Behold: the self-incriminating proposition!

Hysterical little video clip sent by my brother. It's a guy in an audience during some debate. He asks Deepak Chopra (some sort of new age guru, from what I gather) whether or not he had earlier stated that all beliefs are "cover-up for insecurity". Rather, he asks it in a particular way, so as to show up the paradoxical nature of the proposition, if taken literally.

Hilarity ensues.



How would Chopra respond? Probably "Oh..no I meant only certain SORTS of beliefs are cover-ups for insecurity. Not the belief that some beliefs are cover-ups..not that one! That belief is a sign of my keen insight..dontcha' know.

Yeah. Whatever, Maharishi.Write another book.

LOCAL ACCESS VIDEO: Bethel Today 07.27.10 broadcast

The Love List

I'm loving...

this shared boys bedroom

this use of beadboard in a laundry room

these barn wedding invites

this collection of milk glass

this girl's room

(with daybed and trundle - perfect inspiration for Chloe's big girl room!)

Compare and contrast these Blue Angel fly-along passengers

First up, Navy head football coach Kenny Niumatalolo. Mensch.



Next up Reporter Steve. Unconscious through most of flight.

Time magazine devotes cover story to misogynistic Taliban barbarism, and gives a platform to someone who is now directly responsible for its increase.

In an incredible display of moral tone-deafness, Time is, simultaneously devoting a cover story to the horrors of Taliban terror against women, while giving platform to the detestable Julian Assange, someone who is now clearly responsible for placing many Afghans in mortal danger.

Powerful video concerning the 18 year old woman who agreed to pose for the magazine cover:



And on the same website; the detestable Asschapeau is given what he wants most; facetime:




Nice work Time. Nice.

Since the embed codes don't seem to be working here are the two links, assuming they are functional:

Cover Story video

Facetime for Assange

Windhover

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Common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus): photo by Andreas Trepte, 2010

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, pride, plume, here...-- G. M. Hopkins

The poet who reveled in the stooping of the raptor among reaches and crags
upon the wing of the wind
embraced the will in the scream of the plummeting Peregrine, the Greater Will,
the whim
of a beloved brutal and violent predator God --

praised out of silence lord dauphin chevalier and master,
sang flight terror
in the Merlin's glide, saw Christ in the dip of the Kestrel, knew love
ecstatic
in the Gyrfalcon's Sturzkampfflugzeug swoop and Lanner's

wild updraft soaring out of stony nested shade
over tarn and lake -- sensed startled cry of prey, felt hearts
race, heard
sharp fear music from faroff in the instant of speechless prayer
before the inevitable Kill -- and then the fade

back to mere word language my heart in hiding
stirred --
from bird augury and violence in the realm
of the parahuman
the gods have always been made.

Gyrfalcon (Falco rusticolus) in flight, west of Hastings, Minnesota: photo by Derek Bakken, 2006

Merlin (Falco columbarius) pair fighting over prey, Auburn, New York: photo by Bear Golden Retriever, 2010

Merlin (Falco columbarius) pair fighting over prey, Auburn, New York: photo by Bear Golden Retriever, 2010

Merlin (Falco columbrius columbarius) hunting a Northern Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata bromia), Mount Auburn Cemetery,
Massachusetts: photo by John Harrison, 2008 

Lanner Falcon (Falco biarmicus) in a dive: photo by Steve-B, 2006

Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus anatum) in flight, Morro Bay, California: photo by Kevin Cole, 2008

The Emperor's Attendant

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The Persian emperor who had once been defeated in battle by Athens now required an attendant to accompany him at all times, to help him combat fatigue and discouragement and restore his taste for battle by murmuring night and day, "Lord, remember the Athenians." The mere words were enough to awaken the old feeling. This custom of the emperor persisted long after his reasons for going to war with the Athenians had faded from his mind. But his distaste for conflict remained a secret known only to his loyal attendant, who was forever whispering into his ear the prescribed urgings. The emperor seldom slept, the attendant even more rarely.

A new campaign began but the emperor barely noticed, for him things continued as they had been. Even when the fever of battle was sweeping over everyone around him, he felt himself strangely detached, as if standing, fully dressed in his battle armour, his bright war pennants unfurled brilliantly before him, well apart.

Then one night when a ground fog had crept over the camp, the tents were enveloped in silence, and the distant fires of the Athenians could hardly be made out through the mists that cloaked everything -- or, perhaps, it may have been on a night at sea in the Straits that this happened, and it was the distant lights of the enemy ships that were dimmed -- a peaceful moment befell the contending armies -- or fleets.

