Barney and the Theoretical Bubble Machine

"Pundita! I just read your last post! Ever since I started listening to Coast to Coast I KNEW there had to be a machine somewhere in all this! Can you tell me about the Theoretical Bubble Machine? Does it have anything to do with the Illuminati or the Club of Rome?

PS: I got a strange letter from the post office about the shrimp gumbo I sent you for the raccoon. Maybe I didn't seal the container right but I thought the sentence about detonating the package was a little extreme. Today I sent crabcakes. I wrapped them in aluminum foil and packed them in dry ice so there's NO WAY they can leak or stink. I included some waterbugs for the crows but I made sure they can't get out of the plastic bag.

PPS: I'm getting more sleep since I switched to the Malibu Diet and took your advice about being more philosophical about geopolitics.

PPPS: Ever since I visited the World Socialist Web Site I've been having dreams about a sinister looking man in a cheap leather coat. I wonder if he's Trotsky. Anyhow, could you tell me what brand of demon repellent you sprayed around before you visited the website?
[Signed] Better Rested in St. Louis"

Dear BRISL:

Don't worry; he was probably only Beria. The Club of Rome....there's a flash from the past...So you want to know about the Theoretical Bubble Machine, eh? The prototype was built by Roosevelt's Brain Trust. A clunky model using a primitive computing machine was put together in the bar at Bretton Woods. This was after World War II. The model was refined after Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the Lawrence Welk show.

From then on, the Theoretical Bubble Machine had a very colorful history. Harvard professors would pay fraternities in beer kegs to steal the machine from the Council of Foreign Relations and restore it to its supposedly proper place at Harvard. Then the council would organize commando units from unemployed policy experts to steal back the machine. These commandos were paid quite literally in peanuts and ID tags that allowed them into embassy parties serving a buffet.

In the mid-80s Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger organized a raid that brought the Theoretical Bubble Machine to the basement of the Center for Strategic & International Studies. I think some moonlighting employees from Langley and a Sony vice president were involved in that caper.

The possum told me that she remembers a tale her mother told about strange doings one night at Foggy Bottom about 10 years ago (these would be possum years, so I am not sure about the date), so the machine may have ended up at the State Department for a time. But the story is that Samuel Huntington (a Brzezinski disciple) managed to get the machine back to Harvard, whereupon it was promptly stolen back by the Council on Foreign Relations.

The whereabouts of the machine became somewhat murky at that point, but what's known for certain is that in late 2001 Douglas Feith organized a raid that brought the machine to the Pentagon.

Here the squirrel picks up the narrative...on second thought, Pundita will summarize. One day Barney accompanied President Bush on a visit to the Pentagon and while Bush was deep in conversation Barney began wandering around looking for a place to relieve himself, as he has a penchant for doing.

The upshot is that since that day, White House policy has been run by something called, "events on the ground." Within hours, Paul Bremer (a Kissinger disciple) was yanked back to Washington from Baghdad and screamed at until he agreed to step outside his theoretical bubble, Iyad Allawi was pressed into service, and here we are today.

As for the Theoretical Bubble Machine, it's still out for repairs. It seems the composition of the....liquid that spilled into the machine messed up the polka rhythm of the bubbles.