Read This and That

I started a little experiment in January of 2007. I decided to keep track of the books I read throughout the year. Didn’t do it for bragging rights or anything, just to track where my tastes took me and exactly how much I read. So it goes as follows:

The Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London. Finally got around to reading that high school American Lit required reading. Not too bad, but for my money The Sea Wolf is much better.

The Man in the High Castle by Phillip Dick. Interesting exercise in alternative history. For a more thorough shakedown reference this post.

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk. “People who would never throw litter from their car will drive past you with their radio blaring. People who’d never blow cigar smoke at you in a crowded restaurant will bellow into their cell phone. They’ll shout at each other across the space of a dinner plate…….You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn yours up again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound. You don’t win with a lot of treble.” This was actually my second read through of what is probably my favorite book by my favorite author. Not for the faint of heart, but Chuck never is.

The Edge of Disaster by Stephen Flynn. Decent look into the sorry, decrepit state of critical infrastructure in this country. A little “We’re all gonna die!”, but not too bad.

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. Another attempt to cross a ‘classic’ of my mental list. I think the movie was actually better.

Global Brain by Howard Bloom. A little thick and chunky but truly excellent. Again, reference this post.

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. Concise and to the point. A good explanation of the new market dynamics at work in our world. Previous post here.

The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind. Really good, if a bit over the top at times. I almost have to believe some of the dialogue he’s quoting in the book is embellished, it feels a little too slick at times. Also a few factual flubs that don’t take away from the overall work. Worth the time.

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. Cold war doomsday that depressed the shit out of me. On the Beach without the beach, only some of the people live. Recommended by Mrs. Ares. Not a bad read, but heavy like a cancer screening.

To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway. Flaming piece of shit. If this had been his first it would have been his last. With this one he fell pretty far from A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises. I wanted my time back when I finished this one.

Rant by Chuck Palahniuk. You’d be hard-pressed to get me to say something negative about Chuck’s work. Sort of Invisible Monsters-like in the gross out factor. He’s a modern master of labeling and texturing the hidden in plain sight aspects of our society. Hemingway for Generation X.

Brave New War by John Robb. Excellent primer on the migration of 4^th Generation Warfare onto the next battlefield and its meld into 5^th Generation Warfare. Must read for anyone attempting to understand the realities on the ground in the War on Terror.

Leadership: The Warrior’s Art edited by Christopher Kolenda. Good collection of leadership essays written mostly by current or prior army brass. As with most leadership books, there are little bits to be harvested here and there.

Terror at Beslan by John Giduck. One of the best accounts yet constructed of the school siege in Russia in 2004. Gives quite a bit of back story about prior attacks that never got much play over here. If America had endured what the Russians had by the fall of 2004 we’d be coming apart at the seams. As I’ve written earlier, this book is real heart of darkness stuff. Incredible and I mean that in the worst possible way. Plan on having nightmares if you pick this one up.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Like trying to eat a filet mignon the size of a sofa. Both excellent and dense at times, though the latter was a result of Taleb not low-browing it. His pitching was a bit above my swing, but I fouled off most of it. At some point I’m going to reread it so I can soak in more. Good material though. For the After School Special version you can watch his presentation at PopTech! here.

Boots on the Ground by Karl Zinsmeister. Quick read by a reporter that was embedded with the 82^nd Airborne during the march up to Baghdad in 2003. Passed along by a coworker who was in the unit. It’s a bit brief and shallow, with an obvious prejudice towards the soldiers he was with. Not that I have the tiniest problem with that, but that’s my own personal bias riding along.

On the Wild Edge by David Peterson. Well written piece by a guy that went off the grid without going around the bend. Good nature writing, he needs to write more.

Make Love* The Bruce Campbell Way by Bruce Campbell. Funny self-deprecating near fiction by Cheese Theater’s leading man. Gotta love any guy that doesn’t take himself too seriously.

Microbrewed Adventures by Charlie Papazian. Beer around the world from the godfather of home brewing. Made me really, really thirsty.

Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell. Excellent, tough read. Part autobiography, part homage to his team mates. If you don’t choke up a few times during this you don’t have a pulse.

Removing Managerial Barriers to Effective Leadership by Norm Stamper. Read it mainly for work, plus a title that I fell in love with. I dare you to try and find a copy of this in the wild.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. Great, stellar, well-done work about the Dust Bowl. Shows how the “Greatest Generation” got its start in low-grade hell. Very much worth the time and the National Book Award that it received.

The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright. Excellent read. For more on the book slide over to this post. Very deserving of the Pulitzer it received.

Leadership and Self-Deception by The Arbinger Institute. Thin little read about ‘getting it’ leadership. Would probably be lost on leaders that don’t think anything is ever wrong or other people are always the problem.

U-Turn by Bruce Grierson. Very interesting collection of stories about people that woke up mid-life and called a “Do Over”. Gets a bit introspective and navel-gazing at times, but it doesn’t hurt the journey. Very worth the time.

Unconquerable Nation by Brian Jenkins. Jenkins is one of the smartest guys in the room when it comes to terrorism. Pay attention to what he has to say. Also has the distinction of being the rare academic that has seen combat. Good temperature taking of the War on Terror. Bonus: Free on the internet.

No True Glory by Bing West. Excellent look into the problem that was Falluja. Starting with the murder of 4 U.S. contractors in April of 2004 and culminating with the retaking of the city by Marines in November of that year. West scales up and down effortlessly; from the macro political to the micro combat. He also makes it hard not to love grunts.

Overblown by John Mueller. Academic dissection of the domestic consequences and play of the war on terror. It gets a bit long and dry at times, but there are some genuine sparklers to be found. Book doesn’t try to call bogus on the entire apparatus but tries to place it into context, something that is sorely needed.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. Not bad, but I finished and wondered exactly what I was supposed to take away.

