Muz be election time, Miz Beaver

People are startin' to kinda wonder what happened to that towel-head we were spozed to be chasin' down in hot pursuit last year, or when was it, five years ago? Whoops, better snip the leader on that dead fish so it doesn't stink up the joint any further. It's time to float a story that el supremo boogey-man has succumbed to some disgustin' disease like, say, typhoid?

Ok good, now back to Iraq.

Whoops, hold your whiskers there, Gin-Rummy, you rascal you, and refocus your peepers on that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad evil-doer, the scourge of the United National Doggy Biscuit Festival. Oh you are such a good boy today! Yes you are! Go fetch me a few of those missile cruisers 'n' submarines, and make it look like, you know, we're serious about this nuclear whatever-whatever, ok? But don't alarm the electorate, and here's a nice doggy biscuit. Wolf! Wolf!

Joking aside, I don't believe the report that Bin Laden is dead of typhoid in a remote area of Pakistan. We've heard it all before. But as to the question of whether the nuclear armada steaming toward Iran is a bluff or preparation for an actual attack, it's anybody's guess. We've actually been promised another October surprise this year. (They're not even trying to hide it any more, as if it was football.) Is that it? A nuclear bombardment of the nuclear R&D facilities of Iran plus conventional bombardment of that country's infrastructure as a last minute booster for republicans in the midterm? God, I dunno, it seems awfully far-fetched, but hey, whatever it takes! I wonder what's really in those missiles? Brioche? Phylo dough? (Reagan sent a cake.)

My big left toe

One day in early August, my big left toe started swelling up and became a red balloon that I couldn't fit a shoe over.  It wasn't painful, just big and very red.  A friend diagnosed it as Gout, a disease I'd read about in nineteenth century novels but was otherwise unfamiliar with.  Gout is known as the "disease of kings" since it results from overindulgence in rich, fatty foods.  My friend, a wonderful French cook, knew perfectly well that the only royal meals I consume are at his table, but he couldn't resist the opportunity to suggest that my health problems were the result of my diet.  A quick Google search told me that Gout is an extremely painful condition, so he was wrong and it wasn't the cause of my problem.  But—what was it?

Another friend, Dimitry, a physician's assistant at Maimonides Hospital, urged me to get my big left toe checked out, but I'm one of the people who thinks it's better to avoid the medical profession whenever possible, so I did nothing, and just hoped the inflammation would subside on its own.  For me there are two major problems with doctors:

1. Medicine is Ivan Illich's prime example of a disabling profession.  In his view, our reliance on doctors as experts tends to reduce our ability to look after our own health, so the more healthcare we consume, the less healthy we become, an important point with which I fundamentally agree.


2. Doctors always find more problems and tend to suggest drastic solutions.  They're like hammers in search of nails.  The joke is that if you tell a surgeon you have a headache, he'll recommend a brain transplant.

Unfortunately, the inflammation of my big left toe persisted, and then I discovered a large red and blue mark on the left side of my torso, an angry lesion that seemed to grow and diminish in sync with the swelling of my big left toe.  Sometimes it appeared as an amorphous red area, like one of those red-state/ blue-state maps of Alaska or South Carolina.  Other times it shape-shifted into perfectly concentric oval rings, which should have clued me to suspect a deer-tick bite, but there are no deer anywhere in Brooklyn, so Lyme disease just didn't occur to me as the culprit.  Nor did I remember that I'd recently spent several days working on the exterior of my mother's house, which is located in a leafy zone up north where deer are common enough to be regarded as pests.  Looking back, I don't know how I could have been so clueless.

But I was clueless, though I did finally gave in to Dimitry's insistent prompting and presented myself to the Bellevue ER, where the doctors were amused to discover Lyme disease in their midst, an oddity in the city that none of them had seen before.  Bellevue is a large city teaching hospital, and the main Emergency Room teaching doctor kept bringing groups of young acolytes over to stare at the prominent target-shaped lesion on the leeward surface of my body, so much so that the old Cuban stevedore in the bed nextdoor to mine suggested I start charging admission.  I was given a three-week course of amoxicyllin and sent home, but I had to return to the ambulatory clinic for several more tests to make sure the Lyme spirochettes were eliminated.

