Author: Mike

Today's entry, in which I make a realization about the full implications of Chicago's BYOB policy and diagnose a major problem of American culture, and propose Boston Legal as the remedy.

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I saw former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer speak last night about his new book Overthrow, a eagle-eye's perspective on the last 14 regime changes carried out by the United States (he's written more in depth about the coups in Guatemala and Iran).

The Q&A was mostly about the situation in Iran. He mentioned having been in Los Angeles, with its very large population of American-Iranians, talking with several immigrants and dissidents friends. I saw him on CSPAN-2 Book TV a few weeks ago, but his composure was changed last night. He looked worried as he related this new story of a large number of prominent Iranian-Americans being pulled to Washington in the past week to talk with administration and military officials, who are trying to get a sense of the reaction on the street if the President were to bomb Iran. And for kickers, how would it play out in the coffeehouses if they were to, say, drop a small tactical bunker-busting nuclear weapon on Iran?

The funny part is how much the administration believes that (a) a free, democratic, Western-and-peace loving Iran is not going to want the nuclear bomb even though backwater neighbors like Pakistan have them and (b) that us bombing a couple hundred military and scientific station is going to cause a democratic revolution, and that people will rise up against the government, instead of, ya know, rallying around it, and (c) how much they want to find a dozen or so Iranian dissents to sign off on it for accountability reasons ("We've consult with people who know Iran and found that the people there crave getting nuked…"). I can only assume it's like an episode of Sopranos, with contracts going out to whomever is willing to go public with support ("you can take 3 points on the construction of Tehran, with 5 no-work jobs and 2 no-shows"); the lack of the government being able to find a patsy only highlights how poorly this is all going to go.

It's great when the internet adds little touches to my favorite television shows. I'm thinking of the slideshows presented by the DP and costume designer for "The Sopranos" on hbo.com. Over the weekend someone told me that the 24 webpage has the resume of all their major characters posted, filling you in on some of the character's backgrounds off-air.

Since it's off the air, they get to have some fun with it. I love that, according to his online resume, the current "24" President, the cowardly, insecure and power-hungry Charles Logan, was was former House member who became the CEO of "Western Energy Coal & Reserve" (winning the "Energy CEO of the Year"), and left his energy company to become the Vice-President. Wonderful.

Those biographies add little neat details – First Lady Martha Logan has an Standford art history degree and worked as a fundraiser, a path about as Congressional wife as you can get. And my favorite, god bless them, is that Jack Bauer studied at Berkeley. I can't describe how happy I am filling in the blanks of my previous visits with Bauer running around Telegraph Street foiling hippies' plans in real time ("Audrey listen! These are plans for a drum circle! a drum circle!" tick tock tick tock).

Three things about "24": (1) For an actor, to say one line and then have to repeat it louder and more angry must be difficult to do all the time. Considering that is more than half of Jack Bauer's lines I genuinely respect Kiefer as an actor. (2) Isn't it weird to consider that Kiefer is a brat packer? He was in Stand by Me, The Lost Boys and Young Guns. Statement: Jack Bauer versus the entirety of the 80s brat pack movie generation. Through in everyone; Anthony Michael Hall to Molly Ringwald to John Cusack. Bauer wins, hands down.

(3) As a friend pointed out, if Jack Bauer asks you to go somewhere with him, don't go. He does just fine by himself, while it's about 99% likely you are going to die (if only so they don't have to write you into the next episode).

As Edward is locked in a room right now trying to finish his qualifying exams, I offer up this entry and bandwidth as a prayer to the Big Baby Jesus (aka Ol' Dirty Bastard) watching over us from the next world, to come and grant his good wishes on Ed.
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Observe a moment of silence as you watch Ol' Dirty Bastard crash the Grammy awards:

The more you watch that, the more the Dirt Dog will guide Ed's political science knowledge from beyond the grave. Feel free to watch other things on youtube related to ODB, including him cashing welfare checks on MTV or the classic Got Your Money video.

