Changing Seasons
According to the Observer, the Powers That Be are trying to squash a report commissioned at the Pentagon that current trends in climate change could lead to major ecological disasters as soon as the year 2020. I mean, like "submerged cities" scale disasters. Moreover, the Pentagon report predicts that all these nuclear nonproliferation treaties will be rapidly and heedlessly defenistrated as everyone starts worrying and loves the bomb to protect the little they'll have left as the waters rise.

Let me reiterate - this is coming from the Pentagon.

Of course, the President isn't convinced that global warming & climate change are real.

Oy.

Vey.

Bubble Boy
Remember the good old days of the Roaring '90's, where the only reason to buy stock in Amazon or AOL or Pets.com for that matter was because EVERYBODY else was going to do it, so you knew you could make money off of it?

Some of my more nerd-gastic friends may even remember the comic book speculator market from the early '90's, where it was all about variant card-stock covers gilded in silver that you kept in a hermetically sealed vault. As soon as everybody figured out that Action Comics #1 was now worth an obscene amount of money, comic specialty stores were flooded with speculators who bought up 20 copies of the 10 different versions of New X-Men #1 because they just knew EVERYBODY else was going to want it and they'd be richer than chocolate.

Nevermind that those late '90's stocks were ultimately fools gold because nobody bothered to check the fundamentals of those companies until long after they'd paid obscenely inflated prices for shares. Nevermind that none of the genius comic speculators realized that the only reason why Action Comics #1 is valuable is because it is rare, so buying up a ton of them is a waste of your investment money when the publisher has printed more copies than the King James Bible.

Which brings me to the old adage that your mother should have taught you - "If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too just because everybody else is doing it?"

And that, my friends, is exactly what the Democratic primary electorate is about to do by picking John Kerry as their nominee.

Now, this is less about why Kerry's fundamentals are weak, because that argument can be encapulated in the following sentence: George W. Bush, blithering nincompoop that he is, will embarass Kerry on National TV next fall when he reminds Kerry that he voted for virtually every initiative he'll use to attack Bush (the war, the tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, etc.). Let's not even get into the fact that the words "succinct" and "to the point" are personis non gratis to the Kerry speechwriters, thus eliminating the possibility of a pithy soundbite every night to remind people why George W. Bush is responsible for your growling stomach right now.

No, my real problem is that people are voting for Kerry because they think he's electable.

There goes that word again.

And how are they determining Kerry's electability? Why, by looking at the fact that he won the primary in the previous state. ie. Wisconsin voted for him because Washington did because Virginia did because Missouri did because New Hampshire did because Iowa did.

Think about that. We're all about to pick him because the people of Iowa voted for him. Jesus, man, there are more people on the Sunset Strip on a Saturday night than voted for Kerry in Iowa. Can we all just think about this a bit more, for God's sake?

Kerry is untested under national scrutiny. Dean had more passion. Edwards is a better campaigner. Clark had better credentials. Kerry's like the Serpentor of the Democratic Party - he's got a little bit of everybody mixed in, so people figure he's got to be greater than the sum of his parts. But does a smorgasborg really taste better than a meal that was prepared with a purpose in mind?

Apparently, these guys at The New Republic agree with me, for once.

The Taste of Crow
Bill O'Reilly admits that maybe, just maybe, Bush was wrong about that whole "Iraqi WMDs" thing.

Boy, who knew that ice could form this quickly in Hell?

"I'm Out!"
Randall Robinson, founder of the multicultural advocacy group TransAfrica and outspoken activist in support of heavy duty issues of racial justice like slavery reparations and corporate hegemony in the African continent, has, quite frankly, had enough of your shit, America.

And, with that, he is Quitting America, as he describes in his new book (which you can buy for yourself by clicking the nifty red text). "Quitting" as in, leaving for the greener pastures of his wife's native St. Kitts, much like W.E.B. DuBois broke out on the U.S. of A. for Ghana after nearly a 100 years of trying to tell white people about themselves.

Quite honestly, I can't say I blame either of them. There are days when Toronto sounds real appealing.

