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And finally, in the interest of providing fair and balanced disdain...



Readers interested in reposting any of the above images can click on the graphic to get the code at the Cheezburger Network. You can also vote to favor the graphic, there, too. While you're at it, you can see all of my demotivational posters and other creative visual commentary at my main graphics page at the Cheezburger Network.

Wage war wisely. We might not yet be safely in our graves when our children figure out what we did to their world.

Recent discontent among GOP loyalists with Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has led to rumors of a palace coup to install Sarah Palin as RNC head. While at least some of the reporting about the idea is no doubt trial balloon material hoisted by her backers (possibly against her wishes to remain in the financially lucrative private sector), party insiders do seem to be taking the idea seriously enough not to categorically and openly repudiate the proposal to make Palin the RNC Chairwoman in order to officially recognize the GOP's energetic Right-wing faction that has coalesced under the "Tea Party" banner.

Dark Wraith Publishing, which provides news, editorials, and entertainment via The Dark Wraith Forums, Big Brass Blog, and other online properties, herewith endorses former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin to replace Michael Steele as Chair of the Republican National Committee. Dark Wraith Publishing further encourages the leadership of the GOP to install Sarah Palin forthwith and without delay in this responsible and high-profile position.

My latest creation at the Cheezburger Network:

If you labor under the thought that meaningful reform to prevent another financial crisis like the one in 2008 is coming from Washington, think again. Wall Street bankers' orgy of greed did not stop with the near-global meltdown of 2008, and the "reform" legislation in Congress is being hand-written by thousands of high-paid lobbyists as well as the industry's handmaiden, the Federal Reserve. Read Matt Taibbi's latest Rolling Stone article, " Wall Street Wars" for the wretched story of what became of solid, on-target reform of the failed regulatory squalor in which the powerful financial interests of this country wallow and thrive.

As a financial economist, I despair at what is coming, and come it will. I was right the last time, and I'll be right again this time. Solid economic theory tasked to the objective analysis of data veritably howled of a bad, bad crisis, and I wrote about it in my four-part series, "The Economics of Wreckage," my two-part series, "The Federal Reserve under Fire," and finally in my Spring 2008 article, "The Gospel of Impending Doom." My detailed explanations of theory, interpretations of historical and timely data, and predictions based thereupon did no good, of course.

I am wiser, now. Going through the same process of meticulous exposition would have no impact, but I will tell you this: the analysis that motivated my previous warnings now informs me of much greater risk of a confluence of potentially disastrous economic problems—both inflation and recession—before the next presidential election.

When the whispering breeze of a real collapse of the global financial system brushed across our distracted faces in mid-September of 2008, no one could possibly have imagined (except those of us who did, but we were doomsayers, conspiracy theorists, anti-Bush malcontents, fanatics, marginalized academics, or some other manner of noise beyond the fringe of respectable inclusion).

The tribulation will be worse this time. Much worse. Contrary to what you might have heard, the sky really can fall.

As disturbing as that light wind of foreboding catastrophe might (or might not) have been to you, it was the muted, ill breath of genuine, life-changing storms to come in the cascading shards of our broken shelter of sunshine proclaimed by failed stewards and their failed successors. Those are the men and women—our leaders, their bureaucrats, technocrats, handlers, promoters, and thinkers—who have perverted the rule of law to protect the sovereign and its hordes of enforcers, inquisitors, prosecutors, and financiers. In toiling at that work so debilitating to a nation of free people, the sovereign has, in its reign of impunity uplifted on the stage of real and imagined threats touted in endless acts and scenes, become the coalition of inhuman entities ensouled not by any nature or its god, but by the fiat of corrupted law that poses to quicken the unensoulable, be it an unaccountable government or the enterprise of commerce in corporate form.

The disaster this time will not be owned by the Bush Administration, and you can do nothing about what's coming. You might think you can, but you cannot.

As I wrote in January, "Look hard into that darkening twilight: the sun is setting behind you."

Squander the last wisps of day at your own peril.

If you can stomach yet another story of the authoritarian state on parade, try this one from reason.com: Another Senseless Drug War Death.

Nothing all that unusual. Just a 28-year-old Georgia pastor shot during a rather botched arrest of a crack cocaine-dealing girl.

The minister's pregnant wife left to grieve.

Filthy rumors, maybe spread by apologists for the killers. The killers were undercover cops, the regular kind who like to play TV-type Bad-Boyz-Bad-Boyz complete with street clothes, ski-masks, and rather unevident badges during their take-downs of the worst of the worst types like street dealers hawking $50 worth of chemical malignancy.

Read the story and decide for yourself. Did the minister deserve an extrajudicial execution? That's what he got.

And by the way, have you ever seen what a guy with a gut wound looks like while he's dying? You ought to. It's pretty gruesome, what with that kind of pain and all. If the blood comes out black, he might be lucky and die a little faster. One way or the other, though, I'll bet that preacher learned a lesson he'll never forget from those cops.

But, hey, as long as they act under the blanket of the sovereign, the agents of the state who commit outrages to keep us safe simply must escape personal responsibility, personal jeopardy, and the pain of swift, certain, and severe punishment. Those standards are for the commoners, not our masters.

