It's remarkable that prayer and fear adopt such similar poses...

As the year draws to an end I find myself thinking on the commitments I’ve made in my life. Can I maintain the ties that currently bind and do I have the strength to make more? We all desire things we do not have or think we might enjoy a different set of circumstances but without commitment they will never come to pass. I wanted to improve my writing and so I created this journal but even this simple pleasure demands more time than I have to give most weeks. The family I started with my beautiful wife appears some days to be a monstrous commitment; a thing with an appetite so great that by nightfall I am stripped of all my energy and patience only to be left with doubt and feelings of inadequacy. I worry that I take more than I give when it comes to the friends I have committed to and in doing so I take them for granted.

I am not quite forty but deep in my being I feel that my life is at its half-way point. My capacity to change seems diminished these years. In my wild youth change seemed to occur by choice but now change seems to take place due to circumstance and this unfortunately is a far less empowering notion. A commitment to change is invigorating because therein lay the seeds to self-improvement but a mandate to change underscores the ineffectual aspects of your existence, over time it can leave one feeling windblown and on dark days even victimized.

Such goth-ridden ennui!!! Surely this level of introspection will hasten the decay of my still delectable nards! Perhaps I need to commit to a change in perception? A re-invention of one’s world-view has always entailed a change of identity in my life. I am not the boy I use to be but what manner of man I am? Not young, not old, but already carrying baggage from both destinations, I am marooned in a duality of video games and RRSP contributions.

As I’m writing a co-worker just came by my desk and inquired as to where he might purchase a pipe to smoke his marijuana. What an excellent non-sequitur! I told him that bongs might be a nice way to inhale - or so I’ve heard, of course. He said a pipe is required, something he can stow in his car. I think it’s a sad story because if you’re going to smoke a bit of dope then you should certainly be doing it with a loved one nearby to laugh at - or so I’ve heard. Of course it’s or so I’ve heard. It’s always or so I’ve heard…

It’s such a silly society that has been constructed for us to inherit. Is that a benefit of aging? Shall we too get the chance to vote in stupid laws of our own? The Pope, Hilary Clinton, and a few other idiots have been publicly speaking out against video games. Why must every generation have its officially sanctioned tool of the devil? Does no one ever look back and say ‘geez that fad didn’t amount to much after all.’ Where the hell were these alarmists when Heavy Metal came on the scene, or the hippie rock of the sixties, or Elvis, or the god-damned Jitterbug? Remember when dancing the Jitterbug was going to turn you into a sex fiend? My grandfather and I had a good laugh when he reminisced over that one.

It’s always something but what I don’t get is that someone like the conspicuously awkward Hilary was no doubt doing her best trying to fit in while grooving to the then much-reviled Beatles and now she’s liable to become the President? Alice Cooper was and still is one of the most insane, blood-spitting rock stars out there but now he’s a semi-pro golfer who runs a quaint looking pub. Anyone familiar with Gene Simmon’s rise to reality TV stardom can plainly see that the tongue-lashing front-runner of KISS is nothing if not a doting parent and wise old jew these days. If you and Hilary Clinton loved kissing the sky with Lucy Diamond or whatever the fuck you kids did for kicks back then, why would you shit on its modern contemporaries today? You turned out just fine, didn’t you? Or is there something you’re not telling us?

Hey have I stumbled on the cure for my blues? Should I commit to nothing less than changing the world in order to give my life new meaning? It’s a thought that fills me with a sense of exhilaration, delusional though it may be. Will you, gentle reader, entrust me with this awesome and surely corrupting responsibility?

Don’t answer. This plane, I have landed it. It was a round trip, a full circle. Thank you for flying. Here’s some of the news I came across this week.

I’m no girl but this face looks like it could freeze a vagina!

