The disturbing thought arrived whilst in the midst of a whiskey shit. Carrying me mercifully away from love’s labor lost was this head scratcher, imprinted as the sole English text on a package of Chinese toilet paper: “Mind act upon mind.” A redundant and misleading statement within the context of Buddhist thought, the phrase is a succinct, grammatically incorrect reiteration of phenomenology’s central thesis.

Was this foresight and kindness on the part of the toilet paper’s manufacturers? Subtle Communist propaganda designed to undermine our way of life? A mental fabrication elicited by William Grant? Whether or not this statement is a message of hope or despair most likely rests with the individual.

Equally unnerving is the slim blue can of Gatsby brand shaving cream, perched on my sink and also visible from my toilet. The identity issues raised by a grooming product named for a character that was little more than a winning smile are further complicated by this apparent mocking indictment of metrosexuality: “For men who want to keep the skin feeling healthy and fresh.”

Go ahead, you straw man pansy, shave up.

In news outside of my bathroom, a Russian spy was poisoned to death in London, representing the second incidence of an unnecessarily complicated Russian spy assassination carried out in the UK. First it was ricin-loaded umbrellas, now the radioactive substance polonium 210. Next they’re going to be tricking ex-agents into eating shellfish during the summer red tide or mixing diamond powder into their cocaine.

The British police seem to be doing their usual miraculously good job–aided perhaps by their terrifyingly ubiquitous surveillance systems. Whatever the case, their work truly deserves praise, especially compared with that of their American counterparts. From investigative effecicacy, discretion in releasing frightening information, and most relevant this week, restraint in using force, our law enforcement agencies really don’t stack up to those across the pond.

While the London guard was tracking down radiation in sushi restaurants and in general finding needles in haystacks, the NYPD–in an operation akin to taking black off of coal–was busy trying to prevent people from purchasing sex and drugs at a strip club. The operation was appartently prompted by spates of violence against ladies of the night and the normally clean-cut, church-attending strip club crowd’s disturbing upward trend towards drug abuse.

Of course, because current laws make these social problems crimes, it is in the interest of justice system bureaucrats to “sting” those involved, rather than have their law-enforcement officers stand around in uniforms and make sure no one gets hurt at the party.

The net effect of this situation is that rather than the sleazy-but-safe red-light and head shop district of Amsterdam, New York and its environs have a sleazy-and-dangerous flavor everywhere you find big-people fun for sale.

While carrying out their work in this nerve-wracking environment, five of the seven undercover officers tasked with getting drug-addicted and poverty-stricken hookers arrested and put in jail got jumpy and murdered an unarmed man and bady wounded some of his friends.

Calling this incident a law-enforment or racial problem is a bit off the mark. Law enforcement problems are what they have in Oaxaca and throughout Brazil (or in Atlantic City, where dead hookers can lie next to the road undiscovered for weeks). Racial problems have nothing to do with Michael Richards or the NYPD and everything to do with unfair distribution of Pell grants or indifference to Sudan.

The rub is that if those officers had been in uniform, the fight that sent the groom out to his car for the imaginary gun would likely not have escalated to that point.

Both Richards and those New York officers made terrible decisions in the heat of the moment, but maybe they couldn’t have done anything else. Phenomenology argues that one’s experience is the only reality, a stance used both to exempt one from personal responsibility and to put it squarely on one’s shoulders.

I will go ahead and have my cake and eat it too and say that I think both tacks are correct. I think crime of passion laws are on the books in some places for the simple reason that sometimes circumstances drive people crazy.

Consider the various massacres involving US troops in Iraq. There are two groups at fault, one of which is made up of the most powerful people on earth, attended to as though they were Formula One cars, and the other is the boots on the ground, typically filled with 18-year-old kids from poor towns thrust into a hell-on-earth situation that never should have existed in the first place.

I would more readily blame those in power, who are old enough to have seen Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now and who really ought to know better.

So Michael Richards and Mayor Bloomberg are making the rounds of ministers and offering their apologies, while little is done to correct the underlying causes of either incident.

It’s only been three weeks since the Democrats regained some power, and it’s already starting to feel like the Clinton years.

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A small white dog appeared today. He was hunched into the corner of my doorframe, on the small landing through a set of clunking green metal doors just below the slightly larger landing where my bike was stolen yesterday. My accusations of a conspiracy at the center of which were elevator service staff were denounced as scurrilous by Chinese acquaintances that staunchly maintained that this was impossible. My investigative powers in this instance are markedly limited, and I suspect the perpetrator will never be found.

This cute dog is an equally tangled mystery. I have to admit my first impulse on spotting him was to quickly secure the beast in my apartment and keep him for my own. He must have known this thought had flickered briefly through my mind as I returned home passing for the second time the scene of the crime. Was he some form of compensation? I had been imagining going around making sadface at the security guards. I planned to clunk my feet loudly and give puffing sighs, chafing against a backpack that would have been lightly in my bicycle’s basket. I had thought to reflexively pantomime the motions of maneuvering the bicycle’s stately silver frame into the cramped confines of the elevator. Then shake my head at how silly I was to have forgotten, turn my palms upward, and share a wistful little laugh with the uniformed lousy lift worker who probably tipped the thieves off.

