Shoulda Been a Used-Car Salesman

And the implosion of traditional journalism continues. In the space of eight hours Feb. 29, I watched the company I've worked for for umpteen years split itself into four pieces, and then learned that my old alma mater, The Albuquerque Tribune, stopped publishing on Feb. 23. The lights go out, one by one....

Fraud by Consensus in Kosovo

Those stupid Serbs, acting like brats again, burning down the U.S. embassy in Belgrade, whining about Kosovo independence when everyone, including the U.S. government and all major EU nations, think it's a great thing. When the majority of nations are cheering, they must be right, right? Wellllll.........

I want to distinguish myself from some Western Marxist-oriented thinkers who tend to cheer on the Serbs simply because they're slavic pals of the Russkies - writers like Edward Herman, for example. I'm not one of them. I think that far too many Serbs followed nationalist rabid dogs like Milosevic and Seselj in the 1990s who deserved the moniker of fascist. But everything that happened in southern Serbia from 1999 on was a fraud concocted by the U.S. and NATO to preserve Western military dominance.

I'm grateful to the Globe and Mail in Canada for being a rare voice of reason amidst all the Western self-congratulation. To put it bluntly, this is all about "getting back" at the Serbs for their dalliance with Milosevic. I am offended by the way many Serbs acted in the Croatia and Bosnia crises, yet there was no "ethnic cleansing" or "genocide" in Kosovo prior to NATO bombing in 1999. Clinton merely decided to draw a line in the sand, ignoring the fact that the KLA was led by terrorists and drug-dealers, and sent Madeleine Albright to Rambouillet with a mission of giving the Serbs "negotiation" terms that amounted to "How would you like to have your ass kicked?" Since the bombing ended, the main goal of the UN mini-state has been to protect the vast U.S. military base, Camp Bondsteel. UN insiders say there is no way to make Kosovo a viable state. Yet we all cheer, and watch violence erupt in Belgrade and say it must be due to Serb fascist hotheads. Thank goodness for people like Diana Johnstone who tell the truth about this crazy world-turned-upside-down.

Is This All There Is?

What does Lindsay Lohan's odd New York magazine photo shoot with Bert Stern, emulating Marilyn Monroe's 1962 session, have to do with the new study on the front page of The New York Times showing skyrocketing rates of suicide among 45-to-54-year old men (and increasing at an even faster rate among women of the same age)? You know it would have something to do with death and prescription drugs, as everyone is urging Lindsay not to pull a Marilyn, and the Times was hunting for a cause for middle-age suicide's popularity amidst all the Lunesta and Ambien floating around.

But I'm seeing something broader and eerier, touching on a subject Adbusters magazine has been hitting on for years. The Canadian anti-consumer journal, which has tended to be anti-script-drug without going all Tom Cruise about it, warns that corporations lull consumers into believing so utterly in the power of products and pills to provide meaning in their lives, that it can send some people into a spiral from which they never recover. The harsher analysts watching baby boomers go all morbid in midlife say that they're crybabies compared to the Greatest Generation, those stoic folks who put up silently with the Great Depression and WW2. Adbusters would respond that the silent majority never had to put up with the barrage of unhealthy messages telling boomers they could have it all, that the capitalist cornucopia would never end, and that there would never be a lull in success or a time for growing old.

Well, hell, now we've got a recession and a massive national debt, corporations are cutting out mid-level managers and making middle-agers feel worthless, and none of those prescription pills do jackshit except cause Ambien zombie driving. Need anyone ask why suicide is more popular among this segment?

And what about the young? If the Lohan-Spears syndrome is any indication, the 20-somethings are more narcissistic than any generation before, and more prone to turn every bad wrinkle in life into a drama-queen crisis -- and one publicized on Facebook and MySpace, thank you very much. Lindsay's seen the craziness of her peers, the accidental death of Heath Ledger, and seems to be saying that if all the wheels fall off her Landrover, she wants to turn it into a marketable item. Hence the photo shoot. To envision what comes after the boomer suicide craze, remember what Karl Marx said about how "history always repeats itself twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." The farces are omipresent already, except that there's nothing very funny about Marilyn Monroe retakes or campus massacres, just as there's nothing very funny about a lonely 53-year-old man filling his garage with carbon monoxide.

