Arlington Section 36, No. 1431

Thousands who lie there died bravely,
but how many among them lived as bravely?

Happy Birthday

Chester Arthur Burnett
June 10, 1910--January 10, 1976

Week In Review

Thursday: US and Iraqi authorities jointly announced at separate press conferences the death of militant insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, LLC. Zarqawi was killed when he survived an airstrike employing two 500 lb. "bunker buster" bombs which were fired at his compound by Iraqi police, flattening the structure with Zarqawi just inside the outside of the structure, which was located nearby, killing him instantly, after which he lived just long enough to say something that couldn't be heard to US military and/or Iraqi police personnel, who were the first to arrive on the scene after the gun battle in which they killed him shortly after he died. The above photograph was one of several displayed by the US command in an effort to prove they hadn't doctored photos of a slightly injured man just blown to bits in a building he wasn't in.

Friday: US officials today explained the apparent shifting details in the death of militant insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, LLC, by explaining that the fog of war can be particularly heavy when you're not used to publishing stories you might wish to tell the truth about. The situation should revert to normal within the next few days, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "This had us back on our heels for a time," the official admitted. "After all, we just killed a guy that until a few weeks ago we thought we'd invented. Which you gotta admit can be a little disconcerting."

Happy Birthday

Cole Albert Porter
June 9, 1891 (Peru, Indiana)--October 15, 1964

And?

Dr. Sanity, the ever-present reminder that under United States law it's permissible to label practically any trash fish you trawl up anywhere "North Atlantic Cod", offers a run-down of the "Reality-based community's reaction to the death of Zarqawi". Her first quote--her first quote, reader--is a single sentence followed by this:

Note - this is not a direct quote.

"Update one" includes this:

Juan Cole -"There is no evidence of operational links between his Salafi Jihadis in Iraq and the real al-Qaeda; it was just a sort of branding that suited everyone, including the US. Official US spokesmen have all along over-estimated his importance. Leaders are significant and not always easily replaced. But Zarqawi has in my view has been less important than local Iraqi leaders and groups. I don't expect the guerrilla war to subside any time soon."

Really, an academic gathers up Dr. Cole in her butterfly net and dumps him in her moonbat bag, Juan Cole pinned on a mat board next to a made-up quote from Kos and a comment from an open Atrios thread. Juan Cole. By a woman who despairs of "how much civil discourse has deteriorated" and who "really hates idiots".

Forget for a moment that this is Juan Cole's area of expertise, and it's what he blogs about. It would have been rather astonishing if he hadn't commented on the death of Zarqawi. It might have been noteworthy if he'd suddenly changed his tune in an attempt to rob the Bush administration of its stirring victory. Jeez Louise, what he said there isn't even controversial. Dr. Cole, of course, knows there's no reason for controversy. What is firmly demonstrable today will be clearly seen as such when all the confetti has turned to compost.

The only thing that bothers me is this: I'm concerned that these biennial spasms of delight and trash talking (Purple fingers! Spider holes! Uday and Qusay!) are like a morbidly obese man deciding to cram a year's worth of exercise into one hot July afternoon. You'd think someone called "Dr. Sanity" would have caught on to that by now.

Woods of Wisdom

"There is usually little object in travelling tough just for the sake of being tough."

Hudson's Bay Company employee survival manual

Showing Your Imaginary Playmate Who's Boss

James Lileks, "Self-Loathing and the Denial of Terrorism", June 7

You're an enlightened world citizen. Your T-shirt says "9/11 was an inside job." You're pretty sure we're living in a fascist state, that President Bush taps the Dixie Chicks' phones, Christian abortion clinic bombers outnumber jihadis, and the war on "terror" is a distraction from the real threats: carbon emissions and Pat Robertson. Then you learn that 17 people were arrested in a terrorist bomb plot. How do you process the information? Let's take it step by step.

Toronto Star: Their so-called training camp turns out to have been a swath of bush near Washago, where their activities — shooting off firearms and playing paintball — were so obvious and so irritating that local residents immediately called police.

