history will show that wolfowitz was a highly placed israeli spy.

here’s an idea for a children’s or youth oriented story: of a whacky inventor type who hijacks a crop duster, big mystery, why is he doing that? … and it turns out he invented this magic forgetfulness gas … and what’s he doing? he’s being chased by the cia to the middle east … he’s taking the crop duster to there, and he’s flying over jerusalem, and he’s spraying forgetfulness gas over everybody….
and as a result, he solves the eternal problem.

it happened again today. I found myself alone in my office with a couple of Indians talking about the “offshore problem.” its positively surreal.
here’s how it goes:
we’re trying to sell a thing, but our customers might be able to spec it out to an outsourced vendor. Indian vendors are particularly attractive these days because their costs are astonishingly low and their quality is quite high, they speak english fluently, and they’re very aggressive. in addition, they often benefit from educations at american engineering schools, and I suspect sometimes numerous informal relationship networks developed over the past few decades of immigration and h1-b visa guest workers. all this overlayed on a global business context in which there are essentially no rules.
we’re agressive too, in our own way, asking an astonishingly high price for a product not yet proven in the market.
but here we are, discussing our strategy, and how we can respond to our customer’s demands, and we add up how much it will cost us to do it, and when we can get it done, and the numbers aren’t what we want them to be. and then it becomes clear that we could solve some of our problems by using an offshore company.
on the one hand these guys are in some ways in the same boat as me. one is a naturalized american citizen, the other a permanent resident, and they’re not crazy about the prospect of losing their jobs. both were educated in the states, and never went home. but the one who’s an american citizen has a brother-in-law who works for tata. there isn’t an insurance company in the country who hasn’t long ago outsourced large chunks of their it departments to his company and others like it. besides insurance companies, his clients include many others as well, such as the red cross, the imf, etc.
his brother in law is upset because he is himself being undercut by another upstart Indian company called infosys.
“the law of the jungle” I say.
we all laugh.
“we need to be twice as smart” I say. pausing at the irony when I say ‘we’, but also pondering that I myself am an immigrant of sorts, to Texas from New York for no good reason, staying only because the job market for computer jockies seemed more robust than anything I remembered from the northeast in the ’70s. not to mention my grandparents coming to the states for similar reasons, and in the end, maybe I have more in common with these Indians than I do with many Texans, New Yorkers or Irishmen.
“the ROI equation is based on a cost-benefit ratio. if you halve the cost for constant benefit, you win. that’s what’s happening. but what if you double the benefit for the same cost? that could be a reasonable defense.”
“but you have to stay alive long enough for the benefit to become apparent. the productivity benefit may not be measurable for a year or more. the cost benefit is measurable immediately. ” my friend says.
“yeah, and business decisions are based on quarter over quarter results. besides,” I say, “we’re not twice as smart.” we all laugh again, but I suspect my friend. I have seen him smile and laugh reflexively at what might be considered inappropriate times, such as when someone gets laid off. he smiles like a shark.
“all this makes sense as long as you’re computing the ROI of pure labor. but what we’re supposed to be doing is developing new product. that’s a creative process that’s not so easy to spec out in advance and send offshore.”
my friends nod.
“but we’re not doing that either” I say, and we all laugh again.

in 39 lucy baffer started to get sick.
at first she thought she was pregnant
then she thought she might be going through change of life.
she hated doctors, so she didn’t really know…
then she had a terrible hemmorage, and finally had to be taken to the doctor,
turned out she had ovarian cancer, and it was too far gone to treat.
she declined through 40, and finally died.
her husband, jack, said it was a miracle how his business expanded suddenly just as he needed the money.
he worked for the dixon crucible company, selling graphite as an industrial lubricant up and down the connecticut industrial belt up from brooklyn to new haven and back.
she got radiated, having tattoos on her body to show where the radiation marks should be
once she wore a lambskin coat, one of her few luxuries, because it was cold in the hospital. the radiation exuding from her body after the treatment, caused the coat to get cooked.
first they gave her morphine for the pain, then snake venom to break down the resistance to the morphine.
it was terrible,
her daughter, my mom met my dad in 39.  her mom lucy was in bed when she and nanny met,
from her bed she said “you two look like the cat who ate the canary” referring to my mom and dad.
lucy finally died in 2/1/42
“my father was under such stress”
she didn’t learn until 41, when she went to bed, and couldn’t get up.

