The Magic is Over

According to French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, "...the magic is over," for the US. In an extensive interview with International Herald Tribune writer Alison Smale the founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) turned diplomat allows that the next president of the United States will have a daunting task ahead. He offers the dismal benediction that: "It will never be as it was before." Regrettably, I am forced to agree.

As a frequent overseas traveler, I am concerned about our country's international reputation. George Bush entered office with a clear disdain for foreign policy and nation building. So it comes as no surprise that his now obligatory focus on foreign affairs is myopic, ego-centric and belligerent. It is shocking that his administration's attempts at nation building have been so costly and incompetent - creating more problems than before his intervention. What has come as an additional surprise is the amount of blood he is willing to shed, the amount of our national budget he is prepared to squander, and the incredible level of incompetence and corruption he will abide in his mid-guided adventures. Put quite simply, we are ruined. Bankrupt. The price of our government's folly is staggering and ongoing. Our grand-children may not dig themselves out of this hole.

The sad truth is that George Bush is going to spend his last months in office systematically making things worse on every front. You can take that to the bank. He's determined to see his twisted vision through. Neither Congress nor the bureaucracy seems able to stop him. An unstoppable, downward trajectory that will surely take him and his cronies to the darkest place in recent history. It is an enormous irony that in the face of such deeds, Americans still obsess about the victimless-crime of Eliot Spitzer, the ill-advised but consenting dalliance of Bill Clinton and the current mental condition of Brittany Spears.

Bureaucrat Has Virtually No Brain

No, I'm not talking about George Bush in this post. That's a given. Neurologists in France have confirmed that a civil servant who has worked for years in the French National Tax office has virtually no brain. No, really. It's true. Der Speigel carried the story here. The individual involved had hydrocephalus as a child, which was remedied by the surgical placement of a shunt to release the accumulated fluid on the brain. But not before the fluid had so inflated the meningal ventricles as to compress the remaining grey matter - where cognition takes place - into a small band around the inside of the cranium. Still, the bureaucrat married, had two children and went to work clerking at the tax office. Life imitating the comedic arts. This story is bound to elicit a few chuckles, and a few Duh's.

I am, however, intrigued by the conclusion of the physician involved, who said: "Obviously these few nerve cells can achieve just as much as the millions more cells that other people have." There's another side to this story and a lesson to be learned in that conclusion. Probably more than one. It has long been argued that brain cells don't regenerate. Therefore, as the argument goes, we only use a percentage of the gray matter we have as we need extra cells available for repatterning after brain injury. There is some debate in academia around that issue, as new evidence suggesting cell regeneration is in play. Nevertheless, examples like this one - and it's not the only case of its kind - seem to support the notion that just a few nerve cells can get a lot done. I'm going to stretch at this point, and suggest that this same model applies to the Internet and specifically to the blogosphere. A small plexus of progressive blogs, pulsating with YouTube bursts, can achieve as much as the millions of dollars and mountains of resources available to the MSM and corporate globalists. My grateful thanks to the almost brainless French civil servant for this epiphany.