Epic Vibrations.

Conditions: Warm and Timely.


DownFall.

Current polls indicate that Barack Obama leads John McCain by 7-14% with less than two weeks to go to the election. In response to this, the Republicans in McCain's camp are showing their traditional steely nerve in the face of calamity.

With despair rising even among many of John McCain's own advisors, influential Republicans inside and outside his campaign are engaged in an intense round of blame-casting and rear-covering--much of it virtually conceding that an Election Day rout is likely.

A McCain interview published Thursday in the Washington Times sparked the latest and most nasty round of Washington finger-pointing, with senior GOP hands close to President Bush and top congressional aides denouncing the candidate for what they said was an unfocused message and poorly executed campaign.
[...]

At his Northern Virginia headquarters, some McCain aides are already speaking of the campaign in the past tense. Morale, even among some of the heartiest and most loyal staffers, has plummeted. And many past and current McCain advisors are warring with each other over who led the candidate astray.

One well-connected Republican in the private sector was shocked to get calls and resumes in the past few days from what he said were senior McCain aides Ð a breach of custom for even the worst-off campaigns.

"It's not an extraordinarily happy place to be right now," said one senior McCain aide. "I'm not gonna lie. It's just unfortunate."

"If you really want to see what 'going negative' is in politics, just watch the back-stabbing and blame game that we're starting to see," said Mark McKinnon, the ad man who left the campaign after McCain wrapped up the GOP primary. "And there's one common theme: Everyone who wasn't part of the campaign could have done better."

"The cake is baked," agreed a former McCain strategist. "We're entering the finger-pointing and positioning-for-history part of the campaign. It's every man for himself now."

- truthout.org/

It's important to note that the election isn't actually over yet, and circumstances out of anyone's control can change things in an instant. But despite all that, it seems the bright young men and women at the heart of the Republican cause are panicing at the prospect of losing. You know, you can always better judge someone's character by their performance in a losing situation. But how did the Republicans end up down this road, sliding toward a seemingly-inevitable defeat after 8 years of war and terror, topics that traditionally cause people to flock to the 'Daddy' of the two political parties? Tom Engelhardt writes up a report card on George W. Bush's presidency, in where we started in the heady days of 2002, where Terrorists were on the run and the Great American War Machine was limbering up yet again.

The President and his neocon backers were then riding high. Some were even talking up the United States as a "new Rome," greater even than imperial Britain. For them, global control had a single prerequisite: the possession of overwhelming military force. With American military power unimpeachably #1, global domination followed logically. As Bush put it that day, in a statement unique in the annals of our history: "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge - thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace."

In other words, a planet of Great Powers was all over and it was time for the rest of the world to get used to it. Like the wimps they were, other nations could "trade" and pursue "peace." For its pure folly, not to say its misunderstanding of the nature of power on our planet, it remains a statement that should still take anyone's breath away.

The Bush Doctrine, of course, no longer exists. Within a year, it had run aground on the shoals of reality on its very first whistle stop in Iraq. More than six years later, looking back on the foreign policy that emerged from Bush's self-declared Global War on Terror, it's clear that no President has ever failed on his own terms on such a scale or quite so comprehensively.

- truthout.org/

From Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, The Taliban and Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Somalia, Georgia, and North Korea to simple global public opinion and the economy, George W. Bush and his Neoconservative hard-liners have in eight short years swept the board in epic failure and stupidity. Nothing less than a total reversal of the bare-knuckled tactics they introduced all those years ago have been able to produce any results at all (recent negotiations with North Korea bringing about the beginning of the end of their game of nuclear brinkmanship being but one example of that.)

So what happens now? It seems the entire world pauses as America goes to the polls, to elect either a continuation of the policies of "strength" through force, or change to a policy of respect and cooperation. It seems a no-brainer, but the 2004 election was a no-brainer as well, and look where we all ended up at as a result of that.







Groove Is In The Star...

A bunch of smart people have managed to record the sound of far-distant stars, and have put those sounds onto the web for people to, I don't know, attach to videos of cars crashing into aeroplanes, or whatever kids are into these days.

Scientists have recorded the sound of three stars similar to our Sun using France's Corot space telescope.

A team writing in Science journal says the sounds have enabled them to get information about processes deep within stars for the first time.

If you listen closely to the sounds of each star - by clicking on the media in this page - you'll hear a regular repeating pattern.

These indicate that the entire star is pulsating.

You'll also note that the sound of one star is very slightly different to the other. That's because the sound they make depends on their age, size and chemical composition.

The technique, called "stellar seismology", is becoming increasingly popular among astronomers because the sounds give an indication of what is going on in the stars' interior.

- news.bbc.co.uk/

Well, it's got a nice pitch, but you can't dance to it.


- Peace out