While working today on the publicity blitz for the below-mentioned Painters of Blight show, I got the bright idea to conduct a web search to see just far we've spun onto the web.

8 results shown out of a total of 12. But since I have the kind of name that everyone else has, it's nice to find some hits that are directly related to me, without risking -- and 99 times out of one hundred experiencing -- the disappointment of reading about how a bearded middle-age humonculous is trading on my name to sell real estate in Canton, Ohio.

So, it's nice to read someone like Jeliza say ours was the "most intruiging call for entry I've seen lately."

Jim Blanchard
Men's Adventures in the Land of Light

PAINTERS OF BLIGHT at Roq la Rue
Curated by Erin Norlin, David Miller and Kipling West
Two Night Only! Friday July 9 and Saturday July 10
Opening Reception: Friday, July 9, 6:00 - 10:00 pm
Saturday hours 2-6

Roq la Rue Gallery ~ 2316 Second Avenue, Seattle, WA 98121

For two days only, Painters of Blight will occupy Roq la Rue Gallery, featuring two dozen artists paying tribute to the work of Thomas Kinkade and Jack T. Chick. Don't blink and miss it!

Renowned and beloved as the "Painter of Light," Thomas Kinkade is America's best-selling fine artist. One who purchases a reproduction of one of Mr. Kinkade's paintings may elect to have their purchase brought to life by a Kinkade-trained Master Highlighter, who adds color and definition with oil paint, truly bringing the lithographs to "light." In that spirit, artists Jim Blanchard, Kamala Dolphin-Kingsley, Robert Hardgrave, Claire Johnson, Charles Krafft, Pat Moriarity, Erin Norlin, Marion Peck, Benton Peugh, Robert Rini, Bonni Reid, Mark Ryden and Kipling West have highlighted pages from the Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light® with Scripture: 2004 Deluxe Wall Calendar, in their own distinct styles.

Jack T. Chick is one of the most prolific Christian evangelists in America, spreading the good news of Jesus Christ and bad news of eternal damnation though 3" x 5", 24-page comic book tracts, and his black and white shockers form the perfrect counterpioint to Kinkade's lust pastorals. Since 1961 he has created 175 proselytizing tracts, which have had more than 500,000,000 copies published in over 100 languages worldwide. Artists Tom Bagley, David R. Drake, Jed Dunkerly, Nathan Eyring, Rod Filbrandt, Cliff Hare, David Lasky, Deborah F Lawrence, Eric Reynolds, Johnny Ryan and Kamilla White have each created work inspired by Chick.

For further information or images contact: David Miller at 206-909-6770 or paintersofblight@comcast.net . 

I saw Fahreheit 911 last week, like every other traitor in America. I didn't think it was all that great, but I'm probably just being a grouch. I can't be bothered actually investigating, but I bet one criticism Moore's antagonists have is the film's portrayal of "the sovereign nation of Iraq" before the US invasion, which is an idylic place of smiling children, kittens and laughter, a beacon of joie de vie snuffed by cluster bombs. I doubt Iraq was really as cartoonishly bad as had been propogandized, with prisonsers being fed into shredders and the like, but I really doubt it was the carefree wonderland Moore implies. If one were to review on the street footage of Manhattan in the early morning of September 11, 2001, I'm sure there'd be plenty of miserable wage slaves, hunching their way into their soul-crushing job at the World Trade Center, exhausted at 8 am after their four hour train commute from West Virginia. Let's get a little fucking perspective.

Mike Battaglia explains why cartoonist Joe Matt is a success, and in the process, makes some important points about porn stars and humanity that are worth preserving:


Joe moved to Hollywood last year. Let’s take a peek at the modern Joe Matt; in fact, let’s break his recent action down:

1) Instead of watching porn in some little shit hole in Candada, he’s hanging out in limos with the actual stars themselves in the heart of Los Angeles. Have you met a porn star? They’re not confused and helpless, with no where to turn except into the belly of the beast; no, rather, they are athletic millionaires who have massive egos and are surrounded by a bounty of dutiful hit men and Mafia; it takes balls to hang out with a porn star. They’re like leopards; if they see fear in your eye, it’s all over. Porn stars are all right.
2) He no longer has to contend with the tepid whining of silly, overrated Canadian cartoonists.
3) He’s been ignited by the Hollywood energy (it’s there), and he’s getting a boat load of work done.
4) He finally has the room to breath he has always wished for (smog charges the brain and makes for some glorious sun sets).
5) The memory of the incessant, mind-altering nag-fest that was Trish is long gone, as he receives lap dance after lap dance from women so shockingly beautiful that, for a moment, you can’t believe the human race actually produced such fecal abominations as The Third Reich, the Atomic Bomb, and The Internet.
6) 66 has stopped haunting Joe; he has let his internal Satan/God struggle flail out from the cab of his psychic semi like a naughty hitchhiker.
7) HBO, whose Program Directors wield the most coveted “meeting time” in the business, worth about a million dollars a minute, WANT JOE.
8) His strip in the LA Weekly was an instant classic.
9) Joe is becoming the toast of Hollywood in a town so competitive, even the homeless have head shots and clutch their screenplays as they amble up Sunset Blvd in a cloud of head lice.
10) Joe has a cock the size of a small arm, and he looks like a serial killer (In other words, he’s a porn star in the making). With Joe at THE epicenter of the adult film industry, it won’t be long before we can go out and buy a copy of (choke) “Joe’s Casting Couch”.
11) Now that Joe has come to his senses and removed himself from the chunky, lukewarm bile that is the Canadian aesthetic, he is well on his way to becoming an American icon.

