Hypoxia and Medicine - Dead Zone Bow Knowledge Base

Dead Zone Bow Knowledge Base

The collapse of the Twin Towers, Part II: Can the Conspiracy Theorist Debunk this? The impact was one of the largest contributing factors to the collapse. It's the part conspiracy theorists like to forget when comparing these collapses with others. The impacts caused real trauma to all three buildings. (Two airliners into the towers and debris from the north tower for building 7. The building 7 impact is another one conspiracy theorists like to forget) The impacts obviously took out many perimeter columns in the towers. The towers had a number of floors destroyed from about the perimeter columns to the core. The impact sliced the aluminum aircraft into smaller pieces but the speed of the craft also sliced through the steel like butter. The impacts also spread jet fuel into the buildings. Not all the fuel was used in the fire ball. In fact, eye witnesses say jet fuel was creating curtains of fire as it poured down from the impact zone. But the jet fuel only started the fires. It was never the NIST's contention that the jet fuel brought down the buildings as conspiracy theorists suggest. Conspiracy theorists use this as a straw man. They say the jet fuel couldn't have bowed the columns and sagged trusses. Just as lighter fluid doesn't cook your meat in a barbeque, the jet fuel didn't sag the trusses or bow the columns. You also can't leave this important factor out either. Conspiracy theorists say the columns couldn't have bowed and the trusses couldn't have sagged because the jet fuel wasn't hot enough and was used up within about 15 minutes of impact. That's like saying your meat didn't cook in your barbeque because the lighter fluid burns too quickly. All the jet fuel did was act as lighter fluid and intensify the fire for about 15 minutes. The impact brought a 500 mile an hour wind to the impact floors as a wall of debris traveled from one end of the buildings to the other. The jet fuel blast added to the event with more than just a pyrotechnic show. This high wind (debris and blast) blew the debris into the furthest corners of the building. It obviously stripped the ceiling tile system off in an instant. Photographic evidence shows no sign of ceiling tiles on the impact floors. In that same instant the all important "blown on" fire proofing was removed from the trusses and some columns. This could be seen from photographic evidence in the NIST report. The NIST also replicated the fireproofing and conditions during impact and found the fireproofing easily blew off. As with all the NIST tests anyone can replicate them if they doubt the conclusion. Click on the photo to see a larger image. Conspiracy theorists will point to Mrs. Cintron waving by column 134 as evidence the fires weren't hot. But it's absurd to suggest she was there during the impact. It's obvious SOMETHING protected her and she made it to where she is to wave for help. Even if you think a missile hit the towers, something must have protected her. Apparently, all critical thinking skills go out the window when conspiracy theorists see her. As if the fires behind and above her must be cool because her location appears to be. Another of many logical fallacies suggested by deniers. [Wind as in air that moves... Believe it or not, conspiracy theorists have attacked the word "Wind" as if I was saying an absurd weather front moved into the towers. It seems that if they don't take the words out of context they can't attack it. Another absurd point was made about the airliner having air pressure on its leading edge as if the plane was intact as it ripped through the building.] The load was redistributed to the remaining perimeter columns and hat truss system over the core. The design was truly robust and prevented the building from crashing to the ground early. The building was left wounded and on fire but not dead. Unknown to anyone who was used to the typical office building fire, the building was mortally wounded. Just like a wounded animal left bleeding, the towers' fate was sealed. Sources: http://www.debunking911.com

Poem analysis! the cloud! please help!!? i have to analyse this poem: The Cloud I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder. I sift the snow on the mountains below, And their great pines groan aghast; And all the night 'tis my pillow white, While I sleep in the arms of the blast. Sublime on the towers of my skyey bowers, Lightning, my pilot, sits; In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, It struggles and howls at fits; Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion, This pilot is guiding me, Lured by the love of the genii that move In the depths of the purple sea; Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, Over the lakes and the plains, Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream, The Spirit he loves remains; And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile, Whilst he is dissolving in rains. The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, When the morning star shines dead; As on the jag of a mountain crag, Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle alit one moment may sit In the light of its golden wings. And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardors of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depth of Heaven above, With wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest, As still as a brooding dove. That orbed maiden with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the Moon, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor, By the midnight breezes strewn; And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, Which only the angels hear, May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, The stars peep behind her and peer; And I laugh to see them whirl and flee, Like a swarm of golden bees, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas, Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, Are each paved with the moon and these. I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone, And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl; The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl. From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, Over a torrent sea, Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,-- The mountains its columns be. The triumphal arch through which I march With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair, Is the million-colored bow; The sphere-fire above its soft colors wove, While the moist Earth was laughing below. I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain when with never a stain The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again. But i cant understand it! i have read it so many times, and i still cant understand what the author is trying to say! Any suggestions, ANYTHING that will help i will really appreciate it! How does it portrays the life cycle of human soul... please help! THANKS

A long poem I wrote: Thoughts? [Title] The Soul Will Not Be Globalized The soul will not be globalized It shall not bear the cursed mark of the beast Nor shall it be found falling down upon its knees The draft board will not have me fighting When any open wound is biting It shall not bleed in sacrifice For said revived Empire, the vice Of Satan's grasp upon this Earth The soul will not be globalized It shall not trade its burdens to Another form of peace, untrue It shall not be preyed upon By predators with flaming rods Or smoking guns that fail to catch Their enemies that freely hatch A new generation of the righteous The soul will not be globalized You will not find it acting tree hugger You cannot make it a verbal mugger No, it will not deny the facts While covering them up with lies and false pacts With unsuspecting fools and wimps It will not act like flip-flop pimps Sleeping with the plagued seductress The soul will not be globalized It will not claim the sky is falling When their comfort zone is balling Comfort, while as sucking voices dry Silencing the truth that never dies It will not forsake its moral brothers Or its broken hearted others In order to build up its own success The soul will not be globalized No papered manly worth shall buy its freedom No fruit of bitter sugar fats its sore bum It won't be salivating with its mindly wheel Over fallen stars with rusted sex-appeal It will not rough it out to bulge with fleshy pride Nor will it purge itself to light the fire that died In a demon possessed with its own luxuria The soul will not be globalized It will not join hands in marriage with the devil It will not submit to the world wide global evil It will not be a militiaman to march in time with death It will not bow before idle statues with no breath It will not continue tarrying here in sin and transgression It will not drown upon a stormy sea of materialistic obsession It will not crumble beneath the weight of ten thousand stones The soul shall rise above the world It shall choose life over death, not Satan, but the Father While those who don't repent shall be left dead in the water It shall lift its eyes from the cloud and smoke of depression It shall raise its voice up and speak out against its oppression Yes, the soul shall taste the flavour of His righteous blood Washing o'er its skin and cleansing heart in a flood No more shall it wallow in the pigpen of felony The soul shall rise above the world Take staff in one hand, good book in the other With the knowledge of divine grace and mercy to its brothers Young and old, rich and poor, black and white, cross the world And go out into the scorching deserts, lonely islands and arctic cold It shall teach of love and peace and joy to all people It shall clothe the naked, feed the hungry, with food and clothes so real They will be at loss of words to describe an unimaginable miracle The soul shall rise above the world Be a shining light example for the children of heaven Be a crutch for the crippled, eat of bread unleavened It will walk with no fear of the shadow of death Cloaking all the valley which he breathed its first breath With a smile, not a tear, it shall know in its heart That the covenant of God shall never break apart Cause His promise is carved in the inerasable stone The soul shall rise above the world Rise above the darkness Rise above transgression Break the ties that bind it Break the chains that keep it Crush the rock that traps it Crush the thoughts that try to stop it From flying upon Easterlies Easterlies that calm it Drinking water that cools it Wearing blankets that reheat it When the climate changes harshly Gaze with wide open eyes Praise with hands reached to the sky The redeemer is alive and is here for you today And forever and ever, can we hear an amen The Saviour is our Hero that tells us what is true Oprah Winfrey, Doctor Phil, Jerry Springer cannot play us Like instruments of deception and bringers of falsehood Just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern misjudged Hamlet When he had a destiny to try and accomplish The soul shall rise above the world And down on bended knee, it shall confess That yes, it is worthless without truth, love and hope The soul shall rise and come back to the world In the end times that come on the hooves of four horses One of sickness, one of war, one of death, one of hunger That rise above us to try and conquer our united army Our military holds no guns, tanks or bombs Our military is conducted like sweet music of divinity By our commander, Lord Jesus who shall make us strong And in the end, all souls shall rise above the world Then fall and crush the devil down into the Earth Lock him up in the fortress of fire and brimstone And all will come together on Earth to say as one voice That we are victorious over death, hell and grave Cause it's Jesus Christ, our Lord who has eternally saved The souls as one who would not be globalized Can you hear that, it's the thunder Of the four horsemen riding Can you hear them rising against us all with hundred million armies Now, you can also hear the roar of the Lion The Lion of Judea stands tall on the horizon The thunder of the oncoming storm of rain and judgement Shall purify the soil and the grasses of the Earth Yes, Lord, the soul shall not be globalized The soul shall be united as one body for Christ Christ, our Deliverer, our Saviour, our King above all kings Well, think about it friends, time has run real short God bless you all, peace out We'll see you in His court Thanks Lizi! LOL! :D

Anyone who wants the Michael Jackson Tribute song download it here. Let me know what you think? Its by P. diddy, chris brown, boy 2 men, the game and much more! http://www.box.net/shared/z63l72udbo [Diddy talking] I remember the first time i seen you moonwalk, I believed I could do anything, you made the world dance, you made the music come to life [Chris brown - Chorus] This the type of song that make the angels cry, i look up in the sky and i wonder why? why you had to go, go I know its better on the other side, you were chosen from the start never gon let you go, [The Game] Whos Michael Jackson, Your Michael Jackson, Im Michael Jackson, We all Michael Jackson, I guess what Im asking is everybody bow their head for a legend dont breathe for a second, now let the air out, grab the hand of somebody you care about, so you can hear my message, my confession, someone tell Usher, i seen the moonwalk, i guess the young thriller touched him, like he touched me, like he touched you, so carry on his legacy, something i must do, so i trust you lighting candles, concrete visuals, me and my brothers listen to jackson 5 in the living room, first thing i did when i heard was call puff, cos him and Mike tried to stop the beef between us, who was us? Me and fifty, that beef is dead, him and Mike Jackson gonna take us to the ledge. [Chorus] As Im pouring out this liquor candles start to flicker, when list (?) my air ones, MJ was my nier. Not the one that play ball, the one with the hollywood star, and since im a hollywood star imma tell you my story, [Courtesy of KillerHipHop.com] never had a family that close, never see Barry Gordy walking through interscope, just like me they always had Mike in a scope, no matter what you say, imma love him and hes still dope, let me take you back to 85 when i was in a zone, dancing for my momma thriller jacket with all the zippers on, now im doing 90 bout to crash in this Aston, listening to Outcast, Im sorry Mrs Jackson [Damn - Dope line from Game - KillerHipHop.com] anything i can ever do to better you your son was our king so we wont Corretta you, Im writing this letter to all the Jackson kids, we all Jackson kids, time to let us through. [Chorus] [Boys II Men] This the kind of song that make the angels cry, look up in the sky and ask God, why o why why Do we live and let die This the kind of song that make the angels cry, look up in the sky and ask God, why o why why Do we live and let, live and let die. I love you Michael! Rest in Peace Angel. They can't hurt you anymore:)

