Putting out fires with gasoline

I've got two things on my mind as I write this post. Two things.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm currently making my way through Howard Kunstler's doomsday tome, The Long Emergency. It's a dismal, depressing book, to say the least, although Kunstler has an enormously readable writing style.

Kunstler's main thesis is that our entire way of life has been built on cheap energy, specifically, cheap fossil fuels, and even more specifically, cheap oil... and the oil is running out. Kunstler paints this as a civilization-destroying catastrophe, and his arguments are persuasive... but that's not what this post is about.

One of the things Kunstler mentions early on in the book is that as early as 1999, then Presidential candidate George W. Bush was being briefed by petroleum industry experts on the dangers of 'peak oil'... which is to say, what the industrialized globe could expect to happen when the world's production of oil first peaked, and then, began its steady and irreversible decline. How the American way of life, built as it was on ready access to cheap petroleum products, was in danger of utter disintegration when this threat became real -- as it almost certainly would, if not in Bush's first term, then certainly in his second.

So that's one thing I'm working over. And then there's this -- a conservative professor and former chief economist for Bush I, doing a long detailed scientific analysis which seems to offer a great deal of evidence for the fairly nightmarish, even tin foil hatted notion that it wasn't hijacked airliners that brought down the WTC towers on 9/11. Instead, he says, it looks like it may have been an inside job -- and the only people who would have that kind of access, and the ability to cover it up afterwards, would be our own government.

So... yeah, I know. I said, it was tin foil hat stuff. But still, the mind is a monkey, as Stephen King has noted, and when it gets hold of stuff, it has to play with it.

So...

Let's say a candidate for high and powerful office gets a heads-up in the waning weeks of the second millenium A.D. -- the oil is running out. Over the past century, the entire world has used up half of the entire world's supply of an irreplaceable energy source... and the half that's left is in large part in places that are very hard to get at, the stuff that's probably going to cost more to get out and refine than we'll get back by burning it. The world has reaped an enormous technological windfall from these extremely perishable resources, but it's a one-time deal, and the expiration date is coming up. And when oil becomes scarce, what will become of the American way of life, dependent as it is on privately owned gasoline powered motor vehicles, gasoline powered mass transit, and ten thousand vital, everyday items derived from petroleum by products (plastics, paint, medicines)?

It's a nightmarish scenario. America becomes a desolate land of abandoned suburbs filled with rotting houses no one can get to any more, and rusting cars nobody can afford to fuel. Cheap products from the other side of the globe can't make it to Wal-mart, because the boats won't go and the planes won't fly. With no fuel for America's trucking fleet, what food we do manage to produce without the miracle of petroleum derived fertilizers and insecticides can't be brought to centralized markets. And, by the by, our natural gas resources are drying up as fast as the world's oil -- and most of America's electricity plants run on natural gas. So not only do we have no gas, no fertilizer, no insecticide, no plastic, no paint, and very little medicine -- chances are, we have no electricity, either.

Feeling Amish? Well, that's just the domestic situation. China has only just begun to industrialize, as has much of the rest of Asia and Africa. And Europe has been utterly dependent on foreign oil since the start of the Oil Age -- the North Sea oil fields bought Britain and Western Europe twenty years of industrial dominance, but they are running dry as well. (Which may well be why Tony Blair is our only real ally in the current Iraqi debacle.)

When oil reserves dwindle, everybody at the table starts to fight for the scraps. Once the impact of peak oil really starts to be felt, we can expect a state of constant war for what oil reserves are left. Given that nuclear weapons of mass destruction may be counterindicated (as they might damage the pumping infrastructure everyone will badly want to take intact), it seems overwhelmingly likely that these wars will be fought with bacteriological and chemical weapons... a nightmare on top of a nightmare.

We, the blindly gluttonous consuming public, haven't hard much about the impact of peak oil, for largely the same reason we don't hear much about anything else that might stir us up -- the people that the media work for don't want us to hear about it. And when I say 'the people that the media work for', I don't simply mean the large corporation, although of course they have no interest in promoting mass hysteria that would probably impact their own profit margins. I also include all of us on that list. We buy the media's product, and the media knows goddam well that we won't buy what we don't want to hear or read. People like to be scared by their fiction, but we have no desire to be terrified by things that are real -- so a great many things that are real (see my last few posts, or spend some time at Rigorous Intuition, if you don't want to ever sleep peacefully again) never make it into USA Today or People magazine. And one of those things is peak oil.

Nonetheless, while the energy companies publicly pooh-pooh it (they have to, to protect those precious profits), all of them know this is coming. You just have to follow the money. Energy companies have opened no new oil fields in years, maybe decades, and have set up very few new wells in the fields that are already being exploited. When they stop investing in new fields and new wells, you know the pump is about to run dry. Or rather, they know it. They'd just prefer we didn't.

Dubya is, of course, an oilman, if a half assed one, and Cheney is very much a full assed petroleum maven. They knew about peak oil in 1999; they knew it was real and it was going to happen, and say what you will about their morals or ethics (no, really, say whatever you want, it's unlikely to be bad enough) they also know their fortunes are bound up in oil, and if the peculiar alloy of special interests and target demographics we sometimes laughingly call "America" were to crash and burn, these guys would have nowhere else to go.

It is, therefore, my speculation that, upon being warned about peak oil back in 1999, the future Most Powerful Men In The World were moved to make solving that particular problem Job One for the new administration.

Now, there are a few ways you could try and resolve the Gordian knot that is cheap oil. One way, what I'll call the Al Gore way, although it's actually what President Carter tried and failed to implement back during the faux Energy Crisis of the 1970s, is to put America on a drastic oil austerity program to wean ourselves as much off the petroleum tit as possible, while at the same time instituting a crash Federal research program into alternative energy sources. This would require enormous outlays of effort to advertise the problem of peak oil (which the energy companies don't want advertised), and similar amounts of effort to be spent educating the American public as to its possible effects, with the hope of persuading us all to leave our cars in our driveways and get on the bus, or carpool with our co-workers, or subscribe to a van pool. It would require getting Congress to drastically raise CAFE standards, which, of course, the automobile industry really doesn't want Congress to do. And then, of course, you'd have to pour billions if not trillions into alternative energy research.

Had Carter done this in the 1970s -- well, it most likely wouldn't have worked. First, because crude oil really is a fabulous substance; as Kunstler points out, it is amazingly dense, it contains an enormous amount of energy in a very small volume, it is easily transported and stored, it can be refined into thousands of wonderful by products -- and it's irreplaceable. The fuel we have burned in our mad orgiastic blitzkrieg of technological advancement over the past century took millions of years to create through various natural processes. When it's gone, it's gone -- and there's nothing in existence that is even close to being as universally useful.

However, that's why the alternative energy research most likely wouldn't have worked then (and won't work now). The reason the oil austerity program wouldn't have worked is that, well, we Americans are spoiled greedy children and we just wouldn't have done it. Or we might have, but not for very long; after a few months -- at most, a year -- if we didn't have our cheap fuel cell cars and cheap fuel cell central heating/AC units for our basements, we'd have impeached Jimmy and made sure Mondale gave us our Amoco stations back.

Barring an oil austerity program that Americans won't cooperate with and that would only put off the end for a few more years anyway, and a crash alternative fuel development process that wouldn't work, what's left? Securing the remaining supplies of oil, or at least, a big chunk of them, for the U.S..

At this point, it would be clear to Dubya and Cheney that pussying around with the Saudis isn't going to cut it any more. America is going to need to pretty much own the Middle East if we're going to continue our insanely avaricious, short sighted lifestyle into the indefinite future (except that future isn't all that indefinite; if we did manage to take, pacify, and adequately control the entire Middle East, it might give us another 30 to 50 years -- but that's enough for Bush and Cheney, and, well, who are we kidding, it's enough for us, too). How do we do that?

Well, you know, gee, there's this crazy scheme that Paul Wolfowitz and the other whacko neo-conservatives from the American Institute have been pushing since the Reagan days, where we depose Saddam Hussein and set up a puppet regime in Iraq, from which outpost we eventually take over the entire Arabic Middle East...

And now we come to the next thing -- that report by Professor Lew Rockwell, which seems to provide pretty persuasive evidence that what we all saw on TV on September 11, 2001, did not look at all to a trained explosive or incindiary expert's eye as being the result of structural damage from two hijacked airliners. What, in fact, it looked like -- the way the towers seemed to implode, and then collapse, with the wreckage largely (and strangely) remaining within the structure's own footprint -- was an explosion set by professional demolition people. People with, perhaps, access not only to the two Towers themselves (bypassing the extensive security in the buildings) but who also had access to military grade explosive material -- and who knew how to deploy it.

Who could do that? Who could cover it up afterward? Who could keep any government agency from reporting that not enough wreckage from airliners (including some house-sized jet engines which wouldn't have burned or exploded in the crash) had been found in the rubble to support the premise that two airliners had actually hit the buildings? Who could put a gag order on every surviving cop and firefighter that went into the buildings before they collapsed, or who did rescue work in the rubble right afterwards?

Any American with an IQ above that of a radish has, at some point since 9/11, asked themselves the question we hear over and over again on CSI -- sui generis -- who benefits? Who got fat off the 9/11 catastrophe? The answer is obvious but unthinkable to most of us -- the Republican Party came out of it very well, as did Our Heroes, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. They got a blank check to do whatever the fuck they wanted with our government, our military and our money. Logically, they have to be suspects... but we can't think about that. I can't think about that. It's like staring into the face of the Gorgon, or something. If we all had absolute irrefutable proof that the President and Vice President of America had not only let 9/11 happen when they could have prevented it, but had actually engineered 9/11... had signed the secret orders and drawn up the plans their (literally) damned selves... had conspired, hatched, and executed a scheme that culminated in the cold blooded murder of 2000+ of our fellow Americans, none of whom did anything more heinous than get up that morning and go in to work... I think we'd have to all go a little crazy. It would pull too much of the mask off of reality, and force us all to face just a little bit too much of what the actual truth most likely is about the world we live in -- that there are predators and prey, and most of us are just meat for the grinder, and there's nothing we can do about it.

Here's the thing, though. If Americans (and every one else in every other industrialized nation in the world) are reluctant to take the gasoline nozzle out of our arms, we're nearly as reluctant to send our troops off to fight in a war that makes no sense to us. If we go back to my first hypothesis, which is that Bush and Cheney (and, I'm certain, Tony Blair) knew peak oil was coming, and were determined to put its impact on their own particular nations and cultures off for at least another generation, and had already decided that the West needed to own the Middle East, with all its oil reserves -- well, then, next on the agenda is an excuse to invade the Middle East, to whip up the American public and keep the rest of the world more or less complacent.

Many historians believe that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was forewarned by intelligence assets in Japan (some say it was the Japanese ambassador himself) of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He let it happen anyway. Hundreds, if not thousands, of American servicemen and support personnel died in that attack, and FDR could have prevented it... maybe. But what most of us don't know about history, and don't want to know, is that 1941 in the real world wasn't much like we see in the movies these days. America was strongly isolationist throughout the 1930s -- most people believed that 'the European War' wasn't any of our business, and few gave any credence to the reports of Nazi atrocities against the Jews -- and those few who did who weren't Jewish themselves largely didn't care, because in addition to being isolationist, America in the 1930s was, just like every other place in the world, viciously and rabidly anti-Semitic. FDR understood that we had to get into WWII; that the consequences of allowing the Axis to dominate all of Europe and Asia were too horrendous to be borne... but he also knew that the American public didn't want it and wasn't ready for it. For one thing, our military was pretty much a shambles; the only way to get it in shape to fight a world war was to get the entire population motivated to fight.

Pearl Harbor provided the America of 1941 with that fighting motivation, and as has been noted in many other places, we then went on to pretty much save the world. So how do you figure that in the calculus of history -- was FDR justified, trading a few thousand lives to save untold millions?

So 9/11 came along, and Bush got to be the war time President he'd always wanted to be, and a year later, with the most specious reasons imaginable, he got to invade Iraq.

What I'm getting at here is not some paranoic raving/conspiracy theory about how Bush and Cheney absolutely must have been behind the World Trade Center getting blown up. I don't know that it's true, obviously. This is just speculation. (The behavior of the Republican Party since then -- the corruption, the war profiteering, the civil liberties violations, the illegal imprisonments, the secret prisons, the torture, the way billions of dollars in tax money has just disappeared into the coffers of Republican corporate donors, the various sex and bribery scandals we're seeing emerge now -- all of that would seem to be, collectively, a very strong argument that Bush and Cheney and their ilk have no scruples or morals whatsoever, and that they certainly wouldn't flinch at killing 2,000+ civilians if it got them where they wanted to be. But still, it's all just supposition.)

No, what I'm trying to do is to hypothesize on just how history might view Bush and Cheney -- if, at some point, it might turn out that everything they've done since taking office, including the engineering of 9/11, might have been to save the nation from a looming global crisis.

What if we're in Iraq to preserve our way of life from unavoidable and catastrophic energy shortages? What if that's the only thing the people in charge could think of to do that might have worked -- that would prevent the kind of massive die-off (we're talking billions of people, millions of Americans) that would otherwise be the inevitable byproduct of these shortages?

What if these guys are... you know... in some sick, twisted way... heroes? Trying to, you know... save the world? Or, at least, the American way of life?

Just like Captain America and Superman.

Then how do we judge them?

I'm starting to get a glimpse of exactly the kind of nightmarish reality we all actually inhabit. We build cocoons for ourselves of friends and family members. We get a job and we find a place to live and we pay our bills and we pray that the Big C doesn't hit anyone we love too dearly, that no deranged psychotic who claims to be a vampire breaks in and kills us while we're napping on the couch or taking a shower, that our kids don't get kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered by crazy ass Satanic cults, that we don't happen to live in an area that the CIA or NSA are going to decide to dust with some experimental bio-crud... that, in short, none of the malevolent weirdness that seems to bubble just under the surface of 'normal' reality happens to reach one of its tentacles into our carefully ordered lives and spread misery, chaos, and death.

In that twisted, bleak world, which is probably this one, someone like George W. Bush, or Dick Cheney, as corrupt and malignant and amoral and perhaps even evil as they are... could very well be legitimately acting for our own good when they conspire to kill over 2,000 of us so they can get the rest of us to let them invade an oil rich region and kill hundreds of thousands of people who aren't members of our particular tribe, so we all can drive SUVs and air condition our houses for another 30 years or so.

I know. It's like some horrible Grant Morrison mini-series, where everything is shit and all our heroes are actually vicious thugs or amoral, manipulating masterminds and power really does corrupt and everyone in authority is in the active service of knowing, scheming evil... and where all we can ever count on is slightly enlightened self interest on their parts to spare us the worst of the atrocities that happen to other people every day. That all we can do is to cling to the illusion of love while the people down the street, or the guy who sits next to us on the bus, or that happy family we saw in the park where we had a picnic last week, end up getting fed into the hellish engines that really run the world, instead of us. Where compassion and virtue really have no power at all. Where nobody who has any kind of power over us cares about us in the slightest; where the heads of state are all cannibals and devil worshippers and rapists and slavers, and the best we can do is stay out of their larders.

And in that world, our military is killing and torturing people we don't know and don't care about, to steal resources we need so we can keep on paving over our few remaining wildernesses and putting up fast food places and air conditioned housing developments and gas stations and strip malls. We are flooding the planet with our toxins, using up an entire planet so we can have brightly printed wrappers around our Big Macs, and fighting a war against our fellow human beings so we can continue to do it until we are all safely dead ourselves. And if our government is doing that, and we are letting it do that, then how much of a stretch is it to think that our government is perfecting viruses and germs meant to wipe out the populations of other foreign nations that will compete with us for the resources we want, and in the meantime they're testing their new little bugs on select groups of us, just to make sure they work?

Ultimately, every problem in every nation in the world comes down to one thing -- there are way too many people here right now, and more are coming all the time, and hardly anybody is volunteering to get off the planet and make more room for the rest of us.

If some kind of adjustment is inevitable -- and it seems that it must be; we've made irreplaceable resources vital to our continued existence, and they are running out -- and if millions if not billions are inevitably going to die anyway -- what do you do about it? If you're one of the most powerful individuals in the world? Wait for it to happen? Or do your best to make sure it happens to other people you're not in charge of?

If the people who run our country are evil, and they are trying to preserve our country and our way of life through evil means, what does that say about our country and our way of life? What does it say about us?

Well... we're not going to think about that.

Tell you what, though -- I don't think the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge has much hope of holding off the oil derricks, once we all get the news about this peak oil thing.

Tell you something else -- I'm not expecting too many comments on this entry, mostly because most of you are just going to think I've gone nuts, and politely ignore me until I get better, and start blogging about HeroClix and movies again.

Don't sweat it. I'm sure I'll get back to that stuff soon. I can't live in this reality tunnel for long. I'm not that strong.

Ignorance really is bliss. But the next best thing is selective perception.

Nightmare

All from the dark cornucopia that is Rigorous Intution, stuff that makes me badly want to wake up from the reality we all more or less share -- or change the planet I live on -- or the race I'm a member of:


* * * http://pilger.carlton.com/print/133391 -- Flying into Philadelphia recently, I spotted the Kean Congressional report on 11 September on sale at the bookstalls. "How many do you sell?" I asked. "One or two" was the reply. "It'll disappear soon." Yet, this modest, blue-covered book is a revelation. Like the Butler report, which detailed all the incriminating evidence of Blair's massaging of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq, then pulled its punches and concluded nobody was responsible, so the Kean Commission makes excruciatingly clear what really happened, then fails to draw the conclusions that stare it in the face. It is a supreme act of normalising the unthinkable. This is not surprising as the conclusions are volcanic.

The most important evidence to the commission came from General Ralph Eberhart, commander of the North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad). "Air force jet fighters could have intercepted hijacked airliners roaring towards the World Trade Center and Pentagon," he said, "if only air traffic controllers had asked for help 13 minutes sooner... We would have been able to shoot down all three... all four of them."

Why did this not happen?

The Kean report makes clear that "the defence of US aerospace on 9/11 was not conducted in accord with pre-existing training and protocols... If a hijack was confirmed, procedures called for the hijack coordinator on duty to contact the Pentagon's National Military Command Center (NMCC)... The NMCC would then seek approval from the office of the Secretary of Defense to provide military assistance..." Uniquely, this did not happen. The commission was told by the deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Authority there was no reason the procedure was not operating that morning. "For my 30 years of experience..." said Monte Belger, "the NMCC was on the net and hearing everything real-time... I can tell you I've lived through dozens of hijackings... and they were always listening in with everybody else." But on this occasion, they were not. The Kean report says the NMCC were never informed. Why? Again, uniquely, all lines of communication failed, the commission was told, to America's top military brass. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld could not be found; and when he finally spoke to Bush an hour and a half later, it was, says the Kean report, "a brief call in which the subject of shoot-down authority was not discussed." As a result, NORAD's commanders were "left in the dark about what their mission was".

The report reveals that the only part of a previously fail-safe command system that worked was in the White House where Vice-President Cheney was in effective control that day, and in close touch with the NMCC. Why did he do nothing about the first two hijacked planes? Why was the NMCC, the vital link, silent for the first time in its existence? Kean ostentatiously refuses to address this. Of course, it could be due to the most extraordinary combination of coincidences. Or it could not. In July 2001, a top secret briefing paper prepared for Bush read: "We [the CIA and FBI] believe that OBL [Osama Bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."

On the afternoon of 11 September, Donald Rumsfeld, having failed to act against those who had just attacked the United States, told his aides to set in motion an attack on Iraq - when the evidence was non-existent. Eighteen months later, the invasion of Iraq, unprovoked and based on lies now documented, took place. This epic crime is the greatest political scandal of our time, the latest chapter in the long 20th-century history of the west's conquests of other lands and their resources. If we allow it to be normalised, if we refuse to question and probe the hidden agendas and unaccountable secret power structures at the heart of "democratic" governments and if we allow the people of Fallujah to be crushed in our name, we surrender both democracy and humanity.

