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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Quote of the week:

“Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine, I’m on the pavement, thinking about the government.”

-Bob Dylan Subterranean Homesick Blues

Well, it’s September 11, the day that shook America and took its lunch money and common sense. The news recently sounds really biblical, and not just because everyone’s trying to make American politics and terrorism have something to do with Jesus.

Apparently the Japanese are taking time off from their busy schedule of repopulating the world with robots to actually make a new universe. It’s true, and for the most part people have far too many other problems to think about this–myself included. But anyway, if anyone’s down to start a cult based around the projected creation date let me know. Beijing’s really flat, but if you know a good hill, I can get a bunch of white robes made and we’ll mark ‘em up and make a killing.

This new universe will have its own unique laws of physics and other properties. I gather they’re counting on it vanishing into an alternate plane of existence rather than rapidly expanding or otherwise destroying us all. It’s amazing that there are no regulations around this kind of thing. I mean they’re talking about a vacuum in platonic terms that is the basis for a lot of their calculations, and we haven’t even reached consensus on dark matter . . .

Maybe if Senator Bill Frist and his friends could stop worrying about the fate of individual stem cells for one goddamn second the media could cover experiments that are cutting holes in the basic fabric of the universe. Like regime change and interstate highways.

Christ, Japan, this just seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hasn’t your own national body of work in the area of filmmaking shown us time and again the dangers (and monsters!) that inevitably come with screwing around with this kind of thing?

Since it is the five-year anniversary of the creation of Republican fiat power, I thought I’d pass along this terrifying Web site. I signed up and tried to write what I thought were moderate opinions in a civil, conservative voice. They terminated my account after four posts, but one person wrote back and said they liked what I had to say. I think they might have been guerrila-ing around like I was. I think the Web site is trying to appease our enemies, and one guy seemed interested in comforting them.

Check out some of the meatheads posting on that site. I often think about the Pavlonian training we’re undergoing with events like the airline liquid fiasco. I imagine eventually we’ll be at the airport and get annoyed at toddlers for crying after soldiers shoot a man with a fake passport. In the meantime, they’re making a machine that can null your Fourth Amendment rights faster than a cargo plane to Guantanamo. An AP jingoist named Scott Lindlaw profiles the horrifying device here.

I’ve started to think of the growing number of confusing and bad laws in our country as power tools left operating with no one watching. It’s like, they wait till no one’s looking and turn on a circular saw, which is ok, because you don’t need to go out to the shed that often. But then whoops! Now there’s a drill going in the kitchen. It’s ok, you just have to watch your step, but it’s getting dark and it’s hard to tell if you’re in danger—and the noise is so disorienting.

If you need a vacation from this vacation and security from all this security, you can pay a Japanese scientist to open a wormhole to a new universe and step through.

Barring that, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, and stock up on banned books!

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Remember when we all had tails and roamed in packs picking the rotting flesh from carcasses even the heyenas had given up on? It sucked, so we came up with tools with which we could, after some trial and error, create our own carcasses and keep the heyenas from getting hair all over the leftovers. Now we make animals extinct without a second thought and when’s the last time you saw buffalo wandering down Main Street?

It used to be cold and wet and being cold and wet makes you get the sniffles so we stretched some animal skins and bound them to ourselves and now we can almost ignore just how unattractive Aunt Helga actually is because we don’t have to look at as much of her as we used to before she covered herself with pelts…

Sleeping in caves was alright– they were there and with a fire at the mouth they kept warm alright but the bats made so much noise and spiders laid their eggs in little Jimmy’s matted hair and Gods how he squealed like a heyena when they hatched and they were certainly drafty… Now you can live in a hermetically sealed condo/loft and order Chinese every Tuesday and what’s on cable?

We’re a dissatisfied lot who have fortunately been able to, with the use of our extraordinary yet mushy brains, resolve each point of discomfort and distaste and boring through ingenuity and cleverness… Don’t feel like being along? Now you can babble to some associate as you walk down the street on your cell phone… Can’t cook? Microwave… Incapable of deep discussion and introspection? Singles bars…

The challanges of combating the fatigue of the human condition have grown as we’ve progressed in covering ourselves with downy do-dads and gadets aimed to distract us from the daily toil and drudgery… Televisions weren’t enough so we had to accentuate aspects of the viewing experience, make them bigger and flatter with better sound (to hear every nuance of the dialogue) and attatched video game console, DVD player and, coming soon, easy grip catheter… The internet provides similar forms of distraction and disporting by providing an easier access to previous preoccupations…