Praise the Lord! (We have to; the preacher can't because he's dead.) We have entered that new era, that new era of hope and change.

I'm sure the preacher would agree.

They protest that any criticism they levy against the President unfairly opens them to accusations of racism.

They insist that their claims — no matter how ridiculous, no matter how contrary to facts, no matter how incendiary — be treated as legitimate contributions to the national debate.

Their enablers in the mainstream media take them and their Right-wing authoritarian followers seriously.

They pretend not to see the latent violence of their followers virtually boiling over in everything from open threats to public parades of firearms.

In the end, when the vile words those vile men and women spew on their radio and television talk shows, in their books and on their blogs, in their magazines and on their sycophants' protest signs, bring unconscionable tragedy, they will be righteously indignant as the blood from their toil is painted on the door of their greed-driven house of archaic incivility.

Now, here's the question: What will you do if that awful day comes when those hateful minions draw that blood?

What will you do?

Will you cower? Will you continue to believe that dignified discourse is the way to defeat bad people?

Or will you finally come to understand that evil is every bit as real as you are — that it thrives upon those who excuse their fear of direct, unapologetic confrontation by claiming dignified passivity or shallow, harsh rhetoric.

Yes, harsh rhetoric is good stuff, provided it rings its lousy melody well beyond the earshot of the wrongful hordes. Let those Right-wing seditionists prance on the stage of the national character and thereby turn it into an ugly, disgraceful thing. Howl from a safe distance.

What will you do upon that awful day if one of theirs erases the history of the future you tried to write?

You hope it won't come to that?

Yes, hope has gotten you a whole lot so far in this new century.

Just tell me what you'll do if the extremist leaders of the Right really do fulfill their destiny.

Perhaps Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor will now have the latitude to do what Judge Sotomayor declined to do: free an innocent man. Sixteen years of a man's life for a rape and murder he did not commit.

Sixteen years because of cowardly judges, including Sonia Sotomayor.

Then again, as Associate Justice Antonin Scalia once put it, "mere factual innocence" is insufficient not to put a man to death.

Or, as appellate Judge Sotomayor put it, "excusable neglect" that a clerk of courts misinformed the wrongly convicted man's attorney, which caused a filing to miss a new, Git-Tuff-on-Crime appeal deadline by four days.

"Empathy," my ass.

"Liberal," my ass.

And one more thing:

"Change," my ass.


Welcome to dusk; the daylight is behind you.

At my online property Big Brass Blog, I was asked to comment on recent analysis of the role of a financial institution in what has come to be called the "financial meltdown," and I herewith take an unapologetic turn at the entire mentality that has taken hold of intelligentsia as it flails about, looking for a culprit to pillory.

I have brought my writing to bear on this subject before, but I really do need to hit the point right on the head, dispensing with formalistic niceties. I am just plain weary of the "journalists," important media-approved "analysts," and mainstream politicians who spend their time looking around for this or that mendacious bad person, evil firm, or other greedy entity for the root cause of the fiasco that has befallen our financial institutions. It seems that everyone who is respectable avoids like the Plague looking at the failure of the institution in plain sight, the Federal Reserve, where an appalling, systematic, multi-year malfeasance lay at the heart of the whole disaster.

The Federal Reserve failed to control the money supply aggregate M3, and when its failure began to pulse like a flashing red beacon, the Federal Reserve had the unbelievable gall to simply stop publishing the information about the out-of-control aggregate. By not maintaining control of M3, a highly illiquid form of money, it gave banks and other financial institutions all the incentive in the world to construct derivative instruments by which that illiquid form of money could be used to generate more liquid capital.

It's like owning a house when you're cash-strapped. The house is "money," but you can't use it to buy groceries; but what you can do is use that house as collateral to borrow cash-money so you can make bets and engage in other risky behaviors that do generate cash.

It was, is, and always will be the Federal Reserve's principal duty to maintain a stable growth of the money supply, and part of the reason for this is so that distorted incentives do not arise in the financial system where market power is sufficient to both seek and discover prices for financial instruments.

To some extent, the Federal Reserve's custodial role is very similar to the job of parents in ensuring that distorted incentives do not overwhelm decision-making processes of their children. The world has all kinds of bad things to offer, and it has all kinds of ways by which those bad things can infect the thinking of rational entities who want what's best for themselves without regard to larger, longer-term consequences for either themselves or the bigger world that will have to pay the price for their errors.

Yes, of course Goldman-Sachs is a greedy entity. That's what motivates business enterprise, and no amount of shaming, "ethics" training, or preaching from the Bible is going to change either the nature of the firm or the nature of the people who comprise an enterprise. It is our public institutions (in a secular society) that have the responsibility to circumscribe our worst and to foster an environment in which our worst does not become our best choice.

The Federal Reserve failed, and it failed massively, both during the tenure of Ben Bernanke and before him during the last years of Alan Greenspan, who became a spiteful manipulator of monetary policy against Bill Clinton and then a shill for lies about the need for massive tax cuts under George W. Bush.

And now, let me go on the attack against President Barack Obama.