And the emperor's attendant drifted off to sleep.

It was as if something within the world had shifted, in that moment. There then prevailed a period of peace between the Persians and the Athenians.

US Navy sailors in motor launch rescue a survivor alongside the sunken battleship USS West Virginia during the Japanese raid at Pearl Harbor, 7 December, 1941: photo by US Navy
Torpedo exploding on USS Wast Virginia at Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941, seen from attacking Japanese plane: photo by Japanese Navy Ministry

Blackfive on the detestable Julian Assange

Translators beware

Understand, if you take nothing else away from this article, know that when a translator or other "collaborator" was caught, they were most often tortured extensively. Far more often than many of certain political stripe are willing to admit, their spouse or family joined them, and while regular rape was a part of it because of what it means in that culture, other objects (see above) were reportedly used as well. Drills and vehicle batteries, along with hands and feet and other things, made those hours into an eternity that does need to be dwelled on in this instance. A coup de grace in the form of a shot to the head was truly a mercy at the end. It was and is the lucky ones that are killed immediately.

While in Iraq in 2007, I learned of a new twist on this. Instead of mercy, the death blow was changed by some to a last use of the drill, reportedly slowly, on the head. For videos, the slow-saw beheading is the choice.

J had been kidnapped at one point. Thankfully, they didn't realize who he was. They had some idea that his clan and/or family would pay for his return, but they didn't have his real name or realize that he was an interpreter. He got out of it, quickly, and was glad to get out as lightly as he had. If his real name or what he was doing had become known, well, see above.

Since that time, he had taken a number of precautions. He was careful in what he said, to whom, and in how he moved around. The level of precautions was staggering in some respects, but nothing compared to the possible consequences. To this day, I will not say more about him.

Today, the news came that among the documents released by anti-war activist Assange is a list of those working for or with the Allies in Afghanistan. Reports are already stating that the Taliban and other groups are using these lists for targeting.

I doubt that someone like Assange, who is secure in his self-righteous dudgeon, cares. After all, they are just barbarian "wogs" aren't they? Peasants, beneath notice. Besides, to make his anti-war/pro-peace better world omelette, one has to break a few eggs, right? Such unwashed, unlettered peons are hardly worth his attention or care, being no better than the thuggish myrmidons that are the soldiers whom they help. Anyone on our side who has also rushed to assure that no one/real people have been endangered is also guilty of this same unthinking bigotry.

If there were true justice in the world, Assange would have to watch everything that happens to each and every person on that list who is caught by the enemy. In this world, I will settle for doing everything I can to see him charged with the murder of each person so caught. U.S. law, international law, the law of Allies, I don't care. With luck, it would be good to see him indited in as many jurisdictions as possible for each murder. For he is as guilty of each murder as if he had done the torture and killing himself. Period. So is whoever leaked the information to him. Period. I want them found, and tried at the highest level and highest possible penalty. Period.

Hear Hear!

LOCAL ACCESS VIDEO: Danbury Live 07.24.10 broadcast

Great acronyms in history! Todays episode: BOGSAT

I wasn't aware of this one, learned about it today, but it is hysterical. It's definition seems to be this:

Noun: **A meeting of more than two people.

Adjective: It refers to a particular set of properties in danger of being acquired by objects in virtue of being the focus of attention during one or more BOGSATs (noun usage).

The properties in question:

1. Undue ambiguity, vagueness, length, or complication of content. This is acquired by written projects, PowerPoint presentations (or low tech correlates), policies, projects, tasks or organizations:

Research shows that there is a direct proportionality between ambiguity, vagueness length, and complication of content and the size of teams involved in projects, while there is an inverse square proportionality of boldness of content to size of team...or so I am told.

So for example, a committee report that is late due to too many cooks being involved, is either in danger of, or in the process of acquiring this property of BOGSAT. Grammatically the acronym can function adjectivally, or as a verb, or as a noun.

Adjectival example: That report went seriously BOGSAT at about the fifth meeting.

Verbal use: We need to quash this report. Let's BOGSAT the thing.

Noun: **See above - And: That particular BOGSAT was a thing of bureaucratic beauty.

And what does the acronym actually abbreviate? The phrase 'Bunch of guys sitting around a table.'

