Strangelove: How I learned to stop worrying and scientifically love the booty

      It was the impossible situation.  My wife asked me if it looked like she was putting on weight.  By the look in her eye, she was sincere and serious.  She wanted to know.  I was overcome by the irresistible need for self-preservation.  The urge to flee overwhelmed me.  My modern man conditioning suppressed that urge.  And by conditioning, I mean, physical conditioning not mental.  I'm too out of shape to actually "run" away.  The dreaded question, apparently skillfully avoided for years and years, had just been uttered in my direction.    

Okay (heaven help me if she reads this) she isn’t exactly the slim little body she was when we got married.  I mean she is over thirty by *cough, cough* years now.  She has had eight pregnancies, and the corresponding eight deliveries.  So, you know, things may be starting to…settle…a little.  But the woman ain’t fat either.  I like her curves.  Not to be leering here, but a nice full bosom and a round derriere is a huge turn on for me.  We’re not talking J-Lo butt.  But I’ve always had the Marilyn Monroe, Mae West, Maureen O’Hara thing.  Looking at the list I just produced off the top of my head, you’d think I had a thing for women whose names start with M.  I did spend 18 months in Brazil so I can tell you about Carmen Miranda (hmmm…her real first name is Maria).  Let’s mention Sophia Loren and the very classy Ann Margaret.  I want to make it clear that I am only talking body archetype here.  But just to go into TMI mode for a moment, I am partial to brunette and auburn colored hair.  Joan Holloway (Mad Men) fits the mold but her hair is too red.  If Norma Jean would have let her hair lengthen out to its natural color…   I know, this whole blog is TMI.  Let me extricate me from this paragraph. Honey, just pointing out that most of these women are no longer with us, just saying.

So, as far as my preferences go; as exemplified by the aforementioned feminine archetypes, that is what I have now with her.  I have a sweet little brunette wife with the sexy curvy woman’s body.  I’m happy.  22 years of marriage, and I’m still turned on just watching her do stuff around the house.  I’m also turned on by the fact that I’m not the one doing that stuff around the house.  This puts me in a good mood.  And as a plus the woman looks good to me.  I just watch her sometimes; I get a thrill out of seeing her.  A playboy bunny would turn me on less than just watching her bend over and pick up toys, stretch to put away dishes on upper shelves, or even crawl around on the floor chasing a one year old that is resistant to a diaper change.  It’s a spectator sport for me.

Thanks to DOCTOR Gary Chapman, as if he were a real doctor, Gailyn has new ammunition.  She has informed me that her love language is service.  I should help out more.  That would show her that I really do love her.  I’ve informed her that my love language is service, too, as I snuggle up against her.  She tells me not to be vulgar and play slaps me.  Some women seem to like bad boys; as long as the boys are bad when they are supposed to be bad.  But even so, I scored a few points.  What can I say? I’ve been attracted to her since the summer of 1983.  It would be proof overkill to mention that we have 7 kids at home.  So the question she put out there – Do I look like I’ve been putting on weight?  This is not a question I want to answer.

Hopefully, I could redirect this line of questioning.  When we were newlyweds, I wouldn’t say she was naïve, but she believed me when I told her things.  As time went on she adopted a more trust, but verify stance.  Lately there has been more of an “I’ll believe it when I see it.”  I was going to have to be smooth.

I wrapped my arms around her, planted a passionate kiss on her lips and swatted her callipygian behind.  “You’re so sexy, you melt my popsicle.”  This last phrase is from a Katy Perry song that we both find annoying because the tune lingers in your head all day.  And Gailyn also hates it because in the video the singer is laying down wearing only a cloud.  As parents, we’re hip.  We have teens and preteens around.  And yes, I just disproved that theory by using the term “hip”.  At least I didn’t say “bust a move” like I heard a football announcer did last Saturday. 

She didn’t miss a trick.  She looked at me with that look that all husbands have seen when they realize that their wives are not buying it.  She said, “That meant yes didn’t it? 