John Pilger is a visiting professor at Cornell University, New York. His latest book, Tell Me No Lies: investigative journalism and its triumphs, is published in the UK by Random House.

* * * http://members.aol.com/smartnews/cr01.htm -- I think it is important to document for you the clear pattern of experiments performed on children before I go into my own personal experience.

Slide 5-10

Fernald School-Young male children who were institutionalized at the Fernald School in Massachusetts were fed radioactive cereal in the 1940s and 1950s.

Willowbrook State School-Dr. Saul Krugman of New York University conducted studies of hepatitis during the 1950s and 1960s on the severely mentally retarded .

Nasal Radium Irradiation-1948-54. 582 third graders in the Baltimore public schools.

Vanderbilt University Hospital - 1945-49 at Prenatal Clinic - 829 pregnant women given a "cocktail " laced with radioactive iron.

D.C. Children's Center in Laurel in a section called the District Training School in the 60's-Retarded children were used as human guinea pigs for both private industry and the government.

University of Tennessee Memphis - 1954 seven male infants between 2 and 3 days old were injected intravenously with I-131.

Harper Hospital in Detroit - 1954 sixty-five premature infants included in a study of the uptake of iodine-131. Seven full-term infants were used for the control group.

Clinton Elementary school in Minneapolis 1953. Spraying of microorganisms either alone or in combination with the zinc cadmium sulfide by the Army.

Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory - 1959 sixty-six subjects including one pregnant woman and four children evaluated for the retention of radioactive Iron 59.

University of Nebraska College of Medicine 1960 Twenty-eight infants ingested radioactive iodine through a gastric tube. In 1963 twenty-five infants at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who were less than 36 hours old, had radioiodine administered either orally or by intramuscular injection.

University of Rochester-1963 cows fed iodine 131 and then milk given to people ranging in age from six years to 50 years, seven were less than 21 years old.

* * * http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/11/american-leviathan-part-one.html -- In her 1985 report on ritualistic child abuse, reprinted in Cults That Kill, Detective Sandi Gallant of the San Francisco Police Department included synopses of then-current investigations in California to substantiate its credibility.

Cases included:

-- A 17-year old male in Atherton who claimed to have been drugged by injection and forced into S&M pornography by his stepfather, compelled to drink blood, witness animal mutilations and a murder.

-- A 5-year old boy in Fremont who claimed two men repeatedly injected him with something that made him drowsy and forced him into sexual activity in what might have been a church with black candles. Said he was sometimes photographed, and forced to watch the mutilation of animals and human beings.

-- Seven children between 5 and 7 who claimed that at a day-care in Fort Bragg run by a church they were forced to drink blood and urine, witnessed the killing of dogs and cats and one infant, "saw things and possibly animals" suspended from the ceiling, and were injected and then photographed in sexual acts. Black candles and pentagrams were observed.

-- Two children, 13 and 8, claimed to have been injected with drugs and photographed having sex with adults chanting in black robes, and to have witnessed the murder of a small child. Room was lit with black candles, and eldest child claimed room "really stunk."

Six months after submitting the report, with the request that it be forwarded to federal authorities, Gallant's chief returned it, saying "Do you really want me to send this to the FBI? Do you really believe this stuff goes on?" They thought that I might be going psychotic....

* * * http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/11/american-leviathan-part-two.html The case against Richard Hamlin follows upon a retraction by wife Susan of her February, 2004 confession to police of having sexually abused three of her four children and conspiring with members of a Satanic cult, including her father, Dr Sydney Siemer, to ritually murder her husband. (The police report can be read here. )

Susan said there are child porn and snuff film tapes in her dad's house in Fresno and in a self storage center in Indio (Southern California). Susan said she started molesting her kids in 1996 and that her dad Sidney taught her how to put her kids in a "trance like or hyper relaxed stage." ... When we asked Susan if any of her kids knew about these incidents, she replied that in kindergarten in EDH, _____'s teacher had asked him to complete the sentence "I WISH MY MOM ____." _____ completed the sentence by telling the teacher "WOULD STOP LICKING ME."

Detective Hoagland, Lensing and I then re-interviewed Susan alone while tape-recording the interview. Susan waived her miranda rights and again made the same statement and confession during questioning."

* * * http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/031505_mckinney_transcript.shtml Transcript of Representative Cynthia McKinney's Exchange with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, and Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) Tina Jonas, March 11th, 2005

Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld in House Hearing on FY06 Dept. of Defense Budget
Chairman Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and witnesses Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and JCS Chairman General Richard Myers hold a House Hearing on the FY 2006 Budget for the Department of Defense and Military Services.
3/11/2005: WASHINGTON, DC: 2 hr. 5 min.

CMK: Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-GA)
DR: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
RM: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers
TJ: Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) Tina Jonas
DH: Chairman Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA)

25:20
CMK: Thank you Mr. Chairman. Mr. Secretary, I watched President Bush deliver a moving speech at the United Nations in September 2003, in which he mentioned the crisis of the sex trade. The President called for the punishment of those involved in this horrible business. But at the very moment of that speech, DynCorp was exposed for having been involved in the buying and selling of young women and children. While all of this was going on, DynCorp kept the Pentagon contract to administer the smallpox and anthrax vaccines, and is now working on a plague vaccine through the Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program. Mr. Secretary, is it [the] policy of the U.S. Government to reward companies that traffic in women and little girls?

That's my first question. My second question, Mr. Secretary: according to the Comptroller General of the United States, there are serious financial management problems at the Pentagon, to which Mr. Cooper alluded.

Fiscal Year 1999: $2.3 trillion missing.

Fiscal Year 2000, $1.1 trillion missing.

And DoD is the number one reason why the government can't balance its checkbook. The Pentagon has claimed year after year that the reason it can't account for the money is because its computers don't communicate with each other.

My second question, Mr. Secretary, is who has the contracts today, to make those systems communicate with each other? How long have they had those contracts, and how much have the taxpayers paid for them?

Finally Mr. Secretary, after the last Hearing, I thought that my office was promised a written response to my question regarding the four wargames on September 11th. I have not yet received that response, but would like for you to respond to the questions that I've put to you today. And then I do expect the written response to my previous question - hopefully by the end of the week.

27:26
DR: Thank you, Representative. First, the answer to your first question is, is, no, absolutely not, the policy of the United States Government is clear, unambiguous, and opposed to the activities that you described. The second question -

CMK: Well how do you explain the fact that DynCorp and its successor companies have received and continue to receive government contracts?

DR: I would have to go and find the facts, but there are laws and rules and regulations with respect to government contracts, and there are times that corporations do things they should not do, in which case they tend to be suspended for some period; there are times then that the - under the laws and the rules and regulations for the - passed by the Congress and implemented by the Executive branch - that corporations can get off of - out of the penalty box if you will, and be permitted to engage in contracts with the government. They're generally not barred in perpetuity -

CMK: This contract - this company - was never in the penalty box.

* * * *

Nothing like last, and certainly not least, in one of the blog's near-infinite, and nearly infinitely long comment threads, I came across a hair raising passage that the blogger there had re-posted, with permission, from an email he'd received. He hadn't attributed it. I originally copied and pasted it here, but on reflection, I decided that, as I didn't have permission to repost it myself, I'd probably better not... especially since I found the subject matter so unsettling.

According to the anonymous emailer, he'd had a very weird experience himself. He'd picked up a paperback copy of the Necro-- whatever -- you know, that occult text that is either an ancient tome of eldritch power, or something H.P. Lovecraft made up entirely, depending on which reality tunnel you happen to inhabit. He advised that he'd mostly lost interest in the book once he'd realized there wasn't going to be much mention of Cthulhu in it, but he'd persevered and finished reading it. Afterard, he'd started to be bothered by unexplained phenemona whenever he was alone... noises outside his window, heavy footsteps crossing the roof over his head. Having heard that it was a common belief that anyone reading the book would be haunted by the demons that reading the book would release, and the haunting would only cease if the book was burned, the emailer related that he had taken his copy of the paperback out into his driveway and torched it.

The truly strange thing, he says, is that as the book burned, he noticed that each of the pages were blank. Which is to say, as each page blackened and curled up and wafted away, he could see that the page underneath had no printing on it at all. No ink, nothing.

Stuff like this troubles me.

Greatly.

The truth is out there

I just recently discovered a blog called Rigorous Intuition. It's the kind of blog the Late Great Jeff Webb would have kept if he'd survived into the blogging era. It's scary as hell, and by that, I mean, everything on this blog is absolutely terrifying in all its implications.

It's also beautifully written, by someone who is clearly very intelligent and almost obsessively widely read on subjects the mainstream media largely ignores, mostly because the rest of us are happy to do the same.

Any of you who go there will be strongly tempted, after reading maybe one or two entries, to shudder, shake your heads, say "Heh, Highlander's found another woo-woo site", and go on with your daily lives.

But the stuff haunts me.

Try these --

Did some people know 9/11 was going to happen before it happened? Survey says 'yes'.

Think you saw planes hit the WTC on live TV on September 11, 2006? Maybe you did. But maybe that's not what brought it down.

And then there's the stuff we really don't like to think about.

I don't even know what to call this one. Except that it makes me feel physically nauseous. And if any of it's true, it makes me ashamed to be a human being.

This is just a random, and very minor, sampling of the material on Rigorous Intutition... all of it chock full of links to actual news stories none of you have ever heard of, because, well, none of us particularly want to hear of any of it. And to blogs by people we deeply hope are nuts, because if they're not, then our world is not as we think it is, which is something we really don't want to hear. And to other, even weirder crap... all of it out there on the Internet, just waiting for someone to come across. Which most of us by no means want to do.

I'll be blogging about some of this stuff in the near future, but there's no reason to watch the shadows I'll be casting when you can just head straight into the light... if you've a mind to.

I also just started Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency, and I'm sure I'll be blogging about that soon, too.