The Grid by Phillip Schewe. Fun look into the evolution of what’s been called the most complex thing ever created by man: Our national power grid.

We the Living by Ayn Rand. I promised myself another Rand when I gave up on The Fountainhead 2/3 of the way through. Rand was a talented story teller that desperately needed an editor. (Case in point: In Fountainhead I don’t need 5 pages of how great Ellsworth Toohey was as kid. I get the f****** point!) The book is a harsh indictment of the Russian revolution of 1917 and its aftermath. Being Rand, everyone dies and no one is happy.

Leadership and Training for the Fight by Paul Howe. Howe is a retired career soldier and former Delta member. I thought there might be some good work to mine, but it turned out to be largely a manual for first time NCOs.

Overall I was a little surprised at the final tally. Part of this was aided by taking over a month off work. Everybody should take at least a month away from work with the sole purpose of being a lazy bum. Those Europeans are on to something. Out of the above list I would strongly recommend Lone Survivor and The Worst Hard Time. If you’re any kind of reader it will be time well spent.

Ares

Rotting, Putrid, Fetid...........

Wow, this blog's as smelly as an Atlanta Port-O-Potty in August. Mea Culpa Maxima. A confluence of work, events, and lack of ambition pulled me to the bottom of a pit of inactivity. Actually, there are two good reasons for the empty space of late. First is that I didn't feel much like writing, and I'm not gonna ramble on just to fill space. The second is that I came across the blog of a coworker that is truly awful (whose link I'm not even going to torture you with). The Unnamed Idiot's complete lack of a filter or any sense at all made me more than a little self-conscious. After some review and reflection I can safely say I'm not that guy. (Sometimes in life it's good enough to simply not be "That Guy".)

Now that we've disposed of that little moment of insecurity I'll be moving on. More to follow soon. The above is a little bit of the rare white stuff that left its mark all over this godforsaken town yesterday. A little cold blanket of white to cover that pee smell for a few days.

Ares

Happy New Year!

and much love from A&A...

Athena

Short Diversion

Just a short drive-by here; wanted to drop a few links to make you think. First is a bit of a diversion from the usual fare. Gateway Pundit threw up a little composition last week about six bogus stories that have recently come out of Iraq. My purpose isn’t to drag that little tempest into this space but to call down even more fire upon my favorite slapping bag: Big Media. (Who happen to have positive approval ratings in the low to mid 20’s. Take a look at Congress’ numbers: 14%. Holy cow! Lower than HMO’s, and that’s saying something.) If CNN et al. were employees we’d have fired them long ago. Instead we’re just voting with the remote. Now I'm just waiting for them to realize no one's watching anymore.

The second is another excellent installment from the always switched on Michael Totten. The interesting thing about this particular piece isn’t its substance, but the backlash it’s generating. All Michael does for a living is go to a particular place and document what he sees to the best of his ability. (The difference being that he’s self-financed, beholden to no one, and isn’t filtered through an editor.) This documentation isn’t jiving too well with some folks, who are basically calling him a sellout and patsy for not saying things are a complete disaster. If you’ve read Michael for any length of time you’ll know that he’s nobody’s bitch when it comes to maintaining the party line.

That is all. Go forth and think for thyself.

Ares

A Little Dope

I had the distinct displeasure of recently donating a chunk of my life to a piece of crap in Rolling Stone entitled How America Lost the War on Drugs. I had high hopes for the piece, given the depth and breadth of the topic. It’s a ripe and nuanced subject that the author bludgeons his way through with blunt political indictments and stubby metaphors. In a topical landscape that cries out for reason and logic-based analysis we instead get Ben the finger pointing doomsayer.

The stupid f’ing position of pieces like this is that the “War on Drugs” is a finite, closed-ended thing. Let’s place it alongside the unreferenced War on Crime and War on Fire, shall we? Somebody’s house got robbed somewhere yesterday, therefore we’ve lost the War on Crime. A house burned down somewhere today; therefore we’ve lost the War on Fire. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? No more stupid than invoking the name of every two-bit bandito hiding in a mountain cave or jungle hut and equating their continued existence to a complete failure of the entire system. The real battle here is climbing the mountain of human apathy and ignorance.

Here’s another little booger in the sterile salad bar of the article’s reasoning: Pablo Escobar had to be killed, basically executed outright, because he could not be brought to justice. If you don’t believe me read Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden. Pablo was the embodiment of the idea that not every devil will be prosecutable. Some people will just need to be killed, and they won’t always offer you the conscience alleviation of pointing a gun at you. (Don't think of it as assassination, think of it as Goodbye Earl on a geopolitical scale.) If you want to reduce it to a numbers comparison Pablo is probably responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden. Osama does it on television; Pablo did it in a cellar. Dead is still dead.

Further on the article trots our more of the same tired and thin “analysis”. The author talks about Gene Halislip, a “top ranking DEA administrator” that says we missed the magic moment when we could have shut down the meth epidemic before it even started. (According to the author meth used to be confined to biker gangs in northern California prior to becoming a national problem. He should have been in my summer school classroom in 1988 when the kids next to me were doing lines of it.) Apparently all problems in life boil down to retrospective moments where it all could have been prevented and someone is always to blame. In the author’s case it’s the Regan administration, which had the chance to outlaw ephedrine and didn’t. (Funny, I always thought Congress passed the laws in our system of government.) Nothing like being a few decades beyond a decision to render a nice, round, post hoc opinion about how stupid people were at the time.