Recall the prime directive: Question Authority (unless he's a college professor). The plotters must have been impoverished olive farmers radicalized by the removal of Saddam Hussein. Why, if someone came in and toppled your president, you'd go to their country and ... well, you'd thank them. Unless they did it for the wrong reasons! Then you'd blow something up. Like an SUV dealership. At night. Anyway, you understand; you care a lot about Iraqis these days. You think about Iraq more than China, to be honest, but it's not as if you'll scrape off your "Free Tibet" bumper sticker -- unless it's to make room for "Free Darfur." Or "Hands Off Darfur," depending.

Toronto Star: These suspects, it is alleged, simply trespassed on someone's farm and, when the owner told them to leave, gave him lip.

Wait a minute: The "terrorists" were Canadian? You can understand someone blowing up trains in Spain and London. They sent troops to an illegal war cooked up by neocons who want to kill brown people for Exxon and Jesus, or something. You can understand, reluctantly, blowing up teens in an Israeli pizza parlor, because the Jews took the West Bank from the sovereign, ancient nation of Palestine. (How can a liberal socialist country behave so poorly? The world is full of mysteries.) But Canada? Isn't Michael Moore from Canada? You can get medical marijuana from married gay doctors in Canada, and no one has guns. You console yourself: Maybe they were really planning to attack the U.S.

Toronto Star: They apparently didn't realize, or perhaps didn't care, that large groups of brown-skinned urbanites dressed in camouflage are not a common sight in rural central Ontario.


But wait. You read that the suspects were not connected to al-Qaida, and you're confused for a moment. Maybe it won't be over if they get Osama bin Laden (provided he isn't really in an supersecret Idaho prison). What if the "terrorists" hate you for their own reasons? The evildoer-in-chief said "they hate our freedoms" -- as if we have freedoms, really, just try and get a bike-messenger job that has full health benefits. But what if rights and mixed-sex education and an economy based on sustainable hemp-based art installations mean nothing to them?

Toronto Star: [W]hen local resident Mike Côté came upon a group of just such men near his Ramara Township farm last December, he immediately informed police.

As he told the Star this week, the group appeared cold, wet and bedraggled. Some had fallen though the thin ice into a marsh. The leader of these alleged terrorists was so disgusted with his young charges that he complained to Côté about their incompetence.

Maybe you could convince them to hold off while you fix Amerikkka. At least you can get it down to one k. Maybe if the Democrats take the House back. A 10-seat swing won't make the imams cool down, but 20 seats, in red states? Would that be a good-faith effort?


Toronto Star: It appears that a good many knew the police were on to these suspects. Harper knew. So did Toronto Mayor David Miller. So did some of the suspects' neighbours. So did many near the ill-fated Ramara Township "training camp," who told the Star later that police asked them to keep their mouths shut.

But the alleged terrorists, it seems, remained blissfully ignorant. They let themselves get snared in an RCMP sting when one of the 17 allegedly placed an order for three tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, a substance that can be used to make bombs


You worry this will push Haditha off the front page. It's very important that everyone concentrate on the atrocities committed by U.S. troops every day. (It's such a relief not to have to pretend to support the troops anymore.) Anyway, nothing happened. Nothing blew up. If the suspects were planning something, they didn't do it, and this proves we can handle this as a law enforcement matter. Even though the police are racists.

Toronto Star: Some, it appears, chatted openly online about their paramilitary exploits at websites such as the now-dismantled http://www.shaheed.ca , oblivious to the fact that the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service regularly troll such sites.

"I got my gun and tomorrow in the morning I am gonna do some target practise (sic) inshAllah (God willing) hott," reads one 2003 posting. "Checked out some paintball guns today at walmart."

You find yourself almost wishing there was another real attack, so people could see the logical consequences of "fighting back" after 9/11. Yes, it would be bad, but sometimes you have to break an egg to show people the health impact of omelettes. Is it wrong to wish the Canadian terrorists might have succeeded?

Shouldn't you know the answer to that question?

Canadian Press: An alleged plot to take MPs hostage on Parliament Hill was abandoned at an early stage because the suspects — who hail from southern Ontario — knew little about Ottawa, The Canadian Press has learned.

Cat, Amusing Picture of a

Larry's new favorite perch, which requires a jump of about five feet from the kitchen counter. He's obsessed with all things ceiling. His latest trick was turning on the Shop Vac in the basement, though judging from the condition of his fur immediately afterwards we expect that one won't be repeated anytime soon.