Here in Dreamland USA a company called Linden Lab has developed an internet dreamland, Second Life, a self-contained 3-D model world where users can pursue the time-honored traditions of commerce, networking and fantasy as their alter-ego avatar… An amazing combination of network software and graphic design software leave much of the online existence up to the users… My quick tour of the website observed people selling virtual property, virtual constructions for said virtual property, virtual clothing for your virtual avatar, and virtual friends for your virtual life… There seems to be no small amount of games available to play on Second Life and, as expected, many games of chance with which you can become a virtual millionaire or, more likely, a virtual pauper; since some online traders even have exchanges set up maybe you could even become a real life millionaire or, more likely, a real life pauper… Users have created online associations which, according to the Linden Company copywriters, include group film discussions and neighborhood associations… According to a user’s Police Blotter fansite there are even virtual conflicts of squatting and intimidation/extortion going on…

So it appeals to three standard entities: people who spend their money collecting trinkets and oohing about how shit’s cute; people who find themselves playing online poker at three in the morning; people that get beat up in real life but fucking rock at Doom…

Yet as there is still some satisfaction in actually having a physical trinket eBay and other bead exchanges dominate and since there’s better ways to gamble or play games most online poker will be dealt elsewhere… The last group seems particularly attractive as habitual users but, then again, there’s the much more popular and active Eve-Online geek paradise just down the broadband from here…

Who really cares about Second Life? Suzanne Vega, apparantly, as she’s declared the first artist to perform live on Second Life– there’s a neat little movie you can watch of someone’s avatar making her virtual guitar… So washed up has beens have a home, a place where they can dominate once again, where their pixilated and rendered likeness can still be found alluring and smooth… Shannon Grei is quoted as saying she works 40 hours a week designing virtual clothes for avatars– which is how she makes a living. In the same article a Linden Lab employee, Catherine Smith, talks about how you can go sky-diving without a fear of dying… Well, no honey, it’s not sky diving but, yes honey, it ain’t gonna kill you… No adrenal glands pumping bile around your stomach, no wind whipping through your hair at dangerous speeds, no fear no live no die…

Who really cares about Second Life? What kind of person finds it a worthwhile place to invest their time and a moderate sum ($10 a month allows you to buy your first piece of property and begin doing whatever the fuck it is you do) pretending? Probably the same people who used to lurk on BBSs trading phone phreaks and code hacks and sinister little anti-everything messages with one another and the same people that used to meet on Saturday night in someone’s garage for some epic D&D and grape soda… Online daters who can’t handle the crush of pheremones and nerves, recluses who can’t handle the outside, the lonely and dejected and the failed… Everyone else, design students experimenting with styles, highschool economics classes practicing at business, snarky teens looking to talk dirty and pick virtual fights, will most likely have their fill pretty quickly and move along on to the next trick…

No, I dunno– it’s such a vast entity… I spent an hour just looking at the company site and some user forums and still couldn’t begin to understand how it even works… I find it compelling, certainly, and to an extent dangerous… It seems like it’s something which requires actual experimentation (like mushrooms or homosexuality) before having any sort of understanding… One thing’s certain– there’s a lot of potential for something to be made of the space but I have no idea what… Well, actually I imagine it’ll be wasted, set aside, and forgotten… My guts say good idea, but I don’t really know why…

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Does anyone know whether or not the “exploding cigar” assassination plot was an actual CIA budget busting effort that never left the lab or simply a comedic jab at the government’s neverending loathing of Fidel Castro?  According to a recent BBC web-news posting it’s gospel but then again no one bothered to claim authorship of said article so my trust isn’t pouring out all down my pants and filling my shoes with the gushy love of humanity juice… What’s more important to me is that exploding cigars make as much sense as any of the popular American opinions and responses to Cuba over the long tenure of Castro.

Little Havana sure is boiling over at the news of Castro’s temporary relinquishment of power and the White House, or at least members of congress haven’t been shy about expressing the same amount of unbridled greed and excitement as pampered little rich kids on Christmas Eve… Everyone hoped Castro was dead, his nearly 80 year old body quitting under the knife while Cuban surgeons trolled through his intestines… If you were a farmer across the Carribean in any other nation you probably would have died but Cuba has Latin America’s best health care system and it’s probably better than what many uninsured Americans manage to scrounge between emergency rooms and free clinics and helpful little pamphlets with self-evaluation guides… Does this look cancerous to you?

