this is, to a certain extent, a leap of faith, me writing this, because i don't actually believe that anyone reads this blog, since i don't pimp it to anyone, even my friends. but i do believe that the logosphere (for lack of a better term) has something of a life of its own, and that an idea, once floated, can have an effect, simply by being out there.

i suppose what i'm saying is, in effect, that the tree does make a sound, even if noone is there to hear it.

so here's my brilliant idea for what to do about iraq. it's got a couple of moving parts, but it goes something like this:

first step, partition kurdistan and let the kurds have their own country, defended, if need be, by the same no-fly zones that we and the brits maintained to protect them from saddam. you never hear about it, but the kurds are the one good thing, aside from the actual ouster of saddam, that have come from w's war. they've got the beginnings of a representational democracy, enough oil to jump-start an economy, and the peshmerga for keeping their borders secure. sure, turkey'll squawk over it, since they love to oppress their own kurdish minority and don't want them getting any ideas, but maybe we can get the europeans to make it a part of the deal for entering the european union, which the turks would dearly love to do.

that leaves the sunnis and the shiites, who're already fighting a civil war, even if the western media refuses to call it that (kind of like they refuse to call darfur a genocide). whether we stay or not, it's going to get really ugly, and the sunnis are going to lose, because the shiites not only outnumber them by a factor of five or six, and have a few decades' worth of pent-up resentment from sunni oppression under saddam and his ba'ath party goons. we can't really partition them apart, because the shiites would get all the oil and the sunnis won't stand for that kind of marginalization.

so here's what we do: we relocate the sunnis, to america if necessary. it seems only fair, since we screwed up the chance for them to stay and participate in iraq's new beginning. sure, it would be expensive, but almost undoubtedly less so than maintaining our occupation in iraq, and it would buy us some much needed goodwill in the world, especially the middle east.

there are undoubtedly a million problems with this solution (just like every other solution currently on the table), but if we can obviate the sectarian tensions, then the iraqis have a much better chance of making it, and we can bring the vast majority of the troops home.

just a thought.

hurray for the good guys, by which i mean the less-bad guys. like much of the country, if you believe the pundits' spin on the exit polls, what this guy wanted was for america to dtmfa. not that i believe that the democrats have a better agenda. maybe secretly they do (universal health care, anyone?), but they certainly lack the cojones to enunciate what's in their hearts with any specificity.
no, the reason this is good news is because america, like capitalism, works by not working. we've seen from the disasters of the last six years what one-party rule does for the country. without the check of an opposition (or oppositions) with real power, ideology trumps practicality, and shit stops working. america is, first and foremost, a framework for settling arguments, a set of rules by which competing factions that don't agree can split the difference and find a working solution.
checks and balances. they don't call it the golden mean for nothing.
this is one reason i've always had a bit more sympathy for democrats than republicans, even though classic conservatism (the old school variety) usually has a stronger intellectual argument. the democrats (minus the radical lefties, who are cute and funny), despite their many failings, are willing to hear other points of view, especially from each other, and even occasionally have been known to change their minds.
another upshot of the election, i hope, is the end of base politics in general, and republican base politics in particular. extremists aren't very good at working through differences and making compromises; they kind of need absolute power so as to carry out their agenda without adulteration or dilution of any sort, and we all know how well that works out.
so, anyway, hurray for america. the system works (sort of, anyway, enough to correct itself every now and again).

it's been almost three weeks since i quit smoking again, but only in the last couple of days has it really bothered me. for most of the time, it's been like a psycho ex-girlfriend: i missed it some, but knew i had to let it go, and the knowledge comforted me, provided that degree of distance and insulation you need to let your better instincts rule over your animal desires. what always killed me before was the anxiety, that gut-level panicked feeling that something was horribly, horribly wrong. today that feeling has overwhelmed me again. i can't think, can't string more than a thought and a half together. and while i know that it's just my biochemistry adjusting, and that it's actually a good thing, since all this shit would otherwise have lived inside of me forever instead of being processed out, the knowledge is intellectual, lacking the immediacy of lived experience. it's okay. i know it's okay, and that in the end i'll be glad of it, but right now i'm freaking the fuck out and i'm not really sure what to do about it.
that must be why i'm blogging, since i never blog. i only keep this thing open because i really like the name i put on it. i was sure that i'd post regularly, even though my internet access is sporadic. god knows i've got more than enough to say on my favorite subjects, especially politics. some people follow sports. i think it's kind of silly how into it people get, but i also recognize that i'm in the minority on this, and i hardly begrudge people anything that makes them happy, that puts passion in their lives and gives them something to relate to strangers about.
i just don't seem to have that gene.
i tell myself that i'm just trying to be an informed citizen, that i'm just doing due diligence, but there's definitely more to it than that. my behavior patterns vis a vis the blogworld and the universe of discourse have something of the addictive to them.
after all, if i was motivated by the desire to add to the discourse, to actually make some effort to change the fucked-up shit, instead of just yammering on to whoever happens to be willing to listen, i'd be doing more than just spending hours on end in the coffee shop riding the free wireless wave to the land of them what already agree with me, at least substantially.
but what?

One thing the Bush administration says it can do with this meta-data is to start tapping your calls and listening in, without getting a warrant from anyone. Having listened in on your calls, the administration asserts that if it doesn't like what it hears, it has the authority to detain you indefinitely without trial or charges, torture you until you confess or implicate others, extradite you to a Third World country to be tortured, ship you to a secret prison facility in Eastern Europe, or all of the above. If, having kidnapped and tortured you, the administration determines you were innocent after all, you'll be dumped without papers somewhere in Albania left to fend for yourself.-matt yglesias

pretty much hits the nail right on the head.

because noone reads this, i am free to say what i want.

so there was this woman in the bar tonight.
olderish, but still hot. drunk as a sailor on shore leave. burnt down to core-functionality-only drunk. her friends had ditched her at some unspecified time earlier in the evening, but she was undeterred, still going strong.
i hadn't been working for a while, so i don't know anything about what she did before last call. kevin and martha were about, a rare and precious gift, and we were sitting on the couches by the fire, talking about this and that. martha and i got into something or other, and kerry-with-a-k came over to talk with kevin.
she was married, two kids, as later came out, when she decided to lay some truth on us, or something very like it (i'm sure it made sense in her head, and perhaps was quite subtle, but i'm getting ahead of myself). well-off, nicely put together, and trying to get laid.
she took a shine to each of us in turn. for my own part, i was unwilling to ask the question she told me to ask when it was mine to ask. it would have amused me to fuck her, but it wasn't convenient, and i'm not so hard up these days that it mattered much to me either way. probably better all around, as i was the only one underattached, and, as such, the only one likely to take her up on her offer.
i thought about it though, and under different circumstances i might've chosen differently. mostly i found her antics amusing. she was there because the staff assumed she was mine, when in fact she'd just happened along at the right moment to avoid being kicked out when the bar closed. i'd've been gone myself, but i had a new barback, and wanted to make sure everything went smoothly. i'd rather've been gone, back to my apartment to hang out with kevin and martha, but my responsibilities, or at least my working definition of what they ought to be, kept me at the bar, at least until close, after which there was kerry-with-a-k, whom kevin and martha thought i was serious about fucking, at least until it was too late for it to matter if we stayed or went, so we stayed.
in the end, kevin and martha left for the airport, and daniel and andrew went home for the night. when kerry-with-a-k came out of the bathroom, i called her a cab, waited with her until it came, and went home.
and here i am.