Last year a friend of mine in Germany sent me his Meisterarbeit about Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, and as you might expect (if you have any expectations about such a thing), it was a forest of Begriffe.

So many concepts, and such a difficult subject, now further complicated by 200 years of criticism and analysis! But it wasn’t exactly inconceivable that I might provide some aid and comfort for my friend, because I studied the first Critique once upon a time with a famous Kantian, although he never had a balkier student!

But as I began to read through my friend’s thesis, with a German text of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft and two translations (Max Muller and Kemp Smith) near at hand, an uncanny sort of unfamiliarity with what was formerly most familiar about “the Chinese of Königsberg ” suddenly descended upon me.

Did I really have a concept of a “concept?”

Leaving aside the difficult examples which have provided grist for the mills of nominalism and realism for more than 2000 years, and proceeding directly to Kant’s favorite objects of intuition and analysis in geometry, where every quality of a circle can be deduced from the definition, I still doubted that all those qualities were already somehow present in my intuition as soon as I conceived of a curve everywhere equidistant from a given point.

Did I already (or ever) also conceive of the beautiful connection between Pascal’s triangle and the four (or any number of) travelers problem, where all of them traveling at constant speeds on skew lines will inevitably meet all of each other if any two of them meet all the rest? It was hard enough to conceive a statement of the problem!

Worse yet, was it even conceivable for anyone to conceive of the higher-dimensional analogues of our familiar two-dimensional circles, the most familiar of all geometrical objects, but eventually generalized into a realm where anything like a geometric interpretation of those hyper-complicated generalizations may (or may not) be impossible? (This is a worm’s-eye view of the Hodge Conjecture, and for an eagle’s-eye view readers are referred to Pierre Deligne.)

Apart from this zone of ne plus ultra abstraction, everything concrete also conceals an equal inconceivability in its limitless particularity, every apple indescribably individuated away from a concept of apples which is serviceable enough for grocery stores and picture dictionaries, but only because almost none of the differences matter.

If you know it’s a Fuji apple, and it isn’t a rotten apple, or an apple with a worm in it, you know almost everything that you need or want to know about that apple.

So our concepts of concrete things are so dependable in our everyday existence that it’s only natural to invest them with a confidence beyond their everyday context, in a parallel world of Platonic Forms, for example, and not only beyond any possible experience, where Kantian antinomies return us abruptly to the here and now, but even more naturally into domains where we might have any amount of experience, but happen to have none at all.

And then, descending from the aerial perspective of Pierre Deligne and Plato and Kant, down, down, and down to the less-than-a-worm’s eye view of George W. Bush…

I wondered what that dim and demented little man had conceived we were invading when our armies invaded Afghanistan.

Was it only a shape on a map, where Bush or his tools at the CIA wrote “Here There Be Terrorists!” like a scrawl on some medieval Imaginarium: “Here There Be Dragons?”

And dragons exist! …although those nasty animals on an island in Indonesia only minimally resemble the dragons so beautifully imagined by Raphael and many other painters.

And terrorists likewise exist!  …although they only distantly intersect with our everyday experience, and by the time we recognized the name “Mohammed Atta,” it was the name of nothing.

But at one time Mohamed Atta was a brilliant engineer and architect with an advanced degree in urban planning from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg. Immediately before he disappeared into the Islamist underground he was spectacularly under-employed as unskilled labor in a warehouse.

And he hated tall buildings.

Mohamed Atta’s otherwise austere apartment in Hamburg, Germany, had a curious decoration. On his wall hung a poster of the black-and-white photograph taken by Lewis Hine in 1930 of construction workers perched on a beam of the Empire State Building high above New York. The city far below looks dwarfed and inconsequential. According to his teachers and former classmates, Atta believed that high-rise buildings had desecrated his homeland. In the ancient cities of the Middle East, the time-honored mode of construction was to build one- and two-story houses with private courtyards. The construction of towering, impersonal and usually ugly apartment blocks in the 1960s and ’70s, Atta believed, had ruined the old neighborhoods, robbing their inhabitants of privacy and dignity.

The ordinary business of terrorism is so crude that even American media can almost adequately describe it. Dig a hole. Put a bomb in it. Boom!

Mohamed Atta elevated this miserable occupation into an art-form of almost super-human power. Superman “leaps tall buildings in a single bound.” Mohamed Atta knocks them down, with nothing but a set of warehouse box-cutters and a few clumsy accomplices, like Zacarias Moussaoui.

