White Chocolate

I am not sure why I responded to Jennifer's post. Read it once, trying to make sense of it, skimmed it again, and then responded with macro view impatience about our inability to be ruthless and efficient enough, but if we were that we would not have put Bales in prison, nor castigated servicemen who spoke out loud what we all believe, but remains a breach of manner to say: American and European lives are more valuable than certain Arabic African and some Asian groups. And Google would have banned me long ago for demonic ferocity, although there is a difference in the imagining of mobile savagery and the actual ability of my transfer skills, and I haven't attempted to strangle kimmy for being a stubborn female. The minute I sit up I am subjected to relentless head buts from this relegated feline whose litter could not be saved, and as such I am posting without freshly brewed Italian roast, always unwise, even if kimmy doesn't let up, leaping and dancing, chewing plastic because she wants greens, until, resolute, I sit still.

Islamic State is hard enough, which makes them both admirable and dishonorable. They killed the press on our home turf. I stayed my hand on Foley for being a fool, going into the chaos of Syrian fractures, but killing journalists on the home front, then going after the Jews who remained on European soil, remained French-- there is no honor in this kind of attack, even if Islamic State would argue they are doing what WW2 Zionists did. The Zionists in the aftermath of the Third Reich had a reasonably zealous agenda in the face of a mechanized banal slaughter humans had never seen before, lacking the technical capacity. I don't think recreating a modern Israeli state worked, but comprehend it as a mission statement.

Extremists want a Caliphate? Afghanistan is already a prime example of homo sapiens devolution.

Karina pinged to ask how I was; you could wag a finger: See, you fired her and said she was stupid and she has remained kind. Yes, but I gave her about 300 I wouldn't have given a person of color. The kindness I miss is my childhood physical therapy aide. Mary Anne. She let me sleep over, taught me about scoliosis, which she had, not visibly, and prepared me for confirmation, an innocent attachment to a child vanquished by tunnel visions of loss too difficult to absorb. I don't know what went through her head day after day, watching me tortured in leg braces, locked into a standing table, mailing letters with Eisenhower's bust as an imprint on ten cent stamps. Lesbianism wasn't even a concept, though she was a Catholic woman of the 70's, floral blouses and an auburn beatles bob for a hairstyle. 

I need my coffee now.

Shameless Hussy Does a White Paper

"If I seem cavalier about it and in fact I am cavalier about it, it is because this is not my life."-- Donna Leon, with allowances for lack of exact transcription.

Meanwhile, back in the land of grandiose effacement over an old woman's grandiose self-importance, every time a journalist like James Foley dies chasing after a scoop in ancient lands with statistically marginal individuals, the media conglomerates, NYT, Wapo, LAT, CNN, ESPN, let out a yelp of pain. The holy sanctum has been violated: gathering information civilized people need to know at their leisure in a coffee cafe.

Let's take a step back. Foley was a photographer, and his images of the Syrian conflict no more or less redundant than a native's use of his or her cell phone, not that I have data on how many Syrians own a Samsung as opposed to a functioning Apple OS. Reports, making allowances for lack of certainty, indicated Foley was tortured in his captivity. Perhaps this caused him to reevaluate the value of foreign correspondence imagery for the sake of a scoop, since it seems being driven for a news story has its own shades of the pathological, or maybe he rethought the Spanish Inquisition, but how much do people outside of the millennial hot zone that is forever the Middle East feel driven to put themselves in danger by bating Semitic beasts?

Do Foley's images have empirical value? No, with the exception of his beheading. Those images, in and of themselves, will remain as a genealogy marker. As hard as we try to divorce ourselves from primate origin, we're still rather large apes who evolved back into nakedness, even without modern barbers. Knowledge generation is a tricky business, but the Fourth Estate holding itself aloft as a modern temple whose abstract conceptualization is inviolate doesn't take into account the fact that revenue needs to be generated. Most of what the public reads has no monetary value that we can use in turn to generate money, including humanitarian crises. ISIS was bought and paid for according to Western free market and entrepreneurial values. Accommodating the beast will invariably create paths for its transformation. Radical egalitarians like Foley need more patience, not the rush of trotting about hot zones. I am not done with my Pistorius sentiments. Dyer triggered an exasperated trial run. Initially, I wasn't going to bother, but not I'm hunting for sources and more retail packaging.

Barack Requiem

no faith teaches people to massacre innocents"-- our 44th commander rhetorician

Mr. President: When I was growing up, I was a fervent and occasionally rude Roman Catholic, and though Protestant and church fathers differ on textual interpretation, and it is also well known through the midrash  that Hebraic scribes engaged in hyperbole with a fluidity equal to that of their Hellenistic competitors, monotheism nonetheless does indeed justify the slaughter of innocents, particularly when Joshua invaded Canaan to create the state of Israel. Pagans were put to the sword. Does this mean that the twelve tribes engaged in genocide? Probably not on the scale we see today, but griot  is never entirely inaccurate, transcribed even from the distance of the judges to the courts of the corrupt rulers who led Israel into the Diaspora.

In the Gospel, as well, a pair of hypocritical converts drops dead at the feet of either Christ or Peter, or Paul, for that matter, the zealous torturer who conquered Rome. I did not realize James Foley was Catholic. This pierced my eroding conscience briefly, light as a fallen feather of a falcon. There was a tenure, perhaps as briefly past as Clinton's administration, when the barbarism of ISIS would have been equivalent to the showers at Auschwitz, but what has blurred the niceties of this distinction is the inhumanity of the paradigm, couched in fealty to the procedure. A significant percentage of persons gets weighed down by this, and rather than absorbing this unspecified guilty charge like a rat on a ninja course, they become hardened, join ISIS, a militia. 

Unless an extraordinary 2016 candidate emerges, you will be the last President I voted for. Reagan was a liar, and by the time of the Iran Contra testimony, obviously in the early stages of dementia, but he was the last leader in whom decency of conviction made me happy to be an American; now I'm a fascist promising immolation to myself for a hard life in the land of Negrodelphia. I despise Eric Holder, and you, poor fellow, should have been dean of Trinity College. You disappointed everyone, acolytes and adversaries. George Will has pondered whether or not your second term approaches *Carter territory,* but I see your lame duck standing as closer to Woodrow Wilson working himself into that ineffectual stroke.