Darth Vader was not one to countenance BOGSAT:

A Trip on the Santa Fe

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Passing a section house along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, Encino vicinity, New Mexico, March 1943

The heavy industries that built and shaped our lives are dying
The sights and sounds now but memories of their once throbbing rituals
That echo and reflect their death throes
In retrospect
A pall of absence hangs over things
Yet time continues to move forward
Along the rusted tracks and corroded rails
Around blind corners
Through a labyrinth of empty corridors

We've perhaps been here
We will never be back
The tracks go on unscrolling
And we go on following the tracks
These endless parallels endlessly unravelling

A flagman
A pale glimmering signal light
Against the deep blue of the sky
Space drifts
We move forward as a scroll is unscrolled
There is no turning back
The pale glimmering of a signal
A level crossing
The stark figure of a man
He holds up one arm
As if beckoning
We pass another level crossing
Time floats
We follow the tracks
Distance
Iron rusting under snow
Absence
Smoke
The tracks continue on toward infinity
And a vanishing point
Debris of a past cluttered with activity and use

Oblique lines do bend and may greet but parallels though infinite may never meet
Rust covers everything an iron blight of time oxidizing
The past
We won't be back this way again soon
We were never really here so how can it be we're leaving
The blight of time an irony corroding what we've left behind

Time that is the ghostly material medium in which we think and act
Compelled onward yet never knowing where we're going
Turned aside, derailed, misled, diverted, confused, disoriented, finally lost
Time continues to grind on as long as we keep breathing

The world of time through which we travel which we have made and which has made us
Has only one direction
Forward
And one speed
This speed
And one destination

Santa Fe Railroad freight train about to leave for the West Coast, Corwith yard, Chicago, Illinois, March 1943

Re-tiring a locomotive drive wheel, Santa Fe Railroad shops, Shopton, Iowa: the tire is heated by means of gas until it can be slipped over the wheel; contraction will hold it firmly in shape, March 1943

Servicing engines at coal and sand chutes at Argentine Yard, Santa Fe Railroad, Kansas City, Kansas, March 1943

Santa Fe Railroad locomotive shops, Topeka, Kansas, March 1943

Yardmaster in Santa Fe Railroad yards, Amarillo, Texas, March 1943

Grain elevators along the route of Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, Amarillo, Texas, March 1943

A completely overhauled engine on the transfer table at the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad locomotive shops, Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 1943

Santa Fe Railroad train near Melrose, New Mexico, March 1943

Santa Fe Railroad near Melrose, New Mexico, March 1943

Flagman standing at a distance behind a Santa Fe westbound freight train during a stop, Bagdad, California, March 1943

Mojave Desert country, crossed by the Santa Fe Railroad, Cadiz, California

Activity in Santa Fe Railroad yard, Los Angeles, California: all switch lights, head lights and lamps have been shaded from above in accordance with blackout regulations; the heavy light streaks are caused by paths of locomotive headlights and the thin lines by lamps of switchmen working in the yards, March 1943

Folks around these parts get the time of day
From the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe
-- Johnny Mercer, 1944

Photos by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Master Bedroom: Rad Cover and Sconces

A few more bits and pieces of the master bedroom to show you...

Here's the radiator cover HandyMan made. This is the third one he's made and I think its the best one yet. He tried to complement the style of the paneling we have in the bedroom by using similar trims. I especially like the look of the feet... the cutouts near the base make the cover look a little less heavy and massive in the space.

And a few photos of the one bedside sconce (Wyatt sconce from Pottery Barn) we have installed. My American cousin finally came for a visit and dropped it off. It was worth the wait :)

Luckily the scale and size of the sconce was just as I hoped. It looks good on the little platform thingy we added in the paneling. I really like the warm dark metal against the creamy wall. Its nice and sturdy too. On some sconces I've seen, the arms feel flimsy and the dials lose their tension and don't hold the adjustable arms in place. These ones lock nice and tight and don't seem to sag at all.

We haven't installed the second sconce yet because Chloe's crib is still in our room...and we have to dismantle it to get it out of the room... and then we can install the sconce... and then we can hang up some art... and then we can take some pictures... and then we can finally reveal the room to you all. Just in case you were wondering.

Petraeus guidance on COIN in Afghanistan

The PDF is here

Sanka freeze-dried version collapsing some of the 24 points, in no particular order:

1. We must create a real sense of stable long-term security within the Afghan populace. (Message to U.S. pols as much as to ISAF)

2. Corruption will not be tolerated (Message to Karzai as much as to ISAF)

3. I really mean (2), so don't compromise that directive in order to carry out short-term goals, because you think you have no other choice. I mean it.