Not Affiliated With Any Known Form of Journalism

We had two major news stories here locally last week--the identity mixup of two victims of the Taylor University crash last month, then the home invasion murder of seven members of an Eastside family, followed by the 48-hour manhunt for the primary suspect. It was a real test for the local talking hairdos, as both stories were big, garnered national attention, and were so serious that the ordinary vapid patter had to be shelved. You could see the strain on some of 'em by the second half hour.

Which meant that by Monday we were back with a vengeance to the everyday business of taking oversized bites out of a shit sandwich while smiling and telling the viewership just how garsh-darned good the thing tasted. That included yesterday's big 666 story, including an "interview" with the proud parents of a baby boy born by C-section on 6-5 so that their friends wouldn't make fun of them--that's what they said, and that's why I put "interview" in quotes. There was a distinct feel of making fun of the handicapped about the whole thing, but at no time did any of the professional journalists hot on the story's trail mention that 6-6-06 has nothing whatever to do with the Beast, if in fact anything does. The whole thing played so matter of factly you'd have imagined they ran a story on math phobias every day, or a This Week's Exorcism feature.

I still had a headache left over from accidentally hearing one-time President of the United States George W. Bush say, of whatever euphemism he was using for same-sex marriage, that "the nation should decide," which I'm sure at one point would have genuinely caused "conservative" heads to start exploding. But my suspicion is that the sort of person who'd be outraged by the trampling of state's rights inherent in that statement also favors it, so we're not going to hear "George Bush is not a 'Conservative', Take Two" on this one, though I noticed the network pundits were still bringing up his alleged "Compassionate Conservatism" this weekend after having ignored it for the previous five-and--a-half years. The Tony Snow "heterosexual marriage as civil right" thing was bouncing around my cranium as well, though to be honest I'm not sure I will ever get that worked up over anything Snow spits up has to say, because, well, it's Tony Snow. (The absurd notion that Tony Snow was going to make a difference as Press Secretary because he wasn't Scott McClellan lasted, what? thirty six hours?)

So maybe I wasn't in the right frame of mind to listen to the CBS evening news. It's a rare event; I can't tell you the last time I watched network news. Maybe the week of 9/11. And I wasn't prepared for the CBS crew wagging its collective finger at me, but that's what happened, three stories in a row.

The first, naturally, was the big Canadian terrorist story. It was obvious right away that CBS had no real interest in any details when flights of fancy could serve. As a graphic illustrated the path from Canada to Bangladesh apparently taken by one suspect, Bob Shieffer intoned that this showed how easy it was to arrange an international terrorist hookup, despite the notable lack of one word of evidence showing the suspect had, in fact, made such a connection. The Toronto Star story which, by taking the odd tack of focusing on what's known about these terrorists has uncovered a laughable tale of teenaged delinquents with tundra for brains, was still hours away in real time and light-years away in professionalism.

(Really, anything's possible, but why would an actual radical Islam version of SPECTRE want to attack Canada? Did it occur to anyone to ask? )

After all this time, after all the dummy Orange Alerts and bald fabrications, not to mention a horribly botched invasion, what will it take to get professional journalists to consider for thirty seconds before they jump at something like this? It called for nothing more than ordinary skepticism, which ought to be available in spades these days, but still seems to be on the ration list. And this was followed by a report on stem-cell research at Harvard which took the "Here's a Controversy" approach to the story despite strong public acceptance and all sensible argument being on one side, and a shocking revelation that the VA "identity theft" story now involved active-duty military personnel, a story which first broke 48 hours earlier and which was treated as the worst, most selfishly criminal exploitation of Our Troops ever exposed. Too bad one percent of that outrage has never been aimed at the people who sent those same soldiers into war on false pretenses. You just gotta wonder. Don't bad dreams cause most people to wake up?

Caution: Spoiler

I've been working like the dog i' the adage the past few days, and I fell asleep around 9 last night, naturally to awaken around 2 AM. I went into the bathroom, sorry, the master bath, and there was a solid, high-pitched, industrial squeal coming in through the window. I am one of those people, assuming there are others, who can't let something like that go. Besides I'd already had my five hours' sleep.