i have this feeling that just a few thoughts keep rattling around in my brain like a pinball machine.
turns out that is just the way it is with one exception. with the realization, each new repitition of a thought is like a clone of a virus, maybe a software virus, or a meme. excactly copied hundreds, maybe thousands of times, without variation, but with just one error or change in the copy, a new thought comes along.
do you know how rare and valuable a new thought is?
most folks i think have no appreciataion for that. some do, but on the one hand i don’t know if people either value it, or percieve how rare such a thing is.
so here it is: i’ve got all these files, as time goes on, my disk (*i said disk*) size just keeps increasing.
from the beginning i kept most stuff from the active pile, hundreds of little programs, journal fragments, ideas, todos, on the live list, with a lot of other crap on the backup media, at first floppies at home, and mag tapes at work, then zip disks, now cdrw disks, and little by little i’m just aggregating all the ancient shit into a big backup pile on the disks, with an optical backup…
and there’s copies, and copies of copies of some of these files in and among the various backups, and even in my live working directories, not even considering the stuff under version control…
and the nth generation version of one of these programs are like today’s children, running around doing stuff from time to time called to work, and the backups are like previous generations, gone but not forgotten,
and the programs are like viruses and viruses (biological and by metaphor software) are like thoughts, expressions of thought, but not only expressions, manifestations, but the thought itself, possibly replicating, or by mixing and matching with others, reproducing, given a fertile environment, maybe that’s one’s mind, and maybe a human being isn’t exactly necessary any more, given the right program and the right environment.
but its not the terrifying thought that you find expressed in terminator, or the matrix, its just this other thing, that may or may not be benign, but is just out there, you know, like squirrels, or deer, or even maybe the flu. what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, they say.
so picture my mind, or your mind, for that matter, like a pinball machine, or like a pacman video game, with the little blobs of thought percolating around the mazes of the things which you assume as “must-be”. now from time to time, move, remove or replace a wall from the maze, and see if your view of the world doesn’t change correspondingly.

edit:
yet another peculiar omission:
Eighteen days before the invasion of Iraq began, the UK paper the Observer printed the contents of a top secret U.S. National Security Agency memo.
That NSA memo outlined surveillance of a half-dozen delegations with swing votes on the U.N. Security Council.
The memo said that the agency had started a “surge” of spying on U.N. diplomats, including wiretaps of home and office telephones along with reading of e-mails.
Major news outlets in the United States almost completely ignored the story.
At the time, the New York Times did not cover the U.N. spying revelation at all.
When asked why, deputy foreign editor Alison Smale said, “We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting,” Smale replied. She added that “we could get no confirmation or comment.” Smale was subsequently named managing editor of the International Herald Tribune, which is owned by The New York Times Co.
What kind of journalism is this? It would seem a story is not fit to print unless U.S. intelligence officials are willing to discuss it.
The Washington Post printed a short piece on the back page under the headline “Spying Report No Shock to U.N.”, essentially parroting the US government spin.
The Los Angeles Times published a piece emphasizing that U.S. spy activities at the United Nations are “long-standing.”
The LA Times didn’t report on the basis of the story at all, merely quoting unnamed “experts” who “suspected that it could be a forgery” — and “several former top intelligence officials said they were skeptical of the memoÂ’s authenticity.”
The UK government had arrested Katharine Gun, the source for the memo, charging her with leaking classified material. About a year later, the charges were dropped for unstated reasons.
The next day, a member of Parliament and one of BlairÂ’s former cabinet ministers, Clare Short, said that British spies did in fact closely monitor conversations of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq last year. “I have seen transcripts of Kofi AnnanÂ’s conversations.”
see http://www.fair.org/media-beat/040226.html
http://www.agrnews.org/issues/217/mediawatch.html

sometimes you hear country singers doing traditional songs like “hard times” and they’re doing it beautifully, but they don’t seem to have the depth from which to draw the tragedy and sadness out of the song.
the other day, I heard a remarkable young singer on npr’s morning edition, by the name of Nellie McKay. she said she decided to become a professional musician when she heard Dylan’s “Hurricane.” She said, here’s a guy who wrote a song that wound up getting an innocent man out of prison. music can change the world. it matters.
so then, go and listen to Dylan’s version of “hard times”, and compare it with, say, the smith sisters.
there’s this whole other thing going on besides just what’s in the song. ‘know what I mean?

RE: FW: A Christmas Poem
its nice to hear from uncle jack, but between cuddly bear hearts, jokes about killing jesse jackson, and the politics of christmas, I’m a little confused 🙂