4. Dole out money carefully. See (2) and (3).

5. Reintegrate reconcilables, hunt and kill irreconcilables.

6. Get out amongst the people, patrol, talk, listen. Don't be passive about this. Seek out contact. Make it regular.

7. Train up the ANSF forces. ( also see (2) and (3))

8. Don't spin the truth. Deal with it openly.

9. Become a tea addict.

10. Trust subordinates to find ways to implement the strategy in day-to-day operations.

11. Don't freeze if your situation isn't covered by an order. Figure out what the order would have been, and follow that order. You will not be hung out to dry.

12. Take every opportunity to make clear to the Afghans that the Taliban crime family is the scum of the Earth, and doesn't give one whit about their well-being.

Who said it? (No fair googling)

A. Robert Nozick

B. David Hume

C. Leszek Kolakowski

D. Leon Trotsky



"It must, indeed, be confessed,that nature is so liberal to mankind, that,were all her presents equally divided among the species, and improved by art and industry, every individual would enjoy all the necessaries, and even most of the comforts of life; nor would ever be liable to any ills but such as might accidentally arise from the sickly frame and constitution of his body. It must also be confessed, that, wherever we depart from this equality, we rob the poor of more satisfaction than we add to the rich, and that the slight gratification of a frivolous vanity, in one individual, frequently costs more than bread to many families, and even provinces. It may appear withal, that the rule of equality, as it would be highly USEFUL, is not altogether IMPRACTICABLE; but has taken place, at least in an imperfect degree, in some republics; particularly that of Sparta; where it was attended, it is said, with the most beneficial consequences. Not to mention that the Agrarian laws, so frequently claimed in Rome, and carried into execution in many Greek cities, proceeded, all of them, from a general idea of the utility of this principle.

But historians, and even common sense, may inform us, that, however specious these ideas of PERFECT equality may seem, they are really, at bottom, IMPRACTICABLE; and were they not so, would be extremely PERNICIOUS to human society. Render possessions ever so equal, men's different degrees of art, care, and industry will immediately break that equality. Or if you check these virtues, you reduce society to the most extreme indigence; and instead of preventing want and beggary in a few, render it unavoidable to the whole community. The most rigorous inquisition too is requisite to watch every inequality on its first appearance; and the most severe jurisdiction, to punish and redress it. But besides, that so much authority must soon degenerate into tyranny, and beexerted with great partialities; who can possibly be possessed of it, in such a situation as is here supposed? Perfect equality of possessions, destroying all subordination, weakens extremely the authority of magistracy, and must reduce all power nearly to a level, as well as property."

A Point well taken: Wikileaks' Assange - an accessory to Collateral Murder?

From the always informative Crispin at Wings Over Iraq.

I've had my fun poking the detestable Julien Assange's 'shtruggulings' of late, his desperate attempts to maintain celebrity. But, a very legitimate worry has been brought up by a few people. The thoughts are nicely collected for one-stop-shopping at WOI.

The Af/Pak document dump could very well end up populating hit lists for local enforcers in the Taliban crime family. Locals that cooperate with ISAF would be in increased danger, and killings would likely increase in areas of decreasing ISAF presence, if and when draw-downs occur. How great this risk is depends on the extent to which the government in Afghanistan is able to control its country at that time, and the extent to which the detestable Assange deigned to delete visible names of locals from the reports he has posted. Given his track record and zealotry, the prospects are not good.

Julien Assange, and his source would have blood on their hands. Absent any speedy legal recourse, how can we prevent such collateral damage in the future? How can we stop the deluge of classified documents? Even if it were possible to convince traditional media outlets such as the NTY to refuse to publish stories about Wikileak contents, the site itself would still exist. And, even if it were possible to take down the existing site, how long would it be before another took its place, or several, or might Asschapeau and gang simply decentralize their dissemination, flooding numerous web outlets, knowing full well that some will bite and subsequently broadcast the content? Is this the beginning of an age of no secrets, or will adaptations, and countermeasures be created?

Let's hope innocent people will not die in service to Assange's overweening appetite for celebrity.

That would indeed be Collateral Murder.

Sweet Dreams

I heard about this sweet little blog on twitter. You must check it out. It is simply adorable.


New mama Adele envisions what her little Mila dreams about and brings it to life in these fanciful scenes. I marvel at Adele's creativity... and am envious that she has a little one that sleeps so soundly.

*******

I'm also blogging about this here. That's my new blog - Little Folk Design - about all things kid - design, parties, rooms, toys. I come across so many lovely images and products for children that I wanted to put them in one place. So rather than put them here (when what you're really looking for are Before & After photos and posts about our latest renovation) I thought I'd put them there. I might be a little crazy, trying to maintain two blogs, we'll see how it goes.