I have written time and time again against this man. He is, at best, a center-right authoritarian, and his judgment regarding appointments to high offices is nothing short of outrageous. He is not choosing the best; he is, instead, choosing institutional hacks and people of otherwise less-than-stellar minds and strengths. I could name his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, as one of his worst-of-the-worst choices were it not for others who rank in the same league of outlandish incompetence, mendacity, and sheer inadequacy of qualifications and prior performance; but I shall for the purposes of this brief article focus upon Timothy Geithner, whom Obama appointed — under no pressure whatsoever to do so — as the Secretary of the Treasury.

This is the Timothy Geithner who was the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the so-called "Empire Bank," which has a permanent voting seat on the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee, which decides upon and then directs the execution of monetary policy, with the principal means of carrying out that monetary policy being via what are called "open market operations" carried out by the Domestic Trading Desk at the Federal Reserve District Bank in New York.

Beyond Geithner's intimate involvement in the utterly irresponsible monetary policy regime that allowed M3 to grow out of control, because the Reserve Banks are in charge of supervising all member banks of the Federal Reserve system in their respective districts, the Empire Bank was the regulatory point where control of the banks in New York was supposed to take place, and yet New York was the virtual epicenter of the "financial meltdown." This happened when Geithner was the President of the Reserve Bank that was supposed to have had an iron fist of regulatory control over those very banks. And the claim that the Reserve Banks do not have regulatory authority over some of the financial institutions that got in trouble is sheer nonsense: after Glass-Steagall was all but thrown in the trash a decade ago, the financial sector dispensed with all pretense that there was a wall separating banking from all manner of other financial services, yet the Fed could do nothing to regulate this integrated financial services industry? Sure. Right.

Did Geithner get fired?

Did Geithner go to prison?

Did Geithner get publicly humiliated and driven into the wilderness?

No, President Barack Obama appointed him Secretary of the Treasury of the United States of America.

And finally, a brief mention of Ben Bernanke.

For allowing M3 to roar out of control, thereby allowing the creation of the vast overhang of illiquid monetary assets that were used to back ridiculously risky bets by banks, did Ben Bernanke get charged with crimes of any kind?

Was Ben Bernanke fired from his job for staggering malfeasance that will ultimately cost the American economy and its taxpayers more than $60 trillion? (You read that right: $60 trillion. Do a search using the keyword term "notional value.")

Has Ben Bernanke even been called before a grand jury?

Has President Barack Obama made any signal whatsoever that he will not tolerate this kind of stunning malfeasance in the government of which he is now the undisputed chief executive officer?

The answer to every single one of the above questions is a resounding, "No."

I am not interested in hearing about Goldman-Sachs or Bank of America or Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch or any other bad, greedy firm, not until someone tells me why it is that the greed of private enterprise is to be condemned when the incompetence of duly authorized public enforcers of proper behavior was so profound that greed in its destructive form could go as far as it did, for as long as it did, to the extraordinary detriment of the macroeconomy as it did.

Do not talk to me about how bad the kids are when no one wants to give me anything but blank looks about the trailer trash parents who were singularly, unambiguously responsible for seeing to it that their little snots didn't tear up the town.

I do apologize for being so blunt; but life is short, and no one else seems to have the guts to lay it out.

"No one could possibly have imagined..."?

I did. So did a few other analysts. We were marginalized; we were ignored; and the disaster happened.

Ignore us now, and the aftermath will be no better.

Last weekend, formerly disgraced Right-wing radio talk show personality Bill Bennett became the latest in a litany of Republicans pressing into self-service the political crisis in Iran to criticize President Barack Obama.

The refrain from Republicans like House GOP Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) and some others is that Obama is not doing enough to assist the popular forces protesting the re-election of conservative Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was victorious in an apparent landslide over Mir Hossein Mousavi, the candidate Western media have characterized as a reformer.

Grandstanding by the Republicans aside — they would be howling for impeachment right now were Obama to be moving destroyers into position — Mr. Obama has, in fact, been doing nothing much other than continuing precisely the same policies put into place by his predecessor, George W. Bush. As reported by Steve Weissman for truthout.org, an entire program of funding Iranian "democracy groups" to the tune of $400 million was requested by the Bush Administration and authorized by the Democrat-controlled Congress, whose members were quite interested in being kept in the dark about exactly how that money would be used. According to Seymour Hersh, that money, and possibly other funds, was destined for, among other activities, a systematic program of "black ops" carried out by our Special Forces and by insurgent groups inside Iran. On the agenda was the kidnapping of members of Al Quds (a wing of Iran's Revolutionary Guard), assassinations, and bombings.

That's right: the United States, with funding blessed by the Democratic leadership that controlled Congress in 2007, is sponsoring terrorism in Iran. Note the present tense: Weissman points out that there is no evidence that President Obama has rescinded this program, despite its unspeakable beneficiaries and its dubious record of achievements.

First, a major recipient of money from so-called "democracy" funds (including money from the National Endowment for Democracy) has gone to Abdel Malik Regi, seen at left, a major trafficker in the West Asian heroin trade that is pumping narcotics into Europe so aggressively that street prices on horse have dropped by as much as 90 percent in some places. Mr. Regi is a former member of the Taliban, but is now attached to a radical Sunni group perhaps eerily similar to what would become the group called "al Qa'ida" led by Osama bin Laden almost a generation ago.