“I didn’t say yes.  I’m saying that you are gorgeous just the way… you… are…”  Flight would have been the better choice.  Though I might still be going out the window, I thought.  Featherless birds do not fly.  Just the way you are, I’d said.  Wars have been started on less tact and diplomacy.  I frantically plunged ahead trying to salvage the situation.  Another bad choice?  At least at work you can claim you are late for a meeting.  “Well, you’ve had gestational diabetes twice, and you know that the risk of developing Type II is high for women who have had gestational diabetes.  It might be good to lose a few pounds.  Diabetes is a nasty disease.  It affects your feet, your eyes, your heart, everything.  I wouldn’t wish that on you.  So you could do it for health reasons, but as far as how you look I’m happy with you.  I like it fine.”

Now this was a risky move.  Wives do this to husbands all the time.  "I'm just telling you this because I care about you."  99 times out of a hundred women do not accept this logic back.  It's their line and they aren't sharing it with us.  It's a copyright of the fairer sex.  But surprisingly she was okay.  She accepted it.  I would be allowed to sleep in the house that night. 

She told me her weight loss goals.  She had already accepted the answer before she had even asked me the question.  I was supposed to confirm her decision without knowing that she had made one.  This is the area where marriage is not fair.  I can be a hero or a villain at any point without knowing if there is a correct answer.  Lady or the tiger.  I figure, Door 1 - Certain Doom.  It's a tiger and you are getting eaten.  Door 2: Lady – you will either get kisses or eaten – 50/50 chance.  This is the reduction of my unified field theory of marriage – husband edition.  In any matter where a choice is involved, there is a 75% chance she is going to chew you up, and 25% chance she is going to make you feel like a knight in shining armor.  And please shoot me in the head, but the 25% makes the 75% worth it.  We’re like dogs, you can kick us, yell at us, hit us with a rolled up newspaper, but pet us on the head once in a while and we’ll follow you anywhere.  Mostly, we follow because then we can look at your butt. 

It’s true.  It’s scientifically proven.  Ladies, when you sit around talking about whether your men are boob-men or leg-men or whatever, and you know you do…consider that biology and evolution have already made that guy a connoisseur of your rear end.  It’s called the waist-hip ratio.  Without getting all mathematical here, the WHR is a global indicator for attractiveness across all cultures.  Other physical characteristics may be societally preferable (long legs, little noses, round earlobes, bound feet, etc.) but a WHR of .6 to .9 is a universal attraction factor for men.  It’s the hourglass figure.  We are all genetically predisposed to look for it.  Scientists say it is an indicator for health, fertility, fitness.  Recent studies have shown that the higher the WHR the more likely a woman is to produce higher intelligence offspring.  Men don’t instinctively know that part, they just find it good to look at.

One of the global qualities that attract women to men is height.  I'm 6’2”, but Gailyn has called me short.  She is descended from Vikings and Normans.  Okay, I would have made an average Norseman, but hardly a shorty.  Lately time has made a height adjustment for me to about 6’1” (Driver’s License still says 6’2” – and I’m not changing it).  Medical Science tells me I can expect to lose another inch off of my top height in the next 30 years.  So how is this fair?  If middle age decides to pad out her bottom and she gets cuter and cuter to me, will I become less and less attractive to her?  Who thought this stuff up anyway?   Not to mention the whole hair loss thing.  I'm doomed.  But I digress.  Let's get back to the ladies. 

The feminine form is inspiring.  The Greeks knew what they were doing with all that fine sculptry.  The Venus de Milo has a WHR of .7.  All those 18 and 19 century bustles and corsets and hip springs were to prey upon men’s predilections.  Butt pads and hip pads were all the rage in the '50s and '60s.  A front page story of the Wall Street Journal on July 22, 2010 read:  “Goodbye, Girdle: Curvy Stars Spark A Raid on Padded Panties.  'Booty Pop' Rounds a Derrière in Jeans, But Egg-Shaped Foam Shows Under Silk.”  I reiterate, Front Page Story.  Sexy sells.  It is sound if it is round.  But not too round.  There can be too much of a good thing.  I offer this anecdotal evidence wrapped up in a personal aside.    

Recently we have moved Joshua’s old TV up to our bedroom.  A TV in the bedroom is a move that I have resisted for years.  Bedrooms are not for TV viewing.  Besides, we have a bathroom off the master bedroom.  Except for kitchen raids and work, with a TV in the bedroom I would never have the need to leave our room.  I looked at its absense as a forced family interaction program.  But when Josh bought himself the 48” HiDef he had no need for the 32” LCD.  Everybody fought over whose room it was going into.  Being the trusting father that I am, I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with a TV in any of their rooms, so it went in ours.  The sacrifices I make for those kids…I tell ya.