Ex-wife says Ryan pushed sex clubs
June 22, 2004

BY SCOTT FORNEK AND DAVE MCKINNEY Staff Reporters

Actress Jeri Ryan accused ex-husband Jack Ryan of insisting she go to "explicit sex clubs" in New York, New Orleans and Paris during their marriage -- including "a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling."

Jack Ryan wanted her to have sex with him while others watched, the star of "Boston Public" alleged.

The Republican U.S. Senate candidate dismissed his ex-wife's allegations as "ridiculous accusations" and "smut" that she was dishing out without concern about how it would make their young son "feel about his parents or himself."

Those were the key revelations in documents from a 2000 and 2001 child custody battle that a judge ordered unsealed Monday.

A former investment banker, Jack Ryan declined to revisit the allegations Monday, saying he stands by his earlier court response. And Ryan insisted he did not mislead anyone by arguing he was only trying to protect the couple's 9-year-old son and suggesting the documents contained nothing embarrassing.

But at least three GOP leaders are fuming over the disclosures, saying they do not square with what Ryan told them to expect.

State Republican chairman Judy Baar Topinka believes Ryan lied to her by suggesting the papers contained nothing embarrassing, a source close to Topinka said.

Former Gov. Jim Edgar was stunned to hear about Jeri Ryan's allegations after Jack Ryan called Edgar over the weekend to describe the files, but made no mention of the sex clubs. Based on that characterization, Edgar told reporters earlier in the day the files would not likely sink Ryan's campaign.

"Edgar kind of feels like he took this guy at his word and is kind of stunned it could be different from what he was told," the source said.

And Downstate U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) called on Ryan to step down. "I think there's no way the people in Illinois will countenance the type of information and activity he was involved with."

Ryan called the uproar over allegations that he urged his then-wife to have sex in front of others "a new low for politics" during a Tuesday morning appearance on Chicago's WLS-AM. "It seems to me it's just a new standard, and I don't think it's healthy for our democracy."

Ryan said he was fit for high public office, noting that the court documents reveal no violations of earthly or higher laws.

"I think my character has been proven by this," Ryan said in an interview on WBEZ-FM. "There's no breaking of any laws. There's no breaking of any marriage laws. There's no breaking of the Ten Commandments anywhere. And so I think if that's the worst people can say about me in the heat of a difficult dispute I think it speaks very well about my character."

Offered the chance to deny that he visited sex clubs or wanted his wife to have sex in public, Ryan demurred and suggested Jeri Ryan's allegations would have little political traction.

"Well, we were married for almost eight years," he said. "The worst of that was over ... eight years that we went to places that she felt uncomfortable. That's the worst of it.

"If that's the worst, then I think people will say, gosh, that guy's lived a pretty clean life."

During an hourlong news conference at the Chicago Hilton and Towers yesterday, Ryan supplied reporters with copies of the hundreds of pages of documents that Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert A. Schnider had just unsealed.

They are part of a child custody battle after the couple's 1999 divorce. Schnider unsealed them after the Chicago Tribune and WLS- argued voters had a right to know what was in the documents.

The Ryans said they were "disturbed and angered" by the decision but decided not to appeal.

"No parent wants the information or disagreements between themsleves put in front of their children," Ryan said Tuesday on WBEZ. "Basic parenting skills say you don't have disagreements that you share with the children. That's why Jeri Lynn and I tried so hard to keep those records sealed."

Ryan released a statement from his ex-wife that made no mention of the sex clubs, but said Jack Ryan never physically abused her or was unfaithful to her -- two allegations that were not in any of the court filings released Monday. "In response to rumors that have been circulating, there was never any physical abuse in our marriage -- either to myself or to our son," Jeri Ryan said in the statement. "Nor, to my knowledge, was he ever unfaithful to me.

"Jack is a good man, a loving father, and he shares a strong bond with our son," Jeri Ryan said. "I wish him all the best, both in his life and career. I have no doubt that he will make an excellent senator."

Jeri Ryan hinted in the papers that she was unfaithful during their marriage, saying she told Ryan shortly before she filed for divorce in 1998 that she had fallen in love with another man "after our relationship had fallen apart." She said Ryan blamed the breakup on her "affair."

Ryan repeatedly refused to discuss the allegations, saying it would further harm their son. He would only refer reporters back to his original court response. "Jeri Lynn and I long ago put these issues behind us," Ryan said. "I'm still sticking to the exact things we said four years ago."