But, personally, I don't think he should give the Powers-That-Be the satisfaction of running him out of town. Africa may be where our roots are, but America is our country. After all, we built this crap with our bare hands. I'll be damned if I let somebody exploit me and then tell me to get out. How about "kiss my ass"? How does that work for you, Mr. Powers-That-Be?

I'm reminded of Cedric the Entertainer in The Original Kings of Comedy:
"White people think they're just gonna leave us all back here. If y'all go to the moon, damnit, WE ARE GOIN' TO THE MOON."

ABC apologizes. Dean says "Thanks for nothing, jerks!"
ABC & Diane Sawyer finally admit that not only was Dean's scream taken out of context when they played it a billion times last month, but it was also played without the benefit of the deafening roar of 3500 people in the room with Dean at the same time. Could it be that he was actually trying to talk loud enough just so he could be heard?

No, of course not. Dean's a dangerous loon who can't be trusted with our national security. Who knows what that nut job might do? He might, oh, I dunno, INVADE A COUNTRY FOR NO GOOD REASON.

Yeah, right.

Bloodline
Did you know that John Hinckley Sr., the father of the man who shot Reagan within a month of the Gipper's inauguration, was one of the biggest contributors to George H.W. Bush's first presidential campaign back in 1980?

Bush lost the G.O.P. nomination that year, of course, to Reagan and was forced to sign on as Reagan's V.P. Bush was the establishment candidate and many thought that Reagan's excessively partisan stances made him unelectable.



Sound familiar?

Now, why no one seems to want to report this, who can say. But I have recently found myself wondering "how does a former director of the CIA become the President of the United States"? What campaign, especially in the post-Watergate era, was he expecting to run on?

Anyway, Kevin Phillips was a former Nixon staffer who, surprisingly, has nothing but contempt for his old boss's hand-picked spy chief and his son, our current Chief Executive. Here, in this scathing book, he scrutinizes a laundry list of Bush family atrocities, dating all the way back to the 2nd World War.

Black Power Quote of the Day


"I wrote it as a training manual so that people would do it right."


- Sam Greenlee, referring to his novel, The Spook Who Sat By The Door, in which the first Black man trained as a C.I.A. field operative returns to his native Chicago to train street gangs to become the basis of an underground armed insurgency against the U.S. government.

After years of languishing in bootleg Hell, the film version of the book, directed by Ivan Dixon (whom you may recognize as the brother in "Hogan's Heroes") is now being released as a DVD by Tim Reid's Obsidian Home Entertainment.

Many of you may only remember Tim as Venus Flytrap from "WKRP in Cinncinati", or as Frank in "Frank's Place", but ever since the cancellation of that great show, the brother has been working tireless to build an infrastructure to support thoughtful and original black films. Not only has he stepped behind the camera to direct the films Asunder and Once Upon A Time.... When We Were Colored, but he's also been trying to construct a studio lot in Northern Virgina as an economic development project.

Dixon, who is now enjoying a quiet retirement in Hawaii, also directed the Blaxploitation classic "Trouble Man".

But, in a bit of sad irony, the actor who played the epymonious "Spook", Lawrence Cook, just died on December 27th, 2003, exactly one month before the DVD release of this film.

We'll miss you, brother.


For those of you who've never seen this movie or read this book, I cannot stress enough what a powerful effect it had on me. I saw it for the first time as an undergrad, where it was buried in a nearly forgotten video library in Princeton's late and lamented Third World Center. At the time, the Rodney King verdict and the L.A. riots were still very fresh memories. Hip-hop had yet to turn into the bling-bling pablum pop crap that it's devolved into today. Most of what we were listening to in college hovered somewhere between the consciousness of Digable Planets & A Tribe Called Quest and the absolute unbridled anger of Ice Cube, Onyx, & occasionally Paris. Malcolm X had just come out in theatres. EVERYBODY had some article of clothing with a Kinte pattern.

It's only now, with the decade of hindsight, that I see the early '90's for what it was - a minor rebirth of Black Power among the Talented 10th.