Need Help Making Ultimate 80's Song Play List? I'm compiling what in my mind is an ultimate 80's play list and I need more input. Here is what I have so far. Please leave more suggestions because I know there are a lot I'm missing out on. Dexys Midnight Runners "Come on Eileen" Flock of Seagulls "I Ran (So Far Away)" A-Ha "Take On Me" Tommy Tutone "867-5309 / Jenny" Toni Basil "Mickey" Modern English "I Melt With You" Bow Wow Wow "I Want Candy" Frankie Goes to Hollywood "Relax" Gary Numan "Cars" Animotion "Obsession" Thomas Dolby "She Blinded Me With Science" Devo "Whip It" Men Without Hats "The Safety Dance" Dead or Alive "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" Rockwell "Somebody's Watching Me Twisted Sister "We're Not Gonna Take It" Michael Sembello "Maniac" Eddy Grant "Electric Avenue" Cutting Crew "I Just Died In Your Arms" Madness "Our House" The Vapors "Turning Japanese" Bobby McFerrin "Don't Worry Be Happy" John Waite "Missing You" The Waitresses "I Know What Boys Like" Tom Tom Club "Genius of Love" Weather Girls "It's Raining Men" Lipps, Inc. "Funkytown" Matthew Wilder "Break My Stride" The Buggles "Video Killed the Radio Star" Timbuk 3 "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades" Shannon "Let the Music Play" Wall of Voodoo "Mexican Radio" Georgia Satellites "Keep Your Hands To Yourself" Yello "Oh Yeah" Philip Bailey (w/ Phil Collins) "Easy Lover" Taco "Puttin' On the Ritz" Jermaine Stewart "We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off" The Outfield "Your Love" E.U. "Da Butt" Boomtown Rats "I Don't Like Mondays" Harold Faltermeyer "Axel F" Billy Ocean "Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car" Billy Ocean "Carribbean Queen" JJ Fad "Supersonic" General Public "Tenderness" Aldo Nova "Fantasy" Josie Cotton "Johnny Are You Queer?" Red Rider "Lunatic Fringe" Paul Lekakis "Boom Boom Boom Let's Go Back to My Room" Ziggy Marley And The Melody Makers "Tomorrow People" Patrice Rushen "Forget Me Nots" Haircut 100 "Love Plus One" Frank Stallone "Far From Over" Talking Heads "Burning Down the House" Bone Symphony "One Foot In Front of the Other" The Fabulous Thunderbirds "Tuff Enuff" Buckner & Garcia "Pac-Man Fever" Gleaming Spires "All Night Party" Gleaming Spires "Are You Ready for the Sex Girls" Journey "Don't Stop Believing" Revenge "They're so Incredible" Michael Jackson "Billie Jean" Michael Jackson "Thriller" Guns & Roses "Welcome to the Jungle" Culture Club "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" Kenny Loggins "Danger Zone" Kenny Loggins "Foot Loose" The Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) " Michael Jackson - Beat It Irene Cara "Flashdance" Madonna "Like a Virgin" Kim Wilde - Kids in America Michael Jackson - Bad I'm So Excited - The Pointer Sisters Mony Mony - Billy Idol Girls Just Wanna Have Fun - Cyndi Lauper Jump (For My Love) - The Pointer Sisters Papa Don't Preach - Madonna Irene Cara - Fame Karma Chameleon - Culture Club Who Can It Be Now? - Men At Work Word Up by Cameo Walk Like An Egyptian - The Bangles Straight Up - Paula Abdul Gloria - Laura Branigan (Let's Get) Physical - Olivia Newton John Everybody Wants To Rule the World - Tears For Fears Tears For Fears - Shout Little Red Corvette - Prince Always Something There To Remind Me - Naked Eyes Last Night a DJ Saved My Life - Indeep All Night Long (All Night) - Lionel Richie The Loco-Motion - Kylie Minogue Lionel Richie - Say You, Say Me Lionel Richie - Hello Venus - Bananarama Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go - WHAM! Maneater - Daryl Hall and John Oate Tiffany - I think we're alone now The Romantics - Talking In Your Sleep Escape Club - Wild Wild West Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up Material Girl - Madonna Belinda Carlisle - Heaven Is A Place On Earth Let's Hear It For the Boy - Deniece Williams bon jovi - livin on a prayer Bon Jovi - Runaway Taylor Dayne "Tell It To My Heart" Neutron Dance - The Pointer Sisters (I've Had) The Time of My Life - Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes erasure - "chains of love" Roam - The B-52s Sussudio - Phil Collins Bruce Springsteen - Dancing In The Dark The Clash - Rock The Casbah Simple Minds - Don't You Forget About Me Joe Esposito - You're the Best Around Huey Lewis & the News - The Power of Love Cyndi Lauper - Time After Time Hip to be Square - Huey Lewis and The News Back In Time - Huey Lewis & The News Cyndi Lauper - Goonies 'R' Good Enough Ghostbusters - Ray Parker Jr. E.T. Theme - John Williams Kenny Loggins - I'm Alright

Help in finding a metaphor(s) and theme of this poem? The poem is called "The Cloud" by Percy Bysshe Shelley: I BRING fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken 5 The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, 10 And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder. I sift the snow on the mountains below, And their great pines groan aghast; And all the night ’tis my pillow white, 15 While I sleep in the arms of the blast. Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers, Lightning my pilot sits, In a cavern under is fretted the thunder, It struggles and howls at fits; 20 Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion, This pilot is guiding me, Lured by the love of the genii that move In the depths of the purple sea; Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, 25 Over the lakes and the plains, Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream The Spirit he loves remains; And I all the while bask in heaven’s blue smile, Whilst he is dissolving in rains. 30 The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, When the morning star shines dead, As on the jag of a mountain crag, 35 Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle alit one moment may sit In the light of its golden wings. And when sunset may breathe from the lit sea beneath, Its ardours of rest and of love, 40 And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depth of heaven above, With wings folded I rest, on mine airy nest, As still as a brooding dove. That orbèd maiden with white fire laden, 45 Whom mortals call the moon, Glides glimmering o’er my fleece-like floor, By the midnight breezes strewn; And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, Which only the angels hear, 50 May have broken the woof of my tent’s thin roof, The stars peep behind her and peer; And I laugh to see them whirl and flee, Like a swarm of golden bees, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, 55 Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas, Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, Are each paved with the moon and these. I bind the sun’s throne with a burning zone, And the moon’s with a girdle of pearl; 60 The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim, When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl. From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, Over a torrent sea, Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof, 65 The mountains its columns be. The triumphal arch through which I march With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the powers of the air are chained to my chair, Is the million-coloured bow; 70 The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove, While the moist earth was laughing below. I am the daughter of earth and water, And the nursling of the sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; 75 I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain when with never a stain, The pavilion of heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams, Build up the blue dome of air, 80 I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.

Can someone analyze/explicate this poem for me? "The Cloud" by PB Shelley? stanza by stanza if possible(or just in a paragraph)....I really don't understand it! Expect I know that it's talking about a cloud and it's functions,but...anyway..here it is: I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder. I sift the snow on the mountains below, And their great pines groan aghast; And all the night 'tis my pillow white, While I sleep in the arms of the blast. Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers, Lightning, my pilot, sits; In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, It struggles and howls at fits; Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion, This pilot is guiding me, Lured by the love of the genii that move In the depths of the purple sea; Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, Over the lakes and the plains, Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream, The Spirit he loves remains; And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile, Whilst he is dissolving in rains. The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, When the morning star shines dead; As on the jag of a mountain crag, Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle alit one moment may sit In the light of its golden wings. And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardors of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depth of Heaven above, With wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest, As still as a brooding dove. That orbed maiden with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the Moon, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor, By the midnight breezes strewn; And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, Which only the angels hear, May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, The stars peep behind her and peer; And I laugh to see them whirl and flee, Like a swarm of golden bees, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas, Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, Are each paved with the moon and these. I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone, And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl; The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl. From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, Over a torrent sea, Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,-- The mountains its columns be. The triumphal arch through which I march With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair, Is the million-colored bow; The sphere-fire above its soft colors wove, While the moist Earth was laughing below. I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain when with never a stain The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.

Patient Poem Readers -- This really is a long one but please bear with me. Thoughts? [Title] The Soul Will Not Be Globalized The soul will not be globalized It shall not bear the cursed mark of the beast Nor shall it be found falling down upon its knees The draft board will not have me fighting When any open wound is biting It shall not bleed in sacrifice For said revived Empire, the vice Of Satan's grasp upon this Earth The soul will not be globalized It shall not trade its burdens to Another form of peace, untrue It shall not be preyed upon By predators with flaming rods Or smoking guns that fail to catch Their enemies that freely hatch A new generation of the righteous The soul will not be globalized You will not find it acting tree hugger You cannot make it a verbal mugger No, it will not deny the facts While covering them up with lies and false pacts With unsuspecting fools and wimps It will not act like flip-flop pimps Sleeping with the plagued seductress The soul will not be globalized It will not claim the sky is falling When their comfort zone is balling Comfort, while as sucking voices dry Silencing the truth that never dies It will not forsake its moral brothers Or its broken hearted others In order to build up its own success The soul will not be globalized No papered manly worth shall buy its freedom No fruit of bitter sugar fats its sore bum It won't be salivating with its mindly wheel Over fallen stars with rusted sex-appeal It will not rough it out to bulge with fleshy pride Nor will it purge itself to light the fire that died In a demon possessed with its own luxuria The soul will not be globalized It will not join hands in marriage with the devil It will not submit to the world wide global evil It will not be a militiaman to march in time with death It will not bow before idle statues with no breath It will not continue tarrying here in sin and transgression It will not drown upon a stormy sea of materialistic obsession It will not crumble beneath the weight of ten thousand stones The soul shall rise above the world It shall choose life over death, not Satan, but the Father While those who don't repent shall be left dead in the water It shall lift its eyes from the cloud and smoke of depression It shall raise its voice up and speak out against its oppression Yes, the soul shall taste the flavour of His righteous blood Washing o'er its skin and cleansing heart in a flood No more shall it wallow in the pigpen of felony The soul shall rise above the world Take staff in one hand, good book in the other With the knowledge of divine grace and mercy to its brothers Young and old, rich and poor, black and white, cross the world And go out into the scorching deserts, lonely islands and arctic cold It shall teach of love and peace and joy to all people It shall clothe the naked, feed the hungry, with food and clothes so real They will be at loss of words to describe an unimaginable miracle The soul shall rise above the world Be a shining light example for the children of heaven Be a crutch for the crippled, eat of bread unleavened It will walk with no fear of the shadow of death Cloaking all the valley which he breathed its first breath With a smile, not a tear, it shall know in its heart That the covenant of God shall never break apart Cause His promise is carved in the inerasable stone The soul shall rise above the world Rise above the darkness Rise above transgression Break the ties that bind it Break the chains that keep it Crush the rock that traps it Crush the thoughts that try to stop it From flying upon Easterlies Easterlies that calm it Drinking water that cools it Wearing blankets that reheat it When the climate changes harshly Gaze with wide open eyes Praise with hands reached to the sky The redeemer is alive and is here for you today And forever and ever, can we hear an amen The Saviour is our Hero that tells us what is true Oprah Winfrey, Doctor Phil, Jerry Springer cannot play us Like instruments of deception and bringers of falsehood Just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern misjudged Hamlet When he had a destiny to try and accomplish The soul shall rise above the world And down on bended knee, it shall confess That yes, it is worthless without truth, love and hope The soul shall rise and come back to the world In the end times that come on the hooves of four horses One of sickness, one of war, one of death, one of hunger That rise above us to try and conquer our united army Our military holds no guns, tanks or bombs Our military is conducted like sweet music of divinity By our commander, Lord Jesus who shall make us strong And in the end, all souls shall rise above the world Then fall and crush the devil down into the Earth Lock him up in the fortress of fire and brimstone And all will come together on Earth to say as one voice That we are victorious over death, hell and grave Cause it's Jesus Christ, our Lord who has eternally saved (C) 2009 Adam Chambers