To match this masterpiece of the art of destruction, you would have to cast someone like Richard Feynman in the dual role of inventing nuclear weapons and also piloting the plane which obliterated Hiroshima, and if your concept of terrorism includes the whole course of terror running backward and forward between 9/11 and Hiroshima, like Feynman’s hypothetical electron/positrons flowing backward and forward in time, in an infinite dance of creation and annihilation, from Big Bang to Big Bang…

Then it’s probably a concept of everything, and nothing.

4:05 AM somewhere in Los Angeles…

The last thing that I clearly remember is walking into a bar on Silver Lake Boulevard, and in a man-bites-dog scenario the bartender was trying to get my attention.

“Hey paparazzo,” he said, “I invented a new drink specially for you! You want to know what’s in it?”

“Five shots of vodka! Hahahahaha!”

This was supposed to be my last stop on the way to the Kodak Theatre, where Sandra Bullock would inevitably win Best Actress as the first female headliner of a movie grossing over $200 million, in her more or less irrelevant role as a University of Mississippi football booster so insanely gung-ho that she coincidentally adopts a huge, inarticulate, and unfriendly black teenager who is coincidentally a future All-American left tackle at Ole Miss.

This payoff for the relentlessly likeable Ms. Bullock would be followed as night follows day by Best Picture for “The Hurt Locker,” a passive-aggressive video game where Iraqi bombers mysteriously decline to blow up a bomb-squad honcho 800 times in a row, and nobody even wonders why!

It’s just those wacky Iraqis!

So now I’m at an after-after-after party with my new best friend, the inventive Silver Lake bartender.

“Hey paparzzo,” he says, “you want to know what I call your special drink?”

“The Oblivion Ha-Ha.”

Fossil portrait of a Permian global-warming denier

While our feeble President had already diddled away a year with a “healthcare reform” before he even proposed a healthcare bill, and achieved absolutely nothing at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the real problems of Planet Earth have suddenly gotten much worse, and “unexpectedly huge quantities of Siberian methane are being released into the atmosphere” in the shallow waters of east Siberia.

(The dark blue line that looks like a broken string is now.)

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics…

Nonfarm payroll employment was little changed (-36,000) in February, and the unemployment rate held at 9.7 percent.

The number of persons working part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased from 8.3 to 8.8 million in February, partially offsetting a large decrease in the prior month. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.

There was a little more bad news on the BLS summary table of unemployment, which showed an increase of 139,000 in the number of “discouraged workers” who have given up looking for work, between January 2010 and February 2010.

Along with the increase of 500,000 “involuntarily part-time” workers from 8.3 to 8.8 million, there was plenty of bad news, although most of the corporate media described it as “not as bad as expected,” and so on.

Some economic cheerleaders also tried to blame the bad numbers on bad weather, although the BLS had taken the trouble to shoot down this excuse before it got off the ground.

In order for severe weather conditions to reduce the estimate of payroll employment, employees have to be off work for an entire pay period and not be paid for the time missed. About half of all workers in the payroll survey have a 2-week, semi-monthly, or monthly pay period.

So unless you were a day laborer, or snowed in for at least a week, your employment status didn’t change, and snow won’t explain away the bad news.

Even according to Obama’s advisors, his economic “stimulus” has already contributed most of what they expect it to contribute to reducing unemployment.

The stimulus will continue to trickle into the economy for the next couple of years, but as a concentrated force, it’s largely spent. Christina Romer, the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said last fall, “By mid-2010, fiscal stimulus will likely be contributing little to further growth,” adding that she didn’t expect unemployment to fall significantly until 2011.

And in the same excellent article from the Atlantic which I linked above, Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson describes some bleak consequences of long-term unemployment for black communities…

“One problem that has plagued the black community over the years is resignation,” Wilson said–a self-defeating “set of beliefs about what to expect from life and how to respond,” passed from parent to child. “And I think there was sort of a feeling that norms of resignation would weaken somewhat with the Obama election. But these hard economic times could reinforce some of these norms.”

Wilson, age 74, is a careful scholar, who chooses his words precisely and does not seem given to overstatement. But he sounded forlorn when describing the “very bleak” future he sees for the neighborhoods that he’s spent a lifetime studying. There is “no way,” he told me, “that the extremely high jobless rates we’re seeing won’t have profound consequences for the social organization of inner-city neighborhoods.”

