I have this trick I do every morning. I wake up with a ringing in my ears and a crushing weight on my chest. But then as I wake up a little more, maybe have some coffee, I conjure up a personal reality distortion field and the weight is lifted and I can go about my business. And business is pretty good, so who am I to complain?

However, for some reason (jetlag?), I couldn't quite pull the trick off this morning. And unfortunately, it's that trick that for the most part keeps political blathering off of pcal.net.

I have nothing new to add to the discussion of the unmitigated disaster that is our current foreign policy. As they say, opinions are like assholes, and for the most of the current century, 300 million of them have been on prominent display in the US. I have no illusions that anyone wants to take a closer look at mine.

However, I will discuss someone else's opinion, one which appeared on the op-ed page of the Times yesterday. I do this mainly because it introduced some unusual disturbances into my reality distortion field that are still with me today.

Almost in passing, the writer describes having a number of sociologist- and anthropologist-type friends who had done studies on the middle east. One of these studies was focused on producing and analyzing the following bit of knowledge:

The revelatory power of this tiny fact is simply amazing. (Fill in the blanks: the Iraqi population is structurally incapable of setting aside clan loyalties and embracing a nationalist democracy). In capsule form, the sociologist offers an explanation for our current failures in Iraq. We see why we never had a chance of succeeding in the first place.

20/20 hindsight, you may say, but this argument was advanced (if less succinctly) by many of us well before March of 2003. Evidently, most voters at the time did not find the argument persuasive.

And that is where I find the source of the recent disturbance in my distortion field.

For whatever reason, in recent decades it has become fashionable in this country to deride the liberal arts. (Homeless guy asks: "Socratic dialog, anyone?" Hardie-har-har). But today, I can't help but wonder that if it were even just a bit less so, that if a few thousand voters in some swing state somewhere were just a little less inclined to reflexively reject conclusions of the so-called 'soft sciences,' then maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't be so completely and utterly, miserably, despairingly fucked as we are now in Iraq.

More feelgood uselessness from the whitehouse today about getting tough with ID thieves. A task force, hooboy. Goes perfectly with that wonderfully useless legislation we got a couple of years back.

And still not a peep about anything that will actually solve the problem, namely: getting tough with the bastards who are so careless with our information in the first place.

Banks and insurance companies will continue to shift the cost of this problem onto consumers for as long as they can. If these repsponses from the federal government are any indication, it looks like it's going to continue for quite a while longer.

Hint: if you are lucky enough to live in a state that allows it, GET A SECURITY FREEZE ON YOUR CREDIT REPORT. DO IT NOW. It's not a perfect option, but you have to protect yourself somehow. Your financial institutions WANT TO KEEP YOU EXPOSED to ID theft - it's simply too profitable for them to have it be otherwise. And they evidently have successfully lobbied your federal representatives to keep it that way.

8-bit political humor never gets old: