I was wrong

I've been saying that the era of airline hijackings was over. After 9/11 and United flight 93 no passengers would sit still for a hijacking. The shoe-bomber just proved the point, as far as I was concerned.

This just in from Sudan.

So I was wrong. At least I didn't bet any money on it!

Are the Bushites afraid they will be prosecuted?

I hope so. But even more, I hope they WILL be prosecuted for their crimes. It would do a lot to fix the United States of America, and almost as importantly, to fix our reputation in the rest of the world. Watergate didn't affect our international reputation as much as the Iraq invasion has. That was affected by the Vietnam War, which Nixon and Kissinger could argue they inherited and were trying to end, and by such bad deeds as the overthrow of Allende, which really wasn't very related to Watergate. But I digress.

Here's the story from TPMmuckraker.com:

At an oversight hearing this morning, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) grilled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales over the sudden departure of several U.S. Attorneys at the administration's request.

This is informative

I think most people with any knowledge of history, or old enough to remember Khrushchev and his shoe, will recognize that the Soviet threat was not invented by the Neocons.

You should also know that "Jahiliyya" literally means "ignorance" and refers to the state of illiteracy and polytheism that the pre-Islamic Arabs lived in. That this "ignorance" of God and of the benefits of civilization is something Sayyid Qutb saw taking over the world speaks more to his own troubled mind than to reality.



N.B. Most, almost all, Islamists are western educated, and have been cut off from traditional Islamic knowledge. Some of the best and most informed attacks on them have been by traditional Islamic scholars.

TIME

No, not the newsmagazine, the way things keep changing, and how they never change back. The "inexorable march of" thing, if it is a thing. the direction of which is defined by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Is it an illusion? Certainly we experience events in time, but to an objective observer (God?) are all events at any point in time just as real? Is it only from the way we experience events that they seem to happen in sequence? Why can't we go back (or forward) to experience events out of sequence? Will we be able to go back and/or forth when we understand the nature of time better? Why hasn't anyone come back to experience us yet? Or maybe they have? Is antimatter just matter going backwards? It looks that way in a Feynman diagram.

Living in the present (how can you avoid it?) does it really avoid the other times? Does the present moment include all three times (and if so are there nine times? the past, present and future in the past, the same three times in the present, and again in the future?) or does it exclude them? If the present, which so quickly becomes the past, is real, is not the past which it becomes just as real? Or is the present even real? If existence in time is not real, what is? Is there existence outside of time? If it is outside of the space-time continuum that we call the universe (i.e. all that exists) can we call it "existence" at all? How can we divide the present from the future and the past, when the future seems to slide as seemlessly into the present as the present does into the past? "Carpe Diem" sounds nice, but by the time we seize the day it disappears and becomes yesterday. Non-abiding is all we can do, and we must accept it.

Speaking of the space-time continuum, I wonder if there are other universes in which movement in time is free, but movement in a spatial dimension is constant, inexorable and unidirectional, as with what we experience as time in this universe. Would that spatial dimension become the functional equivalent of time? Is that what "time" in our dimension constitutes? From the outside, if there is an outside, is time another spatial dimension? What would the universe, experienced differently, "look" like? What does it look like experienced from outside of time, (assuming that there is an experience of that perspective)?

But why speculate about this? It is typically human to wonder about things we can never know. We humans think ourselves blessed by this faculty, and hope to have answers some day. Maybe instead of being blessed we are cursed with this, and will never know answers. I don't know. I only know that I have questions, but not their answers, and that there are worse things than speculating about these things. Maybe they are what life is all about, just questions, never any answers.

My favorite Jazz musician is no longer with us!

from e-jazz news:

Jazz pianist Alice Coltrane, widow of jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, died on Friday, January 12th at the West Hills Hospital near Los Angeles, California. She was 69.

Mrs. Coltrane was born Alice Lucille McLeod in Detroit, Michigan August 27, 1937. As a young girl, she studied classical piano and began playing organ in local churches. Bud Powell was one of her early teachers. She played piano with her brother, Ernest Farrow, in several Detroit clubs before moving to New York in the early 1960’s to pursue a career in jazz. There, while playing at Birdland with vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, she met John Coltrane. They later married, and she performed in his quartet beginning in 1966 until his death in July of 1967.

There's so much sadness in me right now. She has meant so much to me for so many decades now. There is a void that will not be filled, not for a long, long time. If you never heard her music, go to iTunes or someplace and listen. She took off where John ended, moving into beautiful Indo-Jazz fusion in the 1970s. She didn't record as much as I would have liked, but I have most of her albums. Now there will never be new music from her.

I'm sorry. I just want to be alone right now. Excuse me.

As usual Olbermann says it better!

Thanks, Keith. Keep up the good work.

Who favors the "death tax"?

Everyone who follows the issue knows that Warren Buffett favors the inheritance tax.

What most people don't know is that the whole thing was the brainchild of Andrew Carnegie, who convinced Theodore Roosevelt to push for it to be made law. Carnegie made his money himself, and thought that others should make their own money, not inherit it. Permanent dynasties would be bad for the American "land of opportunity" dream.

Carnegie gave his money back to society, and felt other millionaires should do the same. If they didn't the government should take the money. If they didn't want the government to take the money, they should give it to charities of their own choice.

Bush isn't sending more troops

Bush doesn't have more troops. He's not sending anyone who hasn't already been to Iraq, over and over and over. He's asking the troops who've already been there to do more, and more, and more. Bush is taking a military that's stretched to the breaking point, and he's trying to stretch them just a tiny little bit more. Just to see if they break? Or because those voices in his head (that he thinks are God) tell him to? Or because he hates the US government and wants to destroy it? Or because he's seriously stupid?

I don't know. I just know he's not sending any more troops. Not because the Democrats (and a lot of the Republicans) in Congress won't let him. Because he doesn't have any more troops to send to Iraq. He's just asking the troops he has to do more when they're already doing all they can. That's why more of his generals have left. The same generals whom he says he listens to and whose advice he says he follows.

The man needs to be impeached. Yesterday.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum

It's not hard to say nothing bad about Gerry Ford. He was a nice guy, a rarely honest man in a profession full of scoundrels. He was also my first Congressional representative.

Everyone else has given their respects and their eulogies, although I have yet to hear anyone mention Gerry's being the straight man on the old "Ev and Gerry Show" back in the 1960s. He and Senator Everett Dirksen led the Republicans in the Congress, and went on TV to give the regular Republican response to the Democratic presidents' press conferences.

I'd like to remember Gerry for something personal, though. One of my first political memories is of a tornado in the district, and how Gerry got federal aid to the victims. Ever since I was a little kid I had warm feelings about him, more so as I learned how atypical he was as a politician. I was very happy to see him become the first president who never campaigned for the office (or at least for Vice President) since George Washington, and I didn't find it strange that he, who had so little of the consuming ambition that makes and breaks politicians at every level, also became the first and only president who lost a war. He did what had to be done, and we are a better nation for everything he did for us. I never voted for him, but I listened carefully to everything he said and I always respected him.

They don't seem to make Republicans like that anymore, or many politicians of any party.