Democrat Barack Obama, Ryan's opponent in the U.S. Senate race, has said he is not interested in the allegations and that he would prefer to stick to issues. Recent polling shows Obama holding a wide lead over Ryan in a state that has been trending Democratic in recent elections.

Ryan said he has no plans to step down, saying "I think we'll be victorious in November."

He said he talked to a number of Republican leaders over the past few days, including U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and they all continue to support him.

Outgoing GOP Sen. Peter Fitzgerald called Ryan "a good and decent man" and pledged to "support him with enthusiasm and confidence."

But it's unclear what Ryan told the Republican leaders in his calls. He only told Edgar his version about mistakenly wandering into an "avant-garde nightclub" in Paris, the source close to the former governor said.

Topinka is furious and believes Ryan lied to her in an earlier discussion, a source close to the state treasurer said:

"She asked point blank during the conversation whether there was anything embarrassing in there, and he said no."

WHAT THEY SAID

Declaration of Jeri Ryan, dated June 9, 2000.
I made it clear to [Jack Ryan] that our marriage was over for me in the spring of 1998. On three trips, one to New Orleans, one to New York and one to Paris, [he] insisted that I go to sex clubs with him. These were surprise trips that [he] arranged. They were long weekends, supposed "romantic" getaways.
The clubs in New York and Paris were explicit sex clubs. [He] had done research.

[Jack Ryan] took me to two clubs in New York during the day. One club I refused to go in. It had mattresses in cubicles. The other club he insisted I go to. . . . It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling.
[He] wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused.
[He] asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset.

We left the club and [he] apologized, said that I was right and he would never insist that I go to a club again. He promised it was out of his system.
Then during a trip to Paris, he took me to a sex club in Paris, without telling me where we were going. I told him I thought it was out of his system. I told him he had promised me we would never go. People were having sex everywhere. I cried, I was physically ill.

[He] became very upset with me, and said it was not a "turn on" for me to cry.
I could not get over the incident, and my loss of any attraction to him as a result.

Response from Jack Ryan.
I should not have to respond to the ridiculous accusations Jeri Lynn makes. . .. I was faithful and loyal to my wife throughout our marriage. I did arrange romantic getaways for us, but that did not include the type of activities she describes. We did go to one avant garde nightclub in Paris which was more than either one of us felt comfortable with. We left and vowed never to return. . .. Apparently, Jeri Lynn did not consider how Alex [their son] will feel about his parents or himself when he learns of this type of smut.


Contributing: The Associated Press.

Copyright © The Sun-Times Company
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

 

BEHEADING OF THE DAY

Looks like Al Quaida has latched onto a winning game plan for winning the hearts and minds of the American people.

I'm getting sick of conservatives whining about the lack of outrage toward atrocities like this, comparative to the loud, far and wide condemnation of the Abu Ghraib "abuses" (or "torture," as a civilization ought to call it).

Yes, it is outrageous when anyone is killed like this. Al Quaida are murderous douchebags. They should be killed or caught and punished. But I don't have any say over Al Quaida. Al Quaida does not answer to me or anyone else in the United States or most of the civilized world.

Most importantly, Al Quaida does not purport to act in my name. I will not be a party to torture, and by engaging in torture, the United States is making me an accomplice.

Fuck that.

9-11 plan took twisted path

Infighting, improvisation marked scheme hatched in '99

By Douglas Jehl and David Johnston
The New York Times

WASHINGTON -- In early 1999, Osama bin Laden summoned Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to his well-guarded compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan, to confide to the lieutenant that his long-discussed proposal to use aircraft as terror weapons against the United States had the full support of al-Qaida.
That meeting, described for the first time by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, set in motion an extraordinary series of events. But the path from Kandahar to the World Trade Center was anything but a straight line.

Described in vivid detail by two captured al-Qaida operatives who helped plan the attacks, the plot was more troubled and improvisational than had been previously understood.

As late as August 2001, one commission report says, Mohammed fretted about infighting between Mohammed Atta, the mission leader, and a Lebanese pilot, Ziad Jarrah. With his frosted hair and his fondness for Beirut nightclubs, Jarrah seemed so close to choosing a girlfriend over al-Qaida that the plotters scrambled to line up a replacement pilot. But in the end, Jarrah was at the controls of United Flight 93 when it crashed in Pennsylvania.

Of the four al-Qaida operatives first assigned to the plot in 1999, only two ended up among the final 19 hijackers who carried out the attacks. Both of them -- Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi -- washed out as student pilots, and were relegated to lesser roles. To take their place as pilots, Mohammed turned to other recruits spotted at the camps in Afghanistan.

Atta, the Egyptian pilot who was at the center of the core group, did not join the team until after the plot was well under way. The lineup of hijackers was changing throughout the two years of preparations. Meanwhile, an impatient bin Laden began pressing for an attack as early as 2000, even if it meant using untrained pilots to crash into the ground instead of into buildings.

At the start, though, bin Laden and Mohammed envisioned attacks even more audacious than the one that was ultimately carried out, the report said.