Then we move on to that “most powerful country on Earth” reference. Because having a slew of nuclear weapons and putting humans on the moon is the same thing as finding a guy hiding in a South American jungle hut. That’s a lazy-assed pluck of a lowest common denominator metaphor. I’m calling a euphemism flag on that journalistic play.

We’ve got to get beyond this lazy fixation with defining moments. All human behavior is attached to a time line and will continue accordingly. Crime and the drug trade are only one aspect of that behavior. The supposition of articles like this is it’s possible to have a closed, neatly tied ending to all of this. With that underpinning you can attack any direction you see fit, and lob criticism into any set of coordinates that supports your thesis. I suppose if there is any fault to be found here it’s in my expectations. I was hoping for insight and thoughtful analysis from a magazine that is devoted to celebrity aggrandizement. Tiger Beat for adults that never quite outgrew the fascination with the beautiful people.

Ares

Baby Lothario

So, my lovely assistant D. and I trundled over to La Fonda Latina for some good chow on a day full of office politics and nonsense. I’m proud to say I got her hooked on their Seafood Paella, while I’m still partial to the Bocadillo Vegetariano. We park ourselves in the sun room, next to a woman with two small children: a boy, perhaps 3 years old, and a girl, about 18 months. The boy, though wandering a bit with his chips and queso, is quiet and well-behaved, a perfect angel with big blue eyes and blond hair.

After ordering, I visit the restroom, and when I return, D. tells me she has been “making friends.” No sooner have I regained my seat when I feel small hands encircle my elbow. A tiny intense face, covered in snot and queso, leans close. “And what is your name?” he asks quietly. “My name is Athena. What is your name?” “Gus” he whispers.

My brain is completely divided. One half is recoiling in horror at the snot and queso that is being deposited on my sweater and hand-woven scarf (Christine Stanton, for the fiber fanatics among you). The other half is completely smitten with this little Casanova. My dilemma is solved: his lunch arrives, and he takes his seat. Then our lunch arrives, and we jump into it. Throughout our dining experience, he stands on his chair periodically, quietly facing my back, and placing his hands on my shoulder blades, as though performing some toddler variation of Reiki.

We finish before the woman and children, and after we leave the restaurant I tell D. she needs to check my back for tiny snot-and-queso handprints. She informs me she cannot find any, which is a relief.

Later, back at the office, I tell C., another co-worker, about the Baby Lothario. As I tell the story, my left hand rests on my left hip, and I feel something. Dammit. Tiny snot-and-queso handprint.

Athena

Pimping Out A Paste Eater

This transcends silly and plants both feet firmly in the stupid. Hillary’s campaign issued a press release taking shots at Barack Obama. The particular angle of this issue was that Obama has really planned to run for president all along. (Can we get an official ruling on how many years constitute an “all along” tag?) As reference to their claim the Hillary campaign cites Obama’s kindergarten and third grade teachers. WTF? Good thing I won’t ever run for president. The quote would be a little something like this:

Mrs. Mansburger, Ares’ Kindergarten teacher: “He was a hyperactive little boy that spent a lot of time with his finger up his nose and ate a lot of paste.”

Dude, seriously, WTF? If we’ll all consult our collective rear-view mirrors we’ll see the caricature of presidential elections far behind us. We’ve now moved into strange, unfathomable territory.

Ares

Future Branding

I’ve had a little thought dingle berry floating around my head for a few years. I wonder what kind of sports mascots we’re going to have in one hundred or two hundred years. The Pittsburg Pirates and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers inspired this power think. Pirates were the equivalent of common thugs back in their day. For that matter, there are still parts of the world where people are killed by pirates. I suppose the difference is nobody in our society is dying at their hands. Once everyone who was victimized by a given group of criminals or thugs is gone the stigma dies out with them.

So this leads to my only partially joking hypothesis. A hundred years from now Los Angeles will have a pro sports team called the Crips. New York will have one called La Cosa Nostra. Detroit will probably have one called the Jihadis. And our current home town of Atlanta will most likely have a team of some variety called the Thugs or the Pimps. Not too much of a stretch of the imagination if you just go forward far enough.

Ares

Almost Shot My Eye Out

Tonight was the first in what will probably be many viewings this holiday season of A Christmas Story. It was with belated irony that I remembered I too had a Red Ryder BB gun when I was about Ralphie’s age. I also recalled that I really did almost shoot my eye out. One of those hundreds of childhood moments you’re glad your mother wasn’t there to witness. (I’d have to say a close second was setting the back yard on fire when I was 13.) Moms just don’t understand the relationship between a boy and his BB gun. Before you hit puberty it’s probably the strongest you bond with any implement. What moms also don’t know is that the Red Ryder is a gateway gun. It starts with BB guns, then by the time you’re a teenager you just can’t get enough of that .22 rifle. By early adulthood you’re up to .308’s and 30-06’s. Somewhere around your early to mid twenties it grows into 1911-style .45’s and 12 gauges. By my 30’s it was an AR-15 with magazine connector and a Trijicon Reflex. I think the only place left for me to go is a Springfield Armory standard M1A or a Barrett model M468. Dad, I raise my glass of Tang in salute to your calling that one from way back, and taking all the heat came with it.

Ares

Metal Abuse

In the wee small hours of this morning I happened to get a few moments with my remote and television. VH1 had something called Metal Mania listed in the directory. When I was freshly pubescent VH1 was where mini-van driving soccer moms and wine sipping, sweater wearing, sensitive guys got their music. Now they have an ‘effing “metal show”? Thinking it would be interesting to see what passes for “metal” these days, I sat back on the couch and pressed “Enter” on the remote. It’s a good thing I wasn’t drinking, because it would have probably shot out of my nose. Displayed with the prominent “VH1 Classic” symbol in the corner was Judas Priest’s Turbo Lover. A heavy sigh, followed by some drive-by depression, quickly followed. Dammit.