Second, as if funding terrorist heroin traffickers leading radical religious separatist movements were not bad enough, the results are once again, as they have in the past, proving contrary to the fantasy-driven expectations of the geniuses at Langley and the Pentagon who dream up these wars by disreputable proxies. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is opposed by the predominantly more urban voters, the young, the intellectuals, the upper-middle class, and a swirl of political opportunists. For support, he appeals to a huge reserve of people less attuned to the call of Western culture and all of its trappings. To some extent, without trying to oversimplify the electorate of Iran, his is the presidency of the rednecks, the simple, the devout, and the disaffected. He is, in some ways, George W. Bush in policies with Sarah Palin's draw. He speaks of standing up to the world, and he looks rough-hewn, more like the men of the countryside and those who frequently (and more willingly) go to the mosque.

When our paid terrorists bomb a mosque far from Tehran, when a shot takes out a local tribal leader, when a local man in Al Quds vanishes, the people out where it happens know what's going on: their leaders make it simple in telling them. It's the Americans, it's the British, it's the insurgents. The hip, with-it crowd doesn't buy it, especially when their chosen people, men like Mir-Hossein Mousavi, directly or indirectly benefit from those very same "democracy" funds.

Make no mistake. The whining Republicans demanding that Obama do something to help the "pro-democracy" forces in Iran have already gotten their wish: Obama most definitely has been doing something, and it is exactly what his predecessor in office, George W. Bush, was doing. To the extent that what Obama and Bush have done has worked, it has very likely worked at least in part to ensure a massive turnout for elections in Iran, with a huge vote in favor of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Whether or not the outcome was rigged is anyone's guess. Although we may have intelligence assets able to surmise what really happened, opinions fielded by anyone else, especially outside of Iran, are colored by hope for a more engaged, Western-leaning Iran, despite the fact that Mousavi is no reformer in the sense that most Westerners would like; the Guardian Council in Iran ensures that real reformers rarely, if ever, make it onto a ballot.

Does that mean Obama should pull back and do nothing other than deliver more soaring oratorical flourishes about respecting human rights and all that? Unfortunately, that option would be disastrous, now, but a deft hand is absolutely necessary. Events in Iran are out-pacing blunt, simplistic strategies.

The Revolutionary Guard is too often portrayed in the Western mainstream media as monolithic and thuggish. It is not. It is a professional, modern military force. Its leaders for the most part are not the spinning-eyed crazies that took hostages at the American embassy a generation ago; they are, instead, the hardened survivors of the ungodly Iran-Iraq war. More importantly, although an elite group that is highly disciplined, factions exist within the ranks, both at the top and in the barracks. Already, reports are surfacing that the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, General Ali Fazli, has been arrested for refusing to prosecute Ayatollah Khamenei's vow to crack down on protesters. Contrast the possibility of the head of the Revolutionary Guard being hauled away with a report published June 21 that this same military unit is declaring that it is going to 'crack down' on the protesters.

Most of the footage slipping out of Iran shows police and paramilitary Basij personnel, not Revolutionary Guard soldiers, dealing with protesters. Although Basiji may be under nominal control of the Guard, they ultimately take their orders, as all Iranian military personnel do, from Khamenei, who is the supreme authority. Although probably more complicated than an article like this can describe, the story goes that the Basij is seen by the Revolutionary Guard in much the same way as lower, paramilitary, and part-time, "weekend warriors" are seen by any professional armed forces service people. Basiji are portrayed in the Western media as head-knocking, brutish brawlers hot-rodding on motorcycles and running in packs. The perspective on them by elite Iranian troops is not much more charitable.

Those thuggish sorts of the Basij type are quite useful to entrenched autocrats and dictators, though. The story goes that, during the 1989 student protests in Beijing that led to the massacre at Tiananmen Square, the ruling communist leadership came to realize that the regular army soldiers did not have the stomach to resolutely stop the protests, and so a much more brutish, more violent class of soldiers was brought in, compliments of the modern Chinese equivalent of the old-fashioned warlords who still control the field divisions far from the cities and their more urbane ways of living and thinking. The Basij are carrying on in old tradition, much praised by those for whom they do their dirty work; but the consequences can occasionally be pretty bad for the knuckle-draggers. In the case of Iran, if push comes to shove and Ayatollah Khameini is kicked out by the only Iranian council that might be able pull it off, the Assembly of Experts, although the Revolutionary Guard takes its work as seriously as any professional army, from its guns might come the necessary task of clearing the streets not just of the protesters, but also of Basiji.

And that brings us to the next complication. The Assembly of Experts is influenced by those who have most decidedly not benefited from Ayatollah Khameini's ambitions and mastery of the power politics of the clergy. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose daughter and other family members were detained for having vocally supported Mousavi, and who lost to Ahmadinejad in the presidential election of 2005, may now take the matter of ending Khameini's continued supreme leadership quite personally. The same goes for Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who has been taken down more than once by none other than Khameini. And just to point out how precarious the Supreme Leader's position really is, right now, the Majlis (Parliament) Speaker Ali Larijani is calling into question the accuracy of the vote tally that gave Ahmadinejad such a sweeping victory that a much-anticipated second round of voting was not required.