Unemployment in Detroit approaches 50%

Although 83% of Democrats (meaning “TV-intoxicated monkeys”) still approve of Obama’s “job performance,” which isn’t much different from approving of the “job performance” of a hockey puck that Republicans have been slapping around for 13 months…

Although millions of TV-intoxicated monkeys still approve of Obama’s “performance” as President, which isn’t much different from approving of Donald Duck’s “performance” as King Lear…

While the economy continues to shed jobs, the war in Afghanistan gets bigger, Obama’s generals talk about “delaying” withdrawal from Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of workers give up even looking for work every month…

Democratic monkey-economists are constantly paraded around the networks to explain how Obama’s idiotic “stimulus” succeeded, because without Obama’s idiotic “stimulus” everything would be even worse…

And the Democratic monkey-economists know that everything would be even worse without Obama’s idiotic “stimulus” because none of them can predict or explain fuck-all, and the economic melt-down hit us like a run-away bus without so much as one millisecond of warning from Democratic monkey-economists or the Democratic monkey-politicians who rolled and rolled and rolled over for Bush for eight long years.

But instead of believing all those ridiculous monkeys and their catastrophically discredited theories, maybe we should ask ourselves how many jobs the same amount of money as Obama’s idiotic “stimulus” could have created if Obama had simply hired workers for public works.

If we spread out the “stimulus” of $780 billion over five years, and hired workers at $30,000 per annum, which would give a working mom and dad, for example, a respectable middle-class income of $60,000, then 1,000,000 jobs cost $30 billion per year, and $150 billion over five years, so…

The same amount of money as Obama’s idiotic “stimulus” could have created and maintained more than 5,000,000 jobs for five years.

5,000,000 jobs for five years!

But instead the monkey-Democrats and President “Hockey-Puck” Obama…

Instead the monkey-Democrats and President “Donald Duck” Obama gave us…

An idiotic “stimulus” stuffed with tax cuts, and 4,000,000 jobs disappeared since January 20, 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as President of the United States.

Anyone looking around the United States for signs of unrepentant racism should forget about over-privileged American hustlers like Skip Gates, Eric Holder, and Barack Obama, and take a walk through the Pentagon, where our next murderous “operations” in Iraq and Afghanistan are planned, or the Congress, where endless billions are effortlessly appropriated for mass murder of Asian non-persons, even after nine long years of destruction and futility, or the White House, where a nauseating con-man and his tools promulgate ludicrous apologetics for racism and genocide.

And what does it mean that the trendiest, most up-to-the-minute excuse for the murderous and illegal American occupation of Afghanistan is now… “saving” Afghan women from the Taliban, which is exactly the same as “saving” Afghan women from Afghan men of any description whatsoever, since the only discriminator between an ordinary male citizen of Afghanistan and a Taliban militant is that whatever US soldiers kill is Taliban, and before US soldiers created the latest dead “insurgent,” he looked exactly like any other male citizen.

But we have an excuse for all that killing, we stupid fucking Americans who don’t speak any of the many languages of Afghanistan or understand fuck-all about any aspect of life in Afghanistan, and never took any interest in Afghanistan whatsoever until we needed a patsy for 9/11.

We have a wonderful excuse for mass murder in Afghanistan!

We’re “protecting” brown women from brown men.

You might think that this pathetic and obscene racist propaganda was first dreamed up by Laura Bush or Barack Obama or some other goddamned political trash, but you would be mistaken.

In September 2002 the Columbia Professor Lila Abu-Lughod published a terribly prophetic article in American Anthropologist about a species of racist propaganda which had already served as an excuse for imperialist aggression all around the third world, way back in the glory days of so many European empires.

Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others

As Laura Bush said, “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment… The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.“

“The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”

You heard it from Laura Bush, and would Laura Bush bullshit you? She used to be a librarian! She helped little girls check out books! (Before she became a mostly silent partner in top-down class war and genocide.)

But Professor Abu-Lughod had heard it all before.

These words have haunting resonance for anyone who has studied colonial history. Many who have worked on British colonialism in South Asia have noted the use of the “woman question” in colonial policies where intervention into sati (the practice of widows immolating themselves on their husbands funeral pyres), child marriage, and other practices was used to justify colonial rule. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has cynically put it: white men saving brown women from brown men.

The historical record is full of similar cases, including in the Middle East. In Turn of the Century Egypt, what Leila Ahmed called “colonial feminism” was hard at work. This was a selective concern about the plight of Egyptian women that focused on the veil as a sign of oppression.