On a related note, the new Ghostface Killah album, "Fishscale", is even better than the hype.
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Seriously, go out and find it. It may even be better than Liquid Swords as the best (non-ODB) solo Wu-Tang effort.
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So Seymour Hersch reported in the New Yorker that the Bush team wants to use "mini"-nuclear weapons against underground Iranian targets. People seemed surprised. My question: do they not remember anything?

This newspaper graph is from October 2000

National Institute for Public Policy (pdf), "Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control" 01/2001 (italics mine):

Hardened facilities are designed to withstand conventional or nuclear weapons effects. Hardened targets built underground and deeply buried facilities are the most difficult to destroy and will influence the required number and characteristics of nuclear weapons. Tunnels and caverns, for example, can be hundreds of feet below the surface and well-protected by soil and rock. Examples of hardened and buried targets include missile silos, launch control centers, concrete aircraft shelters, deeply buried command posts, tunnels for missile storage and assembly, storage bunkers, and underground facilities for weapons research and production. (p. 5)

(that report is fun to read, with the think tank suggesting, pre 9/11, the need to keep the military flush for our upcoming military conflict with the "worse yet, a Sino-Russian alliance". Hersch points out in his article that signers of the above document are currently, among other thigns, the national-security adviser, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security for the Bush team.
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)

That report fed into the Nuclear Posture Review, a Rumsfeld signed confidential report given to Congress in March 2002 (excellent broad overview, with links to accompanying editorials, here):

"Composed of both non-nuclear systems and nuclear weapons, the strike element of the New Triad can provide greater flexibility in the design and conduct of military campaigns to defeat opponents decisively. Non-nuclear strike capabilities may be particularly useful to limit collateral damage and conflict escalation. Nuclear weapons could be employed against targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack, (for example, deep underground bunkers or bio-weapon facilities).
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" (p. 12-13)

I find it so weird that people are surprised when, after watching the President ask Congress for funding for the research and development of low-level nuclear weapons and the military for plans and rationales to use them against underground WMD bunkers, it gets reported that the Bush team is very interested in the idea of actually using the things they were so interested in against Iran. New Yorker:

The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

I wonder if my years alternate in quality. 2005 was a great year. Though I'm hoping for a Q2 rally, 2006 has been a rather shitty year so far. After raiding my family's storage closet and the Internet, I decided to get the VCR out of the closet and do a bit of age regression in the past week. Here are the two tapes in question.

Clue II: Murder in Disguise, The VCR Game Did anyone else ever play this in the 80s? My family never really did board game night, but we did play a lot of this game. I remember watching the tape endlessly when I was 5 years old, the same way another kid may watch their favorite Disney movie. I'm glad to see there are some fan sites out there. Sadly the first Clue game in my mom's closet is in Betamax format, but watching Clue II, just as a movie, was every bit as wonderful and lame as I remember it.

A friend of mine had a DVD movie trivia game that we played, where every 4th question or so was based on a movie clip from the disc. Screw that – why doesn't anyone bring this game back? The VCR version was a pain in the ass because to re-watch parts for clues involved an endless amount of rewinding fast-forwarding; a track-skip button would be perfect.

Swindle (1991). I don't know the correct way to go about explaining this, but I will do my best. I don't know about other men, but when I was around age 13 there was a Cinemax adult movie where everything made sense. Both in what was depicted on-screen, and in how a male audience member usually reacts to said movie. For me that movie was Swindle. It may creep some of our family-values crowd (among others) to explain it in this way, but I think of this movie as "my first" movie. Do other people have such "a first" movie in their minds when it comes to cable softcore movies? If not a "first movie" per se, a Cinemax movie they feel some sort of strong allegiance to? (please leave the titles in the comments, anonymously if you must)

I don't know exactly what month or what year I watched the movie Swindle, but I can tell you with a large degree of certainty it was around 1:00am. I believed I saw the movie twice, at which point (hence the ephemeral nature of softcore) it disappeared from the airwaves. I was in a discussion of good versus bad softcore movies the other week and realized on some level I idealized this movie though I didn't remember much about it. I found a cheap, used (*ahem*) VCR copy online, took a deep breath, and ordered it. The deep breath was necessary because I was worried that a lot of the stuff I find sexy, erotic, etc. about women, something that I think of as being essential piece of who I am, would be derived from what was an awful, cheaply-produced throwaway softcore movie. The movie was awful (why did people do those things to their hair in 1991?), but thankfully any correlation was stuff I already remembered and not enough to scare me or make me doubt myself as a person.