With all of this intrigue, both that from the United States with its black ops program that has now spanned two presidencies and that from inside the complex and nuanced halls of power in Iran, itself, calls from American Right-wingers for some new, high-handed action are the very epitome of simplistic, opportunistic thinking. Playing the proverbial bull in the china shop would do nothing to save the dinnerware for America's feast of Middle Eastern interests.

Unfortunately, sitting back and doing nothing at all is an equally bad idea, too. Pretending that what happens in Iran stays in Iran ignores the regional problems that could become decidedly worse if events continue to head the way they are.

If Ahmadinejad stays as President, Ayatollah Khameini will get his "Islamic bomb." Only the utterly clueless believe that Iran's nuclear enrichment program is exclusively for peaceful purposes. The country is surrounded by a matrix of difficult, if not downright problematic, neighbors of all kinds: the Americans; the Israelis; the Kurds; several fundamentalist Sunni groups with ambitions to keep their drugs-and-arms trade going without interference from holier-than-thou mullahs; imbecile clerics like Moqtada al-Sadr in Iraq with his Mehdi Army of idiots with rusty AK-47s; gutless wonders like Syria's President Bashar al-Assad for friends and Lebanon's Hezbollah welfare case Hassan Nasrallah for permanent child support payments; and neighboring backwater hicks with unbelievably sharp knives like the Taliban, who qualify as proxies you'd really rather not have sitting on your porch where Google Earth might photograph them for your better relatives to see.

Of immediate concern is Israel, which has recently conducted two massive military exercises in preparation for a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. The idea that President Obama can talk Israel down from an attack is sheer folly: Israel does not do what U.S. Presidents want unless those American leaders happen to want what Israel wants. Notwithstanding a few accommodations Tel Aviv made in accordance with protocols from the Oslo Accord, Israel has lots of problems and several good opportunities. Among its looming difficulties are a burgeoning population, Palestinian trouble-makers in its occupied territories who have human rights issues, and fresh water availability; and among its opportunities are the chance to get into the game of oil distribution and go further into the wildly lucrative international arms trade. The last thing Israel needs is an Islamic state with discernible ambitions of a pan-Arabic caliphate backed by fissile cooking utensils.

Whether or not Iran now or ever will try to expand militarily is irrelevant: Israel does not want it to have nuclear weapons, and Israel will ensure that it never does. That is the reality of the situation. The United States does not want Iran to have nukes, either, but ours is a strategic interest: with even a modest nuclear arsenal, the Persian state would be in a position to project regional influence more effectively; and, more importantly, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — comprising China, Russia, and a handful of smaller nations — would be hard-pressed to keep Iran's application for full membership on the back burner. Iran's location would then put the oil transport route out of the Persian Gulf squarely in the hands of the SCO, a situation decidedly to the disadvantage of the United States, Western Europe, and our nominally allied nations in Asia.

Israel's military and political leaders could easily see the instability in Iran as a wide-open opportunity to take their shot, especially if it looks like Khameini and Ahmadinejad are going to come out on top. The pair would deal with their political enemies roughly, and any hope of improved relations with the West would be off the table for a long time to come. The stage would be set for using claims of Western meddling as a pretext to block further International Atomic Energy Agency inspections; angry street demonstrations in Tehran and elsewhere would be choreographed to show "support" for Ahmadinejad and whatever he would say and do; gruesome public hangings of former student demonstrators would be must-see TV; and the U.S. would have few policy options other than to continue pouring money into the hands of bad people just because they are the kind of bad people who cause trouble for Iran and its leadership. Following that, an attack by Israel to destroy the nuclear materials refinement facilities in Iran would turn the Persian nation into a basket case, with shards of violent military units going in every direction to control the internal population and foment ramped-up war in Iraq; environmental catastrophe billowing out on a regional scale; and a shattered infrastructure howling for the rest of the world to repair, given the way Israel simply departed Lebanon and the Gaza Strip and left the mess it had created by its bombings in those places for everyone else to pay for.

The current political strife in Iran needs to be resolved quickly, and it is in the interest of the United States to help ensure that the resolution is to the favor of Mousavi, whether or not he actually won the election, which we might never know. For us to claim that we cannot interfere in the democratic processes of another country, flawed as an election might have been, is simply ridiculous. Both George W. Bush and his successor, the supposedly liberal, more worldly Barack H. Obama, have been using the tools of war by proxy, disinformation, and terrorism to destabilize the regime in power in Tehran. This is definitely not the moment to feign belief in the right of Iran to resolve its internal political battles on its own, considering we have been responsible, at least to some extent, for setting in motion the events now playing out in the streets and at the Assembly of Experts, and especially since our sloth right now could easily lead to an Israeli resolution.

Mr. Obama is a bright man. Around him are men and women of considerable experience, if rather less noteworthy intelligence. Options are available, but they must be of the kind that encourages the Assembly of Experts to move toward a government by committee as an interim step to a more modern, transparently democratic process of electing political leaders without as much control from the ayatollahs, whose counsel must remain respected, but whose presence in political life must be subordinated to the trusted officials who will promote Iran's interests in accordance with the tenets of Islam.

We have ways to provide assistance without appearing to meddle any more than we have already. If we can be so willing to deliver brute destruction and willful mayhem to a nation we want to change, we can certainly find the thoughtful, unobtrusive means to offer worthwhile encouragement and quiet help to that same nation on the verge of change so many of its own people want.