At first this was like being in a hotel room.  The TV finds use in two ways; Lie in bed at night and watch until your eyes are bleary (which is why I resisted the placement in the first place) or turn on a cable news network while you are getting ready for work.  I kind of like the latter.  One morning I heard this story:               

Montenegro: Diver harpoons tourist
31 August 2010 | Source: Vijesti, Tanjug

PODGORICA -- A 28-year-old Serbian woman was seriously injured in the Montenegrin seaside town of Budva yesterday when a local diver shot her with a harpoon. The woman, identified as Maja Georgi from the town of Pančevo, was swimming some 20 meters from the shore when the harpoon pierced her left shoulder, in what local media described as an accident. Georgi underwent complicated surgery in the nearby town of Kotor, said reports, and her condition is now stable and non-life threatening.
Georgi, 28, has vowed to go on a diet after she was harpooned by a diver as she swam in the sea.  
"There was suddenly a massive pain in my shoulder and I realised I'd been shot with a spear gun. It hurt at the time but it was an accident and I can laugh now.
"I might need to lose a few pounds but I'm not exactly Moby Dick either," she joked.

I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t hear this news story until after Gailyn asked the question.  I can only give thanks that I didn’t have the opportunity to panic and crack a joke like “Well, at least you haven’t been harpooned yet.” 

It's either the lady or the tiger, folks; the lady or the tiger.  You don't want to catch either one of them by the tail.  But they are kind of nice to look at.

Time for a Little Levity

One dark night outside a small town, a fire started inside the local chemical plant. Before long it exploded into flames and an alarm went out to fire departments from miles around. After fighting the fire for over an hour, the chemical company president approached the fire chief and said, "All of our secret formulas are in the vault in the center of the plant. They must be saved! I will give $50,000 to the engine company that brings them out safely!"

As soon as the chief heard this, he ordered the firemen to strengthen their attack on the blaze. After two more hours of attacking the fire, president of the company offered $100,000 to the engine company that could bring out the company's secret files. From the distance a long siren was heard as another fire truck came into sight. It was a local volunteer fire company composed entirely of men over 65. To everyone's amazement the little fire engine raced through the chemical plant gates and drove straight into the middle of the inferno. In the distance the other firemen watched as the old timers hopped off of their rig and began to fight the fire with an effort that they had never seen before.

After an hour of intense fighting the volunteer company had extinguished the fire and saved the secret formulas. Joyous the chemical company president announced that he would double the reward to $200,000 and walked over to personally thank each of the volunteers. After thanking each of the old men individually the president asked the group what they intended to do with the reward money. The fire truck driver looked him right in the eye and said, "The first thing we're going to do is fix the stupid brakes on that truck!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sometimes in life, you just end up sliding down the wrong pole...
been there, done that, and didn't even get a tip...

Governed by a Ghost

FORBES MAGAZINE:  How Obama Thinks
By Dinesh D'Souza,
September 27, 2010

The President isn't exactly a socialist. So what's driving his hostility to private enterprise? Look to his roots.

Note from Blog owner: It's no surprise that the bloom is off the rose for this President.  It had to happen eventually.  The comedians are now taking full shots at him.  The press is reporting on his failings as well as his accomplishments.  He now has party members openly disagreeing with him.  His ratings have balanced out among the public.  But he is still an enigma to most Americans.  Even though liberals like to blame "GOP" tactics for Americans thinking Obama is a socialist or a muslim or even a non-US citizen, polls show that democrats are even more inclined than republicans to believe these falsehoods are true.  Some of this blame can be attributed to the President himself as he has refused to release his long form birth certificate, his college transcripts, etc.  But whether or not he ever does is less compelling to me than the fact that some people are now openly analyzing him.  What makes Obama tick?  Who is he?  This is a long article, and not surprisingly partisan in parts, but it gives a lot of background about Barack Obama that people have never heard.  I found this column so academically and psychologically compelling that I have posted the whole article here.  I added the pictures from internet sources.

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.

More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?

