The preznit is nothing if not consistent in both his contempt for the rest of the world and in his demonstration of that contempt with diversionary bullshit like this Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change. The man sticks with what works for him.

First it was get your own scientists. When he took office and promptly pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, dubya questioned the validity of a consensus of thousands of scientists from all over the world, basing his decision on the "work" of a dozen or so oil industry funded pseudo-scientists. That's been good for going on seven years of stonewalling any international greenhouse gas treaty.

Then it was get your own coalition. When the United Nations wouldn't stand up and salute his hard-on for invading Iraq, dubya twisted arms and greased palms to put together his "coalition of the willing" false-front of international support prior to the invasion. That's been good for four and a half years of our benevolent empire nation building in the Middle East.

Now it's get your own climate treaty. With a UN climate summit upcoming, dubya is making a pre-emptive strike with this dog-and-pony show calling for an agreement in which industry enacts voluntary measures to cut emissions. On the international stage dubya's latest big idea is being met with the same derision as it's predecessors. And deservedly so. He is, after all, merely selling the status quo and touting it as change. (By the way, "voluntary" is the Republican code word for "You don't have to do it if it decreases profits unless the government provides you with an offsetting tax cut.)

But the rest of the world is not really his target audience anyway. No, this is dubya at his best, playing to his base. The genuinely stupid and the willfully ignorant 30% percent of Amurka who will continue to support him no matter what levels of ludicrousness he ascends to. The people behind whom he's been able to stifle democracy and label dissent treasonous. The people for whom dubya has an incredible Orwellian ability to render facts debatable.

The United States uses 25% of the world's energy supply. We've known for decades that we would not be able to continue this rate of consumption. Yet we've steadfastly refused to take any serious steps toward changing the way we do things. We have, in fact, adopted a policy of maintaining our consumption rate militarily. It's the only truly bi-partisan aspect of our government. To the rest of the world, the message is abundantly clear. American capitalism is paramount to all issues. Our government is going to continue riding the horse that is our oil-based superpower economy until it falls dead under us, blustering and bullying and bombing all the way. It's not going to be pretty.

Note: I know the photo doesn't really have anything to do with this post, but I just had to swipe it from the CNN story I linked to above because Condi is particularly sexy with that just-burned-a-doob look.

This afternoon I completed my 45th trip around our sun at approximately 67,000 mph, or about 26 billion miles. During that same time, however, the sun also traveled .00002% of it's orbit around our galaxy, or about 220 billion miles. Our galaxy, meanwhile, has actually been gaining speed, accelerating through space away from the Big Bang and toward the Great Attractor at 670,000 mph covering about 260 billion miles. Add it all up and I've logged over 500 billion miles on this rock. It sounds pretty impressive until you realize it's less than a tenth of a light year. The nearest stars to our own are the Alpha Centauri triple at over 4 light years away. I think I'll drink a beer and ponder my own insignificance.

As part of my life-long program of multifarious self-education, I recently found myself surfing the intertoobz reading about brain research. I am now prepared to share two important facts. First, there is a boatload of highly technical, in-depth information available to the public in the form of scientific research reports and articles. And second, the public is nowhere near bright enough to understand more than a very small fraction of that information. I'm actually interested in the material and I still only managed to slog through a few articles that required googling two or three words just to understand their titles. The articles themselves are now just a hellish blur because somewhere in there I lost consciousness and woke up with keyboard face and vague memories of dreams about monkeys.

Coincidentally, it was my thoughts on the evolution of consciousness that sent me on that little journey in the first place, and it wasn't entirely fruitless. Aside from the lesson in humility that I probably needed anyway, I learned that there is in fact a scientific consensus that our consciousness, our thoughts, memories and emotions reside in and are generated by the brain. I did not find any research directly stating this, but it can be easily inferred from the fact that all the research that I did find was directed at discovering not if, but how these processes occur in the brain.

My own theory is that man's immense capacity for lying to himself (i.e. religion) is tied directly to the evolution of our more powerful brain. I imagine that the first humans to evolve a mental capacity sufficient enough for a degree of self-awareness approaching what we now call consciousness were probably also the first mythologists. They woke up, so to speak, looked at the cold, indifferent world around them - a world over which they had virtually no control - and freaked right the fuck out. Self-awareness led immediately to self-deception as a defense mechanism against despair, belief providing an illusion of control over life and death. The more advanced portion of the brain playing tricks on the primitive brain stem in order to continue functioning in the face of - now fully realized - dangers all around.

Of course our modern mythologists continue the charade, denying the science and refusing to believe that our mind is part of our physical body. They believe instead in a soul which, upon the death of our body and brain, lives on, complete with our identity and memories and personality. By their logic, the brain appears to serve no purpose whatsoever.

This photo accompanying this CNN story about the foiled German terror plot really grabbed my attention.



The symbology just jumps right out at me. Masked men escorting a masked, blindfolded, zip-tied captive. You know immediately the guy in the middle is in deep shit, but I find it a little disturbing that you have to read the caption below the photo to know the good guys from the bad. Taken alone, the photo is an image the America I grew up in would have despised, that of a man being disappeared.

It also reveals some truths about the Global War on Terror. Not the superpower floundering stupidly in the desert protecting it's oil supply War on Terra, but the real track-'em-down-and-remove-'em-from-society fight against organized terrorism. It's being fought by law enforcement, not military, and it's largely being fought in secret. The rest of the world is quietly getting the job done while our preznit and Congress argue over how badly The Surge has failed. It's mind-boggling.

Back at the beginning of this year I was one of the many paranoid lefties predicting an imminent US attack on Iran. But knowing our penchant for invading the Middle East in the spring, when summer rolled around I figured I must have misread that situation entirely. Then today I read this blog post by Barnett Rubin in which he recalls the strategy used to sell the Iraq invasion in 2002 and suggests we are about to see the same methodical approach aimed at Iran.

Today I received a message from a friend who has excellent connections in Washington and whose information has often been prescient. According to this report, as in 2002, the rollout will start after Labor Day, with a big kickoff on September 11. My friend had spoken to someone in one of the leading neo-conservative institutions. He summarized what he was told this way:

They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”

Call it paranoia if you want, but that last part is so exactly how this administration works that I can't help hearing a ring of truth in it. And just because I'm paranoid about this administration and their seemingly unmatched ability to make bad situations worse doesn't mean they aren't as batshit crazy as I think they are. I doubt it's coincidental that dubya has been making noises about declaring Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization for some time now. It would allow him to move militarily against Iran under the auspices of his War on Terra, without seeking any kind of input or approval from Congress. It's a perfect way for him to bitch-slap the Dems one last time and simultaneously saddle his successor with a third, potentially very nasty front in the war. What better way to ensure the next administration can't immediately start to dismantle his burgeonoing empire?