President Obama must ignore the all-too-public calls of his political opponents who want him to do more about the Iranian political crisis; he must, instead, first resolve the crisis of thinking we have about how to remain a world leader in an age of competition from other nations that want to take our place and citizens of nations who want to have their voices heard.

At the end of the day, if America cannot find the means by which to lead while protecting those who want freedom, the future will belong to nations that are even less likely than we to craft policy that considers democracy other than a mere rhetorical flourish.

In a post published today at the Dark Wraith Publishing online property Big Brass Blog, contributing writer Peter of Lone Tree quotes from author Chris Hedges' recent article, "The American Empire Is Bankrupt," which paints a brutally grim picture of the death spiral of the United States economy and the coming deprivations its non-elites will suffer.

Good evening, Peter of Lone Tree.

Although I greatly enjoy the writings Chris Hedges has published on American religious extremism, his apocalyptic vision of the future of the American economy is generous to a fault and parochial to a rather unexemplary era and its uninspired citizens.

We have received what essayist Jonathan Schell describes as "An Invitation to a Degraded World," and we have accepted it. The acceptance has come in each election from 2000 to the present, and that includes the presidential election last year.

We cannot help ourselves: we embrace the folly of reactionism, and Brand X of the Left is seen as a viable substitute for Brand X of the Right. In the end, the candidates of one company are pretty much the same as those of the other. Duopolies offer choice only to those who have forgotten that choice includes the option, "No."

On we trod, though, into a future not as good as that of our parents.

But not really. I lived through bad times when I was growing up. The death of my father at the end of the '60s was a metaphor for a world and a nation on the precipice of upheavals I did not understand; but, then again, hardly anyone else did either, and the particulars of my circumstances of a degraded world were not the cause of the plight in which my mother and I found ourselves. The truth of the matter is that life was becoming a changed thing for many people way back then.

And before my time, life was becoming a changed thing for the people who had lived to see the turn of the last century, too.

And before their time, life was becoming a changed thing for the people who had lived to see the time after that war between the states.

And before their time, life was becoming a changed thing for the people who had lived to see the dawn of the 19th Century.

And before their time...

You get the picture.

The future is an invitation to a degraded world, a lesser thing, always packaged in the new, the better, the not-old-and-worn-out. Our walk to that place has become a breath-taking sprint, even as we curse the landscape as it becomes more ominous, more barren, more foreboding.

We look back and cannot help but imagine in the time before now a sun higher in the sky, a world less confusing because we know how the story went. The future is a story not told and, therefore, not known. We are never ready for it; and now, as we run at full speed into its maw, we have no means by which to prepare ourselves, much less to prepare that place in which we shall spend the remainder of our days.

If it is of any comfort, though, we do know the part about how bad it's going to be there in that future. It is the place where the ones we love die, the ways we once lived are gone, and the joys we had are faded to the stuff of sadly fleeting dreams about which we can tell no one because no one cares.

The past is about ghosts we knew: they speak through our individual and collective memories.

The future is about ghosts we can only imagine: mostly, they speak through our individual and collective fears.

Times really are going to get rough. I have written many articles about what is coming, and I have now lived long enough to note with a degree of satisfaction that my predictions, economic and otherwise, are being proved accurate. A quite general article of mine about the future is one entitled, "The 21st Century, Epilogue." I took a more metaphorical approach in my story, "The End of Time."

So many people do not listen, though. They have to hear ghosts for themselves. That means they'll have to wait, just like they have for generation after generation; and when they see the future in all its ugliness, they'll wonder why it had to be that way.

Perhaps a few people in that time will notice something particularly awful about those ghosts to come, as terrible as they'll be as they stand before us in the plain sight of that degraded world out there just after tomorrow's sunset: those ghosts of the future will look an awful lot like us.

Right now, as we stand here on the edge of tomorrow accepting that invitation to which we just cannot say, "No," we ensure that ours will be the grave from which will usher that sullen place — that awful, degraded world — of apocalypse and misery otherwise called the future.

We never learn, do we?


The Dark Wraith has spoken.

After having suspended the secret military tribunal system authorized and used by his predecessor in office, President Barack Obama has now announced that he is authorizing the reconstitution and recommencement of that widely condemned means of trying accused terrorism suspects.

Those tribunals are the mockery of justice where "judges" wear hoods, hide behind curtains, routinely rule defense evidence inadmissible, defense witnesses uncallable, and routine defense tactics unacceptable. Their names are not known, their motives are not subject to scrutiny, and their backgrounds are not subject to civilian review.

Those "courts" have no obligation to recognize stare decisis. Decisions begin and end in a set of statutory laws, rules of evidence, and procedural standards upon which even the highest civilian court in the land has deferred in judicial review.

Those "laws" upon which the accused are judged are created not through democratic legislative processes, but rather by martial command structures.

And this is a system of "justice" within the United States of America that President Barack Obama has now endorsed and brought back to life.

"Hope."

"Change."

"Transparency."

Remember those promises?

Yeah. Right.

Then again, maybe we should give the man a chance: after all, it's way too early to be judging him.

Again: Yeah. Right.

I warned you. Over and over again, I warned you about Barack Hussein Obama.