Mohammed, the American-educated Kuwaiti from Pakistan who emerges in the commission's account as a main partner of bin Laden's, at one point planned an attack involving 10 planes. Mohammed wanted to hijack the last plane himself, then kill every man on board and land to deliver an anti-American diatribe.

Another version, scrapped in 2000, envisioned near-simultaneous attacks involving aircraft in Southeast Asia and the United States. Still another, discarded only in the summer of 2001, conceived of a second wave of strikes, following those in Washington and New York, that would target skyscrapers in California and Washington state.

The date of the attacks was not settled until mid-August, the report says, and even in the final days, Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh, another top al-Qaida lieutenant, had not decided whether the fourth plane, the one piloted by Jarrah, should aim at the Capitol or the White House.

"In the end," the report said, "the plot proved sufficiently flexible to adapt and evolve as challenges arose."

Bin Laden listened, but did not commit himself. It was the spring of 1996 when Mohammed described his idea of using airplanes for a terror attack in the United States. He sketched out an aerial suicide plot that seemed to come straight from a 1995 plan by Mohammed and others in Manila, Philippines, to blow up 12 U.S. commercial jets over the Pacific Ocean.

Three years later, at their meeting in Kandahar, bin Laden said the plan had al-Qaida's full support. Mohammed and bin Laden chose an initial list of targets. Bin Laden wanted to hit the White House and the Pentagon. Mohammed wanted to strike the World Trade Center. To that list they added the U.S. Capitol, one commission report said.

Bin Laden quickly supplied Mohammed with four recruits to carry out the scheme, drawing from the thousands of young men who trained in his camps a few especially ardent followers whom bin Laden had singled out for martyrdom missions.

The four men were Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar, Walid Muhammad Salih bin Attash, known as Khallad, and Abu Bara al Taizi. Only Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar stayed with the suicide attacks to the end.

Intensive training began in the fall of 1999. The recruits took part in an elite course at the Mes Aynak camp in Afghanistan. Mohammed, who had attended college in North Carolina, taught the men English phrases, showed them how to read a telephone book, make flight reservations, use the Internet and encode communications. They played flight simulator games and sifted through airline schedules to determine which flights would be in the air at the same time.

At first, Mohammed ordered Khallad and al Taizi to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to study airport security and conduct surveillance of U.S. airlines in preparation for a smaller version of the Manila plot. But bin Laden canceled the Southeast Asia plan. Khallad and al Taizi dropped out; instead, Khallad became the mastermind of the October 2000 attack in Yemen on the Navy destroyer Cole. Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were the first hijackers to enter the United States, arriving Jan. 15. 2000.

Separately, in 1999, four other young extremists were making their way from Hamburg, Germany, where they met, to the Afghan camps, as an alternative to an earlier plan to fight against the Russians in Chechnya. The four, Atta, Jarrah, Binalshibh, and Marwan al-Shehhi, seemed ideal for bin Laden: They were Western-educated and held extreme anti-American views. All except Binalshibh would die in the attacks.

In Afghanistan, Atta quickly achieved high status, pledging "bayat" or allegiance to bin Laden, who made him the operation's leader. The two men discussed targets for the attack. One commission report, based on the interrogation of Binalshibh, said the two men identified "the World Trade Center, which represented the U.S. economy; the Pentagon, a symbol of the U.S. military; and the U.S. Capitol, the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel."

By March 2000, the four new al-Qaida recruits were back in Germany researching flight schools. But after learning that pilot training was cheaper and easier in the United States, Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah left for the United States. Binalshibh, a Yemeni who tried but failed to enter the country, stayed behind as a link between Mohammed and Atta.

By the fall of 2000, the recruits were training at different aviation schools around the country. But al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, the first two hijackers to enter the country, proved to be poor pilots.

Al-Qaida proved adaptable. In place of the two men, bin Laden's scouts recommended Hani Hanjour, who had studied in the United States and had taken flight training in Arizona. He was chosen for the plot in 2000 after he arrived at the Faruq camp in Afghanistan. That December, Hanjour flew to California to join the plot.

With his arrival, the pilots who seized the four planes used in the attack were all in the United States.

As 2001 dawned, all was not well among the pilots.

Jarrah was headed abroad, on the second and third of what would be five foreign trips in 10 months, to see his girlfriend in Germany and his family in Lebanon. Atta and al-Shehhi also left the United States around the New Year, but it was Jarrah, from a wealthy Lebanese family, who seemed to be having second thoughts about the plot.

The report describes Jarrah as a young man who had "studied at private, Christian schools" in Lebanon and "knew the best nightclubs and discos in Beirut, and partied with fellow students in Germany, even drinking beer -- a clear taboo for any religious Muslim." He was very different from the more pious Atta and other pilots, the report says, and during his months of flight training in the United States, he lived separately from and felt isolated by them.

