Current Affairs Archives

Kindle news

Apparently the Authors Guild is not happy with the Kindle 2.0 "text to speech" option. Amazon and the guild are now working on a compromise that allows 'text to speech', but the voice pattern is that of Droopy Dog.

In other news, The estate of Truman Capote is suing Amazon for the use of Droopy Dog in the 'text to speech' option, saying that by doing so, it dilutes their "brand image".

Oh, I forgot to mention that this is satire.

Posted @ February 12, 2009 04:03 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (311)

And The Generals Said; "Dont worry, we can control him"

As Megan Mcardle recently said "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does have a hell of a stutter". So its in that spirit that I enter down this well trodden road. I'm trying to think of another example of a radical fringe political party, led by a charismatic public speaker with no executive experience, possibly someone who could be thought of as a "community organizer" who takes control of a country through elections during an economic downturn and then immediately starts to move large sections of what was formerly private industry into government control. Has that happened before? At the moment, my mind is sort of drawing a blank on examples, but it does have a sort of familiar ring to it. Is there another example out there in the annals of history, where your political party membership would be essential to your station in life or whether you held a job or whether or not you were harassed by your political enemies? An example where the entire arts and entertainment section of the culture was run under the wing of a single political party, where dissent from the party norm and standards resulted in instant blacklisting and the end of careers?

Gosh, I'm sure if I think about it long enough I can come up with an example. It sure seems like we've seen that sort of thing before, right?

And I hope to hell I'm wrong...

Posted @ February 09, 2009 03:08 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (10)

I think I just found my Secretary of State

As we now live in the modern age of the metrosexual, the political correct docker wearing prius driving soft and cuddly live-at-home-till-hes-30 modern male, you don't often get to see one of these in the wild in his true element. This for those of you who haven't seen one before, is a man.

I don't know who this man is but let the word go forth from me personally and sincerely, that this man will never pay for his beer for the rest of his life.

I find myself asking two of the eternal questions "where do we find these men?" and the second question " how do you walk with balls the size of cocoanuts?"

Posted @ February 07, 2009 12:23 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (48)

Let the Record Show

While your 401k was burning, your home was repossessed your job eliminated and North Korea threatened war, and yet another of the Presidents cabinets discovered why the rest of us hate taxes so much, let the record show that on this day the President and his wife took time to read to children.

Let the record also show that the only kid in that audience who isn't saying "When is recess?" is the one saying "I have to go potty".

Posted @ February 03, 2009 09:15 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (181)

Question of the day: Stimulus? I'll show you a stimulus

Question of the day: If we have already decided to spend 825 billion in a forlorn hope to restart the economy, why not consider 825 billion of across the board tax cuts?

That sounds pretty stimulating to me.

It seems to me that its not the spending that's at issue, but who is doing it. How does letting congress spend my money work better than me spending my own? We just blew through 350 billion in government spending and not a damn thing happened. Let's try something new this time with the second half of the TARP funding.

I think I can stimulate my own economy pretty well all by myself thank you...

Posted @ January 27, 2009 10:41 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (14)

Little things lost

I discovered something today that I wished I hadn't. I found out that a friend who I worked with for years had died in 2005. Well people die, that's what we do, so that's not all that unusual. What is unusual is that he died on the same day as my father died. Whats doubly unusual is what he died from.

2005 was the year my father died. Two months after he died, I developed a severe cough that simply would not go away. After a week of non-stop coughing, I began to cough up blood which got my attention, so off I went to my favorite medical facility for a round of specialized industrial care and medicine.

The cause of the blood in my sputum was easy enough to diagnose because with all my coughing I had ruptured my esophagus. A laser solved the immediate problem but left the question open as to the initial cause of the tear. A series of x-rays and a lot of time in the doctors office, a biopsy here and there and four weeks later I was given a clean bill of health. It was not the "big C". It was determined to be nothing more than a severe infection that lead to bigger things, but for a short time in the weeks directly after my fathers death, I was also dealing with the possibility of my annoying cough being something much worse.

The "much worse" was throat cancer which as it turns out, I did not have. Yet as it turns out, my friend and mentor, did, and died of it on the same day as my father. I knew nothing of his condition. We talked on the phone at the end of the year prior, he said nothing about his condition. Perhaps he didn't know at that time, but if he did, he didn't pass it on to me. Frankly it wasn't his style to do something like that. Where I was a "Kirk", he was a "Picard". He was gracious, classy and polite person. As engineers, we made a good team but we would have made an awful cop 'buddy" movie.

When we worked together in the 80's and 90's and his retirement plan back then was that at the end of his career he would cash in his 401k and buy a rock shop in the Oregon desert. It was never going to happen, but it used to make us laugh at the right time in meetings that had gone horribly bad. It always seemed like a great idea to me.

We had a shared background, we had grown up in roughly the same place in Sacramento, but 20 years apart. Here were two Sacramento valley kids working in a company of seriously deep Bay Area bit heads, so we stuck together. A couple of country hayseeds there amongst the cosmopolitan eggheads. We spoke each others language, the language with verbage based on a suspiciously raised eyebrow in a code review or a sigh that sounds like an air leak when someone in management says something patently stupid during a company meeting.

I hadn't heard from him in awhile, which wasn't all that unusual as the fraternity of our shared past life lives out there on a long orbit. We all come around from time to time, but not as often as we would like. All this time I assumed he had finally gone on to buy the rock shop out there in the Harney Desert. I hadn't heard from him in awhile, so I looked him up today and discovered in the process that he was no longer with us. There are times when a Google search can be like the 'angel of death' and this is one of them.

Now it seems my friend will never retire to the Harney desert and I should stop waiting for a call for lunch that will never come. And I now find myself four years late in grief to the man who once taught me the meaning of the word "crisp".

Posted @ January 26, 2009 09:51 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

I was raised by wolves

My pal Ray and I were talking just the other day. He had called to say that the CEO of his company had sent an email that was praising the election of Barack Obama. Then he related a tale of how in the middle of a bit of dentistry, the dental assistant had offered a bit of anti-Bush diatribe.

In the middle of having dentistry - let's pop in a little jab at President Bush. Sure, what could be wrong with that.

I've seen this phenomenon as well. I find that there are some people who just naturally assume that "everyone hates Bush" and therefore no knock is too low, no time is the wrong time for politics.

Jay Nordlinger writes a great piece in NR on the subject today.

As I said, this sort of thing has happened to me as well. This might surprise some of you, but I don't talk politics in public, I certainly don't talk about it at work. I never have, and I never will. I often find myself having to respond to it, and when it occurs, I usually say something like "well I was raised by wolves so you'll excuse me if I abide by the rule that says you dont talk about sex, religion or politics at work. You should respect my diversity in this matter. The real reason I don't talk about those things is something called "common courtesy" which as of late is in short supply. You should never talk about those three things for no other reason that it is simply rude. Talking about any one of those things in a public venue can potentially become an incendiary subject.

So obviously that means I'm depressed and upset about President Obama. Oh, sorry thrillseekers, I'm not. The funniest thing about this election to me is how the left envisaged that we on the right would become as moonbat crazy against President Obama as they did against Bush. It didn't happen and in my opinion, it wont happen. There will be things we like and dislike about President Obama, but I don't think we will hate him. Our negative reaction to Obama wont define who we are.

I'll come back to this later, but to illustrate my point let me relate this story. I was at the office after the inaugural when one of my liberal collegues came by to tell me how happy they were with the election and in a slip of the tongue he said "Im so proud to be an American". He was expecting anger from me but I just said "feels good doesn't it? That sudden pulse of patriotism. Welcome to the side of the angels my friend!"

He stopped dead cold. He was genuinely feeling good and he was feeling genuinely patriotic and these were entirely new feelings for him. I told him it was ok, it was a good thing to love your country but that idea just seemed to make him woozy. For the first time since I've known him, he was forced to recognize something that he had not believed possible.

That he and I, were actually on the same side. That thought doesn't bother me at all, but it bothers the hell out of some people.

Posted @ January 26, 2009 08:01 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (263)

What's the difference between Bush and Obama

- Bush believes in the messiah, Obama wants you to believe that he is the messiah...

Posted @ January 23, 2009 12:24 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (354)

Explain to me how this works

Let's say I am a "cop on the beat". I go from call to call, and on occasion I as a police officer am called upon to apprehend and detain someone in the course of daily duties.

When that happens, I take the accused back to the holding cell, where they are processed into the legal system. They might post bond, they might sit overnight but eventually they see a judge, who with the help of their attorney and the District Attorneys office, will determine where the accused will go from here.

So let's say that some well meaning citizenry has complained that the holding cells are incompatible with human rights. In a craven attempt to curry favor with the voting public, the City Council so decrees that the holding cells should be closed and in a blaze of camera flash - it is done!

Ok. Fine. I'm just a cop. I do my job. I get up and go to work the same way I did before this happened, right?

The problem is, what "job" do I do? Should I arrest anyone? If I do, where do I take them? What happens when they go there? You need a place to hold people as they are processed. If you close it, what do you do to the rest of the system? You take away the jail, you take away the process and without the process, there is no "system".

So now the President has "so decreed" that Guantanamo and all the "secret CIA" jails are to be closed, "In the interest of Human Rights".

I think its fine to want to close Guantanamo, but the question is, what do you do with those folks who get captured in the effort of fighting terrorism? If you don't have anywhere to take them, where do they go? If you are not going to capture them and you don't have any facilities for processing them, what do with them?

Here's the 10 billion dollar question:

"If you're a soldier in the field and you have to choose to capture a combatant (for which there are no longer any facilities or systems to hold or process prisoners, and the very act of capturing prisoners which may very well put you personally at risk of legal entanglements) or kill the combatant, which will end the issue outright. So what do you "choose" to do?"

Yeah... Me too.

The funny thing is that this whole "close Guantanamo" thing was done in the interest of protecting human rights, but in reality, something else might just have occurred. You know, the older I get, the more I'm convinced that the "law of unintended consequences" is as absolute as the law of gravity.

Update: I'm gently reminded of this scene from "A Bridge Too Far" for somewhat related reasons:

Posted @ January 22, 2009 09:48 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (32)

The Geithner Defense

"You know Senator, maybe if you folks in the legislature didn't make a tax system that is so byzantine and obscure that it defies any reasonable persons ability to comprehend much less comply with, maybe if you did that, then MAYBE I might have figured out that I had a problem with my taxes. It's not like I'm stupid, its not like I didn't have tax lawyers, its not that I didn't TRY to pay my taxes, its that none of my lawyers, my CPA's nor the IRS could come to terms on the final amount. The problem Senator with my taxes and yours sir, is that no two tax lawyers or CPA's can ever make a good guess to what the damn tax laws are at any given time! "

Well. That's what I would have said anyway...

Posted @ January 21, 2009 07:50 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (4)

observations

I can't really tell what it is that I'm watching with this Inaugural.

I should be seeing people, American people, who are genuine in their expression of joy that the smooth and Democratic transition of power has occurred and the Republic remains intact. We have, democratically, decided to move on to bigger and hopefully better things. I want to be fair and optimistic, but I don't believe that is what I am seeing here. What I'm seeing here is something else, something that has my worried. I see this Inaugural as the very living evidence, the very essence of the "something good" that lives deep in the America soul that I have always believed in, but I just cant shake this feeling that a good many others out there who are looking at this Inaugural as the end of the America they have always hated and the beginning of "something else".

What worries me is that the "something else" is decidedly undemocratic. What I am worried about is the worship of men over the respect for the Constitution.

There seems to be a lot of talk about the "greatness of the man" and not about the nature of the office that he now holds.

Men( and any woman will tell you this ) are just men. Some are good, some are bad, but they all have their flaws. Let us not forget that he is a man, and only a man and that any man who holds the office will someday leave it. Let us pray he does not begin to actually believe the good things that people say about him. Let us hope that he also does not believe the bad things that people will say. Let us deeply wish that he doesn't care one way or the other, because in the end he was elected to lead, not to be loved and adored or dare I say - worshiped.

The new President is a man,just a man, and there is a real majesty to that fact. The majesty is that a man of no real consequence can be the President if the people so decree. Come what may, we will decide in four years whether to renew his contract to serve us and in eight years he will voluntarily leave the office to his predecessor. This is what the Constitution holds. That is the core of the Oath taken for the office. That is the essential majesty of the office; that so much power,once achieved is to be given up in an orderly fashion. For like the life of a man, it is designed to be temporary, lest it be mistaken by others for a mask of holiness. Being President doesn't make you a better man than the rest of us, it simply reveals to everyone what you already were back when you were just a man. Some men find this humbling, others shrink from the image it brings, others accept the burden and do the best they can, comforted in the fact that it is only temporary and relief will surely come to them in the end.

Let us all be wary of the day when any man is elevated above the office, not for how the process of deification can elevate the man into being something he is not, but how it lowers the rest of us into being something less than men.

Posted @ January 19, 2009 04:02 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (4)

Question of the day: Stimulus Package

So, out of the 850 BILLION DOLLARS that the Democrats propose spending - is there just perhaps possibly maybe any money being spent of better body armor or better Humvee armor? Any Battlefield Laser Area Defense systems to keep those pesky mortars out of the base?

Imagine the kind of Armed Services we could have with just a portion of that cash....

Posted @ January 18, 2009 04:29 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (12)

Last Nights Wyoming Earthquake

Magnitude 3.7 - Epicenter - Just outside of Alpine Wyoming.

How outside? Well, from the maps I'm reviewing this morning, its almost precisely under my sisters house just outside of Alpine. Way to go sis!

Here in "shaky-land", a 3.7 would hardly even count as an earthquake, but a 3.7 directly under your house would tend to get your attention.

Whats with the quakes up there in Idaho-Wyoming-Montana lately? Well I'm sure it has something to do with this:

That is the Yellowstone Volcanic Caldera, which is just a bit north of my sisters place in Alpine. The blue thing is an outline of Lake Yellowstone. The dots are earthquakes since December 26th. You cant see it here but there have been over 900 since that date.

Volcanoes are good at generating earthquakes. Yellowstone is a big volcano. One naturally follows the other and once again we have evidence that the universe we live in is not static but dynamic and changing right before our eyes.

Posted @ January 16, 2009 08:15 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1194)

Honor. You should teach it here, sir.

Patrick McGoohan has passed away today. McGoohans character "Number 6" in the landmark TV show "The Prisoner" illustrated many of my own feelings about the nature of personal rebellion and its role in the operation of a civilization. There might have been one hundred Lucy knock offs over the years, but there has been only one "Prisoner".

My favorite quote from "The Prisoner", which seems rather timely right about now is this exchange with Leo McKern as "Number 2".

Number 2: What in fact has been created? An international community. A perfect blueprint for world order. When the sides facing each other suddenly realize that they're looking into a mirror, they'll see that this is the pattern for the future.
Number 6: The whole earth as... 'The Village'?
Number 2: That is my hope. What's yours?
Number 6: I'd like to be the first man on the moon!

Well obviously, that was before Neil and Buzz and Apollo 11, but the sentiment is one I fully understand.

Oh... and no, I didn't get the last episode either...

Posted @ January 14, 2009 04:42 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (9)

Comments off - Twitter On

Comments are now off for all posts, but twitter is on at all times. Follow me on twitter...

Those of you who wish to communicate in long form can use the email system, the email account is my first name with varifrank.com.

Enjoy.

Posted @ January 09, 2009 08:50 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Quote of the day

"...Saying that you want to spend your way out of recession is like saying the best way to avoid a hangover is to not stop drinking..."

...Caught in passing

Posted @ January 08, 2009 08:32 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (3)

Humans are idiots - #412 in a series

#412: Owners of cloned dogs complain that the clone version doesn't behave exactly like the original.

Really. What a surprise...

Posted @ January 08, 2009 12:39 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (17)

Sandy McTyre to the rescue!

I think the Governor is missing an opportunity here by issuing IOU's to state employees. I think its time he considers issuing our own currency( which is only a small step removed from IOU's). Here's an inspiration from our neighbors to the north:

That's "money" from the Canadian Tire company. Sure, it seems funny and yes it actually is an official gimmick, but in Canada, CT dollars are serious business. The Canadian version of Ebay actually accepts Canadian Tire Money as a form of valid payment.

That's 'Sandy McTyre' right there on the front. He's not the king of Canada, he's just a cartoon character like our Ronald McDonald or heck, just like our Governor here in California. Think about it, Arnold could issue "Cali-Bucks" to state employees which the state would redeem from stores and banks throughout the state. Businesses and banks would then cash in "Cali-Bucks" with the State of California on an agreed upon exchange rate.

Remember - its not really new currency because that would cause problems with the whole "federal and state" thing, its a "loyalty program".

Come to think of it, the way things currently stand I feel better about the full faith and credit of Canadian Tire Money than I do the US Dollar.

Posted @ January 08, 2009 08:42 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (68)

Better check that resume again...

Hmmm, lets see what we got on the stack here:

1. This fellah was a Detroit teacher.
2. A staff member at Michigan State University
3. A member of a task force on school violence
4. A deputy director of the Peace Corps in Kenya, according to a 2005 profile in Detroit's Metro Times newspaper.

Not bad. Oh there's little bit, according to the FBI, he's also the "Zombie Bandit"

snip...

"A convicted bank robber the FBI nicknamed the "Zombie Bandit" during a string of bank holdups in the Midwest in 1991 is the suspect in a robbery last week in Medford. Surveillance videos convinced investigators the man who robbed the Liberty Bank on Dec. 30 is 67-year-old Alan David Hurwitz, who served prison time for holdups at 18 banks across Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

"He is not the most likely bank robber, but we have seen people fall off the pedestal in the past and resort to crime," Medford police Lt. Tim Doney said.

The FBI nicknamed him the "Zombie Bandit" because of the vacant look on his face during the Midwest robberies.

Hurwitz was arrested in 1992 and sentenced to 12 years in federal prison.

Police describe him as a man who did a lot of good until a drug habit turned him to crime.

"He's done a lot of good in his life, but he has been a slave to crack cocaine," Medford police Deputy Chief Tim George said.

...end snip

Zombies. I hate those guys. They're just like Illinois Nazis, only without the fancy get-ups...

Posted @ January 07, 2009 03:53 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (17)

2009 - where every news article looks like it came from the Onion

This just in...

Japan will find it difficult to achieve Kyoto goals

Its hard these days to hear anything over the din of crashing leftists fantasies as it tends to drown out all the ambient sound. I wonder if any of the signatories of the vaunted Kyoto treaty have managed to meet their commitments under that treaty.

Posted @ January 07, 2009 03:44 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (19)

The picture is getting clearer every day

Here's something interesting from CNN:

Commentary: U.S. needs a spy chief with experience

Well that's nice to know. Here we are 90 days after the election, and suddenly we see that for some jobs, "experience" really does matter more than "change".

I told you, this is going to be the funniest 4 years you have ever seen.

Posted @ January 07, 2009 08:27 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (3)

Hey whats it gonna take to get you folks into this car?

Used Cars - A 1980 Kurt Russell movie, where the protagonist, a used car salesman, tries to buy a senate seat.
Coincidence? You decide.

You've been there. You go to buy a car, you walk on the lot and before your second footstep, a human remora has attached himself to you. Helpful to the point of annoying, the ballet begins where handshake, names, cards and pleasantries are exchanged. Well, lets be serious, the remora is the only one doing the exchange, you are looking for a handiwipe.

You continue in your quest, looking for a specific model, and a specific car. Of course that car and model doesn't actually exist. Yes, you've seen the advertising, youve seen other people driving that very car in that very color but you cant find it here at the dealer. Your remora finally guides you towards some other car that you don't like nearly enough but to get the remora to shut up, you tell him its ok. You find yourself being pulled back to his office, which is really a desk sitting in the lobby with all the sense of permanence of a used paper cup.

Your interest dropped off hours ago but the remora insists. Help him out, let him see if he can make you a deal. Be a pal. Paper begins to fly about the desk and improbable numbers begin to appear on the improbable contract paper. The paper is shoved in front of you.

"Is that a great deal or what!" Says the remora with a smile that looks more painful than happy.

You couldn't care less. Your hands are attached to your side as if they were stapled there. The remora reluctantly goes back to work,moving the improbable numbers about the page of paper that looks like it might be legal and contractual. The paper slides back across the table with small imperceptible changes in the actual numbers.

Your reaction is the same. You don't want the car, you never did. The car you actually want and the whole reason you came to the lot in the first place isn't on the lot and any discussion of the car you want is met with "impossible","doesn't exist" "not as good as you think" and my favorite " Wait till you see the XXX model, now that's a great car, but your car is actually the better car".

You then decide that the show is over and get up to leave. Panic ensues. As you get out of the lobby door and suddenly a new character arrives. He's the "sales manager" he ensures you that the car you came to get is actually here after all. He tells you that your remora is new and he's just training and now the "sales manager" wants to help you directly.

The dance begins again. "You want this car?" he says. You say no. He says that you will after you see the numbers. You see the new numbers. Your reaction is the same. You get up to leave. Panic ensues yet again. You sit down and another round of improbable numbers appear on oddly contractual looking paper. You are shocked. The numbers are about half of the original improbable numbers. "Oh, see you do want the car after all!" says the "sales manager". You say no, you're just stunned by the numbers. you begin to look closer at the improbable numbers. You begin to notice that the improbable numbers are describing a completely different car with completely different set of options.

Again, you get up to leave and panic ensues. As you leave the lobby another character arrives. He's the "vice president of sales" and hes glad to make your acquaintance. He's very impressed with the car you wanted to get, the one that's not on the lot because "I've got one of those too! I love that car!". He seems like a genial fellow who's somewhat disconnected and aloof from the all the spittle and sweat that covers the sales floor.

You make your case, you want the car you want at the price you want. He says that seems reasonable, "so if we can get you in that car at that price we can make a deal, right".

Then you make the first mistake of the night.

You say "Yes".

You move to the executive office, a secretary gets you coffee. She likes you, you can just tell. Improbable numbers cross the desk on improbable paper that somehow looks all official but you cant actually read the text, but the deal somehow seem more reasonable. Yes, the model isn't exactly the same but you are assured by the "vice president of sales" that its close enough that no one but you can tell. He tells you some slightly related story that gets your attention because he tells it so well. You think your important, hes talking to you and he's a vice president.

The dance goes on but the show begins to draw to a close. 2 hours later and moments before the place closes for the night, you sign the deal, you get the keys.

Your nose begins to anticipate the wonderful scent of "New Car Smell".

And that's when you discover that instead of the 2008 Challenger, you actually bought a 1984 Dodge Colt. Worse, you paid twice what the Colt was worth when it was new in 1984. Worse still, a week after you get home, you get a call from the "improbable finance company" telling you that they need another 1500 bucks to make the deal or they will have to take back the car and no, the car you traded in is gone so you cant have it back. You signed the contract sir, you should've have thought about all this before you bought the car...

What's all this mean? Well, I realized this morning that all this negotiating that's going on in Washington for the "Car Bailout" was nothing more than a macro version of the basic "car sale dance" that occurs in showrooms across the country. Everyone knows its going to happen, everyone knows it will cost more than everyone says. Everyone knows that 6 months from now, once we are all on the hook for 16 billion in wasted money that the argument will be that we cant let that go to waste and we just need to spend a little bit more and after all whats another 10 billion to ensure the jobs of America?

And this is why everyone hates the deal. We've all been there and we all know where this is going.

Posted @ December 16, 2008 08:15 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (33)

New software holds the key to mapping your dreams

Apparently there is someone out there who has decided to map your dreams.

Naturally, as a software practitioner, this makes me wonder. I think if you hooked me up to this contraption, the 'map of my dream' would look something like this:

Kinda takes your breath away, doesnt it?

The only thing better than being lucky enough to have seen a Connie in the air is actually having been in one while it was in the air. Ive done both and yes, I still dream about her. What a machine...

Photo from 'Flyings Golden Age' The colors are much more vivid in my dreams...

Posted @ December 12, 2008 06:39 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6) | TrackBack (36)

Its going the be the four most interesting years in human history

hehehhheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheh.

Everyday, every single day since the election, I find more and more of these moments where I just fall over laughing.

Posted @ December 11, 2008 06:46 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

Jerry mahoney - Call your Office!

In this post on the WSJ, I had to take a second look at this photo, because it looks like Daschle is so small that he's a ventriloquist puppet sitting on Obamas lap:

Wow, Who knew!

Tonight episode of 'Winchell-Mahoney Time' is sponsored by Studebaker trucks and your local Kaiser-Frasier dealer.

Posted @ December 11, 2008 02:21 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4) | TrackBack (2)

Dont call it a comeback

I just watched Michgans Sen. Stabenow exclaim "Bankruptcy is out of the question, but its clear that a complete reoganization is called for" Yes boys and girls, thats what passes for thinking in Washington. That line of thinking made my head whip around Wile E. Coyote style, just what does she think a 'bankruptcy' is?

It occured to me that we should just create a special legal plan and process just for the Car Manufacturers that has a sitting judge preside over the reorganization of the company, one that ensures that the debts are fairly paid and allows the company to become solvent again, to benefit both the shareholders and the debtors in a fair and orderly way.

Rather than get all wigged out about the word bankruptcty, we can just call it the "Giraffe" Plan instead. Everyone hates the word Bankruptcy, so dont call it a bankruptcy, but everyone likes Giraffes dont they? So call it a Giraffe and be done with it.

There. Problem solved. The second part of my plan to help General Motors involves the public humiliation and execution of the executives who approved the Pontiac Aztek for production. I suspect that will be somewhat more difficult to accomplish, though the pay-per-view tickets on directTV might just fund the whole bailout process.

Oh, and my hats off to the President for saying that the money has to be paid back to the treasury. That little idea keeps getting overlooked in all this. Its a loan, not a gift, but you'd be surprised how fast one becomes the other in Washington politics.

Posted @ December 06, 2008 11:58 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (23)

Anyone Interested in this?

Since being invited to work with Rick Moran on a couple of occasions on his excellent radio show, Ive always wondered what type of Blogradio show would work for me.

And as such, I think I may have hit on one idea that might be worth the effort:

"Ask A Telecommuter!".

Apparently this is an area that many of you are interested in and its something I know more than a little bit about since I've been doing it for the past 8 years. You would think that most people would be doing it by now, but it comes to my attention that many of you are still getting up in the morning and leaving your home to go to work.

I'd like to do my bit for the worlds climate, for the country and for your well being and put a stop to that anachonism if I can.

I'm thinking that it should be a little streaming video show on "How to do it" in regards to telecommuting, what to look out for while you are doing it, what kind of technology that you need to do it and so on and so forth. General help and support for the aspiring non-commuter class.

SO - whattya think?

Ok - Comments are open now, so if this is something youre interested in covering, speak up.

Posted @ December 05, 2008 12:06 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3) | TrackBack (32)

Theres a lawsuit in here somewhere

See, I told you that TV is bad for you.

Posted @ December 05, 2008 08:56 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

"Thats some catch that Catch-22!" said Capt. Yossarian. "Its the best there is" said Doc Daneeka.

Since the beginning of the current banking and credit crisis, Ive been waiting to hear the sound of the rat trap as it snaps closed on the neck of the general American populace, and I'm here to tell you that I've just heard that fatal "snap".

For the past few months, all these banks have been running to Washington to get their hands on cash to cover their losses, losses largely caused by lending regulations imposed by Congress. "Yippie"! they all scream when the 'Peoples Purse' is pried open and gold coins sprinkle down from heaven, saving the poor unfortunate bank from certain financial doom. What a heartwarming story. Why it occurs to some people that every bank should take this sort of largess. Its there, its available and what could possibly go wrong?

Ah but remember kids, Washington favors always come at a high price. Check out this little blurb on the subject of loans to the Big Three car makers. They are sitting in Washington DC right now trying to get their hands on a little of that money themselves and rihgt off the bat, some Senator figures out real quick whos really in charge of the banks.

"As an alternative( to a cash bailout), Utah Senator Bob Bennett suggested Thursday that those banks getting money from the Treasury be required to convert any car maker debt that they hold into equity, thereby easing the Big Three's cash crunch."

Let it sink in for a minute. Ponder exactly what it is he is saying here.

Oh no... You mean the Government is now going to double down on the bad financial advice for banks? You mean to tell me that the same government that told banks via regulations to give people home loans who clearly could not qualify for the loans or even pay them back, is now going to tell the same battered banks that they have to give loans to the Big 3 Automakers, (companies that also cant qualify or pay back loans) because after all according to Senator Bob Bennett - Its the Congresses money that we gave you, right? We helped you, now you go do what we tell you to do - or ELSE!

This is how it ends. As of right now, the Senate IS the banking system. You just try prying the banking system from the hands of the Senate now. You want a loan? Sure, lets just check your voting record, lets see what kind of car you want to buy, oh darn its not a certified government "greenmobile", well sorry mr. Consumer, we cant give you a loan for that new Toyota Dual Axle truck for your ranch, but how about a new Chevy Cobalt Hybrid? Sure thing. Sign right here Mr. Consumer.

SNAP! Thats just how easy it is for you to find that you no longer have any economic choices. No banks - then no bank loans. No bank loans - then no economy. In point of fact, your entire economy is now run by just 100 people. 100 people that if most of us were in an elevator and any one of them got on, we would then get off and walk up the rest of the building rather than risk our well being by exposed to their close proximity.

Posted @ December 05, 2008 08:11 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (27)

Just so you know

While Detroit is in DC begging for money to make things no one wants at prices no one wants to pay, The Amazon Kindle is sold out.

Oh, and those "big discounts on big screen Tv's" and "Shoppers not buying", take it from my personal observations over the past few days that both of those things are simply not true. It might not be as big as last year, but after standing in lines in several big item stores over the past day, I can assure you that people are buying big ticket items.

And I just checked a couple of the real estate options I have been watching closely, and both of them have sold in the past week. They have been on the market for about a year, and both of them have sold - in November! I also know of two Christmas tree lots in the area that are already sold out of trees. Did they plan for the downturn and simply not bring as many trees? Probably, but is that bad? I dont think so. Sure, it goes against the current "boo-hoo bad news" paradigm, but there you go.

There might be a recession going on out there but I'm just choosing to not participate in it.

Posted @ December 04, 2008 09:43 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (7) | TrackBack (1)

Scientists confirms WWII rumor.

Heres a riddle:

Hitler had only one.
Goering had two, but very small.
Himmler was somewhat similar.
And poor Goebbels had none at all.

What are we talking about? Click Here.

I cant help thinking that if his father had none that it would have saved us all a whole lot of bother.

Posted @ November 19, 2008 04:27 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6) | TrackBack (29)

Question of the Day - Lets talk bailouts

Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, California, West Virginia. These are all states in which Toyota manufactures cars in the United States.

And how are sales for Toyota this year? Down 23%. Toyota has already set up plans to cut production, which for everyone but GM/Ford/Chrysler is probably the first thing you would naturally do. Surely this slowdown at Toyota will impact the bottom line domestic US suppliers that have Toyota as a customer, right?

Question of the day: Given the information above, How willing would you be to giving Toyota some bailout money?

Here's a shocker for you, I'd be far more willing to give Toyota some money than I would to GM, and thats not just because I own a Toyota, its because I think they would invest the money better for a greater result for everyone involved. How do I know this for sure? Because they havent asked for it! And thats because they know the strings attached from Washington would keep them from ever being able to make enough money to pay back the loans. While GM has run to 'Big Mama Washington' for a big smothering hug, Toyota has concentrated on making products people want and when people dont want them, they stop making them.

Thats smart. That usually means its a good investment.

I'm not saying we should give Toyota money, I'm just saying that when people say "US Auto Manufacturing", I just dont know what that means. Is that the old companies in Detroit, or is that autos that are built in the US? Toyota is built here, Honda, Subaru, and Nissan, are they US Auto Manufacters? Why not? the CEO of Nissan isnt Japanese, he's Carlos Ghosn, a Brazilian Lebanese guy who used to work for a French Company. Technically, Nissan is half French now since the merger with Renault, yet no one thinks of Nissan as anything other than a Japanese company. This seems wrong to me.

When companies become multinational corporations which almost all of them are now, should we really refer to them after their originating country or does the ethnic background of the CEO matter? or is it what Stock Exchange they operate on that matters when we refer to a company by its 'country of origin'? In my view, GM is no more an 'American Company' than is Toyota. History says GM came from the United States, but it surely didn't stay there. If you were to give the GM shareholders a chance to vote on whether or not to continue US operations or just concentrate on China, and its my guess that most of their investors would just as soon jettison the US market in favor on China. Does that mean that GM would be a "Chinese company"? Just because a company has their headquarters is based here, doesnt really mean that much to me. Does anyone refer to Boeing as a 'Chicago company' just because they moved their HQ to Chicago from Seattle in a dispute of taxes? No. Boeing could move to Baja California, and it will still be thought of as "a Seattle company", but a sense of misplaced nostalgia for what it once was doesnt make it into one now.

A multinational company is just exactly that, so dont be so "unilateral" when you ask for taxpayer bailout money.

Summary: If GM wants more money then sell bonds and stock and maybe look into making a car that actually works after 5 years. Don't talk to congress or taxpayers because once you do, you will never get another buyer on the market again. People who say no one will buy a car from a bankrupt car company need to tell me why anyone would buy a car from a company so poorly run its only hope was to get money from Washington. I can respect bankruptcy as a business strategy because that is fundamentally what it is and what it is used for, but getting more goverment 'help' is almost always a really bad idea that never turns out well for the government, the taxpayers or the companies in trouble in the first place.

Posted @ November 19, 2008 01:47 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

Copy Editor Humor

The punchline almost writes itself...

Posted @ November 19, 2008 09:01 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (6)

How To Stop Piracy: A Primer

1. Stop paying ransom. If ships are captured, insurance and bond holders are to consider the ships sunk and the crew lost. International Banks that procure and trade in ransom funds shall be considered outlaw and their assets frozen. Countries that engage in Piracy shall be given the same consideration as those who harbor terrorists. IMF funds, international letters of credit and UN protection for nations that harbor pirates shall cease upon a UN determination of the support piracy. Nations that fail to secure their coastlines from piracy shall find their coastlines administered and controlled by the United Nations. This will mean that all customs and shipping for the offending country will be administered and controlled by the UN and order kept by the United States Navy and Coast Guard.

2. Kill the pirates. Sink their ships and boats, blockade their harbors. Take no prisoners. Ships at sea that are found without proper documentation and bills of lading and are found to have weapons and crews for the purposes of piracy shall be considered pirates by the Navy or Coast Guard that captures them and will be summarily executed. Hole their boats, destroy their piers and facilities. Leave no local support for people who commit piracy any more than you would for people who commit terrorism.

3. Shipping companies shall hire armed guards and all cargo ships at sea shall carry them. Armed Guards will be managed and supported by the insurance companys that indemnify the ship and the cargo. Ships that do not carry armed guards shall not be insured. Uninsured shipping will not be allowed into any western world harbor.

4. Hire mercenaries to operate "Q" Ships. These ships will act as attractive targets and placed into areas where pirates are known to attack with frequency. When the "Q" ship is attacked, bring all guns to bear. When pirates are captured, offer cash rewards to the Q ship crews for information recovered on the ports of origination for the pirates.

5. Acts of piracy shall be met with summary execution of the pirates by whomever captures them within 24 hours of capture.

6. Nations that are without a Navy or Coast Guard can issue official papers marking hired individuals as "Privateers" on which they can act by authority of the government in the place of Coast Guard and Customs officials. Privateers must be registered with the United Nations and undergo inspection along with being subject to international laws.

7 Individuals who are found to working in concert with pirates, such as crew members who inform on cargo shipments and their availability shall be given the same treatment as that given to captured pirates.

8. In certain strategic world locations, ships will be convoyed to ensure greatest level of protection to shipping.

Posted @ November 18, 2008 07:20 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6) | TrackBack (35)

Movie Alert - Decision Against Time (1957)

Decision Against Time, a 1957 Ealing Studios film. I managed to catch this last night after recording it from TCM. This is a fantastic movie on many levels but it catches my attention for one reason. No, its not just because there are aircraft in the film (a criteria that I often use to evaluate movies) its because the movie shows life from a perspective that is not often seen in film or literature.

This movie shows life from the perspective of a man. Sound silly to say such a thing, but its true. Most film and literature talks about life from the perspective of a woman or a mother. Rarely is there any examples of the view of life from the eyes of a father or husband. This is one very good solid example of that perspective.

Jack Hawkins plays a test pilot of a struggling post-war aircraft company. Jack is also struggling to provide for his family and is not able to afford buying a new home for his wife. He goes to work and is informed by the company CEO that unless they can sell the aircraft that Jack is testing that they will all be out of work within a month.

Jack then takes the aircraft for a test flight with the potential new customer for the aircraft. Naturally, something goes wrong on the aircraft, a fire breaks out in one of the engines and Jack is forced to make some very tough decisions. Should he save himself and bail out with the rest of the crew? or should he stay with the aircraft which would cause him to lose his life but might possibly allow the company to discover the nature of the problem with the aircraft and manage to stay in business afterwards. While this ocdcurs in the air, on the ground, the factory workers for the doomed aircraft company gaze skyward knowing that their fate is tied to the decisions of this one man. They want him to live, but they also want to be employed and working. They realize that they cant have both. They ponder their own humanity as Jack circles the airfield, burning off fuel. News reporters on the scene are told that unless there is a crash there is no story and with no story they wont get paid. Should they hope for a crash just to make a few dollars? or hope for the life of the man in the aircraft.

There is also a debate among the factory workers about whether or not to tell Jacks wife about the pending disaster. Shouldnt we tell her? How does that Help? Maybe she can talk to Jack, talk some sense into him. Its into this environment on the ground that Jacks wife finds that she has to deal with the fact that Jack has taken this very large, life threatening risk with his life and their family security.

She simply doesnt understand why he would do such a thing. Is this a macho thing? Why would he do it? All the other Pilots say they would never take such a risk.

Suffice to say, Jack explains it to her. Its a riveting scene that explains to many people the decisions that men and husbands often face in their lives that other people, particulary wives, simply dont understand.

"Lawrence of Arabia" fans will enjoy the work of Jack Hawkins( Col. Allenby in Lawrence) in this film as well as the actor Howard Marion-Crawford, who plays the reporter in this movie. In Lawrence, he plays the role of the British Military Doctor introduced in the initial scenes of the movie as "an admirer of Col. Lawrence" saying that "he never met the great man personally". It's only later in the film do you see that he did meet Lawrence and slapped him to the ground when he sees the appaling conditions of the hospital that he takes over from Lawrence, not realizing that the man he had slapped to the ground was in fact the same man he to which he would later offer high praise on the steps of St. Pauls Cathedral.

Posted @ November 18, 2008 09:13 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (4)

Well, He did say "Country First", didnt he?

A 'Random Thought' just popped out of my head as I saw the headline of President-elect Obama is meeting with McCain.

Remember that I have already speculated that McCain wont run for another term as Senator of Arizona. In short, he's finished with elected office but that doesnt mean that I think he's done serving the country.

Let me ask you, is now the time for McCain to become either Secretary of Defense or possibly the Secretary of State? Dont be so quick to dismiss it. If the President were to ask McCain to serve, I think he would take the job.

I dont think it will matter who is the President.

Posted @ November 17, 2008 09:17 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (4) | TrackBack (5)

I shouted out "Who killed the blogosphere" when after all it was you and me

Ah, It's first thing Monday morning and I'm already up one Stones reference. Let's see you top that Steve...

Nick Carr explains who it was who killed the blogosphere and most of you already know who it is. I know most of you are saying "Hey, I didnt even know it was sick!" but yeah, when you live in an era where everyone has a blog, then there is no blogosphere. See, while you were out working out linkage stats, someone came along and made the blogosphere irrelevant.

Good. Now we can all get back to talking about something besides politics on our fancy internet web page thingys.

Posted @ November 17, 2008 08:21 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (496)

Megan McArdle Explains it all for you

All the 'back and forth' that we had earlier this week had on this site over the bailout of GM can be distilled into short, sharp, clearly expressed genius from Megan McArdle.

My thoughts about her clarity on the subject? In a word - "Exactly".

Posted @ November 14, 2008 03:18 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

You know youre not supposed to take those ads seriously dont you?

I saw this ad on drudge a few minutes ago. You see these things all over the place and most of the time I dont notice them, but this one jumped out at me:

You know, I dont want to just right come out and say that I think that these people are lying about the weight loss this lady in the 'before' picture supposedly had under their plan, but I just dont think that the 'before and after' picture is the same person. I just have a hunch. I can't quite put my finger on why I feel this way, I just do.

Posted @ November 14, 2008 08:48 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

so what would it take to get me to bailout GM?

Ok, let's say we dont want to go to bankruptcy because that would poison the ability for GM to sell cars. Lets agree for the sake of argument that this is core of the case against GM using bankruptcy as a way to solve its problems. I dont agree, but let's do so for now so that I can illustrate a few things in the process.

The alternative to bankruptcy seems to be that we give GM more money, with fewer strings. This seems to be a genuinely bad idea.

Shareholders buy stock because they believe that the future price of the stock will increase. They believe this through a combination of their own prognostication methods and what is published for the shareholders by the company itself. Its in this way that a companys management is kept accountable. If they fail to meet their goals, the stock is sold ( sorry - dumped ) and a shareholder revolt occurs, resulting in the removal of the management team that failed to deliver. Thats how its supposed to work, and for the most part, it does.

So again the options on the table now are:

1) Bankruptcy.

or

2) To give GM management access to more money and undergo even less accountability than they currently receive from their large institutional investors.

So let's try a third option. Let's call it a "Reorganization" for the lack of a better word. It will work something like this:

A) Let's go ahead and give GM money for a "reorg" but in return, lets break the company up into smaller, more competitive units. In thend, there will be Three GM's, Let's say a separate company for Cars, Trucks and commercial vehicles and Defense. Since its not reasonable for GM to find a buyer for some of the more asinine and incompetant existing product lines, lets go ahead and fund the removal of these business units through a direct "buy out". For example, shut down Buick for lets say 20 billion. You name your business unit and we will agree to a fair price to help you (GM) shut it down. Sound fair?

B) Let's take the Pensions and bundle them into some sort of newly expanded Government Pension protection plan. Oh, and after this - NO MORE PENSION PLANS, its 401k, funded at 7%. Employees in GM/REORG manage their own retirement from here on out, no more of this "cradle to the grave" crap. Oh, and this applies to all employees, not just labor. Everyone sinks or everyone swims at GM/REORG.

C) Retiree Health Benefits. Ok, Let's get that off of GM's back and place the UAW retirees into Medicare. We fund Medicare for each of the GM Retirees added to the plan, thus ensuring that Medicare gets more money and the folks get some form of Health Care. But Frank, "Medicare sucks" you say. Well, ok, we can look at reform of Medicare at the same time makybe kill two birds with one stone. Oh, and dont lay any of that "This isnt what we agreed to in our contract with GM" because if you do that, we can just go ahead and go into bankruptcy and that pretty much puts the end to your contract, right? Consider yourself lucky that we are going this far.

D) Let's have a capital gains cut for any new investors of GM/REORG Stock. Investments in GM Reorg Stock that are kept over 10 years will be free of Capital Gains taxes, now how's that sound? That way the shareholders of GM/REORG can keep an eye on management for their investment and will have an interest in it doing well. Oh yeah, theres that whole, "Its not government money" thing, which naturally makes me happy.

E) Legislative Knot Cutting. Let's take a wholesale look at removing the barriers that keep GM/Ford/Chrysler from being competitive in the world marketplace and lets remove those barriers, ( costs nothing to do and keeps the legislature busy in the mean time, its a win-win). But Frank, wont that make the UAW mad? Look, if the UAW wants more "Auto Workers" in its union, they need to start figuring out how to make more "Autos" in the USA, its a symbiotic relationship between host and parasite and it never foes the parasite any good to kill the host.

That process starts here. Yes, UAW rank and file, you might have to move around a bit, but in the end there might just be more of you, which is good for you, good for me and dare I say it, good for the UAW and GM. PLEASE NOTE: I DID NOT SAY RAISE TRADE BARRIERS TO KEEP OUT JAPANESE CARS FROM THE US MARKET. What I said was, remove the barriers from GM that keep it from competiting on the world market.

Weird? Out of the box? Sure. Would it work? Well, Yes, I think most of these would work and more to the point they would work far better than just giving the current management team access to more cash to keep making the same mistakes they have always made. It would also make the US car industry more competitive and it would remove the knife from the US taxpayers next marked with the words "too big to fail". In my way of thinking, any company that says that they are too big to fail is an immediate candidate for being broken up as part of the agreement to a bailout. Sorry kids, you cant have it both ways.

So yeah, I can see helping GM, but I just dont think giving them a firehose of money to drink from is going to help them with the problems that they have. They need to be reorganized, so let's go do that.

Posted @ November 13, 2008 03:51 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

It just gives me the willies

There is nothing in the world that gives me the creeps more than when Conservatives use the word "fair".

Unless of course, when they use it more than once to make the same point.

Posted @ November 13, 2008 08:39 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

HMS Cumberland: 1 Somali Pirate Dhow - 0

Here's a Somali Pirate Dhow:

Wow. I havent seen anything as fearsome on the high seas since Gilligan shipped out with the Skipper for a three hour cruise.

And heres the HMS Cumberland:

And how did it all turn out? Well, for the Pirates, it didnt end like it does in the movies.
Snip:

"Pirates caught redhanded by one of Her Majesty’s warships after trying to hijack a cargo ship off Somalia made the grave mistake of opening fire on two Royal Navy assault craft packed with commandos armed with machineguns and SA80 rifles.

In the ensuing gunfight, two Somali pirates in a Yemeni-registered fishing dhow were killed, and a third pirate, believed to be a Yemeni, suffered injuries and subsequently died. It was the first time the Royal Navy had been engaged in a fatal shoot-out on the high seas in living memory."

You know, I've been on the "Pirates" ride at Disneyland more times than I can remember, but I would gladly go back every day if they added that little bit of action to the display. Hmmm, maybe if they rename it "Limeys of The Somali Coast"?

That aught to pack 'em in...

Posted @ November 12, 2008 03:14 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (261)

Question of the Day - Consumer Behavior

Let me get this straight:

- You won't but GM/Ford/Chrysler stock?
- You won't buy their cars?

But you want to see "The Government" give a big pile of your tax dollars to them?

Question of the Day:

A) Does it ever occur to you that when you are taxed, when the government confiscates your money that you earned for whatever you did to convert your own labor into cash, that this is where its going?

B) Oh, so you dont get taxed? Does it occur to you that what ever tax money there is that is confiscated from other people, that isnt going to fill potholes but instead to make cars that no one wants, built by a company that no one wants to own stock in?

Extra Credit: If Taxpayers are having their taxes used to fund corporate bailouts, then shouldnt taxpayers get stock certificates in the companies they bailed out? If I buy savings bonds, I get something I can redeem later, why not do something similar with the business bailouts?

Posted @ November 11, 2008 12:04 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4) | TrackBack (15)

What is this I see?

The Brownshirts - 1933

The Brownshirts - 2008

Ah, the new age is here and examples of love and tolerance can be seen everywhere for all to see, like these:

300 protest outside Mormon Church, CHP closes Highway 13 ramps.

Prop 8 Protestors Spray Graffitti on Mormon Church in Orangevale.

Prop. 8 protesters target Mormon temple in Westwood

Mormon Missionaries Attacked By Mob, Stabbed.

76-year-old man and 77-year-old wife were physically assaulted by Prop 8 supporter.

Vandals attack homes owned by Prop 8 supporters.

I could go on for days with more examples of the peace, love and tolerance that flows from the new leaders of world 'love and tolerance'. How ironic that those who calmly lecture the rest of us for the acceptance of alternate lifestyles can so quickly revert to animalistic and decidedly undemocratic behavior in blatant attempt to bully their neighbors into submission and to attack their beliefs with violence. If this had been any other sort of sign you can imagine, whos intent it was to intimidate the people within the house for their beliefs, the reaction would have been quite different. Condemnation, arrest, disgust would be the reaction of the public at large, and it would be the correct reaction by all. And yet, because its directed towards Mormon, its met with titters and laughter by the at large public.

Somehow I feel like I've seen this show before and I didnt much like it last time.

No one should be made to live in fear. It does not change anything at all in the argument to change the sign from the word "BIGOT" to something else. Spend a few minutes yourself and replace the word "BIGOT" with any noun you wish to choose; try out a few 'colorful' ones just for fun. You see, The effect is the same. The righteousness of your argument does not undo the damage done to the the induvidual its being used against. Once called a "Bigot" there is no undoing it. You are, simply because someone else chooses to make you one.

That they would do this to a person at all is beyond disgust to me, but that they decide to take up this horror on this, the 170th anniversary of the issuance of the Mormon Extermination Order by the Govenor of Missouri and the 70th anniversary of Kristalnacht in Nazi Germany is a reminder of how thin the tissue is that holds our collective memory and its resulting morality together and how once its torn, there is no length that the minority will go to impress its will on the majority through acts of quiet terror.

This is a small warning to all of us who see it for what it is. If this sort of strong arm bullying of Mormons is allowed to go on as acceptable behaviour by society as a whole, if we allow people to fear for their lives and their property by quietly accepting this sort of terror as normal, If the targeting of individuals for expressing their votes is to be met with political terrorism, if people will start to fear for their jobs and their property because they speak their minds, then which of us will dare express ourselves when the firehose of leftwing 'thug politics' is turned on us?

The message here should be clear. This isnt about Mormons, Mormonism or their belief system, so dont start arguing theology with me as a way to justify the crimes of the left towards Mormons. Its about Democracy and your right to even have a voice at all. The Mormons are a minority in all but a few places in the world. Yet, they are an organization with billions of dollars and millions of members in their church and at their disposal.

If the thugs can take the right to vote from the Mormons through acts of brutality and everyone else turns a blind eye to it while its done, because, you know, "its just the Mormons", how long do you think you can stand up to them?

Be warned. Those who think I'm overreacting need to simply tell me how far should I let this sort of thuggery go on before I should get upset? Should I wait until Mormons are regularly kept from possible employment in certain companies and industries? Should I wait till playwrights are praised for their anti-mormon writings? Should I wait till Mormons are always portrayed in a negative light in film and literature? Should I wait until pre employment background checks reveal your political support and thus your religion to your employer? Should I wait until people and property are attacked and brought to public ridicule for their beliefs?

Oh. Most of those things have already happened, and not just back in 1933. Its happening now. Pehaps its too late already, eh?

So,how far? and for how long? You come tell me, oh lovers of "peace and tolerance", and when you do I've got some books I want you to read.

Posted @ November 09, 2008 01:58 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6) | TrackBack (4)

Question of the day - GM or Not GM

Question of the day -

"So why can't GM be allowed to go into bankruptcy?"

Seems to me that United Airlines and half a dozen other companies I can name have gone into bankruptcy without also going out of buisness. GM goes into bankruptcy it gets relief on some of its debt but gets "reorganized" which can't be a bad thing if you ask me.

Might it have a little something to do with the juicy union contracts that would become toast in bankruptcy court and thus the political drive to "do something"?

Having GM shed a dozen asinine contracts and unjustifiably expensive health and benefit plans would seem to me to be a good thing for everyone. I dont have a problem giving GM money, but like any investor I want to see the business plan that goes with it before the dollars cross my desk. So far the business plan seems to be to keep doing the same moronic things they have been doing only on a whole new class of investors dollars. Since when did working at GM become an entitlement?

Any Thoughts?

UPDATE:

Welcome Instapundit-eers, Vodka-teers, and the good folks from Powerline.

One other note: most of you seem to have missed the rather obvious connection between government intervention and poorly performing companies. There are lots of arguments about why GM must be bailed out by the US Taxpayer, but no one ever recognizes tht by doing so they ensure that GM becomes more deficient and incapable of competing in the marketplace. If the can't fail now, what makes you think they will be allowed to fail after sucking down a trillions of your tax dollars?

For Example:

We've all seen kids who still live at home when they are 30. The kid of kid whos parents give them an ample allowance and expect next to nothing of them in return. Thats GM in a nutshell. The 'Kato Kaelin' of manufacturing. Now, rather than go to college, or get a job, the no good layabout is about to invite his friends Ford and the Dodge Brothers over to watch a 'Twilight Zone Marathon' on the SciFi channel while they chug a few brewskis.

UPDATE II: The concensus amoungst the commentariat is that "no one would buy a car from a bankroupt company". Perhaps, but why would anyone buy a car from a car company that requires a bailout from the government? We bailed out Chrysler, and where are they today?

Fundamentally, the question to ask is how does the bailout make GM a better company? It doesnt and in my opinion, it can only do harm. You dont think so? Ask the workers at British Leyland.

If its really "for the workers" then give the money to the workers directly. For all the billions they want to pour into GM to 'save jobs for the workers', you could pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to each worker and tell them to go directly to retirement.

Workers dont want work, they want the money they get in exchange for working, or in som cases, pretending to work.

Posted @ November 08, 2008 01:06 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (36) | TrackBack (0)

Strategery

At this time, I wish to point out something that many people on the Republican side have yet to recognize and it needs to be said early and often lest we fall into a very serious mistake.

Pay attention folks - President Obama is off-limits. He is not the new 'Bill Clinton'. Unlike Bill Clinton or George Bush he isnt just the president, he's a symbol. Attacking Obama like he was the new Clinton will have the same effect as attacking Ronald Reagan, his supporters wont be swayed and you will look small as a result.

'President Obama' is a symbol of the country, he's like a walking flag. However, this can work out to our advantage and here's why - Here's a riddle: What has two heads, no brain and an approval rating of 9%?

Answer: The Democratic Congress.

Thats where you will find a target rich environment on which to launch your opposition. If you run on a ticket of change, you have to deliver and the change you bring had better be demonstrably better than what people expected. Chances are extremely likely that they have significantly overpromised and are likely to underdeliver on those promises before the next election. Republicans should exploit this to the highest degree.

Short version: Ignore Obama, concentrate on the Democratic Congress. Separate the two wherever and whenever possible.

Let me also bring the following list into the game:

Christopher Dodd of Connecticut
Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas
Barbara Boxer of California
Ken Salazar of Colorado
Daniel Inouye of Hawaii
Evan Bayh of Indiana
Barbara Mikulski of Maryland
Harry Reid of Nevada
Chuck Schumer of New York
Byron Dorgan of North Dakota
Ron Wyden of Oregon
Patrick Leahy of Vermont
Patty Murray of Washington
Russ Feingold of Wisconsin

Is the Senate Majority leader ever vulnerable? Go ask Tom Daschle.
There are targets on this list that we need to get to work on right now.

UPDATE: Oh, forgot to mention that Bob Byrd has stepped aside from his chairman seat. He's 91. Oh, and he's from West Virginia. Let's see, how did West Virginia vote this time? Red State with an Open Senate Seat. Go For It...

UPDATE II: Betcha McCain doesnt run in 2010. I dont think he will resign, so theres a bit of work to be done there. And I betcha neither does Lieberman, so theres some work to to there too. And I'll bet Ah-nold runs in 2010 for Boxers Seat, and wins!

Posted @ November 07, 2008 09:18 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3) | TrackBack (11)

Channeling my inner Emma Goldman

Dear Little-Boys-and-Girls-formerly-of-the-McCain-Campaign-who-now-find-yourselves-unemployed-and-now-thanks-to-your-antics-are-very-possibly-unemployable.

Ahem.

I just want to give you something to think about as you go about making Sarah Palin into a scapegoat for your failures:

"If you dont have room for Govenor Sarah Palin in your party, then you dont have room in your party for me"**

You ever look at the Reagan/Mondale electoral map of 1984? You folks wanna see that map reversed, with the next Republican getting his home state and nothing else? Then keep talkin' trash about the one thing in your campaign that actually worked - Sarah Palin. You jackasses think that Govenor Palin was all about "getting the PUMA's", well it wasnt. It was about getting the Republican base behind McCain. If Sarah Palin had been at the top of this ticket, I dare say we would have done better and I say this as someone who likes McCain. If Sarah Palin had not been on the ticket, just exactly who do you think would have showed up for McCain? If Sarah Palin was so bad, then why did McCain take her everywhere? Well thats easy because everywhere she went, thousands of people showed up. That didnt happen with McCain, unless of course, people heard that Sarah Palin was going to be there with him.

Now clear out your desk, turn in your keys and go back to getting your masters degrees in Poli-Sci at some Ivy League sausage grinder.

**: Emma Goldman - A left wing agitator from the last century who once said "If I cant dance, I dont want to be in your revolution".

UPDATE: Simple, direct and to the point. It expresses my feelings exactly. .

Posted @ November 06, 2008 02:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3) | TrackBack (2)

Back to basics

I'll have more to say on this later, but for right now, let's try to distill our core arguments in small, bite-sized sentences that people of all education levels can understand.

Here's my first take:

"Its Your Money".

It's not "government money" its not "fairness" to have someone else decide to take it away from you, it is simply your money. You should be left to spend it in any fashion you see fit for whatever reasons you wish.

This is the essence of the concept of "pursuit of happiness" which as I understand it, is a phrase that can be found in some obscure written documents that date from the formation of the country. "Fairness" can be best defined as those policies that result in you keeping more of your own money for you to spend as you see fit.

There is nothing fair to be found in simple confiscation.

Posted @ November 06, 2008 11:11 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (8)

Im Chris from Shamwow!

Hey Chris, I'd check your ratings on your current gig before you sign on for a bigger mission. MSNBC could make more money with your timeslot by just giving it to "vince from shamwow".

Posted @ November 06, 2008 10:55 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (26)

Channelling my inner Mencken

Just repeating over here something that I just said over at Steves Place:

Channelling my 'inner Mencken' this morning, I found myself saying:

“A new President has been elected. Well that aught to teach him…”

The Office of the Presidency is a cruel inhumane joke that we invented to trap our most agressive alpha males. They get attracted to the scent of power, and the find themselves trapped in the steel jaws of a governmental system thats designed on purpose to not work.

That's why everyone comes into the office of the President loks like a bright shiny penny and leaves the office looking like a bag of freshly hammered dog crap.

I almost feel sorry for him. Almost.

Oh, and my mood today? I'm actually feeling pretty good! I'll tell you why later...

Posted @ November 05, 2008 10:33 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

Congratulations President Obama

No sour grapes here. I think it was good race by all parties. I doesnt look to me like its going to be a landslide, but it doesnt have to be. I think McCain has made a solid run against overwhelming odds. I see no shame in that, he was not "Dole 2.0". I think we need to recognize that Barack Obama is the President. I would hope that at some point he thanks the one man who most made it possible:

George W. Bush.

By effectively managing the 'war on terror' to the point that it no longer exists as a factor in elections, it was President Bush who provided the conditions that lead to the rise of Barack Obama. The last time we saw something like this was when George H.W. Bush finished the cold war and was thanked for his efforts by the electorate by being instantly replaced by Gov. Bill Clinton, all for the crime of not knowing what a checkout scanner was. Barack Obama survived the primaries and this election because the electorate doesnt see warfare as a likely possibility in the next 4 years. That can only be because the last eight years were successful and one man - literally one man, and thats because of his leadership in the face of horrible advice and military intelligence data, used his character to do the right thing to defend this country. He should be thanked for that effort and I hope in his graciousness of victory, the new President takes the time to thank him for that.

As I said earlier, if Barack Obama can run the country as well as he ran his campaign, we all should do very well.

Let us all hope and pray for the new President in the execution of his duties. Oh, and here's to the end of 'Bush Derangement Syndrome'. And kids, let's not go and replace it with Obama-mania, one way or the other,ok? He's a man, no more, no less. I hope he remembers that fact as well as you.

There will be plenty of time later for "whats next" but let's all take a moment and recognize what happened here tonight. I'm 47, just like the new President and I have to say that weve seen alot happen in our lifetimes. When I was a kid back in the 1960's, it was a big deal when a black person had their own prime time TV show where they werent playing a maid or a clown of some sort. It was a big deal when a black man was promoted to be on the Thunderbirds Air Demonstration Team, it was a big deal when a black man became an Astronaut. In my lifetime, it was once a scandal for black men to marry white women and in some places it was outright illegal. All of that happened in our lifetime and I'm glad its no longer weird or odd to see black folks do any damn thing they want to for no other reason than they can and marry whomever they please. I no longer live in an age where its assumed that they arent up for the job just because of the color of their skin.

And now we have a President with the name Barack Obama who's father was from Kenya.

Is this a great country or what?

And all you anti-american europeans who cant wait to find something to hate about America and Americans, I have just one question for you:

"Where's all your black candidates, hmmmm?"

You folks in the UK can come talk to me about "racist Americans" when you get a Prime Minister whos something more than opaque.

Posted @ November 04, 2008 06:27 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (12) | TrackBack (3)

caught in passing

Hallway conversation...

She: "You dont really think that McCain will win Pennsylvania do you?"

Me: "No, but I'll bet Palin does"

Heh.

Posted @ November 04, 2008 12:09 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

my only prediction for the day, and its a sad one

I was really hoping against hope that we would see a clear result today.

That hope has now been dashed:

"Denver Election Commission spokesman Alton Dillard says the "days of having your close to final results by 10 p.m. are over." He says officials have tried to make it clear from early on that workers will still be counting ballots into Wednesday, and that still holds true."

So its time to explode a myth. Mail in ballots are not counted until after the election polls have closed. Most elections, the mail in ballots arent even counted and one of the two candidates has to sue the election board to get a count. However, due to the closeness of this election, they will almost certainly have to count them to get a result. Sadly,that will take time. more time than they can get in a single day. This is not limited to Colorado, any state with large amounts of mail in voting will suffer from this phenomenon.

The good news is that this is yet another sign that its a close election. The bad news is that we gotta put up with this crap for a few more days.

Posted @ November 04, 2008 10:04 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (31)

Hawaii Good Luck Symbol makes a sudden comeback

Obama expresses his true feelings.

Look you hatemongers, thats not a "middle finger", thats a Hawaiian "Good Luck" symbol. Obamas from Hawaii, he wants to be your friend, thats all it is. Just relax, ok? You haters out there really need to get a life...

Heck, here's a picture of some good old Navy guys giving the same symbol:

and wouldnt you know that it was published in Time Magazine in 1968, so how could it be so rude as you think it is? See, Its "Good Old Navy" guys, just like John McCain is a good old Navy Guy, and they are giving what you think is an insult to their gracious hosts, the Peoples Democratic Republic of Korea. Now who would give an insult to their hosts? I mean what kind of people do you think good old Navy guys are anyway? Its a friendly gesture ok? Look, here's another picture of the same crew:

Just look at their faces, do you see any angry haters in there? No no I dont either.

If you are being critical of Barack Obama for using this symbol of friendship then you are being critical of the crew of the USS Pueblo and you know what that makes you, right? That's right, youre unpatriotic. So, you just watch yourself, OK comrade?

Posted @ November 03, 2008 01:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (43)

An obscure movie reference which serves as my light for the day

Steve McQueen - The Great Escape

Camp Commander: (To Steve)Cooler. 14 days.
Steve: Walking away, turns and says - "Oh, ah, you'll still be here when I get out, right?
Camp Commander: Cooler. 30 Days.
Steve: Turns, walks towards the cooler. Head held high. smirks and shakes head.

That's precisely how I feel today.

I'm feeling pretty positive today and upbeat. I spend most of the day hummming the Lee Greenwood song "I'm proud to be an American", which honestly if there was any justice in the world would be the national anthem. I feel good, I'm walking with my head held high.

I'm so sorry to tell you this, you leftists out there, but if my party doesnt win, it wont mean that people like me will suddenly "shut up and go away". We might have to go to "the cooler" for a little while, but all you leftists will still be here when we get out. You are not going anywhere anytime soon.

The things I believe in might be beaten in this election, and in a way that means I will be beaten, but I wont be defeated. Its going to take something a little more powerful than what you guys have to do that.

I dont have a McCain sign in front of my house but I do have an American Flag, just so you know whos side I'm on.

I dare you to come take it down.

...-

Posted @ November 03, 2008 11:24 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (7) | TrackBack (20)

If everything is going to hell, then why am I so upbeat?

ABC - Always Be Closing. Good Advice...

Polls-schmolls. Nobody knows nuthin....

Here's a small breakdown of what I think at this late date in the game.

1. Its 2000 all over again. I said awhile back, that for Obama to win this election, he would have to have a landslide and that all John McCain needed to do was continue to break even and he would probably win. The late undecideds would go for the "safe bet" in the election and that was before the world economy collapsed in September.

I see lots of polls. I don't see any poll that shows a landslide Obama win. Sorry kids, you take the outliers on either end and toss them in the trash and the rest, thats the polls that matter. Those show its within 3-5 at best for Obama. Thats margin of error- that's a tie.

Incredible as it may seem, we are right back where we were on the 2000 election. We could finish this election once again with an electoral college win on one side and a popular vote for the other guy.

For either McCain - Or Obama. And wouldn't that be funny as hell if it were Obama who got the Electoral College win!

Advantage McCain.

2. Shopping habits. This last couple of months have been historic times for Americans and the world. The reason why everyone you meet these days is ready to bite your head off is all sorts of things they used to be able to count on has suddenly gone into a tailspin. If I were to categorize the entire American electorate right now, I would say two words would do it:

"Risk Averse"

Everyone is making decisions in their daily life right now, but no one is taking any risk. Buy a car? Ahhh, not right now honey, lets wait on that for a bit, ok? Hey should we swing our savings into some real estate right now babe? Ah, no not right this second, I'm filling out my resume and buying bullion. You see the Stock Market going all over the place, which I admit is fun, but what you don't see is trading volume. America is losing sleep because their mattresses are stuffed with dollar bills right now. These are dollars that used to be in their 401k, but now, people are looking at those dollars to make it through a some of the next few months rather than buying a new speedboat or condo in Maui.

When people are in survival situations, they don't tend do risky things. I don't think the Donner Party spent a lot of time wondering how they could do a bit of bungee jumping off the cliff tops while they waited for rescue. People tend to get focused on "Maslows Hierarchy of Needs" when there is a lot of risk in the air and they are trying to survive.

Its into this environment that Barack Obama has decided to start talking about taxes and specifically why you don't pay enough. His Vice President has already started redefining wealth down to 150,000 a year. Mistake? Well sure, it could be, but I think we know what he means. He means that 250, 150, heck its just a number we picked out of the sky anyway, so what the hell, right? Anyway, it's not about raising revenue to keep the government running, its about "fairness", right? Come on man, everyone loves a little "fairness", don't they?

Note to Barack Obama - Your timing stinks.

Right now, right here in the middle of all this, the "new kid on the block" wants to diddle with the Tax System, take your 401k away and make it so you never want to buy stocks or bonds again, all to create his idea of a socialist paradise right here on earth, just for you, the voter! Eh, Sorry kid, nows not a good time, why don't you come back when things have settled down a bit, ok?

You think back to the last time we elected a Democrat to the White House. It was 1992. What was significant about that year is it was the first time in many of our lifetimes that we could say that there was no real big threat or risk to a Nuclear War. That was really, really big for us back then. We could, for the very first time afford the luxury of a president who wasn't a "wartime military qualified" President. We took a risk on Bill Clinton, because we could do it without fearing for our lives.

Now we have Russia's Putin putting the bear back in the woods and he's hungry, frankly hes eating all of the neighbors that he can get his hands on and threatening the rest of them. Venezuela is now run by a fat version of Castro. Iran wants the bomb so bad they are probably even willing to kill for it. We are in the worst financial crisis in 60 plus years, if not in the entire history of mankind and no one can tell how much oil there really is out there to still be had and so on, and so on etc, etc...

Oh yeah, and the Islamic terrorists are still out there, doing what they do best. killing and maiming women and children in increasingly more disgusting and inhumane ways.

So tell me, you feel like taking a little risk with the fundamental foundation of your country right now, hmmm?

Advantage McCain.

3. The-Car-Salesman-who-tries-too-damn-hard. You go into a car lot because you like a certain car, and you want to buy the car, and suddenly you get 'Mr. Slick' right there with you at all time, he's so on top of you that he's practically humping your leg like he's Ernest T. Bass' bloodhound. Whatever you might have thought of the car and no matter the price, you just have to get away from this guy.

This is what it feels like to be "uncommitted" in this election.

I found myself watching the Military channel this weekend and guess what I saw. Each and every commercial break was an ad for Barack Obama. Now, I thought it was funny because it just showed me what a fire hose of cash the Obama campaign has at its disposal. But I can bet that more than a handful of people who watch the Military Channel and were toss ups, found after two hours of watching nonstop impressions of "Hi Im Barack from Shamwow!" or "Barack Obama - Apply directly to the forehead" from his deep saturation campaign ads that viewers were now (thanks to the never ending barrage) making up their minds, but in favor of McCain.

The thing is, when people get a sense of creepy "overselling", they start to think, "Gee Mister, you sure do want me to but that Pontiac Aztek awfully bad don't you. I wonder if there is something wrong with it. If its so good, then why are you trying so damn hard"?

I think the biggest, weirdest part of the polls is the rather constant 10-11% who say, even today, that they are uncommitted. This has been one long assed campaign, I don't believe that anyone is still uncommitted after all we have seen in this unrelenting horror show we call "politics". What I do believe is that most people who are still saying they are "uncommitted" that they are now - in large part voting for McCain. They just don't want to explain to you why they are voting for McCain.

In some ways its just like high school, no one wants to be seen as voting for the "unpopular" kids, everyone wants to be seen sitting with the hip kids in the cafeteria, no one wants to be seen with the A/V Geeks. But come the mid-terms, everyone is calling the A/V Geeks for help with trigonometry homework. They just don't talk about it.

Advantage McCain.

4. The Polls. I believe the polls this year are unlike any other set of polling we have ever seen. In 1948, the problem was there was one polling group - Gallup, and they were just wrong. Everyone believed the polls they took that year because it was what those folks in the press of the day wanted to believe, not what was actually happening on the ground. It was the opposite problem of what we have now, and yet the problem was similar to todays situation. The problem we have now isn't that there is one polling group, its that there are hundreds and they are all feeding off of each other for their data and the result is, the data is crap. I saw Karl Rove tonight say that there have been more polls taken in the last 30 days then the entire 2004 race. And that seemed like a pretty intense race to me, didn't it to you?

It's not that we have too little data sampling, its that we have too much. In computer science, we call this sort of thing "thrashing". The CPU is running at a 110% but not very much work is really getting done. Its all sort of tangled up on itself.

You can't really use the polls this year for anything other than a general trend, the actual numbers are goofy and in my opinion its because the sample population is being oversampled. The trend is and continues to be, that yes, Obama is ahead, but consistently it moves back and forth about 3 to 5 points, which is within the margin of error. That is a tie, and as I said, a tie will mean that McCain is going to win the actual election.

And another thing, you can't really use the polls overall sampling because politcal polarization has reached a point in this country where people cant say the Presidents name in polite company. Support Bush? Sure you might still do that, and there are still three times as many that say that they do "Support Bush" than say they support Congress, but say it out loud? Oh I don't think so... Its just so, you know, icky...

If the polling groups were accurate, then several of the primary polls that showed Barack Obama winning against Hillary! would have held up. They didn't. Barack Obama consistently underperformed in the actual election against what he was polled to win. (Theres a reason for this that I will get to later.)

Advantage McCain.

5. The Kitchen Sink. I'll say this about Barack Obama, if he can run the country half as well as he has run his campaign, we should do ok. This guy has poured everything into this race. It really shows you what an incompetent clod John Kerry was in 2004( and in my opinion he still is an incompetent clod, but thats another subject for another time). Obama has done it all, he's taken every advantage he can, taken every shot he can get, thrown every bit of ammo there is into his target whenever and wherever he can. The Media is part of his campaign, and thats not just me saying it, they are saying it! They don't care, its no longer non-partial, they look right at ya and say they are on Obamas side. Its almost not a fair fight and you feel sort of sad for McCain, even if you don't like him.

And yet, theres good old John "Old Ironsides" McCain, sitting within the margin of error. Why cant Obama put this guy away? Its John McCain for crying out loud! John McCain tied himself to public financing so he hasn't got a dime. John McCain is a lifetime sufferer of the horrible disease of "Senator-itis". Senators make lousy candidates, the longer they are in the Senate, the worse they are and yeah, John McCain has been in the Congress since Barack Obama got out of High School.

And yet, Barack Obama, with the campaign equivalent of the entire 8th Air Force at his disposal, hasn't retired John McCain from the contest.

Why the hell not? Well lets be totally honest here, its not because John McCain is all that great of a candidate. He is a great man, but he is not a great candidate. Its not because John McCain is better or more capable campaigner than Obama, so what could it be?

Its because even now, there are significant doubts about Barack Obama. The risk factor, the fear factor, the dare I say it "old folks voting their pocketbooks and for their grandchildren" factor is the whats really keeping the "John McCain, Captain of the USS Constitution" afloat. Despite everything that the left and Obama has put downrange on John McCain, he still hasn't been "de-masted", and hes still fighting and he hasn't gone down with the ship. Its this fundamental "Failure to Close" that has caused Obama to go upside down in his primary polls vs. the actual election results ( see above.)

People respect that McCain is still in the game, and running hard against what can only be called overwhelming odds. You don't hear anyone saying "John McCain is too old" anymore, do you? With all his built in disadvantages, he's within the margin of error to a behemoth campaign of huge proportions. Thats not bad.

Advantage McCain.

What is it Alec Baldwin said in "Glengarry Glenn Ross"? "ABC - Always Be Closing?". Barack is out there selling like a demon, but he's just not closing the sale with the "Nyborgs", but in point of fact, the Nyborgs have long since made up their minds and they are not buying what you are selling, they just like to have you pay attention to them and keep them company.

My bet is that its going to be Barack Obama that is getting 'Steak Knives' and its McCain thats getting the Cadillac in this election contest.

So there you have it. In a few days, we will all see. Until then, nobody knows nuthin...

Posted @ October 29, 2008 09:11 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (7) | TrackBack (26)

question of the day - Pathological Journalism?

Its a widely held observation that in this election the media isnt just following its normal bias, its acting in a way that is indistinguishable from the way that they would act if they were paid campaign workers for Obama.

In science, the issue of observer bias is central to the scientific method. Observer bias, or more simply put, the desire on the part of the person doing the experiment to get the results they wish to see in the result is a constant problem that all scientists are on constant watch to work against.

Question of the day - In this election has modern journalism just adapted itself into a form of journalistic Lysenkoism where the politics matters far more than the actual observation?

Here's my case: The "Main Stream Media", now more than ever before, is a single party, single culture group. Their observations are not based on the data they actually see as much as the result they wish to get. When they encounter data that doesnt fit the template, they attack the person that brings the data or they interpret the data as to fit the preconceived results rather than see how the data effects their hypothesis. If the data doesnt fit their hypothesis, then there is something wrong with the data. Theres a parallel for this in science, its called "Pathological Science":

"...the process in science in which "people are tricked into false results ... by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions".

If this is the case( and I think it is), then why would you trust or believe anything that they say about this election being "in the bag" for Obama?

Posted @ October 29, 2008 10:34 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (32)

A random thought - Locust season

On what part of the population is the entire election going to turn?

It occurs to me that the very people most likely to vote for Obama in this election are the exact same people who took out subprime loans to buy homes that cost nine times their annual earnings, only to walk away from the mortgage a year later because they were shocked to find that the bank wanted their mortgage payments each and every month. You know these people, the exact same folks who with their complete inability to understand the meaning of the word "VARIABLE" have now managed to so destroy the world economy to a point where the words "Great Depression" are no longer descriptive enough for the situation we face.

And now these same people want to put a marxist in the White House and increase the power of Congress. Oh yes, that will help, thanks for that guys. Good Work Kids!, 7,000 years of western civilization completly undone in one generation and its all to be replaced with a governmental system that incorporates the social dynamism found in "Lord of the Flies" and fiscal soundness thats found in each and every PBS pledgebreak.

Posted @ October 27, 2008 08:38 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (5) | TrackBack (20)

Question of the day

My father once said that the most magnificent thing about the Nixon Administration was that an entire goverment was removed from power by nothing but the simple rule of law and not a single tank or military division was ordered to be moved in support of the President as he was removed from office. This act, and its reponse by the powers of all of the various area of Government as well as both political parties, he felt, was all that really separated us from the other Democracies in the world. At the end of the day, Richard Nixon was just a man and no man was above the law.

Question of the Day -

All Presidents face executive challenges and all Presidents can and do make errors, some of the errors they perform might even fall into the area of 'crimes and misdemeanors'. The Constitution offers a remedy to the Republic for this problem via the legislative branch, which is known as "Impeachment".

Yet, given the volitile state of politics in this country, is it at all possible that 'President Obama' could plausibly face impeachment at some point in the future?

Extra Credit - What happens to the Republic if such a thing were to actually occur?

Posted @ October 26, 2008 03:49 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

John McCain was never tortured in my jail

I never tortured or mistreated the PoWs and nor did my staff,” Reports Tran Trong Duyet to the UK Times. He is the man who acted as warden to the infamous "Hanoi Hilton", where United States Prisoners of War were handled by the North Vietnamese.

When he says "there was no torture" you understand of course that he is referring to the grotesque inhuman examples set by American troops and Abu Ghirab and Guantanmo Bay, where inmates were forced to wear womens undergarments and were photographed with Lynnde England. Thats what the world thinks is torture. The Mail never manages to mention John McCains own account of his time in Hanoi, or point out why it is that he still can't comb his own hair. Mr. Duyet would have you believe that John McCain stayed at a youth hostel, a Best Western Hotel or in Col. Klinks own Stalag 13 for 5 years.

Sadly, He did not.

Oh, I'm pretty certain that those things that our horrible troops did in Abu Ghirab didnt occur while you were the warden of that Prison, Mr. Duyet, but I am absolutely sure that the following things did occur:

murder, beatings, broken bones, teeth and eardrums, dislocated limbs, starvation, long term isolation, purposely serving of food contaminated with human and animal feces and medical neglect of infections and tropical disease occurred.

How do I know these things occured?
Well -

Bud Day recounted the same things during his time in your care.
Robbie Risner alsso recounted similar things during his time.
Jeremiah Denton also shared his findings, hes also a Democrat.
Joe Kittinger also reported the same thing during his time.
James Stockdale said he saw the same thing.
Everett Alvarez recounted the same things during his time.
Ernest C. Brace, said the same thing.
Floyd Thompson, said the same thing and he was a civilian.
John McCain even recounted them in his book, Faith of My Fathers.

These men are my heroes. You sir, are a disgusting little guttersnipe. Oh, I dont blame you though, you worked for a government that saw the organized destruction of Catholics in the south, through work and reeducation camps that was done on a scale not seen since the end of dachau and treblinka. A human created disaster so total that thousands of your countryman took to the seas in whatever would float, just to get away. Most of them died trying to get away from you and your comrades and the socialist society you helped make. Oh but rest assured, some of them managed to get away. I went to school with one. you'll be happy to know she's doing just fine here in the States. Her brother even went on to become a valedictorian at the US Air Force Academy. Imagine that, people who were so willing to take to the open ocean, survive deprivation and horrors of what met them out there, just to get away from you and yours.

Oh, you can't be blamed because you are just a little man a big machine now can you? just a little man serving "the state", thats what you were then and what you are now. Who are you to question your orders when they told you to break men in your care?

Damn shame for you that they never broke, isnt it Mr. Duyet? It must be hell to wake up every day with that on your mind, knowing that one of your former charges lives life large and free, while you drink fresh sewage from the tap in your squalid little apartment in Hanoi.

Posted @ October 25, 2008 08:30 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (17)

Question of the day - Bubble?

Irving Janis, a research psycologist at Yale devised eight symptoms that are indicative of 'groupthink'. 'Groupthink' is described as the systematic errors made by groups when taking collective decisions.

Let's work through these symptoms:

1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.

2. Rationalising warnings that might challenge the group's assumptions.

3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.

4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, disfigured, impotent, or stupid.

5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of "disloyalty".

6. Self censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.

7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.

8. Mindguards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.

Question of the day - The Media, Democrats and the Obama campaign are deeply entrenched in the culture and process of 'Groupthink' and hence, the Obama campaign can be thought of in terms of an irrational 'bubble'.

Discuss amoungst yourselves.

Posted @ October 24, 2008 02:29 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1)

Monster

"You're shocked that the market is going down? Really? I'm shocked that its holding up as well as it is. You understand when a politician says that he wants to 'spread the wealth' that what he is going to do is confiscate your wealth and give it to other people. You understand that, right? Confiscate...Your...Wealth! Your home, your property, your 401k, your bank accounts, your stocks and bonds, your health accounts - all are in the process of becoming the property of 'the state'. All of it. Thats what "spread the wealth" actually means, it means CONFISCATE and then "distribute along party lines'. This is no longer about this tax rate or that tax rate or what party has a better plan to grow the economy, its about the Government of the United States - all three branches of it - that is now actively and aggressively pursuing and acting on a plan to confiscate private wealth (your wealth) and punish those who create it (you).

When I look at the market, I cant help but think that the Democrats misunderstood the chant 'drill baby drill' from a rallying cry for more oil into a rallying cry for drilling the whole idea of markets into the ground. People keep asking 'when the housing market will come back?' but they dont seem to understand that there is no housing market anymore. There is no up, no down. No gain, no loss. With no up and down, no loss or gain, then what is it? That is not a market, that - is a morgue. That is just a small sample of what is happening to each and every market in the United States. And incredibly, this distruction is entirely by design. By destroying your faith in markets, that faith can be supplated by a newly found faith in government. This is their plan, their design, and they will sell it you by promising to remove all uncertainty and volatility from the market (Its for your own good dontcha know! ). What they dont say is that by removing all uncertainty then there is no 'market'. The market has now been replaced by the 'committee'. A committee that is chaired by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, The Media and Barack Obama.

You ever heard of Richard Matheson? He wrote some pretty good science fiction back in the day, lots of Twilight Zone Episodes and a whole host of short stories back in the 50's and 60's. He's most remembered for one short story thats been made into a movie about a half a dozen times. It's called "I AM LEGEND". Its the story of the last man on earth after a plague wipes out most of the population. What parts of the population the plague doesnt wipe out, becomes transformed into what can best be described as 'vampires'. Most people know that narrative of the story, but most every filmed version and most retelling of the story forget is the main point of the story. The point is this; When you live on a planet where humans are normal and vampires are the monsters, thats something we understand. What Mathesons story forces the reader to come to grips with is the opposite, that when you live on a world where the vampires are the normal, then you, as the last remaining human, have become the monster.

This is what we conservatives and libertarians have become. With the plague of 'fairness' now loose in the ecosystem of public ideas and discourse, we have become the monster. They are working to destroy our nest (the markets) and after that is destroyed, they will come for us. "

Casual hallway conversation. Captured on October 24th 2008.

Posted @ October 24, 2008 12:20 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (15)

Always work the negative angle

A video of John McCain was released today. Whats the lead sentence in the Sky News article?

"The video portrays the Republican as a hero but the message may be tarnished as he is filmed smoking a cigarette."

Unbelievable.

Posted @ October 23, 2008 09:39 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

I am Joe

From Iowahawk:

Go here and download the graphic, print it, and place where its best seen. Stand with Joe. Show all the other Joes you stand with them.

Remember, Obama came to his house. Joe just asked Obama a question and for that, they took his job. The Press and the media hounded this man out of the life he made for himself and his son.

All he did was ask a question. He didnt insult him, throw a pie, call him names or any of the things that the Bush administration has to deal with every day for the past eight years, he just asked a question.

If they can do this to him before the election, what will they do to you afterwards? If they have no shame, if they have no "checks and balances" on their power, if the media( who normally report such an abuse of the electorate as an abuse ) are the ones that are actually perpetrating the crime, what makes you think it will all go away after the election?

Stand with Joe. Stand up while you still can.

Posted @ October 22, 2008 11:29 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (3)

Redshirts Unite!

Star Trek T-Shirts. Its About Damn Time!

Must...Fight...Urge...To...Buy...One...Of...These...Must...Resist...
Must...Fight...On...Should...I...Buy...Red...Shirt?...ooooh...Damn...
Im...Losing...My...Will...To...Resist...Willpower...Growing...Weak...
Cant...Fight...For...Much...Longer...This...Is...Just...Like...
Episode#24...Where...Spock...Gets...Hit...With...Those...Spores...
and...Gaaaaaahhh!...Must...Not...Talk...Trek...Must...Not...Must...
Fight...Bones!...Uhura...Scotty!..NEEDMOREPOWER!...
Vultures!...Assassins!......Khaaaaaaannnnnn!!!!!

UPDATE: Im not getting anything at all done today.

Posted @ October 22, 2008 12:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

60 years ago...

From Wikipedia:

snip.

"Truman toured -- and transfixed -- much of the nation with his fiery rhetoric, playing to large, enthusiastic crowds. “Give 'em hell, Harry,” was a popular slogan shouted out at stop after stop along the tour. However, the polls and the pundits all held that Dewey's lead was insurmountable, and that Truman's efforts were for naught. Indeed, Truman's own staff considered the campaign a last hurrah. The only person who appears to have considered Truman's campaign to be winnable was the President himself, who confidently predicted victory to anyone and everyone who would listen to him. However, even Truman's own wife had private doubts that her husband could win."

end snip...

Trumans victory in 1948, which was predicted by not one single poll, was in large part based on the fact that he was able to secure a 1% advantage in just three key states, all three of which he had been predicted to lose by as much as 10%. Truman, who is beloved by the American public today was actually derided and hated in that time as much as President Bush is today. President Truman was noted in a Chicago Tribune editorial given that very year as a "nincompoop".

Great Presidents are recognized by their decisions in the face of history, not by how much they are loved by the press while they are in office. Harry Truman, who ordered the destruction of two Japanese cities, lead the fight for integration the military, dealt with an unpopular war in Korea and an economic recession was not rehabilitated until the late 1960's.

I'd also like to point out that in 1948, The president worked against the advice of many of his advisors and world opinion on long shot foreign policy project that everyone at the time predicted would most certainly fail.

It was later known in history as "The Berlin Airlift". I humbly suggest Dear Reader, that the Berlin Airlift was "The Surge" of its day.

UPDATE: I'm not the only one thinking that things are askew.

Posted @ October 21, 2008 08:37 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Who you gonna believe?

Staggering News - According to this poll, Proposition 8 in California is ahead by a nose.

Proposition 8 is a "marraige-is-between-a-man-and-a-woman" intiative. Now based on this poll, were supposed to accept the idea that Proposition 8 has a chance of passing, yet John McCain has zero chance of winning in California. This, as the Robot on 'Lost in Space' would say: "Does Not Compute".

How do proposition 8 voters feel about McCain? If you take a look around the town where I live, when you see John McCain bumper stickers or lawn signs, you almost always see "Yes on Proposition 8" signs as well.

Remember, the poll says Prop 8 is winning. Remember as well that Prop 8 has been viciously opposed by the very same people who are voting for Barack Obama. They have poured millions into the Anti-Prop 8 campaign. This has become a pivotal Proposition in this election. In one case, 8 memebers of a college student council face a recall election because they support Proposition 8. Thats pretty stong stuff from the anti-prop 8 crowd. You used to get recalled from office if you were doing something illegal or failing to do your duty, now all you have to do is take the politically incorrect side of an argument and it seems you must be removed from your civic duty, lest the populace be harmed because of your spreading dangerous perverted ideas like "only one man and one woman owning the franchise of marraige in society" and crazy stuff like that. Once upon a time I dare say you could be recalled from office if you were suspected of being gay.

How times have changed.

And I say again, Proposition 8 appears to be winning in California, against everything that the core of the liberal world can throw at it. Does anyone really believe that there are lots of people who will vote for Prop 8 and also vote against John McCain? Im sorry, Im just not willing to buy that. Statistically there will be some small number, but there will be far more who because of the issues behind Proposition 8 wil be voting for McCain who otherwise would not have done so. I think its also statistically small that there are Pro-prop 8 people who are voting for Barack Obama this year, yet I'm sorry to report that I havent seen a single yard sign with Obama/Biden and "Yes on Prop 8". That tells me that the number of pro-obama, pro prop 8 voters is mighty small.

In my little neighborhood, I see more signs for Prop 8 than I do any of the two candidates. That is very interesting to me. It says that this issue has exercised a part of the populace that doesnt normally get exercised. This may be the source of what has moved this poll in the direction it has gone. It may be the key to the election in California for John McCain.

How can Proposition 8 be winning and John McCain also be losing in California? It seems to be that if you go to the polls for one, you are going to pull to level for the other too. Either Prop 8 is winning which will give some form of "political coattails" to John McCain, or the poll is silly and doesnt really show an accurate representation of the political landscape. I can accept that the poll is goofy but I can't accept that Prop 8 will pass but John McCain will lose.

My wife asked me yesterday how the election was going, and I said "cant really tell". That was before I saw this poll result. I honestly have no idea what is going on, I only know that things are not as they appear to be.

Posted @ October 21, 2008 07:47 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (5) | TrackBack (6)

Ok, thats the last time I do that.

I finished reading "Fugitive Days", "Dreams From My father" and "The Audacity Of Hope".

The problem with reading crap like that is you can't un-read it. Its like looking at crime scene photos, watching LBJ lift up his shirt to show you his scars or accidentally finding your grandmothers teeth in the bottom of the glass you just drank out of. You did it, but now you got to deal with the thought of it for the rest of your life as the little images rattle around in your head from time to time.

I wont go into detail tonight but I have discovered the one thing I deeply dislike and distrust about Barack Obama. Its something I think completely disqualifies him to be President.

(You Star Trek Geeks will get this one) What I dont like about Barack Obama is that he's never faced failure. He's never passed the "Kobyashi Maru" test at the Academy. He's simply trying to hard to be liked. I dont trust a man who hasnt absolutely blown it once in his life. You ask a man "whats your biggest mistake?", you better see him immediately look at his feet and then look away for a moment while he decides if he should trust you or not, else you've got a liar on your hands. You've either got a liar, or you've got a man who doesnt entirely trust you either. This is not a good place to start a relationship as intense as the one he's asking us to take part in.

"Whats your biggest failure" is actually a question I ask all my potential hires. If they start giving me some half assed ear candy about failure teaching them everything and it was a great experience, they usually get the door. If they stop and get real humble, if they start to get that face that only comes from experience and if they can tell me how it changed them, they get to continue.

Nowhere in either book or Ayers' book do I get any sense of failure. Loss? yeah, lots of loss, regrets? yeah but not in the way you would think. The word "Pentinent" comes to mind for both men and "they aint it" as my Dad would've said. I'm struck by Obamas non answer to that question in the first debates. It would not have passed my test in a job interview. Obama simply leaped out with the answer as if he was a student too eager to please the teacher. John McCain changed the pitch in his voice and looked down. McCain faced failure. Obama has no idea what I'm talking about, no man who has ever failed leaps out at that question anymore than "one-armed lion tamers" are anxious to get back into the cage with the lions.

To Obama, "Failure" is an interpretation, a grade to be made in class. With McCain, its the bitter taste of bile and the acrid smell of self doubt that lingers over a lifetime. Its that ghostly thought that crosses your mind at 2:00 AM and causes you to sit upright at the end of the bed.

To Obama, Failure is a judgement that you pass onto others, its meaningless and its not a threshold he's crossed in his life, he's been swaddled in words of soft praise throught his life and protected from any harm by those who love him. Frankly, its made him soft and malleable, like super putty. You put him on any image and he becomes a facsimile of that image and you can stretch it to any dimension you like. To McCain, failure is the beating the anvil takes to make soft metal into hard iron. You can bang on it all day long, it only tempers the Iron, it wont suddenly transform into Bamboo because its the fashionable thing to do.

To be honest, only one person out of ten actually passes that test in my interviews. Most people are just simply as full of crap as a Christmas goose and would do anything in the world for you in an interview, except of course, confess it all to you about how "way back when", they totally and completely screwed up. People will try to dress it up into something more than it was or minimize it into less or place the blame someone else or even parade out some fashionable illness to allow them to take the role of victim in the story. But try as they might, no one can quite get the blood out of carpet of their soul. The stain is there, you either make it part of the scenery and you learn to tell a great story about it or you buy a really big potted plant to cover it and hope no one notices.

But you know that you will have this thought rattling around in your mind making noise on your soul like that of a single marble running loose in the bottom of a 55 gallon metal trashcan; that everyone will know why it is that you have a potted palm tree right there in the center of your living room. The harder you try to hide it and the stain just becomes all the more obvious.

So when someone at a job interview asks you the equivalent of "Say buddy,whats with the big potted plant - you tryin to hide something?", try to remember that confession is good for the soul. And for job interviews?, its not so bad either. Just dont make a habit of it. One potted palm shows you are human, two or more shows you have a complusion.

(I will be in the shower with a large container of Comet cleanser and a wire brush for the next 24 hours trying to get the stink of these three books off me.)

Posted @ October 20, 2008 10:56 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

Question of the Day: Whats it all about, Alfie?

Heres todays "Question of the Day"

Are elections about the candidates or are candidates simply a reflection of the larger issues at hand?

Let me say it another way, "What if this election really isnt about Obama or McCain after all"?

Then the question becomes - what is it really all about?

If you start to think about the election and take the effort to not make it a personality contest, lots of things become very clear. Spend a few minutes thinking about it that way and I'll get back to you this evening with what I thought of with my own exercise on this question.

Posted @ October 20, 2008 03:47 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (42)

I Am Spartacus!

David Corn of Mother Jones meets the "working class" and downtrodden he says he supports and the ungrateful bastards give him an earful:

snip:

"The scene turned into a mini-fracas when David Corn, of Mother Jones, defended press coverage. Munoz was having none of it. Why, he asked, would the press whack Joe the Plumber when it didn't want to report on Obama's relationship with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber? "How come that's not in the news all the time?" Munoz said. "How come Joe the Plumber is every second? I'm talking about NBC, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN." A black woman with a strong Caribbean accent jumped in the fray. "Tell me," she said to Corn, "why is it you can go and find out about Joe the Plumber's tax lien and when he divorced his wife and you can't tell me when Barack Obama met with William Ayers? Why? Why could you not tell us that? Joe the Plumber is me!"
"I am Joe the Plumber!" Munoz chimed in. "You're attacking me"

end snip.

I ask you dear reader, which side of the microphone would you like to be on at that particular moment? Poor David, he has no idea where these folks are coming from.

"I am Joe The Plumber!" Thats a ralling cry thats on a par with "I AM Spartacus!".

I can't overlook the irony of a left wing, "supporter of the working class" and the lowly downtrodden getting his lily white ass handed back to him by the very same working class and downtrodden he says he is so interested in helping. I wonder if he will change his mind now that he's actually met them face to face? ( the ungrateful wretches simply dont know what's good for them!)

I'm also reminded that in all my life, one that is straight out of the working class, with time spent working on swing shifts and graveshifts in real life working class factory jobs (just like they show in hollywood), working in plastic factories and working as a landscaper, I never once met a communist or a socialist until I went to college, not one. They were always easy to find in college there because they were always whining about everything under the sun while driving the very newest sportscars and living in apartments paid for by their mommies and daddies. They went to rallys against Nuclear power while I worked at pizza restaurants, ate pallets of top ramen and walked or rode a bike until I graduated. Did I whine or complain about the "unfairness" of it all? Hell no. I enjoyed every minute of it and was grateful for the chance to do what I do. I know what a great and wonderful thing this country is because I've seen the faces of people who didnt get that chance. I known people who came here from Vietnam, unable to speak the language, with literally nothing and go on to achieve great things. I've worked with men who crawled here across deserts I wouldnt drive through and I know what life in this country really means because they have risked it all to come here. I've known people who came here from Afghanistan who know what freedom really means. I know people who lost it all in the dust bowl in Oklahoma in the 1930s who later went on to own their own home construction companies and live a life of comfort in their old age.

They all had hope for the future and they knew where to get it. Not in Europe which wouldnt have them, not in Cuba which would kill them or in Vietnam which would force them into reeducation camps for the crime of simply being catholic or some other socialist paradise set to destroy their souls before they feed their bellys, but here where a man could start with nothing and go on to make a life for himself. For the freedom, for the liberty to live their lives, they have sacrificed it all. They know where home is, they know where their heart is and it is here.

They Are And I Am - Joe the Plumber!

Posted @ October 20, 2008 01:02 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Sunset

Commander-in-Chief President Barack Obama.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

All with the sure and solid backing of each of the large commercial media outlets in every country around the world. Go ahead and speak out, lets see where that gets you. I know a guy who once asked Barack Obama question and he paid the price for it. He was evicerated for having the gall for actually talking to Barack Obama.

So, when the entire governmental system of 'checks and balances' rests solely on their shoulders with no measure of accountability, what will remain of our freedoms? and for how long?

The feeling that it leaves me with reminds me of a scene in the 1960's TV show "The Prisoner":

(Number 2 describes "The Village" - a secret installation where the character "Number 6" is being kept against his will for the crime of "resigning". The Village is a place where the prisoners and their guards are indistinguishable from each other. Number 2 is essentially the warden of prison. )

Number 2: What in fact has been created? An international community. A perfect blueprint for world order. When the sides facing each other suddenly realize that they're looking into a mirror, they'll see that this is the pattern for the future.
Number 6: The whole earth as... 'The Village'?
Number 2: That is my hope. What's yours?
Number 6: I'd like to be the first man to live on the moon!

I know the feeling brother. I surely do.

Posted @ October 18, 2008 08:46 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Question of the day

I just heard Obama at a rally say that "McCain wants to cut Medicare". I want someone to explain to me - point it out to me, show me any example at any time where any President ever cut anything or any size or shape! We still have Mohair subsidies in the budget and a sizeable Helium reserve just in case we get back in the dirigible business and all of a sudden someone is going to cut Medicare?

I want to ask - and this is the question of the day - how does the budget get created? President Mccain can propose anything he wants, but all he gets to do is sign off on whatever the congress decides to do.

And I ask you, who is in charge of both houses of Congress? Democrats!

A future President McCain can propose anything he wants to congress, they will immediately override whatever he says is important with their own ideas. So how is the future President McCain or the future Senator McCain going to cut anything in the budget?

All President McCain can really do is stop the Congress from taking more of your money by the power of the veto. President Obama is running his campaign saying you already have too damn much money and wouldnt veto anything under any circumstances from the Democrat congress.

Posted @ October 17, 2008 11:53 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (29)

Hey! Guess who else gets a "Middle Class Tax Break"?

While the battle of Joe the plumber" plays out, with Joe Biden and Barack Obama now making fun of the idea of a mere plumber making 250,000 a year its important to remember that Senators get 188,000 a year.

Hey wait a second....Oh my gosh, do you mean that Obama is proposing a tax cut for those in the Senate?

Sounds like it to me! Who knew the Senate was considered Middle class!

Posted @ October 16, 2008 06:56 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Geraghty Provdies the Inspiration - You supply the caption

Jim Geraghty provides the inspiration.

Caption 1: "I simply can't understand your tax plan Senator Obama and I work for H&R Block!"

Caption 2: "Democrats - This man is your ENEMY!"

Caption 3: "Senator, the government says its was ok to make 250,000 dollars a year but when I accidentally made 251,000 dollars last year, they took it all away from me. Now I have had to lay off my employees. Senator Obama, what do I tell them when they ask me what happened to their lives? "

Caption 4: "Can you please not say "spread the wealth" because when you do, it makes me feel icky inside."

Caption 5: "Senator Dodd, can I get the same mortgage that you got?"

Caption 6: "Senator Obama, I bought a house I could afford in a place I could afford to live. I put 20% down and pay my mortgage payments early. I try live within my means. I've been married to the same woman for 25 years and have two lovely kids. I pay my taxes, serve on the school board and support the Boy Scouts of America. I own a rifle, two shotguns and a pistol. I also own a truck and a jeep as well as a Harley Davidson. I believe this is the greatest country on earth and I have faith that the future will be better than the past. Senator, what does all this make me in your eyes? "

Caption 7: "Senator Obama, if your party wont trust me with a 401k, why should we trust your party with the US Treasury?"

Caption 8: "No sir, I aint never been to Europe. My Daddy went there through, back in 1944. He came back, but alot of friends of his are still there, at a place called Colleville-sur-Mer. Oh I'm sorry Senator, you were saying something about how I needed to pump up my truck tires to save the planet, right?"

Caption 9: "So If I understand your position Senator Obama, all the problems you see out there in the world can be solved if only I willingly give up more of the money it will be spent more wisely by the government, correct? Really? "

Caption 10: "Thank you for meeting me face to face without preconditions, Senator Obama"

Posted @ October 16, 2008 10:59 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (8)

Sandbagged

SO - we no longer ask our Presidential candidates any questions that involve the military?

I wanted to hear McCain talk about Missile Defense. I wanted Obama to explain how missile defense is different than aircraft defense. I wanted Obama to tell us how many carrier battle groups we are going to have in his administration. I wanted to hear him explain what weapons system he would cut. How big an Army? How many ships in the Navy, how many aircraft and what kinds? Should the V-22 get cut? Should the B-52 be retired? How about a question or two about the damn Air Force tanker deal?

Three debates and I don't get any answers on these and many other important issues, I get the equivalent of what it feels like to have two used car salesman run back and forth and "ask their manager" if they can get me a "discount on the price for the undercoat" ( an undercoat that I don't want or particularly need, but will be forced to take to get off the car lot with my wits and my wallet mostly intact.)

I seem to remember questions about the military in 2004, 2000, 1996, 1992, 1988. 1984. I guess we wouldn't want to ask questions that might embarrass one of the two candidates. I guess since were all safe now and theres no threat from abroad anymore we can just dispense with that whole idea, right?

Just keep saying to yourself "Commander-In-Chief" Barack Obama. If that doesnt do it for you, then this picture just might:

Yeah. I know. I laughed for 15 minutes when I saw it today...

OH! - and one other thing, can we please stop calling these things "debates"? They are at best a joint press conference. There's no actual debating going on in these things, just two guys taking questions at the same time. The only thing missing is Helen Thomas isn't the moderator.

It occurred to me tonight, that based on most of Obamas answers to questions that McCain really isn't running against the Senator from Illinois, he's actually running against 'Santa Claus'. People wait in line for days, then hop in his lap, squirt a couple of tears and then "Senator Santa Obama" promises to send them a big pile of someone elses money down their chimney to make everything all better.

Posted @ October 15, 2008 08:06 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

On this date - October 14th 1912

On this date October 14th 1912, Theodore Roosevelt who is running for President under the new "Progressive Party" is shot in the chest by John F. Schrank. The bullet is stopped by TR's glasses and his written speech. He went on to speak for ninety minutes at the rally in Miliwaukee, but he at times managed to speak no more than a whisper. His opening comments to the gathered crowd were, "I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose." From that point on the party was called the "Bull Moose" Party. Afterwards, doctors determined that he was not seriously wounded and that it would be more dangerous to attempt to remove the bullet than to leave it in his chest. Roosevelt carried it with him until the day he died.

Posted @ October 14, 2008 10:20 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Research Notes: William Ayers in "Fugitive Days" Part IV

Day one ---

I was just thinking of a line from the movie "Minority Report": Watch out chief, you go diggin up the past, and all you get is dirty!"

I have to say that before this exercise, I didn't really know that much about the Weatherman except for little bits of this and that. After spending about 6 hours crawling around in the debris they left behind, I wish I didn't know what I know now. I do feel a bit dirty for my efforts. Over the past few years since 9/11, I have always struggled to deal with one thing that has always dropped my morale every time I think about it. Its not that there are people in the world who want to see everything we have destroyed (and us along with it), that I can accept. In an odd way, I think its almost an honor to know that certain people can't stand the idea and ideals of America.

That's not what gets me down. What gets me down is that there are so many people here, who have lived in the US, people who have benefited from its strengths and values, that think the exact same thing. I find it so hard to accept that so many people right here at home make a fetish of destroying this country and the people in it. They live right next door, they go to school with me, work in the same place as me, only when they see the flag they don't get a jolt of pride, instead they feel the urge to spit at it.

To put my feelings on what I've read so far in clear terms; The Weatherman and their generational ilk simply make me sick to my stomach. To read this book and the parallel efforts gives me the same reaction that I get when I read about the people in "Berlin Diaries" or "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" People who saw evil and didn't just do nothing but actually took steps to help the evil occur, then justified it later under a crazy quilt of half truths and rationalizations. These are deranged people. They are sick and very sad. They live in a deep dark place that I cannot quite see into. They live in world that is populated by the cartoon like figures on the front of Communist propaganda leaflets, angry workers rising up, cold hearted capitalists enslaving the working man while trampling on his children. Imagine living in a world where those goofy puppets that are in each and every protest are real, and thats the world these folks live in, only the 20 foot tall statues of Bush with blood dripping down his teeth are actually real. The reality I live in is nowhere to be found in this book. Where I would look out at the horizon in the morning and see the Sunrise and I would see it for the miracle that it is, they would see only a source of skin cancer and a burden to the oppressed working man picking fruit while the greedy rancher whips them from his air conditioned truck while it sits there belching its industrial fumes.

Every sentence is a pronouncement of class, race or privilege and each motivation is one made of revenge or retribution. They want to excuse their violence behind the shield of some sense of vigilante street level justice but its just violence for hates sake. There is no rhyme or reason in their acts, no strategy beyond the shock of it, no real end to justify the bloody means. It seems that the more bloody the means, the better.

From what I can see, until they managed to kill themselves in one big "todo" in Greenwich, it was all great fun to them. It seems to have brought meaning to their lives as if to say that this all had more to do with establishing their own sense of self worth to their poor wounded upper class "daddy didn't love me" egos than it ever did with "changing the world".

I simply do not get these people.

Posted @ October 14, 2008 08:32 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

Research Notes: WIlliam Ayers in 'Fugitive Days' - Part III

Here's an excellent review of the book "Fugitive Days",written on September 30th 2001.

The author of the review makes the case that Ayers is a "spinner of tales". To me, it will represent a stylistic marker for his writing that should show itself in either of the two Obama "autobiographies" in question.

snip:

"The story of Oughton's struggle is poignant, whether or not it's true. But elsewhere in ''Fugitive Days'' the task of choosing among the true, the near true and the untrue is frustrating. Ayers reminds us often that he can't tell everything without endangering people involved in the story. But his partial retelling reaches fraudulence when he writes, ''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,'' then backs and fills, saying that he bombed it, not literally but metaphorically, as part of the Weathermen group in charge of the operation. He says that he needed to ''claim'' the explosion in order to write about it, and he adds later that he is not ashamed of any of the bombings and would not rule out planting another bomb someday; ''I can't imagine entirely dismissing the possibility.''

In Ayers's hands, a career in terrorism becomes a harmless episode out of a John le Carré novel, in which our hero lives on the run, steals explosives, sets off explosions using ''tradecraft,'' as the flap copy puts it -- as if the Weathermen were characters in ''Smiley's People.'' But the Weathermen game was never really a game. Nor was it ever noble, or even moral. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks that killed thousands of people in Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon, readers will find this playacting with violence very difficult to forgive. "

end snip.

Well, most of us would find it hard to forgive. Yet, the man who is potentially the next President of the United States seems to have found the task quite easy.

Posted @ October 14, 2008 08:14 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Research Notes: WIlliam Ayers in 'Fugitive Days' - Part II

Ayres has a brother, who is also an educator. How much you wanna bet he writes...

UPDATE: He writes for the Huffington Post.

Posted @ October 14, 2008 05:47 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Research Notes: WIlliam Ayers in 'Fugitive Days'

William Ayers had a girlfriend prior to his marriage to Bernadine Dohrn. Her name was Diana Oughton. So who was she? She was in the Greenwich Village Townhouse explosion. According to the forensics report, she was at the point of detonation for the explosion.

William Ayers volunteers the information that she had a fight with Bernadine Dohrn over the construction of the bombs. Dohrn wanted anti-personnel style weapons to be used by using roofing nails with the dynamite. Oughton wanted to stay with simple dynamite. Ayers suggests that it was Oughton who set off the bombs. How he would know this information is not discussed, we have to assume that Dorhn told him of the fight between herself and Oughton.

The target for the bomb was the NCO club at the US Army Base at Fort Dix.

The only survivors of the Weathermen who were at the site were Kathy Boudin and Cathlyn Wilkerson. Kathy Boudin went on to rob armored cars, and Cathlyn? She went to work training teachers in the New York School system.

UPDATE: It cant get any better than this, Bill Ayers speaks in a forum about the weatherman. Apparently, he hates Bush ( who knew!). Unfortunately the link shows me he has written more books that I will now have to read for the forensics exercise.

Gosh, He sure writes a lot, doesn't he?

Posted @ October 14, 2008 05:17 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (7)

Someone Save me from myself - PLEASE!

When I first heard the "psst- Obama didnt write his own book" conspiracy, I found it a little hard to accept. Then I read the Jack Cashill post that started it all and it got me thinking, but I still didn't think it was reasonable.

So, quite by accident I happened to hear Michael Medved interview the man himself.

This is most unfortunate because its going to screw my free time all to hell and I have precious little of it at the moment. Now, because of Jacks initial post and what I heard on the interview today, I am now going to devote the next three days to reading 4 books.

Fugitive Days - By Bill Ayers
Sing a Battle Song - Bernadine Dohrn
Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama
The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama

I'm looking for more examples, but those are a good start for the first 72 hours.

The "Cashill Postulate" is this:

That the most famous writing of Barack Obama, 'Dreams from My Father' does not follow the same literary language and style as any of his earlier writings. How does he determine this? Literary Forensics. Imagine reading a book that someone said was by Hemmingway, only every sentence was a run on sentence. Hemmingway is recognizeable by his crisp and economical use of words. Hemmingway writes sentences like "The night was hot" not "It was a sultry Jamaican evening on the evening tide as the sun dropped below the palms". By itself, this would say that Barack Obama used a ghostwriter, which is not really that big of a deal. What is a big deal is that Mr. Cashill proposes that the ghostwriter is none other than William Ayers himself. This is a problem for a candidate who once described Bill Ayers as "an old guy who lives down the street" and committed his crimes when he was only 8 years old.

This is a quick 72 hour exercise in "Literary Forensics" which will most likely do nothing but make me want to gouge my eyes out. I do not expect to do anything with this except satisfy my own curiosity. If it pans out, if my first level exam passes the 'smell test" then we shall proceed, I have already set aside some software to confirm my findings and let me assure you, it does work.

I will liveblog the experience just so we can share the pain. Yes, come here to varifrank for all your leftist literature needs.

Blech....

It should be no secret that I've learned to loathe politics this season. This exercise will probably cement that feeling in my mind. Fundamentally I find this whole election to be far less interesting than the 2004 contest because I think that the differences between the two are so incredibly stark that it simply could not be more clear. If you have a contest between a leftist and anyone else, to me, anyone else who is running who doesn't a felony on their record or a brain tumor in their head is probably a better choice than the leftist that's running.

To me, socialism has always been a game that is too expensive for anyone but the truly rich to be able to afford to play.

Posted @ October 13, 2008 04:06 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (21)

when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping

Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison said his company may take advantage of the slumping economy to acquire other software companies at a buyer's price.

"Acquisitions that we have been looking at for some time may now be more attractive," Mr. Ellison said Friday at the software giant's annual meeting of stockholders. He added that he expects to target small-but-growing companies rather than large publicly traded ones.

I'm going to say this in the most heterosexual way I can possibly say it but I'm going to say it anyway. So here it goes:

I absolutely love this man.

You can whine and cry and talk about the "end of capitalism" if you want, Larry is going shopping while you sit around feeling sorry for yourself.

Posted @ October 10, 2008 12:04 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (6)

Say, about that autobiography....

An interesting thought on the authorship of "Dreams of my father".

You of course, do know there is software that you can use to determine authorship, right? Anyone out there want to be the "buckhead" of this election?

Posted @ October 09, 2008 08:33 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

The Fremen have awakened!

Sarah Palin - Carson City Nevada, October 4th 2008.
"And how can this be? For (s)he is the Kwisatz Haderach!" From Frank Herberts' Dune.

Posted @ October 04, 2008 08:14 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)

Ready to be President on day one?

Joe Biden went for a walk down memory lane last night, walking down to "Kaites Restaurant in Wilmington".

You know, that nice place right next to the Home Depot that Joe hangs out in.

Only its been closed for 20 years. Apparently he used to stop by when it was open, but again, that was 20 years ago.

Now, I'm absolutely sure that had McCain made such an error, it would be immediately overlooked as quaint(insert smirk here). Sadly, I think its my duty at this point to say that Joe is only a few years younger than McCain and you know what that means dont you? Sure you do...

Headline:

"Biden gaffes prove that McCain not capable of being President"

Ah. That is so easy!

Posted @ October 03, 2008 08:45 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

This Just In...

Tina Fey is doomed to play Sarah Palin for the next 4 years.

Posted @ October 02, 2008 08:32 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Fossett

Steve Fossetts plane has been found.

Reasonable Rational Questions that outstanding:

1. Was the engine running at the time of the crash?

2. Why was he traveling south from Barron Hilton's place? On his way to Mojave? Why didn't anyone know that was his plan, including anyone at Mojave?

3. ELT's are triggered when aircraft undergo G-loads. I know, I've set off my fair share of ELT's back when I was a student pilot( Let's just say that if Cessnas came with tailhooks, I would have perfected the 20ft. short field landing. I had a hell of a time with the concept of "flair" in landing. I just slammed the thing down on the numbers. My instructor cured me of this by making me fly along the runway at 10 feet, and then doing about 10 hours on short grass fields, so I got over my 'carrier landings'. ). So where was the ELT on this aircraft and what is its state? It's not impossible that it didn't go off, but why exactly?

4. Where is the body? My guess is its 6 feet buried into the mountainside or has been ingested by the wildlife in the area over the past year. The fact that the first thing detected of the crash site was his personal clothing items, seems to back up that hypothesis.

5. Why didn't they find the wreck at the time of the accident? Well, you have to know where to look. Without a flight plan and some idea where you were going, your search area is 360 degrees in every direction as far as the aircraft in question can fly. In rough numbers, lets say the Citabria can fly for about 5 hours at 100 mph. If you don't know what direction the pilot was flying and you are flying over the empty and untraveled terrain of the Owens valley, the High Sierra and western Nevada topography then there are literally thousands of square miles to search and in that area, you have to find something about the size of a king-size bedsheet, only the bed sheet has been ripped to shreds and buried partially by rocks and dirt. Remember, Aircraft that crash don't always look like aircraft when the crash, they end up looking like trash and theres a tremendous amount of trash and debris in that part of the world. Aircraft that hit the sides of mountains are usually covered with dirt and rocks as well, which helps to hide them from the eyes of search pilots. Oh, and Search pilots don't go flying up next to mountain tops in the eastern sierra unless they have a good reason to go look there, because, as you can see, its dangerous.

It's entirely likely that:

- Mr. Fossett died prior to the crash. This may shock non-pilots, but aircraft that are correctly trimmed by the pilot will fly without input from the pilot until something changes, like they run out of gas or, as it appears to be in this case, hit something hard. The most famous examples are the Payne Stewart accident, or the B-24 "Lady Be Good", both examples flew on for hundreds of miles without a pilot in command.

- Oxygen deprivation. He was at high altitude, I don't know if he was using any supplemental oxygen. If he was, there is a fair chance it didn't work. If he wasn't, then his physical state at the time is a prime suspect.

- He was caught in a phenomenon known as a mountain wave, or "rotor' which he was fighting at the time of the accident. I was in one of these off of Catalina Island once, it was the most frightening thing I've ever been in. For 15 minutes after we departed Catalina Airport, we were not so much an aircraft as we were simply a 'leaf in the wind'. We had absolutely no control over the aircraft. If we tried to go towards the ocean, the aircraft plummeted towards the sea, if we tried to turn towards the island, (Catalina is just is a big mountain sticking out of the ocean) it would climb like a banshee but not in a good way, it was climbing directly for the island, which being hard, was something we wanted to avoid. We just went flinging around the air like a swimmer inside the tube of a big wave in the ocean. The best we could do was to try to stay in the middle of the 'tube' which was not good, but it was better than the other two options. Once we crossed the south end of the island, it stopped as suddenly as it started. My friend, whom I was flying with that day( he was a 'Raven' in Vietnam ), said it was the most frightened he had ever been in a small plane. We actually watched the wings on the little Cessna 140 we were in - flex. When we departed Catalina Airport, There was no sign, no clouds, there was nothing to tell us that the wave was there.

- The most likely cause of the accident is that he simply flew into the side of the mountain. Its easier to do than you think, especially if you are a high time IFR pilot who is flying VFR. Overconfidence is a constant killer of pilots.

I'm not willing to entertain any crazy "Fossetts Still Alive" theories. Did he run away and is living his life on Tahiti? I honestly would love to think so, but I think Mr. Fossett met his end in the air over California and is buried on a mountainside.

I only hope that now that the wreck has been found that his family can find the peace they have been looking for.

Update: Steve has been found at the site, as expected. Rest In Peace, my friend.

Posted @ October 02, 2008 11:31 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

Genius

Tom McMahon is a Genius.

Posted @ October 02, 2008 09:45 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (5)

Im having second thoughts

Not about Palin, but I am having second thoughts about this election. I used to think it was just important, but now I think its more like:

"Vote for McCain, before its too late"

In regards to Palin, I want you all to remember that they aren't laughing at her, they are laughing at you. McCain and Palin are nothing but proxies for the left to take out their rage at you for all that you have done to them( specifically not letting them have the power they so richly deserve). They really don't understand you, so what makes you think they are going to understand McCain or Palin?

How dare you even consider the idea that you can rule yourself, peasant...

These people don't just want to run the government, they want to run your life(ed: yeah, right inta da ground too...)

Posted @ October 01, 2008 12:35 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (3)

Infamy

September 30,1938. British Prime Minister Chamberlain signs agreement with Hitler proclaiming "Peace in our time".

In the desire to stop a war, Chamberlains actions ensured its eventuality. This action, based on the hope for peace, instead resulted in the deaths of 52 million people world wide in what came to be known as World War II. It would take until 1992 for Czechoslovakia, the main object of the Munich agreement, to return to the freedom they knew before Chamberlain stepped in to help.

History records that Prime Minister Chamberlain was considered to be "a nice man".

Posted @ September 30, 2008 08:14 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Im going down a real bad path here, but bear with me

I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but I'm increasingly finding myself thinking that Democrats are capable of anything and I do mean anything to win.

Is it too hard to believe that they would stoop to sabotaging the market to win the election? Its revolting, but the more I think about it, the more evidence I see. And trust me, its not something I want to see. I've spent the afternoon trying to figure out why Nancy Pelosi acted the way she did with this vote. Things are kind of convoluted in congress but sometimes the best way to kill a bill is to make it so distasteful that even its supporters wont vote for it. If you have the President come out and say that something is necessary and needs to be done right away, but you spend all your time 'poisoning the well', all you have done is insure in a very backhanded wsay that nothing will be done. You can flap your arms and say you tried real hard, but what the President said he wanted to do is going down in flames. It's going down in flames not because it isn't actually necessary but because some people want to see Bush lose.

Here's the sad thing. Bush didn't lose 1.1 TRILLION dollars today, you did.

But heres the thing that bothers me. Since 2006, Democrat leadership in the legislature have demonstrably:

1. Tried sabotage the American Military so that it would be seen to lose
in Iraq.

2. Deny Americans access to their own oil.

3. Destroy the American Financial System. They spent three months
telling us we were dead certain in a recession earlier this year. We
weren't. What they seem to have learned is that they needed to go
further in the effort to scare the living bejeebus out of you.

4. Do we all remember Senator Chuck Schumer and his role the Indymac bank failure? I'm wondering how many bank failures have started because of "whispering campaigns". How many banks were shorted because of an engineered effort to cause the bank to crash?

To what benefit? None of this to benefits America or the American People. Its not as part of an idealogical dispute, but purely to benefit the Democrats. This is just wrong. You "don't like Bush" in fact you hate him, ok, I get that, but you don't burn down the house just to get rid of the sofa.

I cannot get past the idea that the Democrats have engineered this whole scene and that is a very bad thing to believe.

In this election with this track history, are we really ready to give
them the legislature AND the Executive Branch as a reward?

Posted @ September 29, 2008 04:22 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (9) | TrackBack (3)

John Galt Lives!

Shocking Poli-sci students the around the world -- American taxpayers refuse to continue fund banks that give out bad loans!

The question of the day - Why Nancy Cant Count?

Second question of the day - "Hey, if this is such bad news, why do I feel so good"?

UPDATE: Ok, Post lunch paranoia strikes deep. Remember last years run on rice? Remember when everyone was concerned that there wouldnt be enough food? Remember March, April, May when every news report insisted that we were in a recession and the end was nigh, only we weren't? It did seem that someone out there was desperate to create the sort of things that are actually under way now. What bothers me is that 90% of what is going on now was created by the very people who tell us they are interested in fixing it. Henhouse - Fox, guarding of, something like that.

One thing that has been bothering me is why would Nancy Pelosi allow a vote she knows wouldnt work? Why would she step out and insult the Republicans and then try to get their votes, knowing that they would be inflamed by what she said? Is she so stupid and has no idea what shes doing, or does she know exactly what she is doing and has actually achieved her goals? Now she can craft another really bad bill, and get all the Democrats to sign on, and Wall St. will actually be helping them do it. The President wasn't going to sign anything until Friday anyway because the Senate wouldnt be voting until Wednesday, so she still has time to get a second, far worse bill out there and voted on.

Does it occur to anyone else that the Democrats, by destroying any remaining faith in the government, are actually in the process of taking over the government, lock, stock and barrel?

Are we really so stupid as to reward this sort of behavior?

Posted @ September 29, 2008 11:28 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

One Last Saturday Night

All around the world, the financial world sits on the edge of a disaster. If the American liquidity crisis is allowed to sink the our banking system, there will be a stock market crash the size of which will make the 1929 crash pale by comparison. This crash will bring on an economic depression that will spread world wide in a matter of days.

We all know this, its been in the back of all of our minds for a couple of weeks now. Tonight I found myself thinking that the fate of 8 billion people around the world rests in the hands of 100 people in the Senate and 440 in the House and there probably isnt 10 of them that any of us would not find ourselves not immediately repulsed from and in dire need of a shower afterwards, if we simply shook their hands.

Worse, its in these law school rejects, half-wit pseudointellectuals and failed businessmen which comprise the whole of the body of the federal legislature, each of whom hates the other more than the man next to them; that the world is hoping that they will all work together to create a solution to hold off a disaster of truly biblical proportions.

I honestly have more anxiety tonight than I have had at any point since September 11th 2001. I have to sit here quietly and hope that congress essentially nationalizes the banking industry, this is supposed to be the upside. This is supposed to be the good news. The alternative is we go into another depression. Gee, thats some sort of choice we got there, slow death by strangulation or all at once with poison.

Given that the last depression lasted from 1930 till 1980 at a time when the world wasnt nearly as global as it is today, who knows how deep this hole could go.

And it all happened because someone said that it should be as easy to buy a house as it was to rent an apartment and then set about passing legislation to see that the entire banking system of the world could be made worthless because people with no basic economic common sense or credit rating were given more money than they even begin to handle. Then they passed legislation to make sure that no one was penalized for foreclosure or bankruptcy. Did they do it on purpose? Did they set about to wreck the joint when they went down this route? Or was it all just an accident?

Who knows, but here we are, all the same. Purpose or accident the damange is the same. The entire earth is all in the same boat, its not like this will just hit the US economy with everyone else swimming right by, the US goes down, everything else goes down with it. Communist, Capitalist, Socialist or barter-trade, it all depends on capital and capital is built on trust and the entire US economy has just gone NSF at the favor bank.

You know, its funny to me to think that the last time the entire world all sat and hoped for the same thing was when Apollo 11 was on its way to the moon...

Posted @ September 27, 2008 08:54 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

The Other Hitchens: Chinas Slave Empire

Peter Hitchens, author of the highly recommended "The Abolition of Britan" and brother of Christopher Hitchens writes a horrifying post where in it, he is nearly killed by a Communist Chinese directed mob in Africa.

Why?

Snip:

"After the murderous disaster of Mao, and the long chaos that went before, China longs above all for stable prosperity. And, as one genial and open-minded Chinese businessman said to me in Congo as we sat over a beer in the decayed colonial majesty of Lubumbashi's Belgian-built Park Hotel: 'Africa is China's last hope."

End Snip.

China, it appears, has rediscovered Imperialism.

Pour your self a stiff drink and read the whole thing.

I find myself living in a time that is as if all of the adrenaline fueled nightmares of our grandfathers have returned and become real.

Posted @ September 27, 2008 08:26 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (24)

All elections come down to one question

All Presidential elections boil down to one essential question, and the nation votes on that question.

It's taken until tonight for us to get a clear distillate from the fermentation tank of American Politics on this election. The question of this election comes down to one clear thing that you have to answer when you go into the voting booth:

"Is this really a good time for risk?"

Face it kids, Obama is a nice guy and has the ability to tell us all about his vision of the future of America, and his future is a future with surprsingly little Soylent Green in it, but theres just no way you can say hes not a risk.

John McCain is a lot of things, both good and bad, but he is not a risk. John McCain is the dean of students at the school of "Been there- Done that", He's been there, got the T-Shirt and mailed home a box of the locally grown, organic "kissmyass" for the folks at home to enjoy and he repeated this fact over and over again tonight.

It's clear that John knows that the threat of Russia towards Georgia is aimed squarely at Ukraine. I have no doubt that John McCain knows the situation with Ukraine, because he was able to clearly say what the issues were in under a minute. Obama, mentioned lots of states out of the area of contention with Russia, but he skipped right over Ukraine. Does he understand the situation there? Maybe, and then maybe not. Its a risk for us to assume one way or the other. It's a risk that if it turns out well, then good for everyone, but if the risk fails, then its could be very bad for everyone.

A misstep on something like the Russian stance on Ukriane is not insignificant.

Those of us who have a memory of the days when another Russian president decided to take advantage of a young unproven President remember just how close it came to not working out well. The people of Cuba remember, because they have had no hope of gaining their freedom since that event. Yes, we didnt all go up in a flash and thats good, but Cuba became a prison for its people. They paid the price for John F. Kennedys youth and inexperience.

Everyone talks about change like its a good thing, but you know what, cancer is change, so saying "we want change" to me is not exactly going to help you close the sale with that line. To me the word "Change" is a lot like "Community Organizer", it has no definite meaning, I cant find that title in the HR manual at work, I cant find the test you take to get the job and I cant really tell how to tell if you did the job, good or bad. Do you mean "Cub Scout Den Mother"? Thats a community, and its usually needs organizing. Do you mean "button man" for Don Corelone in the process of "getting out the vote" for the Barzini and Tataglia families on the east side? What?

Community Organizer means nothing to me and niether does "Change". To me, "Change" is what happened when I got divorced. It was the change I was looking for, but if I had the choice, I would have rather skipped the whole awful marriage process first and not had the need for the divorce in the first place. To be fair, Change is what also happened when I graduated from college. Again, change often depends on where you stand and what exactly you are standing in at the time.

For me, this election is not about "change", its really all about "Risk". One of the things I have a hard time with for a very long time is explaining this idea that all of what we have here in our lives today, is not in any way, guaranteed or permanent. It can, with just a few twists and turns, all fall away. Your rights, your property, your very lives all twist like leaves at the end of a very long branch from a very old tree.

Modern humans, and Americans in particular have so rarely experienced any privation that they simply dont know what it looks like or what to watch out for to avoid it. Its a situation that reminds me very much of those dangerously deluded people who wont vaccinate their kids because they "heard a guy, who knows a guy" who said that "vaccinations give kids autism". People who do this have almost never seen what happens when there is a major disease outbreak like polio, where just the word "polio" made my grandmother audibly gasp and cross herself.

Unlike my grandmother and her generation, these people today who wont vaccinate, havent seen death or the wages of disease, they simply dont know what it is so they make up a fake fear to take its place. Polio, which they have never seen, has become a rather sick fairy tale, while autism, which they have seen, becomes the thing to be feared and avoided.

The problem is that if you get enough people who dont immunize their children, it makes the entire populace at risk for an outbreak of a disease that can kill and disfigure.

There's a tipping point where once enough people decide that polio is not a risk, but autism is, that the entire population becomes at risk for an outbreak of polio. But if no one in the population has ever seen polio, they simply dont know how to evaluate that risk so they ignore it as something that is not worth bothering with.

Did I just say that Senator Obama is the same as Polio or that people that vote for him are as irresponsible as people who dont vaccinate their children?

No.

What I did say is that the human mind has a problem with collective memory and the assesment of risk. Our current generation has never experienced an actual economic "Depression". The current generation has hardly even seen a recession, they have no idea what those words mean or what the real impact is to their lives. They read about it books, but they dont know what it is. They see bank closings in the news and wonder if they still have to pay their credit cards.

In their experience, Washington is a never ending fountain of money and source of help for all things bad, and all you have to do is ask for it and someone up there will get it to you. They cant imagine a day when someone stands up and says "Sorry oliver, you cant have any more". They only know Americans as the winners in war, they dont know what military defeat looks like or how it changes everything at home. They have no knowledge of being deprived of anything. Most people in the United States think that having only two cars, a TV in every room but no plasma screens and sadly no "cable", is the definition of "poor".

Americans and specifically this particular generation of Americans, have no idea what a thing like conscription is, or what it means to give up two years of your life for the "good of the country". When the country is a war, and we have decided collectively to do that, sure, but when its used to suppress the population? no. Americans cant imagine that happening because they have no experience with it at all, but ask any immigrant from south or Central America and they will tell you what it means.

This is a country that thinks that a "month to month" pay as you go phone plan is an burden and a hardship. This is a country that has lost its collective memory of true hardship. I fear that having lost this memory it may very well have lost its ability to see a risk for what its is and evaluate it accurately in the correct context.

I'm not much for putting risk into the Office of the President. I've read too much history to know just how badly things can go if the wrong person is in the wrong place at the wrong time. If the President of the United States answers the phone at 3:00 am, he aught to be asking "where" are the carriers?, not "what" is a carrier?

I just dont need that sort of stress in my life.

Posted @ September 26, 2008 08:46 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6) | TrackBack (3)

I dont care about the debate and frankly I never did

Who are we kidding? Is anyone going to watch this debate and change their minds about who they are going to vote for? Is Obama going to close the sale? Is McCain going to pull off a mask and reveal his inner Nixon to the world?

No.

Stop kidding yourselves into thinking that you are going to see something here, because there is nothing to see tonight, because its already happened, the "press-**" has seen to it that the message they want to send will be the only message that gets out.

Let me be "Kreskin" here and predict whats going to happen.

10 seconds after the debate is over, the left will hit "enter" on their progressive-apple-laptops-that-look-just-like-girls-makeup-cases-from-back-when-girls-actually-carried-such-things and publish their already written posts, saying that McCain looked tired and worn out, stammered around stage, while Obama looks "statesmanlike" with a firm grip of the facts, even though the word most often repeated tonight by Barack Obama will be "ahh, ummmm, errr". The first 6 paragraphs will also breathlessly point out the relationship between "Ole Miss", deeply entrenched American racism and the shock (to some) of a black man running for President,all while quietly whispering the little known fact that McCain appears to be a "white man".

I'll repeat it again. This is an exercise in pointless twaddle with as much to do with actual politics as the WWF has to do with actual sports.

I dont care if McCain walks out begins to channel the ghost of Jim Morrison, drops his pants and takes a big whizz on stage shouts "I AM THE LIZARD KING!!!,because even if he did do that, I'm still voting for him. Quite frankly, if he does do that, I will probably send his campaign money. If he also turns around smacks Jim Lerher to the ground and calls him "a commie punk", I'll fly to Manahttan and wear a "MCCAIN FOR PRESIDENT" sandwich board in Times Square and ring a bell and hand out campaign literature to the New Yorkers like those "end is nigh" folks.

I suggest to you that rather than sit in front of the TeeVee, a better use of you time would be for you all take the opportunity to go for a walk in the autumn air and enjoy the company of good friends.

** - "Press" used to be a word that invoked the use of a "printing press " in the creation of distibutable information. This is not to say that in those days the information was any better, but in those days you could always reuse the paper for other purposes, such as bird cage liners, training your puppy or what is called when camping "Mountain money". Now the word "press" has come to mean the feeling my head gets either when I place my skull between a C-Clamp and tighten the screws and its the exact same feeling I get if I watch MSNBC for more than 10 minutes, or if Alan Colmes starts to talk or if someone decides this would be the perfect time to talk to Rosie O'Donnell and get her feelings on the election.

Posted @ September 26, 2008 01:46 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

Well after all, he is a fighter pilot

McCain up by 2.

Sure its Zogby, The "Haaretz of polls" ,but there you go.

So, McCain suddenly suspends his campaign, which immediately causes his opposition (who is underestimating and overconfident) to overshoot. This is a maneuver to which to my aviation geared mind sounds like "McCain slams down the airbrakes and rolls over the top of the overshooting aircraft and suddenly finds himself with a shooting solution".

Where did he come up with that idea? Its an air combat maneuver called a "Rolling Scissors". Note to the Obama campaign, if you are wondering where McCain went, check your six.

Posted @ September 25, 2008 01:39 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (4)

ipso facto

NBC's Luke Russert says "The smartest kids in the state go there so it is leaning a little bit toward Obama."
He said in a blog later Wednesday that he misspoke and "made what is without a doubt, quite simply a dumb comment..."