But, hey, the guy threw $787 billion in economic stimulus to the People! Right?

And, hey, he's still talking about a single-payer healthcare system so everybody can have those meds and those ridiculously expensive, high-technology procedures done for free! Right?

And, hey, he's still a LIBERAL! Right?!

One more time: Yeah. Right.

You want his miracle elixir? Enjoy the chaser of poison.

Over and over again, I warned readers about this man. As a short, visual reminder, below is one of my graphics.



We now have what seems to be a highly competent man in the Oval Office. On that score, we should certainly find reason for comfort.

In that office, now, we might very well also have the best leader this nation has to offer.

On that score, we should certainly find reason for great concern.

Regardless, though, one thing is quite certain: You. Were. Warned.

One more time.

You. Were. Warned.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.

The Center for American Progress has published an interactive quiz entitled "How Progressive Are You?" I found out about it from a post at Big Brass Blog. The 40-question exam purports to determine how progressive a person is on a scale of zero to 400. After taking the test, you are told your score, and you are told that the average American scored 209.5 on the scale. Presumably, then, anyone hitting 210 or higher is more progressive than the average American.

I just finished taking the quiz, and I have a few uncharitable words to say about a couple of the instrument's presumptions and impertinent — indeed, fresh — questions. I should predicate this by suggesting that readers might want to survey some of my earlier writings wherein I set forth in no uncertain terms my political/social leanings: most recently, I wrote and published, "A Paleo-Conservative Message to Republicans"; prior to that, among many other articles are "An Open Letter to Bill O'Reilly" and "Conservatism My Way, Blunt and Hard."

Let me get down to business. This "How Progressive Are You?" quiz annoyed me to more than a small extent; but in all fairness, most quizzes annoy me. That's why I am a college teacher: I write and administer quizzes; I do not take them. My personal history taking IQ tests, personality inventories, and assorted other instruments purporting to sort and classify me has been on the less than fruitful side. My first IQ test got me rated a "moron." Back in that time, "moron" was better than "imbecile," as I recall, but the designation still got me a one-way ticket to the class for stupid kids. I'm not talking future Republicans, here; these youngsters were destined for Sarah Palin's advisory council. The upside was that I had me a ticket to ride the short bus, but my mother intervened before I got the fun ride, and I was back in the "normal" class, where I could be miserable with the kids who were dumb only to the extent of mediocrity.

Thank God, I almost got out of high school before "gifted" classes started popping up in small-town American schools. Unfortunately, I got caught in the early experiments, and that's where I took my own initiative to extricate myself from a special program where the kids did "enrichment" nonsense while the teachers avoided like the Plague anything having to do with instruction in serious, fundamental principles of subject matter like English or math. As time would go on and I would learn about the political dynamics of education from family members who were teachers, I would come to find out that "gifted" classes are political footballs that often start with decent intentions but then get hijacked by the important, if incompetent, teachers and administrators of the school in alliance with the important, if useless, parents of the community who want their little precious darlings to be part of the feather-in-the-cap programs.

I quit high school at the end of my Junior year. That was one of the best decision I ever made.

But I digress, but just long enough to address my disdain for tests that try to assess and evaluate. As yet another aside, "assessment and evaluation" is the huge fad now, especially in higher education, where the whole No Child Left Behind rot is taking new root with a vengeance. Try to question this freight train of nonsense in a department or college-wide meeting, and watch how fast you get shut down by the activist faculty members exceeded in their teaching and discipline-specific incompetence only by that of the cadre of administrators who have latched onto this as their very reason for existence as inertial mass occupying office space in the nicest buildings on campus.

But, again, I digress.

It's time to hit a few of the specifics of this "How Progressive Are You?" test that really twisted my colon.

I knew trouble was brewing when I saw the questions about "free markets" and "free trade." Both the Right and the Left are tossing those terms around like toys about which they know nothing and about which they wish to know even less. Don't make me write a long-winded, pedagogic rant on basic principles of economics. No one wants to see the situation get that ugly. (And, yes, there would be a quiz after the lecture, by God.)

And what was that "traditional family values" thing in the "How Progressive Are You?" quiz? Why does every living soul on Earth let the crazy fundamentalists hijack words and terms without even so much as a fight?

Do I believe in "traditional family values"?

If, by "traditional family values," you mean I don't want kids whoring the streets and malls instead of staying at home and doing homework and housework, then call me a traditional family values kind of guy; and if, by "traditional family values," you mean I'm calling you a bad parent if you just throw up your hands, sit on your fat ass, and say, "Well, kids will hump each other, so I might as well just show the boys how to Saran-wrap their weiners and tell the girls to insist on the packaged product," then call me a traditional family values kind of guy.

If, by "traditional family values," you mean I want criminals like George W. Bush, Nancy Pelosi, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Dick Cheney, Jane Harman, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Mueller, Eric Holder, Robert Gates and a whole lot of other Acceptably Important Persons (AIPs) thrown in prison for a long, long time, then call me a traditional family values kind of guy.