By late July, when Jarrah headed to Germany again, on a one-way ticket purchased by his girlfriend, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, Mohammed and Binalshibh discussed the possibility of replacing him with another man, Zacarias Moussaoui. Only after an emotional conversation in Germany in early August, in which Binalshibh encouraged him "to see the plan through," did Jarrah return to the United States and the al-Qaida team.

In fits and starts, the final lineup for the attacks began taking shape. At one time or another, at least nine candidate hijackers, all Saudis, had been dropped from the plan, the report says. But by late April, the 15 recruits who would serve in supporting roles in the hijackings had begun arriving in the United States. Most of the men were short in stature, slender in build, and between 20 and 28 years old. They would serve as the "muscle," to subdue the crew and passengers as the others flew the planes.

Still, bin Laden was impatient. As early as 2000, just as the pilots were beginning to arrive in the United States, he had been pressing Mohammed to carry out the attacks, to protest harsh treatment by Israel of the Palestinians. It would be sufficient, the al-Qaida leader told Mohammed, if the planes were just crashed into the ground.

At least twice in 2001, bin Laden encouraged attacks as early as May, but Mohammed deflected those requests, the report says, saying the hijackers needed more time to prepare. Sometime in the summer, Mohammed himself quietly set aside his vision of a "second wave" of attacks, in California and Washington state, that would follow those in the East; he was too busy preparing for the main onslaught.

At a meeting in Spain in mid-July, Atta told Binalshibh that he would need an additional six weeks to carry out those strikes, the report said. Not until mid-August did Atta settle on the Sept. 11 date.

Since 1999, when bin Laden gave the go-ahead to the plot, the target list had been whittled down, albeit after much debate. From Boston, two hijacked planes would strike the World Trade Center, a target long favored by Mohammed. From Dulles airport outside Washington, a third plane would hit the Pentagon, a favorite of bin Laden's.

But what of the Capitol and the White House? Both had been on the preliminary list, and bin Laden preferred the White House, a message conveyed to Atta. But the chief hijacker resisted; in the center of Washington, the White House might be difficult to strike; he wanted to hold the Capitol in reserve.

The fourth aircraft, hijacked after takeoff from Newark, N.J., was headed toward Washington when it was forced down by passengers into the Pennsylvania field. "As late as Sept. 9, two days before the attacks," one commission report says, "the conspirators may still have been uncertain about which Washington target they would strike."

In Afghanistan, some of bin Laden's most senior advisers were anxious, the report says. They were concerned that the attack could provoke an armed American response and would also anger Taliban leaders and the Pakistani government, whose good graces had permitted al-Qaida to use Afghanistan as a refuge. But in a dispute over whether to go forward, bin Laden prevailed.

"In his thinking," the report says, "the more al-Qaida did, the more support it would gain."

Today's theme is...

Statutory rape!

First off, some of the most fucking horrifying shit I have ever seen.

Okay, I can appreciate the siren-like call of young girls. But when one's unholy lust provokes you to fuck around with Photoshop, create something like this...



...then you are either joking, or have a diseased mind.

Luckily, the state of Virginia has a message for you:



That's right. Sex with a minor. Don't go there.

HEY, DID YOU HEAR? RONALD REAGAN DIED!

Yeah, the media saturation about Reagan's death is kind of sickening. But I've figured out why. The last president to die did it a decade ago, and that was Richard Nixon. As a nation, we've been desparate to lose a beloved national figure, and I think the last president to die who was even halfway likeable was Eisenhower, just over 35 years ago in 1969. And while I'm too lazy to look, I'm sure the national mourning was nothing to compare with the Kennedy blowout a few years before. Reagan isn't being mourned hysterically because he was beloved; he's being mourned hysterically because he was liked, and dammit, that's good enough these days.

I may be drunk, but tomorrow, I'll still be President of the United States of America.

Now a conspiracy theory has coe out about Washingtonienne. Have we all becoem so jaded that we can't accept a sex scandal at face value?

At first I sneered when I received this email from Konformist. "Top 10 Conspiracy Theories of 2003-2004"? A little late, aren't we? But it's actually pretty good.

Top 10 Conspiracy Theories of 2003-2004
By Mike Ward, AlterNet
May 18, 2004

On August 6, 2001, while vacationing in Crawford, Texas, George Bush
received an intelligence briefing called "Bin Laden Determined to
Strike in U.S." It included revelations that al Qaeda members were
conducting "surveillance of federal buildings in New York"; the World

Trade Center was mentioned in the first paragraph, the prospect of
terrorist "retaliat[ion] in Washington" in the second. According to
the briefing, Osama bin Laden's organization was acting in
ways "consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of
attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New
York."

But Bush must have had headphones on, because 36 days later when he
saw Flight 11 fly into the World Trade Center, he claims his first
thought was, "There's one terrible pilot." Even after the second
crash Bush assures us he was unsure what was going on: "I grew up in
a period of time where the idea of America being under attack never
entered my mind."