"Most people occasionally stumble over the truth, but pick themselves up and continue on as if nothing had ever happened."
-- Winston Churchill

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second it is violently opposed. Third it is accepted as being self-evident."
--Arthur Schopenhauer

X-change

So SuperGirlfriend and I were discussing the actress, Ellen Page, who starred in Hard Candy, the movie we saw last Sunday. Turns out she's going to be in the new X-MEN film as well.

ME: Hmmm. Yeah, that girl would make a good Kitty Pryde, but they have to give her longer hair. Not that it matters much to me; I kinda hate the character. She's all Claremont-ie and her powers make no sense at all. Plus, you know, she has a dragon. I mean, ::ralfff::

SG: her hair IS longer on her profile pic, and apparently, HARD CANDY was made a year ago, so she's certainly had some time to grow it out. Though, X3 was probably made several months ago, too. I don't know...x-tensions, maybe...

One of many, many reasons I love her so. ::grin::

Things to do in a call center when you're bored

A call center work day can be extremely tedious. Even the very act of calling in to customer service can be monotonous beyond enduring sometimes. Do your callers and your co workers a favor and spice up their day a little with any or all of these suggested boredom-killers --


* * * When you get someone on the phone and they are talking about their husband or wife, interrupt them to say "Oh, you mean your gay transvestite live-in lover, right? Yeah, we know all about that here." Then kind of sniff and say, "I'm not allowed to tell you what I think of that." Then fill your voice with obviously false cheer and say "So, how can I help you and your... 'husband/wife'?" Try to let them hear the quotes in your tone.

* * * Pretend you don't speak English. When people who know you insist that you DO know how to speak English, advise them that you obviously have some form of aphasic amnesia affecting the speech center of the brain. Then continue to act as if you don't speak English.

* * * When you get someone on the phone who has a very heavy accent, try to speak that way back to them.

* * * Repeatedly warn people for using foul language to you, especially when they aren't. Tell them you'll disconnect if they continue to be profane and personally abusive. Then do it, before they can say anything else.

* * * Advise your immediate supervisor that you're doing your best, but you forgot to refill your medication so you're "flying by the seat of your pants today". If they express any reservations, roll your eyes wildly and insist that you're fine, you're fine, you're GODDAM FINE, and anyway, Jesus is looking over your shoulder, and he's better than any goddam Haldol pills any time, so as long as nobody messes with you, nobody will get hurt. Then specify that it's JESUS that would hurt them, not you, because "just between the two of us, the Savior is a little grouchy today, because I ate the last bowl of Corn Pops before he got out of bed. I didn't mean to. It just kinda happened."

* * * Mention casually to someone on the phone that if they're not careful, they could end up wearing your ass as a hat. Say it just that way... "By the way, sir/ma'am, if you're not careful, you might end up wearing my ass for a hat." Say it in a very noncommittal tone. If they get upset, or ask you what you mean, tell them they'll have to speak with the Master about that. Then immediately transfer them into voicemail, preferably for someone who hasn't worked at your company in months.

* * * Ask whoever you're speaking to if they're a dwarf. Advise them very gravely that while company policy requires you to provide service to broads, kikes, jigaboos, spics, gooks, Chinks, and "those fucking little bucktoothed bastards from that one set of islands in the South Pacific, you know the ones I mean", it doesn't say a damn thing about dwarves. You've read it VERY carefully. So, if they're a dwarf, they can just frickin' forget it, buddy. No service for dwarfs. Not a hope, not a prayer.

If the person on the other end states they are not a dwarf, tell them you can't take their word for it, they'll have to submit written proof. Give them the White House fax number. Then hang up.

* * * Scream "OMYGOD SPIDERS!" into your headset, shriek piercingly, and leap up onto your desk. Stay there, sobbing hysterically, until someone offers you money, or at least pizza, to come down.

* * * Tell someone at random when they call in that you can't tell for sure, of course, of course, but you're reasonably sure they have a very pretty mouth.

* * * Occasionally, instead of whatever greeting you're supposed to give, say "Thank you for calling, and please remember at all times during this call that we know where you live. Now, how can I help you?"


* * * Mention to one of your callers that when YOU say fuck you... which of course, you're not saying right NOW, not to them, of course... but when YOU say fuck you, you mean it as a compliment. Really.

* * * Tell the next woman you speak to that it's not sexual harrassment if she WANTS it, and "you chicks ALL want it".

* * * After you finish providing a customer with information, advise them that they are "DAMN well told".

* * * The next time someone asks to speak to your supervisor, allow as to how you'll connect them over, but it won't make any difference, because you've got that bitch so damn cock-whipped she'd lick your shoes at high noon on Main Street if you offered her a milk bone. Then hang up.

* * * Sing "Unchained Melody". Loudly. When people object, advise them that you're the next American Idol and they'll be sorry they were hatin' when your royalty checks start rolling in, dawg.

* * * Sob uncontrollably. When someone asks you what's wrong, snarl and retreat into the furthest corner under your desk. (This works best if you've previously stashed snacks down there so you can stay there all day.) Warn everyone that if anyone calls the cops, you'll start killing hostages. Talk to yourself in different comical voices. Insist that it's Tommy who's doing this, Tommy's the bad boy, the rest of you are very well behaved. (When you speak as Tommy, give him a high falsetto voice like Mr. Bill.)

* * * Cackle. Everyone loves it when you cackle. Trust me.

* * * Tell a customer that you need to review their records before you can answer their inquiry. For the next minute or so, say things like "Oh my god" or "Jesus" or "That ain't right" as if muttering to yourself, but making sure they can hear you. Then mock-whisper, half covering your headset mike, "Hey, Julian, start the recorder and get that Homeland Security guy on the line. I think I've got one." Then go on with your call as normal.

* * * The above is especially cool if there is actually someone working with you named 'Julian'.

And then, depression set in

Howard Kunstler gives us our usual Monday dose of doom and gloom. I believe he's probably right; it's just, like everyone else, I'm in total denial about it. Life without electricity? Put the bullet here, please.

The cobags over at Sadly, No! have pretty much justified everything the right likes to say about incivility on the left with the entry I've linked to. Sometimes crazy ass stuff like this is funny, but going after a fellow blogger because he's making a plea for civility strikes me as... well... pretty fucking insane. Or perhaps it's just, you know, sophomoric. A lot of the more sophomoric blogs are pretty popular, and even fun to read, but occasionally, they all just make me wince, and at the moment, this particular entry at Sadly, No! is my John Wincy Adams.

Why are the Iraqis so pissed off at us? Well, it's not the fact that we invaded their country for specious reasons, destroyed its industrial infrastructure, killed and maimed about 100,000 of the people living there, and illegally tortured a few hundred more. No, according to this link sent to me by the ever astute SuperGirlfriend, it's also because we're spending several hundred million dollars building an embassy that can be seen from space in the middle of what's left of downtown Baghdad, while all the people who actually live there are getting along on two hours of electricity a day. Which is okay, because, you know, they're residents of a global region that contains some of the richest crude oil deposits in the world, and they're still waiting in line all day to get fuel for their cars. Given that, who needs electricity at home or the office?

Over at the Poor Man, the often obnoxious Sifu Tweety clearly means to mock CNN's news coverage of an Australian mine rescue, but mostly sounds to me like he's making fun of the trapped miners.

Must be a slow day. No developments with gay hookers, no new indictments from Patrick Fitzgerald. Whatever is a leftie blogger to get incensed about?

Transparency

Let's see --

(probably some Infinite Crisis spoilers in here somewhere; if you haven't read the last issue, be careful of your eyetracks)


* * We hit several local comic shops -- Great Escape, the Zone, and Comic Book World -- during Free Comic Book Day, and between SuperGirlfriend and I, I think we have half a dozen of the free Wolverine HeroClix giveaway figs, white shirt and black. If anyone who reads this thing wants one, let me know.

* * We also picked up the last issue of Infinite Crisis while we were at the Zone. So far the new, post IC Earth seems to mostly be designed to correct changes that we old time fans have been screaming about since the first CRISIS. Wonder Woman is once more a founding member of the JLA. Joe Chill was caught, but Batman continued to protect Gotham City anyway. Superman had a career as Superboy.

All that is great, but, once again, DC seems to be largely leaving the new history vague so its writers and editors can fill it in on their own. This is the policy that led to disaster after the first CRISIS; I can only hope that this time around, with people like Geoff Johns and, well, my old buddy Slappy, doing some of the work, that we get a better product.

Did anyone else out there get a distinctly gay vibe at that panel in the end, when Bruce Wayne is saying good bye to Diana and Clark at the water front before embarking on a long voyage of rediscovery on his private yacht, and we see Dick and Tim waving from the deck, and he says "I'm not going alone"?

No? Just me? Okay.

The original Superman died heroically saving the universe from Superboy-Prime... you had to figure he would; can't have a grey templed Superman with the wrong chest emblem hanging around the Modern Age confusing the young idiots in the audience. Nor would it have made sense to have the FIRST Superman, the primal superhero, adopt a different super-identity. Hell, I have to give Johns props for bringing the character back at all. Still, remember that weird mystical amalgam thing they did with Hawkman, so that now the present day character is some odd synthesis of all the different versions of Hawkman? They could have done that with the two Supermen. In fact, when Alex Luthor was busy trying to fuse his father's essence with that of the various multidimensional Supermen variants, I kind of thought Johns might be laying the groundwork for that. That could have been a cool idea. Would have given the Modern Age version some much needed gravitas, to make up for that whole "I got killed by a big retarded spikey guy from space, came back to life, wore a ponytail, had electric powers, went psychotic for a while, and generally showed my ass to an extraordinary degree" vibe he picked up during the appalling post-CRISIS years. And it would have nicely offset all the Byrne arrogance and whininess, too.

Well, nobody pays me to write these things, so what do I know?