Following closely on the heels of this little booger in the punchbowl of my disposition was a viewing of Mad Max2: The Road Warrior. Many a Sunday afternoon was pissed away with me, Jeff, and Matt watching that little celluloid gem. You absolutely have to be a teenage boy to truly enjoy that movie. (It’s where we went in the entertainment continuum after we discovered girls.) The only way to get three boys in puberty to be quiet for an hour and a half was to pop that cassette into the top-loading VCR. One question occurred to me as I watched The Road Warrior. The characters in that movie are dressed pretty much exactly like all of the metal bands that passed through the ‘80’s. Is that movie where that wardrobe guidance came from? Somebody older than me answer that one, I was still in Toughskins when The Road Warrior was in theaters.

On top of this now XM has an all-Led Zeppelin channel. I think Don Henley said it best in The Boys of Summer: “Out on the road today I saw a Dead Head sticker on a Cadillac, a little voice inside my head said don’t look back.”

Ares

Damnable Statistics

You can do all sorts of things with numbers. A data set can be used to prove or disprove a given position, depending on the author’s angle and objective. Just like lawyers can make facts irrelevant by composing a better argument, writers can pull statistics as far as their talent will take them. It was with this in mind that I came across a Congressional Research Service report entitled American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics.

I think we can safely assume from the report CRS doesn’t have a political axe to grind. It’s very Joe Friday “Just the facts, Ma’am”. These numbers don’t tell too much of a story by themselves, but they offer some interesting insight. From 1980 to 1983 there were 7091 military deaths. From 2004 through the end of 2006 there were 5674 military deaths. Total military deaths from 2001 through 2006 are 8795. From 1980 through 1985 there were 13807 fatalities. Mind you, some of those where due to places like Beirut and Grenada, but even with those combat fatalities factored in there’s still quite a gap. The really interesting statistic is the suicide numbers. We occasionally get hit with stories about the jump in military suicides since invading Iraq. From 1980 through 1985 there were 1444 self-inflicted life exits. From 2001 through 2006 there were 960. The highest scoring year since 2000 (2004 with 188) is lower than the lowest year of the 1980’s (1983 with 218).

What does all this tell us? Not much overall. Numbers don’t tell the story, context does. For me, this is further evidence of one of Thomas Barnett’s theories that the world is actually getting to be a better, safer place. Hard to believe that if you imbibe in the daily multi-media swill that’s pushed in front of us, but if you dig a little deeper and look a little more critically you can find it. Now if we could just get people to stop plugging into that pleasure center in the brain that is activated by distant feelings of doom. I’ll do my part by starting on myself.

Ares

Happy Birthday P.J.

A bit fat Ares and Athena happy birthday goes out to P.J. O’Rourke, who turns 60 today. Congratulations P.J., you’re now the old man you spent your youth railing against. For those not familiar, P.J. is the smartest funny man that nobody reads. Okay, some of you read him. My next door neighbor economics professor uses Eat the Rich as an intro text, as well he should. P.J. has the rare ability to entertain and inform at the same time. Give War a Chance and All the Trouble in the World should be required reading for all high school graduates. Parliament of Whores should be the nationwide high school civics text.

Our Founding Fathers lacked the special literary skills with which modern writers on the subject of government are so richly endowed. When they wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they found themselves more or less forced to come to the point. So clumsy of thought and pen were the Founders that even today, seven generations later, we can tell what they were talking about.

The opening lines of Eat the Rich hit the literary nail on the head.

I had one fundamental question about economics: Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck? It’s not a matter or brains. No part of the earth (with the possible exception of Brentwood) is dumber than Beverly Hills, and the residents are wading in gravy. In Russia, meanwhile, where chess is a spectator sport, they’re boiling stones for soup. Nor can education be the reason. Fourth graders in the American school system know what a condom is but aren’t sure about 9 x 7. Natural resources aren’t the answer. Africa has diamonds, gold, uranium, you name it. Scandinavia has little and is frozen besides. Maybe culture is the key, but wealthy regions such as the local mall are famous for lacking it.

P.J., I hope there’s more where that came from.

Ares

Create A Flow of Dollars

After another long silence I’m back at the keyboard helm. That whole earning a living thing sort of got in the way of blogtime. Part of the reason for my silence is that I simply haven’t had much to say. I subscribe to the less-is-more theory of blogging. If I were advancing an academic interest or chronicling an ongoing whatever there would be cause for more frequency. But this is mainly just rant space.

One little juicy thing caught my eye in today’s online Atlanta Urinal-Constipation. Nice, big piece about the Senate investigation into the finances of a few mega-churches in town. The two big ones are Eddie Long’s Newbirth and Creflo Dollar (for those out of town, I swear I’m not making that name up) and his World Changers. Seems Creflo took in $69 million in 2006. That’s a lot of collection plate passes. In the piece he says he doesn’t receive any income from the church, and his revenue is derived from real estate. Wonder where he got the money for his real estate investments? Also says that the church ‘bought’ him a Rolls Royce. ‘Nuff said on that one. Eddie Long isn’t quite as conspicuous with his wealth, although he’s rolling as well. Although the money is theirs to do with as they please, it raises the good question of what does a minister need with a private jet? Suicidal Tendencies nailed this one eloquently in their 1990 ditty called “Send Me Your Money”. Ah, the classics.

