dysfunctional

Ted Cruz doesn't work

ship him back to Canada

ask for a refund

blowhard

Ted Cruz's ego
pre-existing condition
disqualifies him

tiger's whiskers

al-Shabab's new front
terrorism in Kenya
targets Israelis

punctilious

poorly socialized
the panda eats, shoots and leaves
never tips the staff

don't look too closely II

don't look too closely
Bo XiLai's far from unique
most princes are worse

don't look too closely

Beijing wants to claim
Bo XiLai's atypical
(most princes are worse)

Far Wrong

endorsing Boykin
the FamilyResearchCouncil
came out as bigots

tacit endorsement

general Boykin
spitting on Muslim's beliefs
kept his commission

useless

Bacevich rips Brooks
a "pundit" who's always wrong
hasn't earned the name

be here now

rain pelts the Sukkah
crumbling it back to compost
all is transience

timeless

atonal music
evokes an eternity
atoning in Hell

batting clean-up

someone else's mess
Vatican? California?
hire a Jesuit!

kiss of death

Gingrich's mantle
draped on John Boehner's shoulders
neat burial shroud

The Family

Luc Besson's homage
to gang movies played for laughs
lets DeNiro shine

sensational

pope Francis the Great
questions the focus on sex
rather than on Love

useless

chickenshit congress
leads neither to war nor peace
now we miss Tillman

narrow

GuildNavigators
peering across galaxies
lost up-close focus

this is not how it works

Boehner, like Gingrich
hamstringing democracy
dreams of being king

lame

Boehner's "leadership"
leave the Congress impotent
petty partisans

retrograde

"we're going forward"
if you believe John Boehner
new term, all reruns

equity

who bears the burden?
until senators' sons bleed
we'll keep making wars

teleology

thirsty for meaning
in an absurd universe
we lap up fictions

trying times

acne-ravished youth
aslosh in novel hormones
fresh face, stale story

poor risk

nuclear weapons'
potential for accidents
out-weigh all value

ruminations

take in the gestalt
with synthetic aperture
process at leisure

visionary

Coleridge maintained

Kubla Khan's a dream-fragment

that just seems crafted

evocative

floating, disjointed
the dream-fragment quality
resonant haiku

mirror

my father's gestures
reflected in shop windows
claim to be my own

unrealistic

Rumsfeld's agenda
like Robert McNamara's
treated men like cogs

opportunity

retreating sea-ice
promised container ships
will dock at Murmansk

used

Cheney's web of lies
entangled Colin Powell
and all who trust him

you can't win

Szilard's solution
Maxwell's Demon paradox
"Shannon Entropy"

follow the money

for the Pentagon
Peace posed an imminent threat
their budget could shrink

field effect

the dead don't suffer
it's just hard on the others
like being stupid

the horror

worse than merely war
al-Assad's atrocities
target physicians

Fed chair

since Summers withdrew
"not reopening the search"
means that it's Yellen

transitional

as camp counselors
discovering adulthood
is part of the job

fields

James Clerk Maxwell's waves
propagate in no aether
induce each other

the last war

at Mach2.5
carriers are obsolete
SilkWorms are cheaper

deserts

al-Assad deserves
all the dignity in death
that Qaddafi earned

fuzzy

what defines "species"?
when sex is an elective
like prokaryotes

tidy

gravitational
energies are negative
cosmic sum: zero

bleeding

Syria's wounded
fill Israeli hospitals
while al-Assad stalls

disadvantaged

NSA backdoors
make American software
the world's least secure

leverage

New Jersey foregoes
income tax from GoldmanSachs
Race to the Bottom

synch

strange entanglement
 hundreds of movie-goers
synch up in the dark

small world

entangled airports
dengue's back in Florida
wormholes for disease

failsafe

von Hippel/Lindau
the archetypal deadman switch
monitors O2

can't have that!

