like many other countries in western asia and eastern europe, saudi arabia was formed from a province of the former ottoman empire after world war I. its outlines were drawn by the western powers at versailles on the same map tables as those of iraq and yugoslavia. and like iraq it functioned as a british mandate until 1924 when ibn Saud of Najd, overran the Hedjaz including Mecca and Medina, and declared himself king in 1926. ibn Saud had 45 sons and 50 daughters, and died in 1953 at the age of 71.
one of these sons, Saud bin Abdul Aziz was King of Saudi Arabia from 1953 to November 2, 1964.
after driving Saudi Arabia into bankruptcy, Saud was deposed by his half brother Faisal, and abdicated in 1964.
Saud’s name was erased from many institutions and histories
ibn Saud’s second son Mohammed bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud was next in line to succeed, but Saud was followed by Faisal instead.
the third son of Ibn Saud, Faisal ibn Abdel Aziz al-Saud King of Saudi Arabia from 1964 to 1975.
descended from Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab through his mother, he was dedicated to what he saw as fundamental Islamic principles and against the influence of modern western values, while simultaneously encouraging the adoption of certain modern technologies, with the notable exception of information technologies such as radio and television.
On October 17, 1973, Faisal withdrew Saudi oil from world markets, causing the price to quadruple overnight. Faisal’s action was the primary force behind the 1973 energy crisis.
Faisal ibn Abdel Aziz al-Saud was assassinated by his nephew, Faisal bin Musad on March 25, 1975.
Weeks later, Faisal bin Musad was beheaded in the public square in Riyadh.
Khalid bin Abdul Aziz King of Saudi Arabia from the assassination of King Faisal in 1975 until his own death in 1982.
full brother of Muhammad bin Abdul Aziz who declined succession in 1965 after Saud was deposed and again in 1982 after Khalid’s death.
King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud King of Saudi Arabia 1982-2005
Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud king of Saudi Arabia since 2005
half brother of Fahd.

you want to hear something funny? well, I guess you’re not actually going to “hear” it, but anyway…
when I’m at work, sometimes I’m working alright, but I go down these side tracks and wind up working on my tools, not exactly what they’re paying me to do. I once read an email from a japanese fellow who used the perhaps unlikely word “burnish” with respect to enhancing his software beyond that which was necessary, out of a kind of pride, and a sense of craftsmanship. I couldn’t help but think of a samurai swordsmith or the like.
so that’s me with regard to my programming tools, which I’ve been burnishing for a solid 20 years now.
the funny thing is, with all the companies I’ve worked at, and all the stuff I’ve done, all the projects and software shipped, none of it really matters now, not only to me, but really to anyone, since some of the companies are out of business, the projects dead and gone, even the successful projects for the most part obsolete at this point; with a very few exceptions, nothing of all that matters to anyone at all, except that is, my tools matter, at least to me.
I’m still using this stuff, sometimes on a daily basis, and often to great or at least good effect.
so, cool.

I was reflecting the other day on this company meeting we had one time at my old company.
It was poorly planned and organized, and it was hard for folks to get into the room. They were just going to feed us a bunch of bullshit anyway, so some of us kind of hung out in the back of the room.
Kip, the boss, waved to us to come on down saying there was plenty of room, in spite of the fact that we’d have to literally climb over people to get there, and then we’d sort of be trapped between the bosses and their sycophants. Just not a place we wanted to be. So what? We were fine where we were, and since when did it matter to him what the hell we did or thought, anyway? Fucking power trip.
Kip kind of insisted, and we kind of pretended we didn’t understand, and he moved on.
Later on, they sold the company and we found out there had been some accounting irregularities, and we all got screwed, the suck-ups and the independents alike. (Ecclesiastes 9:11)
So what difference does it make?
Just be yourself. Try to be as pleasant as you can, but above all be true to yourself and to others, and “stick to your guns”.
And if they don’t like it, fuck ’em, because it don’t make a bit of difference in the end, and at least you for one will be that much less miserable in the meantime.