So - By saying something so dumb, is Luke Russert telegraphing the fact that he's actually for McCain?

Posted @ September 24, 2008 04:37 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

Priorities on Display

I'll say this about John McCain, he may be 72 years old, but he's not boring.

John McCain seems to have this weird out of date old fashioned idea idea that there is something out there that is more important than politics and your daily poll numbers. He actually thinks that this thing called "the country" is more important than politics. He actually thinks that making a sacrifice for the good of the country is a good idea! The poor deluded old fool...

Barack Obama seems to think that a debate on Foreign Policy is the most important thing that he can possibly do for the country right now, that people crave politics and hang on his every word.

What A Narcissist...

We stand on the edge, not of a recession but an outright depression. If companies cannot borrow capital to stay in business, they will go out of business. Once a certain number of companies go out of business, then there is simply no business to be had. Unless you are some sort of "frontier trapper" living out where you can catch your own food, you need capital to survive because "It takes money to make money". If you dont make money, then you are an expense and when things go bad, expenses get cut and that means you daddy-o. The only reason you got that cushy office job at "Consolidated Sprockets Unlimited" isnt because youre a "great guy", its because theres a market for sprockets and there is enough capital out there for other companies to buy sprockets from your company. If people want your sprockets but can't buy them, then your company doesnt sell sprockets. If it doesn sell sprockets, theres no money to pay for you and your cushy job and before you know it, you're out on your ass and "Consolidated Sprockets Unlimited" is out of business. See how that works? WALL STREET IS MAIN STREET! YOU HAMMERHEADED MORON SENATOR SCHUMER! I dont care how much money you have in the bank, it doesnt mean a thing if its not flowing around the economy. A pile of dollar bills is not money, its insulation. A pile of dollar bills that is invested in the economy is MONEY, or in other words, its CAPITAL! Money doesnt mean anything if there is nothing to buy. The flow of capital is the cornerstone of American economics and frankly, its the cornerstone of your freedom. Remember varifranks universal law of economics, "if you cant own property, then you are property. If there is no economic freedom to allow you to buy property, then you are only the property of the stete."

If you want someone to take care of all your economic decisions then move back home with your parents. I'm sure they kept your room just like you left it. If you dont like capitalism, then stop borrowing money for cars and houses and go live in a field with all the other hippies( And I'm talking right to you Senator Charles "I Hate mortgates" Schumer). Most people think it would be great to get back to nature, but a week of camping will usually break them of the habit. Take it from me kids, Poverty is not "fun". There is nothing good or noble about living in poverty. It sucks, if at all possible, avoid it.

I like capitalism, I like owning a house a car and having a job and having disposable income to do what I see fit with as I see fit. I kinda think that its a good thing to NOT BE STARVING TO DEATH BECAUSE I CAN ACTUALLY AFFORD TO EAT AND I CAN EAT WHATEVER THE HELL I WANT WHEN I WANT TO. Socialist economies are the ONLY places where famines occur. Period. You just think of that the next time you think " Golly, socialism would be great!"

How anyone over the age of 12 can vote for a leftist socialist with zero economic experience or so much as a drab of common street sense to be President of the United States is completely beyond my ability to comprehend. You would get more economic common sense if you talked about the 1980's "laffer curve" with a three legged tincan chomping billygoat with a lapshade on its head. The only thing socialists know about markets and economics is how to wreck them and make everyone equally poor.

We need to recapitalize this country, not nationalize the banks and take away your economic freedom. We need to cut the capital gains tax to ZERO and we need to do it NOW.

Oh, and while we are at it, we need to STOP GIVING MORTGAGES TO PEOPLE WHO CANT MEET THE CREDIT QUALIFICATIONS TO RENT AN APARTMENT!!!!

Posted @ September 24, 2008 02:00 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (28)

I question the timing

Is it at all reasonable to consider that the Democrats are willing to sink the economy for their own benefit?

I mean, wheres the downside for them? They get to nationalize everything, they get to return to the happy days of the Great Depression, its perfect. So why solve it? why not net it burn? Nancy "Nero" Pelosi, its not that far removed if you think about it.

Because of course, Im the only one who is looking at the Democrats askance on how they are handling the whole banking crisis and natually all problems benefit the Democrats at the polls. Is it really wrong of me to be this politcally paranoid?

Posted @ September 23, 2008 03:24 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (8)

Doc Browns Time Machine

I just had a flash of a future, a future where President Palin is running for re-election against Senator Hillary Clinton in 2012. Oh what fun that debate would be!

Then I read this Hitchens post and realized that there must have been some shift in time-space that resulted in the two of us thinking the same thing.

Posted @ September 22, 2008 04:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

Question of the day

Q: How many crises situations has President Bush faced during his Presidency? Military, Foreign Policy, Natural Disasters, Economic, Political, if you stop and think about what this President and this country has faced in the last eight years, its pretty staggering.

"Ah but Frank, does matter to you that he caused most of them?"

Well, I think that blaming the President for Hurricaines is like blaming the fire department for house fires. You might complain about how slow there were in getting there, but the fire itself is not the fault of the guys who come to put it out. Military? I see a military that has been transformed from a post cold war machine that was still addicted to big weapons systems like the Crusader artillery system into one where Air Force systems like UAV's and GPS guided weapons have transformed the battlefield. Economic? We went into the Bush years with the meltdown from the "Dot Com" years, and we are going out with a meltdown of housing, both are more alike than we care to realize. Ken Lay and Franklin Raines are more alike than folks on the left will ever admit. Political? Bush took office in 2001 with what can only be called a near insurrection and except for occasional periods of quiet which can only be described as the political oppostion in the act of re-arming, he's managed the office of the executive branch. Managing when you have a majority is hard but managing when you have a revolt on your hands is damned difficult. President Bush has faced a crises after crises since the first day of his Presidency without any sizeable let up.

So the question of the day is based on this. President Bush going away will not lower the amount of activity in the world. The next President will face at least the same amount if not more than President Bush has faced. Having lived through the last eight years and knowing what we know about this most recent period of time, what do you want your next President to take into office with him? Remember, Presidents are simply the leader of the executive branch of Government. In that position, they fill a large amount of the executive branch with people that, in their experience, will do a good job.

I'm trying to figure out a way to graph those situations along with how President Bush responded to them. I have to say that there are a lot of situations that happened over the last eight years that I had simply forgotten about. Remember the Crisis with the Chinese when they shot down one of our aircraft and held the crew? I had forgotten about that and I had forgotten about the whole ENRON show with Ken Lay as well. The number of Hurricaines and wildfires that have happened over the past eight years. Its also amazing the things you forget about. One thing I've noticed is that President Bush has been through a lot of things over the past eight years but there is no way that he has been bored in office, even for a minute.

Posted @ September 21, 2008 10:28 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

If youre Barack Obama, would you hold a fundraiser at an oil mansion?

Get outta my house, you interloper!

You've all heard about the fundraiser in "Hollywood" that generated 9 million dollars. What you didn't hear is that it was held at Greystone Mansion. You folks who are not from LA will think that it has something to do with Tarzan, but the mansion does have something to do with another Hollywood connection; Edward Doheny, one of the nations early oil magnates owned the mansion. He was made famous in the Upton Sinclair Novel "Oil" Which is what the film "There will be blood" was based on.

I grow tired of pointing out the hypocracy of the press these days, but I feel I must do my duty, so here it goes:

Ahem.... Oh, how they would have howled if a Republican had held a fundraiser A) in a Mansion B) in an MANSION MADE FROM OIL PROFITS!!!!

So There. And yes as always, "I Drink Your Milkshake", but you knew that or you wouldnt be here, would you?

Posted @ September 17, 2008 07:44 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (15)

As a taxpayer Im just asking, as a capitalist Im appaled as a shareholder Im furious

Now, I say this as a complete capitalist, but if a business gets so large that its failure would collapse the market( Like AIG is purported to be), then is it fair to say that the business should be broken up by the government to keep that from happening?

"Too big to fail" should not be "Taxpayers pick up the tab". If you are too big to fail, maybe we need to make you a little smaller.

That goes for you too GM...

Posted @ September 17, 2008 07:49 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (3)

Headline of the day

Joe Biden impresses Manitowoc teen at rally.

Honestly.

Posted @ September 10, 2008 08:04 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

A Democrat speaking in code

We've recived some signal traffic from Politico:

Obama poked fun of McCain and Palin's new "change" mantra. "You can put lipstick on a pig," he said as the crowd cheered. "It's still a pig." "You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still gonna stink." "We've had enough of the same old thing."

What exactly does this mean exactly? Lipstick? Pig? Old Fish? Its pretty cryptic.

Let's say we run this text through the "Democrat-decodifyer" and see what it says.

Well look at that!, it says:

"Help! I've fallen and I cant get up!"

You know, the cool thing about our electronic translator gizmo is that we probably could read that message even before the Democrats can.

You stay classy Obama! And please, whatever you do, dont change...

Posted @ September 09, 2008 05:22 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

57 channels and nothing on

Let's see, as I scan through the TV tonight I see that theres a show called "Ice Road Truckers", a show about men who drive trucks in the frozen north of Canada, usually they are doing their jobs in support of the Canadian Oil industry. Then theres also Deadliest Catch, a show about working fisherman in the Alaska crab fisheries. Theres also "Ax Men", a show about timber men in Oregon and finally, there "Dirty Jobs", where the host goes all over America an spends a day working in some of the most difficult jobs in the country.

Half of America spends its dinner hour laughing at the little people out there in flyover country, you know - the NASCAR type folks who drink beer from cans, plan their vacations around deer season, play softball like it was a religious sect and take time out each week to go to church on Sundays without apology or shame. With all of these shows you get the idea that there sure does seems to be a hell of a lot of people out there who like and respect the people who work in these jobs enough to watch them do it. (I am a big fan of "Deadliest Catch".)

Yet, with all those channels of television, not one of the many industrial hard working television producers has made so much as a single hour of television dedicated to the hard work of the hard to define world of "community organizers". Clearly this is an oversight and the market will step in quickly to fill the airwaves with shows like "Teamster Union Organizer - Local 292" or "Cicero City Alderman - Behind The Scenes". You know from what I've gleaned from the headlines, having a webcam at the Detroit City council meetings would probably be a hoot to watch.

Perhaps I should check the listings on Bravo or PBS for "Barack Obama - Community Organizer".

Posted @ September 06, 2008 09:52 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (7)

A thought about frontier moms.

Xerxes: You Greeks take pride in your logic. I suggest you employ it. Consider the beautiful land you so vigorously defend. Picture it reduced to ash at my whim! Consider the fate of your women!
Spartan King Leonidas: Clearly you don't know our women! I might as well have marched them up here, judging by what I've seen.

You know, my grandmother Agnes had 5 children, she was a nice lady but if you crossed her you could likely walk away with one less appendage for your efforts. My other Grandmother Myrtle, she had 5 kids and I dont think theres ever been a meaner, nastier lady on the planet since Livia, the wife of Augustus. She would never hurt you personally, she would never sully herself with the actual act, but she knew people who would do it for a price. She was always nice to me, but I think she thought I was slow and harmless. My aunt Bobbie had 5 kids, and she ran car dismantling business in Blythe California. Blythe, for those of you from out of state is where the Devil holds spring training for Hell.

My mom had 4 kids and I dare you to cross her or say the wrong thing about one of her kids if you are within arms reach. My advice if you do is this; dont get up from the floor when she knocks you down, just play dead.Its better to play dead than to be dead, ok?

I dont know how they do things "back east", but my own experience with western frontier women who raise kids and know how to shoot things is - dont underestimate them and do not think that they are sickly little stick figure victims that are prone to getting a case of the vapors if it gets a little hot.

Posted @ September 05, 2008 04:06 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

Question for the press

Q: Since Obama has said that "He has been to 57 states in this campaign", do we yet know if one of them was Alaska? Is Alaska important to the Democrats? If not, why not?

Editors note: According to spokesman for Gloria Stienem, when she issued the statement "The only thing Sarah Palin shares with Hillary is a chromozone" was not intended as to be taken as an endorsement of Sarah Palin by Ms. Stienem. Her spokesman said that she hopes that this clarifies the issue.

Posted @ September 05, 2008 03:02 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Joke of the day: From Gerald Baker

"What's the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?”

“One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let's be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy.

“The other kills her own food"

From Gerald Baker.

Posted @ September 05, 2008 12:16 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

What I'm reading: In the Realm of Prester John

Robert Silverberg: In the Realm of Prester John.

Imagine an obscure out of the way place that you have heard about all your life, a place like St. Helena in the South Atlantic. A place you had always heard of, but never actually met anyone who had been there themselves. You accept that its true because other people have told you that it is true. Then one day, you discovered that it really didnt exist, that it was all made up and no one had any idea how the whole story of "St. Helena" got started.

That's the essence of the legend the "Kingdom of Prester John". Its a story that got started in the time of the crusades that quickly got a life of its own, a story that all of western civilization believed to be true from the 1100's to the 1700's, but never had any actual basis in fact.

Posted @ September 05, 2008 08:34 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Think you used enough dynamite there butch?

My reaction? Yeah, She's ready. You say you want change? Well, I got change for you right here and its Big John McCain who brought it to you. McCain picking Palin is the single best example of US Naval strategy at work since Nimitz was at Midway.

Oh, and someone needs to call the Democrats and tell them that we found those balls Obama lost when he picked Biden for VP, they can pick them up at the Palin campaign headquarters. Those folks who are on that side who are convinced that Palin is going to get "eagleton'ed", think again folks, McCain is likely to go before she is. And Biden? Heh...

( oh, and someone tell Brit Hume that the reason she was so solid on stage and not rattled by the situation isnt because she is a polished politician, its because shes the mother of five kids. After five kids, that woman could probably withstand a 24 mortar barrage and not get rattled. A public speaking opportunity is nothing by comparison to a 2:00am feeding. )

Posted @ September 03, 2008 08:29 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

For the Record: I heart Palin

(Backing my theory that McCain has been on the upswing since his appearance at Sturgis, here is Govenor Palin resting on a Harley...)

1. I think the choice for Sarah Palin is simple genius. This choice irritates and annoys all the right people for all the right reasons. All the reasons that have animated the press into levels not seen since Bush was elected are all reasons that I see as positives. Not from Washington? Great. Hunter,Fisher, mother of 5? Perfect. Small town mayor? excellent. Not "vetted" by the liberal press? Well, sign right here Mrs. Vice President.

2. I think the most conservative of values is the phrase "None of your damn business", so yeah you could quickly guess from that I dont care that her daughter is pregnant. If the press didnt care that John Edwards cheated on his cancer ridden wife with a woman who during the affair actually had a baby, then they shouldnt dont care if Sarah Palins daughter is pregnant.

3. I am pretty tired of hearing her child referred to by the press as "A Down Syndrome Child". Last I checked, "Down Syndrome" is a condition and not a designation of human subspecies.

4. The left cant understand why anyone would have a baby unless you had nothing else to do in your life there was government sponsored day care available 6 weeks after the birth of the baby and the baby was guaranteed to be error free. The right understands that life is a blessing and we are all enriched by its presence. This is why Sarah Palin drives the left absolutely insane. The left is all about choice but only if that choice is self serving. To the left, choosing self sacrifice over self endulgence is considered a character flaw.

5. Thanks to the Sarah Palin candidacy, the Republican brand has a very human face. Monday at the Convention, you saw Laura Bush and Cindy McCain on stage, while on everyones mind was Sarah Palin in the background. It is into this atmosphere that the anti-american left chose to riot in the street, attacking boy scouts and old ladies. Instead of attacking "the man", the left can now be seen to be out in the streets attacking women and children. Nice work boys, that should help you out in your quest to take on "the man". Oh damn, the man is now a woman...

6. Let me be clear, John McCain could not have made a better choice. I fully support and endorse Sarah Palin not despite all that has come out - but because of it. For those who say she will drop out of the race, I believe the odds are far better that Biden will drop out.

Posted @ September 02, 2008 07:44 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (4)

A little dance on the role of government in health care

When it comes to health care, the only thing I know for certain is this; that despite your best efforts and all that modern technology has to offer, your fate is that you will get sick and die. 100% of the time, the end result of our lives is exactly the same for all of us. What we share as a species is the fact that no matter who you are, no matter your station in life, the very best you can hope for in life is to simply go to sleep one night and die comfortably unaware of your demise.

So, with that in mind, here is how I tend to break down the “health care conundrum”. Who should be responsible for my health care and why should they do it? I tend to think of the various solutions that exist along the lines of a “spectrum”. At the low end we have “Do Nothing” and at the high end we have “Do Everything”.

Let's examine this spectrum in some detail.

The “Do Nothing” option. Since it can be argued with some certainty that you will die, then it can also be argued that any health care at all is futile and a waste of time and resources. I tend to disagree with this option as I myself have survived several life threatening events like a burst appendix, which with the application of a moderate amount of health care allowed me to continue life beyond the 17 years I had lived at that time it occured. The use of the “Do Nothing” ethic also would have stopped the love of my life from existing at all, since she was born premature and without any health care, she would most certainly have died before her first few days of her life were complete and that would have been a true loss to the world and most devastating loss to me. Also, since I am of the first generation of humans to not live in the shadow of terror that came to all previous generations from polio, measles or half a dozen other all to common things that used to slaughter humanity with impunity; it would seem rather spoiled of me to reject all of what medical science has done since then and say “Ah screw it, rather than clean our wounds with antiseptics, lets all just die of septis instead because you know, were all going to die anyway, right?” So, while there is a pure scientific argument that can be made about zero health care, it can also be shown that it is somewhat silly to think that way, because vaccinations work, antiseptics work, diet works and as such allows the sick to get well and the near dead to go on living where just a short time ago, we would have simply died from things we can now cure easily and cheaply.

Now that we’ve examined (and dismissed) the lower end of the spectrum, let’s go to the other end of the argument the “Do Everything” option.

Unlike the “Do Nothing” option, this one is emotionally hard to walk away from because we are living things, and as living things we tend to strive for life. It’s the nature of everything with DNA to try to stay alive. Emotionally, we want every possible option there is to for us to be able to stay alive, no matter how expensive, no matter how small a chance there is that we understand intellectually to be in a solution to stay alive, we will still want it.

However, if we say we really want this option, we need to ask ourselves “who should go without, so that I can live”? Health Care resources are not infinite and under no “real world” plan could they ever be made to be; there simply are not an infinite number of beds, doctors nurses, gallons of plasma, sheets, operating room lights, ambulances, janitors and so on. They have to be parceled out along some sort of plan and some sort of priority basis; else you would have an oversupply of janitors and an undersupply of surgeons. If you think that you should go first to the front of the line in this decision of "who lives and who dies", then you need to ask yourself “who should go last?” Should my children spend all of their money and live destitute just to keep me alive? Should my neighbors forfeit their property just so I can stay alive for another week, a month or a year? How long is their obligation to my ill spent (in their opinion) life? “Do Everything” actually does have a limit and the limit is set by the bookend called “within reason”. The question that most people find themselves asking about this is “who gets to set that standard of “reason”? Is it Me? My Family? The Doctor? The insurance company? The Government? And this is the problem with “Do Everything” because it’s not entirely up to you, its up to those whom you yourself empower with your life and health. If you are the only person involved with your health care, then the “Do Everything” option is limited only by you and your own resources. But can you operate on yourself? Can you create and design medicines? Well, probably not, so you have to get other folks involved in the process.

The traditional method that humans use to fill a gap in what they have for what they want is to trade something they have for something else. Since the time of the Hittites, we have found it convenient to trade money for labor and resources. So one metric that limits “Do Everything” is how much money you have to trade to accomplish your goal of staying alive. When we think about this, let's try to remember that all of these people engaged in health care are not doing it as a hobby, they are spending a great deal of time and resources just to be able to provide this service to the world. It takes a great deal more time and skill to create a nurse or doctor than can be accomplished on Saturday afternoon at the Learning Annex, therefore, they tend to be in short supply.

The people that work in the health care industry are doing it partially because they believe they are helping people in the process, but they are also doing it because they can trade their skills and time for money and with that money, they can go on to live their lives as they see fit, to buy curtains, or go on vacation in the Bahamas or perhaps even breed and create little doctors and nurses as well. They need money to get paid to them so that they can pay for their homes, their families wants and needs, their food, and yes, their own health care because even the best surgeon in the world finds his own Proctology to be something that is beyond his own reach.

Some people are greatly offended by this idea of trading money for health, saying that its not fair that those with lots of money can get more care than those without. I say that if you recognize that people in the health care industry deserve to be paid for their skills and that people who make the goods that are used in health care deserve to be paid for the effort and that the people who create the buildings and infrastructure that will become hospitals and clinic, also deserve to be paid for their work; then we are more in agreement than the "money is bad" people probably realize. If you are arguing instead for a fundamental “fairness” of the world, then you are arguing for a whole series of things that go far beyond health care and start to become the purvey of the discredited ideas of Mr. Marx ( Karl, not Groucho. Karl was a moron on the same scale as L. Ron Hubbard, where Groucho was a genius. One would be better served by the ideas of the latter rather than the former, and if history had listened to Groucho instead of Karl, there would be far fewer mass graves throughout the world).

It is no more fair to say to doctors and nurses that money should not be used in health care than it would be to say to Farmers, Fishermen and and Stockmen that you shouldn’t have to pay for food. Farmers, Fishermen and Stockmen around the world will understand the true nature of what I’m saying here, in that there is nothing more expensive than something that is “free” and that life itself, it has been said many times by many people, is not fair.

So, the “Do Everything” option is limited, if not by your own resources, then by those whom you bring into the decision. Should your family decide? Well, if you let them, then they will and they will make that decision like all humans do, based on what’s in their best interest, ( which sometimes is shockinging to discover that their interests are not the same interest as yours). If they like you and you have a good relationship, then you can be somewhat assured that you will be dealt with properly but as someone who himself doesn’t trust his own relatives with his car much less his life, this option provides me with no real comfort whatsoever.

Should the insurance company decide? Well yes, if you have insurance, then you have a contract that you honor by paying the premium and they honor by the terms of coverage. They are bound by contract to observe the terms of that contract. However, if the insurance company is silly enough to sign a contract that essentially has no bounds on the level of carewell then! good for you!, but the likelihood of that company surviving the economics of providing a subscriber with "never ended care" is very small. Worse still, by you insisting on “Do Everything” and then trying to force the insurance company to provide it, you will have limited a large number of other people from having a “Do Something” option from the same company. Its that old “finite resources” problem again. If I give you everything, it costs a great deal for everyone else to pile it up for you (and exactly who are you anyway?).

So what about the Government? Shouldn’t they decide? Well, what is the obligation of Government? Is it to keep you alive or to provide for the general welfare of the citizenry? If we agree that you will get sick and die, then the government cannot be obligated to simply keep you alive in all situations and circumstances, in fact history has repeatedly shown that just the opposite is true. History shows that what Governments are obligated to do by the rest of the healthy citizenry is to keep you from being a drain on the finite resources or in your declining health from becoming a risk to the rest of the population. You, as the individual and your “quality of life” are the last thing on the agenda of Government. If you are sick and no longer paying taxes, then you are an expense, and as is in the universal nature of all human governance systems, you will become a problem to be solved and all governments exist to eliminate problems.

If you are also a member of a minority, a religious, racial, political minority from the government or the populace, you will have little satisfaction on the idea of the government acting as an arbiter for your care. If you want an example of Government health care when the individual is not in control of the decisions being made, visit any Indian Reservation or spend a day at the VA. When you are given the fact that all modern government sponsored health care systems were started as an offshoot of the 1890’s eugenics movement, with what was then called “progressive” idea that it would improve mankind by basically killing off or sterilizing large portions of the citizenry who were deemed by "The Government" to be “undesirable, feebleminded, somehow less than whole”, then you can understand why I find idea of the government being involved with my health care decisions, fundamentally repulsive. So again, what is the role of government in my health care? Should "The Government" fulfill a role in with my life that I wouldn’t allow my mother-in-law to do?

Hardly.

Government does have a role in health care, but I want to make sure that the role is a small as possible. It should set standards, set training guidelines and licensing, even allow and adjudicate some form of legal redress, but should it decide who lives and who dies? It makes me shudder to think that there are so many out there who think that it should. The collective history of 7,000 years of organized human history is rife with examples of why that’s always a bad idea.

On the other hand, if I let the government pay for my health care, If I surrender my rights for the childlike and unattainable dream of “Do Everything” then what right do I have to argue when they say that they have done everything they can and I "should go"? If I surrender my right of life to "The Government" for a "cost vs. benefit" evaluation then what does that make me? Is this not THE fundamental “Quality of Life” issue the issue of should I live at all and who is it that makes that decision?

So, in the middle of the spectrum from "Do Nothing" to "Do Everything" is a spread that goes somewhere between “What can I do?” and “what can I afford to pay someone else to do?”. I am not one of those who lives his life like he will live forever and I will not find myself disappointed when I discover that the end is near (for all I know, it probably is even as I write this). As I said, we, the living – die; each and every one of us, without exception. So what can we do in the mean time? And this is where I think that this phrase "quality of life" comes into play because what I think we really want is not “insurance” but “cost containment”. To put it simply, I don’t want to go broke in the process of staying alive.

By myself, as an individual I cannot get the Bayer company to create something as simple as Aspirin because I don’t have enough capital incentive for the Bayer Company to do that just for me. But if 400 million of other headache sufferers all say: “ Hey man! I got a headache and I’m willing to pay someone to get something that makes it go away !” then I can bet that the marketplace, of which Bayer is just a part, will crawl all over themselves to get me a solution. This is as I’ve said before how Humans has solved problems since the time of the Hittites. You have something that you want to get, and I’ve actually got that “something” that you want, so we sit down and trade each other something for it. Anything else other than simple commercial trade, is really just some form of collective coercion and governmental tyranny.

As a consumer, I can walk down the pharmacy aisle and see that I’m correct in this observation. We live in a society where there are 400 brands of toothpaste, competing for my toothpaste dollars, not because its “fair” or the government has decided that everyone has a right to good teeth or that there are companies that are mandated to create and sell toothpaste to me. We have 400 brands of toothpaste because the people who are good at making toothpaste have found out what people with teeth want to buy and the people who want to buy toothpaste are free to choose what toothpaste they desire to buy.

It needs to be said, that not every human society that exists on earth today, or at any time in the past, has ever had such wide choices in the marketplace. The choices what to buy and how much to spend on it is almost entirely left in the hands of its citizenry. With 400 brands to choose from, if you make toothpaste, you need to make really good toothpaste for a very low price or you wont make toothpaste for very long. Until recently, there were few toothpaste options for the individual to buy but now we have 400 brands to choose from, and overall they are pretty damn cheap.

What I want out of "health care" is more of that. I want doctors and hospitals competing to keep me as a customer because that will be the single best proven method to actually contain the cost of health care. Notice I didn’t say “Insurance”, because our primary premise is that you will die, therefore you cannot “insure” against it like you can insure against fire, with the application of building codes and the assessment of premiums. But for that to happen, I have to decide that its my responsibility to take care of my own health, good or bad, and not the responsibility of the neighbors next door or that pack of rabid, wild dogs who live next to the Potomac River who call themselves "The Congress of the United States".

Good or bad my life is my own. You roll the dice, you take your chances and there are no guarantees one way or the other how it will all turn out. My family has a role to play in my quality of life decisions, just as they do in everything else in my life, but in the end, its my choice how I live or die and it should remain exactly as such. I will allow my insurance company to be involved only as far as I have contracted them to help me, but in the end, my life is my own. If they choose not to honor the contract we have agreed to, well, so be it. I can reasonably expect them to honor their end of the bargain and I can legally hold them to it to the best of my abilities, but I cannot expect them to go bankrupt in the process of taking care of me. If such a thing were to be mandated I would find it offensive that I should, in my own desire to live, steal so much from others who could have found care from that insurance company had I not destroyed it, so I could go on living. It would be wrong to demand life for myself when it could be given to me only at the expense of other peoples lives.

I ask only that while I am alive that I am left in a condition of as much liberty as I see fit to use and as much as I can handle responsibly. For my health, I do not want everything that can be done to be done, I only want everything that can be reasonably done with the resources that I have at hand. I have no essential right to expect anything else.

Posted @ August 29, 2008 07:25 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (19)

America Wants to Know

Heh.

Posted @ August 28, 2008 04:29 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Who Mourns for Obama?

So, Apparently there is going to be a Greek Temple for the unveiling of Obama.

This naturally makes me think of the 1967 classic Star Trek episode "Who Mourns for Adonis?"

Apollo: I would have cherished you, cared for you. I would have loved you as a father loves his children. Did I ask so much?
Capt. Kirk: We've outgrown you. You asked for something we can no longer give.

Of course, only myself and Jonah Goldberg will make this connection.

Posted @ August 27, 2008 02:13 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

Opening soon in Flint Michigan

Yesss.....

Posted @ August 18, 2008 02:10 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

A moral equivalance test and a modern day Guernica

Georgia - A modern day Guernica.

It seems its the fashion of the day to try to tie some sort of moral equivalence to what Russia is doing in Georgia to what the United States and its allies did in Iraq.

This is, of course,a putrid pile of of leftist hogswallow and they know it. If you dont agree or if you feel that there might be something to that argument, then ask yourself or anyone else who will listen "where are the Human Shields? Where is Sean Penn? Where is Medea Benjamin? Where is Katrina VandenHeuvel?" Where are the protests of Russian Embassys world wide? Where are the throngs of peace loving protest crowds around the world?

Well, certainly not in Georgia where they can get hurt or possibly even killed in the process. The American Armed forces have their reputation, the Imperial Russian Army has its well earned reputation. Everyone knows its safe to stand in front of the American Army, everyone also knows the opposite is true when standing in front of the Russian Army.

But if the left is anything, its consistent. It's consistently wrong, consistently insane and consistently on the side of tyranny and this time its no different. Its always quick to condemn the so called "American War Machine", and all too quick to excuse the Imperial Russian Empire as it marches over the lives of free people in an effort to crush their homes, destroy their property and most importantly, terrorize their neighboring countries to do the bidding of the new Czar.

Ask yourself this - If Georgia falls to the Russians, what hope does Ajerbijan have? Uzbekistan? Tajikistan? Ukraine?, Estonia?, Latvia?, Lithuania?, Poland?, Romania?, Hungary?

And what or who is to stop them? Don't the current Imperial Russian arguments for military action in Georgia also work in those places as well? What makes you think that this will go "this far an no further". You can be sure that each of those countries know what language His Imperial Majesty "Czar Putin I" is speaking. Its Russian, spoken with a bohemian German accent. Its the sound made by a jackboot holding a man supine against the ground, by his throat, his words of protest caught under in the desire of an empire to increase its ambitions for what is not theirs. Europeans know the sound of this language all too well, for it has been spoken for years on their continent before the peace that was brought by the Americans.

Now, here in the new century, this language seems to be making a comeback. I cant help but notice that war in Europe has broken out, just as Americans were in the act of leaving it. There might be a connection in there to take note of, if there are any of us left to make the connection after this is all over. History says that despite our hopes, this conflict will get wider and uglier before it is all over. I hope that history is wrong, but I'm a skeptic in that area.

Its interesting to me to note how the safest place for a civilian seems to be either in front of or in the care of the American Armed Services while the most dangerous place in the world for a civilian is to simply live on the border with Russia. Theres a lesson in there somewhere about where the real moral high ground in the world exists.

Posted @ August 14, 2008 11:14 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

The Russian Constant

It seems to me, given the nature of the world at the moment, that you could still use this ad today. It kinda makes you sick to realize that, after everything that has been said and done since 1989, were right back to Imperial Russia.

Posted @ August 09, 2008 05:58 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

I dont think that word means what you think it means

I present, "The Obama Salute"

Which of course is supposed to represent the Emperors first initial,which Im sure fills his followers with all sorts of deep down good feelings. But to folks like me, it just says "That guy is a whole lotta nuthin"...

You see, it really does work and yet it works on so many levels.

From the Prof...

Posted @ August 07, 2008 08:07 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Question of the day: Gore my ox?

Q: How many mutual funds would be negatively impacted by a plan to tax "windfall profits"?

Extra credit - How many American retirees would be affected by this move?

Posted @ August 04, 2008 09:55 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Snickers: Get some nuts!

Back when the earth was young, dinosaurs roamed the Earth and all TV shows were made by either Irwin Allen, Quinn Martin or Sheldon Leonard, this would have been considered funny to one and all, but lo, in the age of the "sensitive man" this advertisement makes some people cry and because of that, it must not see the light of day.

Of course, when I say "sensitive", I'm referring to people who play soccer.

It's days like this that I weep for the species. and when I say "weep" I dont mean "cry' I mean I shake my head quietly, by myself, where it cant be seen. I dont want to get caught showing emotion in public because, well, that would be wrong, am I right? I mean there are just some things that a man doesnt do, right?

Posted @ July 30, 2008 12:13 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

How to fix the social security system

Eat up baby boomers, the only thing thats gonna save my generation is a healthy heapin' of suvivor benefits, so forget about your "healthy start" organic food options, forget about the gym you joined and start smoking and drinking again just like in the good old days.

Then fix youself up a daily plate of these:

Paula's Fried Butter Balls

2 sticks butter
2 ounces cream cheese
Salt and pepper
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 egg, beaten
1 cup seasoned bread crumbs
Peanut oil, for frying

Cream the butter, cream cheese, salt and pepper together with an electric mixer until smooth. Using a very small ice cream scoop, or melon baller, form 1-inch balls of butter mixture and arrange them on a parchment or waxed paper lined sheet pan. Freeze until solid. Coat the frozen balls in flour, egg, and then bread crumbs and freeze again until solid.
When ready to fry, preheat oil in a deep-fryer to 350 degrees F.

Fry balls for 10 to 15 seconds until just light golden. Drain on paper towels before serving.

Wait a second - Peanut oil? PEANUT OIL! Oh come on Paula, isn't this exactly the right application for Coconut Oil? Peanut Oil? Sheesh. Everyone knows if youre going to fry butter fat that you want an oil thats 95% trigycerides. Get Chef Gordon Ramsay on the phone, he will make me a proper deep fried butter ball and show this lady a thing or two.

mmmm... deep-fried-butter... Its so simple! Its like Elvis' Fried Peanut Butter Sandwhich, just thinking about it takes 10 years off your life. I'm wondering why I never thought of the idea of "Deep Fried Butter" myself! Its like a "deep fried embolism"! The last thing you say is "Wow, that really is good! then you just expire right on the spot. You could put them on a stick, sell them at the State Fair. If you could get them with a side of salmonella, it would be like virtually everything else you get at the State Fair, except that unlike that corn dog that will make you sick for three days afterwards, the Fried Butter Balls will simply kill you on the spot. So, you take the kids to the fair and one of them says " Hey look, its that prop comedian Carrot Top is playing a double bill with Gallagher, can we go see them, please?" You can just say " Sure kids, just let me stop off at the Fried Butter Ball Stand first". They dont get any pangs of guilt for having driven you to thoughts of suicide and you dont have to sit through Carrot Top and Gallagher. Its a total "Win-Win" as they say...

Go on, laugh if you want to but you know you want to try them, dont you... Wait a second, Im having a flash! So, why not wrap them in bacon before you fry them? yeah buddy, Now were talkin'!

Posted @ July 29, 2008 02:13 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (42)

Can we do it? Yes we can

Looks nice doesnt it? Must be some sort of Modern office building somewhere in Hawaii right? Well this structure sits on an artificial island in the Harbor of Long Beach California, Its named for one of the Apollo Astronauts, Gus Grissom.

So what is it? Why its an oil rig! Its designed to be both pleasing to the eye, as well as lower the industrial sound levels through the creative use of waterfalls and sound suppression panels. There are 4 islands like this one in sitting right in Long Beach harbor. All are within eyesight of the scenic Pacific Coast highway, a number of schools and office buildings, not to mention the recreational beaches.

This is the face of modern oil drilling, even though this was created in 1964 prior to the ever-so-not-forgotten Santa Barbara blowout in 1968. There is also an oil refinery just up the coast in Carson California. In California, oil is available, it can be drilled, pumped, pipelined to the refinery and brought to the consumer in a way thats cheaper, neater, faster and I dare say "greener" than most anywhere on earth.

What the Sierra club and the rest of the "green-shirts" would prefer we do is pump oil from Nigeria, then ship it to Japan for refinement and then use it in California all for "the sake of the environment" as if Nigeria, Japan and the vast oceans inbetween simply dont count in the equations of "environment". If you take into consideration that the State of California is currently at a 28 BILLION dollar budget deficit, you might think that the first thing they would think about was raising money through the use of new oil leases. This is what the City of Long Beach does with the oil that it sits on. Long Beach generates a fair amount of its annual budget directly from oil revenues.

More details can be found here.

Can we drill for oil and live side by side with it? Yes we can, because I can show you that weve been doing that for a long time already. There are currently 1,500 active wells pumping in the cities of Long Beach, Artesia and the Huntington and Seal Beach areas, actively generating 40,000 barrels of oil per day. Think of it, Oil and lots of people living side by side in harmony. Can we do it? Yes we can...

Posted @ July 23, 2008 07:27 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

I cant be the only one who thinks that Obama looks like he's borrowed his big brothers suit

I saw the Obama press conference this morning, and all I could think of was the 80's classic movie "Stop Making Sense":

which if you think about it for a second is an apt metaphor for the whole Democrat Presidential campaign in more ways than one. So here it is, for your viewing enjoyment - The David Byrne "Big Suit"

Posted @ July 22, 2008 12:00 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The only thing that matters

A Pre-war "America First" campaign button. Yes, the way to avoid war is to make sure ships dont sail in convoys. You dont want to make the Uboats mad...

Both campaigns are now busily trying to out do each other on timelines for leaving Iraq. In my mind, this is not the question to ask or answer. Truth is, both candidates and the crrent President all want to leave Iraq. The question is not when to leave but how to leave.

If you leave Iraq in chaos and disarray, you guarantee we will have to come back. On the other hand if you leave Iraq in good shape, you best assure that we will not be coming back.

The question that needs to be asked and answered by each candidate is "What are you doing to ensure that American troops will not be needed in the region during your Presidency?"

Americans left Europe to the Europeans after World War I and found themselves 20 yaers later back in Europe in a wider more deadly war. The instincts of the politicians after the First World War was to leave and never look back. It was the next generation that was forced by circumstances that were created by that decision to go back into Europe. After the war, they knew it would be irresponsible to follow the same action because if we had to go back a third time that there wouldnt be much left to liberate. The words you hear over and over again by any World War II veteran about why they fought so hard is this:

"...So my kids wouldnt have to come over and go through this"

And to that I say - Amen.

After a long and deadly war, Americans collectively decided the best course of action to take to ensure that another generation would not have to die on the beaches of France, would be to stay and act as a force of stability on the continent. It was a long debate with the two arguments coming into the "Morgenthau plan" and the "Marshall plan", but in the end, Marshall won the debate. The result of wishful thinking after World War I was World War II and the deaths of 52 million people. The result of our long costly effort in Europe after World War II is a continent populated by a generation that has no experience in war, which given the long bloody history of that region is quite remarkable. While wars in other regions of the world are still very likely, war in Europe is not very likely at all. No American, and no European leader plan for a war with each other on any level at any time. It is simply unthinkable. I caution the reader that there are many of you out there who say that the middle east can never be peaceful. Rest assured, I am not one of those people. If the Germans can be shown to live peacefully and if the Japanese can turn away from war then any nation on earth can be shown a better way to live with the rest of us.

I watch this election closely because besides just being a good citizen, I have a very good personal reason. My son is 14, and the next President will, through his direct action or inaction as President, determine if my son will spend some part of his late teens not just in the military, but in an active, hard fought and costly war.

As a student of human history I know that wars are often started by well meaning, peace loving folks who intended to do just the opposite. Rest assured, that to me the intentions of the next President will make no difference at all if in 6 years time, my son is called into service to fight to liberate Iraq for a third time because of a desire to leave hastily and in chaos just to meet a campaign promise. Those of you who think we can ignore Iraq and the middle east in the future, need only look at your reaction to the reality of $140+ a barrel of oil. The one thing I have enjoyed about $5.00 a gallon gas is that it shows everyone everywhere that our economy and way of life runs on oil and not pixie dust or compressed hamster pellets.

Let us all agree that even if it takes another 10 years to work out the issues in Iraq and the middle east, that 10 years spent in the region is not the worst thing that could happen. Let's not to spend the hours bickering over whether there was a need to go there in the first place but rather, we should all agree that the best policy to follow in the future is the policy that insures that we never have to go back and fight and that with the right course of action, the middle east might someday be as quiet and peaceful as Europe. This is possible, but only if we do the right thing and not the thing that makes us "feel good".

We left Europe in haste in 1918, It felt good. We embargoed Japans oil in 1940, and it felt good too. We did both those things beliving it would result in peace but 52 million people around the world paid the true price for wishful thinking.

Posted @ July 21, 2008 09:11 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (35)

So Who's Vetting Maliki?

If there is one more translation or one more reinterpretation of Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki's statement about when US Troops should leave, he will quickly find himself at the top of the list for Obama's Vice President. Who else but 'The Master' himself can be so dexterous with public pronouncements of policy?

If he starts giving statements about "Roe Vs. Wade', tax fairness and Social Security, you'll know what's coming next.

Posted @ July 20, 2008 09:16 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Id like to help you with this but Im a little busy at the moment

Theres a reason I'm not blogging much at the moment. The reason is right in this picture:

I cant get a laptop to set level on the deck and everytime the boat moves, the laptop falls into the water. Whoopsie Daisy..! And you know what? Theres no Wifi out here! I'll have to get Slartibartfast to correct that error with Earth 2.0.

That's little old me in my kayak this week out on Fidalgo Bay, with Mt. Baker in the background. I'm the only person on earth who goes to Puget Sound and gets a suntan, but I have a good reason. Its been in the 80's all week, with nary a cloud in the sky the entire time. The locals of course think they are sizzling on the Devils Own Hibachi whereas I, a member of that deranged tribe of "Desert Dwellers" to the South think that this is exactly how it should always be. Of course if it was, it would be brown rather than green and not nearly as staggeringly beautiful as it is.

I'm not really here right now, meaning that I'm not sitting around the office with my laptop. I'm out and about, on the water and off with the occasional effort to gointo the city to wrap up some business which is the actual purpose to my visit up here, but blogging? Eh, no, not right now. I have a ton of things rattling around to blog about but I'm really not in a position to sit down and write at the moment, so bear with me here...

I'll be back soon, but for now think about a couple of things and we shall discuss when I return.

Ahem...

July 16, 1945 was the date of the First Nuclear Explosion in History.
There are a couple of things about this pivotal event that I want you to think about, for example:

A) What would have happened if the bomb didn't go off? Billions of dollars were spent on this project. Is it at all possible that General Leslie Groves and Dr. Robert Oppenheimer could have somehow gotten away with not delivering the 'finished goods' without a demonstration of what all the money was spent on? Witness what happened to Howard Hughes after the war with acusations of "War Profiteering" over his undelivered wartime projects. Witness the fact that then Senator Truman was already near to uncovering the Manhattan Project because of the tremendous cost that was being expended on the project. Could they simply have walked away from it all?

B) Since the Trinity test was to confirm the design of the Plutonium bomb, would the US have gone ahead with the U-235 Bomb and dropped it on Japan if Trinity didnt work? Remember, the U-235 had serious limitations which is why the Plutonium Bomb was necessary.

C) Here's one thats always bothered me. Given the large amount of Soviet espionage that was underway in the Manhattan Project and at work at high levels of the US Government at the time, why didnt the Soviets try to sabotage the bomb? Let's say they did, the US then walks away from the design, convinced that the bomb can never deliver more than a fizzle. Then in 1949, the Soviets demonstrate that the bomb actually does work. During the year it would take to catch up, would the Soviets have used the same restraint against the US and the West as we did towards the Soviet Bloc?

D) What if the bomb simply didn't work? What if the design was flawed and the flaw itself was to go unresolved? Would the bomb eventually have been created by someone else later? How could any follow on team ever received the amount of funding necessary to make that project happen with the political mindset of "It failed with brighter minds than your working on the problem, so who do you think you are that you can solve it?" to fight against. If the smartest minds in the world say it cant be done, do you still try? If so, why? A world where there is no bomb sounds like a dream but I'm not so sure it works out that way and I find that rather interesting idea to consider.

Here's the big question. If there was no bomb, was another World War and this time with the Soviets, an actual certainty? In 1949 over Berlin or in Korea? Did the existence of the bomb and the demonstrable use of it on the Japanese change human civilizations view of the limits of warfare? How many times since 1945 did the bomb actually serve as a firebreak against the horrors of "World War"?

Oh, and another thing. We know about the Manhattan Project because it worked but have you ever thought about the possibility that there were other major projects that didnt work that we never found out about because, well, they did fail. Sometimes things fail because they are silly ideas that dont work and could never work and sometimes things fail because of poor timing. As we all know "Success has a thousand fathers but failure is always an orphan". If there was another "near-hit' project out there like the Manhattan project, how would we know?

Ok, now back to the water. Now where did I put my drybag...

Posted @ July 16, 2008 08:45 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (15)

Gack!

Whats it like in the central valley these days? Its 112 degrees, zero wind, and there are three thousand fires all over the state. The smoke literally blocks out the sun. If you want to simulate the experience, turn yur furnace on, close all the windows and start a campfire on the front room floor. Oh, and make the campfire out of Mule dung and you will get the correct amount of throat chocking acridness in the air for the full effect.

I also have two items that are in the process of making matters even worse.

1. The city I live in has decided to take this particular time to resurface the street I live on. Now I have the extra special wafting scent of tar and asphalt to go with the rest of the total "8th circle of dantes inferno" experience.

But wait, the fun doesnt end there...

2. We spent some time this year to put in a garden. Gardens mean plants and plants mean fertilizer and fertilizer means that Flies will make an appearance. We had more than our fair share, so I natually decided to "do something". I bought a rather clever flytrap that is essentially a plastic bag that you fill with water which contains some chemical that acts as a "fly attractant". Given what flies are attacted to, you can imagine what it might smell like and it does. The plastic entrance traps the fly in much the same way that crab traps trap crabs. Once they get in, they cant figure out how to get out and there they stay.

The trap worked really well. Inside of a few days it was filled to the brim with the loathesome creatures so quite naturally, I decided to throw it out into the trash can.

This was, to say the least, a serious mistake. You see the "fly attractant" smells like something along the lines of rotting flesh, spoiled kimchee, week three of a New York Sanitation strike and the worst gag inducing B.O. ever, beyond anything your travels on third world public transport could have uncovered.

You see, when I tossed this bag into the 55 gallon black industrial trash can, it actually amplified the smell. Now the fly attactant rather than just getting flies excited in 6 foot circle around the trap can be smelled from 3 blocks away. The smell is itself a living entity. Its big enough to have its own zipcode. You can actually see the smell. You can see it the same way you can see a dog fart as it moves across the room like a mirage riding above the highway, a small distortion in your view and then blam, you are overcome like you were hit with a wave. In this case the wave is rotting cabbage and vomit.

So whats it like in my slice of California right now?

It's 112 Degrees, theres no sunlight, theres no air movement, the air is filled with acrid smoke and just to tip it off, the lingering smell of dead bodies wrapped in cabbage and dipped in sewage, sitting under a sunlamp for a week. Oh and just to kick me directly in the crotch, Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi are representing my state, which given the state of things right now seems to make a perverse sort of sense.

Yessiree dear reader, I now live in hell...

Posted @ July 10, 2008 12:52 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (9)

How the Irish saved civilization in 1969

Oh, Wheres your cartop mounted loudspeaker when you really need it. eh?

Thats Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem with their 1969 Irish hit "Bringin' Home the Oil", give me a big hand...

Posted @ July 06, 2008 09:28 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Wesley Clark on why Wesley Clark wont be Vice President

Oh yes, hes the one to even out the Obama ticket yessiree...

Posted @ July 03, 2008 07:57 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (4)

No ice on the North Pole?

UK Independent Exclusive report: No Ice at North Pole.

snip.
"...It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year..."
end snip...

Really?

ummm,eerrr,uhh....well,ummm,thats certainly INCONVEINENT!
Varifrank Exclusive: I Live On A Planet Filled To The Brim With Submorons Who Believe Anything, Literally Anything, That The Press Tells Them So Long As It Fits The Anti-Human Agenda That Has No More Science In It Than Scientology Does.

The photo comes from a damn nice solid science filled explanation of "Why Ice is routinely missing at the North Pole". Heres a hint, that "Santa living at the North Pole with his elves and Mrs. Santa thing?, Its a lie your parents told you... Damn them! Damn them all!

I only remembered this site because I had a former friend who was absolutely livid with my position on global warming in 2000, who sent me another "Ice missing from North Pole for first time ever" piece back in 2000 to PROVE to me that I was a fool.

Its now 2008, I havent heard from him since. I still stand by me previous position. Global Warming happens all the time not just because your neighbor has a bigger car than you, and you Jeff (not that Jeff, but the other Jeff, you know who you are...) are an ass.

Posted @ June 26, 2008 07:18 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (44)

And this time last year, Hillary was a sure thing

Liveblogging from Boston Logan Airport...

John Stewart reminds his audience that its "OK" to laugh at Barack Obama. I keep asking folks who support Barack Obama " Are you really going to elect someone to be President that you are afraid to criticize? If you cant blame the President for your ills, who will you blame? You know the President is the big cultural voodoo doll that we all stick pins in so we can feel better about ourselves. Its one of the roles that he does for us. So, what will we do when criticism of the President is interpreted to mean something, ahem, else? Will the press quickly adapt to the meme that any oppostion to President Obama is a reactionary knee jerk racist act? Will we see headlines daily that say "You dont have to be a racist to be against Barack Obama, But it helps!"

So, what happens when an entire population finds itself with a voodo doll that cant be stuck with pins, and worse, the voodoo doll sticks pins in you instead? Personally, I want a President who can take a punch without getting all upset and bothered about it. I want to be able to call the President "Hitler" if the mood strikes me and I dont want to find the FBI in front of my house the next day because I did. I dont want a weathervane for a President, I want a "check valve" on the legislature.

I dont have to agree with the President all the time to be happy. I just have to know that the person that is President is there to fulfill a duty to the country and not that hes not there to enhance his resume for bigger and better book deals later on in his life.

I think the Republic can withstand an Obama Presidency because I think that fundamentally, the Republic can withstand anything but apathy. I dont see any apathy right now, do you?

We are the "check valve" on the President and the President gets two years at a time to keep things in order his way, then we re-elect the entire House of Representatives and 1/3 of the Senate which can either work for him if we like what hes doing or against him if we dont. People gave Bush limited power until after the Katrina debacle , and then we took it back from him. All told, in the two years of the congressional session, there are only about 9 months of active legislative sessions that are going to take place. The likelyhood of the President making sweeping changes in that time is actually very small, which I'm all excited and happy about, but its probably going to be a problem for those who are expecting something else.

For the record, I still dont think hes going to be elected...

Addressing the "But Frank, everyone just loooooves Obama" meme that has everyone in a tizzy, I like to take people through this scenario. Where I live is a local Donut shop, its been in business for about 15 years. Its run by an older vietnamese couple. I dont think it makes a ton of money, its not a local fave or anything but its there and every week, week after week, doing what they do which is, making donuts.

About three years ago, Krispy Kreme came to town. It was a total sensation, our local store had people waiting in line 24 hours a day for weeks on end. It was completely amazing, Krispy Kreme was redefining the market and the popularity was beyond anything rational. It was a sensation. I thought at the time that the local donut shops were history, because even I just looooooved Krispy Kreme.

So what happened to the mom and pop Donut shop? Well, its still there, doing what it does and apparently making money because after all this time, it would be a very expensive hobby if it didnt. So where is the big time sensation, Krispy Kreme now? Well in our market, its gone. Totally gone. Three years ago, you couldnt go two feet without running into a Krispy Kreme product in stores, gas stations and at every function that you attended. Today, pffft...

How do you go from a "big time sensation", a great product and a fantastic brand to closing 145 stores and disappearing altogether? Easy, you just have to execute your business plan like a bunch of amatures and get way out beyond your own abilities. It happens all the time.

Remember Boston Market? AOL? The American airline industry? Remember that fads dont last but well exectued business plans do.

And please remember, its OK to laugh at Barack Obama.

( And no, I did not compare John McCain or Obama to a Donut...)

Posted @ June 25, 2008 07:13 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (11)

George Carlin

George Carlin taught me that you could be funny and smart at the same time. It is accepted today that comedians can be smart and funny but back in the day, Comedians were of the Rowan and Martin, Lewis and Martin joke telling types. Before George Carlin, comedic insight rarely went beyond "when my wife sits around the house..." patois. I discovered him during the summer of 1976, in Dennis Lucas' garage and I've always been grateful to George Carlin for teaching me that little fact about comedy. Smart can be funny, infact if smart actually is done right, its almost always funny too.

I memorized, actually I devoured his comedy albums in the 1970's, and began to mimic his style and pacing of speech so much that I became obnoxious about it. "Hot water heater? Hot water doesnt need heating..." Im sure it was funny to everyone the first time they heard it, but after I said it daily for nearly a month, it lost its flavor.

My favorite Carlin quote: " I joined the Air Force to avoid military service".

My favorite Carlin memory - Back in my consulting days in the 1980's, after a wild night out in Manhattan, I fell asleep with the television still turned on. I woke up up in the middle of the night and "That Girl" was on, but Marlo Thomas was talking to some guy in a suit and tie with short hair. The only problem with that is the guy in the proper business suit and hair cut had George Carlins voice. My alcohol enhanced brain could not accept what my eyes were clearly seeing, George Carlin - in a suit and tie as straight as can be. I was convinced that I had passed into some alternate universe...

George Carlin has long been on my list of "People I would have loved to have spent 14 hours sitting next to on a flight to New Zealand".

Posted @ June 23, 2008 04:29 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (38)

"Moveon.org" or "America First" - you decide

(in reference to this nytimes article)

ON THE SCREEN A young, mother speaks directly to the camera as she stands next to the family farm house, holding on her arms a baby boy.

THE SCRIPT The woman says, “Hi, Mr. Truman; this is Alex. He’s my first. So far, his talents include trying any new food and chasing after our dog — that, and making my heart pound every time I look at him. So, President Truman, when you said you would stay for 100 years to contain the Soviet Union, save the world from the threat of communism and stabilize the war torn continent of Europe, were you counting on Alex? Because, if you were, you can’t have him.”

Remember folks, The war in Iraq ended the sanctions that killed (according to the far left marxist front organization 'ANSWER') over 300,000 Iraqis in the 10 years that they were in place.

A generation ago, they had a name for the selfish, mindless, boobs of the isolationist mindset. Today we call those people "Buchanan-ites" but in every way that can be measured, there isnt an dimes worth of difference between Moveon.org and that same spoiled "me first" mentality.

And now on the Dumont Television Network, this word from Radio Free Europe...

And the General Clay referenced by Ronald Reagan? Thats General Lucius Clay, the father of the Berlin Airlift.

Posted @ June 19, 2008 11:23 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

What they dont show you tells you everything you need to know.

"With shovel in hand, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama visited a flood zone in Quincy, Illinois on Saturday. Obama helped locals fill sandbags to place on the banks of the Mississippi river.
Obama has vowed to push for state and federal aid to help victims of the floods."

Kinda brings a tear to your eye, doesnt it? Presidential hopeful Barack Obama, taking time away from his busy schedule to fill sandbags. Message: He cares, he really really cares...

Ok, Let's try looking it this way. We will just adjust the camera angle ever so slightly and look at what is revealed:

"...With shovel in hand, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama visited a flood zone in Quincy, Illinois on Saturday. Obama helped locals fill sandbags to place on the banks of the Mississippi river. Obama has vowed to push for state and federal aid to help victims of the floods."

Gee, that camera angle doesnt quite tell the same story as the text, now does it? If they want to use that picture, it would have to go with text like this:

...Like all posturing politicians who have always proven all too ready to exploit a scene of natural disaster and personal tragedy for the benefit of their politics, Senator Obama with over 100 members of the media his secret service staff as well as his own campaign staff, and visited a flood zone in Quincy, Illinois on Saturday. Senator Obama distracted the effort by pretending to help locals fill sandbags to place on the banks of the Mississippi river while the massive press and politcal staff stood by passing out campaign buttons and bumper stickers to those who had recently lost all of their belongings in the flood. Senator Obama has vowed to push for state and federal aid to help victims of the floods, which is almost entirely guaranteed and unopposed by all elements of both the state and federal government. Locals who were on the scene during the "campaign circus" were heard to ask the candidate if he would allow the Army Corps of Engineer to dredge the river or repair the levees, so that this sort of disaster wouldnt happen in the future. In response, the candidate and his staff was heard to laugh to themselves as he retreated into their SUV convoy and drove to the next fundraiser.

It should be noted that while Senator Obama has raised over 100 million dollars in campaign funding in the last few months and breaking all records for fundrasing in the process, he has yet to offer to donate any of these "windfall" funds to the towns in his home state who have been effected by this disaster.

Hero or Opportunist? It all depends on how you look at it I guess.

(Hat tip to The Great Hugh Hewitt)

Posted @ June 15, 2008 02:51 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (38)

Canada to US: I Drink your milkshake!

From CBC:

"Energy giant BP came out the big winner in the federal government's latest auction for oil and gas exploration leases in the Beaufort Sea, offering to spend nearly $1.2 billion to explore on the Arctic seabed"

You know things are bad when even a socialist government like Canada understands the need to drill for domestic oil, but Washington can't quite find the deep down gumption to go and do the same.

Oh by the way, wheres the Beaufort Sea? its just 100 miles to the east from the Alaska National Wildlife Preserve. You know ANWR, that extra special precious place we cant possibly begin to drill in because of some damn reason or another. Yes, our nothern neighbors are "drinking our milkshake"! At this rate by the time we start drilling in ANWR, there wont be any oil left in that area.

Posted @ June 12, 2008 02:55 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Heres a riddle - What does a Cuban have to do to get human rights?

Answer: Why its easy as 1-2-3!

1) Escape from Havana.
2) Join the Jihad in Afghanistan.
3) Surrender to the first American Military Patrol that appears and boom - you get shipped back home but to Guantanamo, where on American side of the wire you have more rights as a prisoner than you do as a citizen of Cuba on the other side of the wire.

Hey, Ive got an idea, why not skip the whole Jihad thing and just jump over the wire in Guantanmo? Well I would...

( My question to the human rights crowd is "After this decision, why would any American in combat ever take prisoners? Why would any Military Command take that sort of risk?, because you know it is risky to take the time and effort to capture people instead of simply killing them outright. You know, things happen out there in the field. Whos to say that the Jihadi was "surrendering"? So will the next "scandal" be on the steadily decreasing number of detainees captured in the field? Hell it probably aleady is. And my question to the rest of you is, If your military is no longer able to kill anyone, capture anyone or break anything in the process, then what is it? )

Posted @ June 12, 2008 10:42 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (15)

The age of the Remote Worker has arrived

An Atari 800 Acoustic Coupler, circa 1984. I tried explaining what a modem was to my 14 year old son the other day, I wasnt entirely successful. The concept of an Acoustic Coupler was completely foreign to him as it is to most people of the current generation. He is 14 and has lived his entire life in the age of the "always on" internet. For roughly half of his life, his father has not commuted to work from the suburbs to the urban office but has worked from an office in the home.

A couple of years ago when I wrote a post about what its like to telecommute, I got some odd responses because to many people it seemed to be a bit too far out on the bleeding edge. Now that gas is on its way to 5 if not 6 dollars a gallon, it doesnt seem so odd or bleeding edge. Since the end of the year, I have had a large number of people tell me that they have now switched to "remote working" on at least a part time basis and many are on full time "remote work"

Heres the link to that post.

As I have said, I have telecommuted (I prefer the term "remote work") full time for the past 8 years. This is partly because my boss is a genius and knows how to keep his people happy, but its also a direct result of the forces at work in the world today. You see, once the IT industry (the industry that I work in) decided it had to work with people in India, then it became a daily if not hourly experience to work with people on other parts of the globe as part of your daily efforts. In 1998, it was unusual for me to work closely with people all over the globe. To be sure there were contacts with people overseas back then, but you didnt work in the same level back then that you do today. Today I work with people all around the globe every day, in fact the person closest to me that I work with is 800 miles away. My direct managers are three time zones from me and my nearest peer is 8 timezones away.

In 10 years, things have changed and they have changed dramatically. In 1998, this "remote work" concept was highly unusual, today I am in no way unusual. In 1998, I flew daily to Los Angeles and home at the end of the day. All I did was sit in meetings. Today, no client would suggest or support such an agregious waste of time and money. In 1998 I had a low speed DSL line. Today, A 20mb Fiber-To-The-Home connection. ( for nostalgial purposes, I still have a 1200baud US Robotics desktop modem. It came with my 1984 vintage Macintosh which I also still have. The 128k first generation Mac which I bought for 2400 dollars in Febuary 1984, still works. Yes, I once paid 2400 dollars for a computer that could only run 5 pieces of software. Today my cellphone has more software, more memory and storage and it only cost 200 dollars three years ago. )

Because of the global nature of our marketplace, because of the internet, because of the incredible rise in commodity prices, the working world is being transformed. The single most importatnt difference between todays Oil Surge and the 1970s is that today a great deal of work can be performed without leaving the home. In the 1970's you had to go to work because thats where the phone was, thats where the data was, thats where everyone you worked with was going to be. Today, thats simply no longer true.

One of the things that will fall out of that is the rise of the "Remote Worker". The "Remote Worker" will replace the factory mentality that our fathers and grandfathers were forced due to their circumstaces to live with. The central factory that came with industrialization transformed cities, changed our culture and modified the daily habits of the human race.

But because of my experience over the past eight years,and watching how it has transformed my life, I have no doubt that the "Remote Work" revolution will be as transforming to our society and culture as what occured in the early industrial age to the world of the past.

My advice to those of you who havent already, take advantage of the price of gas to transform your work. You will find that your biggest impediment to becoming a "remote worker" isnt technology, but a long series of ingrown organizational inefficiencies( sometimes called "middle managers") and cultural expectations. Trust me on this one, you can use this time to make a major positive transformation to your life by becoming a "Remote Worker".

Posted @ June 07, 2008 11:33 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

You are here

View Larger Map

After todays trip, I can confirm that Wentworth Springs Road is one of the finest motocycle roads in the Western Hemisphere...

Posted @ June 06, 2008 05:29 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

missing the obvious solution

Telegraph UK:Water crisis to be biggest world risk

It's too bad we cant just melt all the icebergs and ice caps to free all that freshwater so people can use it. Perhaps if there was some way to heat the earth on a global scale. Perhaps if we could just warm the atmosphere a couple of degrees it would result in much more water in the aquifers of the cities instead of wasted up in the mountans as glaciers.

Oh, I suppose its just too much of a stretch to think that mankind is powerful enough to change the climate, even if its beneficial for millions of people.

( ...and on a side note, arent we reaching a point in our popular discourse where we are at maximum "greatest threat to mankind" saturation? When everything thats fit to print is the "greatest threat to mankind", doesnt that really mean that nothing is actually the "greatest threat to mankind", since the evidence provided by our lengthening life span and growing population show that desipte throwing everything from bird flu, black plague the Pontiac Aztec and Hanna Montana knock-offs at us, the biosphere is apparently pretty much powerless to stop us? And arent all these complaints about "water supply" just attempts by men to ban the practice of suburban lawns, which they are forced to spend valuable free time maintaining for no good purpose? The average suburban man can say "Honey I dont want to grow a lawn" and the wife will show them the stinkface, but if he says "oh my God!, the earth is running out of water, we need to put in a rock garden to be truly green and ecologically correct!" and she will smile at you in return. Who cares what the excuse is, if it gets you out of 3 hours of mindless labor on Saturday afternoon, why not? Its a scam I tell ya, a scam...)

Posted @ June 05, 2008 08:34 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Online Right

Why does the Right side of the blogoshere have less traffic, a smaller audience, than the Left side of the blogosphere?

Good question. My answer? Because we on the right have jobs, families, responsibilities and duties while the left has trusts funds and a cozy apartment in the basement of mom and dads house. The former leaves far less free time than the latter, but I wouldnt trade it for any amount of network traffic.

Posted @ June 04, 2008 02:14 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

George Lucas Wants you to know...

The man who has the imagination to bring you Ewoks, Admiral Akbar, Jar-Jar Binks, Darth Vader dating a girl twice his age (and she was only 16!), Captain EO and the misunderstood classic mid 80's comedy film "Howard the Duck", wants you to know that Barack Obama has "the force".

Oh good, now Barack Obama has to deal with the deadly curse of Star Wars fanboys. That should slow him down...

Posted @ June 04, 2008 07:27 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

10 second movie review: Cloverfield

Cloverfield: Rating - Skip. Rent the original Godzilla instead. Raymond Burr sitting on a block of ice with prestone running through his veins could emote more energy than any of the characters on the screen in this movie, including the "monster".

Phil Spector once described the record album as "2 hits and 8 peices of crap". Modern movies are much the same idea in that the moments captured on the trailer almost always make up all of the better scenes of the movie. 9 times out of 10, once you've seen the trailer, youve seen all thats worth seeing in the movie. Trailers thankfully end in 90 seconds where you are forced to sit for 90 minutes through the movie.

Exhibit A for this case is made by the movie "Cloverfield". If you've seen the trailer, thats it. Seriously, thats all there is. Cloverfield is yet another movie where youth culture makes its shiny faced debut and you just weep for the species. You know the plot to this movie before you sit down to watch it - a big spooky monster comes to New York, makes a hash of the place. You know it because its been done before, lots and lots of times before. The fact is, I cant think of a time when it was done worse than this movie, and that includes the laughible "Q". What you dont know is this is yet another modern movie where the the overdone technique of "hand held video" is used in the same way for film in the same way that garlic is overused in bad restaurants.

The film starts at a going away part for a young man going away to become his company Vice President in Japan. One look at the guy and you say to yourself, "Vice President! Wow, just imagine how far he will go when he finds a comb!"

The camera wanders around for 20 minutes as you "get to know" the people at the party. At this point I began to say to myself " Hey wouldnt it be great if a big slimy monster fell from the sky and ate all these people? Now I would pay to see that!"

And guess what, thats exactly what happened. So, in that respect, the movie works on a very satisfactory level. Unfortunately in the process of removing the main characters from the movie(which you feel surprisingly good about), the monster messes up some very nice places in New York, so you feel bad about that and you really feel bad that its the real estate getting smashed that gets your emotions going and not Johnny "brothers-brown-suit-who-was-just-made-vice-president-and-shipped-to-japan-for-the-mattel-company-who-youre-supposed-to-care-about-but-dont".

This is yet another modern movie where CGI is used to replace script, plot, direction, acting, lighting and story structure. Cloverfield is to film what the Dixie cup is to Wedgewood pottery. My rule is that if you take the CGI out of the movie, could you still make the movie? If the answer is no, then dont make the movie because no matter how good you think the CGI is for whatever scene you think you need it in, its not as good as your imagination would be in the same place. A good director knows when you put your imagination to work. A bad director just makes a tentacled creature appear on screen. Cheap and easy to use special effects has ruined filmmaking. When directors had no special effects they were forced to write better stories, use better actors, spend more time on scene composition. Now they just put any old damn thing on screen and clean it up later and by "Clean it up later", I mean insert a big improbable multi-tentacled slime creature.

You know, like that video game we used to play. Yeah, that would be cool...

Because thats what film today has become. It used to be moving literature but now its the recorded replay of some video game that is on its way to become a rollercoaster somewhere. Yeah, that would be cool...Clovefield! The rollercoaster!

I've had a real dry spell with movies lately, I mildly liked "The Coward Robert Ford" and I really hated and was geniunely disappointed in "No Country For Old Men" so I may need to go watch Ikiru as a "palette cleanser".

If todays directors spent half as much time on plot and script as they do making sure the movie music playlist in Itunes is programmed for the latest hip tunes and the product placement is optimum, we would have some good stuff out there.

What we have instead isnt movies but really,really long trailers.

Posted @ June 03, 2008 09:17 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Ode To Hillary - From Jim Morrison

Face it, it just works on so many levels! The jungles of florida. A line of Napalm thrown down to little effect. The newscopters circling overhead. A losing battle against an entrenched enemy who is being openly supported by the press. A situation where you win every battle but lose the war.

Sounds familiar doesnt it?

If you replace the word "Saigon" in the closing speech from Martin Sheen with "New York", it hits all the right notes.

At last, at long last, the Democratic party brings an end to the karma starved campaign of Hillary Clinton and "House Clinton" is forver more reduced to mere asterisk status. In the end, they were undone not by the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy", but by the comrades on the left who in their need for purity, found her to be not quite pure enough.

Replacing the politically unstoppable juggernaut of "House Clinton" we now see that "House Obama" will take the stage as champion for the Democrats. "House Obama", who is weaker, with less foundation support, with no experience whatsoever in the party is as blissfully unaware of the battlefield ahead as a young waif-like member of the Childrens Crusade was of how to prosecute warfare in palestine against the Moors.

Obamas campaign is based on the idea that he's going to bring everyone together, that the existence of his campaign alone is enough to heal the wound in the American collective psyche.

To demonstrate to us all his certified abilities as a peacemaker, he and his campaign has torn his party in two. Where once was a party in unity has now been replaced by chaos, disorder, anger and contempt.

Barack Obama. A Master Strategist who single handedly accomplishing what Karl Rove only dreamed of doing, defeated the Clintons and the Democratic Party in one fell swoop.

Genius! If he cant get his own party behind him, how can he get the country behind him( or dare I say, the world)? Is that his goal? or does he simply believe that there are more of "them" than there are of "us" and as such we are not a factor because the press tells us every day in every way how much they all love Barack Obama so it must be true, right?

I think that what towers above all the other factors that caused Hillary to lose was the effect of the "karma factor". Hillary spent the eight years of her husbands Presidency kicking the shins of those in her party who would not follow her whim and direction. Tom Wolfe described this sort of thing as the "favor bank" of life. Your actions with others result in either a deposit or a withdrawl from the "favor bank". Hillary started this campaign NSF at the "favor bank" and as a result "Payback" was sure to come one day for that sort of thing. When she announced her campaign, debts from the favor bank would be called in and Hillary would be found wanting. This is why you saw so many people in the high echelon of the Democrat party literally walk away from Hillary. Worse than simply remain silent, they were vocal in their preference of Barack Obama over Hillary. That doesnt just happen, you have to make that happen and Hillary made that happen every day of her husbands administration between 1992 and the year 2000. Everytime she threatened a congressman in 1992 over Hillary-care, it probably cost her 10,000 votes in 2008.

What is it that they say about "Payback"? Its true enough and it need not be said out loud because you are all thinking it anyway so we can just skip that part. Another way to think of it is to simply be careful how you treat people on the way up, because you get to meet them again on the way down.

This is going to be a great election and it will be one made up of great contrasts. McCain is on one side, Obama on the other. The socialist left experiment and its coastal cultural base on one side of the argument, McCain and the "Great American Middle" shop at wal-mart and drive pickup trucks on the other.

I stand by my previous prediction of a 49 state sweep by McCain.

(This is the end...Of our elaborate plans, the end...)

Posted @ June 02, 2008 12:02 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Vacation Blogging

Yes, the news is full of nothing bad news for the economy but I've never been busier in almost 30 years in the IT business, this is probably the busiest time Ive ever had in this business. Busier even more than the grand old Y2K days or the good ol' dot.com days.

You can read more about whats going on in the world of Information Technology today, here.

Yes, its really happening and its happening right now. Its why I havent been blogging as much as I used to. 20 hour days - 6 days a week. So, im exhausted which means its time for vacation.

In what is to me a most unusual move, I'm going to take time off in the summer, european style. For the next 5 weeks, Im off. Outtahere. Gone daddy gone. Dis-connected.

Well sort of. I've been an advocate and user of GPS tracking software for a long time, so I'm going to try to link my travels over the next 5 weeks to the blog along with some digital photography that I take along the way. Thats all I'm going to do for the next 5 weeks in the technical realm.

And the picture above? Its all I think of when I hear the word "Waterboarding".

See ya 'round kids...

Posted @ May 30, 2008 10:13 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Not Plausable

Bonnie and Clyde: Fightin' against "the man" in 1930's America.

Sure, you could say that former terrorist Bill Ayres is now an "English Professor" and has reformed himself from his wild antics in the 1960's. You could also say it in the same way that other people would describe the older european gentleman who lived down the street from you, who was later picked up and deported by the authorities because he turned out to be an SS guard at a concentration camp.

"Nice man, kept to himself mostly, never much trouble, always said hello in the morning, never mentioned the war..."

You could even make the case that you really didn't know about the seditious background of the man that you now dismiss as an "english professor", who was in fact actually plotting and carring out plans to kill Americans back when you were just a "spinach chinned" babe waiting for the next episode of "winky-dink and you".

But if in 1988, you had a summer job with a prestigious law firm and the woman sitting in the corner office was the wife of the the same man, and she herself was an avowed terrorist of noteworthy status herself, don't you think you might remember that? Are you really going to tell me that no one in that entire law firm didnt blurt that out after work while sitting around and drinking down the 6th beer of the evening, down at the corner tavern?

Especially if thats the time and place where you met your future wife?

If I was a hitchiker in Texas during the 1930's and Bonnie and Clyde picked me up on the side of the road and in the process of our adventure I managed to meet my future wife, I think I'd remember Clyde and his profession if someone mentioned his name to me later on.

Somewhere at this law firm there are time cards, memos and various notes from 1988. Imagine how much you could get on Ebay for an interoffice memo or any of the sort of daily office ephemera that is surely kept in the "vault" that has all three of their names on it at the same time.

What I find most implausible is that today, in that entire law firm, there isn't a single employee, staff or associate who as a Clinton supporter isn't willing to do just a little digging in the backroom storage lockers...

Posted @ April 25, 2008 11:05 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

John McCain - Older than...

John McCain is older than FM radio? Oh say it isnt so! Kids, Hes older than Social Security Checks too, shouldn't we get rid of that idea since its clearly past its shelf date?

He's older than the National Endowment for the Arts, so lets ditch that as well. He's older than the State of Alaska, so lets get rid of that so we can start drilling for oil right away. He's older than Pell Grants, Student Loans and Gender Studies. Off they go....

Oh, I could go on like this all day.

John McCain - Saving the world from Punk Hippies since Barack Obama was eight years old.

John McCain - He doesnt hang out with communists, he just kills them.

Oh yes, this is going to be a fun election.

Posted @ April 18, 2008 11:51 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Murtha to address AARP

Snip:

"Democratic Rep. John Murtha says Republican Sen. John McCain is too old to be president. Murtha told a union audience Wednesday that the presidency is "no old man's job." The Pennsylvania congressman is supporting Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton."

End Snip.

Oh, this should help Hillary in Pennsylvania, because what she really needs now is a good old "age bias" slur to put her over the top.

Funny how he didnt say that Obama is too young to be President, eh?

Dear John Murtha,

We welcome your visit to AARP headquarters, so you can explain to our membership in exacting terms why you think that "old people" should vote for your candidate, in light of the slur you just foisted on the American People.

Posted @ April 16, 2008 07:25 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (16)

20 Reasons Why Im Bitter

1. I live in a generation of Americans who don’t know what the words “variable” or “Adjustable Rate Loan” mean.

2. Pets.com really wasn’t worth 60 dollars a share.

3. There just aren’t enough Erectile Dysfunction commercials on television.

4. Bruce Springsteen has made millions singing about being poor.

5. There are still large sections of America that are without the services of an In-and-Out Burger.

6. The death penalty still does not apply to bad drivers.

7. I own an SUV and want the gas mileage of a small Honda Civic. I can have one but not the other. This is simply unfair.

8. My neighborhood wont allow me to park my Personal Water Craft, RV and speedboat in the driveway, which requires that I spend extra money on a storage space.

9. When I fly on airlines, some people have more leg space than I do and get better food.

10. There are large numbers of people who think that Dane Cook is funny.

11. My 47 inch plasma HDTV is heavy and hard to lift.

12. I have 500 channels of television to watch, and there’s not one thing on any of them worth watching.

13. Not one of my three Tivos will record in HDTV.

14. Seafood is only good when its fresh, and I live two hours from the beach.

15. In fine restaurants, polite smokers are always segregated from the general public, yet noisy, smelly, misbehaving children are always welcome and are given the best seats.

16. Soylent Green is people.

17. I now own 'Blade Runner' in 5 different DVD formats.

18. Other peoples ringtones, suck.

19. My gardening service only works one day a week.

20. If I was an irresponsible ass who became a drug user and fathered half a dozen kids out of wedlock, went bankrupt walked away from my mortgage and didn’t pay my bills, the government would provide any number of programs to help rehabilitate me, but if I live a straight life, pay my bills, live within my means and take care of my family, the government can only say that I don’t pay enough taxes and that its only fair that I step in to help people who live in the other category.

Posted @ April 14, 2008 04:09 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (15)

Obama: Nothing has changed

The Hypnotoad endorses Senator Obama!
All Praise to the Hypnotoad!

Look folks, I know you’re all excited because it looks to you like Senator Obama has revealed his true self to the world, but let me warn you that nothing new has happened here because of this new statement.

Why?

1. Because if what he said is offensive to you – but you weren’t going to vote for him anyway. If it wasn’t offensive to you, you were already voting for him.

2. Because if to you, this was a wrongheaded and stupid thing to say you weren’t going to vote for him anyway. But to a large number of people in his party, this is precisely what they believe and of course they would vote for him even after he said it . Reverend Wrights ideas are anathema to you, but to Democrats, he speaks the truth and they can’t honestly figure out what all the hubbub was about.

3. Because despite the rather large opportunity to make headway against Senator Obama, Senator Clinton will fail to be able take advantage of it. If she tries too hard to drive this home, it will backfire and by the end of next week, her party will blame her for the situation. Political campaigns are the first show of an executive management style. What Senator Clinton has shown is that she has no ability to execute any sort of plan. This is not a new revelation; we saw this lack of skill displayed in 1993. She is completely unable to deal with competition of any sort; again, this is not new.

4. In the next 48 hours, someone will remind the voters that James Carville once said “Pennsylvania is two big cities with Alabama in between” which will be twisted into something that was not said, but implied. In 7 days, Clinton will be on the defensive for what Obama said rather than the other way around. We saw this phenomenon on display after the Reverend Wright non-apology apology.

5. Obamas numbers will go up, and Clintons down. She is the anti-particle to Bill Clinton. Where he could charm even his enemies, she can only annoy; even her friends and allies.

Senator Obama is past the point where he can be criticized for anything he says. He has become the “hypnotoad” where everything he says is correct, simply because he says it.
Senator Obama could offer to sell Louisiana back to the French, and a large part of the Democrat party would praise his unique foreign policy stance and the consequences to the country be damned.

People in the Democrat party say that they want change, but as I like to remind them, change doesn’t necessarily mean good and it doesn’t always mean ‘sunshine and lollipops’; for example, cancer is change. Simply wanting change for the sake of change is childish and dangerous. It’s like the sort of emotion that comes from a 7 year old when they say they want to run away from home and join the circus because “mommy and daddy” didn’t buy them a “tickle me elmo”.

What is remarkable about Senator Obama isn’t that he says what he says or that he is getting away with it. What is remarkable is that “Senator Inevitable” has become so reviled by her own party that she cannot beat this guy even given every opportunity by him to do so. The soul of her electability is the ethos of victimhood, and being betrayed as a wife is the core of her constituency. The only strategy she has left to try is to have Bill Clinton come out and endorse Senator Obama, which would restore to her victimhood at the hands of Bill and recharge her campaign.

Could Hillary become “the comeback kid”? Sure, anything is possible, but come back or not, she comes back wounded and her party divided, and you can thank Howard “Early Primary” Dean for all of that. Think of all those big party player endorsements who will have to eat their words if she were to win. Yes, that’s a good message to send, the public voted for Hillary, while the party elite stood by Obama. If you cant run a campaign or a political party, how are you going to run a country?

Democrats are the strangest group of people I have ever known. They speak diversity and yet are shocked to find that half the electorate doesn’t agree with them. This is precisely because they don’t tolerate the presence of Republicans or “right wingers” around them, nor do they watch evil Fox News. Diversity is for other people I guess.

If Democrats shopped at wal-mart, went hunting and maybe joined the military now and then, they might find themselves winning elections again.

Be aware that they aren’t voting for Obama because he’s the best candidate to win the general election, they are voting for him because it makes them feel better about themselves for being who they are, which doesn’t do anything for the rest of us who don’t feel that way about him. He offers the Democrats a sort of “moral car wash” for their souls, which is fine if all that is wrong is that your car is just a little dirty, but if the problem with your car is that you are missing a distributor cap and its out of gas, taking it to the car wash doesn’t much help matters, no matter how good the car wash makes you feel.

John McCain should tell his campaign staff to run just one day of advertising each week between now and Election Day, just to remind all voters that he is in the race. The ad should simply play Obamas ads and speeches on a split screen, and on the right hand side show John McCain simply standing there, shaking his head in wonderment at the outright childish palaver that they both say and believe in that party. At the end of the ad, John McCain could say “ Please vote for me so we don’t all have to spend every single day of the next eight years listening to this drivel. For the love of God and all that is holy, please don’t make the people of this country have to crawl though this. Life is too short.”

McCain will win 49 states, not because he’s a great candidate with a lot of great ideas, but because he’s the only adult in the race.

And for that, we can all give a big “Thank you”, to “Howard Dean – Master Strategist”.

Posted @ April 13, 2008 11:00 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Rockefeller hates George McGovern

Lt. George McGovern. The photo is taken in 1943, during a periond of relative unrest in Europe where 'anti-jewish militants' were in control of the government of Germany and many of the worlds nations worked together to broker a 'peace plan' between the anti-jewish factions of Germany and the rest of their neighbors.

Quote:

"He's a fighter pilot. He flies at 35,000 feet and drops laser-guided bombs, missiles. He was long gone when they hit. What happened down there, he doesn't know.

That's unkind, because that's fighting for your nation and that's honorable. But you sort of have to care what goes on in the lives of people. ... and he never gets into those subjects"

Senator Rockefeller is apparently unaware that the 1972 Democrat party candidate for President dropped bombs from his B-24 from 25,000ft over Europe using a method that was a great deal more indescriminate and directed at civilians than John McCain did in 1968.

Its my guess that Senator Rockefeller cant read.

Posted @ April 09, 2008 08:02 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

now serving double entendre at montana teds

Remember, Tuesday is Soylent Green Day at Montana Teds!

Look, we all knew that Ted was crazy, long before he demonstrated the effect of his losing battle against depression on the Charlie Rose show. Honestly Ted, I think you lost your remaining audience of sympathetic supporters at the "cannibalism" thing.

Now when you say something like "Were all going to be cannibals", you need to be extra special with the text on your website,less someone misunderstand. But check this bit of text that I found on his website for his restaurant chain, the Montana Grill:

At Ted’s Montana Grill, above all we are authentic. Real food. Real people.

Real Food? Real People? I can just see Charlton Heston crying out in the ending of Soylent Green with the words "Real Food IS Real People!!!!"

So, this is just a suggestion Ted, but after your appearance on Charlie Rose this week, you might want to change that text.

Posted @ April 02, 2008 11:06 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

The nerve of some people

Referring to Gov. Richardson's defection to Obama, President Clinton said:

"Five times to my face (Richardson) said that he would never do that," a red-faced, finger-pointing Clinton erupted.

Gosh Mr. President, you mean he lied to you? He looked right at you and lied? How could he do that? Who does he think he is?

Posted @ April 02, 2008 01:04 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Rashomon - The Air America Version

Local radio station KSAC has dumped Air America. My first reaction?,I thought that they were already gone, arent they?

So, let's read the reaction of the loss of the progressive flamethrower from this market, from two different viewpoints.
First up, Mike Malloy - who broadcasts on the Progressive Channel:

"I got the call from (KSAC general manager) Paula Nelson today -- she told me it broke her heart to have to make the change," Malloy says.

"It's not a ratings thing -- we have plenty of listeners," Malloy says. "KSAC is experiencing what most other liberal talk show format stations are experiencing - it's not a lack of audience, it's a lack of business support"

"If you listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, you'll hear (plenty) of national ads," he says. "If you listen to someone like me or Randi Rhodes, there's a complete lack of those types of sponsors."

It's a problem plaguing liberal talk radio in markets across the United States, he adds, noting that stations in San Francisco and San Diego have been forced to make similar changes.

Yes, all around the country is a booming business in Hip-Hop Gospel, because you guessed it, thats what KSAC is changing its format to.

"Progressive" talk radio, to Hip-hop Gospel. Why just the other day I was driving down the road and I just could not get a hip-hop gospel radio station to come in. It really set me to thinking, this town really could use a hip-hop gospel station. Clearly, Im not the only guy who was thinking that.

Well, what do you know! Businesses, who are portrayed regularly as evil, no good corporate blood suckers, don't want to advertise on stations that try to make money selling that opinion, Who knew? Next thing you know, you'll tell me that the DNC won't advertise on Limbaughs show.

But wait, theres more! and here's where it gets fun. We see more evidence of the "Liberal Reality Distortion Field" in action. Remember that station manager, who had her heart broken when she had to make the change, Paula Nelson?

We look at the end of the post and we see a link to another blog. What does that blog say?

"KSAC (1240 AM) station manager Paula Nelson says that, frankly, she's happy her station made the switch today from progressive talk radio to gospel.

Oh, and it's not just any ol' gospel - it's hip-hop gospel. Think anything from Yolanda Adams to the Rooftop MCs.

"It's got all the good beats and an inspirational, positive message, too," Nelson says of the new format, which went into effect late Saturday night. The call letters officially switched today.

And, right about now, Nelson says, she could use some positive.

"I was ready for this change - I just wasn't having fun anymore," Nelson says. "The whole political thing has gotten nasty, dirty and contentious."

And it didn't help that major political companies didn't support the station during its four years as a liberal talk radio station, she says.

"There are all these Sacramento Democratic organizations that haven't spent a dime on (advertising) for our station," Nelson says. "To them I say, 'You did this - you were complicit, you shut us down.'

"If you're not sending us the marketing dollars, then you're part of the problem."

You know, you can hardly tell the difference between what Mike said Paula said and what Paula said. Fun, upbeat positive thoughts set to music has actually beaten the voice of constipation, defeat and negativity. Who would've guessed?

I'm telling ya, the more things go on like this, the more I think McCain is going to win 49 states.

Posted @ April 01, 2008 12:27 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Great Depression - The 2008 Version

Dear Diary,

I am down to my last 4 cases of bottled evian water, and the nutrasystem diet shipment doesnt arrive until next week. I may be forced tout of necesssity to cook for myself using canned vegetables.

I am in despair. My extensive Itunes account has now been terminated. I may be forced to listen to the radio. We await the government help that was promised to provide us funding for out itunes accounts to help us survive against Apples predatory purchasing schemes that scammed into buying more music than we could afford.

Yesterday a group of us at the hobo jungle, which we call "Bushville", discovered that the government has established a sort of "free bookstore" where you can get books for nothing. Its like Borders and Barnes and Noble, except that there is no Starbucks and instead of using a credit card, you just give them your name and address and you can take anything they have for free, which is a pretty good deal. Other people have already read the books, but thats to be expected in times like these. Everyone must sacrifice a little in these sad times.

They say its called a "Library" which is a new word for me. The trick is, you have to return the book after they give it to you, which is a bit problem for me since the first 20 books I got there I sold on ebay the next day for a hefty profit.

The wife gave sad news to the family yesterday. She announced that the vacation to Disneyworld is off this year, since there would be little chance of staying "on the park" and the indignity of staying at a property outside the park would simply be too much for the little ones to bear. She then announced to us that it might be fun to go one of the many National Parks that are nearby and the kids broke down into tears over the indignity of sleeping in something less than the suite at the Grand Californian or the Maui Hyatt, which until this damned depression arrived was our normal annual destination. I never thought I would feel the shame of telling my kids they would have to camp outside in tents like vagabonds as part of a vacation, but thats the world that George W. Bush has brought us to. What kind of vacation would it be for kids to suffer like that?

I have had to endure the unendurable in the past eight years. Last week I told my son that I would not be able to buy him a new car for his 16th birthday, that due to the depression, I would have to buy a used car. It just tore out his heart. "But Dad, how will I face the other kids?" he said and broke down crying in my arms. I think I will have to sell another T-bill just to get him a car of any sort at all. I feel lucky to be able to do that, I know some parents who are forced out of necessity to have their kids ride a bike to school. Its shameful, when you see it, teenagers riding on bikes, you just turn your head and try not to look out of embarrasment for them.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that because of depression, he may have to go to a State College. I may soften the blow by telling him he just doesnt have the grades to go to University.

Its terrible what this economy makes you do.

Posted @ April 01, 2008 07:51 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (47)

Why Do Iraq War Movies Suck?

Please take 15 minutes and view this scene from a film by Akira Kurosawa’s called “Dreams”. It's called “The Tunnel”. Go head, I’ll wait right here for you to come back, it wont take but 15 minutes and it will help illustrate my point.

Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3.

To men that have fought in war and survived, there is a “Private Noguchi” in every shadow. As a genre of the film art form,"War Movies" almost always fail to capture this basic horror of corrosive fear that lives in the heart of any man or woman who has faced the horror of war.

Movies are unique as an art form, as they act more as a mirror of the people making the film rather than reflecting the views of the audience viewing the film. Today's Hollywood cannot make "war movies" because almost everyone in Hollywood has never served in uniform, rarely even met anyone who has served in uniform, have never known the horror of war as a civilian and hold in contempt nearly all who have come into any contact with any war.

The consequence of this is that the modern "War Movie" is actually a political movie, where the spirited arguments for and against the war are fought out on the screen, rather than the audience seeing a depiction of the various battles of the war itself.

Certainly there is never an example of 'heroism' shown on the screen and no hint of a victory is ever given or hinted to. To be sure, in Hollywood, heroism is reseved only to those who stayed home. In fact, this is the only war that the Hollywood culture knows, Not the "Iraq" war, but the war of politics, the war that was fought at the tables of Starbucks around all of the very best neighborhoods in Hollywood, Santa Monica and downtown Manhattan.

If an act of heroism in war is actually shown in a modern war flm, the act is always destroyed and denigrated by an uncaring government or the ignorant charactures known as "the folks back home". The enemy is always held in a place of honor and the people of this country who fight in the war are always treated with contempt, unless of course they act as a traitor or embrace the enemy in some small way. Killing the enemy, and winning a battle is never seen or depicted unless the enemy is shown as an honorable man killed by a blood thirsty American no-necked yokel.

There is no bravery, no honor, no respect in the modern war movie; There are only fools that are fooled to fighting a war for "corporate interests" and general betrayal by the so called leaders and the country. The people who fight on our side are always dupes, on their side they are always men of courage fighting against the odds.

In the example that started this post, you can see Akira Kurosawa capture the essential horror of war. He does not make a political statement because to do so would be false and it would be caught as a lie by the audience. His images state what needs to be stated; the fear, the guilt and the shame, not of the dead but of the living. He does not argue for or against the reasons for the war; a war in which his protagonsts in the film and a large part of his Japanese audience will have personally suffered. He is commenting on the war the way that all soldiers do, in the language of duty, honor and country.

This is language that Hollywood does not understand. This is why "All Iraq War Movies Suck", because they are all made in the wrong language.

Talk to any man or woman who has lived in combat, and if you look into their eyes you will see their "Private Noguchi" looking back at you. Be warned, no man or woman who has actually lived through war is likely to tell you much about war. You are a civilian, you arent in the "special club" made up of the suvivors of war. Because you are a civilian, you dont know and you don't really want to know what that 'fear of shadows' experiencd by veterans of war is really like.

You go to war movies because you think that going to a movie is your version of "doing your part", but nothing could be further from the truth. You react to that scene, not because you know what its like to order men to their deaths and the sense of doubt that forever scars your soul, but because you too feel the shame that the Captain feels, the shame of not dying while others you know, did die.

All you really need to know, is that to the veteran, the fear is always there and it is always real. You should also know that capturing that emotion of surviving war, is rarely, if ever done with the exacting artistic perfection, as it is in Kurosawas Dreams, so don't set your expectations so high.

This is why all Iraq war movies suck. They always fail to capture the essential truth of the event. Those of us who stayed home while it was being fought, only know about the war from the spittle of the people on the other side of the table at Starbucks. Those who actually fought it, dont have time to educate us on what the war was really like, because life is too short for such trival things. The people of Hollywood don't care to tell the story in the way their sacrifice deserves to be told with the language of "Duty, Honor and Country", because they dont know what that means.

Posted @ March 30, 2008 07:51 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (677)

Obama: At last, change even I can believe in!

From the folks at Rifftrax.

Posted @ March 29, 2008 10:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

Dogfight: Congress vs. the American Aviation Industry

Theres a list of names to remember about "The Tanker Deal" that I am certain will come up over the next few months.

The most obvious one is Senator John McCain, who seems to have driven the Air Force and Boeing to the point of exhaustion over this deal.

Here is his statements from November 19, 2004, in regard to the original tanker deal. Very enlightening...

Here is the "document dump" on the Emails that Senator McCain mentions in his statement. This is from the Congressional Record: November 20, 2004 (Senate) Page S11776-S11789

Prominent names that fall out of those statements are as follows:

20th Secretary of The Air Force, James Roche
Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for acquisitions, Marvin Sambur
Darleen Druyan
Former CEO of Boeing, Phillip Condit
Former CFO of Boeing, Michael Sears.

Darleen Druyun has a nice description of her background, called "Rise and fall of a maverick". (ed: McCain must've laughed real hard when he read that one.)

From her plea agreement, we read the following:

- Acknowledged conflict of interest in negotiating employment for herself and others (daughter and future son-in-law) with Boeing while at the same time negotiating with Boeing on behalf of the Air Force.

- In negotiating with boeing concerning a lease agreement for 100 Boeing KC-767A tanker aircraft, she agreed to a higher price for the aircraft than she beleived was appropriate as a "parting gift" to Boeing prior to her leaving the Air Force Procurement Office.

Well, that's not good...

The Department of Justice published this document in regards to Michael Sear's Sentencing.

Quoted within:

United States Attorney Paul J. McNulty - "Mr. Sears had a clear choice. Instead of respecting the integrity of the governments procurement system, he chose the financial interests of his company over the best interest for America"

I think that about sums it up, both the previous "Tanker deal" and the current one as well. At a time when the Aviation industry was realing under the stress of an airline industry in collapse, Boeing was trying and was very nearly was successful at subverting the purchasing process inorder to secure billions of dollars on long term leases for these aircraft.

It was a scheme that very nearly worked and one which the taxpayers and the military in the long run, would have paid a great deal.

The fallout from the failure of this scheme cost many smart and I would even say patriotic people, their jobs and careers, all of those promises became tragedies. Worse, this was being done at a time of war, and I would make the argument that the money and man hours that were wasted in this process did little to help bring an end to the war or to help the sailors and airmen stationed overseas.

Senator McCain and Warner are to be thanked for their efforts.

As a corporate officer you have a responsibility to protect your shareholders but as a citizen you have a duty to respect the governmental processes that involve the use of taxpayer dollars.

All of the people you see mentioned above, were in some form of fashion removed from their responsibilities. Two of them, Druyun and Sears were convicted and jailed. After Condit was replaced, the next CEO was also replaced, Harry Stonecipher was also quickly removed from his position.

Now remember, Boeing is a private company, but in many ways it is also a strategic asset. It is very important to the country as a whole that Boeing be successful in its marketplace. While all of this activity was going on, Boeing was under extreme pressure with Airbus and the A380. In the end, what has saved Boeing and this strategic asset is not a new set of CEO's with special backhanded deals, but the men and women at Boeing who work as engineers, line foreman and test pilots at positions all through the company in the creation of the new Boeing 787.

As we have seen, Former CFO Michael Sears, Mrs. Druyuns boss at Boeing was also removed from his position at Boeing, but what about her boss at the Air Force? Well that was Dr. Martin Sambur. You might be interested to know that according to this site, Dr. Marvin Sambur, is now a contributor to the Clinton Campaign.

I have this feeling that we wont be seeing any contributions from these folks to the "McCain For President" campaign any time in the future.

More to follow...

Posted @ March 29, 2008 02:43 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Dogfight: Congress vs. the American Aviation Industry

Marine Sgt. Geoffrey Kohlmeyer (far right) poses with Sen. John McCain and an unidentified soldier in Al Asad, Iraq. They are standing on the loading ramp of a Boeing MV-22 in Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron VMM-263, known as "The Thunder Chickens".

From Forest Grove News-Times

Senator John McCain, a former Naval aviator who voted throughout the 1990's to continue funding for the MV-22 Osprey, often against Dick Cheneys wishes, just spent a week visting Iraq. During his time "in theatre", he was flow around in a Marine MV-22, a controversial aircraft that is now in its first time under combat conditions.

"Senator, while you were in Iraq, what was your general impression of the Boeing MV-22 Osprey. In your opinion, was the aircraft that you flew in worth the investment over the last two decades?..."

Wouldn't that make a set of interesting questions to pose to Senator McCain?

You should be aware that yesterday, the Defense Department awarded a 10.4 Billion dollar contract to Bell/Boeing to produce 167 new MV-22's.

Unlike the recent "Tanker Deal" that went badly for Boeing, there is no other aircraft in the world like the Osprey and as such, the vendor making it can be expected to get a little preference outside of the normal competitive needs of the marketplace. Detractors will say that there is no aircraft like the Osprey because its an awful idea. On the other hand, Boeing and the American Military might just have the right idea and this is an investment that may have paid off for our benefit.

My bias should be clear, Im not big on rotary wing aircraft since I prefer the confidence and mental calmness that a fixed wing pilot gets from having an actual glide ratio, but I have always wanted to see the MV-22 succeed.

Unlike a host of other candidates in the race for President, John McCain is someone who's opinion on the matter might be based on something other than who lives in his state or congressional district and who and who is not greasing his palm.

It might just be based on actually knowing how to fly and knowing what a combat aircraft must be capable of in that environment.

Posted @ March 29, 2008 11:02 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

Coming up next: The Yoyodyne AT-AT

As a technologist, I find this very interesting.
As a warm blodded mammal, I find it disturbing in a deep seated psycological way. Theres something just not right about it and I can't explain why.

Walking is easy, but as any 2 year old will tell you, balance is hard. This prototype is rather impressive and yet creepy all at the same time.

I'm sure that the fax machines at the legal offices of Skywalker Films are overheating now that this is out.

Posted @ March 28, 2008 02:28 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (18)

True Confessions

Since we all seem to be doing some 'spring cleaning' with our souls, I will air mine out as well.

When I recently stated that back in the 1980's, I had a torrid love affair with Signorney Weaver that ended in tears for the both of us in a seedy Mexican seaside resort,I may have actually misspoke or you may have simply misinterpresed my meaning.

While I did have a torrid love affair with Signorney Weaver, I just neglected to mention that I never actually met her in person and that she has no idea who I am or that I exist. While I have been to a seedy Mexican seaside resort, I never visited it with Miss Weaver, while it is possible that she did visit it on her own at some time in her past. It is possible that I confused the details of my affair with Sigourney Weaver with a late TV night showing of "Night of the Iguana".

Aside from those tedious details, the story is completely true.

I think what matters here is the background narritive of the story, not the actual facts of the situation.

Oh, by the way, Howard Wolfson is a good friend of mine, with only three degrees of separation( I know Rich Galen, Rich Galen knows Howard Wolfson, see how easy that was?). This fact,and my ability to prevaricate with such ease practically makes me part of the Clinton Campaign.

Posted @ March 25, 2008 07:58 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (5) | TrackBack (1)

Arthur C. Clarke - "The candles cost more than the cake"

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, in December 2007 saying "thank you and goodbye from Columbo Sri Lanka".

Would it be too much that we, the earthbound, do honor to this man, his intellect and his vision for the shared future of mankind by renaming the "International Space Station" as the "Arthur C. Clarke" Space Station?

It seems a small thing to do as a memorial to one man considering what his vision has done for us all.

( My favorite "Clarkian" bit of logic: "Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying". I thought of that Clarke-like twist recently when I said that I would be much more impressed if life was not found on Mars than if it was. If life is found either existing now or at some time in the past, it would not surprise me at all, what would absolutely shock me is if there was absolutely no life on Mars now or at any time in the past. That fact and the implications would positively floor me, as I'm sure it would Sir Arthur. )

Posted @ March 18, 2008 09:49 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6) | TrackBack (49)

How to Melt a Tank in Three Seconds Or Less

From PopSci.com

Posted @ March 14, 2008 09:25 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (8)

The Remainder Bin is a little bit more full tonight

Not too terribly long ago, John Podhoretz once wrote a book called "Can She Be Stopped?: Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless... "

It turns out that the answer to that question is that not only can she be beat, but she managed to get beat by the lightest weight fighter who ever fought in her weight class.

You understand what I'm getting at right? She didnt get beat by the big bad right wing, paternal,God and the flag big buisness conspiracy that rules the world, she got beat by the only person in her party who didnt cower down to her in fear. As I said before, the man is to be both thanked and respected for that fact. He wont win the Presidency, but he deserves a medal for his work all the same.

Its my expectation at this point in the election show that on March 5th, we finally will see the "good ship USS Clinton" finally slip beneath the waves. I just realized that ff Castro dies on March 6th, i'll be all out of champagne, I guess that means I better stock up!

Let me also say that I think that Senator Obama is the most beatable candidate to grace the stage since McGovern or maybe Carter in his second electoral attempt to be a President. The only type of person that people hate more than a person who recently stopped drinking or smoking and cant wait to get you to stop either one is someone who implusively overpromises and then underdelivers. We have many, many months to go before the election and I guarantee you, this patina of charisma is going to buff off and reveal a pretty dull piece of statuary underneath. Any teenage male can tell you that when your potential new girlfriend is in one those girls with a 5-alarm teenage crush, that when that crush soon wears off that shes not too happy about the loss of endorphins that come from discovering that you really arent the dreamboat that she thought you were, and she will blame you for not being the guy she thought you were and ruining that really cool good feeling that she had. And yes, there will be blood... Fallen Idols, dont usually do very well.

Part of the reason I say that Obama will be defeated is because I'm now starting to hear Democrats say that they can't vote for someone who is that far to the left, that they just might vote for McCain after all, because " he doesnt seem so bad by comparison to that guy". When you have one candidate who most Republicans will vote for and a good number of Democracts will vote for, you have yourself a Presidential candidate who is going to win ( and not by 300 votes either). I have yet to meet an "independent" or a Republican who does anything but laugh at the idea of voting for Obama. Its my belief that while "everyone loves Obama" and theres no question that they do, only a small number are going to be willing to give him the electoral equivalent of free access to both the liquor cabinet and the Corvette.

Between now and the election, McCain only has to remain steadfast and alert and keep a smile on his face. Dont fall of the stage, dont dotter in the Debates, just answer the questions intelligently and clearly. It shouldnt be too hard to smile though, he's about to be President of the United States. He finally gets to outrank his "old man" and his Grandfather.

And all I have to say how is "GO NAVY!"

Posted @ February 21, 2008 07:23 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Who you callin' a plagiarist?

Senator Clinton is calling Senator Obama a 'Plagiarist",which strikes me as a charge that ultimately wont stick because of the character of the person making the charge.

The problem is that Senator Clinton has run her entire campaign by co-opting her husbands presidency, in effect "plagiarizing" President Clintons work as her own. Senator Obama on the other hand is running on his record, and no one elses.

Words are easy to copy, but it takes a real heart of larceny to steal someone elses political record.

This tactic will go nowhere, and will in the end backfire. You can already hear the keyboards a'tappin in the Obama campaign headquarters and by morning, we will have a dozen examples of Senator Clinton doing the very same thing.

It's desperate, inneffective and bitter. Sounds kinda like a law firm on retainer to the DNC me...

Posted @ February 18, 2008 07:13 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

And I say this in the most totally straight-hetero way I possibly can

but I just LOVE Bob Lutz.

Now, I'm sure his comments will upset those who are parishioners at the Holy Church of Mother Earth, but folks lets try to remember that if the market insisted on having cars that ran on soap bubbles and pixie dust that its not Mr. Lutz' job to figure out how to talk you out of it or agree with you; its actually Mr. Lutz' job to figure out how to make the best soap bubble/pixie dust burning cars for the most profit.

He doesnt care why you want zero emission cars, he just wants you to buy them from him. He's not making cars for you and your sense of well being. He's making them so the shareholders of General Motors can make a profit. If theres a profit in it, he would make cars that run on hamster pellets.

If I were Mr. Lutz, I would sell the Volt, not as an "Green" car, but as a "patriotic" car. This is the car to free America from foriegn oil. Whats that song they run? "This is our country?" Well, this is our car.

I'm one of those funnily odd folks who think that you can get closer to the "green ideal" if you remind people that its fundamentally patriotic to do so than you can by tut-tutting everyone who doesnt live up to your neo-luddite idea of modern civilization. At the end of the day you have to understand that every gallon of gas you burn actually funds the people who want to kill us.

You want to go green? then try going Red, White and Blue first.

Welcome Instapundit-eers! And to think that for awhile there I was sure I was blackballed by "the prof" for some infraction.

Posted @ February 14, 2008 09:21 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (9) | TrackBack (51)

Two Predictions

1. Romney is out by Friday.

2. Its a McCain/Huckabee ticket.

These races should have been much closer than they were. In the end, it can best be said that Romney simply never closed the sale with the Republicans. People hate McCain, but they cant quite make up their mind one way or the other about Romney and thats a shame. It's my personal opinion that Romney was robbed.

My own feeling is that Republicans have an built in distrust of eastern Republicans and we see that illustrated in this race. The two candidates who have done the best, are the two from the furthest west in the candidate pool.

Here's another thing to consider. McCain has always had this odd sort of black cloud following him through his life. He was on the USS Forrestal during the fire, more to the point he was right in the middle of it. He was shot down and became a POW. He also had some fairly rough handling as a candidate for President back in 2000.

So, lets say 71 year old John McCain makes it to President. What are the odds of his Vice President needing to take the helm at some point?
I know, its a tough thing to talk about, but its very possible. That means that the number two guy is going to have a more than average shot at being President.

Yes thats right, this is a "double-whammy" ticket.

First, McCain was supposed to be out of the race and into 'forlorn hope' months ago. Well that didnt happen...

And now I've just painted a very likely scenario where we would get a "President Huckabee", which we also said would never happen.

Never say never...

And let me say this about Romney. The man is ok in my book. You folks that voted for Huckabee because you got some major bug up your ass about Mormons, do me a favor and take one of your Mormon nieghbors to lunch and talk to them. Just sit down at the table and talk to them. You really need to set your 16th century, small minded bigotry aside and see the real measureable goodness that they and their faith brings to the world. You dont have to share another mans faith to respect him for what he is in his.

He is a good man and he doesnt deserve what you folks did to him, he really doesnt. This is a big country, but it sure does have its share of small people in it. Some of you did vote for Huckabee because he really represented what you wanted, but more than a few of you voted for him for less than honorable reasons. You know who you are and you have to live with yourselves on that one.

Ok, you folks that hate McCain, good for you! Now, welcome to the town of Minority, population - "You". Now, you say you call yourself "The Real Republicans!", well now you get your chance to prove it. How? Its called "Down ticket". You dont have to vote for McCain, thats fine, but you still have a chance to get what you want by working to elect a conservative Republican Senate and House. If the candidate in your district sucks, then go find another one. Its a big country and a whole lotta districts. This is the age of the internet, you can find them and help them. Thats the cool thing about the House, they all have to run. You say you want to make a difference and you are principled and believe what you think you believe, then go and do thusly.

Forget about McCain but do something besides just sit and pout. You can neutralize McCain or Obama or Evita by ensuring that the House and Senate are on your side. Those damn framers of the Constitution, they think of everything, dont they?

Posted @ February 05, 2008 11:07 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Tells you everything you need to know

I just got back from voting at my local precinct. This is one of the most Republican counties in California. Turnout so far, is the lowest recorded in over 16 years.

San Francisco, which can arguably be called the polar opposite from this precinct has a different story.

Momentum. It tells you everything you need to know.

You know, its not like we havent already been campaigning for a year because we have. Its not like rock ribbed conservatives didnt get a chance or didnt raise enough money, they did. Its not like people didnt get their message out because "big media is out the get them", if that were really true, Huckabee would never have left Arkansas and Ron Paul would be leading a reenactment of the Boston Tea Party somewhere.

The problem is that no one is buying what they are selling. If solid conservative is a good product then why did Tancredo fold up like a wet paper sack? Thompson? Didnt get their message out? Come on guys, Huckabee won Iowa on a $1.95. Its not just money, you have to have something to say on those big media buys.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter ran on a campaign of change and people bought it. It was refreshing and fun to watch someone like us rise to be President, the only problem was that the world wouldnt wait for us to feel better about ourselves by electing a nice man to be President. We very nearly lost it all in 1978, and yes kids, it was that close.

I was there. I watched it happen. I watched gas lines, forget paying lots for gas, you just couldnt get it. You had "odd/even" rationing. I watched gas go over a dollar a gallon and I thought there would be a revolution in the streets, I really did. It was that bad. I watched mortgages with interest rates like credit cards. I watched as my countrys flag was torn down and burned everywhere in the world.

I watched in agony as my President used the word "Malaise" in public and it made me wretch. (And just to run salt in the wound, I think he wore a sweater when he did it.)

The late 1970's were a dark time for the United States. It was an era, marked by Gov. Jerry Brown saying that people needed to "Lower their expectations", that Americans needed to understand that America was in decline and would remain there. That was what passed for leadership in the 1970's.

I hated the Jimmy Carter 1970's the first time I lived through them. I'm really going to hate them the second time when they are warmed up and resold to us in 2008, but thats whats coming.

And no, I dont think that means that another Ronald Reagan is going to rise from the grave and save us all from this horror. In this party, in this climate of todays political world, the mortal Ronald Reagan couldnt get elected to anything under this Republican party.

The God Ronald Reagan didnt get elected to anything by the way.

The God Ronald Reagan didnt come about until long after he died. We forget that the veneration for Ronald Reagan didnt come into universal appeal until after he had left office and until after he died. While he was in office, and while he was in competition, he was hated and feared and despised and dismissed - by Republicans!

Reagan brought Democrats, Independants and yes, Republicans into the party. Once upon a time, we thought this was a good thing, now we get snotty when we hear that Democrats might like one candidate or another.

Its not the candidates fault that this disaster has happened. Its ours. Candidates are a reflection of the party, and this party has turned its back on the country in a fit of self pity.

Well, we get what we deserve. You'll excuse me for awhile, I have to find my 2 stroke moped, my bellbottoms and white Adidas shoes and my pukka shell necklace. If I have to live through the 1970's again, I might as well look good doing it.

Posted @ February 05, 2008 04:56 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Endorsing McCain

Primary campaigns are when you decide the idealogical makeup of the party. If you've got strong feelings on subjects one way or another, the time to get them out and discussed and hopefully make them part of the party platform is during the primaries. After the primary is over and the party has voted and cleared one candidate and their approach, your party platform has also been set for that election.

Remember, Democracy is not about getting your way, its about being asked. "Getting your way" out of Democracy is really just a side effect of the process itself.

Heres the situation:

There are now three viable candidates for President. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain.

On the Democrat side, we have two leftists. The race for that partys nomination is not yet decided, but soon will be.

On the Republican side, we have former Naval officer and POW. As of last night, this race is now decided.

Idealogically there are vast difference between all three candidates but no matter who we vote for, and it pains me to say this, we are getting a Senator.

Mitt Romney worked his tail off and spent alot of money, and got second place in most of his primaries. I'm sorry, but thats just not good enough, which is a shame. Huckabee exists to give people who more than a little anti-mormon hatred a place to go and there appear to be more of those people than I had hoped was the case but thankfully not enough to give us a candidate with that ethos as a base. Ron Paul? Well theres one in every crowd isnt there. The mirage candidacies of Fred Thompson or Rudy Guiliani show that pundits, pollsters and "gut instincts" really dont mean a damn thing. In both cases, when these two candidates were put to the test, they folded up like a wet paper sack. How these two actually worked out may not have surprised you, but it surprised the hell out of me.

So its either McCain or one of the two leftists. So as to paraphrase a wise man and statesman of the last administration: "You dont go into the election with the candidate you want, you go with the one you have"

We now have McCain and we had better make the most of it. At this time I'm now formally endorsing McCain and I wrote a check for his campaign this morning.

Posted @ January 30, 2008 07:07 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (6) | TrackBack (39)

This is not an endorsement

I’ve been watching the election season like a passerby on the street trying not to be noticed as I peer through the dark glass on the front of an adult bookstore. Of course I want to look inside; it’s just that I don’t want anyone to see me while I do it. I haven’t commented on the election much because I don’t wish to become known as a political pundit, I like to believe that my mother and father raised me to be better than that, but I will take just a moment and say something about it that might just shock you.

I think its time I reveal that I have been following one particular candidate since his candidacy was announced. At first I thought it was a joke candidacy, meant only to boost his standings in the party and get his name out in the public mind for a future and far more likely shot at the “big prize”. Yet, with all the shock that comes from the idea of “A Capulet dating a Montague!” I find myself here now, during each of the primaries and caucases rooting and in some cases even cheering when the results for this particular candidate come in.

I’m not doing out of a strategy meant only to beat the far more formidible candidate by backing the beatable one instead, I’m doing it because despite my political leanings and patriotism for this country, I find this one candidate, whom I once dismissed as one who would end up one day only as “a new metaphor for lightweight” is instead the one I find the most interesting to watch, and I dare say the most courageous in his campaign.

I’m talking about Barack Obama.

You see, you just don’t take on the Clintonistas lightly. They are brass knuckle, suspicious flat tires, brick through your window in the middle of the night campaigners. They are dedicated to the cause, which is to say, themselves being in power. You stand in their way; you get the full force of influence applied against you. You become “One of them”, that infamous list of people who are part of a “right wing cabal” mean to hold back the waves of the progressive future that is promised by the American “Evita”.

And yet, Obama has taken on “the machine” and survived. Despite their self agrandized reputation, Obama has shown the Clintonistas are in fact, beatable and more to the point, beatable without someone from the left needing to become an “evil right wing hatemonger”. There is nothing more delicious to me than to watch the former President reach into his black bag of rhetoric and try to weave a spell that casts Obama as a member of the right wing, only to have Obama smile and watch all that pixie dust from the wand of “The Great Prevaricator” wilt away, which of course makes Bill Clinton even more angry and even more impotent in the next attack.

There simply aren’t that many men who have been able to withstand that assault. Obama has managed to do it with a smile. I like that.

I find it fascinating to watch the former President get red faced angry that the press is not doing what he wants them to do, as her perceives that they did for him in the past. Poor fellah doesn’t seem to understand that the fawning 60’s generation “dry-look” press of his day have been largely replaced by bare knuckle internet kids who were born in the era of Reagan and have as their homepage the nemesis of Clinton, The Drudge Report. Such is life at internet speed which is something he never could quite deal with during his administration. That former enemy has now grown a new layer of muscle and outer armor plate over the past decade when they last locked horns and he lost. The press of today finds Clinton “wagging finger” wand of 1998 to be just as impotent as it was then and now its twice as pathetic. Worse for Evita, everytime he opens his mouth, she becomes just a little bit smaller, reminding more than a few of us of the 1980’s Lily Tomlin movie that is serving as a metaphor for her candidacy. It’s gotten so bad that press coverage of the Clintonista campaign rarely mentions the junior Senator from New York, just the latest machinations of the once great and powerful man making the world safe from the right wing, who is now increasingly seen by many as just a white haired bumbler pulling levers of machinery behind the curtain making special effects on the wall.

Poor Bill, he doesn’t realize that this is the age of HDTV and in this age, its important that you hide the strings as best you can because now everyone can see everything all the time. All this happened because one man said;“ Heck if the Democrats want to run a junior Senator with little experience based only on the value of minority status then let them run me!” and he hasn’t backed down an inch since then to the wall of intimdation and damnation thrown up against him not by us evil right wingers but by his own party and polticial fellow travellers.

I respect the fact that he has withstood every attack launched against him. I respect that he hasn’t just stood there and been nice about it and not responded in kind. He’s handed back as much as they have handed out, and considering the forces allied against him, this is no mean feat. I respect a man who has courage, and that man has a certain kind of courage to do what he is doing.

It’s not Iwo Jima courage, but its courage all the same and it deserves our respect.

So what do I, a “no-necked”, rockribbed, knuckle dragging, rightwinger of the first order get out of an Obama candidacy? Well a black man is running for the Office of President of the United States, and that seems to be ok with most folks. It just totally ruins one of the columns of the temple of mythology that shelters the left. The country as a horror of racism has a real live black man running for President, even in the south and the man has the ability to campaign and win his party nomination.

A black man running for President, and no one seems to really care (except of course the Clintonistas), I think that says something about all of us, something rather positive. It was always ok with me but I’m just not like a lot of folks; I don’t tend to believe in this superstitious nonsense called racial classification. I tend to think that were all of the same race, the human race, and this stuff we call “race” is a rather new thing that only happened in the last 9,000 years or so. It’s something that came about only with the human diaspora that occurred at the end of the last ice age. Give it another 9,000 years and it all goes away and we all look like Kennewick Man once again.

Oh I know, crazy me. Obamas candidacy and potential Presidency says that race doesn’t matter, which is what Ive been saying for a long time. I think that’s a good thing. The Clintons want it to matter because its all they have to run on, which is pathetic. It doesn’t matter Obama and his ability to win beyond his "race" is proof of that and good for us all that it doesn’t matter anymore.

I like his campaign because he has the gall to be a Democrat and offer praise of Ronald Reagan. I like that he did it for two reasons; first because President Reagan is worthy of praise. Second, because of the genius that by doing so sent Bill Clinton into a lather, which predictably backfired on Bill Clinton, it’s a “win-win-win” strategy. Obama has Clinton playing Obamas game and not the other way around.

A smart man that Senator Obama, and I admire smart men.

I also like the fact that Obama is beatable in the general election by those of us on the other side of the political argument. Yet, if Evita overcomes this challenge from Obama, I like the fact that she has now had to fight and claw and work very hard for this election. Our big fear before Obamas challenge was that the wave of inevitability would sweep her into office with little or no effort and that the “mandate for change” would give her the cover to do what she wanted, which is nothing less than moving us rapidly towards European socialism. That being a system which has failed to produce the utopia it promises in every part of the world that its been tried no matter how often it is tried but that wont stop those who want to try it here.

This sort of thing is much like hoping that the flightless pengiun really will fly if you just move it to the right place and give it the right incentive to do so. No matter how much you think the pengiun should fly, the penguin will respectfully disagree. Humans have an inate desire to be free, and putting more controls on people and their behaviour, no matter how well intentioned, does not make you more free and in the end, people will reject it.

I admire Obama for not putting the ‘flag motif” on his campaign literature. Look closely, and you don’t see it. You expect to see it, because you always see it, but its not there.
I admire that he doesn’t wear a lapel pin with a flag. The flag repels Democrats and Leftists like vampires are repelled at the sign of the Cross. Of course Democrats are also attracted to votes like vampires are to blood, so they are usually in a quandry. Wave the flag and get elected or don’t wave the flag, stand true to their beliefs and lose. I respect the fact that he’s willing to say what so many other Democrats say yet dare not do for risk of “offending the voters”. His willingness to do what other Democrats only dream of doing despite the risk shows a certain level integrity to his thinking.

It also ensures that I don’t have to look any further at this candidate or ideology. If you cant see symbol of this country in the light of the glory for which it stands, you don’t get to play on my team. I thank him deeply for not wasting my time by pretending to be something he is not.

Because of Obama, Evita is no longer "Senator Inevitable" and for that fact alone, he should be thanked by one and all. No one in this country should ever be “inevitable” but she came very close to being just that. I don’t like the precedent that it would have set. But that is no longer, thanks Barak Obama and a few thousand Democrat voters who would not be intimidated by some pretty powerful forces on the side of the “Status Quo”.

Obama has had the audaciousness to say that CNN probably shouldn’t have Begala and Carville commenting about the election when they were and are members of campaign staff. And in the shock of the ages, CNN agreed and removed the two “Clintonista Political Officers” from the channel. It makes me say;“ Why didn’t anyone think of this sooner!” but there you go action gets reaction and the advantage goes to – Obama!

I also like the fact that so many of the Democrat Senators have aligned themselves with Obama. The fun part being that if Evita gets the nomination, she has to fight and fight hard whomever the Republicans nominate, and so long as it’s not Ron Paul that we nominate, I’m pretty sure we’ll do just fine against her with half the Democrat Senate feeding us damaging information from behind the scenes. If I’m wrong and She wins; about half the Democrat Senate will have her tied up in knots for her first term because about half of them are now not just endorsing her competition, they are working actively on Obamas side against her and that’s not something that will go unpunished.

The punishment She will mete out will be small, and it will be petty but most of all, it will be fun to watch. I will stock up on popcorn. Ah, The bitter, acrid smell that comes from the buzzsaw of Democracy as it hits the hardshell of your hopes and dreams. I don’t think Saul Alinsky covered that in his book, at least not the first edition.

In point of fact, Obama has liberated the Democrats from the one force that usurpsed their power in the 1990’s. Not the evil “right wing”, but the Clintons themselves. It was Clinton who lost the House and Senate; it was Clinton who reshaped the countries politics so as to lose the Presidency in 2000. That party has been in long retreat since the days of Clinton. Obama has shown them a brighter future comes only when the clouds of the Clinton finally leave their party for good. If they give the Republicans the lightning rod of Clintonism and not the photogenic type but the Evita type and the Republicans will be in unchecked power for a generation. This is why the Democrat power base in the Senate is in revolt over Evitas acendancy. All she can do is threaten their power, not enhance it and therefore it must not be allowed to succeed.

I respect Senator Obama, I would even go so far as to say I am growing more and more to like him. It might just be the fact that for the moment we have the same enemies, but I see something in his character I did not see before. I hereby I retract my previous statements about his being “diaphanous”.

Come what may in this election, Senator Obama is a force to be dealt with. I cheer his candidacy and his campaign. I think that if I were Democrat, I would not only vote for him but I would actively campaign for him, for he has clearly given even me reasons to hope for the future of this country and that’s not a bad thing to have as the base of your candidacy.

After all, it worked for Ronald Reagan.

Posted @ January 27, 2008 03:21 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Voting with their feet

Snip...

RAFAH, Gaza Strip - Tens of thousands of Palestinians poured from the Gaza Strip into Egypt Wednesday after masked gunmen with explosives destroyed most of the seven-mile wall dividing the border town of Rafah.

The Gazans crossed on foot, in cars or riding donkey carts to buy supplies made scarce by an Israeli blockade of their impoverished territory. Police from the militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza, directed the traffic. Egyptian border guards took no action.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said Israel has no forces on the Gaza-Egypt border and, "therefore it is the responsibility of Egypt to ensure that the border operates properly, according to the signed agreements."

end snip...

Now hold on there just a darn minute. You mean to tell me that there was a wall between Gaza and Egypt that was put there by the Egyptians to keep the Palestinians out?

I must have missed that part in Jimmy Carters book complaining about how the Israelis put up a wall and how awful it is that they did that. I have to say Im shocked to find that other Arab states are interested in keeping out Palestinians to the point that they put up a wall to keep them out.

Posted @ January 23, 2008 07:18 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (8)

What I'm reading; The Big Switch

The Big Switch: Nicholas Carr

I've lived long enough to watch Black and White TV be replaced with Color TV, watched VCRs replaced with DVD, watched streetcorner phones replaced with cellphones. I've also watched mainframes replaced with Client/Server systems and I watched client/server replaced with Web Apps.

Now, I'm watching Web Apps about to be eaten by "the cloud" and once again the big debate between what was happening and what is happening goes on again. This book describes a parallel between the effects of electrification at the beginning of the last century and the growth of "utility computing" at the beginning of this one.

I've read this book twice in three days and I am absolutely intoxicated by the implications of what the book has to say. After I read the book the first time, I spent some time using the internet to check on a couple of facts that the book made reference to. One item was the contruction of what was considered by the author to be a large data center in Oregon by Google. Dollars spent doesnt tell me anything, but you show me a cooling tower and a substation and I can guess whats going on in the building pretty quick.

It took me a few minutes of research but in quick order I had overhead pictures of the "secret site" along with a 15 minute video walkthrough of the site while it was under contruction. One overhead view gave me an excellent view of the data center cooling towers and the substation that had been created to power this monster. I had all I need to determine the nature of this site and I also knew right away why the chose this location over others. The city the chose had a municipal power district and they owned their own hydroelectric dam on the Columbia river.

Of course I could tell most of that information by using Google Earth. Interestingly enough, the view of the site itself does not appear on Google Earth or Maps, I found the best picure on of all places, The New York Times.

Now, they are not a public utility so I dont think that they are under any disclosure requirement, but it does make you wonder what would happen if the information had been in some way harmful to that company.

Secrecy can become addictive to the corporate mind.

In 15 minutes, I could tell everything I needed to know about these two rather large non-descript buildings. But more to the point, I had checked the facts of the book but I was also able to check the theory of the book itself. Information that was once in the hands of a very few people is now in the hands of everyone.

The world once again has changed under our very feet and I wonder just how many people are really aware of this tranformational fact. When I presented the output of my little weekend research project to some co-workers and made a case for what I felt the implications were to my little group to this new situation. However, only a few of the people I talked to understood what I was trying to say, and these are people who I work with every day in this same part of the information world, people who should know better that to think that the way things are now will never change. Most of the folks I talked to could only comment at how worried they were about "their jobs being moved overseas" and how this new information didnt help them with that worry.

I now keep a picture of the Oregon site as my Windows desktop backdrop as a lesson to myself in humility.

Posted @ January 21, 2008 02:15 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (10) | TrackBack (9)

The Batman Utility Belt

Back when I was an “on the road travelling software consultant,” our little “band of techie brothers” used to joke about how the demand for “on the spot “ contact had spawned the growth of the “Batman Utility Belt”.

You could tell the average techie by what he wore on his belt. A cellphone, if not two (one would be your home phone, the other for the company, the company being loathe to use valuable company cellphone minutes for your personal business) A Palm Pilot , a beeper ( yes, beepers were still required, even though you had a cellphone.) and very probably a small flashlight and tookit as well.

It was rediculous. You had these things riding around on your belt that you just had to have with you at all times, lest someone not be able to get in touch with you at some precious moment. I hated it, I utterly, totally and completely hated it. They weighed a ton, if you had to suddenly sprint somewhere, you rattled like a broken 25 cent kiddie ride in front of the grocery store. Heaven help you if you had to catch a flight with all that stuff because sure enough, you get it all cleared by security and one of the two phones goes off, but you can’t get to it and the nightmare of "missing the call" begins anew. Don’t forget that on top of all the crap, you still had your rather large and heavy mid-1990's era laptop to lug around with you.

Over time, I learned to loathe cellphones, because they just lead to trouble. If you give people the idea that they can get ahold of you any time day or night and sure as anything, they would do just that. Beepers? I still can’t stand beepers. Luckily the usefulness of beepers has fallen out of favor and their curse is slowly being removed from the world, and not a moment too soon if you ask me.

I quit being a “road warrior” back in the fabled year of 2000. You remember the year 2000, the year that all our electronic devices failed due to the now famous man made disaster caused by the Y2k bug that laid waste to all civilization and left half the human race as zombies and the other half living in backyard bomb shelters, holding off their former neighbors at gunpoint.

Oh? That didn’t actually happen? But it was in all the papers, "world doomed due to inability to tell what day it was" or something like that. That didn’t happen? Does that mean I can come out of the bomb shelter now? Or is this some trick by the cannibalistic zombies to lure more food out where it can be had?

But I digress…

When I came off the road, I also gave up cellphones. Like I said, I really hated cellphones back then. In many ways, I still hate them, but since 2000, they have improved dramatically. In 2000, I had that assembled bit of kit attached to my belt everytime I left the house, but in todays world I can get most of that stuff down to a single device which is much more comfortable to use and carry. In addition to just being a work tool, the modern “smartphone” is also, dare I say it, a nice thing to have.

Wow. Theres a transition for you! You see! I can learn new skills.

What I once thought of as being the “devils own horseshoe” is now a pretty nice thing to have? Well yeah, because now that same space and weight that you used to use just for a cellphone can also have much more functional use for recreational purposes.

About two years ago, one of my co-workers turned me on to the Nokia 8125. Knowing that I was rather legendary in my hatred and dislike for cellphones, my friend ran through the options for this new system and was a good advocate for its use. He made a good case but in the end, I was convinced to use it because of the low, low price since we were gettting them for through a special company deal, but that the cellphone could also double as a PDA.

So I gave in and I got the phone. It took quite a while for me to warm up to the phone but eventually I found that the key feature was how well the phone worked with my office PC. The fact that the phone was a Microsoft Windows system helped in my conversion from begrudging user to raving fan.

It’s not that Im a big fan of Microsoft Windows and I don’t hate it either. It’s a tool like any other, it just so happens that most of the software I use on the office deskop is Windows oriented. (This is not an invitiation to sell me on Apple or Linux. I actually have a 1984 128k Macintosh that I bought new in Febuary 1984, so I’ve been around Apple for as long as most of you have been eating breakfast. And I use Linux every single day, so save it folks; I’m already on your side. Its like telling someone your religious affiliation, suddenly half the room jumps up and tries to convert you to their side when in point of fact, the argument is already long over. )

There’s just a tremendous amount of software, really helpful software that can and does run really well on the Windows Mobile Platform. Heres a few examples of what is running on my Phone (which is now 2 years old):

1. Slingbox Mobile. Slingbox for those who don’t know is one of the best working, easiest to use pieces of technology ever invented. What does it do? Well, Tivo and the DVR revolution allowed you to break the bounds of “when” you watched your TV, Slingbox breaks the bounds of “where” you watch TV. If you are travelling and you want to watch what you recorded on your Tivo instead of the god-awful cable choices you sometimes get when you are on the road, all you need is an internet connection and there you go. You’re not watching someone else's TV, youre watching your TV from somewhere else. Slingbox Mobile allows you to use the Cellphone Wifi connection to watch your Tivo from anywhere you can get a Wifi connection. How does it work? It works great. Slingbox tied to a Tivo is the perfect combination.

2. Tivo-To-Go. Ok, so youre out somewhere where you can't get to Wifi and you want to be able to watch a movie or one of the shows you recorded to your Tivo. Tivo-to-go lets you download the recorded shows to your PC, or even your cellphone. My cellphone as a 2gb SD memory card, and on that card, I cant get 4 hours of recorded shows. Frankly that’s more than I can watch on the phones battery. I typically keep a couple of episodes of “No Resevervations” on it, just in case in stuck somehwere and I want some light entertainment.

3. Odyssey Mobile. This one is pretty cool. Having GPS in your car is becoming a “must have” but if you travel or move around, you don’t want to get back into the problem of having to take a GPS with you everytime you go, else the “Batman utility Belt” comes back into play. What would be better is if you could have a good GPS for driving that’s right in your phone. That’s what Odyssey Mobile gives you, a solid transportable GPS that you can use to help navigate in whatever town you land in.

4. Pathaway. Ahhhh. Pathaway. The “GPS tool of the gods”. Pathaway quite literally does everything that you would want a good GPS to do. Its ability to allow you to make your own maps from topology mapping software makes it particularly helpful when you are off in the woods. Its real selling point is the use of GPS Tracking, allowing you to track other pathaway users or allow other pathaway users to track your position from either their own pathaway systems on their phones or on a website. GPS tracking is the killer app for GPS systems but tie a GPS to a cellphone and its really fantastic.

5. Yahoo Go! Yahoo Go is a set of easy to use tools to make a cellphone easy to access the web. Frankly, this tool makes up for some of the shortsidedness of Windows Mobile, but it works and works well. Mapping, Information and websearch with an easy to use one-handed interface make it a must have for any Windows Mobile app.

6. ATT Remote. ATT Remote is probably one of the most underused thing that any homeowner can use to help monitor their home. Instead of signing up for a security company, you can use ATT tools to set up cameras and sensors all around your home. You can monitor your home or turn on lights all from your cellphone from anywhere in the world.

Yes, you can also use this litle device to make phone calls, but wheres the fun in that?

Posted @ January 17, 2008 04:50 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (18)

The Bourdain Dilemma

We spent this weekend in Napa Valley celebrating our anniversary. We spent our time there enjoying 65 degree temperatures, clear skies, entirely too much great wine and seeing hardly any of the normal polyester clad herd of middle aged wine poseurs that transforms that lovely valley into an impassible traffic jam during the normal vacation season.

Its times like this when I'm reminded of my relatives who are getting freezer burn in Idaho or getting soaked to the bone in Seattle and they who are always hounding me about "leaving California" as they have wisely done. Oh yes, you were right all along, I should leave Sunny California for Idaho or Seattle,blah,blah,blah,blah,bllllaagghhh.