President Vladimir Putin has been fairly elected as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year and why not? He’s been everywhere and rooting for him has been a guilty pleasure of mine these past twelve moons. Putin’s graceful slide into the uncontested rulership of Russia proves once again that effectiveness trumps morality on the world stage every time. Nuclear frikken poison people! Tom Clancy didn’t have the balls to invent it in one of his books and we were too afraid to even imagine such deviltry until someone critical of Putin died from polonium exposure. Another female dissenter was shot dead riding an elevator. Who on earth could shoot a woman? It’s horrible, it’s monstrous, it’s cold-blooded in the extreme… I imagine it takes some true grit however. It all sounds very Russian, don’t you think? Anyway I found this to be an interesting read and the pictures are great too.

Sure he’s a cold fish but he swims in a lake of money!

Thanks to Marc for this supplementary Putin article that follows the fortune he allegedly amassed. You can’t begrudge a Soviet-styled power broker a forty billion dollar pay-off now and then, can you? Most would but I got a thing for leaders who fashion themselves after James Bond villians.

I hate to say I told you so but really I never hate to say I told you so…

Surprise! The United States is deeply concerned over the prospect of failure in Afghanistan. They can’t bring in any more troops and so naturally their NATO allies are following suite. You see, the world at large would just love to transform the bandit-spawning narco-economy into something less scary but without the required (here comes that word again) COMMITMENT it’s just so much ass-wind standing in for foreign policy. We white people, it’s true we’re the most awesome people of all but I have to tell you that we can be pretty damn arrogant most times. There are in total around 40,000 troops in Afghanistan and somehow these übermensch were going to change the destiny of twenty-seven million people, a great many of them for which the words soldier and citizen are interchangeable because they have been at war with others and themselves for decades! It was, still is, and the history books will condemn it as pure delusion. One line says it all. Our Canadian government and its armed forces leaders need to read this one line and let it serve as a wake-up call. This comes from the U.S. Admiral and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs:

“In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must.”

I would not play basketball with that kind of partner never mind go to war! The Canadian soldiers who have died and their grieving families deserve way better than to have done so in a second-rate misadventure, a campaign of lesser priority.

In my mind it is an unforgivable sin of leadership to entrust your military with a mission they cannot complete. Military engagements are won by making a wish list of everything your forces could possibly need and then doubling it. The commitment to this plan of action was far too small and in doing so blood and treasure was pointlessly wasted, to say nothing of our reputation as an effective and serious nation. It’s simple really: If you don’t commit fully, then you just don’t go, you find an alternative course of action and you take military occupation off the table. Our government paid but a pittance of Afghanistan’s true price in order to cynically curry economic favour with an ally whose pretence for warfare is even faultier than our own. In this our government has failed us, utterly.

The C.I.A. is doing nothing wrong but they don’t want you to see it anyway…

This issue is making news but stuff like this has happened too many times lately for me to think anything will come of it. I’ll throw it up for posterity and continuity however. So the C.I.A. took videotapes of them torturing Al-Qaeda members but then they destroyed them. I don’t think there is any reasonable doubt that they were destroyed because the tapes captured some truly monstrous behaviour. Some say the White House said ‘don’t destroy the tapes’ and others say the opposite. Lawyers are counselling all concerned parties as to their responsibilities and culpability, which really says all you need to know about how morally ambivalent the U.S. Government has become. Look for even a shadow of strong leadership in this issue, you will not find it.

Adorable sounding physics lessons can be found on YouTube.

I’m going to download these physics presentations from M.I.T. professor Walter Lewin over the holidays. They sound really interesting!

The Reuters Pictures of the Year 2007

Reuters pictures of the year are always neat. The one above is from the collection and is of a Canadian soldier seeking cover just second after his location was shelled. A thousand words indeed.

The men who read these books are now in my belly and boy did they give me the meat sweats!