Meanwhile, my big left toe gradually normalized, but my General Practitioner had trouble figuring out whether it had been caused by the Lyme infestation, so he ordered other tests that included an EKG, and that's when they discovered I had a significant heart murmur—or rather confirmed it since the GP had heard it through his deathoscope.  He told me the EKG didn't look good, and ordered another round of tests, including an echocardiogram, CAT scan and catheterization.  The echo machines are in great demand at Bellevue so it took several weeks to get in there.  Now those weeks are behind me, the echo-gram is done, and the cardiologist has informed me that my aortal valve, the valve that meters blood from the left ventricle into the arterial tree, needs to be replaced with stainless steel or pig tissue, so I'm on the launching pad for open heart surgery.  (Like... whoop--dee--shit.)

If I decide to get the surgery, I will probably survive, since the statistics for this particular procedure are pretty good and they do it at Bellevue all the time, though there could be complications, but after it's done I won't actually feel better.  They tell me that I will notice no perceptible change in my overall health.  Of course I also have to find a way to pay for it, and since I am now completely asymptomatic, it is pretty difficult to wax enthusiastic about heart surgery.

Let's review, shall we?  Starting with a stupid little inflamed toe, I moved on to being diagnosed with Lyme disease, which is somewhat serious, but fortunately the doctors cured me of that.  Unfortunately, they found a potentially fatal problem I hadn't been aware of that, had they not found it, might not actually be harmful and I might be perfectly fine and would not now be facing major surgery.  If I don't do the surgery, chances are pretty good that I'll continue living for a long while, though there's also a chance I might not.  (The cardio-guy I went to for a second opinion said that I could have it done next year, "but why wait?"  He also told me I could drop dead at any moment.)

Am I fortunate that they found this problem, or not?  And is it really so important to live a little longer than I would if I don't get my aortal root and heart valve replaced with tissue from a pig?  (What kind of pig?  A nice friendly pig with a curly tail that has to die for this?)  I'm really not sure, but what bugs me even more than imagining what they have to do to temporarily disconnect my aorta without killing me is that I still have no idea what caused the inflammation of my big left toe.

 

* WARNING *

Space aliens have landed and are somehow sucking the cortex layers from the brains of randomly selected human earthlings.  Theay are replacing our high-level thinking materials with a substance that looks like green jello and appears to contain no neurons but can be remotely accessed by means of undetectable signals from advanced communications equipment located on the dark side of the moon.

 

Reasonable people & conspiracy

Reasonable people steer clear of conspiracy theories and the characters who espouse them, since they exist in a twilight zone of unprovable conjectures and impassioned beliefs that range from sincere and seemingly rational to batshit insane.

Reasonable people don't frequent the websites that go into the anomalies of 9/11, although such anomalies no doubt exist—the puffs of dust that emanated from the collapsing towers, the too-small hole at the Pentagon crash site, the "ghost plane" that was seen by witnesses in Pennsylvania—all of these things seem suspicious at first but one suspects they can be explained without much difficulty—the wave of downward pressure in the structure of the towers caused the dust puffs, the wings sheared off the plane that hit the Pentagon, etc.  In the end, one is left with competing narratives and no authoritative method to distill truth from conjecture, so one simply moves on since the cat needs to be fed anyway and it's laundry day and, etc.

I don't know if the Bush administration was just asleep at the switch on 9/11 or whether they knew something was about to happen and declined to prevent it for political reasons.  I strongly suspect the latter, but since I am a reasonable person and lack conclusive evidence, I keep silent.

But then, what about the possibility that the reasonable disinclination to get lost in the conspiracy labyrinth is an obstacle that prevents reasonable people from perceiving the truth?  There is always the danger of throwing out the good apples with the rotten ones.  After admitting this possibility, the next step along the trail of madness is to understand that the reasonable disinclination to go in for half-baked theories might itself be the cloak that shields the perpetrators from discovery.  Maybe they even planned on it from the start.  It's simple psychology—do something so outrageous that nobody would ever believe it, then blame a more likely suspect.  (This is, in fact, the sort of pernicious policy I tend to associate with the Likud.) The Bush crew is the most mendacious and cynically manipulative administration in US history and it would be naive to put such outrageous chicanery beyond them.

Reasonable people understand that we don't yet know the whole truth about the events of 9/11, but because other major mysteries that engendered conspiracy theories have never been resolved (the Kennedy assassination being the supreme example), there is a tendency to accept the lack of resolution as inevitable, thereby adding another layer to the impermeable cloak of mystery.