For a bunch of overly educated Black 19-year-olds living literally in the belly of the white establishment beast, the idea of an armed rebellion was more than plausible.

It was intoxicating.

Which only makes me sadder to realize how much of a fad that really was. Three years later, instead of red, black, and green, Black college students all around the country had discovered Tommy Hilfiger, Polo, and the red, white, and blue. The 5% wisdom of the Wu-Tang Clan loses to Puffy Daddy at the Grammys.

And the world has been poorer since.

Somewhere, I think we decided that cash=justice. But I think we've skipped a step in between, where cash must transform into power before justice can roll down like a mighty stream. Folks like Greenlee and Huey and Stokely got the power=justice part, but they also missed the point. Sure, there's power in a shotgun, but the establishment will almost always have better firepower. Something tells me that the real answer lies somewhere between Rockafella and the Black Panthers.....

Vote in The Invisible Primary
It's amazing what you can learn when you start actively participating in a political campaign.

The term "invisible primary" is used among pundits and politicos to describe the chase by political candidates to raise money for their campaigns. The conventional wisdom, of course, has always been that the candidate with the most money almost always wins the party nomination.

Of course, up until this year, I suspect that only a small number of average citizens actually give money to candidates, and, even then, only the extremely wealthy or active, who usually end up maxing out at the $2000 limit.

Of course, Howard Dean has changed alot of that by being the first candidate to really take off from small contributions from a ton of individual donors. Dean's raised roughly $40 million dollars, where the average contribution is something like $80 per person. Part of why this has happened is that he's inspired such a passionate following among the rank & file. The other part is that they've taken advantage of the internet to make it exceedingly easy for anyone with a credit card to contribute to the political process.

And Amazon.com has never met an internet business model they didn't like.

Which is why Amazon is now providing a page where anyone can make any contribution up to $200 for anyone of ALL the registered Presidential candidates. Yes, now, even the crazed Lyndon Larouche supporters can get in on the act.

Needless to say, you all know where I stand on the issue, but far be it from us here at Macroscope to stifle dissent. So, for anyone who's not ready to commit troops and treasure to Dean's crusade here, use the link above to find and support the candidate of your choice. I'd rather that everybody was actively supporting someone than sitting back, just waiting for the 2nd Tuesday in November before they start to think about the future of this country.

Misinterpreted Quote of the Week

[crowd response from 3,500 campaign volunteers, some from as far away as Tokyo, in bold]

"Well, you guys, you have already got the picture here. I was about to say, you know, I'm sure there are some disappointed people here. You know what? You know something? You know something? If you had told us one year ago that we were gonna come in third in Iowa, we would have given anything for that. And you know something? You know something? Not only are we going to New Hamphire, Tom Harkin, we're going to South Carolina, and Oklahoma, and Arizona, and North Dakota, and New Mexico! We're going to California, and Texas, and New York! And then we're going to South Dakota, and Oregon, and Washington, and Michigan! And then we're going to Washington D.C. to take back the White House!

Yeah!!!!

YEEEAAAHHHH!!!!

We will not give up!

Yeah!

We will not give up in New Hampshire!
We will not give up in South Carolina!
We will not give up in Arizona!
Yeah!
Or New Mexico!
Yeah!
Oklahoma!
Yeah!
North Dakota!
Yeah!
Delaware!
Yeah!
Pennsylvania!
Yeah!
Ohio!
Yeah!
Michigan!
Yeah!

We will not quit now or ever! We want our country back for ordinary Americans.

Yeah!!!


I.... and we're gonna .... win in Massachussetts!
And North Carolina!
And Missouri!
And Arkansas!
Yeah!
And Conneticutt!
Yeah!
And New York!
Yeah!
And Ohio!
Yeah!

Let me.... let me... let me.... Wait a minute, wait a minute, waaait a minute. There are some polite things we need to do here. And the first is to thank some people......"

- The entire text of the speech Howard Dean gave to his disgruntled supporters following his third place finish in the Iowa Caucuses last week.

Of course, my transcript can't actually do it justice. If you actually watch the video in the link above, you'll see that it was not a concession, but more like the St. Crispin's Day speech in Shakespeare's Henry V (e.g. "Once more into the breech, dear friends!!!!")