Does this sound like a good novel? All the vampires were running towards the castle whilst the werewolves were on four paws running. Arrows were shooting at them, flaming arrows that could burn their skin off in a second with an instant kill. Razuel Kaslak looked up and saw the king looking back down at him, knowing that he is going to fail that Razuel is going to kill him, but the king wasn't really scared of this man, 'So what if he is half vampire half werewolf I will still kill him, he thought. The King was on the highest point of the castle he was like an open target... if only the werewolves and vampires had bow and arrows. There was thousands of vampires and werewolves charging most of them dying by the arrows. It was like they were entering a death zone, the king stared into the eyes of Razuel, he could see hate in his eyes, revenge and even a great leader. The king picked up an arrow and aimed it down at Razuel, Razuel was thinking that this was going to be the final moment of his entire life, that this is how he is going to die. Razuel stopped charging and stared back into the king's eyes he could see evil red flames inside him and betrayal, but what Razuel was confused at the most that when he looked deeper and deeper into the king's eyes he could see sadness, that it was like he regretted what he had done, but that wasn't going to stop him from killing Razuel. He shot the arrow at Razuel going at least seventy miles an hour, Razuel didn't even try to dodge he just stood there waiting for it to come and said softly 'Thank you' he could see his best friend Vegtra Gaffic turning his form from werewolf to human as he was jumping in the way for Razuel. Vegtra fell down to the floor bleeding to death, he was coughing up blood because it had hit him in the back of the neck. Razuel fell down to his knees and looked over his best friend's body, he was absolutely devastated, he was weeping that he should never of brought Vegtra along, if only he knew that this would happen. His best friend died with his eyes wide-open, he was only a boy at the age of twenty five, he was soo young. Now that he is dead Razuel would never fogive the king ever, that he would take his revenge even further. He was shaking on the floor, he was grinding his teeth together. clentching his fists. He looked back up at the king and shouted 'I am coming for you!' he closed his best friend's eyes and softly said to himself 'I am sorry I got you into this.' he stood back up and headed towards the king to finis off what he started. Your all god damn stupid, just because I can write something better than you can. In my story werewolves and vampires can get killed by being stabbed, shot with a bow and arrow or beheaded or hanged. It is just like real life only that it is not, I am making something that other people haven't made and the reason why the king could see a great leader in Razuel Kaslak is because he knows that he will be over took by these outcasts and the reason why Razuel could see sadness in the king's eyes is because the king knows that he will be killed by this great leader once and for all and that he can not do anything to stop it.

What would you rate my top 100 hip hop albums? Since someone reported this question the last time I posted it, I though I'd post it again. Rate this list of my top 100 hip hop albums of all time. 1. Gangstarr - Moment Of Truth (1998) 2. M.O.P - Warriorz (2000) 3. Jedi Mind Tricks - Violent By Design (2000) 4. Beat Junkies - The World Famous Beat Junkies , Vol. 3 (1999) 5. DJ Babu - Duck Season, Vol. 1 (2002) 6. Dr. Dre - 2001 (1999) 7. Sticky Fingaz - Blacktrash: The Autobiography Of Kirk Jones (2001) 8. Soulbrotha - Collector’s Item (2009) 9. Masta Ace - Disposable Arts (2001) 10. OC - Jewelz (1997) 11. DJ Premier - Rare Play, Vol. 1 (2008) 12. DJ Premier - Rare Play, Vol. 2 (2009) 13. Bumpy Knuckles - Industry Shakedown (2000) 14. M.O.P - First Family 4 Life (1998) 15. EPMD - Out Of Business 16. Dead Prez - Let’s Get Free (2000) 17. M.O.P - Firing Squad (1996) 18. Jay-Z - Reasonable Doubt (1996) 19. Screwball - Y2K: The Album (2000) 20. No I.D. - Accept Your Own And Be Yourself (The Black Album) (1997) 21. Pharaohe Monch - Internal Affairs (1999) 22. Cali Agents - How The West Was One (2000) 23. GZA - Liquid Swords (1995) 24. Westside Connection - Bow Down (1996) 25. Common Market - Common Market (2005) 26. Cymarshall Law - Hip Hop In The Flesh (2007) 27. Surreal And DJ Balance - Future Classic (2006) 28. Louis Logic - Sin-A-Matic (2003) 29. K-Otix - Universal (2001) 30. Vakill - The Darkest Cloud (2003) 31. Common - One Day It’ll All Make Sense (1997) 32. Various Artists - Soul In The Hole Soundtrack (1997) 33. Ivan Ives - Iconoclast (2007) 34. Endemic - Terminal Illness (2009) 35. Fashawn - Boy Meets World (2009) 36. Talib Kweli - Train Of Thought (2000) 37. Edo G - The Truth Hurts (2000) 38. Motion Man - Clearing The Field (2002) 39. Mykill Miers - It’s Been A Long Time Coming (2000) 40. Dutchmassive - Junk Planet (2004) 41. CunninLynguists - Southernunderground (2003) 42. Afu-Ra - Body Of The Life Force (2000) 43. E-Roc - The Return (1998) 44. Electric Company - Life’s A Struggle (2003) 45. J-Live - The Best Part (2001) 46. Sound Providers - Looking Backwards: 2001-1998 (2006) 47. Eminem - The Slim Shady LP (1999) 48. Group Home - Livin’ Proof (1995) 49. Various Artists - Always Bigger And Better, Vol. 1 (2000) 50. Killarmy - Silent Wars For Quiet Weapons (1997) 51. Mr. J Medeiros - Of Gods And Girls (2007) 52. Wu-Tang Clan - Wu-Tang Forever (1997) 53. Common Market - Tobacco Road (2008) 54. Binary Star - Masters Of The Universe (2000) 55. Ill Bill - What’s Wrong With Bill? (2004) 56. Mobb Deep - Hell On Earth (1996) 57. D*Tension - Contacts + Contracts (2002) 58. Asamov - And Now (2005) 59. All Natural - Second Nature (2001) 60. Jeru The Damaja - Wrath Of The Math (1996) 61. Ghostface Killah - Ironman (1996) 62. Cormega - The Realness (2001) 63. Insight - Targeting Zone (2008) 64. Big Shug - Street Champ (2007) 65. Masta Ace - A Long Hot Summer (2004) 66. Skinnyman - Council Estate Of Mind (2004) 67. Cypress Hill - Skull & Bones (2000) 68. Gangstarr - The Ownerz (2003) 69. The Beatnuts - A Musical Massacre (1999) 70. Pacewon & Mr. Green - The Only Color That Matters Is Green (2008) 71. Cymarshall Law - Freedom (2008) 72. The LOX - We Are The Streets (2000) 73. Pete Rock - Soul Survivor (1998) 74. Little Brother - The Minstrel Show (2005) 75. Supastition - 7 Years Of Bad Luck (2002) 76. The Roots - Things Fall Apart (1999) 77. Mobb Deep - The Infamous (1995) 78. Naughty by Nature - Naughty by Nature (1991) 79. Non Phixion - The Future Is Now (2002) 80. CunninLynguists - Will Rap For Food (2001) 81. Kev Brown - I Do What I Do (2005) 82. Archetype - Bleed For Them (2007) 83. Busta Rhymes - Anarchy (2000) 84. Big L - The Big Picture (2000) 85. Declaime - Conversations With Dudley (2004) 86. DJ Spinna - Beyond Real Experience Vol. 2 (2002) 87. Jurassic 5 - Power In Numbers (2002) 88. Q-Unique - Vengeance Is Mine (2004) 89. Funky DL - Classic Was The Day (1997) 90. Black Moon - Enta Da Stage (1993) 91. Del Tha Funkee Homosapien - Deltron 3030 (2000) 92. Gangstarr - Step In The Arena (1991) 93. The High And Mighty - Home Field Advantage (1999) 94. Ivan Ives & Fresh The Hitman - Juice To Get Loose To (2008) 95. KRS-One - Keep Right (2004) 96. Raekwon - Only Built 4 Cuban Linx (1995) 97. Mathematics - Love, Hell, Or Right (2003) 98. DMX - It’s Dark And Hell Is Hot (1998) 99. Nice And Smooth - Ain’t A Damn Thing Changed (1991) 100. LA The Darkman - Heist Of The Century (1998) @Anita: Jurassic 5 is on there. #87. @Adam: Yes, I asked it before. It got reported. This is a repost. Read the sentences before the list. @TheMicMessiah: No. Heist of the century>Illmatic.

Rate this poem please? South from a city’s zone of twilight While willows weep on a haunting night I offer weak comfort from sorrow My spirit bowed down low To accept reality from horror Dawn the day and come tomorrow No matter what we do or say Tragedy will have come our way I watch her feign a smile Feeling helpless as a child Wanting to say ‘think not of me’ Sensing her desperate pain and dark blue misery I take her hand and gracefully she follows To our howling mount of willows She embraces her heart against mine To warm it with internal sunshine And the willows weep once more East of hell the river’s roar Hear the shouts of a dozen divers Search for Zoey in the river In a sea of dark emotions I assert my deep devotion A kiss of hope on her forehead But in my mind the fool in the river is dead Then the night turns to still A chirpy bark on our little hill And when the willows stop bewailing Zoey comes in bounds and leaping While divers stage brave heroics for nothing Coming up and re-submerging My silent rage like flames igniting Thinking, ‘kill the dog and set the willows weeping!’