The attacks of 9-11 have since been used to justify two military
actions that the government has chosen to call "wars," the more
recent of which - a "pre-emptive," which is to say unprovoked,
assault on Iraq - has yielded American soldiers their bloodiest two
weeks of combat since 1971. Odd, then, that every expressed reason
for the Bush administration's massive and deadly undertaking in Iraq,
most conspicuously Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass
destruction, has evaporated under scrutiny. In fact, the only thing
we know for sure is that the invasion isn't about oil. Tony Blair,
among others, has been quite clear on this: any attempt to explain
the war in Iraq as an oil war is a "conspiracy theory."

This makes one wonder whether other so-called conspiracy theories
might be more worthy of consideration than we've been led to believe.
Some months ago I wrote an article originally published in Popmatters
magazine about this. In light of subsequent events, the time was
right to revisit it - particularly since the political climate in
America, with its indefinite detentions and pointless color-coded
alerts, has taken a more Orwellian turn than anyone ever imagined
possible.

1. Prior Warnings.

Right after September 11, rumors began floating around that World
Trade Center employees of the Jewish faith had been mysteriously
alerted to stay home that fateful morning. This racist fantasy had an
equally ugly counterpart among anti-Islamic reactionaries: that
Muslims the world over knew of the 9-11 attacks in advance and
managed, en masse and in their millions, to keep it a complete
secret.

Such bizarre hearsay about collective foreknowledge has many
unpleasant effects, not the least of which is to delegitimize an
otherwise worthy question: was anyone told beforehand that something
shocking might happen on or around 9-11? It turns out quite a few
people claim to have received such warnings. Although the mainstream
press tends to mention these accounts in isolation or attribute them
to uncanny serendipity, when taken together they cry out for further
explanation.

The airport security service for San Francisco mayor Willie Brown,
for example, had contacted him eight hours prior to the strikes and
warned him not to fly, and controversial author Salman Rushdie also
claims to have gotten warnings before September 11 not to take to the
tarmac. As reported in the Sept. 24, 2001 issue of Newsweek, several
employees at the Pentagon cancelled their flight plans the night of
September 10, citing "security concerns." And last but not least,
Justice Department head John Ashcroft had stopped flying commercial
aircraft two months before 9-11. Why? The FBI cited an
unfavorable "threat assessment" - but after September 11 has been
unwilling to elaborate on this.

2. What Was With That Handshake, Anyway?

As I write a scandal is unfolding at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq,
where American soldiers are accused of torturing and brutally
humiliating prisoners, possibly at the behest of military
intelligence officers. In a particularly bitter irony, Abu Ghraib was
once a favored torture chamber of Saddam Hussein, a fact that leads
some to ask whether there are actually any good guys in the U.S.-Iraq
conflict.

There are more reasons than this to wonder. Where Iraq's human rights
violations are concerned, U.S. foreign policy has long been sterner
in rhetoric than in deed, dating back at least to the 1980s - when
many Bush administration figures were dealing with Iraq on behalf of
then-president Reagan. Among these were Mideast envoy Donald
Rumsfeld, whose 1983 meeting with Hussein resulted in a videotaped
handshake that has since crossed the world countless times on the
Internet. Speculation abounds as to what may have transpired at this
meeting, but one thing is certain: at the time Hussein was employing
chemical weapons almost daily in his hideous war with Iran. In 2003
the Bush administration referred to these gas attacks as part of its
justification for invasion, but for whatever reason it has taken 20
years for Rumsfeld et al. to discover their own outrage over these
horrific crimes.

3. That's Our Plan and We're Sticking to It.

From the toppling of the Taliban to the creation of the Homeland
Security Department, September 11 has been used to justify virtually
every action that the Bush administration has taken since. But as
with so much concerning the administration, this is more complicated
than it appears. Case in point: conspiracy theory web sites - and
later on, mainstream progressive e-zines - have made much hay of the
Project for the New American Century, an extragovernmental pressure
group which has long been bent on conquering Iraq. As far back as
1998, PNAC sent the Clinton administration a now-notorious letter
insisting that the sanction-choked country posed an imminent danger
to the United States. P-Nackers such as conservative writer Bill
Kristol argue that the oil moguls and weapons firms PNAC represents
have long been preoccupied with Iraq out of an abiding humanitarian
concern, but the fact remains that where Iraq is involved, September
11 has not altered policy so much as it has been used to justify
policies that were already in place.

4. The Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Your Liberties.

Similar stories haunt the USA Patriot Act, which was promoted as a
response to 9-11 but in fact resembles anti-terrorist measures passed
following the Oklahoma City bombing as well as an anti-drug bill that
was scuttled in 2000 for being too "reactionary." The stunning 9-11
attacks created a more compliant social climate for such harsh
measures, so that after the attacks Congress passed the Patriot Act
without even bothering to read the provisions it had earlier found so
untenable.

Different people draw different conclusions from this. Unabashed
conspiracy sites like www.prisonplanet.com speculate that the
government deliberately orchestrated the 9-11 attacks in the hopes
that this would drum up support for war and indoctrinate the American
people into willingly abandoning their freedom. Others such as Gore
Vidal make slightly more temperate accusations, that corruption and
real-politik policies left American security in a dire state of
neglect, setting the stage for the attacks. Whoever is right, it
seems clear that although life in America has changed radically in
the wake of 9-11, the plans in the highest levels of the government
have remained oddly unchanged.