The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money

The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.

Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.

Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.

One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?

Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.

These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse. But we have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history. In the process, we ignore Obama's own history. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.

A good way to discern what motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's dream? Or something else?

It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a "new order for the ages." A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating "a distinct species of mankind." This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal, Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more unique or exceptional than Britain or Greece or any other country.

Perhaps, then, Obama shares Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. The President has benefited from that dream; he campaigned as a nonracial candidate, and many Americans voted for him because he represents the color-blind ideal. Even so, King's dream is not Obama's: The President never champions the idea of color-blindness or race-neutrality. This inaction is not merely tactical; the race issue simply isn't what drives Obama.

What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.

I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.

Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."

Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.

Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"

As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."

Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.

While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force."

From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.

Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.

If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.

Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism. Certainly that is the way the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi portrayed himself at his trial. Obama's perception of him as an anticolonial resister would explain why he gave tacit approval for this murderer of hundreds of Americans to be released from captivity.

Finally, nasa. No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach. We can see how well our theory works by recalling the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. "One small step for man," Neil Armstrong said. "One giant leap for mankind."

But that's not how the rest of the world saw it. I was 8 years old at the time and living in my native India. I remember my grandfather telling me about the great race between America and Russia to put a man on the moon. Clearly America had won, and this was one giant leap not for mankind but for the U.S. If Obama shares this view, it's no wonder he wants to blunt nasa's space program, to divert it from a symbol of American greatness into a more modest public relations program.

Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father's influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His "granny" Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather's other wives) told Newsweek, "I look at him and I see all the same things--he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son."

In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"

The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."

In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.

Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.

But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

Dinesh D'Souza, the president of the King's College in New York City, is the author of the forthcoming book The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery Publishing).

Is This the Mental Illness of the Decade?

Las Vegas Hoarder Found Dead in Her Cluttered Possessions

by Hugh Collins, AOL News

(Aug. 28) -- A Las Vegas woman who had been missing for four months was found buried beneath a mountain of garbage and clutter in her own home.

Bill James brought the search for his wife Billie Jean to a horrifying conclusion on Wednesday when he spotted her feet sticking out from the pile of junk that filled the room from floor to ceiling.

The collected clothes, trash and knicknacks in Billie Jean James's house was so vast that sniffer dogs had searched the home without finding her corpse, The Associated Press reported.

"For our dogs to go through that house and not find something should be indicative of the tremendous environmental challenges they faced," police spokesman Bill Cassell said.

Billie Jean, 67, went missing from her home in April, according to a local ABC affiliate. Bill James says he woke up from a nap and could not find his wife anywhere.

He assumed that she had wandered away. She had recently had a mini-stroke that left her disoriented, and he worried that she had suffered another.

Authorities launched a massive hunt for the woman, using sniffer dogs and even helicopters equipped with infrared to search the desert. Meanwhile, Bill set up a Facebook page to promote the search and offered a $10,000 reward.

Little did they know that she would eventually be found exactly where she was meant to be -- at home.

Family friends told the Las Vegas Review Journal that Billie Jean was a compulsive hoarder, with a passion for shopping for trinkets and clothes. One friend said that Billie Jean referred to the room where she was found as "her rabbit hole."

Sari Connolly, a friend of' Billie Jean's, said she had become so obsessive in her hoarding that she kept people out of her home, even refusing to let them use the bathroom.

"She became this hoarder person, and she wouldn't let anyone come in her house," Connolly said.

Cassell told the AP that the house had only small amounts of clear space so that people could get around, and that the home was filled with strong odors from animals, garbage and food.

Billie Jean is not the first person whose hoarding instincts proved fatal. In May, an aging Chicago couple was trapped for two weeks after being buried in their belongings (click to read story).When they were rescued, they were found to have rat bites on their bodies.

In 1947, police found a body inside a Manhattan row house. Brothers Homer and Langley Collyer had filled the house with possessions, including a Model T chassis, 14 pianos and more than 25,000 books.

Both brothers were found dead among the clutter.

Michelle Carro, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Nevada, told The Las Vegas Review Journal that hoarding happens when people find it impossible to make decisions, organize themselves or focus on immediate tasks.

Billie Jean's death is "an example of what can happen when your hoarding behavior is out of control," he said.