Then you have to see it from my eyes, looking out across the vineyards, the verdant hills with a light cover of yellow mustard plants coming into bloom providing all that lovely contrast with just a whisp of fog on the hilltops, sitting on the veranda of the lodge, that there I was holding a glass of wine with fresh bread and cheese all made locally as the warm yellow sun hits my face - all in mid January, I'm thinking to myself "Oh sure, I'll call U-haul leave all this behind and move to those places that are right now under 4 feet of snow or where the rain hasnt stopped in 12 straight weeks..."

Are they nice places and beautiful in their own scope? Sure they are and I really like them, but they are simply not for me. To paraphrase Emma Goldman, "If I cant wear shorts outside in January, I dont want to be part of your revolution"

I'm a Californian, worse still, a Native Californian. Even worse, a 2nd generation Native Californian, which is like saying you are sasquatch, a mythical beast that many have heard of, but few have actually seen and is thus discredited out of hand by closed minded academic types.

And just so I set the right tone, I now will go ahead and show all of my "leper-stripes", you see, I'm the worst kind of Californian.

I'm a Southern Californian...! ( Cue the ominous music!)

Worse even still, as hard as many of you find this to believe, I really do like it here and I plan on staying, so when I'm visiting your state please dont lecture me about "not moving up here" as they do so frequently in Oregon. I know lots of people from California have moved to all the other western states, but you guys have to understand, those folks werent Californians either, they were from Texas or Ohio or somehwere else. They came to California and after 5 whole years, moved on to somewhere else. You are just the "flavor of the month" as soon as those folks see another rainbow in the sky, they will leave your part of the world too. When you lecture me at the gas station in Roseburg Oregon about how they dont want Californians up there, its cool, I get it. We tried telling the Oakies that too back in the 30's, it didnt work but we tried. You just have to take my word when I tell you I really am just visiting. Love Oregon, Love Washington, Love Idaho and yes, Love Nevada, but I'm really not going to move from here to wherever-the-hell else you think I cant wait to move to. Because the evidence is, I can wait and in all likelyhood I will continue to wait. This isnt just a place to park my trailer for a week like it is for some folks, its my home, what else am I going to do?

We got the opportunity to eat at Bouchon in Yountville, the pedestrian version of the famous French Laundry. Seeing as how the $240 per seat 'prix fixe' menu of the French Laundry was well beyond my means along with the almost two years it takes to get a reservation at that legendary establishment was also well beyond my patience level, Bouchon is the best choice for people like me who think that there is a limit to even the best of things.

Yes, of course I had the Boudin Noir, like you had to ask. How can you pass up blood sausage prepared in the French style? You can get steak and french fries anywhere, but blood sausage isnt exactly coming to a "drive up window near you" any time soon.

The restaurant and food were fantastic and I had a moment to contemplate what I call "the Bourdain Dilemma".

The dilemma is this. If all you eat is fast food or "banquet frozen fried chicken " or Hungryman dinners "fresh from your freezer", you think that is what food really tastes like. Your metric of food success is rather narrow, being that if it doesnt make you sick, then it must be "ok" and on occasion it might even be thought of as "good", depending on how hungry you are when you eat it. You eat at Chilis, Fridays or half a dozen other cant-tell-one-from-the-other places and no matter what you eat it tastes like day old deep fried chicken breading. Because you dont know any different, everything you are presented with in the modern world is "good", meaning only that didnt get sick, that it was served quickly and that it was probably covered in a thick yellow-ish cheese.

On the other hand, you take someone like Anthony Bourdain. He has a real dilemma, he actually knows what chicken tastes like and guess what, it doesnt taste like day old deep fried breading, which is less like chicken and more like that of a gymsock than you realise. He knows fresh food from microwaved crap but remember, he has to get through the day just like you do, only instead of seeing a place to eat every 10 feet in this country, what he sees is the equivalent of an open sewer with a big neon sign over it. He doesnt see food, he sees hell, dipped in batter and coming in packs of 6, 8 or 10 chunks at a time. Anthony Bourdain is the man who once said that the most disgusting thing he ever ate was the Mcnugget. You'll remember Bourdian is also the man who ate Warthog anus in Namibia. Mr. Bourdain has a dilemma because he knows good from bad and at times, this can be a burden. The Namibian Warthog anus? Well it made for good television anyway but if its all the same to you Mr. Bourdain, i'd slide the mcnugget down the list just a tad and slide up the fermented shark and warthog anus on this list instead.

I have a bit of this problem when it comes to seafood. I cannot eat seafood that is not fresh. Fresh seafood to me means I can see where the food was caught, and I can probably also see the fisherman who caught it and as little as an hour ago, the fish was on the fishermans hook. Thats the kind of seafood I can and do eat, but anything short of that I cant even stand the sight of it much less eat it. As a result, I dont eat alot of seafood. Unless I'm on Oregon or Washington of course...

Eating at Bouchon gives you just a small view of this burden. You are introduced to food you simply dont find on every corner. There are no 2-for-1 coupons at Bouchon. Its honest, good, solid, fresh food and its frightening because its simple and you can taste for the first time things that you thought you knew really well, but it turns out that you only have a very slight knowlege of. For example, I had French Onion Soup as a starter. This is not a difficult dish, but most people make it with pre-prepared beef stock that comes in cartons. Yes, its good when you make it that way over other options but when you eat it at Bouchon, its made with beef stock that is prepared on site - there are no cartons. It is fresh Onion Soup, its flavor is deep and dark and after eating their French Onion soup from that point on, all other French Onion soups are just some form of Campbells Condensed-Cream-of-what-was-probably-French-Onion-Soup-but-you-cant-tell-that-its-not-actually-wallpaper-paste Soup.

I now must decide to either learn to make it properly myself, or forgo my favorite soup.

Posted @ January 14, 2008 10:41 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (7)

The best cellphone application - Ever!

Pathaway GPS Professional for Windows Mobile

Im still fascinated by the coolness of the bluetooth GPS I got as a gift for Christmas. Since then I've tested a few different applications, but I have to say I have found one to be so staggeringly good and useful that its worth mentioning.

It's called "Pathaway", and its a very good phone based GPS system, as well as a GPS Tracking system.

By now I think we all know what a GPS system is so I can dispense with explaining that, but other than giving you nightmares of "Big Brother" what possible good use could there be for a "GPS tracking system" for a civilian not engaged in the Private Investigations trade?

Let's try to imagine that you have an extended family across a few counties. You have some teenagers and some older independent adults that you have to take care of, all with different schedules and agendas. Now, imagine that the older adults live out in the countryside and have had experiences where they have gotten lost or disoriented out there where there is no streetlights or signs or any of the things we have here in the city.

Yes, having a GPS is helpful in that case, and so is a cellphone, but what would also be helpful would be a GPS tracking application that is easy to use and take everywhere with you. For example,lets say the GPS was in the phone and the tracker was something that ran passively on the phone too, so that there would be little risk of being forgotten or misconfigured. A GPS that you can take with you, is a GPS that comes with you when you travel to a new town, or when you get out of the car and take a little hike. You know, the kind where people get lost in the fading light.

GPS tracking allows you to tie the facilities of a GPS to a cellphone so that the GPS location information is reported back to a central site via the phone. You can view the information on a website or if you are using Pathaway, you can also use your cellphone to view the location information for the other Pathaway users on your cellphone.

"Well,couldnt you just call them and ask where they are since they already have a cellphone in the first place?" Sure you could do that as long as everything is ok. But if your relative is lost, and disoriented, or worse not able to respond to the phone due to being upside down in a ditch on a dark country road, well the GPS tracking system comes in particularly handy when you start your search and rescue.

Last year, a family travelling from Washington to California got lost in a storm and in the process the father of the family died trying to get the familiy rescued. The biggest difficulty that their relatives faced is that they had no idea where to start the search once they realized that they had not arrived at their jobs on Monday morning. GPS tracking would have given that information to anyone who cared to look. If you are travelling long distance, a relative or a friend who is not part of the trip can track your progress on a website( or on their own "Pathaway" enabled phone). If for some reason you become overdue, the last reported location of the GPS makes a terrific place to start looking for you. It cuts down on the guesswork of where to start searching and that is often what ends up saving lives.

If you are driving with a group of people long distance, you can each track all of your party, noting anyone who drops out of the convoy and their progress, or if someone opts for a different route, and again this can be done in a passive mode. Theres no need to call every 10 seconds asking "where are you", you just look down on the display and see it in the context of a moving map.

Teenagers or soon-to-be teenagers beware; your life just became amazingly difficult. With Pathaway active on your GPS Smartphone, I can track my teenagers and their GPS enabled phones like Marlin Perkins on Mutual of Omaha stalking a wild mountain goat.

Your teenager tells you that he's on his way to his friends house to do "homework", but the GPS tracking software tells you that he went to the mall, and the 7-11 on the corner, then off to the park for a bit of skateboarding first. And just to make the pain of being a teenager that much worse, you can view all of this info on your cellphone and then use the system to guide you directly to the layabout while he's off doing what hes not supposed to be doing. Yes, "Surprise!" is a good word for the look on his face when you arrive at the park and pull him off by his ear.

Imagine being at Disneyland and you all want to disperse around the park for the day. The Pathaway system would give you the info you need to find everyone later in the day, even if they cant answer the phone because they are on a ride or even taking a nap at the moment. Your cellphone would give you the tracking infomation for each person in your group who you wish to track. (Look at that, aunt barb is in Tommorowland and mom is already back at the hotel. Ok, no sense going to frontierland, lets just try to intercept aunt barb after she gets off the monorail...)

I really love this app. And remember, I really hate cellphones so this is saying alot.

Pathaway is available for Windows Mobile and Palm Powered Handheld phones. I use an older Cingular 8125 phone with a bluetooth GPS. Also note - if you want the GPS tracking features(and you do), you need to purchase the Professional version, not the standard version. Also note - you can turn the tracking off, so if you dont want to be found, you dont have to be (just dont tell your kids about that feature)

Posted @ January 10, 2008 09:43 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

excuse me - I have to call my sponsor

That was frightening. I very nearly wrote a post about politics. I just spent the last half hour composing a few thoughts about that thing-that-shall-not-be-mentioned. Then when I realized what I had done, I scrapped it. Man that was close.

I need to find a PA (Politic-pundit Anonymous) meeting thats close by and call my sponsor.

Posted @ January 09, 2008 07:16 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (47)

Outstanding Technical Work and Great Content At The Same Time

Pajamas Media is Beta Testing new HD video over the web. Sure, Im biased towards Pajamas Media but this is an outstanding use of this technology.

Take a look, let them know what you think.

Posted @ January 07, 2008 06:22 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (25)

"Dead Week" Is Now Over - Now Get Back To Work

Sure, Flying Subs are silly:

But some Soviet Engineers kept the wolf from the door working on just such a crazy idea. Not as cool as the Seaviews Flying Sub, but what is, right?

Oh, and just in case you need a blast of black-and-white Irwin Allen goofiness, watch for the "Written By" credit on this nugget:

Written By Cordwainer Bird? Who the hell names their kid "Cordwainer"? ( Besides the obvious answer of "Mr and Mrs Bird")

Oh, thats just Harlan Ellison being Harlan Ellison.

Who's Harlan Ellison?

One of my long list on unaccomplished goals is to start a fight with Harlan Ellison, just so I can watch him work.

Ok kids, clean up. take down the christmas lights from your cubicles, get your email cleared out, wipe the egg nog and powdered donuts off your desks. Now its "back to work" week, you slackers, "Dead week" is over, your boss is back and wants to know what the hell you've been doing for two weeks so you better have an answer.

Posted @ January 06, 2008 07:42 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4) | TrackBack (65)

Cheaper to buy all commuters Dodge Neons and a tank of gas a week for life

From the National Review comes this little nugget from the goldwater institute:

Myth #3 Light rail has been successful in other cities.

Reality: Light rail has had a miniscule impact on traffic congestion. In no city in the country does light rail ridership equal more than 1.2 percent of travel. In densely-populated Boston, which has the highest use of light rail in the country, the daily passenger miles per directional route is 9,942. But the U.S. Department of Transportation reports that for the top 50 urban areas in the country, the average passenger miles per lane mile of freeway is 26,370. So even the most optimistic forecast on light rail ridership comes nowhere close to the normal usage of a freeway mile.

My father used to say that public transportation systems were to urban planners and homeless advocates what the Reagan era rail deployed MX missile system was to defense planners. They both were completely ineffective and really only served as a way to keep their charges dry and out of the rain while also keeping them on the move and away from the prying eyes of the taxpayer. He also called city transit buses "rolling insane asylums", which based on my experience is just about right.

Back in the early 90's I rode light rail daily from the suburbs to downtown Sacramento. On any given day,the rail car was filled with myself and no more three other office workers. The rest of the car was filled with homeless folks who had gone "Aluminum mining" during the night out in the suburbs. They carried large black plastic trash sacks full of dripping and dirty aluminum soda cans with them. They would load up in the suburbs and then take light rail downtown to get to the recyclers where they would redeem the evenings takings and then go rest at the Salvation Army for the day and start over the next day.

I dont know what they called it, but it looked exactly like work to me.

For them, it was easier to take the light rail system than to take the bus. The Light Rail cars were largely empty which allowed them to take big plastic sacks filled with soda cans without the other passengers or the bus driver getting upset at the craven display of entreprenurial urban survival techniques. The plan worked pretty well except when there was a sucker such as myself who was actually using the system for personal transportation instead of for bulk aluminum hauling.

I think people who are being asked to fund light rail should understand that if we were honest we would say that we ourselves dont want to ride light rail, we want everyone else to ride light rail. We just want all those other people off the freeway.

Posted @ January 06, 2008 12:06 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (39)

Size matters

I often tell people who believe in UFO's that if they truly had any inkling of the size of the solar system or the galaxy (or even the universe) that they would stop believing such silly things.

Then while scanning for information on the possible asteroid hit on Mars and I see this:

and I see in graphic detail that the fundamental problem with my species is that its allergy to intelligence and rational thinking is much worse than I had imagined.

Just to make it simple as I can for you folks, Mars is a really, really, really, really, really long way from earth, so lets just leave it at that.

The good news here is that if this is what passes for science in the land of Iran then we can expect that their "nuclear" program is really just a building sized Kenner EZ-bake oven with a huge 10000 watt light bulb inside. It should be too hard to find, but why bother. The cakes those things make taste like crap anyway.

The bad news is, its not just Iran who has a problem with scale:

Well, yes at some point in the future it could hit the earth - maybe. Of course at some point in the future the earth will burn into a cinder when the Sun goes nova, in 5 billion years! But hey, its not like any of us will be there when it happens.

Oh, and if you really want to freak out a UFO fanatic, visit "Heavens-above", put in your location information and look for Iridium Flares. If you schedule your time just right, you can have your UFO "Pigeon" in the right place to experience one of these events. After they get good and worked up,convinced that theyve just seen the latest anal probe team sent from Zeta Reticuli, you can tell them all about gold old fashioned satellite telephones.

Dont tell me I don't know how to have fun on a Saturday night. A nice clear starry night out in the country, a few bottles of Guinness and a bunch of loopy UFO believers is like a trip to Disneyland for me.

Posted @ January 05, 2008 08:06 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (64)

A sure sign of boredom

...is when people talk about the weather.

Todays weather talk comes from the storm we had today here in California. Now I feel guilty talking about the weather here in California because compared to most places in the world, we simply dont have weather. We Californians dont live in weather, we visit it on weekends like someone elses step children. Live in snow? I think not. Live two hours from fine skiing? Oh sure, thats how you do it.

Suffice to say that todays news was full of politics and news that California was being hit by a large storm. Weather makes news in California for only one reason - we have all the media people and their video cameras.

How did the weather effect me? I have a well known talent of being able to sleep through anything. Yes, I have even slept through the detonation of a one thousand pound US Air Force bomb( but thats another story for another time) but last night I didnt get any sleep at all. We had some heavy winds, about 40kts, which by itself was fun but what made it extra special was two things. First, it wasnt just a 40knot wind, it was also accompanied by 70 knot gusts and second, the wind was coming out of the east. Here in the central valley, the wind rarely comes off the mountains to the east as anything more than a breeze, but last night the wind was booming. It was like hitting the house with a sledge hammer at random moments for eight straight hours.

So, no sleep, which is bad. It makes for a real long day at work. Next up, the backyard fence decided to collapse down the side of the hill. I felt bad about this at first, thinking that my landscaping ( or horrible lack of it ) had somehow contributed to the failure but a quick trip around the neighborhood showed that everyone with a north-south running fence took some damage. I had company, I felt better and had much less shame, so it was a win-win for me that everyone else suffered too.

So why is it such a big deal when California gets any sort of weather? Like I said, its because we dont really get any for the most part. When any weather actually does happen people here always act like they've never seen rain before or that they are made of alka-seltzer and will "effervece" to death at the slightest touch of water falling from the sky.

Interestingly enough, rain always happens in this time of year in California. This time of year was known by the native Americans who once populated this fair state as a special magical period known as "Winter".

Think of it this way, unless you are in California, you rarely get to experience earthquakes. So you wake up one day and you experience a 4 point quake and you cant shut up about it for a week. Here in California a 4 point quake wouldnt rate mention in the newspaper and if you did mention it you would get the look we reserve just for tourists.

Its like talking about rain in Seattle. The locals in Seattle dont talk about rain no matter how much it rains or for how long or take even the slightest notice of it , they just carry on living life like we do, only much, much wetter. So if you do notice it, if you blurt out "Gee sure is raining alot lately" that will make you " one of those people..." and everyone will point at you like you are the last unabsorbed human in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers".

You know, a "Californian". You know, its funny because when they say "Californian" up there, its like a dirty word or something. It always makes me laugh when they do that. Its like they are saying "Colon Polyp" or something.

Posted @ January 04, 2008 08:56 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Cringeing in the face of the one eyed god, while I face my personal demons.

must....work....to....fight....the....urge...to....talk...politics
....must....not.....give....in.....must.....not....turn...on...cable
....news.....

Oh look! Its Susan Estrich....

NO.... turn the channel back to "Voyage to the bottom of the Sea" on American Life Network. Quick before that voice gets in your head, yeah i know she looks like Janice, lead singer in "Dr Teeth and the Electic Mayhem" on The Muppet show, but NO, STOP... must stop...must stop now....do not talk about politics...must not pay...attention...

Whew, commercial break!

safe...for....now....cant...hold....out...much...longer....If "Senator Inevitable" isnt actually inveitable, then what is she? She's Roger Clinton with even less talent, a bad haircut and a lime green pant suit, thats what she is.

DAMN. concentrate, concentrate man Dont read the ticker, stay off Drudge!

Oh Look, its Richard Basehart.

Must fight it, must fight urge...President Huckabee today went to Salt Lake City on a fact finding. ohohoaaaheheheheehehe, oh stop come on, youre killing me......fight it man, fight it. Drink something, take a cold shower, go for a walk...

Oh look, "Time Tunnel" is on, look at that, spacemen in aluminum suits, sure thats scarry, yessss. I can break this, I can quit anytime, you wait and see. That's right. all the way through to November, not a peep outta me. You wont find me pining for Kerry, nosirree...

OH....MY....GOD...my first commercial advertisment right here in my state! Oh nooo, they pushed the primary up to Feburary. The bastards. Those cruel, inhuman bastards! 30 days in mid winter with nothing but wall to wall political ads. I have to look at these frikkin, side show freaks for 30 non-stop dark and wet outside so you cant even look the other way days. You maniacs, you maniacs, you blew it all to hell! Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape! This isnt a Hospital, its an Insane Asylum nooooooooooooooo! Hospital? Insane Asylum? That's not Charlton Heston, thats Sally Kellerman in MASH. oh, no... I cant even keep the voices in my head straight anymore.

Huckabee...hucKAabee...huckaBEE...HUckabEE...HUCKABEE!!!...Fred J Muggs, er, uh, Fred C. Dobbs, er, Fred "Russians dont take a dump without a plan" THOMPSON...oh my god someone named friggin FRED is running for President! How can that be? this is some sort of weird parallel universe, someone went back in time and stepped on a butterfly while hunting dinosaurs, this proves it!!! THIS CANT BE HAPPENING......

Whoa, gotta get hold of myself. I got to get this monkey off my back, gotta to get to,to,to Oh look "Lost in Space" is on, oh good. Wow who's idea was it to let Dr. Smith near Will? Doesnt anyone besides me think that is a really bad idea? Are the Robinsons the worst parents in history? Did they volunteer to get sent into space or were they "volunteered", you know Ive always wondered about that because I mean really, who takes your family into space in velvet, velour one piece suits?.....horsehead bookends,horsehead bookends,horsehead bookends,horsehead bookends,horsehead bookends,horsehead bookends,horsehead bookends,horsehead bookends...

Oh look, its Obama.

aiiiiiiiieeeee!!!!!! Spiders. Spiders everwhere! Madness...

Posted @ January 03, 2008 07:17 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (2)

Lantos Retires

79 year old holocaust survivor and Congressman from San Mateo has decided to retire after the discovery of esophageal cancer. His statement was particularly moving to me:

"It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress," he said. "I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country."

Well look at that, a Democrat who knows the true value of freedom, democracy and the great debt we all owe to this country for providing both. The man is dying of cancer, and all he can say is that he is grateful to be here. Well congressman all I can say is "thank you, sir". I'm grateful to have lived in your time.

I didnt always agree with Congressman Lantos, frankly I dont always agree with anyone, including myself, but I've always found him to an intriguing person to listen to and after all, isnt that the whole idea of this "democracy" thing? opposing ideas clashing and competing for votes, but all of us getting together for a beer afterwards?

I dont like speaking about people in the past tense while they are still alive and I wish him the best with his treatment, but I will miss him nonetheless.

Posted @ January 02, 2008 03:30 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Writers Strike? Like I'd notice.

Burgess Meredith - "Time Enough to Last"

In 1966, on any given weeknight you would have found me sitting in my room making a model airplane, watching "Twilight Zone" or "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" or "12 O'clock High".

Its now 2008, and I find myself pretty much doing the same thing, then on a little rabbit eared metallic black and white TV in the back of a small house on Manhattan street in Sparks Nevada, now I watch TV on a Slingbox and I live just across from Sparks the other side of the Sierra Nevadas in California.

The Sci-Fi Channel marathon of Twilight Zone has made me witness again the greatness of Burgess Meredith as an actor and Rod Serling as a writer. Notice I didnt say anything about special effects? Thats because there werent any. Did it distract from the show? In my opinion, not a bit, in fact I think it actually helped!

I had a discussion this weekend where I argued that the easy availability of special effects via CGI has temporarily clouded the artistic vision of directors and producers of film and television, they have succummed to the quiet narcotic of computers and software. In 1977, Jaws showed us that not seeing the shark was actually better than seeing it. The Shark, once fully seen ends the movie. By drawing the focus of the tension around the largely unseen shark our imaginations filled in the blanks, and our imaginations of what the shark might be were far worse than what the shark actually ended up being ( which was if I remember correctly was a big pile of "Roy Schieder Fishing Chum" through which Richard Dreyfuss was forced to swim for the happy ending to be complete )

That director at that time didn't have a choice in how to present to movie, he had to take the risky art route of trying to get the audience to be frightened at the right time and laugh at the right time and not confuse the two. There simply wasnt the CGI that there is today. That director was forced to use the creative art of film making to provide the image of the shark in the shape of your own shadow of fear, there just below the water slightly out of reach, just waiting to eat your girlfriend (at just the right moment in the date, so you wouldnt have to call the next day).

Today the same director would have the shark doing a tap dance on center stage with a straw hat and cane just because he could. Its CGI, its practically free so why not make the shark into a three headed "dog shark" with "frickin lazer beams" and make it three, no four times bigger than the boat! Yeah, sure thats the ticket.

In 1977, it was the art department and the bank that determined your level of special effects, you as a director and an actor had to paper around the lack of special effects with words, with acting, with a bit of creative lighting and the occasional big rubber shark shaped thing that would end up an ornament outside a crab shack in Pensacola. In 2008, its the mopey, hoodie wearing kid with the Ipod stuck in his ears who thinks that "The Matrix is the greatest movie of all time" that determines how many dog-heads to put on your shark. And its meaninginless to have one or two or three dog-heads because everyone knows that with a few choices on the digitalization software, you can change the "directors cut" to have more dog-heads than the version the studio wanted to send out.

Its not that you cant do it, its just that it really doesnt mean anything. Its just not "special" anymore, is it?

You understand that as a technologist, a computer technologist no less what I have just said is heresy, but it really needs to be said. For an effect to be "special" it has to have the sense of "WOW" in it. You have to know that what is going on in front of you is a result of effort and not some new wizbang software that your kid can download and get working in the same afternoon. For instance, you compare Ray Harryhausen and his "sword fighting skeletons" to anything in "The Matrix" and judge for yourself if that is "special". personally, I'm taking Ray's sword fighting skeltons over anything in the Matrix. For Ray Harryhausen, some guy has to move clay models of skeletons step by step every day for a month for each skeleton, for each swing of the sword - now thats a "special" effect. Compared to a bunch of Apples tied together spinning out bits and bytes day after day, Im sorry but its not that special to me. A truly special effect is invisible. It acts a tool for the actor and director. A true special effect is not noticed. Todays special effects allow actors and directors, and frankly producers to be lazy, to not be artists because they think they can overcome any error and make any landscape with a bit of finely placed CGI. Dont take 100 takes of a scene to get it right, just get it in the can and we'll CGI in another actor later if we have to...

It's not that there are any "special effects" in Twilight Zone, there arent. Its all stagecraft and dammit, its good stagecraft. It was good then and its still good now. I dont care that the effects are of the tin foil and styrofoam rocks variety, I want 22 minutes of good story, excellent directing and fantastic acting. A modern set of special effects adds nothing to the story being told. Replace Burgess Meredith with some goo-goo bright light CGI special effects? Sorry, its not going to make a better story. Frankly, the lack of special effects make me concentrate on the story being told and not the bright shiny object.

Its not that I think I'm in a rut or that I'm a luddite, its that I think I know what I like. "To Serve Man" doesnt get better if the Kanamids have better looking spaceships. "Time enough to Last" doesnt improve if I get to see the atomic explosion. It's not important. What is important is the look on the face of Burgess Meredith when his glasses break. The other 19 minutes are in that episode are there to drive you to that point. Any bank vault would do as a set, you dont need Lucasfilm to make a CGI vault.

I like 12 O'Clock High because I like to see how directors make a single B-17 sitting in 1960's Chino California look like the entire 8th Air Force in 1944 England( Awfully desert like there in England,eh? gee wasnt aware that there were any groves of eucalyptus in England..hmmm). I like "Voyage to the Bottom of Sea" because as much as I think the Flying Sub is an horrid engineering improbabilty, it sure does look cool. I also like seeing how many of the seaweed monsters that the "good sub Seaview" finds week after week are really just leftover props from "Lost in Space".

Posted @ January 01, 2008 11:27 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Ford Derangement Syndrome: Presidential Assassin Sara Jane Moore released today

Who's Sara Jane Moore? Back in the oh-so-fun 1970's, she was one of a number of failed aassassins of President Gerald R. Ford. Presidential assassination attempts arent unusual, but what is unusual is that the assassin in this case was a woman. More unusual ( forgive the small pun ) is that this was the second assassination attempt on the same President by a woman. Just 17 days previous to Sara Jane Moores attempt, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, one of the Charles Mansons followers attempted to kill President Ford in Sacramento.

She too, failed in her attempt.

Sara Jane Moore was an bookkeeper and FBI informant. She also owned a .44 caliber pistol, which was taken away just days before the attempt at killing President Ford. She was sympathetic to the Symbionese Liberation Army and their cause. The closest that anyone came to determining a reason behind her attempt was that she believed that there was a "war on the left" being waged by the President. Quoted after the attempt, she said:

"...I do regret I didn't succeed, and allow the winds of change to start. I wish I had killed him. I did it to create chaos."

The FBI said that had she made the attempt with her own pistol, history might very well have been different.

The Tony award winning play "Assassins" made a characture out of Sara Jane Moore. Whats interesting to me is that the revival was met with rave reviews - in 2004.

Here is a scene from the play, where her character is presented during a song called " everyone's got the right"

PROPRIETOR

(to Fromme)
Yo baby!
Looking for a thrill?
The Ferris wheel is that way.

(Fromme comes over.)

No, baby,
This requires skill --

(Fromme puts money down; the Proprietor shrugs, gives her a gun.)

Okay, you want to give it a try...

(As Fromme plays with the gun, Moore is spilling keys, credit cards, lipstick, etc., over the counter.)

Jeez, lady--!
(indicates Czolgosz)

Give the guy some room!
The bumper cars are that way...

(Moore finds her money; Proprietor gives her a .38, which she accidentally points at his stomach.)

Please, lady --
(turning barrel away)
Don't forget that guns can go boom...

Every year there is a new flu, but its just a new strain of the old killer. Its worth remembering that Bush Derangement Syndrome is just this seasons version of an old killer, one that barely missed Reagan, Ford, Nixon, Truman, Roosevelt(both of them) and Kennedy, Mckinley, Garfield and Lincoln was slain by. Presidents come and go, but every assassination destroys the contract of democracy between the governed and the government in a small way,edging it towards the abyss.

Witness - The Pakistan situation.

What Mr. Sondheim wanted to say was that it was the American culture itself that produced these crazed killers. What he neglected to point out, is just how many of them were people of the left.

What we all fail to recognize is that history shows that Sara Jane Moore to be a crazed and failed assassin, but that current leftist sentimentality of the press and of popular culture works overtime to justify her insane actions.

I wonder if the left will ever understand the madness that they feed and their role in nurturing the insanity.

Posted @ December 31, 2007 02:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

Achmed - The Dead Terrorist

As we close off 2007, we are reminded that thanks to the US Military, it is now safe to laugh at terrorists.

Posted @ December 31, 2007 11:53 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Christmas Gadgetry

I have a Nokia 8125 Cellphone thats about 2 years old. I love it, I can do most anything with it, from watching tivo-to-go downloaded movies from my tivo, to using it to watch my slingbox, why it even allows me to make phone calls, but it was, in my opinion, missing just one thing.

A GPS.

Now, having a GPS in a cellphone sounds silly until you realize that having a GPS in your cellphone is about as handy a thing as you could ever want. Let's say you're travelling to a new town and you need to find a bookstore. What do you do? ask someone? Oh come on now man... Wouldnt it be cool if you could just get the cellphone out, type on the GPS and get the directions, turn by turn instructions and even the phone number of the place and off you go! ( This actually happened to me in Denver last May, and it was got me started thinking about how much I wanted a GPS that was a part of my cellphone.)

GPS receivers are starting to become more prevalent ( Witness the newest incarnation of the 8125, the "tilt")
but for us "fogeys" who dont want to get a new phone every year, there is help.

You say you want GPS on your phone but you dont have one? Got a bluetooth enabled "smart phone"? Well try this, the General Satellite BT-359CS GPS Reciever

Yes, Thats the actual size! It's about a 1/2 inch thick.

This GPS receiver runs for 11 hours on battery power and communicates to the cellphone via bluetooth. With the addition of free software like Yahoo Go! and Google maps, you can now have a helpful GPS for travel or for your car, right there on your modern electronic swiss army knife, the cellphone. Better still, the the GPS software will also display route, Points of Interest and traffic information at the same time, which is an advanced feature on most car based GPS'es.

You say you got a small business and you need to track all your folks as they travel on a webpage? You say you got teenage kids and you want to know their whereabouts through the day?

Well, Try this.

Here you have one GPS device that can work with your cellphone or your PC which you can carry with you anywhere. And for hobbyists, the USB connection and high battery time makes it an intriguing update for your Lego Mindstorms NXT

What? Doesnt everyone have an NXT? Doesnt everyone have an NXT attached to their Remote Control Airplanes? No?

So, its just me then?

UPDATE: I've just finished testing this with the phone/gps. It works, and it works very, very well and costs nothing.

Posted @ December 27, 2007 11:17 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (52)

Yeah! - Im a Dork! So what?

	I received 100 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Take the Sci-Fi Movie Quiz canon s5 is

Well, its not news to me that I am, but some of you might be surprised.

Posted @ December 23, 2007 04:32 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

Mars Under Attack

Bullseye...

From UK Times:

"...Mars is in danger of being struck by an asteroid at the end of next month, astronomers have calculated.
The newly discovered space rock known as 2007 WD5 has a one in 75 chance of colliding with the planet on January 30. While the probability of an impact is only slim, the odds have been cut from one in 350 when the object was first identified, and they are much shorter than is usual for new asteroids.
If 2007 WD5, which is about 100 metres in diameter, does strike Mars on January 30, it would cause an explosion equivalent to several megatonnes of TNT...

So, theres two ways to look at this. First, the natural inclination on some folks part to want to do something to stop it from happening, which is silly on the face of it, despite your best desires, there is no man made technology that will get us to Mars by jan 30th, so its a non-starter.

The second way is to think of it this way. If we were going to spend any money on this issue, it should not me to stop it, it should be to actually see that it happens. What better place to test and observe the effects of an asteriod collision with an inner ring, terran style planet than to have something whack Mars. You want to wait till an asteroid hits us here on the blue/green earth to learn what the cost will be, or do you want to see how this looks in the Nevada of the solar system?

I thought so.

But what about the poor Martian ecology Frank? Screw the Martians, they've been asking for this for a long time. Those green skinned, three fingered, anal probing, fly all the way across the solar system with your landing lights on bastards, I've had it up to here with them...

All kidding aside, I really hope we get to see this happen.

Posted @ December 21, 2007 10:25 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (369)

Useless Information Department

Question #1: Which has the greater population?

A - Canada
B - Australia
C - State of California

Question #2: Which has the greater GDP?

A - Canada
B - Australia
C - State of California

Question #3: Which has the bigger military?

A - Canada
B - Australia
C - State of California

UPDATE: Yes, It's California. California now surpasses Canada and Australia in Population ( California Population - 38 million, Canada 33 million and Australia with 21 million) and GDP.( Australia 718 billion, Canada 1.1 trillion and California $1.7 trillion) California also has more military strengh as measured in manpower and budget. The one area that both Australia and Canada have more military presence than California is the sea. Both Canada and Australia maintain Naval craft, while California has few aside from "Fish and Game" assets.

Why do I bring this up? It's for perspective. People use Canada and Australia as examples of "What the US should be more like" in terms of foreign policy and health policy as if they were all equivalent. But to understand this idea properly, you have to understand the size of the countries involved. Most people tend to think of Canada or Australia as "Big" countries that are in some way equivalent or at a peer level with the United States in terms of population and economic size. The truth is both of those examples are best thought of in terms of being more like another California rather than a peer to the entire United States.

Everyone should understand that I have a great affinity for both of those countries and am part Canadian myself so its not that I'm trying to say that these countries are good or great, its just a size comparison Im attempting to make. Canada and Canadians - great place, great country, great people. Australia - great place, great country great people.

They just arent as big as you would think.

Posted @ December 19, 2007 07:08 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (2)

Dead Week

Theres a tradition in the software business called "dead week”. That’s the week between Christmas and New Years. Hardly anyone works during this week, most everyone around the globe are out on vacation, taking personal time off and so on. Since so many people are out, there is no "critical mass", no quorum of managers, so "Dead week" is a nice quite time to work in the business. Theres almost no expectations for your time during that week, theres not enough people around to add up to any sort of possible surprises. If anyone gets ambitious, you can quickly bury them behind a wall of signatures they cant possibly get, because at the end of the day – everyone in authority is gone. Better still, it’s the Christmas holidays, and unless there is some deep disaster afoot no one will call anyone at home.

Unless you are unfortunate to be a part of some “year end - go live” project, the time from December 15th to the day after New Years is total bliss. Its quiet, and it gets quieter every day as you move through the end of the calendar. You just have to be creative on how you use your time.

When I worked in San Francisco, we created minature golf courses in our cube farms and played a "round of 9". We held little contests like how many coke cans could you crush in 30 seconds and posted the scores in main conference room. We went shopping, ate lunch for 4 hours, made margaritas in the breakroom and caught up on our technical reading (and by “technical reading” I mean we set up DOOM and played it on the company LAN).

I pretty much do those things every day now that I work from home so in some ways “the thrill is gone”, but back in the days when I commuted to work, it was the one time of year I actually didn’t mind the time and effort spent getting to work.

Tommorrow I will finish the last of this years meetings and presentations and with that, “Dead week” for me at least, officially starts. It’s been a busy year for me this year, and I’m looking forward to the next couple of weeks of no phone ringing, no emergencies and no email panics from “amature night” managers with no real clue what is going on.

The luxury of free time. It really is hard to beat.

Posted @ December 18, 2007 08:18 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

So this new Amazon Kindle thing....

Apparently its not just a newfangled way to read books with a 400 dollar electronic device, its also an easy way to get your book distributed.
Say....That gives me an idea...

Posted @ December 16, 2007 04:55 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

A note in passing - Triticale

Tom Arnold.

Over to the right, you will see a blog noted on my blogroll for a Triticale. He was one of the very first people to help me get a blog started.

Triticale, The Wheat Rye Guy, Tom Arnold died of leukemia yesterday. Our thoughts go out to his family.

Posted @ December 15, 2007 10:38 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (36)

100 years ago - The 'Great White Fleet' Sails

On December 16th 1907, The Modern United States Navy came into being with the sailing of the "Great White Fleet". Here is a terrific article on that great event.

In December 1907, there was:

No Panama Canal.
No State of Arizona.
No State of New Mexico.
No State of Alaska.
No State of Hawaii.
No Penicillin.
No Freeways.
No Radio.
No GPS.

Very few cars.
Very few aircraft.
Very little electric power.

Women did not vote, nor did they serve in any of the Military Services.

Travel by the fastest known form of transportation of the day, the locomotive would allow you to travel 800 miles in 14 hours. Today, 14 hours can take you to any spot on the globe.

Most people of that era ever travelled more than 100 miles from their homes. Yet the sailors of the Great White Fleet would travel around the world in the two years of their adventure. In the end, they would travel 42,227 miles in their journey with little or no contact with home except by occasional slow mail postings.

The ships of the fleet, like most of the world at that time, was powered by coal. For all intents and purposes, the sailing of the 'Great White Fleet' around the world in 1907 was equivalent to sending a modern day US Airforce Bomber Wing off to the planet Mars.

Three signifcant US Navy officers were in the fleet during the circumnavigation. Their names were Nimitz, Spruance and Halsey. They would each become legendary later in history.

In my little game of "six degrees of separation", Teddy Roosevelt shook Nimitz's hand, Nimitz shook my grandfathers hand, and I of course shook my grandfathers hand. Maybe its just me and my "geological way" of looking at things, but 1907 doesn't seem like that long ago, and yet, the world has most certainly changed since a coal powered fleet plowed its way across the seas.

( ** - The State of Oklahoma was admitted to the Union in November 1907 )

Posted @ December 14, 2007 01:34 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

Has anyone considered that Huckabee is doing so well in Iowa because of no other reason that he hasnt had enough money to be able to run around and annoy the hell out of those folks out there in Iowa? Is it possible that Huckabee is in fact the "none of the above" candidate? and it really wouldnt matter who it was in his position, because he's essentially bounded by the idea that hes not "not one of those guys"

Heck anyone could fit that bill.

Think about it. Fred Thompson was doing fine until he started running. He starts running and look what happens. Tommy Thompson stopped running and his numbers went up!

But lets think about it for a second like an Iowan (Iowan? Iowander? Iowandite?), youre an average Joe standing in line at the local "Maid-Rite" and practically every day some schmoe from the political class who wants your vote is going to show what an average guy he is by "Just showing up and getting something to eat here at good old Maid-Rite, all impromptu dontcha know. Why it happens every day here in the Senator/Govenor Haflblab campaign office, we love Iowa dontcha know. Hey buddy, let me and my 6 sharp elbowed campaign staff get in there for the katchup bottle and a quick photo, ok my friend?, how 'bout those Buckeyes hahahaha..."

After 6 months or so of this sort of daily nonsense, your vote is probably going to go to whatever candidate or party doesnt show their face and disrupt you in your all to short lunch hour. Oh look, its John Mccain - again! Well check him off the list. Romney? get outtahere man, im trying to eat fergodsake...

Maybe the way to wrap this sucker up is to not run at all and to tell everyone thats what you are doing? Heck by that logic, I'm probably doing pretty good in this campaign.

Posted @ December 14, 2007 12:40 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (5)

How many foreclosures - and what kind of loans?

The world economy is melting down because of the US Real Estate market, at least thats the story that we are being fed by the nightly press. The story is that millions of homeowners have joined the likes of Tom Joad and his family and are sleeping in boxcars, thrown out by predatory lenders who couldnt wait to steal a little money from the little man.

Those thieving capitalists...

Here's a little perspective:

Gee. Most people have either a Prime Fixed or dont have a mortgage at all. Only a small number - a single digit small number - of "Sub Prime" loans.

So how many foreclosures are there and from what category:

Gosh, 43% of forclosures are in the subprime adjustable rate area.

( from the fantastic Larry Kudlow Money Politics)

What we have just proven here is the far out Nobel prize winning theory that that the subprime adjustable rate loans are risky to lenders.

I don't deny that there is trouble in the housing industry, what I do deny is that this is a shock and a surprise. Banks and lending institutions work diligently every hour of the day in figuring out who is a good risk and who is a bad risk on who is the best person or company to loan money.

It's fundamentally what they do.

Someone telling me that the banks didn't know that these loans were risky is like telling me that the insurance companies didnt know that insuring homes on the coast of florida was a big risk.

Of course they know, that's their job.

They play the precentages. You bet that paying a small amount of insurace premium each month will cover you if anything goes wrong, and the insurance company bets that lots of people paying the monthly premium will cover any losses.

So if you are a bank, and you have lots of "subprime loans", are you really that surprised when they go to straight to hell? No. You knew it was a risk. You probably had the person taking the loan get Private Mortgage insurance.

Oh wait, you mean to say that some of these loans were so risky that the person getting the loan couldnt qualify for Private Mortgage Insurance? or that by getting PMI the person would have enough money every month to get the loan?

And you're telling me that it didnt send red-lights-a-clanging-and-warning-bells-a-flashing on the loan officers desk?

Really?

Ok, so youre a bank, you are flush with cash because of the booming economy and you dont make money by sitting on it, you make money by lending it. The only part of the market you can expand into now ( because most everyone who can buy a house already has one ) is the sub prime market. This would be the market of people who dont own a house, and have had some problem with their credit score.

Sure, rich pickings in there, but that area comes with risk. So it would seem to make sense to me that you would as a bank, prepare for that risk, maybe set aside a certain amount of money to cover those potential losses in the event of, God forbid, the risky subprime loans dont get paid on a right honorable payment schedule according to the terms therein.

And here's where Mr. Sarbanes and Mr. Oxley come into the game.

You see, back on the last boom and bust cycle some 8 years ago, some geniuses in the Congress decided it was those nasty capitalist companies telling people things about their companies that got all those poor consumers in trouble.

You remember dont you?, The glory days of the stock market when there were people who bought Pets.com for 60 dollars a share, expecting, ( nay demanding!) that they make a profit and angry to the point of lawsuits to find that dog food really doesnt ship well in 60lb bags through the USPS when you can just drive down the street to get it at the same price - right now.

"Something must be done", said the people and Congress stepped in to make it so. So of course, Congress began to make sure that companies didn't send out too much good information about how they were doing, so as to unnaturally influence the poor and hapless victim, the consumer and shareholder. That horrible deceptive activity by those nasty captalists resulted in the passage of the Sarbanes/Oxley act, which is to American business what the McCain/Feingold act is to politics.

Oh good, Congress has saved us all from the predatory stock market profiteers, we can all rest easy now.

Sarbanes Oxley did a lot of things to American companies, almost none of them good and almost none of them solved any of the problems they were intended to solve. One thing it surely did was invoke the law of unintended consequences. Now under Sarbanes Oxley, companies have to be very careful about how they communicate and what they communicate. Unfortunately, that means that when there is good news, they rarely talk about it because things might change for the worse but when there is bad news, they wont shut up about it because if things get better no one will notice the bad activity. Since Sarbanes Oxley, you constantly see cases where stocks have "exceeded their quarterly projections".

What Sarbanes Oxley did was to cause companies to muzzle good news, and to amplify bad news and this is what you see happening today with the US Real Estate Market.

Either that or all banks suddenly lost their ability to determine who was a good risk and who was a bad risk, or its just possible that many banks are using this problem as an opportunity to throw lots of underperforming loans in risky areas and bad properties out under the rug of "the nationwide sub prime disaster - "which is not our fault dear shareholders but the fault of unforseen consequences and market forces...". After a few bad quarters the bank suddenly finds itself in the land of 'milk and honey' because the only loans they have are of the "high return, low risk" category.

"...Wall Street reports today the surpising rebound in the mortgage industry after 4 straight quarters of bad news..."

I'm not saying that banks and lending institutions arent deceptive - they are. I'm just saying that I find it hard to believe that this "Subprime lending disaster" is a surprise or as big of a problem as its being made out to be.

I mean, who would have thought that folks with 70,000 a year income couldnt really afford to make payments on a 750,000 house?

Probably the same people who bought Pets.com stock in 1998.

Posted @ December 14, 2007 07:13 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

What I'm reading

The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories.
Yeah you are right, I probably should get a hobby.

Posted @ December 09, 2007 07:17 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

It's not a bug, its a feature.

In regards to last nights "debate"(which I did not watch because my contempt for this sort of cartoon WWF version of politics grows by the hour) - I think those of you who are complaining about how unfair it was that CNN did such a laughibly bad job providing balance are missing the big picture here.

Come on guys, we are Republicans, since when have we ever expected a fair shake from the press? Democrats need special handing because they are 'delicate flowers', they need biased questioning to ensure that they shine, because frankly without it, they would stink on ice.

Think about the daily crotch kicking experience that President Bush has had to withstand since 2000, you show me the Democrat candidate who can withstand that sort of daily punishment.You think this "I hate the president" idea goes away with the end of President Bush?

Come on. 'Bashing the President', whomever he or she is a cottage industry. Its practically the new 'Silicon valley'. I'll bet the money spent on pundity is greater than the GDP of most European countries. People used to make and wear loud bowling shirts in public, they used to put flames on the side of their cars 'to look cool!" and followed the local football teams, now they play the big game of pundit politics like they know what they are talking about and they play rough like it really matters one way or the other.

What poppycock.

I say 'bring it on**', let's stop with the pretense of a balanced media, and just go ahead and let the Democratic candidates ask questions of our guys directly. Heck, have Sydney Blumenthal himself ask questions, I don't care. Frankly, all you Republican candidates should be able to answer and demolish their questions and if you really want to be my President, because thats what it will take to lead this country.

Democrats can run only if the conditions are just right. Democrats are the "goldilocks party". Picky, choosy little girls that are not above breaking and entering someones house to break their furniture and eat their food. They can't debate, they can barely talk to each other,much less a critical audience. No, not those folks, the 'Delicate Flowers' the 'victims of society', the 'angst and sadness' party. The party that cries more than "Iron eyes Cody".

Feh.

We Republicans dont just stand their and cry when some pinhead throws trash at our feet, we say "Hey jackass! - pick up da friggin' trash!"

You gotta remember folks that when you are President, you dont get to lead just those people in the country who agree with you, you gotta convince those who dont agree with you that your ideas were really theirs in the first place. Thats called 'leadership'.

Our guys can take a punch. No one on our side is complaining that "The boys are picking on me".

Sheesh.

The fact is folks, this isnt an infomercial for a new vacuum, its running for the office of "President of The United States"(Someone nudge Fred and let him in on that little factiod. Let him know the about the phrase that 95% of success is showing up. Nice ideas Fred, but you really do have to shake hands and show up in New Hampshire and Iowa if you want to run for President).

Heck,even our version of Dennis Kuncinich, Ron Paul can take on their guys on any number of subjects. (Ron Paul...say that reminds me, have you ever seen Dennis and Ron in the same place at the same time? ) We are Republicans here folks, we dont run from a fight. we welcome it.

You have to remember that the Democrats have already run screaming from the room at the very idea that they might have to (Gasp!) talk to Fox News(Cue the ominous music). If you want to be the President, like it or not, you gotta talk to folks from all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of variations in rational thought.

Stop whining. Get used to it. Embrace it. Its not a bug folks, its a feature.

(** - Ok, I would say that if John F'ing Kerry didnt totally ruin the use of that term)

Posted @ November 29, 2007 10:28 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

The Sick Lady of Edmonds

Vaction Blogging.

It's not work, its not play, its something in between.

We are now back from our annual trip 1900 mile round trip up to the in-laws in the Pacific Northwest. While I was there, I had a very nice visit to the much improved 'Museum of Flight' and in general it was a great trip. Burgerville on the way up, Ivars Salmon chowder a hockey game on Thanksgiving Eve, a visit to the Cascade Symphony and Third Place books meant that most of the big items on the annual "must do" list were completed.

Should I write on the Hockey Game? nahhh... The Symphony where the audience was older then the vey old members of the symphony turning the concert into a contest of wills to see who would fall asleep or die first? nahhhh....

The simple joy of Ivars Salmon Chowder or Burgerville and the 'Tillamook cheddar cheese and Bacon burgers'? Nahhhh....

Or, how my wife and sister-in-law went trawling at the local harbor bars for just a small slight chance to see Captain Sig Hansen of TV Show 'Deadliest Catch'? Nahhh. They had to settle for "Sig Sat Here" at the 'Lockspot' bar, along with a now favored T-shirt advertising said same.

Nahhhh. I'm not going to blog on any of those subjects. Instead of those the most obvious of things, I'm going to blog on my sister-in-laws 'objects d'art'.

My sister-in-law enjoys the arts of all types and works hard in her enjoyment. She is in the truest sense of the word "a patron" of the arts.

My sister-in-law, who serves as the family bed-n-breakfast for the annual Thanksgiving visit has a set of very interesting art in her home. When I say 'interesting', I say it in recognition that her home is esquisitely decorated and in very good taste, except as we shall see, a couple of examples of oddness. I say 'interesting' with the same voice inflection that Spock gets when the the Enterprise is suddenly surrounded by Klingon Battle Cruisers.

You see, while most of her art is pitch perfect and very nice indeed, she has a couple of very odd paintings that frankly, make no sense at all. Every time I see them, I just twist my head "RCA Victor Dog style" and wonder two things:

1. Who would paint this particular subject?

and

2. Who would buy it? and why?

To illustrate this phenomenon, I submit the following:

I call this one "Old Church - New Crack House". Now to be honest, this painting sneaks up on you like a special effect painting in the Disneyland 'Haunted Mansion'. If you see this from across the room, you say to yourself 'oh look, a painting of a church in a field, how nice". But as you get closer, it reveals its deep dark, uncomfortable self. The windows are boarded up and overhead vultures circle apparently waiting for the right moment to swoop in and snack on the long dead parishioners. It's like "Little house on the prarie" meets "The Omega Man". You expect that this was one of the paintings rejected by Rod Serling for "Night Gallery" as "Dear Sir, Sorry to inform you - this just too creepy for prime time". I'm fairly certain that if you showed this painting to most people in Europe they would see nothing out of the ordinary, because this is how all Europeans see churches.

I dubbed this painting "The Sick Lady of Edmonds", in a sort of homage to "The Mad Woman of Chaillot". This painting has always made me scratch my head and say, "Just what the hell is going on here?".

My wife likes to inform me that "She's not sick, she's resting. She's clearly tired of picking up after her ungrateful, slovenly, layabout husband and her uncaring children and shes just taking a moment to rest in her room for just two minutes without being bothered. Is that so wrong?"

I think they call that sort of analysis, 'projection'. It's like a Rorsach ink blot test, you sort of see what you want to see.

I look at it and I figure that she's saying "Oh sure, why this is exactly how I wanted to be captured for all eternity, in my house coat, flat on my back with my hair in a mess. Yessirreee, thats exactly what I had in mind when I told my parents I wanted to marry an artist. If only 'Johhny Von Rembrandt' here would put the same effort into painting the kitchen, this would all be worth it.I'll bet thats my towels he's using to clean his brushes, how many times have I told him not to use my towels..."

But why paint this scene in the first place? Did some artist get a sudden flash of inspiration and one forehead slap later, put his fingers together in faux picture frame style around the scene before him of his pale faced tuberculosis suffering wife as she sipped tea in her sickbed and said " AHA! I've got it! I paint what I see!". Her words from clenched teeth " Edward!! - Not NOW!" go unheard and unheeded as he gathered his oils and brushes. When the muse calls, you answer.

later, at the 'Art Gallery', a Lebowskian patron of the arts says to the owner 'This is it, this will really help tie the room together!"

Posted @ November 26, 2007 09:40 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

busiest.week.ever...

In short, I worked my fanny off.

I Havent shaved in three days.

Spent 5 hours driving 60 miles into the bay area for a 40 minute meeting, the awfulness of which represents the very last time I will ever set foot in Northern SF Penninsula. Period.

Did a radio show with Ed Driscoll. Loved it.

Spent three days locked in a large auditorium of a former state mental hospital and reviewed deep technical material.

Ate at 'Dave and Busters' next to a table of kids all under the age of 10 who had cellphones with cameras and thought it was 'heeelarious' to play paparazzi with each other by flashing their phones at each other. By the time dinner arrived, I was blind. The company was good, the food was awful, the restaurant was unspeakable.

Had a headache so bad I had to pull over to collect myself so that I could drive the 30 miles from where I was working to the nearest available hotel.

But now - Im on vacation, so blogging shall commence...

Posted @ November 16, 2007 08:17 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

A 1960's era acoustic rodent control device

I have an image running through my head.

US troops in Styker combat vehicles drive up the the edge of a village in Iraq. The sit inside, looking out at the village through the small protected windows of the vehicle. The Jihadis in turn, hide behind walls and street barriers and await the Americans in ambush.

The commander in the lead vehicle points to his second in command and nods "do it". The second pulls a lever. Suddenly the lead vehicle in the Stryker convoy begins to unfold a large articulated box, revealing a set of loudspeakers.

Inside the Strykers, the men scurry to put on their ear protection devices, winceing and shaking their head at the unspeakable horror about to be deployed against their enemy in the town.

The Sgt. yells the command "everybody git ready!", and then throws the volume knob to 11.

And this is what comes out of the speakers:

All around the village, dogs, cats, small animals, furry rodents of all size and shape as well as Jihadis, grab their ears and scream in agony. The Sgt. in the lead Styker sits in his self imposed silence while the screeching tune of "Run Al Run" booms forth from the loudspeakers overhead as he watches the scene of a village of jihadis writhing in agony unfold out the small windows of the Stryker. He sits quietly eating a snickers bar, and says to no one in particular "poor bastards, you almost feel sorry for them".

Posted @ November 07, 2007 02:48 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Just a couple of quick Pakistan observations

Im still under full 'Lucy and Ethel' mode here at the lab, but I just had a few questions about the Pakistan situation.

1. Wasnt it the considered view of so many in the puditocracy that what Iraq really needed in this time of strife was a 'strongman" that could restore order? Well now you got a stongman in an area of deep strife, so stop whining.

2. Dictatorships generally end very badly for both the dictator and the nation being dictated. Julius Caesar first set the pattern of being done in by his pals, and more recently we have the example of provided by Huey Long. The phrase "he meant well" doesnt seem to provide as much protection for the dictator as a good kevlar vest.

3. We should all understand that the Pakistani Army sentry who is standing watch in front of Musharrafs office is standing there without much else to do on his watch but be 'at brace' and silently ponder his destiny against his potential for earning a place in history. A man, a grudge, a pistol and an opportunity; the world has been made on such volatile combinations.

4. It strikes me as odd that he Islamic world has dictatorships that sit at each end of the world, almost as its 'bookends' with Mubarak in Egypt, Musharraf in Pakistan. In between those bookends stand most of the variations of human suffrage from tribalist, monarchial to religious state. Yet, there seems to be room on their bookshelf for everthing but a tolerance of democracy and modernity.

5. Pakistan can be seen as the most modern of the Islamic countries, by comparison to almost any other Islamic nation, it is an industrial powerhouse, yet in every measureable metric it is being swept away by its brother country, India. Yet India and Pakistan were at peer level until India embraced free market capitalism in the 1980's. India is now on its way to be a peer with China, yet Pakistan is now on its way to be a peer with - Iran. China too moved away from central planning to a market economy at the same time as India. Do property rights naturally lead to human rights and as such to human liberty? One proof would be that the opposite is also true, which seems to be at least one vector of what is going on in Pakistan.

And remember what I said, Pakistan stands head and shoulders above all the other Islamic countries. The road from Tribalism to Monarchy to liberal democracy took 1000 years in Europe, should we expect it to be any faster in the middle east?

Posted @ November 06, 2007 07:39 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Busy

It's not that I dont have a whole lot to say, its that I am really and deeply truly samped and busy beyond belief at the "revenue producing activity", I mean we are in full "lucy and ethel at the chocolate factory" busy lately, so bear with me for a bit.

And for you kids out there that dont get the reference above, here it is:

I promise to finish the '89 quake story this evening, and I might work in time to make fun of Mrs. Clinton along the way.

Posted @ November 03, 2007 10:20 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

One Thousand Blog Posts

On August 13th, 2004 I wrote my first blog post.

It was called “Pardon My Dust” and it was an apology, because I had no idea what I was doing or why.

It's now one thousand blog posts later, I still don’t.

But 3 years and 2 months later, I’m still here. At the time I started this blog at the end of the summer of 2004, the war in Iraq was just a year old, the election was just a few months off and I had no idea what it was I was going to write about or why.

Of course, now 2004 is history and we all know how it all turned out.

But history is like that. At the time you’re living it, it doesn’t seem like history, its just day to day stuff, it may or may not be important at the time, but it doesn’t occur to you that you will look back on a time like the summer of 2004 and have an appreciation for where that time sat in the big jigsaw puzzle of life. At the time I started the blog, there were significant amounts of people who really truly hated George W. Bush.

3 years and 2 months later, there still are.

At the time I started the blog, there were significant amounts of people who really truly believed that John Kerry was the best candidate to beat George Bush in the upcoming election.

3 years and 2 months later, they still drive around with their Kerry/Edwards bumperstickers oblivious to the march of time or that the election is now over. And that their "Dear Candidate" lost.

At the time I started the blog, there were sleepy seaside villages in the Indian Ocean that catered to foriegn tourists. New Orleans, Biloxi and Pascagoula were all parts of the ‘redneck riviera’ known for their laidback lifestyle and excellent seafood.

3 years and 2 months later, all those places have gone from the world in their own way.

3 years and 2 months ago, Bunker Mulligan, Johnny Ramone, Rob “acidman” Smith, Janet Leigh, Gordon Cooper, Theo van Gogh, Yasser Arafat, Price Bernhard, Artie Shaw, Johnny Carson, Max Schmelling, Johnnie Cochran, Terry Schiavo, John Mills, Frank Gorshin, Anne Bancroft, King Fahd, Peter Jennings, Bob Denver, William Rhenquist, Rosa Parks, Richard Pryor, Stanley “tookie” Williams, Willie McCool, Darren McGavin, Harry Browne, Slobodan Milošević, Buck Owens, Louis Rukeyeser, Alex Toth, Mickey Spillaine, Saddam Hussein, Red Buttons, Glenn Ford, Ann Richards, Freddy Fender, Milton Freidman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, James Brown, Gerald Ford, Art Buckwald, Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Robin Olds, Calvert Deforest, Johnny Hart, Kurt Vonnegut, Don Ho, Jack Valenti and my father we all enjoying life in the summer of 2004.

3 years and 2 months later, they are all gone.

What a party it would be to have them all over for one more Thanksgiving dinner. Personally, I get dibs on the seat next to my Dad and Anne Bancroft, but only if Darren McGavin sits on the other side of the table.

The world changes a little bit every day and the weird part is unless you take the time to watch it, you don’t notice it all that much. What has 3 years and 2 months and a thousand blog posts given me? An appreciation for the little things, for the passing of time, the note of the seasons, the smell of rain, the sound of thunder and the extreme temporary nature of everything and everyone you see around you. The world around us all seems like its made of concrete, steel and importance and its something permanent, but its all just so much alka-seltzer in a glass.

This is just a blog, but I like to think that years from now my little scribbled notes about what I was thinking was important at the time will help someone who comes after me know what I life was like for me in this little bubble.

Why did I start doing this? I started because I wanted to teach myself the discipline of writing. I wanted to have a place to go where I could put down in words what was going on in my head on any given day. I thought that blogging was easy. but most of all it was because blogging was, and is, fun. If it wasn’t fun, I would have stopped doing it long ago.

Because blogging actually isnt easy, its hard. Writing is hard. It’s damn hard to sit down and write. It’s hard to put down in words ideas that other people can make sense of or use. Blogging, the little tiny bit I’ve done, has made me appreciate the written word for the art that it is. Because in 1000 blog posts and 3 years and 2 months, Ive probably written about 10 things that were worthwhile.

There are things I don’t like about blogging. I don’t care for the death threats when I upset someones delicate sensibilities about their political beliefs, but you take the good with the bad. Yes, people get really upset when you challenge their beliefs.

So whats the good that offsets the "Death Threats"? Well I’ve been given some pretty good opportunities and I’ve met some real nice people in the process of being a blogger. My personal 'global village' is now populated by some first rate folks who have helped me in ways I don’t think they are aware of.

For someone who’s almost as allergic to meeting people as Howard Hughes was, I've even opened myself up and actually gone out and met other bloggers. I drove all the way to San Francisco and spent a wonderful evening with neo-neocon. Im sure I bored her silly, but I had a great time with it anyway. I could have talked to her for a week without stopping. I think she was grateful for the improvised ability to make a speedy get-away at the first opportunity.

I even once got a link from He-to-whom-I-aspire, James Lileks. Of course, I got it about a week after that arty-farty gasbag James Wolcott linked me with a rather bad review, but that’s ok. He’s a corpulent windbag who lives on the remains of his family name, no one outside of the Borough of New York have any idea who he is. But James who-the-hell-writes-like-this-with-what-seems-to-be-no-effort Lileks once said “oh this looks interesting” about one of my blog posts.

That my friends, was cool. (and Wolcott can still kiss my ass).

I’ve gotten more than my fair share of linkage from Glenn Reynolds. I’m sure he wont remember it, but one of my first forays into the blogosphere was acting as his on the scene reporter for how the media was trying to spin the economics around Christmas one year, so I wrote him and told him that everything looked fine on this side of the country, that people were buying everything off the shelves like usual, thankyouverymuch.

He posted it. That was nice. He does that a lot. I don’t know why he does it, but he does. It means a lot to me everytime it happens. I personally dont think Ive ever written anything worth linking, but he has and I thank him for it.

Getting a link from Reynolds is like when a comedian on the Tonight Show got the nod from Johnny Carson to come over to the sofa after they did their routine. You made it to the cool daddy-o! So come sit on the sofa with me and Ed and lets all head over to the Smokehouse after the show for a big steak with all the trimmings.

I even got a chance to work with Roger Simon on the Pajamas Media thing. Of course, that’s how I got in trouble with James Wolcott, but I was in good company, he hates Roger too.

But because of that contact, I got a chance to get into the A380 when it first came to the United States. I still have my badge that says “MEDIA” on it. I loved it. That was a great day indeed.

Ed Driscoll and the Anchoress are still with me. That’s nice. Stephen Green and David St. Lawrence continue to make me think, and they make me think that I’m not doing enough and that I could and should do more.

I don’t watch TV with any level that I once did. That by itself is reason enough to start a blog.

I’ve had days where I thought that I had enough, that I couldn’t get up the stuff to make another blog post. I’ve had other days where I’m frustrated that I cant get to the blog to write up what just popped into my mind.

It’s become an old friend actually. Its there, you pick it up, you spend a couple of hours and off you go. No expectations, no judgement, you just do what you do.

And that’s blogging really. You just sit down and write what comes into your head.

This is blog post one thousand. An hour ago, I had no idea what it was I was going to say about blog post one thousand, but 3 years and 2 months and another 1000 blog posts from now, I will be able to read this and recall what was going on in my life at the time and reflect on it with a greater illumination than I would have had I not bothered to write it down.

I'm sure that far off in the future some poor Archaeology undergrad is going to pour over all these blog posts from all these blogs and try to make sense of it all and go slightly mad over the whole thing.

And that is reason enough to keep going, so I think I shall.

Posted @ October 29, 2007 10:45 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (7)

UPDATE: Bobby Calvin

The now famous reporter for the Sacramento Bee who was upset at a checkpoint in Iraq has been now been vetted by co-workers as "OK", and he has apologized to "doc weasel" and rebuilt his blog with the stored version that the good doctor had on hand, with the now famous entry intact.

Since he really didnt have to do any of those things, and since everyone gets to be a total jackass at least once, I say no harm no foul. Its ok to screw up, you just have to own up to it. He seems to have done that so he's off the hook with me.

For now anyway.

Since he works in the same town as I do, I might stop by and see if he can give me the real 'Bobby Calvin' story when he returns. And if he finds out about this offer and takes me up on it, the beer will be on me.

(apology and vitriol aside, It's still pretty funny...)

Posted @ October 25, 2007 09:30 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

The music is reverseable

While out driving today, I discovered a little trick to help me get a sense of clarity. You see, people often use code words to say something that they know is offensive, but they want you to buy into it anyway.

For example, let's try this small example.

In yesterdays example of clarity, Senator Reid gave us the following:

"As you know, one reason that we have the fires burning in Southern California is global warming. One reason the Colorado Basin is going dry is because of global warming."

Ok, a quick turn of my newly created "liberal ideology" decoder ring reveals the following message:

"As you know, one reason that we have the fires burning in Southern California is because you have too much money. One reason the Colorado Basin is going dry is because because you have too much money."

See! thats as clear as anything, and you know it makes sense. Because calls for "solving global warming" always go after just one solution, taking away more of your money.

So try it yourself. Just substitute the words "you have too much money" in every bit of gobbledygook you get from the "I heart the earth" people. I'm going back into the codex to see if I can decypher any more hidden messages. Hey, someone tell the boss that the water tank at Midway island is broken and they are all out of fresh water. Now where did I leave my ELO cd's...

Posted @ October 25, 2007 01:38 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Im still laughing...

'Der Professor' had an item up on his blog about a reporter from the Sacramento Bee in Iraq who was upset that an American checkpoint didn't know who "Knight Ridder" was when he tried to go through the checkpoint without the proper id.

That was funny enough, but the best part was the reporter has a blog of his own and wrote about it there too. And yes, the blog has comments.

And yes, the comments are hilarious. For those of you not from the Central Valley and Capital city of the fair state of California, you should know that the Sacramento Bee is to the left of Pravda and just about as accurate. You could read "the daily worker" and get a better sense of reality than you get from the Bee.

"Knight Rider, Ted Knight, Riddler Rattler, Cake Batter, I dont give a damn who you are, you come through my checkpoint sunny Jim, you better have your act together and your paperwork in order and don't get mouthy with me, Mr. Johnny Smartass "I went to J-school-and-all-i-got-was-this-lousy-t-shirt" or youre going to need to start wearing a cup. You gettin' my general vibe on the situation there slick?

I give the reporter credit for leaving the post and comments up, but he is a 'class-a' toetapping jackass of the first order. He's lucky he can still walk upright.

UPDATE: The blog is down, but as you know, on the internet, you can run but you cant hide.

Posted @ October 24, 2007 09:03 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Harry Reid to Las Vegas: Drop Dead

“One reason why we have the fires in California is global warming,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters Tuesday, stressing the need to pass the Democrats’ comprehensive energy package.

Thats right kids, the senator from Nevada is talking about global warming. The brownest state in the union, also known by my circle of freinds as "Gods catbox", the state where the biggest city runs 24 hours a day and you have to drive thousands of miles to get to it from anywhere.

Yes, that Senator thinks that global warming is a problem.

I guess that means the Senator is going to go home and tell his constituents in 'sin city' that he's going to free all that electricity from Hoover Dam so that we can power our Prius'(Whats Plural for Prius? Priuii?) in California.

(I love Nevada I really do, I've lived there, my sister was born there, my grandmother is from Rhyolite, but lets face it kids, its like 'civet coffee', its an acquired taste and not meant for amatures or sissies. If you want maple trees and lakes, then stay home in Indiana or some other lovely place.)

Harry Reid is the least Nevadan of any person I've ever met.

Posted @ October 24, 2007 03:17 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Santa Anas and Firestorms

People who live in hurricaine country always compare earthquakes and hurricaines, but people who live in Southern California always compare earthquakes with Santa Anas, which people whos only knowledge of california comes from the annual visit to that place in Anaheim have no knowledge of. Earthquakes get the headlines because they are exotic, but Santa Anas are what people in the southland truly dread. You can prepare for earthquakes, but there is nothing you can do to prepare for the twice annual arrival of the damned 'Santa Anas'.

If you've never been in the Santa Ana winds, you just have no idea what they feel like. But for comparison purposes, Its like having poison ivy, then having the upper layer of your skin rubbed raw by latex ballons while you stick your head in an convection oven.

Its not just the heat, its the way the wind makes you feel crazy that makes the wind especially creepy. And to make matters worse, the desert scrub that grows on the hillsides burns like gasoline, as do the tops of all those palm trees. Once the fire starts, it just races from house to house until it gets to the beach, the only thing that seems to slow its progress are the freeways and the cement river channels. Notice I said "slow", because Santa Anas feel like they have a life of their own. Nothing stops a Santa Ana, it stops whens its good and damned ready to stop and not before.

Once upon a time, I lived in Anaheim right next to the big amusement park dedicated to a mouse. One day during a Santa Ana wind, I went to work in the morning and as I drove down Katella Ave, I looked behind me to see a small fire at the top of a telephone pole just a few streets away with a fireturck or two at the bottom trying desperately to put it out.

The small fire I saw that morning ended up engulfing and devouring several blocks of homes, apartments and stores. It became a fire big enough to be seen from where I worked in Tustin. It started because one palm frond on one palm tree touched a powerline and it just spread down the street, block after block after that. And thats how it goes, you go to work in a neighborhood of homes, you come back into the debris of disaster, all because of a few knots of wind blowing down from the desert. One minute you live in the center of calm suburban normality, the next minute its all under a foot of ash. Once the firestorm gets started, theres nothing in the world that will stop it. It stops when its done, not because of anything you do.

How bad are firestorms? Well, I've lived through earthquakes and firestorms, and I will take earthquakes any day. The biggest earthquake I ever lived through, the loma prieta quake had several of my co-workers displaced for several months. They did they best they could, and their spirits were up for most of their displacement.

By contrast, the Oakland fires that happened just a small time later were much more emotionally distrubing. I dont remember anyone leaving the Bay Area over the quake, but after the Oakland hills firestorm, I knew a large number of people who not only left the bay, but the state. I saw more than a few people break down in tears over the fires. I never saw that happen over the quake.

Strange as it sounds, in California, you are prepared for quakes which happen randomly and rarely, but nothing can prepare you for watching not just your house but you entire neighborhood burn to ash down to the foundation in just a few hours. The Santa Anas come twice a year, and there's not enough alcohol in all the bars of LA to calm the jittered nerves of the southland when they come.

Posted @ October 22, 2007 08:58 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Staring out towards the horizon

Sir Francis Drake. Sailor. Circumnavigator. Pirate.

In June of 1579, an English ship landed on the coast of a remote place that would eventually be known as California. Sir Francis Drake on the run from the Spanish, had the audacity to sail north from the Central American trade routes and not south like everyone had expected. He and his crew explored the coast, found a good spot, and careened the ship and repaired the hull.

For three weeks, Elizabethan era sailors walked along the sand of California beaches, thousands of miles from the nearest European, and no one had any idea where they were, or where they were going next.

For all their connection to what was then called civilization, they might as well have been on Mars.

California, or what would become California, had the same moderate climate that it has today, had plenty of food and most importantly, it was very sparsely populated. At least by comparison to what would come later.

I’ve often wondered about what that was like, to be thousands of miles away from anything remotely close to civilization and all the compromises comes with it.

I’ve also wondered if any of the crew found the temptation to stay as attractive I would have found it. I wonder if "the good Captain" left anyone behind or if during those three weeks ashore if anyone went out for firewood one morning and just didn’t return,

Along with a firearm or two, a hatchet, a knife or two and a couple pairs of shoes.

I was thinking about that just the other day as I swam through the flotsam of what had been a bad meeting at work. Lots of yelling and finger pointing and as I stood at the podium with my powerpoints illuminating the wall behind me I found myself saying in my inner dialog:

“If I could leave, I mean really leave, I mean leave as in “Alpha Centauri or Bust” leave, I’d be so totally gone right about now”.

Its one thing to think about going to Alaska or New Guinea, Gilf Kibir or some island the South Indian Ocean, yes there are parts of those places that are remote, but you just know every sunrise or sunset you can look up and see a satellite brightly go into the terminator and there’s a jet contrail over most parts of the sky anywhere in the world. Signs of civilization are in every corner of the modern globe. My guess is that we live in a time where there is no place you can go and be as remote as those Elizabethan sailors with Drake were.

But the laws of physics and the expense of space travel aside, what is it that keeps us here in civilization? Why not just keep moving like our ancestors did? Until about three generations ago, that was what people did; they kept moving along. There’s a certain value in moving beyond the potential improvement in economic condition, there’s a sort of lifestyle “car wash” that occurs with immigration that allows you to re-invent yourself at the next stop.

I’ve traveled past most of the immigrant trails in Utah, Nevada and California (yes, 150 years later, you can still see the wagon trails in the dirt, the graves, the inscriptions on rocks that mark the passage of all those people) and I always find myself asking what it was that made them walk, I mean literally walk over that territory.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that it was about something more than the money.

To me, it was also the ability to “get away” as much as what they were going to that mattered to them. It was the ability to start over, to leave it all behind that mattered. They weren’t just going “to something”, it was that they were leaving something behind.

On purpose.

In the end, that was the whole idea. That’s why they didn’t stop in Nebraska, Wyoming or Idaho or other places that were just as nice as what they would find in California and Oregon. Those places were just too close to all that they hoped to leave behind. Too easy to be found, too close for someone to bother going to find you. 300 years after Drake even for the people of the world of the “49’ers”, California and Oregon might still as well have been Mars, and frankly that was probably the real attraction.

Today, no matter where you go, no matter how far, there’s a McDonalds just around the corner, A TGIFridays, Macaroni Grill in the same part of the neighborhood as the Applebee’s, a Target right across from the Home Depot, the Lowes on the other side of the street and the busiest store in town is always Wal Mart.

The most uncomfortable feeling in the world is to be traveling on business, to be tired and worn out walking through a Wal Mart at 2:00 am for aspirin and for just a fleeting moment, you forget what city you are in because all the stores are the same, they same layout and floor plan, the same goods on the shelf.

And overhead, cameras watch your every step. There’s a camera watching you and someone watching the camera every step of the way. Forget innocent till proven guilty, in the modern mercantile business, you are a criminal until you cross the threshold of the store, after that you are a disgruntled customer.

Everytime you go through the register, a little bit of data about you is gathered but it’s like the old thing about natives not wanting their picture taken because they felt you would be stealing a part of their soul. For me, everytime I buy something and the person behind the counter tells me to use my “bonus card”, I feel like a part of me besides me money has been taken from me. Sure, its only data but it still bothers me. Right now they just want to know what I’m buying to help them predict what to put on sale and when but some day, it’s going to be more than that. Someday, someone is going to want that data about certain individuals to prove a point in court and then it wont be funny anymore. Soon, our purchases of cough medicine, aspirin, hemmroidal creams or contraception will all become fodder for the legal world.

Cameras at red lights, traffic cameras at bridges and freeways being fitted with license tracking software. GPS in your car so the insurance companies can track your mileage and travel habits. Bank records come with with your every use of your ATM.

All of that data, all about you and its all out there for just waiting for the subpoena and some day the subpoenas will come. Good people standing for office or even applying for jobs will be called to explain why they purchased various things at various times from various stored or why they were in parts of town they shouldn’t be in or why they constantly broke traffic laws. That’s how civilization is made. The tall non-compliant grass is mowed down by the dual motorized blade of “were only looking out for your best interests” and “its for the good of the children”.

Frankly, it’s all starting to make me feel just a bit uncomfortable. It’s starting to make me look out at the horizon and think about what it means to leave. It’s also made me long for a time when you really could get away, just by walking towards where the sun comes up or goes down until you run out of land. And then you make a boat, and keep going.

If you could get away today, would you go? I mean really get away, not take an RV up the Alaska Highway and stay at KOA’s all the way to the arctic circle; I mean go “away”.

There are days when I think that it’s a good thing that we don’t have the technology to leave the Earth and the solar system as easy as we would like, because if we had anything like that, the Earth would probably be a ghost town in a week. Not because the Earth is such a bad place mind you, but because all of human civilization has at its core a way of making you want to leave it just as soon as you can.

Maybe that’s what makes us human, the desire to leave all the other humans behind.

I envy the men of the Golden Hinde and I admire all they accomplished, but I’ve always wondered what it was that made them come back to Elizabethan England after seeing a place like Wild California. Because I think I would have stayed right there on the beach and waved as Captain Drake, the crew of the Golden Hinde went over the horizon taking that little piece of civilization with it.

Posted @ October 21, 2007 12:49 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

life is what happens when your making other plans

I thought I would be right back and I could finish the story of my experience in the '89 loma prieta quake.

Then life interrupted and threw me off my game.

I will get to it soon, but its going to have to wait for revenue producing work to subside.

Posted @ October 18, 2007 09:35 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Happy Loma Prieta Day

On October 17th 1989 at 5:05 pm, The San Francisco Bay Area was struck by a large earthquake. And where was I? under the Bay Bridge(pictured above- the 'after' version), under the bay itself, standing inside a packed BART train. We felt a bump, and then about 3 minutes later the train stopped and we waited well inside the dark train tunnel just under the shore of West Oakland.

Inside the tunnel, we waited for what we thought was just a typical daily, dead simple no big deal delay to clear, so we could get home. Baseball fans took out their portable tv's in hope to catch a few minutes of the World Series Game that was being played just a few miles to the south of us, as they travelled home.

My wife was on the train just 10 minutes behind mine. When we left work that day, we thought it would be a typical hour long trip home.

We were wrong.

(I'll be back later to finish the story.)

Posted @ October 17, 2007 04:25 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Kathy and Woz: The odd couple

Kathy Griffin and Steve Wozniak? Who would have guessed? Like my friend Corinne used to say: "God makes them and they get together. You never quite know who or why!"

This is probably the worst single picture of Woz in his whole life. All I can think of is the subtitle should be something like this:

Kathy Griffin: [singing] If you're blue, and you don't know where to go to, why don't you go where fashion sits...

Woz: 'UTTIN' ON THE 'IIIIITZ!!!!

I wish them the joy that comes from making us all look stupid.

Posted @ October 17, 2007 12:03 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

good news - bad news

Good news: Phil Hendrie is back on the air.

Bad News: George Lucas wants to make a Star Wars TV show.

Here's my thing on Star Wars:

1. Loved Star Wars.
2. Really loved Empire Stikes Back.
3. I absolutely hated 'Return of the Jedi' all the way down to the zippers on the ewok costumes. The whole Star Wars thing just went straight down hill from there. Once, a story tightly told, only to be betrayed by the teddy bears from hell.

I distinctly remember sitting in the audience and wondering what the hell happened to George Lucas. Little did I know that Return of the Jedi would be the one I hated the least. By the time we watched 'little ani' become Darth Vader(yet another really bad idea),
I was looking at my watch anticipating when it would finally at long last, be over. Fine, so he's Darth Vader, ok, we get it.

I should have been in tears but instead I was doing the "potty dance" and thinking about how I was going to tell the kids I really didnt care if we got the dvd when it came out.

I really thought the ewoks were the worst idea I had ever seen. Then I saw Jar-Jar and I knew that there was a whole new basement in the outlet store of 'bad ideas'. You see, this is what happens when you have too much money, theres no one to slap you upside the head and say "Have you lost you mind? Teddy bears? A flop eared malaprop spewing swamp goon? Come on George let's try to do something really good here, ok?"

I hope that Mr. Lucas takes the time to remember his last foray into television, because I sure havent forgotten it.

Ladies and Gentleman, put on your pukka shell necklace, your bell bottoms and adidas shoes to return with me to 1977. For your viewing pleasure I present "The Star Wars Holiday Special".

Avert your eyes if you have an allergic reaction to the likeness of Bea Arthur.

Posted @ October 17, 2007 12:30 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Varifrank's Laws

1. You dont get paid by how hard you work, but by how hard you are to replace.

2. A man without enemies is a man not living up to his full potential.

3. The universe is not an entirely rational construct, therefore science and mathematics have their limits as tools of discovery. Sometimes you just have to guess.

4. All great discoveries occur because of a random accident colliding the irrational persistence of a man who didnt know any better than to keep working when everyone else had already given up.

5. The worlds large monuments, such as the Pyramids of Giza were made for no other purpose than to simply keep people busy. There is nothing more dangerous to governments than well fed people who have free time, no common purpose and most importantly no need of control or organization by said governments.

6. The migration of Homo Sapiens around the planet after the end of the last ice age was fundamentally powered by the genetically ingrained desire within all members of the species to get as far away from their inlaws as possible.

7. The core idea of western civilization is the phrase "none of your business".

8. The core idea of fascist and communist thought is "you have no business".

9. There is no leftist thought, except that no matter what the situation is "America is always wrong".

10. The collapse of civilization begins when your next door neighbor takes an interest in whats on your side of the fence.

11. News is not information. News is just the airtime that exists inbetween car commercials; its only purpose is to keep you watching long enough to make it to the car commercials. If they thought they could hold your attention by broadcasting a lava lamp, they would do it.

12. The only part of the news that you can really use is given to you by the weatherman, who is almost always the station idiot.

13. You can teach anyone who can think logically how to code software, but you cannot teach anyone to think logically; they either have it or they dont. You would really be shocked at how few people think logically.

14. Most humans are sane and rational, but all human organizations are insane and irrational. The bigger the organization, the more insane and irrational. Therefore, avoid joining all large organizations the same way you would avoid making eye contact with the crazy homeless people that you see on the way to work.

15. If you cannot own property, you are property.

16. No matter how important you think you are, 10 years after you are dead, the only people who will remember you ever existed or what you looked like are related to you. Use your time accordingly.

17. Having children is the only method of time travel to the future that is allowed by science.

18. Utopia is the single most destructive idea ever invented by mankind.

19. If you find only yourself at the center of the purpose of your life, your life has been wasted.

20. If you feel the need to whine about the current circumstances of your life, imagine yourself standing on the stage of a college lecture auditorium, in the audience sit all the members of your ancestry extending back all the way in time to the stone age. Father, grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great grand fathers and mothers and so on and so on. Now, imagine trying to tell them how tough you have it and then try to imagine how hard they would laugh at you for complaining about the air conditioning on your lexus not working or your condo in florida going down in value.

Inspired by Nivens Law's.

Posted @ October 16, 2007 11:26 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Sure is a lot of activity going on in little old Syria lately

From October 14th 2007:

snip.

"...the official North Korean Central News Agency said the speaker of North Korea's parliament, Choe Thae Bok, has left for a trip that will take him to Italy and Syria. The report gave no other details."

end snip.

Given the fact that the world now recognizes that what Israel struck in the Syrian desert was a North Korean designed nuclear site, it makes you wonder what intelligence briefings Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ( Third in line to the Presidency) is getting.

Which makes me wonder about something that has been rattling around in my head for a long time about the intelligence briefings that are being received by the Democratic leadership in Congress.

This site in Syria had to have been known to many intelligence teams for some time, certainly it was known to exist before Speaker Pelosi stepped on a plane to give the Jihadi enemies of this country a photo-op, she must have been given some sort of "briefing" on the nature of the folks she was meeting with.

As such, I can only conclude the following:

- The Democratic leadership get them, but dismiss the conclusions, due to ideology.

- The intelligence briefings are laughibly bad and full of nothing but double talk and CYA language, rendering them largely neutered of any valuable or timely information.

- The Democratic Leadership get them, they are accurate in their assesments....

...and they dont care!

Given that the Democrats are now hell bent to destroy a strategic alliance with Turkey, for no other purpose than the destablize the region, I can only conculde that they not only dont care about Syria dangerously escalating the world towards nuclear war, they are in some ways working to see that it happens.

visted Syria this year. Do you think they will be proud of that if the North Koreans are

Posted @ October 14, 2007 10:08 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Guess the author!

In an article written today, who was the journalist who said:

- "President Bush has no better friends than the spineless Democratic congressional leadership."

- "Some supporters were outraged at the obfuscation by the Democratic front runners"

- "To have major Democratic backing to stay the course in Iraq added up to good news for Bush."

- "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is another Democratic leader who has empowered Bush's war."

- "Is it any wonder the Democrats are faring lower than the president in a Washington Post/ABC approval poll? Bush came in at 33 percent and Congress at 29 percent"

Click here to reveal the answer.

I think someones been getting way too much saltpeter in her morning cream-o-wheats.

Posted @ October 04, 2007 08:52 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

"...like khaki dolls hanging below green lampshades..."

Click here to hear the broadcast

Thats the way that Edward R. Murrow described a drop of US Paratroops into Holland as part of Operation Market Garden in September 1944. A perfect 'word picture' to describe to people who only knew of war from what they saw in magazines what men falling to the earth from thousands of parachutes might look like.

You can think of this as a journalistic "palette rinse".

This broadcast describes the drop of paratroops from a Douglas C-47 into the fields of Holland. This is recorded at the actual event. You hear the engines of the aircraft, you hear the wind through the door and you can feel the moment in his voice.

Its electric, the moment fills me with tears.

Occasionally, its nice to be reminded of a time when journalists were on the same side as you and your country, instead of the 'perfumed preening pimps for socialist utopia' that we have today.

And for the "kids" out there, Operation Market Garden didnt go that well for our side. Its very likely that a large number of the men Mr. Murrow witnessed in the jump from that aircraft, died within in the following weeks.

The sound of those engines on the C-47. Theres nothing quite like that.

Posted @ October 03, 2007 02:39 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Scenario of the day

Imagine in todays hypersensitive political age that a General in Iraq visited a field hospital and in the process came across two soldiers who were weeping and crying, and geerally being a couple of complaining little whiners.

Now imagine that the General publically slapped the crap out of both of them in full view of the press and other Officers and Enlisted men in the hospital.

Imagine that in the early days of this mans career, he was also engaged in fighting against an insurgent guerilla army, and having ambushed several local guerilla commanders, shot and killed them then strapped their dead bodies to the hood of his car and put them on display for the press.

Ok, you get it, he would have never had a career in the modern day United States Military. He would be a subject of 'Hardball' for months on end, TNR would run this character on the front page, along side pictures of Abu Ghirab as evidence of American atrocities and "why do they hate us? here's why!". John Kerry would probably call him General "Jengis Khan".

Now go ask your veteran family members how many more Americans would have died in World War II and how much longer the war would hase gone on, had they not been under the command of George S. Patton.

Then sit and wonder what sort of 'idealogical cheesecloth' we are using to filter our military leaders of today and what it will eventually produce.

More Wesley Clarks? or more George Pattons?

You decide.

If you have a teenage boy in your family, ask yourself what type of man you want leading your kinsman if he were to be called into a war?

Wesley Clark or George Patton?

You decide.

Posted @ October 03, 2007 10:06 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Blog Radio - The Rick Moran Show

Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House has given me the honor of appearing on his Radio Show today at 1:00 Pacific today.

Little does he know that my voice has a timbre that lies somwhere between Don Knotts being kicked in the balls and fingernails being dragged down a chalkboard...

UPDATE:

Click the icon above to listen to the show. I start rambling on like Dutch Schultz on his deathbed about 15 minutes into the show.

Posted @ October 02, 2007 11:00 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Democrats and Board Games

Not content with just being known to history as "defeated for 7 years by the powerhouse political strongman George W. Bush",Democrats have now decided to attack a man who owns the airwaves for three hours a day.

Apparently he said something about 'phony soldiers' and they didnt want him cutting in on their act because they consider the "false accusations about the military" their street corner and they arent going to give it up without a fight.

What was once said about "not starting an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel" can also be said about someone who's voice can be found in every populated area of the western hemisphere for at least 3 straight hours every day.

3 hours a day, 5 days a week, repeated on Saturday and Sunday, with newsletter and website and podcast for a low,low monthly subscription. Democrats seem to have collectively decided in their "moment of triumph" with a whopping 24% approval rating to wander into the idealogical bull ring, not dressed as a matador, but wearing a red union suit, clown shoes and a big red nose, and then bend over while facing the other way and waving at the kids in the front row of the stands.

Right in the path of the charging enraged bull.

And now we know why it was that a Democrat managed to get us into a land war in Asia (not once ,but twice - Korea and Vietnam - Truman and Johnson ) a complete lack of understanding of the fundamentals of strategy.

It was once said that the wars of england were won on the "playing fields of Eton". In America, your grasp of strategy comes down to the board games you played as a kid.

Remember when you were a kid and there was always this other "snot nosed kid" who considered himself above playing kid games like Risk, Stratego or god forbid a little 'penny ante' Poker, three of the four foundations for a really good fundamental understanding of strategy**. Well that kid probably grew up to be a Democrat. Always true to his high principals and 'impossible to impress' standards, but completely deviod of the common sense that only comes from knowing why Australia is only continent on the game board worth holding on to.

Picking a fight with Limbaugh.... Can they be bigger idiots? Whats his downside? hmmmm,nothing really. I get material for lifetime of shows and a dozen book deals, so bring it on!. Whats theirs? oh, gosh lets see, an invigorated right wing electorate who already hates you and sees you with nothing but suspicion. Sure, that works, lets go pull the lions tail Gumby, that will great be fun!

What else can the Democrats do thats in the realm of common sense things that even children know better than to do? Perhaps pulling on Supermans cape, spitting into the wind? pulling the mask off the Lone Ranger? or dare I say it, by messing around with Jim?

Does their complete lack of fundamental economic sense also come from their idealogical rejection of the game "Monopoly"? Did inner city communist parents even allow the game of "Monopoly" in the house? Is this why they can't understand why owning the hotel is much better than renting, even on Baltic Avenue?

You and I get this basic fundamental ecomonic fact before we are out of elementary school, but ask your average leftist if owning is better than renting and they rub their chin and go off into a debate about the real question being "is renting really greener than owning?"

Is this why leftism has always failed?, because its core ideas cant be condensed to work in game theory and little bitty charms that you use a random throw of the dice to move across the board? Milton Pennybags, icon of ruthless capitalism!, but where is the little "mini-fidelito" working his way through the world of guerilla warfare?

Will there ever be a "CHE! - By Milton Bradley, batteries not included"? Of course not, because who wants to play a game where the object is that everyone loses and you blame your inability to win on the people who live in the house next door.

Democrats. The Poindexter Party.

**(Chess being the 4th, but I'm too much of a nerd to admit it)

Posted @ October 01, 2007 02:56 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (8)

Back

(Bonneville Salt Flats, captured last Sunday via the 'Cellcam' while driving "blue betty".)

After one very long week in a building buried deep in the 'salt flats' just outside of Salt Lake City, I'm now back at my desk in suburban California. I can't tell you what it was I was doing there, but I can tell you I was in Salt Lake long enough to eat at the Red Iguana, Rodizio Grill and at Cuchina Toscana.

All three were excellent, and the 'after hours' activities almost made up for the butt-numbing god awfulness of 'system testing', which went perfectly, which is to say nothing went wrong, which as I said, is "face-implanted-on-the-desk-thats-covered-with-your-own-drool inducingly-dull.

Nice town Salt Lake, but it's good to be home.

Posted @ September 29, 2007 08:30 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Top 10 worst public speaking ideas for infamous personalities

Somewhere on this list belongs the literally insane idea of a genocidal antisemitic hellhound coming to of all places, New York City and somwhere just before that is the idea that a genocidal antisemitic hellhound should receive an invitation to speak at an institution like Columbia University.

Here goes:

10. John Wayne Gacy visits 'boys town'.

9. Jeffery Dalhmer giving a speech at the Culinary Institute of America.

8. Ted Bundy appearing at a fund raiser for WEAVE.

7. Dan Rather signing books at an 'Accuracy In Media' event.

6. David Duke being extended and accepting a professorship at Tuskeegee.

5. Noam Chomsky as Guest Celebrity Conductor at the Annual Boston Pops July 4th "John Phillip Souza-pallooza" weekend.

4. Paris Hilton and Laura Schlessinger on a "reality show road trip" to - Salt Lake City by way of Las Vegas.

3. O.J Simpson doing a commercial for Marriage Encounter Weekends.

2. Larry Flynt at Disneyland, waiting in line at "its a small world" directly in line behind Andrea Dworkin.

1. J.Z. Knight at a CSICOP conference

If the man who shall not be named wants to come to the US, have him to come to Los Angeles. I can find more than a few of his former countrymen who live there today, in peace and freedom. Those who have escaped his nightmare of Islamic Revolution who would be more than happy to give him a reception he would not soon forget.

One also wonders why he isnt going to visit The Carter Center in Georgia. It would seem to me that the former President and the man who now leads the movement that held Americans as hostages against all standards of international law and decorum would have a great deal to talk about together.

Posted @ September 21, 2007 03:52 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

warning: I aim to misbehave

Fair warning is given, I'm about to offend and irritate a fair number of you. I gotta powerful rant going and its about to flow out all over the keyboard.

Think of it like a Gallagher concert, don't worry about it, just get your plastic sheeting out, dont wear white, and enjoy the show. Try to remember that no matter how uncomfortable you may be that you are not the watermelon.

Here's a hint to the subject. It seems that someone from 'out of town' wants to come to New York, and somehow I'm all for it...

Posted @ September 20, 2007 02:23 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

frustrating blogger nightmare

Sometimes you can't think of a thing to blog about, and sometimes you spend days thinking about a single idea that you want to blog about and you get nowhere with it and you decide not to post anything on it and then theres when you finally have a big, "hallelluha" epiphany moment where you finally figure out a big,big thing that you have been puzzled by for 6 years...

...and you are so swamped with "revenue producing work" you cant sit down and get it into the blog.

but here it is: The Petreus hearings the week and bad Robin Williams movie I caught in passing this week, helped me crack the code of the "Bush Derangement Syndrome" virus. I now know exactly what it is that drives the left so insane.

It's not what you think. It's also why the left hated Rumsfeld. It's also why so many of us on the conservative side of the argument remain somewhat immune to the worst of the side effects from the disease.

and i-cant-get-4-hours-free-to-type-it-up-and-get-it-posted...

aaarrrgghhh!

The weekend is coming. But so are the reno air races. DAMN YOU FRANKLIN COVEY AND YOUR EVIL DAY PLANNERS!

Posted @ September 13, 2007 01:26 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Fossett lost, but Ogle found

A fascinating tale from the SF Chronicle.

Those of you who are not from the area who are wondering how anyone in the modern world could get lost with all the electronic aids available and the preponderance of telephones, radios, and a McDonalds every 10 miles, you should be aware that this is some of the most remote, most difficult terrain in the lower 48 states. You have a better chance of being found on the backside of Mars than you do if you crash in this part of the world.

When I was a kid living in Northern Nevada, a private plane that departed from Stead AFB went missing one day. It took 10 years to finally locate the missing aircraft and it was only 15 miles from the end of the runway.

It was found by accident at the bottom of a ravine. I suspect that this too will be the fate of Steve Fossett, to be found by a hiker 30 or 40 years from now.

Posted @ September 10, 2007 08:06 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

The Day Before

I don’t remember much about September 10th, 2001. I’m sure I had a list of things to do the next day, I’m sure I had an agenda to follow and things to do, but I can’t remember a single one of them.

I went to bed in one world on Monday, and I woke up in another one on Tuesday.

It all seems like another world; the things that we worried about on Monday, September the 10th. They were all torn away like thin tissue paper on the following day. I had a different life when I went to bed on the 10th from the one I woke up with on the 11th and the one I lead today from the one I lead then.

On Monday September 10th, I was working on a new team at work, concerned with converting Solaris to Linux, from Sparc to x86, worried if the next round of layoffs that was going through the entire industry would reach me and my little team of technical staff. Were we about to be “outsourced” like so many others in our business had been, or just “whacked” from the corporate roles altogether?

I could have said that about any day in September 2001, not just the 10th. I have no specific memory of that specific day, and yet it was a day that would mark the end of a way of life, you would think some memory of that day would remain with me. Nothing would be the same the next day, and yet, there was no sign that a major change was coming, no strange light on the horizon marking the coming fire.

I think it’s a sign of just how traumatic the day to come would be. If you get into a serious car accident, the fact that you forgot to mow the lawn the day before, which was right up to the moment of the accident the most important thing on your mind, right up to the moment your car went crunching along into the telephone pole, turns to vapor with only the slightest scent of sigificance left hanging on your mind after the accident.

Lawn? Mow? Laundry? Grocery store? Bagels? Pound patrami? Sauerkraut? What?

Big trauma is the kind of thing that wrecks your soul like a 5 year old wrecks a chessboard when he realizes he’s about to lose. He laughs at you and the flips the board into the air and all the pieces and the board fly about, while you just sit there at the table with a dumb look on your face. As you try to pick things up, you can’t really remember where you were in the game when it ended.

I lived most of my life in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. I didn’t live in Germany, but in Western world, the non-communist world, we knew that as long the wall was standing, there were sure to be men with guns, tanks, aircraft and missiles willing to make sure it stood there doing its evil business. There would be other men on this side, ready to stop them. No matter where we stood in the political spectrum, the shadow of that thing and all it represented, hung over all of our lives.

No matter what people think today, people should know that the Cold War went on for the better part of 40 years and people died fighting it every single day for that entire time. It wasn’t bloodless. It was bloody and right up till the very end, it could have gone either way. Men died and people were killed every day for 40 years. The fact that it didn’t become a nuclear exchange shouldn’t be used as evidence that there was no fighting and that it was peaceful. There was fighting and dying all through the Cold War.

It was not peace; it was living daily with the shadow of big horror that might be, lit up by the occasional flare of the “brush wars”. It was war fought on a more strategic level with more people wary of the consequences, but it was war all the same.

Once the wall came down, it took awhile for me to let go of it and all it represented. The war was over, but it seemed very unreal; it was the most unlikely of results. It was the last thing I expected to happen. I had expected the war to begin right at the very place that had seem people with champagne in one hand, using sledgehammers in the other to knock down the cement creature that had snaked through all of our lives.

The big war I had expected to come for all of my lifetime, never came, and for awhile I was actually certain that it was “just a trick”. It seems so silly now, but for the first couple of years, I kept looking for some sign that it was just fakery by the other side, meant to put us off our guard.

It never came of course, and eventually I had to let it go. I began to enjoy a world I could never image as a child. A world without Strategic Air Command and its unspoken Soviet equivalent making slow ovals in the sky, making their contrails silently with their deadly cargos ready to do the work we sent them to do with just a word. No SAC, no “Alerts”, we turned our missiles off and we all went home.

Frankly, it was a world without Soviets.

I remember the first time my son, born long after the end of the cold war asked me “ Daddy, whats a Communist?”. The question shocked me but half way through my answer, I was crying tears of joy with my explanation. An enemy so gone, they became a trivia question in a board game just five years after their complete collapse. In the end, the “10ft tall” men of the Soviet Union that I had feared in my childhood were no more than the equivalent of hunchbacked, gap toothed “carnys” in a travelling tent revival meeting in his. The Soviet was just an edge of town revival tent held up only by the point of bayonets, full of the sweet smell of good intentions, hot air and the promise of a better world made true by the desire to “stick it to the man”, but completely empty of anything that actually worked.

In 1989, they pulled up stakes, leaving nothing behind but a field full of litter, where the day before the glittery hopes of the little people were on display as evidence of their ascendancy.

If what happened on September 11th 2001 had happened on September 11th 1991, I think I would have been better prepared. I would have been half expecting it.

All through the 1990s, you read books like Fukyamas “ The End of History” that were basically made by people like myself who were lost in a world without any real meaningful challenge to the Western World. China? Yeah, they were Communist, but not really a competitor and after the collapse of the “Communist mother church” in Russia and the signs of the cracking at Tienamien Square, you felt like it was just a matter of time before they went too into the ashcan of history. Islamic terror? it wasn’t even on the radar. It was like fearing some splinter group of the IRA. A car bombing here, a hijacking there, a nuisance, but not really a threat. Iran? Couldn’t even beat Iraq in a 10 year war. In 1992, we beat the Iraqis, all while the usual leftists suspects said that thousands of Americans world die and that the US Military had ordered body bags in the thousands in anticipation, our doom was foretold because we were imperialists and they were strong men of the middle east, used to the ways of the desert, while we were soft and incapable western imperialists who would meet our doom as we had before in Vietnam.

The war, such as it was, was over in 100 hours and we, the soft Americans were victorious. Our losses of men in the war seemed inconsequential. We had faced the Soviet Union by proxy, its client the Iraqi Army and their equipment was as worthless for them as it was in Afghanistan.

Our troops came home to parades and the President said;“ We beat Vietnam Syndrome”. It all melted away in the mouth of history like cotton candy.

We put our trucks and tanks back into storage and we piece by piece dissembled the military. “War is hell” but peace can be utterly brutal to the military and the 1990s were worse than any peace before. There didn’t seem to be any sense to keep it all going, who was it we were we going to fight anyway?

For once, there was no need to worry about the enemy on the other side of the hill. The rules of business were replacing the rules of battle and warfare. “We might just get through this after all”, I thought. It was a warm syrupy opiate of a thought, and like most addicts I took in as much I could get, and overlooked the side effects.

The mind-set of the 1990’s were like cough medicine narcotics; all sweet and addictive and a spoonful at a time. The “world of the internet”, the new world of global commerce and a whole new way of doing business. Profit didn’t matter, “eyeballs” mattered. Business mattered, not military might, that was the old way and those days were gone, just like the wall itself was gone.

It was all so damn dumb. Like an office christmas party that goes on too long and gets too loud, you almost hope no one remembers it, but we do, we all do.

I don’t really remember what I was doing on September 10th. When I awoke the next day, it was as if I awoke in a house in the middle of a forest fire. Whether or not I had done the laundry the day before didn’t seem to matter anymore because by mid afternoon I was wondering if y the end of the day, I would have a house in which to do it.

To this day, I start the day the same way every day. I quickly check the TV, to see if any commercials are playing. If there are, then everything is ok. Because the first thing I remembered on September 11th was something I didn’t think about when I saw it at the time.

There were no commercials on that day.

My head hit the pillow on the night of September 10th in a world of concerns and worry for things that, in the end, didn’t really matter anymore. All sickly sweet and full of nothing but the numbing effects of an addictive, self destructive medicine I should have been smart enough to know better than to take in such quantities. A world of debating tax cuts, petty office politics and a stock market that was on its way down rather than up as it had been all through the 1990’s.

But the world I awoke to on the morning of September 11th, was a world at a war. A war that I thought in the "cherry flavored" 1990's would never come.

Posted @ September 09, 2007 09:51 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

you can't make this stuff up

"The Syrian government has actually shown a lot of compassion in keeping its doors open, and being a host for so many refugees..."

Dennis Kucinich, in Syria, today, with a straight face.

Posted @ September 06, 2007 07:31 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

You know what his problem is, dontcha?

From the Daily Mail:

snip...

"...The ex-newspaper editor took great delight in making fun of President Bush for falling off a Segway - the two-wheeled, motorised, gyroscopically balanced scooter that, its makers promise, will never fall over. However, he was bitten by karma and suffered the same fate as Bush..."

...end snip

You know what his problem is dont you? Yes you do! Why, he's a toe-tapper!

Snip...

"...He broke three ribs after falling off the Segway at 12mph in California - just three days before he was due to make his biggest TV appearance to date, as a judge on the grand final of reality show America's Got Talent...."

In my experience, men who fall down in public are only looking for one thing...

A judge on a talent show? Suspiciously laying about in suggestive poses in public? He's a "toe-tapper", I'm telling ya, I got a aguy who called a guy who asked a guy and they all confirm. toes have been tapped...

Mark Levin probably thinks this guy is a "toe-tapper" too...

Posted @ September 03, 2007 04:00 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Announcement: I've got a little list...

From this day forward, I shall use the perjorative term "toe-tapper" to describe someone I wish to mock. I hope to start a world wide popular movement of anti-"toe-tapping" bigotry.

We'll put a stop to all this well coordinated top hat, black pants and leather shoe wearing frivolity once and for all. The devils scourge of tap shoes, tap dance schools, the "black mass" of tap dancing contests and the subversive showing of Fred Astaire movies; all this shall end when the revolution comes my friend, you just wait. Soon, we shall all wear Vans and finally be free of the curse of patent leather and click-click-click clakety-clackety-clackof metal dance taps.

And after the tap dancers are gone, we shall start on the people who wear sandals to business meetings or formal affairs. First, we will start the slow torture with with those who wear sandals with socks,not just white gym socks but bright multi colored socks, and then women with big arms in sleeveless dresses, and then men who wear baseball caps with business suits will go. Not necessarily in that order, but they all have to go.

Which reminds me...

We need to do something about the millionare "movie stars" who go on national TV and look like they were just in the parking lot draining the fluid from the transmissions of their cars.

Cut your hair, sit up straight, you're on TV! You mom is probably watching. And for Gods sake, what have you got to whine about? What are you, a coal miner? if you never work a day in your life again, you will have a very comfortable existence. But nooooo, its whawhawhwhaaaa, oh cry for me argentina... I've had a summer of Lindsey Lohan, Amy Whinehouse, Owen Wilson and Britney "doesnt-everyone-hold-their-kids-in their-laps-when-they-drive,dammit-paris-I've-lost-my-underware" Spears. I never thought anyone would make me nostalgic for Madonna, but Spears did it. Thats how bad it is folks, where Cher once stood, now stands Madonna, and someday God-save-us-all will Britney "no-pants" Spears stand, only to be followed God knows what and I really do not want to know what it is that takes her place.

I used to think that the infamous "Donkey Shows" of Tijuana maked the final level of hell for the fallen and the the damned, but now I'm convinced in just 10 years time I will see "serious actresses" profess their desire to be in "The Donkey Show" to further their career.

Mark my words, that day is coming.

And exactly why is it that all you people in Hollywood all so damned unhappy? Oh wait, I dont care why you are unhappy I just want you gone, so get in the truck, its off to be processed, you slacker genius voice-of-a-haunted-generation-whos-neven-done-a-damn-thing wonderkid. I've had it with everytime these no talent goobers fall and scape their knees, they are off to 'rehab'.

Talented people dont go to 'rehab', they dry out, write great albums or books about it or they die 'before their time' in a bathtub in France. That's how nature deals with the curse of fame. The Gods look down, see how you've put your divinity inspired talent to work, and they find you screwing around and wasting it on "Daddy Day Camp III". Well off you go then, you get "walk the plank" into loser obscurity, only to come back as a shriveled shell of your former self in 50 years time, when the next generation discovers your comic or singing genius that you had for all of 10 seconds before you discovered the "fun" of some new and exciting version of morphine and got turned into a vomit covered, human toilet seat cover with a SAG card who really "just wants to direct".

You penance for your sins is you get to answer the question "so what would you do differently if you had to do it all over again" a thousand times a day until you die of a stroke on camera.

Amy Winehouse is right, Rehab is for losers. You want rehab? then get a job - a real job, a demeaning, soul sucking hourly pay, tax paying job, go feed your kids, all of them, not just the ones you live with on alternate weekends because your business manager said it would be good in the divorce settlement, and stop hitting the crackpipe everytime you inhale.

That will straighten your crap out real fast.

You are only going to rehab because your business manager has determined that you still have money to be drained out of your accounts, not because "you are special", because you aren't. Remember Pete Duel? Yeah, in his day, he was pretty "special" too. 20 years later, you can't find anyone who knows who he is.

Look in the mirror, you addict losers, thats you in 20 years, only Pete Duel was talented, it will probably happen faster for you.

How about Alfred Lunt? Name ring a bell?

how about Anna Magnani? No? Well they were both Academy Award winning quality folks. But you ask a random sample of 100 people if they know who the are, you'll get zip back except from the whackjobs. Thats fame for ya, you work your whole life, you get to be a statistic in a book somewhere.

The minute you are broke - dead broke and you can't even work on "Dancing with the Stars", rehab is no longer your option, jail is.Just like all the little people. Just ask Dana Plato, oh you cant because she's dead. Damn...

Robert Mitchum didnt go to rehab, he went to jail and you know what, I can respect that. He didn't whine about it(oh no! look what the man did to me, whahhahahwhaa), he didn't apologise, he just did his time, and went on to have a career. A good solid kick butt never gonna forget this guy career. And he still managed to raise three kids, all from the same wife, that he was married to for 37 fricken years.

Robert Mitchum: Actor-Badass-And no freaking "rehab".

And who decided these walking emotional trainwrecks should have a say in politics of any kind anyway? They can't do math, they cant drive, they are completely irresponsible in every way. Run for office? sure they are qualified for that, but talk about it, engage in discourse?What! are you kidding me? You wouldn't let half these people watch your kids for two hours while you go out to dinner, but you are going to pay 100 dollars a plate to go to a fundraiser with these losers so they can sit at an elevated podium with 100 other no talent goobers as they try to shake off a hangover, all while you look through opera glasses from 200 yards away and say "Honey, I think he's looking over here, no wait a second, thats his bodyguard holding his hair back while he inspects the palm tree up close. Wow he really cares about the environment, he's been looking at the base of that tree now for 10 minutes."

Actors. The original "toe-tapping" monkeys.

sheesh...

Posted @ September 02, 2007 08:39 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

History File: Two Generations of McCains, Sept 2 1945

Vice Admiral John McCain and Cdr. John McCain Jr.,on board a U.S. Navy ship (probably USS Proteus, AS-19) in Tokyo Bay, circa 2 September 1945. Admiral McCain died a few days after this photo was taken.

The United States Navy had begun the process of occupation just a few days prior. Japanese Naval bases on the island of Honshu, including Yokosuka are already under control of US troops. Repatration of Allied Prisoners of War in the Japanese Home islands and under its control is under way as part of "Operation Swift Mercy" The Fleet has begun to assemble in Toyko Bay for the surrender ceremony on September 15th.

As part of the initial surrender agreements with Japanese, General Wainright and General Percival ( Wainright, who surrendered at Battan and Percival at Singapore) are to be reparitated with utmost speed, so that they may be part of the surrender ceremony.

62 years ago, the world had seen the end of Hitler, the end of fascism in europe, the total destruction of two cities to atomic warfare and the end of the Japanese Imperial Empire.

62 years ago this week, The end of World War II was at hand. In 9 days, John McCain III, a man who is today a Senator from Arizona and running to be President of the United States, with one son in the Marines in Iraq, would at the age of 9, lose his grandfather.

History has its way with all of us, but the eyes of our grandfathers never leave us.

Posted @ September 02, 2007 07:13 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

North korea joins libya in nuclear capitulation

North Korea agrees to give up its nuclear ambitions.

There is no confirmation on the theory that the breakthrough came after Kim Jong-il was caught toe-tapping in the mens room.

This seems like good news to me,
- we didnt go to war
- we worked with 5 other states in the region which border North Korea
- we provided a diplomatic framework that didnt involve tromping off to Washington D.C. everytime someone wanted to talk about something

That and the removal of one of the routes to Nuclear Iran, seem like very good thing to me.

Its good news, which tells me the only thing we will hear about it will be those parts of the deal that appear to make President Bush look bad, buecase in the end thats all that matters. All news these days is after all, opinion, spin and entertainment dressed up in a suit.

Posted @ September 02, 2007 12:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

In Defense of Larry Craig

Here’s what I learned when I read the police report on Larry Craig

1. Whatever you do when you are on a layover between flights, don’t use public bathrooms before you get on the next flight. Clearly, that is a sign that you are looking for anonymous gay sex, because no one in his right mind would use a public bathroom for any other purpose.

2. If you enter the bathroom and all the stalls appear to be full, don’t stand outside and tap your foot. While in some cultures looking at your watch at tapping your foot is a way of showing that you are anxious and perhaps ready to explode your bowels all over the floor, in Minneapolis it means only one thing, you want anonymous gay sex.

3. If you really, really have to go, and you are not really sure that there is someone inside the stall or not, whatever you do, don’t investigate further by trying to look inside. Clearly, that can only be read as a sign that you want anonymous gay sex.

4. If you get inside a stall, and you have your roll-on flight bag with you, be sure to hold it over your head while you sit on the toilet because if you place your bag in front of you, that can only mean one thing, you want anonymous gay sex.

5. If you find yourself frustrated and angry that the geniuses in the janitorial staff has set the ultra mega large roll of toilet paper in such a way that despite the fact that the roll is the diameter of a watermelon, it still only dispenses one square of toilet paper at a time, whatever you do, don’t fumble around trying to get more toilet paper, because if your fingers manage to appear on the bottom of the wall, it clearly can mean only mean one thing to the person next to you; that you want anonymous gay sex.

6. If a man in the bathroom takes you by the arm and tells you to come with him and flashes what looks like a badge, it usually means he’s really a policeman, and not the kind in "The Village People". Do not react in a late middle age homophobic way and get all bothered because you think for just a second that someone might think “you’re gay too”(oh heaven forbid!), just stand up straight and answer the man’s questions. Seriously, you’re in your 60’s Mr. Craig, I can assure you that no one is hitting on you.

7. If you have a choice between missing a flight and getting a lawyer to help you address the charges against you, heres a helpful bit of advice, get the lawyer – miss the flight. Chances are Senator, the local police force is counting on you and many others doing exactly what you did, pay the fine, and then (you’ll excuse the pun) - blow out of town.

Is there such a thing as entrapment? Do policeman lie? Do they bend the truth? Do DA’s get overactive and push prosecution of cases when the politics of the matter fit their particular template? If you say no, then I got some phone numbers of a bunch of college students who went to a party one night in North Carolina and nearly went to prison over it. Their lawyers and their families can tell you stories about how an entire legal system fell around their heads one night and how the press tried and convicted these young men, despite the fact that there was never any evidence of any sort of crime.

But unlike you, they were smart enough to get lawyers. Imagine if they hadn’t, and trusted the police and the DA, like you did...

Senator, if I was on your jury, I don’t see enough in this case to convict you of much of anything, I don’t see you soliciting sex or anything else close to it. According to this paperwork you to me look like a befuddled airline traveler trying to do his business in a dignified way in an undignified place.

Unfortunately there’s never going to be a case because you decided to pay the fine and admit to something that is quite a bit more than what I see reflected on the paperwork in front of me. That of course, isn't stopping the press from making you out to be "The Idaho Caligula", but that's the press for you, they dont let facts get in the way of a good story.

I’m going to take a guess here and think that you got more than a bit flustered, you got yourself in front of a whole lotta policeman who said a whole lotta things that you considered very unseemly, and considering that you’ve spent the last year getting chased around by the worst sort of slander about your very personal sex life, for just a moment there you saw your life go before your eyes. While you sat there in that little room with the hidden camera going, you stared into the two way mirror for a second when one of the helpful policemen probably leaned across the table and offered you a way out. “Just plead to the lesser crime and no one would be the wiser,” he said quietly, grasping your arm and looking into your eyes. You leaped at it, you had to, after all of the scenarios of disaster running through your head, it sounded good and after all Senator, in your experience policeman are always fine people, the nice one that offered you the deal probably seemed like a real nice guy, unlike that effeminate little bug-eyed man who arrested you.

I could be wrong because after all, the evidence presented to me wasn’t in a court of law but from a website called ‘the smoking gun”. The policeman who filed the paperwork may be a lot more convincing in person than his notes appear to me to be. That doesn’t mean I think the Minneapolis Police are lying or that they have some hidden agenda here, because I dont.

I think that policemen are just people and people make mistakes. That's why we have courts and an adversarial legal system, Mr. Craig. Its just a shame you didn't use it for this case.

Did he lie? Don’t know. Did you lie? Don’t know. But I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, Senator. Its my opinion, before you go tromping over a mans life, the evidence needs to be a little bit more than what I see presented here.

Oh, and Senator, I don’t care if you’re gay or not. It's 2007, who isn't gay? If that bugs you, that's your problem. What this whole adventure does convince me of, is that you most certainly are a complete blithering idiot of the first order and that’s what should matter the most to the people of Idaho and not your sex life one way or the other.

Don't run for re-election. Take your retirement, and get some therapy, ok?

Posted @ August 28, 2007 10:18 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (13)

A Headline my grandfather would not understand

poverty –noun

1. the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support; condition of being poor; indigence.
2. deficiency of necessary or desirable ingredients, qualities, etc.: poverty of the soil.
3. scantiness; insufficiency:

obesity - noun.
The condition of being obese; increased body weight caused by excessive accumulation of fat.

I don't want to be judgemental but perhaps they would have more money if they just didn't eat so much?

Posted @ August 28, 2007 02:22 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Worlds Ugliest Cars

Business week has a slide show on the 11 ugliest cars of the 1970's.

What's sad is, I owned 3 of them.

1. The Chevrolet Corvair.
Air cooled 6 cylinder engine, 100 fanbelts and a two speed automatic transmission, what's not to love? Don't all cars leak oil at the rate of a quart per day?

Yes the 1968 corvair monza convertible was a nice car. I didnt have that one. I had the 1963 4 door hardtop model. It was old the day it rolled out the factory door.

2. The Chevrolet Chevette.

My first car out of college. To be honest, I never had a problem with it. It was the last car I ever owned without air condtioning. It was also the last car I ever had with "wind wings".

3. The Ford Pinto.

This car was the "family wagon" from 1975 till 1982. It taught all 3 of my sisters to drive. One sister backed it out of the garage with the doors wide open and yes, it did eactly what you think it did. The doors peeled off the frame like a banana peel and fell to the ground. At no point in the 9 foot long maneuver did my sister slow down or stop, she just kept going as the doors were loudly ripped from their mounts, all the while she sat oblivious to the metal carnage going on around her as she kept dutifully looking backwards down the driveway, so as "to avoid getting into an accident" as she would try to explain later.

The old man got home from work that day and just stood in the driveway and looked his daughter, and then at the debris pile leading to the car and shook his head from side to side, took his hammer and mallets in hand and simply "convinced" the doors to go back on the car. It was as if he wasnt the slightest bit surprised or disappointed. It was his daugther, her 'Modus Operandi' was well known and it was after all a "Pinto", it could be rebuilt with a minimum of effort.

The poor pinto, with its newly mangled doors would go on for another 4 years of use and abuse at the hands of my sisters. It never failed or faltered, but it burned oil like a two-stroke motorcyle.

My wife owned a Gremlin. It not only didnt have an air conditioner, it had a heater that always worked, which if we lived in anchorage would have been a feature but since we lived in the central valley of california where August is the season where lead melts in your driveway, it was a hellish experience to drive. Literally.

It was later sold to one of my other sisters(not the 'door peeler', but another sister) who proceded to get into an accident a week later. She and the Gremlin were unharmed however, the truck that hit her, was totalled. Ugly? yes. Built with soviet tank robustness?, you betcha. (And yes, I'm talking about the gremlin, not my sister)

Posted @ August 28, 2007 11:48 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

caught in passing

William Shawcross, of the recent article on the accuracy of the Presidents assessment of Vietnam...

Well, his father was Lord Shawcross, and was the Chief British prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials. He makes an appearance at the end of the "World At War".

Funny old world, aint it?

Which tells you what I've been watching as of late. ( I found the turtlenecked, longhaired 1970's version of historian Stephen Ambrose to be a particularly disturbing image.)

Posted @ August 27, 2007 06:27 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

my new favorite French phrase.

President Sarkozy, in the original French:

"une bombe iranienne, ou le bombardement de l'Iran"

I love it. It's "Crisp".

( my old favorite French phrase was "Les cimetières sont pleins d'hommes indispensables" - De Gaulle.)

Posted @ August 27, 2007 03:38 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

The Making of "The World At War"

You can get anything on the internet, if you look hard enough.

I've mentioned it before, but the 1970s Documentary 'The World at War" remains as one of the finest works in this history of the medium.

If you've never seen it, you need to get it, sit down and watch it.

Now.

If you have seen it, you need to see it again. And you already know why.

Now, thanks to YouTube, There is a 5 minute view that shows the producer discussing the making of this fine documentary.

I highly recommend this documentary.

Posted @ August 25, 2007 04:12 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

mortgage fraud- money laundering - offshore shipment scam continues (now going worldwide!)

...and again, something in this story jumps right out at me:

snip...

"...A former Philadelphia resident who spent some of his time in a federal prison in Georgia concocting a scheme to defraud Cendant Mortgage Corp. of $2 million was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Camden.
Reginald Greene, 47, known as "Amin," was indicted on charges of wire fraud and money laundering. Also indicted on money laundering charges was Michael Umali, 38, known as "Khadafi," a resident of Oxen Hills, Md.

The pair had met in the federal prison system and worked with a Cendant employee, not named in the indictment, to arrange the wire transfers of cash to cover 15 purchases of residential properties, according to the indictment. Closings of the properties were all scheduled for Sunbelt Title Company in Miami, Fla.

end snip...

More details here.

I cant quite put my finger on it, but something in that story just sort of jumps right out at me...

Oh, and its not like were alone in the US with a sudden outbreak of 'mortgage fraud'. Like all things truly modern, its a "global phenomenon":

snip...

More ambitious fraudsters appear to have taken out multiple mortgages and walked away with the cash, and the scam has been mimicked here.

Persimmon sold apartments in one of its Thamesmead developments to a property developer, Atrex, at a deep discount. Atrex is then believed to have created false identities to borrow from lenders at inflated prices, and then pocketed the difference.

In other cases, it is believed to have used “mortgage mules” ? genuine people, but who had no connection with the properties in question. A&L has since ordered its surveyors to make more stringent checks amid fears that genuine buyers in new-build developments could be left stranded in negative equity with loans worth more than their properties because they have been forced to pay inflated prices for flats.
snip...

“The investigation has established that between May and November last year, a company bought 84 off-plan new-build flats in Thamesmead. The company then resold the flats at greatly inflated prices using mortgage brokers and chartered accountants to fraudulently provide inaccurate mortgage applications for the genuine buyers. In most cases the buyers would not otherwise have qualified for a mortgage.

“The fraud came to light following reports from banks and building societies when either the properties came to be sold or repossessed and the true property value was realised by the lender. The full loss to the lenders cannot be ascertained but the benefit to the conspirators is estimated in the region of £3m-£4m. The investigation is ongoing and arrests have been made.”

A spokesman for Persimmon admitted selling to Atrex, but said it had made the necessary checks.

“We have developments across the region that attract interest from both private and buy-to-let investors and at the Pinnacles in Thamesmead we sold approximately 40% of the apartments to a single property company, Atrex Property Company Limited,” the spokesman said.

“It is not our policy to discriminate against any purchaser wishing to buy the property within an expected time-scale from the date of the reservation. The formal procedure that we require is a money-laundering identity check.

“We meet our legal requirements but are always reviewing our procedures to ensure they are as effective as they possibly can be.”

end snippage...

One of the things about globalization that we didnt think of is how a scam, once perpetrated, can travel half way around the globe before the local market has any idea that its underway.

UPDATE: Welcome Pajame-hedeen! The story has been going on for awhile, and was first noticed by this blog as the great "pot house" story of 2006. This story, and its trail seems to be just the start of what has become known as the great sub-prime mortgage collapse.

The news updates on the radio every 15 minutes are telling you that your neighbors are foreclosing on their homes at a huge increasing rate. What's really going on is that people( in my opinion, organized crime and yes, even Jihadists) have been scamming banks on a gobal basis, taking advantage of what can only be called crappy unethical banking practices that are none too interested in looking closely at the paperwork on these deals and their partners in shady real estate practices across the western world.

"mortgage mules"? Just remember, you heard the term used here first...

Posted @ August 22, 2007 08:02 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

ALERT: Have you seen these two men?

From KOMO.tv in seattle

SEATTLE -- The FBI is asking for the public's help identifying two men who they say have been exhibiting unusual behavior on Washington state ferries.

FBI spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs said the men have been reported by by passengers on several ferry runs and, while the behavior may have been innocuous, investigators would like to talk to the men.

Burroughs said the men appeared to be taking an unusual interest in the workings of the boat, but she would not elaborate.

Passengers and crew members on different runs on separate dates reported the men to authorities.

Investigators would not disclose on which ferry runs the men were seen.

Anyone with information about the men is asked to call the FBI's Seattle office at 206-622-0460.

(Additional note: If you ARE these two men, get thee to an FBI office immediately.)

Posted @ August 20, 2007 06:35 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

once again we play our little game

If there is such a thing as the 'healing power of prayer' then there must also be the ability to wish someone dead. If that is true, then Fidel Castro must have the hateful thoughts of 6 million cubans sitting heavy on his coal black soul.

The Great Babalu has picked up signals that say, once again Castro is dead.

Perez Hilton is catching the same wave.

Here's how we play this game:

- Wishes alone dont make it so, but sudden movement of diplomatic staff is a pretty damn good indicator that something is up. Watch the venezuelan and spanish embassies.

- Denials will fly, until everyone is in their assembled places in Cuba. Watch for movement of South American leadership to Cuba to come out of the blue.

- Watch for sudden alerts by the US Coast Guard for 7th District.

- We will know for sure within 12 hours.

I've scheduled myself for a very large hangover for the 24 hours following the first available photo of 'el jefe' in a casket.

Yes Virginia, its quite ok to wish someone ill. Commandants of concentration camps like Cuba deserve no special dispensation under the normal protection of common humanity.

I hope he's dead, and I hope he died in pain after a long illness.

Posted @ August 17, 2007 09:47 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (2)

Research Bleg: Investment Title Documentation

Can anyone offer any help as to what this is?

And why is it posted to the internet?

It pertains to our case of "I&R Inestment Properties" in Stockton, but I dont understand enough about real estate to know what it is I'm looking at....

Thanks.

(jasper lamarr crabb, jasper lamarr crabb...)

Posted @ August 17, 2007 08:41 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

something about this story jumps right up at me...

Mortgage Fraud Bust Linked to Stockton Homes

- The FBI says Iftikhar Ahmad, 36, made millions by buying and selling more than 100 houses over the past eleven years.

- According to a complaint and supporting affidavit filed in federal court, many of the transactions involved a quick turnaround with a dramatic price increase.

- Many of the mortgages came from subprime lenders and in some cases the buyers used stolen identities, according to the FBI.

- In many of the real estate transactions, the buyers defaulted within a year.

- The FBI believes Ahmad sent at least $484,000 of the money to his native Pakistan.

- Investigators say Robert Ortiz Alfaro bought two homes from Ahmad with a combined purchase price of $520,000. Both homes went into foreclosure. Manpreet Singh, 24, also bought two houses from Ahmad worth a total of $695,000, according to the FBI. One of them went into default within months of the transaction. Ahmad, Alfaro and Singh face charges of mail fraud. Ahmad also faces money laundering charges.

So, you have lots of "ill gotten" cash that you need to get into banks without raising suspicion. You find a willing accomplice who can act as a real estate agent and you buy homes using a set of false or stolen identities and you use the cash in less than 10,000 dollar increments to "salt" the bank accounts of the stolen identities, so as to provide the basic requirements necessary to secure a loan. You then get subprime mortgages to buy the property using the stolen identity( Im guessing that there were lots of people at George Costanzas "Vandelay industries" who were taking out sub-prime loans), the money for the purchase of the house goes to your escrow account from the sub-prime lender and is then deposited in your confederates banks.

...and three months later, you and your false identity are nowhere to be found, the 'salted account" is emptied, and the house sits vacant, only to be foreclosed by the subprime lender, who now has a house worth 50% of the value loaned. This is how you rob a bank, without using a gun.

Identity theft. Mortgage fraud. Money Laundering. Pakistan.

How much you want to bet that this isn't an isolated case?

A friend in the real estate business once told me " The real money isnt in selling drugs, its in selling the real estate that the drugs buy..."

More here at the Mortgage Fruad Blog

Posted @ August 17, 2007 08:30 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

Walsh - Duffy get up here, I got a job for you...

Research question of the day:
The collapse of the recent housing bubble -

Is it related to the grown number of "grow house" busts in the last 6 months, which is itself related to the growing number of money laundering operations that have been closed down?

I know that the Sacramento housing market was badly hit when over 300 homes were discovered to be purchased solely to work as places to grow pot and when those homes were closed they sat on the market, and that sudden large amount of distressed inventory caused the market to look weak.

If this is happening in this market, there is no reason to believe that its isolated here. If its happening on the same scale across the country...

Gray area offshore banks need to launder money, give loans to other banks, who move the money with high risk real estate loans, which are used in part to buy homes to grow pot, and all goes well until the pot houses are discovered, which also uncovers the real estate offices and mortgage companies that are funding the traffic, which when closed gives the reaction to the market that "houses arent selling..." which is symptom of the actual disease and not the disease itself.

More to follow...

Posted @ August 15, 2007 08:57 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Finally...

( an image that matches my emotions right now...)

I havent been blogging much for awhile because I have been working on a very large work related project, And today it went live,so I'm elated.

Theres some low intensity, "post golive", clean up work to do, some reviews to do, and then its off on real vacation for a couple of weeks.

I will be attending "Blog Fest West" on August 18, 2007.

Elated, exhausted and damn happy to be here. Thats me all over...

Posted @ August 10, 2007 11:08 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

And now for a moment of clarity

Now children, wasn't that refreshing?

(When things go bad, they always call for the sonsabitches - Admiral Ernest J. King)

Posted @ July 25, 2007 02:51 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Iraq: Better than Vietnam!

In Soccer, that is...

Lesson #1: It doesnt matter whats going on in your country, there always time for soccer.

Lesson #2: "Charlie Dont Surf?" Well apparently he doesnt block or run with the ball very well either.

Lesson #3: How's that Taliban team doing in the cup this year?

Lesson #4: We left Vietnam years ago, so why isnt it paradise yet?

I wonder why theres no exhibition game between Iraqi players and American teams?(ans: we would get our ass stomped thats why, but it might be good for Iraqi national morale...)

You know, It's funny how much more motivated the Iraqi players are, now that they don't live under the constant threat of dismemberment at the hands in the Husseini crime family.

Posted @ July 25, 2007 08:22 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Forced Perspective

Back when paved roads were new and travel by car across the country was a spectacular adventure, various organizations printed detailed maps and travel guides to assist the driver in his quest.

One such guide was the Mohawk-Hobbs Travel Guide. This guide provides the intricate details of the "Victory Highway" which is today known as Highway 80. This highway crosses the Sierra Nevada mountains, the Nevada and Utah deserts and cross the rockies into the great plains.

The guide,(available online here) is an interesting read for anyone who has ever made the trip across country by car. It gives you a perspetive that has been lost on the nature of the people living at the time.

It must've been something to see that road back in the day. All two lanes and gravel shoulders, no signs, snowplows, tow trucks, buses to casinos or a McDonalds every 10 miles. Every town different from the next, every garage noted with detail for the help they could provide that you would most surely need. Those of you who tinker with old cars and say nostalgically that "They dont make them like that anymore!" rarely hear the answer from those of us who have sat beside the road with the said same "they dont make them like that " car rendered useless because of some mechanical oversight, often at the worst possible time in the worst possible conditions;

"And Thank God for THAT!"

I dont hold much nostalgia for cars of the past. I like the way they looked, but the idea of going back to an era of "points, plugs and condensers" every 3,000 miles vs. electronic ignition, compression ratios and maintenance schedules of the modern engine and I'll take todays engines any day of the week against anything produced in the past.

Travel guides are relics of the past. Today you zoom along at 80+ miles an hour in air conditioned comfort, listening to hours of MP3's or satellite radio under the watchful guidance of GPS, telling you of every gas station, restaurant along the way, all the while knowing that if anything were to wrong the Cellphone is there to help you out of your trouble. A written guide telling you theres a mechanic in the next town? ("just one"? you say.) Whats the sense? every town is the same as the next, there's the McDonalds, the gas station on every corner, the Wal-Mart and so on. You drive on radial tires that go 40,000 miles betweeen replacement, a feat in the old days of "re-cap" tires was simply unheard of. You have no idea what "vulcanization" is much less understand why the Mohawk-Hobbs guide tells you if there is someone who can do it in every town along the way. "It must be important" you say, but its lost on you as to what it is or why they cared so much about it.

Occasionally today you see the past expressed along the side of the road with a the sign that stares back at you like a mute ghost baring silent testimony to a world that no longer exists. For example, the sign "RADIATOR WATER" as you drive up the Grapevine from the valley floor up Tejon pass on California I-5 harkens back to a time before pressurized radiators, when any water would do and to car engines that had barely enough power to pull the bulk of the cars of that age, over that pass.( again, look great, generally drove like hell, no power steering, no power brakes, and ahem... no power!)

Today, even the smallest economy car flies right over the pass with nary a thought of the regular travails of those who stood at the side of the road, radiator cap in hand, to a fountain of hot steam being ejected from a too small radiator, temporarily scalded and stranded there on the roadside on the way to the promised land that was just over "the hill".

Every time I go over the Grapevine, I'm painfully aware of what it means. I smile as a fly over at 80 miles an hour with the engine temperature not even taking notice. The "RADIATOR WATER" sign passing on my right, marking the base camp on so many earlier summits of the great pass. I usually see someone in the side of the road, filling their late model beater car with water and I always say a quiet prayer for the poor bastards trying to force the last bit of work from the old piece of detroit iron. Another alumni from the school of "been there done that" trying to make do with what they have.