* * * My boss had a sit down with me the other day and basically, while the threat of dismissal didn't exactly get laid down on the table, she at least tipped her hand enough to show me she only needed one more jack to make the whole trip. I've been trying to concentrate harder and not hate our participants quite so much, but it's difficult. Many of them are nice enough to me, but many of them aren't, either, and I have difficulty giving "gold call customer service quality" to affluent people who are screaming at me because I'm not making it easy enough for them to avoid paying their taxes.

Still, I think I've been doing better, and I also suspect that the threat of dismissal is a bluff. There are other people there who have been working there much longer who are just as nasty to participants on the phone as I am.

* * * Hey, I just helped SuperGirlfriend dye her hair. Now that's an experience.

* * * Speaking of SuperGirlfriend, we have about 47 different bottles of salad dressing in our fridge -- okay, that's a slight exaggeration, but still, not much of one. A few nights ago, though, none of those 47 varieties would do, and SuperGirlfriend hauled several of the ingredients from our amazingly well stocked spice, condiments and general cooking ingredients cupboard out, and mixed up her own. For those who haven't experienced it first hand, SuperGirlfriend is a galaxy class cook... something she has only had vicarious joy from, since she went on her diet years ago. Now I'm on a diet too.. 270 lbs, and uncomfortably tight 44 inch waistline slacks, being the outside limit of gluttonous indulgence I'm willing to tolerate in myself... so I'll be experiencing her galaxy class cooking vicariously, as well, for the most part.

Still, I'm very lucky to have SuperGirlfriend in my life (always) but now, especially as regards help with losing weight. I've never had much luck doing it before (old friends like Opus would doubtless be startled to only recognize me from the neck up, these days, but I've been overweight since my mid 20s and other than for a brief time after Basic Training, my volume has slowly but steadily increased over the years since), but SG is a dieting expert (one of the many many reasons I admire her is that, upon being told a few years ago that she needed to lose weight due to various health factors, she went right out and lost weight -- something most of us mere mortals find nearly impossible to do). So with her doing the cooking and/or packing lunches for me, and her being able to run an instant calorie calculator in her head, all I really have to do is make sure I don't carry any snack and soda money with me to work, and never eat anything she hasn't approved of first, and I should be golden.

Or, at least, slimmer... by fall, I'm hoping.

* * * According to Mike Norton's blog, his mother's health has taken a grim turn -- just in time for Mother's Day, too. SuperGirlfriend and I are both keeping him in our thoughts, and now, all of you can, too.

* * * In our obligatory political commentary section, everybody over here on the left seems to be getting all excited about the possible implications of what most are calling "Hookergate", but what billmon insists on referring to as "Fornigate", in one of those coinages that is very nearly too clever for me to embrace. What us lefties mostly seem to be working ourselves into a lather of anticipation over is the possible revelation that not only were many Republican elected officials and political appointees reveling with prostitutes provided by "Duke" Cunningham at select poker parties in a Washington, D.C. hotel, but that some, most, or all of these sexual favors were being provided by male prostitutes. Josh Marshall, just for one, seems to be fairly salivating at the thought of actual photographic evidence of this stuff being introduced into the record.

All this is fine, but I think it's important to point out that the real story here is the hypocrisy of the "Family Values" party if it's proven they've been frolicking on the other side of the law with professional sex providers. That hypocrisy becomes especially striking if it should turn out their paid casual sex partners are same sex casual sex partners... but it's a fine line between abhorring their double standard, and descending into gay bashing ourselves.

Denouncing a Republican Congressman who has been elected and re-elected at least partially on a stance that plays to the homophobia in his district, after he's caught with someone's dick in his mouth, is one thing. Hell, I guess we can even revel in that a little; its very much their own petard these people are being hoist by. But it's the hypocrisy that's sickening here. Let's all remember, if Bill Clinton's sex life was nobody's business but his, Hillary's, and whoever else he happened to be doing at the time (and I very much believe that's true) then the same holds for these conservative poker players. The point isn't who they're boning in their personal time; it's who they are denouncing and repressing professionally, in order to get re-elected.

* * * My old friend and fellow MAOTE blogger Nate Clark is having a rough time with depression right now. Nothing we can do for him long distance that SG and I aren't already doing, but I just wanted to note that, so he knows we're thinking of him and sending good thoughts his way.

* * * In a final, slightly positive note, Mike Norton emails me to advise that apparently his mom's prognosis isn't as grim as we'd assumed, from his post. So that's good. Not great, but good.

SuperGirlfriend and I have tentative plans to see a movie today (probably something called Hard Candy, just because the options are so spare right now), so I'll close this and wish you all a very happy Sunday.

These don't go to eleven

This is all clix nonsense. If you're not wild about HeroClix, boogie on, reggae human.

I've always had issues with the way certain of my favorite superhero characters were translated into clix form. That's why, when WizKids changed out their chief designer job a few expansions back, and hired a guy named Seth... something or other... I had high hopes that the new guy in charge was going to set things right. After all, he was supposed to be this fanatical comics fan who really wanted to prioritize getting the characters down in clix form as accurately as possible. And I was hoping that would mean something.

Well, it has meant something, but it's something completely unintelligible to me, or at least, completely unlike what I was hoping it would mean.

This new angle on dial design in HeroClix is, apparently, economy. Seth Whatever His Name Is seems to feel that his major mandate is to battle stat inflation, which was, I admit, starting to get a bit out of hand... with the Icons set having delivered a Superman figure that had a 12 Attack, an 18 Defense, and a 5 damage, with Hypersonic Speed and Impervious, the insatiable hordes of power gamers -- folks I generally refer to as cheese-dogs -- were already starting to clamor for more. Better. Faster. Stronger. Each set, it seemed, had to outdo the last. If there was a fig with insanely high stats and powers in one set, then there had to be at least one fig in the next set that went even higher... right?

Such expectations are madness and folly, and quickly lead to a game where figures from older sets become useless and unplayable when stacked up against the powerhouses coming out in the latest edition. Clearly, something had to be done, and I acknowledge that. However, the action taken by WK in their latest two sets, Armor Wars and Collateral Damage, and now, from what we've seen, in the upcoming one, Sinister, seems to me to be somewhat overdrastic -- nowadays, it seems, everybody has an Attack Value of 9.

Okay, not everyone. It just seems that way. Here's a rough comparison I just ginned up, using the search features over at the WizKids site --

ICONS (last DC set not designed by current designer)

84 Total pieces
35 pieces have a 10 attack value (3 of these are LEs, and not available in boosters)
10 pieces have an 11 attack value (1 LE)
2 pieces have a 12 attack value (no LEs)

COLLATERAL DAMAGE (first DC set designed by current designer)

138 total pieces
30 pieces have a 10 AV (6 of these are LEs)
6 pieces have an 11 AV (1 LE)
2 pieces have a 12 AV (1 LE)

FANTASTIC FORCES (last Marvel set not designed by current designer)

126 total pieces
49 pieces have a 10 AV
13 pieces have an 11 AV
4 pieces have a 12 AV
(LEs were included in booster packs for this set, so all pieces were available to the casual collector)

ARMOR WARS (first Marvel set designed by current designer)

140 total pieces
43 pieces have a 10 AV (14 LEs) (!!)
12 pieces have an 11 AV (3 LEs)
2 pieces have a 12 AV (1 LE)

Laid out like this, the trend is pretty unmistakeable. Not only are there fewer high attack pieces per set, but there are FAR fewer per set proportionally -- and a much higher percentage of the few high attack pieces are not available in boosters, and thus, much harder to obtain.

The trend seems to be continuing in Sinister, where the vast majority of dials we've seen so far seem to top out at 9. This is a direct contrast to only a few sets ago; in Fantastic Forces, for example, even a relative loser of a character like the Shocker had a 10 attack value on his Experienced and Veteran dials, while in Sinister, master warriors like The Swordsman start with an 8 attack value (on the rookie) and reach apogee with the now apparently standard 9 on his experienced and vet dials.

Yes, 9 is the new 10. And honestly, I don't like it. I admit, it could be an emotional thing. In previous sets, it's very possible (I don't feel like doing more searches right now) that the majority of figures had attack values of 10 at some point on their dials, and I didn't notice that because it didn't bother me. To me, 10 is a perfectly acceptable stat... a bit weak, perhaps, for characters that should have greater accuracy than that, like Batman, or Iron Man, or weaponsmasters like Green Arrow or Hawkeye... but, well, it's 2 digits, and you can hit a great many figures with a less than average dice roll when you're starting out with a 10. And I tend to have very poor luck with any random chance factor in any game -- dice, card draw, whatever -- so to me, being able to hit something on an average roll or less is a prized attribute. And I doubt I'm the only gamer out there who feels that way.

With the general attack value dropping to 9, though, the odds just got significantly worse for those of us who can't count on our dice to do anything special for us at any given time. With a 9, you need an average roll to hit a 16 defense, a better than average roll to hit a 17. If someone slaps down one of the relatively few figs that has an 18 defense, things look bleak indeed for those stuck at 9. Go much higher than that... as an elite few figs can and do... and honestly, you may as well tip your figures over and go get a Pepsi. Which is to say, if you sit down at a table with a lot of your brand new figs you just can't wait to play, most or all of which have attack values of 9, and the guy across the table from you whips out a Kingdom Come Flash... that pain you feel is the fork he just stuck in your arm, because you're done.

So I don't like it. I don't like it one damned bit. When you attack someone in this game, it's extremely frustrating to roll and miss. Now, we all experience that frustration several times a game, and it bites, but it tends to be balanced by, hopefully, at least an equal number of times you roll and hit, which is very sweetly satisfying (unless the dickhead across the table makes his Impervious or Super Senses roll and negates all your damage, but that's what Outwit is for). But even more than the simple game mechanics implicit in the change, I hate it for another reason -- it shortchanges characters who don't deserve it.

Fighting stat inflation is one thing. Taking competent characters and turning them into hopeless goobers, on the other hand, is something else entirely.