Scale: John Vachon

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Seed and feed store, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1942

Middle America in the time just before and on into the early years of the War: this is the world into which I was born, in which I spent my childhood. In memory, it remains familiar to me, and has a scale I am able to recognize.

I say that world remains familiar to me in memory. But memory is a notoriously fleeting faculty, requiring, latterly, a bit of prompting. The photos here work for me as prompts. They take me back to that gone world, and perhaps even help to create the memories.

The photographer John Vachon (1914-1975) left his native Minnesota in 1936 to attend college in Washington, D.C., but within a year had dropped out of school and gone to work for the Farm Security Administration. At the time FSA director Roy Stryker was assembling a crew of the finest photographers in the country, their mission to document the lives of common working people and rural poor around a Depression-stricken America. Vachon, with no prior training in photography, began at FSA as a messenger, later became a filing clerk and fell into taking pictures out of a curiosity bred of proximity.

"John came [to Washington] to go to Catholic University," Stryker recalled in a 1963 Smithsonian oral history interview. "Got into some trouble down there because he was curious about the world about him and didn't attend classes. Finally wound up as a messenger in our place. I needed a librarian -- John was out doing filing and messenger work, and I asked him if he'd like to take it. And he took it over and became very successful at it."

Encouraged by one of most famous of the FSA photographers, Ben Shahn, Vachon borrowed a Leica and on weekends began snapping shots around the Potomac River valley. "I came back from vacation once -- I'[d] never had an assistant down there, but I came back and John had taken to loading one of our cameras," Stryker remembered. "He'd gone off on a walking tour and came back with some surprisingly good pictures. Later on it became apparent that John should quit the filing and become a photographer, and he turned [out] to be a superbly good one. He's what I have said many times is the only 'congenital photographer' that I ever realized we had."

With the loan of equipment from Stryker and under the tutelage of FSA photographers Arthur Rothstein and Walker Evans, Vachon took on his first solo traveling assignments for the agency in the fall of 1937 in Nebraska.

In a 1973 interview Vachon looked back on this period as the time of his true birth in the art he would practice for the FSA until its dissolution in 1943 and later as a photojournalist at Life and Look (where he would work for for 25 years, until its demise in 1971). He had been sent to work in Omaha, but given no list of specific subjects. He was on his own.

I spent a cold November week in Omaha and walked a hundred miles. Was it Kearney Street where unemployed men sat all day on the steps of cheap hotels? A tattoo parlor, and the city mission with its soup kitchen. Men hanging around the stockyards. One morning I photographed a grain elevator: pure sun-brushed silo columns of cement rising from behind CB&Q freight car. The genius of Walker Evans and Charles Sheeler welded into one supreme photographic statement, I told myself. Then it occurred to me that it was I who was looking at the grain elevator. For the past year I had been sedulously aping the masters. And in Omaha I realized that I had developed my own style with the camera. I knew that I would photograph only what pleased me or astonished my eye, and only in the way I saw it.

He quickly developed that style of his own. And over the next several years ranged afield across the interior of the country, working out of various FSA regional offices at the standard $5-a-day salary also drawn by his more experienced colleagues Shahn, Evans, Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, Carl Mydans, et al.

Samples of the photos that resulted from Vachon's odyssey can be seen here and in the two preceding posts. They capture the image of an America that is, for all intents and purposes, lost.

I say lost; yet then again some essence of what John Vachon saw in his travels, in those years of austerity, perhaps remains. His photographs seem to identify a trace in the American grain, a vein of lonely spaces, material emptinesses and great spiritual distances. But his eye can be hard and gentle in the same moment. He sees darknesses that go deep within the interiors of the common places, yet explores these depths dispassionately: as though they were merely surfaces, without judgment. The evident absence of judgment has made it difficult to classify Vachon as a social historian with a direct political intent. There is in his work a surprising affection for this vacant heartland.

And that element perhaps accounts for the paradoxical intimacy of scale, which brilliantly solicits the historical imagination.

Grand Grocery Co., Lincoln, Nebraska, 1942

Photos by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Something Occurring by the Side of a Road

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Children playing by road near school house, Kansas (?), c. 1942

I Hide and Seek

Along the roadside it appeared the children might have been playing a game of hide and seek. Passing cars slowed down as the people strained to see what these children were doing, kneeling with their heads hidden beneath folded arms, or lying motionless as if playing dead by the shoulder of the road. At a quick glance it looked as though they might have been hit by cars. But the bodies were scattered at a certain distance apart. The impression that they were playing a game was in the mind of the beholder, it was possible this was a misinterpretation. A theory of games is not the same thing as a game; in order to understand the progression of a game it is not necessary to have a game theory. If it is possible to make a false move in some game, then it might be possible for someone to make nothing but false moves in every game. The person passing along on the road would have no idea.