I used to worry a lot about work. before that, maybe I didn’t worry enough, and then I worried too much. you know how it is.
but nearly thirty years’ experience in this business — and you’d better believe its been a wild ride — have taught me, that first of all, worrying is not a constructive use of energy.
but more importantly, the difference between success and failure can often be dependent on a random, or at least an unpredictable set of factors. sure, preparation and hard work is necessary, but its not sufficient, I can tell you that much for a fact.
you see, without exception, people who’ve been successful have also been lucky, but they will have a natural tendency to diminish the luck factor, and maybe even convince themselves that their success and other’s failure is due entirely to their relative merit.
my name for such folks is “jaglthag” — jack ass got lucky, thinks he’s a genius.

People like Bill Clinton say you can’t fight for your agenda unless you’re in office, and you have to be better than the next guy if you ever want to win office, because its combat. But the truth is you can’t win the battle because the game is fixed. You can’t motivate folks if you can’t get the message out to them, and even in the internet era, you can’t get the message out to them unless you can get it past the gatekeepers. Who are the gatekeepers? Aside from those of us who live in the world, whose strings are pulled by our own self-interested as filtered through those of our employers, the gatekeepers to public opinion are the corporate media — television, radio, newspapers, even the movies. But these media entities are all corporate entities first and foremost, operating for profit. Therefore, they are slaves to the power of money, not the bastions of truth that they and the people they serve would have you believe. People like Bill Clinton and Al Gore and John Kerry operate within the box. They believe that there is a consensus out there that largely agrees with them, and all they have to do is get the message out, and they’ll win. The funny thing is they’re right. Any working person, any minority or any right-thinking woman would be a fool to vote Republican, given their agenda. But such people do vote Republican, in droves. Why? It is because their belief systems are constructed, managed, manipulated and maintained, intentionally and consciously by an immense establishment. An establishment so vast, so wealthy, so powerful, that the people who operate within it aren’t even aware of its existence, even as it delineates their actions.