plz. help me to write the main idea of this article in the NY Times. in two pages.? November 5, 2006 Where Plan A Left Ahmad Chalabi By DEXTER FILKINS 1. London, August 2006 Many miles away in a more dangerous place the dream is ending badly. The bodies pile up. Good people stream to the borders. Leaders pile money onto planes. The center is giving way. The apartment on South Street in London is an antidote to Baghdad in nearly every respect. Where the Iraqi capital rings with chaos and violence, the sidewalks of Mayfair are quiet enough to hear your own voice above the cars. Baghdad is treeless and tan; the South Street apartment opens onto a private park filled with the lushness of an English garden. Just across the way is the Anglican church where General Eisenhower, stationed here as the commander of Allied forces during the war, came to pray. A maid greets you at the door, an elderly Lebanese woman who doubles as an Arabic teacher for the children. The parlor is neatly appointed and filled with art, most of it European, different from the Baghdad house, where most of it is Iraqi. There is “Sketch of a Woman,” by Lucien Pissarro, the French painter who propagated Impressionism in London; it catches the light nicely. The furniture is expensive, the kind that makes you hesitate to sit down. But the place has a lived-in quality too; family members come and go, clutching bags and calling to one another down the hallways. No one seems the least bit awed by the man of the house, who is dressed in a bespoke suit and carries himself like a monarch, and who, until now, hasn’t spent more than a day at a time here since before the Iraq war began. For Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq is an abstraction again. Once again, his native country is a faraway land ruled by somebody else, a place where other people die. It’s a place to be discussed, rued, plotted over, from a parlor on an expensive Western street. Iraq’s new leaders, the men who excluded Chalabi from the government they formed this spring, still call for advice — several times a day, Chalabi says. He is here in London, his longtime home in exile, temporarily, he says, taking his first vacation in five years. At lunch at a nearby restaurant an hour before, he ordered the sea bass wrapped in a banana leaf. He walks the streets unattended by armed guards. But the interlude, Chalabi says, is just that, a passing thing. His doubters will come back to him; they always have. As ever, he wears a jester’s smile, wide and blank, a mask that has carried him through crises of the first world and the third. Still, a touch of bitterness can creep into Chalabi’s voice, a hint that he has concluded that his time has come and gone. Indeed, even for a man as vain and resilient as Chalabi, his present predicament stands too large to go unacknowledged. Once Iraq’s anointed leader — anointed by the Americans — Chalabi, at age 62, is without a job, spurned by the very colleagues whose ascension he engineered. His benefactors in the White House and in the Pentagon, who once gobbled up whatever half-baked intelligence Chalabi offered, now regard him as undependable and — worse — safely ignored. Chalabi’s life work, an Iraq liberated from Saddam Hussein, a modern and democratic Iraq, is spiraling toward disintegration. Indeed, for many in the West, Chalabi has become the personification of all that has gone wrong in Iraq: the lies, the arrogance, the occupation as disaster. “The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,” Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.” Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge. The Iraqis, not the Americans, should have been allowed to take over immediately — the people who knew the country, who spoke the language and, most important, who could take responsibility for the chaos that was unfolding in the streets. An Iraqi government could have acted harshly, even brutally, to regain control of the place, and the Iraqis would have been without a foreigner to blame. They would have appreciated the firm hand. There would have been no guerrilla insurgency or, if there was, a small one that the new Iraqi government could have ferreted out and crushed on its own. An Iraqi leadership would have brought Moktada al-Sadr, the populist cleric, into the government and house-trained him. The Americans, in all likelihood, could have gone home. They certainly would have been home by now. “We would have taken hold of the country,” Chalabi says. “We would have revitalized the civil service immediately. We would have been able to put together a military force and an intelligence service. There would have been no insurgency. We would have had electricity. The Americans screwed it up.” Chalabi’s notion — that an Iraqi government, as opposed to an American one, could have saved the great experiment — has become one of the arguments put forth by the war’s proponents in the just-beginning debate over who lost Iraq. At best, it’s improbable: Chalabi is essentially arguing that a handful of Iraqi exiles, some of whom had not lived in the country in decades, could have put together a government and quelled the chaos that quickly engulfed the country after Hussein’s regime collapsed. They could have done this, presumably, without an army (which most wanted to dissolve) and without a police force (which was riddled with Baathists). In fact, the Americans considered the idea and dismissed it. (But not, Wolfowitz insists, because of him. His longtime aide, Kevin Kellems, said that Wolfowitz favored turning over power “as rapidly as possible to duly elected Iraqi authorities.”) The Bush administration decided to go to the United Nations and have the American role in Iraq formally described as that of an “occupying power,” a step that no Iraqi, not even the lowliest tea seller, failed to notice. They appointed L. Paul Bremer III as viceroy. Instead of empowering Iraqis, Bremer set up an advisory panel of Iraqis — one that included Chalabi — that had no power at all. The warmth that many ordinary Iraqis felt for the Americans quickly ebbed away. It’s not clear that the Americans had any other choice. But here in his London parlor, Chalabi is now contending that excluding Iraqis was the Americans’ fatal mistake. “It was a puppet show!” Chalabi exclaims again, shifting on the couch. “The worst of all worlds. We were in charge, and we had no power. We were blamed for everything the Americans did, but we couldn’t change any of it.” It’s three and a half years later now. More than 2,800 Americans are dead; more than 3,000 Iraqis die each month. The anarchy seems limitless. In May 2004, American and Iraqi agents even raided Chalabi’s home in Baghdad. He has been denounced by Bremer and by Bush and accused of passing secrets to America’s enemy, Iran. At the heart of the American decision to take over and run Iraq, Chalabi now concludes, lay a basic contempt for Iraqis, himself included. “In Wolfowitz’s mind, you couldn’t trust the Iraqis to run a democracy,” Chalabi says. “ ‘We have to teach them, give them lessons,’ in Wolfowitz’s mind. ‘We have to leave Iraq under our tutelage. The Iraqis are useless. The Iraqis are incompetent.’ “What I didn’t realize,” Chalabi says, “was that the Americans sold us out.” Turkish coffee is served, then tea. I consider Chalabi’s predicament: the Iraqi patrician, confidant of prime ministers and presidents, the M.I.T.- and University of Chicago-trained mathematics professor, owner of a Mayfair flat, complaining of being regarded, by the masters he once manipulated, as a scruffy, shiftless native. “I’ve been a friend of America, and I’ve been its enemy,” he says. “America betrays its friends. It sets them up and betrays them. I’d rather be America’s enemy.” And so he is. Sort of. With Chalabi, it’s hard to be certain, and not just because his motives are so opaque, but because he is never still. He is enigmatic, brilliant, nimble, unreliable, charming, narcissistic, finally elusive. The journey to Mayfair is a long one. What happened to Chalabi? Well, you might ask: What happened to Iraq? 2. Mushkhab, January 2005 The election is coming, and we are heading south. Twenty cars, mostly carrying men with guns. They hang out the windows, pointing their Kalashnikovs at the terrified drivers. Get out of the way or we shoot, and maybe we shoot anyway — that’s the message. But that’s Iraq. We move quickly, weaving, south in the southbound, south in the northbound. Very fast. Unbelievably fast. Drivers veer and career. We go where we want. We’re low on fuel, and a gas station beckons. It is one of the strange and singular facts of Iraqi life that despite sitting atop an ocean of oil, Iraqis must wait hours — often days — for gasoline at the pumps. Lack of refining capacity, smuggling, stealing, insurgent attacks, Soviet subsidies: it’s complicated. On the road outside Salman Pak, the line is perhaps 300 cars long. The Chalabi convoy cuts straight to the front of the line. No one protests. It’s the guns. The Iraqis wait for days, and our effrontery brings no protest. Not a peep. We get our gas and we speed away, guns out the windows. Very fast. An hour later, we arrive at our destination, Mushkhab. It’s a mostly Shiite town about 100 miles south of Baghdad. It is friendly country — to Chalabi, and still, then, to Americans. The whole town — the males, anyway — gathers round. Chalabi stands in the center, dressed in a dark gray Western suit. The Iraqis clap and read poetry; some of it they sing. It’s a tradition, a kind of serenade to the honored guest. “Hey, listen, Bush, we are Iraqis,” the poet says, and everyone is clapping. “We never bow our heads to anyone, and we won’t do it for you. We have tough guys like Chalabi on our side — be careful.” Everyone laughs. We move inside the mudhif, a tall, long, fantastic structure woven of dried river reeds, a kind of pavilion of rattan. The room is laid with hand-woven carpets, and on the walls hang framed yellowed photographs of the leaders of the tribe, Al Fatla, meeting with their British overlords many years ago. A pair of loudspeakers are set up in the front. Chalabi takes a microphone. “My Iraqi brothers, the Americans pushed out Saddam, but they did not liberate our country,” Chalabi tells the group. “We are asking you to participate in this election so that we can have an independent country. This is not just words. The Iraqi people will liberate the country.” He goes on a little more, warming to the Iraqis assembled about him. “On my way here, I saw a huge line of people waiting for gasoline,” Chalabi tells the group. “Some of them were there for two nights, carrying blankets with them. It makes me very sad to see my brothers wait for days to get gas at the station.” Shameless, huh? I thought so, too. Almost a thing of beauty. It was so outrageous I almost wanted to forgive him, as a teacher might her sassy but cleverest boy. And that’s the thing about Chalabi: he’s very difficult to dislike. It may be his secret. It was Chalabi, after all — a foreigner, an Arab — who persuaded the most powerful men and women in the United States to make the liberation of Iraq not merely a priority but an obsession. First in 1998, when Chalabi persuaded Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act (in turn leading to payments to his group, the Iraqi National Congress, exceeding $27 million over the next six years) and then, later, in persuading the Bush administration of the necessity of using force to destroy Saddam Hussein. And when it all went bad, when those nuclear weapons never turned up, the clever child shrugged and smiled. “We are heroes in error,” Chalabi told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Almost with a wink. Lunch is served: a long table heaped with rice and roasted lamb. No seats. Everyone stands, dozens of us, and we dig in with our fingers. After a time, we prepare to leave. The table and the ground around it are littered with rice and lamb bones. We re-form into a convoy and speed toward the holy city of Najaf. By the time we arrive in Najaf, it’s dark. The fighting between American soldiers and the Mahdi Army irregulars laid waste to the city only a few months before, but on this night, Najaf seems remarkably calm. The pilgrim hotels lie in ruins, but the golden dome of the shrine of Imam Ali shimmers under a January moon. Chalabi exits his S.U.V. and strides inside through the 20-foot-high wooden doors. A clutch of Sunni leaders, whom Chalabi has agreed to show around, trail in step. The curiosities intersect: the Sunnis are not Shiites, and this is the holiest of Shiite places, the tomb of the son-in-law of the Holy Prophet and the very heart of the Shiite faith. But they are still Muslims, and they are allowed to pass. As a non-Muslim, I wait outside in the street. More unlikely than the presence of the Sunnis is their tour guide, Chalabi. Or it was unlikely. Not anymore. Chalabi, the Westernized, Western-educated mathematician, has entered his Islamist phase. It’s not terribly convincing. He does not don a turban. He has no beard. He does not pray. He does not, really, even pretend. But as a practical politician — as an exile come home to a strange land getting stranger by the day — Chalabi had to do something. Relations between Chalabi and the Bush administration began to sour almost immediately after the fall of Hussein, when the Americans decided against putting Iraqis — presumably Chalabi — in charge. Bremer considered him an egomaniac. When no W.M.D. turned up, more and more Americans came to blame Chalabi for the war. Chalabi’s association with the Americans grew more disadvantageous by the day. The break came on May 20, 2004, when the Americans, accusing Chalabi of telling the Iranian government that the Americans were eavesdropping on their secret communications, swooped in on his Baghdad compound. American troops sealed off Mansour, the neighborhood where Chalabi lived, while scores of Iraqi and American agents kicked in the compound doors. One of the Iraqis, Chalabi said, put a gun to his head. “Look, I think they tried to kill him,” Richard Perle, the former Pentagon adviser and longtime Chalabi friend, said of the American and Iraqi agents. “I think the raid on his house was intended to result in violence. They had sent 20 or 40 Humvees over there. Chalabi was being protected by a force of about 100 guys with machine guns. It is a miracle that it didn’t result in a massive shootout.” No shots were fired, but the break seemed final. Isolated, Chalabi turned to Islam — and, in particular, to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric and leader of two armed uprisings against the Americans and the Iraqi government. Sadr is an erratic and unpredictable young man who sometimes ends his sermons with apocalyptic visions of the “hidden” 12th imam revealing himself. He is also the most popular man in Iraq. In the anarchy that ensued following the fall of Hussein, Iraqis, once known for their largely secular outlook, ran headlong toward Islam. Religion and anarchy moved together: the worse conditions got in the streets, the more Islamic Iraqis became. In the three and a half years that I have known Chalabi, I never once saw him pray. Or give any indication that he harbored religious beliefs at all. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser and a devout Shiite, told me once that when he and a group of five senior Iraqi politicians visited the Imam Ali shrine in 2004, all of them prayed but Chalabi. While the others knelt, Rubaie said, Chalabi stood quietly with his hands folded in front of him. On this return visit to the Imam Ali shrine, Chalabi and his Sunni colleagues spent 10 minutes inside and exited without saying a thing. But word travels quickly down Najaf’s narrow streets, and by the time our convoy sped back to Baghdad, there were very few people in Najaf who did not know that Chalabi had come. Once, when I asked Chalabi about his flirtation with the Islamists, he answered not in terms of religion but of politics. Moktada, he explained, was not essentially dangerous but merely misunderstood, an outsider who could be coaxed into Iraq’s new democratic order. Chalabi was happy to act as the bridge, and if he benefited politically from his efforts, he was not complaining. “The Americans made a mistake when they excluded Moktada in the beginning,” Chalabi told me. “Our real business is to persuade everybody that Sadr is better inside than outside, and to provide some measure of comfort to the middle class that he is not going to eat them up.” Indeed, Chalabi and Sadr are not as unlikely a pair as they may seem. Musa al-Sadr, the late Iranian-born ayatollah and Moktada’s cousin, presided over Chalabi’s wedding in Beirut in 1971. Chalabi’s wife, Leila, is the daughter of Adel Osseiran, a leader of the Lebanese independence movement. Musa al-Sadr was the founder of Amal, which became the prototypical Shiite party in the Middle East. It seemed like a game, and not one that Chalabi liked to give away. Whenever I asked him about his coziness with Moktada, and how it squared with his own religious beliefs, I usually received a curt retort. For a time, Chalabi — and the Americans — got the better of the deal. Moktada fielded candidates in the January 2005 election, and his militia, though still untamed, fell into line behind its leader. He endorsed something less than an absolute role for Islam in the Iraqi Constitution. By early 2006, parties loyal to Sadr held the largest bloc in the Iraqi Parliament. As for Chalabi, Moktada kept him afloat a little longer. But in siding with the Islamists, Chalabi helped make them stronger than they were, and he threw his weight behind a number of trends that were only then becoming dominant: the Islamization of Iraqi society, the division of Iraq into sectarian cantons. Those trends later spiraled out of control, into the de facto civil war that is unfolding now. Some Iraqis who watched Chalabi then still don’t forgive him — and they think that ultimately, the Islamists got the better of him. “Ahmad’s problem is that Ahmad is usually the smartest man in the room, and he thinks he can control what happens,” I was told by an Iraqi official who worked with Chalabi at the time and who would speak only anonymously. “But these guys don’t care if you have a Ph.D. in math; they’ll kill you. In the end, things went way past the point where Ahmad thought they would ever go. I can’t imagine he wanted that. But he helped start it.” 3. Baghdad, October 2005 Chalabi is standing on the rooftop of his ancestral home in Khadimiya, a heavily Shiite neighborhood known for its shrine. Mansour, the area where he has lived since Hussein’s fall, has slipped into anarchy. The final round of nationwide elections is a couple of months away. For the moment, Chalabi is the deputy prime minister, behind the affable but ineffectual Ibrahim Jaafari. Across the street stand a pair of grain silos built by his father, Abdul Hadi Chalabi. Downstairs, on a wall in the sitting room, there is an old British map dating to the 1920’s, showing Baghdad, which was much smaller than it is now. North of Baghdad, in what was then farmland and what is now Khadimiya, a dot indicates a town. The dot says, “Chalabi.” At the time, Chalabi’s family owned nearly two and a half million acres throughout Iraq. Those vast holdings are reduced to the compound where Chalabi now stands. It’s about 10 acres, including the main house, which a team of workers is renovating, a large swimming pool, a grove of date palms and, in the back, a mudhif. There is a row of garages, decrepit now, where workers once serviced the machinery and trucks that brought the wheat and dates to market. “Imagine,” Chalabi says, turning to me. “And C.I.A. says I have no roots here.” Chalabi spent 45 years in exile. Under the Hashemite monarchy installed by the British after World War I, the ruling class of the new Iraq was largely made up of Sunni Muslims, as it had been under the Ottoman Turks. The Chalabis were part of the small Shiite elite; most of the rest of the Shiite majority formed a vast underclass. The remnants of that Shiite elite now form a sizable slice of the political establishment of post-Saddam Iraq. In addition to Chalabi, there is Adil Abdul Mahdi, the vice president, a Chalabi friend since boyhood; Ayad Allawi, the former president, who is a Chalabi relative by marriage; and Feisal al-Istrabadi, the deputy ambassador to the United Nations in New York. In the 1950’s, Chalabi, Mahdi and Allawi were schoolmates at Baghdad College, an elite Jesuit high school. Even in their class photos, nearly a half-century old, all three men are instantly recognizable: Mahdi, the soft-spoken intellectual; Allawi, the charming bully; and Chalabi, the boy genius in a bow tie. On July 14, 1958, King Faisal II, the British-backed monarch, was deposed and killed; a day later, the prime minister, Nuri al-Said, fled to the home of Chalabi’s sister, Thamina. She dressed Said in an abaya, the head-to-toe gown worn by women. With the army closing in, Thamina Chalabi took Said to the home of Feisal al-Istrabadi’s grandparents. Ahmad Chalabi, then 14, watched his mother and Bibiya al-Istrabadi weep as they pondered the prime minister’s fate. “Three or four hours later, Said was dead,” Chalabi told me. “He shot himself.” Chalabi fled Iraq a few months later, first for Lebanon, then England and then America, where he received a degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. (Dissertation title: “Jacobson Radical of Group Algebras Over Fields Characteristic p.”) He did not return to Baghdad until April 11, 2003. Chalabi’s homecoming, after the U.S. invasion, was not the triumphant return he hoped it would be. What should have been his principal claim to legitimacy — his central role in toppling Saddam — never carried him very far; it became a liability as Iraq descended into chaos. In the new Iraq, Westernized elites carried less and less authority. Power belonged to the clerics and to the populists. And then there was the scandal at Petra Bank in Jordan, the outlines of which every Iraqi, no matter how dimly educated, seemed already to know: that Chalabi had been convicted in absentia for fraud and sentenced to 22 years in prison for embezzling almost $300 million. (Chalabi, who fled Jordan before he could be arrested, has long denied the charges, maintaining that they were cooked up by the Jordanian government under pressure from Saddam Hussein. Last year, the Jordanians signaled that they were willing to pardon Chalabi. But Chalabi insisted on a public apology, which the Jordanians refused to give.) Even the small army of Iraqi exiles that Chalabi had raised before the war never grew to be much more than a personal militia. One poll, conducted in early 2004, showed him to be the least trusted public figure in Iraq — even less trusted than Saddam Hussein. Dexter Filkins The suspicions that ordinary Iraqis harbored about Chalabi were never relieved by his industriousness. As oil minister and deputy prime minister, Chalabi worked night and day, often on the minutiae of Iraq’s oil pipelines and electricity lines or the precise wording, in Arabic and English, of the Iraqi Constitution. I typically went to see Chalabi at night, sometimes at 9 or 10, and usually had to wait an hour or so while he finished with his other visitors. If it was true that Chalabi had returned to Iraq with the expectation of acquiring power, it was not true that he was unwilling to work for it. Chalabi, like all Iraqi political leaders, functioned in conditions of mortal danger at nearly all times. Even when he wanted to walk into his backyard, he had to be followed by armed guards. It’s an exhausting and debilitating way to live. But while many Iraqi exiles either gave up and returned to the West, or now spend as much time outside the country as in, Chalabi stayed in Iraq almost continuously following Hussein’s fall. For all the hard work, his zigging and zagging across the political spectrum frustrated many of the Iraqi elites — his only natural constituency — especially after his flirtation with the Islamists. “I don’t think Chalabi has any credibility left,” Adnan Pachachi, the 83-year-old former foreign minister, told me before the 2005 elections. “He is not acceptable to Iraqis. People don’t like him shifting all the time. This thing with Moktada — it’s ridiculous.” One who remained true was his friend Mahdi, who seemed, perhaps from his boyhood days swimming in the Tigris with Chalabi, to carry a deeper understanding of his old friend. “This is the style of Ahmad,” Mahdi told me just before the elections. “He was a banker. He works a dossier. Each time it’s different — he invests here, he invests there, he invests elsewhere. He has had successes, he has had maybe his failures. I can work with him.” Chalabi never grasped his essential unpopularity. In the first round of elections, in January 2005, Chalabi rode into office as a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition pulled together by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the powerful Shiite religious leader. Nearly every Shiite in Iraq voted for the U.I.A., and a name on its slate all but guaranteed a seat in the Parliament. The leadership of the U.I.A. was sharply Islamist. Nearly a year later, as the December 2005 elections approached, Chalabi veered again, away from the Islamists, away from Moktada. Chalabi publicly chided the Shiite coalition as being too Islamic-minded, declaring he didn’t want to be a member of a government that was planning to transform Iraq into an Islamist state. By that time, of course, Iraq was already quite Islamist anyway. “They’re Islamist, and I don’t want to be part of the sectarian project,” Chalabi told me just before the elections that December. I actually believed him, but given his association with Moktada, it didn’t seem that many other Iraqis would. The reality, anyway, was more complicated. In the weeks before the election, the Shiite alliance offered Chalabi and his supporters 5 seats on its 275-seat slate; Chalabi demanded 10. Some Shiite leaders told me that they had deliberately offered Chalabi a low figure in the hope that he would leave their alliance for good. Mahdi, the vice president, denied that this was true. “For four days I tried to convince him; I even threatened him,” Mahdi told me. “I said, ‘Ahmad, if you leave this room, we will be no more friends.’ I was not serious. I was only threatening.” So Chalabi went his own way. If he had wanted only a seat for himself, he could have taken his place in the Shiite alliance; plenty of other Iraqis did. In going alone, he must have known that he was risking disaster. He went ahead anyway. A few days before the election, I drove up to Chalabi’s compound in Khadimiya for a lunch he was holding for tribal leaders. In much the same fashion as in Mushkhab 11 months before, about 100 sheiks from Sadr City listened to a Chalabi speech before descending on heaps of lamb and rice. One of the sheiks, a man named Sahaeh Masif al-Kindh, approached me as he walked out. “Chalabi didn’t forget us when we were living under Saddam,” al-Kindh told me. “He was Saddam’s biggest enemy. We don’t forget that.” 4. Washington, November 2005 The second round of Iraqi elections is only a few weeks away, and the wheel is turning again. Chalabi, once in favor, then out, is back in. Ostensibly, he has been invited to Washington by Treasury Secretary John Snow to talk about the Iraqi economy. But it’s more than that. He’s going to see Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The allegations that prompted the raid on Chalabi’s compound 18 months before, that he tipped the Iranians to American eavesdropping, are mysteriously forgotten. Indeed, everything seems to have been forgotten. Chalabi is rising on the catastrophe that Iraq has become. The Bush administration is grasping for anyone who might help them. On paper at least, Chalabi has a shot at becoming prime minister. Most of the meetings are private. There is a dinner at the home of Richard Perle for some of Chalabi’s old Washington friends. One of the events, a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, is public. The room is filled. At the end of a speech, Chalabi is asked by someone in the crowd if he would like to apologize for misleading the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Chalabi nods as if he knew the question was coming. “This is an urban myth,” he says. The audience gasps. Chalabi told me later that his role as an intelligence conduit on weapons of mass destruction began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was contacted by the Department of Defense. Not vice versa. “They came to us and asked, ‘Can you help us find something on Saddam?’ ” he said. “We put out feelers.” By that time, the autumn of 2001, Chalabi had a long record of working with the American government in its shadow war against Hussein. Throughout the 1990’s, however, Chalabi demonstrated time and again that he would pursue his own interests, even if they clashed with those of the United States. There was the time in 1995, for instance, when Chalabi, under the employ of the C.I.A. in the Kurdish-controlled city of Erbil, launched an unauthorized attack on Hussein’s army. The attack failed to spark an uprising against Hussein; the Turks sent troops into northern Iraq; the C.I.A. was furious. It was a fiasco. “Very quickly he got out of control,” one retired C.I.A. officer who worked with Chalabi told me. “We didn’t know what he was doing over there. He was trying to provoke a war with Saddam.” Then there was the time, in 1996, when Chalabi interfered with a C.I.A. plot to topple Saddam. I heard the story not from Chalabi but from Perle, the Bush defense adviser and Chalabi friend. As Perle tells it, Chalabi called him in a panic from London, telling him that a C.I.A.-backed plot against Hussein was fatally compromised. The fact that the C.I.A.’s Iraqi front-man for the plot, Ayad Allawi, was a rival of Chalabi’s (as well as his relative) had nothing to do with his concerns, Perle said. As Perle tells it, he quickly telephoned the C.I.A. director at the time, John Deutch, who agreed to meet in downtown Washington. Perle said he spent an hour laying out Chalabi’s worries. “He was obviously concerned,” Perle said of Deutch. The plot went ahead anyway. It was a catastrophe. Hussein arrested as many as 800 people and reportedly executed dozens of high-ranking officers. As a final indignity, Hussein’s men dialed up Allawi’s headquarters in Amman, Jordan, on a C.I.A.-provided communications device they captured from the plotters and left a message: “You might as well pack up and go home.” Some people in the C.I.A. held Chalabi responsible, believing that he had spread word of the plot in order to deny Ayad Allawi the upper hand in the exile movement. “There was abiding suspicion in the agency that Chalabi blew it,” the former C.I.A. agent said. The fallout over the failed coup precipitated the C.I.A.’s decision to break ties with Chalabi. Chalabi dismisses those claims, and some in the C.I.A. from the period back him up. “Chalabi was as true to me as the day was long,” says Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. field agent in northern Iraq. “If Chalabi was going to blow the operation, why would he tell the C.I.A.?” There was the money issue, too. Throughout the 1990’s, as the C.I.A. and Congress funneled millions of dollars to Chalabi’s organization, the Iraqi National Congress, rumors swirled about corruption. One of the skeptics was W. Patrick Lang, a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. In 1995, Lang told me, he was sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, when he overheard a group of Iraqis talking about the money they had received from the American government. “I knew who these guys were, and I heard them speaking Arabic, and it was obviously Iraqi Arabic,” Lang said. “So I went over and sat next to them and listened. So what they were talking about was how to spend the Americans’ money, going on shopping trips, stuff like that. Oh, they were talking about going shopping for jewelry for women, toys for kids. Consumer goods. They were also talking about Las Vegas. ‘We will sneak out of here and go to Las Vegas. We have a lot of money now.’ ” A couple of years later, Lang said, he visited the office of Senator Trent Lott, then the Senate majority leader. After introducing an Arab businessman to Lott, Lang sat in Lott’s anteroom with a number of Capitol Hill staff members who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, which provided millions of dollars to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. They were praising Chalabi: “They were talking about him, that Chalabi fits into this plan as a very worthwhile, virtuous exemplar of modernization, somebody who could help reform first Iraq and then the Middle East. They were very pleased with themselves.” Lang, an old Middle East hand who had worked in Iraq in the 1980’s, said he was stunned. “You guys need to get out more,” Lang recalls saying at the time. “It’s a fantasy.” Years later, Lang said, many of the same men who were sitting in Lott’s office that day became key players in the Pentagon’s plans for an invasion of Iraq. Which brings us back to Chalabi’s “urban myth”: the notion that he provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration and helped persuade them — or provide the pretext — to invade Iraq. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Chalabi exhorted the audience to turn to Page 108 of the Robb-Silverman report, a recently completed blue-ribbon investigation, which, he said, exonerates him. It does, in a way. The report does not say that Chalabi & Company played an important role in the events leading to the war. It says only that the Bush administration did not rely much on intelligence Chalabi handed over in making the decision to invade. “In fact, overall, C.I.A.’s postwar investigations revealed that I.N.C.-related sources had a minimal impact on prewar assessments,” the report says. This is also Chalabi’s version. In the run-up to war, he says, he provided only three defectors to the American intelligence community. “We did not vouch for any of their information,” Chalabi told me. One of the people whom the I.N.C. made available to American intelligence was Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, who claimed that he had worked on buildings that were used to store biological, nuclear and chemical weapons equipment. Chalabi told me that he made Haideri available to American intelligence at a safe house in Bangkok. He didn’t think much of Haideri or his information, he says, and was astonished to learn later that the information he provided became a pillar of the Americans’ charges against Hussein. “We told them, ‘We don’t know who this guy is,’ ” Chalabi said. “Then the Americans spoke to him and said, ‘This guy is the mother lode.’ Can you believe that on such a basis the United States would go to war? The intelligence community regarded the I.N.C. as useless. Why would the government believe us?” Perle, from his perch on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Advisory Committee Board, backs Chalabi’s version. He was privy to much of the intelligence the administration was collecting on Hussein in the days before the war. He says that American intelligence officials began from the premise that Hussein had never destroyed his stocks of banned weapons and that he had kept his programs alive. American spies were only looking to confirm what they thought they already knew. In any event, Perle said, very little of their information came from Chalabi. “I had all the security clearances,” Perle said. “I was pretty much aware of the people that the I.N.C. was bringing to the table to talk about what they knew. Everything they did came with a disclaimer. To the best of my knowledge, there was no single important fact that was uniquely conveyed to U.S. intelligence by anyone who had been assisted by the I.N.C.” Indeed, Chalabi says, much of the most important evidence that led America to war did not come from the I.N.C.: not the report on the uranium from Niger, and not Curveball, the Iraqi defector who made bogus claims about mobile biological weapons labs. “It’s not our fault,” Chalabi says. But the story doesn’t end there. A second report, released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2006, reached far more damning conclusions. The report states flatly that Chalabi’s group introduced defectors to American intelligence who directly influenced two key judgments in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which preceded the Senate vote on the Iraq war: that Hussein possessed mobile biological-weapons laboratories and that he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program. The report said that the I.N.C. provided a large volume of flawed intelligence to the United States about Iraq, saying the group “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.” (Five Republican senators disagreed with the report’s conclusions about the I.N.C.) Chalabi’s denials are unconvincing for another reason. His role in the preparations for war was not just as a source for American intelligence agencies. He was America’s chief public advocate for war, spreading information gathered by his own intelligence network to newspapers, magazines, television programs and Congress. (A New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was one of Chalabi’s primary conduits; in an e-mail message sent in 2003 that has been widely quoted since, she wrote that Chalabi “has provided most of the front-page exclusives on W.M.D. to our paper” and that the Army unit she was then traveling with was “using Chalabi’s intell and document network for its own W.M.D. work.”) Indeed, the press proved even more gullible than the intelligence experts in the American government. In a June 2002 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee, the I.N.C. listed 108 news articles based on information provided by the group. The list included articles concerning some of the wildest claims about Hussein, including that he had collaborated in the Sept. 11 attacks. David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, offers one of the most compelling explanations for how pivotal Chalabi’s role was in taking America to war. Kay said that while the C.I.A. had long regarded Chalabi with suspicion, disregarding much of what he gave them, Chalabi had succeeded in persuading his more powerful friends in other parts of the government — Vice President Dick Cheney, for instance, and Wolfowitz. The pressure brought by those men, Kay told me, ultimately persuaded George Tenet, director of the C.I.A., that the White House was committed to war and that there was no point in resisting it. “In my judgment, the reason George Tenet and the top of the agency came over to the argument that Iraq had W.M.D. was that they really knew that the vice president and Wolfowitz had come to that conclusion anyway,” Kay said. “They had been getting information from Chalabi for years.” Of Wolfowitz, whom he has known for years, Kay said: “He was a true believer. He thought he had the evidence. That came from the defectors. They came from Chalabi.” Kay said he continued to feel Chalabi’s influence with Wolfowitz even after the invasion, when Kay was leading the team searching for W.M.D. from mid- to late 2003. “Paul, when faced with evidence that we had developed on the ground, would say, Well, Chalabi says this, the I.N.C. says this, why are you not seeing it?” Kellems, the Wolfowitz assistant, disputed Kay’s story, saying that Tenet’s views were shared by officials across the government. “The position taken on weapons was the consensus view of the United States, including of the Clinton administration and other Western intelligence agencies — as well as that of Mr. Kay himself prior to visiting Iraq,” Kellems said. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in Bush’s first term, adds a final turn to the labyrinth. In the frantic days leading up to Powell’s speech at the United Nations in February 2003, when he laid out the case for war, Wilkerson said he spent many nights sleeping on a couch in George Tenet’s office. During those preparations, Wilkerson told me, Powell insisted that every point he would make at the U.N. had to be supported by at least three independent sources. “We had three or four sources for every item that was substantive in his presentation,” Wilkerson told me in an interview in Washington. “Powell insisted on that. But what I am hearing now, though, is that a lot of these sources sort of tinged and merged back into a single source, and that inevitably that single source seems to be either recommended by, set up by, orchestrated by, introduced by, or whatever, by somebody in the I.N.C.” Wilkerson said that the revelations, some of which he says he has heard from his own friends inside American and European intelligence agencies, have forced him to rethink how America went to war. “I have maintained pretty much the same thing that the president said, ‘Well, we all got fooled, it was lousy intelligence, and no one in the national leadership spun the intelligence,’ ” Wilkerson said. “I am having to revisit that. And that is disturbing to me.” Wilkerson raises a crucial point. Assuming that Chalabi was a source for at least some of the bogus intelligence, we might ask ourselves: so what? Was the American national security apparatus so incompetent that it could be hoodwinked by a handful of shopworn engineers and an Iraqi mathematician to take the country into war? Or is the lesson more disturbing — that Chalabi simply gave the Bush administration what it wanted to hear? “I think Chalabi and the I.N.C. were very shrewd,” Wilkerson said. “I think Chalabi understood what people wanted, and he fed it to them. From everything I’ve heard, no one says he is dumb.” 5. Tehran, November 2005 Amid the debate about Chalabi’s role in taking America to war, one little-noticed phrase in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on W.M.D. offered an important insight into Chalabi’s identity. One of the principal errors made by the Bush administration in relying on Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the report said, was to disregard conclusions by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency that “the I.N.C. was penetrated by hostile intelligence services,” notably those of Iran. The Iran connection has long been among the most beguiling aspects of Chalabi’s career. Baer, the former C.I.A. operative, recalled sitting in a hotel lobby in Salah al-Din, in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, in 1995 while Chalabi met with the turbaned representatives of Iranian intelligence on the other side of the room. (Baer, as an American, was barred from meeting the Iranians.) Baer says he came to regard Chalabi as an Iranian asset, and still does. “He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,” Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections — he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.” Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts” with Iranian officials. “Here is what I think happened,” Lang said. “Chalabi went and told the guys at the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Tehran: ‘The Americans are giving me money. I’m their guy. I’m their candidate.’ And I’m sure their eyes lit up. The Iranians would reason that they could use this guy to manipulate the United States to get what they wanted. They would figure that the U.S. would invade. They would figure that we would come and we would go, and if we left Chalabi in charge, who was a good friend of theirs, they would be in good shape.” Lang’s thesis is impossible to prove, and Chalabi denies it. And even if it were true, Chalabi’s role would be difficult to discern: so many different Iranian agencies are thought to be pursuing so many different agendas in Iraq that a single Iranian national interest is difficult to identify. Still, if Lang’s and Baer’s argument is true, it would be the stuff of spy novels: Chalabi, the American-adopted champion of Iraqi democracy, a kind of double agent for one of America’s principal adversaries. In late 2005, I accompanied Chalabi on a trip to Iran, in part to solve the riddle. We drove eastward out of Baghdad, in a convoy as menacing as the one we had ridden in south to Mushkhab earlier in the year. After three hours of weaving and careering, the plains of eastern Iraq halted, and the terrain turned sharply upward into a thick ridge of arid mountains. We had come to Mehran, on one of history’s great fault lines, the historic border between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. As we crossed into Iran, the wreckage and ruin of modern Iraq gave way to swept streets and a tidy border post with shiny bathrooms. Another world. An Iranian cleric approached and shook Chalabi’s hand. Then he said something curious: “We are disappointed to hear that you won’t be staying in the Shiite alliance,” he said. “We were really hoping you’d stay.” The border between Iraq and Iran had, for the moment, disappeared. More curious, though, was the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there. For starters, Chalabi asked me if I wanted to come along on his Iranian trip only the night before he left — and then procured a visa for me in a single day: a Friday, during the Eid holiday, when the Iranian Embassy was closed. Under ordinary circumstances, an American reporter might wait weeks. Then there was the executive jet. When we arrived at the border, Chalabi ducked into a bathroom and changed out of his camouflage T-shirt and slacks and into a well-tailored blue suit. Then we drove to Ilam, where an 11-seat Fokker jet was idling on the runway of the local airport. We jumped in and took off for Tehran, flying over a dramatic landscape of canyons and ravines. We landed in Iran’s smoggy capital, and within a couple of hours, Chalabi was meeting with the highest officials of the Iranian government. One of them was Ali Larijani, the national security adviser. I interviewed Larijani the next morning. “Our relationship with Mr. Chalabi does not have anything to do with his relationship with the neocons,” he said. His red-rimmed eyes, when I met him at 7 a.m., betrayed a sleepless night. “He is a very constructive and influential figure. He is a very wise man and a very useful person for the future of Iraq.” Then came the meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president. I was with a handful of Iranian reporters who were led into a finely appointed room just outside the president’s office. First came Chalabi, dressed in a tailored suit, beaming. Then Ahmadinejad, wearing a face of childlike bewilderment. He was dressed in imitation leather shoes and bulky white athletic socks, and a suit that looked as if it had come from a Soviet department store. Only a few days before, Ahmadinejad publicly called for the destruction of Israel. He and Chalabi, who is several inches taller, stood together for photos, then retired to a private room. At the time of Chalabi’s visit, Iran and the United States were engaged in a complicated diplomatic dance; the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, had been authorized to open negotiations with the Iranians over their involvement in Iraq. Still, Chalabi insists he carried no note from the Iranians when he flew to Washington the next week. Officially, at least, Iran and the United States never got together. As ever, Chalabi had multiple agendas. One was to learn whether the Iranians would support his candidacy for the prime ministership (the same reason he traveled to the United States). It makes you wonder, in light of the Baer and Lang thesis: was Chalabi telling the Iranians, or asking them for permission? Or making a deal, based on his presumed leverage in the United States? The possibilities seemed endless. Chalabi played it cool. “The fact that Iraq’s neighbor is also a country that is majority Shia is no reason for us to accept any interference in our affairs or to compromise the integrity of Iraq,” he said after his meeting with Ahmadinejad. Richard Perle, Chalabi’s friend, discounted the idea that Chalabi might be a double agent. “Of course Chalabi has a relationship with the Iranians — you have to have a relationship with the Iranians in order to operate there,” Perle said. “The question is what kind of relationship. Is he fooling the Iranians or are the Iranians using him? I think Chalabi has been very shrewd in getting the things he has needed over the years out of the Iranians without giving anything in return.” For all of the skullduggery surrounding the trip to Iran, though, the greatest revelation came later in the day. When the meeting with Ahmadinejad ended, he asked Chalabi if there was anything he could to do to make his stay more comfortable. Chalabi said yes, in fact, there was: would he mind if he, Chalabi, took a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art? So there we were, in the middle of the Axis of Evil, strolling past one of the finest collections of Western Modern art outside Europe and the United States: Matisse, Kandinsky, Rothko, Gauguin, Pollock, Klee, Van Gogh, five Warhols, seven Picassos and a sprawling garden of sculpture outside. The collection was assembled by Queen Farah, the shah’s wife, with the monarchy’s vast oil wealth. And now, with the mullahs in charge, the museum is largely forgotten. The day we were there, the gallery was all but empty. We had the museum’s enthusiastic English-speaking tour guide all to ourselves. “Thank you, thank you, for coming!” Noreen Motamed exclaimed, clapping her hands. We walked the empty halls. Chalabi moved through the place deliberately, nodding his head, pausing at the Degas and the Pissarro. “Wow,” Chalabi said before Jesus Rafael Soto’s painting “Canada.” “Look at that.” A retinue of Iranian officials walked with us, unmoved by the splendor. Ahmadinejad had stayed behind. For all of the furies that emanate from the halls of the Iranian government, it has taken fine care of Queen Farah’s collection. Indeed, about the only way you would know you were not in a museum in New York or London was the absence of the middle panel from Francis Bacon’s triptych “Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendant,” which depicts two naked men. “It is in the basement, covered,” Motamed said with disappointed eyes. Finally, we came across a pair of paintings by Marc Chagall, the 20th-century Modernist and painter of Jewish life. The display contained no mention of this fact. Chalabi gazed at the Chagalls for a time. Then, with a rueful smile, turned, to no one in particular, and said loudly: “Imagine that. They have two paintings by Marc Chagall in the middle of a museum in Tehran.” The Iranian officials seemed not to hear. 6. Baghdad, December 2005 A winter rain is falling. Chalabi is standing inside a tent in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of eastern Baghdad. He’s talking about his plans for restoring electricity, boosting oil production and beating the insurgency. People seem to be listening, but without enthusiasm. The violence here, worsening by the day, is washing away the hopes of ordinary Iraqis. Less and less seems possible anymore. People are retreating inward, you can see it in the glaze in their eyes. As Chalabi speaks, I pull aside one of the Iraqis who had been listening. What do you think of him? I ask. “Chalabi good good,” the Iraqi man says in halting English. Whom are you going to vote for? “The Shiite alliance, of course,” the Iraqi answers. “It is the duty of all Shiite people.” When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.” He shrugged. But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free. No amount of deal making or of public relations foot-work, or of endorsements from friends, was able to save him. Chalabi may have helped bring democracy to Iraq, but it was democracy that finished him. He was, in the end, a parlor politician, someone from the world of his father or grandfather, or maybe of Victorian England: a brilliant negotiator and schemer who might settle a country’s problems over a cup of tea. But in Iraq, by late 2005, real power was no longer held by the parlor men, or by politicians at all. It was held by people like Moktada al-Sadr, populist leaders with a militia and a mass following in the street. The election results were a harbinger of the civil war. Iraqis voted almost entirely along sectarian and ethnic lines: Kurds for the big Kurdish parties, Sunnis for the Sunni parties and Shiites for the big Islamist Shiite alliance. Iraqis who tried to run on a secular platform — Chalabi, for instance, and his relative, Allawi, in another party — found themselves abandoned. Just two months later, in February of this year, following the destruction of the Askariya shrine, a holy Shiite temple in Samarra, the civil war began in earnest: Shiite gunmen, who had for years been restrained by the Shiite leadership in the face of the Sunni onslaught, were finally free to retaliate. Chalabi, shut out of the government, claimed that his sin was one of miscalculation. There was some truth to this: in all likelihood, Chalabi did not lose because he had been convicted of stealing millions of dollars from a Jordanian bank. Or because of the rumors swirling around Baghdad that he had looted the treasury. Or even because he was an exile close to the Americans. No: plenty of Westernized Iraqi exiles were elected to Parliament — among them Mowaffak al-Rubaie and Adil Abdul Mahdi — who, like Chalabi, didn’t have local followings and were trailed by similar questions. Practically speaking, Chalabi lost because he had broken from the big cleric-backed Shiite alliance that swept the election. “I had not realized how polarized Iraq had become,” Chalabi told me after the election. He might have gotten a seat in the cabinet, but that didn’t work out, either. That stung: the new Iraqi government is staffed with Chalabi’s old colleagues, many of them members of the exile alliance he once led. Jalal Talabani is president. Adil Abdul Mahdi, his boyhood friend, is vice president. Barham Salih, comrade of many years, is deputy prime minister. His old confidant Zalmay Khalilzad, who played a central role in forming the new government, is the American ambassador. In the end, they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — bring him aboard. “Chalabi really made a mess of things,” said one Iraqi political leader who now occupies a key post in the government. He declined to elaborate. As anticlimactic as was Chalabi’s fall, its real meaning lay in a paradox: democratic politics no longer mattered. For three years, the American-backed enterprise in Iraq rested on the assumption that the exercise of democratic politics would drain away the anger that was driving the violence. Instead of bullets, there would be ballots. But at the culmination of that long process — two constitutions, two elections and a referendum — the violence was worse than ever. It turns out that democratic politics does not stop violence; indeed, the elections, by polarizing Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic communities, may have helped push the country into civil war. Effectively, by the fall of 2006, the overwhelming majority of Iraq had no government at all. It was a failed state. Yes, there were Iraqis — Chalabi’s friends — who went to their jobs every day, toiling dutifully and not so dutifully inside the Green Zone, which every day seemed more and more divorced from the reality outside. In the Red Zone, as the real Iraq is called, Iraq was a nightmarish, apocalyptic place, where gunmen kidnapped children and sometimes killed them, where bodies turned up at the morgue peppered by holes from electric drills and corpses lay uncollected in the streets, along with the trash, for days on end. Ahmad Chalabi devoted his whole adult life to toppling a dictator and achieving power in the place of his birth. He felled the dictator, helping along a reckless gamble that wagered the future of a nation. The gamble failed, a nation imploded and Chalabi never ascended to the throne he so coveted. But in an odd turn of fortune, the throne no longer had anything to offer. 7. London, August 2006 The conversation is wrapping up. The talk turns to the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the machinations of those around him, what the future might hold. Chalabi, in an expansive mood, gets up, goes into a closet and brings out a note that Bob Baer, the C.I.A. agent, scribbled to him in that hotel lobby when the two men plotted a coup many years before. The talk, improbably, turns to memoirs; at the moment, Baer’s, “See No Evil,” was a best seller. I ask Chalabi, who is back on the couch, if it isn’t time that he write his own. He doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Too early!” Chalabi says. “Too early!”