Deep from within the Mohawk-Hobbs travel guide for the old "Victory Highway", (printed between 1926 and 1936), I noticed the following entry for the road between Golden Colorado and Denver:

U.S. Veterans' Hospital. used mostly for gassed soldiers of the World War; about 4,000 patients. The largest of its kind in the country.

A simple entry. They might as well be describing the existence of the local Wal-Mart. There was no cure for victims of poison gas. This was, sadly, not much more than a warehouse for men to live out their days in some level of dignity that would be unattainable anywhere else. What stuck me most of all with this, is the mundane nature of the entry. From the perspective of their time, this was to be expected and was routine; it was simply a part of life, worth comment as an "aid to navigation" for the travelling public, but no emotional reaction was necessary or expected.

From my modern eyes and sensibilities, its evidence of a horror. The certain horror of mechanized industrial war.

Somewhere along a very rudimentary two lane road that streched from coast to coast called the "Victory Highway", thus named to denote a War fought far away, stood a Veterans Hospital. Built at a time when the surrounding community had less than 1,000 people, what was then known as Hospital 21 and later as Fitzsimons medical center.

Today, the facility is closed, its original use as a tuberculosis ward and a warehouse for men injured by the horror of poision gas, is thankfully, no longer necessary. Aurora Colorado is now a large population center with several hundred thousand people living in the area. The "two lane road" is now a true highway eight lanes across and all concrete, well marked and kept clear of snow all year long, and never smaller than two lanes in each direction across all three thousand miles of it.

None dare breathe the word "Victory" in the modern world, lest they be mocked by the intelligencia as nothing more than a country bumpkin. Might as well revert to its original Greek term "Nike" for all the use we give it.

Poison gas attacks and the victims they produce, seem to be made of the sticky web like threads of a bad dream. People tell you that such horrors exist, but you yourself have never seen anyone, much less ever known of anyone who experienced such a thing. The men who were once warehoused in this facility who were victims of poison gas attacks in the "World War", and the families who knew them, have all long since passed. Since their entry into the facility, no fewer than four major wars have occured with wounded far in excess of the 4,000 that were once housed here for one unique type of wound.

Weaponized Poison Gas. Once upon a time in the not too distant past there was a large government run hospital in far off Colorado, dedicated just for living victims of this terror. The dead of course, stayed in France; about 85,000 of them. Today, the area is probably on its way to becoming an IKEA where crappy swedish furniture made from sawdust and formadelhyde can be sold on the cheap. The history of the hospital and the lives and experiences of the men who once lived there, lost under the trolley wheels of so many shopping carts.

When I look back at history, I'm never quite too sure if we've come a long way, or if we have a long way to go. I suppose it all depends on your perspective, whether you are stranded on the side of the road, radiator cap in hand or zooming by at 80 miles an hour, whether you are a witness yourself to poison gas attacks and the effects that they cause or if you have no idea what that phrase really means.

The century which started with such promise, was in fact one long war, with an occasional armistice seemingly given only for the convienence of the combatants to reload their weapons. Peace, what there was of it, came only at the end of the century with the brevity and meaning of an afternoons daydream.

With the turn of the century came a new war, and with it a new perspective but a perspective forced from a view made without the council of those who faced the horrors of the past, like a driver broke down on the side of the road, stuck wondering and not really knowing if its going to be ok to take the radiator cap off the hot engine or not.

With that generations passage, the generation that knew trench warfare and "no mans land" and yes, "poison gas attacks" came the curse of ignorance to which we are in some ways, still afflicted. With that generations passage went the sure knowlege that comes from witnessing the horror of war to be replaced with the air conditioned comfort of ignorance.

Posted @ July 23, 2007 10:26 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Being Kicked While Down

Dennis Kucinich, Leftist Presidential Candidate, a "Vegan", has fallen victim to a bout of food poisoning.

I do not wish the man ill (He is 60 years old) but once again we see evidence that God (or Gaia) has a wicked sense of humor, much in the same vein as that expressed by activists dedicated to the lives of wild animals, who are then attacked and eaten by bears.

However the article, written by a newspaper in Ohio, notes the following fact:

"Kucinich, a former Cleveland mayor, typically polls in the low single digits."

Jeez. I hope Dennis is wearing a cup when he reads that. That's like saying:

"Dennis Kucinich, former mayor of Cleveland Ohio, Crown Prince of Barsoom and heir to the throne of Emperor Norton ignited a firestorm of controversy in the James Madison High School Chess Club by answering a students challenge and insisting that Spock was only half the Vulcan that Tuvok was. Reaction to this controversial stance was fiercely expressed by the audience of high school students that as a result of his spoken stance on the controversial "Spock vs. Tuvok" debate, had now become a transformed into a makeshift mob. After withstanding a withering firestorm of pencil erasers, spitballs, cat calls and hisses, Candidate Kucinich backed away from the podium and made a hasty retreat from the School Auditorium under the watchful eyes of the Principal and custodial staff, waving his arms wildly in a futile attempt to deflect the projectiles from doing harm. When reached later for a reaction from the campaign his manager(known as "mom") could only add that she was sure that President Bush was somehow to blame... "

Remember that little throwaway line "polls in the low single digits..." every time he appears on TV or in a "debate" as somehow a serious candidate for President. This guy would have to go up 5 points just to be considered a joke.

I dare say that any one of us could also be said to "...poll in the low single digits" and nobody knows any one of us from the guy next door.

Posted @ July 18, 2007 05:16 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (2)

Passchendaele: Color Photos from Hell Itself

Passchendaele. A battle in World War I. A single battle that resulted in losses of 448,000 British Empire and French killed and wounded and 260,000 killed and wounded of the German Empire.

Today, the Queen will attend a Last Post ceremony in Passchendaele at the Menin Gate, where a memorial arch is engraved with the names of the 54,896 Commonwealth soldiers who died with no known graves.

Newly discovered rare color photgraphs of the battlefield can be found here. The photo above is from that sample. I just want to point out the look in their eyes, that look is a reflection of horror that no Hollywood actor has ever captured.

Posted @ July 18, 2007 11:44 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Life is too short

14,000 ft Mr. Shasta as viewed from the top of 10,500 ft Mt Lassen.

A fantastic weekend and another mountain successfully climbed. Other than a burned neck ( oh yes, I guess I really am a "redneck" now...), all is well. It makes a huge amount of difference to climb it after camping at 8,000 feet the day before, than to do what I did last time and go from sea level directly to the top. That climb was quite painful, this one was a breeze.

The next climb is White Mountain Peak in Owens Valley in August. That will be my first 14,000 foot peak.

Posted @ July 16, 2007 07:09 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

The nature of freedom and Platos 'allegory of the cave"

Shin Dong Hyok, a North Korean defector, is pictured at his residence in Seoul, South Korea, on Monday.

So you defy the government and you get thrown in a gulag. You know that there is another world and therefore you struggle to survive and to get out. You know the gulag as punishment as something to be avoided, but what if you were born in a Gulag? what if thats the only life you've even known? What if its your only frame of reference?

"...Shin, now 24, was a political prisoner by birth. From the day he was born in 1982 in Camp No. 14 in Kaechon until he escaped in 2005, Shin had known no other life. Guards beat children, tortured grandparents and, in cases like Shin's, executed family members. But Shin said it did not occur to him to hate the authorities. He assumed everyone lived this way."

end snip.

Read the full story here.

Imagine all of North Korea as a real life version of Plato's "Allegory of the cave". The very idea of it makes me gasp in horror.

Posted @ July 13, 2007 12:55 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Why Atari failed

"Dance Dance Immolation", a modification of the "Dance Dance Revolution" video game where players match the steps displayed in the game, has taken a step forward by promising to Immolate the players with a flamethrower if they make a mistake.

Apparently, beeping sounds and flashing lights just isnt enough anymore, being sprayed with hot burning naptha is the "new hotness" in video games.

ti,ti,ta,ta,do,re, mi, fa, so --- BONK!

Mom: Now kids, dont forget your firesuits and kevlar!

Oh Pong!, where is thy sting?

(From cnet news...)

Posted @ July 13, 2007 09:23 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Quote of the day

"The Democrats in the Senate need to explain how making Iraq into a "Darfur" is good for Iraqis or Americans."

Joseph Lieberman. Statesman.

UPDATE: Ok, so I didnt hear so well...

From Hugh Hewitt Transcript:

snip..

"...But honestly, who are we fighting there? We’re fighting al Qaeda and Iran. And that’s the consequences. You know, one of the generals when I was over there last time, said to me a month ago, when you talk to your colleagues in the Senate, tell them if they don’t like what’s happening in Darfur, they’re going to really hate what happens here in Iraq if we pull out too soon".

end snip.

Posted @ July 12, 2007 04:41 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Sheehan/Pelosi: Evidence

I was joking the other day that there would be people in San Francisco that would consider Cindy Sheehan "too right wing", but the fantastic site "zombietime" has documentation of that exact scenario for all to see at a 2006 Berkeley Rally.

Click here to view the event.

She's reading questions from the audience when someone asks, as if it matters, "Do you drive a vehicle and if so what is its approximate gas mileage rating"

There it is, "Gas Mileage" as the new moral standard.

That site makes me laugh every time I see it.

Posted @ July 12, 2007 01:08 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Easter Surprise

It started nice enough, unseasonably cool, with a nice light marine layer hanging over the valley. This time of year the valley can be a blast furnace. But today, aaahhhh, light marine layer, 60 degrees.

I think to myself, cool! I can take the dog out for a walk first thing in the morning, without working up a big sweat, what a treat.

But, no. I end up on the phone for nearly three hours. No walk for me, the dog gets to go out, thanks to the wife. So my dog gets out, but me, I get to sit inside and talk on the phone. By the time I'm finished, its back to good old fashioned blistering valley heat. Oh yeah, and it did manage to sprinkle a little overnight, which is nice, but it didn't really rain enough to really get anything wet, just enough to make the normal dust layer on your car into little dirt marks.

So now my car is dirty. Like a thousand cats with muddy paws took a walk over it.

Then I decide to make some chicken buillion for lunch. I take a mug from the cupboard and procede to fill it with the broth and then I go back to my office for, you guessed it, yet another phone call. A few minutes later I go back into the kitchen, where my wife tells me that my teeth and lip are "bright green".

Well she doesnt just tell me, in an offhand way, like " say honey I was talking to the broker the other day about what we needed to do to get a vacation home, oh by the way your teeth are green, and he said we really aught to open an IRA..."

No, nothing dignified like that. Instead of that, she keels over laughing in real panty wetting spasm of laughter that goes on for at least 10 minutes.

Well, at least I've got that going for me. I can make my wife laugh.

Apparently the last use for this particular mug was for this years Easter Egg decorating session, and it wasn't washed out well enough when it was completed.

I rather foolishly assumed that dishes kept in the cupboard were in fact, clean. My lifes experience as an older brother and a father of two tells me that I should have known better and to always assume that your taking your life in your hands when you use kitchenware, but there you go, I let my guard down just once and what do I look like?

I look like what Andy Warhol thinks I should look like.

So there I am, unproductive as hell and literally "green in the face".

Then my son adds insult to this existing injury, and asks to go to Fry's.

I love Frys. All techies love Frys. It's our store. Its a no hold barred no compromises, we carry not just one motherboard kept behind the counter away from the public, but 20, 30 sometimes 40 motherboards proudly displayed for all to see. No insulting "Geek Squad" style service plans for us Frys shoppers, we are the Geek Squad!

But no, I don't get to go to Frys today because one of my 'little miracles' is being less than a miracle today, and I'm back on the phone again, talking to some middle manager in Pigsnuckle, Arkansas about why some fantastic piece of software is now splattered all over the screen doing little more than mocking its user instead of doing what its supposed to do.

I get through this little nightmare, its now 3:00 in the afternoon. Its practially quitting time and I've barely gotten started on what I wanted to get accomplished for the day.

Then to make matters worse, I find out that a set of reciepts for my expense reports have once again gone missing. I hate expense reports. I hate making them, I hate turning them in, I hate using them. It doesnt matter how close I follow my expenses, how much I put every possible dollar on the expense report, I always seem to come up in such a way where I am out two or three hundred dollars at the end of the Quarter.

So naturally, I then spend the rest of the afternoon...

ON THE PHONE WITH AMEX!!!!

I hate the phone. I hate talking on the phone, I hate talking on the phone with a set of neon easter egg green teeth. But I really hate chasing down receipts for expenses that I've already turned in - TWICE. Because after I'm done with the phone, I then have to go to the AR department and ask them where the hell are my receipts!

I hate having to go to the office. Go.To.The.Office. Just the words alone grate on my nerves.

So I drive to the office, the actual real life office, the one with other people in it, that office. "Why arent these people at home working?" I always say to myself on the odd occasion that I am forced to go into the office. I always wonder just whats wrong with these people that I've now been forced against all common sense to come visit.

Think of it, having to spend your own money to "go to work", its downright barbaric.

Go to work? I am my work, whats this "go to work" stuff? isnt that right up there with "Hey pardner get me a sasparilla!", and "Jethro, go throw a shoe on that Mare before she goes lame"?

Go to work... I feel like Fred Flintstone rapidly paddling my feet under the car to visit the rock quarry.

These people arent on my vibe, they are leaving work, they are going home for the day. My day, thanks to all the interruptions hasn't even started.

So I go down to AR, I find the right clerk, and ask my pointed questions.

She goes through the files. Snapping gum.
Ah yes, the final kick in the crotch, the gum snapper. the close talker and the gum snapper all in one package. You know the kind, the kind that calls you "hun" and gives you a hip check in the hall and laughs like a donkey.

Yeah. that's the one. Everybodys got one. Doesnt matter where you go, everbodys got at least one, like OSHA fire extinguisher laws.

She finds the defiled expense reports, find the missing reciepts in the wrong place** and then she says in a chirpy "didnt quite make the audition for "Alice's Flo" sort of way...

"Say hun, didjall you know you've got some really green teeth"?

and before she finishes the word "teeeeeeh", shes all the way buckled over in a full gut bustin' laugh.

I have no defence. I just cant run off like I'm Marsha Brady and wait for a commercial break. I try explain to her the nature of how it happened, the easter egg dye and all that, which of course just makes it worse.

In between her trying to catch her breath and explain to everyone else as she was now busy trying not to laugh and explain it to the now gathering crowd, I used basic hand signals to ask " are we ok, expenses done?, im outta here..." to which she just threw her hands over in the universal clerk hand signal for "at this point buddy, you could requisting an whole helicopter for yourself and a years avgas too and I would approve it"

I got one thing finished today. Expenses paid.

oh well, it could be worse...

**- not my fault.

Posted @ July 11, 2007 07:21 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

a local perspective on the sheehan - pelosi race

You know, I've worked in San Francisco for years and Ive seen it all; I've seen every naked bike ride for cetacean sexual rights, every vegetarian street fair, ever annual "world cant wait for (fill in the blank removal of whatever non Democrat president currently running the country).

I watched them writhe in horror over the mere existence of Ronald Reagan, the nightmare years of George H.W. Bush and his illegal war in Iraq, (the one with the UN support), and I watched them cry as they put US flags on their buildings after 9/11( not because of 9/11, but because to many of them, the national expression of patriotism at a time of grief was worse that being forced to live in Hitlers Germany), and yes it has come to my attention that there is a small but determined group in San Francisco who apparently arent big fans of George W. Bush or his illegal war against Iraq(the one without UN support).

So today I awake to see that Mrs. Sheehan has decided it would be in her best interest to run as a candidate for Nancy Pelosi's Congressional seat, which is, you guessed it, San Francisco( and parts of Marin...)

Pelosi...Sheehan...Pelosi...Sheehan....Pelosi...Sheehan...

It's a hell of a thing for an electorate to be put in a position to have to choose between such statesmen(er, uh stateswoman, oh I mean "stateswomyn"), such intellectual giants, such legislative drive and verve. I swoon at the idea of a real televised debate between these two. Just who will use the words "Trotskite". "Lackey", "Youre a Republican - no you are!", first? What side do you take on an issue? How can anyone see any daylight between these two?, they are more closely matched than Incan masonry.

I'm not there today, but I can bet you anything that somewhere within all that metropolitan wonder, sitting at a non corporate co-op barrista there is a group of black clad SF city workers all huddled together reading "the daily worker" and a enjoying their frothy "fair trade" java, when one will say to others "Its nice that someone is finally running against Nancy, but I think Mother Sheehan is just too "right wing" for my tastes". And you know, the others in the group will silently nod their heads in agreement, because to them the truth about that statement is self evident.

Once again, Democracy and this evil paternal culture has failed to bring them a candidate that truly represents their constituency and they will have to settle for the candidate who is the lesser of the two evils.

Posted @ July 11, 2007 08:04 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (348)

And I ask you...

Official: Iraq Gov't Missed All Targets

I ask you, other than for quarterly fundraising for their phoney baloney campaigns, when did our government ever hit a target for anything?

Balanced budget? Miss...
Compliance with all legal statutes? Miss...
Accountability and integrity? Miss...
Defending the nation? Miss...
Build a frikkin' fence? Miss...

I mean come on, if we start expecting governments everywhere to actually make goals and to achieve them, I mean what next? cats and dogs living together?

Are we going to say with a straight face that Pelosi, Reid and Bush " got it goin' on when it comes to governance" but the Iraqis, well there just a bunch of incompetent boobs who cant do anything right, so lets make sure they never get the wise idea to try to be a democracy again by leaving them to the tender mercies of the Iranians?, yeah that's a great idea, because once youve been betrayed and your nation stripped bare for genocidal retirbution, you're always willing to listen to reason, why just look at what that strategy did for the Cambodians!, say where are all those Cambodians anyway...

Let's see:

American Political Class Scorecard:

Despite every attempt to sink it, Booming economy. check...

Living in a peaceful democratic Western society for 231th straight year. Check...

Assassination level for elected leaders - near zero. Check.

Little threat to your personal health and safety, just for saying you might want to consider being a democracy? Check.

Accomplishments:
Exactly Dick.

Iraqi Political Class Scorecard:

Actually having a "political class" instead of an inbred bunch of murderous thugs from Tikrit running the place. Check

Booming street corners. check...

Living in the remnants of a fascistic wasteland that you are risking life and limb to convert to a westernized democracy for oh, what exactly 2 whole years. Check...

Assassination level for elected leaders - 50 percent. Check.

Little chance of maintaining your personal health and safety, just for saying you might want to consider being a democracy? Check.

Accomplishments:
Still in theregoing to work every day, taking their life in their hands trying to make that squalid crack house of a country into something to be proud of, and laying down their lives every single day to do it, no thanks to you, you freaking ungrateful egg sucking cowardly liberal dogs.

Who the frig said that Democracy was going to be easy?

Who?

George "I Froze my ass of in Valley Forge, got chased across the continent by an army for eight god damned years while my layabout congress "dwiddled, diddled and resolved", before we finally started to win " Washington?

Thomas " 36 ballots before Congress to break a tie between me and that contemptable curr Aaron Burr" Jefferson?

Dolly, "Got my ass shot off evacuating the White House from an invading army intent on buring it to the ground" Madison?

Abraham" I just got here and the whole country split in half,brother fighting brother and I got a bullet in the head for my troubles" Lincoln?

John F. "You cant say Dallas doesnt love you " Kennedy?

Yes boys and girls, democracies, as we can witness by our own sad example of playhouse politics writ large, suck when it comes to effectiveness. That my dear friends is precisely what makes them so attractive in the first place!

Tyrannical governments are effective, spit shined, trains run on time, "man as machine" nightmares.

Democracies, are a heard of drunken asses running for the shade.

Exhibit A: Pyongyang, North Korea.

Orderly, no crime in the streets, everyone knows their place. You can just tell that this scene smells like bleach, even in midsummer.

Not A Democracy...

Exhibit B: Manhattan.

A town so loud and boisterous, you are required by law to drink heavily, just to stay somewhat sane.

Yessiree, the reeking stench of mid afternoon "curb urine" is just nature's way of saying "Welcome to Democracy"!

Iraq is a new Democracy in a really bad neighborhood. It like opening a new IKEA in the worst neighborhood in the world, only instead of the locals stealing the shopping carts, they hold the employees hostage for money. Just because the locals commit crimes against IKEA, doesnt mean that you shouldn't build new businesses in bad neighborhoods, else, wont they always be bad neighborhoods with all the problems therein? You have to take chances. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt. You hope for the best, even when its against common sense. Its what makes us a Democracy. Think about it, democracies dont make sense, they suck, they always have, but you still vote, you still work at it.

Its not that they dont suck, its that they just suck considerably less than the alternative.

We are an old Democracy, and frankly, we still suck at very simple things. But give it time folks, they will eventually produce a line of politicians that will outdo even ours at "slipperly weaselness".

And on that day, we can be truly proud. It took us 60 years to provide Germany with the comfort and guidance it needed to produce that Moray eel-like bastard Gerhardt Schroder. So give it time, ok?

But for now, our little brothers have some growing to do. and we best stick around and help them do it, else

This man will, with our help, teach the world that democracy isnt worth the work, which will only make it more necessary for more of our kids to go more places around the world and die in bigger numbers.

We have a choice for the future and so do they, they have chosen democracy, they have stood in the face of horror and flipped it the finger. We should stand with them, instead of running away like the selfish gutless cowards they have been told we are.

The choice for Iraq is to be the "new West Germany", or the "new Somalia". Our choice is to be lying cowards or remain true to our words and ideals.

Posted @ July 09, 2007 07:48 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

So Where is VariFrank These Days?

This is a partial explanation. I've had the Toyota since October of last year, and I've put 14,000 miles on it, and I work from home. Yes, I have been out and about quite a bit lately! So, where have I been? well here's one place:

Cold Boiling Lake? That sounds like a George Carlin Joke ("Hot Water Heater"? what the hell is that? Hot Water doesnt need heating!)

Actually Cold Boiling lake boils because of carbon dioxide that is released from deep within the earth. (Gasp! oh, say it isnt true...)

Carbon Dioxide? From the Earth? Come on man! Did Halliburton get to you too?

You know I really wish that scientists would get to work on a chemical substance that could convert all that icky carbon dioxide into something useful, like good clean oxygen for example. Something that was simple and yet, self replicating. We could call it "Chlorophyl"

Nahhhh. That's too far out to be reasonable or possible. We should just tax people to death or make them buy cars that are two sizes too small instead. Whats the sense in scaring the hell out of people if you can't turn right around of regulate them into submission, right? Yeah, that'll work...

Here's another explanation for my whereabouts:

"Bumpass Hell" the largest active fumarole in the United States. Basically you hike down into the bottom of an active volcano, and see how the earth converts solid rock into sludge and carbon dioxide (Gasp! oh, fine I'll just stick my fingers in my ears and say "lalalalalalalala" until he's done....). The name comes from the poor unfortunate man who found this interesting geological area that is now in the Lassen Volcanic National Park. He then slipped into one of the volcanic mud pots and promptly lost his leg in the scalding hot water.

I'm pretty sure he said something more than just " Oh hell!".

Here's another explanation:

This animal is not 4 feet away from the camera. I stood absolutely motionless for 5 minutes while it looked right at me. With those ears, this babe could probably measure my heart rate. I slowly moved the camera from my side and shot from the hip. Much to my surprise, as well as to the deer, the picture came out pretty nice.

Just a few feet down the hill, her mom and dad stop to have a bite to eat. Run furry woodland creatures, the air abounds with carbon dioxide! Run for your lives!

And another...

Mt. Lassen. 10,462 feet. The rock near the summit with the large dot is called "Vulcans Eye". yes thats snow, yes, thats ice on the top of the lake. No, its not cold outside, a balmy 78 degrees. Its june...

Actually, its just a normal summer this year, and summer is my personal favorite time of year and I'm just not the type to just let it go past without doing something. This summer I also have a major work related project, so I'm working long hours during the week and taking long weekends by using Fridays and Mondays when I can for their proper use away from work. With that all going on it doesnt leave time to comment on terror attacks in Scotland (Scotland? are there "jews" in Scotland? Was Scotland ever part of the Muslim lands? and whats with the fire-laden SUV? Aren't there any Ford Pinto's In Scotland? I mean, its SCOTLAND for cripes sakes. Who picks a fight with the Scots? The Scots invented Rubgy just to hone their skills at gang fighting. Haggis not in the Koran? Bagpipes got the fatwa against them? What could the jihadi beef possibly be against Scotland? I know, its silly to think that there are rational reasons for these things, but until the Jihadis start drving cars that they themselves manufacture into things, I will continue to hold them in contempt. I was born in LA, Im perfectly aware that any jackass can crash a car, but it takes a civilization to actually make a car. My advice to the jihadis that will listen is work on the latter and the former wont be necessary. You can't be in the extortion business if people arent actually afraid of you and since youre O for 3 ( O for 4 is you count the NY Airports scheme), it looks to me like youre scraping the bottom of the barrel for recruits... )

So yeah, I know blogging is light lately and I know theres lots of stuff going on, but I got my priorities folks. You got a choice between kayaing through Whiskeytown Lake or blogging about Trent Lott, my advice is to take the kayak. I haven't given up blogging or writing or half a dozen things that I am passionate about, but life is short, the weather is nice and it would be a crime to sit inside at tap on the keyboard with all this so close to home.

Posted @ June 30, 2007 08:23 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

It wouldnt "voom" if you put 50,000 volts through it.

The lovely plummage of "immigration reform" is no more.

'It's not pinin'! 'It's passed on! This bill is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! 'It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the door It'd be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now 'istory! It's off the twig! 'It's kicked the bucket, It's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-BILL!!

...and yet another Congressional session ends without much of anything actually accomplished, just as the founding fathers intended.

With just three more Congressional sessions between now and the election, I can't wait to see what the next three "snipe hunt", "wild goose" chases are the President will use to keep Congress blind with rage and distracted for the next year and a half while he attempts to close out his Administration without getting tossed into the hoosegow. I have never seen such a rush to fratricide expressed by an executive since the days of Adam Osborne and the Osborne effect.

I have never seen a bigger waste of time in my entire life and I lived through the Clinton Impeachment, the Libby trial, eight seasons of the Sopranos.

...now for Gods sake go find a hobby, will you?

UPDATE: I ws recently in an work meeting that was held offsite, where one of the team decided on their own to take the rest of us through a rather draining exercise in futility. The guy who did this was rather adamant about the necessity for the exercise and could not understand the hostility that was generated towards him as a result of doing it.

He asked me if I thought it was worthwhile and I said yes, but that "It didnt accomplish what you set out to do, but as a team building exercise, it was really outstanding"

"What do you mean?" he asked.

I told him "We've really come together as a team because now everyone is completely united in their hatred of you and your ideas!"

So the immigration debate has done something that hasnt happened since 2001, its united America. Unfortunately for the President, its now united behind its near unified dislike of the man in the office.

In the business world we have a saying that goes like this:

"Is this the hill you want to die on?"

Meaning that while your argument might very well be righteous and correct, it might not be worth the fight accomplish, because its possible to both be right and yet lose everything you have at the same time.

That, in a nutshell is the "Bush dilemma".

Posted @ June 28, 2007 11:33 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels–bring home for Emma...

Its summertime, so that must mean that once again I am sitting inside a data center somewhere, with no windows, in 80db white noise noise wondering why the magic flashing lights that are supposed to mark success in my job, arent actually flashing like they should be.

On occasion, I do find a few moments to break from the tedium to roam the web. Yesterday a friend who knows my passion for the novel "A Canticle for Liebowitz" passed me a website that is a posting of peoples Grocery lists, and from those lists the author (and yourself) can learn a great deal about those who were doing the shopping. ( Those of you who have read the novel are aware of the reference of the title of the post"

So here it is - Grocery lists. There is also a book by the author of the blog called "Milk, Eggs, Vodka"

Ok, back to the damn flashing-lights-that-are-not-flashing-the-way-they-should-be...

Posted @ June 15, 2007 09:08 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Presidential Illness

When I hear that the President is reported ill and had to step away from a long awaited meeting, I am instantly reminded of the "flu" that JFK reported suffered from during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He wasnt sick, he just needed to get back to Washington without too much notice.

Of course it could just be that the President is ill and that theres nothing to it, but it does make me want to start scanning the news feeds for anything interesting thats going on out there.

Of course, Presidents named Bush have a history of falling ill overseas...

Posted @ June 08, 2007 01:27 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Rick Moran - Cooler than me

Rick Moran runs the blog "Right Wing Nut House", which is consistently one of the better things on the web. Rick is running a pledge drive right now to keep himself in the business of doing what he does so well.

Now, you have two choices. You can take what's given to you by the world and accept the mediocrity that you often get as "good enough" or you can recognize talent for the rare thing that it is and encorage it to thrive, in the hope that you will get more of it.

I think he's good and worthy of support and have done so myself in this pledge drive, I encourage you to do the same.

His blogging and the standards he keeps help set the standards for blogging for the rest of us. Let's see that theres more if it by helping Rick with his pledge drive this week.

Posted @ June 04, 2007 02:06 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (14)

JFK Terror Plot: Drawing connections

Buckeye Pipeline System map.
Information on the entire Buckeye pipeline system can be found here.

Summary:

"...The official said the plotters had conducted surveillance on giant jet fuel tanks at JFK and the pipeline. They had taken surveillance video of the targets and took it to Trinidad to review the tape..."

This case is not about Airports. Its about pipelines.

Al Queda Connection:

- Adnan el-Shukrijumah, works as a "fixer" for al queda.

- Between 1996 and 2000, Adnan traveled extensively, spending time in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Trinidad, Tobago and Guyana.

New Jersey Connection:

- The JFK pipeline takes fuel from a facility in Linden, N.J., to the airport.

Guyana Connections:

- Shares a border with Venezuela

- has a large population of Afghani Muslims.
- 10 per cent of Guyana is Sunni Muslim
- recently began to recieve increased shipments of Venezuelan oil.

Posted @ June 02, 2007 10:36 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (310)

Things to do before you die...

...Cross the Bonneville Salt Flats at night, in a full moon.

Ok, now I can mark that one off my list.

After a business trip that included side trips to Yellowstone and Wyoming, I'm now back safely from working in Salt Lake City.

Last nights crossing of the high desert was just outstandingly beautiful and not likely to be forgotten anytime soon.

Posted @ June 01, 2007 03:02 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (5)

Where I've Been

A man and his Toyota at Grays River Wyoming.

Big Sky Country? An understatement...

Ran into a storm of mayflies crossing the Snake River Canyon on Saturday that lasted 10 minutes. At first I thought it was raining, then decided that rain is usually not black and doesnt stick to you windshield. It literally blackened the front of the Toyota, making the headlights unusable. Even after using a truck stop car wash, The front is still covered with little tar like bodies of these suckers. Note to Toyota, follow Land Rovers lead and put wipers on the headlights...

After crossing the Norther Nevada Desert on Saturday, I was struck by a condition that closely resembled cholera or dysentery. Without going into details best left unblogged, I'm here to report that while for many hours I was absolutely certain I was about to meet my demise in a most undignified way, I'm alive and happy to report that the event has,ahem, passed. Up till now, I wasn't aware that Montezuma had even been to Northern Nevada, much less wished to see revenge enacted just for my crossing it.

I saw a real live, non-cartoon moose on Sunday in the Grand Targhee, my very first moose without a corresponding flying squirrel around as his partner. Meeting a moose in person is much like meeting a big cow with antlers. It's docile and very, very interested in vegetation, of which you are not and thus you find yourself totally ignored. My youngest sister ( the local Wyoming inhabitant - known in the family as "Calamity Jane" as her her lifes work is now a backwoods guide in the Jackson and Yellowstone Area, hence the visit to the region) says as a general rule not to expect such cooperation as this from the moose population.

As a result of my new found ability to "talk to the animals", she now calls me "Dr. Doolittle". Actually what she said was much colorful and more in taking with her well deserved nickname, but I try to keep this a family blog as much as possible. Just remember that she too was raised in the Navy, and now finds herself in career as backwoods guide for fisherman( just insert your favorite colorful F-word verb between "Doctor" and "Doolittle", and you get the idea). She is not the kind of person you meet hanging around the water cooler at CNBC Headquarters in Fort Lee New Jersey.

And maybe that explains everything that is wrong with "Teevee News" in one simple lesson.

Like my father, she has no little tolerance of "fools or easteners". I only get special dispensation from the application of this rule because "I'm family". I have evidence to support this fact, because I was there the day she came home from the hospital, a fact I never let her forget. Its exactly this sort of "family history blackmail" that keeps me alive when she's guiding me through the backwoods. I have some embarrassing pictures Calamity, and as long as I get back to the house in one piece, they'll stay hidden. If something were to happen to me, I don't think you would be able to survive the shame of the release of pictures of you when you were five on that merry-go-round horse crying you eyes out in fear while we all pointed at you laughing. Yeah, hard to be big tough backwoods guide with those embarrasing pictures out there, isnt it? You better think twice before you hit me over the head with that shovel, Ok Calamity?

Saw a dead moose on the roadside on Monday, 150 miles from the first moose I came across on Sunday. I have no idea if the two knew each other. I can't imagine any car hitting an animal that big and being drivable afterwards, but while the moose was still laying there in a very undignified way, there was no sign of the car that hit it. This showed me in very real terms what the local economy considered valuable and what was simply not worth the effort. A crushed car will get towed to a carlot and poured over by insurance adjusters, while a dead moose will just lay by the side of the road. I cant help but feel that the moose deserves a more fitting end than a Chrysler Minivan.

Somewhere in America is a husband hurredly explaining to his wife what happened to "the family van" that he took against her better judgement for a weekend of fishing with his friends in the Caribou National Forest in Eastern Idaho. She is of course, not buying "the moose story". Trust me maam, whoever you are, no matter how bad your favorite "family truckster" looks right now, the moose got the worst part of the deal.

Ok, back to work...

Posted @ May 28, 2007 10:24 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

my entire worldview has been totally shattered

I'm just not prepared to live in a world where this is true.

I mean, how will I spend the endless hours arguing with my leftist friends if I can just point to a simple set of facts and be done with it? Wheres the sport in that?

Posted @ May 24, 2007 08:29 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Bush!

A friend just called and said one key line from a 1970's blacksploitation movie and at the same time I was looking at the picture of Harry Reid doing his "French Aerobics" and it just got me laughing. 30 minutes later, I'm still laughing.

So as a service to you the readers of this blog I will share the joke with you and since I'm audio-visually challenged, you'll just imagine the bass line intro to the Issac Hayes classic "Shaft!" from the movie of the same name and follow along with the pictures below.

Who's the white chief Exec
That's a sex machine to all the chicks?
(Bush!)
You're damn right

Who is the man
That would risk his neck for his brother man?
(Bush!)
Can ya dig it?

Who's the cat that won't cop out
When there's danger all about
(Bush!)
Right on

You see this cat Bush is a bad mother--
(Shut your mouth)
But I'm talkin' about Bush
(Then we can dig it)

He's a complicated man
But no one understands him but his woman
(Laura Bush )

fade out...

He beat the cowards today, and thats all that matters to me right now. In the words of President Lincoln when describing General Grant "I cannot afford to lose this man, he fights".
It would have been all to easy to give in. A lesser man would have done just that. This man, is not a lesser man.

I dont always agree with him and he annoys me at times to the point of distraction, but there are days like this one when I thank my lucky stars that he is the man in that job.

Thank you Mr. President.

Posted @ May 22, 2007 04:06 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

my sides hurt...

Democrats Drop Troop Pullout Dates From Iraq Bill

Hahahahahhhohohohoehehehehehahahahahaha. oh man, I hvent laughed that hard in years.

Posted @ May 22, 2007 03:53 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Sarkozy to divest French ownership of EADS

Emirates Airlines A380, coming to an airport near you...

It looks like its a "Whoa Nellie!" situation after all.

From the UK Guardian:

"Mr Sarkozy has already met the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to discuss the future of EADS. "I found in the German chancellor someone who has perfectly understood that we need to act fast. What I want is that it works," Mr Sarkozy said. The speed with which the new president has addressed the issue reflects the high profile EADS and Airbus have in France."

Airbus and its parent company EADS have identified as one of the key problems in the structure of the company the dual board, dual management structure where decisions are shared between French interests and German interests. You should also understand that President Sarkozy went to Chancellor Merkel only two days after taking office. The topic of conversation appears to have centered around the issue of EADS and it also appears that the conversation was to find out if there would be any problem in France "cashing in its chips".

From what I've been able to glean from multiple sources it appears very likely that France will divest itself from state ownership of EADS. This follows the UK divestiture last year. This is harsh medicine for European socialism, but it will in the end be very good for EADS.

That leaves one question to be answered, who would purchase the shares once divestiture begins to occur? Rest assured, there is already an interested party waiting in the wings, and thanks in no small part to the short sighted, pig ignorance on the part of American Xenophobes this have found it necessary to spend their capital in some place other than the United States.

And who is this other party?

Why of course, its Dubai!

You'll remember Dubai, as the owners of "Dubai Ports World" and all the endless controversy that their appearance on the world stage caused when they tied to buy a UK based port management company last year. Dubai is the group that every tin hatted crackpot was so absolutely sure was going to "work with terror groups to sneak a bomb into the United States because they would control security at ports", which was never the case but dont let a few facts get in the way of a good story, right?

It now appears vey likely that not only will Dubai be buying large numbers of aircraft from a direct competitor of Boeing, but they will also be buying into the manufacturing process as well. Gee that worked out swell, didnt it!

Now in retrospect doesnt it seem silly to have worried about "The Ports Deal" in light of the new reality? European manufacturing is now tied to a vast sea of available Arab capital. That my friends is a much bigger and very real threat to this country than the cartoon "boogeyman" threat presented by the possibilities of Dubai Ports World moving shipping containers at our ports.

Folks you have to understand that in the world there are allies and investors and there are also enemies and competitors. There are times when you have to set your prejudices aside and just get on with business. Frankly, I would rather have Dubai investing their money here than in Europe. DeGaulle once said that "France has no friends, only interests" and he was right. Countries have no friends, they have interests. Dubai and France are both looking after theirs, but we foolishly helped them work together to do it.

My grandfather spent three years as a "guest of the emperor of Japan", and yet his car was a small Mitsubishi Truck. Mitsubishi was the manufacturer of the wartime "Zero" aircraft. When I asked him about why he would make this choice, he said "Well, we won the war, and they make damn good cars so why the hell not!"

He was in his own small way, simply looking after his interests.

Posted @ May 19, 2007 09:41 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Whoa Nellie!

Is Sarkozy about to divest France of Airbus?

Stratfor thinks so.

Looks like I've got some reading to do this evening...

Posted @ May 18, 2007 01:53 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Question of the day

Is there any political constituency remaining on the entire planet Earth, other than Barbara and George H.W. Bush, that President George W. Bush hasn't absolutely pissed off this week?

Just checking.

I mean, President Clinton couldnt make a decision without talking to a focus group beforehand and that truly was a bad thing, but so is doing just the opposite. Every once in a great while as you serve in public office you might want to try to satisfy the people who voted you into office, even if you personally disagree with it.

Posted @ May 18, 2007 10:40 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Good News, Bad news - The Next Generation

Here's a set of problems that I've faced this week that my fathers generation and my grandfathers could never have imagined. They worried about polio epidemics, world wars, deep dark economic depressions; but this is what I have in my generation as "good news - bad news"

The "Good News":

My home and my home office have been upgraded from copper to fiber optic, and it all works fantastic. In 1978, I wrote my first computer program on a time sharing computer system using a "modem" on an acoustic coupler at all of 110 bits per second, on paper tape no less! Now I sit at home and work at a 75mb. In 1978, I thought 300bps was fast... You kids out there have to go to museum to find out what a "modem" is, or an "acoustic coupler". Ah, those where the days my friend. Good times, good times...

The "Bad News":

My 47 inch plasma monitor just died. You know, its not like you keep a spare one of these things in the closet and there really is no substitute for them. Now instead of displaying lovely scences in High Definition, its just a big black void sitting there silently mocking me. Damn...

Welcome to the world of 2007...

When I stop and think of the conditions of the lives of my ancestors, there are days when I'm embarrased to say that I have any real problems at all.

Posted @ May 17, 2007 10:15 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

To Our Three Daughters (A Fisking)

Original Text Here...

We hope that by the time you read this, the solutions to global warming will be well under way.

It's only Tuesday dear, you might want to give yourself a little leeway on this...

You already know from living with us, how concerned we are about this problem.

Yes my dear, this is the real reason you've never been allowed any sleepovers with your friends, why birthday party dreams of pony rides and big plastic "bounce houses" are crushed under the reality of mommy desperately needing to host yet another NRDC fund raiser on the same weekend.

Sometimes, we go over board with our reactions to everyday annoyances like over -packaged products, leaving lights on in the room, taking too long a shower or leaving your chargers in the wall.

'Wire Hangers' darling, don't forget the 'Wire Hangers'.

We embarrass you when we glare at hummer drivers and or get emotional when we talk about drowning polar bears.

Ohh, nooo. Not the the dreaded liberal "glare". You inhuman bastard Laurie David, dont you know how that must make those people feel, knowing that you disapprove of the free expression of their consumer choice? How do you expect them to live with the shame of it all? You know when the Prius driving people glare at me for driving a 4-wheel drive SUV I can't hardly notice it because they are usually doing it from a full three feet below my floorboards.

But we do this because all of the things that we love and care about are at stake.

How dare those people buy big cars just because they can. I mean really, who do those people think they are anyway?

We do this because we do not want the day to come when you ask us why we did not do more.

Why, oh why did you take me to Disneyland, instead of riding in an inflatable boat with Greenpeace? Why did you make me go to my graduation when I could've been arrested for civil disobiedience and thrown into Cook County jail? Why did you force me to get a car for my high school graduation when what I really wanted was to cut sugar cane in solidarity with the workers in Cuba?

We want you to be able to enjoy snowy winters.

Yes, damn you all and your Hummers for eliminating the white christmases we once had in Malibu and replacing it with the oppressive day in, day out disgusting sunshine. Let's try to enjoy winter this year in Aspen, Telluride, Banff and St. Moritz. Let's take the Lear Jet out for a run. You know, at Park City Utah, they expect you to actually carry your own skis! Now that's roughing it!

We want you to be able to cool off between your sheets on summer nights.

It's called "Air Condtioning" its that knob on the wall, over there next to where the servants quarters are. If you turn it to "ON", cold air magically comes out of these vents in the ceiling. It really is the greatest thing since sliced bread. You should try it. Apparently the servants sit in the other room and blow air across ice cubes with paper fans. I dont know why everyone doesn't have servants, they are just so damned handy to have around.

We want you to see the leaves change colors when they're supposed to.

Not just when we forget to turn the sprinkler system on when we leave the house in Malibu for 6 months while travelling around the world in a jet, like what happened last year.

We want you to visit Yellowstone National Park and spot a bear.

If were lucky and we pray real hard to the Goddess Gaia, perhaps we can get a bear with some real show business talent, like maybe one that can ride a unicycle while juggling beach balls, instead of one that falls over on his back and grabs his feet and sticks his ass up at us from the side of the road or knocking over trash cans all night long with his friends, like they did when we visited last year.

If you get a mosquito bite, we want it to itch, not carry a deadly disease.

Gee, its a damn shame we got rid of all that nasty DDT stuff. I wonder how they got rid of mosquitos back in the golden age, before all this fol-der-all called "modern" living.

We don't want your generation to be the generation that is defined by mass species extinction.

Not to worry, this is the generation already defined by narcissistic personality disorder.

We want you to live in a world where we face the truth about our problems and do everything we can to solve them.

Doing everything we can? Kinda cuts into that whole "leasure time" idea doesnt it.

We want you to grow up to be activists.

Not just any "activists" you understand, but the right kind of "activists". Don't go getting any ideas about protecting Second Amendment rights, working towards freedom for Cuba, ending the practice of abortion or emancipation of any islamic countries or anything. That sort of "activism" just wont do.

That's why we wrote our book, The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming.

And how many trees died in the production of that book? How many Octopuses (Octopii?) died just to have their ink squeezed out of them into big industrial sized vats, just so you could write a book that no one will read and will fill the garbage dumps of America like so many dirty disposable diapers already do? Shouldn't all books exhorting the green lifestyle be online audio books that download to your Ipod so you can listen while you sit and brood on all day at the horrors of Western Civilization while sipping a 7 dollar cup of coffee at Starbucks?

It's for girls like you and yes, boys, too.

Aw, gee thanks! Boys too! Wow, I feel all warm in side, like a Cocker Spaniel puppy just licked my face as I rolled down a big grass hill in the sunshine. Oh wait, thats just a toilet paper commercial that I'm watching.

The more people who understand global warming, the better chance we have at bringing about change -- change as individuals and change as a country.

And if you and your friends shave their heads, wear saffron robes and chant 'Hare Krishna' at the airport terminal, a spiritual awakening will occur across the land, from sea to shining sea.

Change means accepting the fact that the way we are living is causing huge damage to our planet. Change means that once we accept that responsibility, doing everything in our power to correct our course. Change means hope, not despair. Once you understand global warming, you understand how much you can do to solve it. Time is of the essence...lets get started.

So stop writing mindless books, stop papering telephone poles with flyers that exhort the arrival of the Dave Matthews band, stop making bumper stickers, stop celebrity airlifts for charity events, stop the whole 'Soylent Green is people' speech every time it gets a little hot in the summer ok?

We love you so much,

Your mothers,
Laurie David and Cambria Gordon

It doesnt matter who you are in life kids, you don't get to pick your parents.

Posted @ May 15, 2007 12:12 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Question: Where is the Islamic Ghandi?

So the other day while watching the Richard Attenborough movie 'Ghandi' and I'm thinking to myself;

"Here we see a follower of the tenets of a non-Christian religion who wishes to free his people from Western Imperialism. Ghandis methods were to say the least, unconventional but more importantly they were successful. His methods worked, didn't require an army and what's even more interesting, his former enemies now adore him. If your goal is to succeed in removing and occupying force from your country, then this would seem to be the proven and most successful method to do it. And yet despite Mr. Ghandi providing a clear leadership template for successfully ridding your countrymen from 'foreign influence', it would seem that instead of this, the most "peaceful" of options, that nearly every other method possible has been tried by Islamic populations, and all have fallen into miserable failure. "

So, if Islam is a "religion of peace", then where in its long history is there an example of an Islamic "Ghandi"? So far, the history of Islam is littered with Generals, Commanders, Princes and Kings, but I can't find an example of an Islamic leader who doesnt seem to eventually want to 'go to the sword' himself or advocate its use for others, almost as an article of faith.

My second thought is that there is nothing we in the west would like to see more than the appearance on the world's stage of an "Islamic Ghandi" but nothing that many leaders in that faith would fear more, which I think illuminates a great deal of the situation at hand.

Posted @ May 14, 2007 07:22 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Quickly

I'm busily doing the 'revenue generation dance' today so I dont have time to elaborate this question as fully as I should, but just to get you started while I'm out...

Apparently the FBI has interrupted a possible attack on Fort Dix New Jersey.

1) Those who say we should 'protect the troops by bringing them home' need to explain that conceptual idea in the light of this very real context. New York, is home and terror attacks have killed people there. New Jersey, is home, yet terror attacks are now being tried. For those of you educated in public schools since 1980, New York and New Jersey were never part of any Islamic empire in the past.

This is the fundamental lesson of 9/11 that the left fails to recognize. There is no arbitrary line behind which we can retreat, and what is worse is that by attempting to do so, we only invite more attacks. This is counterintuitive to those on the left, but obvious to the rest of us.

2) Politics used to stop at "the waters edge" and once upon a time, so did Terrorism. Welcome to the new world.

3) If Terrorists think nothing of taking on an armed camp like Fort Dix, then what makes people think they wont attack try to mall or some other large venue with the same objective? Oh, you think they have morals and guidelines that would obligate them into not attacking innocent civilians, right?

4) Watch as the day goes on as people on the left try to rationalize this effort as legitimate. Take notes.

5) Just a quick note to Osama "worst military commander in history, and thats including General Santa Ana and Saddam Hussien" Bin Laden. Dude, I really think you aught to not try attacking people in New Jersey and New York. Let's just say those folks who live there tend to hold a grudge when they feel slighted in some way and tend to react, you know "physically" when threatened. God help you if one of those people ever catch you, because if they do, I think there's going to be a return to "Free Beer and Baseball Bat" night at Yankee Stadium. You get my drift there, dontcha skinny?

Posted @ May 08, 2007 11:18 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

So what did I think of the debates?

Well that picture of Tony Blair just about wraps up my approach to these attention getting, time wasting exercises in wonkery. I dont want to discuss an election thats going to happen in 2008 in 2007. I just dont.

On top of that, I really dont think this is much of a race. As a Republican, I have to say that its teriffic to watch the candidates we have on our side, because I really dont care who wins the Primary to get the nomination. For once and probably for the first time I can say that any one of them will do nicely. I prefer Guiliani, but if I had to take Romney or McCain, I'd be fine with that. Really I would.

Oh, and shut the hell up about the 'Fred Thompson' thing already. That just annoys the hell out of me. Either he's in the race or not, you can't be both. I don't buy this line of "Conservatives are looking for another candidate in the race" as evidence of a Fred Thompson line of support, because conservatives are always generally dissatisfied with the candidates no matter who they are. Yes Reagan fans, way back in the 80's, even "The Great Renaldo" was derided as "not good enough" for the rock ribbed members of our tribe.

That's what it means to be conservative, to be generally dissatisfied, cranky and wishing for a return to that golden age of the past( which never really did exist in the first place...). Conservatives pull this kind of crap every election and they are pulling it this time too, and it wont mean a thing when it comes down to the wire. He who has the most votes in the primary will get the party, lock, stock and barrel. No one is sitting this one out in 2008 saying "Democrats aren't any worse than Republicans", weve all had a pitcher of water thrown in our faces with the 2006 election, and now we know that no matter how bad it was then(and it was), that this Democrat Congress is truly - worse than anyone could have possibly imagined.

It's my guess that if the Democrats continue to "out-French the French" by spending ever minute of camera time that they've had since they regained power looking for someone, anyone to surrender to, thereby reminding everyone in the world what a bunch of feckless yellow cowards they really are; that a good portion of that party will go for whomever the Republicans put on the table.

Remember kids, the way you win elections is to get your party solidly behind you and to take a good percentage of the other guys party too. Name me a single Democrat who will get a sizeable portion of Republicans in this election? Wesley Clark? oh, sorry hes not running this time. It's Hillary or Obama, and kids, I want you to look really, really close here, because there isn't so much as a fleck of 'conservative values' what-so-ever on either of their platforms that would make even the most foppish, blue blooded country club Republican switch for either of those two. These guys arent banking on taking away votes from Republicans, they are working hard to get their own voters lined up behind them, and they are working real hard at it too.

I would say if a country wide Republican primary were held today, that Guiliani would take New York, California, Florida and yes, even Texas with a sizable lead.

I dont expect that to change. I suspect that in each of those states a large number of formerly Democrat voters, disgusted by their parties continued collaboration with the enemies of this country, will also vote for Mr. Guiliani out of utter disgust. Those states make one big pile of votes to set up as a base. This is not to say that the rest of the Republicans are bad candidates, or that they won't or cant win, its just that the one candidate on either side of the fence who can get the biggest pile of all the voters,Democrat or Republican, is and continues to be - Rudy Guiliani.

But like I said, I don't really care who it is, because I know who it's not going to be. It's just not even close. Weve never been presented with clearer choices between the two parties or the two potential candidates.

All I really ask for in this election, is two things.

First - Please, oh dear Sweet God in heaven, stop us all from making Presidential politics into the equivalent of the World Wide Wrestling Federation Championships. I know, even I stoop to accasionally poking fun at one candidate or another, but the never ending pointless speculation and babble and has just got to stop. It's just not that interesting folks, go back to sports, go flyfishing, take up bowling, ok? You'll thank me for it later.

Take a little time and pick a candidate, read their material, go work their campaign if you think that will make you feel better, but for gods sake, shut up and go get a hobby, make model airplanes, plant a garden or something until about July 2008, will ya? Sheesh.

Second - I pray deeply that whomever wins, and I mean this sincerely for both of the candidates who end up running either as a Democrat and Republican, I hope and pray deeply for a landslide, a sizeable landslide for whomever wins. No one deserves to be an a position where they have to try to motivate and manage the shipping crate full of flesh eating,blood crazed gerbils (also known as the "People of the United States") with just a 300 vote margin out of 350 million people. Bush didn't design it that way, it just happened, and to me it always seemed to be the cruelest thing that was ever done to him in his life.

Roosevelt fought a war overseas, and so did Wilson, but neither of them did it with almost a full blown state of Civil War going on here at home at the same time. Bush has had to fight a war like no other war before, all around the world, while also trying to keep the economy from falling into a depression, but he's always been under the burden of doing it in a near state of seige here at home since before he took the oath.

The Honeymoon for this President occured from Tuesday September 11th 2001, until Wednesday September 12th 2001, when he was accused of cowardace by the Democrats, because he didnt immediately return to New York City after the attacks. For 12 hours he had peace. I doubt he noticed,since at the time we were still under attack.

I hope no one is ever saddled with that burden ever again. A lesser man or woman would have folded up like a wet paper sack under the never ending pressures of that job, but through it all, this man has stood tall. Forget Reagan, get me someone who can talk like Tony Blair and stand tall like Bush, and I'm happy. I'm satisifed that in our current candidate ranks that the bill can be filled for that order.

Now you'll excuse me, I've got a garden to till...

Posted @ May 03, 2007 09:20 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Mission Accomplished

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower (right) smiles as he holds the two pens used by German representatives to sign the unconditional surrender document ending World War II in Europe in the early morning of May 7, 1945. His chief of staff, Lt. General Walter Bedell Smith, looks on, left in the picture. A jubilant staff surrounds both of the men.

There was no exchange of salutes. German Generals, Jodl, Friedeburg and Oxenius stood at attention before Eisenhower as he sternly asked them:
"Do you understand the terms of this unconditional surrender and are you ready to comply with them?"

General Jodl-*, in the center of the German trio, clicked his heels and bowed his head in the affirmative after Strong interpreted the Supreme Commander's question.

The Germans left the General at 02:57, after a two minute audience.

General Suslaparov led the Russian officers into the Supreme Commander's office and firmly grasped Eisenhower's hand. The Supreme Commander beamed and said, "This is a great moment for all of us."

General Suslaparov spoke and when his words were interpreted Eisenhower replied: "You said it."

While the surrender of German Armed Forces was accepted by the Allies in May of 1945, fighting would continue in the European theatre of war for the next two years in the form of guerrilla and German partisan activity, known today as an "insurgency", but know at the time was "Werewolves". US Military Deaths from accidents and from partisan activity from 1945 until 1949 are estimated to be roughly 4,000 deaths, excluding the period of time known as the 'Berlin blockade', which would increase the number to 6,000. Civilian deaths in the same period resulting from starvation, harsh imprisonment, civil reprisal and the displacement of large numbers of people as refugees were numbered in the tens of thousands. General starvation for the civilian populace remained a serious issue to be solved until the early 1950's.

U.S. Army uses tanks to supress a riot at a Yugoslavian DP(Displaced Persons- 'Refugee') camp

By agreement of the Allies, at the end of the military phase of the war, Germany was partitioned and would retain elements of this partitioning until 1989. West Germany was formed out of the partitions controlled by France, Great Britain and the United States, East Germany out of the Russian partition. A wall, with barbwire, machine guns,minefields and the reality of many civilian deaths and divided families, would split the country in two and would exist from 1960 until 1989. While West Germany and East Germany eventually became sovereign nations, they would both live under large scale military occupation by the United States and the Soviet Union from 1945 until 1989.

To this day, a military presence by the United States can still be found on German territory-**.

While Americans have maintained a standing army and air force in the almost 60 year occupation of Germany, Germany and Europe have enjoyed a period of peace and prosperity unequaled since any time before the advent of the Roman Empire.

During the late 1970's, Germany enjoyed a brief period where manufacturing productivity was greater than that of the United States. Several prominent economists predicted that Germany and her one time Allies in Japan would soon return to manufacturing superiority over the western world, leaving the United States behind in the dust.

While Americans and Germans still have differences in politics and values, no one of any side of the political scale believes that war will come to Europe from any other European or American government, ever again. While the price was high in both lives and treasure and the task took a great long time to accomplish, the mission of ending 'war in Europe' has been accomplished. There is hardly any miltary force in even the largest of the European countries, there is certainly no 'martial will' in the armed forces that still exist there, or any public support or desire for war anywhere in the european continent.

But it was not always so. The history of Europe of the past 1000 years is a wall to wall history of the horrors of war. Roughly ever 20 years until the end of World War II, Continental Europe suffered from a major war or plague.

Now, it is among the most peaceful places on the planet, rivalling only the United States, Mexico and Canada for large populations at real peace with one another.

Years after the end of the war, American G.I.'s were often asked why they fought so hard in the Second World War and the answer was almost always the same:

"So my kids don't have to come over here and do this again"

Americans of that war and that generation, knew the high cost that comes from an incomplete victory and a policy of isolation because they had learned the lesson of 1919. The American nation was shocked at the cost of the First World War and chose to enter a period of isolation afterwards but the result was not peace, but the rise of Hitler and the Japanese Empire. The cost of the 'peace movement' that formed at the end of the First World War could be measured in real terms of the 52 million people world wide who died in the second period of conflict.

It was a conflict that could've been avoided. The conflict of the Second World War and its horrid cost in lives is what inspired a generation to do what it could to ensure that the lives spent in that conflict would not be wasted by the nation being forced in the next generation of American soldiers being sent to the soil of Europe to fight yet another war.

It should always be remembered in veiwing history, that what has happened is not a guarantee of how things would turn out without any uncertainty. History is a series of plans, accidents and miracles that have occured in just the right order to the make the reality that we now read about in 'full view' with a clear head in the safety of our homes, but at the time that history is in the process of being made, the future is always uncertain, but people living it at the time made the choices they made, based on what they knew about the past and more importantly what they learned from the lessons of the past.

In 1946, there were two plans for the future of Europe. One was the Morgenthau Plan, the other is the one we all know about, the Marshall Plan.

The potential value of a single child. A German family in post-war eating a meal of mostly potatoes.

Here's what you need to know about 'The Morgenthau Plan':

- Germany was to be partitioned into two independent states.
- Germany's main centers of mining and industry, including the Saar area, the Ruhr area and Upper Silesia were to be Internationalized or annexed by neighboring nations.
- All heavy industry was to be dismantled or otherwise destroyed.

Sound familar? It should. This isnt far removed from the plan that the Allies forced onto Germany at the end of World War I.

Yet, knowing this President Roosevelt supported the plan. In fact, many of the worlds influentual people believed it to be the way go. Germany was to be no more. Germans would pay a price for the crimes of war. This is exactly what was tried in 1919, and that idea was, as evidenced by the very existence of Second World War, a disaster.

The actions of a few contrarian individuals, heroes in my mind, would see to it that 'The Morgenthau Plan' would not be the one enacted by the allies, but instead the Marshall Plan would form the core of American support for the rebuilding and reformation of Europe for the next 60 years.

History recognizes the Marshall Plan as one one the greatest acts in foreign policy of any nation,but its implementation was far from certain. Its implementation, while a tool for peace, required the use of military force and resolve to execute.

History recognizes many other opportunities over the 60 years of its involvement for Americans to decide to leave Europe behind and to not look back.

Berlin, May 1945. The war is over, but life goes on...

In 1948, The Blockade of Berlin by the Soviet Union nearly brought starvation to the civilian population of Berlin and brought the return of War to the world. The world today knows the event as the "Berlin Airlift", where American and British airmen risked their lives flying plane loads of food into the people living in the City of Berlin.

We could have left it all behind right there. If we had, what would have happened to us?

U.S. Army Tanks on alert while the Berlin Wall is being built in 1961.

In 1961, The Soviet Union and their client state in East Germany created a wall that divided the two countries, again taking the world to the brink of nuclear war. Units of the U.S Army based in Berlin defended Berlin against the Soviets with the potential use of tactial nuclear weapons. The Soviets backed down.

We could have left it all behind right there. If we had, what would have happened to us?

In 1976, the Soviet Union deployed Short Range Tactical Missiles(SS-20's) into Eastern Europe. The United States did not budge, but chose to deploy its own missiles, the Pershing II Missile to counter the threats.

Would the wall have come down as it did, peacefully in 1989? or would the wall come down in the treads of tanks deployed in a much bloodier and longer war? Would the cause of peace have been better served if our military had not remained so vigilant in defense against the real threats to peace?

Those who profess to be a part of the "peace movement" need to understand that the emotion of "wanting peace" alone is almost never enough to actually gain the peace they so desire. On occasion, you have to demonstrate that you are willing to fight to be able to maintain the peace that you have. A large number of military people for over 60 years dedicated their lives to the cause of maintaining peace in Europe. Lives were lost, large amounts treasure were expened, and it took three generations to fully accomplish the mission of peace in Europe, but the true price of peace is never cheap or easy or fast. The cost of failure to remain vigilent fills the graveyards of battlefield after battlefield all across the world.

Our mission in Europe is now truly 'mission accomplished', but our mission is the Middle East is just getting started. Let us all hope that we are able to learn the lessons given to us in the years 1919 and 1946 and apply them to what we need to do now in 2007. If we return to the policy of 1919, we will find our grandchildren in a war of untold horror on a world wide scale that will make the Second World War look small and insignificant by comparison. Unlike the Second World War, we here at home will be on the front lines of the next war. but if we can remember the lessons of diligence, patience and faith given to us by the experiences of the year 1946, the war, a war that need not happen, can be avoided.

The best way to fight a war is to ensure it never needs to be fought in the first place. History shows us that this can be accomplished only by showing resolve towards maintaining the peace, if need be, by preparing to fight for it.

Those who want to ensure only the very conditions that will surely lead to a larger and more deadly war, are not interested in peace and should not be given that honor in the debate of the direction of our future.

Because it must be remembered that the future, is always in motion.

German Children in Berlin after the lifting ofthe blockade.
These children now have had a lifetime of peace and a future of peace, freedom and wealth after a committment of 60 years by the United States.

Do these children deserve any less?

Iraqi Children and Marine. Globe, Anchor, Eagle and smiles.

Notes:

*- Interestingly enough, The German Air Force has maintained a squadron in New Mexico since the 1960's

**-General Jodl would later be tried and hanged as part of the Nuremburg War Crimes Trails. In 1953 a Munich court re-assessed the Nuremberg legal procedures and concluded Jodl was neither guilty of crimes of war punishable by death under international law, nor of other crimes which would have made him a criminal or abuser of military power. He was completely exonerated, though the Allied powers refused to comment further on the Jodl hanging and Nuremberg trial. History it seems, never lays down in a straight line..

Posted @ May 01, 2007 01:22 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

George Tenets Inner Monologue

Secretary of State Colin Powell, Addressing UN Security Council on WMD's in Iraq. CIA Director George Tenet is to his left, US Ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte to his right.

"...Hmmm. Maybe now would be a good time to speak up and say that all that crap about Iraqi 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' and it being a "slam dunk" was just me trying to impress my secretary at lunch one day. Nahhhhhh. Besides, look at him, he's on a roll! I'll just let it go and get back to it later. I can always come back and deny it by leaking it to my pal Woodward. That sort of thing happens all the time this town, who's gonna know?

I mean its not really a "fib" now is it, I mean Saddams going to have weapons of some sort when its all said and done, right? It's Saddam were talking about here fer cryin' out loud, of course hes got big nasty things that he shouldn't have! That's what makes him Saddam! If you can't stereotype the behaviour of a dicator, then who can you stereotype, right? Give him the benefit of the doubt?, let the inspections work?, come on man its saddam-freakin-hussein here, he kills his own people for sport, with store bought, "off the shelf", "lookie here folks, we got the reciept!" chemical weapons no less. He can't help himself, it's some "mommy doesnt love me" thing at work in the whole hussein family I guess. Besides ol' dubya is on a roll, who is going to care in 5 years what Saddam had one way or the other. Half the Democrats I know are kicking themselves for not having dealt with this skank back in 1998 so they couldve taken all this glory for themselves.

Well savor the flavor suckers, because all of you got walked out the door after election day, and look who's getting the medal of freedom for finally getting rid of that damn Saddam and the rest of his clan now, eh? Yeah thats right baby, you pal Georgie boy, that's who. You suckers... hehehehe - oops no smiling, no laughing it would look bad. look ominous...stare straight ahead and hey wouldja look at the AP photographer!, zowie!, boy talk about your "slam dunks", hehehehe. I gotta remember that one...

Man, I can't believe they let me stay in this job after they came to town. I really thought my goose was cooked, but you just never know how things are going to turn out, do you? I mean, how I escaped getting my hide nailed to the outhouse door over the USS Cole, the Tanzanian embassy, and the failure to notice all that activty around jet pilot training, I have no idea.

I wonder if I should run for President some day. Yeah, I like the sound of that; "President Tenet" it kind of rolls of the tongue. That would make those bastards who called me fat in high school sit up and finally take notice, you betcha. No, I wasnt the captain of the footba...uh oh... he's talking about those "aluminum tubes" again. Man, thats really gonna leave a mark when they find out they are really just curtain rods. Time to look at my notes like I'm really interested and nod my head up and down like I agree.

Oh man, Negropontes starting to get all "parochial school" on me with the sideways looks again. I gotta stop drifting off on these things, I really gotta start working out more. Come on Colin, wrap this sucker up wouldja, I gotta date waiting for me at 'The Smokehouse' at midtown in about an hour... "

Posted @ April 30, 2007 09:10 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Can't place the face, but the voice sounds like someone I've heard before

Somewhere in Chicago, then in Arkansas, then in Washington D.C during the 1990's.

And doesnt Harry Mudd remind you a little of someone else as well?

Posted @ April 30, 2007 02:34 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Tenet and the Libby memory test

George Tenet is the first celeb-ra-staffer to turn in a book after the Libby standard of memory tests has been standardized.

Now that many people have started reading over his book and find themselves saying "Sorry George, but I remember it a little differently than you do", I wonder if anyone will take the time to remember that there is a former Chief of Staff for the Vice President who will be doing time in prison for a whole lot less.

Posted @ April 30, 2007 09:09 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Barstow

Mars Surface Winds Generating "Dust Devils".

I've been transfixed by this view of the martian landscape all day. Just a simple dust storm across the surface of a small red dot in my sky. It's worse than any given day in Barstow, but theres nowhere else I'd really rather be than where this picture was taken.

Lately I've noticed myself thinking about space more than usual. It's probably because of the discovery of an "earth like" planet in the star system Gliese 581. When I heard the news ,almost knee-jerk like I said out loud "alright! now we've got somewhere to go!".

What a weird reaction to have to such a small bit of information. Some astronomer announces that they've seen what appears to be a small speck of light, they look at the data and decide that its a planet almost like ours, and the next thing you know I'm standing in my garage packing for the trip.

It's almost like some deep part of me really needs to know that there is a frontier somewhere, anywhere just to be able to feel normal.

Living in a world as we do today, where tourists can and do go to the furthest reaches of the planet, seems to bother me more than I realized. The ability to "get away" has been a part of every generation of humans; that is, until now.

My dad used to say that the reason that there were humans on every continent and seemingly behind every hill on the planet was because as a species we were wired in our DNA to get as far away from our inlaws as possible. From the beginning of time back on the savannahs of africa, generation after generation of human newlyweds kept hoping to move just far enough away from their inlaws so they could visit around the holidays, but far enough apart to give themselves a good excuse to leave early to "beat the traffic". On and on it went, generation after generation all of them moving further out on the horizon until every 'nook and cranny' of every spot on the globe had been reached and populated by someone else's relatives.

It was a good system and it worked for a very long time, but things have changed for us. Now there is no frontier, no place you can go to get away from anyone else their relatives or yours - ever. Cellphones reach every spot on the globe at all hours of the day or night and everyone lives with the expectation of "instant real time" communication. You don't answer your phone on the first ring and people think its an insult.

I can remember when the words "Live Via Satellite" meant something really really big was going on. Now it just means theres a wrestlin' match on 'teevee'.

Thanks to the 'Jet Age', you are 14 hours from any spot on the globe and when you get there, you'll be met at the airport by a cabbie wearing an NYPD t-shirt, carrying an I-pod and yes, carrying a cellphone that was probably made in Finland.

Trade and travel restrictions are more liberal than they have been in the history of mankind. Wars, famile and pestilence, where they occur are regional and small in nature by comparison to almost any time in the past. So who is it on the plane with you while you travel? Yes thats right, just about anyone else in the world, because where travel used to be a sign of sophistication or at the very least someone rich with some scandal to hide but it's now just a sign that you've got $1000 dollars buring a hole in your sweatpants.

Now dont get me wrong, these are all good things and I'm all for seeing and visting all parts and peoples of the world but I got to tell you, there are times when I want to go somewhere where there is ZERO expectation that anyone can find me with my cellphone, someplace where no one has ever heard of Britney Spears or is populated by anyone who uses the phrase "Carbon Neutral".

There are days that I would really like to go somewhere else.

I went somewhere else twice in my life, and both of those places are gone now, overrun with the tracks of civilization. Places where people just didnt go back then are now places where elderly retirees can drive their RV's in safety and comfort.

Way back in my youth, I once took an epic trip down the Baja Pennisula. I was in the process of a divorce from what would soon be my first wife, and I found myself also between jobs( and yet, this was not the worst year of my life. It wasnt even close, so for those of you feeling down in the dumps for your situations, keep you chin up. Things got much worse and much better as I moved on through life ).

One of my cousins and a couple of his friends were going fishing along the coast of Baja and I decided that since I had nothing else to do that I would go along. Fishing trip? It was more like a trip into the distant past via "The Time Tunnel".

The road down the Baja pennisula, if you could call it that, ended just a few miles outside of Ensenada, and was replaced with a few miles of 55 gallon drum heads. Then it was dirt, gravel and little else. There were no GPS, no highway patrol, no gas stations every exit, hell there were no exits.

You were on you own. There was the four of us at ages between 20 to 24, A Ford Bronco and a 68 Chevy Truck, spare tires, tools, fishing gear and thats about it. There was no expectation of help if anything went wrong, if you got hurt, you died. If the truck broke down and couldnt be repaired, it would probably stay where it broke down if we couldnt fix it.

We were completely on our own. We were for all intents and purposes living in the 18th century. We were on our own in a way you can't hardly do anymore. We went days without seen any signs of human habitation. We slept right on the beaches. We fished all day and moved along down the coast, completely losing track of time and dates.

It was fantastic.

On rare occasion we would find a small town or a village, but they werent the sort of airconditioned, franchised "rubber tomahawk and sombrero" places you see today. These were places where people lived and fished and went about their lives, somewhat oblivious to the outside world that we lived in.

About half way through the trip, we saw a set of telephone poles leading to a small village and decided to stop. We took a seat at the bar and ordered food as a change of pace from what we ate on the beach. Then we asked if we could use the phone. The owner just pointed us to the pay phone on the wall. My cousin walked over to use it and discovered that there was no dial tone.

He asked the owner when the phone would be repaired. The owner said he had no idea, that no one in the town had any use for the phone. Then my cousin asked if he knew what caused it to be out and the owner just pointed at the lobster traps that were stacked against the wall.

Lobster traps, that were clearly made of untwisted telephone cabling. We stuck out head out of the open air bar and followed the phone lines and sure enough about a half mile down from the town there was a big gap between two poles. The Federal Government of Mexico had wished to provide telephone services for the people of Baja, but the people of this part of the coast of Baja had found the phone lines to be put to better use then asking other people "hey watcha doin...".

"Who are we going to call? Everyone we know lives here! " the owner of the bar said to us. You really couldn't argue with that, its just the way it was. Who needs a phone, we got everything right here in river city big fellah...

After we had gone as far down Baja as we could, we took a ferry over to the mainland. What looked to be a quick half day trip instead took two agonizing days to cross, as the ferry broke down in mid crossing with ourselves and five other trucks on board. The Gulf of California was absolutely becalmed, not so much as a ripple on the water and no discernable horizon due to the dust and haze which sounds like loads of fun until you realize that there was no way to drive off the smell of the stench from the ferry, which was a lukewarm heated combination of tuna parts, cigar butts, vomit, diesel oil and chemical toilet effluent. Once it gets on you, there's not enough Lava soap in the world to get that smell off of you. To this day, I can't eat tuna fish without thinking of the 300 lb. Captain of the ferry laughing at us from the wheelhouse and eating his cigar at the same time while we sat there in the middle of nowhere and waited for the tug to find us and bring us in. The Mexican Anti-"Captain Ahab", not chasing anything around "perditions flame" but just sitting up in the wheelhouse, eating cigars and spitting tobacco down at the deck and the passengers below for sport.

We arrived on the Mexican mainland and after showering in an actual hotel, with running water and yes, a telephone that actually worked and we drove back to "El Norte", and crossed the Sonoran desert in the process.

That my friends, is a serious desert.

Oh, it might be hot and dry where you live, but compared to the Sonoran desert out around the Colorado River Delta, it might as well be Louisiana wherever you are.

We stopped in the desert at one point to deal with a mechanical problem. The Chevy had blown the last of its tires, and we need to send the Bronco ahead to get the last tire repaired. I stayed behind with one of the other guys to watch the truck as the rest went on ahead to the next town.

At night in the desert there wasn't a sound. I mean not a solitary sound. It was the sound of the absence of all living things. Occasionally the truck would make some sort of noise due to the cooling of the various metals causing a small clank here or there, but that's it. You could quite literally hear your own heart beat out there. It was the most "empty" and the most "nothing" I've ever been in.

It was fantastic.

Since that trip my contention has been that anyone who crosses the Sonora desert by foot with the only thing keeping them going is that simple desire of coming across to the United States; if thats the case they should be met at the border with a wet towel, a large glass of lemonade and we should just sign them in right then and there and give them the oath of citizenship.

Anyone who crosses that place on foot and survives is ok by me. we'll work on that whole 50 states and capitals civics test later...

When we crossed the border back into the US at Calexico, we faced returning to a world run by the clock and the calendar rather than one run by the seasons and the tide. There was no getting away from it, no matter where you went, there you were and someone else knew it. The world we left behind on that trip might as well have been the world that Cortez and his men found when they arrived in the new world. It probably hadnt changed all that much since that time.

But its all gone now. Baja now has a nice asphalt paved highway that goes all the way down to Cabo San Lucas. The road south of Ensenada is no longer "the gates of the anitpodes" but the first of many PEMEX stations and McDonalds all along the route. On a road that my friends and I once agonized over possibly losing a tire or puncturing an oil pan because there was no expeactation of help of any kind, now average Americans from LA suburbia drive their Honda Accords and Civics in air conditioned comfort down to places all along the coast, Kayaking and talking about the natural beauty of all that they see.

The Mexican Federales now have check stations to make sure you make it safely all along the route. What the hell is that all about? Safely? Federales? When I went down Baja, I wept when I saw a barbwire fence, because I knew it meant that someone was possibly around the area.

And now there's cell phone towers all along the route.

Blasphemy...

The blessed emptyness of it all is now interrupted by stupid ring tones and people saying "Hey watcha doin..." at any hour day and night, just because they can.

Where's the sport in that? You can't get truly lost today of all you have to do is reach into your pocket and say "Mom, come get me..."

So I look at the animated "gif" at the top of this post thats been provided by SETI and NASA and I swoon for the possibility of blessed emptyness and I know how much I personally really need the concept of frontier. Because from some of us, its not enough to just get away from our inlaws. We need to maintain our own sense of our humanity by leaving it behind to go see whats on the other side of the hill. That hill, right there behind that "dust devil". I wonder whats over there...

Were just wired for that sort of thing, I think.

Posted @ April 29, 2007 10:09 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

How do you say "Look and cook" in Russian?

Every war changes the battlefield in small but very perceptible ways and once its changed, you cant go back and fight the way you did in previous war. You have to adapt to the realities presented, or surrender to them.

In the last few engagements with the forces of Jihad, weve seen how cheap, simple and decidedly ineffective missiles when fired 'en masse' can still have the desired effect of ruining the morale of the enemies of islamic jihadis.

The Hezbollah-Israeli war of last summer was a war fought under these exact terms. Hezbollah launched lots of little missiles into civilian populations and caused the israelis to react to them. The reaction was in my view clearly justified, and perhaps more than a bit too restrained, but there can be no doubt that the world didnt think the Israeli reation was justified and Israel suffered not from the missiles launched at them, but by their own reaction to Hezbollah, which was in the classic way of invading and clearing territory of a threat( which to my eyes is completely justified and understood but in the modern age is simply not tolerated even when it is clearly justified).

The result of the missile tactics used by hezbollah are twofold - first that Hezbollah accomplished its goals in southern Lebanon and second as a result of that success, we will see more of the same deployed in more places, perhaps even against US interests at home and abroad.

So the issue at hand for those of us in the west is now,"what are the defensive measures that can be deployed against waves of small dumb missiles?". When I say "dumb missiles",I am referring to the fact that the missile has no level of sophistiction in its targeting. The missile is simply aimed at an approximate location with little concern given if it the weapon hits what it is aimed at or not.

In the modern battlefield, the mere fact that the weapon is launched is enough to embolden those who fire it and to strengthen their cause. It cannot be overlooked that the jihadi war is a war fought not like a military campaign,but like a PR campaign. The goal in a PR campaign is not as much for territory but for headlines.

What I find most interesting when I look into this question of "battlefield missile defense" is just how sophisticated it seems to be.

The picture I've placed above this post is taken from an article on the Raytheon Vigilant Eagle System.

Here's a snip from that article:

"This system (Vigilent Eagle) uses laser and microwave energy to target and shoot down anti-aircraft missiles.

"I take the view that lasers supplanting what we sell now is not threatening, it's an opportunity. And with a disruptive technology, good can be good enough," says Swanson.

That's the idea behind the company's Laser Area Defense System, a counter-mortar system installed in Raytheon's 20mm Phalanx antimissile rotary cannon. The current Phalanx, which can compute the trajectory of an incoming shell and fire 4,500 rounds per minute, was good for $300 million of contracts last year from the U.S. and allies.

Replace the ordnance with a fiber-optic laser and you can destroy 60mm mortar rounds 500 yards away, as Raytheon demonstrated last June. Four engineers borrowed mortars from the Sandia Explosives Lab and blew them up with a borrowed 20-kilowatt off-the-shelf laser from the Air Force Research Laboratory just hours after 80-mile-an-hour desert winds whipped through. If a prototype due by December 2007 improves the laser beam director, it could get deployed alongside existing Phalanx systems within 12 months."

End snip...

So it seems that laser anti missile weapons are well underway with their development and it also seems that they are close to being deployed as well. This would have the effect of blunting the most recent development of the terrorists to continue their activities of extortion against the west.

Which brings us back to the Russian angle in this story. We may thing of ourselves as the "Arsenal of Democracy", but no one can argue that the Russian Government is not the "arsenal of Jihad".

Perhaps this is why Russia seems so dead set against the idea of missile defense on any scale, even when we wish to cooperate directly with them in its development and deployment?

If we develop successful,easy to deploy and cost effective battlefield countermeasures to exactly the sort of weapons that the Russians make and sell by the truckload, then that would make the Russian weapons market into a complete waste of time, now wouldnt it?

Perhaps that is why we see these sort of silly statements from the Russian government these days.

In the end, it seems it is all about trade, isnt it?

Posted @ April 28, 2007 10:57 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Great Farking Zarkwon

Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Galaxy.

Just dropping a quick note here from "yours truly". My home and my office in it, the place that serves as my personal version of the "batcave" is without internet or phone service because I was silly enough to take the advice of my local phone company and have them upgrade my home to a Fantastically Fast All New And Improved Fiber Optic Network System!

Well, it hasnt worked out quite the way it was planned. You know the phrase " You just cant get good help these days?" Well, I'm living it.

For me, trying to live with the lack of internet access is like suddenly being forced to camp out in the wild. Losing the internet is for all intents and purposes like I have fallen into a wormhole back into the 12th century.

I'm busily scrambling around all day trying to keep my organization up and running as I upload and download emails every 4 hours at the local Panera Bread, in between visits from the phone company,various supervisors and their contractors as they try to undo the damage done so far.

It sucks. It sucks bad. Losing TV is annoying, losing the internet is frankly, unbearable.

I'll be back in business soon. Try not to stare at my old pal Zaphod Beeblebrox too much, it makes him all "twitchy".

Update: Great llama of bahama!, I'm back in business! I'm not fiber-ed yet, but I am working again and that's ok.

Posted @ April 26, 2007 09:55 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Questions of the day

Q1: Why do liberals, much more than conservatives, feel the need to communicate their politics via bumper stickers?

Q2: Why is it that they can't just have one bumpersticker, but are almost always compelled to cover the entire rear of the car with variations on a theme?

Q3: Are the bumper stickers a way of communicating with us what the driver believes or what the driver would like to command us to do?

Q4a/b/c/d: Are bumper stickers the "communication of ideas"? ( i.e.- The sky is blue)

or are they requests for wishes to come true? ( i.e. - I sure wish the sky was blue)

or are they admonishments (i.e. - the sky would be blue if it werent for you and thats why we cant have nice things)

or are they paper versions of grade school bully tactics (i.e - Joey is a poopy head, let's make fun of joey - booh joey!)

For the record, I have no bumperstickers of any sort. I feel no need to communicate with other drivers, aside from brake lights and turn signals, but I see this "bumper sticker forest" all the time and it always makes me laugh.

Theres just something sad and emotionally needy about this phenomenon.

Posted @ April 25, 2007 03:57 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (16) | TrackBack (268)

Wartime lies - the 1940's Version

Capt. Colin P. Kelly - Hero**?

Oh my heavens, what have we discovered about the evil duplicious administration and his neocon fascist warrior cult now? The heinious crime of the military, painting rosy scenarios about losses in combat all to justify their illegal wars. Will they never learn?

But we've seen it all before, havent we? Oh, the shame of it all.

Just look at this from that evil racist war in the 1940's:

"...An imminent air attack sent the three bombers off to their respective targets before refueling and bomb loading were completed. Captain Kelly had only three 600-pound bombs aboard and orders to attack airfields on Formosa (Taiwan), some 500 miles north of Clark. The mission would earn Colin Kelly a place in American history and legend.

In the confusion of the early days of the Pacific war, Kelly was credited with sinking a Japanese battleship and with award of the Medal of Honor. Overnight he became a national hero. It later was determined that Kelly and his crew did not sink a battleship, nor was he awarded the Medal of Honor, although some still believe both...

end snip.

General Macarthur and his cronies needed heroes to justify their ill considered run up against the Japanese so as to make their illegal war stick in the minds of the American people, so they trumped up some regular acts into things that werent true.

You know what, I'll bet that Lt. Commander Johnson really didnt get his silver star either, or the Senator Tom Harkin wasnt really in Vietnam at all!

You just can't trust those military types...

** - A Hero? Well, all kidding aside, my answer is yes, indeed he was. The fact that his actions were a bit convaluted by the press and the high command for their own purposes at the time, do not detract from the act, his sacrifice and their meaning to the rest of us. But here in the "post watergate age", we tend to look on every example of distortion from the government as an act of brazen deception, but most of the time, its some just some amount on incompetancy in the organization itself. Its nothing personal, its just what happens in organizations like the government.

Would Private Lynch perfer that her commanders release a report showing her incompetence under fire(yes, people can argue that allowing sand to jam a rifle while in combat is a measure of incompentence) as another in a long line of reasons why women probably shouldnt be in combat? It's not likely that she would. Was such a conversation had by people around the mess hall at some point during or after her rescue? You can bet on it. That doesnt make it right, and it shouldn't detract from her story or the stories of other women in combat or the sacrifice of others on her team that didnt make it through that incident, but its not right for Private Lynch to try to help the enemies of the military make hay out of something she aught to let lay as it is. She did good and her rescue is one worth telling again. Didn't get the facts right? Sweetheart, have you seen what passes for facts in war movies these days? Since way back in the time of Hector and Achillies, facts dont enter into what gets written down about other peoples war stories.

This is why old men in the VFW who have actually been in combat have precious little to say about it. How the hell do you explain to someone who hasnt been there what its like? How do you expect them to understand what you saw?

I find it interesting to watch the party dedicated to putting more government interference into every part of your life, is always the first to tell you at the 'top of their lungs' how its the government that has lied to you and has "done you wrong". So go ahead Congressman Waxman, you acts are meant to discredit the miltary in the eyes of the average citizen, but all he's really doing is making more conservatives out of every day folks who are getting yet another lesson on how not to trust the authorities.

Posted @ April 25, 2007 01:01 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Another Bush critic silenced

She was on to the Bush administration and its conspiracy on 9/11, so clearly she had to go. They put pressure on ABC(American Broadcast Company, what does THAT tell you comrade!) and they caved to the administration and Karl Rove. She was on to them, she got too close to the truth. She had to go.

This administration will stop at nothing in its attempts to control the populace. First it uses Rosie as a way to discredit the left, and now that she's gotten close to the truth, they make her a "non-person". She's like a modern day Karen Silkwood, only without the nuclear technicians background and the car accident.

Watch the skies comrade, thats all I'm saying.

Posted @ April 25, 2007 08:06 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Remember this next November

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, visting the dictator of Syria in his capital of Damascus. Give us a big smile Nancy, wave to all the peaceniks and freakazoids in your home district who never met an anti-american despot they didnt like.

But Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi can't make time to visit General David Petraeus in Washington.

Is there no depth to the Democratic Partys contempt for the American Military? Have you no shame? Have you no decency? Have you no common sense at all?

The man should be getting a ticker tape parade for his efforts in Iraq, but instead he's getting doors slammed in his face all across Washington D.C.

Big smile for cameras Nancy. Make sure history records you holding the fetid claw of that monster, while showing your backside to the men and women fighting for this country ,your country, OUR country...

Posted @ April 24, 2007 10:24 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (46)

Have the Chinese been secretly supporting Israel?

Headline:

74 killed in attack on Chinese oil venture in Ethiopia

snip...

"...Scores of gunmen have attacked a Chinese-run oil field in a remote area of Ethiopia killing 74 people including nine Chinese after a gun battle that lasted for almost one hour.

Seven Chinese workers were also kidnapped in the attack which the government blamed on a separatist group, said Ethiopian prime minister's spokesman, Berekat Simon..."

"...The attack echoed a spate of killings and kidnappings in recent months that have plagued Chinese workers in Nigeria, where Beijing is also aggressively seeking to develop the nation's oil reserves..."

...end snip.

I'm trying to figure out how this could have possibly happened? Lt' run through the list "the usual leftist excuses for mayhem"

- China isn't in Iraq or Afghanistan
- China doesnt support Israel
- China has no known neo-conservative connections
- China can't really be called "allied to the United States"
- China doesnt have a history of imperialism in the middle east
- China doesnt try to impose its cultural values on the world

How could this have happened? Terrorists don't just take violent action for no reason except for "commerce raiding", do they? No one of the oppressed peoples just kills and destroys for,ahem, money do they? Maybe they saw one of thoose "Free Tibet" bumperstickers when Richard Gere drove through town and decided to do something about it?

It must be a misunderstanding. I'm sure once the Chinese sit down with these oppressed "freedom fighters" and talk out their issues that everything will be straightened out to everyones satisfaction.

Oh I know what it is! the Ethiopians are eco-warriors fighting against big oil and the corporate bloodsuckers! It all makes sense now, yeah! You know its true, you just have to think really hard with your "inside voice", play hours of barefoot hacky-sack while listening to "rage against the machine", read lots of Chomsky and eventually you can find a good eco-friendly, anti-capitalist reason to rationalize the murder of innocent people. I hope they bought "carbon offsets" before the attack...

Posted @ April 24, 2007 11:27 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Oh the things you find while reading...

As I reach back into greek philosophy to help me find a way through the morass of modern critical thinking, I found this little nugget:

"We are disturbed not by events, but by the views which we take of them"

Epictetus - Greek Stoic, 55–b.c.e - 135 b.c.e.

I found my self earlier this week telling someone that what bothered me the most about Virginia Tech was not just what happened, but how people who were not there were reacting to what happened and how I found those reactions to be interesting, for reasons I had never considered before.

It was as if due to this event that our culture had a chance to sit in front of a mirror and write down what it sees reflected back at itself.

I've never come across this character before, so I will have to read some more...

Posted @ April 21, 2007 07:21 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (43)

Nine questions for the day

I do not wish to offend by asking these questions. try to think of them as questions that are academic in nature. I ask these questions to illuminate, irritate and most of all, possibly cause you to think.

Questions:

1. In what way is the video of the madman different from showing the video of Osama or Zawahiri or Atta?

2. If we are losing in Iraq because there are still examples of bombings in markets, then why do people still advocate that schools in the US stay open with students in attendance, despite continued attacks by madmen?

3. When was the last time the media reported an act of actual heroism by a member of the military with the same breathless precision as the insane butchery of the madman of Virginia Tech?

4. If we have built a culture that debases heroism and the idea of sacrifice of the self and have replaced it with a culture based on self satisfaction and glorifies the notion of rejecting any idea of compliance to a societal norm; Then why are we so shocked when the results of our acts and values, become manifest?

5. Set aside the issue of comparative religious views and ask yourself, "How are the populations victimized by the insane mass murderers of the Pennnsylvania Amish school, Virginia Tech and Columbine, Beslan, the London buses and the Madrid trains different from the civilian populations of the Middle East"?

6. Since broadcast media are subject to the licence of their franchise to the public airways and are periodically called upon by the FCC to provide evidence that they have acted in the public interest, can you make a case why their reporting of the news in a continued biased fashion violates that portion of their franchise? My test case is the madman video and transcript, you may have more examples of how news reporting has acted to inflame or exacerbate a danger to the public.

7. When will Michael Moore and Rosie O'donnell say that the attacks on Virginia Tech were a government conspiracy designed to take away our rights?

8. Do you really need to know if the madman had a rational reason to kill 32 people at Virginia Tech? Is there any possible construct of a rational reason for such an act?

9. Does any offense prepretrated against the madman during his life provide a possible rational reason for you to excuse his acts?

I look forward to your answers. I will publish mine tommorrow.

Posted @ April 20, 2007 01:38 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (46)

Bush makes things hard for business editors of news outlets

Despite being at war and under constant threat of attack, despite highest fuel prices of all time, the Bush management of the economy seems pretty solid.

To me, it would seem that no matter where you stand in your politcs, the fact that things are working - and working pretty well by the looks of it - would be seen universally as good news. Sadly, that is not the case...

Which makes me wonder if maybe "fuming about the rich" is whats leading to global warming...

Posted @ April 20, 2007 08:51 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (29)

More sparta, less athens

I say this with total respect towards the students, faculity and family of Virginia Tech and I shre in their loss. This is not a judgement of their actions in the massacre, they are victims and not to be judged one way or the other.

This particular post is more towards the rest of you who might someday be in this situation. I fear that unless we change some basic things about our culture, we will see more of these.

It seems to me that 'self defence' is not considered an option in polite society. It is time we learned (or relearned) the need to sometimes be a little more "sparta" and a little less "athens".

Here are a few guidlines to consider:

1. Do not wait for the police or the authorities to tell you what is going on. If you hear gunshots, assume that it is time for you to take action. Every moment you delay stopping the madman ensures that more innocent people will die.

2. Do not assume that if you just lay there and do nothing that you will live. Assume that if you just lay there, that you or someone else will surely die.

3. Do not assume that you can reason with the madman, if you must assume anything at all, assume that you must do everything possible to ensure your survival, even if it means engaging in violence.

4. If you can run away from the problem, then do so. If you cannot run away, prepare to defend yourself. If you can defend yourself, find someone else who can't and help defend them. The concept of 'safety in numbers' applies to humans as well.

5. If you find protecting your own safety while leaving others to be killed to be a reprehensible idea then prepare to defend them from the madman.

So, how can you defend yourself from a madman armed with a gun?

- throw chairs.

- Throw books, bookbags, paper, pens, paint.

- Find the fire extinguisher, aim towards the attacker and fire, the throw the empty device at the madman.

- Find the fire hose and hydrant. aim the stream towards the attacker.

- Run towards attacker en masse, armed with pens and pencils, sticks, stones whatever is at hand. Some of you will surely die in the process, but one of you is likely to maim the madman and save lives.

- If the attacker tells you to line up against the wall, refuse. Do not cooperate with madmen. The more he deals with you and your refusal to cooperate, the more likely that others are to escape. Dont worry about possibly making him angry, he is already irrational and beyond reasoning.

- If you have a camera with a flash, use it. blind the attacker with whatever means you have at hand.

- Improvise.

- Throw hot coffee or any other burning substance on the individual. feel free to throw the coffee pot as well, throw glasses, knives, forks, baseball bats, helmets, pottery, car parts, loose laying lumber plumbing fixtures at the madman.

- Got any pepper spray handy? Now would be a good time to find out if it works or not.

- Make noise. distract. block pathways and doors. turn out the lights, impede their progress in any way possible.

- Do not consider the feelings of the madman in your acts, his goal is to kill you, your goal is to stop the killing by any means necessary.

If you can disrupt Ann Coulter when she comes to campus or the ROTC when they recruit on campus, you can stop or disrupt a madman when he comes to kill you and your classmates.

UPDATE: Some comments from the instructor who expellend the madman from class -

snip...

Nikki Giovanni encountered Cho only once after she removed him from class. She was walking down a campus path and noticed him coming toward her. They maintained eye contact until passing each other.

Giovanni, who had survived lung cancer, was determined she would not blink first.

"I was not going to look away as if I were afraid," she said. "To me he was a bully, and I had no fear of this child."
End snip.

Well. I dont know her, but I like her already. She can teach my kids anytime, hell this lady can teach me anytime...

Posted @ April 18, 2007 02:08 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (9)

The Bee/Cellphone Connection

I'm officially weighing in on the story reported on Drudge/Instapundit about the death of bees as somehow the fault of cellphone technology...

Ahem.

"The only way that cellphones are effecting bees is if the bees are flying around talking on the damn things and causing lots of little mid-air bee collisions".

Full disclosure, I'm a well known hater of cellphone technology so its not like im on the side of the cellphone industry but seriously guys, the advent of hybrid cars, womens perfume, gatorade in neon colors or "bratz dolls" are all far more likely a culprits in "bee deaths" as are the growth of cellphones in modern civilization. Do the Amish use Cellphones? Any Cellphone towers in Bird-in-hand Pennsylvania? How's their bee populations? Sure, I dont know either, but I would think that you would want to find out before you go scaring the hell out of everyone.

Let's start looking there before we start enforcing a new tax of cellphones to help our poor little winged helpers, shall we?

Dontcha think its funny that no one ever says:

"Study shows sudden unexplained rise in cockroach deaths possibly due to overhead power lines".

Cockroaches, rats and flies all go on living endlessly without interruption no matter what you toss at them, but all of the rest of Gods creatures are undone by mans industrial works as soon as it hits the market shelves. No one seems to give a damn about cockroaches. If all of nature is a wonder to be protected from the harsh hand of man, then why doesnt anyone care about the cockroaches and flies?

If cellphones are somehow whacking bees from the skies, then maybe we could adjust them to somehow get rid of mosquitos? Now THATS something I would gladly pay 5 bucks a month for.

It's always the same story. In the minds of "the new luddite", new technology can only make the world worse. There is a whole subculture of people who spend their days and nights ( using the very technology they so dispise) trying to prove it to be true, that the world sucks and its all your fault, and in the end its for no other purpose than to find a new way to tax you for your sins.

They say this even when every single metric about life in the modern age that there is shows just the opposite to be true.

I love Bees and I hate Cellphones, but science is science. If I wanted to make stuff up to get my own way politically, I would be a whole lot more creative about it than this.

Ok, what if its satellite television systems? GPS systems? Free WIFI on every street corner? Big Bass speakers on teeny tiny cars? The decreased use of non-leaded paint? maybe bees LIKED lead in their paint? Would we put it back if we found that to be true?

No. "Screw the bees", we would say.

Radar? What about that? Would we turn it off if we found out that Radar was causing the bees to die?

Nope. "Screw the bees", we would say.

Who wants a sky full of 747's without radar? You want to go back to world without cheap air travel? not me brudder! What about lithium batteries? Cellphones use lithium batteries, and hybrid cars use lithium batteries so maybe the bees are sensitive to something about lithium batteries? would we get rid of hybrid cars if it helped the bees?

Nope. "Screw the bees", we would say.

Well maybe its the rise in the use of biodiesel? Again, if thats the case, people will say "Screw the bees" in response. And the thing is, they would be right to do so.

If bees are so weak as to fall apart after a teeny tiny bit of radiation from freaking cellphones as opposed to the thousands of other radio sources, then off go the bees into the exhibit next to the south pacific dodo bird. But the cool thing is that people seem to be forgetting is that bees are insects and insects breed fast. Those bees that live will be the type with the genes made to survive the onslaught of the 'evil brain cancer causing cellphones' and there you have it, in a few generations, we'll have bees that will do just fine co-existing with humans and cellphones.

So all of you that want to go into the office on monday morning and look down your nose at your coworkers who are insensitive to the plight of the bees, do a little more research on the subject before you start tut-tutting about how "they dont care about nature", ok?

Because they dont care about the damn bees, and neither do you.

(And the cool thing is, I got through this whole post without using any of the obvious puns like "what about CB radios? get it? C-Bee, hahahaha. I kill myself sometimes... )

Posted @ April 15, 2007 03:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Fun with Google Earth

This months issue of Air Classics Magazine has a great article about a family in 1960 who decided to fly around the world in a World War II era PBY Catalina Flying Boat. Unfortunately, the flight came to an end in Saudi Arabia, when the family was attacked by ( as the article states) "Blood-crazed Muslims".

It's a great story, but I kept thinking "Now where have I heard of this story before?"

And then I remembered. It was on Google Earth.

I occasionally spend hours using Google Earth and looking for interesting things that can be found on the pages of that system. Its a great way to waste time. Chilean Navy bases( with submarines!), cattle fences that cross northern Nevada, oil refineries and tank farms deep in Libyan desert, missile bases outside of Damascus, political advertisements cut into the desert sands of South America, they are all fun to look at. I was once looking up and down the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba to see what can be seen from space and sure enough, I found this:

Yes, its the very same PBY flying boat thats covered in the article. The PBY, Shot down in 1960 with an American family and a reporter on board. They surivived the attack by hostile locals, and later, met members of the Saudi Royal Family and yet here we were 47 years later looking at a picture of the same aircraft as it sits on a beach of the gulf.

You can't hide anything from anyone these days. You can't even hide things that happened 47 years ago.

Posted @ April 10, 2007 10:51 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Like Johhnny Cash Said...

"...I've been everywhere man, I've been everywhere...!"

April 1st - Sacramento, California to Idaho Falls, Idaho.

April 4th - Idaho Falls, Idaho to Seattle, Washington.

April 8th - Seattle, Washington To Sacramento, California.

What did I do? What did I see? What did I find that I didnt know before?

- Crossed the Continental Divide three times.

- Crossed into and out of Idaho twice.

- Went through 12 different Mountain passes, never on the same route twice.

- Saw Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Hood, Mt. Batchelor, Mt. Shasta, all in one day. Fantastic...

- Discovered that a river does indeed run through Missoula, Montana.

- Found that Montana has by far the best maintained and best constructed highways of the lower 48 States. It might be that they are the same as all the others, and that they are simply waiting for people to drive on them, but they are truly magnificent to drive on. Smooth as a billiard table, well marked and clear of any sort of debris.

- While passing through Montana, we once traveled for over 75 minutes without seeing another car, truck or vehicle travelling in either direction as we moved down the road. At the same time, no AM radio stations were accessible on the dial, there we were in "scan" mode, the dial just went around and around. This was truly the back side of nowhere and it was fantastic. It is great to know that such a thing exists.

- We were only 100 feet from a major crash of a lumber truck in Idaho and we didn't hear or see a thing. I have no idea how thats possible, but thats what happened. One minute, everything is fine, the next a full lumber truck spread out on its side, across all 4 lanes of traffic. And we never saw a thing...

- That the most spectacular mountain pass by far was the Snoqualmie pass just outside of Seattle. This is not to say that the rest were mere portals through mountain country, its just that Snoqualmie is absolutely stunning.

- A single female deer can stop a full size Dodge RAM pickup truck dead in its tracks.

- That the phrase "Big Sky Country" is an understatement.

- That all 5 radio shows of the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy take 12 hours and 30 minutes to listen to, which is the exact amount of time it takes to travel from Idaho Falls, Idaho to Seattle, Washington. I dont think the author intended this to be the case, but it works out that way just the same.

- That I would rather have my teeth pulled out of my skull with rusty pliers than ever eat at another McDonalds ever again.

- Cities can be recognized at the periphery by the blue signs that say " Gas Food Lodging" and now in the modern age, they are quickly followed by the signs that say "Gentlemans Club" and "Wal Mart". One is left to wonder if at some future iteration of retail marketing, the two concepts will manage get together and provide the male consumer with what can truly be called "One Stop Shopping".

- That if you are ever in Seattle on a Friday for the first sunny, warm day in about 6 months, you will notice that office productivity in the downtown area will fall off to exactly nothing as everyone will want to be outside catching a few rays. The Green Lake area of Seattle will then swarm with lots of local people, half of which will be nearly opaque due to a complete lack of any descerable tan on their skin.

After a 14 hour day behind the wheel today finishing off the trip at just over 2500 miles, I'm now too tired to go on.

More to follow...

Posted @ April 09, 2007 12:44 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Drive, He Said (Part II)

And drive he did. On this leg of the trip, we go over the continental divide three times, cross three States( Montana, Idaho and Washington), go though four mountain passes ( Monida ,Lookout Pass, 4th of July Pass and Snoqualmie

This is the second leg of the trip and now we are at 1600+ miles. Here's more "Drive-by photography" as the annual Varifrank "trip around the west" continues.

Idaho/Montana State Border. I-15 headed north into Montana. Taken at roughly 8:00 am Wednesday Morning. Say, is that snow up there on the hills and some low hanging clouds I see? Ah, yeah it is and today from Missoula to Spokane its going to be either raining, snowing or some combination thereof making the driver very glad of his purchase of the Toyota FJ Cruiser.

Western Montana Geology. Just outside of Butte. I know it looks bleak here, but most of this part of Montana is fantastically beautiful and forested, its I just have a thing for rock formations, thats all. Unlike most state mottos which tend to overemphasise some small thing, the phrase "big sky country" is an complete understatement. This is a fantastically beautiful state. So why dont you see more of it on this post then? Hey, I'm driving here! I got priorities!

The authors hands, sighted at the wheel of the FJ Cruiser, somewhere outside of Missoula Montana, Headed north on I-90. It was supposed to be a picture of yours truly, but my copilot, while master of the PSP and XBOX seems to be challenged to master the workings of the camera.

Two mountain passes remain to be cleared heading into and out of Idaho as we cross the "panhandle" on our way over to Washington State.

Later the same day( I estimate its about 5:00 PST in this shot), The Columbia River Crossing in Western Washington. By this time "Get-there-itis" has now begun to take total control of my mind. We are still three hours and one major mountain pass short of our final destination on this leg of the trip.

Arrival at our destination at 8:05 Local time. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe Radio Show served as our Audio complement to this leg of the trip. It's the ideal thing to listen to when driving past hours of vast magnificent emptyness.

This leg of the trip - 884 Miles: Idaho Falls, Idaho to Seattle Washington. 12 hours and 30 minutes travel time. We gain an hour going from Mountain to Pacific time.

More to follow...

Posted @ April 05, 2007 10:55 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

It Helps if you hum "The Blue Danube"

Boeing 787 Interior

One of my great frustrations with the modern age comes from the expectations for the future that were set as part of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. To me, that was what the future was supposed to be. Nuclear powered Space Shuttles, big space stations, moonbases, the whole bit. It looked nice, it looked clean. Most importantly, it looked fun.

Reality turned out somewhat different than that of what Kubrick proposed. Most thankfully, there was no Soviet Union in 2001, but in almost every other area the future that turned out to be was a whole lot less exciting than the future that the filmed projected on to our sense of "how things should be".

Now I know that Boeing Commercial Airliners are not Nuclear Powered Space Shuttles, and were not talking about huge rotating Space Stations( So big as to be able to afford the expense of bother of having a Hilton Hotel on board), but take a few moments and visit the "Sneak Preview" for the three new Boeing Aircraft that are about to be released. Like I said, it will help set the mood if you hum the "Blue Danube".

Unlike the Airbus A380, the Boeing 787 will prove to be revolutionary, for the industry, the manufacturer and the passengers as well. This "Sneak Preview" should give you a sense for just how much this aircraft is going to be quite different than anything you've seen before.

Somehow I dont think that in 1968, Stanley Kubrick expected that the travelling public would be wearing sweatpants, t-shirts and carrying computers in backpacks either. The future is indeed a funny place...

Posted @ April 02, 2007 01:34 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Drive, He Said....

And Drive He Did.

Sneakily captured out the window of the FJ Cruiser on Sunday afternoon, somewhere deep in the Northern Great Basin.

Posted @ April 02, 2007 01:22 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

best.quote.ever

A buddy just told me a funny story about when he went to see a movie recently. As the movie previews went by and included the trailer to the movie '300', someone shouted out:

"too soon!".

I love it.

Posted @ March 30, 2007 09:24 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Congress escalates tensions in middle east

In a clandestine effort to help destabilize the middle east, Congress will begin the execution of "Operation Moonbat" next week. More details here.

At appears that the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi will be leading a crack team of Congressional Crackpots to Lebanon and various capitals of the middle east next week.

The list of crackpots includes:

Democrat Keith Ellison. Congressman from Minnesota- US 's first Muslim congressman.

Democrat Nick Rahall. Congressman from West Virginia, is of Lebanese descent

Democrat Tom Lantos. Congressman from California who is Jewish is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee

Democrat Henry Waxman. Congressman from California who is also Jewish.

Republican David Hobson. Congressman from Ohio.

Hmmm. Let's see...

Keith Ellison. Middle East Venue. Access to camera time.
Henry Waxman. Middle East Venue. Access to camera time.
Nancy Pelosi. Middle East Venue. Access to camera time.

Oh yes I'm sure that we will hear a great lincolnesque speech on the virtues of America along the lines of 'look what I, a poor muslim child in the wastelands of racist christian Minnesota managed to accomplish, America is truly a great country' from Mr. Ellison next week. Yes, I'm absolutely sure that will happen...

Congressman Rahall was active last summer in trying to end the war between Hezbollah & Israel. And how did he do that you say? well by attacking Israel naturally! He came out against a "bipartisan congressional resolution" in July 2006 supporting Israel during the Hezbollah War. During the war he wrote a letter to President George W. Bush calling on him to tell Prime Minister Ehud Olmert "that enough is enough. It is time for the disproportionate use of violence to end and for negotiations to begin." No word on whether or not an equivalent letter was sent by Congressman Rahall to Assad and to Hezbollah asking them to stop shelling civilians in Northern Israel.

"What did you do in the war daddee"?

"Well son, I wrote a letter."

"Did you sprain you hand, daddee?"

"Why no son, I had my secretary write it, I simply signed it"

"No daddee, I didnt mean did you sprain your hand writing the letter, I meant did you sprain you hand patting yourself on the back?

Lantos? Well I like Lantos, so he gets a pass this time.

Henry Waxman? Haven't we tortured those poor people over there enough? Is this the real "shock and awe" weve all heard so much about? The Shock of Nancys lack of logic and the Awe of Waxmans idiocy? You couldn't do more damange to those folks if you strapped him to the hard point of a B-52 and...

Say, come to think of it, thats not a bad idea...

I have no idea who this joker from Ohio is, but unless hes going to take notes at the first annual "Beruit Festival of America bashing" that will surely result, then its a waste of my time.

You think this Congressional comittee will stop by the former Marine barracks for any sort of photo op?

Now remember kids, "politics ends at the waters edge".

Posted @ March 30, 2007 08:11 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

I've seen this movie before

Hostage Taking; It's like the 'Beau Geste' of International Politics.

1. Third tier dictatorship takes Hostages.
2. "Wise old men" advise caution.
3. Third tier dictatorship increases rhetoric, engages in street theatre.
4. "Wise old men" assure their government leaders that diplomatic solution is just around the corner.
5. Public grows angrier by the day.
6. Third tier dictatorship asks for apology.
7. Months pass into years.
8. Hostages released to new administration in attempt to garner favorable negotiation stance.

In the late 1700's and the early part of the 1800's we fought two wars against the Muslims over what was essentially "Hostage Taking". It should be noted that everyone in Europe hated us for it too. We established that we do indeed require a Navy and the Marines got a stanza in their anthem out of it.

In this century, in 1968, we saw this scenario play out in the USS Pueblo incident. Europeans might be surprised to find out that during the event, we didnt attack North Korea like a bunch of "cowboys". Americans might be surprised to find out that while the crew was returned, the USS Pueblo is still in North Korean hands.

In 1978, We saw our embassy in Iran captured by Iranian "students", and we all know how that movie got picked up to be a weekly one hour series thats still running for the last 30 years with the wherewithall of the 'Law and Order' franchise.

This weeks version of the movie is a British remake, but the plot is the same and yet I suspect, that this time the ending might also be somewhat different from the American ones weve seen before.

First, Iran usually does these things through third party actors so that they can use the excuse that "it wasn't us, it was those horrible kids down the street" and then politely tell the world that they would be happy to talk to them if only we could negotiate on other things at the same time. However, this time its not "third parties" doing the evil deeds, but the Iranian goverment itself that has taken the hostages. That doesnt play well with other governments around the world. So, I'm taking this as a desperate act on the part of the Iranians.

Second is a question of timing. Why now? Isnt a week after you get voted down in the UN a bad idea to go kidnapping other people naval personnel? Again, I smell the "stink of fear" on the part of the Iranian government.

Now the Iranians surely are who they are, but so are the British. I know everyone is quick to ask "What would Maggie do?" this week and use it to condemn Tony Blair, but I'm not going to go there yet. The British have a way of doing things and this is their folks that are being used as pawns, so good or bad, I say its Mr. Blairs call to make. I caution those of you who think he should be doing more to remember that what we see in the news is not whats actually happening behind the scenes. It will be years before we find out what was going on behind the scenes right now, so dont use the headlines on Drudge to give you any sense of whats really going on right now. You can bet your bottom dollar that the English are doing what they do best at this point to resolve the issue in a very polite fashion. I also want to remind you that when it finally comes to blows, it should be very clear who's side you should be on and why.

Oh damn, I've gone and shown my hand.

Two things are becoming increasingly more likely as we move forward and they both lead to some form of state level violence between England and Iran. Yeah, It's War I'm talking about.

Oh yes, You should have no fear about our role in this. I'm sure we will get to help out and exact a little not so quiet revenge for our past issues with the Iranians. Usually when 'John Bull' decides to throw down against some little tinhorn pissant dicatorship, we usually get to stand by and hold his coat and warn off the other little smartasses who think they want to jump in and help out the cat that "John" is rightfully kicking the crap out of.

First, diplomacy only goes so far and it also has a language of its own. When the Iranians said "you must apologize" what they really said is "forget it, you dont get them back unless you come back with a much better offer". They know damn well that when they made this offer that England had already provided proof that their people werent in Iranian waters, they just told England the equivalent to "f**ck off".

They just did it diplomatically, thats all.

Second, England has already started to close off economic ties to Iran. We did this sort of thing in 1978, so dont get your hopes up that as a result of England doing this that all of a sudden they will come crawling back to the table, begging the English to give them their pretty trade credits back, because thats not going to happen. The English have just told the Iranians to "f**ck off".

They just did it diplomatically, thats all.

So were back to another remake of the same old movie. Tinhorn dictatorship holds western superpower hostage in humilition which is resolved after much talking at a much later date.

or...

This time, something else happens(maybe- a very likely maybe). Remember, timing is a factor here so pay attention. Iran needs to escalate this little action from 'hostage taking' to something much more serious. Normally, its not in the hostage takers interest to escalate the situation. They just want to get your attention, they dont want you to actually fire up the SWAT Team and come bustin in through the door.

Usually what "state level hostage takers" are after is lots of face time with the other party for the purpose of getting other political issues resolved. We in the West don't do business this way(unless youre in the waste management business in New Jersey and your name ends in a vowel), but in the Middle East, this is business as usual. (Nothing personal you see, its just business. Been going on since the Crusades probably longer, so dont get your panties in a bunch you infidels... )But the timing this time tells me they are after something else.

I think in this particular remake of 'Beau Geste', the Iranians actually want to fight the English. I think that just may be their actual goal. They are waiting for the English to overreact, they are waiting to be able to call for "world wide jihad" as the aggreived party. I think for the mullahs, that may be their only way out of their current predicament.

As of late, things are not going so well for the mullahs. "World Wide Jihad" as a franchise operation isnt exactly going where we all thought it would by this point. To be sure, it exists, but the chessboard has gone more towards our side than towards theirs. Headlines are one thing, but the mood in "the souk" of the middle east is definetly not going towards the mullahs. Add to it the fact that their "Dr. Evil operation" in North Korea has failed to produce a working atomic bomb, which means a ton of money was spent by the Iranians and "lil Kim" converted it all into warehouses of Cheap Brandy, Slim Jims and Skidoos rather than something slightly more nefarious. I take the recent report by the CIA that the North Korean bomb was a "fizzle" as one of the key factors in this hostage taking event. Its not just that the bomb itself was a "fizzle", but that the manufacturing process itself was faulty and that will take time to fix.

Time, that the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary government doesnt have.

The lack of a bomb means that nuclear extortion is probably out of the question, so there goes that line of revenue.

The lack of a full out war in Lebanon with Israel means that the "war against Zion" revenue pipeline is probably not going as well as it could be either, so there goes that line of revenue. Since the Israelis have left most of what can be called 'Palestine' they have diffused most of that anger and as a result lowered that revenue line as well.

"Outrage over cartoons that make fun of Mohammed" pipeline? I think thats at the the bottom of the charts by now.

And you know what, the kids around the campus at good old 'Tehran A&M University' have started getting that look in their eye again, you know the one the Shah and his henchmen saw in 1978 and completely ignored. The locals have all started to point out how similar things are now to those days and remind everyone how fast the Shah fell.

So I'm guessing here, but I think the Iranians actually are looking for a fight this time. The risk isnt that I'm right, because if they want a fight they will get one, the risk is that they might not be actually looking for a fight, but just might get one anyway.

To quote Fred Thompsons character Admiral Painter in "Hunt for Red October":

"This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it."

Accidents happen. Not just to our side, but to their side as well. Somewhere on the coast of Iran is a battery of Chinese made Silkworm Anti-ship missiles. All it takes is one trigger happy comamnder to fire his missiles at just the right time and things will, as they say "get out of hand". If he sinks a commercial oil tanker or a military ship no matter the Navy, its war. Not just with England, or the US, any action in the gulf is action against the ecomonies of the world.

Big time.

20% of the worlds oil comes through that little alimentary canal called the "Straits of Hormuz". That little underpaid civil servant in a green suit doesnt have to hit your ship for your ecomony to get completely plinked off the target range. He manages to sink one ship and every insurance company in the world goes absolutely ape. Every futures index goes off the charts and every company already teetering on the edge of solvency will vaporize. And remember, he doesnt have to do it on the "orders of the mullahs", he just have to think it up all by himself. One underpaid man, one imported second hand 1960's generations anti-ship missile, just one ship and a global economy falls into the gutter.All this will happen to the world because of the rash actions of one underpaid junior officer at some missile battery outside of Bandar Abbas.

And thats the risk here. It's a big risk, and its a very real risk.

My advice is to watch closely, let the English do what they gotta do, but be prepared, Admiral Painter could be in this movie too.

And then start to think about what our reaction will be if one of the targets from our friend in Bandar Abbas isnt an oil tanker, but is a United States Navy Nuclear Aircraft Carrier, of which there are two in the area. I know what the President will, but what will those who are afflicted with the last stages of BDS do while our men are being picked out of the waters of the Gulf?

If the "bad thing" happens, you wont be asking "What Would Maggie do" but "What Will Nancy and Harry do" because thats the world we now live in.

Posted @ March 28, 2007 04:26 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

My Birthright as a Californian

I got to use it today. It's the follwing phrase.

"We were going to go skiing this morning, but we decided to go to the beach instead."

That about wraps it up for those of us who were actually born here, and still remain. Its not "Mark Twain" and it wont fit on a license plate, but anyplace you can live where mountain skiing or playing at the beach is an option for a days play, isnt so bad.

Posted @ March 17, 2007 07:27 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Richard Jeni: October 31, 1962 – March 10, 2007

"If you have a choice of selling shoes to ladies or giving birth to a flaming porcupine... look into that second career..."
Richard Jeni - Comedian.

I've noticed as of late that can measure the passing my life by remembering Comedians who have died. I can tell you exaclty what I was doing when Sam Kinison died, Richard Pyror, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Michael O'Donoghue or Phil Hartman and I'm sure 10 years from now I'll remember what I was doing when I heard Richard Jeni died.

Death is one thing, but suicide? I don't get it. Dying is easy and inevitable, so what's the rush? I always thought it was a shame to waste what life you have when so many were begging for more. How many people in the Intensive Care Units in hospitals around the world cry out for just another hour, another day or to hold on just long enough to hold the hand of their loved ones? For someone to consider suicide just seems so damn angry to me. Its like eating a four course meal in front of a homeless man and laughing at him for what he doesnt have.

I've never understood the process of thinking that would lead you to want to commit suicide, ritual or otherwise. Everytime I see it happen, I understand it even less than I did the time before. I understand cancer, sickness, disease or even "old age", but I do not get suicide.

I don't think I ever will.

It's when I see something like this happen that I'm reminded that for some people, life on earth is a life spent in a very lonely place that is awash in a universe of irrationality.

Posted @ March 11, 2007 07:13 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Timesuckers

1. New Laptop.

Toshiba Tecra M6(Its not "mine", its from the good folks that actually pay me to work). Theres few things more fun than a squeaky clean new laptop. Add "New Car Smell" and you've got the same rush as getting a new car. Getting a new laptop is like moving into a new apartment, no matter how well you pack, theres always something you forgot to move.

2. Broken Dishwasher.

We seem to grind up dishwashers here at Casa Varifrank. This is the third one in 6 years. Whirpool, Maytag, and now Bosch. Yes, I'm very unhappy about it. You just can't have nice things these days. In the rest of my 45 years I dont think I ever had a dishwasher fail, in the last 6 years - boom - three of them. Why? well of course, I blame Bush...

3. The Big Sleep. 1946 Humphrey Bogart. The Unedited Version( on TCM this evening)

I've been trying to watch it for the past 5 hours. Its a two hour movie. Everytime I get started, I go 15 minutes and someone or something interrupts. Yes, its the one with the incredible and yet most uncomfortable almost like catching your parents talking dirty to each other "Horse Race" dialog that occurs between Bogart and Bacall. You just have to see it to believe it. Elisha Cook from the "Maltese Falcon" makes an appearance.

I get a kick out of watching people walk around in what is supposed to be post-war LA in heavy east coast overcoats and hats. They must've roasted when they made this film. All of the women who appear in this movie are spectacular. Now if I could just get people to stop pestering me about things for the next two hours, I might be able to finish it.

4. Sick Kid. The young one finally got the flu that ripped through these parts last month. I hate it when kids get sick, it has a way of invading your every thought even when everything is fine. To parents, a kids fever, no matter how small, is the boogeyman made real.

Delays occur but the work continues. We will soon return to the further adventures of Mr. Hastings as soon as the deck is clear.

Posted @ March 06, 2007 10:20 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Libby: A chill wind

Libby convicted.

There is only one lesson to learn from this whole adventure.

Scooter Libbys Rules of Public Service:

Rule 1) Under no circumstances talk to anyone in the press about anything, no matter how trivial or mundane the subject may seem at the time.

Rule 2) The press is not interested in the truth or "giving you a voice", they are interested in their own future book deals and getting invited to the right kind of cocktail parties. If they thought they could get away with outright killing you,( which would naturally get the producer of the Bill Maher show to call their agent and get them booked on the show - because they'd be considered "edgy and provocative"), you'd be dead in a parking lot somewhere, face down with an ice pick in your skull by lunchtime that afternoon. I dont care how much they smile at you, in Washington, every microphone is a snipers rifle, every television camera is an IED. You're not a senior administration official on background, you're a target for a future indictment.

Rule 3) If you are in doubt at any time during your service about what to do when meeting a "member of the press", refer immediately to rule #1.

Rule 4) If you ever think about bending rule #1 "just this once because the truth needs to come out"; refer immediately to Rule #2.

For a press corp that has spent the last 6 years bemoaning access to the White House, I can't see how this helps them. I can tell you that if I worked in Washington and my phone rang this afternoon from anyone in the media, there is no way in hell I would ever pick up the phone. The Sunday chat shows are about to be filled with reporters talking to each other, because no one at any level of government will dare even sit at the same table as the press.

Kinda makes me wonder if this was all part of "Bush's evil plan" after all...

Posted @ March 06, 2007 09:49 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Spring Sunday

It's 70 degrees, no wind, light clouds.

So do I sit inside blogging on a day like today or perhaps take the bike out for a spin?

What would you do?

I'll blog when I get back...

Posted @ March 04, 2007 11:52 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

a brief intermission...

While 'Privateers' is still in production, this is brief intermission. This is the week of tax preparation as well as some overwhelming workload from the revenue producing side of my life.

Here's a few tidbits to chew on during the commerical break:

1. UPS, the last customer for the freighter version of the A380 has now mercifully officially, formally and for the last time cancelled the order. You'll be somewhat shocked to hear this because on Feb 23rd UPS and Airbus announced that both parties had renegotiated the contract. The fine print however said that UPS could walk away if there were any further delays. UPS wanted to take delivery in 2009, but this week discovered that Airbus had already begun to shift workers from the freighter to the terribly behind schedule passenger version of the A380. As a result, deliveries slated for 2009 were pushed back to 2012, so now its "goodbye giant freighter".

2. What can we expect from Airbus now? With no customers for the A380 Freighter, Airbus will in all probability cancel the line, but like most Europeans they wont come right out and say that, they will insist that the company is producing the line, even when its obvious to everyone( just evidenced by UPS ) that there is no such thing.

3. And yes, French Aerospace Unions will go on strike against Airbus to protest job cuts, causing further delays to an already badly disorganized European Aerospace group, making job losses even more certain.

4. McCain announces Presidential candidacy and his poll numbers go down. The last time I saw this phenomenon was at the end of the internet boom when tech companies were hyped by underwriters, until they actually went public and the market responded by not buying the stock, leaving their underwriters with lots of overpriced stock. My bet is Mccain doesnt even make it to the Iowa primary. When you are a Republican and your biggest fan in the main stream media is Chris Matthews, the piece of legislature you are most known for is "McCain-Feingold" which is a byword for excessive government intrusion and you've spent your career as a "maverick against the far right wing of the party", then your chances of securing the Republican nomination during the primary are pretty laughible to those of us out here in flyover country.

Meanwhile, Rudy Guiliani seems to have inherited the "teflon suit" from Ronald Reagan; nothing seems to stick to this guy. He smiles,laughs at himself and his numbers go up every time he opens his mouth.

Hillary! and Obama are going round and around in a sort of "deadly embrace", each fundamentally defined by the weaknesses of the other. He because at the core of it all - he "isnt she", and she because of the bulk weight of the number of posters, buttons, flyers and other campaign ephemera thats been sitting in midwestern warehouses extolling her virtues as a candidate, just waiting for this opportunity to be used.

While Iraq may not go down in history for having finished off Al-queda, it will be noted that it did help end the political ascendancy of the matriarch of the Clinton family. Along with her sparkling demeanor, the "long campaign" is her worst enemy. If she's done in Iowa, she's done. She's the "Howard Dean" of the 2008 campaign, the one who everyone in the "main stream media" put their money on, and the folks in the caucuses just sat back and laughed at.

In 2009, she will replace Howard Dean as head of the party.

Posted @ March 02, 2007 07:35 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

calling all cars!

Calling all cars, calling all cars! Be on the lookout for a Kasper Gutman and his associate, a Mr. Joel Cairo(pictured above), they are wanted for questioning in the theft of the Maltese Falcon from Johns Grill on Ellis street.

Contact Lt. Dundy or Detective Polhaus if you have any information as to the whereabouts of these two characters.

Posted @ February 12, 2007 08:15 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

North Korean prison break?

Interesting news from North Korea:

"...About 120 North Korean prisoners have escaped a political concentration camp in the northeast of the country and security officials in the area are on high alert, said news reports.

The prisoners escaped the concentration camp in Hamgyong, a province close to Chinese and Russian borders, in December, reported the Dong-a Ilbo newspaper on Wednesday..."

First off, no information gets out of North Korea that Noth Korea doesnt want to let out.

Second, this apparently happened in December but is just making heads turn in the south today.

Third, that old devil 'logistics'. 120 people, who need 1,000 calories a day just to stay upright are on the move in the countryside and on the run from the authorities. You might manage to break out of prison by yourself and manage to scrounge enough to eat to stay alive and still manage to stay hidden from the guards, the army, the police and the local gentry; but if you and your group gets bigger than, oh, lets say five people, you are going to be found rather quickly. 120 people going anywhere on any terrain in any conditions will tend to leave a hell of alot of material behind, so they tend to be easy to track.

So what happened? Did the camp authority just collapse, and this is not so much an organized escape as a case of something more attune to a group of escaped farm animals walking away from a farm by leaving out the front gate?

Did they get help from outsiders? if so, from where and by whom?

Very interesting. I'll be watching for more...

UPDATE: ohhh. its the guards!

Now, this is even more interesting!

"...The Hwasong prison camp -- located deep inside a mountain and encircled by high wire fences -- holds about 10,000 prisoners, Daily NK said. The escape seemed to have been carefully planned with outside help since the escapees drove off in a vehicle waiting outside the prison, according to the report.

Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are believed to be held in prison camps in the communist North for political reasons, according to U.S. government data.

Separately, Daily NK reported Sunday that 20 North Korean guards along the border with China had fled the country to avoid arrest for allegedly helping North Korean defectors cross the border..." (allegedly? does CNN really need to say 'allegedly'?)

Bribes? Organized resistance to authority? In the socialist peoples paradise of North Korea? my worldview is shattered...

UPDATE II: More details here.

Posted @ February 07, 2007 04:58 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

agony

I have the worst case of 'bloggers block' that I have ever faced.

This is the 16th striaght night that I've written a post just to scratch the damn thing and start over at the end.

blech...

Posted @ February 06, 2007 11:25 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (5)

astronaut love triangle

Well theres something you dont see every day. A NASA astronaut who goes off the handle in an attempt to keep her boyfriend.

My first thought when I read this is that at Mess Halls around the world and in the galleys of Aircraft Carriers are men and women who were turned down by NASA, who after reading this story realize that their slot into space was taken, not by a better pilot or aviator, but by a crazy woman. You will be able to tell who they are because they will be rather animated in their speech patterns and perhaps a little more honest than usual about their assessment of other pilots. I'd stay away from them today if I were you. They are likely to be a very bad mood.

My second thoughts on this are not for general publication.

Posted @ February 06, 2007 07:39 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

Rudy, Dont fail

I'm just telling you now so as to rapidly 'cut to the chase' on the endless sillyness that surrounds the blogosphere on "who supports who", I'm for Rudy.

The man who broke the back of the mafia, the man who cleaned up 42nd street, the only candidate at ground zero on 9/11. He's an inspiration, He's upbeat and he's all smiles. He's a happy guy. The rest of the candidates are like 'proctologists on parade'.

Edwards? - Kerry, without all the natural advantages that come from years of Swiss schooling, a French accent and a beret.

Obama? - Replaces the word 'gossamer' in the english language as metaphor for 'lightweight'.

Hillary? - Oy, there isnt a man in the western hemisphere who doesnt involuntarily cross his legs when she appears on TV. She'll be out by super Tuesday... Chorus of 'where's bill' grows everyday and goes unanswered. The first time he shows up on the hustings, her campaign ends within 14 days.

Biden? - 'Bidencide': The inability to shut the hell up when talking about any subject, causing all in earshot to seek relief by slitting their wrists involuntarily.

Romney? - Theres a guy like him in every class I ever taught. Shows up on time, dresses nice, does his work and does it well, doesnt distract from the material being taught and often helps the other students in his free time. I always find myself wondering "what's wrong with his guy?, why can't he just be, you know, normal? Whys he got to throw off the curve for everyone else"? When you see someone without obvious flaws, it just makes you suspicious of deeper, more dangerous flaws. For example, axe murdering homocidal maniacs are always described (after the fact ) as "quiet and nice,always said hello but kept to himself didnt bother anyone".

Keep an eye on this guy, he's up to something I just know it.

McCain? - The family great uncle, who everyone dreads being sat next to at thanksgiving dinner, because for the entire dinner you will get to hear about his most recent bowel surgery, even if you heard about it last year, you get to hear about it again, in between the yams and the stuffing, you get to hear in great detail about the pain and indignity of having a bowel resection and how colostomy bag technology has really come along since they gave him his version (just look...)

President Giuliani - its just got a nice ring to it.

Roger is for him too, which just about wraps it up for 2008. Why even hold an election?

(Yeah, its a 'clash' song for the 80's and I've dated myself again...)

Posted @ February 05, 2007 12:23 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

hey, didnt we already have a 'dead horse' story this week?

Judy Miller Testifies to Multiple Sources on Plame

Reporter Not 'Absolutely Certain' Libby Was First Source. Oh, now she tells us...

Ignore the Washington Post, your one stop shopping on the most asinine trial in the history of mankind can be found at the man Time calls 'man of the year' Tom Maguires blog - 'Just one minute'

Posted @ January 31, 2007 10:43 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

another bush critic dies under mysterious circumstances

Kentucy Derby winner, and frequent outspoken Bush administration critic Barbero dies under mysterious circumstances. Authorities unable to ascertain whereabouts of Dick Cheney or the ousted and discredited Donald Rumsfeld at the time of the horses death.

Those monsters will stop at nothing to keep their regime going...

Posted @ January 29, 2007 10:48 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

mating season: boeing 767 tanker makes first contact

Boeing is competing for a contract to replace the US Air Force's KC-135 Tanker fleet. A final Request for Proposals for the KC-X program is expected soon followed by a contract award announcement in the summer.

Boeing has produced nearly 2,000 tankers in its history and currently is building four tankers each for Italy and Japan. The KC-767 has logged more than 200 flights and 600 hours during its flight test program.

(Editors Note: Boeing is competing against Northrop/EADS who are competing with an Airbus A330 derivative. Boeing is agressively going after this contract with an alternate proposal based on the Boeing 777. Now that - is one big tanker!)

Posted @ January 28, 2007 07:59 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

rick moran has a question for you leftists out there

"...The netnuts are fond of calling those of us who support the mission in Iraq chickenhawks. What do you call someone who sits on their ass in front of a keyboard, railing against the President, claiming that the United States is falling into a dictatorship, and writing about how awful this war is and yet refuses to practice the kinds of civil disobedience that their fathers and mothers used to actually bring the Viet Nam war to an end?

I call them what they are; rank cowards. There should be a million people on the mall today. Instead, there might be 50,000. Today’s antiwar left talks big but cowers in the corner..."

As always, "Read The Whole Thing"

Posted @ January 27, 2007 10:42 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Ex-Wife of John Warner Supports Hillary

"I'm for Hillary" says the famous ex-wife of Hotel heir Conrad "Nicky" Hilton, Michael Wilding, Eddie Fisher, Richard Burton and Richard Burton (2nd marriage),Senator John Warner, Larry Fortensky and widow of Producer Michael Todd.

With a candidate getting backing from celebrities with character like this, why even bother to hold an election? I'm mean its cinch that Hillary is going to win now! Why she's cornered the crucial Larry King panel guest and Michael Jackson supporter demographic!

Try to keep in mind when when you see thngs like this, that we have almost twenty three long months to go until the election.

twenty...
three...
looooooooonnnnng...
months...
to...
go...

zzzzzzzzzzzzz

Remember that between now and then, that for every day that goes by some other Hollywood half dead ghostly spectre of the past is going to crawl forth from their coffin to try to prove to the world and to themselves that they are still worthy of receiving the warm glow that comes from receiving camera time, by proclaiming to everyone in the world that:

a) Bush is as dumb as a retarded three-toed tree sloth!
b) Hillary is great!
c) Obama is great!
d) Warren Beatty really should run for President!
e) All of the above.

day after day, after seemingly never ending freaking day this is what we have to look forward to.

Posted @ January 25, 2007 10:29 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Quote of the day

My favorite smell? Cordite. After you've fired a gun.
From: "What I've Learned" - Peter O'Toole

I have to admit that cordite is up there on my list, but I've got a thing for the smell of air blowing through laundry that's hanging on an outside clothes line.

Posted @ January 25, 2007 04:32 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Whats missing at the RNC

Have you seen yours lately, Senator Ensign?

Posted @ January 25, 2007 04:10 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

The futurist - who hates america?

A new-to-me blog the futurist wrote a terrific piece last year that further expands on the hard to believe explosive subject of "maybe everyone really doesnt hate us after all"

but then again, maybe I'm just too "immature" to understand the root cause and validity behind anti-american bigotry.