Did you ever wonder how it came to pass that so many great minds came together at the founding of our country — John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson..and the like? What was it in the world that forced so many great men to the forefront of their generation?
I have to believe its not what was there, rather it was the very lack of structure that allowed them to develop, and brought them forth. What schools did they attend? What time honored traditions, what gatekeepers to power checked them?
None. They were revolutionaries.
And though they lived in towns for the most part, by any modern standard they were frontiersmen, surrounded by a wild world.
[In general, they were successful men, and had all achieved a certain level of wealth in life (although in some cases it was ambiguous — Thomas Jefferson died in debt apparently, but after all he owned a plantation and slaves, and lived a relatively aristocratic life. By contrast Adams was frugal and prudent; Franklin was by any standard industrious.)]
But where would they be now? In business, no doubt. No such men would ever rise to the top in today’s political world because we have an entirely different system in place. One that selects a different kind of person.
For example, the paper today has a picture of Alberto Gonzales defending the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretaps of Americans talking to “suspected” terrorsts.
We have no way of determining how valid that claim is or how limited it is, or in fact whether this program and others yet to be revealed are operating in secret essentially without limitation. We in fact have no idea what the hell is going on, because everything’s secret. The programs are secret, the rationales for those programs are secret, the data supporting those rationales are secret.
Its been so long since we’ve been free, we don’t even know what the word means anymore. That’s because our liberties have already been eroded so dramatically, over generations, and through increased capabilities of technology as well as what we choose to do with those capabilities. By “we” I of course mean “they”.
The interesting thing to think about though is that the idea of an expectation of personal privacy and assumed freedoms are really novel ideas, or they were at least in the 18th century.
To think that we have people sitting on the supreme court today who can read the fourth amendment: “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches …without probable cause supported by Oath …shall not be violated” and claim both expert knowledge of the constitution and that it provides no explicit right of privacy — its unfathomable. We look to these people for our last resort, and they have abandoned their posts. Anyone can see that.
Lately, I have been rereading De Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”. I have found it very apt in this day and age.
De Tocqueville was struck by the nature of the American character and our peculiar institutions, relating them to British traditions and institutions and of course contrasting them with those of his own native France, where power was centralized and for example, the press was tightly controlled. As I read it, I am struck by how modern America resembles the monarchical France of the eighteenth century much more closely than it seems to resemble post-revolutionary America.
Mr. De T. would say things like “The United States have no metropolis;…the Americans have established no central control over the expression of opinion, any more than over the conduct of business.” And you can’t help but wonder how if these premises no longer hold, what conclusions must inevitably follow. In the event you doubt that there is central control over the expression of opinion in this country, I recommend another good read: “Into the Buzzsaw”, edited by Kristina Borjesson. Truth is stranger (and scarier) than fiction.
You wonder if the gravity of absolutism and ultimate decay is inevitable — if, as Spengler, Toynbee and others have argued — that the cycles of history are inexorable. Is it possible that once we were thrust into a position of leadership in the world after World War II, that our path could not be stopped. We have heard the arguments posed in terms of “isolationism” versus “engagement.” But was it merely “engagement” when we assassinated democratically elected leaders like Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1956 or supported the coup against Salvador Allende, in which he was killed in 1973? (Look it up.) Or were these unfortunate acts justified and in fact necessary in the broader context of Soviet aggression?
I dont know about that. But even if these and other similar events are part of a broader historical context, we as individuals have also made choices along the way (by “we” I again mean “they”).
It could be that the key factor that leads a civilization into decline is that the instituitions which broker power go without check, and that these unchecked institutions create their own sort of inevitablity.
What I mean is that the founding fathers were very careful to put in place those checks and balances that we all learned about in school, being keenly aware of the abuses of the British crown. For example, the now sometimes controversial second amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, was based in the then commonplace observation that only the nobility were allowed to arm themselves. Good thing we’ve moved on past all that. Or at least we imagine so.
We had long since internalized these ideals, even as reality fell short of them time and again, through racial discrimination, discrimination against immigrants, Jews, Catholics, and women, and state sponsored violence against workers protesting conditions in the factories and mines. Today, its hard to imagine a time where people had to fight and sometimes die to stop things like child labor, unsafe and inhumane working conditions. First they’d call out the hired goons and if that didn’t work, it would be National Guard. Too many of us don’t even know about that era, even though it was less than a century ago. But in any case, we’ve moved on past all that. Or at least we imagine so.
Then during the cold war an entirely new and secret set of institutions developed, perhaps for good reason, but I think possibly even on the face of them, the original rationale might not stand up.
The communists indeed had spies here, just as we had spies there. On the whole, their spies seemed to be better than ours. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, but its hard to say from this distance, and not knowing all the facts, whether the Soviet Union was really that much of a threat, or was it rather doomed to collapse from the sheer weight of their own economic morbidity, from the flawed character of their leaders as much as the flawed theories of socialism itself. With rare and isolated exceptions, socialism must eventually be doomed, because it depends on an unreliable force: human wisdom and altruism. In order for socialism to work, people in all roles in society must just “do the right thing”. Capitalism on the other hand relies on a much more reliable force: human selfishness and greed.