No one doubts that very bad things have happened to women in India and Egypt and Afghanistan, and every example of brutality in Afghanistan for the last 30 years has been carefully catalogued by apologists for our senseless invasion and murderous occupation, and sanctimoniously attributed to the contemptible medieval theology of the Taliban and traditional Islam in general…

As if the glorious lifestyle which apologists for mass murder intend to share with the women of Afghanistan didn’t imply a few risks of its own.

For example, HIV.

While Americans are cursing the Taliban’s evil brand of Islam, and attributing every abuse of every woman who was ever abused in Afghanistan to the Taliban, suppose the Taliban turned the tables and attributed every gruesome case of HIV in the United States to the evil American brand of “secular humanism” or “Christian capitalism” or whatever other name you may assign to the mélange of greed, stupidity, and sanctimoniousness that passes for American culture.

The point of this analogy is… that’s how the Taliban see themselves, as protecting women against aspects of “modernity” like sexual promiscuity, and their “superstitious and primitive” religion may even inspire them to believe that sexual promiscuity may cause some godawful plague (like HIV) to descend upon the population!

So while “secular humanists” are bemoaning abuses in Afghanistan, the Taliban could just as well demand an answer to their questions, like…

How many lives has “secular humanism” sacrificed on the altar of “sexual freedom?”

In 2007, the CDC estimated that 583,298 people had died of AIDS so far, including 557,902 adults and adolescents, and 4,891 children.

And it’s just as accurate (and includes just as much context) to claim that all those lives were sacrificed on the altar of sexual promiscuity by “secular humanism,” as attributing every instance of abuse of every woman who was ever abused in Afghanistan to “primitive” Islam.

And yet this imperialist dogma excuses everything, and every time some lunatic in Afghanistan mutilates a woman, and every time Afghan children are murdered by American bombs and rockets and artillery, shit apologists for our murderous occupation smile their superior smiles and congratulate themselves for “saving” brown women from brown men.

But if you want to know what “colonial feminism” really means for the women of Afghanistan…

You can see it in James Nachtwey’s great photograph.

Note: Although I wouldn’t expect shit-head apologists for genocide to comprehend simple maps and statistics which illustrate the differential prevalance of HIV in Islamic and non-Islamic countries in the third world, other readers are referred to my diary on this subject, which I posted in December, 2009.

PIIGS is an unfortunate acronym for the relatively poor countries in the EU (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain), but the real pigs in Europe are now and forever the Germans.

The top German pigs have been imposing a reasonable facsimile of the neo-con agenda on their unwary population for about a decade of stagnant wages and increasing job-insecurity…

Especially over the past decade, German manufacturers — already juggernauts of industry — became some of the most globally competitive companies. Just as American firms did, they turned to outsourcing and overseas production hubs. They kept salaries down at home, with average wages stagnating in Germany for a decade. Germany still has no uniform minimum wage, and aggressive cost-cutting has resulted in more and more Germans laboring in temporary or contract jobs with lower pay and less job security.

German consumers responded by saving their pfennigs, and German domestic consumption crashed while exports ballooned to a trade surplus of $184.9 billion, second only to Saudi Arabia.

So the benefits of neo-Reaganism in Germany accrued almost entirely to bankers and other billionaires, while the rank-and-file repaired their old cars and appliances, and patched up their pitiful overcoats.

Harharharhar!!!

Even in prosperous countries, almost everybody gets screwed!

Meanwhile the PIIGS used their brand new credit in the Eurozone to borrow piles of money, expand government services, and increase public-sector salaries.

But according to the dogma of globalization, neo-Reaganism’s Democratic twin, all that debt would eventually be repaid by the rising tide of global prosperity, which lifts all boats, turns slumdogs into millionaires, and…

Harharharhar!!!

It never happened! Globalization was bullshit and top-down predation, and while Germany exported BMW’s, Greece exported olives, and went broke.

Now Greek government bonds are about to turn into junk-bonds, and that would set off a godawful chain-reaction, because the forward-thinking Eurozone is about to disallow junk-bonds (rated less than A2) as loan collateral, and German banks are holding a heck of a lot of Greek sovereign debt.

That’s the Trojan Horse in Berlin.

If the Greeks default (and junk-bond status for their bonds would push interest rates so high that default would be more or less inevitable), then German banks (and others) are faced with ugly write-downs, and aren’t you glad to know that this alarming possibility has produced a booming market in credit default swaps!