Posted @ January 25, 2007 01:26 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Sign the pledge

Let me say this first. I am not someone who tosses around the words "I will quit the party" lightly. I believe that "you dance with them that brung ya"

So I do not toss around the words "I will not support Republicans" lightly, but I say that with direct and specific meaning. If the party does not take action to stop the reckless self serving cowardice being undertaken by Senator Warner in the Senate, I will not not support the Republican party. Not one thin dime, not one even remotely positive blog posting. That goes for all of you up there Honourable Ladies and Gentleman, so let's not try to take cover behind the "I'm your pal, its us against Warner, so dont get mad at me" because it wont work with me. You stand with him, I will not stand with you. It's that simple.

The message that Warner is sending is nothing short of the worst sort of gutless cowardice, it is worthy only of rebuke,not support on any level however 'quiet and reserved' it may be. Do not allow this masturbatory action to detract from our mission.

We as Republicans can debate border control, we can debate issues of taxation, but we cannot and will not stand for cutting the legs out from our military while they are at war. We did not send our men and women in Iraq to be fodder for the loudmouth layabout Senators on CSPAN, we sent our men and women to fight the enemy and win.

Let them fight and we will win. Let this action stand on the floor of the Senate and no one in our military will fight for us again without looking over their shoulders for support; but do it also with a mind to the fact that our enemy will keep coming no matter how many 'non binding resolutions' you pass.

There can be only one Peace from this war, and that is the Peace that comes through victory.

Now, go sign the pledge and do the same.

Posted @ January 24, 2007 06:02 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

America: Now more than ever, more popular abroad - just dont tell the pollsters

I've never understood how on one hand people overseas will tell the pollsters how much they hate America - and Americans, and yet our streets seem to be increasingly filled with people from all around the world who have risked life and limb and broken the law of their country and ours to get here.

I mean, if I dont like a restaurant, I dont stand in line for 4 hours to get in, I just go somewhere else. I sure dont stand in line for four hours and then say how much I hate the place.

I wonder if theres a sort of 'natural reflex' to just tell the pollsters what they want to hear, rather than tell them what you actually think.

Think about it, when the western United States was being settled, I dont think there were people saying how much they hated Oregon and California when they were selling everything they had and walking away from Ohio and other parts of the east. " I hate Oregon, so lets take our life in our hands and try to go there", followed by headlines that said " Oregon more unpopular than ever says poll of former residents of Ohio".

face it, if there is a line of people stretching across to continent walking to oregon, then any poll saying "oregon unpopular..." is clearly based on faulty data, right?

It's not that I've dont trust the MSM(I dont), its just that when my dashboard instruments give me information that is contrary to what I can see and test with my own eyes, I tend to think the instrument is broken in some way.

UPDATE: Welcome instapundit-eers.

Via the fabulous babalu:

19 men gave up everything they had in the socialist paradise of Cuba and risked their lives crossing 90 miles of open sea on a raft to come to the United States. Their reaction on arrival?;

"...The rafters were overjoyed! They wanted to know how long before they could get a job and were jittery with excitement at the world opened before them. Some of them reported that living under a system where you fear the police and the state 24 hours a day is not living, and to not be able to enjoy the fruit of your own labor is the worst form of slavery."

You see those big smiles? Gosh they do seem geniunely happy to be here, dont they?

(Funny, none of these men seem to have commented on our foreign policy stance with Israel. Perhaps they are just "immature" as one commenter on this post has opined.)

Posted @ January 24, 2007 07:25 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (16)

The Asshat Senator from Virginia

A few people asked me today what I thought of Senator Warner and his "non binding resolution".

angry? well yeah. you could say that...

In the last 6 years, where I have repeatedly watched the President of the United States called every name in the book, where I have watched a country denigrated by its own citizens and their representatives in both Houses of Congress while its own men and women were away during a time of war, yet after all of it, I have never in my 45 years of life ever seen anything that has made me so stomping mad as this.

Warner, You fat bastard. You unthinking coward. You slimy warthogs rectum. You walking colosotomy bag. You mouldering sack of crap. Get out of my party!

I can take Dick Durban calling our own military the equivalent of nazis, I can take a former President saying that we are "supporting the jews" and somehow making it sound like its a bad thing, I can take the near endless lies and slow assassination of the President by Democrats on an almost daily basis for 6 years but I cannot, nor will I accept from a member of my politcal party the kind of gutless, wincing, crybaby cowardace that is in display by my party as is being done at this moment by the Senator from Virgina. Make that former Senator, because to me, he's mud.

If I do not see the head of the Republican Party revoke this mans membership from the party or otherwise publically rebuke this dottering, infeebled, spinach chinned, daiper wearing jackass in very stern public and exacting terms, then I will leave this party. Having John Warner in the Republican Party is just not all that different from having Jane Fonda in the party, except that Senator Warner has slightly bigger breasts and a better signing voice than she, and I may point out that neither of those things we are in any particular need for right now. We need to support our President. We need to defeat the enemy, we need to let our military go do the job we ask them to do with the tools we begrudgedly have given them.

Dear God in heaven, do not fail to send me enemies, but oh please dear lord save me from my friends.

When this party has retreated to the point that the best and most forceful spokesman that is left for the Republicans is Joe Lieberman, then the Republican party is no more. When the day comes when a man who has the clarity of mind to marry Elizabeth Taylor (because he was sure that this time after all the other marriages, that it was sure to work) is considered to be a "stalwart right wing thinker" in the Republican party, then perhaps its time we refomed the Whig Party and waved goodbye to these aging party boys that have grown too fat in the ass and too damn deaf and dumb in the head to see the consequences of their acts.

This act, this "non binding resolution" will kill our men and women in the military. It will kill them because it has shown the enemy exactly how to win. Dont fear their Aircraft carriers, dont fear their bombers, dont worry about the Marines, just kill 3,000 Americans and they will run home like squealing little crybabies.

You want to end the war? then agree to fight it. Take the fight to the enemy and press it home until they give up. That is our task, nothing more, nothing less. To fail in this fight is to only ensure that our grandchildren come back to fight "Gulf War III".

Two wars in the Gulf has been enough for our country to bear. Let's end it here. Lets not have to go back in 20 years because we decided today to leave another dictatorship in place to threaten our country in the future. Let's leave a democracy behind this time and undo the curse left by our Governments cowardace in backstabbing the people of Vietnam.

This man Warner deserves nothing but the very largest steaming cup of contempt that can be thrown into his face for this bald attempt to gather the love that comes from the end of a camera for his own personal fulfillment over the responsibility that comes with governance within the party of ideas, the party of liberty.

We are not Republicans because it is easy; we are Republicans because it is hard. You cannot be Republican by default, you have to choose to be a Republican, and its a hard choice to make. Public sentiment has always been against Republicans, and dont expect that to change any time soon. Since the days of Lincoln, our party has always made the tough choices that life requires and weve moved human liberty forward as a result despite the collective entropy of the masses that always seems to say that we should 'do nothing', and weve done it all the while getting kicked in the shins by 'public sentiment', but we dont care, were not here for the love of the camera. We are here for love of country, of our nation, of our liberty.

If its the love of public sentiment that you want, then go be a Democrat, but if you wish to serve your country rather than yourself, then be a Republican. But remember, its hard. No one will like you, your friends will ostracize you, your neighbors will draw the blinds on the windows as you walk by, you will have to hide your party affiliation from those you date, but you will know in your heart that doing the right thing very often means going against what makes people happy in the short term, but you know that it must be done. That's what makes you a Republican.

I say a very public and hearty "Screw him" and that goes to anyone on our side that decides to back this 'non binding resolution'. And dont ever ask me again what I think of this man or any of the other cowards who now abandon the President, this country and its military in a time of war. You aught to know me by now...

(from the musical 1776)

Does anybody care?
Is anybody there?
Does anybody care?
Does anybody see what I see?

They want us to quit; they say
Frank, give up the fight
Still to Alqueda I say
Good night, forever, good night!
For I have crossed the Rubicon
Let the bridge be burned behind me
Come what may, come what may

Commitment!

The croakers all say we'll rue the day
There'll be hell to pay in fiery purgatory
Through all the gloom, through all the gloom
I see the rays of ravishing light and glory!

Is anybody there? Does anybody care?
Does anybody see what I see?

Posted @ January 23, 2007 04:17 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

hes not tanned, hes not rested, but he is ready

Stephen Green, who has been silent for far too long, is going to 'live blog' the State Of The Union speech this evening.

Go, Enjoy. You wont be disappointed.

Posted @ January 23, 2007 10:11 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Democrats fail to stop American in-surge-ncy

You know two can play at this 'war of expectations' thing;

3,200 new US troops arrive in Baghdad
Despite the best efforts of the highest priced punditry, Democrats have failed again to stop a growing number of American troops from entering the Bagdhad area.

3,200 troops from the so called "82nd Airborne" division entered the city unopposed, supported by much of the local populace, who have been quietly supporting the outsiders. Recent attacks on American Insurgents by the Iranian and Democrat supported Badr Brigade have resulted in severe losses and a general retreat of Iraqi insurents that is now seen occuring across the region. While scattered resistence is offered by the Badr brigade, it is noted that not a single city that has been captured and occupied by the American Insurgents has ever been recaptured by the now floundering Iraqi and Iranian forces.

While no news organization has come out said so publically, it now appears to this reporter that all is lost in Iraq, and that Democrats should being pulling out of the region immediately if their lack of credibility in foreign affairs is to remain intact.

Yet, despite this clear loss of inititive, leading as some would say to the inevitable impression of being in "a quagmire", Democrats have instead chosen a policy of "stay the course" in their war against the growing presence of Americans in the Middle East.

hmmm... hey thas kinda fun, I'll have to start my day like that more often.

Posted @ January 22, 2007 07:59 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

SNL - "Youre Great"

I'm old enough to remember when SNL was on Saturday nights, and not imbedded in my web site.

Posted @ January 22, 2007 07:47 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Harvard professor: Department is bastion of sexism

Parents of America - this is where your tuition dollars are going.

Let's read this paragraph from cnn together, and see if we can detect everything that is wrong with it, shall we?

"BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- A Harvard University professor who accused the school of gender discrimination has withdrawn her resignation, but said Thursday that the school's landscape architecture department remains a bastion of sexism".

1. Accusation of 'gender discrimination'? What the hell does this mean? Did spanky and alfalfa reform the 'He man woman haters club'?

2. It's serious enough to resign and serious enough to report breathlessly, but not so much that you really mean to leave the job. Must not be all that bad if you ask me.

3. In the 'landscape architecture department'? At Harvard? Whats the semester cost for going to Harvard? So you can study wheres the best place to put the ficus? I guess the ESP and telekinesis department lost its credibility and all those folks had to go somewhere.

4. "Bastion of Sexism" sounds like the name of a terrific bar or a great garage band but it does not sound like the haunt of college professors - especially those in the "landscape architecture department".

5. These words leave you with the impression that our poor put-upon female college professor has been forced to get the men of the departent coffee and was ordered to pick up their shirts at the dry cleaners. However, parsing through the article you discover that 'professor cinderella' has been teaching at Harvards "landscape architecture department" since 1992 while she developed a world renoun and internationally known landscape architeture practice on the side. Oh, the horror and indignity of it all. All those years forced under the servitude of men, it mustve driven her to the madness of practicing free market capitalism and moved to the hard stuff of starting her own business.

The poor thing, I'm surprised she didnt stand on a table in the professors lounge and hold up a piece of carboard with the word UNION on it, as the thugs from the regents office dragged her away to meet her doom.

Posted @ January 21, 2007 11:12 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

The big day is here at last!

All hail! - the new king in town...

Well today, Hillary Clinton surpised absolutely no one in the world by announcing her candidacy for President of the United States. Yet, instead of creating a buzz about the candidacy of the woman who has already enjoyed more unelected executive power since back when Mrs. Edith Wilson said "Woodrow has a really bad head cold and wont be out for weeks, but he said its ok for me to sign those papers you got there Senator"; Hillarys genius campaign staff has instead created the worlds largest collective yawn, causing immediate redefinition of all english language metaphors for the concept of 'anti-climactic'.

And I'm afraid its all downhill from here on out. Theres nothing like an oversold winner when they lose, and let me take this opporunity to say again - she wont win.

Her timing was terrific, after allowing virtually every other Democrat in the Western Hemisphere to announce that they too would like to be President and after sending disbarred and impeached husband to desert island for the duration of her campaign, she announces her candidacy on cold Saturday morning in January when all the reporters who ask the really tough questions are in line at costco buying firelogs, thus allowing only the second string reporters to be around to fall at her feet like "womyns studies" students at a k.d. Lang concert.

Ahh, what a vision!, Hillary does a webcast. Its a study in leadership like Churchill at the podium. There she sits on the front room sofas, talking down camera to us about having "a conversation", on a form of media that allows only one way communication. Ironic? well If you think about it, it is kind of a talisman of the future of this campaign and the country."let me tell you what you think" is the subtext here, and it wasnt lost on me a bit.

Don't try to question her motives dear readers, dont try to get a straight answer from her from here on out. To do so will only invite the worst sort of anger in those who seek only fairness towards the good and gracious "St. Hillary". You mind your place you peons, "It's her turn" dontcha know. Learn to heel, that's my advice.

There she sits, like everyones maiden aunt, talking to us about the need to "communicate", while using a downward camera angle, leaving me with the audience perspective of a five year old child. She sits there as only person on planet earth still unaware of husbands philandering, making the subconscious mind wonder if she will ever notice if the chinese decide to invade Taiwan. Despite voting over and over again for action in Iraq, when challenged about that fact, she uses the excuse that "Bush lied to me". What kind of a character do you have when you let men walk all over you like that, over and over again? Oh sorry, shouldn't ask questions like that, musnt use words like that. sorry.

Oh, what fun it will be over the next two years to listen to a campaign that is filled to the brim, with funloving "soundbite sized" statements that will be hurled at us daily from every audio orifice, such as "it takes a woman to clean up a mess this big!" followed by giddy laughter from the women in the newsroom. I wonder if they make a "nerf TV", because I think I'm going to need one.

So why is she qualified to be president?, well she enjoys the same basic qualification as most men enjoyed for nearly a millenium, that being her gender, but she has little else to show for a job thats likely to age her 25 years in the 8 years that the office is available to her. She's certainly old enough for the job and she has passed my own prime requirement for the office of having run for and held a public office before running for this one. But from there, it gets kind of light if you ask me. But just as all caterpillars must one day metamorph into buttterflies, its a fact of nature that all lawyers eventually cocoon themselves with their most trusted advisers and turn into "Presidential Candidates", then climb to the top of the nearest tree, spread their arms and cry out the immortal words; "its time for a change!". And this time, they really mean it...

Why is she qualified to be President? Well, at the start of her campaign for Senator of New York, she has actually convinced the people of the State of New York that she is in fact from New York, when she is actually from Chicago and comes to New York via Arkansas and Washington D.C. making her as residendially qualified to be Senator as the Canadian Snow Geese that visit the state every year. I actually do respect a politcian that tries to use that sort of bald faced double talk, especially when they manage to pull it off so well that people now actually think that she is from New York, though I suspect that the populace of New York has been subject to a good deal of lead in their water suppy by evidence of this vote and many other logical incongruities. Guile is a good character trait to have as President, and yeah she's got it, by the bucketload.

Why is she qualified to be President? The foundation of candidacy seems to be based on the idea that "she is not Bush", which instantly makes 239 million americans feel that they have at least one thing in common with her. "Connecting with the people", is a very good trait to have as President.

What should she do next?

Well, for starters, She should send Sandy Berger to national archives to gather up and destroy all film negatives of pictures like this:

Whoa...Long live "the dry look", eh?

So, What will happen next?

The phones will begin to melt at RNC headquarters as donations begin to pour in from all corners of the globe. She has single handedly given us Republicans something that is both fun and easy for us to agree on. We all hate her immensely, and the idea of being saddled with the reality of having to listen to that sharp edged harpy talk down to us like we were her pet dogs for the next four years is enough to get even the most self destructive Republican back on board. Congratulations Carville!, you've single handedly breathed new life into the corpse of the Republican Party.

The RNC will begin running commercials showing just her picture on the screen with the crowd chanting "four more years" on the voice over. Despite it being initially thought to be a Democrat sponsored advertisement, it will prove to be amazingly effective - for Republicans.

Oh, and John Kerry, what will happen to him? Well my guess is that while quietly playing with his stamp collection in good ole beantown, he will be suddenly and inexplicably sucked into a mysterious black hole, the only thing left in this dimention will be the fading memory of that horrible campaign. No one notice his departure or will much care that he is gone. The office of Junior Senator of Massachusetts will go on, much like it did while he held the office.

Empty, and not of much use to the people of Massachusetts.

Posted @ January 20, 2007 08:57 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Side by side comparison

Bush War Plan(Code Name: Victory)

Insure that middle east becomes a place where Democracy is seen as the norm,rather than an anomoly. Insure that scenes like the one above are performed more often. Return people of the middle east to a existence that includes the possibility of dignity and human liberty. Generations from now, Iraqis and other people in the middle east will find themselves to be the recipients of the fruits of liberty, that being peace and freedom.

Pelosi War Plan(Code Name: Surrender)

Ensure that Iraqis civilians are forced to fight overwhelming odds against the very worst form of Islamic terror without the support of American Troops insuring death and deprivation to Iraqi civilians young and old across all of Iraq. Ensure that others in the middle east dont stick their necks out trying to join the world of democracy, of peace and freedom. Ensure that future generations of Iraqis hate Americans for their cowardace for leaving them to the tender mercies of Iran.

Ensure that the scene above, never happens again.

Posted @ January 19, 2007 04:54 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

A bit of a translation problem

"The president knows that because the troops are in harm's way, that we won't cut off the resources. That's why he's moving so quickly to put them in harm's way," Pelosi said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

Hmmm. I'm sorry Ms. Speaker, I can't understand a word you're saying. You see, I don't speak French...

Posted @ January 19, 2007 04:45 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

They actually said this (and they meant it too)

A group of Senators once got together and sent a letter to the President. Here is the text of that letter.

"Dear Mr. President:

Up to now, you have set this summer as the deadline for announcing a decision on the deployment of a National Missile Defense (NMD) system. We are writing to urge you to delay such a decision and not to take any steps toward deployment at this time.

Last weekend's test failure demonstrates that it is too early to know whether deploying a cost-effective NMD system will be possible in the near future and whether it will provide real protection against the potential threat from emerging nuclear powers.

As you know, there is growing scepticism within the scientific community about the technical feasibility of the proposed system. A recent study by the Union of Concerned Scientists and MIT has raised serious questions about whether it would be effective against even the fairly simple countermeasures that adversaries would be capable of developing. Furthermore, a group of 50 Nobel Laureates and the American Physical Society, which represents 42,000 physicists, have recently issued statements critical of making a deployment decision before the system is adequately tested against realistic countermeasures.

We fear that a decision to deploy would imperil, not improve, our national security. Both Russia and China have said they will respond with a new buildup of their own nuclear forces. Furthermore, our allies have expressed grave concern about the impact deployment would have on international strategic stability.

Mr. President, the most effective way to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons is by continuing our arms reduction agreements and by working aggressively to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and missile technology. We hope you will continue your efforts to preserve the ABM treaty and resist pressure to deploy a national missile defense system at this time.

The letter was signed by the following Democratic senators:

Max Baucus (MT) Jeff Bingaman (NM) Barbara Boxer (CA)
Richard Bryan (NV) Robert Byrd (WV) Max Cleland (GA)
Tom Daschle (SD) Christopher Dodd (CT) Byron Dorgan (ND)
Richard Durbin (IL) Russell Feingold (WI) Dianne Feinstein (CA)
Tom Harkin (IA) Tim Johnson (SD) Edward Kennedy (MA)
Robert Kerrey (NE) John Kerry (MA) Frank Lautenberg (NJ)
Patrick Leahy (VT) Carl Levin (MI) Barbara Mikulski (MD)
Daniel Moynihan (NY) Patty Murray (WA) Jack Reed (RI)
Harry Reid (NV) Charles Robb (VA) Jay Rockefeller (WV)
Paul Sarbanes (MD) Charles Schumer (NY) Paul Wellstone (MN)
Ron Wyden (OR)

It is of note that Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), Vice President Gore's choice as running mate, did not sign the letter, and in a July 25 hearing stated his hope that the president would "keep the program going forward."

The letter was sent to President Clinton on August 8th, 2000.

Knowing what has occured in history since that time, I can't believe anyone on this list can show their face in public, much less run for office (and win!). Gee, I wonder if the 'concerned scientists' ever sent a corresponding version of the letter to the Chinese?

Posted @ January 19, 2007 07:22 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

10 things I learned from Iraq

- No matter how much we wish to think that war strategy can be discussed in ‘silver bullet’ terms of things such as aircraft carriers, submarines, bombers, fighters, missiles and stealth technology, warfare is still largely about one man holding a rifle and standing on a piece of land, and refusing to be moved off of that land by other men with rifles. Warfare in the last 2000 years can still be distilled down to squads of men moving across terrain behind some form of personal shield. In the age of Achilles, it was done with brass plates over leather, today its done with Kevlar body armor.

- While it was always tempting to try to fit Iraq into the metaphor provided by other wars, such as WWII or Vietnam, it turns out that Iraq was neither of those things and thus has generally escaped definition. It has now been raised to be its own metaphor. In the future, people will not refer to a war where the public is divided and the goals shift almost daily as ‘another Vietnam”, but will instead bring out horrible possibility of “another Iraq”.

- We in the west talk endlessly about the benefits of freedom and democracy in a 'progressive civilization', but we are often too busy enjoying the benefits of those things to see how essential it is to the life of those to whom it has been denied. Sally Strothers cries her eyes out for you to send food to the worlds poor, but little hadji is going to have to grow up in a charnel house because it would be wrong to “impose our cultural values” on him. A crate of velveeta covered macaroni or a Madonna DVD is almost never thought of as “imposing our cultural values” but seeing that people are not executed for speaking their mind is.

- To many people, Abu-Ghirab and Guantanamo now outweigh the 9/11 attacks in terms of how they see our role in the world.

- While I thought that Afghanistan would be very hard and would take at least 10 years to make even the most basic level of military progress, that it would never be invaded successfully and would resist to the last man, I thought Iraq would be the “easier” of the two.

- For the record, I expected that the Iraq invasion would take almost 7,000 US military lives and would take 6 months for us to make it to what was left of a “scorched earth” Baghdad. I expected the bridges to be blown at every opportunity, cities and towns to be scorched (by the Iraqis) and a refugee crisis of huge proportions that would slow our progress. After that was over, I expected that the Occupation would take 10 years before the first elections would occur.

- The same group who screamed the loudest to “end the sanctions” in the 1990’s are the same people who cried the most when Saddam was executed in 2006.

- Now that America is in Iraq, the world cares deeply of the loss of quality of life of the Iraqi people. When Saddam was in charge, the world couldn’t possibly have cared less.

- The justification for going into Bosnia was the fact that Bosnia was in a full blown sectarian civil war and that we needed to stop it. The justification for leaving Iraq is that it is a full blown sectarian civil war and that we dont need to stop it. Makes me wonder what the Bosnians had that the Iraqis dont. Oh yeah, were still in Bosnia by the way...

- Public support for the “War on Terror” came into existence at 5:30pm EST September 11th, 2001. It peaked on January 12th, 2002 and it ended on May 3rd 2003. In 2004, the dials on the “Cultural Time Machine” began to slowly roll backwards and by 2006, the display on the chronometer had gone all the way back to 1968. Welcome to the past ladies and gentleman, I cant wait to see how it all plays out this time.

Posted @ January 18, 2007 12:33 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (6)

I wish he would just die already

There are times when I'm convinced that Fidel Castro is just fine, and is simply trying to push his Google ranking up with false reports of his death. He's just sitting somewhere on a beach with a laptop saying "Raul watch this, my blog will jump right to the top of Technorati in about 10 seconds, all I gotta do is say that 'Castro is getting ill' and poof! right up to the top..."

Just put a pillow over his face and count to 1000 very slowly, ok Raul? It's not like you dont know how. What? You think Gil Grissom and the team from CSI is gonna come investigate this? Are you kidding me? Come on man, you know you want to.

I dont want to see any more whispered reports of "Castros pending death" until I start to see reports of where Jimmy Carter is going to stand in the funeral procession.

Fidel dying after a long painful and dehabilitating illness is apt justice in my opinion, but live or die, Cuba will still be ruled by a Castro. Its just that for about 10 years, we have to watch "Fidel the lesser' run around pretending to be real deal.

Cuba Libre, folks. And let's just leave it at that.

Posted @ January 15, 2007 10:11 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

A Teaser

This is the subject of this weekends essay:

Map courtesy of Wikipedia...

And just to let you know, It's not what you think.

I'll be back later...

Posted @ January 13, 2007 03:21 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

A visual aid to assist Senator Boxer

Dear Senator Boxer,

These men

are not children. They are not babies. They are not victims, they are American Marines. They were not pressed into service against their will, these men volunteered to serve their country. These men put their lives on the line in war zones both at home and abroad to carry out the orders of the President and perform under their oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. They do this willingly and without reservation.

They are not objects of pity or scorn. They are the very best that this country has to offer.

just to 'compare and contrast', this person -

is a rank, floor licking politican of the first order, who is not fit to shine their shoes. Please check your mirror and see of you resemble this disgusting self loathing creature.

Don't mess with Dr. Rice, and stop talking about members of the military like they were lost pre-schoolers, you contemptible scab...

Posted @ January 12, 2007 11:31 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

my reaction?

No President can go too far wrong by announcing that he has sent a Carrier Task Force into action.

In short - I thought it was positive, dead solid and perfect. Now, if we can get that sort of thing on a monthly basis...

No Defeat. No Surrender. No whining about a "national malaise". The man is a thumb in the eye to the world of conventional pundit wisdom, to them he should be flat on his back surrendering his Presidency to the forces of modernity and good sense, but the old man says "come and take them" like some sort of modern day Spartan.

That's my Bush. Give 'em Hell old man.

Now, let's go execute the plan, shall we?

Posted @ January 10, 2007 07:29 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (10)

Just keep in mind

As you hear the responses to tonights speach, that the only thing that sends the Democrats into shudders of fear and dread isnt that the plan wont work but its the mere shadow of a thought that the Presidents plan in Bagdhad just-might-work.

And therefore, it must be stopped.

Posted @ January 10, 2007 04:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

piddle, twiddle and resolve

This Headline( and that picture of the three of those folks):
Democrats Plan Symbolic Votes Against Iraq Plan

Made me think of this lyric from 1776:

You see we piddle twiddle and resolve
not one damn thing do we solve
piddle twiddle and resolve
nothing's ever solved
in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy, Philadelphia.

and I laughed.

and yet, this headline and this picture:

al-Qaida Chief in Somalia May Be Dead

made me smile. go figure...

Posted @ January 10, 2007 01:12 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Foreign Policy Alternatives

Some Republican operatives in the Senate have performed a public service by doing a bit of 'dumpster diving' in the Senate office buildings. As a result, they have uncovered a list of possible 'alternative strategies for Iraq' that was produced from a brainstorming session by the Democrats so that they may be offered to the public by the "new powers that be" in Congress as an alternative to President Bush and his evil warmonger ways.

- Hide behind sofa - rub rabbits foot for good luck. Tax the rich to purchase sofas and rabbits feet for poor and dispossessed.

- Hide behind sofa, light up a doobie, play Jim Morrison albums at full volume, tell everyone how horrible vietnam was.

- Drink heavily, invite girls from secretarial pool over to 'let off steam'.

- Write a revised 'pay any price, bear any burden' speech, insist that the other speech given by former President was just a 'horrible misunderstanding'.

- Complain about the US not supporting freedom and democracy in the world, then help a small third world government create one, then cut the funding for support of this new government when they are invaded by its militarist, dictatorship neighbors.(see Vietnam, South).

- Offer driving lessons to insurgents (no charge!), then fail to offer requisite swimming lessons to go with the driving lessons, then put on neck collar and apologize on teevee to Government of Iran for wiping out hordes of insurgents in sudden rash of 'driving accidents'.

- Offer to bus shiites to sunni neighborhoods and vice versa in plan to increase the 'diversity' of iraq.

- Tax ammunition and explosives of insurgents to help control the spread of violence.

- Negotiate surrender of US to Islamic revolution of Iran as best way for the US to 'atone for the sins of the past', hope to get best terms possible for Democrat party members under 'long term fascist collaborators discount' plan.

- Blame Reagan.

Posted @ January 10, 2007 10:25 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

5 things you dont know about me

Mrs. "neo-neocon" has tagged me with one of those blog memes, so here goes.

1.In high school, I was an A/V geek, worse still; I also ran the school ‘radio station’. I could not have been a bigger nerd if I had hornrimmed glasses, which 'thank the maker' I did not. It is true that I had acne so bad my face bled if I smiled, but glasses? thankfully and inexplicably, no.

Yes dear reader, I was one of those pimply faced do-gooders who ran between classes moving slide projectors and audio equipment from class to class and from school assembly to school assembly. I was the master of feedback and a mover and shaker of wiring. I was responsible for the care and feeding of the the most expensive electronic things on campus. I was in fact, not much more than the Principals “roadie”. Honestly, my work in the A/V group is a close as I ever came to having an artistic outlet. In between moving equipment around campus, I studied photography, films and filmmaking, the use of slide projectors synchronized to soundtracks as an interactive special effect for presentations. It actually was my first foray into the world of technology, which would make the basis for my career. People who knew me then fully expected that I would surely find a career in radio, as some sort of “announcer” or disk jockey type thing. But I had other ideas, almost none of those ideas involved work in something as public and exposed as being in radio or God forbid a disk jockey.

2. While my job does on occasion require that I give technical presentations to large numbers of people, and I do perform this effort with absolutely no problem at all, I find the idea of being in a room with more than 5 people at a time just for recreation purposes, alarming to the point of nausea. I am now and shall always be, a very non-people person. Its nothing personal, its not “you”, it’s the whole human crowd thing that I have trouble with, it just give me the hives. Give me a book by the pool and I’m happy. That is, of course, if no one else is at the pool. Put me in a party with people I don’t know, and I’m quickly looking for the most remote corner of the room and I’m stacking the furniture around me as a barrier. I have to say that over the past 20 years, my phobia has improved. I used to simply vomit and pass out in the bathroom, now I can manage about an hour before I start to cringe uncontrollably.

3. While I consider myself a car aficionado, I have owned a ‘63 Chevy Corvair, an ’82 Chevette, an ’84 Pontiac Fiero. Only the Fiero was bought by choice, the rest were out of poverty driven desperation and all three were staggering examples of “how not to build a car”. The ’62 Corvair was bought on my 15th birthday, with my own money for 300 dollars. My idea was “Well at least it runs”, my father had a different idea. I awoke the next day (my actual birthday) to find the car completely disassembled – every bolt from every nut, and a gift copy of “Chiltons Auto Repair for the 62 Corvair” as my birthday gift. He had given me exactly 365 days to accomplish this task and I had absolutely no clue how to put it back together. The old man had a seriously warped sense of humor. I was successful in the task, and out of spite immediately sold the car and bought a motorcycle, which was promptly taken away until my 18th birthday. I was a difficult child. My favorite car that I have owned was the 1990 Nissan 300zx. My favorite motorcycle was the Honda 1975 750/4. I tend to prefer motorcycles to cars. Its the whole "crowd" thing again, I guess.

4. The proudest moment in my corporate life occurred when I was being viciously attacked verbally by a Vice President of a large Oil Company ( it starts with a "C", ends in "RON"). Unfortunately for this particular VP, the week he picked to attack me that I was on sulfa drugs for a major kidney problem I was suffering from. You see, Sulfa drugs tend to have a nasty side effect of making people very “irritable”. Given that I also had to fly almost 18 hours to have this meathead yell at me(for something that was a) no longer a problem, b) not MY problem in the first place as IT WAS HIS IDIOT TECHS THAT BROKE THE SYSTEM IN THE FIRST PLACE, c) a two second fix over the phone, therefore totally not necessary for me to fly from Tennessee back to California, with a broken kidney I might add, just so he could scream at me like a spastic 15 year old girl.) I was to say the least, “most irritated”. After being yelled at in the most unprofessional way for nearly 20 minutes, I just totally and completely "snapped" and began to unleash verbally back at on the poor bastard with all that my Navy upbringing had taught me about the anglo-saxon language. After my returning his verbal fire in several non-stop, spittle covered, rage filled minutes, moving step by step closer to him at the end of each profane stanza and calling down from hell all that the ‘lords of cussing’ could muster onto this mans head like some crazed ‘preacher of hate’; he was left in tears, cringing and simpering behind his desk, holding only his decorative letter opener towards me as his only remaining pathetic defense.

Most people will occasionally find themselves in a situation where they want to really yell at their boss or their customers. Well, I actually did it, and the really cool thing is, I didn’t get fired for it.

Two months later, I gave a presentation to a group of ‘key investors’ for the company I worked for. One of the people was – you guessed it - the said same cringing Vice President of a large Oil Company, last seen taking shelter behind his desk, with a letter opener in his hand, looking for all the world like an Eskimo with a really, really small spear and I was a rather large enraged polar bear.

Not only did he not just get up and run out of the room screaming when he saw me start up the presentation, after it was over he reached out and shook my hand and congratulated me on a "job well done". Apparently, he had forgotten about the day I nearly threw him out of a 6-story office window just for the fun of watching him splatter on the ground below.

Later I asked my boss about this. His explanation is something I’ve never forgotten.

"Frank, do you think that Mr. XXXX is a jerk?"

“Well yeah, he’s an A-Class Jackass Jerk of the first order”.

“Do you think everyone thinks that too?”

“Yeah!”

“Do you think you’re the only person in history to ever scream at the top of your lungs at him? Well, I've got news for you, to you this was a big deal, a most unusual event, but to him it was just another day at work. He thinks that sort of thing is normal. He doesn’t remember what you did, because since then it’s probably happened half a dozen times again. I’ve screamed at him half a dozen times myself. It just doesn’t mean a thing. ”

And that explained why I still had a job after verbally attacking a Vice President and and corporate investor of my company.

5. I have known my best friend since he and I were 15. We first worked together at a miniature golf course and go-cart track. We went to college together and we have both worked at the same companies professionally, but we have never worked together since the days at the miniature golf course. His wife and mine were also roommates in college, and we both live within a mile of each other to this day. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

Well that wasn't so bad.

Posted @ January 08, 2007 11:57 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

This is what you get when you hang out with a bad crowd

that lady with the apple on her face has tagged me to talk about "5 things you don't know about me", which I find to be both terribly embarassing and a bit of an honor considering everyone she asked is on my list of "damn fine bloggers". How I got there, I have no idea. Maybe she thinks I'm Vodkapundit?

So I have to go walk the dog but then I will write a blog post about me, which is much like being in the 7th grade and having a girl ask you to go to a square dance, youre thrilled at the honor of being asked but your horrified that someone might see you in the process.

Posted @ January 08, 2007 09:49 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Now take him to Detroit

Korean Martial Arts Master Bong Soo Han - who helped revolutionize Hollywood's understanding of martial arts by creating fight sequences for modern American films, died on Monday. He was 73.

You'll remember Master Bong Soo Han in his role in 1977's Kentucky Fried Movie from this vignette called; " A Fistful of Yen" where he played the evil "Dr. Khlan".

Dr. Klahn: The CIA thinks they can infiltrate the Mountain of Dr. Klahn!
CIA Agent: You can't scare me!
Dr. Klahn: Take him to... Detroit!
CIA Agent: No! No, not Detroit! No! No, please! Anything but that! No! No!

Rest in Peace Bong Soo Han. You were truly a man of extraordinary magnitude.

Posted @ January 08, 2007 09:20 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

bob lutz - the smartest man in detroit

"The Chevrolet Volt has a battery-powered electric motor that can run the car for up to 40 city miles on a single charge. Beyond that, a gasoline-powered, one-liter, three-cylinder engine can generate electricity to power the car and replenish the battery, with a range of up to 640 miles..."
from msnbc.com

My notes:

1) If you absolutely insist on driving to work, where 90% of the drive is spent "sitting" you might might as well look good while you do it.

2) This is what you get when the guy running the show actually likes cars. Bob Lutz is a man who "Gets It".

3) This car desperately needs a convertible option.

4) Might I suggest the use of ceramic Bose speakers imbedded in the sides of the car that play sound effects, such as the thunder of a Chevy V-8 at the flip of a switch? The problem with electric cars is you cant make an entrance.

5) Apparently the big technology problem to overcome is cooling the batteries. May I suggest, ahem, a radiator?

6) You know, this would be just as nice with a V-8. Maybe thats the key here, a correctly designed car could accept a variety of power plants, depending on the desire of the end user. If they did it right, the dealer could mate the frame with the powerplant at the time of purchase, rather than at the factory. It would also help with the process "Powerplant Upgrading" as the technology improves.

Ok, before I start getting complaints that I've turned into Autoblog, I'm actually working on something big that is going to deal with a problem I've been thinking about since the Hezbollah war last summer.

When I say big, it is larger than just about anything else I've ever done, and I think we all know how windy I can be. I'm thinking multiple posts, maybe even a podcast.

This is just a little Sunday afternoon diversion. So just relax, ok?

Posted @ January 07, 2007 11:27 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

I think I see a pattern here

Yet another politician who didn't support Bush on the Iraq war has died. hmmm...

Also, attacks on the US from outer space are up 300% under Bush.
(I know, I know - why does the solar system hate us so?).

Or is the headline here "Critics say Bush Missile Defense fails to protect US from space terror."

Posted @ January 04, 2007 03:08 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Gauge the distance

The death Benito Mussolini and his mistress by Italian Partisans in April 1945.

The May 7, 1945 Time Magazine reports the death of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini with the following prose:

"Death came last week to Benito Mussolini, from the rifles of an Italian firing squad. As his body lay, reviled and spat upon, in a public square of Milan, it was as though the pent-up jury of a nation was beating upon the senseless clay of the man who had led it to vainglory, shame and disaster..."

The entire report from that day can be found here.

In summary - Benito Mussolini – Killer , thug, madman, murderer, who found justice that the end of a rope. No trial, no appeal. His body in all its gore, displayed for all to see with no respect or concern given to his family.

Shall we now compare that clear minded prose to the "goo-goo" coverage of Saddam Hussein?

Jan 3rd 2007 – Time Magazine

“The brutal spectacle of Saddam Hussein's execution, recorded on cell phone video and seen around the Middle East, has drawn condemnation from around the world, including Washington. But Saddam's final moments highlight a much more serious and fundamental problem facing the Administration: The U.S. no longer has any control over the Iraqi political process.

Having created a new state in Iraq — and not yet ready to admit that it is a failed state — the U.S. felt obliged to hand Saddam Hussein over to the Iraqis to administer the death penalty...”

The full report can be found here.

Saddam Hussein. Brutal dictator? Madman? A Killer who found justice at the end of a rope, after he was given a trial, and then an appeal? Oh no dear reader, Todays time magazine views Saddam Hussein as but another victim of a failed US foreign policy. A brutal monster not to be reviled, but a low man worthy only of pity. A victim of the dumb cluck ham-handed American military-industrial machine.

Just what the hell happened to the minds of journalists? Is this what happens to peoples brains after two generations of fluoridation?

Posted @ January 03, 2007 11:18 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

so they werent kidding after all

The Giugiaro Mustang - I love it.

ok, its a good start. You start to think the world is safe for democracy again when BAM!, this shows up:

Apparently Ford wasn't content in being mercilessly mocked by me because it might make a 'wagon' version of the Mustang, now its considering making a car thats modeled after both a truck and a 1950s locomotive.

You know, when I think "speed" and "sportscar", the first two metaphors that jump right into my mind are "truck" and "locomotive".

Remember the 1970's Triumph Spitfire commerical? the guy starting his car while an overlay of a pilot starting a real spitfire played at the same time? THAT is proper imaging for a sportscar.

Not "hey man, this car looks like a freight train".

Posted @ January 02, 2007 11:35 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

I’ve had one hell of a vacation, and yet I haven’t gone anywhere

I stink at vacation. My genetics simply haven’t prepared me for a world of leisure. For years after my grandfather left the Navy, he wore a sort of improvised uniform and essentially went to work every day with his own self imposed regular work hours in a machine shop of his own design, behind his home in San Simeon. It wasn’t a job, it didn’t involve any sort of commerce, but to him that job was as important as anything he ever did to earn a wage. He may have left the Navy, but he was still on duty.

Sure enough, when his health finally declined to the point that his work was no longer possible and that he was no longer ambulatory, he died soon after. It wasnt the health, it was the lack of purpose for the day that did him in.

My father was the same way, just 30 days after retiring to Idaho he died of a sudden massive stroke. He spent exactly one month off the clock and frankly it was probably the burden of dealing with “free time” did him in.

In his last week before the stroke he uncharacteristically just sat in a chair on the deck with a set of binoculars looking out towards the Grand Tetons and said to no one in particular “I don’t think I can take all this laying about” and ‘tsk-tsked’ himself at the shame of it all. My mom said that in the final month, he would wake every morning and just sigh, now that he had to face the incomprehensible torturous burden of “free time”.

He hated that phrase “free time”. He believed that time was unique in the universe of things, it could neither be created nor destroyed and while it was always used, it largely went to waste. He used to say that “unlike money, which can be created and lost over and over again, time was irreversible, irreplaceable and in very short supply”.

I’m blessed with having a job in an industry that I really love. I honestly think I would do what I do even if I didn’t get paid. My biggest challenge with this style of work is learning how to stop working. And with my genetic predisposition in the area of personal work ethic, it’s a bigger problem than you think.

Those of you who have been around this blog for a long time know that I work from my office in my home. On occasion I do travel to various places in my job but day after day, week after week routine is that I work from a reclining sofa, laptop in its proper place an office phone by my side. That’s it. My job is not physical, its mostly communicating and thinking. Yeah, it’s not a bad gig to have, but it does have its unique difficulties. Most people have to be motivated to go to work, I have to be motivated to stop working.

Like I said, I stink at vacation. I routinely stop accruing vacation and have to be told to go on vacation and use the time or lose the benefit. The best of my managers tend to note this mental defect of mine and schedule my vacations for me. The really good and smart ones just call my wife and ask her for the best dates for my vacation, thereby cutting out the useless and ineffective middleman in question. I make sure the kids and the wife get their time, but after the number of years I’ve been with the company I work for, that still leaves me with two more weeks a year to occupy.

Its hell.

This last break for example, I had quite literally forgotten that I had schedule time off for the end of the year. It was only after working half a day that my manager noted my presence online and asked “ Why are you here?” that I was reminded that I wasn’t supposed to be earning revenue for the next two weeks. So, after putting a few things away that I was working on and making solemn vow not to log on, check email or use various IM tools, I took vacation.

And what did I do? Go to a beach in Hawaii or go skiing like other normal people?

Nahhhhh.

Oh you know exactly what I did brother; I worked with computers, read technical magazines and other such nerdy technical things for almost the entire time of my vacation break from work,

Just-like-I-do-when-I-am-at-work…

And you know what else? I had a great time doing it too! I don’t recommend it for everyone, and I don’t mean to say that its better than going to a beach in Hawaii or going skiing, but I have to say that there’s something to be said for just doing something, not because you have to, but just for the fun of it. And yeah, computers, software, networking things together is FUN.

Now, I didn’t work with the same stuff I work with at work, I worked with other things that are decidedly “outside the lines” of what I do at work, but that’s precisely why it was fun. Yes, I'm exactly the kind of person who goes to Las Vegas with a stack of technical books and sits at the pool being generally annoyed because the rest of the people at the pool cant keep it down so I can read this exxciting article about "virtual machines".

I should be locked up.

For example, during this vacation, amoungst a host of technical things, I worked with a set of Legos. Lego Mindstorms that is.

Lego Mindstorms is a deceptive piece of technology. If youre like me, you hear the word "Lego" and all you think about is the pain of stepping on them in the middle of the night when your kids don’t clean their rooms, but the “Lego” aspect is not what is really important here. Lego Mindstorms is a simple to use, create your own robotic system. It uses a software controllable cpu system that drives a set of sensors and motors that you can control. A bluetooth compatible, portable cpu system that uses an RJ-45 interface with gui driven software. Oh, sorry, I got carried away for a moment, Ill have to wipe the drool from the keyboard.

Home Robotics today has that same sort of vibe that was happening in the world of home computers in 1978. No one at the time took it seriously, and few had the vision for what it would eventually become. There were just a few whackjobs in their garages playing with things that looked to the rest of the world to be not much more than toys. But if you look 20 years in the future, and those same whackjobs transformed the world with their little gadgets and toys. My feeling is that Home Robotics will have the same transformative effect as home computing. I spent a good portion of the time off making something that would mop the kitchen floor.

Why? Why the hell not!

So yeah, a good portion of my vacation was spent playing with Legos, and yeah, I loved it.

Another part of this vacation was spent setting up another Slingbox. This makes now two for the house. The rule should be that if you have a Tivo, then you MUST have a Slingbox. Theres no sense timeshifting if you cant also placeshift as well. I enjoy sitting in Panera Bread and watching my Tivo on my cellphone, it freaks out the kids sitting in there with the ipods.

“Download to tv shows to my ipod”? Bah! how 2005 is that! (I don’t have an Ipod, I absolutely hate the interface; which makes me a complete and total culture heretic to the starbucks crowd and as nearly as unhip as Merv Griffin**.)

I cannot say enough good things for this little piece of technology. It works, it works very good and its addictive. I now have friends and relatives from all over the globe watching my Tivo in the wee small hours of the evening. If you’re wondering why your network bandwidth suddenly stinks, you can stop blaming all the “new AOL users” and start blaming streaming video from slingbox users on your network.

I also spent a good deal of time helping the kids get their new Xbox 360 going, and getting a couple of their friends who also got Xbox 360s for Christmas going on the network. I’m struck by the staggering weight of computer infrastructure going into people’s houses. Explaining to non-technical people “what a wireless network router is” and how to set up a WEP security system is quite an experience.

All worked out well, and its clear to me why television networks don’t have any ratings. They only time the kids watched TV over the holiday break was when they were waiting for their friends to join them online. Passively watching TV has as much attraction to this generation as listening to recordings of “Fibber Magee and Molly” did to mine.

If you’re wondering how much better the Xbox 360 is from the “old” xbox? Well, the xbox 360 is a great all around machine for the home. Think of it as a great high quality DVD player that also lets you play games and the price wont bother you as much. I think the video conference facility is the most underutilized under marketed part of the Xbox. I had a small video conference with a co-worker overseas who also had an Xbox 360. It worked very well, and with just a small amount of effort, Microsoft could easily create a set of software for the 'home office worker' that would greatly facilitate that world.

Oh, and wouldn’t every boring meeting and conference be that much more fun if you could entertain yourself in the meeting by playing a ‘first person shooter” game with your co-workers? Sure. I know, I had the same thought.

Thank god vacation is over. Its good to be back at work.

**- I once met Merv Griffin in an elevator at a hotel in Carbondale, Illinois. He stepped in with his dinner guests and one floor up, the elevator got stuck between floors. For one hour, I was both an audience and a guest of the worlds smallest “Merv Griffin Show”.

The hour flew by. He’s seems like a nice guy. He dresses funny, sort of like the “white rabbit” in “Alice in Wonderland”. He was wearing a suit that was somewhere between a floor length bathrobe, a Col. Sanders costume and something “Huggy Bear” would wear on “Starsky and Hutch”. Oh, and he was smaller than I thought he would be. But ever since that experience, I’ve had what I call the “Merv Griffin” test for all celebrities.

It goes something like this:

“If celebrity X were to be stuck with me in an elevator for an hour, what is the likelihood that celebrity X would not make me want to impale them in the neck with my ballpoint pen, just to get them to shut the hell up?"

Merv passed the test with flying colors. Depending on my mood, Donald Trump might pass the test but Rosie O’donnell doesn’t stand a chance.

Posted @ January 01, 2007 11:37 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Saddam Disagreed With Bush About Invading Iraq - MSM

April 2003: Marine Cpl. Edward Chin, using a flag given to him by Iraqi civilians as he helps them pull down a statue of their despotic ruler.

"I wish things were like when Ronald Reagan was still president".
The Late Despot Saddam Hussein - Reported in the July 2005 issue of GQ, which quoted Spc. Sean O'Shea, one of Hussein's former guards.

Posted @ December 30, 2006 12:14 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

sic semper tyrannus

The Bodies of Iraqi Villagers in the town of Halabja Iraq after a Chemical attack by Saddam Hussien on March 17, 1988.

After the chemical gas attack on the Iraqi town of Halabja, reporter Guy Dinmore of the Financial Times noted the following.

"It was life frozen. Life had stopped, like watching a film and suddenly it hangs on one frame. It was a new kind of death to me. You went into a room, a kitchen and you saw the body of a woman holding a knife where she had been cutting a carrot.

The aftermath was worse. Victims were still being brought in. Some villagers came to our chopper. They had 15 or 16 beautiful children, begging us to take them to hospital. So all the press sat there and we were each handed a child to carry. As we took off, fluid came out of my little girl's mouth and she died in my arms."

Saddam Hussein of Tikrit. May his name be blotted out.

It was he who engaged in acts of genocide against his own countrymen.

It was he who fought a war with Iran that included the use of Chemical and biological weapon attacks on civilians and military alike and fought so ruthlessly that the war eventually resulted in over three million dead.

It was he who invaded Kuwait and brutalized the population.

Saddam Hussein is now dead at the hands of a fledgling democracy that most people considered impossible just a few years ago, composed of the very people Saddam once tried to wipe from the earth.

Sic Semper Tyrannus. The age of the murdering dictator is now at an end.

UPDATE: Comment from a friend - "Attorney Ramsey Clark loses yet another high profile client to an unsympathetic justice system, what are the odds?"

UPDATE II: Tommorows headline today - "Saddam secretly disapproved of Bush reasons for invasion of Iraq."

Posted @ December 29, 2006 07:15 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Lost Star Trek Scripts: The Changeling

A highly intelligent probe that thinks that Captain Kirk is its creator imperils The Enterprise. Captain Kirk again deploys the use of a “logic Bomb” in an attempt to destroy the probe.

Act III Scene IV:
…
...snip.

Kirk: NOMAD, your mission is to destroy and sterilize all things that are imperfect, is that true?

NOMAD: Affirmative. Sterilize all imperfections.

Kirk: Ok, NOMAD, work with me here. Would you say that President Reagan was a great president?

NOMAD: Affirmative. While at the time he was generally dismissed as a naïve genial boob, supporters and detractors alike as well as myself now mark him as a truly great President.

Kirk: Ok then, How about President Ford, Good President or Bad?

NOMAD: At the time of his Administration, President Ford’s popularity suffered from the decision to pardon President Nixon, but history has shown this to be the correct decision, despite the emotional desire for the public to see Nixon prosecuted for his crimes. NOMAD believes President Ford to be a great President.

Kirk: ok NOMAD, how about President Bush?

NOMAD: STERILIZE! STERILIZE, STERILIZE!!!!

Kirk: Ok NOMAD, keep your shirt on, President Bush has been dead for 300 years. So, you’re saying that President Bush was not so hot, I take it?

NOMAD: Affirmative.

Kirk: So, just to make sure I’ve got your positions all tied up. Reagan great, Ford great, Bush bad, correct?

NOMAD: Affirmative.

Kirk: Interesting. That presents us with quite a problem.

NOMAD: Explain.

Kirk: Let me ask you something NOMAD, what would you say to any life form that were to disagree with your positions, of “Ford Great” and “Reagan Great”?

NOMAD: Imperfection. Must Sterilize. There can be no disagreement to these facts.

Kirk: You’re sure? Anyone who disagrees must be sterilized?

NOMAD: Affirmative. My mission is to find and sterilize all imperfection.

Kirk: Listen to me closely NOMAD; President Ford thought that Ronald Reagan would be a very bad President. You think that Ford was a great president and so was Reagan, so how can you resolve this imperfect logic? Is it at all possible with the existence of this imperfection to accept the fact that Bush was also a great President?

NOMAD: No, Must, Not, Compute. Imperfection. IMPERFECTION Reagan was-Great-President-Ford-Did not think so-this-is-faulty-cannot-trust-opinion-of-Ford-on-other-matters, such-as-Bush-on-Iraq-War-Must-sterilize-ster-I-lize-ster-il-ize-STERILIZE. MUST STERILIZE!!!

Kirk: Ok Spock, I think you can you can toss it in the transporter now, I think he’s about done.

(Spock and Scotty quickly grab the malfunctioning NOMAD and beam it into space where it detonates harmlessly.)

Spock: Captain, might I suggest that you could’ve just revealed NOMADS error over confusing yourself with “Jackson Roykirk” and skipped over another opportunity to discuss trvial matters of old earth political history.

Kirk (hand on his hips, mocking Spock): Oh damn! someone’s mad that I whipped the “logic bomb” out again and he didn’t get to use his “superior Vulcan intellect” to get rid of yet another threat to the ship. Oh, yeah, thanks again Mr. Vulcan science officer for jumping right in and helping out.

(Kirk turns to walk out of the room with a dismissive hand wave, when THWAP! Spock hits Kirk directly in the back of the neck with a karate style hand move, knocking Kirk to the floor)

Scotty: Thank you Mr. Spock. I’ve been waiting all day for someone to do that.

Spock: You’re Welcome Mr. Scott. You will of course, dispose of the Captain in the usual fashion, I assume?

Scotty: Aye.

....End Snip.

(Note: This is my way of saying Im actually out on vacation,and I dont have bandwitdth for serious essays on the life and effect of President Ford, but I've had enough of the MSM using the death of President Ford to once again dig at President Bush. Aye carumba folks, let it go already.)

Posted @ December 27, 2006 11:38 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Castro update

News reports starting to come in the past 8 hours that a "Spanish Intestinal Specialist" has been called to Havana to work on Fidel Castro.

However, there is a deliberate approach in all the reporting to not mention the world "Cancer" but the cold dead tendrils of Cuban information control have made a small mistake.

Several reports have managed to get the name of the "Spanish Intestinal Specialist" into the public. It is Dr. Jose Luis Garcia Sabrido.

However, a quick Google check shows that this Dr. Sabrido has appeared at two conferences in the past two years in the field of Oncology.

Oncology is defined as:

"Oncology is the medical subspecialty dealing with the study and treatment of cancer. A physician who practices oncology is an oncologist. "

I submit evidence dear friends,that the Cuban government calling on this Doctor is confirmation of the fact that El Jefe has some form of Cancer, and is in fact, dying.

At the start of the year, I said I wanted to see Castro die this year, but only after a long painful and embarrasing illness.

Well, It looks like its going to be a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year after all.

Posted @ December 24, 2006 05:18 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Saudi Royals: Following up

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker is on the job with a good summary of the "Saudi Situation".

You'll note that the position of Ambassador to the US is now filled by a commoner, American educated Adel al-Jubeir. He seems to work for the "Bandar Bloc" in the house of Saud.

Authors Note: He cant be all bad, he dated Miss Campbell Brown...

My favorite quote thats referenced in the American Thinker article is this:

snip.

Across the kingdom, in both official and casual conversation, once-quiet concern over the chaos in Iraq and Iran’s growing regional influence has burst into the open.

Saudi newspapers now denounce Iran’s growing power. Religious leaders here, who view Shiism as heresy, have begun talking about a “Persian onslaught” that threatens Islam. In the salons and diwans of Riyadh, the “Iranian threat” is raised almost as frequently as the stock market.

“Iran has become more dangerous than Israel itself,” said Sheik Musa bin Abdulaziz, editor of the magazine Al Salafi, who describes himself as a moderate Salafi, a fundamentalist Muslim movement. “The Iranian revolution has come to renew the Persian presence in the region. This is the real clash of civilizations.”

end snip...

It doesnt sound like much to us in the west, but one muslim calling another "worse than Israel" is pretty serious stuff. Oh, I forgot to mention that when the MSM say "Salafist" in regards to Saudi politics, they mean "Wahabi".

I think this is a good time to note that the UN actually sanctioned the Iranians over the issue of Nuclear Development, which is sure to get a reaction from Terhan.

And its only two days until the start of the Haj.

Stay tuned.

Posted @ December 23, 2006 08:59 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Its that time of year again

Where we all sit around and enjoy the holiday spirit by mercilessly mocking the genius of George Lucas.

For those of you who are unaware, in 1977 right on the heels of the massively successful release of the original Star Wars, Lucas was talked into doing a "Holiday Special" for CBS. THe decision to engage in this idiocy resulted from a moment of staggering weakness that came out of the bubbly unreal giddiness of the massive success from Star Wars. It was a decision that he would go on to regret for the rest of his life.

Basically, you take characters from "Star Wars", mix in a little "Holiday Special" television commercialism and excrete it out of the bottom end of the CBS television network and guess what comes out? Bea Arthur, Art Carney, Jefferson Starship, cartoons, oh and a chance to hear Carrie Fisher sing on Television. I dont know why Jamie Farr, Gavin Macleod, Maclean Stevenson or Gary Burgdof didnt make the cut. History did not record why they was left out of this chance at stardom,while Harvey Korman and Bea Arthur managed to make the cut. Chalk it up to the value of agents in the right place at the right time.

Thats right children its the famous " Star Wars Holiday Special" in all its glory, served up for posterity on youtube. THe only thing we are missing is a sponsorship by Dolly Madison Cakes and youve got a full blown cross generational tradtion.

So grab a big chunk of peanut brittle and a 44 oz mug of holiday "jolt cola" and prepare to wince mightily at the biggest commercial miscalculation since someone told Michael Jackson about plastic surgery.

Youtube only stores the show in 10 minute sections, so be sure to visit the "related" section to get the rest of this nugget of television history.

Lucas was quoted years later as saying " I'd like to find every copy in the world and smash it with a sledgehammer". Once youve seen it in its entirety, you'll understand why. You'll probably volunteer to hunt down every copy and buy the man a sledgehammer too.

On a personal note, I dont remember watching it in 1977. I do remember thinking it was the dumbest idea I'd ever heard and I just knew that it was going to be awful, so I didnt bother, but I wish I had.

Posted @ December 23, 2006 01:05 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Duke and DA Nifong

What a disgusting nightmare that has turned out to be. No Timeline, no DNA, nothing to support the case whatsoever, and now the DA has decided to graciously drop charges of rape, but just to ensure that "Justice is done" the far easier to prosecute and virtually impossible to defend against charges of kidnapping and "Sexual Offense" will stay.

Unbelievable.

It reminds me of a quote from Catch-22:

"The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with."

Posted @ December 22, 2006 10:13 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Zucker-vision

Posted @ December 19, 2006 11:28 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

The uncertain world of 1946 and the future we created.

Let’s mix up a batch of the following:

- A country that is weary with war, wanting to exact some form of retribution on the enemy, a hated despicable dictatorship that has been toppled with the use of US military force.

- Just before the enemy is beaten, a team of “Washington D.C. elite government leaders” puts together a plan for what is to be done with the beaten country and its populace.

- The Plan is presented to the President of the United States.

- Part of the plan involves partitioning the country into several large administration zones, and giving control to another party. A party that was once a close ally of the US but is now involved in the start of a clandestine war against the United States.

- Leadership of the UK and the US sign on to the plan, that is until someone gets a closer look at what the plan actually means in terms of lives that will be lost in the implementation of the plan.

Sounds like fun. What could go wrong? Smart people, concensus, the public loves it. Cool! Lets do it!

This isnt fake, it's a real plan with real people, but be careful. If you make a mistake and implment it rather than the less popular alternative, it could cost millions of lives in the world that would result.

Yeah, its a plan from a sort of "Study Group" alright,only it’s not the Secretary Baker and the Iraq Study Group of 2006; its Secretary of the US Treasury Henry Morgenthau and its 1946. The plan is called the “Morgethau Plan”. It’s the plan that came about before the Marshall Plan. It’s a plan for how to deal with Germany after the war. It’s a plan that is subtitled “Program to Prevent Germany from Starting a World War III" and most of the people alive at the time, and most certainly the Washington intelligencia would agree that the plan, draconian though it may seem to modern minds, would be just the thing to deal with the Nazis at the end of the war.

As Stephen Green would say “Read The Whole Thing Already”.

There’s more than one lesson for everyone to learn in this but here's a few that I offer in consideration:

1) Smart people can do very dumb things for very good, but very wrong reasons.

2) Public emotions can effect public policy in very bad ways. Giving the people what they want can and often does get alot of people killed.

3) Giving the public what it wants does not always supply the best solution.

4) Every generation has to make a choice as significant as this one. The ISG is simply this generations test. Fail to get it right can result in a plan as horrible and deadly as the Morgenthau plan being adapted, rather than the fantastically successful Marshall Plan.

It's time to stop the Iraq Study Group Plan before history damns us all for implementing it, just as it would certainly have done if we went ahead with the Morgenthau Plan.

Posted @ December 18, 2006 09:54 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Never miss a chance to suck up to Dictatorship

One of these men is long standing critic of the American military; the imperialism of the west and the foreign policy of George W. Bush and the United States; and is the beneficiary of a personal fortune that was created by family connections.

The other is The President of Syria.

And if not for the votes of about 2 million of you in 2004, this might be a picture of the Sitting President of the United States meeting with an inbred thug who is acting in the role of a cheap suited, chinless Mussolini to Irans Hitlerian regime.

Do you know how many showers I would need to take to get the stink of sitting in the same room with Assad off of me?

Posted @ December 16, 2006 05:41 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

A little Saudi profiling

1974 Time "Man of the Year"
Faisal bin Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman ibn Faisal ibn Turki Al Saud
'King Faisal' to you and me.

So, just who is this guy?

- Descended from Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab and Ibn Saud, the founders of the modern 'House of Saud"

- November 2 1964, Ascended to the throne after his brother abdicated to exile in Greece, due his his bankrupting the Saudi government.

- October 17, 1973 Faisal withdraws Saudi oil from world markets, quadrupling the price. Faisal's action was the primary force behind the 1973 energy crisis.

- On March 25, 1975, Faisal was shot point blank and killed by his half brother's son Faisal bin Musad, who had just come back from the United States. The assassination occurred at a Majlis, an event where the king or leader opens up his residence to the citizens to enter and ask him questions.

The King recognized his nephew and bent his head forward, so that the younger Faisal bin Musad could kiss the king's nose, in a sign of respect. Rather, Faisal bin Musad drew a pistol and shot his uncle in the face numerous times while claiming vengeance for his brother Khaled. Khaled was killed by Saudi Security troops in 1966 during a protest against the introduction of television. He was known to be a religious Islamic fundamentalist who was upset at depictions of Islam on Television. Faisal bin Musad was immediately captured, while the king was rushed to a hospital and treated by an American doctor, but it was to no avail, as two bullets shot at point blank range killed him.

Prince Faisal Bin Musad was declared officially insane. He was later found guilty of regicide and in June 1975 he was beheaded in the public square in Riyadh.

It is interesting to note that the fact that while his brother was killed during a protest to keep depictions of Islam off of television, Faisal Bin Musads assassination of the King and his execution were all covered on live television.

So who is Faisal bin Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman ibn Faisal ibn Turki Al Saud or "King Faisal" as we call him?

- The guy who argued for the removal of support of the United States due to its support of the creation of the state of Israel in 1947.

- The guy who started the first "Oil Crisis" of the 1970s.

Oh yeah, he's also the father of Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, the recent"Runaway Ambassador". We called him King, but Turki called him "father".

Tonight, the word around the campfire is that Ambassador Turki and the "Famous Prince Bandar" are "having words". So now I have to go find out more about this Bandar fellow and his background just to try to make sense of which side is trying to knife which side in the back.

It would appear at first blush that Bandar outranks Turki in the hierarchy of Princes. It is also interesting to note that Bandars father is Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, the Minister of Defence and Aviation since 1962. His brother is Prince Khalid bin Sultan a Saudi general in the 1991 Gulf War.

So, my gut tells me that the profile of these two guys is starting to look like this:

Turki - Intelligence, skullduggery, 'shadow warrior', Mr. inside-outski. On the unfavored 'Richard III' side of the family tree, perhaps he even wants to change the order to the throne a bit to get even for what happened to "old pops"?

Bandar - Military, Statesman, On the favored side of the family tree.

Hmmm...

It would seem that the Saudis may also be having some trouble getting their intelligence services to agree with their government and military.

More to follow...

Posted @ December 14, 2006 11:14 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Whats the coolest thing thats happened to my blog in a long time?

Ok, its a little thing, but it means alot to me. Theres one blogger whos work I admire more than just about all of the blogosphere combined. Someday when I grow up I hope to be able to do what he does.

That guy is James Lileks.

In Todays "Bleat" he linked to my post on the Saudis and as a result, I feel like a million bucks.

James "I can make you laugh,cry and think at the same time" Lileks gave me, Mr. D+ in English for 14 years running - actual real life linkage.

Finding a linkback from James Lileks on your blog is like opening your door on a Sunday afternoon and having Bono ask if he can come in and kick back for a bit. You're sure it happens to someone out there, but it never happens to you.

Linkage. Its that "new drug" Huey Lewis was on about in the '80s. I thought it was cough syrup that he was singing about, but its linkage, I'm sure of it.

Now if I can just get those freaks at The Corner to notice me...

Posted @ December 14, 2006 09:11 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

In my ignorance of Islam

I had forgotten that the annual Haj to Mecca is this month.

The Haj is an annual pilgrimmage to the holy sites in the city of Mecca that all Muslims are compelled to take at lest once in their lifetime. What it means is that during the Haj, all around the Muslim world is a tremendous transfer of humanity into Saudi Arabia.

So what could go wrong, right?

Well...

"In 1979, radical Muslims from Saudi Arabia managed to seize the Grand Mosque in Mecca in a two-week stand-off that the monarchy has been determined never to see happen again.

Al Qaeda militants, who hold dear the memory of the Mecca rebellion, launched a violent campaign in 2003, targeting foreigners, oil installations and government buildings."

Sometimes you need a gentle reminder that its not always all about us. Al Qaeda hates just about everybody, but they have a special hate for the Saudis.

Later on in the article, theres this:

"Gunmen killed two Saudi security personnel last week when they opened fire on a guard post at a prison in the Red Sea port of Jeddah, the main arrival point for most pilgrims just 45 minutes drive from Mecca."

"The kingdom said earlier this month it had detained 136 foreign and Saudi militants, some of whom were posing as pilgrims, who were planning a series of suicide bombings and assassinations around the country."

This is just what the Saudis have admitted to, since the assailants had the bad taste to be so public about their efforts. You can be sure that there is much,much more that is going on that isnt being talked about.

That reminds me. The ISG makes a big to-do about talking to Syria and Iran to "stablize the situation", but I dont remember anyone saying what we should do to bolster Kuwait, Jordan, UAE and yes, the Saudis.

Posted @ December 14, 2006 08:46 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

I Guess they made their quota early this year.

Sorry, Its the first thing that popped into my head when I read this headline.

The second thing was: "We no longer murder spies but traitors, counter-revolutionairies, capitalists, Americans, Russians, Non-Russians of all size and shape, journalists, fry cooks, car salesman, toll gate keepers, fishermen, pipeline operators, ship captains, taxi drivers, air traffic controllers, computer operators, electricians,grocers, farmers and last but not least - lawyers are subject to our special attentions at a moments notice."

Posted @ December 14, 2006 05:22 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Ahmet Ertegun: 1923-2006

Ahmet Ertegun, and Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker of Cream.

Its thanks to the genius of Ahmet Ertegun, You got Ray Charles and Led Zeppelin. Ahmet Ertegun died today and the world is a little bit smaller.

What do Kemal Ataturk, Donald Rumsfeld and Ray Charles all have in common. Ahmet Ertegun. Click Here to read more about this fascinating man.

How did he die? Brian injury. How did he get it? He fell at a Rolling Stones Concert. The man was 83, at a Rolling Stones Concert.
In his spare time, he also wrote the classic Ray Charles song "Mess Around". I wish we were all as cool as Ahmet Ertegun.

(...As he said to Ray Charles once, I now say to him: "You are the F**king end!")

Posted @ December 14, 2006 03:54 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

This is just flipping wrong

From CNN:

"...reports that Ford could make four-door versions of its next-generation Mustang."

Well, I guess we can say that the design geniuses who created the Gremlin, the Pacer and the Aztek have managed to find jobs in the Ford design divison.

Bad idea. A Geniune, First Class Bad Idea. Please stop making great cars into crap. Is it that hard? You dorks at Ford need to just go into the parking lot and see whatever your driving and dont make anything that looks like that, ok? Thats simple enough. No more cozy suburban econoblocks ok? You want to make a 4 door car, fine. Just dont call it a "Mustang". Call it a "Donkey", a "Mule", a "Platypus" or a nice cuddly "Cocker Spaniel" if you want, but for Gods sake dont call it a "Mustang".

This is a Mustang:

This is also a Mustang:

This is a man, driving a Mustang:

You get it now, Ford? Its not just about how many cup holders and kiddie car seats and vanity mirrors you can stuff in your little metal pinata. Sometimes its about the self respect that comes from driving a car that both performs like an actual "sportscar"; something that generates adrenaline when you press the gas pedal and doesnt look like something oldsmobile rejected as being "too suburbo-safe even for our aging demographic". "Sports" being the operative part of the word "SPORTS-car". Sportscars are not Barcaloungers with wheels. Sportscars are not SmallRv's, You do not care about the back seat or the rearview mirrors in a "sportscar". Does anyone making cars or designing them actually love cars anymore? Are they all just clockwatching wussies waiting for retirement? I tell you what, you guys at Ford, the next time you go into a design meeting and ask " What can we do to improve sales" you take out a gun and shoot the first person that says " Let's put 4 doors on a sportscar and make it look like a Tempo or a rounded edge K car". If you have a meeting a day like that inside of a month, people will start looking for other solutions than to make perfectly good sportscars "Safe for mom to drive".

Idiots. Fricken Idiots. Go take a look at "Mom", Shes might have a Minivan for the kids, but shes got her eyes on a MiniCooper because its the closest thing out there to a true sports car that hasnt been turned into a big-rolling-turd.

Quality.
Fast.
Scary.
Uncomfortable for anyone but the driver.

That's a Sportscar. The word "Cozy" and "good for the kids" doesnt come into the recipe.

Someone get Bob Lutz on the phone.

Sure. I drive a car that looks like it was designed by "Black and Decker", but its not a sportscar. Its SUV, a "Sport" -"Utility"-Vehicle. An SUV is supposed to look like something from a toolbox, not a Minivan with ground clearance.

Posted @ December 14, 2006 10:16 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

Movies I love ( The Rare Book Edition)

Sometime back awhile ago, I made a list of really, really bad movies and I promised an eventual list of really good movies that I liked.

So here we are.

This is not a list of “greatest movies ever”, this is only a list of really great films that I have seen, but I find that almost no one else I know has ever seen or even heard of these films, hence the 'rare book' concept. These are real gems, movies that are interesting, well crafted and will stay with you long after the DVD is back into its Netflix envelope.

Ikiru

An Akira Kurosawa film, need I say more? He could make a movie called “Small Engine Repair” and I would watch it. This movie is the story of a city bureaucrat who discovers that he has only a few months to live because he dying of stomach cancer. In the process of coming to terms with his pending death, he goes on a spree in the city and meets a girl. The girl helps reveal to the man a possible route to his own salvation. After his death, his co-workers gather in a sort of wake ceremony and begin to discuss the behavior of their friend and co-worker, who in the months prior to his death began acting very odd. One by one, each of them relates stories that reveal the nature of the man and how he learned to deal with the end of his life. All I can tell about the impact of this film is this; I dare you to not cry.

I dont mean to say that the movie is all weepy, its not like that at all. Its a very emotional movie, both up and down, which is an entirely different thing. There are scenes in this movie that are so moving and touching and inspiring that it’s hard to find the words for its true greatness. Why this film is overlooked, I have no idea. I would put this movie into any list of '10 greatest films of all time'.

Ice cold in Alex

'Ice cold in Alex' is the story of a WWII British medical team in the North African Desert. The crew of this ambulance is cut off and finds themselves behind enemy lines, but the real enemy in this film isn’t just the Germans, its the desert itself. The Doctor of the Ambulance repeatedly uses the inspiration of getting through their troubles and having a “Cold drink in Alexandria” as a motivator to keep the crew going as they do everything they can to stay alive in the hellish world of the North African desert in during wartime.

This is a quiet English movie where there is barely any mood music and most of the key scenes have no spoken dialog. It’s a movie about desperate people, but the most moving scenes are performed in absolute silence. There are two scenes that come to mind. The first the ambulance has to be winched out of the bottom of a gulley up the side of a cliff, which requires an act of superhuman effort to accomplish and you wonder how they can accomplish this task with the decidedly non-mechanically minded folks that are assigned to the ambulance. You are taken step by step through the process of moving a large truck up shifting sands and it’s a very, very tense scene.

The second scene is at the end of the film where you are finally allowed to see the actual “Cold drink in Alex”, and its absolutely breathtaking when it finally appears on the bar, a cold pint of beer, glistening with condensation on the outside of the glass. You react to it the same way as that the characters in the movie. It’s a great scene that you wont soon forget.

The Big Lift

It’s rare to find a film that even mentions the Berlin Airlift, but this film is actually about the airlift itself. Filmed just after the Berlin Airlift, This movie shows post war Berlin, Germany and the German people themselves as they once were not so very long ago. This is a film about a country shattered by the effects of war. This film is not made up of movie sets and special effects; this is the real thing. It’s a movie and a story about the men who flew in the miracle of the Berlin Airlift and the people they were helping to survive, people who just a few years earlier were our enemy.

Sure, it’s a movie, but to me it’s almost like a time travel experience to a period of history that is slipping away from our collective memory. The film is shot at a time when the Cold War was just getting started and it was all far from known how things would eventually turn out. It’s hard to get Americans to understand that there was once a devastating war in Europe that killed millions of people. Today if you say “Europe” people hear “Vacation”. But not all that long ago, “Europe” meant deprivation and destruction. This film shows that in deep detail.

Watch the credits and you will see that many of the characters in the movie are actual veterans of the Berlin Airlift.

A Matter of Life and Death (or ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in the US)

This film is really hard to find, but if you can find it, watch it and you won’t be sorry. Its pure fantasy, but it’s a real blast. David Niven plays a British bomber pilot named Peter who is flying a mission where he and his crew are shot up pretty bad. As her prepares to leave the aircraft, he informs the ATC operator that he has no parachute and will surely die, that his crew are all dead and the aircraft is on fire. The ATC operator is an American woman who is played by Kim Hunter **. They talk for a moment and David Niven jumps out of the plane into the fog to his ultimate demise.

And here’s where it starts to gets weird. After he jumps from the aircraft into the fog, he then appears on a English beach, standing in his flight gear and apparently none the worse for wear. It seems that as he jumped from his burning aircraft, his “conductor” to heaven missed him in the fog, so he has been returned to earth by error. As he walks along the beach a bit stunned to find that he’s still alive, June, the ATC operator he was talking to before he jumped finds Peter walking on the beach and of course, they both fall instantly and madly in love. (ah, Hollywood...)

Ah, but here’s the problem, Peter died. He’s not supposed to be walking the earth, he supposed to go to his great reward. His "conductor" whom only Peter can see, keeps trying to get Peter to go on with his mission; not in a 'menacing ghost' kind of way as you might expect; because as the “heavenly conductor” is actually a foppish French aristocrat who was killed during the French Revolution. Its hard to menance anyone dressed like that, with that kind of accent. However, being dead isn’t Peters only problem. Since his accidental return he’s fallen in love with a woman and that just gums up the works for Peter and the poor “Heavenly conductor”.

As a result, Peter must undergo a trial for his life in Heaven to determine whether he is to live or die.

Its funny, it’s touching, it’s instructive and in a way it’s timely as one of the key plot points in the film is the nature of US and British National relationships. Peter, a British pilot, June an American WAC and the Judge in the trial for Peters life is a Parson killed in the American Revolutionary War, so he’s got a bit of a bias against the English. The Jury is made up of the dead of the allies of World War II and his Attorney makes a special sacrifice to argue for Peters case.

The Red Tent

This is a Russian-Italian movie about the ill-fated expedition by Italian Admiral Nobile to fly an airship over the North Pole. Peter Finch plays Nobile, who every night conjures up the ghosts of men and women who were part of the disaster on the ice and they in essence put him on trial for his errors. Some absolve, some accuse and some forgive, but history has the final verdict to the life of a man, who once was great, but is now mostly forgotten.

It’s an interesting movie, but I loved the movies approach to a man putting himself on trial by summoning the ghosts of his past. I’ve replayed the closing scenes of the movie in my mind several times as it serves as a warning to those of us who take things in their work as being far more important than they really are. Sometimes, things are just beyond your control and no matter how you plan or how good you are, things can and will go terribly wrong.

Sean Connery is in the film, playing arctic explorer Roald Amundsen. Amundsen was not a big fan of Nobile, but Amundsen disappeared on a rescue mission to find him which makes you think about the role of a man in the process of fufilling his duty and how that sometimes works with fate and destiny. They have a most interesting dialogue at the end of the film.

The Hill

It’s Connery again, only this time its in the Libyan Desert and not the Arctic. The Hill is set in a British Military Discipline Camp in Libya the 1950’s. The Hill refers to a form of punishment for the likes of men like Connery, who have ran afoul of the rules of military discipline. The movie has almost nothing to do with the military but it does have a lot to do with the nature of oppression and the abuse of authority to further the careers of weak men.

“We're all doing time. Even the screws.” is the key line of the movie, and it’s uttered by Connerys character. In his characters view, all men are the same, but to the authority figures who run it, that’s exactly the kind of thinking that needs to be beaten out of him and the rest of the prison population to bring them back into line. Ossie Davis plays a prisoner who shows us all how to stand up against the ‘little men’ of the world.

The Best of Times

I grew up in the Central Valley of California. No one sitting in the snows of the northeast says to themselves ‘Gosh, when I get out of high school, I’m moving to Sacramento, because people out there are so damn cool”. People think of California as palm trees, movie stars, and beaches, but that’s only about 5% of the State. Most of us live in the other 95%, the part that they don’t make movies about. This movie is about the other 95% of the State thats been my home for most of my life.

'The Best of Times' is about a couple of aging high school football stars in the part of California that no one knows much about, down in the southern end of the valley, in Taft and Bakersfield. Yes, these are real places. You might have heard of Bakersfield, but you probably never heard of Taft. These are two towns in the Oil fields. (California has oil? Oh, say it isn’t so!) These are rough working class towns with no particular Hollywood style values at all. I’ve been down there many times and I love it. Taft that is, Bakersfield?, BAH!

Robin Williams plays a ‘butter fingered’ end receiver who drops the one pass that might have allowed his team in Taft to beat the perennial winner in the comparative rich town of Bakersfield, which Taft has only come close to winning on that one game in all the years they have played against each other. Kurt Russell plays his best friend who is also the Quarterback who threw the pass that was dropped by poor Robin. Years later, Robin is a manager of a Bank owned by the Bakersfield “big daddy” and high school football sponsor. “Big Daddy“ is also Robins' Father-in-Law, who never fails to remind Robin of the big flop in his football career and the end of the one shot of potential glory for Taft High School. Robin lives obsessed with “what might have been” and is always replaying the fateful day, only to find that in the end, he’s the guy that dropped the ball, as everyone in his life constantly reminds him.

Kurt Russell, who was arguably the best quarterback that Taft ever had, has fallen into hard times, working at a small auto-repair and Van painting business, his dreams of football stardom ended due to an injury after the famous “dropped pass”.

Robin eventually gets into a bet with his overbearing Bakersfield father in law. The bet being that the old Taft team could actually beat the old Bakersfield team. Robin and Kurt then begin work to gather the now middle-aged men of the Taft team into one more try to beat the now hated Bakersfield.

This is a sentimental favorite for me. I love the scenes of backwater California and redemption of a middle aged man through the game of football with his friends.Oh, and Holly Palance drives me wild.

Watch and Enjoy.

** - Yes, It’s Zira from ‘Planet of the Apes’ you nerds…

Posted @ December 13, 2006 06:03 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Enter the Saudis

1) VP Cheney goes to Saudi Arabia.

Comment: Few people notice the significance of this since everyone is hyperventilating about the media decoy operation called the “Iraq Study Group”.

2) Out of nowhere, Saudi Ambassador to US resigns and returns home.

Comment: Unlike the western world who put people into ambassadorships as a part the long held traditional practice of political payoff, Saudi Ambassadors are members of the royal family. In their case, the Ambassador is the local representative of the King.

So why resign? Surely it wasn’t to “spend more time with the family”. Perhaps some unpleasant information came to light that roving ambassador Cheney gave to the Saudi King. One thing is sure, the King wants a different voice in Washington D.C. for some reason. A different voice means a different piece of sheet music if you ask me.

3) Saudi King announces that the ‘Arab world is ready to explode”.

Comment: Why now All of sudden? Now, after everything thats happened has happened its ready to explode? Lots of people have been predicting the rise of the ‘Arab Street’ but most of them are people who have only touched sand at a Hawaiian beach, so when the King of Saudi Arabia says “Arab Street Ready To Explode” it gets my attention.

4) Saudi Arabia announces support of Sunni Iraq.

Comment: You know, The Saudis have been so quiet in regards to Iraq, I almost forgot they were in the neighborhood. You hear more from China on Iraq than you do the Saudis. This seems very significant to me. Which makes me think that everybody has been speculating that “Israel should take out Iran”, so what if Saudi Arabia stepped up to the plate instead?

Why? Means, Motive, Opportunity.

· Saudi Arabia has a capable US trained Military – Means.
· Saudi has the funds for a large scale military operation – Means.
· Iran is Shiite, Saudi is Sunni - Motive.
· Iran and Saudi are long standing enemies - Motive.
· No one wants a nuclear armed Iran less than Saudi Arabia. – Motive
· Being invited into Iraq by Sunni leaders makes the control of Sunni Iraq part of the Saudi national self-interest. Saudi Arabia isn’t going to hesitate to say that Iran is killing people under Saudi control and then “do something”. – Opportunity.
· By stepping into Sunni Iraq, Saudi Arabia has a front line with Shiite controlled Iraq, which is rapidly becoming a proxy for Iran – Opportunity.

Stay Tuned.

UPDATE: Further details and speculation can be found here.

Posted @ December 13, 2006 10:22 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (18)

Fine. Let’s just get it out of the way now shall we?

I can’t stand the fact that its 2006 and people are already blabbering about the 2008 Presidential election. It’s like being around sports fans in the off-season. It’s pointless and it doesn’t reflect reality even a little bit, but that doesn’t stop them from talking about it anyway. Blah, blah, blah, blah, fricken blah.

So its in that spirit that I do a little ‘Self-Q&A’ ala Dean Barnett.

1. Let’s start with the big one first – Hillary! Will she run? And if she runs, will she win?

Hmmm. That’s a tough one. “Is Hillary running for President”? Gosh, it’s really hard to tell. She’s never really shown any interest.

Of course she’s running you ninny. She’s been running for President since 1968, her alarm clock plays “Hail to the chief” as wake-up music, her pee-chee folders are covered with doodles that say “Madame President” and “Mrs. President” and “Command-HER in Chief” over and over in obsessive teenage girl scribe with big frilly hearts and ponies. So on to the next question:

Will she win?

In my opinion – no, and most decidedly no. Since 1989, its been Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush, so I think the last thing that people are interested in is tacking on another 8 years of Clinton to the end of that chain. I think that’s why we saw the ‘trial balloon’ last week saying she would be “President Rodham”. My biggest reason for thinking that she cant win is fundamentally based on this simple fact that “She” is not “Him”. People hear “Clinton” and they think “Bill”, and they usually don’t think about her one way or the other. She gets a lot of movement in the polls until she opens her mouth and reminds people once again that “She” is not “Him”. She’s “Hillary”, he’s “Bill” and they are decidedly different people and there is no getting around that. “He” – Polished practiced politician of the highest order. “He” - can walk into a room of people carrying pitchforks who want to ‘tar and feather’ him and inside of a half hour those same people will be shaking his hand and asking for his autograph. “She” - gives solemn illustration to the term “harpy” and so effectively denigrates the term with her rather scary visage that the “International Working Coalition of Harpys and Crones (local 142)” have gotten together a legal fund to sue her campaign for stealing their act. “He” - has a nice relaxing way of talking that makes you want to listen, even if you don’t like him and you think he’s a fraud (as I do) . “She” - has that practiced, pinched, politician speech cadence that most nervous politicians pull out for the cameras because they think in their vanity that what they are about to say is going to be captured for posterity and they want it to sound really, really important, even if what they are saying is just “ I want a ham sandwich”, it comes out like “IIIIIII WWAAAAANNT AAAA HAMMSSANNNDWIIICCHH…(wait for applause to die down, pound on countertop with fist, point at audience with thumb on top of fist, look at notes, check microphone, get misty eyed…). This might have worked in the age of the “newsreel” but it doesn’t work at all in the age of the ipod. She needs to lighten up more than she can safely afford to do or is willing or capable of doing. She’s as uncomfortably awkward in public as that picture of Nixon on the beach in formal dress shoes.

The third reason is that I think we live in a 48/48 electorate. 48% of the electorate will vote for whomever the Democrats put up there, and the other 48% of voting Republicans will not. It’s the other in-between, uncertain group, who I call the “Heisenberg” bloc of about 4% of the electorate that throws the election one way or another. This is not a third party, this is not the 'rise of the libertarians', but the roughly 4% of the voting electorate that is impossible to measure or gage and you just can never tell one way or the other which way they are going to vote until its over, and even then its hard to get a sense of what is going on. I suspect that’s because even they don’t know until they actually vote. I think Hillary08! has about 42% of the Democrats locked up and the funny thing is she doesn’t need to spend a dime to get their votes, but she will anyway. I think she will have to claw for the other 6% but I think the ‘Heisenberg bloc’ is not having any of it. They saw her goods in 1992 and when they did, they gave Congress to the Republicans in 1994.

In the end, she will be the single biggest fundraiser for the Republicans since Lincoln or Eisenhower, but she will not win the general election for President. For a lifetime of effort she will note only an asterisk next to her name. In the words of Zathras; “she is not the one”.

2. Barack Obama. Big deal? Or flash in the pan?

Ok, I’ve said that Hillary is going to run, but not win, so what about Obama? I think that the one thing I see in this election is a sort of 1976 vibe going on. People are really,really,REALLY interested in anything “new”, no matter how silly it might be. I think the Obama ‘boom-let’ is a serious indication that the real thing that a candidate needs to win this election is the ability to say "that they haven’t been around, and that they aren’t quite sure what all the fuss is about because its such a sunny day and why don’t we all go down to the beach and throw the Frisbee and drink lemonade for the day and forget all this fussin’ and fighting..."

The “Obama-phenama” we see going on comes out of that vibe. He is a nice man with a big smile and a reassuring demeanor and rather than potentially being called a racist by asking him big “meenie” questions, everyone is going to be very nice to him in public and don’t want to go making the nice man upset with any sort of well you know “impolite political questions” like we ask everyone else. However, his biggest supporters will drive their cars with OBAMA bumper stickers to the polling places, and vote for Hillary. Don’t think that will happen? Ask all those Democrat folks with the goofy Orange “DEAN” knit caps who it was that they voted for in 2003 in Ohio. They loved Dean, worked for his campaign, and then voted for Kerry - Big time. They feel good about Obama, but they aren’t stupid and just as they did with Howard Dean, they will say one thing and do another. Obama makes people feel better, but he hasn’t closed the deal and frankly he will have to put together a real “A-class” team on the ground to even get close to doing that. It’s my guess at this point that pulling that off is going to cost more in time and strategy than he can effectively do in this particular run. He’s a good, safe VP choice if he doesn’t pull a real boner out on the campaign. If he survives this process, doesn’t embarrass himself, and gets a few more fencing scars, maybe next time, but certainly not this time.

3. What about the Republicans? McCain? Newt? Giuliani? Romney? Rice?

McCain? No chance. Well ok, there’s always a chance, but no matter how well it goes for him, at the end of the day, you have McCain to step right in and ruin it for him. He’s like the cranky uncle that you like but you don’t sit next to at Thanksgiving because he will start talking to you and then forget to shut the hell up once the food is served and no matter how much you try to get him to stop talking about having his colon polyps removed, he will just keep getting louder and louder because he just cant take the hint. I submit the idea that Senators almost always make really, really bad candidates for President. McCain doesn’t smile, is cranky, and frankly I don’t think he’s a particularly good campaigner. He tends to be very unlucky, and luck comes in real handy on a campaign. McCain is perpetually walking across a nicely mowed lawn, only to step on a rake and getting the handle violently slammed into his face.

Newt? Oh good lord. Get the hook already. Listen, I like the guy, but you talk about people who are walking-talking “Bullet Magnets”, there’s no better version of that in politics than Newt Gingrich. I doubt Newt could win a Senate Seat in Georgia much less the Presidency. Move along folks, there’s nothing to see here. Go get your jollies somewhere else, this isn’t going to happen.

Giuliani…Hmmmm… Well I like him. If there’s anyone left who still has there “halo” from 9/11 its Rudy. He also has the smile, and yes dear cynical reader, it does count. I can’t exactly tell if he really is running or what his intentions are, but I think he could be a very serious contender for President. He can get a good solid percentage of the Republicans and frankly a solid block of the Democrats and I believe that “Heisenberg bloc” would look favorably on him as well.

Rice? VP maybe, but I think she’s probably finished with this line of business. This period of history has been a real meatgrinder for anyone but for the Bush administration, its been a real long road; to expect that she would want to step right back into this at the top level is just too much to expect. She also fails one of my fundamental tests, that being a successfully campaign and term in office somewhere before the Presidency.

Romney. If being a successful Republican Governor of “Kennedy Country” doesn’t qualify you to run for President, I don’t know what does. I don’t think the “Mormon question” will be anything at all to worry about, but the press wont shut up about it no matter how much we fail to react. I’m watching and listening, so far, I haven’t seen anything that pulls him away from the pack.

4. What are the Republican chances to keep the Presidency this time?

If the Democrats in this legislature are complete clods as I expect that they will be, I think the chances are very good. The 2006 election served as sort of a pressure release valve for the Republicans, now the pressure to deliver is on the Democrats and frankly their black beasts are going to be hard to feed while ‘making nice’ across the table to the Republicans who flipped in this last election. They can’t win if we don’t let them. If the Republicans give into the sort of “my turn” mentality with McCain that they did with Dole in 1996, then their chances are not very good. If they read the electorate correctly, if they manage to speak clearly their intent, and for heavens sake, hold the Democrats accountable to their record over the next two years, they will do fine in all three branches in the next election. There is no better case for Republicans in charge than watching the Democrats at work.

5. What are the Democrats best chances to win?

Hillary-Obama. This is a good package for the Democrats. Obama insulates Hillary from the sort of assault that Lieberman just underwent from the far left. I think that is his best value to the Democrats at this point. Where she is a deep space gravity well of anti-charismatic particles he manages to counteract those forces with his own charisma, so you end up with nothing offensively negative or positive, just a sort of nice how-ya-doin middle of the road power couple out to run the most powerful office in history of mankind. that’s all, no big. It’s very a very daring paring of policy and PR, and its very fresh and new, but its doomed before it starts.

Oh, and John F. Kerry? Like the Titanic before him, that ship has sailed. I hear he’s doing Dinner Theater out on Cape Cod as the Ghost of Jacob Marley in the Narragansett Housewife Players’ production of “Scrooge”. He gives a monotone, yet Dr. Seuss-like rhyming 2-hour lecture to Ebenezer Scrooge on the role of the Supreme Court in determining the price of corn in Nebraska while playing a slide show of his tour in Vietnam in the background; which Scrooge and the audience considers to be a fate that is “worse than death”. 9 out of 10 performances of Scrooge by the Narragansett Housewife Players results in the actor playing Scrooge running from the stage in sheer terror. "John Kerry IS the new Max Schrek", says the playbill. You just can’t buy that kind of publicity.

6. Anything else?

Yeah. I can’t stand this modern obsession with politics. Can we get back to following sports for entertainment instead of watching the lifetime careers of the kids who couldn’t cut it in drama class in high school? I wished we followed the world of science with as much interest as this crap.

Posted @ December 12, 2006 05:52 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Jeane Kirkpatrick (November 19, 1926–December 7, 2006)

"When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies. They blame United States policies of 100 years ago. But then they always blame America first."

- Ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Long before it was fashionable, Ambassador Kirkpatrick believed in victory of the west over Communism. At the time she said this, the world, the media and certainly the Democrats believed Communism would win over the west and that it was only a matter of time before what was surely inevitable would occur. Members of Congress were going to Nicaragua to make nice with communist dictatorships and undermining the Presidents Foriegn Policy as a way to make sure that we could make peace with our enemies on the best terms. We were giving up, ready to surrender in the face of the threat presented by the worlds Communist states. In many ways, the very same people advising today that we should talk to Syria and Iran also advised then that we should work with the Soviet Union to make the world safe. Others, like Ambassador Kirkpatrick thought otherwise. She was laughed at by the intelligencia, and mocked by Democrats as a stooge for that Idiot in the White House - Ronald Reagan.

Yet only 5 years later, the Soviet Union was gone, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the world awoke to a reality where Communism was not ascendant but finally seen by all to be the fraud that Ambassador Kirkpatrick and Ronald Reagan always knew it to be.

We do well in these dark times to remember that the future is always in motion and that a few determined and dedicated people can change the world for the better, for liberty, for freedom, for all mankind.

We shall prevail.

Posted @ December 08, 2006 08:17 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

The Other Hitchens

I'm a big fan of Christopher Hitchens, but I'm an even bigger fan of his brother Peter Hitchens. The book "The Abolition of Britain" is one of the best "culture" books I've ever read.

I was more than a bit happy to find out that he has a blog.

Read and enjoy...

Posted @ December 07, 2006 04:39 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

ISG: My first reaction

I've seen the report. I've watched the press conference. So, what do I think?

I think someone needs to throw an Second inaguration party for George H.W. Bush, because he just got a second term in office. Half of that adminstration is now strutting around Washington like its 1992 and they won the election. I'm also reminded exactly why the old man didn't get a second term. The word "wimp" cries out of today's zeitgiest like a wounded dog with its leg in a bear trap. Its eactly this sort of cowardace that caused us to go into Iraq and finish the job in the first place, yet here we are getting advice about Iraq from the said-same "play-it-safe" types that set the foundation for it all.

Nice work if you can get it I suppose...

Three million Kurds have just become this generations Czechoslovakians; a people who wished only to live in Peace and Democracy, who have been sold and sacrificed to the beast by the rest of the worlds Democracies on the hope that the beast will lose its appetite for the rest of us, once it is done eating the Kurds.

Once again we see that there is no victory in the field that our military can accomplish that our politicians cannot convert into a defeat solely for the purposes of getting more camera time on CNN.

Posted @ December 06, 2006 03:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

The FSB Reminds us all

Take note those of you who say that "Saddam wasnt a threat to us"; The Russian FSB and its haphazard use of a few milligrams of highly radioactive Polonuim has managed to kill at least one of their targets, put the lives of thousands of others at risk and effectively destroyed a British Airline. Imagine what the impact would have been if the attack had not been aimed at a few ex-patriot Russian "troublemakers" but all the tourists visting the Tower of London, or any of the shopping malls or large restaurants in the greater London area itself. Impossible you say? Tell me how.

Bear in mind that during this entire attack, not one process used for the detection of radioactive materials, Customs, British security forces or the local police had any idea that their deployment against English citizens was underway until the attack was long over, and it was only the detection of the radioactive materials in the victims urine that showed what was involved.

In the atomic age, all that is really needed to be a threat to your nieghbors and to the world is the desire to kill. The Russian FSB has just demonstrated the large scale threat to human health that can occur with just a small amount of radioactive material in the hands of someone with the desire to use it. I remind the reader that in the world of espionage, the FSB is considered to be somewhat ethical, unlike many of the security services of the middle east and North Korea.

Anyone who says Saddam wasnt a threat need only call the governments of Kuwait, Jordan, Syria and yes, even Iran to find remnants of towns and cities that were destroyed by the despotic Hussein Regime. Take one part despotic hatred and combine it with one part atomic materials and combine them with world wide Airline service and you can in a few hours spread enough materials to effectively destroy the economy of any country in the world. That is a recipe for blackmail on a global scale.

Those of you who say that America and the West have no business telling Iran that it cant have Atomic Weapons need to remember that Iran is the client state behind Hezbollah. You'll remember Hezbollah, who recently sent 10,000 missiles into civilian areas of Israel and has had a hand in killing several of Lebanons elected leaders via assassination, not to mention controlling large sections of that countries infrastructure for the purposes of spreading terror throughout the middle easy. Im sure that there are those of you that say that Iran would never do such a thing as terrorize countries with blackmail and espionage, but the record says otherwise.

Posted @ November 30, 2006 07:49 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

A Survey For you - The readers of Varifrank

Please take a few minutes and help the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism with their survey of Blogging and of this blog in particular.

Click Here for the Survey.

After the survey is complete I will post the emails I sent to the group with my opinions about blogging and what it is we do out here in the blog-o-sphere.

Posted @ November 29, 2006 08:41 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Castro may be no-show at 80th birthday

Hmmmm...

You know, If someone throws me a party and everyone comes from all around the world to celebrate and I dont bother to show up at my own party, people would talk.

Of course it may not the the 'guest of honor', but the venue:

Snip...
"...The birthday celebrations were to begin Tuesday night with a gala at Havana's Karl Marx Theater."
End Snip...

Oh, that sounds like fun! Nothing says drink and dance till midnight like the name 'Karl Marx'.

Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, Gummo and Karl. You remember Karl Marx, the cranky, constipated not very funny Marx Brother who ran off to Cuba with Grouchos first wife. His catchphrase was "Arise, you prisoners of starvation!".

He went over like a lead balloon, except in France, where everyone naturally thought he was a genius.

He made Gummo look like Robin Williams.

Posted @ November 28, 2006 03:18 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Hey Kids! Congressman Rangel wants to help you get into College!

I know I'm getting into this one late what with the Holiday fol-der-all, but I caught the latest Rangel-ism.

Then I remembered that Rangel is a Congressman. Congressman take nominations for people to attend this nations Military Academies. An Honor, a privelege of the highest value that given only to a small number of people every year. By an Act of Congress passed in 1903, two appointments to each academy are allowed for each senator, representative in Congress.

Sure enough, Congressman Rangel has a very nice link on his congressional website, under "Constituent Services" that tells you what you need to do to get a Nomination to attend a Military Academy, all courtesy of "Charles Rangel, The Peoples Friend"!

Snip...

"...Nominations in my Congressional District are made on a competitive basis, stressing scholastic, athletic and leadership abilities. The basic eligibility requirements for a nomination include the following:

- Must be 17-21 years of age as of July 1st of the year of admission

- Must be unmarried with no dependent children
- Must be a United States Citizen

To apply for a Congressional Nomination, students must submit all the following information to my Washington office by December 31st.

- Letter of Recommendation from Guidance Counselor or Principal
- SAT or ACT scores sent directly from the Educational Testing Service (ETS)
- Official school transcript sent directly from your academic advisor/institution
- Complete list of your extra-curricular activities
- Three (3) letters of recommendation from people who know you other than members of your family, but from people you know well (this does not include the recommendation by the Guidance Counselor or Principal)
- A 300-word essay explaining why you want to attend the academy
- A recent photograph..."

end snip...

So remember you high school layabouts in Charles Rangels Congressional district, you have just about a month to get your paper work in so you can be considered for something he thinks your probably are overqualified to do. What I want to know is,given what he said on "Meet the Press" what are his standards for acceptance for the nomination?

Hey, you know what would be cool? If we had a journalist or something in the media who would go look up all the people who entered the military thanks to Charles Rangel's nominations so we could see how they did with their second choice, defaulted careers in the military. Tim Russert, Call Your Office...!

Posted @ November 28, 2006 01:55 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

A small point, but an important distinction

People often point to our nations inability to tolerate losses on the battlefield as one of the decisive factors in warfare in the modern age that is defeating the western world; but few take the time to think that we are also being defeated because we have chosen a strategy of not inflicting losses on the enemy.

We have created a culture that can not accept the idea that death and destruction are the natural wages of warfare. We no longer penalize those countries that engage in warfare by destroying their infrastructure and killing large numbers of their armed forces or their civilian populations. Almost from the start, our armed forces are more interested in the humanitarian aspects of the battlefield than we are in inflicting the horror of war as a way of incenting the enemy into "bending to our will". The result is that we have forced our enemies into a strategy of using civilians as shields and cities as fortresses against retaliation.

In World War II, it was common practice for Allied ground forces who found themselves under sniper attack in small european villages to back off and call in an artillery barrage. The result of this action was not that "the sniper was brought to justice..." but that the general civilian populace were taught that their quiet tolerance of the "insurgent" or sniper would probably result in their own destruction. The result of this sort of practice was that the civilians would find their way through enemy lines to let the allied forces know where the snipers were in their town, not because the necessarily liked the allies but because it was the only way of avioding the horror of their artillery.

Imagine the battlefield commander of today who doesnt give three days notice of an impending attack on a town, a full press briefing of who and what will be used in the attack. Heaven forbid if during the attack someone manages to get video of the enemy being killed in the streets during the attack.

You dont have to imagine it. Thats Falluja.

Now try to imagine your grandfather standing on the outskirts of Caen saying "Hey, someone get the New York Times up here, we need to make sure that the French civilians get out of Caen before we can send in the artillery in three days..." Chances are more likely that after a week of watching his men get killed from sniper fire from the beautiful church spire in the middle of town that "the old man" simply cranked the field telephone a few turns and gave the map coordinates to HQ and let fly with an artillery barrage, all while he and his men cheered each shell as it went overhead into the town as they ate dinner in their foxholes.

"Thats war" is what he would have said if you were silly enough to ask him how he could have done such a thing. But what I wonder about is why we even have to ask. We in the modern age are too far gone from the age of horror to understand that sometimes horror is exactly what is called for, if only to stop a greater horror from occuring.

"War is cruelty and it cannot be refined" The man said, and we in our foolishness have tried to do just that.

We have predictibly failed.

Our modern age has provided a plethora of "wonder weapons" which can destroy precise targets with great regularity at low cost to ourselves and the civilians in the area. We feel better because as basically humane people, we desire to see that only the guilty are punished and the innocent are not effected, but in war and in war zones, this is a perversion of reality. The unintended result of our desire to be humane is that the civilian populace in war zones do not fear our weapons,because they are known to be precise and guided not just by electronics but by squads of lawyers and analysts who will do a great deal of work to ensure that the target is legitimate long before the word is given to launch.

Unfortuantely, the civilians do fear the insurgents who now find the only place to hide and receive cover is within the civilian populace itself. In our desire to be nice, we drove them there and our desire to be nice has given them no penality for doing so.

With no threat of retaliation by our armed forces, they have no choice but to work with the insurgents, to provide them cover, either by quietly turning a blind eye or by overt acts of support. This is the direct opposite of the effect that we need in order to be effective on the battlefield.

I am not advocating a return to "area bombing", but I am saying that it may be time to re-examine the effect of our tactics. No matter how legitimate we are in our desire to be humane on the battlefield, the effect has been to drive the enemy into the very place we were trying to keep them out of and as a result the long term effect will be the death of more civilians, which is what we were trying to avoid.

The best way to lower our losses and the losses of civilians everywhere is to ensure that our military is so universally feared that just the threat of its being used causes those who would be our enemy to come to the table and talk. What I fear is that our desire to be nice and loved in the world has caused just the opposite to be true.

"If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking."

"War is, at its best, barbarism."

"This war differs from other wars in this particular: We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make young and old, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war."

General William T. Sherman.

I politely remind the reader that General Sherman effectively ended the Confederates desire to continue the persecution of the War with his actions across the State of Georgia.

Posted @ November 28, 2006 11:46 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

Iranian Military Aircraft Crash - A Pattern?

Well maybe not a pattern but there sure seems to be a real problem in Iran with aircraft crashes.

From Aviation Safety Network for aircraft accidents in Iran Since 2000:

Date Aircraft Type Fatalities

27-NOV 2006 Antonov 74 38
01-SEP-2006 Tupolev 154 28
28-MAR-2006 Antonov 12 0
09-JAN-2006 Falcon 20 11
06-DEC-2005 Lockheed C-130 94+
12-AUG-2005 Antonov 140 0
20-APR-2005 Boeing 707 3
07-MAR-2005 Airbus A.310 0
25-JUN-2003 Lockheed C-130 ?
19-FEB-2003 Ilyushin 76 15-22
23-DEC-2002 Antonov 140 44
24-FEB-2002 Ilyushin 76 ?
20-FEB-2002 Tupolev 154 0
12-FEB-2002 Tupolev 154 119
17-MAY-2001 Yakovlev 40 30
13-NOV-2000 Yakovlev 40 0
24-SEP-2000 Fokker 100 0
18-JUL-2000 Fokker F-28 0
02-FEB-2000 Lockheed C-130 8
02-FEB-2000 Airbus A.300 ?

We can draw two conclusions from this data.

Lesson 1. Try not to fly in Iran.
Lesson 2. NEVER Fly on Russian aircraft.

Posted @ November 26, 2006 10:02 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Post Thanksgiving Bloat

A New 4 Wheel Drive Vehicle, A big holiday and a rare window of good Pacific Northwest weather can only add up to one thing.

Road Trip.

So after crossing three mountain ranges with 2 blinding rainstorms( in both directions)we managed to get an introduction to "burgerville" in Albany Oregon( I Highly Recommened!), a Hockey game between the Seattle Thunderbirds and the Chilliwack Bruins on Friday Night. I think I've finally found a sport with enough violence to keep me interested as a spectator. I grew up on the edge of a desert, so Hockey is an exotic event for me, much like surfing must be in Edmonton Alberta.

For Thanksgiving we had Fresh Turkey, Turkey Curry, Turkey Soup, Salmon, Salmon Chowder and Nanaimo Bars. Thanksgiving took three days to move through all the entrees from snacks, pastries, meats, vegetables, fish and pies and it was worth every minute.

How was the car? Well, with 2 kids, 1 wife and a 70 pound dog with all our gear stored on board, the new FJ Cruiser was outstanding in all conditions encountered and we encountered everything except blistering sunlight. City and country, heavy weather, rough roads or in town heavy traffic, this is quickly becoming my favorite car.

On the way out of town I got to see this lovely aircraft sitting on the ramp:

The 747 LCF (Large Cargo Freighter) captured out the car window as we barrelled out of Seattle on Saturday. (Ok, look at the nose of the Aircraft. Thats your normal 747, just try to remember what it looked like to see one of those for the first time. Now, look behind the nose on the fuselage where the normal 747 bulge usually drops. This 747 is considerably larger than that first 747 you saw now isnt it...)

After 1986 miles, punctuated by potato chips and roadside hamburgers/fries/shakes, heavy rainstorms, fog, freezing mountain summit roads, Oregon "Truck Trains" and what seemed like a nearly endless stream of christmas tree trucks this is exactly how I feel right now.

Very,Very large and Pea-green.

Posted @ November 26, 2006 02:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Foggy headlines on Drudge

Drudge has a headline that says:

"Congressman calls for cutting off funding for Iraq", which is misleading to say the least.

The "Congressman" is Dennis Kucinich.

So to be accurate, the headline should be:

"US Ambassador to Barsoom says; "No more Quatloos for Iraq!"

Ladies, take heed. This is what happens to your children if you choose not to breastfeed.

Posted @ November 16, 2006 09:22 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

I have something in common with North Korea

Scarlet Fever is breaking out in several North Korean provinces, which makes me ask "Why"?.

I had Scarlet Fever once, and now North Korea has Scarlet Fever so "It's a small world after all...".

I dont think I've ever heard of a "Scarlet Fever Epidemic". I sure hope that who ever is making this diagnosis is getting it right and that really is Scarlet Fever and not something else that has escaped the weapons labs of that regime.

(Here is just a partial list of my wounds)

2 broken arms.
1 broken leg.
1 broken jaw.
Dislocated shoulder.
Kidney Reconstruction Surgery to correct birth defect.
Acute Appendicitis (removed)
Tonsilitis (removed)
Pneumonia.
Scarlet Fever.
Ruptured trachea.
Coma - 72 hours (due to severe head trauma)

That old " what doesnt kill you makes you stronger" chestnut?
I'm here to tell you, its crap.

Posted @ November 15, 2006 08:06 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Well that was fun

I was out of the house at 4:30 this morning for a quick flight down to San Diego for business. I arrived at the site at 8:30 and then talked, demo'ed and 'whiteboarded' almost non-stop until 6:00pm. I then drove back to the airport, only to sit at the gate until 9:45.

I finally arrived back at the house at 12:30 am. Theres a 20 hour day for you. This is the kind of stuff they dont tell you about on career day in high school.

Posted @ November 14, 2006 12:53 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Chafee says he may leave GOP

Varifrank offers to rent the moving truck and help him pack if it will help.

One less east coast country club Republican whos voting record is to the left of Hillary Clinton is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

The man is Jim Jeffords without a set of convictions to which he can betray. Spineless jellyfish? Ive got a bowl of jello in the fridge with more fortitude than this goober. For gods sakes man get a comb...

How many pounds of lead based paint chips did this dork eat as a child? Does he really think that now that the GOP is out of power that he's suddenly in a great position to negotiate with the GOP to stay?

Just Go Already.

Dear Mr. Republican Party Leadership to be named,

Please post a picture of Senator Chaffee on the wall of your office, under it please post the words "Not This Guy".

Your truly,
Varifrank

Posted @ November 10, 2006 09:53 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Rightwing blogger Full employment act has just passed!

Democrats control the house.

An interesting turn for the country, but I wont have to hunt for a blog topic for two years.

A few quick notes:

I've been sentenced to two years of looking at Henry Waxman.

Alcee Hastings will be in charge of Intelligence for the House. That alone should make a blog post a day.

Charles "I cant think of a single tax cut I'd keep" Rangel. What I like about this is how I have just been classified as "rich". Wheee! I should call my mom and let her know I'm now a target for a higher tax bracket!

And Nancy Pelosi will be the third most powerful person in the free world. It sort of solves the Hastert problem in a unique way, doesnt it? That reminds me, Time to buy stock in Photoshop.

I take some comfort in the fact that Republicans are good at being the minority and Democrats look funny in power, sort like a 7 year old sitting behind the wheel of a Corvette trying to look over the dash.

I'm exceptionally happy that the "Chafee wart" is now removed from the 'Buttocks of America', and almost consider this all worth it to see him gone. The man was a Democrat. Yes, I enjoy saying "was".

In general, I see a real 'house cleaning' in place. Probably not the worst thing in the world, probably what those wig wearin' white guys had in mind back in the day.

Lieberman wins. Sweet. Who says religious supporters of President Bush and the "War in Iraq" can't win in the east? Oh yeah, Bush is still President, right? Gotta remember to get the old man a Veto pen for Christmas. I think he's going to need it.

Ah-nould wins. Get ready to call him "Senator Ahnold" in 4 years.

And remember kids, don't be bad sports. You get beat, say so. Shake it off. It's not the last election, its just this election. We get another shot at it in 24 months. You plays the game, you takes your chances. I lived through Jimmy Carter and a Democrat Controlled congress under the gaze of 20,000 Soviet Missiles. If we can survive that, we will still be here in 2 years.

Posted @ November 07, 2006 08:20 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (5)

Bill Whittle Explains It all For you

The man is back with more essay greatness. Here's just a taste:

"This is the cockpit of the F-102 Delta Dagger’s successor, the F-106 Delta Dart (I could not find an F-102 panel, but they would have been very similar)"

"Now, picture yourself in this chair, at 40,000 feet, traveling at one and a half times the speed of sound. Now imagine that someone has painted the windows white – you are flying on instruments. Now imagine that not only do you have to be able to fly blind, by referencing these instruments, but that you also have to stare into that orange jack-o-lantern of a radar, and interpret a squiggle that will lead you to your target. Now imagine that in addition to not hitting the ground, or your wingman, and watching the squiggle, you also have to turn those switches on the right side panel to activate weapons systems, to overcome enemy countermeasures…without looking outside, as you hurtle through air at -40 degrees F, air so thin that should you lose pressure, you have about 4-6 seconds of consciousness before you black out and die.

I maintain that the instant George W. Bush closed that canopy and took off on the first of his many solo hours in an F-102, it is quite impossible that he was either an idiot or a coward.

To which I humbly add "And I dont care who his daddy was or who may have helped get him into the Texas ANG, theres only one seat in that bird. You can have all the family connections you want, in that plane, theres nobody to help you through the takeoff checklist from the moment you sit down and buckle in."

Go read the whole thing whole thing already...

Posted @ November 06, 2006 05:12 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

On the Receiving End

How do I know the "Get Out The Vote" machine in full swing?

Well, my phone has received a phone call every hour for the past two days. I enjoyed the Ben Stein call, but the rest just go right to the delete button. It's not that they are bad, its just that theres nothing more annoying the someone still trying to sell you when you've already bought the car.

There is one other thing I've noticed. All the calls are for Republicans and Republican issues. I havent received a single call or pamphlet from the Democrats for their candidates or issues in over a week. Its as if the Democrats ran out of ammo a week early. If it wasnt for the Media making up news to cover for them, they wouldnt have hardly any visibility at all.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit-eers!

I would think if there is anything to this "Democrat Wave" idea, you would see it reflected in the Doolittle-Brown race in my district (CA-4), but I just havent seen it.

It's as weak a race as I've ever seen for this district from the Republicans and yet the incumbent candidate Doolittle has always managed to maintain a respectable lead on his opponent and its not because Doolittles opponent is less than capable, he's actually pretty solid. The Democrats have worked their tails off in this district and they have spent a good deal of money to try to take the seat.

In my opinion, based on what I see and hear, all that work and money just hasnt paid off. I may be completely wrong in 48 hours, but it doesnt look to me like this seat is going to flip to the other side.

It seems to me that the money spent here might have gone to better use elsewhere for Democrats. It seems to me that early on in the campaign the Democrats put their strategy on the 'Abramoff scandal' as the key pivot-point of this election, and here we are in the last 48 hours of the campaign and it doesnt seem to have been the reason that anyone is making their decisions for who to vote for. I think that if the Democrats dont achieve their goals on Tuesday, a lot of people are going to blame Kerry, but I think the train might have come off the rails way back when the "Tie them to Abramoff" strategy was made.

I dont think a its a good working campaign strategy for Democrats to try to tie their opponents to a scandal that they then have to spend 20 minutes trying to explain to the voter, only to get a dismissive "oh they are all crooks" waveoff from the voter. It comes down to the old chiche of "Yes, Congress is a bunch of idiots, but my cogressman is a different, He's a pretty good guy".

When I ask people about what their decisions are going to be based on, Abramoff doesnt even move the needle on the average persons 'shock-o-meter'.

I think if Democrats can't win here, then they cant win anywhere and this whole "Democrat wave" thing is a creation of wishful media thinking, like so much of this election so far seems to have been.

My "I'm not to be listened to as a prognisticator because I dont know nuthin..." prediction is the Doolittle will win CA-4, but unlike most years, this year he really had to work hard to keep his seat. Why anyone, anywhere in their right mind would ever want to run for office is completely beyond my comprehension.

Democrats may salute themselves afterwards as having forced Republicans to spend money in previously uncompetitive districts, but that is what losers always say when they lose.

Posted @ November 05, 2006 02:43 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (11)

Shocking Hollywood news

From CNN.com

Snip.

"Neil Patrick Harris is gay and wants to quell any rumors to the contrary. "I am quite proud to say that I am a very content gay man living my life to the fullest," Harris tells People magazine's Web site. The 33-year-old actor said he was motivated to disclose his sexuality because of recent "speculation and interest in my private life and relationships." Harris stars on the CBS comedy "How I Met Your Mother." He started on TV as a teen, playing the namesake doctor on the series "Doogie Howser, M.D."

End Snip.

Oh.My.God! He's 33 FRICKEN YEARS OLD!

Posted @ November 04, 2006 07:26 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Press discovers shocking news regarding associate of church leader

"I did not have sex with him." Said cult follower Mary Magdalene in response to new questions about her relationship with the cult leader.

The Whole.Shocking.Story... can be found here.

Just imagine the press of today covering the "Nazarene Carpenter and his crazed group of followers". I half expect some days to wake up to breathless headlines that say "Our Church pews are filled with sinners! - says leading church cleric" as if that somehow refutes the core ethos of Christianity.

Posted @ November 03, 2006 01:26 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

8th Day of "Reasons to Get out and Vote Republican"

Today's Reason: To teach them a lesson. Its not the Republicans I want to teach, its the Democrats.

Here's what I want to teach them:

"The Anti-war movement is electoral poison".

In my mind, the "anti-war movement" is just the gateway drug to the more corrosive and dangerous mental drugs of "Anti-American" and "Anti-Capitalist". If you stop the Democrats natural attraction of "Anti-War" then you can stop the move towards the next stop in the descent.

We've taught the Democrats before, and we can teach them again.
In the 2000 election, we taught the Democrats:

"The Anti-Gun position is electoral poison".

They used to run on "Anti-gun" like it was the first chapter of the bible. Now, they dont even mention it anymore. You see, Democrats can learn, hell even Rhesus monkeys in a lab learn to move the lever when they get a shock.

Democrats learn by losing, thats their shock. They cant believe it when you dont vote for them. It took weeks in 1994 for them to understand that they lost. They dont like to lose, but they are smart enough to learn from the experience. Republicans took 60 years to learn from the losses of the 1960's, they dont learn so fast, you have to beat them with a big cartoon mallet again and again and they still do the same dumbass things, like "Id rather lose on principal..." and crap like that. Democrats arent like that, Democrats react to losing power the way monkeys in a pharmaceutical cocaine study react to getting a carrot instead of their favorite derivitive of the coca leaf. They will do anything to get their fix, even give up on cardinal components of their movement, like their position on gun ownership.

1996: Gotta get a registration system going.
1998: We need a debate in this country about Guns.
2000: Its time to give up the guns.
2002: Anti-Gun? What are you talking about son, why I got me a
shotgun right here that my pappy gave me, of course I love guns, dont you got a gun? cant have enough guns!

As Republicans, we can debate what is and is not the proper conservative position on a budget. We can debate what is and what is not the proper position on immigration. We do it within the framework of "America the Beautiful", which is why the only debate we usually have on the military is "why the hell arent we squishing fill-in-the-blank-despot-of-the-moment" not the quality of the men and women in it. We can have a debate because we have a context that works. We know even when we lose a debate we come home with half a loaf of pretty good bread.

Their side doesnt have that context. Their side of the argument is often distilled into "America is wrong and you have too damn much money".

Now remember, until recently it was "America is wrong and you have too damn much money and too many guns", but we changed that.

We were successful at changing the other side from a dangerous idea. The Republicans were successful. Conservatives were successful. America, dare I say it, was successful.

And that was before we had an Internet. Just imagine what we can do now.Today we face a world where, like it or not, agree with it or not, desire it or not, fighting and dying in defense of this country is called for. Defense of this country is what is called for, in action and word.

We can no longer afford a political ideology that questions whether or not this country is worth fighting for. We cannot afford an ideology that says that defense of this country is inherently racist, imperialist, capitalist, "Only About Oil", and just plain wrong.

Why? Because its that sort of thing that gets more people killed around the world. It sets the stage for war. How many wars would get started if the people who wanted to start them with us, thought about it and said "No thanks!, We do that and Americans will want to hunt us down and kill us for sport, I'd rather try to be their friend, just look what happened to you-know-who..."

You want to stop terrorists? Stop treating them like they are heroes. Stop thinking that because they oppose the US that their cause must be "just". Stop thinking that every "rebel has a cause".

The "Anti-war" movement gives the impression to the enemy that we are divided and weak and that we can be beaten. This is what leads to more War and deadlier wars. What we see as a family disagreement and an intellectual debate is misinterpreted by the people that are out to kill us as a reason for them to step up attacks, its a reason to celebrate, its a reason to maintain positive morale in the face of devastating defeat.

"See, even the Americans support what we are doing, just look at their elections, look how so many of them actually argue that we are legitimate. They make fun of damned George Bush, We cant quit now, we've almost won!"

The "Anti-war" position kills people. It feeds our enemies. If you want to win a war (or end it) you need to starve your enemies, not encourage them. It's no more complicated than that.

If you vote for Democrats in this election, you might think youre voting for a perfectly nice centrist Democrat, but the "Anti-war" wing of leftist thought will take that perfectly nice candidate that you voted for and use it as evidence that their side in the argument is actually perferred by Americans. Not the "centrist American" side, but the loathesome "We hate America" side. Your vote will be used to prove it.

They will take that protest vote of yours to argue "America is in descent", that our sins have finally caught up with us and we need to be sorry for all the evil we have done in the world, and look at all the people who agree with us! They will argue that fundamental changes in our country are necessary to make up for our crimes of the past, that our its our military is actually what causes wars, that people in the military should be prosecuted and they are what causes other people in the world to hate us and not our lovely and socially relevent "pop-culture".

Look. Lamont is going to lose and Lieberman is going to win, but that is one race. That might be enough to make some Democrats scratch their head and think about the value of the "Anti-war" wing, but its not enough. If Democrats are tossed yet another defeat this time, they will learn. They will get the message. They will remove the leech of "Anti-war" from their crotch and we might start to see Democrats like Harry Truman again. Democrats who don't apologize for America or being an American.

And that will be good for all of us.

Until Then, Vote Republican, until the Democrats think of "Anti-war" like they now think of "Anti-gun".

UPDATE: Right on queue, Sy Hersh comes out and says this: "In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation,” he said. “It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you – there has never been an American army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq."

By implication, Mr. Hersh wants to know why we arent filling the streets calling our soldiers in Iraq babykillers.

Murderers? Stupid? Babykillers? In a single week, with just a hint that they might win a part of Congress, this is what we get to hear.

Posted @ November 01, 2006 06:21 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

And I approve this message....

Jim Webb for Senate. He looks happy to see old lurch doesnt he?

Ford For Senate. Don't look at the Camera...

Cantwell Senate. Don't stand. Don't Stand. Dont stand so close to me!

Lamont for Senate. The Incredible Shrinking Candidate Who Proves That Opposing The Iraq War Is A Winner...

Posted @ October 31, 2006 05:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

9th Day of "Reasons to Get out and Vote Republican"

Todays Reason? John "F*cking" Kerry.
People ask me why I'm not a Democrat, and I just point to this guy and say "Exhibit A".

Why vote Republican? Because there should be no electoral victories for Democrats until they can publically agree to be on our side against our enemies. This guy? He's not on our side. Nor is Senator Durbin, Leahy, Byrd or Kennedy. Don't reward them with victories until they are.

UPDATE: Kerry takes to opportunity to point out his error by compounding it with yet another error. Kerry wasnt disparaging "Our Troops" he was just disparaging those nasty evil Republicans and if you think he was making fun of troops, well then you're just a big meenie too. Next up on CNN, Senator Kerry shows his support of Fire Departments everywhere by lighting the US Flag on fire and then trying to put it out with a stream of urine. Disrepectful of the flag you say? you big meenie, that shows what you know. He was clearly just aiding the men of the Fire Department, anyone who thinks that John Kerry doesnt support Firemen, just doesnt know John Kerry.

Rove. You evil Genius, how did you pull this off? What next, John Kerry appears in public wearing his green "Mao" hat?

Posted @ October 31, 2006 10:38 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

10th Day of "Reasons to Get out and Vote Republican"

"We killed the Patriot Act," boasted Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, to cheers from a crowd at a political rally after the vote. December 17, 2005 After succesfully filibustering a vote on the extention of the Patriot Act.

Under a Republican Congress and a Republican President, this man:

Kahleed Shiekh Muhammed, The man who planned the 9/11 attacks, was captured and turned over to Pakistani Authorities for interrogation. The Interrogations revealed a treasuyre trove of information. The information received during these interrogations resulted in the capture of over 150 Al-queda operatives. Those operatives had their phones tapped and the email accounts intercepted for several months before they were captured as well, further revealing the depths of the network. This man, and the part of the terror network he controlled are no longer working to contribute to the deaths of Americans as a result of the Patriot Act.

Kahleed Shiekh Muhammed, Planner of 9/11 is now an inmate at Camp X-ray in Guantanamo Bay Cuba, undergoing further interrogation by US Authorties.

Under a Democrat Controlled Congress, this man may or may not have been captured. If he was captured, his rights to a lawyer would be assured, his access to legal protection would be the highest priority of this government. The men who captured him would probably be under indictment for abusing this mans civil rights.

It matters who is in Congress.

Posted @ October 30, 2006 03:58 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Well, I think its cool....

Here's a cool website I found while looking for something else.

The State of Alaska and the FAA have published views of Alaskan Airfields to make it easy for Private Pilots to use the remote airports all over Alaska.

The Alaska AFSS Website can be found here. Click on any onf the location buttons and you will see a view of the airport from the air.

You know for a place that the environmentalists describe as pristine and only used by wandering heards of Caribou, it seems to me that there is a whole lot of Airports and towns all over Alaska.

Gosh, can Caribou qualify for a Rating?

Posted @ October 30, 2006 03:07 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

President Bush To visit Vietnam Next Month

No one else seems to care, but it sure gets my attention...

"...will pay official visits to Vietnam on the opportunity of an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit meeting next month, a Vietnamese official said Wednesday."

"...include General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and President Hu Jintao, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President George W. Bush, as well as Chilean President Veronica Michelle Bachelet Jeria said Nguyen Thanh Chau, Deputy Head of the APEC-2006 Secretariat at a pres briefing in Hanoi."

"...The elect-UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who comes into office in 2007, will also attend the 2006-APEC Economic Leaders' Week, which is scheduled for Nov.12-19."

The 'Full Story' can be found here.

Gosh, I can't help but notice that North Korea wasnt invited.

Posted @ October 29, 2006 08:40 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Now that Democrats are about to run the house, wheres all that talk about the Draft?

One of the idealogical cudgels from the 2004 elections was the false claim that "Bush/Cheney will start the Draft again".

The press gleefully spread the false charge in as many press conferences and editorials as possible before the election. Secretary Rumsfeld burned way too many calories chasing that particular snipe.

Democrat House Representative Charles Rangel actually created a bill that would do exactly that. The Universal National Service Act (Rangel, D-NY)-HR 4752

However, now that the press has noted that the Democrats are possibly going to be in change of the leadership of the House which will naturally result in a change to its legislatural agenda, but danged if I can't find a mention of "reinstituting the Draft" anywhere in this election. Funny how Charles Rangel isnt being asked about his "Lets make the draft again" Bill every day on Hardball or Meet the Press.

But thats ok, because the college and hugh school age kids apparently have a memory even if the press doesnt. I found this quote about an interview that Indiana Rebulican candidate Chris Chocola had with an audience of college students:

"...One student asked Chocola about the possibility of a draft, especially with the notion that the country might soon find itself in a conflict with a nuclear-capable Iran."

"...Mentioning a proposal by Democratic New York Congressman Charles Rangel last year to institute a draft - a measure that failed, Chocola said, with fewer than 10 favorable votes - Chocola said he doubted a draft is forthcoming."

So its silly to consider now, but in 2003, it was the "looming doom" that awaited us all, even though the whole idea from the start to finish was only a chimera from the mind of one Democrat.

Posted @ October 29, 2006 10:15 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

11th Day of "Reasons to Get out and Vote Republican"

USS Shiloh Aegis Cruiser using newly developed Block 3 Ballistic Missile Defense. Currently "forward deployed" in Japan as a mobile Ballistic Missile Defense System. Budgets of Fiscal Years 2007, 2008 are crucial to see more AEGIS Cruisers and Burke Destroyers upgraded to the new SM-3 "Hit To Kill" Missile Systems.

Airborne Laser Missile Defense System. Currently undergoing last level of acceptance testing before full deployment by the USAF in 2008. Budgets of Fiscal Years 2007, 2008, 2009 are crucial to the development of this system.

Patriot Anti Missile System. Currently Deployed around the world in places like Saudi Arabia, Jerusalem and Tokyo.

"The United States does not need a multi-billion-dollar national missile defense against the possibility of a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile."
Spoken in 2003 by House Minority Leader Pelosi who will be Speaker Pelosi and will effect the legislation that the House takes action on, unless you dump your stupid "teach them a lesson", "lose to win" defeatism and get with the program.

I'll trust a new weapon defense system before I trust the Security of this nation to the likes of people who would rather put their trust in paper treaties with the worlds last remaining dictatorships.

Posted @ October 28, 2006 10:02 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

12th Day of "Reasons to Get out and Vote Republican"

Because some of us look at this and scream, and others look at it and swoon. I Vote Republican because I want the Congress to be made up of people who look at this and scream.

Posted @ October 28, 2006 01:09 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Let's Talk

Dear Iran and North Korea,

Hey boys, I just thought I'd take a moment and drop a note to say "howdy" and maybe talk about a few issues that concern all of us.

Before I start, I feel it necessary to inform you both that the 747's that you have detected flying in long 'racetrack' style patterns just outside your borders, those are US Airforce aircrews that are training for airborne laser anti-ballistic missile systems. Oh sure, they probably don't have lasers on board right now, but that doesnt mean we can't move ahead and get the rest of their systems tested, as well as train all the aircrews they will need to watch your little wretched rathole countries.

Oh how impolite of me, to say that counties that violate basic human rights with such regularity that your own citizens prefer death over imprisonment while your governments both use famine and genocide as a way to control your own populace, what an insult it is for me to call you rats.

An insult to the rats, that is.

Oh, you say the US Air Force can't possibly keep aircraft in the air 24 hours a day on continual alert? Gosh I sure am sorry to tell you fellas this but weve been doing that sort of thing since the 1950's. Were pretty good at that sort of thing. It sure is a good thing we have that big base down in Diego Garcia to operate out of virtually unopposed against you folks in Iran and it sure is nice that Japan has decided to allow our Airborne Anti Ballistic weapons systems to be based in their country, just right across the Yellow Sea. Isnt that sweet?

Boy it sure is a shame you fellas spent all your money on uranium processing instead of an airforce or a Navy. But hey, its probably alot easier to make an atomic bomb than it is to make single domestically produced jet fighter, which niether one of you seem to have the capacity to do. Yeah, you can buy fighters from Russia and China, but I gotta tell you boys that we take those same planes out for little test flights in Nevada all the time, We buy ours from the same folks you do actually, and frankly if I was you I wouldnt be paying top dollar for those turkeys. On top of that, since we've had them in our labs we're starting to get pretty good at shooting them down. Come on over some time, I'll introduce you to the Nellis Air Force Base commander and he can show you all the copies of all the Chinese and Russian Aircraft that we've been testing since the 1960s.

Whoops. I guess I shouldnt have told you that, thats supposed to be "a secret". Damn.

What a shame, all that time and effort making a big complicated weapons system just to have the hated infidel 'great satan' capitalists running dogs go and fence you in again.

It sucks to be you, doesnt it?

Gee, I wonder how long it will take some 'smart guy' in the Air Force to mount the Airborne Laser on a UAV, something on the scale of the Global Hawk. Now wouldn't that be funny? Airborne Robots flying right outside your borders that are undetectable on radar that can shoot lasers at your missles.

And you can't do a damn thing about it either.

Now that I think of it, Didnt one of you go and try to launch six or seven missles this summer? And they all did what? They fell into the ocean, right? Imagine that, all six just up and fell into the ocean.

You boys can't catch a break.

Hey, wait a minute, why stop at shooting down missiles? Why not just shoot the laser at anything we want? What's the big whoop? I mean if you can use a laser to hit a missile, I guess you can use a laser to hit, oh lets say a truck, a bridge, the occasional tramp freighter loaded with counterfeit cash and illegal weapons systems on their way to the middle east to be traded for badly needed cash, a little getaway in the country where you keep your girlfriend ( you little devils, you guys really crack me up, you sure get around I tell ya..) or maybe even a train? Say, you use a trains alot there in North Korea, dont you?

Heck, I'll bet we could hit a single window pane in any building we care to shoot at. That would get your attention real quick now wouldnt it? Wouldnt leave a whole lot of evidence behind either. One minute giving another speech to the boys and then "Poof" the window explodes into the conference room as a thousand shards of hot glass. That would sure put a cramp into your "Annual Tupperware Sales Kick-off Meeting" now wouldnt it?

Of course we would have to know what window pane you were standing behind at the time, but that would mean we would need people inside your organizations who were either less than loyal to you or somehow in need of revenge, but that can't happen, now can it? I mean since you folks are known for your generosity, I can't see how we could make any headway there, so you should rest easy on that thought. I'm sure that all of your underlings are happy with their positions and havent the slightest desire for any sort of "advancement".

You know, warfare sure isnt very anymore fun when you can't hide behind a wall of conscripts.

Anyway, I think I need to cut this short before I start to reveal more "secrets" like the spaceborne laser system that we deployed, oh damn I did it again didn't I?

Oh, Condi and Rummy wanted to remind me to say that the 100 Dollar Superbills that you have been making have been getting better with every batch. So I sent them a challenge, I said "there isnt anything you folks can do that we cant do any better". So just for sport, I told them try to see how hard it would be for us to make our own version of the "Iranian Real" and the "North Korean Won".