Not knowing which of the staff members was the responsible party, I was reduced to giving inscrutable and discomfiting looks to each in turn, attempting to gauge from their reactions the probability of complicity. I think this kind of behavior is a bad habit of mine. I didn’t learn anything. This was the latest in a series of personal detective failures.

Here is a music video about immigration:

I don’t know what’s going on with this Web site. It is worth a read for a few reasons, but more interesting are the pictures. It does call itself “Tasteless” so I can’t really get down on them for anything. I continue to be fascinated by the Elian Gonzalez-style political football. He appeared just before Christmas, the near-miracle child of Juan and Elizabet, born into a parallel universe Hell on earth communist Cuba. The reporting on the incident felt very murky, with the circumstances being far more entangled than similarly dramatic soap opera plot lines.It is an interesting reminder of a time when the conservative base considered Janet Reno and the Clinton administration as heavy-handed rights abusers. Talk radio couldn’t shut up about “Big Government” and the loss of personal freedom. The present situation is impossible not to think about, so I won’t belabor the point.The remembrance of conservatives attacking Clinton as being too tough on immigration is also chuckle worthy, but Elian’s improbably wealthy Florida family and swiftly supplied expensive toys probably made it all seem less “beaner” to the suddenly compassionate, spirit of the law-leaning right wing. But it was always unclear exactly what Elian Gonzalez wanted. Clinton is certainly a man politically minded enough for one to suppose he was eager to spin and manipulate the story in the service of general US-Cuba policy as well as his own immigration and border policy platforms–the controversy surrounding the infamous closet photo aside.

The Cuban government had equal reason to put forward its version of the facts. The result was two families and two governments trying to get their way, and so journalistic standards fell as writers tried to build story lines into what was essentially a stalemate until the whole matter was instantaneously resolved with dozens of machine guns.

The cartoon bluntly illustrates the furor and harsh rhetoric that sprung up around this and makes me hearken back to the days of my youth when Americans considered this kind of storm in a teacup a major international incident. It is interesting to note that the Bush and Clinton administration stances on Cuba are quite similar. Of course the language is different. Bush sticks to his open-fly, lazy-shotgun diplomacy, calling out the country by name and giving it a list of things it has to do to avoid getting shit on. Clinton chooses tact:

Fifty years ago, a farsighted America led in creating the institutions that secured victory in the Cold War and built a growing world economy. As a result, today more people than ever embrace our ideals and share our interests. Already, we have dismantled many of the blocs and barriers that divided our parents’ world. For the first time, more people live under democracy than dictatorship, including every nation in our own hemisphere, but one — and its day, too, will come.

Speaking about Latin America policy as a whole, he says:

Now we must act to expand our exports, especially to Asia and Latin America — two of the fastest growing regions on Earth — or be left behind as these emerging economies forge new ties with other nations. That is why we need the authority now to conclude new trade agreements that open markets to our goods and services even as we preserve our values.

While every US President’s Latin American economic policy–and NAFTA in particular–has certainly caused a bunch of Hell, it may be partly because the more liberal portion of the policy hasn’t been followed through on:

We should all be proud that America led the effort to rescue our neighbor, Mexico, from its economic crises. And we should all be proud that last month Mexico repaid the United States — three full years ahead of schedule — with half a billion dollar profit to us.

Gosh, last I heard about Mexico, Obrador was planning to run a shadow government from the streets and the courts were heading into a long deliberation about which districts to recount. Is Mexico still there? I sure hope so. Oh wait, this is the last I heard about Mexico: Teacher hacked to death in besieged Mexican city.

Clinton mentions increasing exports to Latin America, noting that the continent’s growing international reach necessitated a new economic strategy. As it stands, things have deteriorated pretty badly with Venezuela, which is kind of a blow-it considering that they have a lot of oil. With China throwing a money party and Russia selling weaponry down there, it seems like we’re well and properly alienated from some countries and missing out on a bonanza with others. The article reports:

Chinese President Hu Jintao said China would invest $100 billion over the next decade in Brazil and Argentina on a variety of infrastructure projects. Chinese trade with Latin America generally is growing: From 1994 to 2004, trade between China and Latin America quintupled to $40 billion a year. U.S.-China trade is at more than $400 billion.

China’s growing commercial presence in South America has raised alarms in the U.S. Congress, which last fall held hearings to determine whether U.S. interests were at risk. The consensus of those who testified was that they were not.

For all the hatred directed at Janet Reno and the recent revival of criticism of Clinton, they caught Timothy McVeigh.

It took both a broom and a bell pepper to get the cute dog out of my apartment.

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