I went outside, expecting the source to be our neighbor to the north (the "Canadas"), the guy who does zero maintenance and whose air conditioner sounds like a MIG take off. Wasn't him, though, and it wasn't the trouble-making family (the "Hatfields") just up the block, though they yet had their front door open, giving a nice view of the string of white Christmas lights which adorn their fireplace. I kept walking, and the sound never got any louder. I was nearly to the church at the end of the block, where I would have gotten a less restricted shot at determining direction--your ears can fool you, class--when it stopped altogether, which convinced me a) it was somebody, probably in some commerical establishment three blocks over, who was running something that shouldn't have been running at that hour; and b) it was too frickin' cold out to have walked a quarter mile in a lousy t-shirt while still bed warm.

Of course my faithful companion was waiting silently at home for my return, so I grabbed the remote and punched up Turner Classics. It was The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), but unfortunately it had already been on for forty minutes and he'd already shrunk, so that was ruined for me. All that was left was watching Grant Williams run around with oversized props while some smoothy makes off with his now unsatisfied wife. Sometimes size does matter.

I decided to critique his survival technique, especially since at this hour every other channel was an informercial. I should also point out that Williams was already in the basement, and I forget how he got there. I'm pretty sure he had an altercation with the cat while upstairs, so taking to the basement solved his immediate predator problem, though, of course, not for good. (Now that I think of it, his wife may have become convinced that he was eaten by Fluffy, making the moves of Mr. Smoove just that much more irresistable. ) But freed of that danger, WIlliams proceeds to go about things all wrong. Now none of us can say for certain that an unexpected weight loss of such proportions wouldn't play on our minds for a time, but...survival means using your head! Setting priorities! And the first of these is hydration, but Williams takes it for granted. Something drips on him and he swallows a couple mouthfuls. We'll allow as how people in the 50s were unaware of the risks of giardia; today we would be sure to treat the water (by boiling 15 minutes if no other purification method was available). Still, assuming there's no pressing medical or safety issue at hand, potable water is your number one concern.

Somewhere along the line Williams fashioned himself a toga. No doubt this was a nod to the social mores of the moviegoer of the day, but it's no excuse for going barefoot. A simple pair of sandals could have been made quite easily. Bear in mind that you'll probably do a lot of walking in any survival situation, and if you're shrinking by the minute you'll have to do even more. And not that clothing was a bad idea; as you shrink the ratio of surface area to volume may increase, so you'll lose body heat more rapidly. A toga is not going to be a great choice under the circumstances. Some puttees or leggings, even wound strips of material running from ankle to thigh, would help. So would stuffing the upper garment with insulating materials. Keep your core warm--top of the head to the navel.

Williams did create a shelter out of an abandoned matchbox. This was a good choice under the circumstances, as his only insect opponent turned out to be the exceedingly rare Midwestern web-spinning tarantula, and she couldn't fit in the box. But most basements will house a variety of arachnids and other undesirables, underscoring the fact that fire should be a major priority in the wilderness. If he'd been astute Williams would have stashed firestarting materials around the house before he shrunk down to insect proportions; even so, a little ingenuity would have had a fire going in no time, since there appeared to be a match left over (even though he was too small to manipulate the match, Williams could have shaved the head for combustible materials and the body for tinder, or he could have fashioned a wick and taken fire from the pilot lights of the water heater or furnace. Taming fire tames the world around you.

Williams wastes a good deal of time in the pursuit of food (cheese from a mousetrap, some sort of breadstuff near the spider's web), nearly getting himself killed a couple of times in the process. This was really all wrong, first because food is not your number one priority, second because if it is you might want to head for the kitchen, cat or no cat (speaking of which, if you do have a cat upstairs and mice in the basement you might want to consider letting Kitty go downstairs once in a while). In fact if you could swing it the refrigerator just might be the idea location under the circumstances, as food would be ample and predators nonexistent. It would be cold and dark much of the time, but people have endured worse.

I have to admit I lost interest around the time the water heater broke (never set up camp in a dry stream bed) and consciousness shortly after. And I dreamed myself a dream, and in it the US President noticed his jacket sleeves were growing longer.

On Vacation

Back in a few.

June

National Accordion Awareness Month