Bets by some of the same banks that helped Greece shroud its mounting debts may actually now be pushing the nation closer to the brink of financial ruin, Nelson D. Schwartz and Eric Dash report in The New York Times.

Echoing the kind of trades that nearly toppled the American International Group, the increasingly popular insurance against the risk of a Greek default is making it harder for Athens to raise the money it needs to pay its bills, according to traders and money managers.

These contracts, known as credit-default swaps, effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire: a default by a company or, in the case of Greece, an entire country. If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.

“It’s like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house — you create an incentive to burn down the house,” said Philip Gisdakis, head of credit strategy at UniCredit in Munich.

Now the Germans want the Greeks (and the rest of the PIIGS) to slash public salaries and services, raise taxes, and turn themselves into globally respectable poverty-zones, and Ireland’s neo-con government has already complied.

“I can’t even keep up with my own debts, never mind the nation’s,” Cullen said, shopping for cut-rate sausage at a discount supermarket he disdained to visit in better times. “I’ve got to spend 30 hours a week taxiing just to break even. Something else has got to give. I can’t give any more.”

Despite the pain its cutbacks are imposing on ordinary people, the conservative Irish government of Prime Minister Brian Cowen has won praise from the European Union and the bond markets for its efforts to cut debt, prices and salaries.

But Greece is resisting, mainly on the basis of a (slightly veiled) threat to default on all those bonds German banks have already swallowed, and it would probably be a very good thing for all of us if all the PIIGS refused to implement the draconian austerity program which the Germans (and their tools at the ECB) want to impose, and a very bad thing if Europe stymies its feeble recovery with a lethal combination of higher taxes and diminished spending.

Tax and don’t spend! What’s not to like? It worked for Hoover!

“This premature fiscal tightening is the route to the Second Great Depression” – or at the very least, a long period of economic stagnation, warned Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.

While the shit-head Army spin-doctors are bellowing about our next great “operation” after “Operation Moshtarak” has completely destroyed the little of Marjah that existed before we arrived with our tanks and artillery and rockets and supersonic bombers and Marines trained to kill with incredible efficiency…

While idiots on the blogs are blathering about the evil Taliban, as if you shit-heads have a right to make life-and-death decisions about Afghanistan…

This man must die, because we say so, we Americans, the stupidest fucking sons-of-bitches on the face of the earth…

We Americans who can’t even find Afghanistan on a map…

We Americans who can’t speak any of the many, many languages of Afghanistan…

We Americans decide life and death in Afghanistan!

While this whole obscene circus was celebrating the murder of at least another dozen children in Marjah and planning our next great “operation” in Kandahar…

While this obscenely stupid dog-and-pony show was repeating itself for the hundredth or five hundredth time in Afghanistan, after nine goddamned years of our obscenely stupid occupation…

One reporter for the Associated Press actually interviewed a couple of actual citizens of Afghanistan, and one particle of truth somehow found its way into the nauseating ocean of bullshit and outright lies that passes for “reporting” in the United States.

“There is no difference between Taliban and the civilian people. The Taliban are the rural people. They are our people,” said Musa Jan, who arrived a week ago from Marjah. He spoke to the AP outside a makeshift warehouse in Lashkar Gah where the government was distributing essentials to war victims.

“The fight was continuing when we were trying to get out,” said Jan, who said he paid about $35 for each of the three taxis. “That was all our money, and now we have to come here and beg.”

Jan said his neighbors house was bombed by an aircraft, killing five occupants inside, including children.

Sultan Mohammed who fled last Friday from Marjah said he had to walk for several hours before a motorcyclist gave him a lift. He said the Taliban fled when the soldiers came to his area.

“But who are the Taliban? They are the rural people,” he said.

Al Qaeda is gone. The “foreign militants” are gone.

Now it’s just villagers, rural people, their people, and us…

Their people and us with our tanks and artillery and rockets and supersonic bombers and Marines trained to kill with incredible efficiency.

Media worldwide are publishing photos of a massive suicide bombing yesterday in downtown Kabul, but what’s the difference between looking at those brand new photos, instead of looking at very similar photos of a very similar bombing in Kabul January 16, 2009?

What’s the difference between looking at brand new photos of a bombing in Kabul, instead of very similar photos of a very similar bombing in Kabul July 7, 2008?