Road out of Romney, West Virginia,1942/3

II History Lesson

The Sunray man wearing the spectral white face of carbon black may not after all be a visitor from a scorched and vacant dead world beyond our solar system. You whistled soundlessly in the sleepless dark and he came, as in a dimly remembered children's game.

When you played hide and seek there was a secret excitement hidden within the game, the private knowledge that, should you be lost, it was he who lay in waiting, he who would find you.

Worker at carbon black plant, Sunray, Texas, 1942

III But Then

in the hard white northern distance of the clouded morning the school bell tolled.

The child who was found in the game of hide and seek discovered he did not know the language that was being spoken by the other children. He may well have known some other language or languages, but the babbling going on around him in the here and now, that to him seemed a mystery, a bafflement.

Behind every tree in the immediate vicinity of the confused child was concealed another bewildering uncertainty. Branching off in several directions from the point where he stood a labyrinth of conflicting paths beckoned equivocally. And so it seemed to the child he had no choice but to hold perfectly still and remain completely silent. It is at this point that from behind the nearest tree emerges the waiting figure.

Landscape, Northeast Utah, April 1942

Photos by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

I'm No Stylist

source unknown

Do you ever come across a photo of a bookcase styled so perfectly, with every object existing in perfect harmony with all others that you wonder 'how did they do that'? I do, often. Styling objects and creating beautiful vignettes doesn't come easy to me. I'm not a good collector, I'm too impulsive to accumulate a nice collection of depression glassware or ceramic animals or vintage plates so my accessories drawer is filled with ones and twos of things - things that don't go with other things.

I had to give it a go though and create a vignette atop the dresser in the master bedroom. (Yes, the bedroom that we started redecorating months ago. Its almost done and I'll reveal soon). So I walked about the house and gathered bits and bobs, pieces and props. And this is what I came up with:

Looks like a simple arrangement, right? Yeah, it took me a few tries to get it looking like that.

11 different iterations and I'm still not sure any of them look any good. But I ended up settling on one anyway. At least that part of the room is done :)

Devastating Document Dump! Wikileaks causes what may well be a catastrophic meltdown in U.S. foreign policy community.

Maybe I should have ALLCAPPed this, or put it in red font. Gird your loins. Julian Asschapeau has really outdone himself. He's been promising a release that would leave U.S. foreign policy and intel types quivering in the corner asking for their binkies. Get ready for it...Sit Down...Take a deep breath...Drink a bracer if you need to..It's really really bad...Katrina bad...

The Pakistani ISS actively aids Islamists, and the Taliban while...get this...the U.S. Government drops buku bucks on the Pakistani government, like Homer Simpson caught in a pyramid scheme, hoping for the big payoff!

Good God! Saints preserve us!

In other news,

Planet Earth found to orbit the Sun,

Rain: Origin believed to lie in cloud behavior,

Extensive Climate studies indicate that the Summer season may be hot,

Sister Studies suggest that Winter temperatures tend toward cold.

That's the best ya' have Julian? Really?

Once again, let's go to Broadway Joe for the color commentary..


Julian, you are truly treading water, you are...



"Shtrugguling"

Drunk Namath sound bite NFL sound bites

Oh, and keep wearing your tinfoil hat Mr. Assange. They are looking for you. You know...THEM.

UPDATE: Julian very impressed with himself. Aura self-reported to be awesome, majestic even. Julian tells Der Spiegel he is one tough hombre "I enjoy crushing bastards"

Ooo. Let's go to Chief Brody for fashion commentary on that nice tin foil hat of yours!

LOCAL ACCESS VIDEO: July 22 2010 broadcast

GUESTS: State Rep. Jason Bartlett, U.S. Senate candidate Rob Simmons

Wisdom

.

Wisdom, Montana, April 1942

Triumph of the Will
over the contingent
and the incidental
Wisdom, Montana
April 1942
everything we could view
looked large
and nearly empty
John Vachon's vision
of an arid
America

Cemetery at edge of Romney, West Virginia, 1942

Lincoln, Nebraska

March-April
1942
forty days
without a
traffic
fatality

Lincoln, Nebraska, 1942

Photos by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)