And, consider this: Dean's charm offensive Thursday night, with the help of David Letterman, Diane Sawyer, and especially his wife, Miss Crushed Cupcakes herself, Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean, has brought him back within the margin of error in polls relative to John "Vote for Me Because I Already Look Like The President" Kerry.

Which brings me to a really personal peeve of mine.

I've made my thoughts on so-called "Electability" known months ago. But let's get at something that seems to be on everybody's mind this week, namely, what exactly constitutes "Presidential" behavior.

Dean has taken alot of heat this week for not looking presidential for giving a loud, rousing speech to his supporters instead of hanging his head and sulking off into the night after his Iowa loss. But Dean stil has tremendous structural advantages over his Democratic opponents. In addition, Dean has the strongest, most compelling message in the entire Democratic field. How can I say that? Well, simply listen to the other candidates: they all SOUND LIKE DEAN. Even the Congressional Democratic response to the State of the Union lifted whole chunks from Dean's standard stump speech.

Dean is already leading the Democratic party, even as he takes the slings and arrows that come from leadership. Because he believes he's right.

With 600,000 people publicly hanging their hopes on Dean, it would have been irresponsible on his part to give a sheepish concession. These people were relying on him. And, whether they know it yet, so is the rest of the country.

Courage. Conviction. Responsibility. Leadership.

Those sound like Presidential qualities to me.

So, to those who're really big on pomp, circumstance, appearances, ceremonies, facades, and pretense - go ahead and vote for Kerry. Bush will thank you in the end.

But if you just want the country to work, vote for Dean.

So, while I'm waxing nostalgic about Shakespeare, let me simply quote Kenneth Branagh from Dean Again, the film he made after his own version of Henry V:

"This is all faaaaar from over............."

Five Years Late
When I was in elementary school, I had a Space: 1999 lunchbox. For those of you who aren't up on your '70's sci-fi, the premise of the show is that the moon is being used as both a scientific, military, & industrial center by the year 1999. Everything is cool until a bunch of toxic waste left on the dark side of the moon blows up and knocks it out of Earth orbit, sending it into deep space and leaving the poor humans stranded on Moonbase Alpha to wander the cosmos forever.

Pretty bleak, I know. And, let's face it, rediculous. Any explosion on the moon's surface strong enough to knock it out of orbit is also likely to turn Moonbase Alpha into a giant-sized garlic press for the people inside. But science fiction has always fibbed just a little bit with the science. Between the refreshingly realistic Eagle landers, Martin Landau as a very un-Kirk-like Commander Koenig, Barry Morse, the original Lt. Gerald from "The Fugitive", as the resident loopy scientist, and a super-hot shape-changing alien babe, the show was waaaay cool.

And, judging by today's announcement, slightly prescient.

I must admit, I have mixed feelings about Bush's announcement of NASA's new goals. I'm a science baby, so anything that can return us to active space exploration gives me a nice warm fuzzy. In addition, a number of scientists suggest that the moon may have vast depositories of the element Helium-3, that I believe some say could be used to actually make cold fusion a reality, thus replacing our need for fossil fuels, eliminating the stranglehold that Saudi Arabia & Co. have on the world economy, and removing virtually all funding resources for Islamic terrorists. The moon could be the next gold rush while simultaneously bringing Mid-East peace.

Of course, the operative term there is "could".

Remember, these are the same people who don't believe in global warming, so their science may be, shall we say, "questionable", if you know what I mean.

And let's get down to brass tacks: who's going to pay for all of this? According to the International Monetary Fund, Bush's fiscal policy will have bankrupted the world economy long before any next generation space vehicle has even had the chance to roll off of an assembly line.

Who knows, maybe we'll just be a global monarchy by then and God-King Jorge Epiphanes the Second will just decree all personal property forfeit in pursuit of the Holy Pilgrimage to the Heavens and above.....