I suppose on some level this is a mark of progress. What’s good enough for Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson is good enough for Eddie Long. Equal opportunity hucksterism at work. The worrisome aspect of Creflo and Eddie’s churches is the underground power. There are a lot of buried cables of political current at work here. Vernon Jones, my favorite local elected idiot savant, has been playing touch & rub under the table with local preachers for years. He’s not the first; the Southern Baptists have been doing this for over a hundred years in this town. Vernon leased a county building to a local church for a buck a year right after he was elected. When he fired the police chief a few years ago, a local preacher was tasked with going to the chief’s home to tell him. (Typical Vernon, didn’t even have the sack to tell him face to face like a man.)

Back to Creflo, anybody that’s watched him preach will get a familiar feeling. Creflo comes off as a pimp in a thousand dollar suit. Hey, I just had an idea for slogan for World Changers: Pimpin for Jesus. Or maybe the less caustic “Blinging for Jesus”. I actually sort of hope this Senate investigation doesn’t run too far. Not because there isn’t anything to find, but because of the price we’ll pay if it goes too deep. If it gets beyond cursory it will immediately become racial and we won’t be able to swing a dead cat without tales of victimization. What I really wish is that some A-list investigative journalist/author would do a thorough book about the power/wealth nexus of these churches and politics. Mark Bowden would probably come away thinking Somalia was simple by comparison.

Ares

Children of Men

I actually sat still long enough tonight to get through a movie: Children of Men. Gotta say, it wasn’t an easy view. The plot goes a little something like this: It’s 2027 in Britain and women worldwide have been infertile for almost 20 years. Some nebulously unspecified holocaust has racked the rest of the world and the U.K. is the only bastion of ‘civilization’ left. Because of this foreigners and immigrants are declared illegal. With no children society is coming unglued because The End is in sight. Sort of like On the Beach with the end of humanity happening in slow motion.

There’s a bit more to it, but I don’t want to blab too much for those that haven’t seen it. With the concepts the movie is based on it would have been exceeding easy for it to devolve into a world class downer or a “message movie”. While it was a bit depressing it was also pretty compelling. Overly active minds will probably extract cautionary tales from every angle of the film. Case in point; go to YouTube and type Children of Men into the search bar. Look at a few of the comments below each clip. Lazy thinkers love their dystopia wrapped neatly and presented to them whole. The work is science fiction.

The First World has had a fixation with dystopian futures for a few generations now. Thus far nearly all of it hasn’t panned out. People’s Exhibit A: Paul Ehrlich. Another aspect of this first world dystopia fetish; it’s always just around the corner. People’s Exhibit B: Mega Disasters on the History Channel. Not that this particular series is unique. Nearly all the science documentaries produced in this country have some sort of tie in to potential future calamity. The entire genre seems to have enlarged considerably over the past decade or so. You have to be a certain level of rich to allow dystopian fiction into your entertainment repertoire. Maybe this is where our guilt lives when we remove god from the equation. (Those that know me will know that was not an evangelical statement.) Sounds like somebody’s thesis waiting to be written.

From an academic standpoint it’s an excellent movie. It’s so cleanly filmed that at times it felt like a Stanley Kubrick production. The ugliness was beautifully shot, if that makes any sense. The violence is presented to look unchoreographed. Violence that is scripted and presented to look clean ends up making it more palatable, which it shouldn’t be. As I said, it’s a tough film to view but strangely compelling. Probably worth watching, just not before bed.

Ares

The Price of Beer

While Mrs. Ares and I were on our illustrious journey out west we toured a few breweries. It’s just something we do on vacation to pass the time and sample the local brew. (On a side note, by and large they’ve got it going on out west when it comes to beer. In some small towns we visited the locals don’t even buy beer at stores. They take a gallon jug to the brewery every few days and have it filled. Like going to the dairy for your milk. Why can’t we do that here in the south? That’s another day’s post.) One of the breweries we visited was Butte Creek Brewing Company in Chico, California. Something the tour guide said caught my attention. As we were in the grain area of the brewery she said the price of grain was rising sharply, which was going to result in beer becoming more expensive and probably some smaller breweries going under. My amateur observation and this article confirmed her statement.

Why is this happening, you ask? Really it comes down to one word: Ethanol. In our inane attempt to achieve “energy independence” we’ve started converting cropland into fuel. With greater subsidies available, farmers (read: Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill) are planting more corn and less of everything else. Those of us who passed high school economics know that when there is less of something the price goes up. Another way this is playing itself out is a rise in soy prices, which is a result of switching cropland to corn. This is going to manifest in a lot of areas because soy is used in so many products. Earlier this year Mexico was rocked by a jump in the price of corn. Reason for the jump: More corn going to Ethanol production.

As for Ethanol itself, I have a few issues. By every account I’ve read there is a net energy loss in production. In other words, it takes more energy to make a gallon of Ethanol than the energy you get from that gallon. While on vacation I read The Worst Hard Time, which is about the Dust Bowl. (Excellent read, by the way.) One of the major contributing factors was that during World War I the government guaranteed a price of $2 a bushel for grain, which was drastically high. This caused a huge increase in breaking new land for grain production, which accelerated topsoil loss. Anybody here think ADM or Cargill is going to be all that concerned about crop rotation and conservation? Finally, there is a basic and fundamental premise to our survival as a species: You don’t mess with the food. This feels like we’ve started down a bad path. Unfortunately there are large amounts of money and emotional political issues tied to this, so it will probably take longer than usual to see it for what it is. On a personal level, they lost me when they started messing with the beer.

Ares

The Looming Tower

I just finished The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. It starts off outlining the life and development of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian intellectual father of militant Islam. Qutb lived in the U.S. during the 1950’s and thought it was the most decadent place on earth. He took this view back to Egypt and spun out a medieval interpretation of Islam. This in turn influenced another fire-beard named Ayman al-Zawahiri, who started plotting to overthrow the government at age 15. Zawahiri went on to found al-Jihad, which based on the name you can pretty much guess what they did. Al-Jihad and Zawahiri had a John Hinkley/Jodie Foster type fascination with the government of Egypt.