5. The War in Iraq Is Not About Oil.

We have noted with relief the assurances of those on high that the
Iraq War has nothing to do with control of natural resources. We can
therefore assume that the following facts, though interesting, are
completely irrelevant:

Iraq holds the world's second-largest oil reserves, and owing to
decades of wars and sanctions many of these fields lie un- or
underdeveloped, simply waiting for sufficiently motivated energy
firms to come along and tap them.

As luck would have it, executives from such firms are exceptionally
well-positioned to influence the current administration.

Oil and gas prices in the U.S. are currently the highest they've ever
been, a problem that oil from Iraq is likely in the coming years to
help alleviate.

And finally, the highest priority of the administration's military
forces when they moved into Iraq was to secure its oil ministry, even
as museums and hospitals in Baghdad were being looted.

6. Bread and Circuses.

For a long time following 9-11, strange facts such as these were
rarely mentioned in the mainstream media. This is no longer true.
Anomalies from the August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing to the
agenda of PNAC are now common knowledge, but many people seem not to
have noticed.

Why this is? Part of the answer probably can be found by looking at
the assumptions underlying the media's coverage of war. Although they
will occasionally cover news items that might damage the U.S.
government's credibility, in general the American media have waxed
awfully uncritical since the cynical days of Vietnam, and
particularly since 9-11. For example, the attack on Afghanistan,
which was portrayed as a response to 9-11, was also presented as a
kind of World War II re-enactment in which the U.S. - with its 700 or
more military bases in 120 countries worldwide - was cast as
a "sleeping giant" in a stunt intended to link 9-11 and Pearl Harbor.

Bush spoke of America, which has engaged in more than 200 military
actions since 1945, as a "peaceful" nation, but "fierce when
stirred
to anger." The "axis of evil" speaks for itself.

Such puffery not only misrepresents the U.S. government as benevolent
in foreign affairs and reluctant to use military force, it also
dehumanizes Islam in American eyes, much as the Japanese were
dehumanized in World War II. It is additionally useful for shaming
those who question government actions, tarring them as a kind of
Fifth Column. But the most important effect of the war on
terror/World War II analogy is to create the illusion of clear lines
between good and evil in the current conflict when in fact those
lines, as in Vietnam, are becoming blurrier by the day.

7. What You Gonna Do When They Come For You?

Propaganda of earlier decades is usually pretty easy to recognize. In
hindsight, for instance, most of us can see that the duck-and-cover
newsreels of the 1950s and '60s were selling Americans a bill of
goods about the "survivability" of nuclear war.

But how good are we at recognizing media PR today? Some would say not
terribly - at least if the popularity of reality TV is any
indication. From Survivor to Fear Factor, reality shows all ask us to
identify with people whose lives are being captured on camera, often
almost continuously. And they encourage us to think that's okay.

This is happening in the context of an increasingly intrusive
surveillance apparatus in America and Western Europe, where the
average city-dweller can expect to be photographed by closed-circuit
cameras anywhere from a dozen to 73 to 300 times a day. Not many
people complain about this, perhaps at least in part because Big
Brother has changed the way Americans feel about Big Brother. But
it's hard to imagine earlier generations accepting such a state of
affairs, weaned as these generations were on novels and movies -
1984, Fahrenheit 451, even Videodrome - which warned that excessive
surveillance would spell the end of freedom.

8. Chip Me!

In the finest homesteading tradition, the Jacobs family of Boca
Raton, Florida, has volunteered to plumb a new technological
frontier: They have agreed to have "VeriChips," computerized ID tags
about the size of grains of rice, surgically implanted in their
bodies. On May 10, 2002, their dream was realized. Today the Jacobses
constantly emit a low-frequency hum that's readable with a
specialized scanner, which makes their medical histories accessible
in much the way your Shoppers Food Warehouse preferred customer card
allows your cashier to learn, with a single swipe, that you prefer
Charmin.

Implantable chip technology is in its rudimentary stages today; in
the future, more sophisticated chips are likely to be put into your
kids as homing devices to help discourage child abductions; they
could serve as permanent biometric identifiers; still more advanced
models might even be able to monitor your body chemistry and
administer precise doses of psychiatric drugs to regulate your mood.

Despite the Jacobs' enthusiasm, some are less than tickled about this
new technology, particularly since being chipped, like owning a
credit card, will probably someday become a prerequisite to such life
necessities as renting an apartment. Also, once the chip is in your
body, you have precious little say in what the device does. The
ramifications of this are ominous, particularly where chips that
administer psychoactive drugs are concerned. In his conspiracy
nightmare "Blueprint for a Prison Planet," Nick Sandberg sums up the
worst-case scenario: "With implant technology accepted as being part
of life in the twenty-first century," he wonders, "who is going to
notice if they no longer require us to actually program them, but
seem to do it without our help, no longer allowing us access to our
true feelings even if we wanted them?"