And I gotta tell you, You get Rummy and Condi together over a few beers and you'd be surprised what they can come up with. They got some of their CIA/NSA pals together and damn if they didnt make some "Superbills" of their own and those little suckers came out pretty good! Our own treasury department says that you can't tell the difference between the ones you make for your countries and the ones we made for fun. Just to prove it to you, I sent a big box of them off to your ambassadors.

I also sent a big box to the Chinese and Russian Ambassadors. Frankly, we kinda let the printing press run a little longer than we intended and Whoopseedaisy! Wouldnt you know it, before long we had shipping containers full of those little suckers. So, since congress insists that we account for every dollar, I had to get rid of them overseas, had to trade them with those banks in Macao. The silly bastards actually thought they were real. Of course, compared to the US Dollar they arent worth much, but we managed to recoup our investment pretty fast.

I sure hope that didnt screw up your balance of payments to Russia and China. That would be bad now wouldnt it? Those boys dont have a sense of humor, they are a strickly "cash and carry" operation over there.

Hey, they dont call me the "Great Satan" for nothing!

Anyway, if either of you boys feel the need to talk, just give us a jingle here in the White House and I'm sure the switchboard can have the call routed to Dr. Rice right away.

Yours Truly,

George W. Bush.
President

P.S. - "Peace through light", dont those Air Force guys just crack you up?

Posted @ October 28, 2006 10:23 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Emirates cancels order for 10 Airbus A340 planes

Emirates airline has cancelled an order for 10 long-range Airbus A340-600 planes plus the option of 10 more.

" said the decision had been taken because the Dubai-based carrier believed the A340 lacked the technology offered by more up-to-date planes..."

This just abouts destroys the A340 line of aircraft for Airbus.

Ouch. And yesterday Virgin "deferred" their A380 orders. For you kids out there ,deferred means that contractually it is hard to actually cancel the order, but its real easy to push the delivery date off into the far,far future. Airbus gets to say that they have the order, Virgin gets avoid paying for an aircraft they dont want anymore.

And don't forget, every one of these changes causes the number of A380s they need to "break even" to increase. That in turn makes it all that more difficult to raise money to build the A350.

All eyes are on Emirates and Singapore Airlines, who together hold 75% of the existing A380 orders. If either of them start to walk away, the A380 will take up the role of "the new Concorde". Cool, stately, but ultimately a money loser on a grand scale.

Posted @ October 27, 2006 08:52 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Reasons to vote for Republicans

- To watch Keith Olbermans head explode like an overripe pumpkin on live TV.

- To watch Pollsters have to explain why they got it so wrong – again.

- To kick the Democrats while they are down. After 6 years of breathless accusations, after 6 years of Democrats doing everything in their power to endanger the United States from subverting the CIA to giving the New York Times classified information, they deserve a good kick.

- Because after 2 years of being dragged through the mud over the Plame affair, which the press and the democrats would not shut the hell up about, Karl Rove deserves a victory just to give them the finger.

- Because its time to update the “Dewey Defeats Truman” photo with something more modern, like Bush holding a NY Times from cover that says “DEMOCRATS SWEEP CONGRESS”, only they don’t. Priceless.

- Because Charlie Rangel promises to leave if the Democrats don’t take the house. If we can get him to take Murtha, Pelosi, McDermitt and Hastings with him, I’d personally help him pack and I’d pay for the moving van.

- Because I have really enjoyed not listening to Robert Byrd for the last 4 years and if the Democrats get the Senate, I will have to listen to him tell us AGAIN all about how the South looked before the invention of the cotton gin.

- Because the day after the election, Media will have to talk about something else instead of the Republican victory. Given that the economy is good and a Republican victory will make it clear that America is in the war for the long haul and thus nightly body count reports for Iraq will become irrelevant, it should make every news broadcast about 10 minutes in length which in my mind, is about the right length.

- Because I can't get enough of Carville and Begala shaking their head from side to side wondered ‘what the hell happened’ on CNN. I need to see it one more time.

- Just to listen the twisted reptilian logic that will try to spin the Republican victory into a win for Democrats. I just love trying to follow that sort of thing, its like reading Stereo cabinet instructions from IKEA.

- Because I’m tired of “October Surprises” and I don’t want to do anything that makes the hired campaign staffs think that they work.

Posted @ October 26, 2006 03:35 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

BBC Reporter Imbedded with the Taleban

Incredible. In-freaking-credible.

And you just know from the first sentence that its going to be a shining example of why the world of journalism has absolutely no credibility with most people in the military world:

"There is no army on Earth as mobile as the Taleban..."

Damn, and we spent all that money on C-5's, C-17's, MV-22's, Armoured Personnel Carriers, Tanks, Submarines and Aircraft Carriers for nothing. Foolish western capitalists, we should have put all our money into 30 year old chinese made Ak-47s, Camel caravans and sandals made out of car tires.

The fact that his own countries 'British soldiers' have already travelled half way across the globe and the Taleban can only travel the distance of a tank of gas in their Toyotas, never crosses this jerks mind. In the mind of the journalist, all rebels, no matter how despicable are virtuous. I wonder how he would be received if he was imbedded with the crips or bloods as they pulled drive by shootings in East LA. Journalist Hero or 'thug supporting' moron? Hey as long as hes "taking it to the man" its ok, right?

Oh and theres this nugget of genius later on:

snip.
"When we stopped for the night, they (The Taleban) would break into groups to eat in different houses in a village..."

snip.

"They demand and get food and shelter from places where they stop, but it is impossible to say how enthusiastic the villagers really are..."

end snip...

Yeah, its really funny how hard to get these villagers to speak their minds when their little part of the Kush has been invaded in the middle of the night by lawless men who cut off the heads of women who have the bad fashion sense to flash an uncovered ankle.

He also forgets to mention that they (The Taleban) often hold the children of the village hostage as they break down the doors of the village to get to the food. But hey, you just cant be sure if they support the Taleban or not. It never occurs to him that you probably don't want to start a fight with a gang of people who are the very defintion of 'outlaw'. And for goodness sake, whatever you do folks, dont have "South Park" on the DVD player when they arrive. Remember, its "All Allah All The Time" when you live under the lurking gaze of the taliban. And absolutely No Kite flying either you heretical blasphemers...

I'm sure Daniel Pearl would have really appreciated this man's efforts to further our understanding of the Taleban.

Posted @ October 26, 2006 01:03 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Right Wing Defeatists Respond to King Henry’s “ St. Crispin Day” speech.

“We happy few…” Who’s he kidding? King Henry makes a big deal about this distraction of fighting the French for some half cocked reasoning, but hasn’t done a thing to keep the dirty Welsh out of this country. Hell, he probably is Welsh! His poor handing of this whole half witted campaign has us slogging across half of France, and for what? Were no closer to winning today than we were when we landed in the god forsaken country. We should have more mounted Calvary like the French, but King Henry has his heart set on unproven archers from the backcountry. Is that really a strategy? When has that ever worked? We should just get back on our boats and get a fence built in Dover right away and forget this whole disastrous French Campaign.

And where’s our port security anyway? I’ve been waiting for the so called “sovereign” to make some statement about why he’s allowed the Moorish spice traders to have access to Dover and Plymouth, but he’s strangely silent on this outrageous oversight. Once again he has failed to deliver on his promises.

I’m voting for the House of York this time. I’m going to teach the Lancastrians a lesson they will never forget by withholding my support.

Happy St. Crispins day to all of you optimists out there.

Posted @ October 25, 2006 09:12 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

The Long March

In 1947, the world was beginning to recognize that it was at the start of what would eventually be known as the “Cold War”. We in the West were faced with an aggressive empire bent on world domination was already at work subverting the will of democracies throughout Europe and the United States. Yet in America, after participating in and witnessing the effects of a war that that resulted in the deaths of 52 million people world wide and the applied concepts of genocide to an entire people in Europe, Americans were once again faced with the very real possibility that the war they had just completed fwas not as “over” as they had hoped.

Men of that generation expressed their primary reason for fighting and sacrificing everything during that war with a simple phrase;

“I fought so my kids wouldn’t have to”

The true cost of the failure of the world to deal with the First World War was not lost on the generation that had to fight the Second World War. They saw personally that to delay solving a problem or to even deny that the problem exists ensures that the problem becomes so big that the horror of war is the only solution left. Yet, a war that fought in the machine age would always result in the deaths of millions of civilians and members of the armed services. The days of Chivalry ended at Gettysburg, but it took two wars after that for the world to realize the truth. War was no longer limited to the armies in battlefield, in the machine age, the civilian in the factory was considered a combatant, the home they lived in a legitimate target for destruction.

In 1947, the free world was faced with yet another threat, a threat every bit as big as the threat it had just faced from Fascism. In those days, the future of the west was far from certain. Members of Western Academia and many in the political class, long enthralled with the concepts of socialism and the ‘sovereignty of the state’ over the rights of the individual opportunistically decried the “inequities of the free world, capitalism and the government of democracies” and proclaimed loudly that one day soon that it was all but certain that Communism would win in the battle of civilizations against the evil Capitalist world.

In 1947, if you had told anyone alive at that time that the “Cold War” would go on for another two generations, risk nuclear devastation on a global scale, cost hundreds of thousands of lives in wars all across the globe and cost trillions of dollars, what do you think that many of that generation would have said in response?

My guess is that many of those people would have said;

“Yeah, but do we win in the end?”

And when you tell them that yes, in the end we do win, that there was no global thermonuclear war and that Communism was eventually shown to be the false religion we all knew it to be, they would say “Hooray” and then ask what they need to do to get started. What people of 1947 knew is we have lost in ours; and that is the cost of losing. They knew the stakes of the battle at hand, but we cant quite get our minds around it. It wasn’t just expensive to fight the Cold War; it was expensive beyond measure to fail to fight the war. The long streams of refugees from Communism that came throughout the Cold War reinforced our will to continue the fight. That generation knew that to lose wasn’t just an inconvenience; it was a death sentence. We saw the refugees from slavery form their long sad lines throughout the Cold War; from Germany, Hungary, Vietnam, Laos and to Cambodia, the cost of losing was brought home to us in the faces of the broken people who had lost everything they had but hope.

They came to us as their last hope to live as free people rather than as slaves. We understood what they lost and what the stakes were if we were to lose.

The Cold War was long, it was expensive and it could have gone either way right up to the end. It took several years for me to even accept the idea that it really was over after it had ended. Long after Strategic Air Command had ceased to be and the missiles in their silos had stopped being aimed at our enemy, I still lived in reaction to what the Cold War had conditioned me to believe. It seems silly for me to say so now, but took years for me to stop thinking that it was some sort of trick by the Soviets to lure us into a trap.

I was a child of the Cold War, I awoke every single day with the thought that “today could be the last day”, that the Soviets were going to push through central Europe and the war that so many had worked to avoid would finally have come. I expected it. As a kid, I lived near a SAC base and I knew what an “Alert” was. I knew when the bombers suddenly flew out of the base in the middle of the night what it actually meant and what it could very well be the start of. I didn’t hope for the war to come, I dreaded the idea, but I did expect that it would come. From 1965, when I first became aware that there was something that my father did at work that involved some people shooting at other people in ships, until 1995 when I finally decided that the Soviets were really gone and they weren’t coming back, I expected the war to come at any moment.

Every.single.day; I expected it to come.

The decade long interlude that occurred between the “Jihadi War” and the “Cold War” seems like a “morning after” hangover memory of a wild party from long, long ago. At the time, the 1990s seemed like the arrival of a new golden age. It seemed that the rules we had all lived under for a millennia were no longer operative. War was suddenly and decidedly out of fashion, ideas were the new currency and you needed a five gallon bucket for a wallet just to keep up with the easy cash that was to be made on the shores of the “new internet world”.

That’s how I remember it anyway. I know it wasn’t like that, but that’s how I remember it. Historians will remember it differently; they will remind us all that the threat from Soviet Communism was almost immediately replaced by a threat from Islamic Fundamentalism which had been simmering during the cold war and once the cold war was over and several of the key Islamic fundamentalist states were no longer constrained by their former sponsors, they move wholly towards the cause of the “New Caliphate”, the core of which formed around the graveyard of the Soviet Armed Forces, namely Afghanistan.

While the west enjoyed its orgy of hedonism during of the 90’s and ignored the threat posed by the Jihadis, the threat grew exponentially every year during that time. We simply couldn’t be bothered to put down our drinks and stop to notice the forest fire that was occurring just outside our borders. Our fences were falling, our orchards were being overrun and we didn’t even stop to notice. They stuck Manhattan in 1993 and we laughed at the foolish little men who tried to get their deposit back after renting a van and using it to put a bomb in the basement. “The fools tried to knock down the towers” we said, and laughed at the name “Mohammed Salameh”.

They blew up our embassies in Kenya and people said “so what”.

Then they struck a destroyer in harbor and people said “ Why are we in that country anyway?”. At the time, we were worried about more serious threats, like the fear that our power grid was going to fail because someone in 1970 didn’t think to denote the century in their date stamps and as a result on December 31st 1999 all of our electrical power would end and we would all suddenly be living like the Amish. Yes boys and girls, we actually worried about such things. We spent billions of dollars fixing this problem, learned men who should have known better stocked up on gasoline and bullets, prepared for the end times that would surely come. Forget about those silly “turban wearing fools”, it’s the Y2K Bug you really must fear!

Then all of a sudden with a pop, the 1990s were over. The Champaign bubble economy had indeed crashed, but it had nothing to do with “old Cobol code”. It was the simple economics of it all that finally caught up with us. The rules of economic sense and logic that had existed for millennia had returned to extract their revenge on the current generation of Internet Argonauts.

In 2001, the war we had managed to avoid throughout the Cold War and its aftermath had come to kill us at home. They came to kill us in Manhattan, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. They used our tools, our freedom, or hospitality against us. They finally managed to kill us in our home. It was a threat that could no longer be ignored, yet as we would see, there would be a great number of people who still try.

In 2001, the President responded to the attack of 9/11 with these words:
.
“We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail”.

I knew what he was saying. The war that we had just been forced into fighting would not be “over by Christmas”. Unlike the cold war, there was no “Al-queda-land” for us to bomb, no fleet to sink, and no armies for us to maneuver against.

But much like the cold war, we were fighting an idea as much as an Army.

I wonder though, how many of us understand that this war, like the cold war will go on for another two generations, risk nuclear devastation on a global scale, cost hundreds of thousands of lives in wars all across the globe and cost trillions of dollars to fight.

I wonder just how many of us understand just what the true cost of losing this war actually is. I wonder how many of you understood that this war, again much like the cold war, would also risk another civil war here at home.

Because I sure didn’t understand it.

I was prepared to go to war against the Jihadis. I was prepared for the eventuality that the war might spread beyond what was manageable, but I was never prepared to believe that the bulk of our fighting over the past few years would actually be with each other.

Once again, as we are threatened by the very real menace from an enemy who means to kill us all and we react to that threat by fighting each other, in a way giving strength and comfort the enemy who wants to kill us. All of us. It makes no sense, but suicide rarely does.

This war will go on for another two generations, risk nuclear devastation on a global scale, cost hundreds of thousands of lives in wars all across the globe and cost trillions of dollars to fight. But I’m not sad that we have to fight this war. That is the burden that every generation has had to pay for its freedom since Thermopylae.

I am sad that after 3,000 years, there are still so many people on our side who actively want to lose this war, believing that to surrender is to bring the peace they desire, when history repeatedly shows that path they wish to go down only brings more war and more destruction and death. World War II didn’t have to happen; the generation who fought it understood that to be the case. They also understood that the fight after the Second World War needed to be fought as well. Our generation, for reasons I cant understand, has fallen into the same trap that the academics of Europe and America fell into after the First World War, believing that simply wishing not to fight is enough to bring peace to the world, when in fact, it virtually ensures that war will come on a massive scale.

This war will be fought, whether we choose to fight it or not. The only thing that will change is the cost of the war. Our Ancestors said that they fought so that “their children wouldn’t have to”.

It is time for this generation to take that understanding of reality as a fact.

We are in this for the long haul. It will not be over by Christmas, and the "Butchers Bill" will only get larger every day we fight each other instead of the Jihadis.

Posted @ October 24, 2006 11:05 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Big Surprise

Bill Quick didnt vote for Republicans in this election. He references a list to make his case more saleable to the rest of us ignoramuses.

However, I notice that he forgot to add that "Bush and the Republicans failed to make us safe from Bird Flu". I remember when Bill was decidedly upset at me that I wasnt upset about "Bird Flu", but that was before the streets were clogged with the rotting corpses and the nights filled with brain eating zombies left over from the last years bird flu epidemic, which struck directly after the deadly dirty bomb attack with "suitcase nukes" by al-queda dock workers in the shipyards of New Jersey who were let into the country by that judicial horses ass Harriet Miers and her "foreign looking" cohort Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Oh, what a fool I was not to listen...

I'm sure that the new head of the House Intelligence Committee Alcee Hastings will meet with Bills finely tuned standards of ethics and "doing whats right for America" over those scoundrel Republicans he so righteously just voted against.

Alcee Hastings, A Qualified Democrat Congressman. Qualified because hes an impeached Ex-Judge. Impeached and removed from office for corruption and bribery in 1989 and elected repeatedly to congress by the good folks from Florida since 1993. Now, Thanks to well meaning folks like Bill Quick, (who now all seem to have legislative foresight of "Mr. Magoo") Democrat congressman (Yes, thats right, impeached for bribery and corruption) ex-judge Alcee Hastings is about to decide a good portion of our legislative priority in Congress! Wheee! I feel liberated already. You see, up untill this election, Mr. Hastings hasn't been allowed near the "sharp end" of any of the machinery in Congress thanks to those "rascally Republicans" who came to power in 1994. But thanks to Bill Quick and lots of other "concerned citizens", Mr. Hastings is about to have complete unfettered access to all sorts of really fun information that I'm sure he will treat with the utmost care and concern. You can always trust an impeached ex-judge with national secrets, so long as he's not with the "danged Republicans with the funny sounding foreign last names", like "Gonzales" or "Miers" for example...

The thing is folks, he's not the one off oddball in the Democrat party. He's actually quite average, just look at their records. What they indict Republicans for doing, they wave as a badge of honor for doing themselves.

Really folks, no matter how righteously angry you are at Republicans, the answer can't be "More Democrats Please", atleast until the Democrats can see fit to join our side of the fight, that side being the American side and not the side they always seem to be on, which always seems to be on whatever side the United States is trying to defend itself against.

Saying the Democrat party is the answer to bad legislation and ethics is like saying the solution to hemmoroids is a length of barb wire. Yes, your current problem is a quite a pain, but the method you propose to cure it is of a whole scale of pain beyond even that.

I'd love it if our choices in elections were "Republicans and Right Wing Republicans", but it took nearly 60 years to just to make it "Democrats or Republicans" instead of just "Democrats and Only Slightly-Less-Left-Wing Democrats". But be warned, if we screw around here and get all filled with sanctimony, in the blink of an eye we can go back to a country that actually votes for a Congress that cuts off funding for Vietnam, takes on a foreign policy of "detante" with the worlds most evil governmental system of all time and elects someone like Carter as President.

We Republicans used to do crap like that all the time; that is until we Republicans learned not "the let the perfect be the enemy of the good", right about 1980 or so. Then we started winning elections, and changing legislation and changing direction of this country from a defeatist "has been" power that was passed its prime and instead turned it into the worlds unchallenged superpower in a little over 10 years.

In 1979, the defeat of the western world, capitalism and democracy was all but eminent and all the smart people said so too. In 1989, The Soviet Union died. It took a hack hollywood actor to remind us all of the possibilities of our future and to make us stop squabbling about "idelogical perfection" and to take "half a loaf" when you could get it.

Smart man that Reagan.

Oh, you dont think things have changed in the world since back then? Then hop into the "way back machine", set the dial for 1978. You'll come back with your hair on fire. If you still yearn for the "years of idealogical right wing purity", then cooling your heels in the "river of defeat" of world of 1978 should cure you of that fever right quick.

I just don't see how rewarding the very worst form of left wing Democrats in this election brings us one day closer to winning the war. These Democrats have done everything in their power to impede the war and this country at every step of the way so far, does it really make sense to allow them to run the government? Come on now...

Because in the end, that's the only metric that counts. You can tell me all sorts of great stories about what a dork Bush is, and you can tell me how you dont like so and so in congress, and you can tell me how you dont like this or that legislation, but you cant tell me how the Democrats are going to make it anything but worse.

You will never convince me that these Democrats will pursue the war - against Jihadists that is. Against Republicans and George W. Bush, they will chase him "...around the Horn, and around the Norway maelstrom, and around perdition's flames" before they give him up.

What they will do is hunt down the President and his party on their own little game of "payback". I'm sorry kids, but entertaining though that idea might be, I just dont think we have time for that right now. I think we'll be damn lucky to get through this war alive and our world intact. I dont think we can stop right now for a five alarm 'Three Stooges' pie fight on the floor of the House. Its a luxury we can't afford. And the Democrats will have to do it too! they dont have a choice, their constituents will demand it. They will be compelled to do it, no matter the number of real people who will be killed as a result.

Republicans legislators are dorks, but they do tend to return my calls. They don't always do the right thing, but they are unabashadely on the American side in a fight and I like that and even if it is pandering, dammit it is pandering to my side - the winning side the RIGHT side. Democrat legislators just look at people like me as a potential future source of taxation, and the 'root cause' of all that is evil in the world and they cant seem to decide what side they want to represent in a fight against the United States. Go ask a Democrat "What side are you on", and then count the answers you get back. It shouldnt be that hard of a question to answer, but you'd be surprised how that one stumps them.

Hastings, Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, Kennedy, Rangel. Go ahead, give them the keys to "legislative liquor cabinet" the let them drive the "agenda corvette" into the "reality telephone pole".

That will teach the Republican kids not to drink and drive. Yeah, that'll show em...

Posted @ October 23, 2006 10:36 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

I am NOT a Diplomat

But then again, neither is this guy:

snip...

"Alberto Fernandez, director of the Office of Press and Public Diplomacy in the Bureau of Near East Affairs, made his comments on Saturday to the Qatar-based network. "History will decide what role the United States played," he told Al Jazeera in Arabic, based on CNN translations. "And God willing, we tried to do our best in Iraq." "But I think there is a big possibility ... for extreme criticism and because undoubtedly there was arrogance and stupidity from the United States in Iraq," the diplomat told Al Jazeera.

end snip...

Liberating 3 million Kurds from death at the hands of a murderous dictator is an example of 'arrogance and stupidity' but going on an anti-American news network and badmouthing YOUR OWN GOVERNMENT WHILE YOU ARE STILL IN ITS SERVICE, is an example of what?

Tell me Mr Fernandez, how does this kind of grandstanding HELP ANYONE resolve the issues? How does this help the cause of diplomacy for which you have dedicated your life?

A man who is the

- Director of the Office of Press and Public Diplomacy
- in the Bureau of Near East Affairs

Who also doesnt know how to SHUT THE F*** UP.

Ghad!

Is it any wonder we can't get anything done with the rest of the worlds governments when our own State Department is chock full of paddleheaded morons like this? This man is in charge of our press handling in the middle east. Well hows that going lately? Yeah, as a result of Mr. Fernandez and his fine professional efforts - oh - let's make that the COMPETENTCY of his office - Press and Media in the middle east can always be counted on to take the US side in a discussion on, oh let's see, Koran Flushing, Cartoon representation of the founder of the predominate religion, treatment of islamic detainees in the United States and so on and so forth. Media creations, all fraud, and all have gone unanswered.

With 'Professionals' like this guy...

Well hell, why dont we just call up Dr. Zawahiri and ask him to fill the new opening thats about to become available in the State Department. He will probably get us an agent of the enemy, but at least he might get us someone whos at least COMPETENT AT HIS JOB!!!!

Whats a matter Mr. Fernandez, couldn't Al-jazeera find a flag for you to burn and then piss on while you were on the show? No life Size puppets of President BOOOSH to burn while you talked in DIPLOMATIC LANGUAGE ABOUT AMERIKKKA and its failures in the world?

Only one word applies here for this donkeys ass - Fired. Clear your desk and have your badge ready to be surrendered to security. You jackass... You Latte drinking, Lexis driving, slack panted, Penny loafer, NPR listening, watercooler prowling, defeatist coward. And you want to run the Office for Press in the middle east? I wouldnt let you be my Latex salesman!

Mr. Fernandez, if you can't get on board, then get the hell off, but for Gods sake cant anyone in Washington just shut the hell up while they are overseas? Is there some energy wave that comes from the front end of cameras that causes peoples brains to slide out their alimentary canal? Is it so hard to understand the idea that while you are in the service of the government, that you keep your opinions to yourself WHILE YOU ARE OVERSEAS! Out here in 'proletariat-land', we operate be the simple business rule of 'never embarrass your boss or the company you work for by word or action while on business' so why the hell cant you slick sided fatasses in the general D.C. Metroplex manage to follow the same rule?

Its a simple rule, its not hard to follow either.

(I pay this guys salary? Really?It staggers the mind.)

UPDATE:Speak on Sunday, Retract on Monday.

Snip.

"Upon reading the transcript of my appearance on Al-Jazeera, I realized that I seriously misspoke by using the phrase 'there has been arrogance and stupidity' by the U.S. in Iraq," Fernandez said in the statement. "This represents neither my views nor those of the State Department. I apologize."

End Snip.

"Arrogance and Stupidity? I meant to say "Flatulent and Incredulity". No, thats not it. It was "Narrow Glance and The Roof Did It In For Me" yeah thats it. Bad Translation. Simple as that Madame Secretary, no ma'am I would never be so stupid as to bad mouth the country on Al-Jazeera, you know how the arabs are, they just make up whatever the hell they want to to say and thats what comes out in translation. Yes, its all a terrible misunderstanding. Yes, maam, sorry maam. I certainly do apologize.

Oh Hell... Theres no way out of this, is there? I'm boned...

Posted @ October 22, 2006 10:53 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Update

I've just come back from two weeks of heavy technical training. I'm going to take a day off tommorrow from the nearly non-stop reading about the fascinating world of network routing protocols and all the various modes that one can connect a routers together and go ride the bike before fall turns to winter and Im stuck looking at my bike for 90 days and sighing at where I'd rather be.

I promise to be back in full screedy blog mode for the next two weeks before the last election in the Bush Presidency.

Yes, I noticed that the Airbus now has to sell 470+ of the new A380s just to break even. I also noticed that they've sold about 170 so far, and none this year at all. If Europe were an investment firm someone would be yelling "SELL" at the top of his lungs about Airbus.

Yes, I did notice that the loss in revenue to Airbus has now completely imperiled the second design of the A350. At this point, even if Airbus finds the money to develop the A350 it will arrive atleast 5 years after the Boeing 787 is on the market. Layoffs? Re-orgs? Re-structuring? Dump a few product lines that arent making money? Yes, A dynamic "for profit" company would do exactly that, but Airbus isn't any of those things, because its major shareholders are countries who want to ensure that the wasteful inefficient processes keep doing their ineffcient processes in their country,making airbus into the aircraft manufacturing equivalent of PBS. Europe should be privatizing Airbus, but instead they will overcontrol and overdo, laoning even more money to a bloated out of control nightmare that will lose even more money. Long story short, buy Boeing. When the 787 shows up, and the world takes notice of what the Carbon Fiber fuselage really means to aircraft manufacuting at all levels, you can thank me for the stock tip.

Yes, I noticed that the Iranian President has with a completely straight face told the Europeans to stop supporting Israel or "bad things might happen". 3,000 years later and the Persians are still working from the The Xerxes Handbook of Foreign Policy. It didn't work then, it wont work now, but it wont stop them from trying, now will it...

Yes, I did in fact notice that while the press loves to try to say that the Republicans are running away from President Bush, almost no one is pointing out that Lieberman is running away from the Democrats - and winning big as a result. When Lieberman wins and Webb loses, what does it say about the state of the warrior-democrat? It begs the question.

Oh and while I'm at it, Where's Howard Dean? Someone who's about to engineer a winning election for the Democrats seems mighty reserved and quiet,dontcha think?(Oh, I should've known, He's campaigning for Ned Lamont. That's how you find Howard, you just look for the big smoking hole in the ground where someones campaign augered into the ground after taking his advice...)

Yes, I did notice that North Korea has now decided to apologize for attempting to set off a second atomic test, and now appear to have stopped any testing procedures while at the same time, the US Secretary of State is getting lots of smile time with the Chinese President and Foreign Office. I also noticed that nearly no one in the 'World press' has given any credit to Secretary Rice for her diplomatic efforts in accomplishing this breakthrough.

Yes, I did notice the Democrats were caught leaking top security documents to the press for nothing but the ability to bash the President during an election. One day, and I suspect that day is not far off, someone in uniform is going to be killed out there in the field because someone in the Democrat party felt it was more necessary to "Get back at Bush" than to protect the safety of security of the United States at home and abroad. Someday, and I hope that day comes soon, people in the US press will begin to understand that they are citizens of this country and not just observers from another planet with no stake in who wins and who loses in the war of civilization.

Yes, I did notice CNN thinks its ok to show videos that show US servicemen being killed by terrorists in the interests of "equal time". Well, what do you expect from a company started by a man who can't decide what side he's on in the war on terror? Ever heard the phrase "The fish rots from the head down"?

CNN...Cable News Network, is it really "Chicken Noodle News" after all, as they were derisively called when they first started. I can think of something slightly more scatalogical than "noodle"... (Hey, maybe the 'Asshat News Network', if Rachel Lucas would allow me the use of the term...)

Remind me in two years of "who CNN was way back when" when they too go the way of the Los Angeles Examiner and the DoDo bird. If Larry King were to go and "have lunch" with Roger Ailes, CNN will be reduced to being known the "other news network", you know, the one whose only claim to fame is voiceovers from Darth Vader and with only slightly better audio than CNBC.

I promise. First a day filled with gasoline powered adrenaline, and then, blog,blog,blog.

Posted @ October 20, 2006 08:17 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Judged For My Crimes Against Humanity

My new cellmate arrived with a bang in the middle of the night. The guards made as much noise as they could wile dragging the new soul down the hall, banging their nightsticks on the bars of ours cells for nothing but the damn meanness of ruining what sleep there was to get under the always burning florescent lights of our wing of the prison.

I didn’t get up to greet him; I didn’t even turn around as they opened the door to toss him in. I heard him hit the floor with a slap like a sack of wet cement. They laughed, he groaned. “Enjoy your new ‘comrade in arms’ Frank; you two should get along just fine” said the bull, barely hiding his glee at having spent the last few hours turning my new cellmate into bloody shadow of a man.

I didn’t move. I didn’t get up to help him. I just let him whimper and crawl into the lower bunk like so many of the faceless men that came before him. No sense in getting to know the man, ‘cause he won’t be here long anyway.

That’s how it goes in the sad logic of the ‘convict’s code”.

For just a second as I was waking up, I forgot I had a cellmate. Then he groaned to remind me that no matter how much I didn’t want to, I would have to talk to him.

“Listen, get over to the bucket and try to wash up, we’ve only got about 10 minutes before they blow the horn for breakfast lineup”.

He turned and sat on the edge of the bunk. He sat there holding his head in his hands for a few seconds and then stumbled to the wall, where the bucket and washcloth gave us our only link to dignity. Thankfully there was no mirror there to remind us of how far we had gone in our decent into the animal world of prison.

“So what are you in for?” He asked. They always ask that, it’s a sure sign that this person is just a common joe, swept up in the net of the governments sense of justice.

“Cuttin’ the heads off parking meters” I said in return. He smiled and shook his head“ Great, now I’m stuck in a cell with a movie buff”. But now I was stuck too. Now I had to talk to him, he had a brain. He knew “Cool Hand Luke” when he heard it. He might be a convict like the rest of us, but he can't be half bad if he knows obscure movie references.

“Names Frank. Before you ask, I’ve been in here for three years, 4 weeks, 2 days and 8 hours, scheduled for a minimum sentence of another 20 years, but I wont be here for them to let me out if you get my meaning. And before you ask, I’m in for the same thing you are, so don’t ask, ok? It’s a dumb question around these parts.”

His eyes lit up from behind the bruised mounds of red, black and blue flesh that were once his nose and eyebrows. He stuck his finger in his mouth, moving along the inside of his left cheek to find the source of the blood that was trickling out of the corner of his mouth. All standing in mute evidence of the beating he took the night before. With is finger still in his mouth, he stopped and garbled back at me;

“So, you’re a Global Warming Denier too?”

I just smiled at the rookies’ naiveté and said to him;

“We all are friend, we all are”.

Posted @ October 12, 2006 07:40 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Good Morning Ivan

From Strategy Page: " An F-15 Eagle from the 12th Fighter Squadron at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska, flies next to a Russian Tu-95 Bear Bomber Sept. 28 during a Russian exercise near the west coast of Alaska. (U.S. Air Force photo)"

What I find most interesting is the rear gunner position has the guns level. During the cold war, the protocol was to aim the guns straight up, lest there be a "misunderstanding" between the two aircraft.

I once had an F-4 Pilot tell me that the Bear was the only aircraft that could be found in the air by sound alone, that they only had to turn off the radar and stick their helmets against the canopy and listen for the sound of those huge turboprops. The noise from the Bears engines is supposed to be enough to stun a small animal into a coma at 50 yards.

Posted @ October 12, 2006 12:35 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Hold My Calls...

varifrank in his current physical state...

Look, its not that I dont care, its not that I dont have something to say, its not that there isnt a thousand things going on right now...

Its just that I'm busy ok? You savvy "Busy"? Busy,busy,busy,busy and every time some jackass pundit comments on "how bad the economy is" I want to scream! Bad Economy? are you kidding me? We should be so lucky! I stopped accruing vacation time in August! AUGUST!

And it never stops. Everytime I think I clear the deck, bam!, a new set of emergencies arrives.

In all seriousness, things are winding down to a respectable 80 hours a week so I should be recovering soon to my previous 3 post a day standard. I see by the sign in front of the local Sams Club that Former Attorney General John Ashcroft is in town plugging his book on Friday, so I might have to make time and go cover that little event so I dont get fired from Pajamas Media for a lack of posting.

Quickly:

- Kinky Friedman - Best looking Campaign Poster - EVER.

- Still havent met one single Republican who has said "yeah, I think its Nancy Pelosis turn at the helm of the government, so I'm voting against my own party this time" Sure I havent met a single Democrat whos changed sides either, but you could say that about every election since 2000. My guess at this point is that this is going to be the "Shakespeare election" full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. A change here and there, and a few surprises, but in the end, I'm betting that the rock rolls about an inch from where its at now. ( except that Hastert finds another job in January and that's fine and he's probably not that upset about it either...)

- Which begs the question; "What do the Democrats say when they lose since everyone is working overtime to manufacture the expectations of a big win?" How do you explain it away? Diebold, butterfly ballots? If the republicans lose, it will of course by all "Bushs fault, but if the Democrats lose, then what will the story be?

- The A380 is now generating money for the airlines that ordered it, not by flying paying passengers but from refunds from EADS. We can now call it the "flying CEO Killer" for its amusing habit of destroying the careers of european manufacturing CEO's. Making big airplanes is easy, making big airplanes that pay off for the shareholders and airlines that order them is very hard, jst ask Boeing - the 747 nearly killed that company off.

- Taiwan is the key to North Korea. Its Taiwan that can provide the Chinese with the proper motivation to shut off the oil to that horrid little regime. North Korea is a Chinese invention, its time they fixed their little problem before things get out of hand.

- North Korea is the same today as it was on the Saturday before the test and as it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Until the regime ends and every day that they exist until that day comes, they exist as a threat to the peace of the world. That is their express designed methodology. It is all they know how to do, they sure as hell can't feed their people. The weapons they have only help them express that threat, its their way of making the "mulberry street extortion shakedown" into state policy. The "nuclear test" changes nothing. End that nightmare, and the weapons become irrelevant.

- Oh, and If I find out that we bought all those fancy billion dollar nuclear weapons systems and billion dollar submarines to carry them just so we could NOT use them when the time comes out of some misplaced sense of supposed "decency", then I'm going to be very, very unhappy. I'm not one to lightly advocate all out nuclear war, but for North Korea to sit back and not just threaten - but to actually DO IT, to think that our response should be anything less than total is just irresponsibly asinine. To fail to act invites more of the same and that cannot be allowed to occur. China should be on notice, nuclear materials have fingerprints. We find any materials anywhere with North Korean fingerprints, it will be taken as an act of war against the United States and will take immediate action. In that event, if China were to choose to protect North Korea from us, we will act against China as well.

- Blockades sound like fun, then someone in the blockade decides to get antzy and suddenly you are in a real live shooting war. Wars often start as a result of just such things getting out of control. If Bush pushes for a North Korean embargo, hes likely to get it. The story however doesnt end there, the story doesnt end until Kim does. The Blockade will not end his regime, but it will make us feel like we are doing something in the mean time.

- Yes, My Grandfather is rolling in his grave at the popularity of the idea of a re-militarized Japan. The revolutions his grave is creating stand to generate several hundred kilowatts for the local utility company. "We were damn lucky to win against them last time, we wont be so lucky next time, if there ever is one and you better hope there isnt..." he used to say.

Lots of thing going on, lots. Just none of them are "bloggable". Oh, I forgot to mention, I've developed an addiction to Honeycrisp Apples. I dont think I've ever eaten anything that is so staggeringly good. I could honestly not eat another piece of candy for the rest of my life as long as I had access to these apples. They are just incredible!

Posted @ October 09, 2006 10:22 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

A few hours later

In regards to North Korea, exactly what has changed this morning from Saturday morning other than that they now have slightly less nuclear material?

They were belligerent on Saturday, they are now.
They had nuclear bombs on Saturday, they still do now.

All that has changed is that they have made it clear to the world that they are a real threat to every country in the world. You can't hide your errors behind 'victim of imperialism' status when you have an atomic bomb and wave it around like a kid with a popgun.

Posted @ October 09, 2006 08:05 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

North Korean Wake Up Call

Word coming in that North Korea has 'joined the club'

I've tried 4 times in the past 30 minutes to write a post, only to have information coming in change what I was going to say. So for now, Im just watching and listening as posting seems silly with the speed of information coming in right now. ( quick someone find me a scientist that can calculate the energy necessary to create a 3.5 level quake...)

Just making a list:

A nation in a technical State of War that still exists with South Korea and the US ( and the UN for that matter)

Dictatorship of the highest order.

A world wide pariah nation, that the US and its allies have cut off from all trade over the past few months.

Has spent the summer firing intercontinental ballistic missiles at the US and Japan.

30,000 US Troops on the front lines of the Korean DMZ.

Japanese Prime Minister was scheduled to arrive in South Korea today, any change?

Any change from South Korean government who has been to date the largest enabler of the North Korean blackmail schemes?

Any word on US Armed Service Alert level?

Ok, Where are the Carriers? or The USS Shiloh?( Ballistic Missile Defense, funny how no one is against that sort of thing now that we really need it, right?)

Any movement of the Chinese or Russian Fleet or Army in the past 30 days?

Yeah, I can almost see the 'Alternate Universe' where Saddam managed to pull this off because after President Gore took office, the sanctions were removed from Iraq, and infrastructure poured in while petro dollars poured out to North Korea.

"...While America went about paddling around the worlds oceans looking for the perpetrators of 9/11 with enhanced law enforcement procedures hand in hand with the rest of the western world; the countries that the former Presidential Candidate George W. Bush once called the "Axis of Evil" formed a coalition of their own to oppose the United States. A coalition that tied middle eastern petro dollars to the technology of North Korea to create a malevoent force to threaten the peace of the world in opposition to the worlds one remaining superpower..."

President Gore. I can wake up to any reality tommmorow morning and deal with it, but I cant quite get that one to work.

Tick...Tick...Tick...

...Thank God I'm unburdened of thinking about and trying to post something new on the incredibly stupid Foley incidient. Today when I heard the headlines that "...a former congressional page came forward to say he had sex with Congressman Foley..." that my head was going to explode, then it was revealed in the paragraph level story that the "former page" was actually 21 at the time they, um, well, you know.

So I though to myself, its not much of a story then, is it? I mean Senator Hillary Clinton had sex with a former "Boys Nation" kid and no one got upset about that did they? I mean, Bill was a former "Boys Nation" kid, and she did have sex with him at least once - the proof being their daughter Chelsea. The fact that she had sex years with him after he legally stopped being " a kid" shouldnt enter into the discussion, should it? It's the seriousness of the charge after all.

Posted @ October 08, 2006 08:53 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Rip Van Winkle

Anyone drivng north on Highway 101 into San Francisco today around 5:00PM? Anyone notice over by Candelstick,er,um what is it now, oh yeah, "Monster" park a big fella on the side of the road rolling around in the dirt in his best business casual trying to fixing a flat tire?

Hey, well thanks for stopping and offering to help me out you jackasses.

So what did I miss while I was out?
Stock market at all time high -
Gas prices falling through the floor -
Technology stocks on the rise -
And a "Sex Scandal" in Washington D.C.

Damn! I must've hit my head and woke up in 1998!

I sure hope I didnt throw out all that Pets.com stock, nows my chance to cash in before it goes south in a year.

Posted @ October 03, 2006 11:20 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Cause and effect?

So "the fence" that everyone said "could not be built", is going to be built after all! Well imagine that! It must make my Grandfather proud to know that the same country that created the Panama Canal, Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams and the Tennesse Valley Project still has enough construction and civil engineering cojones left to create a simple fence.

I guess there's still hope for us yet...

Will it keep people out? If it was me on the southside of the fence wanting to go North, hell no, but thats not the point. The point of any fence isnt just to say "stay out" but also to say:

"Mine"

I think that's the more important message that is being sent with the the fence. This is our side, that is your side. If you want to keep an old Chevy on blocks in your backyard, thats fine with me but this is "our side" and we want a Jacuzzi and a brick barbeque unit in our backyard and the wife is real particular to what she looks at in the backyard and as much as I personally admire the fine design styling of late 50's-early 60's model Chevy's I'm afraid your 1959 "cats eye" Chevy Impala with the bondo fenders that you have on your porch doesnt quite cut it with the wife, she's all hung up with this "flower" obsession of hers and she just wont let go of it. So I have to throw up a few thousand dollars of formerly majestic tree materials as a boundary between our two places of residence.

Sure, you can jump right over it if you really wanted to and yes, you can buy a ladder thats taller than the fence, but the point is that once you cross a fence in that way there's no mistaking what it is you are you are doing. Theres no way to politely look the other way at a neighbor "accidentally" jumping your fence with a ladder, and the genuine sweetness of your purpose at the time really doesnt matter.

By doing that, you have stepped into that thing called "Mine". Its universally seen as a "bad thing" and is frowned upon, well, generally everywhere.

Oh, you can come over for a visit us anytime. Just use the front door. The way the new fence works is this; you knock at the front door, we answer, and if we are feeling up to company, you come on in and we have a grand old time.

People respect clear boundaries. If you don't make an effort to mark your territory, then its not your territory for long. Even Dogs and Cat's know this, so it must be true...

So I'm disappointed that we need a fence, but I'm happy that our governmental leadership finally recognizes the basic facts of "National Sovereignty". You either protect and defend your borders or you are just a "big Belgium" in no time at all.

That being said, I do have to wonder if our recent outbreaks of "E Coli" are due to a change in the standards of those picking vegetables for the rest of us. A change that has occured due to the unintended effect of our doing a more complete job of "protecting our borders".

"The law of unintended consequences" does pop up in the funniest places sometimes, doesnt it?

First -
You slow the migration of illegals immigrants.

Then -
The supply of readily available low skilled farm workers falls.

Which -
Causes farms to reach lower into the available labor pool...

...Resulting in the use of people who really shouldnt be involved in any way with the production of food. The final result is that more people die of a very simple, yet all too common, third world hygene problem right here in the "first world".

Cause and effect? maybe.

But I still like the fence. I guess it just makes me feel good and sometimes that's enough.

UPDATE: A thought occurs. When I need to build a fence between a neighbor and my house, I usually get my neighbor to kick in half the expense. You think theres any chance of getting Mexico to kick in for half?

Posted @ September 29, 2006 10:26 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Then there were the strawberries

"Ahh, but the strawberries that's... that's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic... that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox DID exist, and I'd have produced that key if they hadn't of pulled the Caine out of action. I, I, I know now they were only trying to protect some fellow officers..."
Humphrey Bogart - 1954's The Caine Mutiny.

The only thing missing from Chris Wallaces' Fox News Sunday interview of President Clinton was the sound of clattering steel bearings in the Presidents hands. President Clinton could survive the onslaught from conservative talk radio in the 1990's, but if President Clinton was to face the Blogosphere of today in his adminstration, he would be cut to ribbons in no time. Back then, President Clinton just had to deal with "The Drudge Report". Now there are 100,000 Drudge Reports and network television has half the ratings they did in his time. "Controlling the message" today is much much harder than it was in his time.

You can say what you want about President Bush; but the truth is that he can take a punch. The man has taken a swift kick in the crotch for breakfast every day for 6 years and he keeps getting up with a smile in his heart and a sense of swift determination to see the job through to the best of his abilties. You dont have to like him but you have to respect the simple physical resiliancy of this man.

My favorite parts of the interview?

- "I have never criticized President Bush - BUT..."
...and then spends the next 5 minutes doing just that. And you know for just a minute I was worried that he might actually be forced against his will to do the decent thing and respect his successor with the same grace, style and respect that his predecessor showed him.

- Where he uses the current number of troops in Afghanistan vs. Iraq to try to say that "Bush doesnt take Osama Bin Laden seriously" because of an apparent over emphasis on Iraq rather than Afghanistan.

This strikes me as odd because I seem to remember a fixation by the Clinton administration on Iraq during the 1990's. A fixation rightly based on the FACT that Iraq and the Saddam regime was a threat long before George W. Bush became "Gov. O'Texas",much less the President. Yes, there was the attack by Clinton on the 'asprin factory' and the cruise missile attacks on bases in Afghanistan, but there was also attacks and threats of attacks on Iraq all through the 1990's. Wasn't it President Clinton who ordered the US government to work on "regime change in Iraq"? For my money, President Bush is simply carrying out the recommendations of the previous administration on Iraq.

- "They had 8 months to work against terror and did nothing"

See, I dont remember that. What I remember was Washington D.C. personnel and infrastructure at total loggerheads because the previous adminstration did everything short of lighting fire to the office buildings to keep the incoming Bush administration from being able to set up its government. It was an unprecendented display of childish,unprofessional, sophomoric crap. I remember lots of little cutesy games being played with keyboards and superglue and the near universal removal of the "W" from all computer keyboards. I remember President Clinton doing just about everything in his legal power to make it hard on the incoming Bush administration to be able to get started. I remember walkouts by union staff in D.C. office buildings and other forms of soft sabotage in the first few months of the Bush Administration. Did that stop President Bush? Well it sure as hell didnt help, and if it effected just "George W. Bush - the person" well thats fine, but the truth is that crap like that cost the government many, many manhours and those manhours had to come from someplace, didnt they? I also remember a dangerous little incident with China over a P-3 Orion and a Chinese fighter that had to be handled with deftness in the first few months, this was a might distracting to the government at the time Here you are, new to the job and the very real prospect of "war with the Chinese" and you havent even gotten your name on the White House stationary yet.

I remember "Jumpin Jim Jeffords" switching sides and throwing the Senate into the opposition partys hands just in time for the nomination process to slow to a crawl in the summer of 2001. I remember Robert Hanssen of the FBI being arrested for spying for Russia and I remember that it took until nearly August for most of the major offices, such as the head of the FBI to be filled, thanks to the antics of people like Jumpin' Jim Jeffords.

President Clinton wants to paint the 'Summer of 2001' as a period of peaceful calm, where the birds were singing and the squirrels were carefully gathering nuts on the Capitol Mall, but President Bush had his hands full trying to keep the collapsing Clinton economy from becoming a full on disaster. That summer, the world was certain that Bush would not get his tax cuts because of his weak political situation, but he got them, not because he was a great politician but because everyone knew, on both sides of the aisle that unless swift action was taken, we were looking at the very real possibility of an economic depression. The world losing faith in our banking institutions and our stock market was a very, very real threat in the Summer of 2001. It was dealt with successfully, and like all of President Bushs' successful stories, quickly forgotten and jammed into the 'memory hole'. In September of 2001, whatever cool designs we were drawing on the etch-a-sketch of that years history were obliterated forever.

If the Republicans can be blamed for distracting President Clinton during his administration then President Clinton and administrations antics during the transition can certainly be used as a 'reason' for President Bushs' slow start at the beginning of his administration.

For every day of the last six years, President Bush has been called everything under the sun by everyone opposed to him, he's had his administration undermined in unprecedented ways by President Clinton and the Democrats. President Clinton has even felt it necessary to tell people overseas that "the Bush administration was wrong to attack Iraq". Can you picture Harry Truman ever saying that sort of thing against the Eisenhower administration? Don't even get me started on what President Jimmy Carter has done to the Presidency and to this country to defend his ideas of right and wrong against the "evil Bush regime".

But through all of it, I don't remember President Bush losing his temper with a reporter with quite the same verve and style that President Clinton has done with this reporter.

So, are we picking on President Clinton and his record on fighting terrrorism in the 1990's?

Sure. thats our job in the blogosphere. After all - "Dissent is Patriotic", isnt it? all we are doing is dissenting from the official line put forth by the Clinton Administration.

Poor guy. I actually feel sorry for him. He is condemmed to spend the rest of his life trying to figure out why everyone is laughing at him behind his back. The rest of us are just looking at the historical record with a somewhat objective fashion but that poor bastard actually believes what he thinks he remembers about his record.

He is now doomed to live the rest of his life in a battle with the incurable disease of nostalgic disappointment, the sort of battle waged by aging ex-quarterbacks of the losing team in the big game or by Sea Captains passed over for the big promotion for the last time.

Posted @ September 25, 2006 11:28 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (9)

Osama bites it?

It's Saturday morning, so it must be time for the "Osama is dead" rumor of the week.

This week its "Died of Typhoid" in Pakistan. We in the first world dont see much Typhoid, so heres a quick run down on what Typhoid is.

"Typhoid fever (or enteric fever) is an illness caused by the bacterium Salmonella Typhi. Common worldwide, it is transmitted by ingestion of food or water contaminated with feces from an infected person. The bacteria then multiply in the blood stream of the infected person and are absorbed into the digestive tract and eliminated with the waste".

Food contaminated with feces? that can't be considered "halal", can it?

After infection, symptoms include:
- a high fever from (103 °F to 104 °F) that rises slowly
- chills
- bradycardia (slow heart rate)
- weakness
- diarrhea
- headaches
- myalgia (muscle pain)
- lack of appetite
- constipation
- stomach pains
- in some cases, loss of hair resulting from the prolonged high fever
extreme symptoms such as intestinal perforation or hemorrhage, delusions and confusion are also possible.

When untreated, typhoid fever persists for three weeks to a month. Death occurs in between 10% and 30% of untreated cases.

I find it interesting the Osama bin Laden might have fallen victim to the same sort of death that the Martians fell victim to in the "War of the Worlds". Not bombs or bullets, but a simple bacterium. And it may have even been carrired to his cave by one of his compatriots, Ala "Typhoid Mary", or in this case, maybe "Typhoid Ali".

My take? Osama isnt making tapes, he's not standing on balconies of cities surrounded by throngs of admirers, hes either dead or in deep hiding. If hes alive, hes in Iran or Waziristan and I think if I were stuck in either of those places, I would prefer death but thats just me... Waking up on Saturday to rumors of his death is not a bad thing, even if its not necessarily true.

Posted @ September 23, 2006 09:49 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

A day that will live in history

I'm staggered by the speech at the UN today by the Iranians.

I will never forget this day.

4000 years later, and Western Civilization is still vexed by an explict expressed threat from the Persians.

When are we going to end this nightmare?

I'll be back later. I need to think a little bit more.

Men of Ionia, that what you are doing is not proper, campaigning against your fathers and wishing to enslave Greece.

It would be best if you came on our side. But if this is not possible, at least during the battle stand aside and also beg the Carians to do the same with you.

But if you can not do either the one or the other, if you are chained by higher force and you can not defect during the operations, when we come at hand, act purposedly as cowards remembering that we are of the same blood and that the first cause of animosity with the barbarians came from you.
(Herodotus, book VIII,22).

Written in 430 B.C.

Its as if we are the new Greeks and the Persian menace is still here.

Posted @ September 19, 2006 05:32 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Crazed Mobs of rampaging thugs left mystified as to why the world refuses to take them seriously.

Militant Islamic Mobs, have now once again demonstrated that there is nothing the people of the west can do or say that wont somehow be interpreted as an insult to some part of the membership of their all powerful religion.

You try to be nice, you try to engage in dialog with militant imams and their followers and where does it get you? Simple, you end up burning in effigy at the end of a rope in a crowd of thousands of angry out of work youths.

So you decide to make a movie to show the glories of the life of the prophet to the people of the west and where does that get you? Hostages taken in Washington DC, and later you and your daughter get killed in a suicide bombing as someone tries to “get even” for your horrid crime against their religion.

Swell.

So why does anyone bother to mention them at all? No one mentions the Amish, do they? Mobs of Mennonites hardly ever come up on the cover of Newsweek as they burn posters of the heathen temptress Britney Spears or Madonna, whose name alone would be enough to the Militant Mob to elicit some form of retribution. Like the Militants, the Amish want to live in the past; it’s just that the Amish aren’t at all bothered if you don’t.

You don’t see headlines that scream “Lancaster County PA, the hotbed of the Amish Insurgency” and its not because the Amish are better people than those who ascribe to the beliefs of the Militant Mob, its just that the Amish put their priorities on raising barns, milking cows and feeding their families instead of “getting even” for centuries of indignities handed down to them by the heathen “Auslander”.

The Amish also don’t hack your head off with a sword if you gaze too long at someone’s daughter in public. The Amish just smile at the tourists and go on their way even if they insult and shove them around. They live their way and we live our way. To the Amish, the winner of the “were closer to God than you are” contest is to be decided by God and not the local barn raising committee, which is just as it should be (if you ask me). Its not that your average Amish youth doesn’t occasionally want to firebomb a tourists car, its that they are usually too busy bringing in the harvest to spend time on such frivolity.

You see, the Amish have their priorities and the Militant Mobs have their priorities. To the Amish, feeding your family and taking care of your community is first and revenge comes later.

Much, much later.

To the Militant Mob, it’s the other way around. There’s never time to feed your family, but there’s always enough time to protect your family’s honor by burning down a church, destroying holy relics or killing a nun.

Yet its Militant Mob that wants the Pope to apologize for talking about rationality in religious thought and quoting someone from long ago. But is this really something that requires an apology? I mean if we all start apologizing for poorly thought out speeches to inappropriate audiences, the rioters are going to run out of things to burn before the end of the first week of this new policy.

If we were to establish a sort of “Maslows Hierarchy of Needs” for “Apologies”, can we establish that poor speechifying is at a much lower level of the pyramid than say, oh I don’t know, blowing up sacred relics – like this one:

Buddhas of Bamiyam - Destroyed by Taliban.

No one seems to be asking the Taliban to apologize for this, yet to me, and probably even the atheistic Chinese Communists, this would seem far more offensive to the “brotherhood of Man” than what Pope Benedict said.

Funny how Buddhists didn’t take to the street and start burning mosques after this affront. Well, I guess this is where that whole karma thing kicks in, but imagine if it had been the other way around and Buddhists had so much as looked sideways at anything in regards to Islam. Oh wait, we don’t have to imagine, because that’s pretty much what happened. 3000 years ago some crazy Buddhists had the bad sense of timing to build a shrine on land that would much later be under the control of Afghani tribesman who would follow an entirely different religious dictate.

Fools. Infidels. They deserve to die, its all clear to me now…

Or how about someone in the Militant Mob stands up to apologize for the fact that for most of the worlds Muslims, their best hope for survival and a future isn’t by living in the holy cities of the Caliphate in harmony with all of the sacred goodness of Sharia Law, but by living in the bosom of the “Great Satan” itself.

What the Pope said or didn’t say is of no consequence, because, well he’s the Pope, the leader of the Catholic Church. It’s only of consequence if you are Catholic. By comparison, I don’t give a rip if the Grand Mufti of Mecca puts a Fatwa out about not watching football on Saturday. I would if I was a Muslim, but I’m not, so I don’t care. But Muslims seem to care a great deal what the other religious leaders have to say, why? I have no idea. The Dali Lama for example, he's out playing golf with Greenskeeper Carl Spackler and can't be bothered with insults because hes pretty secure in his beliefs.

To the Militant Mob, it’s not what the Pope says that is the affront; its the mere existence of the Pope and the religion of which he leads that is the true insult to their religion. It seems that the Militant Mob can't handle the concept of the competitive marketplace of ideas and even worse, the mere idea that other people might actually choose a different way from theirs, is simply unspeakable.

I find it somewhat ironic that the Pope was making a speech about the place of reason in religious thought and that this extremely non-radical idea to us in the west and has now been met by a demonstration of the worst kind of irrationality by the Militant Mob.

“Pope Must Die says Muslim”.

Yeah. thats rational.

On second thought, I don’t think that the word “apology” means the same thing in English that it does in Arabic. Apparently in Arabic the word “apology” means, “Die in the worst way possible as quickly as possible”.

This reaction demonstrates to my non-denominational eyes just how right Pope Benedict was in his thoughts in his speech. It seems to me that the response of the crazed mobs and their knee jerk reaction have proved his point and as a result, the only apologizing that should occur is from the leaders of the mobs themselves, who are only too willing to call for large scale deaths and total war in response to a simple straight forward idea, as if that were somehow – rational!

Posted @ September 19, 2006 12:31 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Hey, did you know mickey spillane was a pilot before he was a writer?

Yes, Mickey " I the Jury" Spillane was a real live fighter pilot before he was a writer. But heres a great rantburg post that shows that the tradition continues.

If youre a pilot, you will laugh at all of this. If youre not, you'll just have to trust us. And yes, this is EXACTLY what pilots talk like to other pilots. Try not to think about it the next time you fly commercial.

My favorite Mickey Spillane quote: "I dont have fans, I have CUSTOMERS DAMMIT!"

Posted @ September 12, 2006 01:47 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

I'm getting comfortable being wrong

First, I had to get used to being completely dead wrong about Israeli strategy in Southern Lebanon.

Now I have to get used to being wrong about the 'toxic soup' in New Orleans after Katrina. It seems there isnt any...

Somehow being wrong about these things doesnt bother me at all...

Posted @ September 12, 2006 08:34 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

The 9/11 posts

9/11 and the need to get more information than what I could find on traditional sources was what got me started reading blogs. Jane Galt, who was working at the 9/11 site after the disaster was one of the first and finest that I ever read. I have always found her writing to be staggering.

I started blogging two years ago. 9/11 is the annual moment to reflect on the actions and reactions of that day.

Here are my reflections from the past two years about that horrible day.

August 28th 2004 - The way you look tonight.

A rememberance of the towers, the night of the attack and a loss that has occured in my life since they went away.

September 11th 2004 - Never Forget.

A simple somber note to mark the day.

March 15th 2005 - Contrails.

What I saw missing in the sky over the US after 9/11 and how it relates to our fight for freedom.

September 11th 2005 - Night Visits.

My reoccuring nightmare from 9/11. It still lives with me today.

Never forget...

Posted @ September 11, 2006 03:11 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Were still here

Children of London after an attack by German Bombers in 1940.

1978. That was the year I experienced the possibility of my death for the first time.

I was 17.

The week it happened started innocently enough. The big task for the week was to help my father, who was an upholsterer, move a very heavy cast iron framed hideabed down a three-story apartment building stairwell. I told him just how much I didn’t want to do it in my whiny pimple faced adolescent way and he responded in exactly the way that fathers of teenage smartasses often respond.

He smacked me open handed in the back of my head and reminded me with his other hand – his pointy finger lined up an inch from my nose - that what I wanted to do and not do at any given time wasn’t all that important to him. I would be there on Saturday to help with the damn hideabed, “come hell or high water”.

And that was that.

I whined about it all week long. He just smiled and said “ bitch about it all you want kiddo, the works still gonna be there when you are done”.

Friday night came and I was out of the house like a shot to be with my friends. Shakeys Pizza on Auburn Blvd was the place to be and we were there. They don’t make places like Shakeys anymore. Large wooden picnic tables for “family” seating. Dark cavern like lighting. Shakeys didn’t offer fancy “vegetarian pizzas”, but lots of meat, lots of cheese pizzas cooked on slabs of stone.

I got home about 11:30 and went promptly to bed. About an hour later I woke up with what I thought was a stomach ache. It got worse. I started vomiting and unlike most times when I threw up I didn’t feel better afterwards. Then the pain started. I felt like I had a red hot railroad spike being hammered into my side.

I, being a 17 year old dork assumed that this was just “food poisoning”. Not wanting to incur the wrath of my parents, I stayed in my room and tried to sleep it off.

It didn’t work. I didn’t get any sleep and the pain got steadily worse. Then I began to sweat. In fact, I started to sweat like a lawn sprinkler.

Then at 7:00 am on the nose, my father knocked on the door and shouted “ TIME TO GO KIDDO”.

With all the activity overnight I had forgotten about the hideabed, but he hadn’t. I stood up from the bed and discovered something else; I couldn’t stand up straight. The pain had me hunched over and even that angle hurt like hell. I walked across the room, reached for the doorknob and opened the door to see the old man standing cross armed in the hallway. I started to tell him how I was feelling and he stopped me before the first word came out of my mouth.

“Don’t even think for one second you are going to play some horseshit “I’m sick” crap on me!, now you get you ass together and get out in the truck NOW!” The old man wasn’t having any of it.

I was completely flustered. I had no idea what to do, here I was in genuine pain, crumpled over and sweating like I was in a sauna and I couldn’t get a word out of my mouth in self defense. And yet with all of this, I just figured that it would go away, that it was gas, indigestion, food poisoning or something like that. Something simple, everybody goes through this sort of thing, right?

I got into the truck and closed the door and the old man started in on a lecture about the “value of work” only I didn’t hear it, not because I had tuned him out but because my ears had started to ring, only the ringing was so loud I couldn’t hear anything. I was also dizzy and started to wonder if I was going to pass out. I now developed a new symptom. I started shaking, like I was freezing, only I was anything but freezing.

As we were driving down the street, as my dad was banging on the steering wheel to make a point in his lecture from the pulpit of the truck cab, I looked over at him and he looked back at me and in mid sentence, mid word he just stopped talking. He just looked at me and then sort of squinted his eyes, half believing what he saw on the other side of the cab.

“Didn’t you just put that shirt on?”

I just shook my head “Yeah”. It was all I could do.

“Why are you sweating like that?”

I responded “Yahshmdhhahhnnyaaa”

I was trying to say “ I don’t know”, but the shaking had started to effect my ability to talk. I just shook my head in a circle instead.

We pulled into the shop, and he opened the doors and I got out of the truck walked in my crumpled over state. He asked me to lay down on the cutting table. I did, but I could not uncurl my legs as they had gone and drawn up into my chest, fetal like. He lifted my shirt and looked the area that I indicated was causing the problem. He touched my side and the closer he got to the beltline the more I screamed, then he noticed something I couldn’t see but changed his whole demeanor.

He picked me up and loaded me in the truck. I was no longer capable of walking or talking.

“Hold on kid, we’ll get you taken care of”

I don’t remember the drive to the hospital. I do remember getting laid out on a gurney and getting pushed into the emergency room and getting an immediate reaction from the attending nurse that told me that whatever this was, it wasn’t food poisoning.

I remember the doors getting banged open by the gurney as they pushed me through the hospital and thinking I was going to get in trouble for the damage I was doing to the paint on the doors. You think weird things like that when you’re in a lot of pain.

Then I left the world for a little while.

It wasn’t food poisoning. It wasn’t gas or indigestion.

My appendix had burst during the night, and I was now bleeding internally.
It was a very bad break that was causing all sorts of other problems.

So I was gone for a little while. Two days later, I awoke in a hospital room to find half a dozen tubes in my arms, up my nose and inserted into my urethra. I didn’t care because I no longer felt like I had a hot railroad spike being hammered into my abdomen like I did before I passed out.

My nurse stopped by when she noted that my eyes were open and said something I never forgot. “Hey, look at that, you’re still here!” and she just smiled. I wondered where it was that I went. I still had no idea what had happened to me.

My parents came in and explained the whole thing. The appendix, a little tiny thing really had at first become inflamed, had expanded and had burst like a little toy balloon, and when it went finally blew, it caused all sorts of other problems. I had lost some blood, I had to stay in the hospital while they watched me, but I would probably be fine.

I told my dad that I was sorry I couldn’t move the hideabed and he just started to cry.

After a couple more lost days, I started to sit up and feel better, then I wanted to get out of the hospital. I had to start walking, but that wasn’t as easy as it sounds. The surgery had taken its toll on my abdomen muscles and to my surprise they have a big impact on your ability to walk.

At first, it was a big deal just to stand up. Then it was a big deal to walk across the room. After another week of observing me for fever or changes that would indicate some sort of infection, they decided to let me go home. I was glad they did; hospitals are noisy confusing places that are not really suited for just laying around convalescing which I think was actually their original purpose.

So, I went home and sat around instead. My folks went to work so I had the house to myself. I spent most of my time just learning to walk again. Step by step I gained more endurance until at last, I could walk down the street to school. I hated school but I loved my friends. I hated school, but hated being home even more.

My doctor called me about a month later just to see how things were going and I answered off the cuff with a phrase I would start to use more often in my life, something the nurse had taught me:

“Well, I’m still here!”

I nearly died. It wasn’t the first time or the last time. I managed to survive and to go on to tell the tale and that was all that mattered. I survived to see my high school graduation. I survived to see college, my first jobs in a line of many in a career lifetime. I survived to go on to get married and have kids, climb mountains, fly aircraft. Not everyone did make it, before I graduated high school; five kids from my class had died while we were in high school. Drowning, car accidents, disease; they had all taken their toll on the class of 1979. Every yearbook had at least one kid who didn’t make it.

Five years later, my younger sister would become one of those kids, a victim of a car accident, an event that still haunts the soul of my mother and bothered my father with undeserved guilt until the day he died.

But I was and still am “here” and I am grateful for every moment of my life since.

Five years ago, I awoke and saw something I thought I would never see. My country and the world itself were brought face to face with real evil. The stench of the Islamic revolution which started while I was in High School had now reached out and killed people in Manhattan. The first year of the war was the worst. None of us had any idea what was going to happen next. We had no idea if the envelopes that came in the mail were trying to kill us or to what lengths the monsters would go to try to kill us the next day. Would they get the bomb, did they have the bomb, were they already here with the bomb?

On the first anniversary of 9/11, I awoke and said

“Well, were still here!”

In the days right after 9/11/2001, I wasn’t sure we would be. The real fighting war we spent the entire cold war successfully avoiding was now here, brought right to us. We didn’t have to go out and find it; it found us.

We are still here. In the past five years, we’ve endured real threats and real attacks and we’ve survived. We held an election in New York City that very year. We held congressional elections the next year, and two years after that, we held a presidential election. In the days after 9/11/2001, we all assumed that we might not be able to do that anymore.

We are still here, and our President is still criticized by citizens around the world. Last I checked, most of the Presidents critics don’t spend their nights worried that the FBI will carry them away in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Such is life in “fascist Amerikkka” I guess. In the days right after 9./11 people weren’t entirely sure that they would have that right anymore.

We are still here, yet there are no concentration camps, no lynching of Arabs living in America, no American “Krystalnacht” of Islamic Mosques. Of course, every newspaper brings out the template every week that says “Arab community fears backlash” but as of this year, there is no backlash, probably never will be.

We are still here, having football, baseball, basketball and Hockey games and whole Olympic events with thousands of fans sitting in the stands. Week after week in stadiums across America, terror targets of large civilian populations are presented to the enemy with no effect. No Islamic blubberhead is going to keep us from the OSU-Texas game.

We are still here. We are still building skyscrapers. We are still living in cities. The Sears Tower and the Empire State building still have people going to work every day. Airlines still fly people from place to place. We are still building hospitals, schools, factories, libraries, cafeterias all around the world, including lands that were formerly under the control of the Taliban.

We are still here. Our currency is still worth something. Our economy is at its best. Our unemployment is at such a low level, that almost no one today remembers what unemployment rates look like in real recession. Yet, we are at war. There is no Draft and the ranks are still filled with volunteers.

We are still here. We are still going into space, building space stations and carrying international crews and furthering the world of science by our works. Our citizens are so industrious that they are now making their own spacecraft. Five years ago that was still considered fantasy, but five years later it is reality.

We are still here, but the dream of a new caliphate is surely dying. Five years later, Osama and is gang of murdering thugs have lost every attempt to stop the cause of freedom. Elections have been held throughout the middle east and at each election, Al queda has failed, let me repeat that – FAILED to do anything to stop the expression of citizenship by free people. Even those people who that hate us, like elections.

We are still here, and while Osama still is as well, he has done nothing in five years to help his fellow Muslim in a time of need. While Osama sat on his haunches in a cave, our Navy fed, clothed and housed thousands of Muslims who were victims of the Tsunami. To his eternal shame, the Muslims of Banda Aceh were grateful for our help.

We are still here, but now Saddam awaits his fate in jail being forced to watch American movies of his character engaging in sodomy with the devil himself, who is portrayed somewhat sympathetically to his own. His sons are now rotting in the hell they most certainly deserve thanks to the 101st Airborne. Five years ago, Saddam was padding the payroll of the UN and his sons were driving the streets of Baghdad pointing out to their driver which of the women on the street were to be their plaything for the evening, to be discarded in the gutter later the next day (if they were lucky). Prisons around Iraq filled with innocents, while its neighboring countries wondered what the crazy clan of maniacs would do next. Five years ago, the graves of the Kurds gassed by his cousin “Chemical Ali” cried out for justice. Five years later, justice is doing its work in a Baghdad court.

When my appendix burst, I was taught the lesson that there are no guarantees in life. You might be here one day and gone the next. Be grateful for the time you have and don’t waste it or whine about what you may or may not have. You are still here, and that’s enough.

You’re still here! Recognize that for what it is, nothing less than a miracle.

And never forget that there are 3,000 people who aren’t because of what happened that day.

Posted @ September 11, 2006 02:19 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death

First Castro, but now is Kim Jong-il also "Not Feeling Well"?
From Australia Herald:

Kim Jong-il, 64, is reported to have diabetes and other medical problems involving his kidney and liver.

More from the Korea Herald:

snip.
"...Opposition lawmaker Chung Hyung-keun, a member of the parliamentary intelligence committee, also claimed last week that the North Korean leader is having difficulties walking due to worsening diabetes, liver and heart problems.

Pyongyang has never confirmed such reports, but Kim is believed to have received medical treatment at various hospitals overseas, including in China and some European countries.

The intelligence agency also believes he received a diagnosis at a Chinese space center while visiting the country in January, according to the ruling party legislator.

End Snip.

Apparently it plays hell on your health to be the supreme dictator of a Nation.

Posted @ September 10, 2006 12:12 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Update

With all thats been going on in the world, and there has not a peep from me about it.

Seems odd, doesnt it? Well theres a reason for it.

Well, this years "Project from Hell" finished at 10:00 am this morning. Despite its very best efforts to kill me, I'm still alive at the end of it to talk about it. Yea!, I Win!

I've had 2 hours sleep in three days and to cap it all off as a parting gift, a 6:00 am departure out of Austin this morning.

People always ask me "So, what do you think of Austin?" Frankly I didnt see any of it; except for the airport, the rental car agency, the hotel and the place where I worked, which is in a windowless wearhouse-like basement in a leafy suburb outside of Austin. So, for all I saw of Austin, I could have been in Sioux Falls. I wouldnt have known the difference.

The glamorous life of a software tech places you in close proximity to really great cities and cultures that you often find are just out of your reach because the nature of your work is more akin to a sort of corporate death march than any sort of luxurious congressional fact finding junket.

In the end, what you see of all cities is the same.

Airport. Car. Hotel. Restaurant. Hell Hole.

Nowadays, You could be anywhere in the US and its all the same. Regional cuisine died when Krispy Kreme crossed the Mason Dixon Line. It doesnt matter where you go anymore, theres a Taco bell a McDonalds and a Starbucks within three miles of your current location. Target is next to Best Buy, Chilis is next to Bennigans which is next to Macaroni Grill which is next to Johnny Carinos and if there isnt, there soon will be and Dennys is always open.

I'm not whining. This business is not exactly like coal mining, no one shoots at you, you dont go home smelling like greasy food, but there are moments when you begin to question your career choices; like when you realize that the vending machines in the copy room are your primary source of daily nutrition.

Anyway...

It was a great project and we accomplished more than we hoped. Someday I might talk about it, but not today and not here. This blog is not about what I do for a living, except at the very periphery.

I am going to take some time in the next few weeks and rest up. The Reno Air Races are next week and I've stopped accruing vacation, so I need to get that cleared up in the best possible way, so there might be some major road trips in the near future.

So dont assume that just because I havent said anything that I dont have anything to say, its just that there are times when if you touch another keyboard you think you might go into anaphylactic shock.

Blogging will continue at "normal speed" next week.

Posted @ September 09, 2006 05:05 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

This is Your Brain - This is your Brain on LA

James Ellroy 1958 - El Monte California, on the day, almost to the moment that he is notified of the murder of his mother.

James Ellroy 2006.

After all this time, after all these years, he still carries the same 'thousand yard' stare.

This summer I read "My Dark Places" by James Ellroy. I found it to be one of the most stunning books I've ever read. Its not like anything else I've ever read before. James Ellroy suffered from one of the single most traumatic events in anyones life, not just a death of a parent, but a murder. "My Dark Places" is the story of how that horrible event came to be and the history of what occured to the crimes only remaining victim.

The first chapter of the book is the story of his mothers murder told much like a scene in one of his books, told from the perspective of the police and how they investigate the crime. The second chapter is the story told from his perspective, or what a murder of your parent looks like from the eyes of a 10 year old boy. But it doesnt stop there, he goes into many different directions on this same catastrophic event, an event that has never been solved. He eventually takes up the task of reviewing the case and hires a detective to "investigate the investigation" to see if its possible to find out anymore about the murder of his mother. From police files now almost 50 years old, Ellroy and his hired detective find people who were interviewed in the case in 1958 and talk to them about that day from so long ago.

Just the idea of seeking out to find these people, whos only item in common was a single night at work in El Monte California was an idea that I found utterly spellbinding. For example, he tracks down and finds a woman, who at the time in 1958 was a car hop at a restaurant that his mother visted on the night she was murdered. He then finds this former 'car hop' in modern day Reno Nevada. She remembers the case and the night that she was interviewed by the El Monte Police.

Think about that, one night in 1958, you're at work doing your 'car hop' thing. The next thing you know the police are asking you questions, you give them your statement, you go lineups but nothing really happens. Zoom - a lifetime goes by and the El Monte police and the questioning grows smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror as you go down lifes highway. But 40+ years later, the child of the lady that was killed 'way back then' tracks you down and asks you to talk about what you might remember from that time.

It reminded me of what scientists do when they throw atomic components at each other in a labratory to create a collision. The collision creates tracks on the plates, which reveals to the scientists a great deal about the physics of the components. Here was this collision, this disaster in the life of Little James Ellroy and all here are the parts that flew out in a dozen directions from that collision.

In the life and writing of James Ellroy, no matter where he is or what hes doing; everything leads back to a night in 1958, in El Monte California.

"My Dark Places" is a book that tracks the most personal of disasters and tracks the damage across his life and the life of many other people who just happened to have been interviewed or somewhat or somehow trangentally linked to this one night in 1958 in a suburb in LA.

Having been born in and lived in LA for most of my early life, I've always been atracted to anyone who can write about life in Los Angeles.

Most writers don't get LA. But Ellroy does.

Here's in an article that he wrote for the LA Times in July of this year that explains how and why he has come back to LA.

What I like about Ellroy as a writer is he taught me that a fragmented sentence is just fine as long as the sentence has something to say and that a sentence with three words can often express an idea clearer than a sentence with one hundred words.

Posted @ September 04, 2006 10:28 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

"I was struck by how stunningly banal and formulaic it all was."

"I was struck by how stunningly banal and formulaic it all was."
Actor Michael Caine in Venice 2006

I like Michael Caine. I don't know him, but he presents himself as a well balanced person. Compared to some of the self deluded emotional basketcases that make up the world of drama, Michael Caine seems downright "normal".

And I do have to agree with that he's saying about the state of todays movies.

But....

I do have to point out that Mr. Caine is a major player in not just one but two movies from my list of "worst movies ever made".

1981 - The Hand. So bad is was spoofed on Second City TV as " My Bloody Hand" with Comedian Dave Thomas doing Caine. This one is about a cartoonist who loses his hand in an accident, only the hand doesnt get the memo and decides on its own to start killing people who anger the cartoonist. Oh yeah one other thing I forgot to mention; its directed by Oliver Stone, written by Oliver Stone and in one scene, Oliver Stone even works as an actor in this film.

Not since Ed Wood has any one man taken up so much space on the credit roll.

1987 - Jaws. The Revenge. The tagline " this time -its personal". You remember this one, the "Jaws Sequel" where Chief Brody's family, long tramautized by marine life decides to on vacation - in Bermuda. See if you can guess what happens?

I like a good number of his movies. I'm not busting his chops, but when I heard this quote today my first thought was from an interview that he made in regards to "Jaws - The revenge". When he was asked about this movie, he said, "I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."

Yes Mr. Caine, what comes out of Hollywood is often very awful, but it buys a lot of houses for alot of people anyway, including yourself. So go buy a DVD player and a good sound system, get a BIG plasma screen and a nice comfy barcalounger. Then visit Scarecrow Video in Seattle and don't sweat it so much, because theres lots and lots of good movies out there to watch. Its not like Hollywood just started making bad movies, they've ALWAYS made bad movies. Its just that with digital technology the new bad ones stay around longer ( anyone else remember the deep rotation of 1982's "Beastmaster" where it played on HBO for what seemed like every hour on the hour for about a year?)

Don't get me started on the subject of "Bad Movies". I love bad movies almost more than I love good movies. You can learn a lot about good movies by watching bad ones. You learn to appeaciate the fact that film really is an art. What constitutes a really, really, bad movie is not just something from schlock-meisters like Ed Wood Jr., but what happens on screen when really good directors, actors, writers and artists conspire to turn out a complete disaster. The best part is -it happens all the time!

Witness:
1974 - Sean Connery/John Boorman Classic - ZARDOZ
1979 - Paul Newmann/Fernando Rey/Robert Altman - Quintet
1986 - Lucasfilm Disaster - Howard the Duck.

I could go on and probably should, but its been a long weekend...

Posted @ September 04, 2006 08:32 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (9)

The Guardian moves to the next argument against self-defense

UK Guardian:

"The Pentagon claimed a victory for America's missile defence system last night when a mock warhead was successfully destroyed in space in a test which cost $85m"

Ok. So, weve quickly moved from " It wont work, it cant work" on to " Sure it works, but it costs too much"

Hmmm. I can think of one thing that is more expensive:

Yes. Defending yourself can be expensive. Dying is much cheaper.

I would like someone to explain to me why anti-aircraft systems are "ok" but anti-missile systems are "not ok".

Is anyone advocating that we shouldnt have anti-aircraft systems? They dont always work, they fail from time to time, they cost a lot too, but no one, not even John Kerry says "It's a Waste of time and money, lets not shoot down other peoples military aircraft as it would be provocative"

Ok, I agree that its hard to shoot down missiles but thats why everyone is not doing it.

Its hard.
But we do it anyway.

It's also hard to make aircraft invisible to radar and make them out of plastics instead of metals. We managed to pull those impossible things off, despite everyone saying that they couldnt be done too. We are so good at doing impossible things that we have civilians making their own spacecraft. Thats something that other countries dont even try to do, but put a bunch of "sideburn wearing" free people in Mojave with enough time and money and you never know what is going to roll out of the Hangar.

Going into space is hard.
Going into space is expensive.
But we do it anyway.

Imagine for a second that we didnt decide to make Ballistic Missile defense a priority. Look at the world for a second. North Korea and Iran, working every day of the week to build missiles and atomic weapons. North Korea has already launched their missiles - weapons systems, not camera laden publicity shots - over their neighboring countries.

Do you seriously want to live in a world where we didnt even try to defend ourselves from those to psycopathic regimes?

Making Nuclear Aircraft carriers is hard.
Making Nuclear Aircraft carriers is expensive.

But we do it anyway. And we have 12 of them.

Everyone, on our side or our enemies side cares where our carriers are. If your country is hit by a natural disaster and you need help you care a great deal about where our Navy is. If you oppose the United States and a US Navy Carrier Task Force shows up on your doorstep, you care.

France has two nuclear carriers, and no one cares.
Ever.
Not even the French.

The one thing the world can count on is that the French Navy is always somewhere else when their is hard or expensive tasks to be done.Don't think so? just ask the Lebanese.

So, who is wasting money on "questionable weapons systems", The US or the French? Could the French Navy be a force for freedom in the world instead of floating brothel customers? Sure they could, but they choose not to. Yet they spend the money anyway on systems they have no intention of ever using.

The UK could use a Nuclear Carrier, atleast they use their Navy like a Navy. If the French arent going to use theirs, perhaps they should lease it out to someone who will?

The way I see it, if the Russians and Chinese are going to continue to proliferate missile technology to criminal client states, then we dont have much of a choice. We can either do the easy thing and start shooting at their cities, or we can do the much harder thing of trying to defend ourself against the threat.

Just like every generation has done since the beginning of time.

Rock.
Which leads to -
Shield.
Which leads to -
Stick.
Which leads to -
a bigger stick with a sharpend end.
Which leads to you -
lining up your best friends with big sticks with sharpend ends.
Which leads to you -
lining up your best friends with big sticks with sharpend ends and carrying shields.
Which leads to -
Bow and Arrows.
Which leads to -
Lots of Bows and Arrows.
Which leads to -
a big steel stick sharpened on both sides.
Which leads to -
a suit made of metal.
Which leads to -
arrows with metal tips.
Which leads to -
Gunpowder.
Which leads to you -
throwing a box filled with gunpowder.
Which leads to you -
using metal tube filled with gunpowder to shoot a big rock.
Which leads to you -
using a metal tube filled with gunpowder to shoot big metal rock
Which leads to you -
using a metal tube filled with gunpowder to shoot big metal rock filled with gunpowder.
Which leads to you -
using airplanes to drop big metal rock filled with gunpowder.
Which leads to you -
Using metal tube filled with gunpowder to shoot down airplane.
Which leads to you -
using another airplane to shoot down that airplane.
Which leads to you -
Launching a big metal tube filled with gunpowder.

Which natually and quite understandably leads to -

you shooting down the big metal tube.

Well, atleast "trying" to shoot it down.

Of course you could just "do nothing", which was an option at any one of the steps along the way. The result would be like this:

Rock.
Which leads to -
you doing nothing
Which leads to -
you sitting on your fat ass around the campfire one night singing
"give peace a chance" while your enemy sneaks up from behind and beats your brains in.

Well that worked out swell now didnt it? Only now it isnt one soon to be dead dork sitting around a campfile, its the very real possibility that picture above will come into reality for millions of people all over the world.

Am I being a real reactionary by mentioning the word "enemy"? The idea that some people might just be "out to get me" or do me harm in some way, isnt that a little paranoid?

Well, yeah it is, but I've got 10,000 years of human history backing me up on my assertion, what have you got that says we should ignore what is written so clearly on the record of humanity? Pick any continent, any culture, any people at any time since the end of the last ice age and show me any group of humans, anywhere - anytime, that didnt at some point take up arms against the folks on the other side of the hill at some point in their history.

My grandfather used to say; "Humans just aint nice people".

Well I'm not that cynical, but I know what he meant. Some people are nice. In fact, out of 8 billion humans I'd go so far as to say that most people are nice. But there are still lots of people who are decidedly "not nice". There are still lots of people in the world who believe that killing and enslavement are just the natural actions of the state.

The problem I have with many people on the left is that they fundamentally dont understand that pacifism in the face of genocide is not a virtue. In fact, by promising to not fight they ensure that more people are killed, not less. Sometimes being a pacifist can be a brave act, but there are times when being a pacifist is just another name for being a coward.

In a free society, a democracy, a place where men are not the property of the state, but the state is the servant of the people, if you call yourself a citizen of that society, you don't have a right to defend your country against its enemies -

you have a duty.

Posted @ September 01, 2006 09:52 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

Didnt I just graduate a couple of years ago?

I discovered two very disturbing things this week.

1. A schoolmate from my high school years has just become a grandmother.

2. My High School, which was only one year old when I attended it in 1976-79, is being closed by the district due to a lack of students. Whats worse, its being converted into an elementary school, making it the worlds only elementary school with a science lab, metal and woodworking shop, football stadium and gymnasium. Whats even worse, the other high school in the district dates to 1910, and its being kept open.

Yes, the rival high school. You know, those people...

So first I have to adjust to the idea that the sweet lovely squeaky girl that sat in front of me in 10th grade calculus class, whom I was in deep teenage lust for, is now being called "grandma". To me, its everyone else in the world who ages and grows infirmed, whereas I of course remain exactly the same as I was in 1979. (Maybe even better!)

The first thing about my high school that I had to adjust to was the idea that the people attending it today werent even born when I was there. Impossible you say? Yeah me too, and yet the truth was made clear by demonstration of simple math.

Now I have to adjust to the idea that my brand spanking Pre-"Proposition 13" funded "modern architecture as modern art" high school, complete with its 1970s olive green shag carpet in the administration building is now being closed; while the turn of the century, brick faced farm community school, which was out of date and inadequate to the task in 1940, 1950, 1960, 1970 and yes, 1980 is going to stay open.

Those people? They get to stay and we have to go into the dustbin of history? how is that fair? how does that make sense? Doesnt the School district realize we beat the hell of of that school in football, soccer and baseball for nearly 20 straight years? doesnt that count for something? anything?

Back then,we were cool. They were, well dammit, they didnt even have a student parking lot. What kind of high school doesnt have a student parking lot? I mean really...

And...and...AND

They arent going to have the common decency to just close it and plow it into the ground and put condos in its place, oh no, they are going to do something worse. much, much worse.

They are going to make it into an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL!

My entire catalog of high school memories has now been tossed about in my mind like so many plastic snowflakes floating in a snowglobe.

Grandma? Elementary school?

I feel like Charlton Heston in 'Planet of the Apes' yelling "its a madhouse! A madhouse!.

Posted @ August 31, 2006 11:41 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6)

Thought for the day

"It is not enough to fight. It is the spirit which we bring to the fight that decides the issue. It is morale that wins the victory."

George Marshall - 1948.

Posted @ August 30, 2006 10:46 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Glenn Ford: 1916 -2006

Glenn Ford as "Dave The Dude" in the 1961 Frank Capra movie 'Pocketful of Miracles'.

I love the part where Mickey Shaughnessy as "Junior" delivers the line:

"Hey! Did you guys know that Manhattan was an ISLAND!"

Posted @ August 30, 2006 10:07 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

US Treasury Secretary in Vietnam: Subject - North Korea

APEC finance ministers to discuss money laundering in Hanoi.

Snip.

Finance ministers from the Asia-Pacific region will meet next week in Hanoi for talks partly dedicated to the fight against money laundering and terrorism financing, officials said.

Snip.
Vietnam is investigating US claims that North Korea opened bank accounts in the country to launder illegally gained funds. The State Bank of Vietnam has ordered commercial banks to check for illegal accounts or illegal transactions by North Korea.

Snip.
Last month Stuart Levey, the US Treasury Department's Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, visited Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and Singapore to discuss the issue.

Snip.
US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is expected to attend the meeting in Hanoi. Misuse of financial systems, terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction "are logical subjects for him to address," Marine said.

End snip.

Vietnam is a largely cash based society, but that is changing due to the forces of globalization. Cash economies and poorly regulated banks are an ideal platform for "state based" money laundering purposes.

Think of it this way, if logisitics is what drives a traditional army, then money laundering is what drives the forces of guerilla terrorism.

Posted @ August 30, 2006 10:05 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Is it just an accident?

I’ve been wondering for some time if the reason why Airlines are such a target for terrorism has more to do with their symbolism to the third world rather than their availability as targets. To the third world, a jet aircraft represents a lot more to people than a way to get around.

It represents freedom in a very real, very tangible way. You can talk to me about flags all day. You want a ‘symbol of freedom’, watch a 747 leave LAX while you stand underneath the flight path. You stand there watching this massive aluminum machine climb up, pulling in its wheels, the flaps retract and then it goes above the ‘marine layer’ and off to “who knows where”.

Your mind always stops and asks: “ I wonder where it’s going”.

You want to get deeply depressed? Watch a 747 leave when everything is going wrong in your life and you cant go anywhere. You can really learn to hate 747’s that way. But remember, you live in the modern world, you might have a bad day here and there, but your worst day will not suck as bad as the best day of the folks in the third world. I’m not saying its justification for terrorism, I’m just saying that to you it’s an airplane, but to some people, it might be much more than that.

What better way to express your anger at the world and your lot in it, than to destroy such a large symbol of freedom? Or better yet, use that symbol to “show them” or to somehow use this symbol to “get even”.

Revenge. It goes through the soul like a burning road flare goes through nylon carpet.

So its possible that terrorists like to destroy airplanes or terrorize their passengers, because of the symbolic value they represent, their inherent ‘freedom” rather than the yield of death attacking them may generate.

The 9/11 attacks were as much about the symbolism of the attack as the effectiveness of the mission.

So, is an airliner a symbol or just an available target? I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I probably should think about it some more before I say anything. But what made me thing about this idea was that today, someone decided to take an SUV and to start mowing people down in the Jewish section of San Francisco.

Use a car to terrorize?

Why Because of the effectiveness of the weapon? The yield?

Or…

Because of the fact that of all of modern civilizations inventions, none of them symbolize personal freedom more than that realized by someone sitting behind the wheel of their own car?

I’ll show you...I’ll get even with them. Let me shove their "personal freedom" down their throats. I’m going to run down every “Jew” I see, you just watch....

If you grow up in LA like I did, and you are well immersed in “car culture” you know that cars mean something more to people than simple transportation and that people often change their personality when they drive. Cars are like alcohol, they reveal a persons hidden subconscious nature when they are placed behind the wheel. I cant tell you the number of meek unassuming women I’ve know who drive like a fighter pilot when they are behind the wheel of their car. People can be “mean drunks” just like they can be “mad drivers”.

Of course, you’ll notice that our perpetrator didn’t go to the Vietnamese neighborhoods in San Jose to “get even”, He didn’t go to Oakland or Richmond, or out to suburban Contra Costa County. He went to the one place in the Bay Area with the largest Jewish population, in the most tolerant city on the face of the earth.

So is he just another “Angry young man”? or is it part of a bigger pattern?

Well, I’ll bet that its just one guy. It is also part of a bigger pattern, but I think this just an unfulfilled malcontent taking out his frustrations in the only way he felt would bring him honor.

Terrorism? Yeah, but on a very personal basis.

As far as his association with Fremont goes, Let it go. Fremont is the capital of Afghani life in the US and from reports I’ve read, he is an afghani so its not a surprise and not an indication of a bigger problem. It would be odd if he wasn’t somehow associated with Fremont.

I lived there for years and the afghani people I found there there are wonderful.

I use that word “wonderful” deliberately. Here is a picture from the community from the invasion of Afghanistan thanking the President for his actions.

The people of Fremont know what we have done for Afghanistan, and they are grateful (and how soon the rest of us forget).

This guy is a whack job who is not representative of the community I lived with in Fremont, so be careful with your paintbrush.

But somehow I do wonder about the psychology of using a car as a weapon of revenge.

Posted @ August 29, 2006 11:07 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Bush to Go to Vietnam in November

How cool is this!

snip...

"U.S. President George W. Bush is likely to pay a state visit to Vietnam on the occasion of attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders' meeting to be held in Hanoi capital in November, a U.S. diplomat said here Tuesday."
end snip.

I heard this mentioned by the White House after the 2004 election, so I'm happy to see that they have continued to seek this opportunity out.

Considering that the Vietnamese have just cooperated in shutting down North Korean banking, I'd say this is a very good step in the right direction.

Posted @ August 29, 2006 07:31 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

US Beats North Korea 7-0

Caption: "I got two words for you Kim Il Sung - Shut the F*** Up!" Said US Softball Pitcher Jennie Finch.

From USA TODAY:

Snip...
...Jennie Finch pitched a two-hitter Monday to lead the defending champion United States past North Korea 7-0 at the softball world championships.

Finch, who dominated during the Athens Olympics, struck out seven and was backed by Crystl Bustos, who put the Americans ahead 3-0 with a three-run double.

End Snip.

I can use a little 'light news' now and then, how 'bout you?

Posted @ August 28, 2006 12:44 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

one global warming side effect we didnt count on

People used to talk about the weather when they didnt have anything else to talk about. Now, because we've so politicized the weather, people talk about the "Valerie Plame case" instead.

Talking about the weather to pass the time was much more fun and productive than talking endlessly about this, the ultimate "go nowhere - do nothing - inside the beltway" legal case.

And just think of the BTU's we've generated doing it. Don't we have any concern for the poor Pengiun and Polar Bear?

Posted @ August 28, 2006 12:03 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

A Moment of Self Indulgence

I'm a sucker for black and white pictures of the 1930's and 1940's. Here's some photos from the 'WeeGee' Collection:

Coney Island 1940.
Not one of these folks has a car with air conditioning, or a house with air conditioning for that matter. I'll also bet you most of them dont have a refrigerator, but an "ice box". Not one person on this crowd knows anything about the existence of "global warming", all they know is that "its hot", which means one thing - "lets go to the beach". It kinda puts your "boy it sure was hot this summer" stories in some perspective, now doesnt it?

Rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera 1943.
Sorry, I just love the look of this one. It's like the 'Mclaughlin Group' before Eleanor Clift joined. Oh wait, thats her in the back. Sorry about that Eleanor...

Untitled.
I always wondered what old Fred Mertz did before he and Ethel moved in next to the Ricardos. But a New York cop? I never would have guessed that one.

Viral Marketing - '40s style.
Wait! Where are we staying again?

Transvestite in a police van, 1941.
Tonights episode of "The Naked City" is brought to you by the Gillette Safety Razor Company.

Posted @ August 26, 2006 12:44 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

It all comes back to money

In nearly everything in life, it all eventually comes back to money.

In this story from Bloomberg, we can see the "Patriot Act" have an effect that almost no one talked about. Not the terrible crime of investigating the books you check out at the library, but money laundering, the lifes blood of terrorism and all sorts of state level illegality.

snip.

The U.S. Treasury Department, in a shift in its policy toward North Korea, has decided to treat all transactions involving the nation as suspect and subject to sanctions while dictator Kim Jong Il develops nuclear weapons.

``Given the regime's counterfeiting of U.S. currency, narcotics trafficking and use of accounts worldwide to conduct proliferation-related transactions, the line between illicit and licit North Korean money is nearly invisible,'' said Stuart Levey, Treasury's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

snip.

Investigators later froze the U.S. assets of 10 more North Korean entities it said were involved in illegal activities. The U.S. has also targeted 13 Iranian organizations and one from Syria, Treasury spokeswoman Molly Millerwise said in Washington.

Levey last month visited Vietnam and told leaders there to be wary of allowing banking relationships with North Korean banks.

North Korea has demanded that the U.S. remove financial sanctions as a condition for resuming talks on giving up its nuclear weapons program.

Bush said he asked China's President Hu Jintao earlier this week to put pressure on North Korea to return to the talks, which include as participants Russia, China, South Korea and Japan.

End snip.

Oh, and theres this little item. Kim Il Jong is going to visit China next week!

snip.
"A major South Korean newspaper quotes intelligence sources saying Kim Jong Il may travel to China as soon as next week, at the invitation of China's President, Hu Jintao."

"Relations between North Korea and its neighbour have been strained after China backed a resolution at the United Nations Security Council, condemning Pyongyang over a series of missile tests last month."

End snip.

You and I travel when we want, where we want. Kim Il Jong doesnt leave the nest unless its a very big deal. He doesnt fly, he only takes the train, and they never ever talk about it before hand.

So, President Bush talks to Hu Jintao.
Hu Jintao then "invites" Kim Il Jong.
Kim Il Jong "accepts" the invitation.
To visit the President of China.

And all this in the week after our President essentially shuts down "the bank" and puts the word out to all the other banks that all transactions from this group will be tagged as "suspect".

Gosh. I sure would love to be a fly on the wall for that meeting.

Gee, it's almost like Michael Corleone has just asked his sister Connies husband to come to dinner, isnt it?

UPDATE: Hello, Mr. Kim? Yes, this is 'Eddie' from South China Gas and Electric. Ah, Yes sir I hate to inform you that we've been forced to turn off your gas until you come downtown and straighten out a few things with the head office.

Posted @ August 25, 2006 05:42 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

This just in...

Image transmission intercepted by SETI radio telescopes...

Well, I guess the debate of "what is or is not a planet" all depends on where you are standing at the time.

Posted @ August 25, 2006 10:25 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

A Peacetime Question Asked in Wartime

Imagine you’re hiking in the high desert of the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains. It’s twilight, and you’re heading back towards camp. You hear a high-pitched mechanical whine out on the horizon, so you look up from the trail to see what it might be and you see “something”.

Something that is absolutely astounding.

You are an aviation enthusiast. You are intimate with most of the current technology in aviation, but you have never seen anything quite like this before. In fact, no one has.

You know what it is, but more importantly, you also know what it means.

You also know that you probably shouldn’t be seeing what you are seeing. It’s an accident of placement for you and this “thing”; a pilot simply avoiding the weather and making a turn he probably shouldn’t have made that put you in a position to see what you probably shouldn’t be seeing. History has often changed because of such accidents.

This is the very latest in aviation technology. You also know that if you didn’t actually see it yourself, you would never believe anyone who tried to tell you about what you looking at. You know just by looking at it, that this is very, very significant, and potentially very deadly to our enemies.

It’s ours. It’s a product of our nations military industrial complex. The existence of this technology or even the general knowledge of it can tip the scales in any war for the next ten years.

Your taxes paid for it; your neighbor’s kids might end up flying it. Your government approved it.

So the "peacetime question asked in wartime" is this:

Why would you ever tell anyone what you saw?

Be careful with your answer, it reveals more than you realize.

UPDATE: Yeah, theres more to this and I'll be getting to it next. No, I'm not hinting that my vacation was even more fun that it was.

Posted @ August 24, 2006 05:27 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (11)

How I Spent My Summer Vacation...

On The Summit of Mt. Lassen.
10,462 feet Above Sea Level.

I loved every step. The view was spetacular, the clouds you see behind "Herr Doktor Krankenpants" here are at the same level as the summit, so one minute its bright sunshine, the next you were standing in a cloud.

Whats it like hiking at 10,000 feet? Exactly like you'd imagine being an 80 year old and running a marathon would be at sea level.

Next year - Mt. Whitney.

Posted @ August 23, 2006 05:40 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

This just in...

Headline on CNN:

According to Aztec stone carvings, they tasted "Just like Chicken".

Posted @ August 23, 2006 12:59 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Doomsday?

So we all sit around in anticipation of August 22nd...

and...
and...
and...

All out Nuclear War? nope.
Biological Terror? nope.
A sternly worded rejection of the UN? Nope...

What we get is wall to wall coverage of the JonBenet Ramsey/John Mark Karr hearing.

Is this what Iran meant to do to us? Drive us insane with bilgewater stories like this? Can we expect the Persians to bomb us with a near daily diet of "Entertainment Tonight Gruesome Celebrity titillation Wall-to-Wall Crime" of the Week segments on the news every half hour on the hour? The inhuman Persian mullahs, they will stop at nothing to destroy our will to live.

I assure you that nothing that modern civilization has spilled forth from its alimentary canal in the last 30 years has made me consider converting to a life with the Amish more than the JonBenet Ramsey story. It's not just "what happened", but the near pornographic nonstop breathless "reporting" that has occured since the crime happened that makes me wretch.

Im sorry for the little girl. Im sorry for her familiy, but I dont want to know, ok?

I.Dont.Want.To.Know.

make it stop. Make it go away...

If this is how the Persians are going to fight us, by manipulating our media and filling us with utter near "cellular level" disgust by repeating every half hour "Coming up Next... Newly Discovered JonBenet Home Movies That no one has ever seen!" then there is no defense, there is nowhere we can hide. We are doomed!

This is how the world ends.
This is how the world ends.

Not with a bang but with commercial bumper music every 10 minutes right after traffic and weather.

Yeesh! I just cant stomach another potential 2 years of this story, every day having to look at that freak. I dont want to know his name, where hes from, what he did. I dont want to know, ok? I've already suffered enough by surviving the Natalie Holloway story, the Chandra Levy story, the Laci Petersen story, the lady from Texas who killed her 5 kids in a bathtub story. Sheesh...

If this is how they want to fight us, then we are doomed.

DOOMED!

No sane person can survive being immersed in this kind of spew.

Posted @ August 22, 2006 10:48 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

US/Iraq Intervene to Stop Iranian Shipment of Anti-Ship Missile

Well, well, well....

From USA Today
Snip.

"...The officials described this timeline:

•July 15: Three days after the war began, a source tipped off U.S. intelligence about an imminent shipment of missiles from Iran to Hezbollah.

•July 19: A spy satellite photographed Iranian crews loading three missile launchers and eight crates, each normally used to carry a Chinese-designed C-802 Noor missile, aboard a transport plane at Mehrabad air base near Tehran. Israel says Hezbollah fired a C-802, a precision-guided anti-ship cruise missile, at an Israeli warship off Lebanon's coast on July 14.

•July 20: The Ilyushin Il-76 transport plane left for Damascus, but Iraqi air-traffic controllers denied it permission to enter Iraq's airspace. The Iranian flight crew then requested permission to fly over Turkey. Turkish controllers granted permission — but only if the plane would land for an inspection. The plane returned to Tehran, where the military cargo was unloaded.

•July 22: The plane flew humanitarian aid to Damascus after stopping for inspection in Turkey.

Read the whole thing - and of course you dont need to ask if that would have happened with the previous regime in charge of Iraq because we already know the answer, dont we?

Posted @ August 18, 2006 01:32 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Andrew Sullivan - Call your Office!

From UK Guardian:

snip.

"Reports from Pakistan suggest that much of the intelligence that led to the raids came from that country and that some of it may have been obtained in ways entirely unacceptable here. In particular Rashid Rauf, a British citizen said to be a prime source of information leading to last week's arrests, has been held without access to full consular or legal assistance. Disturbing reports in Pakistani papers that he had "broken" under interrogation have been echoed by local human rights bodies."

end snip.

I've always maintained that "torture" should only be used if it is effective. Based on last weeks events being intercepted which was due to the effective application of what some people call want to call "torture", I'd say it was called for. I think that anyone that was scheduled to fly on the 10 aircraft that werent blown up last week would also agree.

However, I'm also sure that there are still people that would have preferred that we didnt "agressively interrogate" the Pakistani contact, despite what has been demonstrated from that information.

And its precisely this fact that I dont understand.

Posted @ August 15, 2006 11:15 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

I go away for two days and look what happens...

Israel accepted a UN 'Ceasefire'.

My immediate reaction?

Congratulations on your stunning come from behind victory, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

I cannot make sense of this. Its completly baffling to me.

Posted @ August 11, 2006 09:08 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

Liveblogging Air Travel: The Return flight

How long did it take to get ticketed, baggage checked, through security and to the gate today at Austin?

30 minutes. Of course everyone in the boarding area was reading newspapers with the headlines " Chaos at Americas Airports". I just had to laugh. It was no worse than your average Christmas.

However, Im still sitting in Denver due to a delayed flight. It Figures.

Flying is still the same old story of hurry up and wait no matter what is going on in the world.

A good question was asked earlier about the impact on the stores at the Airport. As we all know, airports have become malls, giving the flying population a place to shop between flights. Well one very dramatic impact this week has been to stores at the airport that sold liquids, such as "The Body Shop", or a few boutique wineries and the Duty Free stores.

They are all closed. They arent even going to try. Say good bye to that business model. I wonder of the stores that rent DVD players are next.

I've got several hours and nothing to do, but I've got Wifi, so how bad can it be.

Back in a few...

Posted @ August 11, 2006 08:12 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Keep Em Flying

I hate morning flights, and yet, there I was at 4:00 am Thursday morning waking up to take another flight. I don’t normally wake up to an alarm, I usually just wake naturally, but there’s nothing natural about being awake at 4:00 am, unless you haven’t yet gone to bed.

Half asleep, half wondering if there was something I forgot at home, I sped down the empty country roads out to the airport, hoping to get there before the magic “ one hour” timeframe. Since 9/11, the earlier you get to the airport, the better off you are. I always try to get to the gate an hour before departure. I don’t like surprises and Thursday morning would just remind me just how much I don’t like them.

Halfway to the airport, the Radio broke into my groggy half sleep, half drive with an announcement,

“Breaking news – A Terrorist plot was broken early this morning…”

Good. Keep up the good work guys.

“…21 members of a terror cell in the UK were in the process of attempting to bring down...”

Uh, oh. “Shoe Drop” is eminent.

“ Commercial airliners bound for the US…”

Yeah. That’s the usual M.O. for these guys.

“ As a result, the Department of Homeland Security has raised the threat level to Red…”

Man. This is going to just play hell with the airport this morning.

“One other note, DHS has said that passengers will not be allowed to carry liquids on board the aircraft…”

So, I set my expectations accordingly. I decided it was going to be a rough day at the airport and that it was possible that the whole day could come to a stop even before I got there.

Travel in the summer is always hell for the experienced traveler. For those of us who travel all the time, it isn’t lines, the TSA or terrorists that get under our skin the most, its tourists, especially ‘first time away from home’ tourists. I found my “first time tourists” in my line, 10 deep standing with enough luggage to hold an entire division of soldiers for a month, waiting for someone to “help them”, all while they leaned on the new expensive automated kiosks that could in fact help them with their problem, or at the very least, help the rest of us, if only they stopped leaning on them and started using them.

But truth be told, despite the lines of “amateurs”, I waited all of 15 minutes to get ticketed. Not bad for a line that was 25 deep when I got into the line. And why did I have to wait in line? Well, I decided that my normal method of using “carry on” baggage was probably not a good idea today under the circumstances, so I had to check my bag. My laptop would stay with me, but the other stuff would have to ride in the cargo area.

I picked up my boarding passes, and went up to the TSA area. This morning, the line stretched all the way back to the bridge from the parking garage, roughly 25 yards. I thought to myself, “oh well, there goes that flight!”. But to my surprise, the line was long but it was moving at a good clip. I was through the security portal in a little under 10 minutes and standing at the gate, waiting for boarding.

The only thing that was out of the ordinary was that we had to be rechecked on boarding by another brace of TSA folks. The new “No liquids” rule really threw for a loop the Starbucks crowd. Not having their precious brown caffeinated liquid was just something most of them had never considered.

The result was that it took longer to board and we left Sacramento late, but through a miracle of scheduling, we arrived on time to Phoenix. Phoenix had its own version of the lines, but it was moving at about the same pace as Sacramento. Boarding for Austin from Phoenix was a breeze, not much more than a typical day at the airport.

What I did find interesting is that while I was standing and waiting to board, I was watching CNN talk about how flying today was just a disaster, the end of the world, The “Katrina of the Airlines!” Just look at the lines in Chicago, “proof of the coming apocalypse!” Breathless coverage. Good for ratings I suppose.

But there I was, actually flying on the day described as “chaos” and I was looking at a totally different picture. Things were taking a little longer than usual, I was a little more thirsty than usual, but that’s all it was really. Big lines, lots of surprises, but it was also a long way from the “Soylent Green at the airport” that CNN was making it out to be.

The only real change to my normal flying routine, that is besides not having my requisite bottles of Diet Coke, was the 15 minutes I had to spend waiting at the baggage return for what were my formerly carry on bags.

Everyone woke up on Thursday to receive a big “Three Stooges Slap” across our collective cheeks. We are at war kids, and this is just a small reminder of that sad fact. We are at war whether or not we voted for Gore or Kerry or Bush. Were at war not because were in "Iraq" or "Palestine" but because of the people who hate us and want to kill us wish to keep on killing us in any way they can. No amount of excusing their hatred or trying to understand it, or rationalizeing it can make it go away.

They attack our airlines, not just for the shock value, but because of the freedom they represent. Islamic fascists might be able to make a bomb out of shampoo and toothpaste and they may even get some hapless kid to want to wear the bomb on an airliner and set it off, but they even begin to be able make the airplane that they ride in.

What makes us better than them? Well, We make aircraft, spaceships, fast cars, telephones, crystal glassware, lamps, decorative jewelry, books, magazines.

They make bombs and strap them to kids to kill other kids.

We make food processors, waffle irons, 300 brands of toothpaste.

They make toothpaste into bombs.

We make a singing toy fish that hangs on the wall and sells for 9.99 at a place called "wal-mart".

They make bombs.

But Aircraft and Airlines are the very real representation of “Freedom” and as we have learned over the past few years, there is nothing they hate more than just the idea of “freedom”.

And they really hate us for it, for freedom. They hate us so much that they are willing to kill themselves just to show us just how much they really, really hate us, and you are supposed to fear them, cower and hide your eyes from their gaze in fear of what they might do to you.

Aren’t you scared now infidel? Don’t you want to quit? Surrender now and die or live as a slave!

Gee, is that my list of choices, Mr. Jihad Johnny? Surrender or die?

Well ok then, then I guess we’ll just have to keep on fighting.

No, I’m not scared of flying now. I will continue to fly, do my job, and smile the whole way through it, for no other reason that it just drives them crazy to see that sort of thing happen. Were supposed to cower in fear from the threats, but the truth is on thursday morning, I wasn’t the only one just going on with life. That was a whole lot of unscared people standing in those lines.

Irritated people? Yeah, but flying just the same.

The people we fight are not 20 feet tall supermen, they are just people like you and me, with fears and foibles, wishes and desires; they even bleed just like we do. They are deluded fools and followers of a dying philosophy who cant understand how their God has abandoned them and instead of smiting the infidel, has favored the hated infidels, that being, you and me dear reader who have had the bad taste to wake up on Thursday morning, (even at 4:00 am) with a smile on our face for all the good in our lives.

And they absolutely hate us for it. It absolutely drives them insane with rage that we just go on with our lives. We stand in long lines and toss away more diet coke, more bottled water, more toothpaste than can be created in all of hate-filled madrassas around the world. We feed our dogs with more care and better nutrition than they feed their own people.

And every day that we go on, we get stronger and they get weaker.

How many skyscrapers have we built in 5 years? Ships? Aircraft? Homes? Cars? Books? Plates? Forks and Knives? Televisions? Pottery Barns?

And Al-queda?

I rest my case.

Five years from now, when not having “liquids” on our flights is considered just as normal as having to take our shoes off in security was on Wednesday, I’m sure there will be someone waiting to get on a flight who is flustered by some inconvenience that’s been newly imposed on our world by the terrorists, who just suddenly has the urge to smack himself in the forehead with an open palm and say (as I did this morning)

“ Oh that’s right! – SMACK - Were at war!”

And as long there are people in the world who find it easier to hate us than to deal with their own problems, we will be at war. Not because we want to be, but because they cant afford not to be.

So life goes on. And despite their best efforts to make it otherwise, it’s a pretty good life too.

And that, is why they hate us.
And that, is what “the war” is all about.

So 'Keep em Flying' everyone. Life is Good.

Posted @ August 10, 2006 11:16 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

Update

Hey, guess who was at the airport travelling in the middle of the nationwide terrorist alert?

yeah. Me!

I'll have more later, but for now I can tell you that as far as Phoenix, Sacramento and Austin airports are concerned, everything went fine. Was there 'chaos at the airports'? hardly. I was delayed by all of 20 minutes because I checked my bags rather than go through the new 'carry on' inspections. Big Whoopidee-doo.

Parents of little kids with all the strollers and all of the rest of the required 'kid care infrastructure' were the most concerned, but everyone I saw rolled with the punches pretty well.

My guess is that sales of bottled water at the airports will be sharply down next week.
Not a big deal.

Posted @ August 10, 2006 01:35 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Confirmed: North Korea Primary Supplier of Missiles to Iran/Hezbollah

From LA Times:

snip.

"Israeli intelligence believes North Korea recently sold 18 intermediate-range missiles to Tehran. Some accounts also place Iranian observers in North Korea when the Pyongyang regime test-fired seven missiles over the Sea of Japan this month.

"The Iranians are looking to North Korea for their new designs," said Uzi Rubin, a former head of the Israeli missile defense program. "Of course, we are worried. Whatever North Korea makes eventually ends up in the Middle East."

Rubin says Iran is particularly interested in North Korea's multistage missile, the Taepodong, because it can be used to launch a satellite. The missile was one of the seven test-fired recently, but it failed after 42 seconds, splashing into the sea not far from the test site.

Another missile that Rubin believes might have been among those tested was an intermediate-range missile based on an old Soviet design for a submarine-launched nuclear missile. These newly manufactured missiles are estimated to have a range of 1,550 miles, which would enable them to reach Israel and much of southern Europe from Iran.

Israeli intelligence chief Amos Yadlin said in April that Israel had evidence that the North Koreans had shipped 18 of these missiles — known alternately as the SS-N-6 or the BM-25 — to an Iranian missile base at the port city of Bandar Abbas.

"What the Iranians bought was a missile in a box. It is an unproven missile," said Israeli defense analyst Alon Ben-David, who said there was great curiosity about whether the new missile was among those tested..."

end snip...

Unproven, except for the fact that they were the same missiles used by the Soviet Navy, known for simple, straightforward designs that accomplished their goals without the use of sophisticated support systems.

I think its appropriate at this time to note that Iran is interested in creating its own nuclear weapons, and that North Korea already has this capability.

axis of evil....axis of evil...axis of evil...

Posted @ August 06, 2006 12:58 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

New Weapons = New Tactics

The "Year of the Missile" Continues. This graphic from Globalsecurity.org shows the nature of the weapons being used.

(Click to enlarge)

The Israelis have cleared the "Katushyas range", and are now faced with Fajr-5 missiles. These are large weapons, launched from big "semi" sized trucks. These weapons are also not "Free Fire" weapons like the Katushyas; they are aimed. This is not an inprecise terror weapon like the Katushya.

Here's what a Fajr Missile Launch Vehicle looks like( From Globalsecurity.org)

Note To Reuters: This is NOT a school bus, milk truck, red cross relief vehicle, a tour bus filled with refugees, or a roving gypsy pipe organ.

Expected change in tactics: I expect to see Israel step up air attacks on roads and any sort of wheeled vehicles that are moving in the area south of Sidon. The Fajr Missiles are not limited to the Litani like the Katushya have been. Israeli Apache and Drone activity is probably going to increase today in response to these attacks.

Question of the day: Unlike Katushyas that are only airborne for a very short time, Fajr-5 Missiles have to be airborne long enough to be intercepted by Arrow and Patriot Anti-Missile Defense systems.

So - Where are they?

Also - is there any word of any of our Burke Class Destroyers moving into the Eastern Mediteranean?

UPDATE:I think we all know that Iran is supplying these new weapons, but how many of us knew that the weapons probably originated - not in China - but from North Korea!

Globalsecurity.org is making the case that the "Iranian" Fajr-3 and Farj-5 missiles are actually from a system created in North Korea.

Gee, weren't the Iranians recently in North Korea witnessing a missile launch?


UPDATE: A response from John Pike of Globalsecurity.org in the Boston Globe on "where are the Patriot Missile Systems":

snip.

"The Patriot, which can cost around $1 million apiece, is hardly a cost-effective way to knock down the $500 to $2,000 Katyusha rockets that Iran has been supplying to Hezbollah, said John E. Pike , director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense research group in Alexandria, Va. ``They're not going to waste a Patriot on them," Pike said. ``That's a losing proposition."..."

end snip.

Israeli Public sentiment may eventually override this decision. What's the sense in having a missile defense system if you cant afford to use it. In reposonse to Katushyas he may be right, but Farj and Zelzal long range weapons, it may be a different story.

Posted @ August 06, 2006 10:56 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Israel Dropping Leaflets on Sidon

And we should all know what comes after leaflets by now, shouldnt we?

From Reuters:

Snip.

The Israeli army announced its intentions as a senior U.S. official was meeting Lebanese leaders on a possible deal to end Israel's 25-day-old war with Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State David Welch said after meeting Prime Minister Fouad Siniora that the solution lay in a "lasting political framework backed by an international force".

( My reaction?: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz)

An Israeli army spokesman said leaflets dropped on Sidon, whose normal population of 100,000 has been swollen by refugees from war zones further south, had warned all residents to leave.

"We dropped leaflets warning residents to leave because the army will attack Hizbollah rocket launching sites in Sidon," he said. Other army officials confirmed the warning had been given.

A local official in Sidon, who asked not to be named, said Hizbollah's Shi'ite guerrillas were not present in the mainly Sunni Muslim city. One resident said he had seen a leaflet that warned people to leave, but that did not mention Sidon by name.

End Snip...

Sidon, for those of you still not looking at a map of Lebanon, is well to the north of the "Litani Line".

As far as todays announcement of an agreement between France and the US, since neither the US or France has combatants in the war it seems to have about as much weight in the situation as a pronouncement on the future of space travel by Brazil and Chile. This isnt the Cold War, so the rules have changed. No one in Washington is thinking that the Soviets are going to come in and take over the area and outside of various contracts for Oil and refineries with some of the combatants, the Russians couldnt care less one way or the other how the war is going.

No one is worried about a brushfire starting a bigger war between superpowers resulting in world wide nuclear war.

And no one, anywhere, gives a damn about what France has to say.

That is, unless of course you believe that France has some pull with Iran which has up to this day been hidden from us by some dark diplomatic process and methodology. I find the idea that France is going to pick up the phone and turn off the "Iranian spigot of hate" to be laughable. Almost as laughible as the idea that if Israel doesnt do what we ask that we would stop supporting them.

So the war goes on and Israel continues to moves north.

Iran on the other hand has promised to send Surface to Air missiles to Hezbollah. Not right now of course but "...in the coming months".

Ah. Thats nice, dontcha think? Hey pal, I know youre in big trouble right now, but I promise to help you in the future. Oh, and I'm not sending any of my jets or anything, just a few second hand shoulder launched SA-7's. No Theater-wide Air Defence systems, no "committment to protect Hezbollah from the air", just a few more ineffective second rate old Soviet boom-boom sticks.

With friends like that...

I wonder if there will be anyone left at Hezbollah HQ to receive them when ( or if!) they arrive.

Posted @ August 05, 2006 01:27 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

A Reminder

My rules of operation and expections of the readership to the blog were published long ago in this post.

Posted @ August 05, 2006 10:48 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

The Year of the Missile

Don't get too comfortable in with the war in Lebanon as it now stands.

Here's whats happening. Despite the hard work of "General Media" to deter Israel from being effective, Israel is not being deterred in Lebanon and whats even better, shes not getting any real public sanction for her actions. Lots of finger wagging, but thats all. I think everyone is aware of what is going on here and who the players are. Hezbollah has used Lebanon, hijacked a country for its own use and has used the indigenous population as hostages to hide behind. Protests go on all over the world, everyone says "they support hezbollah" but not many of the protestors are getting in their cars and driving over to where the fighting is going on.

While lots of other people are upset that this didnt get wrapped up in the traditional style of the IDF, that being 72 hours from start to finish, I have to say - with all the deepest apologies to everyone involved, that it will take what it takes. (I still stand by my 14 day window by the way, and I still think the "line" will not be the Litani, but somewhere further north, somewhere around Sidon.)

Here's one thing to note. Syria hasnt moved. Syria hasnt moved to support Hezbollah, or Lebanon. Syria hasnt done a thing to effect the battlefield in any way that might get them attacked by Israel. Smuggling and resupply have occured, but Syria has cleary decided either this isnt the right time to fight, or they have decided not to fight at all. Ambassadors can prattle on and on all they want. If you dont move tanks or artillery, it means nothing.

But the real change in the last week has been Iran. Iran is no longer hiding behind its proxy, they have now spoken publically and said "yeah, we sent Hezbollah those missiles, what of it?"

So, Let's say I'm Israel. I take a look at the situation in the theatre and I see...

Saudi Arabia - Sitting tight.
Egypt - Sitting tight.
Jordan - Sitting tight
Syria - Sitting tight.
Lebanon - Neutral.
West Bank - Surprisingly quiet.
Gaza - Gone.

so now its down to:

Hezbollahland - Currently being enveloped and subdued. By my estimate - 10 more days and it will effectively be "Northern Gaza".

and who else does that leave?

Iran. But Iran isnt sitting tight this time, oh far from it. Iran just jumped out and said "We dont care to hide anymore - We are your enemy, we will resupply our allies in Hezbollahland, and we will send men and materials to fight you too!"

So, again, lets say I'm Israel. Do I ignore this threat? Do I stand by and allow a country to come right out and declare itself a combatant, and yet say nothing about it? Do I allow Iran to resupply with men and materials Lebanon without any action? Katushyas are a pain in the rear, but Iranian Farj are a real big problem because while I can take enough of Lebanon to keep the Katushyas down to a minimum, I cant keep enough Lebanese territory to keep the bigger missiles like the Farj down. The problem just moves further, and to compensate, the enemy brings missiles with more range into the game.

Oh, And theres a new problem.

Our newly exposed enemy - the Iranians - have been contracting with North Korea to make Taepodong missiles for export.

Taepodong-1 has the range to strike not just Israel, but Europe. And dont think for a second that Iran isnt going to make that threat clear to the Europeans.

Not from Lebanon - but from Iran itself.

Again. Let's say I'm Israel. So what do I do next?

Oh yeah,I forgot to mention the little fact that Iran was one of two countries to fight a war by throwing missiles at cities.

Remember the "Iran-Iraq" War? Remember the "War of the Cities"? I dont want to get off the subject here, but if you want to start talking about "atrocities", go read up on that little nightmare. By comparison, Israel is conducting a search warrant on Lebanon when you look at what Iran and Iraq did to each other back then.

So the situation is this:

Two weeks ago, Iran starts a proxy war against Israel, just 60 short days before the UN drops a boatload of sanctions on their already hapless economy. You and I dont think UN sanctions matter, but Iran seems mighty upset about it for it to "not matter". At the same time, Iran just happens to be testing a new long range missile with North Korea. North Korea needs money, Iran needs long range weapons, its a marriage made in heaven, right? Only the test didnt go so well now did it? It's not that they are walking away, its just that the timing in the original plan is just a little off now, thats all. Maybe Iran settled for the older, more reliable missiles instead? maybe...

So, again. let's say I'm Israel. I manage get the "land of the katushya" just about wrapped up when out of the sky over Tel Aviv comes the earsplitting sonic boom that occurs as the nosecone of the newly purchased North Korean missile reenters the lower atmosphere, the warhead explodes and destroys several city blocks without any warning.

So what does Israel do next?

Patriot and Arrow Missile defense systems will go into action, but there has to be more because the Israeli people will demand it. But remember that a week ago, Israel caught hell for hitting a building in a war zone that just happened to have women and children in it.

Now Israel will be hitting,not just a building, but entire city blocks. In Iran...

Imagine what the world reaction will be if Israel launches missiles to Iran in retaliation for a long range missile attack. And then imagine the missiles go back and forth for awhile.

Things have changed. This is now the "year of the missile" and none of us can ever go back to the way it was.

Posted @ August 04, 2006 08:53 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

The Global Warming tipping point

I'm a Skeptic.
I love James Randi.
I've read "State of Fear" and agree with it completely.

But I have never been more convinced that "Global Warming" was nothing but total and completly inane gobbledygook than when I heard today that "Pat Robertson now believes in Global Warming because apparently Pat has discovered that in August - Stay with me here - "its hot outside".

Sorry Al Gore. When a Conservative media preacher starts signing on to your pet scientific theory, that's the "kiss of death" for that theory if you ask me. I'm not sure that Pat believes in Dinosaurs, that men can fly or if the earth is really round or hollow, but he's suddenly gosh darn sure that "its hot outside and its all your fault sinner! now repent!"

Poor Al. It looks like he's going to have to find yet another "new gig"...

Stay tuned. I have a feeling that in December that Al Gore will discover that parts of Canada are suddenly and inexplicably cold and dark, that lake water hardens with a thick opaque covering that is hard to penetrate and that the land is often covered with a mysterious white substance that causes lawns to die and your extremities to go numb if you dont cover yourself when you go outside. Canadian Municipalities and homeowners are often forced to spend thousands of dollars to remove this toxic substance from roads and highways. This toxic scourge, called "winter" by aboriginal Canadians, must be stopped before it comes to your town.

I guess that for an out of work politician, theres always work that you can "scare up" from somewhere if you really work hard at it.

Posted @ August 03, 2006 10:23 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (5)

Shut Up and Give

International Fellowship of Christians and Jews

Mercy Corps has set up relief for Lebanon.

Since I did help World Vision implement their Expatriate Payroll system, I think I can recommend their aid system to help the Lebanese. (NOT Hezbollah, Lebanese. The Lebanese are victims of Hezbollah every bit as much as the Israelis are victims of Hezbollah. The Lebanese are hostages behind whom Hezbollah is hiding behind to fire at the Israelis.)

www.worldvision.org

Don't support Hezbollah.
Don't support Iran.
Don't support Syria.
Don't support Pessimism.

Support the Lebanese.
Support the Israelis.
Support Victory.

You cannot stand neutral in this war. You either help the enemy, or you aid and defend your allies. There is no Sweden. There is no middle ground, no ocean to hide behind, no excuse high enough to hide your shame. 2000 Generations of Western Civilization have passed before you came into the world. All of those who came before us were challenged in their time to help bring concepts like personal freedom, the rights of the individual, the sanctity of life, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from religion, freedom from persecution, for artistic freedom, for logic and science, for the emancipation of women as equals with men; all were brought into the world in which you were born because of the sacrifices of the generations that came before you.

All of those things which you hold so dear are now at risk of being lost.

Now, its your turn to serve the wolrd to see that these rights, the very treasure of the western world, survive this generation for your children and for their children beyond.

In this world you are either Vichy or Free, Collaborator or Maqui. You decide. There is no third way. You serve, even by doing nothing, but by doing nothing you serve only the side that enslaves men and kills women and childen for sport. It is no more sophisticated than that, for that is what we fight for; the right not to be enslaved, the right not to be killed for praying to a God of our own choosing, the right for women to live as equals with men, the right to speak, to breath, to be...

Someday, the war will end and you will have to answer for your actions in this war. Did you fight for them? Or did you fight for us? You decide now how you want to answer that question in a generation.

Whos side were you on when the world was forced to choose between a world where all of mankind lives under the boot of slavery or a world where freedom, dignity and human liberty are sovereign right for all mankind?

Or did you just stand by and do nothing while your fellow human beings were allowed to be dragged away in the night and made into bars of soap and lampshades?

You decide. The world awaits.

...-

Posted @ August 03, 2006 06:42 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (9)

Please - No more " Gee its hot outside" stories...

"So, do you think that people in the 1930's during the dust bowl sat around saying talking about how its all the fault of 'global warming' or did they just say "Gee, it sure is hot outside!"

Dennis Miller - All In.

Posted @ August 03, 2006 01:12 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

China - North Korea Fighting?

In know - consider the source BUT...

snip.

China's Peoples Liberation Army has deployed 2,000 reinforcements to its border troops along the Tomen and Yalu rivers bordering North Korea following signs of instability, a major daily here reported.

Small-scale clashes between North Korean soldiers and Chinese border troops had been increasing in frequency. Last October, a Chinese soldier was killed in an exchange of fire, the Hong Kong Daily reported last week. With the buildup, the PLA now has 7,000 troops guarding its eastern border.

end snip.

Now,why would such good friends and comrades need such things on their common border? How much do you want to bet the recent flooding is much worse than we know about.

And just so China doesnt feel like its being picked on by its little brother, North Korean Guards decided now would be a good time to shoot at South Korean Border guards.

Snip.

"North and South Korean troops along their heavily fortified border exchanged gunfire for the first time in about a year, a military official said on Tuesday, with the incident coming as ties between the two have soured.

North Korean troops fired two shots at a South Korean guard post near the Demilitarised Zone on Monday night and South Korean troops returned six shots, an official said by telephone.

"No one was injured in the incident," the Joint Chiefs of Staff official said.

One of the shots hit the guard post, causing South Korean troops to immediately return fire, the official said...

end snip.

Two shots From North Korea then South Korea shoots 6 times in a "disproportionate" response. Typical imperialist warmongers, shooting back after fired on...

Posted @ August 03, 2006 12:50 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Another war - same enemy

The enemy, is pessimism.

From Wikipedia - The battle of Henderson Field.

snip.

On 23 October 1942, with the addition of more troops, the Japanese made another attempt to capture Henderson Field from the south of the salient. The newly arrived U.S. Army's 164th Infantry Regiment and 1st Battalion, 7th Marines defended this position, and after a determined battle the attack was finally repulsed after committing the U.S. reserves.

On 25 October Platoon Sergeant Mitchell Paige and 33 marine riflemen emplaced 4 water-cooled .30-caliber Browning machine guns on a ridge to defend Henderson Field. By the time the night was over the Japanese 29th Infantry Regiment had lost 553 killed or missing and 479 wounded among its 2,554 men. The Japanese 16th Regiment's losses were not accounted for but the 164th's burial parties handled 975 Japanese bodies. Total American estimates for Japanese casualties on that ridge were 2,200. All the men in Mitchell Paige's platoon were either killed or wounded during the night of fierce fighting. Mitchell Paige moved up and down the line placing dead and wounded troops back into foxholes and firing short bursts from each of the four Brownings to deceive the Japanese that a force still held the ridge.

At dawn of the next day, battalion executive officer Major Odell M. Conoley reinforced Paige on the hill. It was decided that they would charge the remnants of the two Japanese regiments who were now regrouping. Conoley gathered his resources who consisted "three enlisted communication personnel, several riflemen, a few company runners who were at the point, together with a cook and a few messmen who had brought food to the position the evening before." In total 17 marines charged the Japanese at 05:40 on the morning of the 26th, signaling the turn in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War.

end snip...

On October 23rd 1942, things looked really bad. On October 25th, The finally Japanese had lost control of the island, and in doing so, lost control of the war.

Had they existed in the 1940’s CNN On October 23rd would have said “AMERICANS ENGAGED IN FUTILE BATTLE AGAINST POPULAR JAPANESE INSURGENTS”

The New York Times of today would have said “NO MILITARY SOLUTION IN PACIFIC, WORLD ASKS FOR CEASEFIRE TO SAVE LIVES OF PACIFIC ISLANDERS”

The Washington Post of today’s world would have said “FAILED STRATEGY OF ISLAND HOPPING CALLED INTO QUESTION AS ILL ADVISED GUADALCANAL QUAGMIRE CAMPAIGN CONTINUES”.

Almost exactly three years later, the Japanese Empire, which had never experienced a defeat; had been defeated. The war ended on the deck of the USS Missouri with the capitulation of an Empire into the hands of a Democracy. Peace came, not from the pen of diplomats, but from the capitulation that was imposed by the men of the Allied Armed Forces.

My point? Yes, Hezbollah fired a lot of missiles today. They will still lose. Hezbollah has two choices, fire the missiles they have wherever they are or they will be captured wherever they are. Better to fire them off, then to have them sit on the ground. Since Hezbollah cannot manufacture Katushyas and since there are now 20,000 IDF soldiers cutting off every road that is not already crowded with refugees flowing north, it seems that every day we go forward just diminishes the supply of rockets. Today Hezbollah dimished its supply by 200 rockets, with almost no effect on the fighting ability of the Israelis. Hezbollah cannot change the direction of the war in its favor with these weapons. Katushyas are terror weapons, and the Israelis have simply failed to be terrified.

Despite all that Hezbollah has done, It is not Israel who is calling for a cease fire, it is Hezbollah and their allies.

I would say Hezbollah is using “banzai tactics” here; but that would infer the existence of a code of honor on their part.

Historical evidence says the contrary.

Posted @ August 02, 2006 11:30 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (5)

Who'd a thunk it?

From LATimes:

snip.
"Israeli infantry crossed the Litani River in several spots and reached the northern edge of what Israel held as a buffer zone for 18 years until withdrawing in 2000, said Brig. Gen. Shuki Shihrur, deputy commander of the northern command. Shihrur said his forces were in control of positions along the waterway, which runs roughly parallel to the border, through air and artillery power. In some areas, he said, ground forces had sped past settled areas to reach the river and beyond in a bid to prevent Hezbollah from bringing in new fighters and arms.

The goal of the ground offensive was not to conquer towns but to work southward from the river, and north from the border, to clear out Hezbollah and weaken the group before any international peacekeeping force could be deployed in southern Lebanon, Shihrur said.

He estimated troop strength at the equivalent of six brigades, which, according to estimates, could amount to 10,000 or more soldiers. The force, believed to be at least twice as large as any previously used in this conflict, includes armored and engineering units, the battle-seasoned Golani Brigade and paratroopers.

"I estimate the time required to complete the job will take around 10 days to two weeks," Cabinet minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told Israel's Army Radio.

end snip...

Submitted without comment.