As usually happens when you start pooping where others eat, Egypt soon became too hot for Zawahiri, so he fled to Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia he came across pious piss-ant named Osama bin Laden. About this time bin Laden, like a lot of other rich boys in the Muslim world, wanted to go play danger against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The bin Laden family’s connections to the royal family of Saudi Arabia allowed him to channel large amounts of money and aid to the mujahideen. One interesting factoid brought out in the book: The Arab fighters were largely worthless against the Soviets and the mujahideen couldn’t stand them. Also, bin Laden’s legend as a brave battlefield commander is myth he marketed and promoted. When the conflict ended bin Laden and a few other key players decided that liked playing adventure and wanted to continue jihading. After a lot of brainstorming they decided that the U.S. would make a good enemy and the elected bin Laden head of the club because he could swing the most money. Eventually Zawahiri merged al-Jihad with al-Qaeda because he ran out of money.

One of the most interesting concepts brought out in the book is the idea of takfir. Takfir is the intellectual fig leaf militant Islam uses to create its circular, adolescent nihilism. In short, takfir is the idea that it’s okay to kill infidels, and anyone that doesn’t think like you do is an infidel. For example, when an al-Qaeda member was being interrogated about the embassy bombing in Nairobi in 1998 he was asked how killing women and children could be justified. The bombing took place on a Friday, and the al-Qaeda member said that if the victims were good Muslims they would have been at the mosque and not where the bombing took place.

The book takes a lot of air out of the myth of al-Qaeda. What is painted as a worldwide network of legions of committed religious zealots is actually a very loose association of deranged sociopaths. Modern society has enabled their reach to exceed their grasp, and modern media tells the narrative of the image, not the substance. Over the years of its existence a lot of members have left. 9/11 did not result in hordes of the faithful joining the fight, as bin Laden had hoped. The ones that enter today have bought into a marketing campaign that would make B.F. Skinner and Madison Avenue blush. If you study the composition of cults al-Qaeda very much fits the pattern. Even without an academic analysis the book makes for compelling reading. It’s a measured, wide-ranging examination in a field of shallow understanding.

Ares

Go West Young Man

There’s an honest reason for the stale stench on this page. Mrs. Ares and I spent the past few weeks on vacation out west. After a few days in northern California we did the great American Road Trip to Montana. Not much, only 2,000 miles in a little over a week. Never had a vacation that was that much fun and that much work.

After some quality time on Interstate 90 we rolled into Missoula. I-90 through northern Idaho is one of the most beautiful interstate drives you can do in this country. Missoula is a little rough and a little industrial, but pretty thinned out by Atlanta standards. Best part of Missoula was visiting the Big Sky Brewing Company. The next day took us down state highway 93 and along the eastern edge of the Bitterroot Mountains. I’ve seen a few mountains in my day, but this place will stop you cold. After a few hours in Hamilton I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave.

Alas, we had to press on as we needed to take possession of a U.S. Forest Service cabin north of Dillon. While the cabin had electricity, that was as far as it went into modernity. Being 8 miles down a dirt road that was shaky at best in a rental car was another obstacle. Still, it was clean and quiet with views you couldn’t beat. I was pretty okay with it until the mouse ran across my arm in my sleep. That was where sleep and I parted company for the duration of the cabin stay.

After the a few days of outhouses and cabin mice we gladly checked into a hotel in Bozeman. Aside from checking out the town we were taking a crack at the Lewis & Clark Marathon/Half-Marathon/5K. I settled on the 5K and Mrs. Ares joined me. Or, as we’ve taken to calling it, the Pneumonia 5K. It was 43 degrees and raining throughout the run. Still a lot of fun though. Bozeman seems like a nice town, and you can’t beat having mountains on 3 sides to view.

Montana is an interesting place. The residents are fiercely rugged and don’t seem to like outsiders too much. (Except Bozeman, which is a tourist and college town.) With the land speculation that’s been going on there the past dozen years or so I can’t say I blame them. I also came to the conclusion that I probably couldn’t live there for three reasons: I don’t have enough facial hair (and I look really stupid with it), I don’t have giant pickup truck, and I don’t have any Carhartt clothing. Carhartt is the state uniform of male residents between 6 and death. Overall I think my friend Dave described it best when he used the term “Gun-toting tree-huggers”. As for me, I’m just glad to have showers and flushing toilets at my disposal again. Remember, plumbing is what makes civilization great.

Ares

Dennis Kucinich...Still an Asshat

Once again Dennis the Menace demonstrated his membership in that irresponsible group of politicians that think if you just believe hard enough in good things the world will be a better place. The Troll did a little grip & grin tour of Syria recently. After praising the Syrian president he made sure to tell the world that he wasn’t going to Iraq to visit the troops. (Much to the relief of everyone there in uniform.) “I feel the United States is engaging in an illegal occupation…I don’t want to bless that occupation with my presence.” Sorry, I didn’t know you were the f****** pope, able to bless entire countries in a single bound. Because your junior miss-sized blessing was all that was missing to make things complete in Mesopotamia. .

The self-proclaimed lover of peace is championing a government that calls for the genocide of the Jewish people. (I won’t farm the fertile soil of criticism against Nancy “Hajib” Pelosi and her sporting the latest in oppression wear during her unwanted visit.) How does that math work in his tiny little head? I’m sure he has to climb back into mommy’s papoose for frequent naps after all that hard thinking of trying to self-justify the contradictions. If someone would get him a high chair he could look across the table and see that Syria is sufficiently blood-soaked via their proxies in Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah. The only condition of Dennis’ praise is that the other party agree with him about George Bush. An intellectual kiddie pool if ever there was one.