New Rap Song Advocates Killing Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin? Have any of you seen this? Is MSNBC proud that Keith Olbermann is seceretly behind this? Has anyone seen him on MSNBC lately? He has lost his mind! He bitches about Fox News Bias? Are you kidding me? This guy is worse than Michael Moore. Here are the lyrics of the song. chorus) i wipe the dirt from my hands as i walk from your grave those ain't facts those are lies in the statements you made so we gotta get em get em we gotta chill em chill em we gotta dead em dead em we gotta kill em kill em (verse 1- esoteric) you don't believe homeless vets exist, you put a spin on everything like the exorcist, you're a lying coward, lost soul, most statements you make are not so that's how chickenhawks roll, i find the fact that you a fox news asshole, ironic cuz you never been in no foxhole, i hope that you rot slow you and your talk show, no spin zone that's a vertical inferno fire and brimstone, we seeing all your neo-con bullshit f**k a press room you want the pres at a pulpit i cringe at your right wing lunatic fringe no elegant speech just sheltered beliefs hate dominates like the celts in the east michelle malkin wants to snitch like you tellin' police she oughtta be, shot, they gotta be, stopped infrared for bill o'reilly's head that's a key spot i'm not a violent man but actually your blasphemy is badgerin me' to blast you for your factual inaccuracy naturally, media matters to me so we gotta shut down fox news, that's way it has to be Stop the tape: media matters? Just a coincidence. As you'll see in an upcoming verse, maybe not: (chorus) i wipe the dirt from my hands as i walk from your grave those ain't facts those are lies in the statements you made so we gotta get em get em we gotta chill em chill em we gotta dead em dead em we gotta kill em kill em (verse 2- trademarc) dear bill, I’d like you to getcha mouth off that conservative cock long enough to sit and talk it out, scratch that, let’s backtrack I’ll stalk ya house knock u out drag out gag ya mouth dog it’s out, I wanna hurt you immerse you in torture F**k make fun of you with punchlines I’d rather kill ya family in front of you by lunchtime a one line execution in sunshine, Its crunchtime, let’s take it to the frontlines Bless the union of marriage? Oh that’s classic, d**k in your in your hand making phone calls to andrea mackris you got it backwards, phone sex leading to threats to get her flat up on ya mattress is as sick as the list adjectives put upon ya favorite actresses in your book, no spins so grim, you borderline rapist, sexist, racist makeshift talking head celebrity that needs a facelift (chorus) i wipe the dirt from my hands as i walk from your grave those ain't facts those are lies in the statements you made so we gotta get em get em we gotta chill em chill em we gotta dead em dead em we gotta kill em kill em (verse 3- esoteric) i transcribed all your lies til my thumb was sore separated all your letters like an underscore First a reference to "media matters," and then one to transcribing O'Reilly's words? Just a coincidence, or might these folks spend time at Media Matters? i'm in your driveway like "billo what you runnin for?" you want beef but you'd never send your son to war that's my favorite reason but i got a hundred more you're a, political prostitute a money whore your ass is upper class frontin like you come from poor backgrounds you need to get smacked down with guns galore (verse 3- trademarc) or something more hardcore slasher flick bashed to bits, scattered ya chitter chatter is littered with little that matters you mad hatter blabbering on, I’m dead pan, steady handed kill you on a web cam, body battered til I got red hands, and leave a trail of dead fans, that’s a youtube number one download dump you at the end of your towns road or hang you like Benito Mussolini if the ground’s cold (chorus) i wipe the dirt from my hands as i walk from your grave those ain't facts those are lies in the statements you made so we gotta get em get em we gotta chill em chill em we gotta dead em dead em we gotta kill em kill em (verse 4/outro esoteric) you’re the worst person on the planet credit yourself you mutilated Malmedy, then you edit yourself your lawsuit proves it man, you read it yourself you’re a sick man, you’re better off deadin yourself pan left, maximum carnage like grand theft pan right, see the mic thru the antichrist’s chest o’reilly gets a shankin, he’s a liar, falsifier and I’m a wolf out for his blood til he retires All of the people in the media -- including the good folks at MSNBC -- that have helped develop this threesome's hatred for conservative journalists should be very proud of themselves. Take a bow, Keith. http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/08/14/new-rap-song-advocates-killing-bill-oreilly-michelle-malkin It scares me!