Posted @ August 02, 2006 12:40 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

I think I know who is writing their copy

Iraq: April 5, 2003

"They are not near Baghdad. Don't believe them.... They said they entered with... tanks in the middle of the capital. They claim that they - I tell you, I... that this speech is too far from the reality. It is a part of this sickness of their plan. There is no an... - no any existence to the American troops or for the troops in Baghdad at all."

Lebanon: August 1st 2006

"A group of Israeli commandos was brought to the hospital by a helicopter. They entered the hospital and are trapped inside as our fighters opened fire on them and fierce fighting is still raging," Hezbollah spokesman Hussein Rahal told The Associated Press.

There's Only one problem with this. Its over, the IDF are back and they accomplished their goal. I guess someone forgot to tell the "spokesman".

From haaretz:
"Israel Defense Forces commandos completed a raid of the Hezbollah stronghold of Baalbek in east Lebanon at daybreak Wednesday, in what Lebanese security sources described as a major operation against suspected Hezbollah positions.

The IDF reportedly captured five junior Hezbollah militants and killed several others before completing the operation and safely returning to Israel.

Lebanese security sources identified three of the men as Hussein Nasrallah, Hussein al-Burji and Ahmed al-Ghotah and described them as low ranking members of the group.

I dont know what "Hezbollah spokesman Hussein Rahal" looks like, but I think I might have an idea:

I Got my Job through the New York Times!

(Hey, a mans gotta eat, right?)

Posted @ August 02, 2006 12:16 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Baalbek Raid successful - So where is Syria?

10 miles from the border with Syria in an area formerly occupied by Syria’s Armed forces, the IDF has landed commando troops, seized several high value targets and has managed to leave the area intact.

This is a serious slap in the face to Syria, Iran and Hezbollah. The Bekaa is the capital of terror operations in the eastern Mediterranean. Israel was able to accomplish its goals in the heart of where the terrorists should have the greatest amount of protection.

Earlier this week, Syria announced that it was placing its Army on alert. Let’s watch carefully to see what Syria does next.

Possible moves:

1) Syria moves its tanks and infantry into the Bekaa to protect its interests and save its honor.
2) Syria moves its tanks and infantry into the Bekaa by invitation of the Lebanese government, such as it is.
3) Syria doesn’t move its tanks and infantry into the Bekaa.

If any one of the three scenarios occurs it will be very illustrative of the real situation from the perspective of one of the most important players, that being Syria.

1) If Syria doesn’t move to protect their client, it will clearly cause problems with their key partners, the Iranians.
2) If Syria doesn’t move to protect their client, it will clearly cause problems with the Lebanese.
3) If Syria doesn’t move its Army after this, then why have one? If this situation doesn’t merit the movement of troops to protect syrian interests, then what does? Syria officially becomes a paper tiger in every way that matters.

but if they do move...

1) Then does Israel react to stop it or does it accept a Syrian incursion and open alliance with Hezbollah?

If they do move their Army, it will be very interesting to see what the Israeli response will surely be but then again if they don’t move it, the reaction from Iran should also be very interesting.

( If I don't see a line of Syrian tanks rolling into the Bekaa by morning, I think that will tell us alot about how things are going...)

Posted @ August 01, 2006 09:17 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (7)

Just a small set of observations

For those of you that are absolutely certain that "Israel can't win" in Lebanon I'd like you point out, that Israel is going where it pleases, how it pleases, when it pleases throughout the region.

"General Media" might be entertaining to us here at home but he is nearly useless in the battlefield.

Gen. Media has once again failed to stop tanks, artillery, helicopters and personnel carriers.

Despite what we are all being told about how its a "pushbutton war", fought by polls and public opinion, Wars are always won by some guy standing in a field holding a rifle who refuses to be removed.

Despite what you've been told, those who oppose western civilization are not 20 feet tall and unbeatable. They are not superhuman, they have fear and dread just like the rest of us. They die just like the rest of us.

One other point - Winning forces rarely call for "cease fire". If Hezbollah was really winning, the very last thing you would hear is a call for "cease fire".

Peace does not come through the pen of diplomats. Peace only comes with capitulation. So long as there is no capitulation, there will be no peace. While it hasnt always been so, Egypt and Jordan now live in peace with Israel. It will someday also be true of Lebanon and Syria.

Israel is winning because despite every effort to remove it, it is still there. Every day that Israel exists, is a victory against the forces of hate.

UPDATE:

Israeli soldiers from a combat engineer batallion smile for the camera on Tuesday( Photo Appears Coutesty of FOX News ).

There you go! That's better.

UPDATE II: CNN is reporting that Israeli troops have landed 10 miles north of Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley,making even my predictions of the size of the Israeli movement into Lebanon look conservative.

Snip.

"Israeli aircraft flew support missions as troops hit the ground about 10 km north of Baalbeck in the Bekaa Valley near the Syrian border, the sources said.

The Lebanese army also reported heavy helicopter traffic east and west of the town.

Israeli troops entered Hikma Hospital in northern Baalbeck, where they checked the identification cards of all staff and patients, the sources said, adding that there was no indication that anyone was taken from the hospital. "

The Bekaa used to be so controlled by Syria that even the IDF Air Force had a great deal of difficulty flying up there, now it seems that its safe enough to fly in troop carrying helicopters. That means that Anti-Aircraft, even shoulder mounted missiles are not much of a threat. The Israelis appear to have landed, what appears to be a substantial amount of troops in the capital city of the region, just 10 miles from the border of Syria and have some ability to maneuver in an area that used to be a solid Syrian enclave.

Posted @ August 01, 2006 10:27 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

The Honorable Edward Koch Explains it All For You.

Are you one of those people who can't quite understand this whole " war on terror" thing? Are you the type who just can't bear to hear another "neocon" rant about the so called "necessity of war"? Do you own way too many cats, drive a volvo but wish you had a prius? Are you one of the three remaining listeners to Air America? Do you think Dennis Kucinich is really smart, and if there was any sort of real democracy in America, he would be president instead of you-know-who?

Are you repulsed at all these "nasty people" on the right who make such a fetish of fighting the "so called enemy"?

Then sit down and take a seat, pour yourself a drink and read a little essay from the former mayor of New York. Not Guliani, But The Right Honorable Edward Koch - Democrat.

Snip...

"The enemies of the Western world in this war of civilizations are the Islamic fanatics. Those fanatics number hundreds of millions. They truly believe they have the right to kill all infidels. Sometimes, the fanatic warns us in his own words. Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in 1925 in which he told the world of his plans. A recent leader of al-Qaeda, the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, spoke openly of his beliefs, “Killing the infidels is our religion, slaughtering them is our religion, until they convert to Islam or pay us tribute.”

"Take them at their word. Hitler meant what he said. So do the Islamic fanatics. Unlike the Western world, where we love life, the Islamic fanatics love death, what they refer to as martyrdom, killing the infidel—Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims of different sects—and being rewarded with 72 virgins and a prominent place in heaven."

"They believe that we Westerners do not have the inner strength to withstand them."

end snip...

Read the whole thing.

See, there IS one Democrat I could vote for. Too bad hes not running, but if he was, I'm sure the New York Times would be against him.

Posted @ July 31, 2006 11:13 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

I'm just warning you in advance

If this really does proves to be the end of Fidel Castro and he actually does die this time, I will be celebrating his demise for a solid week.

One.Solid.Week.

How can I take such joy in Castros death? Because everytime another tyrant dies, an angel gets their wings...

Posted @ July 31, 2006 10:26 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Neo-neocon: Women and children first: the propaganda of compassion, at Qana and elsewhere

A fantasically well thought out piece by the great Neo-Neocon that says what I thought I was trying to say, but failed miserably to do.

Snip.

Hezbollah knows that there's nothing like dead women and children to turn public opinion against those doing the killing. And there's nothing like the Western news to fail to adequately provide and evaluate the all-important context for that killing.

Hezbollah could not--and would not--operate this way if it didn't rely on both the compassion of the West and its news cycle. Without these things, Hezbollah's actions would be suicidal. But with these things, Hezbollah's actions are effective.

Go read the whole thing.

Neo-Neocon. Smarter, better, faster than I could ever hope to be.

Posted @ July 31, 2006 05:02 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Ben Stein: How To Lose To Terrorists

Dear Mr. Stein.

Thank you for showing me that Im not the only one who sees this sort of thing.

Snip...

* Because the Hezbollah -- as has been well reported -- launches missiles at purely civilian targets in Israel as a matter of course, and no one in Europe or in the American left says "boo" about it. It's considered the Hezbollah's "right" to kill Israelis and when they do, they boast about it and promise to do more;

* Because it's been also well documented that the Hezbollah hides behind civilian targets and adjacent to civilian dwellings in Lebanon to fire its rockets at Israel, and when Israel fires back and mistakenly hits a home with civilians, the world of "intellectuals" and "thinkers" blames Israel and calls Israel bloodthirsty;

* Because when the Israelis kill civilians, they apologize, but when the terrorists kill civilians, they brag -- and the beautiful people scream at Eretz Israel and excuse the terrorists;

End Snip.

Read the whole thing.

P.S. We're not losing. Were still here, and every day we are, is a victory in itself.

Posted @ July 31, 2006 02:38 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

With Suspension of Aerial Attacks, IDF Possibly Moving To More Ground Ops

Published on June 30th By Vital Perspective, with a supporting link to Stratfor. Now that the suspension is hereby suspended,let's see what happens.

Posted @ July 31, 2006 01:58 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Disproportionate Outrage

Magen David Adom is reporting that for July 30th, they treated 69 people who have been victims of Katushya rocket attacks as part of the 120 missiles that were fired into Israel in the last 24 hours.

That's 69 Civilians, Men, Women and Children, who were targeted by Hezbollah.

I'm waiting for the world to erupt in outrage over the senseless attacks on Israeli civilians.

I have a feeling it will be a long wait.

Posted @ July 30, 2006 11:48 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Hezbollah tactics in Seattle?

From Komotv.com

Quote:
"The man suspected in a fatal shooting rampage hid behind a potted plant in a Jewish charity's foyer and forced his way through a security door by holding a gun to a 13-year-old girl's head, the police chief said Saturday."

Using little girls, as shields. Ah, it's the famous Muslim warrior code is in evidence again. Salahdeen should be spinning in his grave.

This seems to me to be the micro version of what Hezbollah is doing to Lebanon on a macro scale. I should be shocked and surprised to see this sort of horror, but the really sad thing is, I'm not.

UPDATE: More details on the Seattle shooting, and more technicolor examples of anti-semitc hate in the "progressive" city of Seattle can be found here.

Posted @ July 30, 2006 10:10 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Escalation in the hezbollah media war

Arab commentators are now saying that it wasnt just children in the building that was bombed in Qana, but that they were handicapped children.

Oh, of course. I'm also sure they were handicapped children of lesbian double amputee mothers who were suffering from Adult Attention Deficit Disorder as well.

You would think that Hezbollah would care more for their children than to allow them to be exposed to harm by housing their dangerous and unstable missiles in a day care center.

UPDATE: Apparently further explanation is necessary, because some people don’t understand what it was that is I was trying to say, and have taken offense.

Do I think that the death of children is funny? Nope.

Do I think that double amputee lesbians who have kids that go on to die in explosions are funny? Nope.

I didn’t write it to be funny, I wrote it to illustrate a point about what the “Hezbollah spokesman” was saying in regards to the relative value of human life, set to a hierarchical standard of victimhood. (Hezbollah spokesman? There’s a job that’s right up there with Satan’s proctologist…).

So to better illustrate my point, let’s step out of the case at hand and use a hypothetical case to help diffuse the raw emotions of what is being discussed.

Let’s say a man is struck by a truck and killed, while crossing a large inner city intersection.

If I were an average everyday person, I would just say;

“ A man was killed by a truck”.

However, if I were another certain type of person, let’s say a professional writer, I would go through great pains to establish the level of the tragedy by ascribing value to the person beyond that of being just “a man”. For example, Lets say the man in the accident was also a writer! “A man” dying from a traffic accident may be considered unfortunate for this person, but if he were also a writer? Well, that would be a tragedy! In this person’s worldview, humans are not all at the same level; some people are better than other people.

So this person would take pains to tell to us:

“A writer was killed by a truck”.

To this person, it’s not just that “a man” who died, but it was “a writer” who died.

It’s not just an accident that has occurred, it’s a tragedy! A writer! Don’t you understand!

This type of person is implying by their choice in language that “just a man” would somehow be less of a loss than “a writer”. This type of person says one is worth more than the other.

You can almost imagine an alternate case where this sort of person would say;

“ A man was killed by a truck. Luckily, he wasn’t a writer”.

And now we can go back to the case of the choice of language by the “Hezbollah spokesman”.

It isn’t enough that children were killed, but that they were “handicapped” children. Implying (by my skeptical logic) that “normal” children would be less of a tragedy than that presented by the image of handicapped children being killed. For me in my little world, kids are kids; you don’t need to segregate them into categories, unless…

And here’s were I get myself into trouble because having a sister who is also handicapped, I think I know something of the logistics of handicapped children.

In a nutshell, they are hard to get around. You tell me you’ve got a building in war zone with 60 handicapped children, I’m looking for 120 adults in very close proximity to help keep them together, and I don’t think I need to point out that 60 kids in close proximity with solid rocket fuel and explosive warheads is a really bad idea, but apparently not because Hezbollah thinks its just “a-ok”. When someone takes a situation like this and slips in a little fact like “ and all 60 of them were handicapped too!” I find myself a being a bit of a skeptic on the situation, I find myself asking “all of them were handicapped? or just some of them”? If its only some of them, then how many? And why mention it at all?

However, lets entertain the thought, (radical though it may seem to some people who are always more than willing to assign heroic status to decidedly unheroic people, like Hezbollah and virtually every other terrorist organization) that the “Hezbollah Spokesman” was just “guilding the lilly” as it were, in regards to the story of the bombing.

Why? Isn’t the death of 60 children enough of a tragedy to gather my emotions and put forth my sympathy? Well, apparently to some people, its not. This man decided that he had to assign more value as victims to these children to make me feel sorry for them as if I wouldn’t feel sorry for them if they were ”just children”. Who could not feel sorry for handicapped children? What kind of uncaring snot would not care for the lives of handicapped children? Even the “hated Zionist enemy” would feel sorry for handicapped children, wouldn’t they?

You can almost see the page of the Hezbollah Media Manual:

Snip…

Page 5:

All Children are Handicapped Children.
Alternate: Be sure to mention the following optional situations to generate sympathy:

A) Victims were attending a birthday party
B) Victims were attending an innocent family gathering and celebration.
C) Victims were attending a wedding.

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MENTION THE KAYTUSHYA ROCKETS STORED IN THE BASEMENT OF BUILDING

End Snip…

So suddenly, it wasn’t just children in the story, but “handicapped children”, and the story just moved on from there. But for me, it was a big indication that someone didn’t feel the story was genuine enough, that it had to be “punched up a bit”. At that point my bullshit indicator went right off the scale.

You don’t have to “punch up the truth”, unless of course you wish to make the tragedy more than it really is and by doing that it then becomes “propaganda”. And that ladies and gentleman, is what I find revolting. Double amputee lesbians who’s children die in missile attacks have my complete and total sympathy. Craven rat bastards who wish to move the deaths of children into a totem for the “righteousness for their cause”, a cause that involves the killing of other people’s children as a regular, desired and accepted course of the day, can kiss my bubble gum pink ass!

You’d like another good example of this sort of rationalization of death you say? Well let’s try this on for size because it seems relevant to the case at hand.

A week ago, Hezbollah launched katushya missiles at Nazareth and they killed two children. Do you know what the Hezbollah leadership called the kids who were killed?

“Martyrs”

You see, the children were Arab Muslim children living inside Israel. The leader of Hezbollah apologized to the families for killing their children.

To me, children are children. But to some people, it’s more important that children belong to the right class of victimhood before sympathy can be emoted. Kill Jews in Nazareth? then hand out candy in celebration! Kill Muslims instead? say I’m sorry, loft the kids into “martyr” status and try again tomorrow.

Clear enough? Ok then, I thought so.

Posted @ July 30, 2006 09:54 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (10)

Israeli Air Attacks Kill Civilians

Hezbollah fighters manning anti-aircraft unit. Notice the lack of uniforms. When you read headlines that rebuke Israel for killing civilians, remember this photo.

From the Herald Sun.

UPDATE: An alternate headline for this would be " Hezbollah Human Shield Air Defense System fails to stop Israeli Air Raids"

UPDATE II: Hezbollah things nothing of hiding behind women and children using them as unwilling hostages and human sheilds. They also think nothing of "militarizing" their children for use as props parades to show the strength of their movement.

Witness:

Children dressed as Hizbollah guerrillas march at a parade to celebrate 'Jerusalem Day' in Beirut on Friday. — Reuters

This is fron a recent victory parade in Beirut for Hezbollah. This isnt the Hezbollah version of Baby Gap, These kids carried placards saying "Death To Israel" and carried mock guns and grenades. To you and me, Children are innocents. To Hezbollah, they are only tools to further their goals.

UPDATE III: On July 28th, Hezbollah attacked an Israeli Hospital with Rockets. Funny, I dont remember the UN being "up in arms" over that atrocity. I dont remember Israelis rioting in the streets of Tel Aviv over that, do you?

Posted @ July 30, 2006 07:29 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Hezbollah Gameplan

1. Launch missiles into Israel. Kill civilians. World press remains silent.
2. Israel detects missile launch, performs reconnisance.
3. Israel drops leaflets telling civilians to leave the area of missile launch.
4. Hezbollah fills building where launch took place with women and children.
5. Israel attacks site of missile launch.
6. Women and children killed.
7. World press condems shocking attack by Israel.

Now, remind me. Who started the war?

Posted @ July 30, 2006 06:55 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

You can't make this stuff up

ah yes, the "Jedi master of the idiotarian left" is at it again, only this time Robert "my name is now a verb" Fisk, has turned his 'poison pen' towards Israel.

Robert Fisk: Is Israel Losing Its War In Lebanon?

Quote: "Chillingly, Israel's prosecution of these attacks bears an increasing resemblance to the systematic destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto by Nazis in World War II".

I get it now! Its all so clear to me. Israel uses precision weapons, warns targets a day in advance of attacks to vacate the area, uses uniformed troops exclusively, and follows the Geneva convention on the protection of rights of captured soldiers. Buries the dead of its enemies with respect according to their religious traditions.

It should also be stated that Israel has been know to show favor toward followers of the Jewish religion. Its a fact, I looked it up.

On the other hand, Hezbollah wears no uniforms, uses weapons with no guidance systems against civilian populations fired from within elementary schools and mosques for the expressed desired purpose of killing or maiming civilians, uses civlians as shields and hostages, denies captured uniformed soldiers access to Geneva accord protection under the Red Cross or Crescent, routinely butchers and kills civilian and military members of other countries for sport, describes its own losses as "Martyrs", routinely kills members of any religious minority outside of their own sect, even those within their own religion, again, just for sport.

It should also be stated that Hezbollah has been known to be decidedly hostile to members of the Jewish religion, including the denial of the european jewish holocaust while praying daily to their God for the destruction of Israel and the Jews.

Yes!, Thanks to Robert Fisk, its all prefectly clear to me now! Israel is exactly like the Nazis in Warsaw. I dont know why it took me so long to see such an obvious connection.

(Chillingly? Who talks like that? )

Posted @ July 29, 2006 10:17 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Things are not quite as they appear to be

Israeli soldier (later Major General Yossi Ben Hanan) cools off in the Suez Canal in the Six Day War. Note captured AK-47 rifle. Israeli soldiers often traded their unreliable carbines and short-range Uzis for AK-47s taken from captured or killed Arab soldiers.

Look, I’m just a common every day schlub. I don’t pretend to be a master expert in military strategy. My only military experience is about 4 years as a Civil Air Patrol Cadet in my teenage years during the 70’s and that doesn’t count for anything. I don’t pretend for one second to be able to read minds. But I do know my history, I do know how to play a mean game of chess, and I can read a topographic map pretty damn good.

I’ve been watching the war from afar. I haven’t been able to comment daily as I’ve been really busy with real revenue generating work instead of blogging. But I have come to one conclusion based on what I’ve seen and what we’ve heard.

It’s all crap.

It’s not the usual bias that I’m complaining about. It's not the usual “reporting news the way they want things to be” as news instead of commentary that is going on.

It’s that I don’t think what is happening – or what is being reported as happening is necessarily what is happening.

Relax for a just second loyal readers, I’m not the "black helicopter" type, that’s not what I’m saying.

Here’s what I’m talking about. When you see news coming from Israel, its censored. That’s a good thing. I support that, its saving lives. When you see news from Beirut, its also censored. It’s also mostly propaganda. It’s a fact. I think were all over the age of 5 here, so I don’t think anyone who reads this blog is going to slap themselves in the head and shout “ Oh say it isn’t so!”

But knowing this simple set of facts, knowing that both sides want to put the best shine on their version of the story at all times, then ask yourself this;

“Why is it that stories coming from Israel this week are so damn pessimistic”?

Israel has press organizations, agents and other people to spin the story. They can put the proper pressure to ensure on the media to ensure that the story is told as close to the way they want it told. Yet, the stories coming from Israel seem to me to be bleak and nasty and full of fear and dissention, almost to the exception of any sort of good news.

Today, my "spider senses" started to twitch when I watched a news story told from a hospital from Israeli troops who had just returned from inside Lebanon. They were talking about the Hezbollah troops like they were 20 feet tall, each of which had 6 popeye sized arms with a .50 caliber machine gun and a full belt of ammo in each oversized hand.

I thought to myself for just a second, this doesn’t feel right. First, the only info that gets out is the info they want out, so why would Israeli government officials be so interested in letting this message get out? These are Israeli troops. These are not European conscripts. These guys know what defeat means. It means they will be feeding their families to the ovens of Hezbollah and the Iranians. They will fight to the death because failure means the end of everything. There is no line of retreat for Israelis. To Israelis there is no honor in losing, just death.

Israelis don’t talk like this in battle…so why are they and more importantly, why are we seeing it?

Shouldn’t the message being sent by the Israelis be “ We’re jubilant, we’re winning, we’re happy joyful fighters protecting our homeland, kicking the crap out of the Arabs again”? We’ve always seen that before haven’t we? even when they faced attacks by big armies from all three sides at once, they were cheery and happy in the face of battle. Defeatism and doubt are not things that you hear from the Israeli army.

Why send or allow to be sent, the exact opposite of that message?

One possibility is that things really are bad. Ok, I can accept that. But are they? Work with me for a second. Let’s ask ourselves the question again in a slightly different way;

“Why would any government be interested in sending a message of their own weakness at the beginning of a shooting war”?

Well, you do it because you want the enemy to commit. You want the enemy to be in the best place for you to deal with them, not in a place where they can defend or they can retreat from.

Many of the key important battles of history have been fought with this basic strategy in mind. You have a line of troops. You skirmish with your enemy for a while and then your lines begin to fall apart in the middle. Your troops in the center of your line begin to retreat. In the heat of battle, your opponent believes that the lines have broken and pours his troops into the now widening gap with the hope of splitting your forces in two.

Your opponent has now committed himself.

The only problem is, the gap in the lines didn’t open because your opponent was beating your troops, the gap opened because your troops maintained the discipline to follow orders.

Your troops in the center fell back because they were ordered to.

What your opponent failed to see was that on each of the “horns of the bull” were reinforcements, horse calvary, heavy shock troops, and more men than he had counted on, hidden on the hills just behind the battlefield. What was once a gap in your line has suddenly turned into a complete envelopment of his troops. Now the troops who he thought were in retreat have stopped, turned and have started killing his army with a vengeance.

There is no way out.

Your opponent made the fatal mistake of seeing only what he wanted to see. He wanted to believe that your army was only as big as what he could see on the battlefield and the gap was exactly what he wanted to see and just the right time. It wasn’t the cleverness of enemy that fooled him; he fooled himself into seeing just what his enemy wanted him to see.

From the moment your enemy committed himself to a reality that didn’t really exist, the battle was over.

216BC: Battle of Cannae - The destruction of a Roman Army by a much smaller force under Carthaginian General Hannibal.

Cannae, Marathon, half a dozen battles from Alexander the Great, even Sitting Bull at the Little Big Horn have used some version of this strategy to destroy an enemy.

The key word here is “destroy”, because I think that’s exactly what Israel is up to. They don’t want to tit-for-tat Hezbollah and its proxy Iran, they wish to destroy it.

In 1982, Israel went into Lebanon but in the way they went about it, they ended up just pushing the enemy north. They paid for that strategy with a long occupation of Southern Lebanon and out of that, the creation of Hezbollah. The enemy was bruised, but it was not destroyed. Once again, the enemy had been allowed to retreat from the battlefield. In the Arab world, this is considered a victory. In the Arab world, what we would consider an outright defeat is considered an honor.

I’m not saying I understand it myself, I’m just saying that our values and theirs don’t line up, so try to look at events of the day through their lens when you interpret what they are doing and why they are doing it. To them, survival alone means they won. Real defeats rarely happen, because when the going gets tough, they just pretend to be civilians and melt into the background and pretend that they were all “saved by Allah”. It would be like fighting the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge, only to have them strip off their uniforms and pretend to be Belgian farmers if they were captured.

I said to myself at the beginning of this action that I would give anything to see a real battlefield defeat, but that it was much more likely that someone would step in at the 11th hour and get a ‘ceasefire” that would once again hand the terrorists a victory and leave the Israelis hollow for their efforts.

But that was 12 days ago, and frankly things certainly appear to have changed. For the first time in my life, Arabs that kill Israelis are not being given the cover of “peace missions” and “cease fire” calls for “dialog” for their actions. Arab terrorists have started a war, and they have for once – gotten exactly that in return. And I have to say as revolting as war is, I find this fact to be downright refreshing. Finally, starting a war has consequences beyond who sits on what side of the negotiation table. Finally starting a war might mean that you will lose! What a concept! (It certainly takes all the fun out of it, doesn’t it? – which is precisely why I think the President is following that idea. Terrorism isn’t any fun if it doesn’t get you what you want, but instead costs you everything you have. The first step towards ending terrorism is to stop making it pay as a strategy for engaging the enemy. )

Oh, and all this noise about "international support for peacekeeping". Uh,huh. Yeah right you betcha. International peacekeeping brigades populated by the ghostly Family Circus Character known as "Not Me".

The trick for the Israelis it seems, is keeping Hezbollah in the right frame of mind. Keep them thinking that they might just beat the Israelis this time. Keep them right up next to the border.

Oh what heroes we will be for fighting the Zionists.
Come a little closer now...
Oh how we will be praised in the capitals of Islam
Come on…
We’ve got them on the run Ali, we only need to push them a little bit harder
Come on sucker, just a little bit more…

Then SNAP! The Israeli trap is slammed shut like the worlds biggest rat trap.

The Israelis have been preparing the battlefield since the very beginning of this action. Don’t for a second start kidding yourself into thinking that they are following some slapdash half assed “ war by a little bit” strategy because they haven’t. Their actions have been taken with the greatest deliberation.

They know exactly what they are doing.

In my opinion, they are going for ‘all the marbles’ this time. Israel cannot and will not accept an enemy on its border that can and will fire missiles into its population. This time they are explosives, what happens when they are chemical and biological weapons?

An enemy that has pledged to commit genocide against them is not someone who any Israeli, or any Jew of any sort is going to negotiate anything with.

If you have been lead into thinking that this is going to be “lost by Israel”, I think you need to pick up a history book and talk to someone, anyone, who is from Israel. If you think that this action is going to lead to some sort of “talk” with Hezbollah or Iran or Syria, well then you’re high and I wouldn’t recommend taking any sort of urine tests any time soon because you won't pass.

It’s my opinion that Israel is in the process of preparing Southern Lebanon for the annihilation of Hezbollah and by that I mean, Iran. Remember what I said last week, Hezbollah is to Iran what the Nazi “Hermann Goering Division” was to the Wehrmacht, it’s a division of fighting troops, that’s all, no more no less. Its not a political party, its not a fraternal insurance organization. They are shock troops for Iran, no more, no less. Hitler and Mussolini had wall sized propaganda posters of themselves overlooking the town squares and the wide support of the populace too. It didn’t stop them from being genocidal monsters. The fact that there are Arabs who admire Hezbollah shouldn’t color anyone’s impression of who they are, what they stand for, and what they intend to do if given the chance.

In my opinion what Israel wants at this point in the war is an overconfident enemy committed to a course of action. They want as many of Hezbollah south of Sidon as is possible, and they want them to bring as much of their resources as they can lay their hands on with them.

Just picture General Custer riding down on the camp at the Little Big Horn saying;

“Come on boys we’ve caught them napping”.

Only this time, The Israelis are the Sioux, and Sheik Hassan Nasrallah is General Custer.

My belief is that the Israelis will strike heavy from the Golan going north at breakneck speed with the largest movement of armor since the 6 Day War. Just prior to that, the Bekaa will be hammered into utter oblivion by the air. I think what we’ve seen so far is small “test” shots to determine targeting information for the area.

Just short of the Bekaa valley, the Israelis will pivot and rapidly move west towards Sidon. They will cut every bridge, every road, every goat path between the south and Sidon. They will let Sidon sit north of their lines. Once the perimeter is complete, once the reach the Mediterranean, where they will be re-supplied by their Navy who will already have established a beachhead for re-supply, they will release troops from the south who will move quickly up the coastline to cut off any remaining retreat into Tyre.

Tyre will be a disaster, but it will also be Hezbollahs grave, just as Beirut was the grave of the PLO.

At this point – I estimate roughly 4 days after the start of the Armored column from the Golan, the end is inevitable. Hezbollah and the world Arab press will scream like banshees at the humanitarian disaster that will be Southern Lebanon, but what they really mean is once again an Arab army is being defeated wholesale by the hated Zionists.

Once the Israeli tanks move north in large numbers, we will know that the end for Hezbollah is only 7 to 14 days away. I think Israel will be near Bekaa before most people figure out what’s going on and by then it will be too late to do anything about it.

There will be no “cease fire” this time. There will be no retreat to save the honor of the Arabs this time. Those that think that Israel is going to lose, or that Israel looks weak or any of you other “armchair generals” who think that Israel is a spent force and isn’t quite as good as the Armies of the 1960’s and the 1970’s, I must now remind you of something that many people seem to have forgotten about the Israelis.

You see, the other side in this war has promised genocide for Israel. Israelis have historically had but one thing to say to anyone who ever says such a thing;

“Never again”...

In war, things are never quite as they appear to be. Pay close attention, but remember that everything you see happening is not necessarily what is going on.

UPDATE: A Good Question! – “What about Syria?”

In one of the most interesting and underreported events of this war is the apparently complete lack of reports of any movements of Syrian army or air force units. Early in the war, Israel flew directly over President Assads house.

Ok, let me repeat that in case you weren’t paying attention.

An Air Force from a neighboring nation with a long history of fighting your nation flew over your capital and the home of the leader of your country.

Your air defense systems were unable to detect their presence or stop them once they were detected. They came in, did what they wanted, and left the area unopposed.

This despite your investing in lots and lots of these:

SA-2 Site just outside of Damascus (Photo appears courtesy Google Earth)

What conclusion can we draw from this little display of airpower by the Israeli Air Force?

The Israeli Air Force has already established, not “air superiority”, but “air dominance”. It’s my belief that the Syrians dare not move any of their key military assets into anything that could be considered a threat to Israel. No tanks, no aircraft, artillery or troops movements that could possibly be “misinterpreted” or they will be smashed to bits in a matter of hours.

Now, given these conditions, let’s say you’re President Assad and you wake up one day to hear that the Israelis have a massive column of armor speeding up to the Bekaa. At the same time you find out that the Bekaa Valley is under a huge air assault and you are not able to communicate with any of your assets in the area.

At that moment the phone rings, and it’s the Israeli ambassador sitting in the office of the Syrian Ambassador. He informs you that the Israeli Army is moving towards the Bekaa and once they reach it, they will stop and begin to move to the coast of Lebanon. However, if Syria moves its troops or does anything at all to transform the battlefield, Israel is also prepared to move on to Damascus.

So, do you sit tight, essentially cut the Hezbollah and the Iranians loose? Or invite Israel to invade your capital city?

My guess is you will sit tight. Iran will scream, but there’s almost nothing that they can do about it. That occasional glint of aluminum that you see out of the corner of your eye at high altitude above your Capital is a reminder that the Israelis can go where they please and do what they please.

Now, when you see headlines of “Arab nations line up in support of Hezbollah” start asking yourself “ and where are the troops, supplies and ammunition from these friends of Hezbollah”?

Egypt has an Army, a great big one. It shares a border with Israel. Have they moved any assets? Nope. Called up reserves? Nope. How about Jordan? No movement that I can see. How about Turkey? Nope. Nothing going on there. Saudi Arabia? Big Air Force – could come in handy against Israel. Not so much as a “Notice To Airmen” regarding military operations in the Hejaz.

Everyone just loves the self sacrificing Hezbollah, but when the bill comes to the table, everyone is in the bathroom. Oh sure, the members of the Arab league wave their arms around like a lawn sprinklers in support of their poor picked on Arab brothers, but no one has moved a tank, ship, aircraft or organized army unit in support of poor little Hezbollah.

In fact, I was never so sure that Hezbollah was doomed than when everyone suddenly unified behind them in support, yet, no one moved a single military asset to support Hezbollah...

I think that speaks volumes.

UPDATE II: Comments are off. Apparently some people feel that pessimism is the sign of sophisticated thinking and any sign of optimism is a sign of mental disease. Apparently my saying that the "Israelis will win" is considered just too controversial for some people. I've said it before and i'll say it again. This is not a message board, its a blog. It's not your blog, it's my blog. It is not a public utility. You dont like what I write, then dont read it. It's a big blog world, I'm sure you will find another blog that fufills your fantasy of israel losing somewhere else, you wont find it here.

Posted @ July 28, 2006 11:38 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (31)

A Fletcher Comes Home

Apparently there is another Fletcher Class Destroyer coming home.

The old man would've really dug this.

Posted @ July 25, 2006 01:09 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

A Call for Podcast: The World At War

During the 1970's Thames Television produced one of the best documentaries of the World War II era. Narrated by Laurence Olivier, it explains in detail, the how, why, who and when of what happened in World War II. The best thing about the show is the documentary uses many of the people who were actually in the actions described in the episodes. For example, when they talk about Operation Market Garden, they have General Horrocks their to explain it to you.

A Man whos been there - Camera on face - Words from the man whos been there and the look in his eyes when he remembers. It was just as simple as that, with guiding narration from Olivier himself.

This documentary explains the utter horror that was faced by that generation in the clearest yet deeply emotional terms I've ever seen. It was produced in the 1970's and yet it hasnt aged, or become hokey. In my opinion, there has never been a better job done with the material.

This documentary is just staggering in its presentation of "The World at War" and how it changed all of our lives.

If you havent seen it, run - do not walk to the nearest bookstore to get a copy, or put it in your netflix queue. I guarantee you will not be disappointed. I do not recommend you watch it with kids under 15, but I do recommend it as "required viewing" for every kid over 15.

The other day I found myself watching an episode of this show and thinking that it might be time for a "World At War" Podcast, updated for "our war". A New documentary done in the same fashion, describing in the same sort of detail how all of this all came about. Downloadable episodes of 20 minutes in length that cover how the war on terror started, the major actions so far, interviews with the major players. The Thames' "World at War" provides the perfect template for what the podcast could be.

I think there is a serious risk in today's world of forgetting just how this all came about. It might be time for a budding historian or journalist to start to document what this all was about before we all forget.

Posted @ July 24, 2006 01:27 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

If Kerry was The President...

If John Kerry was the President

"We'd all be singing showtunes!"

If John Kerry was the President

"This would be an ice cream truck, and we would each have a dollar"

If John Kerry was the President

"This would be an Onion Headline Parody, instead of the real thing"

If John Kerry was the President

"These vests would carry twinkies instead of explosives"

Sorry Mr. Kerry, It's just a shame all this democracy stuff had to get in the way of such pretty picture.

Posted @ July 24, 2006 10:02 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

NATO in Lebanon?

From Reuters:

"The United States is open to a NATO-led force keeping the peace on Lebanon's southern border with Israel, although using U.S. forces has not been discussed, a senior Bush administration official said on Sunday.

Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz said his country could accept a NATO peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon to ensure Hizbollah is removed from the border. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had earlier said calls for an international force were premature.

"It's a new idea, we'll certainly take it seriously," John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in a taped interview with CNN's "Late Edition."

"We have been looking carefully at a multinational force perhaps authorized by the Security Council, but not a U.N.-helmeted force," he said.

It's not quite "Israel joins NATO..." but its getting closer.

Posted @ July 23, 2006 02:08 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

North Korea condemns Enterprise’s port call in South

From Navy Times, the North Koreans React to the arrival of the Enterprise"

"The army and people of the north will strongly react to the dangerous moves of the U.S. and its allies for a war of aggression against it with its deterrent for self-defense,” the country’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland said in a statement."

The North Korean Navy could not be reached for comment.

Posted @ July 21, 2006 10:09 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Enterprise: "Ready on Arrival"

The USS Enterprise, a U.S. Atlantic Fleet aircraft carrier, steamed into the Asia-Pacific region for the first time in 17 years earlier this month. The Norfolk based Enterprise last traveled to Pacific waters in 1989. The last US Carrier to visit a South Korean port was the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, which pulled into Pusan in March 2004.

For recent US carrier activity - Please see the Valiant Shield Exercise.

USS Enterprise left the Persian Gulf on June 6th to become part of the US Navy 7th Fleet. The ships motto is "Ready on Arrival".( Boy, there sure is alot of carriers in the Pacific all of a sudden...)

Posted @ July 20, 2006 09:21 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Have you hugged your Hummer Today?

From Reason.org

Quote:

"What's particularly interesting is that individual consumers are defying all expectations and turning their backs on hybrids at a time when gas prices are soaring. (The average U.S. retail price of gas spiked to a record high of $3.01 last September following hurricane Katrina, and just last week it hit its second highest price ever at nearly $3.00.) Nor is the reason all that mysterious. Spinella's customer satisfaction surveys show that 62 percent of hybrid owners are dissatisfied with the fuel-economy performance of their cars given what they have paid for them.

This means that when gas prices go up, these people don't rush out to buy more hybrids. "They buy a Chevy Aveo," says Spinella. "It delivers the same fuel economy as a Prius, but at half the price."

snip...

But despite all these drawbacks, hybrids are at least better for the environment than say….. a Hummer, right? Nope.

Spinella spent two years on the most comprehensive study to date – dubbed "Dust to Dust" -- collecting data on the energy necessary to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a car from the initial conception to scrappage. He even included in the study such minutia as plant-to-dealer fuel costs of each vehicle, employee driving distances, and electricity usage per pound of material. All this data was then boiled down to an "energy cost per mile" figure for each car.

Comparing this data, the study concludes that overall hybrids cost more in terms of overall energy consumed than comparable non-hybrid vehicles. But even more surprising, smaller hybrids' energy costs are greater than many large, non-hybrid SUVs.

My reaction? Bwhahahahahah! So go read the whole thing...

Posted @ July 20, 2006 11:38 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Proportional Response

US Marine Corp Barracks (Beirut) October 23, 1983.

In the last few days the call we’ve seen the rise of a new phenomenon in the world press. Israel is not being criticized for its need to attack Hezbollah, but rather that it needs to take a “proportional response” to the attacks.

Let me just say this about that. Oh, and if your kids read this blog or if you are sensitive to language of the nautical culture in which I was raised, please move your browser ahead past the next paragraph.

I'm afraid it’s going to get a little salty.

Ok, kids out of the room? Fine. So here goes.

Of all the chickensh*t moronic crap ideas that the left has ever shoveled out of its half mad henhouse of illogical nonsense and somnambulic concepts that make up most of what serves as the core of what is known as “leftists idealism” I have never – EVER – heard anything so damn head-up-your-a** dumb in all my life.

And I know from chickenshit moronic crap. Ive seen it shoveled by the very best in the business. And I’ve lived through Carter, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry and Dean, but this is just beyond the pale.

Ok, the kids can come back in now.

Proportional response? PROPORTIONAL RESPONSE?

Do you have any idea who it is we are talking about here? Hezbollah. HEZBOLLAH. This is not the ‘Jaycees of Lebanon’ you wet-noodle dope smoking freaks. These are murdering bloodthrirsty and I do mean BLOODTHIRSTY thugs. You notice al-Qaeda hasn’t spoke a word in support of these corpse loving, coprophagic freaks? That’s because they are too far out even for good old Osama himself. Even that freak has standards and these guys aren’t on even their mailing lists for his annual holiday Ramadan Cards.

Compared to Hassan Nasrallah, Osama is like Barney Fife.

You do not set terms of moral authority with these animals to those of us in the West who love life and human diversity. You do not talk to their “Press attaché” like they were just some local political party.

Are you out of your mind CNN? What next? Are we going to see CNN meet with the “Charles Manson press attaché” so they can take us through the Sharon Tate murder site so the “press attaché” can tell us it was really just a poorly interpreted piece of performance art that was interrupted by the mean old police, and that the phrase “kill the pigs” is just a result of years of police brutality.

Oh if only the mean old police would learn to love the murdering hippies there would be 'peace on earth' now wouldn’t there?

Proportional Response? Hezbollah is firing missiles into civilian populace across an internationally recognized and maintained border. Hezbollah is killing people in a sovereign UN nation, not that anyone cares. Hezbollah is capturing uniformed soldiers of an organized Army, and violating the Geneva Convention, again not that anyone cares.

And who is it who is calling for a “Cease Fire’? That’s right the same animals who’ve started the war, the same ones who are calling for the destruction of Israel out of one side of their mouths are saying “ oh please don’t hurt us” out of the other. “Oh the poor little things, how could Israel just pop up all of a sudden and attack those nice little misunderstood people” seems to be what the press undercurrent is in their coverage of this little event.

Maybe, just maybe people should consider that Israel is fully aware of who these animals are and just what they want to do.

Yet somehow, Israel is always supposed to be the ‘adult in the room’. Somehow the teensy weensy little old political parties who just want what’s right for their families are always just like poorly misunderstood kids who soaped a few car windows or tied a tin can to the cat’s tail. Precocious little scamps, they just have bingo games at the mosque on Fridays, they are beloved by the people, they only want to negotiate with Israel for the return of what is rightfully theirs, right?

I do not know what it is, but there is some collective loss of memory on just who Hezbollah is. Hezbollah is Iran. Iran is Hezbollah. Hezbollah is to Iran what the Nazi “Das Reich’ Division was to the Wehrmact. Get this through your heads CNN, Helen Thomas, Patrick J. Buchanan - Israel DOES NOT BORDER IRAN! IRAN HAS HAD NO CLAIM ON WHAT IS TODAY ISRAEL, SINCE CYRUS THE GREAT!

Hezbollah had to INVADE another country just to be able to fight with Israel! They now control the lower half of that country. That country, is the poor people of Lebanon who had managed to live in peace with the Israeli neighbors, until they were chewed into paste by their lovely Arab brothers who turned it into a charnel house instead of what was once the “Paris of the Mediterranean’.

And when you and your goat humping, three fingered leaders go screaming at the camera and get all hot and bothered by “occupation” why don’t any of you talk about the occupation of Lebanon by Syria and Hezbollah?

Oh yeah, “inconvenient fact”. Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to point out that you were the very worst sort of propagandistic genocidal maniacs.

Wait! that’s not true, that’s EXACTLY what I wanted to do.

Instead of chastising Israel, we should be sending them more arms! We should provide them satellite photos of Syrian tanks, overlaid with graphics that say; “ hit me” on top of each one.

We should thank the Israelis. Not because the Israelis are fighting their enemy, but because Hezbollah – Iran – is and has always been our enemy too!

Hezbollah has killed, and continues to kill Americans. Hezbollah makes no bones about calling us their enemy. Yet, despite all they have done, we continue to look the other way.

So get this through your head;

Hezbollah is like Al-Qaeda, only Hezbollah has a sponsor. It has Iran, it has Syria. Hezbollah is what Al-Qaeda would be if we would have stayed out of Afghanistan. Hezbollah is what Al-Queda would be in Iraq if we had stayed out of there too. Hezbollah is the very definition of State sponsored terrorism. Given the chance, Hezbollah what every terror group hopes to be. Free to move at will, given cover by the local population, who they promptly use as human shields, free to extort the host government for cover from the intrusive international government law enforcement.

Imagine Charles Manson and his gang, The Baader-meinhof gang, The IRA, the Weather Underground, the KKK, the Nazi Party and the “Peoples Temple” all being gathered together. Now, feed them a solid diet of meth and put them in an isolated desert camp for 30 years.

That’s Hezbollah.

Now, some jackass decides to give them a warehouse of Katushya missiles and tells them that all their problems will be solved when you and your neighborhood are removed from the earth.

When this starts to happen, are you going to act “Proportionally” in response? As in, just sit around and do nothing while these animals fire rockets loaded with large caliber buckshot into your kid’s playground? Your grocery store? Your home?

They dont want to negotiate - they want you dead. Theres no peace treaty, theres no trade route to give them, no "common ground" unless its your grave. Thats all they want. You and your family - dead.

The only possible sane act for a decent person to take, the only act that any person interested in justice and peace could consider is to do whatever it takes to end this threat to life and civilization.

Missiles are not forms of protest, they are weapons of war. No more – no less.

Before I conclude this particular screed, I wish to leave behind a sort of ‘Devils Resume’ for Hezbollah for those of you who don’t remember who these animals are. These people are our enemies, not because we choose them to be, but because they have already been killing us for some time. Just to put us all in the proper frame of mind when we hear the worlds “Hezbollah”, I think its time to review their actions towards, not Israelis, but Americans.

This is what Hezbollah has done to us. I can assure you, what they have done to the Israelis is far, far worse. I’ve gathered this information from Wikipedia, and various news sources. These sources go into much more detail on each of these subjects. I’ve simply compiled the list on this post to make it easier to follow for the subject at hand.

Terry Anderson

On March 16, 1985, Anderson had just finished a tennis game when he was abducted from the street in Beirut, placed in the trunk of a car and taken to a secret location where he was imprisoned. For the next six years and nine months he was held captive, being moved periodically to new sites. His captors were Hezbollah.

He filed suit against the Iranian government for his captivity, and in 2002 was awarded a multimillion dollar settlement from frozen Iranian assets since it was the finding of the court that Hezbollah was an entity of the Iranian Government.

Thomas Sutherland

He was the second-longest held captive after Terry Anderson. By the time of his release on November 18, 1991 at the same time as Terry Waite, he had been held hostage for 2354 days. His memories of the experience have been published through his book entitled ‘At Your Own Risk’ which was co-authored by his wife Jean. He claims to have attempted suicide a number of times and to have spent a substantial amount of time in solitary confinement.

In June 2001, the Sutherland family won a $353 million verdict in a lawsuit against the government of Iran.

Father Lawrence Jenco

Was taken hostage in Beirut by Hezbollah in January 1985, while serving as director of Catholic Relief Services there. He was held for 564 days before being released and allowed to return to the United States.

He was held for 564 days before being released and allowed to return to the United States.

He spent much of his time chained and blindfolded, and was allowed to use the toilet only once a day. Fr. Jenco suffered serious eye infections and other health problems as a result of his captivity. In changing from one hiding place to another, he was bound with tape and placed in stifling hiding places in trucks, lest he be found by soldiers or police inspecting a vehicle. He also suffered beatings by the guards.

After his death, federal judge Royce C. Lamberth awarded the estate and family of Rev. Lawrence Jenco $314.6 million in damages from Iran for the 18 months he was held hostage in Lebanon in the mid-1980s. The ruling includes $14.6 million in compensatory damages to Jenco and his six siblings or their estates and $300 million in punitive damages. Jenco "was treated little better than a caged animal" said Lamberth in his ruling, which laid the blame upon the Iranian government. The Iranian government defaulted on the lawsuit, declining to answer any of the allegations.

Robert Stethem

Petty Officer Robert Stethem (November 17, 1961 – June 15, 1985) was a United States Navy diver and Steelworker Second Class. He was killed after the commercial airliner he was aboard, TWA Flight 847, was hijacked. In the Navy, he was assigned to the Navy Underwater Construction Team No. 1 at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia. He was returning from an assignment in Nea Makri, Greece aboard TWA Flight 847 when it was hijacked by members of the Lebanese political and terror organization Hizbullah. They demanded the release of 435 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

When their demands were not met, Stethem was singled out. The hijackers learned he was a member of the U.S. military. They beat him with a chair leg. Then they shot him and dumped his body on the tarmac at the Beirut airport.

Mohammed Ali Hamadi of Hezbollah was convicted in 1989 in Germany for the beating and shooting of Robert Stethem. On December 20, 2005 Hamadi was released and allowed to return to his native Lebanon on the following day. The German government has denied there was any link between Hamadi's release and the freeing of Suzanne Osthoff, a German archaeologist, the week after his release.

William Richard "Rich" Higgins (January 15, 1945 – July 6, 1990) was a United States Marine Corps colonel.

On February 17, 1988, Higgins was captured and held hostage by Hezbollah while he was serving on a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. He was killed on or before July 6, 1990.

William Francis Buckley (May 30, 1928 – June 3, 1985) was a U.S. Army officer and intelligence agency operative. He was kidnapped by the Islamist group Hezbollah on March 16, 1984, while serving as CIA station chief in Beirut, Lebanon, and was subject to torture and interrogation at the hands of his captors for 444 days; the man overseeing his torture was Imad Mugniyah, a former leader of Hezbollah. Buckley was eventually smuggled to Tehran via Damascus aboard an Iranian plane. He died in captivity in Beirut after illness and torture.

One of his tormentors during his time with Hezbollah was Aziz al-Abub who was a Hezbollah psychiatrist and mind control expert. Aziz was a graduate of the Soviet Union's People's Friendship University. Aziz al-Abub used drugs and physical torture on hostage William Buckley over his captivity.

US Marine Barracks Beirut

On October 23, 1983, around 6:20 am, a yellow Mercedes-Benz delivery truck drove to Beirut International Airport, where the 1st Battalion 8th Marines, under the U.S. 2nd Marine Division of the United States Marines, had set up its local headquarters. The truck turned onto an access road leading to the Marines' compound and circled a parking lot. The driver then accelerated and crashed through a barbed wire fence around the parking lot, passed between two sentry posts, crashed through a gate and barreled into the lobby of the Marine headquarters. The Marine sentries at the gate had loaded pistols but were not able to stop the driver even though they shot at him. According to one Marine, the driver was smiling as he sped past him.

The suicide bomber detonated his explosives, which were equivalent to 12,000 pounds (about 5,400kg) of TNT. The force of the explosion collapsed the four-story cinder-block building into rubble, crushing many inside. The death toll was 241 American servicemen: 220 Marines, 18 Navy personnel and 3 Army soldiers. Sixty Americans were injured.

In May 2003, US District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth declared that the Islamic Republic of Iran was responsible for the 1983 attack, on the grounds that Iran had originally founded Hezbollah and financed the group throughout the years

French Parachute Barracks Beirut

About 20 seconds later from the attack on the US Marine Barracks, an identical attack occurred against the barracks of the French Third Company of the Sixth French Parachute Infantry Regiment. Another suicide bomber drove his truck down a ramp into the building's underground parking garage and detonated his bomb, leveling the headquarters. In the attack on the French barracks, 58 paratroopers were killed and 15 injured

Proportional response? Based on these items and many many more just like them, we are way behind our quota in the removal of Hezbollah and its Iranian zookeepers. Proportional to me means weve got a lot of work to do in killing Hezbollah. Thats not what people mean when the say "proportional" but thats what I take away from it.

You can do what you want, but for me, I stand with Isreal.

Posted @ July 19, 2006 08:45 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

What the US State Department should say in response

Iran's Hizbollah says ready to attack US, Israel says Reuters.

The United States should respond - today - with the following public statement.

" The United States will interpret any threat or attack by Hizbollah on the United States or its interests as a direct attack on the United States by the Government of Iran".

When even Reuters understands that Hizbollah is "Iran's pet", whats the benefit of contining the "Kabuki dance" of pretending they are not what they are?

Let's wait and see what really happens...

Posted @ July 18, 2006 02:16 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

The Defeat of Iran in Lebanon

For the second straight week Iranian troops have failed to secure a breakout in the Southern Lebanon Theater in its war against Israel. The Iranian armed forces inability to secure air supremacy in the Southern Lebanon sector of the war has doomed thousands of its ground troops to a certain death at the hands of the superior Israeli forces who are operating virtually unimpeded from their bases in Israel. Israeli forces have now either destroyed or secured all the key re-supply locations into Lebanon from sea and land, leaving Iranian troops operating in Southern Lebanon without hope of rescue. Israeli Artillery units operating on the border continue to use counter-battery strategies against the launch of the highly inaccurate and ineffective World War II Russian Katushya rockets. While Iran has fired a high number of missiles, they have produced almost no results, while Israel has pounded the Iranian armed forces daily, removing nearly 55% of Iranian ground forces without the use of Israeli ground troops.

Iranian troops, who have previously used the local Lebanese population as human shields have found this strategy less than effective since the start of the war due to the local Lebanese population evacuating the area for territories to the north that are out of the control of Iran. While Iran continues to use civilian hospitals and homes as cover for its missile batteries, this strategy has not deterred the Israelis from attacking and destroying a large number of the these sites. It appears that Iran committed a strategic mistake by not bringing any form of Anti-Aircraft systems with its troops into Southern Lebanon.

As Israel has continued to call up its reserves and stage the vast supplies necessary for preparation of a new ground initiative in Lebanon which will be used to separate the Iranian troops from their safe havens in Syria, neither Iran or Syria have been able to offer any strategic force or method to stop what is certain to be a solid defeat of the Iranian initiatives in Southern Lebanon.

It appears that once again the Arab world is about to suffer from another humiliating military defeat at the hands of the Israelis. Incompetence in Iranian military and civilian leadership and its armed force made incapable of dealing with the modern battlefield tactics when placed against the competent and determined forces of Israel appear to have dashed the dreams of the Iranian government in its long standing desire to confront and destroy Israel.

Since the start of the Iranian adventure in Lebanon, Arab and Muslim governments around the world have worked to distance themselves from the latest Persian attempt to unify the Muslim world behind the banner of war against Israel. In one shocking example of a lack of Arab Muslim unity, Al-queda spokesman have refused to to support the aims of the Iranians. Since the start of the Iranian adventure, Al-queda spokesman have remained strangely silent in the Arab press. This latest Iranian effort at Muslim unity appears to have backfired badly as no government in the region has agreed to support or give sympathy for the Iranian adventure. No government has agreed to supply troops or supplies to Iran, Lebanon or Syria in what can only be called a clear rebuke to the Iranian initiative. One unintended effect of this war is that stock markets throughout the Persian Gulf region have fallen drastically, causing no end of bad will in the governments that sit just across the waterway from Iran.

Once again the spectral headline images of defeated Arab troops throwing off their uniforms and melting in with the local populace looms large in the minds of Muslims around the world.

Unlike the wars of the 1960’s and the 1970’s, it does not appear that there will be any “Cease Fire” to save Arab honor from disaster. In this war, the United States and the United Nations seem prepared to take the actions necessary to ensure the defeat of Iran and Syria by Israel in Southern Lebanon.

Posted @ July 18, 2006 10:17 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Australia Deploys Weapon of Mass Destruction

The cruel and evil Aussie bastards have deployed the most venal, evil and crippling Weapon of Mass Distruction known to mankind.

Have they no honor?

The horror, the horror....

How long until this horrible weapon falls into the hands of al-queda?

How long until Kim il-Jong is throwing this weapon across the DMZ into South Korea, sending waves of humanity running and shreiking in panic?

Its time to have another Geneva convention. This weapon must be brought under control.

Posted @ July 17, 2006 10:29 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

OpFor: Prepping the Battlespace

I completely concur with this assessment by Opfor.

In warfare, most of the time you try to create a situation where the enemy can leave the battlefield. Its easier to fight people who are on the run than if they are in entrenched defended location. In this case however it appears the Israelis are creating the conditions to keep Hezbollah right where they are at. I think this is for two purposes. First, if you remember the last time the Israelis went into Lebanon, they rolled up the PLO pretty quick, but then the world stepped in and gave the PLO exile elsewhere. I dont think the Israelis are going to let this happen again. With the current actions by Israel, even if you wanted to give exile to Hezbollah, there would be no way to make it happen. I think that is a large part of their intent.Second, I think the Israelis, unlike the rest of the Arab world, realize that the cold war is over and the worry of the middle eastern brushfire starting a bigger war between the US and the Soviet Union is no longer a throttling factor. Fundametally, Iran and Hezbollah have made a serious error by saying that this is a war, because for the first time in a very long time, the Israelis can give them one, and they are doing just that. Unlike our Armed Forces, the Israelis arent looking for peace, they are looking for victory.

I think we are within 72 hours of an outright lightning speed invasion of southern Lebanon. Watch for heavy airstrikes in the Bekka valley in the 12 hours prior and for word of more Israeli reserves being called up. I think that the Iranian anti-shipping cruise missiles have put a serious crimp in the plan, but I suspect they will also be dealt with shortly.

I do not rule out attacks on Syrian airfields in the next two days. Israel must remove any hope of resupply from Iran and the only way to do that now is by air from Syria.

My only prediction at this time is that no matter how bad this gets, Israel will still be here when its over but I have my doubts about Syria and Hezbollah. Iran has moved its pawn out into the field and I think the Israelis are about to chop it off.

This time, there will be no face saving "Cease fire" to save the Arabs from defeat. This is going to get alot worse before it gets better.

Posted @ July 16, 2006 06:32 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Thank you for delaying my flight

I've just returned from the second of what will be eleven trips this summer as I complete this years "Meatgrider" project.

Theres a show called "Airline" which gives a real life view of what its like on the ground for people working for or flying on Southwest Airlines. One of the most common things you see on the show are passengers in the process of screaming at the Southwest staff for some problem in scheduling, 98% of which are caused by the passenger themselves. Since I travel a great deal, and I often travel on Southwest, people often ask me what I think about that strategy. My feeling is that it doesnt help to yell at the staff. It really doesnt, it may make you feel better but it really doesnt change anything. Stomp your feet, get angry, yell and scream all you want, not much is going to change as a result. It may actually make things worse.

On this trip I got to witness this revolting human behavior first hand. I was scheduled for a connecting flight through Denver, when just as we were boarding the aircraft, the flight crew stopped the boarding process and said they had a problem that required a "safety check". Well I know what that means, it means that in the pre-flight inspection check of the aircraft by the flight crew, one of the flight crew found something that could possibly be a problem. I'm ok with that, I'd much rather have a problem found on the ground than a problem found in mid air. If you find a problem on the ground, its usually fixable. If you find it in mid air, the NTSB will usually notify your survivors of what the problem was that caused you to depart this mortal coil.

So there we stood waiting to board for all of about 20 minutes when it started. The "it" being the moans, groans wingeing and whining. This didnt end for almost 12 hours. I was standing next to a lady who was carrying a dog on the flight. You know the type of dog I'm talking about, a little yappy white haired dog that fits in carry on bag. and you know what they say about dogs and their owners and how they start too look alike, well its true! She starts carrying on about how shes going to miss her connection and that simple thought starts to carry through the crowd like a virus. At the 20 minute mark the cell phones begin to open and conversations start about how "this crappy airline" has brought western civilization to an end. Mind you, the airline, the crew and the desk agents have performed, in my opinion, perfectly. The flight crew has recognized a potentially deadly problem with the aircraft and have called in the mechanincs to look at it. The desk agents have told us exactly what is going on, and they've begun the process of putting people on other flights on other airlines. The desk agents didnt break the plane, the desk agents havent lied. So far, all that has happened is that weve been delayed for 20 minutes.

But at the 20 minute delay point, people are starting to scream at the staff. and when I say "scream" I mean just that. Papers are flying, accusations are being made, people are banging on the windows, all that unpleasant mob mentality stuff. I'm completly embarrased by the displays of emotion over what is a simple and easily addressed problem. I feel sorry for the guy who is going to miss his wedding rehearsal, but I think missing a wedding reheasal is a minor inconvience compared to having youre fiance have to plan your funeral because you died in a plane crash.

Sometimes I think people forget that air travel is a miracle. It may seem like it sometimes, but it is not the cross town bus.

So what am I doing while all this is going on? Well I'm waiting quietly and staying out of the way. I'm not changing my flight, I'm not screaming at the staff. It's not because I'm not going to miss my flight - I will. Its not becuase I dont care - I do. It's because it doesnt help - It doesnt help me, and it doesnt help the staff or the flight crew. The problem will sort itself out. If its cancelled, I will be rescheduled. I have the 800 phone line to United and I know how to use a phone. I know the options in and out of my little regional airport. I know that United is not going to fly a Lear Jet just to get me where I want to go. There are 100,000 people flying United today. I'm just one of those people.

But here's the real reason I am taking a position of peaceful zen like quietness. I want a flight crew who takes the time and effort to look at information and make clear headed decisions about whether we should fly or not. I do not want to help create conditions where the flight crew or the company feel pressure to fly when they probably shouldnt be.

It's not engine failure or bad aircaft designs that kill passengers and flight crews on aircraft but "Gotta-get-there-itis". This easily preventable disease is still the biggest killer of flight crews and passengers in the world, and its the passengers and the pressures they put on flight crews to "get there" that serve as one of the root causes to this horrible disease.

In my case, the flight crew of this particular United flight noticed a small hydraulic leak on the verticle stablizer. No big deal you say? Well commercial jets dont fly so hot without working hydraulic systems. (Remember this?)

They could have ignored it, its just a small spot of fluid, they could've come from anywhere (C'mon man, we gotta get going, dont worry about that little thing...You can almost hear the thoughts run through the flight officers head cant you...). The fact is, they chose not to and I want to encourage that sort of thing. It makes me, as a frequent flyer feel much better knowing that the standard for pre flight aircraft inspection is "safety" not a whole host of passenger " I missed my connection" concerns or people calling from the home office telling the pilot to look the other way because the passengers are screaming to get the plane off the ground and "granny fatpants" is going to miss her Square Dance at the local Temperance Hall on Saturday.

I'd much rather be inconvenienced by a delay, than dead from a bad decision. For me what matters is safety above all. The emphasis for scheduling is up to me. If I'm flying on a tight schedule and the schedule doesnt work, its ok, most of the schedule is out of my control. If its within my control to change my schedule by flying with fewer stopovers or with bigger layover windows, or heaven forbid - early, I do it. If I dont have those options, well I take the chance that a simple delay could blow the whole trip. It does happen, but its not the worst thing in the world. This is the worst thing in the world. I missed this flight because I was stuck in a meeting that went long. One of my coworkers managed to catch it. He was interested in getting home for his kids first Halloween.

He didnt make it.

Under no circumstances do I want the airline to take risks with a flight just to keep me happy. Get me where I want to go in good health, thats all I ask. The schedule I'm trying to keep and my place in it is entirely up to me.

This flight was delayed for 8 hours. The aircraft was taken out of service and replaced by another 757. We arrived at Denver, not at 3:30 in the afternoon, but at 11:30 at night.

United put us up in a hotel in Denver. The hotel planned ahead for arrival since room service would be closed by the time we arrived and they prepared box lunches for us to eat. The shuttle bus picked us up the next morning and I was delayed from my original mission for all of 4 hours, since I arrived at work in Austin at a little after noon rather than at 8:30 in the morning. In the end it was no big deal.

But for some people, the miracle of modern commercial flight is not enough. Through this entire flight, the waiting for the flight to leave, the customer service desk in Denver, the ride from the airport to the hotel, and the shuttle bus back to the airport the next morning, I was stuck with the biggest bunch of whining crybabies I've ever seen. Though the entire experience, people where whailing and whining and carring on like this was the evacuation of Saigon and we were on the last helicopter off the roof.

While we were in line at the customer service desk in Denver waiting to be issued our hotel tickets, several people from my flight were screaming at the staff, since they were certain that the airline wasnt going to help them with a hotel.

They screamed at the shuttle bus driver in Denver because he was waiting for other passengers on the flight.

They screamed at the hotel desk because room service was over at 11:00 and it was 11:30.

They screamed again at the shuttle bus driver the next morning when we were stopped in traffic for all of 2 minutes. ( oh the horror, the horror...)

No matter how much the United staff tried to convince these people that they would get a hotel and that they were being taken care of, they could not be assuaged. They were angry and they wanted their pound of flesh. Me? I got in line, said a polite hello to the agent, announced my flight number. I promptly got my hotel ticket and a set of instructions for how to get on the shuttle bus, said a thank you to the staff in return and went merilly on my way. I was in and out in a flash, while there were atleast 30 people from my flight still screaming that what I had just accomplised could not have occured.

I slept like a baby at the hotel, knowing that had a man who I didnt know, a complete professional, who while inspecting the aircraft before the flight looked at a small spot of hydraulic fluid on the tarmac and them looked up to see it dripping down from the rear fuselage. He then called the mechanics, who removed an inspection plate on the stabilizer. What they found was a hydraulic actuator for the aircraft rudder that had sheared off completely from the hydraulic line, the break caused the fluid to fill the internal spaces of the stablizer. A small spot of which had fallen to the ground with a splat. In doing so, it managed to catch the attention of the anonymous flight crew, who could have looked the other way, but didn't.

Yet my fellow passengers chose instead to stand and argue insisting all the time that the airline was not helping them and that they had in fact stranded them mercilessly to the indiginty of sleeping at the airport. Yet, no such thing was true or even close to it. They had a hotel, the airline was paying for it, and that all had been prearrainged for their impromptu overnight stay. The hotel had also taken the extraordinary step of preparing meals in advance of our arrival. Yet it didnt matter to these people. Once you go to "angry mode", theres nothing an airline or anyone else can do to bring you back into the fold.

In my mind, the airline had perfomed very well. A problem occured, and they dealt with it honestly and with professionalism. The same could not be said of the passengers.

In my mind I can see that there are 300 familes of passengers and about 7 flight crew families who are not planning funerals this weekend. The fact that the alternative to this disaster was a small unplanned overnight stop in Denver, just doesnt measure up as something to complain about.

So I say "Thank You" to United Airlines for delaying my flight. I'm alive today because of the professionalism of your flight crews and your airline and I want to thank you for the work you and your crews and staff do on a daily basis.

I appreciate your professionalism.

UPDATE: One of my coworkers just reminded me that when we are onsite on difficult projects, we always ask each other "whos the Patroni"? Whats a "Patroni" you ask? Well, in the movie "Airport", George Kennedy plays a character named "Joe Patroni". Joe Patroni is the "go to" guy for the whole airport and airline who makes airplanes stand up and bark and basically doesnt give a damn about anything or anyone except the job at hand. Every project has a "Patroni" and since today is also Boeings Birthday, and the post is about someone who "pulled a Patroni" I figure its worth giving him a graphic at the top of the post.

Happy Birthday Boeing! And thanks for all the hard work all you "Patronis" do out there.

Posted @ July 16, 2006 10:05 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (24)

Castros Buys Farm?

El Commandante taking "The Big Sleep"?
Is El Jefe on The Night Train to "The Big Adios"?
Is Fidelito taking a little "Dirt Nap"?
Is El Grande Borracho being "Planted in a wooden Overcoat"?

The Great Babalu is picking up "that certain noise". Apparently its been reported in Venezuela as fact...

Stay Tuned...

If its true ( and man I sure as hell hope so!) - I'll have a bad hangover scheduled for Saturday, so I'll need to start drinking heavily now.

oh please, oh please, oh please I really hope this is true. and lets hope the end was painful too...

Why do I think this time it might be so? Because back in June his Doctor decided to tell the world " Fidel will live to 140!". I thought at the time that it was a pretty wierd thing to say, unless he was about to kick the bucket.

Posted @ July 11, 2006 05:48 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

The 12th Memorial Day of Deceased Kim Il Sung… Kim Jong Il, Why Did He Disappear?

Well this is one confusing hash of paranoia and cultural miscommunication:

"On the 8th, (North) Korean Central Broadcasting did not report any news about Kim Jong Il’s visit to Gumsusan Memorial Palace to cherish the memory of deceased Kim Il Sung. It is very exceptional because after the death of Kim Il Sung, on every midnight 8 July, North Korea broadcasting media had reported Kim Jong Il’s visit to the Palace."

Read the whole thing. Draw your own conclusions...

Posted @ July 11, 2006 01:23 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Bumper Sticker Wars

I was out this weekend on the coast, and as we all know the closer you get to the coast, the closer you get to the world of “Blue culture”. Visiting “Blue culture” cities is to me like visiting another country. They speak in their own language, they have their own way of doing things.

I noted a few interesting bumper stickers in the parking lots I passed through.

What if everyone voted?

Well, I suspect what would happen is that you would lose by an even larger margin than you already are. Apparently, the point to this one is that they would have won if only more people cared enough to get out to vote for the leftist side.

What is it about the left that makes them wish to insult their own side as an attempt to get more people to take their side? If I call you a lazy fool, does that make you want to say “ wow, this guy is smart?” What is it about the left that requires that they live in the illusion that everyone is on their side, yet they are confronted daily with evidence that everyone is not on their side?

They love democracy, right up to the point where the people tell them to take a hike. Then of course, everyone is a moron, or worse a dupe of the corporate world.

I read the bumper sticker and immediately thought of Robert Kennedy Jr. I watched Charlie Rose this weekend, he had an interview with Robert Kennedy Jr. I want to highly emphasize JUNIOR here, because the man and the crowd he travels in have made this weird sort of “cargo cult” out of his sainted father and his likeness, even to the point that older guys like Charlie Rose love to say “Robert Kennedy” and then conveniently forget to say “…junior…” as if it would result in the old man himself reanimating on the spot.

Robert Kennedy JUNIOR is like Frank Sinatra JUNIOR. I don’t care how drunk you are or what time of the morning it is in Vegas and I dont care whos name is on the Marquee, it’s not “the old man” up on stage and no amount of makeup or bright lights is going to change that fact. He may look like RFK and he may sound like RFK, but unlike his sainted old man, Robert Kennedy JUNIOR is so devoid of charisma he sucks whatever charisma there is out of the air like a Shaper Image Ionic Breeze sucks pollen and dust mites out of the air.

But I digress...

Anyway, On Charlies show, RFK Jr. was going on and on and on and nearly breaking out in tears over the fact that there was no ‘fairness doctrine” on the radio airwaves and as a result people weren’t hearing all about how the fact that illegal immigrants were here because we all decided to not join unions. It was pathetic. It was do devoid of leadership and ideas that it just reeked of failure.

"People would vote for us if they werent so stupid and if they didnt listen to that damn Rush Limbaugh..."

Oh, Naturally.

As far as I could tell from RFK JUNIOR, illegal immigrants and lack of union membership were caused by Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes and with just a little bit of government oversight provided by you-know-who, we could all return to the golden age of Democratic one party rule, where we would all work for the AFL-CIO, get shift differential down at the Ford plant and drive a big four door De Soto while we socked it to the "fat cats on Wall Street".

Well, that would get more people out to vote, but I don’t think it would go the way that my bumper sticker person would really want it to go.

What if everyone voted?

Ah, sleep - perchance to dream...

Bush Lied. People Died.

I love this one. I love the simplicity. There’s something about a rhyme that attracts the small minded and petty. My guess is that too many leftists smoked pot while reading Dr. Seuss books and the effect of that is that they think that any rhyme is subversive, intelligent and powerful. This little ditty is supposed to be like garlic to a vampire, it’s supposed to make me curl up in a ball and cry. It actually makes me laugh, every time I see it.

Lets take a look at each part of the “littlest subversive sentence in the world”

Bush Lied.

Gee, I thought the case made by “moveon.org” in the 90’s was that “everyone lies”? Oh wait, it was “ everyone lies – about sex”. Yeah that’s right. So it seems the argument being made here is “Bush lied - about Weapons of Mass Destruction”, or another way of putting it is “ Saddam never had any weapons of any sort except for the ones we sold him and Rumsfeld personally signed for when he met with Saddam, oh and that Nuclear reactor that the Israelis bombed? That was just a big Disneyland style prop, no way that could have ever been a nuclear reactor, even though the French in the person on Jacques Chirac himself sold it to Saddam. And what about those half a million Iranians and Kurds that were killed with Chemical and biological weapons? Well, since they were just brown people being killed by other brown people, who really cares about them anyway? Oh, and Saddams cousin? “Chemical Ali”? Apparently, he’s just a big fan of Aerosmith, Why assume it has something to do with being a genocidal manic who enjoyed shelling Kurdish villages full of women and children with Mustard gas? And what about all those shells that were actually found? Pay no attention to those things because they have the wrong serial numbers".

Get this through your heads, you hippies. Saddam used every weapon he had at his disposal, and he saved the very best weapons for use against Iraqi civilian populations. The war in Iraq was not the equivalent of a major pot bust that goes terribly wrong and instead of arresting the neighborhood drug dealer it results in the SWAT team breaking down the door to old granny Whitebread house and breaking her extensive Franklin mint plate collection.

What Saddam had or didn’t have at the time was of almost no consequence. What was of consequence was his track record. Now, given that he’d invaded every single one of his neighbors and bought every weapon of mass destruction that could be purchased on the open market and as the Kurds will surely testify; used them to kill civilians in mass numbers, thereby qualifying as “Weapons of Mass Destruction – and Used them”, can we not dispense with the idiocy of “there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction”? Because as long as Saddam was alive, and had easy access to cash, and a wanton desire to kill as many people as he could to maintain his power, it was just a matter of time. How long should we have waited? Until he had a bomb? or until he fired it at Jerusalem?

President Bush did not invade Iraq to capture a warehouse of atomic bombs. He decided only that it was necessary to hold the UN accountable in its resolutions against Iraq and thus, an invasion and occupation and conversion to Democracy was necessary. Those of you who said that “Bush should’ve finished the job in 92!”. Guess what boys and girls, you got your wish! Those of you who are saying that its impossible to change an Arab country into a modern democracy should look to the Kuwaitis who are now an Arab Democracy, with women in power. Yet it was the worlds “progressives” and John Kerry specifically who voted against stopping Saddam in Kuwait. Invade a UN member state? No consequence! Had we taken their council in 1992 what would the middle east look like today? What would the world look like today? Peaceful? Hardly.

Well that’s the “compassionate left” for you, always willing to let the little brown people of the world die just to make a political point now and then about the futility of life.

Now that we’ve had fun with the first part, lets tear into the second part:

People Died.

Did people die because President Bush took action, or because the worlds left chose to take the path of inaction instead? Are people dying in Darfur because we are killing them or because of worldwide indifference? Did people die in Uganda, Cambodia, Zimbabwe because we in the west killed them with military action or because we in the west choose to look the other way?

Or did we kill them with something else?

Did people die in Iraq or Afghanistan or because we killed them, or because other people let them die? Or worse, are there still people who wish them to keep on dying, just so long as we don’t have anything to do with it one way or the other?

If you were to put a set of 5 gallon drums of kerosene in your garage and take the tops off, is it the aimless smoker who wandered by who actually set the house on fire or is it someone else? Who is really to blame?

What the people of the left refuse to recognize is how their ‘dissent” has made the war go on longer and be more bloody than it needed to be. What the left refuses to recognize is how their direct actions have killed millions, not with weapons, but with indifference or worse, outright support of al-queda and its goals.

We could have stopped Saddam in 1998 or Osama, or Zawahiri. We chose not to. Democrats voted for “Regime Change in Iraq”, but then chose to do nothing deliver it. Europeans voted for human rights, and then traded for Oil with Saddam.

And people died, and kept on dying, long before Bush ever decided to even be Govenor of Texas.

What happened in the 1990’s was not peace, but war deferred. War deferred is war intensified. We can thank the left and its romantic notions of “the peace dividend” for the world we face today.

Yes, “People Died”.

And the left helped create the world that killed them. In Darfur, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Cambodia, Congo, Iraq, Syria, Palestine the left has created the conditions that have lead to war, to genocide, to the destruction of civilians and civilization.

The left makes a fetish out of every rebel, believing them to be legitimate against the crushing oppression of western civilization. The left will sanctify the monsters, hoping that one of them will finally “get even” against the hated and terribly unjust world we live in. So what if millions of innocent people are caught up in the tank treads of another tyrant like Hugh Chavez, Fidel Castro or Kim il Jong in the process?

It’s the cause the matters, right? So what if a few people get hurt along the way.

Bush lied? Maybe.
People Died? Yeah. And you helped kill them, hippie.

Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam

And I suppose Afghanistan is Pushtun for Korea.

Vietnam – The Bad War, The proof of the imperialistic designs of the west on the little people of the world, and proof that the west cannot win any war, anywhere. Proof at last of the futility of life. El Salvador – Vietnam. Nicaragua – Vietnam. Grenada- Vietnam. Panama- Vietnam. Bosnia, uh, no. Run by a Democrat, must be ok. Kuwait – Vietnam. Anytime anyone lifts a rifle, its Vietnam. The spooky scary war that makes homeless wretches out of all men. If you look hard enough, World War II was Vietnam.

You see, we cant win, “Charlie” proved that to us.

There’s a sickening laugh that accompanies this bumpers sticker that sounds like “tee hee, lookie here what I see, isn’t this funny”?

Well its not. Here’s what I see when I think of Vietnam. 50,000 Americans killed, a nation brought to the brink of civil war. That’s our side. What’s on the other side? 7 million killed after we abandoned them, concentration camps and the removal of human and civil rights for an entire nation. The nations of Cambodia and Laos were turned into a genocidal graveyard, all while the world turned its back. Not because we fought, but because we stopped fighting.

Because we made a commitment to protect people and then walked out on it when they needed us the most. It isn’t fighting in Vietnam that haunts us in our nightmares, its that we ran away and abandoned the people who lived there and the shame of that act that haunts us all.

Say what you want about what we did or didn’t do in Vietnam, but when Pol Pot was converting 8 million people to fertilizer in Cambodia, no one raised a finger, no one said a word. The left and its all so important UN stood by and sanctioned Pol Pot and we said nothing.

The left looks at “Vietnam” the way Al Bundy looked at the high school football championships. It was a moment of glory to be revisited in times of nostalgia. For most of the left, Vietnam was something to protest against a way to define “us and them”, but for many people, Vietnamese people, it was where the “west lied, and people died” it was where we abandoned them to the tyranny of Communism.

Vietnam was a moment of shame, brought on by a culture of defeatism and nihilistic anti-heroes that abandoned all that we in the west have lived to believe in for over 2000 years.

“Protesting Vietnam” in a democracy safe here at home was not heroic. It doesn’t take heroism to live in the protection of a constitution and laws and a culture that believes in dissent. It takes heroism to fight an enemy who is determined not just to kill you but to destroy your family and wipe out any measure of your existence. This is what the South Vietnamese faced. This is what we left them to do. This is where we failed them.

This is our shame. The shame was in making a commitment and not keeping it.

Yet the left is hopeful that the same will be true of Iraq, actually hoping and wishing and praying that Iraq comes to the same fate as Vietnam as if it was a good thing, ignoring all of the history of what actually happened after we left them to fight alone with our damnable inaction. Vietnam should be a warning to the left of the consequences of failure, but instead they are attracted to the hope that Iraq might turn out to be Vietnam.

By Iraq turning into a “new Vietnam” their worldview holds water; they feel relevant and worthwhile and to the left, that’s all that really matters. So what if 7 million more people die in the process? It’s all about how you feel and your self worth that matters the most to the left.

So what if a few people get hurt in the process?

Should we leave Afghanistan to the Taliban? Should we leave Iraq to the Sunni Baathists? Would “the war” be over if we did, or would it get worse? And if “the war” were to get worse as a result of these actions, then who would be have to blame?

Ask yourself this; “When have the romantic leftist notions of peace and a pacifistic world ever resulted in anything but death and mayhem for civilians around the world, and why does anyone anywhere give them any more credence than that given to Hindu snake charmers?”

Gore/Liberman – Overlayed with a “John Kerry for President” sticker.

On a Volvo, naturally. What I found interesting is that the Lieberman part of the Gore sticker was overlayed with the Kerry sticker, so it actually said “ Gore Kerry for President ”. Accidental placement? Oh, I don’t think so. What I also found interesting is how John Edwards and his contribution to the Democratic side denote neither a feeling of nostalgia or a rebuke as Lieberman now suffers.

John Edwards – “The man who never was”.

Posted @ July 09, 2006 02:39 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (11)

Alternate Universe Editorial - NY Times September 12th 2001.

( What the NY Times would have said had the Bush Administration actually stopped the 9/11 attacks before they happened...)

EDITORIAL
Federal Law Enforcement Abuse of Foreign Students
Published: September 12th, 2001

This week saw an series of unprecedented arrests and detainment of students studying in the United States in what the Federal government is calling a "crackdown on terrorism”. Around the county, 18 Students, most of which are of Arab extraction, have been charged with being a part of what the White House is calling an “al-queda terror cell”. At this point the White House has offered only a tissue of information regarding the identities of these students and have so far not provided any details behind what motivated the arrests. The wanton disregard for the rights of foreign students and possibly even the rights of American citizens marks the low point in the John Ashcroft Justice Department in its administration of the law within the United States. Attorney General John Ashcroft has said that charges against the 18 men will be withheld from the public until it can be determined if all the members of the cell have been detained. This action has been called clearly illegal by the ACLU and by several Democrat members of the Senate and there is a move underway in the 9th Circuit Court to see that this is overturned. The ACLU and other civil libertarians have promised to make the case of the abuse of Mr. Atta and his fellow colleagues a central point to their fund raising this season. While Attorney General Ashcroft has said very little about the case in public by hiding behind the “ongoing investigation” dodge that has become standard procedure in Washington, the New York Times has learned that the case involves the improbable use of commercial airliners to crash into buildings in key cities throughout the United States. It is unclear how 18 students of modest means would manage to procure airliners, and a background review of these students reveal that none of them have had any training in flying aircraft. We at the New York Times have reviewed these charges with several security organizations and each one has told this paper that the idea of using commercial airlines to crash into buildings is, at best a fantasy, and could not possibly be carried off even by the best of Americas commando teams, much less a group of college students. In our opinion, these charges are false and are based only on the anti-Arab racial hatred that serves as the core culture to many of those in the new Bush Administration.

The abuse of foreign students under the trumped up charges of “terrorism” show that the Bush administration is working to shore up his base with the very worst sort of jingoism and blind patriotism as part of a ham handed attempt to improve their badly sagging poll numbers. If it were not for the abuse of civil rights of foreign students like Mohammded Atta, this would be simply another sad political attempt to fool the American public.

We call upon Congress and the courts to stop this abuse of executive power before the rights of all citizens is completely eroded by an out of control Attorney General and the newly selected President.

Posted @ July 07, 2006 04:33 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

10 questions about North Korea

1. Under what circumstances would the UN Security council sanction “strong action" against a state that has belligerently attacked another UN member state? The flip side of this is when has a "strong statement" ever changed anything?

2. For those who say that now that North Korea has acted outside all legal and international standards of law by firing weapons at the civilian population of the west, that the US should now talk diplomatically to North Korea, I ask only this - What exactly would you tell all the other countries of the world who, rather than resort to extortion and other "acts of war" as part of their diplomatic missions, have instead followed the rules and behaved in what is recognized as a civilized manner? What would you tell them to convince them that they are not “suckers”? What do you tell our allies? What do you tell future generations when they ask how the worlds diplomatic systems completely broke down in the early part of this century because this country allowed itself to be held open to extortion, and that the method of extortion rather than that of elemental cooperation became the norm of behavior between nations?

3. Why is the left now fully invested in a policy of “go it alone” cowboy unilateralism in response to North Korean warlike belligerency?

4. As it is with all things involving engineering, accidents happen. Let’s say that one of the inevitable engineering accidents is a North Korean TD-2 Missile that falls on an elementary school on Japan or Guam. Given the nature of the inflammatory language used by the North Koreans, would this act fall into the category of an “act of war”? If not, why not?

5. If you launch one missile and it doesn’t work, no one is surprised. Two and they don’t work, again not surprised. But launch seven and they all fail? Either you have to believe that they have the worst QA in all of Asia, or perhaps, just perhaps we should entertain the idea that we are actually shooting them down. So why wouldn’t we say anything about shooting them down? Because if we say to the world that we are shooting them down, they can play the aggrieved victim that’s been victimized by the big bully imperialist United States. If they just “fall down and go boom”, well that brings doubt on the whole missile program and everyone who works in it, thus causing even more damage than our interceptors appear to have done.

6. Let’s say we go all Albright/Feinstein and sit down for ‘one on one’ talks with the North Koreans. What should our ambassador say to the North Koreans? Well, how about this “Hey jackass, stop firing missiles at us, or were going to start firing back and well see who runs out of missiles first” Just what exactly do you have to talk about when the other side has decided to get your attention by firing at you? What would Albright have said after Ft. Sumter? “Mr. Lincolns failed policies that lead to this disaster in diplomacy. Here’s an opportunity for Mr. Lincoln to talk to the aggrieved President Davis over the issues that are so heartily felt in the south.” Or Pearl Harbor? Or the Alamo?

7. Where does this go from here? Let’s say they keep launching and we keep shooting them down and that gets the North Koreans nowhere in their big extortion scheme. What next? What’s to stop the North Koreans from having an “industrial accident” that leaves nuclear fallout radiation streaming out, to be caught on the winds and deposited in the US and Japan?

8. Whatever happened to “fear of US military retribution”? That has worked pretty well as a deterrent in the past so why did we allow that to be taken it off the table? We used to think nothing of bombing people for being insolent and rude. I’m not saying we should do it in this case, I’m just asking why it is that before we start, it’s already off the table.

9. Let’s say Hugo Chavez goes to North Korea and buys TD-2 missiles. How is that different from Fidel having Soviet Missiles and would our response not be just a severe?

10. What does North Korea value above all other things and how can we keep it from them?

Posted @ July 07, 2006 02:24 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Nice Try Kim

To: Mr. Kim Il Sung
From: US Ambassador to South Korea
Subject: Thank you for the 4th of July Gift

Dear Mr. Kim,

On behalf of the People of the United States, I wish to thank you and your country for your contribution to the celebration that is underway today in our country and around the world. Your fireworks display brought a great deal of joy to the members of Americas Navy and Air forces.

As our way of saying thank you, we would like to offer our own display of thanks for the People of North Korea by pointing out that On July 6th, 7th and 8th, The International Space Station and the United States Space Shuttle Discovery will be visible from your country. It should make quite a view from the ground. I know I speak for the crew of Discovery when I say that they certainly do most enjoy the unfettered and unobstructed view of your country from their vantage point.

Please enjoy the show.

Yours truly,

J. Allen Werthiemer Esq.
United States Ambassador to South Korea.

P.S. US Navy Seal Team 9 will be picking up the pieces of your "rockets" off the floor of the Sea of Japan for evaulation later today. Please let us know if you would like the debris shipped back to your labratories after we have finished looking at them. We understand you have some difficulty in rasing a Navy of your own and we are willing to help you out in any way we can in this matter. America has a large and capable Navy. Coincidentally, many of our ships are right off your shores at this time.

P.P.S. The United States also has a large holiday in September called "Labor Day". If you could try for another "fireworks display" on that holiday, we would appeaciate whatever you could manage to bring to brighten our day.

P.P.P.S. The Ambassador from Japan sends his love. Apparently his grandfather spent a great deal of time in Korea, and he is looking forward to visiting it in the near future.

Posted @ July 04, 2006 02:28 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Leading the Charge

Take a guy named "Tibbets" put him in a bomber and face him towards Asia and what do you get?

Thats easy, Second thoughts.

From Stars and Stripes:

"Tibbets is the grandson of Brig. Gen. Paul Tibbets, who piloted Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber used to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima during World War II in 1945.

Tibbets also flies bombers, but his subsonic, low-observable stealth machine is considerably more high-tech than his grandfather’s.

“The B-2 has proven through time that it’s the best bomber in the world,” said Tibbets, who commands the 393rd Bomb Squadron, part of the 509th Bomb Wing based at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo. “We kick down the door.”

Once upon a time I stood under the wing of a B-24 at the Reno Air Races with about a dozen pilots of various acclaim. We were all awaiting the arrival of the B-2. While we stood there on the ramp, everyone began to opine as to the value of the B-2. "Too damned expensive", "A white elephant", " silly damn thing" was the general concensus of the pilot community that had gathered for the shade of the big aircraft on the ramp. You cant impress pilots. They just dont care. If they are on the ground, their only interest is getting back in the air. Pilots may be impressed from time to time, but they never let on in public. They dont communicate or emote to non-pilots. Sitting in a crowd of pilots is like participating in a festival of monosyllabity and grunts.

And then we saw it. Immediately everyone reached for their binoculars as appeared low over the ridgeline behind the airport. Jaws dropped , but not a sound was uttered as the spectre flew by nearly silent in exactly the way that big jet bombers dont, but ghosts do. It was not like any sort of airplane that we had ever seen before, it was just a thin grey line moving back and forth through the sky with almost no sound. Nearly slient, nearly invisible, and it doesnt show up on radar. Wow.

After it left the area, everyone on the ramp clapped in ovation for the clearly amazing show that we had just seen had changed the concensus of opinion "I dont know how many we bought, but we need to buy twice as many right now. That is one damn scary aircraft." Its amazing what a 10 minute flyby can do to change someones mind.

The lesson being taught wasnt lost on the old time pilots who stood with me on the ramp at Reno. It wasnt how the aircraft would perform in a future war that mattered the most. It was how a weapon of such clearly superior strengths could stop a war from happening in the first place that really mattered.

Posted @ June 28, 2006 09:34 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Chris Hitchens Asks the "Question of the week"

"What happened to the human shields?"
snip...
"would not now be the ideal time for those who hate war to go to Iraq and stand outside the mosques, hospitals, schools, and women's centers that are daily subjected to murderous assaults? This would write an imperishable page in the history of American dissent."

I had forgotten how much I loathed this pretention in the daily press of 1992 and 2002.

He has four more great questions for the "anti-war" zealots. So read the whole thing already...

Posted @ June 28, 2006 09:12 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Killing Them Softly

Michelle Malkin has posted a series of wartime propaganda posters phototshopped to get the message across to the clueless morons at the New York Times. Heres a few of my favorties:

John Schrenko:

From Sublog:

What's my take on the fact that the New York Times seems willing to walk over dead bodies for an increase in circulation? Well, I'm wondering just how far they are willing to go in pursuit of a headline. If they discovered that we had a mole in the Iranian government or military, what would stop them from releasing that information? Common sense? Good conduct? Past history?

If they discovered a key weakness to the Aegis missile system, what would stop them from releasing the information? Love of country? Concern for Public Safety?

The answer is nothing, for they answer to no one but themselves and to the New York Times, all that matters is that they "get President Bush". Of course you understand that when another 9/11 occurs, they would be the first to accuse the President of "not doing enough" despite having committed sabotage against every attempt to make the country more secure.

Actually... The only thing that would ever stop the New York Times from releasing classified information would be if the information in some way made Bill or Hillary Clinton look bad.

Posted @ June 25, 2006 09:45 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Mineta leaves office in 2005, But only noticed missing today.

Mineta Resigns, World asks "Who is he again"

After Capitol Hill Cleaning staff complained to the Bush Administration about unpaid bills from Secretary Mineta, police broke into the offices of Secretary Norman Mineta, only to find a handwritten note taped to his chair date April 2005, saying only that he had "Gone Fishin".

When questioned as to how a cabinet secretary could disappear for a full year without being noticed, White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolton replied "Well, He didnt complain when we cut his budget, so we figured that we shouldnt mess with a good thing.".

Posted @ June 23, 2006 09:28 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

The start of the European Trade War

Airbus suffered another setback today when the Congressional Committee on aviation blocked any attempt to use federal funds to upgrade airports to support the Airbus A380.

From MSNBC.com

"The troubled Airbus A380 programme was dealt a potential blow on Friday when an influential US congressmen said federal funds should not be used to upgrade US airports to accommodate the world's largest passenger aircraft.

John Mica, chairman of the House aviation subcommittee, claimed it could cost as much as much as $1bn to refit up to 18 airports to handle the 550-seat A380, which is due to enter service next year despite ongoing production delays."

(As if we would spend our tax money to help Airbus destroy our airline industry. Yeah, like that was going to happen...)

Well, This isnt going to sit well within the smoky backrooms of the Capitals of Europe. In retaliation for this issue, we now can expect a full out aviation trade war which will likely smack Boeing pretty hard, but for an already strapped and wobbling Airbus, it just might prove deadly and mortifying to the EU itself. We can now expect to see retaliation like "Boeing Aircraft pulled for safety concerns from European skies" or " Pollution and safety concerns cause European governments to hold certification of Boeings latest Jet - The 787 Dreamliner".

Oh yeah, this will just get uglier and uglier until both sides manage to find a couple of adults to sit down and make some sort of working agreement between the two parties. Don't expect to see that anytime soon though because its like an alcoholic or a drug addict, they need to go all the way down before they can agree that they need to seek help. Right now, its payday and both parties have managed to get thrown out of the first pub of the evening and the night still is young. We have a long way to go until one of us wakes up and tries to wipe something off our cheek, only to find that its the curb.

The Euros dont need a trade war, they need to get on President Bushs' good side and thats not going to happen because their own people wont stand for it. The result of all that pandering to the emotions that come from European public dislike of President Bush, American and Americans is going to be even more unemployed people in Europe, leading to more layoffs and overturned governments, which naturally Europeans will look at as being all our fault in the first place, which is pretty funny if you think about it.

The European Trade War is now underway and if you think they hate us now, just wait a couple of years. Rampant unemployment tends to make you very,very cranky.

Posted @ June 23, 2006 07:54 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Arnold who?

Schwarzenegger Denies Bush Troop Request

You know Govenor, we've done recall elections before in this state and if you keep this up, it wouldnt take very much for us to get another one started.

Posted @ June 23, 2006 07:38 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Exercise Valiant Shield 2006

From the Air Force Times, I found this picture:

"A B-2 Spirit and 16 other aircraft from the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps fly over the USS Kitty Hawk, USS Ronald Reagan and USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike groups in the western Pacific Ocean on Sunday, June 18, to kick off Exercise Valiant Shield 2006. The joint exercise consists of 28 naval vessels, more than 300 aircraft and approximately 20,000 servicemembers. (U.S. Navy photo/Chief Photographer's Mate Todd P. Cichonowicz)"

On a day when the Democrats in the Senate worked overtime to try to bring a victory to terrorists through legislation, I found this picture a sharp reminder of just how far out of step their 1960's mindset really is.

A B-2, two nuclear carriers named after Republican presidents who both brought freedom and liberty to the world being followed by a squadron of Burke Class Destroyers. When North Korea decided that it would launch a Missile at Japan and the United States, the rest of the world wondered what our answer would be.

Well, here's your answer.

(A Full size version of this picture can be seen here. Trailing behind the Carriers you will see a series of the new Arleigh Burke Class Destroyers. These ships are now providing Theatre Missile Defense for the western world, despite the fact that for 20 years, Democrats have tried at every opportunity to say that "it cant be done", to defund, and to mock anyone who said that "missile defense is destablizing and it wont work". To that I say "Thank you for not listening, President Bush". )

Posted @ June 22, 2006 01:52 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

The 2006 meatgrinder

For once in my career, Im actually bringing a project live in the summer rather than the dreaded weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years.

For the next 6 weeks, I will be back in the life of the 'Road Warrior' as I bring the yet another project into the world for my corporate masters.

Despite the fact that the world is getting ever so much more interesting as we enter an era of " Theatre Based Missile Defense" Blogging during the next 6 weeks will be sporatic, wierd and mostly from out of town.

And while all sorts of things are going on and everyone has at least some prediction for the future I can tell you with some authority that the world will not end for the next 6 weeks because it simply isnt in my project plan. But after that, all bets are off...

Next Stop - Austin.

Posted @ June 19, 2006 11:21 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Bottom Line: North Korean ICBM

The New York Times writes a long winded article on the current situation with North Korea and as its very last line it finally makes it perfectly clear what the real risk of all this nasty business really is.

Quote:
"A successful test would make North Korean missiles more marketable to Iran and other clients in the Middle East..."

Now, go to your Rand McNally Wall Maps and draw a circle 6,000km wide using the following countries as the center starting point:

North Korea.
Iran.
Cuba.
Venezuela.

This would be a good time for the President to annouce the deployment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Defence system.

Posted @ June 19, 2006 10:45 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

ALERT: North Korean Launch Imminent

N.Koreans asked to raise flags on Sunday at 0500 GMT.

Snip..
"The North Korean leadership has told its people to raise the national flag at 2:00 pm (0500 GMT) on Sunday, in what may be a sign that Pyongyang will go ahead with a missile launch test, a Japanese government official was quoted as saying.

Japanese daily Sankei Shimbun on Sunday also quoted the Japanese official as saying that the North Koreans had been instructed to monitor television and other broadcasts for a "message to the people""

Stand by.

Posted @ June 17, 2006 08:53 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Crisis at Airbus reveals weakness to EU economic model

Here's an interesting article in the UK Times on the wider implications of the problems at Airbus. Heres a sample:

Snip...

"The stock options exercised by Noël Forgeard(Note: A month before Airbus announced the delays in the A380 program, this cat sold his stock. You can imagine what the reaction would have been had the CEO of boeing sold is stock a month before the end of the fiscal year), the joint chief executive of EADS, are being seen as proof of the evils of the “Anglo-Saxon ultra- liberalism” that is invading Europe. In addition, delays in Airbus’s A380 superjumbo, which are being accompanied by Franco-German squabbling over who is to blame, are undermining a project viewed in France as one of Europe’s few achievements in recent years.

The damage is on a par with the extraordinary media and political hype that accompanied the launch of the superjumbo last year. President Chirac was joined by Gerhard Schröder, Tony Blair and thousands of well-wishers in Toulouse, southwest France, to watch its first flight. French television scrapped its usual programmes to broadcast the event. Politicians said that the aircraft’s maiden voyage would swing French voters behind the European constitution in the referendum in May 2005.

They were wrong. With the French increasingly convinced that the European Union has become a vehicle for capitalism, the constitution was rejected. Opponents said that they wanted une Europe sociale — an ill-defined concept that involves union rights, harmonised welfare and taxes and tighter restrictions on free enterprise..."

end snip.

Go read the whole thing already. What we are witnessing in the problems of Airbus is an example of how the EU will work in the real world, and from this article you get the impression that it doesnt work very well at all. We are also witnessing proof that the laws of economics cannot be overruled simply by the will of the legislature and "good intentions"; either investments make money for their investors or they do not. What is significant about Airbus is that it has as its largest shareholders the governments of the EU, and its becoming clear that these shareholders are going to be left holding the bag if Airbus is not able to make a profit. Remember, it isnt just that the EU government gave tax incentives to Airbus to allow them to be competitive, they have given large loans to underwrite development of the aircraft in their product lines. The loans - that the cash strapped EU governments need to be paid off to remain solvent. Recently Airbus decided to scrap its A350 ( the competitor to the 787 Dreamliner) and has been negotiating with EU governments for even more cash loans to complete that project. In light of new accusations of stock irregularities, BAE removing itself from the Airbus consortium and now more questions on the delivery dates on the passenger version of the A380 with what is sure to be less profit from that line with the now required renegotiation of the existing delivery contracts and its going to be a difficult year for both the EU and Airbus.

The fate of Airbus is now effectively tied to the same fate of the 'Grand Franco-German union".

Remember that after its all said and done that its easy to make an airplane but its hell to make one that pays off for the airlines that fly it. The surprise here is that the EU has chosen its first battlefield to be the "economic battlefield" and it appears that they are about to undergo a defeat that compares to that of Rome at Cannae.

While we see the Chinese, Indonesian, Indian and South Korean economies have increased their use of capitalism to become more competetive as nations, the EU banked on a compromise of the command economy concepts of the past to maintain their standard of living.

From my observations on the Airbus experiment, it appears to me that they were very wrong and that the impact from that decision is about to be felt world wide.

Until Europeans begin to embrace more open markets for goods and more capitalism in their economies Europeans should prepare themselves for living in a dramatically lower standard of living compared to those of us who have moved into the other direction.

Posted @ June 17, 2006 01:09 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6)

Watch The Skies: North Korea To Launch Missile This Weekend

North Korea is apparently scheduling a launch of its new missile this weekend.

snip...
"The missile is believed to be a long-range Taepodong-2 missile test, capable of reaching the US mainland with a light payload, Kyodo said. The information was based on satellite images received in the last 48 hours. While the missile has not been loaded with fuel, it has been moved to a test site in the country's northeast, Kyodo said."

That gets your attention now doesnt it...

Air Force Times is reporting that as of June 14th, U-2's are on their way to South Korea.

North Korea is already upset that RC-135 Reconnisance aircraft are already in range.

snip...
"It was North Korea's second warning in a week against alleged US spy plane intrusions. On Sunday, the North Korean Air Force threatened to "punish" US spy flights, recalling the fate of a US Navy plane it shot down in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) in 1969."

Well, someones got a "bee in their bonnet"...

And now Japan has ramped up its defenses as well.

Snip...
"Asahi Shimbun reported that the U.S. handed Japan a satellite photograph of the missile being carried to the launch pad location this week. The Japan Defense Agency is reported to have strengthened its air guard mobilizing the defense system AEGIS and the scout plane EP3 of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force."

EP3 would be the derivative of the Lockheed P-3 Orion and "Aegis" referres to the AEGIS class missile cruisers/destroyers, several of which have been sold to the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force ( Japan doesnt have a "Navy" as such, but the JMSDF is a pretty solid force ). Think of the AEGIS as a floating anti-missile system.

Here is an interview with Adm. Gary Roughead, commander, U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet in Asahi Times, May 24th 2006.

Snip...
"Q: Why are more advanced Aegis ships being deployed to Yokosuka?

A: We in the Navy are sending our most capable ships forward. My two war-fighting priorities are anti-submarine warfare and ballistic missile defense. I think you will see in the future continued increasing capability in the western Pacific. Having our most capable ships forward, I believe, is the best policy for the safety and security of the region...

I looks to me like this is the weekend where North Korea reminds us just how malignant their leader truly is. Prepare to spend some time digging up all the votes against "missile defense systems" because in the net 24 hours we are about to see the Democrats go screeching into the night about how "The President Has Failed to secure our country from risk from missile attack blah blah blah..."

I wonder how long it will take for the Democrats to now say we should pull our troops out of South Korea and Japan because:

a) Weve now clearly lost WWII and the Korean War.
b) George Bush mislead us into helping Japan.
c) It would be illegal for us to shoot down their missile.
d) Missile-schmissile, it was no real threat. The real threat is Wal-mart and Halliburton.

Thats the "war cry" of the Democrats these days.
"Billions for legal fees to fight against corporate America, but not one dime for missile defense".

Posted @ June 16, 2006 09:03 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Headline/Subtext of the day

Bill Gates to retire. Wow! I never thought I'd see this day. As someone who has been "in the buisiness" since before there was a microsoft, I can tell you that this is quite a day.

But I guarantee you that every single techie in the world who heard the words "Bill Gates to retire from Microsoft to work on his charitable medical foundation" immediately began to insert his own subtext. So here's of few of mine:

1. African villages terrified to hear that the horrible scourge of "Blue Screeen of Death" is about to visit their shores.

2. Medical Industry to undergo transformation as Gates introduces " Vaporcare" to Hospitals. "You call it a broken leg, but we look at it as a new feature" said the former CEO of Microsoft.

3. Gates says that the new "Gates Hospi-care 1.0" systems will only work with newer, yet to be released "Humans 2.0". "We can't be expected to work with the older inferior models forever. Theres has to be some form of cut off on the older out of date models" said the worlds wealthiest philanthopist.

All kidding aside, I wish the man well. I was about to say that if he can do to to the medical industry what he did to software, but I stopped myself before I accidentally opened a whole can of snark. Not going to go there...

Posted @ June 15, 2006 07:33 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6)

Silence, Heretic!

Since we live in the days when a former divinty student has started his own church to yell down from the pulpit " Repent Sinners, for the end is nigh. Vote for me or the world will end!"

I thought I would add this post from The National Post into the debate:

Scientists who work in the fields liberal arts graduate Al Gore wanders through contradict his theories about man-induced climate change.

Go Read the Whole Thing Already....

Posted @ June 14, 2006 06:02 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Think youre having a rough day?

Try working at Airbus and coming to work to see this headline on your desk:

Emirates Air - The Largest A380 Buyer is considering its "Options".

Airbus has contracted to build 45 of the great flying beasts for Emirates with the contract saying that they will start to take delivery in 2007. Airbus has just announced that it will take another year to make delivery. Add to this bit of trouble and Airbus announcing that their aircraft in testing are way over the expected weight, meaning that the aircraft will never hits its efficiency targets. What is that old saying? If you owe the bank 1000 dollars, they own you, but if you owe the bank a million dollars, you own them!

Well, this is sort of like that. Only Airbus isnt just a company, its a collection of governments that act as the major stockholders in the Airbus corporation.

Now, I dont for a second think that Emirates Air is about to drop the A380, but they are about to make the contract much more to their liking and alot less profitable for Airbus. That means it will take more airframes to make the A380 line pay, which is very bad for Airbus, and thus potentially very bad for the French, the UK and Germany.

If Airbus were to suffer any more of these "surprises" with their customers, it will surely start to impact the governments of Europe in a very negative way.

Remember, options mean nothing until delivery and just to illustrate, Here's a list of companys who had "options" for the Boeing 2707 SST.

And when it comes to delivery, just remember before that happens, anything can and will happen. The A380 has to do two things to make the "line" pay off for the investors. First, actually make it to delivery, which has just proven to be harder than they had counted on. Second, the aircraft has to pay for the airlines that own it.

This first is likely, but the second is a long way from being proven to be true and its getting further away every day.

UPDATE: Sabotage? Who said anything about sabotage?

Snip...
"The new development comes in the wake of an investigation by Airbus on how three cables were cut on an A380 aircraft in the assembly line. But an Airbus spokesperson said there was no connection between the cable cutting incident and the reported delay in delivery.

Airbus spokeswoman Barbara Kracht confirmed the incident, first reported in the local newspaper La Depeche du Midi.

The three cables on the superjumbo were cut sometime between Thursday night and Friday morning, said Jacques Rocca, communications officer for Airbus France, a division of Airbus.

"What was found leads us to believe that this was more of a malicious act than an accident," Rocca said. "But the term 'sabotage' is strong and inappropriate."

The local newspaper had raised the possibility of sabotage. The A380 was being outfitted with electrical equipment. Rocca said the severed cables were discovered at the start of the workday on Friday morning. He did not indicate what the cables were for."

Posted @ June 14, 2006 12:37 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

My favorite headline of the day

Well my schedule has gone totally to hell, but I cant let the day pass without my noting a few things:

1. John Kerry says " I was Wrong".

Summary: John "Moebius" Kerry explains that the only way for the US to be successful in the war on terror is to increase our standing with other nations, and the best way to to that is to abandon our allies in the middle east as a token of our seriousness.

A speech from John Kerry tends to make about as much sense as a wiring diagram for a Chinese Stereo.

2. Telling the FBI the truth saved Karl Rove

Gee, who would have guessed that? I guess thats big news in Washington, but out here in the sticks its pretty much SOP. Of course the unspoken subtext in this story isnt what Karl Rove did or didnt do to avoid prosecution, its that no matter what he did, there wasnt anything actionable.

3. Deficit? What Deficit?

From Investors Business Daily.

Obviously this is because the NSA is monitoring our bank accounts.

4. And whats my favorite headline of today?

Thats easy - Daryl Hanna Removed From Tree.

Wow, usually wacked out Hollywood actresses dont become ripe for picking until October.

Posted @ June 13, 2006 05:48 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

Sic Semper Tyrannus

Submitted without comment....

Posted @ June 11, 2006 10:36 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Zarqawis peers react to his passing

So let's ask the "Islamic Supermen" what they think of the loss of Zarqawi...

Saddam Hussien.
Captured December 14th 2003.
Currently awaiting a sentence of "Death by Hanging".

"Well I tell you, this is what happens when you outsource, isnt it? I mean, you just cant get good help these days. I mean we have an entire invasion against us here in Iraq and do you think one of the fedyeen geniuses could manage to blow up a single bridge or string a wire across a road? No, so sure enough I have to hire out for that kind of expertise. So who do I get? Yeah, "mr. lets kill lots of Muslims to make them love us and our cause". Yeah that will get them on our side, Like I havent been doing that for years already and look where it got me, a suite right here in the Downtown Bagdhad YMCA. But what are you going to do, its not like weve got the pick of the litter to choose from out there, you take what can and make the most of it. But seriously, if a bloodthristy terrorist thug cant hide in Iraq, whats the world coming to?"

Well, now its three years later and everyone is an expert at roadside bombs. But does that help me now? No. But does he send me a bill every two weeks like clockwork, oh you betcha!

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
Captured March 1 2003.
Currently undergoing 'close interrogation' in Pakistan.

"He was always a real bite in the ass. Everytime we went out to dinner, he was always the first to say we should "go dutch". of course, he would always get next to nothing and then start with the " hey,are you gonna eat those fries?" Then after dinner is over, he goes into the " Hey man! I just had a glass of tea, I'm not kicking in for your ladyfingers" routine. What a tightass."

Abu Zubaydah
Captured March 28, 2002
Current incarcerated.

"Not my favorite guy. very close friend of Libbi though, if you know what I mean. Very-close-friend (wink-wink). I dont care for people who wear "Hi Karate" and still think of themselves as cool. We'd be out at Jihad camp doing exercises and he'd smell like the Avon lady crawling around out there, I mean you could smell him upwind when he wore that stuff,which was all the time. He had cases of it. I mean, who knew that they still made that crap? "

So, I'm on my way out to help blow up LAX and who stops by? Thats right, Mr. Johnny "tres flores" Jihad himself. Sure enough, he splashes me on both cheeks with the friggin 'Hi Karate', just for "Good luck" he says. Yeah. great. So the Border Guard catches a whiff as I'm coming through the gate and of course now he thinks I'm hiding something, which of course I was and the rest is history. Yeah, thanks a bunch, you freakin idiot. I hope you and your asian stinkwater roast in hell.

Abu Faraj al-Libbi
Arrested May 2nd 2005.
Currently under close interrogation by Pakistan.

Er, uh Who? I'm sorry friend I know not of who you speak. One day I was on my way to the local Madrassa to turn in my algebra homework, and the next thing you know these men throw me into a truck and said I was a Jihadi. I mean really, do look like a Jihadi to you?

Zacarias Moussaoui
Captured August 2001.
Currently serving several life sentences at the SUPERMAX facility in Florence Colorado.

"So, let me get this straight, they dropped two 500 lb bombs directly on his head. Is that right? Well theres only one thing to say then... LUCKY BASTARD!!! He doesnt get to live for the next 40 years with Ted Kaczynski as his roommate. Oh, man, he goes on and on and on about dolphins and the machinery of modern life. He just never shuts up. "Wapners on at five, Wapner is on at 5, Im a good driver, im definetly a good driver, I wouldnt open that letter if I were you. Yeah, a regular hoot to spend my wait for eternity with. He asks me atleast a dozen times a day "what do I think of Al Gore". Like I care diddly about Al Gore! He's constantly writing letters to publishers saying that "Al Gore stole his ideas". As if anyone is ever going to open a letter with a return address from him. He just never shuts up about Redwood trees. It's enough to make you scream. Kaczynski....Kaczynski... you know, I'll bet thats a jewish name. Yeah, thats got to be it. A Zionist conspiracy to drive me mad. That's got to be it. "

Ted Kaczynski
Currently Serving a life sentence in the SUPERMAX facility in Florence Colorado.

"If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later..."

TED!!! (Shouts cellmate Moussaoui...)

Posted @ June 09, 2006 03:48 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Iowahawk: Zarqawi reports that heaven is overrated".

Only one word covers it. Heh...

(not work safe, not kid safe,but funny just the same)

Posted @ June 09, 2006 10:50 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

A Link between the canada 17 and Zarkawi?

Maximus - the Bosnian who was arrested September 25th 2005 and served as the key link to the UK, Canada 17, and the two US terror suspects was also working for Zarqawi.

"Police officials here say Bektasevic(AKA: "Maximus"), 19, also ran a Web site on behalf of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian who heads the insurgent group al Qaeda in Iraq. More details on the Bosnian link can be found here.

Remember that arrests in this cell started in August 2005 with the two Toronto jokers being caught trying to smuggle weapons into Canada. Later in Bosnia, a Webmaster arrested 'in situ' in September 2005 and more Bosnian arrests occur until December 2005. Then, the RCMP starts large scale undercover operations. More arrests of key individuals occur in March and April 2006. Then, large sweeping raids across the EU and Canada occur in June 2006, effectively destroying the network of this cell of terrorists.

And 5 days later - the head of the cell is dead.

Coincidence?

Posted @ June 08, 2006 01:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

A good week for freedom and democracy

This week we saw in illustration of governments in cooperation world wide in an effort to dismantle terror networks resulting in arrests in 22 countries; Zarkawi and 17 of his very closest friends killed as a result of information received from Iraqi civilians, and now the USS Cole is back in action.

NORFOLK, Virginia (AP) -- The USS Cole left port Thursday for its first Middle East deployment since a 2000 terrorist attack blew a hole in its side and killed 17 sailors.

A good week for freedom and Democracy.

UPDATE: The fabulous Dr. Sanity rounds up reactions from all those folks who wouldnt know a good thing if it feel out of the sky and wiggled in their laps. Once again, I'm stunned by those who just last week were trumpeting the successes of Zarkawi as evidence of our failure in Iraq, but now that hes dead he was A) just a figurehead B) Never really a threat anyway C) Didnt have any Al-Queda connections. It seems that for some people, all news and information is being filtered through the "good for Bush, not good for Bush" machine to determine if something worth celebrating or not.

UPDATE II: If Bush keeps killing all of the middle east "partners for peace", who will be left for us to surrender to? ( Shades of Jimmy Carter and his belief that Arafat was a 'partner for peace'. heh...)

UPDATE III: The Butchers Bill; A list of killing of children and beheadings that Zarkawi took credit for.

UPDATE IV: From DailyKos - "Bush's idea of justice is bombs falling out of the sky?". Well, uh yeah, you got a problem with that? Whats your idea of justice,eh hippy? a full hashpipe?

Posted @ June 08, 2006 09:58 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Nihilist In Golf Pants: Top 11 Things That Anti-War Protesters Would Have Said At the Normandy Invasion on D-Day

The Post is funny. The comments are even funnier...

Posted @ June 07, 2006 09:02 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Canada the UK and the US: Its all about networking.

The links between the Canada case, the UK case and the Georgia connection are continuing to come into sharper focus.

There are three operations that have been underway between the EU, the United States and Canada:

Operation Mazhar The British/EU effort.
Operation OSage The Canadian Effort
Operation Northern Exposure. The US Effort.

So, while many of us thought that the UK operations was unrelated to the Canada effort, there appears to be some overlap. The UK has just made more arrests that the BBC is saying is related to the Canada case, not the UK case. Click here for mor details.

An additional arrest in the UK may prove to be the key arrest in the entire network, including the first mention that I've seen to a connection to Zarkawi. Click here for more details.

I'll have a more comprehensive post on this later tonight. There appears to be a massive break in the intelligence side of the game that is effectively leading to the rapid roll up of terror networks in the west.

Networks. It's all about the networks.

Posted @ June 07, 2006 10:10 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

They used to call me crazy joe, but now they call me "Batman"

1940: " Hey wouldnt it be great if you could fly like a bird..."

The Result:Hollywood invents "Commander Cody" and later remakes the same idea as "The Rocketeer".

2006: "Hey wouldnt it be great if you could fly like a bird..."

The Result:

The full story is here. ( This just has to be a joke, right? I mean no one would actually do this would they?)

Posted @ June 06, 2006 12:35 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

A better thing to think about than the obsession with todays date.

""It makes me feel like I'm here for a reason. I'm here to do something with my life,'' said Ashley, who will attend the University of Arizona in the fall on a scholarship. "I'm not here to sit around and cry and waste my time thinking about what happened to me."

More details can be found here.

Now stop whining and get back to work. Smile you ingrates, life is good!

Posted @ June 06, 2006 08:37 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Canada 17: More Connections

Two of the men arrested in Canada, now known as the "Canada 17" were arrested in Buffalo New York in August 13, 2005. What did they do? Oh, well they apparently were trying to smuggle handguns into Canada by taping them to their bodies. You'll remember Buffalo as the location of one of the cells that were broken in the days just after 9/11.

Now, what would you boys need handguns for in lovely liberal progressive Canada?

Oh, and on the Georgia Tech angle? In October 2005, Explosive devices were fond near the campus. Is there a connection? well not yet, but its awfully interesting.

The most shocking thing about the Canada 17 is the fact that several of them are underage, meaning we dont know their identities, but this is not a new thing to the Canadian Jihadis. One of the most controversial inmates in Guantanamo is Omar Khadir. So what did he do? Well little Omar was picked up in Afghanistan by our troops. Apparently our troops dont take kindly to having hand grenades thrown at them.

Omar Khadir is controversial not because hes thrown grenades at troops in a war zone, but by the fact that he is 14 years old and not been shot dead on the battlefield, but is instead a detainee at Guantanamo Bay Cuba, and so his inlaw Abdurahman Khadr. More on Khadir family can be found here.

Oh, and where is he from in Canada? Vancouver? Ottowa? Nah, he's from Toronto.

More to follow...

UPDATE: Profiles are now available of some of those that have been arrested.

UPDATE II: "FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko said U.S. authorities have been co-operating with Canadian police since they discovered that the two Georgia students travelled to Toronto in March 2005 and met at least three of the Canadians who were arrested." More info here.

Ok, so thats how the Georgia Tech sideshow fits in.

UPDATE III: The story continues to come into focus. From Canadas National Post:

"The Toronto busts are linked to arrests that began last August at a Canadian border post near Niagara Falls and continued in October in Sarajevo, London and Scandinavia, and earlier this year in New York and Georgia. The FBI confirmed Saturday the arrests were related to the recent indictments in the U.S. of Ehsanul Sadequee and Syed Ahmed, who are accused of meeting with extremists in Toronto last March to discuss terrorist training and plots. “There is preliminary indication that some of the Canadian subjects may have had limited contact with the two people recently arrested from Georgia,” Special Agent Richard Kolko, the FBI spokesman, said in an e-mail to the National Post."

August is when the two Toronto geniuses were busted at the border for trying to smuggle handguns into Canada from Buffalo.

UPDATE IV: More clarity from the National Post -
"It was Cesur Abdulkadir, a 20-year-old Danish-born Turk. The officers yanked the coat away and saw he was clutching a pistol with a silencer. His index finger was on the trigger. One of the Bosnian officers knocked the gun out of Mr. Bektasevic's hand and the two men were arrested. A search of the apartment turned up 20 kilograms of explosives, a suicide belt and a Sony 60 Hi 8 VHS tape that contained instructions on how to make a bomb and warned of a pending attack against an unnamed country. "God is great," said the voice on the videotape (a British forensic expert determined the voice was "more than rather likely" that of Mr. Bektasevic). "These brothers are ready to attack and, God willing, they will attack the non-Muslims who are killing our brothers and Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and in many other countries. "These weapons will be used against Europe, against those whose forces are in Iraq and Afghanistan.... We are here and we are planning and we have everything ready. This is a message for you."

Apparently the only people left on earth who think that Afghanistan and Iraq are not linked together are in the American Democrat Party.

Update: Welcome Instapundit and Hugh Hewitt readers! Just to catch everyone up and to give you all the "short version" it looks like this

The Canada 17 bust is tied to an arrest made in April in Bangladesh, which is also tied to a couple of students at Georgia Tech. Somehow the FBI managed to get custody of the Bangladesh individual, which has raised the hackles of Pakistani public opinion. The two Georgia Tech students recently traveled to Canada and somehow drew attention to themselves. The RCMP were either montoring the mosque, key members of the mosque or the training camp itself and were able to spring a very nice "sting" where the members of the 17 attempted to buy 3 tons of the highest caliber ammonium nitrate. For those of you following along at home, ammonium nitrate and any sort of accelerant ( diesel, gas, propane) makes a very large explosive capable of the worst kind of damage. During the 1990's we saw four examples of ammonium nitrate bombs, The WTC bombing( 1 1/2 tons), Oklahoma City( 1 ton), Khobar Towers( 1 1/2 tons) and Kenyan embassies ( 1 1/2 tons). Keep those numbers in mind whenever anyone says this was "no big deal". Three members of the 17 were already in custody due to being arrested in Buffalo NY last August while attempting to smuggle handguns past the border.

If you want to map out what the attack the Canada 17 could have looked like had it been allowed to continue; here is the analysis of the Kenyan Embassies attack in detail.
In October of last year, Some sort of explosives were found in and around the campus of Georgia Tech. I do not know if that is connected to this case, but the FBI agent I sourced earlier confirms what the original reporting has stated, that information received from these two individuals was key to the case moving forward at this time.

Summary: While the left was wetting its pants over the "Cartoon controversy" and making everyone go "absolutely flapjack" on the issue of "evil President Bush and his illegal NSA domestic phonetaps",it appears that a group of solid professionals on our side,both at home and abroad managed to stop June 5th from being remembered as something more than the day before D-Day.

Why am I paying attention to Canada and not the case thats going in the UK? First, theres only so many hours in the day, and second, its Canada. Canada is what every single leftist thinks we should be like and act like, from its foreign policy to its health system, and yet, here we are looking at the most dangerous cell of terrorists since Mohammded Atta was at work and yet, these guys were going to attack Canada! Not that there ever is a rational argument but there is no possible rational justification for this attack. This should serve as a marker for anyone about the distance our enemy is willing to go to accomplish its goals. There is no middle ground, no compromise, no "common ground" with these people. It's either victory or death.

While were all chattering away about the "Terrible Mexican border Situation" or "Harriet Miers" or the "UAE controlling our ports" or "Muhammad as a Cartoon" or "The NSA is listening to our phone calls", other people in our communities were working quietly behind the scenes in an effort to kill us. All those made up nightmares pale in comparison to what these people could have accomplished had our professionals not kept their eyes on the ball.

And boys and girls I need to remind you... this was only one cell.

And there are more out there, just waiting for the right moment.

Posted @ June 05, 2006 11:57 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (8)

Compare and Contrast

This is a picture of three celebrities reenforcing their slowly fading career by making a name for themselves by speaking against the elected President of a Democracy. Niether the magazine, nor the subjects of this cover have suffered from any retaliatory acts by the goverment.

This is a picture of a man who by his selfless act against tyranny has put the lives of himself and his entire family at risk in hope of stopping a line of tanks controlled by a tryanical government in the process of killing protestors against the government of China.

This picture is an example of 'speaking truth to power'. The other picture is an example of career enhancement. The first picture is of self promotion made in a culture of narcissism within a democracy. The second is of selfless bravery in a culture of repressive tryanny.

The day I see Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn or the Dixie Chicks stand in front of a line of tanks in Havana, or Peking, or Pyongyang is the day I will start referring to them as "brave". Until then, they are merely "pretenders".

My previous post on the impact of the actions of 1989 can be found here.

Posted @ June 04, 2006 12:43 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

The Canada 17

Michele Malkin has the list of names.

First throught: How much you wanna bet at least one shows up on the list of Guantanamo detainees?

Second thought: How long till some Canadian leftist blames the fact that Harper was elected as the cause of the "sudden rise in non-francophone terrorism in Canada".

Third thought: You notice how when you say "3 tons of ammonium nitrate", no one gives a damn about warrants for the intercepts?

Obviously we've got a night of googling to see if we can find out if these cats have ever surfaced anywhere before.

UPDATE I: Apparently the left now refers to any prison with terrorists as "Guantanamo". Canada just opened its own facility in Ontario.

UPDATE II: Somehow I missed this: "Shareef Abdelhaleen, 30, is a computer programmer who emigrated from Egypt 20 years ago with his father, now an engineer with a nuclear utilities services company..." Ack!

UPDATE III: Just in case you are wondering, Ontario gets 40% of its power from nuclear power. Both Gereation sites are near Toronto.

UPDATE IV: Apparently the Canada arrests came from a set of arrests in Georgia. I cant seem to find any information on that, but if thats the case we have a US,Canada, UK cooperation process underway.

UPDATE V: BINGO! Snip
"A 21-year-old Georgia Tech student taken into federal custody last month has been charged with giving "material support" to a terrorist organization, according to a federal indictment unsealed Thursday. The student, Syed Haris Ahmed, a mechanical engineering major who had become increasingly devout in his Islamic faith, was arrested March 23 by the FBI."
...
"In a separate case that may be related, a 19-year-old Roswell, Ga., man was arrested Monday in Bangladesh. Ehsanul Islam Sadequee was arrested by Bangladeshi authorities after at least eight months of federal investigation into him and his family, his sister, Sharmin Sadequee, said Thursday."
...
"Ahmed told his family that authorities found a video on the Internet and apparently traced it to him. The video was of a building and was perhaps made during a trip with friends. Ahmed's family members said they did not know the location of the building or when the tape was made. WAGA-TV reported that the station's sources say the FBI believes Ahmed traveled to Pakistan last year to attend a terrorist training camp. His family acknowledged that he traveled to Pakistan, but they said he was attending a religious school. The report cannot be independently verified."

Sadequee, the sister of the man arrested in Bangladesh, said her brother was briefly detained last August at Kennedy International Airport in New York when he was flying to Bangladesh to get married.
She said the family had immigrated from Bangladesh and had lived in Atlanta since 1988. Sadequee said her brother was born in Fairfax, Va., and is a U.S. citizen, although from 2001 to 2004 he was home schooled in Bangladesh and attended a British school there. Sadequee said her family, including an aunt in Canada, has been interviewed by authorities several times since August. She said agents have told the family that her brother's name "came up when we were investigating someone else."

This was reported on April 21st, 2006, but the article makes it clear that the case had been underway for some time.

UPDATE VI: The Bangladesh connection. The timing is interesting:
"It may be mentioned that Ehsanul Islam Sadequee was arrested by police on April 17, 2006 and handed over to FBI from the Kalachandpur Bridge Police Check Post near the Baridhara DOHS, Dhaka. Subsequently, he was flown to the USA by a chartered CIA plane on April 20, 2006 without any order from any court of Bangladesh."

Well, Someone is moving pretty damn fast here...

UPDATE VII: On a possibly related subject, the London bust the other day seems to have become something somewhat worse than car bombings; "Terror cell was planning nerve gas attack on capital".

Posted @ June 03, 2006 05:38 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Train collision in North Korea leaves 1000 dead

More evidence of the condtions inside North Korea from The Mail and Guardian.

A Buddhist humanitarian aid group said on Friday that two troop trains packed with soldiers collided head-on in North Korea in April leaving more than 1 000 dead.

The reported accident occurred in Kowon County in the remote and rugged north-eastern province of South Hamkyong on April 23 when a train's brakes failed on a downhill stretch of track.

It rammed into another train that was climbing the hill on the same track, according to the group, Good Friends.

"The number of dead was very high as the cars of both trains were crowded with soldiers, including those being discharged and new conscripts," the group said in its weekly newsletter.

South Korea's government said it had heard nothing about the reported accident and was unable to comment.

The aid group said that North Korea's government imposed a news blackout on the tragedy but the news, which at first was whispered among relatives of the victims, slowly leaked out of the Communist state.

North Korea tightly controls news about the country from reaching the outside world and also clamps down on the flow of information inside the country.

However, control if its northern border with China has relaxed in recent years due to the rise in two-way trade and more people and information are crossing in both directions.

North Korea's railway system is known to be in an extremely poor state. Decades-old rolling stock run no faster than 65kph on rusted tracks, with a lack of fuel and electricity forcing many trains to remain idle.

Meanwhile, North Korea is also about to launch a missile with enough range to hit the United States. Its a weird world we live in, isnt it?

Posted @ June 02, 2006 10:32 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Finest.Post.Ever

Gerard Van Der Leun shows us how its done in what I consider the finest piece on the subject of memorial day Ive ever read.

Posted @ June 02, 2006 03:02 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Aesop’s Fables: The Village and the Weather Gods

Once upon a time, there was a village on the edge of the sea. This village lived on the commerce that came from the trade of seafood and the goods made from creatures the Fishing Guild caught from the sea. Salted fish, sharkskin and grease made from salmon provided the people of the village with a plenty of business and a healthy lifestyle by trading with the surrounding tribes for goods and services. It was a happy village made of small groups of people of various trades guilds and associations. Of these groups, the largest and most powerful was the Fishing Guild. The people of the Fishing Guild lived on a beautiful peninsula on the edge of the village and enjoyed the fruits of their labors by owning the very best homes of the village. Their wealth was a subject of envy by some in the village, especially the politicians who wondered what could be done to curb the power of this one group.

One winter, the village was struck by a series of storms that wrecked a number of its homes. The fishing fleet was at sea when the storms struck the village and it wasn’t until long after the storms arrived that the Fishing Guild returned to the village to see the damage.

“We’ll be happy to help out neighbors in any way we can” said the Chief of the Fishing Guild to the crowd of villagers as he surveyed the damage from his boat. But one villager, a politician with his mind thinking towards the future replied; ”Yes, but perhaps it was the Fishing Guild that caused the storms in the first place”!

The people of the village began to gather to hear the politician make his speech of accusation against the rich and powerful Fishing Guild. “The people of this village have lived here for generations and we’ve never had storms like this before. Perhaps the gods are unhappy with the Fishing Guild. Perhaps the ‘weather gods’ disapprove of the new oars that the fishing guild have been using on their boats or the way they exploit the people of the village who serve as oarsmen during the fishing season”.

The Chief of the Fishing Guild replied. “Hogwash my friend! Oars do not affect the weather and the gods do not worry themselves about the size of our oars. If they did, wouldn’t the gods destroy our homes and not yours? Our homes were not touched in the storms. Tend to your own sins my friend and leave the mighty Fishing Guild to deal with what works best on the sea!”

The crowd began to murmur aloud in speculation at the wealth of the Fishing Guild. The people of the village began to wonder if the Fishing Guild were somehow appeasing the gods of the sea so that their homes would remain undamaged, while theirs were destroyed in the new and more powerful storms of the last season. It seemed so unfair that one group could survive the wrath of the gods while others of the village suffered. The villagers craved for justice, for some ability to control their circumstances.

A meeting was called of the village elders to discuss that the impact that the Fishing Guild was having on the life of the villagers. The village anti-fishing politician made his case for the masses; “The sea gods are clearly angry at us for our inability to control the Fishing Guild and their use of the offensively large oars. It is the fishing guild that has created the offense, and they need to be controlled by the good and noble people of the village, or we will all be wiped out with large storms sent by the gods.’

One citizen who was shocked and skeptical at this suggestion asked the politician;

“ You can’t be serious! There is no proven connection between the size of the oars and the strength of weather”. In response, the politician gave them his calm and reasoned reply:

“We can’t afford to take the chance that we might be wrong. We must take action now before it is too late. The gods have warned us, and now we much take action. We must do something about the excesses of the Fishing Guild while we still can!”

The village elders invited the Chief of the Fishing Guild to the elders meeting and announced to him their plans to control both the size of the oars and the number of oarsmen in the fishing fleet as a way to appease the weather gods and return the village weather to its former state. The people demanded that the village elders do something about the weather, and the only sane course of action for the elders to take was to penalize the richest and most capable of the village community.

Angrily, the Chief of the Fishing Guild cried out to the elders, he said; “ If you change the size of our oars, or cut the number of the oarsmen, all you will do is reduce the size of the fishing fleet that can sail for the season. That will mean there will be only half as many fish that will be caught and brought back to the village. This action will have not the slightest impact on the weather, but it will certainly impact how many of us in the village will be able to eat”

The village anti-fishing politician now persecuted his case with renewed anger, he looked across the audience assembled for the meeting and said; “I’ve spoken with the shaman and they all agree that the weather gods are angry at the village for not controlling the Fishing Guild and its wanton abuse of the sea! However, the shaman say if we control the Fishing Guild by trying to limit their impact on the sea, the gods will be appeased and the storms will no longer strike the village and we will all live again in a “heaven on earth”.

The chief just shook his head at the prosecuting politician and said; “They don’t all agree! We’ve spoken with the shaman as well and several of them say as we do that the weather is not controlled by the gods but…”

The prosecuting politician cut him off in mid sentence.

“Do not speak blasphemy Chief! Everyone knows that the gods control the weather! The shaman you speak of are former members of the Fishing Guild and hold their interests ahead of those of the village. They are not to be listened to in this matter!”

The village elders then held a vote and agreed that the only prudent course of action was to limit the size of the oars and the number of oarsmen. The next morning, the village would confiscate all of the oars and registered each of the oarsmen of the fishing fleet at the beginning of the fishing season. Oars would be held by the village elders and would only be issued when the village agreed that the oars dimensions met the current shamanistic specification to ensure that the splashing of the oars in the water did not offend the gods as they had done previously by the greed and impudent Fishing Guild.

That year, because of the reduction in the number of oarsmen, the fishing fleet shrank in size to nearly half of what it had been previously. Many proud and once wealthy fishing families were forced to burn their boats to the waterline, since they could no longer fish and were made penniless. This negative economic effect was felt not by just the members of the once proud Fishing Guild, but also by many people of the village who were also now made penniless by the changes imposed on the fishing fleet as they too depended on the trade that came from the goods that were produced from the fish that was provided to the village by the now persecuted Fishing Guild.