Allende's Chile
implements democracy
so we have him killed

donc, je suis

Descartes spawned Wheeler
only observers exist
gazing at themselves

loopy

backward causation
permits John Wheeler's cosmos
to sprout from his mind

the shoulders of giants

Stork/Eschenmoser
sketched out steroid synthesis
Johnson made it so

sinat chinam

Corporations' tool
Mossadegh and Allende
never threatened us

Monroe Doctrine

Castro's defiance
of U.S. hegemony
provoked Bay of Pigs

bargaining chip

Syrian admit
they have chemical weapons
tactical candor

great minds

Leibnitz and Newton
contested priority
inconclusively

mayor of the 1%

Bloomberg's trickle-down
prettified New York City
rose-tinted with blood

myopic

dim electorate
over-focused on gun rights
lost sight of the rest

lord of all he surveys

vigilant, stock-still 

the eagle peers from his blind 

hanging from the sky 

innumerate

Reagan never grasped
the plural of "anecdote"
still isn't "data"

non-correlation

a hundred million
diabetics in China
can't blame McDonald's

pre-conditions

'til al-Assad's gone
Kerry can't claim victory
what's left to discuss?

enlightenment

Baruch Spinoza
herald of modernity
made God redundant

deadman switch

von-Hippel/Lindau
starts hypoxia response
just by building up

honor among thieves

Yahoo and FaceBook
outraged to be called "evil"
sue the NSA

universal condiment

minced in vinegar
Miura peppers' best use
weapons-grade relish

a pillar of smoke by day...

pyrocumulus
darkens half the horizon
Diablo's on fire

not dead yet

fleeing Sanhedrin
there's still lift on Windy Ridge
sweet validation

placebo

religions' tenets
illusion of certainty
make death easier?

regressive

subsidized sugar
made peons from freeholders
"feudalization"

ezer k'negdo

lady Astor snarled
"I would poison your coffee"
he quipped "I'd drink it"

necessary

to explain carbon
Hoyle invoked excited states
hitherto unseen

unforgiving

for lack of steel tools
buffalo make lion rugs
like Wiener Schnitzel

reformist

carved out of a swamp
Peter the Great's capital
"window on the West"

futile gesture

the Paiutes' GhostDance
spread far like a prairie fire
leaving just ashes

history's judgment

Teddy Roosevelt
bid for immortality
funding mt. Rushmore

lottery

I taste cilantro
but am blind to truffles' charms
raw genetic deal

degrees of freedom II

Pauli exclusion
only constrains Fermions
Bosons can condense

degrees of freedom

Pauli exclusion
only constrains Fermions
they're incoherent

for the worse

Pixies without Kim
just leave you with Black Francis
and he still can't sing

unprincipled

Cheney's company
drills for oil on the Golan
profits trump prophets

unintended

under Prop. 13
immortal corporations
pay Ford-era tax

choices, choices

Chinese grocery:
half the things "increase vigor"
the others taste good

make it fit

strings evolve to 'branes
a "theory of everything"
needs more dimension

integration without integrity

wedding "it" to "bit"
MicroSoft bought Nokia
Evil, incarnate

don't ask for what won't work

the Powell Doctrine
precludes the limited strikes
that Kerry asked for

loss

the Ninth Circuit Court
ruled against Drake's Oyster Farm
Wilderness purists

no deal

the Arab League's gift
balking at Syria strikes
lets us off the hook

death-ray

Archimedes knew
how to kindle Persian ships
with concave mirrors

visionary

Fritz Lang's grand opus
terrified Americans
specter of Class War

parody

proper ovesight
begins with ousting DiFi
from "Intelligence"

boon

a glut of lobster
now that we've wiped out the cod
scuttles towards market

dumb

Dubya crowed "crusade!"
Saudis and Iranians
ditched the alliance

gaffe

Obama's "red line"
dumbest move of his decade
gave Assad control

autonomy

Obama's "red line"
dumbest move of his decade
gave Assad control

out-gamed

Neoptolemus
suffered a fate worse than death
he got deified

quality control

each microsaccade
toss out all the bad pixels
call the rest "data"

uncertainty

John Wanamaker
knew half his ads were wasted
but just not which half

regulatory capture IV

who oversees whom?
Feinstein trusts the NSA
more than her voters

starting conditions

virtual photons
inflationary cosmos
presto! lumpiness

improvised

to aid Allenby
Lawrence blew up Ottomans
(and sofas, and chairs)

cancel the apocalypse

Hutton glimpsed DeepTime
no vestige of Beginning
no prospect of End