Take, for example, this little fella here --

This the Swordsman, a classic character with a rich history reaching deep into Marvel's Silver Age. When he was first introduced he was an amoral mercenary type, a master of his weapon, one of the finest warriors in the world. The Mandarin hired him to infiltrate the Avengers, in hopes that this would give Swordsman opportunity to eventually kill Iron Man. In exchange, Mandarin somehow built a great many magical and advanced technological devices into Swordsman's weapon, giving him an array of offensive capacities and making him, well, more suitable for inclusion in a superhero team, and more capable of holding his own against superheroes, should they get wise to him.

Eventually, after being found out and run off the team, Swordsman returned, down on his luck, hunted by enemies, seeking redemption. The Avengers, probably more out of pity than anything else, let him rejoin the roster, along with his girlfriend at the time, mysterious Vietnamese super-martial artist, half assed mystic, and former Numma One BJ Girl Mantis. Swordsman did well at first as an Avenger, which is to say, in his first issue back, writer Steve Englehart gave us a montage shot showing Swordsman being quite effective against a variety of threats we'd never seen before and would never see again. Later on, he began to feel sorry for himself and his performance levels slacked off. In the end, though, he was instrumental in leading the Avengers to stop Kang's attempt to acquire the Celestial Madonna and through her child, rule the heavens (don't ask), and he finally sacrificed himself heroically to save Mantis from Kang's wrath.

There have been a couple of other characters called Swordsman since this. One was an alternate dimensional doppelganger created by Bob Harras during his run on Avengers in the 1990s. This Swordsman looked a great deal like our Swordsman, and seemed to have similar abilities, but we never found out much about him. He and his girlfriend Magdalene hung with the Avengers for a year or so, and then Kurt Busiek shuffled them off to another dimension with the Squadron Supreme, and that's the last we've seen of them.

Then there's the current Swordsman, some nutjob running around in an entirely different costume in Thunderbolts. He's the son or the nephew of some villain and I can't remember right now what his deal is but he's not, to my mind, really much of a Swordsman at all.


While the original Swordsman wasn't even remotely a likable character, he was an integral part of one of my favorite runs of Avengers, and the issue where he dies saving Mantis, Giant Size Avengers #2, is probably my favorite superhero comic of all time. So I've long wanted to see him show up as a HeroClix figure, and I was elated to discover he'd be included in Sinister.

Then I saw his dials.

To the right you can see the Rookie Swordsman, as defined by WizKids. He costs a walloping 20 points, which very nearly makes him a pog. His powers, for those of you who have read this far for some reason without knowing how to read WK's colored power charts, are Leap-Climb, Flurry, and Close Combat Expert. Leap-Climb let's a character get around a HeroClix map board without worrying about different elevations of terrain; Flurry let's a character make two Close Combat Attacks a turn instead of 1, Close Combat Expert adds 2 to any damage done by a Close Combat attack.

Giving Swordsman Leap-Climb is... well, it's troublesome, because he's never been the kind who jumps from rooftop to rooftop. On the other hand, we have seen him take some very long falls in comics and roll to his feet uninjured; in one early issue of Englehart's run, he tells the Valkyrie (while fighting her) that one needs to learn to take long falls in this business; it was one of the first things he picked up. So... okay, he can have some Leap Climb, although for someone as generally swaggering and macho as the Swordsman, I think Charge would have been a better choice.

Flurry and CCE are fine; the Swordsman should have both. But look at those horrible stats! This guy is a master of his weapon and he needs to roll above average to hit anyone with a 16 (which is to say, above average, but not uncommon) defense? He needs a 10 (on two 6 sided dice) to hit the clix version of Iron Fist! This is a guy who was one of the finest fighters in the world, who was hired to take on the Avengers? Come on. I can see Mandarin hiring this goober to wash his lackeys, maybe. But to fight the Avengers? No way.

Nearly as troubling as the stats is the rookie level's lack of any range strike or attack powers. This would seem to indicate that this is the Swordsman as he existed before Mandarin gimmicked up his sword, which is to say, as he was for about six panels in his first appearance. Why would you make a fig out of this guy? It's like making a figure out of Peter Parker, just before he got bitten by the radioactive spider, or of a 7 year old Bruce Wayne. This is obnoxiously stupid. The rookie Swordsman should be a bad guy, and maybe his stats shouldn't be quite as good as his later levels, but it should be the guy who nearly beat the Avengers.

And, to reflect that the rookie is a bad guy, I think he should have gotten a villainous TA of some sort. No, Swordsman never worked for Dr. Doom, and no, he was never a Master of Evil, but Minions of Doom and Masters of Evil TAs have been given to other figures that were never officially part of those factions, just as the Avengers TA is given to Thunderbolts and Alpha Flight characters. (On a side note -- this exasperates the crap out of me. How much money is it going to cost WizKids to create specific TAs for specific teams? Fobbing Alpha Flight and Tbolts off with the Avengers TA sucks.)


Okay, the rookie reeks, granted. But maybe the next two levels are better. Let's see the Experienced Swordsman --

Well... you can't see it here, but the Experienced has the Avengers TA on his dial, which is as it should be. WK has gotten very stingy with giving out the Avengers TA (as we'll see with Swordsman's next level), because they gave us a Feat Card that works very well with it, so now they don't like putting it out too much. I can understand that, but characters that deserve the TA should get it. In this case, Swordsman has it, and that's fine. But that dial...!

Swordsman's sword, at this point in his career, has an array of powers that are, honestly, just mind boggling. (It's fairly obvious that Stan Lee decided to create a character like Hawkeye or Green Arrow -- the archetypical superhero-archer, who fires gimmicky arrows with great accuracy -- with a different weapon, and since it would have been cumbersome to have a character hauling a few dozen different swords around, he simply built a lot of different gimmicks into the Swordsman's blade.) How they work I could not tell you, and why the sword hasn't run out of charges, or had its battery go flat, in all the years since Mandarin first charged it up, I have no idea, as well. But Swordsman has demonstrated over his career the ability to fire beams of pure force out of his weapon, magnetic attraction beams, heat rays, freezing rays, paralysis rays -- he even had a sleep gas attack in there, once.

You can't really reproduce this in detail with WizKids's power card, but still, you could justify a great many powers with this -- Energy Explosion, Incapacitate, Smoke Cloud, Poison. And if you want Swordsman to have a power that bypasses an opponent's damage abatement powers, you can always hang an Armor Piercing on him. And he does have a few clicks of Incapacitate, which is a good all purpose power to simulate many of the effects the sword can create -- put a Stunning Blow on his so he can do damage with an Incapacitate attack as well, and he'd be pretty well set there.

But that dark blue power you see in his second attack slot? That's a power called Psychic Blast, and that makes no sense to me at all.

Look, I acknowledge -- a character with Psychic Blast doesn't have to be Psychic. This is one of those powers where the name isn't as important as the game mechanic, which is to do non-reducible damage (damage that cuts through all damage abatement powers) at range. So I'm not saying "Well, Swordsman isn't psychic, he shouldn't have Psychic Blast". What I am saying is, well, Swordsman doesn't HAVE any powers that can get 3 clicks of damage past, say, Iron Man's armor or Thor's Invulnerability. 1 click of damage, okay... he could do that with a gas attack or something; and again, that's what Armor Piercing is for. But 3 clicks? No. Psychic Blast (or Piercing Blast, as Mike Norton calls it) is just wrong for the Swordsman. His weapon can't wound a god or bypass the best cybernetic armor in the galaxy. He simply doesn't have that capacity built into it.

And, again, that attack is just wrong. He gets the ubiquitous 9 Attack Value, for one click, and then he's down to an 8 or less and the only thing he can cut with that sword is a bouquet of daisies for Mantis. Hey, buddy, whoever you are... the Swordsman called. He wants his costume back.

But what about the Vet? Maybe he'll redeem the whole REV. After all, hardly anyone plays any level of a REV but the Vet anyway, unless there's a really good reason not to (like Black Canary's Vet not having any range strike, because by that point she's lost her sonic scream powers).
Hmmm. Well.. the Vet hasn't improved on that lousy 4 range, which is sad, given that blasting stuff with his sword is pretty much all the Swordsman does. And the powers seem a little better, but..

Oh my God. The Vet... doesn't have the Avengers TA.

Now, this is ridiculous, and will not stand. Fortunately, under my House Rules, if I play a theme team (which I usually do) I can put any TA that is justified by continuity on the force, provided the entire force has that TA. So I could play this guy with a team of Avengers and give him the TA, and I will, I'm sure. (What I'm more tempted to do is get an extra Veteran Taskmaster, break open the dial, steal the disk of paper with the powers and stats printed on it, and slip it into an Experienced Swordsman's base. I'll have to remember that such a modified Swordsman would be a 75 point piece instead of 35, but I can do that.)

Still, leaving the Avengers TA off the Vet Swordsman is just inexcusable. It's the kind of thing that really infuriates hardcore fans who know the characters. If you're going to give us the fig, that's great; the only reason to do it is to make us older fans happy (the Modern Age comics fan has no idea who the Swordsman is, and unless he's got a 15 attack with HyperSonic Speed, they don't care, either). But that being the case, why do something this stupid, just to aggravate us?

All right, let's look at the dial itelf though. Hmmm...

Well... the attack is still crappy. If there's only a vague vestige of a justification for earlier versions of the Swordsman to have a 9 attack, there's no excuse for giving it to the Vet. (The Vet Taskmaster dial I referenced above starts with an attack value of 12, and, like this Vet Swordsman, has Blades/Claws/Fangs in his first slot. Now, that's the Swordsman, dammit. Taskmaster is a goober; if he can have stats like that, certainly Swordsman should get them.)

The defense... hmm. A 17, with Energy Shield/Deflection. I know from the threads at WK's boards that a great many cheese-dogs who have never even heard of the Swordsman are already drooling at the thought of pulling a Vet in a sealed booster tournament -- against other figs whose attacks mostly average around a 9, a character with a 19 defense against ranged attacks will be nearly impossible to hit. Now, it's been pointed out to me before, when I raged against Swordsman getting ES/D over on the WK boards, that he has demonstrated an ability to whirl his sword around like a helicopter blade and deflect attacks. Of course, he was deflecting arrows; I'm thinking this might not work as well against particle beams... but never mind, he can do it, so fine, he can have it. And I have no trouble with him having Combat Reflexes, which is further down his dial, and which gives a plus to defense against close combat attacks. The Swordsman should be very difficult to hit in close combat.