What’s the difference between looking at brand new photos of a bombing in Kabul, instead of very similar photos of a very similar bombing in Kabul September 17, 2009?

October 8, 2009?

December 15, 2009?

August 15, 2009?

January 18, 2010?

And so on.

Ever since Marjah became one of the most famous “cities” in the world, I have been scanning the internet for images of it, and although I found thousands of photos tagged “Marjah,” or “Marja,” almost none of them show anything that looks like so much as a village, much less a city where somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 people are supposed to dwell, and all that my many Google image searches turned up was a few tiny photos of almost nothing at all.

For example, the caption under this image from the Indian Express says…

US Marines walk in a column as they enter Marja in Helmand province on Saturday.

It’s like a joke! Entering Marjah! There’s about as much evidence of human habitation as in photos that come back from Mars!

But eventually a few TV reporters entered Marjah, and since TV reporters have to stand in front of something, the BBC found something in Marjah for their reporter to stand in front of.

And that’s “liberated” Marjah, insofar as I could find any representation of it on the internet.

David Vitter, Harvard ’83

Anybody who criticizes the Ivy League and especially Harvard is immediately suspected of resenting his or her rejection from those ancient universities, but no such motive can be attributed to me, since I was guaranteed admission to Harvard when my grandfather gave them a cyclotron!

It was later revealed that this “cyclotron” was only a miniscule laundromat in nearby Brookline, Massachusetts, which my grandfather called “Atomic Wash,” and as if spinning washers and dryers didn’t already cycle enough to justify the cyclotronic hype on the posters my grandfather affixed to every telephone pole in Brookline, he added his own inertial mass to the spin by revolving around the laundromat on a large adult tricycle, wearing fire-engine red pajamas and screaming “I’m the Higgs boson!”

Luckily for me, I had already been admitted to Harvard before they inspected the Brookline “cyclotron,” and like every other legacy boy, I received an entire résumé of B minuses as soon as I walked onto campus, along with lifetime membership in every Harvard Club from New York to Calcutta, 12 hours of Berlitz training to master “Vocal Mannerisms of the Very Elite,” and all the rest of the “Harvard Package.”

The “Harvard Package” also includes a list of famous Harvard alumni, and it begins well enough with John Adams and John Quincy Adams and Henry Adams and other Adamses too numerous to mention, but sometime around the 1960’s it all went horribly wrong!

First came the geniuses who took us into Vietnam, like McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and John Kennedy (another legacy boy like me!), and when I skipped ahead to escape the Vietnam ghetto, I collided head-on with Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Larry Summers, Grover Norquist, Bill Frist, Paul Bremer, Mitt Romney, David Vitter(!), Doug Feith (“the stupidest fucking son-of-a-bitch on the face of the earth”), Henry Paulson, George W. Bush (MBA), and of course Barack Obama, and a better friend of all the legacy boys on Wall Street they never had, than Barack Obama!

But I still might have rationalized away all the damage my alma mater has inflicted on the world, by exaggerating the feeble counterweight of Harvard alums like T.S. Eliot and Eliot Spitzer, except for a very unfortunate encounter in the Harvard Club at an undisclosed location, where I noticed Doug Feith and Richard B. Cheney chuckling quietly together in a corner.

“What are you doing here, you Yalie trash?” I said to Cheney, and just before the Secret Service explained that an 800 pound gorilla sits anywhere he wants to sit, and threw me out the window, I could hear Doug Feith shrieking…

“Now who’s the stupidest fucking son-of-a-bitch on the face of the earth?”

And that’s why I hate Harvard!

From the Guardian…

Nato and Afghanistan government launch inquiry after planes fire on convoy of vehicles, killing at least 33 people.

Zemeri Bashary, an Afghan interior ministry spokesman, said the airstrike hit three minibuses on a major road near the Uruzgan border with the central Day Kundi province.

Bashary said the 42 people in the vehicles were all civilians.

Last Thursday, an airstrike in the northern Kunduz province missed the insurgents it was targeting and killed seven policemen.

And so far Operation Moshtarak has killed at least 19 civilians in Marjah.

And of course NATO didn’t explain how anyone could even think that you can tell the difference between civilians and insurgents inside three Afghan mini-buses, traveling down a dusty road.

This most recent massacre occurred in Daikundi Province..,

And it isn’t exactly the garden spot of Afghanistan…

But the narrow valleys of Daikundi Province are full of almond groves, and sometimes life can be beautiful, even in Afghanistan, after so many years of war.