What Songs to i Absolutely need on my ipod? AddictionRyan Leslie Feat. Cassey All Falls Down Kanye West Feat. Syleena Johnson Alphabetical SlaughterPapoose Ambitions Az A Ridah2pac American Dreamin'Jay-Z Amusement Park50 Cent AngelShaggy AnonymousBobby Valentino Feat. Timbaland Apologize RemixLil Wayne ft. one republic AppetiteUsher Around The World The Game Feat. Jamie Foxx ASAPT.I. Ayo Technology (She Wants It)50 Cent Feat Justin Timberlake & Timberland B-Boy StanceCassidy Baby Fabolous Feat. Mike Shorey Baby Don't GoFabolous Feat. T-pain Back Down50 Cent Back Like ThatGhostface Killah feat. Ne-Yo Bartender T-Pain Feat. Akon BeautifulSnoop Dogg Ft. Pharrell Because of YouNe-Yo Feat. Kanye West BedJ. Holiday Feat. Plies BeefRoyce Da 5'9 Best Friend50 Cent Feat. Olivia Bid LongPlies Big BrotherKanye West Big PimpinJay-Z Feat. UGK Big PoppaBiggie Smallz Big Shit PoppingT.I. The Bitch in Yoo (Ice Cube, W.C. Mac 10 Diss)Common Sense Blow My MindStyles P Feat. Swizz Beatz Blue Magic Jay-Z BM J.R.Lil' Wayne Body Bags (G-Unit Diss)The Game Book Of RhymesNas Boost MobileKanye West Feat. The Game & Ludacris The Boss Rick Ross Ft. T-pain Boy Looka HereRich Boy Boyz-n-the-HoodEazy-E Brand NewLil Wayne Brand NewLyfe Jennings Feat. Lil Wayne & T.I BreatheFabolous Brown Paper BagDj Khaled Feat. Dre, Young Jeezy, Juelz Santana, Rick Ross, Lil' Wayne & Fat Joe Bump N' GrindR. Kelly BurnUsher Burn It UpR. Kelly Feat. Wisin y Yandel Burn This City Lil Wayne Feat. Twista Bust It Baby (Remix) Plies Ft Trey Songz Bust It Baby 2Plies Feat. Ne-yo Buy U a DrinkT-Pain Feat. Yung Joc BuzzinShwayze Ft. Cisco Adler Byrd CallJr writer Feat. Lil Wayne California Vacation The Game Feat. Snoop & Xzibit Can't Believe ItT-Pain Feat. Lil Wayne Can't Deny ItFabolous feat Nate Dogg Can't Help But WaitTrey Songz Can't Tell Me Nothing Kanye West Cannon (AMG remix)Lil Wayne Ft. DJ Drama,Freeway, Wille The Kid, Detroit Red, & Juice Cannon Lil Wayne DissGillie Da Kid Cash Rulez Cassidy Feat. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony & Eve) Caught UpUsher CertifiedLloyd Certified Gangstas (Remix)Jim Jones Feat. Game, Lil' Flip Change ClothesJay-Z Feat. Pharrell Changes2pac Chopped & Screwed T-Pain Feat. Ludacris Cleaning Out My ClosetEminem Clock WorkJuelz Santana CloserNe-Yo Colors Sean Kingston Feat. The Game & Rick Ross Come to MeP. Diddy Feat. Nicole Scherzinger ComfortableLil Wayne Feat. Baby Confessions Part IIUsher Cookie JarGym Class Hero Feat. The Dream Crack HouseFat Joe ft Lil Wayne CrazyNe-Yo Feat. Jay-Z Crying Out For Me Mario Crying Out For Me RemixMario feat. Lil Wayne Da Art of Story Telling Pt. 4Outkast Dance With The DevilImmortal Technique Dead PresidentsJay Z Dead Presidents IIJay-Z Dear Mama2pac Dear SummerJay-Z Dear SummerLil Wayne Diamonds and GirlsLil Wayne Feat, Currency Diamonds Are Forever (Remix)Kanye West Feat. Jay-Z Diamonds from Sierra Leone Kanye West Diamonds On My Damn ChainFabolous ft. Young Jeezy & LiL Wayne Did It BeforeLil Wayne Dirt Off Your Shoulder Jay-Z Dirt off Your ShouldersLil Wayne Disco Inferno50 Cent Do It (Remix)Lil Wayne Do What You DoLil Wayne Do YouNe-Yo Doctor's AdvocateThe Game Feat. Busta Rhymes Don't Get ItLil Wayne Don't MatterAkon Dope Boyz The Game Feat. Travis Baker Dope In My BloodThe Game & Lil Wayne DownRakim Y Ken-Y Down And Out Cam'ron Feat. Kanye West & Syleena Johnson Dr. CarterLil Wayne Dreamin Young Jeezy Feat. Keyshia Cole Dreams The Game Drive Slow Kanye West Feat. Paul Wall & GLC Drop It Like It's HotSnoop Dogg Duffle Bag Boy Playaz Circle Feat. Lil Wayne EarthquakeLil Wayne Feat. Jazze Pha Enough Beef Royce Da 5'9 Feat. Common & Chino XL EtherNas Everybody Get UPPitbull Feat. Pretty Ricky Excuse Me MissJay-Z Expect The UnexpectedCassidy & Murda Mook Fall for you Fallen Angel Chris Brown FalsettoThe Dream Feels Good Feat. MyaThe Game Fiesta RemixR. Kelly feat. Jay-Z FinallyLloyd Banks Fire50 Cent, Nicole Scherzinger & Young Buck FiremanLil Wayne Flashing LightsKanye West Fly In/Carter II/Fly OutLil Wayne Follow My Lead50 Cent Feat. Roblin Thicke Freeze T-Pain Feat. Chris Brown Fresh Azimiz Bow Wow Feat. J-Kwon Fuck Tha PoliceN.W.A Fully Loaded Clip50 Cent Funeral Muzik50 Cent GalleryMario Vazquez Game's PainThe Game Feat. Keyshia Cole Gangsta ShitJuelz Santana Gangsta Zone Daddy Yankee Feat. Snoop Dogg A Garden of PeaceLonnie Liston Smith Georgia BushLil Wayne Get Back Ludacris Get Down On The GroundGillie Da Kid Get It PoppinFat Joe ft Nelly Get It ShawtyLloyd Get No BetterCassidy Feat. Mashonda Get u WetPlies ft. Pleasure Ghetto RemixAkon feat. 2pac & Biggie Gimme That (Remix)Chris Brown feat. Lil’ Wayne Gimme The LightSean Paul Gimme What Ya Got (feat. Lil Wayne)Chris Brown Gin And JuiceSnoop Dogg Feat. Dr, Dre & Dat Nigga Daz Girl TonightT THose are all the songs in my i-pod currently