One click of Charge isn't enough, Swordsman was always charging into combat... but at least he got the one. The Vet gets no Leap Climb, so apparently he's forgotten how to take long falls (or climb walls) by this point, which is sad. He does get some Flurry, which is appropriate. Force Blast? (The purple in his Speed slot.) Well, I guess Swordsman can do it, and under my recent redefinition of the power it will be useful when playing in the context of my House Rules, but under normal WK rules, it's just a waste of ink and points. Nobody ever uses the power in a standard WK game; under their rules, it's nearly entirely useless.

The rest of it -- one click of Blades/Claws/Fangs, some Incapacitate -- that's fine. The final two clicks of Psychic Blast are just as stupid and out of place as they were on the Experienced version, but at least here the attack value is so low it's unlikely anyone will ever try to use them. And this dial is interesting in some ways; the second slot, with Flurry and Close Combat Expert, has the potential to see Swordsman dish out some real damage if he gets two lucky rolls. The third click, with Flurry and Incapacitate, could see Swordsman putting two Incapacitation tokens on an opponent that started with none, and if he has Stunning Blow on him, doing 6 clicks of damage, too... not too shabby, the kind of swashbuckling derring-do and effectiveness we'd expect from the character. If only his attack weren't so sad ass, I could get excited about playing him.

Now let's turn our attention to another long awaited character -- Black Bolt.

This is a Unique, so he doesn't have Rookie, Experienced, or Veteran versions. There's only one dial. And I really really wanted it to be a good one, one that would represent the Black Bolt we know from the comics faithfully and well.

A little background on Black Bolt -- he's the ruler of a secretive, super powered race of genetically mutated human/alien hybrids called the Inhumans. All the Inhumans have super powers, and most of them have freakish or, well, inhuman, appearances. Inhumans are neither good nor evil by nature; as with anyone else, some of them are good, some of them are bad, most of them are just kind of blah. Black Bolt and the Royal Family generally behave as the protectors of their race, and are fairly heroic and altruistic; on the other hand, Black Bolt's brother, Maximus the Mad (also included in this set, although we haven't seen his dial yet), is as bad as they come; a super genius with some psychic abilities who is constantly scheming to steal Black Bolt's throne and wife (another Inhuman named Medusa).

Black Bolt has a normal human appearance (actually, he's a total babe, judging from how women in the Marvel Universe react to him) and the inherent superhuman ability to harness the electrons in the air and use them in various ways -- he can fly, increase his already signficant levels of superhuman strength and durability, and project energy blasts that range widely in power. Unfortunately, this power is in some way linked strongly to his larynx. While he's learned to channel the electron flow in various ways through sheer willpower as I've described above, he has no control over the release of electron-energy that occurs when he speaks. Thus, if he lets so much as a whisper past his lips, the effect is catastrophic to everything around him -- he can knock down a skyscaper with a murmur, or level a metropolis with a shout.

He's also, of course, a regal, kingly presence and the natural alpha male of the Inhumans. He's extremely altruistic and very very fearful of the damage his voice can do (this isn't an uncommon trait in the Marvel Universe; Cyclops is also very afraid of the damage his eye beams can do, and other characters have similar fears regarding their own potentially uncontrollable abilities). We've seen him speak maybe half a dozen times over the forty years since the character's creation; it's always a last ditch measure of absolute desperation.

I'd have given Black Bolt high stats (for a Seth-designed character, the Sinister version has very good stats, but I'd have gone higher). I'd have started him out with some Charge and Super Strength, and probably a high defense to keep him from being hit, so I could give him one click of Leadership. (I'd have created an Inhumans TA so he could use a Feat Card called Inspiring Command -- the only good use for the otherwise generally pointless Leadership that WK has given us -- or at least given him the FF TA, like previous Inhumans Crystal and Medusa have had.) I'd have then gone to Running Shot and maybe some Ranged Combat Expert, perhaps with some Incapacitate or Barrier (Black Bolt has sporadically demonstrated the ability to form short-lived 'electron structures' out of the energy he commands), still with Super Strength, and probably some Invulnerability. On his last click of life -- and I'd have given him a deep dial -- I'd give him some Pulse Wave and a decent damage, to represent the option for him to speak, as a final, last effort. I might have even created a Feat Card just for him, something like BLACK BOLT SPEAKS -- Prerequisites: Black Bolt When this character attacks using Pulse Wave, quadruple his effective range and damage done. After the attack resolves, remove this character from the game.

That's how I'd have set up the character. Unfortunately, what we got was this mess instead:

Leave aside the little stuff -- no Super Strength at all, what the hell is he doing with the power Defend, Energy Explosion, or Psychic Blast, none of those fit, and, well, no Leadership, and Black Bolt isn't exactly the kind of guy who either Outwits or Perplexes anyone, so I don't know why he's got those powers, either, no Leadership... okay, this is fucked over with a dead stick for sure, but, hey, at least they got the last click of Pulse Wave and the high damage right...

...but what the baby jesus are they doing, giving Black Bolt Pulse Wave on his first two clicks?

Pulse Wave, with Black Bolt, is clearly meant to represent him speaking, with the uncontrollable blast of destructive energy that results to all around him. By giving Black Bolt this power on his first two clicks, Seth has essentially turned him into a guy who flies into combat screaming his own name like, I don't know, Space Ghost, or something. "BLACK -- BOOOOOOLT!!!" the King of the Inhumans literally booms out, as he rides the wild shrieking wind down towards his foes, and watches with grim satisfaction as they, and all their works, crumble into dust before his awesome sonic majesty.

I mean, seriously -- what the fuck?

This isn't the biggest disappointment of the set for me, though... at least, to date.

That would be this guy, right here:
I know what you're thinking. Why the christ is John Shaft a HeroClix figure? Well, that's not John Shaft, and no, it's not Samuel L. Jackson, either. That's Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD... as he appears in the horrible and mindlessly idiotic alternate timeline that is home to Marvel's Ultimates line.


Now, over there is what the real Nick Fury looks like, and below is the fig WizKids originally gave us of him, which doesn't look good from the angle they shot it at. But I have it, and it's really a very nice looking fig, and it's one of the first Uniques I ever bought as a single, and I was and still am very happy and pleased to have it, as Nick Fury is one of my favorite characters of all time.


Now, I hate the Ultimates. I hate them, I hate them, I hate them. I won't bother to go into why here, just take it as a given that I loathe the Ultimates characters with every fiber of my being, and let's move on.

I hate the Ultimates Nick Fury, the same way I hate all the other Ultimates characters. Every time WizKids brings out another Ultimates character in clix form it aggravates the crap out of me, and this one is especially infuriating to me. As with the Ultimates Captain America of a few sets back, what makes this version so goddam objectionable is that WizKids has made the dial much, much better than the original, or 'real', version of the character we were given.

Let's compare:




The top is the dial of the first Nick Fury, the real Nick Fury to me, from a very early expansion called Clobberin' Time. The bottom chart shows the dial of the new, infuriatingly wrong, Ultimates Nick Fury.

Both dials have things to say for them. The real Nick Fury gets a shorter range, but has 2 range targets, which is very useful -- especially under my House Rules, where Outwit (the black power on the Damage slot) is handled as a range attack. He gets several clicks of Running Shot, which will endear him to normal WK players, as Running Shot is one of the few powers that allows you to move and attack at the same time when you are playing by official WK rules. Unfortunately, his attack has dropped to a nearly useless 8 by the time he gets this power, so he can move around and shoot, but he won't hit anyone other than HYDRA agents who are already shot up a little, and maybe the Foggy Nelson pog. (Even in the old days, many characters were given obnoxiously and inappropriately low stats... don't even get me started on the first version of Hawkeye.)

Samuel Jackson-Fury gets no Running Shot, which will make mainstream clix players disregard him almost entirely. Under my House Rules, however, this doesn't matter as much -- Running Shot is nice, since it lets you move, shoot, and continue moving, allowing a fig to potentially dart out from behind cover, make a ranged attack, and dive back into relative safety again -- but, again, under my House Rules, all figures who have ranged attacks can move up to half their Speed value and take a shot at someone. So Samuel Jackson-Fury is okay there; he's as mobile as most. And has a longer range than the real Nick Fury, to boot.

The real Nick has no attack powers at all. This is rank. Look at SJ-F -- he's got some Energy Explosion (to simulate Fury throwing explosives, something he's certainly equipped with). He's also got two clicks of Psychic (or Piercing) Blast. Now, again, this power shouldn't be there; Nick Fury uses advanced SHIELD weaponry, but he doesn't have anything that's going to leave a mark on an Invulnerable or Impervious character. Some Incapacitate, to simulate a stun-beam of some sort, would have been more appropriate. Still, Sam Jackson-Fury does have the Psychic Blast, with a higher damage value than the real Fury ever gets. This in and of itself makes him a much more formidable figure.

Sam Jackson-Fury also has one click of Toughness, to simulate the SHIELD body armor that... um... he isn't wearing, but the real Nick Fury is. He has a higher defense than the real Fury (one point of Defense makes a huge difference in this game). He keeps that Defense for two clicks, and even then only drops to a 16 for another 2, while the real Fury starts with a 16 defense and drops steadily from there -- again, by the time he gets Running Shot, one of the two powers he has that is truly useful under WK's standard rules, he's got a 6 movement, an 8 attack, and a 14 Defense -- at this point, Dennis the Menace can take him out with an aggie from his slingshot.