This got me thinking about my age group, the ones who grew up with Cable television but not the Internet. Every age group has a knee-jerk reaction against what the kids these days are like (myself more than most, I was a camp counselor once as a summer job), and good arguments can be made against their music, clothes etc. I have to wonder about their access to porn. Not in the Tipper Gore "we must protect the kids!" way, but in a "these kids never had to stay up till 1am to try and catch The Bikini Car Wash Company" way. The Internet gives them a billion bikini-less car washes at their fingertips. They didn't learn the hard way that USA Up All Night was never, ever going to show a naked boob on the air, they didn't have to smuggle an adult magazine the same way a terrorist may try and get plutonium, and they never came up with complicated ways of taping shows on the VCR while leaving no evidence that it took place. All they have to do is type a word into google's image search and everything is right there. Forget Grand Theft Auto – I honestly believe the lack of having to sit and wait till 1am for your naked T&A is what's destroying the character of the kids these days.

I am equally worried that I have such detailed opinions on these matters and that I'm having a hard time turning this into a platform from which to run for office.

I love the Valentine's Day period, if only to see the endless "Let's advise the oafish husband on how to buy diamonds" television commericals, or to hear the pragmatic "women love this stuff, let us at Mega Jewelry Depot help you shovel it to them" talk radio commericals.

It's all seems so useless, when there is only one Valentine's Day event that needs to be observed: White Castle's Valentine's Day Romantic Dinner:

Make your Valentine’s Day STEAMY! Take your Valentine to White Castle on Tuesday, February 14 between 5 p.

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m. and 8 p.m and enjoy hostess seating, candlelit dining and your own server. Reservations are required, so check the list below for participating Castles near you!

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And how. Check the link to see if a White Castle near you is participating. My love of all things White Castle has been well documented on this site, and this is my chance to take said love to the next level. God bless us everyone.

"Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology…Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025." – 2006 State of the Union Address

Generations of the future, bear this in mind when you write the histories of these current times: President Bush is great at playing this game of three card monte – first he shows you the Free Market card, and when you aren't paying attention he replaces it with the Crony Capitalism card.

How are we going to fight our addiction to oil? The New York Times reports that our first step will be to give away royalties on $65 billion dollars worth of gas in the next five years. The article traces the exploitation by the Department of the Interior of a plan Clinton put into effect a decade ago to encourage high-risk oil exploration when oil prices were too low to justify the cost. Who knew that overhauling our energy polices overlapped so well with giving pork-lined handouts to campaign contributors?

There are any number of problems with this oil addiction talk and royalties incentive policy, both in the abstract and on the ground. An oil addiction is a problem, but it's only a problem if you use words like "global warming" or even "conservation." It's not a problem because of "unstable parts of the world." Considering that the top two exporters of oil to the US are Mexico and Canada and that the price of oil is set globally (so Saudi Arabia will just sell it's oil to India and China, being no worse off from our boycott), I don't see the global jihad getting worried about SUV hybrids. Also, if the plan "let's fight an oil addiction by drilling for more oil" strikes you as the same thought process of "I'm going to fight my obesity problem by buying bigger pants", there's a good reason for that.

And of course this handout means that the Bush team feels that record global demand and record high prices for a product requires government intervention to provide incentives for supply – that the market doesn't do that itself and the Bush team needs to offer some carrots. And that's just to start. Of course this all assumes that the Bush team is actually trying to build a stable, rational policy agenda here, instead of just raiding whatever offices they can with patronage jobs and looting the coffers for handouts to their former (and presumably future) employers. But that's not what's up, right?

Ever dedicated to the fine art of helping clockwatchers finish out their Friday afternoon, ginandtacos.
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com brings you this week's Friday poll: Which is the better (you are free to determine the grounds of "better") parody video:

Brokeback Squadron

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Brokeback to the Future

These parodies writes themselves. Leave your vote, with an optional justification, in the comments section.
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