Having laid out my credentials as a reasonable person who doesn't go in for wild theories but who remains uncomfortable about official narratives, let me tell you about my own conspiracy theory.  I'm not interested in questionable points of evidence.  Rather, I look at the major events that have taken place since 9/11 and I notice the overall and continuous de-emphasis of Bin Laden as the evil perpetrator and enemy mastermind, culminating in the following headline in today's New York Times (online version):

U.S. Strategy Shifts Focus From Al Qaeda

On the one hand, for the US to shift focus at this point seems not unreasonable, since many copycat terror organizations have sprung up to follow in Bin Laden's footsteps.  Such small and loosely connected organizations represent a new force in the world, one that is irresistibly attractive to dis-empowered people who join them in order to reinvigorate their own dormant sense of imminence and hit back against the dominant forces that have long been oppressing them, especially the US.  But these groups have multiplied so enormously primarily as a consequence of the US war in Iraq.  If that war had not occurred and the focus had remained on Bin Laden and if Bin Laden had been brought to justice, then these small terror groups would not now have such drawing power on the "Arab street" and all over the Islamic world.

At some point, the following questions need to be asked:

• Why did the focus shift so early from Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein?
• Was Bin Laden allowed to escape Tora Bora? (See here, here, and here.)
• Was it necessary to identify a different enemy (Iraq) so that Bin Laden and all his associations could escape public scrutiny?

I must admit that I find these questions much more compelling than the minutiae of the 9/11 attacks, the more so since Bin Laden had such a strong association with both the CIA and the Bush family.  I mean, ... Gawd...

UPDATE (6/2/2016):  It's a few months shy of ten years since I wrote the above post, and I'm blogging again.  Over the intervening years I've changed my tune on this question of conspiracy because the physical, photographic, anecdotal and recorded bureaucratic evidence in support of conspiracy is now overwhelming and impossible to refute.   I believe, along with many thousands (if not millions) of other sane and rational (reasonable) people that it's imperative to reopen the case and to follow all available leads with journalistic thoroughness in full public view,  just as it is more vital than ever for the Kennedy assassination to be similarly exposed, but this thankless (not to say hopeless) and arduous work is not going to be done by me.  I, the Luminous Pachyderm, being of sound mind and body, do hereby bury my head in the sand.

Accordingly, I am considering changing the name of this blog to "Fluorescent Ostrich."

The failure of "non-existential" war

John Robb at Global Guerillas makes an interesting case for his contention that our conventional methods of warfare are obsolete and that now the western countries are learning that they can't attain their objectives through war because they don't have the will or resources to fight "non-existential" conflicts (wars of choice, not neccesity).  He leaves out any discussion of nuclear weapons, maybe because he understands the nuclear option to be self defeating and therefore unthinkable.  (I'd like to introduce him to Richard Bruce Cheney, but never mind.)  He enumerates the reasons why warfare is not turning out to be the tool of policy that the neocon fantasists imagined, including the fact that conventional military strategy and weapons are futile in the new asymmetric "4GW" conflicts against dispersed non-state organizations like Al Qaeda.

I wonder if any of this new thinking has made it through the endoplasmic filters that have insulated the executive branch for so long.  Former President Khatami has been invited to Washington, which is a surprising diplomatic turn.  Of course the know-nothing tabloids are already screaming that it represents appeasement, and maybe it's just a short period of (Condoleeza-style) theatrical diplomacy before Cheney gives Rumsfeld the go-ahead to unleash the Weimaraners, but let's be optimistic for a change.  I'd be happy to be wrong about the nuclear paranoia, anyway, though I feel quasi-idiotic.  Am I crazy or do I have a death wish, or what?  And what is all this criticism of Israel?  Am I anti-Semitic too?  I better watch my step or I might alienate my non-existent readership, and then where would I be?

Hell, that's where, just like that Jehovah's Witness preacher told me the other day on the subway.  He was yelling at the top of his voice, warning me that I was in danger of going there, and I probably should have listened to him instead of yelling back:

"I'm in hell already!"

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Labor day update:  I keep returning to the notion that the apparent outbreak of diplomacy we're seeing now is nothing more than a kabuki dance intended to show that no stone is being left unturned in the effort to avoid war.  If congress flips to the Democrats in November, there will surely be a movement to impeach for the high treason of falsifying evidence to mislead the country into the Iraq quagmire.  It could be that the Bushites want to embroil the country in another war so they can wrap themselves in the kevlar cloak of wartime emergency and avoid that bullet of accountability.