The real difference, though, lies in the three clicks of Willpower Sam Jackson-Fury gets, starting with what is arguably his best overall click, his second. Here he pops up to a 10 AV, matching the best AV the real Fury has. He still has a 17 Defense -- tough to hit when you have a 9 AV, which nearly all the figs he'll be facing do. Willpower means he can push, or take actions on two consecutive turns, without taking damage, so he can stay right there on that click blasting away until he gets hit. He has a 3 damage with the power Outwit, which lets him cancel any one power from the dial of anyone within 10 squares of him, meaning anyone he has the range to shoot at. Outwit is generally used to get rid of damage abatement powers like Toughness, Invulnerability, or Impervious, but Sam Jackson-Fury doesn't need to worry about that rubbish, since he has (nonsensically) a blaster that will hurt anyone from Dr. Doom to Superman (Psychic Blast, remember). So he can use his Outwit (a free, automatic action under WK's rules) to get rid of other stuff, like damage avoidance powers such as Super Senses, or just annoying powers you don't want your opponent to have, like Perplex or Outwit or especially Probability Control.

The real Fury gets Outwit, too, although by the time he does, his Attack Value is an 8 and he's unlikely to hit anyone. However, I should admit here, under WK's Outwit rules, this power is always a nuisance (under my rules, it's much more limited), so any fig on the board with Outwit that is playing in a normal match has the capacity to be somewhat effective. (Under my rules, attempting to Outwit a figure that isn't adjacent is handled as a range strike, so while the real Fury's 2 range targets helps this a lot, his AV of 8 and his range of 6 make him much less potentially damaging than Sam Jackson-Fury... again, under my House Rules.)

Sam Jackson-Fury gets more damage all the way down his dial than the real Fury, starting with a 3, and eventually dropping to a 2, but at this point he gets Ranged Combat Expert, meaning that on a ranged attack he does 2 more damage.

All the way around, the newer, Ultimates version of Nick Fury is a more effective piece than the previous, mainstream version of the character. I can't tell you how much this enrages me, especially since the new Fury costs 1 point more than the original Fury. (You ditch all that Running Shot, you have a smackload of points to spend on other powers, I guess.)

Beyond that, though, I'm emotionally troubled by that Psychic Blast, just as I am with the Swordsman having it. It's a very effective power, but those characters simply should not have it -- and that makes me feel almost as if, if I play with those figs, I'm cheating.

I would much, much rather it was Incapacitate, instead.

Another much anticipated character included in this set is The Stilt-Man. His dial sucks, too, but I won't object to it; he's pretty much a goober in the comics and he should be a goober in clix form, too. But I'll be very pleased to get a fig of him.

All told, I'm mostly happy with the character choices in Sinister, but I've been overall more disappointed than not in how those characters have been defined. Looks like I may have to design and print some dials of my own...

The Running of the Grey

(A guest piece, here at the razor-thin end of Miserable Annals' guest-blogger April, by Mike Norton)

[Note: Written and submitted at the last minute and probably anti-climactic after the other contributions, this isn't a piece I've been struggling with as the month rolled on. It came to mind during the course of this weekend. So, indolence and circumstance make the last guest-spot of the month likely the least auspicious and most likely to include a dropped letter or even word, but all of that's more to my detriment than anyone else. Sorry, no refunds for the time lost reading it. Hopefully none of this makes me a terrible guest.]

I've been wondering if we're in some unspoken competition.

"We", at the moment, being Crypt Leak, Abbygal and me, though I we're all doomed to join in the race in some way at some time.

See, as we headed toward the weekend - the three of us having lunch together at a nearby restaurant on Thursday - the topic of parental health issues was on the agenda. Abbygal was going to be with her parents since her father (a man worthy of at least one entry to himself, though I know him almost entirely anecdotally, but it's not my place in the world to write much about The Rev) was going in to have a shunt installed due to an enlarging aortal aneurysm. Meanwhile, Cryptleak was heading back to his mom's place to help take up some of the burden from his brother who's much more local and been helping their mother -- who just recently took a spill down some steps and ended up with a compression fracture in a lower vertebra. No fun stuff there.

I, on the other hand, was planning on a more relaxed weekend, including going back to visit my mom on Saturday, take her out to lunch and to get some shopping done. She's looking to get some new curtains, so I was going to take measurements and we'd take care of it in the course of the day. I called her Saturday morning to reconfirm when Nick (the younger of my sons) and I would be heading her way.

About 40 minutes later the phone rang. It was mom, calling me to tell me she though the plans were off because she'd fallen and thought she'd broken her leg. She couldn't move it and she was in a lot of pain. That's my mom for you, though, more immediately concerned that I not waste time running out that way than, well, with calling a friggin' ambulance.

Call the ambulance, mom.

And, so, then she did.

My brother was there, and while he's been an asset to her in some ways in others, well, that's another piece likely never to be written, but it's fortunately not terribly germane to this piece.

I'm a good 40 minutes away, so I caught up with them at the ER, where the elder of my two sisters - who's also an RN, though working these days at a different hospital, was also already there. Cindy's one of the nicest people one could ever hope to meet, and in many ways is an inspiration -- another subject for another piece, and one I might eventually get to. I will note - though it's not important to any of the rest of this piece, that Cindy is a mother of seven, who is eight years older than me and began her work & academic career down the E.R. path seven years ago. (Hmmm. Maybe that "inspirational" was a more loaded term for me than I realized.)

Accelerate through the day and the triage tangle. Finally there's an X-ray and a prognosis: Fractured femur, high, towards the "neck" of the bone. Admitted. Before the evening's out surgery is scheduled for the following morning. Hip replacement -- they're not going to try to repair the bone that high up in a patient in her mid-seventies.

The surgery was this morning, and she was resting comfortably when Travis (older son) and I visited this afternoon. Tomorrow the plan for recovery - the whens and wheres - will be mapped out. (I'm trying not to focus on how the hip that was replaced is on the leg where she's been having knee problems, so recovery's going to be... a challenge.)

What all of this is bringing to mind is that, at least in the circle of us three, that we're each, undoubtedly, wondering at some point is how much of our own futures are we looking at thirty odd years down the line?

Certainly, thoughts of doing what we can to avoid perceived pitfalls each parent may have taken along the way are sound. There's nothing like having the child/parent roles reversed, with the wrong one looking bewildered and shaken, to scare the shit out of a person. No, no, no... I'm the kid here, remember? We had a deal, right?

So, yeah, one good thing is if this gets me to take better care of myself. Something else to think about -- but don't take too long, boyo! It's later than ye think!

Still, I wonder what we have to look forward to thirty to forty years hence - forgiving my brobdignagian presumption, of course - with what jokingly passes for healthcare here in the U.S.A. Oh, make no mistake, I'm not knocking the tech -- most of which is excellent and getting better by the day it seems - but I'm wondering mostly about the healthcare system, most pointedly as in the costs.

Oh, we can hope that the great demographic hump that is The Baby Boomers (the result of some wartime and post-wartime humps of a different sort) will prove to be such a magificently potent voting bloc that substantial changes will soon come to keep us from being written off and placed at the curbside as we reach what we, increasingly sarcastically, have called The Golden Years. Hope that no effort will be spared and no check of solvency and credit will be a factor in deciding treatment. Still, such hopes are more rightly termed wishes, and I suspect shares of WishCo (and, no, I don't mean her) aren't doing as well as Pfizer's.

It's such a huge task, I'll admit, but we have to get behind something. We have to bring accountability and a prioritization to government. We cannot continue to accept the word of paid pundits when it comes to the feasibility of universal healthcare for U.S. citizens. If money and resources can be found to send men and women off to kill and be killed for a raft of shit - for a list of lies offered like cards from the hand of a cheap magician (Pick a card! Any will do!) - then we can find it for a future with healthcare with dignity.

We cannot continue to allow people who are connected to almost limitless amounts of money speak to the mass of the american public and sell them a bill of goods they cannot afford. Lying, connivers who will smile and tell you "It's your money! We're trying to let you make choices the buy the healthcare that's right for you!" Listening to this from some callous, pompous prick who plays up a public image of being a good ol' boy - a hardworkin' everyman... who's had his every failure bailed out by the money of others... and here we are, in 2006... and guess what? Not only are we paying for more of his failures, our parents, children and very possibly grandchildren are, too.

I'm running afield of the healthcare focus, and for that I apologize, but after the "solutions" pushed through for Medicare last year it was inevitable that it come around to the current administration.

This year is an important mid-term election. We're the electorate. We can decide what the issues are. No, really, we can. We just have to push hard enough, to shout the messages loudly enough.

Do what the damned politicians have been doing for the past six years - in some respects what they've been doing forever, but it's become a high art in the past five: Scare people. Scare them with a future in which they're not merely old, but sick and told in not so few words that it's in their best interests to just go make their peace with God and decrease the surplus population. How can we miss? We have something real to scare people with. Look how far they've come with imaginary hobgoblins about how a third-rate dictatorship that'd been bombed back nearly to the stone age was an imminent threat to us?

For now, do some research on who's up for re-election in your state and who's running against them. If you don't know their records, then do some digging.

Next, start to look into organizations who have already made national healthcare their central issue. (Note: I've yet to carefully sift through the following, so don't take any of these as a specific endorsement. That's yet to be determined.) Physicians For A National Health Program is one possibility. Healthcare NOW! is another, each of them pushing for a single payer system of some sort. As you find other, better sources, please let me know.

Do some searches and start digging. Pull up what's offered as fact and compare it with what's being presented by other groups. You get plenty of junk email, why not get on some mailing lists that might be helpful?

Don't be dissuaded -- many special interests are involved, and those in opposition to upsetting the highly lucrative health insurance system in place are sparing no effort in making the case for change seem hopeless. It's not. We don't have to turn on each other in a mad scramble. We're not rats. Don't allow yourself to be turned into one.

Once you feel you've gotten a handle on the issue, go back to the list of candidates and write letters to those in the race. Let them know you won't be mollified with hollow promises, and if they have any sort of record on the issue find it. We're part of the most amazing information-sharing era mankind's ever seen, the growing challenge is to make sure that the information one's gotten hold of is factual. It can be a challenge, because juicy and/or simple lies often proliferate far faster than the truth, but not only is finding out worth the effort, it's a matter of Life, Death and human dignity.

We're all in the Running of the Grey, even if some try to hide it under hair coloring kits. Hiding it's fine, but this isn't a race one can bow out of -- well, aside from dying. No pun intended.