Those more on the left of the political spectrum seem to have a soft spot for Cuba– Jimmy Carter even went and smoked cigars with Castro… Yes, the country has a great health care system (triumphed by the WHO) and better literacy rates than Louisiana (my guess) yet also has more political prisoners than those rotting across the razor wire at Guantanemo and isn’t too shy about executing them periodically… Not political prisoners in the sense that Timothy McVey would be considered one- that is to say no one’s blowing up government buildings– but political prisoners in the sense that writing newspaper articles critical of the Cuban government will very easily wind you up in prison for twenty years… The left seems willing to overlook such pesky little dark spots on the Carribean’s great social experiment and besides, maybe these authors, professors, scientists and other guttersnipes were funded by the CIA and Castro has every right to protect himself… Meanwhile people have no qualms about not buying Chinese goods, or at least they like to say that but then find a really good deal down at Target and who’s got time to check every tag in the store seeing where things are made?

Then you have people on the right side of the political spectrum who think that the Chinese are alright if you don’t look too carefully at their willingness to imprison monks, pro-democracy pamphlet writers and drive over students with tanks… Actually even the left doesn’t mind that so much if US-China trade relations are any indication… We trade with China and we’ve pressured most of the white world into not even having regular diplomatic ties with Cuba…

The history of Cuba and America maybe sheds a little light on why the US government still views an isolated pocket of totalitarianism as such a big deal… Through-out the cold war Cuba was the USSR; before the government privatized industry and expelled US business interests no one gave a shit about Fidel and his Pancho Che galavanting about the Americas.  The US didn’t offer any notable support to Batista when, after repeated attempts, he was forced to abandon Havana to the revolution, nor was the US terribly concerned when Cuba began to support (failed) insurgencies in Panama, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Pataguay or Guatamala… No one cared when the Castro regime went about cleaning house of old Batista supporters and executing over 200 people within the first year of the new order… Sure, Batista wasn’t a nice guy but US foreign policy, expecially in Latin America, likes the bad guys…

But a year after privatization and a declaration of communism Kennedy was in office and three months after he took oath the US conned a bunch of exiles into invading– the Bay of Pigs.  Frankly even then the US wasn’t too concerned about Castro since we couldn’t even be bothered to follow through on any support and left the invasion force to die on the beach… It’s an old trick we, decades later, pulled a couple of times on the Kurds when we weren’t really too concerned about Sadaam Hussein…

It took the Cuban Missle Crisis and further buddying up to the Soviet Union to get America really aggressive about Cuba and suddenly there’s a worldwide trade embargo (world being not the communists who like to send starving children rifles) and posturing and exiles en masse to Havana… If you bucked the embargo, like Allende tried to do, Pinochet magically appears on your doorstep and you, eh, commit suicide. You can’t even blame Che for any of this since he was in Angola at the time saving the Marxists from the, well, no, they all died too…

You’d expect that, with the decline of the USSR and a simmering down of the cold war that the US would open, as it did with other communist countries (of economic consequence, not Vietnam or anything) new dialogue and get filmed shaking hands for television… The Russian invasion of Afghanistan didn’t merit as much intervention as socialists coming to power in Grenada– maybe the Cuban soldiers fighting alongside the revolutionary army got Castro excluded from the love-fest…

But then the wall came down and the Russians decided to stop pretending and concentrated power amongst the rich in a capitalist fashion instead of a communist one and every former communist nation, even Vietnam, is able to once again have their markets flooded with American business investments… Except Cuba, which has absolutely no way of being a menace to anyone but Cubans… Is there even a navy? I think Texas is safe…

So the liberals can’t be bothered to keep in mind human rights and the conservatives (who ignore that readily) can’t be bothered to ignore the sucesses of Cuba and the fact that the chessboard’s not even a chessboard anymore, it’s a fucking dartboard… Cuba receives less respect as a nation than any of the axis of evil countries Bush keeps jabbering about when he’s not down in Little Havana prepping exile community leaders for the great opening of Cuba to freedom and McDonald’s and some fancy hotels… According to those back on the island Miami business interests have started sniffing around waiting for Castro to croak…

So maybe exploding cigars makes more sense than anything the US has ever thought of in regards to Cuba… You used to be able to buy them from the back pages of Boy’s Life…

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In case anyone read my last blathering, and then thought me cynical or something gay like that, I thought I’d put up a link to a Lebanese blog directory of sorts I found on the internet. There’s probably better (by which I mean more easily navigated) directories around but I’m supposed to be working right now:

http://openlebanon.org/

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