Teutonic bloviations

I am doing a mini-review of Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark for the magazine. So far I am pretty skeptical about their description of a grand conspiracy involving the Pakistani army as an institution in A.Q. Khan’s nuclear mail-order business. I went on amazon.com to verify some information on the publisher and came across this review. Some choice excerpts:

Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Walker teutonic bloviations are an admixture of discredited Neocon assertions, unsubstantiated, or outright distortion, and pure unadulterated balderdash. His nauseating fixation upon and paranoid conspiratorial delusions about Pakistanis are a transparent attempt to justify the murderous rampage, carnage and barbarism faced by West Asia. The twaddle fails to illuminate the confusing deluge of eerily inept and counter-intuitive claptrap masquerading as fact in the clumsily stage-managed “global war on terror” environment.

(snip)

Pakistanis refuse to take foster parentage of the morass of foreign policy failures that perpetuate this cycle of blowback and violence. Empire building and Imperial hubris has repercussions.The powers to be have to think of the consequences of creating evil. The Frankenstein monster like Rabbi Eliyahu of Chelm’s mythical “Golen” came after it’s maker. How many remember the lessons from the broomstick in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

(snip)

Blaming someone else for the Neocon inspired foreign policy failures is a favorite pastime of losers in the USA. Blame China for the problems in North Korea, blame Libya for the issues in Chad, Blame Cuba for the anti-Americanism in Venezuela, blame Iran for the fiasco in Iraq, blame the Palestinians for the war in Israel, and blame Pakistan for the incompetence of the puppet Vichi like Karzai war lordism misnamed a “government” and the failures of NATO in Afghanistan. You can fool some of the people all the time, all the people some of the time, but not all the people all the time. The American people see thorough the smoke screen of demonizing all Muslims everywhere. America and world recognizes that the failed Neocon policies will not get better by blaming others.

Man, I bet you can read this stuff in sync with Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz!

Your call is important to us

Reading this rant last night got my blood pressure up and activated some PTSD responses. We have all had these infuriating encounters with large bureaucracies in which their minions do anything to insinuate your culpability (and idiocy). Some embark on a righteous crusade. Others take the fatalistic approach and shrug it off. I’ve done my share of crusading. When my license plates were stolen on a Friday night in Berkeley I received numerous tickets: because the street was adjacent to university property, both UCPD and BPD slapped on tickets. Saturday and Sunday. Plus, for good measure, one for not turning my wheels far enough on the hill.

After several angry encounters at City Hall (“The law of California states that you must remove an unfit car from the road.” – “It was a weekend, the DMV was closed. I couldn’t get new plates.” – “The law of California states that you must remove an unfit car from the road!”) and fruitless pleas, I called my representative What’s-her-name in Sacramento and talked to the Mayor’s office. In the end, I paid them all, of course.

Here’s my Prague roommate’s Quixotic attempt to get his debit card replaced. Note that Citi Bank USA and Citi Bank Czech Republic are separate entities, at least from an Indian perspective:

It’s Gettin’ Hot in Here (So Go Flee all Ya Homes!)

San Diego, my erstwhile hometown, is again in flames. It was only a matter of time before Santa Ana winds, one of the worst droughts in recorded history, and the metastisization of suburbia (and now exurbia) would commingle into its present form. In my own capacity as a California State Parks biogeographer, the signs of devastation were clear in February: shit wad dryin’ out ‘fore it could come to seed. The rains weren’t falling in the winter, and predictions for this year were for some of the fiercest Santa Anas on record.

While the flames in Malibu may pull the heartstrings of the celebrity mags and sites like TMZ.com, it is San Diego County that will likely face property damage of Katrina-like proportions.

The humanistic approach to a catastrophe such as this would include calls to distant friends and relatives in their time of need, donations to evacuee aid organizations, or even a heartfelt missive to the local paper. I do draw upon a well of sympathy for those in plight, including my own parents who may have to be evacuated from their quasi-coastal locale in a few short days, but within me also exists a fount; rage can only express my mood when noting that the urban-wildland interface has been increasingly crowded out by an array of manufactured homes (and people).

Wildfires are as essential to coastal chaparral ecologies as the spotty rain that peppers the earth in San Diego. It’s the goddamned people who promote hotter, longer and more deadly fires. To wit: Too much human resource has attenuated the quality of natural resource. This a hypothetical scenario that tests H1A: Overpopulation is the death of us of all, and H1B: The impact of a segment of that overpopulated body, namely the industrialized world, China, and the Seychelles (OK, maybe not them) has compounded preexisting phenomena.

Yes, I am gloomy, and so should you.

Am I espousing a fringe environmental credenda? Should I not indulge in some schadenfreude in seeing horribly unsustainable McMansions built in sensitive canyon ecosystems at a rate Starbucks and WalMart would envy? Perhaps on both accounts.

But this series of fires is just the beginning. One could reductively assert that this is Mother Nature fighting back. However, if anything Mother Nature is colical, and the 100,000+ homes that may face engulfment are the result of a fitful immune system fighting back, not an apocalyptic war.

When considering donations in this time of need, think of where your money is better spent. For obvious reasons Planned Parenthood is as good an investment, if not better, than the Red Cross. We need more public pronouncements from Al Gore, not Dubya and the most current cast at FEMA.

Waterboardin’ USA

Harry Shearer, aka Derek Smalls in Spinal Tap, has a great show at KCRW. Although “Le Show” can be a bit polemical – he’s especially rabid in his anti-Pakistan tirades – his political satire and general hilarity are worth checking out.