I haven’t abandoned the news or current events entirely, they have merely had their priorities adjusted while I’m reading Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy. I’m nearly finished The Golden Compass and it has really drawn me in. I think Mr. Pullman has created one of the most exciting and believable child heroes in fantasy fiction and yes, I completely agree with you in that there are too many of them as it is. Lyra is a bit different however; she’s not the usual, cerebral weenie who finds her confidence and courage at the end of the book. Rather she’s something of a self-assured unholy terror right from the get-go. Lyra’s true strengths lie in her being an uber-kid; her vast quantities of determination and deceitfulness are the only tools she needs to overcome a variety of legitimately discouraging obstacles… Well that and a spot of future telling… Oh yeah, and one of the most insane combination bodyguard/all-terrain vehicle a ten year old could ever hope for, but still I think most of the credit belongs to her.

Nearly twenty years ago fantasy and science fiction were stitched together into horrid, clunky abominations. The Shadowrun line of books and games we’re forerunners of this Frankenstein-style genre-splicing. They thought it hip to have elves sporting assault rifles and I detested their products roundly for it and their other short-cuts to creativity. Writers have since had time to hone their surgical techniques and now we are treated to something far more subtle and interesting. The Golden Compass bends time in its own alternate version of earth. Oxford remains firmly in the 1600’s, London’s moved ahead a bit to the 1800’s, and the North Pole seems to have been catapulted into the 1940’s. It somehow works even if the end result is a Texan cowboy and a polar bear sharing a hot air balloon ride.

The reviews of the just-released movie are not altogether kind and at the time of this writing it’s getting a 45% on Rotten Tomatoes. Such is the peril of making a fantasy book into a film; the medium has a lot going for it when it’s kept firmly in the mind of the reader. Seeing a cowboy and a polar bear in a hot air balloon probably looks preposterous but having a writer set it up for you as a climax to an excellent adventure scene is an easier sell. When you read a book you don’t have it entirely play out in your mind like a movie; it’s a shadow version of sight, there and not, the visual intermixed with the sentence structure, all of it incomplete and yet somehow cohesive in the end. Fantasy movie makers must be careful to not make things too blatant. As well time plays a heavy roll. A book that takes you two or three weeks to read gives you ample time to digest the wacky and wild, there’s a rest period between meals. In a two or three hour movie it can result in way too much at once. It has the same effect as the Mandarin Buffet has on me; too much cheap food under one heat lamp, all of the combined smells turn me off the concept of lunch completely.

It has however been an interesting news cycle this past week so for the sake of posterity I’ll throw up some links.

Russian President puts the cool back in Cold War...

There goes our man Vladimir! One day he’s scaring the hell out of all Europe and on the next he sweeps his party into a Parliamentary election victory with an impressive 64%. Plus have you seen him without a shirt on? Weapon of Mass Seduction more like it! With the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty now serving as Putin’s toilet paper the Russians are free to move tanks, jets, and helicopters wherever they please throughout their western regions. I hope the European Union enjoyed their time negotiating with Russia as some kind of spent drunken has-been because those days are over.

Hugo Chavez can't get ahead in politics. Get it? It's a PUN!

Chavismo looks to be in need of Viagra. I just had to post his picture. Look to that massive, swollen, torrentially perspiring melon of his and those teeny, tiny books! He looks like Ogre King of Hobbiton! He must eat one-hundred head of steer every fortnight! The little folk who serve him must have to butter-skate on his skillet before they fry him up a thousand eggs!

This is Hugo’s first defeat since assuming power, though he remains President until 2013. He was looking to fast-forward his socialist Bolivarian revolution by giving himself the power to unilaterally alter Venezuela’s constitution and remain in power indefinitely. It proved to be too much to ask despite the fact that he is wholly beloved by his people. The vote was close and chances are he will take another run at these changes again.

This, the Russian election, and the one in Palestine last year show us the full range of democracy, how one government system can result in such different outcomes. Power to the People sometimes has pretty crazy results. Russia loves the strength and identity Putin has restored in their hearts and for this he seems poised to become all but a Unitary Executive. It’s what they have demanded with their votes so you can’t rightly disqualify the notion even if it does collide with our version of government. When the Palestinians voted for Hamas the U.S. and Israel howled in disbelief, thinking that the servile Fatah party was the only viable choice. They never stopped to think what would motivate the Palestinians to pick what they have labelled a terrorist organization. They don’t get that things are just that bad for these people, that a free choice for anger and outrage is better than accepting the yoke of servitude in some sham of an election.