The Troll is completely entitled to his opinions, and supporting the troops isn’t some compulsory altar that should be bowed at. That said, 46 Marines from his district died in Iraq in 2005 and his response is “I don’t want to bless it.” He’s been faithfully consistent in not blessing both the war and the memories of those who died. Because to him it’s all about politics. But if you can’t say anything nice about men and women that are your betters, men and women that believe and commit more than you do, then why don’t you do us all a favor and keep that tiny cake hole shut.

Endnote: Had to cut & paste a comment from a site about this issue. Meanwhile in Syria, Dennis Kucinich models avant-garde 21st century impressionistic Burkah-wear® made from a breathable, yet radiofrequency reflective material patented by Alcoa for the fashion/RF conscious progressives in both the United States and the court of President Bashar Assad. Stunned is all this fashion reporter can say. LMAO.

Ares

Stupid, the Universal Solvent

Couldn’t resist hitting this one. Leona “Only the little people pay taxes” Helmsley finally did us all a favor and stopped being an oxygen thief a few weeks ago. (Am I the only one that thinks she looks like The Joker from Batman? That face is gonna give me nightmares.) Alas, her idiocy shall live in short perpetuity. She left her dog 12 million bucks. That’s some expensive kibble. Leona probably wanted to extend some professional courtesy to a fellow bitch for not biting her.

The real shame is that her chauffer only got a hundred grand. Who cares that only two of the four grandkids got 5 million? All they did to be on the payroll was get involuntarily enrolled in the gene pool. The chauffer, however, probably swallowed Olympic-sized buckets of shit from that woman down through the years. He’s gonna have to spend all that money on therapy and anger management. If I was him, I’d be volunteering to take that dog for a walk.

Ares

Unreality TV

I spent a nearly worthless evening doing something I don’t do very much: Watching fiction on network television. Not quite sure what moved me to throw time down that particular hole tonight. Maybe I was just too lazy to reach for the remote. Anyway, my two selections on this eve were CSI: Miami and The China Syndrome.

Prior to this evening I had not sat through more than 5 consecutive minutes of a CSI episode. Now I know why. I’ve seen bits and pieces of the other CSI franchises: New York and Las Vegas. David Caruso fronts the Miami flavor, which is part of the problem. William Petersen and Gary Sinise front the other two. Petersen has genuine talent (great example of this is the original version of Red Dragon, called Manhunter) and Sinise is unpretty enough to look like a cop. Caruso comes off as a game show host with really bad lines. Some carrot-topped cracker more wooden and stiff than a chest of drawers, floundering his way through a script so slick it doesn’t stick to anything.

My real reason for detesting CSI: Miami isn’t Mr. Freckles. First, the older I get the more I object to the continued selling of homicide as entertainment. In between the scenes we get drive-by overhead money shots of glamorous Miami, false advertising at its finest. Second, when the crime happens a 20-something with 8% body fat shows up in a Hummer to test for epithelial cells and DNA, which is slung back to the lab for a complete return (with color photographs of the perp) within an hour or two. Apparently David Caruso yelling “Dammit, I need that right away!” tends to negate the laws of chemistry. In real life you get a chain-smoking, pot-bellied guy in an 8 year old Crown Victoria bitching the whole way through about getting yanked out of bed. Ah, but Ares, it’s just television, you say. Yes, I know that and you, the four readers of this blog, know that. But the mouth-breathing, front half of the intelligence bell curve, mental midgets that inhabit the larger portions of our world have a difficult time distinguishing between the two dimensional and the three dimensional worlds. Somehow, that notion tapers my entertainment gradient significantly. Damn I’m getting old.

The nugget that followed was The China Syndrome. I must have been really, really lazy to not reach for the remote when a Jane Fonda movie came on. My justification was that it got a bunch of Oscar nominations, I’d never seen it before, and I wanted to see just how much of a boogey man they made the power industry. Gotta love any movie where there are murderous goons at the beck and call of corporate white guys. Some of the freeway scenes were a little déjà vu, made me think I was watching CHiPS. Best part for me was when the fire department was at the scene of the car accident: It was Engine 51 and Squad 51. (“Dix, we’re gonna need and IV with ringers lactate.”) Then when the SWAT team arrives at the power plant it’s the same stinking van from the series. It was a prop-vehicle reunion.

According to Wikipedia, the movie came out twelve days before the Three Mile Island incident. In a shocking move that will never be replicated, the movie was actually pulled from some theaters because they didn’t want to look like they were profiting from it. If a similar movie were made today, and a melt down occurred two weeks later, there would be producers lined up out the door of the closest church, hitting their knees to thank god and slip big fat thank-you checks into the collection plate. Still, the movie must have had some effect. In 1979 we’d just gotten the economic crap kicked out of us by OPEC, yet we embraced the more expensive alternative. No reactors have been built since. Even knowing the plot devices were bogus I still got sucked into the movie a bit. There’s something about all things nuclear that is hard-wired (forgive me) into our fear centers. The movie reminded me of another one I saw as a kid called Special Bulletin. That movie scared the shit out of me. Mom, in case you’re reading this, I was probably too young to watch that one. It gave me cold sweat, toss-and-turn nightmares for months. I hope David Caruso doesn’t do the same thing.