A Full Accounting
Next Tuesday, the day after what is shaping up to be a bloodbath in the Iowa Democratic Caucuses, is the State of the Union Address. Now, while I suspect everything Bush has proposed in the last week, such as making it legal to exploit undocumented workers (and just what do you think that's going to do to your wages & benefits when IBM can hire illegal aliens who'll work for peanuts just as well as the California grape growers?), or going to the Moon (more on THAT later), there are other things that are actually part of his job. You know, little things like promoting the general welfare and ensuring the blessings of liberty. All that jazz.

So, the good folks at www.TomPaine.com have compiled a little score card of what's actually happened since Bush took office, relative to what he's actually talking about. Use at your leisure.

Oh, and, just in case you have some real horror stories on the state of your own personal union, Howard Dean wants to hear them.

"Open For Business" or "How I learned to stop worrying and love Amazons"
I'm sure I've lost count of how many books, authors, movies and other forms of media I've linked to, recommended, or otherwise mentioned here on Macroscope. After all, how can one be a Spaminator without endless sources of information? So I'm sure I've generated more than my fair share of traffic at Amazon.com, intentionally or otherwise.

Well, since it's a new year, I figured, why should I advertise for Amazon for free? With that in mind, Macroscope has officially become an Amazon associate - in other words, everytime you link to a book or whatever at Amazon from Macroscope and actually buy something, The Royal We here get a tiny kickback. Just so you know, I'm highlighting all those Amazon links in previous threads in RED.

Now, would it be completely shameless of me to recommend that, even if you aren't buying a book I'm recommending on Macroscope, to go ahead and use this button

for ALL your Amazon purchasing needs? I'd certainly appreciate the business, just as I'm sure the good folks at Sallie Mae would appreciate it, too.

Please note that this particular post will stay on the main page for the forseeable future, just for your shopping convenience.....

Night of the Long Knives

"It's time for 'no more Mr. Nice Guy'. All those people shouting, 'Down with America!' and dancing in the street when Americans are attacked? We have to kill them."

Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for a New American Century, encouraging the White House to forget about all this "win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis" crap.

And the White House, as usual, is listening. Apparently, they've secretly tucked away millions of dollars in the Iraqi War appropriation to fund paramilitary units loyal to the Iraqi National Congress to start assassinating people that they BELIEVE are ex-Baathists supporting the insurgency, much like the CIA did in Vietnam in an operation called the Phoenix program.

And we all know what a resounding success that was.....

Painfully Honest Quote of the Day

"Listen, here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this......The system isn't about ideals. The country doesn't elect great leaders. It elects fucked-up people who for reasons of ego want to run the world. Then the citizenry makes them become great. "

- Tony Kushner, playwright for, among other things, Angels in America, about why it was foolish for progressives to vote for Nader in 2000, and why it would be even more foolish for them to vote for anyone other than the Democratic nominee, no matter who it is (including Lieberman) in 2004.

Needless to say, I don't completely agree with this point of view, but his statement about the nature of Presidential candidates is definitely spot on.

The Atlantic | December 2003 | The Bubble of American Supremacy | Soros

The Next Bubble
How rich is George Soros? He was just fined $2.2 million by a French court for insider trading. For the average American citizen, who's median net worth was ~$71,000 in 1998, the equivalent fine would be about $22.

So, for a dude who came to the US as an immigrant, he clearly knows a thing or two.

In his latest book, The Bubble of American Supremacy (excerpted here in The Atlantic Monthly, he compares the current push for global American hegemony (otherwise known as The Bush Doctrine), as a geopolitical equivalent of the dot.com boom of the late '90's. In other words, it seems like a good thing on the surface, but it's totally unsustainable, with equally disastrous results.

Dean's Real Opponent
In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War protest, following the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and months of protests, riots, & political unrest, GOP presidential candidate Richard Nixon began several morally dubious strategies to ensure his election to the Oval Office, such as using Henry Kissinger to undermine President Johnson's peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. But one of the cornerstones of his campaign was the so-called "Southern Strategy". Poor rural whites had traditionally been Democrats until the advent of the Civil Rights Movement. Nixon appealled to their prejudices and fears about the Blacks asking for their rights through the use of code words like "law and order" and "the great silent majority" and the old Confederacy has been in the pocket of the elephants ever since.