9. Peak Oil and the End of the World.

Chicken-littlism may well be humanity's oldest avocation. Since the
beginning of what some of us like to call "civilization," doomsayers
from the Muggletonians to the Heaven's Gate cult have frantically and
confidently spoken of the world's imminent demise - and each time,
they've been all wet. The latest pessimistic vision of the future
regards "peak oil": the idea that as rising demand for oil outstrips
the capacity of producers to supply it, formerly stable economic
systems will be thrown into disarray, leading eventually to the kind
of anarchy foretold in movies like Mad Max.

One would hope peak oil is a hand-wringing fantasy on a par with the
survivalist craze that accompanied Y2K. But there are some facts in
favor of the peak oil agitators: a recent, stubborn rise in gas
prices, with little relief in sight; the ominous fact that the
world's total oil production declined in 2001 and 2002, and rose in
2003 by only .5 percent, while demand rose by nearly 2 percent; and
the otherwise inexplicable war in Iraq - which, though a political
liability in the short run, is likely in the long haul to yield the
U.S. virtually unending supplies of oil just when the peak oil
theorists claim it's going to start getting quite scarce.

If the peak oil theory is right, the Iraq war, terrible though it is,
will be remembered - like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand or
the Nazi invasion of Poland - as a mere prelude to a much bloodier
affair. According to proponents like Kenneth Deffeyes and Colin
Campbell, the coming decline in oil supplies will trigger privations
in seemingly unconnected economic sectors. Industrial agriculture,
for instance, depends heavily on oil and so much of the world's
population will face starvation in a future of dwindling fossil
fuels. Many oil-peakers speak of a coming "die-off," as the world
population adjusts to the resources available to it - by perishing in
the billions from war, famine, exposure, and civil unrest.

10. Life After the Fall.

The peak oil theory has been around for some time now, so some people
have thought long and hard about its consequences. Such folks include
new-urbanists like Jane Jacobs - who forecast that Americans will see
fewer lengthy commutes and more self-sustaining local communities, as
higher prices at the pump obviate automobile addiction in the U.S. -
and more pessimistic "anticivilization" thinkers like Internet scribe

Ran Prieur and Richard Heinberg, who foresee a future in which a much
smaller populace ekes out a spartan but sustainable existence,
feeding largely off the detritus of late capitalism's industrial-
sized excesses and marveling at the degree of this generation's
waste. Conventional wisdom holds, somewhat vaguely, that alternative
power sources such as hydrogen or nuclear power will come along at
the last minute to rescue the West from such a fate. But the
anticivilization thinkers have worked long and hard to imagine the
consequences if no such alternative is found.

It's worth noting that the world they envision is one in which many
people live today. It resembles, for instance, the privations of Sadr
City - the now-famous ghetto of Baghdad where running water is
unreliable and raw sewage flows in the streets - or the arid
countryside of Sudan, where political upheaval has displaced a
million people and the prospect looms of another Rwandan-style
genocide, complete with the same indifference from the supposedly
humanitarian West.

In The Soft Cage, a book on the rising surveillance state in America,
Christian Parenti quotes Slovenian writer Slavoj Zizek regarding
9/11. Writing of that horrifying taste of third-world violence in the
first-world streets of America, Zizek sardonically welcomes Americans
to "the desert of the real." "The point," Parenti explains,
"is not
to justify the crimes of 9/11," but instead to awaken Americans to
the reality that "the world is a brutal, vicious place and that
America is deeply implicated in its worst aspects." In other words,
even if the well-to-do in the West can somehow avert the fate that
the peak oil theorists predict, for peoples around the globe the end
of the world is now - and this has been true for a long time.


Mike Ward is a contributor to PopMatters.

The Onion comments on deleted scenes that are included on DVDs:

Lagaan

Scene: The Equipment Scandal

What Happens: In a 17-minute sequence excised from the nearly four-hour Bollywood musical, British colonial Rachel Shelley sneaks some cricket equipment to Indian villager Aamir Khan, setting off a chain of events: jealousy in Khan's girlfriend, betrayal by a teammate, and incarceration when a British commander insists that the equipment was stolen.

Why It Doesn't Belong: For starters, the movie is already four goddamned hours long. Anything that doesn't involve singing, dancing, or the actual playing of cricket is best left out. Also, the sequence is anchored by an interminable interrogation scene in which each team member must individually prove that he isn't the traitor.

Where It Might Belong: As a stand-alone, semi-allegorical short film, in which gifts from strangers lead to unfortunate ends.

+++

Speaking of Lagaan, one thing that just occured to me: does a colonial governor really have the authority to halt taxation for three years on a bet in a cricket match? I couldn't imagine the home government approving such an arrangement.

 

A definite improvement in these new photos of Washingtonienne and Wonkette.  

Other sites are reporting a spike in traffic thanks to their Jessica Cutler "coverage," while I'm getting dick. I'm gonna have to post that sex video if things don't shape up soon.