But you can’t really argue the point either way, because the rationale is all secret, based on secret information, secret data and secret responses and activities some of which will never be known.
Its really kind of tantalizing .. what happened that is known and what will never be known
To start with, I recommend a good biography of J. Edgar Hoover and all his shenanigans (see the one by Curt Gentry for example). Some of the bizarre stories out there, for example, you might take a look at what Sharon Weinberger writes in Imaginary Weapons, that our use of psychics during the cold war really worked, but the results are all classified. I’m not saying it really happened, I’m saying “who the hell knows?” They’re not above using a journalist to throw some bullshit out there just to confuse you. Or look at what former CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner has to say about the so called MK-Ultra projects. His sworn testimony is in the congressional record. Look it up. Apparently, we went off in search of “truth serum” and “mind control techniques”, and some really crazy things went on. But all the files were destroyed. No, really. And its like this stuff never happened, isn’t it? To those who claim that these things never really did happen, that of this is a bunch of bullshit, and these are all nothing but a bunch of urban legends, its exactly like that. Its hard to get your head around the surreality of it all.
What I’m trying to say is you can try to debate what did and didn’t happen and whether or not it was justified within the context of the era, but the simple truth is we don’t have the facts.
In any case, things do go on, things that we’re unaware of, let’s leave it at that. That can’t be a controversial statement, can it? And if we’re unaware of them, then we can’t very well debate or protest against them can we? And that is the nut of the problem.
All kinds of things have gone on in the name of liberty, things we wouldn’t beleve. Things we won’t allow ourselves to believe. Things have been revealed that many Americans still choose not to believe, even when shown the documentation. Assassination. Torture. Crimes “in defense of liberty”.
And maybe the world is a harsh place, and this is the price of liberty. Again it boils down to trust.
You’ve got to trust your leaders, if these things are going to be kept secret from you, but the system by which we select our leaders is so corrupt that we can’t help but select leaders that are unworthy of that trust.
I’m convinced that if Thomas Jefferson were alive today he’d be a revolutionary.
I only wish there were another way, aside from revolution.
That’s not to likely to succeed anyway. Historically all change has to come about violently, whether by revolution or unfortunate circumstance, like drought, famine or economic upheaval. But there needs to be an underlying sociological engine that drives it, a motivation.
If you’re hungry enough and you don’t have enough else to do then maybe you have enough time on your hands to rise up. But if everybody is too busy working you don’t have time to form mobs in the streets. And if work is rewarding enough then you don’t really have a reason to rise up in the first place, do you?
Its one of the ironies of history that we will accept a terrific erosion of our ideals in the abstract as long as our concrete reality isn’t disturbed too much.
You can look pretty much anywhere and you sort of see the same distrbing disconnect with reality.
Its like in the realm of astrophysics. they point these radio telescopes anywhere in the sky, anwhere at random, and they see the same thing. They see the same background radiation that turns out to be the same spectrum that we see in stars from our own galaxy, and in other galaxies that we can see with visible light, only red shifted all the way into the microwave frequencies.
Everywhere, the entire sky is filled with this background microwave radiation wth the same spectrum, the same component frequencies.
The world is like that.
Political events are like that.
The so called intelligence communities and their nefarious activities and goings on
They can do as they please without check.
And the military and civil bureaucracies, the deficit and the debt.
There’s no political consequence for raising the debt. Its an abstraction.
But there sure as hell is a political consequence for cutting back on medicaid.
So our “statesmen” don’t have enough caharcter to tell us that they have to do the right thing for our own benefit, because we punish them when they do.
That’s really very disturbing
So everywhere you look its the same song, new verse, right?
And one might conclude that therefore there’s the same underlying cause.
and thats probably the most disturbing of all.
The underlying assuption of democracy is that the best wisdom lies with the people.
We’re starting to lose faith in that assumption, if we keep too much secret, that means that we don’t really trust the people’s judgement, do we?
Maybe the general common sense of the people is sound, but we’re too easily manipulated.
But is it inevitable ?
Can the process not be reversed?
Not without a dramatic change in our society.
Such a change is…
I don’t think its even possible for such changes to be induced, especially from outside the power structure.
But that’s been said before, I’m sure. Mighty empires and kingdoms have fallen, sometimes taking entire civilizations with them, and often in bloody wars or revolutions. But don’t forget that even though they all fell — China, Egypt, Rome — before they fell, they all stood for centuries, if not millenia.
Its like the weather.
The weather has to be conducive.
The zietgist. The weltanshauung.
The spirit of the time and the generation
has to shift.
I don’t see that happening any time soon.
I only see power becoming more concentrated.
In an era with so much that is secret going on we have to trust our leaders even more than the Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries were asked to trust their leaders, and we have even fewer checks and balances on those leaders’ powers.
These two factors combined lead to a very disturbing conclusion.
And that’s a shame.

you know, the ultimate cynic would have guessed the corrupt when not incompetent military-industrial-bureaucratic complex would not have been able to avoid blowing us all up to kingdom come there in the fifties and sixties. but the soldiers with the keys in the bottom of their missile silos never got the order, at least not yet.
so that’s something, anyway.

tom petty asks “the boys upstairs want to see / how much you’ll pay for what you used to get for free”