Ares

Sick Mainstream

Again yesterday I was trapped at a Secure Undisclosed Location where CNN was being involuntarily beamed forth. The particular fetish of the day was their upcoming interview with John Mark Karr. (Why is it when you’re in the media’s sights you suddenly get three names? John Mark Karr, George W. Bush, Lee Harvey Oswald, et al.) We can’t begin to catalogue all the things that are wrong with this. First and foremost, he’s just creepy. If his head fit his body he’d probably look a little more mainstream. But the big issue here is why are they giving uninterrupted face time to a child molester? What’s the possible commercial gain? The laugh-out-loud part of the CNN teasers was the anchor reading viewer e-mails about the segment. I’ll reduce and paraphrase the e-mails for you: “You suck! STFU! Get that sick F*** off the air!” I call this the domestic violence model of journalism. “They must love us because they beat us.”

As for Mr. Karr, got a little question for you. What exactly where you doing Thailand when you suddenly volunteered to be a suspect in the Original Dead White Girl case? Why do single white men go to Thailand? Was it to volunteer at the Wee Tikes Playground and Boarding House? And why did you pick that particular time to remember you were a suspect? Spend all your money on Ring Pops and Ferris Wheel rides for your new best friends and needed a lift home?

Ares

(ps. If you missed it, look at the left side of the picture & you’ll see why it fits.)

The Merely Obvious Will Do

I don’t want to sound like a one-track guy, but this is such low hanging fruit that I can’t resist hitting it. Seems CBS News (an oxymoron if ever there was one) threw up a little article about the hurricane that’s whirling around Hawaii. We’ll ignore the banner “Category 4 Hurricane Heads Toward Hawaii” headline. This is easy to ignore if you read the body of the article, which contradictorily states that the storm will pass Hawaii and probably only inflict heavy surf. No, the part of this article that really caught my attention was the graphic at the top of the article. There’s what appears to be a weather sat shot of a hurricane. Underneath the picture is the caption “Hurricane Flossie strengthened to a Category 3 story early August 11, 2007, as it headed toward the waters south of Hawaii.” All well and good, but the picture is of a hurricane in the Atlantic. If you look at the picture you can make out Cube in the lower left corner, the Bahamas in the left center, and the east coast of the U.S. on the left side. I guess Flossie wasn’t photogenic enough from space to go with truth in graphics.

In another bit of non-shocking CBS news we peruse this article. Seems Hezbollah (due to the disparities in Arabic translation it can also be spelled Hizbulla, Hillsbella, and HellsBells) took out some ad space on a billboard in Windsor, Canada. As you can see, big as life at the bottom of the billboard, is the CBS logo. Way to work in that product placement. You know why we have advertising executives in this world? Because there are some things prostitutes just won’t do. Not quite sure exactly what they were trying to accomplish by buying a billboard in Canada, but fools and their money rarely consummate for too long. One nice, interesting theory that’s been hatched in the Ares and Athena think tank is that Windsor is across the river from Detroit. Greater Detroit is home to the largest concentration of Arab Muslims in the U.S. Do the math and insert your own 10 cent theory from that starting point. Little side note to Hassan Nasrallah, the beard boy in the middle with the funny hat: You get further in the West by using small furry animals or babies in your advertising.

Ares

The First Robin of Autumn

Much like the first robin you see in winter is a harbinger of spring; I’ve found the first harbinger of autumn. On the shelves of my local grocer I found a cool, gleaming six-pack of Samuel Adams Octoberfest. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. It’s been uglier than an inbred possum the last few weeks. I think the temperature is being measured in Kelvin and the air quality is being referred to as chunky. It’s been so hot the kudzu won’t grow, the day laborers won’t loiter, and the crack heads have switched to dry ice. Atlanta in the summer: Who’d have thought an entire city could smell like rotting dumpster, except where it smells like urine?

A little bit of Sammy helps wash away the mental stink of summer. Not with alcoholic diffusion but with sensory recall. Octoberfest beer fast forwards me to that time of long sleeves, heavy comforters, and god-like slumber. Everyone seems to catch their breath and revise their view of the world in October, whether they know it or not. It’s that final pause before the whirlwind idiocy of the holidays, followed by the mildly hollow letdown of the post-New Year winter. For my money, there are few better things than the smell of a neighborhood full of fireplaces in effect on a frigid night. All of these things are imminent, says that little half-full bottle on my desk. Thank you Jim, I needed that.

Ares

The Long, Slow Burn

As stated previously in this space, apologies for the stagnation. The dog days of summer are taking their toll. Everything seems a bit overcooked, overworked, and overused. The days at work are simply a sweat-based endurance trial with no finish line. After a few days in a row on the clock I feel like the bastard son of Kafka and Henry Rollins.

This summer has left me on an island all by myself. My mind goes its own way, usually to the streets of my hometown. Summer becomes a jail, a ship run aground, a ladder to nowhere. The summer animal, I can never outrun or hide from it. The summer bores me out, turns me into a hollow carcass. Fueled by insomnia and a thirst for everything. I turn into boneless limbo man caught in the middle. My skin turns to leather, I turn inside in. I seal off. Underneath this leather exterior I scream, twist, convulse, and burn silently. I wonder to myself wouldn’t I be better off far from anything that bears the least resemblance to this? You can change the scenery that surrounds you. You can run from the fists that pound you, but you cannot escape your feelings. I’ve crawled every sewer from here to there and I’ve never done it. And I burn silently.

The streets lie, the sidewalks lie. You can try to read it but you’re gonna get it wrong. The summer evenings burn and melt and the nights glitter, but they lie. Underneath the streets there’s a river that moves like a snake. It moves with smooth, undulating, crippling muscle power. It chokes and drowns and trips and strangles and lures and says “Come here, stay with me,” and it lies.

Thanks Henry, I needed that. Stay cool.

Ares