Which is ironic, when you consider that Nixon & his predecessors have largely treated these people like their subjects instead of their constituents. They do nothing to improve the economic fortunes of the South, and then point to affirmative action & Willie Horton as the root of all their woes.

It's also worked for so long because so many Democrats look down their noses at poor whites, overtly treating them as inhumanly as their Republican representatives do behind closed doors.

So, in yet another move where he attempts to actually follow the ideals of the Democratic Party instead of just it's rhetoric, Howard Dean has decided to address this issue head-on.

Bush & Co. are offering poor Southern whites prayer in the school, a ten commandments monument, and the comfort of knowing that no homosexuals are running around getting married behind our backs.

Dean is offering them health insurance, better schools, and better jobs.

In other words, the same thing he's offering everybody else in the country. The radical nature of what he's doing is that he's a Democrat who's actually acknowledging these people as a part of the country.

Let's see if they'd rather have a monument instead of a paycheck.

Rope-A-Dope
Scott Ritter is a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq during the mid to late '90's. Here, he talks about how, although the never found weapons of mass destruction, they kept stumbling across plans to hide conventional weapons & small arms, how to make improvised explosive devices, and all the other elements of an insurgency campaign. But, since their mandate was just to look for WMDs, they really couldn't do anything about it.

Too bad, because, despite what the talking heads would have you believe, the attacks on coalition troops in Iraq is looking less and less like Al Qaeda & foreign fighters, and more and more like Phase II of Saddam Hussein's Plan to Defeat The Americans - fall back, draw them into the country & cities where their tactical & technological advantages are negated, and just bee-sting them to death.

Why, Oh why can't people learn from Vietnam?

Bush Fears Dean
After all, why would the GOP start running ads in Iowa to question the patriotism of political war critics?

And if he doesn't, according to these Republican strategists, he should. In this memo, they come to the conclusion that Howard Dean could even spot the President Florida's 27 electoral votes, PLUS most of the Old Confederate South, and STILL become the new President of the United States in 2005.

In their words, "Let us not be fooled by misguided conventional wisdom. Dean is a threat and Republicans better not ignore him."

Music to my ears.

Dirty Pop
There are many lessons to be learned from this entire Michael Jackson fiasco.

The first is, if people THINK you're a child molester, maybe you shouldn't hold sleepovers with the children of complete strangers. It just might not look too good.

I really, really, really want to believe Michael. I really want to believe that he's innocent and that this is all a witch hunt. But the fact that the sleepovers continued for a decade, even after he'd been publicly accused of being a pedophile, with a gravy train of dozens of random children......

I recently watched The Wiz for the first time in nearly 20 years, and Michael as the Scarecrow was a simply mesmerizing musical/dance performance. Every time I think about the Motown 25 special, I get goosebumps. I mean, people lost their minds watching Michael perform that night ("Oh, my God! He's walking...... BACKWARDS?!?!?!?!?!?!")

Michael was magic.

A black Harry Potter in penny loafers.

I am part of a generation of Black children who grew up in the age of "Billy Jean" and Thriller and Off The Wall, where Michael seemed to be a living embodiment of all of the promise and hope that our community had placed in us for the future.

And maybe that's the point. Maybe Michael's madness (and, believe you me, I'm still not convinced he's a child molester, but Michael Jackson is clearly insane, perhaps dangerously so) is a visible, visceral symbol of the sickness that still pervades young Black America. He had the world at his fingertips, yet his mental scars run so deep that, instead of using a razor on his arms like most cutters, he's opted for a plastic surgeon's scalpel to help externalize his suffering. He claws jealously for the closeness of babies, as if he can become young through association.

I pray he didn't do it.

But I still hope for some court-mandated therapy.

God knows he needs it.

Return of the Press Gang
Why is the Army suddenly looking to recruit a bunch of volunteers to work on local draft boards?

And, in other news, how long have those 130,000 troops been getting shot at while wearing full combat gear under desert heat?