Di, Dodi, and a Conspiracy So Vast

Mohamed Al Fayed, owner of Harrod's and father of the deceased Dodi, told a coroner's inquest Feb. 18 that his son and Princess Diana were murdered by British and French secret agents acting at the behest of the Royal Family, particularly Prince Philip. Obviously, this is the kind of thing that rekindles interest in a decade-old death and generates buzz in both print and online. The sad thing is that there are far too many people on the planet that appreciate the paranoid mindset. There's all kinds of proof the royals were creepy people and that Diana was not loved, but murder by MI-6? More like death by paparazzi!
As one blog commenter told the Guardian, sure you can show that Prince Philip was educated in Baden by people close to the Nazis, but that "doesn't prove a goddamn thing."
The way in which conspiracy theories kill critical thinking has been addressed quite well by people like Chip Berlet. But there are still great minds of my generation that have been destroyed by the search for the ultimate conspiracy -- take Global Outlook magazine, for example. There are indeed power structures that run the world, but searching for vast conspiracies is the business of small minds, not open ones.

Kaboom!

Got a problem with wayward spy satellites leaking hydrazine, revealing their own secrets, and leaving large parts of themselves all over the globe? The solution is simple: shoot down the suckers with the new improved Navy SM-3 missile, on board every Aegis cruiser involved in theatre missile defense! In advance of a Valentine's Day press conference at the Pentagon, the Associated Press reported that that the DoD already had decided to shoot down USA 193, an experimental satellite of the National Reconnaissance Office, before it falls to Earth in early March.

USA 193 was an experimental spy satellite, reportedly built by Lockheed-Martin and launched on a Delta-II rocket from Vandenberg AFB in December 2006. The New York Times cited specific problems with an imaging device on the satellite, but Jonathan's Space Report said that the satellite was meant to test several types of imagers, including radar, and that the satellite itself failed.

John Pike at Globalsecurity.org assumes the most important reason to shoot the satellite down is the toxic hydrazine used as a propellant. Security specialists wonder, since the satellite was intended for experimental sensors, if the intelligence agencies want the satellite destroyed before curious eyes can examine what's left of the payload. And critics of missile defense wonder if the whole show is just a way to promote the handy-dandy Aegis cruiser and its resident missile.

Thou Shalt Not, Except Sometimes

The State Department has taken a distinct and troubling new step by praising the assassination by car bomb of Imad Mughniyeh of Hezbollah. Not that I'd disagree too much, mind you -- the man who planned the 1983 Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks, and several of the Beirut Hezbollah kidnappings of the late 1980s, is probably indeed better off dead. A strict Christian approach to confronting evil would say that one can never rejoice over another's death. But let's face it, I was overjoyed the day Augusto Pinochet bit it, and will probably feel similarly for, say, Henry Kissinger or Dick Cheney (not the president, who is too much of a bumbling tool of the powerful). But I know I'm wrong to have a "party on the gravestone" view, and it seems troubling that the governments of the U.S. and Israel would make an official statement to praise a murder.

Warrantless Surveillance and the Lookalike Parties

To no one's surprise, the Senate completely caved in Feb. 12 and provided the White House and the National Security Agency everything it wanted in gutting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, including full indemnity for phone companies that get conned into performing illegal surveillance. The New York Times was smart enough to realize that the big issue was not simply how much of FISA was destroyed, or to what extent carriers could parade their "get out of jail free" cards, but rather the degree to which cowed Democrats in both houses of Congress, even when in a majority position, give the president everything he wants so as not to look "soft on terrorism." As the Times article points out, this does not bode well for Guantanamo, waterboarding, extraordinary renditions, habeas corpus, or much of anything else in the Bush imperial presidency. It's nice to have two lookalike parties - note that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did not vote.