Hugo Chavez has given his people more education and empowerment than any Venezuelan leader before him. I find it both reassuring and ironic that in doing so his own people have come to realise the difference between the struggle and the figurehead. Chavez will be gone one day, one way or another. Their work will go on.

If Iraq sucked any more their women would be prostitutes... Oh wait, that's happening too...

Iraq has been rated the third most corrupt nation on earth, sitting below only Ethiopia and Myanmar, both of which I don’t think are even human countries but rather some kind of emerging simian stone-age empire. I kid, I kid! Just because a nation doesn’t have a space program doesn’t mean they’re destined to make my acid wash jeans for pennies a day in a sweat shop. I know these things but I can never seem to remember them. By the way acid wash is coming back and it’s coming back big because it’s awesome. Fuck you!

So you have to pay several hundred dollars to become a police officer in Baghdad. I’m trying to think of a better way, a more nefarious way, to cause a society to collapse in on its own moral crapulence but I think this is the clear winner. What do you think these new police officers are going to do on the first day of work? If you said: “Why Dyno, they are going to re-coup their losses of course,” then I would say: “Why do you bother pointing out the obvious to me? Do you think I’m some kind of idiot?” And then you would say: “Let’s not fight. I have this dime bag and it’s never going to snort itself.” And then I would say: “How can I not love you? Here, let me unzip that fly.”

Afghanistan: Big in the Bandit Business since 982!

What I find interesting in this article about the Afghan road between Kandahar and Kabul is that if you picked up a newspaper five hundred years ago you would probably read a very similar article. There are bandits on this ancient trade route still, and they will rob and even mutilate you as they did back then. What I don’t like about the article is how they spin the repaving of the road itself as a humanitarian effort. Read any military history book, building roads is not a P.R. move. You can spend a quarter million dollars on asphalt or you can spend a full million in repairs to your battered motorcade. That the Afghans get to use the road when American Humvees aren’t convoying on it is purely incidental. It’s like when a fly crawls over your shit. Letting the fly do it doesn’t make me a fly-lover. “Go ahead, fly! I’m done drawing with it, it’s all yours.”

It's kind of stony but I would still eleven herbs and spice the fuck out that shit yo!

Its Dinosaur With The Skin Still On Time kids! They found a Hadrosaur with skin and muscle still attached and in good form in a bizarrely fossilized state! You get to actually see the cool dinosaur scales. Already this has given them corrections on what the Hadrosaur actually looked like, stuff the bones didn’t tell, like for example it has a meatier backside for the T-Rex’s to dine upon. It sucks that dinosaur’s became extinct because you know that they would be delicious on the barbecue.

But-but-but the nuclear bombs and the hating our freedom and the terrible terror!

I will surely return to this topic because the blow-back is even now huge and will not go away any time soon. The latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear weapons capability gave the Persian regional power a clean bill of health. They don’t think there is a program and they don’t think there has been one in years. This report was given to Bush in August but that didn’t stop him from war-mongering about nuclear holocausts and World War III. Already there has been downplaying and spin control. It is now clearly evident that the response Bush was trying to muster against Iran is in no way justifiable given the actual level of threat. Carrier Battle Groups are stationed off the Gulf of Hormuz, bombing campaigns are ready to go, and for what? No weapons, no weapon programs, nothing even close for years. It’s the lies of Iraq all over again.

A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction...

Keith Olbermann is my favourite pretend-older brother because he’s been calling Bush on his shit and taking him out behind the woodshed for years now. His comments on this latest issue are hellacious even by his own excoriating standards. I have never heard anyone speak about a world leader in these terms in my life! You can watch the show or read the transcript. It is a scorcher!