Help interpreting poem... Snow-bound by John Greenleaf Whittier? THE sun that brief December day Rose cheerless over hills of gray, And, darkly circled, gave at noon A sadder light than waning moon. Slow tracing down the thickening sky Its mute and ominous prophecy, A portent seeming less than threat, It sank from sight before it set. A chill no coat, however stout, Of homespun stuff could quite shut out, A hard, dull bitterness of cold, That checked, mid-vein, the circling race Of life-blood in the sharpened face, The coming of the snow-storm told. The wind blew east; we heard the roar Of Ocean on his wintry shore, And felt the strong pulse throbbing there Beat with low rhythm our inland air. Meanwhile we did our nightly chores, Brought in the wood from out the doors, Littered the stalls, and from the mows Raked down the herd's-grass for the cows; Heard the horse whinnying for his corn; And, sharply clashing horn on horn, Impatient down the stanchion rows The cattle shake their walnut bows; While, peering from his early perch Upon the scaffold's pole of birch, The cock his crested helmet bent And down his querulous challenge sent. Unwarmed by any sunset light The gray day darkened into night, A night made hoary with the swarm And whirl-dance of the blinding storm, As zigzag, wavering to and fro, Crossed and recrossed the wingëd snow: And ere the early bedtime came The white drift piled the window-frame, And through the glass the clothes-line posts Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts. The old familiar sights of ours Took marvellous shapes; strange domes and towers Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood, Or garden-wall, or belt of wood; A smooth white mound the brush-pile showed, A fenceless drift what once was road; The bridle-post an old man sat With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat; The well-curb had a Chinese roof; And even the long sweep, high aloof, In its slant spendor, seemed to tell Of Pisa's leaning miracle. A prompt, decisive man, no breath Our father wasted: "Boys, a path!" Well pleased (for when did farmer boy Count such a summons less than joy?) Our buskins on our feet we drew; With mittened hands, and caps drawn low, To guard our necks and ears from snow, We cut the solid whiteness through. And, where the drift was deepest, made A tunnel walled and overlaid With dazzling crystal: we had read Of rare Aladdin's wondrous cave, And to our own his name we gave, With many a wish the luck were ours To test his lamp's supernal powers. We reached the barn with merry din, And roused the prisoned brutes within. The old horse thrust his long head out, And grave with wonder gazed about; The cock his lusty greeting said, And forth his speckled harem led; The oxen lashed their tails, and hooked, And mild reproach of hunger looked; The hornëd patriarch of the sheep, Like Egypt's Amun roused from sleep, Shook his sage head with gesture mute, And emphasized with stamp of foot. All day the gusty north-wind bore The loosening drift its breath before; Low circling round its southern zone, The sun through dazzling snow-mist shone. No church-bell lent its Christian tone To the savage air, no social smoke Curled over woods of snow-hung oak. A solitude made more intense By dreary-voicéd elements, The shrieking of the mindless wind, The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind, And on the glass the unmeaning beat Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet. Beyond the circle of our hearth No welcome sound of toil or mirth Unbound the spell, and testified Of human life and thought outside. We minded that the sharpest ear The buried brooklet could not hear, The music of whose liquid lip Had been to us companionship, And, in our lonely life, had grown To have an almost human tone. As night drew on, and, from the crest Of wooded knolls that ridged the west, The sun, a snow-blown traveller, sank From sight beneath the smothering bank, We piled, with care, our nightly stack Of wood against the chimney-back, — The oaken log, green, huge, and thick, And on its top the stout back-stick; The knotty forestick laid apart, And filled between with curious art The ragged brush; then, hovering near, We watched the first red blaze appear, Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam On whitewashed wall and sagging beam, Until the old, rude-furnished room Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom; While radiant with a mimic flame Outside the sparkling drift became, And through the bare-boughed lilac-tree Our own warm hearth seemed blazing free. The crane and pendent trammels showed, The Turks' heads on the andirons glowed; While childish fancy, prompt to tell The meaning of the miracle, Whispered the old rhyme: "Under the tree, When fire outdoors burns merrily, There the witches are making tea." The moon above the eastern wood Shone at its full; the hill-range stood Transfigured in the silver flood, Its blown snows flashing cold and keen, Dead white, save where some sh Are people still at the mercy of nature, as they were in Whittier’s day?