If, by "traditional family values," you mean I want my religion for myself in my home and church, and I want your religion out of my face, then call me a traditional family values kind of guy. And that means I want you to get your politically correct science and your eternal life-promising healthcare and meds out of my face, too. (And don't ask me to pay for your membership dues at the Cult of Medicine: I don't tithe at the Church of Cthulhu, and your medical establishment's collection basket isn't nearly as cool in a pre-Gothic sort of way.)

If, by "traditional family values," you mean I want to work hard and earn a decent living and not support welfare queens at corporations who take tax breaks and bailouts, and not support welfare queens at municipalities that beg themselves silly for the latest prison to be built in their neck of the woods, then call me a traditional family values kind of guy. I'll support government efforts to help people who have hit the skids, especially if children are going hungry or needing stuff, and I'll support government efforts to throw serious money at long-term problems of inter-generational poverty arising from our history of racial and ethnic injustices; but tell me my tax dollars are going to some welfare queen corporation that axes workers, makes unsafe working conditions and dangerous products, or tell me that my tax dollars are going to some prison building program, and I'll tell you what real traditional family values are all about. I don't know about your family, but my family doesn't have any corporations, agencies, institutions, municipalities, states, mutual funds, or other non-human things in it.

Enough with the traditional family values theme.

Moving on with that "How Progressive Are You?" quiz, what was that question about whether or not I think unions are a good thing? Are they talking about what unions have become in the past couple of decades? Call me old fashioned, but I remember the days when unions went to strikes without much of a dance beforehand with the pretty boys in management. After Reagan and his cowering courts did the number on PATCO, it was like all the unions in this country folded up shop and became nothing but dues-collecting repositories for guys and gals who couldn't actually work for a living. Back in my day, union guys cracked heads: there wasn't a whole lot not to like about going knuckles-to-knuckles with company-hired head-bangers and their on-the-take cop supporters. Peaceful co-existence with profit maximizers is achieved only when the profit maximizers have a little pain on the cost side of the cost-benefit analysis of how far to screw the union people. These days, it isn't that way at all; so, no, I most certainly do not think unions are a "good" thing. Show me a few old-time guys from Cleveland and Chicago running the unions again, and show me the scars on their knuckles, and then maybe I'll tell you that unions have once again become a good thing.

Finally — and by no means have I given an exhaustive list of my beefs with the "How Progressive Are You?" quiz — let me put in a word for military readiness and force. The Bush Administration wrecked the former and gave the latter a really bad name. The quiz seems to imply that progressivism has something to do with using diplomacy, peaceful means, and international institutions as the exclusive solution set for any and all problems the world might have with some of its less-than-desirable leaders. I would agree that all kinds of means are available short of and as alternatives to the use of force on bad people running nations; however, that is not always the case.

Unfortunately, in the pantheon of monsters running nations, Saddam Hussein was way down on the list, and a whole lot of the claims of his purported misdeeds cannot be separated from years of propaganda pumped out by interests that wanted him gone and his country open for plunder. That means Saddam most decidedly should never have been on the "To Kill Today" schedule, and events subsequent to his ouster magnificently succeeded in showing why, exactly, "Iraq" existed as a stable, if rather artificial, nation only because its factions were permanently kept at bay by a brute-in-charge.

Sometimes, though, monsters do need to be dealt with, and that means killing them. No, that does not mean "talking" to them; no, that does not mean "giving them incentives" to behave like civilized human beings; and no, that does not mean "imposing international sanctions" upon them.

It means killing them.

When I see all the liberals holding hands and singing silly, sappy songs for the ungodly human suffering in Darfur, or when I see pathetic international aid attempts to feed countless starving kids in other parts of Africa, or when I see useless "diplomatic engagement" to somehow alleviate the utter misery suffered by the North Koreans laboring under the inter-generational whacko dynasty of the Kim Jong Il bloodline, I cannot help but determine that, sometimes, it is far better to either knock it off with the phony rhetoric about caring or just deal with the monsters once and for all.

I stipulate immediately, though, that killing them might not be easy: bad guys can be pretty darned slippery (notwithstanding the sheer stupidity of trying to off Castro with an exploding cigar); however, we seem to be darned good these days at wasting lots and lots of innocent bystanders with our drones, our fire-and-forget weapons, and our special ops jockeys, so what's the problem with using the assets in our inventory to slaughter some people who really need it instead of wasting our firepower only on people whose last words are, "Is it really safe to have a wedding party outside in this weather?"

And, of course, on the other hand we must conclude that some places are simply where God meant no civilized person to meddle. Afghanistan comes to mind. So do suburban areas of Alaska. Ditto for the south of France during the Cannes Film Festival.

Again, I digress.

How progressive are you? Take the quiz and find out not only how progressive you are, but also how annoyed you get when complex matters of your relationship to society, your sentiments about politics, and your philosophical underpinnings get packaged into a 40-question instrument that reduces you to a series of knee-jerk Right-Left talking points, buzz words, and over-simplifications.

Who knows? By the end you might be so annoyed that, whether or not you get labeled a progressive, you can tell for yourself that you are old, impatient, and downright curmudgeonly.

Just like me.

By the way, if you want to know what I scored, listen to my Internet radio talk show this coming Thursday night, March 19, 2009, at 10:30 p.m. EDT: it's called Dark Voices Radio, broadcast on BlogTalkRadio.


Enjoy your week, fellow progressives on a scale of zero to 400.