And for sympathetically challenged Obamabots who still worship their hypocritical Messiah, here's a little news from Obama's war in Iraq from the great war-reporter Dahr Jamail...

A US military raid of a home in Kut brought the deaths of a man and his sister-in-law, who just happened to be the wife of a local clan leader; additionally, four Iraqis, one of them, a police officer, were arrested. Protests erupted as angry Iraqis denounced the raid. During a funeral procession in Kut where the cloth-draped coffins of the dead were carried, protesters called the Americans “criminal occupiers” and demanded the release of the seized men. “We condemn this horrific incident,” said Latif al-Tarfa, governor of Wasit province, “It violates the agreements between US forces and the Iraqi government. Innocent people were killed and the city is now very tense. They were poor people. They do not cause any political or security problems.”

US forces denied killing the man and claimed the death of the woman was “accidental.” They also claimed they had full permission from Iraqi authorities. Contradicting this US military propaganda, Maliki viewed the US military raid as a crime that violated a bilateral security pact, and wants US forces to hand those responsible to the courts, an Iraqi official in the office of Maj. Gen. Qassim Moussawi, the Baghdad security spokesman, told reporters. “The general commander (Maliki) is affirming that the killing of two citizens and detaining others in Kut is considered a violation of the security pact. He asks the commander of the multinational forces to release the detainees and hand over those responsible for this crime to the courts.”

Make no mistake about it - there is a war on. The floodgates of hell have once again been opened, largely as the result of US unwillingness to pressure the Maliki government to back off its ongoing attacks against the US-created Sahwa, which have led to the Sahwa walking off their security posts in many areas, which has been a green light for al-Qaeda to resume its operations in Iraq. In addition, many of the Sahwa forces, weary of not being paid promised wages from the government, as well as broken promises by the occupiers of their country, have resumed attacks against US forces. Again, there doesn’t appear to be anything in the short term to indicate these trends will stop.

I think that Sam Smith puts it rather well.

Philip Lader, creator and maitre d' of the New Year's Renaissance gatherings attended by the Clintons for many years, liked this sort of language. Said Lader on PBS:

"The gist of Renaissance has been to recognize the incredible transforming power of ideas and relationships. And I would hope that this administration might be characterized by the power of ideas. But also the power of relationships. Of recognizing the integrity of people dealing with each other."

There is an hyperbolic quality to this language that shatters normal sense of meaning. Simple competence is dubbed "a world-class operation," common efficiency is called "total quality management," a conversation becomes "incredibly transforming," and a gathering of hyper-ambitious and single-minded professionals is called a "Renaissance" weekend.

Key to this language is its disconnection from what it is meant to connect: two or more people. Intelligent as the speaker might be, there is no longer much consciousness of the other person at all or what they might be thinking.

This has striking similarities to high functioning autism or Asperger's Syndrome. Key to the Asperger style is the constant repetition of thought patterns and the imperviousness of the practitioners' thinking to outside fact or argument. The technical name for this is perseveration which has been defined as "the persistent repetition of a response after cessation of the causative stimuli; for example, the repetition of a correct answer to one question as the answer to succeeding questions," an almost perfect description of what regularly occurs on your average Sunday talk show. A less technical but even more generally apt definition is "continuation of something usually to an exceptional degree or beyond a desired point."

Of course this little bit just barely touches the surface.

Read the whole thing. It really is quite good.

C

Congratulations, you have once again managed to successfully wage war against the imaginary strawmen you have concocted as your interlocutors for this edition of making up your own definitions for words to illustrate a point in your own little fantasy universe.

Calling people Obots displays a frightening lack of empathy. Perhaps you despise what you lack.

Anyhow, your usual batch of criticisms are universal. A casual glance over history reveals wars of conquest, expansion, and the building of an empire. There are also repeated giveaways to the elite class that reached a peak under Wilson with the founding of the FRB.

In other words, your scattered and curmudgeonly criticisms of Obama lack context. You make general criticisms of the American empire a particular criticism of President Obama. So it makes you sound like an acrid puddle of batshit.

I now await your usual highly personal and misguided rejoinder.

The reason we can sympathize with people is because we can empathize with them.

Theory of mind is the ability to recognize that others have thoughts, emotions and ideas similar to ours, empathy is a result of theory of mind - it is the ability to recognize that those thoughts, emotions and ideas are equal to ours in importance.

Empathy is the essence of our evolution of species, it allowed us to co-operate and communicate in ways that secured our survival.

Here's a word for this diarist to look up: puerile.

What a lot of anger going nowhere!