Strangely, the poverty that was now spreading in the village only increased their anger at the Fishing Guild. The people in the village took great comfort in their actions towards the Fishing Guild. They felt good to get even in some way.

But the next year, the storms were worse than they were before. The villagers were shocked and recriminations in the village began anew because once again, the storms struck the village while the now diminished fishing fleet was away at sea.

As the fishing fleet came into harbor and their crews saw the devastation the storms brought to the village, The Chief of the Fishing Guild then turned and spoke to the fleet “We’ve done what they asked, and now they can see the errors of their ways. The size of our oars and the number of oarsmen had no impact on the weather; just as we told them would be the case. We stand vindicated and now you will see our fleet returned to its former size.”

On his arrival into the battered harbor, the village elders summoned the Chief of the Fishing Guild. When he arrived at the meeting, he was placed immediately under arrest. They said to the assembled villagers; “Clearly our actions were not enough to appease the gods. We must remove the fishing guild from the village altogether!” The politicians of the village attempted to calm the village by demonstrating that they were at least “doing something” to help the people of the village, unlike the hated Fishing Guild who everyone in the village now believed was the cause of their disaster.

The next morning, the villagers burned the remaining boats of the Fishing Guild and confiscated their homes. The fishing guild and their families, now scorned by the rest of the village gathered their remaining goods and fled, never to return.

After the loss of the Fishing Guild, the village foundered economically as the loss of trade that came with the fishing now effected each and every one of the remaining ‘land lubbing’ villagers. No fish at the end of the season meant there was nothing to trade with the surrounding communities. The village elders advised that the people of the village seek alternatives when it came to new goods to trade, but none of the alternatives were as profitable or as in demand as those provided from the works of the Fishing Guild.

The next year, the storms hit again, only this time they were much worse than before and after they were over, those of the village who still remained had finally had enough and began to depart the village for the surrounding communities.

Most of the villagers that is, except for the one politician who had accused the Fishing Guild of its crime against the gods.

Having saved his money during the last few years of disaster, He and his family moved into the largest of the homes left behind by the Fishing Guild and began to renovate what was left of the former village for their own benefit. The few remaining villagers were hired as servants to the new estate that was created on the grounds of the once happy village by the sea.

Strangely enough after a few more years of bad storms, the weather retuned to its former moderate pattern. He told his servants “See, I told you if we were rid of the Fishing Guild the weather would get better and we would have a heaven on earth. Now, prepare my dinner and see to it that the laundry is done my faithful servants”

Moral: The politician’s idea of a ‘heaven on earth’ is not the same as yours, so when they promise one to you, beware. You might not get what you think.

Posted @ June 01, 2006 09:04 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

New Blog: Instapinch

The best thing about blogs is the fact that you can build your own resource pool out of people who really do cool things. When you are evaulating news about the world, you can either trust some hack reporter to get the story right or you can reach into your blogroll and find someone who actually does the job for a living and ask them.

For example, why am I not wetting my pants over "bird flu"? because I have an ER Nurse and a CDC doctor in my list of associates. We talked about it and to make a long story short - they arent worried, so niether am I.

So if you find yourself in need of the perspective of a Naval Aviator, Then check out Instapinch. So, stop by and say hello.

Posted @ June 01, 2006 09:26 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Back From Beyond

Donner Party Memorial, May 29th 2006.

On October 28th, 1846 A party of emigrants who had spent the summer crossing the Great Basin( a very dry high alpine desert), failed to cross the Sierra Mountain range before the onset of the annual snows.

This memorial sits off the side of Interstate highway 80 and marks the campsites where a large part of the emigrants camped for the winter. The base of the memorial marks the height of the snow that winter, the tourists below give a sense of scale of the overall size of the memorial. The Encampment at Donner Lake lasted from October 1946 until April 1847.

Forty-two members of the Donner Party perished over the winter, 47 survived. The Donners came to California before it became fashionable and the trail was far from well established. The 49'ers of the Gold Rush were still two years off. An ill-advised shortcut given by a man who had never actually seen the trail, resulted in the loss of nearly 30 days in the crossing. The experience of the Donner Party serves as a warning to all who might take such shortcuts in life.

One member of the party, Louis Keseberg was discovered with the half eaten corpses of his fellow travellers at his tent when the relief party arrived in April. During the trip, he is also thought to have taken part in the abandonment of one of the other travellers in the desert. He was the last survivor of the encampment to arrive at Sutters Fort. When you start to complain about the habits of your seatmates on Southwest Airlines, just be glad your not sharing an exit row with Louis Keseberg.

This site also marked the completion point of my epic motorcycle trip this weekend over the Sierras. Unlike the weather found by the Donner Party, the weather was great but it was a little colder in places than I had anticipated including a bit of early summer snow. At one point I was caught at the pass in a small localized snowstorm with about 100 other motorcyclists and it was quite a scene. We looked like the set of a "Mad Max" movie as we took over the small diner in Foresthill California and waited for the storm to pass.

To my knowledge, no cannibalism is known to have occured during my short stay.

I have always called the Donner Memorial the "No Whining" Memorial because no matter how bad you think your situation is, no matter how bleak your day or your current life circumstances, you can be certain that its better than the situation the Donner Party faced in the winter of 1846. Today, the area of the Donner encampment is surrounded by multi-million dollar vacation homes, fully stocked grocery stores and a six lane freeway.

Life is good.

( More info on the Donner Party can be found here.)

Posted @ May 30, 2006 03:28 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

3 Day Weekend Checklist

1. Motorcycle checked and ready. Check.
2. Tank Full. Check.
2. Weather good over the sierras. Check.
3. "Honey do" List complete. Check.
4. Cellphone charged. Check.

This is my way of saying that blogging will be light this weekend. If youre on Foresthill road on the way to Donner Lake and you see a Copper Suzuki SV650 going way too fast around the curves, thats me.

While Im out, Get on over to neo-Neocon and read her posts on "Hate this war". Its a fabulous bit of thinking, but I think theres more here than shes uncovered. I'll have more to say about it after I've cleared my mind with a bit of adrenaline and gasoline.

Oh, and for your viewing pleasure - Its the "art of Octopi and women". Heh...

Posted @ May 26, 2006 12:56 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

GDP growth fastest in 2-1/2 years

I'd like to blog on this, but Im too busy trying to figure out why someone would build a statue with four toes.

Posted @ May 25, 2006 09:09 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Where were you on August 20, 1977?

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

- Hitchikers Guide To The Universe.

Since August 20, 1977, the fastest craft ever launched from earth, The Voyager II Spacecraft has been flying outward away from earth and into the great unknown. Every single day since then, that little piece of metal and machinery has been rocketing towards the edge of the Solar System.

Voyager II will finally reach the edge of our solar system this year.

Carter, Reagan, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush, Berlin Wall, Fall of Communism, Jonestown, 9/11, Yuppies, Home computers, Satellite TV, Cellphones, The Internet, Mir up - Mir down, Space Shuttle up - Space Shuttle down. The first Star Wars movie had only been out for 3 months. Now there are 6, and they are all on little DVD disks which werent even invented when this spacecraft was launched.

I now officially feel small and insignificant. For all but the first 16 years of my life, the fastest thing ever made by man has been speeding towards the edge of the solar system every single day, and it only just reached it.

Space is big. Really, really big...

I once had an email exchange with the head of SETI, Seth Shostak. He's a hell of a guy, he actually returned my emails. I asked him a few questions about the SETI project, which is a project designed to listen to radio waves in hope of detecting extraterrestrial intelligence.

Now, I had always thought that they were scanning the airwaves of interstellar space listening for radio stations the way I scan the car radio on long trips across Nevada late at night, hoping to use the atmospheric skip to catch a far away radio station from places like Seattle or even New York. It's one of the truly mystical experiences in life to be travelling across the highways of the west on moonlit nights, scanning round and around through the radio dial to find some sign of life on earth by trying to get a reflection of a radio signal thats bouncing off the atmosphere while you speed down a highway where you are the only car, the only light on the horizon for miles. Suddenly out of the dash, crackles a repeat of "The BBC home service" from some far off underfunded public radio station and you find yourself wondering about the randomness that makes up so much of your life.

So in my email exchange, I asked Mr. Shostak "If we were to place the SETI radio telescope dishe on, oh, let's say Pluto for example and scan towards Earth,from the signals that the Dish picks up,would we detect life on Earth"?

His answer knocked me for a loop, because his answer was "no". He explained that SETI doesnt listen for all the possible signals that could possibly be generated on all the possible frequencies. They had in fact limited their search to a specific set of frequencies. Up till then I had always imagined that the first signs of life would be someone accidentally catching a rerun of Tau Ceti's "I Love Lucy". This was not to be the case for SETI was looking for a specific signal and frequency and not the Tau Ceti squid version of "Lucy and Ethels big adventures".

I was really flattened by what Mr. Shostak told me. Neither the frequency or the signal they were looking for would be detected from the hypothetical SETI "Pluto Listening Post".

It seemed to me like a really big long shot to hope that we would ever find evidence of other civilizations in space and once he explained to me how the search actually worked and how SETI came to the conclusions that they did, it seemed like an even longer shot than it was before.

After all, Mr. Shostak and SETI couldn't detect Earth with his methods and yet here we are, blasting our radios, watching TV, circling the planet with GPS satellites. If detecting humans at a distance was hard, you should remember that he has almost no chance of detecting the existance of the intelligent species like dolphins, whales, chimpanzees and the great squid.

It's not that I believe that we are alone in the universe, its that I believe that "Space is big. Really really big..." When I saw the article today on Voyager II, I was reminded of just how big it really is.

I'm sure that we will find other life in the universe. I'm pretty certain we will find other life in this Solar System. I'm dead certain that most of what we find will not be watching television or listening to the radio when we finally do find them.

I wonder if the "Giant Squid of Tau Ceti" spend their spare time writing blogs...

Posted @ May 23, 2006 10:22 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (7)

Bradbury Reminds

"...In midnight beds with blueprint, plan and scheme
You are the dream that other people dream"

Read the whole thing.

It's time to call the stonecutters...

Posted @ May 17, 2006 11:18 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

The mind staggers

Mexico Threatens Suits Over Guard Patrols

I'll have more about this later. This is as they say, a "target rich environment".

Posted @ May 16, 2006 03:58 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Names of Guantanamo Detainees

They can be found here.

Any big surprises? Well for one thing, theres a whole lotta people from China on this list. Funny, you don't hear anyone refer to China as a hotbed of Islamic terror. hardly anyone recognizes the fact that China has any Islamic population at all.

And this guy just cracks me up:
96. AL SHIHRI, ABD AL SALAM GHAYTAN MURAYYIF AL ZAYDA (full name cut off) — Saudi Arabia

Full name cut off? You mean theres more? This is why they dont wear uniforms. If they did, the name tags would way a ton and a half.

The fact that nearly every name on the list has "Mohammed" in it reminds me of the movie "Buckaroo Bonzai" where all the aliens had the first name of "John".( John Yaya, John Smallberries, John Bigboote...)

Posted @ May 16, 2006 09:05 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Loudmouths and the madness of crowds

Yeah, I listened to the president’s speech this evening. I liked it, I had no real issue with it, I would have preferred he keep it to the single issue of border enforcement as I consider all other discussion on immigration to be moot until that problem is solved, but that’s a minor quibble with the speech as a whole.

After it was over, I went on my normal evening run and while I was out I listened to a few of the normal AM talk radio shows just to hear what the general consensus was.

To my total surprise, it seemed that most of the audience was incensed that the President didn’t call for a wide reaching pogrom on the illegal immigrants and that anything short of that was a clear sign that he was just a “limpwristed flop who was just caving in to political pressure” and in the end “not much better than a damn democrat”.

The loudmouths were crying out for blood and utterly furious that the president didn’t give it to them. They didn’t just want a border fence anymore because that just wasn’t good enough; now they wanted a border fence with immigrant heads impaled on it.

I have to tell you that its hell to run when you are spinning around like a character in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Here’s the problem that the President now faces. The Republican party has always had a “knuclehead nativist” stripe a mile wide down its back, and for 60 years the kind of knuckleheaded thinking of “I’d rather lose on principle than win by compromise” kept us away from any sort of political power and deservedly so, because it’s the kind of thing that adolescent children say not adults in the process of running a government of a great country.

Here’s a clue for you knuckleheads – Politics is Compromise. You will not get everything you want – ever. No matter how big your political party gets you will always have to compromise your vision of the “perfect” you want in order to settle for the “good” you can get. No amount of “bloody shirt” speechifying is going to change that fact, no matter how much you want it to be different.

A Democracy is an ugly thing that runs with the coordination of a three legged dog. If you want purity of movement then go get yourself a dictatorship. And when you do get the kind of simplistic purity of movement that your emotions seek, you can stop calling yourself Americans because you will be slaves again. Democracy is supposed to work like crap; its not supposed to be smooth and simple. Its supposed to be hard to get anything done, its part of the design! You talk, argue, complain, debate, and finally you put it to a vote. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose and you start all over again the next day.

You knuckleheads are just not going to deport 11 million people from the continental United States, and it isn’t just a lack of political will that’s keeping that from happening, it’s hard cold political reality so stop thinking that anything else short of that is a loss, because it isn’t really a starter in the first place.

This immigration problem of today was a reality that was well underway long before President Bush ever thought of even being Governor of Texas, much less President of the United States. Yet, President Bush is the first President since James K. Polk to make border security a serious issue, and you are all ready to crucify him for the effort.

There are now so many of you knuckleheads that you started to listen to the madness of crowds and will settle for nothing short of an open declaration of war on Mexico as a small sign that “he’s finally serious about border security”.

Well I say grow up you prancing loudmouths, this is not the WWF and Bush doesn’t need to hit Vicente Fox in the head with a metal chair just to get your vote. It’s easy to call anonymously for blood from the safety of the mob, but its hell to be the man to actually make the call. George Bush is not the leader of the mob; He’s not an alderman of Chicago who lives by doing your bidding and kissing your ring.

He is the leader – nay – the President of this country.

He is the President of all of it, the left and the right, the legal and the illegal, the throaty mob that hates him and small quiet group of us who do not. He is not just the President of the sniggling, smartass, whining, blowhard “kill them all let god sort them out” false bravado, knucklehead constituency who are oh so willing to toss away a government, all because they didn’t get their way.

You don’t like his plan on immigration? So your idea to make it all better is to put Nancy Pelosi in charge? Yeah, that’s showing them!

You think he should deport 11 million people immediately, so you think that process can be furthered by “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid”? Oh he’ll get right on your priority list first thing, why he’s the people servant that man is…

And of course the cause of freedom and national security will be greatly amplified by the administration of President Hillary Clinton. Ahhh, just think of the cabinet she will have! Think of the two Supreme Court choices she will get to make. Just think of the fun you will get to have when our military officers are routinely pulled off civilian aircraft overseas after she agrees to allow the International Criminal Court to have jurisdiction over our military. Why, just think of how fun it will be to see War Crimes trials across Europe, not for Dictators, but for American Servicemen.

Oh, and just think of how because of you and your little "pity party" that there won’t be a Republican of any stripe in any position of power to stop them. That’s right man, you “showed them”.

Yes, that will show us all just how righteously angry and pissed off you are.

And for all your anger, what we get is a return to a command economy, the superiority of the UN, less sovereignty, more taxes, the further erosion of the family and the shaming of the US Military.

The Second Coming of the Clintons will make the Carter years look like “Golden Mycenae” in comparison.

And just think, its you loudmouths that will have made it all happen. It will be something to be proud of, something to tell your grandkids about.

If we manage to live through it.

Posted @ May 15, 2006 09:54 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (9)

Get the stonecutters on the line

From National Review.

and excerpt from the Presidents upcoming speech:

“We must always remember that real lives will be affected by our debates and decisions, and that every human being has dignity and value no matter what their citizenship papers say.”

Huzzah!

Posted @ May 15, 2006 03:30 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Congress shocked to discover the existence of "intelligence gathering organizations" at work in the US.

The wisest of my High School teachers once told me:

"Show me who you hang out with and I'll tell you who you are"

Mr. Woodhouse got it, The NSA gets it, the President gets it, but Congress seems to live in an alternate reality.

Posted @ May 12, 2006 09:46 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Rules of engagement in the War on Terror

Don’t fight before Ramadan as it interrupts the UN sponsored peace process.

Don’t fight during Ramadan because it shows disrespect to an honored people and a great religion.

Don’t fight after Ramadan since so many civilians will simply be caught in the potential crossfire.

Don’t fight in the winter, because it may cause discomfort to the enemy. It is also a well-known fact that American troops are unable to survive the difficult conditions and deprivations that result from “snow”.

Don’t fight in the summer as excessive movement in the hot weather imposed on the enemy by our Armed forces may cause their premature deaths due to a lack of water.

Don’t fight in the fall, as fighting at that time is clearly designed only to impact elections in America.

Don’t fight in spring, because that’s when Network Television does its “Sweeps” campaign, and any news from the war zone will be ignored in favor of the far more important news of how many women are currently pregnant in Hollywood.

Don’t fight with ground troops unless each of them is fully incased in body armor and is incapable of any potential harm on the battlefield.

Do not try to drop bombs from aircraft, as the aircraft that normally do that are busy dropping food and water in enemy territory to ensure the well being of the people you are fighting against.

Don’t fight with airpower as it causes too much indiscriminate destruction on the ground.

Don’t fight with the Navy, because it’s simply not fair to fight people who don’t have one.

Do not fly the American Flag at home or abroad. Please keep all patriotic displays somber and subdued at all times. American Olympic Athletes should hang their head low when entering a stadium at events. Remember, It’s dissent that is patriotic, not this unfortunate habit of “flag flying” or “song singing” or any celebration of all the supposedly great things about your country.

Do not assume that people in the battlefield that are armed and shooting at you are the enemy. In many parts of the world, this is a sign of welcome and firing back at these innocent people in response can do untold damage to Americas public image around the world.

Do not display dead bodies of the enemy, as this is disrespectful to their culture and values. However, be sure to go to the Supreme Court to secure the right to display dead Americans and to protest at their funerals.

Under no circumstances discuss any actions on the battlefield of our military in terms of "bravery" or "victory". Only discuss our military in terms of failure, loss and futility. All American soldiers are to be portrayed as unfortunate dupes of the "Corporate Machine". All Enemy soldiers are to be portrayed as brave and principled rebels "fighting for their beliefs".

Do not keep detainees in prison camps in US territory, because they are to be afforded all access to the American Constitution and legal support and as a result should be set free until their appointed court dates.

Do not allow detainees to be sent to other countries, as those other countries do not respect the American Constitution and system of law and the detainee may come to harm in these other countries as a result.

Do not return detainees to their countries of origin, as we are often unable to determine if they are welcome by that countries government and the detainee may suffer by our actions.

By all means, see that the former detainees are given a seat in a major university where they may add to the great diversity of opinion that is available on our nations campuses.

Under no circumstances profile or exclude by association anyone from using any facility in the United States no matter how bad their documentation, no matter their country of origin, no matter alleged association with criminal elements considered by some to be dangerous to this country. Be sure at all times to extend the welcoming hand of freedom to anyone who wishes to come to this country for whatever purposes they desire.

Do not inconvenience anyone with any unnecessary and unproven methods of detecting bombs or weapons at our major airports, as this is an affront to our nations approach to civil rights. Treating people as criminals before they have been given a chance to defend themselves is simply discriminatory.

Under no circumstances are you to look for terrorists in the United States. Treat every single person who sets foot in the United States as a person who by their touching the holy soil of the country have had their hearts turned to the purity of good thoughts. Everyone in the US, citizen or not, is to be afforded the rights of full citizenship.

Be sure that any method used by the government to lower the risk of danger from terrorism is met with public derision. If time allows, be sure to expose to public knowledge any secret methods that are being used to intercept potential terrorists as a way to undermine the government and as a result ensure the safety of so many people.

(Please note: These rules only apply to Americans...)

Posted @ May 11, 2006 10:30 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

And who thinks being a congressman is qualification for anything?

Since "the buzz" this morning is "Hayden has ties to the military", I'd just like someone, anyone to ask what is the success rate of politicians who have lead the CIA has been in the past?

Here's the total list of CIA directors.

Rear Adm. Sidney Souers, USNR January 23, 1946 - June 10, 1946
Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, USA June 10, 1946 - May 1, 1947
Rear Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, USN May 1, 1947 - October 7, 1950
Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, USA October 7, 1950 - February 9, 1953
Allen W. Dulles February 26, 1953 - November 29, 1961
John McCone November 29, 1961 - April 28, 1965
Vice Adm. William Raborn, USN (Ret.) April 28, 1965 - June 30, 1966
Richard M. Helms June 30, 1966 - February 2, 1973
James R. Schlesinger February 2, 1973 - July 2, 1973
William E. Colby September 4, 1973 - January 30, 1976
George H. W. Bush January 30, 1976 - January 20, 1977
Adm. Stansfield Turner, USN (Ret.) March 9, 1977 - January 20, 1981
William J. Casey January 28, 1981 - January 29, 1987
William H. Webster May 26, 1987 - August 31, 1991
Robert M. Gates November 6, 1991 - January 20, 1993
R. James Woolsey February 5, 1993 - January 10, 1995
John M. Deutch May 10, 1995 - December 15, 1996
George J. Tenet July 11, 1997 - July 11, 2004
Porter J. Goss September 24, 2004 - May 5, 2006

Admiral, Admiral, Admiral, General. Jeez, its almost like I see a pattern here....

George Tenet? Allen Dulles? Robert Gates and Webster? Woolsey? What do they share besides being civilians?

Gates and Webster: Failed to detect or exploit the fall of the Berlin wall,the "Fall of Communism" or China's "Tienanmen square".

Dulles: Cuba and Iran. Yeah, that worked out swell.

Tenet: 9/11. India and Pakistan join "nuclear club".

Need I say more?

Besides the fact that #2 man at the CIA today IS an Admiral. Jackasses.

Somedays I think I'm living in a "scrappleface" post.

( Oh, and its my guess that President Bush actually welcomes hearings on the NSA program that will result now that Hayden is the candidate, if only to shut up the chattering nabobs in Congress...)

Posted @ May 08, 2006 09:50 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

The Verdict

Rudolph Hess. The German Moussaoui.

Well, its the "death penalty" debate again. Another pointless exercise in unmoveable politics in a head-on collision with unbendable minds.

I support the death penalty. I always have. I support it, not because of "eye for an eye" or any sense of vengence but because I think its humane. I dont think it should be handed out lightly or gratuitiously or for vengence but I do think that there are cases where it is not only called for, it is actually the required and the decent thing to do.

"Death penalty - Decent? Humane?

Allow me to explain.

We are not discussing what crimes should be considered as "capital crimes", but only what penalties should be applied for those crimes. The issue about what "is" and "is not" a capital crime has nothing to do with my argument. Civilizations makes moral and value based judgements as to the descending order of crime severity. In a Democracy such as ours, in some fashion its the people who speak to what "is" and "is not" the most severe of crimes and their penalties.

That being said there are only two choices for the very worst capital crimes, Death or life imprisonment without possibility of parole. Let's consider the second option first so as to put it in context with the controversial "Death Penalty".

Think about what the phrase " he got life..." really means. Life imprisonment, locked into a cement hell with no hope of ever returning to the outside world. Day after day after day of tedious oppression. Imagine what it is to grow old behind bars. Decades pass and those connections you had on the outside world begin to fade away, your health and sanity fade, but your living conditions do not improve. There is no rehabilition, there is no salvation, you are alive but in every way that can be measured, to your family, your friends, your culture, you have died. You will never contribute to life. Once you have died there will be no one who will remember your name except for those whom will remember you only as a criminal.

You start out young and tough and you end up a beaten animal no matter who you are, the path to end is the same. The penal system and teh criminal system will beat you at every turn. No matter how bad it is, no matter how long it takes for you to die, you have no hope of it ending with a sudden call from the parole board.

You will live and die behind bars. You will die a little bit every day.

Imagine starting every single day of your life without hope and without redemption. This is real life where there is no Hollywood ending. Imagine that the process of waiting for death takes decades. Decades of being victimized, processed and used at every possible opportunity as the prison population continues to change around you but you stay behind. Others may leave, but you stay and you will never leave.

Think about life in prison, not in terms of days, months and years, but as decades. Think about what a life sentence that started in 1970 would mean to the person serving that sentence today. 36 years behind bars. If they entered prison at age 20, that would mean that you probably are only half way through your sentence before you eventually die. You've been in prison since 1970, yet you are only half way to the inevitable end.

How much has the world changed since 1970? Ponder that idea for a moment and all the things that have happened since that you take for granted. How much will it change in the next 30 years?

It doesnt matter, you will have seen none of it.

What you saw in that time was cement, steel, vomit, blood and the compressed spring-like hatred of the insane. What you heard every day for 60 years was 24 hour industrial noise. There is no such thing as a quiet prison. There is no quiet corner to escape into a world of your own. You are always aware that you are in prison. You will very likely go slowly insane over the six decades of your incarceration. You will never leave alive. You are aware of that fact ever single day of your existence.

This is what life imprisonment means. It means that in a capital crime that the State is excused from the responsibility of carrying out your sentence. Its not "the State" that killed you, it was just an unfortunate part of your incarceration. The state will not rehabilitate you, nor will it ever parole you, but it will ensure that you are kept in conditions that decent people would not keep dogs at the neighborhood SPCA.

Life imprisonment is a great many things, but life without hope is not humane. It is slow cruelty visted on the criminal by the State under the guise of humane treatment. It is cruelty refined.

When we treat animals in what we call "a humane way", we recognize the sad fact that an animal that is in pain should not be allowed to live in those condtions. When that occurs, we speak in terms of "putting them down". When there is nothing that can be done to address the affliction, we regretfully and respectfully take up the ugly business of putting the animal down. We do it, because it is our duty to see it done right.

Here is my test case for my position on the "Death Penalty"

Jeffery Dahmer.

Once upon a time, Jeffery Dahmer someones little boy, all full of the promise that parents always have for all of their children. But something went horribly wrong with Jeffery. He became a cannibal of the first order. This man had some very serious issues. He killed and ate people. He kept their bodies in a refrigerator in his house. The issues that lead to his desire to become a cannibal had no hope of any sort of treatment, there was no magic pill to take, no therepist to talk to. There was never going to be any "slap to the forehead - what was I thinking!" moment for Jeffery. He killed, he ate and he killed again. As long as he was alive, thats all it would ever be.

Jeffery Dahmer was caught and convicted. He was sentenced to life. Actually he was sentenced to 15 life sentences, just to make clear to everyone that he would never ever be eligible for parole. There was no redemption or correction to Jeffery Dahmer as part of his sentence.

Up to this point many people would just say " that seems fair" but they dont know the end of the story, for Jeffery Dahmer didnt finish his sentence naturally.

A few years after he started serving his sentence, Jeffery Dahmer was beaten to death in a toilet. The State could feel that it was just in not giving Jeffery Dahmer a "Death Sentence" but its safe to say that the State was at the very least, a co-conspirator in his death.

Life in prison? Is that really what we should call it or is it slow death roasting in hell? Is it really humane to be beaten to death in a toilet?

Is it humane to put prisoners with 15 life sentences in close contact with guards when the prisoners know that there is no penality beyond what they have already been given? Do guards deserve to die because the State needs to feel that its humane in its sentencing of criminals? Is a guards life worthless while a criminal is to be valued? Should other prisoners who have not been sentenced to life be allowed to be killed by those who were? Should the State be held without blame for these conditions?

Some people say that the State has no right to take someones life, but they fail to explain how a State can exist at all without the taking of life. States have police and military forces that are often regularly called upon to die in the service to the State. The State thinks nothing of the righteousness in these examples of 'taking of life'. The State may allow even the construction of homes in areas prone to flooding and will not be held to account at the loss of life that will surely result from their actions. States kill people for that is what they do. The idea that they dont have the right to kill people flies in the face of the recorded history of 7,000 years of civilization.

I do not like the "Death Penalty" but I see it as more humane than the alternative. A death sentence where you can die with dignity or a life sentence where you are beaten to death in a toilet, you can be the judge which is more humane. I do not want it applied "willy-nilly" but I do believe that if you are not going to rehabilitate or "correct" convicts while placing them in a cement hell without any hope of parole for an entire lifetime, then I think the State will find it too easy to not carry out its final duty. The Death Penalty is severe and it should be but that should not be a reason to sidestep its duty. The State carries out a Death Sentence, whether or not the Convict is hung by the neck, beaten in a toilet or dies in his sleep 60 years after starting his sentence.

I reject the idea that a "life sentence" is more humane than the "Death Penalty". The only difference between the two, is speed.

Today Zacarias Moussaoui was denied the prize of martyrdom for his crimes. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Moussaoui will be treated to life as slow death. He will die, 60 odd years from now, not as a "brave martyr to his cause", but as a toothless, babbling shell of a man.

During the next 60 years the decrepit religious order to which he belongs will be brought down and "radical islam" will be swept into the dustbin of history alongside the Nazis and the Communists. Civilization will go on but Moussaoui and his perverted order will play no role in it. He will die alone, unknown and quite insane not as a great "sacrifice to his cause" but as a footnote to history as the Islamic Rudolph Hess.

"You are not with the guards now, madame! You are a prisoner! I may leave here today empty handed. But you... are not going anywhere!"

Laurence Olivier in "The Boys from Brazil".

Posted @ May 03, 2006 03:40 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (7)

Spin to victory: Part II

....Where once again we demonstrate that most of news is not fact but spin dressed up as fact.

In sharp contrast to the sparsely attended, impotent and pointlessly ironic "end the war" protests that occured over the weekend in a few eastern cities; today's fervently pro-american protests held by exiled Mexican immigrants throughout the country showed the American public the large number of deeply patriotic immigrants that are part of the American community. "What you see here is people who have seen what the left has to offer and having suffered at the hands of "compassionate leftism" have fled from those ideas in large numbers at the first opportunity" said Senator Martinez.

Meanwhile, several leading anti-war activists have opined that the immigration protests were "just another failed attempt by the Bush administration to try to take attention away from the failed policies in Iraq".

Posted @ May 01, 2006 10:57 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Speaking of 'National Anthems'

Regarding The Mexican National Anthem (From wikipedia):

snip...

"Article 39 (of the Constitution) prohibits the anthem from being altered in any fashion, prohibits it from being sung for commercial or promotional purposes, and also disallows the singing or playing of national anthems from other nations, unless you have permission from the Secretary of the Interior (Secretaría de Gobernación) and the diplomatic official from the nation in question."

...

"In the rare occasions when someone performs the anthem incorrectly, the federal government has been known to impose penalties to maintain the "dignity" of the national symbols. One example is when a performer forgot some of the lyrics at a soccer match in Guadalajara, she was fined 40 USD by the Interior Ministry and released an apology letter to the country through the Interior Ministry.[14] In addition, the anthem is sometimes used as a tool against people who might not be "true Mexicans". In one case, minority groups, such as the Black Mexicans, have been stopped by police and forced to sing the anthem to prove their nationality"

Posted @ May 01, 2006 03:52 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Spin to victory

subtitle: Why Varifrank will never be hired by a newspaper...

(parody alert...)
In cities across America, expatriate citizens of the corrupt socialist regime of Mexico protested for the inclusion of Mexico into the United States. Exiled from their country due to centuries of repression at the hands of tyrants, Mexicans revel in the freedom and prosperity they have found within the worlds oldest and most successful Democracy. "In American, we can protest even though we are not citizens. In Mexico, we would be shot for this even though we are citizens there. We are more free as illegals in the US than citizens of Mexico! This is truly a great country!" said one protester.

Protestors chanted "We are not going back" and proudly flew the flag of their adopted country in a sign of solidarity with the nation that has welcomed them with open arms. While Mexico continues to presecute undocumented citizens in their country, the United States is unique in the world as being very open in its policies of immigration. Sources say that unlike Mexico where legal penalties are severe for violation of immigration rules; Americans regularly overlook labor laws and citizenship requirements as a way to assist their neighbors to the south in their heartfelt wish to become part of this country. "Americans are immigrants, they know what its like to be on the run from failed governments like ours in Mexico" said one marcher today in Los Angeles.

Due to increasing examples of corruption and the continued use of failed socialist economics to prop up the PRI regime, Mexican citizens are abandoning their failed government in a greatly increasing annual rate. Observers of the state of government between the two countries have begum to hear rumors that high level members of the Mexican government quietly support what has become an increasing call by their exiled citizens to have the individual states of Mexico become "protectorate territories" of the United States; which is the first legal step to inclusion in the Union,eventually leading to full statehood.

The US Ambassador to Mexico could not be reached for comment on the rumors that he has recently met with President Vincente Fox to begin talks on secession.

An unnamed official of the Mexican government is quoted as saying "Look at Arizona and California, when we had they were a total wasteland and today they are a paradise! Imagine if Sonora or Baja California were to become part of the United States. The wealth they could generate would be staggering".

Posted @ May 01, 2006 12:48 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

United 93 and Our "Survivors Guilt"

One year during Easter break, I learned a valuable lesson about how long fear and guilt can stain a man and his soul. Every year during Easter, my cousins and I would go to my Grandparents house in San Simeon for the break in the school year. My cousins and I were practically the only kids in the area as it was a very small coastal town, populated almost exclusively by retirees like my grandparents. It was a great time to spend with my cousins and my grandparents. Rock hunting along the shore or rabbit hunting in the hills, it was a great place to be a kid and the company we shared was as good as it gets. My grandfather was a walking encyclopedia. Every rock had a story, every plant a potential use. Glass floats found on the beach were given a sense of reality as he told us how they were made and where they came from and how long they had probably been floating before we found them. “The chief” is what my dad and uncles called him, but he was always just “granddad” to us kids. He was a hero in the world during a time and in a culture that was without the virtue of heroes.

One day I came back from the beach and came into the house, I slammed the screen door behind me. My grandfather was asleep on the sofa in "mid afternoon nap", but when the bang of the screen door reverberated through the house he leapt up off the sofa exactly the way that 70 year old men don’t and electrified cats often do.

I will never forget the look of stark terror that was on his face, and although he was looking right at me, it was as if I wasn’t there. In just one moment he had gone from snoring and sleeping away the afternoon on the sofa to standing in a cold sweat, looking confused and terrified.

That metallic sound of the screen door as it slapped the inside of the doorframe had just the right timbre, just the right pitch to send a nightmare loose in the mind of my sleeping grandfather. In one moment it was 1968 and he was sleeping on the sofa. The next, he was years in the past on the little “tin can” of the USS Fletcher, on watch below decks as she was being shelled by the battleships of Imperial Japanese Navy as they steamed through “the slot”. Of course at the time I knew none of this history and the minor role he played in it, all I knew is that I was probably going to catch hell for waking my grandfather in the middle of his afternoon nap.

“You have to be careful honey, that screen door does something horrible to your grandfather. So promise me you’ll be more careful with it, ok?” My grandmother said into my ear in a quiet whisper as she leaned down to guide me out of the room. My grandfather tried to compose himself as he sat there, his head in his hands and somewhat embarrassed to have been caught so emotionally exposed. I nodded a slight "yes" to her in return all the while wondering when the punishment for my innocent act would come. But there was to be no punishment. It was a simple accident and she knew it. It was one that she herself had caused several times over the years. She had witnessed his struggle with the past. She recognized their sound but never knew the cause for the sudden involuntary screams in the night of a man who had survived what so many others had not. It wasnt just the stress of the event, but the guilt that comes from survival that had left a mark on his soul.

That sound, that sudden sharp metallic clang that was made in the afternoon of the happy years in soft retirement along the California shore during the 1960’s was just enough of a trigger to transport a man back into a creosote, sweat and black coffee soaked moonless night that that was long over on the calendar, but never more than a moment away in his resting mind. A dark night in the uncertain summer in the South Pacific when all that stood between life and death for those below decks was the all too thin grey bulkheads of a very small ship. An inch of steel and the roll of the dice of fate is all that anyone below decks on that ship had to protect them from the strike of the deadly “long lance” torpedo. He and his crew were in the enemy’s backyard, and they didn’t call it “Iron bottom sound” because of the minerals found there. It was because so much of our Navy had already been sunk there and the floor of the sea was littered with our ships that were far bigger, far more capable than the little USS Fletcher.

That night of slow monotony mixed with the quick mechanical terror of warfare at sea as well as the whole war itself were long since over and well in the past, but they had really never left the mind of the man who had witnessed it first hand. The watch he stood that night had never really ended.

The screen door I slammed that day rang like the dinner bell for the beast that ate into his soul.

He had lived through that night and the war,and yet so many others with him that night had not. The guilt of survival was far more punishing to him than what the enemies aim had brought. It ate at his soul like spilled acid on a metal plate.

You see, time does not heal all wounds; it merely schedules them for surgery and forgets to provide the anesthesia.

Yesterday, I thought about my grandfather and the incident with the screen door when I grappled with the question of whether or not to go this weekend to see United 93. I don’t for one second believe that my life is anything at all like my grandfathers, yet I too suffer from a bit of survivor’s guilt.

Once upon a time, I was a “road warrior” and I have on occasion flown out of Boston on Tuesday mornings. I have over 500,000 miles on United Airlines and therefore the world of “air travel perks decision making” would have put me on a United Airlines flight before all the other possible choices. I believe that in the past, I probably have flown that same flight, on a different day and a different year.

I stopped living the “road warrior” life in 2000. In my time in the air as a "road warrior", I have witnessed many,many things. I once saw a passenger on a flight in the midst of a psychotic episode. I was horrified as the person tried to open the door of the aircraft while we were in flight. I watched as he was subdued by the crew, and after that flight I never again used the term "Stewardess".

I've just missed catching flights that went on to crash and killed co-workers, but nothing has effected me like the story of United 93. To me, United 93 is not just the story of other peoples suffering that bothers me the most. It is the nagging sense of guilt that has come from surviving these "near misses" that eats at my soul. The story of United 93 triggers those emotions in me like the screen door of my grandfathers house triggered his.

United Flight 93 claimed the lives of several of my company’s employees. They were people just like me, who were doing business one day and returning home the next and doing by air what most people do with the crosstown bus. But for a small change in my career decisions and personal desires during the preceding 12 months before 9/11/01 one of the flights of that day might very well have been a flight that I too would have been on and most certainly would have died like all the others. I cannot look at any pictures from that day without thinking, “it could have been me on that plane”. Its very unsettling to see your potential death scene replayed over and over. It is a small step from the reflective thought of "could have been" to the guilt that comes from the speculation of "should have been".

As I said, I once just missed catching a flight that a co-worker managed to catch. It crashed, and he was killed. That event bothers me too, but events of September 11th were something else altogether. It wasn’t just an "accident of icing" that caused the deaths on that September day; it was a deliberate murder. On that day, people were trying to kill us. The acts of that day represented something far more deliberate than that of a "regular" plane crash. "Acccidents happen" and we can rationally accept that they do, but we simply cannot accept the idea that there are people in the world who hate so much that they will set out to kill us by any means necessary.

Like most people who fly commercial and maintain some form of private pilot rating, I often find myself on long flights daydreaming about the “what ifs”. People who are pilots like myself often ask ourselves “if there’s a problem with the pilot, could I get in the cockpit and fly this plane?”. This is absurd, but we ask it to ourselves as if it was a real possibility. We ask ourselves if we know the location of the flaps and landing gear on a 737 like it might be important to know that sort of thing, as if holding a private pilots license holds you responsible in some way to the airline.

We ask ourselves what would we do first and what would we do to be sure, to be certain that the plan would land, even though we never flew anything bigger than a Cessna 172. Before September 11th, it was just a way to kill time, a harmless “Walter Mitty-ish” daydream to help kill the choking tedium that comes with long distance flights in coach while pressed up against the fuselage with a kid kicking the seat back, wishing we were anywhere but 30,000 feet in the dry air over Kansas with another 3 hours to go before we are released from our imprisonment..

We all know the plot to the movie “Airport” and we all think we are the Dean Martin character in the movie. Life however, is not a movie plot, life is often cruel and unforgiving and things in the world often fall right to hell, even for very good people and innocent children.

It is because of these mid-flight “Walter Mitty” adventures that I knew the morning of the massacre that the hijackers had used the Hudson River as a visual reference to guide them to Manhattan. I knew it before noon on that very day. I knew it, because I had seen it outside my window on many flights, and I too knew that as long as I followed that clearly defined river, that I could find the fabled island of Manhattan. There was no need to practice using navigation aids like GPS. Just look out the window, follow the river, and look out for the big buildings and dive when the time is right. It was as simple as that. I knew the moment I saw the attack that they had planned with ruthless efficiency to attack on just the right day – a clear autumn day with both ceiling and visibility unlimited, and using just the perfect visual landmark, a wide straight river that crossed right in front of the path of the aircraft to ensure that they could get to their target on their limited skill set. I knew that they had planned it well enough to know that it really doesn’t take a whole lot of training to steer and commercial airliner in mid flight. It takes training to land and takeoff, and they had no intention of doing either one. I fully recognized the cleverness of the attack. No bombs to be sniffed, to guns to be detected, just raw muscle and simple, supposedly harmless, box cutters tied to the applied use of terror physical against the passengers. I knew, that even though there were many hijackers on a flight that only the ones who took over the cockpit and actually flew the plane knew the full intentions of their mission. The “bully boys” that kept the crew and passengers at bay outside the cockpit were as surprised as anyone that they were actually on a suicide mission.

Until September 11th, all hijackings were just bad TV drama. You land somewhere, make faces at the camera, express grievances, and they may kill a passenger or two, only to be let off the hook by the well meaning folks at the UN. On September 11th., the “bully boys” thought they were getting their name in lights but only the hijackers cockpit crews knew they were to be the “New Divine Wind”.

After United 93, that all stopped. Admit it. Every time you get on an airline today, you check out the passengers as potential threats. You size them up. Is that guy a cop or a whackjob? What kind of shoes are those? Is that person acting in any way that might give away their actual intent? You are polite to all, but inwardly suspicious of everyone at the same time. There’s not as much small talk on airlines these days. You don’t offer to play a game of cards with the person sitting next to you anymore. You sit, you scan, you watch. You glance at the crew, and you nod to them in acknowledgement of what you both know but dare not express out loud.

I know the story of United 93, but the written word doesn’t tell the story like a movie does. Movies are just a step away from dreams, or in this case, a nightmare. Movies imprint on the mind in a different way that the written word. For weeks after September 11th I don’t think I was able to sleep more than a few hours at a time. I always snapped bolt upright in the night in a sweat at the scene in my mind of the aircraft hitting the towers and knowing, really knowing what that scene represented. It wasn’t a machine crashing; it was people in the act of dying, of people being killed. They were dying and being killed deliberately and by the design of a group of madmen. In those months of no sleep and nightmares, it always felt to me that in my dreams, the planes weren’t hitting the WTC - they were hitting me for my crime of “not being there”.

The worst thing that the massacre of that day has left me with is a nagging sense of guilt that lingers in the back of my mind. I have been left somewhat hollow by the experience. After the day the massacre occurred and dice of fate had been thrown I had gone on to see more sunrises and sunsets, while others in my company had not. I do not know how to explain it or account for it; I just know that it is simply the way it is and over time I will learn to accept it for what it is.

I have done nothing in my life that should rationally cause a case of "survivors guilt" over the events of September 11th, but I cannot shake the horrible sense that I have let those people down in some cosmic way. I recognize that it’s not rational to feel this way but I can’t shake the feeling that in our day-to-day luxury of life that we have lived since that September 11th, that we’ve missed the point of what those people on United 93 so clearly understood in moments before it all ended.

While we stand by and debate the truth of the war that is being waged against us, the people of United 93 understood that we are under attack by madmen who want nothing more than to simply kill us all. Some of us even debate if there is an "enemy" at all. We as the living have that luxury while the people on United 93 looked into the eyes of the madmen and witnessed first hand their acts of perverted hate and saw the 'heart of darkness' for themselves.

There was no debate about the true nature of the madmen on Flight 93 by the people who were there. That debate only exists in our world.

They wish not to negotiate territory, trade disputes or borders. They simply wish to kill us all. It is not our “support of the Jews” which has caused their grievance, it is our very existence. Their God has forsaken them, and rather than face up to the shame generated by that fact, they choose instead to seek vengeance against those that appear to them to have found Gods favor. They hate happiness and freedom in every form, and wish only the worst conditions on all mankind. We can no more accept the Jihadi conditions for our surrender than the people of United 93 could just sit in their seats.

The United 93 movie represents something else besides a just a movie. It’s the ugly and cold metric of commerce. There are a number of people in the business of producing movies who are betting that Americans won’t go to see this movie. They believe that people do not wish to be reminded of that day. They do not think that Americans will go to see what happened. If United 93 were to fail, it would give rise to the myth that “Americans do not support the war”, which is becoming less a call for “leaving Iraq”, and more often than not is now a call to return to the days of the 1990s, when threats were ignored and allowed to fester into the embolism of 9/11.

They find it very easy to make a movie that drives a wedge into the country and destroys the morale of free people while it gives comfort to our enemies, like “Fahrenheit 9/11”, or creates a series of unsustainable paranoid theories like “Syriana”. But to make a movie about the first battle in the war against terror and show citizens as heroes, that is simply beyond the people who run Hollywood. Its extremely important to me that United 93 does well at the marketplace, because if it were to fail, it would give comfort to those who say there is no heroism in fighting back, that there is only heroism in defeat and dissention.

If United 93 fails at the box office, the war on terror will be re-written in our popular culture the way that returning Vietnam vets were re-written from normal people into murdering psychopaths let loose on the general population. Like it or not, what passes for popular culture very often serves as the basis of history. Popular culture is often the lens by which historical events are later interpreted.

If we are not careful to support this movie because of our collective sense of “survivors guilt”, then the failure of United 93 will serve as a springboard for furthering the cause defeatism that permeates most of modern era popular culture. No matter our victories in this war of which United 93 represents just the first, popular culture is already working to marginalize them as inconsequential. A ‘defeat at the marketplace” of United 93, will further make the case for those who think we must “lose to win” in their perverted logic in the worship of failure.

I do not know yet if I can go into a theater this weekend and watch a movie like United 93, but I do know that whether I choose at this point to see the movie or not, I will be buying a ticket to ensure that the legacy of that story is given the respect that it deserves by popular culture.

Hollywood knows nothing and cares not what tale is that is actually being told on the screen, but it does respect what happens at the box office. It will notice either a success or a failure and will react accordingly.

Like the sound of the screen door was eventually to be accepted as “just a noise” by my grandfather, I will also learn to look at movies about 9/11 as “just a movie” without an overwhelming sense of survivors guilt. Someday I will look at pictures of the 9/11 massacres and I wont feel that somehow that I failed the people on those planes.

UPDATE: Reviews for 'United 93' can be found here.

Posted @ April 28, 2006 02:10 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (21)

"Iron Mike" Defies Terrorists; Demonstrates what 'freedom of speech" really means

From 'Stars And Stripes' and Frontpage Magazine:

The picture that best defines our war:

And the story of the heroes behind it:

Snip...
"What Burghardt saw too late was another wire leading between his legs to a third such cannon shell. A distant terrorist, probably watching through binoculars, triggered it by remote control. The explosion hurled Sargeant Burghardt’s body 10 feet into the air. His limp frame came smashing down, face first, on the roadway.

As fellow soldiers rushed toward the limp body of Sargeant Burghardt, whom they knew as “Iron Mike,” he was awake. While still in the air, he had thought “I don’t believe they got me” and was already feeling “ticked off they were able to do it.”

After hitting the ground, Burghardt was unable to feel anything from the waist down. “I was lying there thinking I didn’t want to be in a wheelchair next to my dad,” Burghardt remembered, “and for him to see me like that.”

Around his body, his fellow soldiers looked down at his shredded uniform. After the gigantic explosion, they were amazed he still had legs and was clearly alive. They quickly began cutting off what remained of his pants.

“I felt a real sharp pain and blood trickling down,” the Sargeant remembered. “Then I wiggled my toes and I thought, ‘Good, I’m in business.”

Medics arrived with a stretcher, but Burghardt had other ideas.

“I decided to walk to the helicopter,” he said. “I wasn’t going to let my team-mates see me being carried away on a stretcher.”

And he wanted to send a message to the cowardly terrorist still probably watching from afar. He stood, then raised a one-fingered salute of defiance toward this bomb and all insurgents.

Sargeant Burghardt, theres a world of thanks and a truckload of beer waiting for you and your men in Califonia.

Posted @ April 27, 2006 11:13 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Who is Ty Cobb?

Dr. McCarthys Lawyer. More here from Westlaw. More info on Ty Cobb Esq. at RightWingNutHouse. And more from Chris Hitchens...

(Tonight on a very special episode of "Mythbusters",Jamie tries to disprove the myth of doppelgangers...)

Posted @ April 25, 2006 04:39 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Dr. Freud, Call your Office

Any man who poses for a painting like this ...

is a man in the market for a red sportscar.

Posted @ April 25, 2006 12:08 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Gas Price Whining

My definitive piece on "how to beat the high cost of gas" can be found here.

I still own my 8 cylinder mega-truck, and I still buy gas once every 6 to 8 weeks. My secret? Easy, Just dont drive as much...

Posted @ April 25, 2006 09:37 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (7)

McCarthy: " I Didnt Leak, I was not escorted out"

From MSNBC.

snip...

"McCarthy's lawyer, Ty Cobb, told NEWSWEEK this afternooon that contrary to public statements by the CIA late last week, McCarthy never confessed to agency interrogators that she had divulged classified information and "didn't even have access to the information" in The Washington Post story in question.

After being told by agency interrogators that she may have been deceptive on one quesiton during a polygraph, McCarthy did acknowledge that she had failed to report contacts with Washington Post reporter Dana Priest and at least one other reporter, said a source familiar with her account who asked not to be identified because of legal sensitivities. McCarthy has known Priest for some time, the source said."

As they say, Read The Whole thing...

Later in the article, several apologists say in a sense that such "old fashioned ideas", such as not violating security oaths are outmoded in the modern world, and by Bush actually prosecuting leaks, it imperils the "security community" by forcing them to honor their oaths and that a better idea would be to simply give the Washington Post and the New York Times a security clearance so they can print whatever they think is important and cut out all this leaker "fol-der-all" about "leakers". Cut out the middleman and pass the savings on to you, the citizen.

Better yet, Let's stop giving security clearances altogether because of the burden it apparently places on the overburdened employees of the CIA.

(Note: one other point of no significance whatsoever. She has a lawyer named "Ty Cobb"?, what? is he from the firm of Jackson, Landis and Ruth? Their slogan "We'll hit your case out of the park or its free!")

UPDATE: More info on Ty Cobb Esq. at RightWingNutHouse.

The score so far -
1) She was a high ranking member of Clinton NSC
2) Whos boss inexplicably stuffed classified information into his pants and removed them from the archives, pleaded guilty and paid a fine, but never disclosed the nature of the materials removed.
2) Has working background with Ghana affairs.
3) Who works at an NYU speakers board with Washington Post Reporters Dana Priest and Sy Hersh.
4) Dana Priest Pulitzer winning reporter for her story on the renditions program, and who's husband appears to act on occasion as an agent for former Ambassador to ghana, Joe Wilson.
5) Sy Hersh, whos most recent opus was on the Administration "deviltry" at the now notorious Iraqi prision "abu ghirab". His work was purported to be simply "reporting the scandal", which was in fact investigated and prosecuted by the military long before it became public via Sy Hersh.
5) A CIA agent who was, until she was fired was in the CIA Inspector General office, which is responsible for making sure there are no "leaks", yet a regular and repeated campaign appears to have been run by the CIA against the elected government of the United States.
6) ---> Now has a high powered lawyer from deep within "The World Wide Legal Defense League of Clinton Apologists, Inc.".

Now, back to the question of "Who sent Joe Wilson, and Why"? It appears to me that there is now a much better answer to that question than there was before last weeks polygraph.

Posted @ April 24, 2006 04:29 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Who Does Dr. McCarthy Remind me of?

I was asked this morning, what historical event "the Mccarthy case" most reminds me of.

I thought about it for a second and what comes to mind is this. When the Manhattan Project was underway, there were a large number of scientists working on the bomb, and had signed security oaths to protect what they had learned (and the Government and people of the US had in point of fact - paid for), that thought to themselves that it was simply wrong for the US to have exclusive use of nuclear technology and that steps should be taken to ensure that others besides the US had "the bomb".

So, they started working with contacts in the Soviet Union to give them the information. They had decided on their own to leak information ensure that the Soviet Union had an equal footing with the US in regards to nuclear power.

Ted Hall was the first person who came to mind as a historical example of the sort of self-righteous person who is so full of self hatred and personal guilt, that any sense of basic right and wrong simply disappears into a fog of martyrdom.

When Ted Hall was asked about his actions, he said "an American monopoly on nuclear weapons was dangerous and should be avoided."

To address this "American Monopoly", He took action to arm the most genocidal, anti-human regime in the history of all mankind with the single most destructive weapon in history which was used to subjgate its own people as well as threaten the people of the United States and its allies.

The depths of some peoples hatred of the United States simply cannot measured.

At the core of the McCarthy case is a person who is singularly the most responsible for providing the intelligence warning the US of the threat of al-queda, and failed twice during her tenure( In 1993 and 2001) to provide that warning. Her career didnt progress because of a change in administration politics; it didnt progress because she was dangerously incompetent and as it turns out, she is also dangerously disloyal.

A person who is willing to spy for a political party is a just step away from a person willing to spy for another nation. Once you start to rationalize your reasons for disobeying your oath, theres no turning back.

Dr. Mary McCarthy is not a "leaker"; she is a spy who has taken actions to subvert the democratically elected government of the United States.

Posted @ April 24, 2006 10:41 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

The First rule about "fight club"

also applies to the CIA, yet some people are shocked to find that the CIA treasures an atmosphere of secrecy, to wit:

from al-jazeera-on-the-hudson, sorry, I mean the NY Times:

"There's been a fundamental shift in practice at the Publications Review Board. There's literally been a reinstitution of the 1950's attitude that what happens at C.I.A. stays at C.I.A."

They say that like its a bad thing...

Posted @ April 23, 2006 08:06 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

The "Grand Unified Theory" starts to gel.

Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, Sandy Berger, Richard Clarke. Do they all lead back to Dr. McCarthy?

And whats this? Did they travel as a group to get some sort of discount? Seymour Hersh, Dana Priest, Anthony Lewis and Mary McCarthy? What? They couldnt get Chomskys agent? With that much left wing hatred on display behind the podium, the audience must've needed to wear big rubber ponchos like they have at a Gallagher concert.

Posted @ April 22, 2006 01:41 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

McCarthy: Second Day - First Thoughts

1. Maybe the war would be over by now if half the CIA wasnt more interested in "getting Bush" than it is with "getting Osama".

2. The WAPO and the New York Times are saying that McCarthys efforts are not just legitimate, but actually required for the safe running of a government. Would they say the same if other members of the CIA were to reveal classified information on the failures of the Clinton Administration?

3. In my mind, the CIA is a compromised organization. Mary McCarthy is not some back bench disgruntled civil servant, she's a major player in the Security Community, the NSC and the CIA. Organizations tend to take on the attributes of those at the top. People who are promoted within the organization are promoted because they mimic those in the leadership. This means that there are a large number of people in the CIA whos careers map, personal network and decision making processes mimic those of Dr. McCarthy. Those that are supporting McCarthy now need to explain how an out of control, and apparently disloyal CIA has helped secure the United States against the people who are trying to kill us.

4. How many "dots" are not being "connected" because half of the CIA is sitting in its cubicles frothing at the mouth in hatred over the words "President Bush". How many people have died due to someone elses Bush Derangement Syndrome?

5. At what point does the actions of someone like McCarthy stop being a "Leak" and start being a form of "shadow government"?

6. Its supposed to be the "Central Intelligence Agency", not the "Central Policy Agency". We didnt elect you Dr. McCarthy, you are not "the decider"; its not your call.

7. If a person will violate their security oath for political revenge, what wont they do?

8. What strikes me as most interesting about this case is that it appears that Dr. McCarthy has close working relationships with many people in the "anti-Bush" community and the Democrat party. Is this just a leak, or part of an attempt at a soft "coup"?

9. Why is Dr. McCarthy so interested in overturning the results of an legitimate election? Should we trust someone who doesnt trust the voters? ( I love replaying Clinton Apologies for my own benefit)

10. Now that we have reason to question the loyalty of Dr. McCarthy and that she served in the NSC with Sandy Berger, Just what was it that Sandy Berger was carrying in his pants out of the archive? Is it related to this?

Posted @ April 22, 2006 09:32 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

The Friday Office Blog Pool

Mary O. McCarthy - CIA Officer and former NSC member. Fired for leaking classified information to the press.

NOTE: This is officially the biggest story of the year, if not the decade. The CIA no longers stands for "Central Intelligence Agency" its the "Compromised Intelligence Agency". The implications involved with where this story is going are simply staggering. Be aware that since this post was originally made, many many updates have been added, so keep scrolling to pick up the latest findings.

The Story:

CIA Fires an Officer for leaking info to Media.

The Pool:

1. How long until the CIA Officer is referred to by the media to as a "whistleblower"?

2. How long until he/she shows up on Chris Matthews?

3. Rougly how many BTU's are being generated by quick fingers tapping on New York literary agents blackberrys trying to find this person, so as to sign a real hefty book deal before the competition?

Any takers?

Its a bit of a problem for the media. If they make this character to be a hero "speaking truth to power", it does make you ask why Libby is being prosecuted.

Theres much more to this story, and we havent seen the last of this for some time.

UPDATE: Fox News reports that the CIA officer is a "Mary Mccarthy" ho testified for the 9/11 commission. The 9/11 Transcripts show only this name:

"Mary McCarthy NSC senior director for intelligence, 1998-2001"
Testified on "Warning of Transnational Threats" as Mary O. McCarthy, former National Intelligence Officer for Warning, Central Intelligence Agency

Not just a deskbound "paper pusher", now is she...

My first clue on where to look for info on Mrs. McCarthy is that Porter Goss was seen today carrying a copy of the 9/11 Commission book. It turns out, she testified, and was involved at the very highest levels of National Security.

UPDATE II: More - In March 2001, Rice asked the CIA to prepare a new series of authorities for covert action in Afghanistan. Rice's recollection was that the idea had come from Clarke and the NSC senior director for intelligence, Mary McCarthy.

UPDATE III: Even More - "In sending the draft MON to the CIA, the NSC's senior director for intelligence programs, Mary McCarthy, cited only the August 1998 and July 1999 MONs as relevant precedents--indicating that these new authorities were limited to using the capture and rendition approach. There was no indication that this MON authorized kill authority, although lethal force could be used in self-defense. See NSC memo, McCarthy to CIA, Dec. 1999". ( note: a MON is a " Memorandum of Notification ", apparently an ass saving device sent from the executive branch to others over areas of possible legal concern. )

Rendition? Wasnt that the issue behind the info she was leaking to Dana Priest? ( Limited in 1999 to capture and "rendition"...File under what might have been...)

UPDATE III: I just got this really wierd vibe that this is all going to lead back to Sandy Berger and Richard Clarke.

UPDATE IV: From the NBC site - "The officer flunked a polygraph exam before being fired on Thursday and is now under investigation by the Justice Department, NBC has learned."

Here's a 10 second career tip from Varifrank. When your boss walks into your office and asks you if you did "questionable things", confession is your only route to safety. Oh, you'll still get fired, but you might be able to get your boss to remember why it was he hired you in the first place if you dont treat him like a fool. It helps convert "fired, and prosecuted' into "retired for health reasons". If you make your boss tie you up to a polygraph to find out what both he and you already know to be true, it shows contempt for the system, and no one respects that.

UPDATE V: Chapter 4 9/11 Commission - "Mary McCarthy, the NSC senior director responsible for intelligence programs, initially cautioned Berger that the "bottom line" was that "we will need much better intelligence on this facility before we seriously consider any options". I toldja Berger was in this in some way...

UPDATE VI: Two documents pop up that she authored during the Clinton administration.

McCarthy, Mary O. "The Mission to Warn: Disaster Looms." Defense Intelligence Journal 7, no. 2 (Fall 1998): 17-31.

A National Security Council staffer and former NIO for Warning, Dr. McCarthy agrees with the Jeremiah and Rumsfeld studies that there is a "dangerous scarcity of specific skills, particularly technical and linguistic," among U.S. analysts. She believes that major changes are needed.

McCarthy, Mary. "The National Warning System: Striving for an Illusive Goal." Defense Intelligence Journal 3, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 5-19.

The author is National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Warning. Her article deals with current structure and problems. "The National Warning System usually concentrates on threats judged to be about six months away or less."

Ok, scratch the "Mrs." , its "Dr. McCarthy". How could such a smart person have done such a dumbass thing? Dr.? Hmmm I wonder from where? Yale? Well, God does have a sense of humor...

UPDATE VII: Bingo. She was on the NSC with Sandy Berger during the Clinton administration.

UPDATE VIII: Biographical info from CSIS. "Prior to joining CSIS in August 2001, Mary O. McCarthy was a senior policy adviser to the CIA's deputy director for science and technology. Until July 2001, she served as special assistant to the president and senior director for intelligence programs on the National Security Council (NSC) Staff, under both Presidents Clinton and Bush. From 1991 until her appointment to the NSC, McCarthy served on the National Intelligence Council. She began her government service as an analyst, then manager, in CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, holding positions in both African and Latin American analysis. From 1979 to 1984 she was employed by BERI, S.A., conducting financial, operational, and political risk assessments for multinational companies and banks. Previously she had taught at the University of Minnesota and was director of the Social Science Data Archive at Yale University. McCarthy has a B.A. and M.A. in history from Michigan State University, an M.A. in library science from the University of Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Social Change and the Growth of British Power in the Gold Coast (University Press of America, 1983)".

UPDATE IX: Questions, Questions, Questions. If She was fired for leaking information on "the CIA’s rumored secret prisons in Eastern Europe", yet as the EU itself now says, "We've heard all kinds of allegations, impressions; we've heard also refutations. It's up to your committee to weigh if they are true. It does not appear to be proved beyond reasonable doubt," he said. "There has not been, to my knowledge, evidence that these illegal (activities) have taken place". That means that McCarthy appears to have leaked info to a WAPO reporter (Dana Priest), who managed to get a Pulitzer for reporting a story that now appears to be both - not true and legally actionable by Mccarthys employer. She appears to be someone who is getting fired for illegally releasing information, whether or not it was actually a lie, is not the question at all. It doesnt seem to really matter in this case.

Is the original story based on truth? If its not, then just what the hell is going on here? If it was a part of a planned disinformation campaign, then to what purpose? The story of "Secret CIA prisions" nearly destroyed the remaining coalition in Europe that is working with the US. The ripples from that story still reverberate through the halls of power in the European capitals. If it was a lie, and McCarthy is the one who released it, then what was the purpose?

My other major "area of question" is this; just what is the motivation for a person to take a lifetime career and committment and turn it upside down? For what? This story, and not all the others that may have been known? That the CIA has prisons that the "average joe" knows nothing about and that on occasion they interrogate their prisoners with "questionable means"? This is news? Isnt that what we pay them for? Is this a case of 'Bush Derangement Syndrome' gone to the most extreme? Is this just more evidence of a possible "covert coup" against the Bush Administration by the "lifers" in the CIA?

She sees like a smart dedicated professional, why do something so absolutely guaranteed to go so horribly bad for everyone involved?

I don't just get it.

UPDATE X: Ok, this seems to make sense to me. It looks like someone is on the same wavelength as I am.

UPDATE XI: For the moment,I am resisting the "grand unified theory" that seems to be forming around this story and the very interesting connections that appear to exist between Dr. McCarthy and so many prominent Bush detractors. Let's see what the morning brings...

Posted @ April 21, 2006 01:35 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

varifrank calls for "Open Skies" Policy

Google Earth - (the single most addictive product that I've seen in some time) allows me, by simply giving it my address, to see satellite views of my house with such detail that I can see what car is parked in the driveway and what color it is...

And yet, I cant see any details of North Korea, Iran or China?

Posted @ April 21, 2006 11:12 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

Update

Im back from my travels. Blogging resumes...

Posted @ April 20, 2006 03:28 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Questions for the day

Q1: Is the "Revolt of the Ex-Generals" being treated as wholly legitimate in the eyes of the MSM?

Q2: Do Military leaders ever receive legitimacy in the eyes of the MSM or the left - except when they take action against the American Administration?

Q3: Is the left supporting or calling for a "Military Coup" against Bush?

Q4: One question for the Ex-Generals: How has your annoying piss-pants-dance, politically motivated prattle helped us win the war?

Posted @ April 18, 2006 09:53 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Tel Aviv - Baltimore

This man:

Did this today in Tel Aviv:

And the only thing stopping him from doing the same in Baltimore, is this:

We are at war.

Posted @ April 17, 2006 01:49 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

A Blogger Struggles

I have a really big snarky rant that i'd like to post, but I cant figure out how to do it without some particularly illustrative cursewords.

So, if you remember the movie "TERMINATOR" - Where the Terminator is trying to figure out the best phrase to give the biker and a little drop down menu appears in his eye with a list of various distasteful phrases that should be said and he chooses...

All Im saying is, I wish I had one of those.

Posted @ April 14, 2006 11:42 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

Neil Young: "Impeach The President" song in the works

Oh no, another rocker against the President. Wow, thats a real brave act of one man speaking truth to power now isnt it?

Why is it that everyone on the left are such big supporters of Dick Cheney? For all the bravado of those on the left who say "Bush should be impeached" theres a complete lack of understanding that by successfully doing that, Dick Cheney gets a promotion!

How does this help their case? "whoopiee, we invalidated an election"! wheee! were big time democrats now!

Ok, so lets say they get Cheney too, two for one - what the hell...

President Hastert? Check this list. Theres not one Democrat on the list until you get to number 12 - Norm Minetta.

So lets say they manage to "Get Bush". So what? Does anyone think they can pull off an additional 11 impeachments to get the first Democrat in the line of succession?

And before you get to "President Norm Minetta" - you have to go through not just "President Cheney" But - and doesnt this make your heart skip a beat - "President Rumsfeld". Of course, first you'd have to go through the impeachment of "President Rice".

I dont mind "the left", its just that they are so damn dumb and small mindedly petty sometimes you just cant take them seriously anymore.

Posted @ April 14, 2006 11:24 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

My childhood nightmare has returned

This is pitchblende, its the source ore for Uranium.

Once its scooped from the earth, it gets processed into this stuff. It's called "Yellowcake".

This material is then processed into a gas and then that gas is spun around in one of these things, a gaseous diffusion centrifuge. This one is from Oak Ridge Tennessee, sometime in 1944.

What comes out of the centrifuge is something called "enriched Uranium".

Once you have few pounds of this material, you can put it in something like this:

It's a simple device actually. You see, once enough enriched uranium is brought into close proximity, the material will cause a chain reaction with itself. In fact, its so simple that most people dont know that this device, the bomb known as "Little Boy" didnt need to be tested by the scientists on the Manhattan Project as it was virtually certain that it would work when used. They tested the hard bomb, the Plutonium Bomb "Fat Man" because they werent sure it would work. They never had any doubt about "Little Boy", they just didnt have enough enriched uranium to make very many of them.

"Little Boy" was a Uranium Bomb. It was the "easy" Bomb.

This is what happened when that bomb was tested for the first time:

A few thousand pounds of pitchblende, into a few hundred pounds of yellocake, into a few pounds of enriched uranium, add some 1940's technology, stir with a pinch of patience and 100,000 people living in a city that was alot like Long Beach California ceased to be in a flash.

Today, this man said his country had created, "Enriched Uranium" and thus joined the "Nuclear Club".

This man works every day prays every night for the death of me, my family and my civilization. This man says that the Holocaust never occured. This man says that "Israel should be wiped off the map".

I am not Jewish, I don't pretend to know what it is to be Jewish, but today, for the first time in my life, I feel jewish.

When I was a little boy, some crazy bastard went and put some nuclear missiles 90 miles off our shore, and the world nearly went into global thermonuclear war and as a result, putting an end to my young life and millions of others before it had a chance to get started. My parents always talked about the Cuban Missle Crisis as "the scary times". My dad always talked about the plans he made with Mom, about how she was to take my sisters and I out of the city if "things got bad" while he was away at sea during the crisis. This was the talk around the kitchen tables of America in October 1962.

Today, I look back on those days with nostalgia as a period of relative sanity and calm.

Posted @ April 11, 2006 01:17 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

It cant be done: Part II

NASA Satellite photo showing the Mexican-Guatemala border visible from space. Why? Because its fenced in. Check the angle shaped jungle discoloration in the middle, as well the dark line ( thats a "fence" folks) thats leading to the coastline.

Here's a view from National Geographic thats a little closer:

What's My Point?

1. Come talk to me about changes to immigration policy when we have an established and recognzied border with Mexico, because as things stand today, we dont have a border.

2. Dont tell me "it cant be done", because heres proof that it is.

Posted @ April 10, 2006 11:54 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (5)

Why dont I care about Sy Hersh?

Because in the alternate universe where Noam Chomsky is President, Sy Hersh is the Secretary of State.

This guy has used one template for every story he's written since 1969.

" America bad, American Government really bad, Republicans unbelievably bad..."

Does he think that I really give a damn if some 6th generation ivy league state department hump is going to quit because he disagrees with the President? Some mid level "state department poindexter" like
"J. Fletcher Preachy McGottrocks, Assistant deputy chief of staff for Central American affairs, Yale class of 65..." is all upset that Bush and Cheney didnt call him before making the 'big call', so he takes Sy Hersh down for a martini or two at the Westchester country club and has a good long crying jag on the shoulder of his good friend.

Hersh calls that sort of thing news, I say its a call for an intervention.

Mark me down on the list of people that are actually happy that someone in Washington is at least thinking about using those big expensive weapons systems weve all paid for over the years. The mullahs just spent two weeks displaying their wares, a russian sub, a russian torpedo and some ground effects aircraft.

my reaction: "Whoop-i-dee-freakin-doo..."

so think of this as our response in the big poker game of international politics. I see your underwater missle and I raise you 50 ICBM's, so let's see you your cards smart guy...

Sy Hersh ( and the mullahs...) just figured out that while they might have a few toys, we have a fleet of Nuclear Submarines that are chock full of the "weapons from hell" on board, and yet, to Sy Hersh, now its "hankie time".

Just what does he think we have those things for?

Does anyone besides me think its just a bit peculiar that the said-same news groups that are screaming about "leaker in chief" seem to have missed the story of insiders in the State Department willing to tell reporters like Hersh about our plans for nuclear war, something that if true, would most certainly be a major breach of national security?

Anyone care to follow up on that story?

Posted @ April 10, 2006 10:41 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

It Cant Be done!

1869 Promontory Point Utah - First Transcontinental Railroad.

August 1914 - Panama Canal Opens.

1955 - US Federal Interstate Highway System Opens.

1969 - "We came in peace for all mankind" Man Lands on the Moon.

2006 - Congress declares "US Border Fence too difficult and expensive to build"

Posted @ April 07, 2006 09:08 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (5)

Macao: Another front in the war on terror

People talk about Iraq as a central front on terror, but theres another war going on quietly behind the scenes. One of the places where there have been signifigant gains by the US against the North Koreans is in the money laundering captial of Macao. Since the US shut down Banco Delta Asia and froze over 25 million in assets, the changes in Macao have been substantial.

The original post from the LA Times can be found here.

snip...

"Today people here want to do business with the Americans, not the North Koreans," said Jose Rocha Dinis, director of the Jornal Tribunal de Macau, a Portuguese-language newspaper, as he drove along a waterfront cluttered with construction cranes. "When they are seeking investment from the outside, they can't let the North Koreans get in the way."

A North Korean company, Jokwang Trading Co., long believed to be a front for illicit activities, closed its headquarters on the fifth floor of an office building near the bank. Most of its personnel have relocated to Zhuhai, just across the border in China proper, business sources here say.

"You used to see the North Koreans around here all the time with their Kim Il Sung badges, but suddenly they're gone," said Seok Yeong Chong, a South Korean businessman living here. He said their numbers had dropped from more than 100 to only a handful. "They gave the Macao government too much of a headache."

Businesspeople here say the North Korean presence became a liability at a sensitive time. The North Korean government in Pyongyang is more unpopular than ever internationally because of its pursuit of nuclear weapons. At the same time, China is trying to develop Macao into a gambling destination to rival Las Vegas.

The freezing of the $25 million in the Banco Delta Asia has been a particularly big blow for a government scraping by for lack of hard currency. North Korean banks kept large sums of money in the Macao bank. Now, with those accounts suspended and other banks frightened off by the Treasury Department action, North Korea has been largely cut off from international trade.

"The impact is severe," said Nigel Cowie, a British banker based in Pyongyang who is general manager of the Daedong Credit Bank, serving mostly the tiny foreign community in the North Korean capital.

In a telephone interview from Pyongyang, Cowie said that North Korea, because it had no credit and a weak banking system, dealt almost exclusively in cash, which might have created the appearance that it was laundering money when it was not.

"I can't speak for what everybody was doing, but I can say that in our case, a lot of legitimate business has been hurt," Cowie said.

The North Koreans blame the U.S. for their woes in Macao. A senior North Korean diplomat, Li Gun, visited Washington last month on what appeared to have been a futile attempt to get the Macao freeze lifted. He left angry, declaring that North Korea would boycott negotiations on its nuclear program until the banking situation was resolved. "Under this continuing U.S. pressure, we can't go back to the negotiation table" Li said.

Here's another report on the crackdown that is clearly causing some pain (original post here)

snip...
"It is true we are having great difficulties but they cannot kill us," said Jon Sung-hun, president of Pugang Corporation, one of the North Korean companies whose assets have been frozen in the crackdown.
"Because of the US's terrible sanctions, all bank transfers are impossible and we are also not able to carry cash between countries.. but we are finding other ways," Mr Jon told the Financial Times, denying his company had been involved in wrongdoing.

"These days the world is multinational but they think they can catch us this way because our country is a closed society, but they are just not clever enough."

Mr Jon declined to elaborate to avoid tipping off American authorities.

So know you know why your 10 dollar bill looks like Canadian money...

Posted @ April 06, 2006 08:52 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

When some people say “immigration” most people are hearing something else.

I have to say that while I’ve done a fair bit of writing as of late, at the same time I just haven’t been able to get the blogging engine going. This case of “bloggers block” has been going on for almost a month now. It started back during the “port issue”. At 8:00 am the day it happened I was livid at the idea. At 8:30, after I thought about it for a minute, I relaxed a bit. By 10:00 I had done enough research to know that it was a baloney issue, and the shrapnel like phrases of “Arabs in charge of our security”, “selling our ports and our security to the highest bidders” were just a pile of nonsense. By three o’clock that very day the story broke, I couldn’t care less about the issue any more. It just didn’t look to me to be a real issue. It was widely and repeatedly misunderstood and it was propped up to be something other than what it was. Most of what was being said just wasn’t true and frankly it still isn’t true. After a few days I had the distinct feeling that I was being manipulated, that some people’s reactions just weren’t genuine, but spun up and full of froth.

Of course it didn’t end there at the first few days, once the tinder of the underbrush of senselessness started smoldering, the tall trees of logic started to catch fire and burn. We had to sit through day after day of hot lead pouring down from above. It got to the point that you couldn’t talk about it without someone going into full froth mode.

Last year we had the “Harriet Miers kerfuffle", which I couldn’t stand and I begged off of blogging about because it just drove me crazy and that issue was mild compared to the “Ports Kerfuffle”.

Now we face the “Ports issue on steroids”, that being the issue over “Illegal Immigration”. Talking about Immigration is like talking about abortion; no one has ever changed anyone’s mind on the subject so talking about it just annoys the hell out of everyone when the subject comes up. It’s a subject that you can only talk about with people who already agree with you and frankly, what’s the sense in that?

When I hear people use the word “immigration” to describe what is going on, I find it funny because the problem being discussed has almost always has nothing to do with immigration at all. But the problem is, you can’t even talk about the issue in rational terms. “Immigration” isn’t “Migration”. Immigration is a legal process of becoming a citizen of another country. What’s going on now is something more akin to tribal “hunter gatherers” following a pack of bison across the plains for food than the legal process of joining another country.

So now its time for full disclosure. First off, I was born in Southern California, which is many ways the Capital City of the third world in the Western Hemisphere. I lived most of my life south of the San Bernardino Mountains before I went to High School. My father was born in San Pedro and his father was from Germany. After my father left the Navy, he ran a mill in Gardena, and later worked at a variety of furniture factories in the industrial district of LA. To say that my father spoke Spanish at work goes without saying, because that’s who you worked with when you worked in those kinds of jobs. In my own life I’ve worked in commercial landscaping, at a plastic pipe factory and for two summers I worked on a peach orchard in the upper Sacramento Valley. Did I speak Spanish while I did those jobs? You betcha, because that's who I worked with. In my little tiny slice of life, I’ve either worked beside or worked for, went to school with, played with, mowed lawns with immigrants both legal and illegal documented and undocumented for most of my life.

But just wait a second, my "full disclosure" gets even better.

My mother’s side of the family is from Canada. In 1933, my grandparents and their extended family of about 12 cousins, grand aunts and uncles, up and moved from Kitchener Ontario to Lansing Michigan. Unfortunately they didn’t bother to talk to anyone in the government about the process of “legally” immigrating , they just up and moved. They were self-sufficient, they weren’t rich by any means but they had enough to enjoy a good life, they never took welfare or any state support and they paid taxes and like most Americans, they did pretty well, but they didn’t vote. Because as they said at the time, "that would be wrong".

And they never looked back. Was it illegal? Again, you betcha. Did that bother them? Nope! not in the slightest. They felt they were voting with their feet. They wanted a better life for their kids and America was clearly the place to do that in. They never felt any shame about it; it was a simple fact of life. They voted with their feet. Legal immigration from Canada was extremely limited, so there wasn’t any way to go about it. This country represents more to people all over the world than just a place to work. People all around the world are inspired by what this country means to them, not just the poor mestizos who come up from the south but even for working class Canadians.

So, I think I have a view towards immigration that most people don’t have. I know the migrants pretty well, and I have to say this.

I like them. I do. I really do.

They work hard. They take care of their families, heck unlike many Americans they've actually bothered to have families. They aren’t spoiled little babies who cry every time something needs to get done or sit around and sing “ oh woe is me...” every time something goes bad, they get out there and do what needs to be done. They don’t whine about how bad things are today and how they are being ripped off by the man. To the migrants, this is a great place to be with great opportunity and hope. To the migrants, these are the good old days.

Now, remember, I’m the very worst sort of “Right wing Republican” that every liberal has a picture of taped to his dartboard; I’m “Snidely Whiplash” in the flesh. I’m supposed to hate people who have a skin tone is darker than ivory soap. I’m supposed to be against anything that doesn’t look like it came off the set of “Our Town”, but I don’t. I’m supposed to be the one sneering at the low riders and the maids and the landscapers. But I’m not sneering at them. I’m happy to have them, and frankly I’m glad they are here.

Most of these people who come here are the hardest working people you ever met. Most of them are the nicest people you ever met. Most of them took their lives in their hands to get here, many worked in conditions of near slavery, indentured to a “Coyote” just to make it here and after they get an underground job, they get to do something hard, smelly and well frankly something we don’t think our “little junior” should ever do, that being the very worst sort of manual labor. This might very well be the “push button world of the Internet” but there is still one hell of a lot of things that require a certain amount of sweat and endurance to get done.

After payday comes, these people very often go to Western Union and wire a good portion of what they make back home to feed the parts of their family that didn’t make the trip. That takes guts, it takes heart and soul to have the discipline to take a risk like that, not for yourself but for your family, knowing that at any moment they could be killed, jailed or deported back to wherever they came from, all to work at a job in the most menial conditions, only to send most of the money back home.

It’s important to me that you understand that most of these folks we are talking about don’t come here by choice; they do it because the alternative is very often, starvation. They aren’t crossing the Great Sonora Desert to mow your lawn so they can get a 50 inch plasma TV. It takes more than that to make a man take that risk, and very often it’s the look in his kid’s faces at dinner when there isn’t any and there might not be any tomorrow either. You couldn’t get me to walk 5 miles for a TV, but if my kids were hungry, I’d cross the Sierra Nevada in midwinter if I thought the only place with a job was in Reno and I had to feed my kids.

It’s not politics and its not “shiftless immigrants” that is causing this migration, its biology; you do what you have to do to take care of your family. These people are not motivated to take these risks by crass consumer greed, unless you consider a full stomach to be a luxury.

Put yourself in the Mexican state of Oaxaca with no hope of getting any sort of job and money is hard to come by even under the best of conditions. Now stand by and watch as members of your family die of Tuberculosis or Chagas disease or tetanus, diseases that immigrants live with every day but the average suburban American has never seen outside of history books. Then imagine your cousin comes in and tells you he can get you a job as a dishwasher in El Paso for 5 bucks an hour and all the hours you can work, and realize you haven’t seen the equivalent of 5 dollars for over a month. How fast would you pack you bag, say your goodbyes and start walking north? If you don’t understand the near magnetic, almost salmon swimming upstream pull that would have on you, then you my friend have never been hungry, you’ve never buried members of your family from common diseases and you have never lived life without the hope of a future.

That lack of experience doesn’t make you a problem; it just means that you are an American. The world of want and fear and disease is a far off place from the lives and minds of most Americans. It’s an every day horror and nightmare for the lives of the average migrant.

Let’s all just stop saying that they are up here “living on welfare”, shall we? There just isn’t any welfare anymore; they are up here working. If they can’t find a job they make a job. You see them at the end of every Home Depot parking lot. You see them there, a line of men standing and waiting for work. You doing a little landscaping project? you want an extra hand to help you put in lawn sprinklers? 5 bucks an hour and lunch and you’ve got yourself a deal mister! While I often find my brother legal citizens on street corners with cardboard signs begging for money, I’ve never seen that from a migrant. What I have seen are immigrants selling bags of oranges or roses on street corners.

Selling Fruit. Basic Commerce. It’s a job and they aren’t begging. I wouldn’t do it, but I’m not hungry enough to consider it. If my kids needed food, you can bet I’d be the best and biggest orange selling white guy you ever did see. If they didn’t buy oranges here, I’d move to Canada. To feed my kids I'd do anything. The law will just have to wait.

Its not politics at work here folks; its just biology. A man does what he has to when it comes to feeding his family. It’s why thousands of men packed up their families and left Oklahoma for places like Bakersfield California in the 1930’s. You talk to any long term resident of California and you are likely to find an “Oakie” not too far away, which again, makes me laugh. 2nd generation oakies in California, talking about the evils of migration.

When most people use the term “Illegal Immigrant” they are really saying something else, and frankly what they are saying is something I don’t like to hear. Many people who are the most exercised over the issue of “Immigration” just don’t like Mexicans, which I also find to be funny because most people who think that way wouldn’t know a Mexican from a Salvadoran or a Costa Rican or a Honduran. They just know they don’t like them “darned Mexicans”. I can’t help thinking that many of the people screaming about “illegal immigration” today would have been burning the “Oakies” out of their shacks 40 years ago.

So, does all of my fond feelings for the immigrant condition mean that I’m all for free and unfettered access to the US?

No.

Does it piss me off when immigrants continue to fly their flag over the US flag and speak of “La Raza”?

Oh, you bet it does! Big time baby...

And are their bad people that come into this country illegally? Sure there are, and I cant stand that fact that Mexico gives protection to murderous criminals so long as the death penalty is in effect here in the US. I also don’t think for a second that being illegal gives you some special variance on the ways of the world.

Do I think there should be a border fence and more border guards?

Yes.

All 2000 miles should be fenced and patrolled and penalties for crossing illegally should be enforced.

Is that a big job? Sure it is, but we are a big country and we’ve done big things before. If we can dig a trench through the jungles of Panama, we can sure as hell put up a fence here at home. I seem to remember that we went to the Moon awhile back; that seemed like a big job too, but we did it. In that same time frame, we built a whole Federal Interstate Highway System, we don’t think much of it today, but it was a big job and it got done somehow and now we cant hardly live without it and yeah there were a fair amount of people at the time who were against it and said it couldn’t be done. They were wrong, just as those who say a wall can’t be built today are wrong. It seems to me that without that basic tool of governance in place, that being a legally recognized and respected border, none of the other provisions that are currently in discussion over “immigration” really matter. You either have a border or you don’t, and right now, we just don’t.

I don’t think the key issue about “immigration” is about the people involved because as I’ve said, I like people. Its the governments that I can’t stand and in this case there is two governments to work on, and for some reason we always ignore the other partner in this little game of ours and concentrate on the people instead.

This is a serious mistake in my opinion.

The government we share a border with is every bit the failed state the Iraq is (or was ) and every bit as dangerous. The socialist policies of the Mexican government have allowed poverty to expand at the same time that other Socialist governments in such as India and China have now seen the light and have opened economic liberty to their people. The result of wealth has grown in those two places, while poverty has grown in Mexico.

Why is this? How can a country with large oil reserves be in such poverty? Easy. Socialists run the oil company. PEMEX is the worst run oil company in the world, and what’s worse, PEMEX is the largest tax base for the country.

In addition, Mexico has severe restrictions on the ability for non-citizens to buy property in Mexico, and what’s worse is that non-citizens have less than equal access to the law in Mexico, and as a result, property rights are often subject to “squatters” overrunning the property. This makes in nearly impossible for foreign companies or individuals to justify putting capital to work in Mexico. It’s a simple rule that if capital isn’t coming in then people are going out, and that’s exactly why Mexicans, Hondurans, El Salvadorans are leaving and always will until that issue is corrected. Mexican citizens have found themselves in a condition where they have more rights as illegal migrants in the US than they do as legal and proper citizens of Mexico.

So, while the rest of the world gets wealthier, Mexico gets poorer, which feeds the cycle further. Mexico is a country where its only major export is its own people. The Mexican economy is floating on the money wired back from the US from Western Union on paydays. Its absolutely pathetic, but that’s the Mexican government for you.

Would I offer amnesty to people who are here illegally? No. Frankly, I wouldn’t offer them citizenship at all. I would offer legal residency, but citizenship is not an option for anyone who first takes steps to violate the laws of the country. The status of legal residency, which can be revoked for any felony. Legal residency means we know who you are, and you have to keep in touch, failure to do so means your status is revoked. Legal residency also allows people who have kids born in the US to remain in the US with no fear of separating the family. It also would mean than access to those privileges that come with citizenship are limited to the legal resident. Legal residents should expect to get no support beyond basic services, if they lose their job and you are no longer employable, well it might be time for them to pick up stakes and leave.

I’m sorry my friend this time it didn’t work out for you. Yes, its true, you pay taxes and you can’t vote. Yes, that makes you a “second class citizen”, but you are also a guest. If we like you and you like us, we might upgrade you to the route of taking the test to be a citizen. If you pass that test, then you are in fact a full citizen but until then you are a guest, so long as you follow a few basic rules.

If you cant, we can and will have you deported.

Should we give legal residents a driver’s license? Sure, but the country of origin and the immigration status needs to be stamped on the front. I don’t know why this is so hard to implement, and no one wants to solve this and say what it is. It’s a “drivers license”. It’s not a passport. You can have a driver’s license if you are not a citizen, so long as it’s clear what your citizenship status is.

So when it’s all said and done, I just can’t get excited about this issue and since its sucked up all the oxygen in the blogosphere, its sapped my “blog-a-bility”. It’s not really about immigration at all. That’s a legal progression exercise. That problem seems solvable and pretty straightforward to me. No matter how much everyone wants to whine about how bad the economy is, the reality is there are more jobs than people and people are naturally coming in to fill the resultant vacuum. I think a border wall is necessary and proper and I don’t have a problem with it in any way. I don’t think one is necessary across the Canadian border because the population is so small and the majority of the border if fairly remote. If it starts to become a major problem, then I will change my mind, but for right now, small ones should suffice in Washington and New York and Maine.

I think it’s entirely possible for people to come to the US to work and not be citizens or enjoy the all privileges that citizens get. I don’t have a problem with that, although I know the ACLU would have kittens at the idea of such a thing, but its common practice in 192 countries around the world, I don’t understand why it would be a problem here. Citizens and non-citizens enjoy equal access to the law, but they are not equal in the eyes of the law.

Citizenship means something; just as a country and its borders do as well.

Posted @ April 05, 2006 06:11 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6)

So who owned the terminal?

From Seattles KomoTV News:
22 Stowaways Found In Container At Harbor Island

Key points:

snip...

The Rotterdam docked about 9 a.m. Tuesday and was carrying general cargo. Based on the ship's manifest, investigators believe it left Shanghai on March 23, Milne said.

Four days earlier, it was in Hong Kong, and the following day, it was in Yantian, China. After Shanghai, the ship made a stop at Nangbo, China, then Pusan, South Korea, before heading for Seattle, Milne said.

Early Wednesday the stowaways apparently pried open the container, lowered themselves about seven feet to the ground and tried to slip out of the secured terminal area, he said.

About half were discovered by a guard "on a routine security patrol" within the terminal and the other half were spotted trying to get out through Gate 4, Milne said.

Once they were intercepted, "there was no attempt to flee or hide," he said. "They were cooperative."

Port and city police as well as federal authorities established a cordon, checked cars leaving Harbor Island, where the ship docked, and are confident no one who might have been in the container escaped detection, Milne said.

Secure Terminal. Guards. Federal Authorities.

So the shipping company has limited responsibility in the application of security.

UPDATE: And in other Hong Kong News, someone tried to ship out a MIG-29 and was intercepted.

Posted @ April 05, 2006 11:04 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

I'm still struggling with bloggers block...

But has it occured to anyone else that at the same time our country has people in the streets protesting for the right to not be a citizen and still legally work, the French have their own citizens protesting in the streets to secure the right to not work?

America = non citizens upset at not being allowed to work.
France = citizens upset to find that they might have to work.

Posted @ April 05, 2006 09:30 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Guess Who's Got an A380?

So tonight I'm killing time at a bookstore in between picking up and dropping off from various kid functions, and I stopped by the magazine rack for a quick look at this months offerings in the way of Aircraft Magazines ( known as "Air Porn" by my wife).

Airlines Magazine may 2006 issue - Cover Story Building the A380. Centerfold - The Airbus A380, Worlds Largest Passenger Aircraft - Wearing the colors of United Arab Emirates Airlines.

I laughed out loud. You just wait till that baby lands at JFK.

UPDATE: Apparently Emirates Airlines plans on being the first and the largest owner of Airbus A380s. They plan on taking delivery of 45 of these babys.

So, they can buy and fly 45 of the biggest aircraft in the world, which they fly at will through American Airspace, own terminal gates in Americas Most Premiere Airport(JFK), which they can load and unload God knows what, but they can't own the company that owns the company that drives the forklifts in Bayonne, New Jersey.

Posted @ April 03, 2006 09:18 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Apple Computer Set to Mark 30th Birthday

I really dont think about my age very often. Frankly, I'm much happier and more heathly now than when I was in my twenties. Other than the loss of hair and the need for glasses, life in the comfortable middle ages is preferrable in every way to life of the age of ill spent youth.

There have only been three times I have stopped to think about my age.

1. Stopping at a gas station one night and paying at the counter I looked down to see one of those " YOU MUST BE BORN BEFORE THIS DATE TO BUY BEER". The date was a year after the year I graduated high school. It finally occured to me that there were kids born the year I left high school who were just turning 21.

2. One of my kids wanted to know what kind of DVD's did I have when I was young. I began to explain that when I was young:

- There was ONE phone company, no cell phones and long distance calls were a luxury.

- "Live Via Satellite" was like watching pictures from mars.

- We didn't have a color TV until 1972.

- TV Shows often broadcast themselves as "IN COLOR" the way that they do for HDTV today.

- There was a thing called an "8 track cassette".

- Our 1976 home had the following in the way of "high tech":
A stereo, known as a "hi-fi",which included a device known as
a "record player".

A washer, but no dryer, we had lines that went across the backyard for that.

A Dishwasher and a refrigerator.

A Color TV. One. It sat in the Front Room. If you wanted to watch something, you sat in front of it and turned it on, after it was over, you turned it off. We had no way to record television.

I had a transistor radio, and a cassette player. It was not a walkman but a big thing that sat on my desk. I had headphones that looked like something you would wear as a radioman on a wartime B-29.

When I told my kids this information, they looked at me like I went to school with Abraham Lincoln.

3. Apple Computer Set to Mark 30th Birthday.
In high school I was lucky enough to get into a class that taught Computer Programming as part of a "Regional Occupation Program". The program was intended for kids that didnt want to go to college but wanted a trade. Computer Programming wasnt the big deal it was today, it as largely card punch machines and paper tape drives. I loved it, it got me off campus 4 hours a day and I got to play with some really great stuff. It was science with a practical application. In the second semester, one of the instructors brought in a bunch of computers from the local computer club. These clubs were populated with the same sort of people who owned HAM radios and metal detectors. Remember, We didnt call them "PC's" then, that name had yet to be invented. There was a Commodore PET, which used a cassette tape as a storage device, a TRS-80, which also used a cassette drive.

And there was an Apple II. It used a "floppy disk drive". Compared to the others, it was like a Ferrari at a tractor show. The cassette drive was nice, you could write programs and store them on something that you could load later. It sometimes took only 20 minutes to load a program into memory. A big step forward from the paper tape drives we used for the time sharing mainframe we used for most of our work.

But the Apple II had a "Floppy Disk Drive". It took seconds to load a program into memory. We all knew, back in that dusty room at Marconi Tech that the Apple was really going to be something big.

I remember telling my parents about the Apple. They looked at me and said "Who in their right mind would pay 2,000 dollars for a toy?"

"But mom, you can program it to do calculations, it can do bookkeeping"!

" I can do bookkeeping with a pencil and a piece of paper, 25 cents. We can take the other $1999.75 and go buy a car"!

Talking to people in 1978 about what computers could do was like talking to Zambezi tribesman of the value of fully funding your IRA.

In 1984, just 6 years later, I bought my first computer. I still have it. It still works. In Febuary 1984, Apple release the MAC, and I bought one. It cost me $2,400 and I had to eat Top Ramen noodles for 3 months to keep the budget together. It has 128k of memory, one floppy drive and five pieces of software. Oh, and a modem...

It didnt really sink in until today that its been 30 years since I sat at the kitchen table with my parents and talked about the world that I was sure would be. "Computers are going to change everying" I said.

What is funny, is that while my imagination was ahead of the curve, what has actually happend since then is so far beyond anything even I could have imagined.

I knew things would be different, but even I really had no idea how much different.

Posted @ March 24, 2006 11:49 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (10)

Ray Makes a Very good point

Yesterday I made a post about the finding of a Cold War bunker in the Brooklyn Bridge.

Today, My pal Ray stops me and makes a very good point:

"So here were talking about a losing a fixed-in-place Cold War bunker in the middle of New York City, one of the most populated cities in North America. Worse, the bunker is literally in the Brooklyn Bridge, a prominent city landmark... Lost, just completely lost it - For 50+ years.

Yet everyone on the left is constantly screaming that we didnt find Saddams WMD's in Iraq?. Hell, we cant even find our own stuff here at home!"

And thats why its great to work with smart people.

Posted @ March 22, 2006 02:47 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Cold War bunker found in Brooklyn Bridge

Great story, from CNN:

"New York workers have discovered a trove of Cold War-era supplies within the masonry of the Brooklyn Bridge, a cache meant to aid in survival efforts in the event of nuclear attack...".

Gee, War supplies from the 1950's. It's quite a time capsule from another time when we were threatened by an tyrannical enemy that wished us death or slavery. Maybe if they look hard enough in there they will find a Democrat party leader who believes its "ok" to fight for America. Remember when there was such a thing as a Democrat who categorically and proudly said things like "pay any price, bear any burden in the defense of liberty". Can you imagine 'Daily Kos' reacting to that today, or Howard Dean responding?

Imagine a world where Democrats proudly flew the flag and sang "happy days are here again" and believed it. Folks who believed it was a good idea to fight for America. Folks who were totally unlike todays regressive tribe of reactionary utopians who burn the flag and sing "up against the wall redneck M-Fers!...

I wonder what happened to those folks.

Posted @ March 21, 2006 03:52 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

Where did All The Students Activists Go?

C.W. Nevis took his daughter to a protest this weekend and wonders "Where did all the student activists go"?

I've been on college campuses over the past couple of years taking a variety of classes. One of those classes was a German Language class. The instructor was a very nice lady, an older German woman who lived through the war as a child. She was a very good instructor and frankly she was such a good instructor of German that she invigorated my love of the english language, which is a hell of thing for a German Langage instructor to do. She was a genuine nice lady.

She was also quite a free spirit and tended towards a leftist ideology, which is really not unusual on campus. Most of the time she kept politics out of the classroom, but we usually got a small 5 minute lecture during the week on some subject that bothered her.

The students were predictably young, but they also held a secret that they revealed to me and the rest of the class one week after a lecture from the liebe professorin.

One week she began a pre-class lecture on the evils of "Depleted Uranium". I listened quietly, being the good observer that I am, as I was more interested in the class reaction than playing verbal tennis with someone who was not going to be turned by my arguments in any account.

The class sat quietly and listened, but didnt react to the accusations of horrible crimes against humanity, they just got ready for class and organized themselves for the task at hand, only half listening to the instructor. When she finished her 5 minute lecture, she left the room to pick up some paperwork for that class session.

Then they did it. As soon as the door closed, almost every student stood up and unzipped jackets or pulled off their sweatshirts and vests to reveal something absolutely stunning.

80% of the class was wearing grey t-shirts with one word on the front

ARMY

"Well why didnt you say something"? I said with a laugh to one of the kids, nay, soldiers who were also attending the class with me and about 5 stunned party animals.

"Dude we've got work to do. You spend all your time getting angry at nitwits and you miss the whole point of being in school in the first place". The discipline that the service had given to my classmate showed in his professionalism He wasnt angry, he had a job to do, he was there to learn. My classmate had just returned from 2 years overseas duty in Korea and was about to be sent to Germany, and possibly "parts beyond".

After a round of high-fives, they all tucked in their shirts and went back to their previous slacker camoflage, when the instructor came back and started the class all the while seemingly unaware that nearly all of her class were actually reserve or active members of the US Military.

So, C.W. -Where did all the student activists go? Apparently they joined the Army.

Posted @ March 21, 2006 10:59 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (5)

Fred Barnes: A Third Term for Bush

Huzzah!

I wholeheartedly concur with Mr. Barnes. I dig the Lieberman move...

Posted @ March 20, 2006 11:07 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Why Supermodels rarely are Cisco Certified

This is where outsourcing goes off the rails. Think of this picture the next time you call a Technical help desk.

Hallo, Dis iz Ivanka Dzhugashvili who is serving you please, Do you have a problem Wid de Cisco Router?, Yes? Please hold, yes? are you dere? Do you have a teeket?

Sweetheart, RTFB means "Read The Flipping Book", not "Wear The Flipping Book". Read, R-E-A-D is there a word for that where you are from? Hmmm...?

Perhaps she should try sitting on it...

Posted @ March 17, 2006 03:11 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

A reminder

Regime Change Iran gives us a post that should remind all of us that the Iranian Atomic Weapon program isnt just about changing our behavior, its about controlling their own people.

It also reminds me to try remember to separate what is Islam from what is Persian and not to confuse the two.

Posted @ March 16, 2006 10:21 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Separated at Birth?

Gov. Mark Warner

Star Trek Ferengi Character

Apparently, The NY Times thought it would help to doctor Mark Warners Picture,looking at the results of their efforts I can't imagine what the original must have looked like.

Posted @ March 15, 2006 09:03 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

More tales of Korean counterfeiting

This appears to be 'South Korean", but it gets my attention for a couple of reasons:

...snip

Federal authorities investigating a man who smuggled money into the country have seized 250 counterfeit bank notes in billion-dollar denominations, they announced Tuesday.

The 250 bogus Federal Reserve notes had 1934 issue dates and were stained to make them look old, but no such currency exists, said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice.

Federal authorities have not charged the man, Tekle Zigetta, in connection with the counterfeit notes, but warned that the sale or transfer of fake securities has increased in recent years. Scam artists typically sell phony government bank notes at a discounted value or use them as collateral to secure loans or make purchases.

"A billion is a substantial number, we want to ensure that no one was duped or fleeced by the passing of these documents," Kice said. "We also want to publicize this story to see if anyone out there has additional information to help us build a case."

Authorities opened an investigation into alleged currency smuggling by Zigetta in 2002 when he arrived at Los Angeles International Airport with $37,000 in undeclared cash following a trip to South Korea

...end snip

From the SF Chronicle.

So, someone went through all the bother to counterfeit the bills in 1 BILLION dollar denominations. (cue Mike Myers as "Dr. Evil")

The idiots...billion dollar bills? what were they thinking?

Ok,

Question #1: What President did he put on the front of the bills?

Question #2: "Tekle Zigetta" doesnt sound like a Korean name to me, why was he flying back and forth to Korea? Alias maybe? what, "Kayser Soze" just too obvious?

Question #3: According to the story, he fled during the initial smuggling investigation back to Korea. He was lured back and arrested in January. What kind of story would cause this character to fly directly into the hands of the law?

It is doubly interesting that the Nevada Secretary of State lists the rather unique name on a Corporation with two other people.

What do I think?

Money Laundering.

I'm wondering why South Korea as a place to flee to. The obvious answer is it allows contact with North Koreans, who are hard up for cash lately, but sometimes the obvious answer isnt always the right one.

Be back later, I'm following the trail of the corporation where this character was registered corporate officer.

UPDATE: According to this video from CBS 2 news in Los Angeles, Tekle Zigetta said the bills were "found in a cave in the Philippines". Ah, well, that explains everything. Oh, and its Grover Cleveland as the President on the front of the bogus 1 BILLION dollar bills.

Grover Cleveland? shhesh!

Posted @ March 14, 2006 08:29 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

My neighbor, Dr. Zawahiri

Cover your keyboard. if you read this you might do a danny thomas 'spit take; across your screen.

Ok, here goes -

Well, according to a government informant tetifying in the Hayat trial, Dr. Ayman Zawahiri was living in Lodi California during 1998 and 1999!

...snip
"Naseem Khan, the prosecution's key witness, said al-Zawahri lived in Lodi in 1998 and 1999 and that he saw him at the mosque there. Khan said he never had a conversation with him, although he spoke to him in passing..."

...end snip

Oh dear me! Al queda living in the Golden State? Not just any alqueda lackey, but 'Muslim Brotherhood' himself, The "Producer" of Al-Queda was living it up in right here in river city.

First Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme moves here, the SLA kills a bank teller and hides out here for awhile, and now the 'number two' man of the most dangerous terror network was found living here. This is a regular nest of vipers this place is, I tell ya.

Anyone remember 'grandma death' and the 'vampire killer' of the 1980's Sacramento Scene? Ok, I guess I'll have to dig those up. (oops! sorry, bad phraseology).

Anyway, all kidding aside, if this is true, its staggering in its implications.
Think about it, Al-queda leader living in US -pretty recently.

Forget the Clinton administration trying to arrest Osama overseas, his bagman was living right here!

Posted @ March 13, 2006 03:33 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Headlines

Water discovered on Moon of Saturn: Life possible says NASA.
Zogby poll shows new life forms find Bush unpopular.

Hitler: How Bush Blew It.
Infamous former leader of the German Third Reich returns from hades to offer stark criticism the Bush administration. “He’s just not racist enough” complains former leader of Germany. " I'm tired of people running down my reputation by comparing me to him".

Yale admission records show Nazi Reich minister Albert Speer admitted as student in 1946.
“ We believe in a diverse student body” says Yale president.

Ghosts of Rep. Smoot and Hawley appear on Capitol Steps to warn Congress on protectionism.
“What are you thinking you nincompoops, look at what we did to the country” cry sprits of long dead congressmen who caused world wide depression with protectionist bills.

Iranian scientists find working on atomic program difficult due to side stitches from laughter.
”Those jokers at the UN don’t really think were worried about them, do they”? says Hamdi Hashemi leader of the Iranian atomic weapons program.

Gas prices climb as Saudi Arabia agrees to stop selling oil the US.
“ We don’t want to be a security risk to the people of the United States” says sheikh .

Zogby Poll shows Taliban set to win more seats in Congress than Republicans.
“ Many people like their strong Anti-jewish stance” says Zogby.

CIA Whistleblower reveals that Bush often holds meetings in White House Oval office that are classified as National Security related.
Outraged Democrat leaders want hearings to discover content of these meetings.
“ Who does the President think he is, the President?” said Senate Minority leader Harry Reid.

Lack of al-queda attacks in US cited as proof of Bush failure in War on Terror.

Low unemployment numbers seen as further proof of Bush failure in on the Economy.

Bush failure to return to Gold Standard angers Republican constituency.

Bush failure to ban Fluoride in drinking water angers Republican constituency.

Bush efforts to increase investment in US fails, France and Germany gleeful at their sudden windfall.
“ He had us beat, and then Congress stepped in and handed us this gift, its like Christmas!” said German foreign Minister Joscka Fischer.

Bush failure to order “shoot on sight” orders to border patrol angers Republican constituency.
Low poll number may force Bush to shoot illegal immigrants himself.

US seen as bad investment for wealthy oil nations.
“Why should we take a risk on these rubes when the Chinese and Indians will treat us with respect?” says Shiekh.

Japan and China site American Terrorists like Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Dillinger, Mcveigh and the Terror organization KKK as reasons not to invest in US.
“You just can’t support putting investments in a country that has supported organizations like that; its barbaric ”

US Ports safer back in hands of Mafia Controlled Teamsters, says Rep. Duncan Hunter.

Posted @ March 10, 2006 06:09 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Larry Kudlow Distills The "Ports Kerfuffle"

How to distill the "Ports Kerfuffle" in three paragraphs.

From Larry Kudlows article in National Review Online:

...snip

When you scratch this debate among conservatives deep enough, what you are left with is a clear demarcation between free-traders and protectionists. Those conservatives who oppose the deal are lining up with xenophobic protectionists like my old friend Patrick Buchanan. On the other hand, conservatives in favor of the deal align themselves with the pro-growth, free-trade tradition embodied by Jack Kemp. The Kemp adherents believe in breaking down global barriers in order to enhance prospects for prosperity and freedom everywhere. That’s in large part what the UAE/DP World episode is all about.

Whether it’s anti-Arab Islamophobia or anti-Mexican Hispanophobia, the fear-mongers in the conservative ranks do not truly believe in economic opportunity. Nor do they believe in Ronald Reagan’s “City on a Hill” vision of America, where it is our charge to lead the world toward free-market prosperity, political democratization, and true freedom for all peoples.

Yes, there is a rift in the conservative ranks. Opposing President Bush are those with a vision of pessimism, defeatism, and fear. Supporting the president are those with a Reaganite vision that brims with opportunity, victory, and success in the spread of freedom and democratization. Can there be any serious question that the resounding conservative Republican ascendancy and success of the past 25 years launched by Ronald Reagan and advanced by George W. Bush is built on optimism — and positive results? I think not.

...end snip.

and there you have it. Once upon a time, my dad used to tell me that fear wasn't a characteristic of leadership and people who live in fear or gave council to their fears, werent leaders. The President has taken a risk with the "Port Kerfuffle", but its a risk that a leader would take. You may not respect his decision, but you have to respect his standing by the decision. It does show you that the President believes something is right for the country, he does it no matter the polls. President Bush could very easily react to the Ports deal with a resounding "HELL NO", and by doing so he would climb to his highest ratings since 9/11, but he wont do that, because no matter how it might serve him personally to do so, it would not serve the country or his duty to it as President.

If Congress could show 1/10th the character of the President, we wouldnt have to go through 6 months of opportunistic grandstanding against the "Patriot Act", only to have it pass by 89-10.

There are days when I think that President Bush is the last adult in Washington D.C. If you are one of those convinced that President Bush isnt quite what you wanted from a President, just remember how close we came to having this man in the office of President making these decisions:

Now that you've seen what the past 6 years have been like, do you think President Gore would have agreed with the many decisions that President Bush has made?

Spend a day thinking "what might have been" and you quickly come to the conclusion that we are mighty lucky indeed to have the President we have.

Posted @ March 04, 2006 10:21 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

AP Reporter Discovers US Military Aircraft in Iraq

This post from the AP is easily one of the dumbest posts I have ever read, and that is saying a lot when you consider the Associated Press and its long history of idiocy.

Lethal ‘flying gunships’ returning to Iraq
AP: Armed airplanes used in Vietnam War secretly moved to Iraqi base

...Snip

Lethal "Flying Gunships"? Well, one would hope if they are in fact "Gunships" that they would at some point prove to be "lethal" or what would be the point?

...Snip

In a secretive operation, heavily armed gunship versions of C-130 transport planes like these at an airbase in southern Iraq, on Wednesday, are being shipped to Iraq.

"Secretive"? Operation Iraqi Freedom is hardly a secret, and if it were, your blabbing about it would void that statement, dont'cha think?

...Snip

AN AIR BASE IN IRAQ - The U.S. Air Force has begun moving heavily armed AC-130 airplanes — the lethal “flying gunships” of the Vietnam War — to a base in Iraq as commanders search for new tools to counter the Iraqi resistance, The Associated Press has learned.

An AP reporter saw the first of the turboprop-driven aircraft after it landed at the airfield this week. Four are expected.

Well, it looks like someone got out of the hotel in the green zone and discovered a whole new world to cover.

The Iraq-based special forces command controlling the AC-130s, the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, said it would have no comment on the deployment. But the plan’s general outline was confirmed by other Air Force officers, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Military officials warned that disclosing the location of the aircraft’s new base would violate security provisions of rules governing media access to U.S. installations.

Wow! Who Knew! Telling the enemy about our movement is considered "Bad" by the Military authorities. I would have never guessed...

The four-engine gunships, whose home base is Hurlburt Field in Florida, have operated over Iraq before, flying from airfields elsewhere in the region. In November 2004, air-to-ground fire from AC-130s supported the U.S. attack that took the western city of Fallujah from insurgents.

The result: We won in Falluja. Funny thing about how Al Qaeda neglected to get an air force.

Basing the planes inside Iraq will cut hours off their transit time to reach suspected targets.

You can almost hear the reporter want to ask how they can do this without a warrant.

The left-side ports of the AC-130s, 98-foot-long planes that can slowly circle over a target for long periods, bristle with a potent arsenal — 40 mm cannon that can fire 120 rounds per minute, and big 105 mm cannon, normally a field artillery weapon. The plane’s latest version, the AC-130U, known as “Spooky,” also carries Gatling gun-type 20 mm cannon.

Stop!, you're making me swoon...

The gunships were designed primarily for battlefield use to place saturated fire on massed troops. In Vietnam, for example, they were deployed against North Vietnamese supply convoys along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where the Air Force claimed to have destroyed 10,000 trucks over several years.

Well, you have to work the Vietnam angle in somehow. The Reporter might be surprised to learn the B-52 was also used in "Vietnam", as well as the M-16 that all those camoflaged fellows around him are carrying...

The use of AC-130s in places like Fallujah, urban settings where insurgents may be among crowded populations of noncombatants, has been criticized by human rights groups.

The said same "Human Rights Groups" say very little about Terrorists groups subjecting civilian populations to being made into hostages, a direct violation of the Geneva Convention as well as common decency...

The slow-moving AC-130s also offer an intelligence gathering advantage in the Iraq fight: sophisticated long-range video, infrared and radar sensors.

I Know!!! Aint It The Coolest thing?...

American commanders are marshaling all available tools to detect the Iraqi insurgents’ stealthy operations, especially at night, when they plant roadside bombs targeting American road patrols and convoys.

Um... Mr. Reporter sir, the AC-130 is decidedly "Not Stealthy", and thats one of the beautiful things about it, it has one very nice feature.
It's "Scary". Fear - is a powerful motivator. "Hey Ali, lets go out tonight and bomb the girls school, er, uh, say... is that a Spectre Gunship? Ok, why don't we stay home and play canasta instead..."

The Air Force’s senior tactical commander in Iraq said the AC-130 can be both a high-intensity and low-intensity weapon.

I love it when they talk like that.

“It’s got tons of guns, and it’s got all kinds of stuff on it that can be applied to the problems you have,” Brig. Gen. Frank Gorenc, who refused to discuss the current AC-130 deployment, said in an AP interview.

"Problems" being those people who enjoy killing women and children for the express purpose of spreading terror in civilian populations under the guise of fanatic religiosity.

That “stuff” includes “the ability to take these high-tech pods and to use them to find guys planting (bombs) and to find other nefarious activity,” he said.

Don't look now Hadji, the Generals got your number...

The Predator drone — the MQ-1 unmanned aerial vehicle — has been a reconnaissance workhorse in Iraq, but Air Force officers say they don’t have enough to meet demand for missions. The fiscal 2007 Defense Department budget proposed last month by the Bush administration envisions spending $1.6 billion on additional reconnaissance drones.

Reconnisance - looking around. Spectre - Blowing things up. It's a "win-win" as far as I can tell.

Posted @ March 03, 2006 03:38 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Rick Steves: Fighting back only makes them mad

Hello, my name is Rick Steves and I'm the host of a PBS travel series. This week I used my position as a local seattle semi-celebrity and my unnofficial position as a halfwit liberal totem for the flaccid urban left to write an editorial in the Seattle Times. Afer all, I'm on TV, and public TV at that, so I must be smarter than the rest of you ignorant boobs out there in the "red states".

The first sentence of my well thought out open minded editorial says " The greatest risk to our society today is not Islamo-fascist terrorism, but the people who use that term to scare us."

Unfortunately, as a result of this reasoned call for dialog, certain bald headed, monobrowed thugs like the proprietor of the website Varifrank.com have decided to inflict this editorial to what is called by the kids today "a fisking".

Like all liberal moderate folks, I certainly do support the right of free speech and the "first amendment" except when its used to make the "right kind of people" with the "right kind of intentions" look like idiots, like me for example. I really dont think its fair, do you? If you agree with me, please be sure to stop by the next PBS Pledge Drive and help me survive, because if it werent for people like you I might have to compete in the free market of ideas, and then what would happen?

( Oh, I'll give this piece fisking all right, lemme at 'im... Check back later. If I were you, I'd be sure to wear a cup.)

Posted @ March 03, 2006 01:25 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

We've all been there...

We've all been there. It's the middle of the afternoon, the air conditioner is on the fritz so its a little stuffy in the court and you had a big lunch at "Macaroni Grill". You were up late last night Im'ing in a "Babes of the Supreme court" Chat room going on for hours about whether or not Star Trek or Babylon 5 was the better Sci-Fi show.

And now you have to sit and listen all afternoon to some halfwit monotone lawyer prattle on in a desperate attempt to justify his grotesque hourly rate.

First, you let your eyes droop for just a second. Then another. Then you realise its been a full minute and you've lost complete track of what they are talking about.

Then it happens. Your head hits the desk, and you wake up a full hour later in a puddle of your own spit with everybody laughing at you.

Forget about being caught "sleeping on the job", you just pray that you didn't talk while you were doing it.

( Lighten up folks, she's 72 years old and a cancer survivor. I'm 44, run 5 miles a day and I still fall asleep in meetings at least once a week. I absolutely HATE meetings. My contempt for meeetings and people who hold them, knows no bounds. I'm in full support of Justice Ginsburgs Mid afternoon naps. )

Posted @ March 02, 2006 04:39 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6)

Bush continues to make a fool of Harry Reid

Remember way back around Christmas 2005 when Harry Reid grabbed a big armful of love from the cameras when he said "We killed the Patriot Act"...

Headline today:

Senate Approves Patriot Act Renewal: 89-10
From AP:

...Snip

The Senate on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to renew the USA Patriot Act, after months of pitched debate over legislation that supporters said struck a better balance between privacy rights and the government's power to hunt down terrorists.

...Snip

The vote was a significant victory for Bush after revelations late last year that he had authorized a domestic wiretapping program provided ammunition to senators demanding more privacy protections in the Patriot Act.

Senate Democrats and a few Republicans refused to allow a vote before Christmas on renewing the law before 16 provisions expired on Dec. 31.

Unable to break the deadlock, Congress opted instead to extend the deadline twice while negotiations continued. In the end, the White House and the Republicans broke the stalemate by crafting a second measure that would curb some powers of law enforcement officials seeking information. Both will be sent as a package to Bush.

Remember, this just happened when Bush was supposedly at 34% and every soldier in Iraq is in the process of deserting his post and running away to Canada( so says Zogby...)

The Democrats were certain that the Patriot Act was going to prove to be solid ground for them in the 2006 election. Speaking of that, I havent heard very much about the President illegal wiretaps either. And to think I spent $24.95 on James Risens book "State of War" for nothing...

Ok, let's move on to making the Bush Tax Cuts permanent, shall we?

Posted @ March 02, 2006 01:10 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Bush Admin sued for trying to fix levees

It looks like our current 24 hour L'affaire Du'jour is:

"Bush was warned about Katrina Damage".

By way of implication, "If only Bush would have done his job"

You need only consider that for four years before Hurricaine Katrina, Bush did his best to try to limit the potential damage, and was stopped by the very same people now screaming at him for "doing nothing".

From this beautiful article in September 2005 National Review we learn the following :

...snip
"The Bush administration’s flood-control efforts were often relentlessly opposed by environmental groups, and this opposition was frequently echoed by liberal activists and in the press. Bush kept his promise, and his appointees at the Corps of Engineers have stopped the “spring rise” plan that concerned so many about flooding. Environmentalists launched a barrage of criticism and a series of lawsuits...

"...Ironically, among those criticizing Bush for his actions to prevent flooding of the Missouri River was the ever-present anti-Bush environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He chastised Bush in 2004 for “managing the flow of the Missouri River.” If, before Katrina, Bush had proceeded full-speed ahead and fortified the levees of the Mississippi for a Category 5 hurricane, Kennedy and others of his ilk would very likely have criticized Bush for trying to manage the natural flow of the Mississippi. And it’s a good bet that many of the lefty bloggers now critical of Bush for not reinforcing the levees would have cited Bush’s levee fortification as another way he was despoiling the natural environment.

I wholehardily agree with that assessment.

From what I saw during Katrina, it appeared to me that the assets and organizations that the Executive Branch of the Federal Government was responsible for, actually went into action as soon as possible.

I also saw a State and City Government that was, to put it mildly negligent, from not ordering National Guard into action ( Governors do that, not the President) to not having even the most basic plans for how to react to an emergency at any level, much less a major catastrophe. Sunken School Buses? Cops looting or walking off the job altogether? Is that a Bush thing? I dont think so...

Even today, the City of New Orleans is still planning on how to rebuild those parts of the city that simply cannot be protected. This is beyond irresponsible, but its 'par for the course' in Louisiana.

And yet - "It's Bush fault".

If Bush were half the dictator that they say he is, Bush would lock this pack of frauds and charlatans up in about 30 seconds. Instead, he respects their authority and positions, and gets screwed for it.

Oh well, "Rank has its priveleges" I suppose...

What I learned from Katrina and the half a dozen other Hurricanes last year is that there is nothing that FEMA can do that if FEMA's funding and mission were given instead to the US Coast Guard, that the Coast Guard could instead deliver, faster, better, cheaper and with more accountability than FEMA ever hoped it could.

So in that spirit, let's consider this idea.

Let's give the US Coast Guard:

The USS Constellation,
The USS Kitty Hawk
and the USS John F. Kennedy

( all non nuclear Carriers, that are either mothballed or soon to be ) and create three maritime "Emergency Response Task Forces" with the current Navy hospital ships as their core. Place one task force on each coast - Pacific - Atlantic and Gulf.

What you get is an organization that can respond anywhere in the hemisphere in 72 hours with enough organization and capability to make a big difference. An organization that is not Department of Defense, but more correctly, Department of Homeland Security. Not quite military, but not fully civilian either, and reports to the President directly via a cabinet level position. No need to worry about lines of authority over State Govenors. Govenors and National Guards can work with the Coast Guard, or be seconded to it directly as the Emergency unfolds. Whats important is that during those crucial first hours, there is a permanent place and organization that can be coordinating efforts while the logistics train catches up.

FEMA failed because it is built like a 6 fingered glove and it fit about as well as a 6 fingered glove to its actual mission.

On the other hand, The US Coast Guard - Works.

Not only would this greatly improve our response time in large scale emergencies, there is also the more important issue of our national defense. With the implementation of "Maritime Emergency Response Task Forces" our Navy and its regular mission and resources would not have to compete for attention with natural disasters.

Katrina showed us how a ship like the USS Iwo Jima can serve as a mobile emergency headquarters as well as a hospital and a landing field. My concern isnt that how well it worked - it worked great!, it's that ships like the USS Iwo Jima actually have another job right now, and I'd rather not distract them from it.

I wonder how much smuggling in the Carribean would be impacted by the permanent presence of a US Coast Guard Carrier Task Force.

Posted @ March 01, 2006 10:24 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

"Port Kerfuffle" is now officially "Closed"

Once an area of serious debate makes good fodder for satire and comedy, the half-life of the contrived media issue can be said to no longer be radioactive.

Frank J. marks the official closing on the ports issue with this brillaint piece.

Oh, and now that Howard Dean thinks that the ports issue as advantage to the Democrats, that pretty means that this particular "vampire" has returned to its coffin and had the lid nailed shut.

I'm just waiting for AL Gore to show up and drive a stake through its heart.

Howard Dean continues to demonstrate that no matter how badly the Republicans screw something up, he will always be there to frame the issue in such a way to make Democrats look even worse.

Say, its that a FLAG on the Democrats web page? An American Flag? Is this "net sabotage"? Have they been hacked? Next thing you know, they'll be supporting troops and denouncing Cindy Sheehan and singing 'God Bless America'...

Oh, I do crack my self up sometimes, but picture the campaign ad for Just a second.

Democrats waving the flag.
Howard Dean singing 'God Bless America' as he walks across a wheatfield in overalls, hand in hand with the basic farmer types in overalls.

As he is carrying a shotgun, while driving a pickup truck and going to a NASCAR Race.

All while talking about "Defending America"

...FROM FORIENGERS!!!!

Bwhahahahahah. ooohhhhehehehehhhhahahahhooo..hehhahahahhhaha.

Oh, yeah, and 'Stuart Smalley' is going to run for the Senate.

haHAHHAHAHhahahahahah,..... Oh, please, stop! I cant take it....

My sides hurt. oh man.

Ok, Prediction time. Howard and the Democrats are now pushing the "Defending America" as the central theme of the 2006 campaign. Uh, oh, hold on..

hehehehahahahahhohohohohoahahahahha.

Selected, Not Elected. Nope.
Bush Lied. Nope.
Economy. Nope.
War on Terror. Nope.
Halliburton. Nope.
Enron. Nope.
Bush is Dumb. Nope.
Iraq is a quagmire. Nope.
Wont Work With Allies. Nope.
Squandered good will around the world. Nope.

And now its come down to "Not Racist Enough". or "Isolationism For-ever!"

Yeah, that'll work.

hehehehahahahahhohohohohoahahahahha. oh man...

Posted @ February 28, 2006 02:21 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

The Wonders Of Socialism

Exhibit A: South Korea Begins shipment of fertilizer to the north.

...snip
Seoul has provided more than 1.9 million tons of free fertilizer to help improve grain production in the communist state. North Korea has depended on international handouts to feed a large number of its 23 million people since a nationwide famine hit the country in the mid-1990s.
The shipment follows a request for aid by the North earlier in the month. It also asked for an additional 300,000 tons of fertilizer throughout the year

...end snip.

When is the last example of a capitalist democracy suffering from a famine? When I think strategic materials, I think titanium, oil, highly refined ceramics, I don't think of fertilizer. I tend to think that if you can't manage to feed your own people, then your concepts of world governance are completely bankrupt. It's one thing to say a governmental system has failed when its econonmy fails to grow at a certain rate, but when you fail so badly can't even make crap, thats a whole different level of failure.

Exhibit #B: Alcohol shortage cuts Havana rum production.

...snip

"In January we sold nothing and in February only 2,170 cases, but since this month we have received none of the necessary raw materials, there's a danger we will not even be able to export what we had projected for March" Carbonell said.

Cuba in the 1950s enjoyed a higher standard of living than several European countries. Under the wonders of socialism, it can no longer feed itself and its indigenous industries are now gone. Wasnt the Che Slogan "socialism or death, or is it just mistranslated and its actually "Socialism AND death". The evidence of the past 45 years supports only one conclusion.

Cuba under the socialists has gone from a proud nation that can feed its people that exports food and goods, to the economic equivalent of the Character George on "Seinfeld"; splayed on the floor with its pants around its legs while it yells "Vandelay Industries!,Vandelay Industries,Vandelay Industries!"

Venezuelans should be asking Cuba's El Jefe " And you want to be my latex salesman?"

(Hat Tip: The Magnificent Babalu...)

Posted @ February 28, 2006 10:53 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Thank you for flying Hyperbole Airlines

Well, in this case " Thank you for shipping on Emirates Sky Cargo"

From the Emirates Sky Cargo Website:

...snip
Emirates SkyCargo is the award-winning air freight division of Emirates Airline. Established in 1985, we quickly built a reputation for leading the industry in innovation, flexibility and service.

Today, we continue to set the standard. Flying to over 75 destinations worldwide, we pride ourselves on offering our customers comprehensive cargo solutions. Through SkyChain, our online cargo logistics system, we're changing the way the cargo business works, empowering our customers with the tools they need to better control their consignments.

Our cargo solutions have been developed to provide our customers with cutting-edge air freight services. Our Priority Products assure on-time delivery throughout the world, while our extensive trucking and offline partner networks ensure comprehensive coverage where our customers need it most.

Our fleet, too, demonstrates our commitment to excellence. Amongst the youngest of any airline, it comprises the latest wide-body jets from Airbus and Boeing. We were the first major airline to place an order for the revolutionary Airbus A380 super jumbo.

In everything we do, quality is our watchword. We're particularly proud that our efforts have been recognised throughout the industry. IFW voted us 'Air Cargo Carrier of the Year' in 2004 and 2005. Air Cargo News voted Emirates 'Cargo Airline of the Year' in 1995, 1999, 2000 and again in 2001 and has named us 'Best Cargo Airline to the Middle East' for the last 17 consecutive years. SkyCargo was also awarded 'Best Cargo Airline to the Indian Subcontinent' for the 8th consecutive year by Air Cargo News and ' Logistics Service Provider Award ' by STMicroelectronics.

...end snip

So, let me get this straight - While the entire US political-wonk class is frothing out the mouth over the sale of "port dock concessions to the United Arab Emirates" in a fashion I havent seen since the great "Flouride Wars of the 1950's", it turns out that "Emirates Air" and its subsidiary "Emirates Sky Cargo" has Passenger and Cargo Terminal Space at JFK.

That's John F. Kennedy INTERNATIONAL Airport, formerly known as "Idlewild"

That's in New York City, New York State.

You read that right.
Passenger Terminal Space and Cargo Terminal Space.

New...
York...
City...

John...
F...
Kennedy...

Cargo...
Terminal...
Space...

Now, I ask you:

1) Did anyone ever go screaming about "Selling out our airports to the highest foreign bidder?"

2) Did anyone ever see any headlines in the New York Post saying "JFK Airport sold to dirty, untrustworthy,terrorist loving Arabs?

3) Did anyone ever say that we handed over security of New York airports to "Foreigners"?

4) Have we ever had any problems with Emirates Airlines, despite daily flight schedules since 1985?

5) Have we ever heard of any "terror" efforts being expidited to or from Emirates Airlines?

6) Has Emirate Airlines ever used its knowledge of Airport Security as a way to "sneak terrorists" into the United States?

7) Is there any evidence at all that the Emirates have used this airline as a conduit for terror networks?

Now, explain to me how this is different than the Dubai Ports Deal?

You want to go all "nativist" and start a policy of "keep the darkies out", you go right ahead. Let's do that, lets get this country on a policy of not allowing Air Cargo in the United States that follows the same line of logic that some of you are setting for ship based cargo and we can all go line up at the unemployment office now and beat the christmas rush.

I just want to understand your position here, they can fly aircraft in and out of an airport in New York City all.day.long, but allowing them to unload ships is out of the question? They can enter the airport traffic pattern over civilian populations all over the east coast all.day.long, but they can't operate a shipping terminal in Bayonne, New Jersey?

Now I know some of you are still going to say "HELL NO" and say we shouldnt let them do EXACTLY what they've been doing since 1985, but as far as I can tell, they have been following the rules
SET BY US...
Following the regulations
SET BY US...
Complying with security requirements
SET BY US...
and still managing to give their customers great service and their owners a profit!

Do you still really think its "too much of a risk" to let them run a crane and forklift service in Bayonne, New Jersey, considering they've been FLYING IN COMMERICIAL CARGO JETS INTO NEW YORK AIRSPACE SINCE 1985?

Emirates Sky Cargo is part of the Emirates Group. From the looks of things, they are a busy group of folks.

UPDATE: Welcome Hugh Hewitt readers. Vodka-lanche, Insta-Lanche, Malkin-lanche, Lucianne-lanche and now I can add a Hugh-nami to my collection! ( Reference trackbacks, they are like the Boy Scout merit badges of the blogosphere...)

Posted @ February 25, 2006 10:34 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (11)

Bushs Only Hope

Im thinking two things this afternoon while I enjoy some weekend outside time.

Item #1: Ports? Seems to me a lot of good are shipped by air today. I wonder how many airports have hangars, terminals and other facilties in cities all around the country that are already owned and operated by groups exactly like Dubai Ports World? I'm thinking Kennedy Airport and Newark.

Item #2: I think the 'Ports Kerfuffle' is very bad indeed for President Bush. I think the Democrats have now successfully re-defined Bush from " strong on defense" to "A Friend to Terrorists".

It seems that the current positioning by Democrats is'nt that Bush is a racist, but that apparently he's not racist enough. I'll have alot more to say about this later this evening, but my gut tells me that the only thing that can save the President at this point isnt anything he might have to say or do. This only thing that can save President Bush is the "X-Men of the Democrat Party".

Howard "The Howler" Dean. The X-Men mutant with the super power to take a gigantic political lead and convert it into a staggering loss, all while selling it to party donors at as a big success.

Al "The Channeller" Gore. His special mutant power of channelling the minds of others, took a step towards tragedy when he accidentally channeled the spirit of disgraced Vice-President Aaron Burr while watching Professor Irwin Corey. Since then, the voice of semi-consipiratorial deposed power coming from the facade of a tuxedoed comedic stage peronae has been used as a tool of anti-democrat propaganda in the manipulative hands of Evil Dr. Karl Rove.

I havent checked the listings for tommorrows Sunday Shows, but if either of these two are on anyones shows, I'd be ready for "the quote of the week'

Posted @ February 25, 2006 04:14 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6)

The law of unintended consequences

I spent a little bit of time today looking at the big picture with the whole “port” controversy. I decided that the central argument of the “against” side is essentially the “Hewitt proposition” – that its simply too risky to allow this to happen. There is only one other clear argument that I’ve heard and argument comes down to “It really doesn’t matter what good friends the UAE may have been up till now, they’re still Arabs and as we all know, Arabs need not apply”. There’s no way to reason with someone who is locked into that one, so I’m going to ignore it for now. (I’ll get back to you in just a minute, Mr. Quick)

However, “Risk” is a nasty thing. There is risk in everything. There is even risk in doing nothing. “Hewitts proposition” is essentially “…that a company that is owned by a holding company that is based in the UAE is far easier to be infiltrated than a US or European owned company would be”, and therefore this “port deal” is simply too risky for us to chance that as a result of the deal they might get their hands on some critical information about our ports that might help someone attack us.

“Might”, “maybe”, “could be ”, “its possible”, “what if”.

Ok, let's play that for a bit. Let’s tell Dubai World Ports, the third biggest port facilities management company in the world that while they might be good enough to run most of the worlds ports (outside of the US of course), they are just “too risky” for us to chance that they might allow some nefarious actions while operating our ports here in the good old USA. We will also, for the time being, ignore the fact that whether or not Dubai World Ports is allowed to run a “dock concession” here in a US port, they will most certainly be loading ships bound for the US from ports that they are already working in around the world – even if we do nothing, this is a certainty, but it will be a certianty within the context of a strained if not broken relationship.

So, let’s go ahead and set the dial on the theoretical “time machine” and take a little trip into the "alternate future". Just so everyone is on the same page as we start, the “Iraq war” that the lefties are talking about “stopping”- that war is over and it has been over for about two years as far as I can tell. We will not be refighting that war. We were very successful in that war. We were successful, not just because of a great military, but because of great logistics support; support that was provided from our now spurned "Arab friends", like Kuwait, the UAE, Oman, and yes, even the dreaded Saudis. All of these countries are countries which have earned the tag "supporters of terror" from many sides of the "port" arguments during this weeks kerfuffle. This despite their efforts in assisting us in the Iraq war and many,many efforts that have never reached the headlines of newspapers.

Armies travel on a big grey and green lines of material provided by the Navy. Navies need ships and ships need fuel. Ships need ports to load, unload and repair. Men that make up armies and air forces and even navies, need food, supplies, ammunition and places to get those things to be effective in the battlefield. The closer the ports are to the battlefield, the larger your chances are of success in maintaining lines of provisions. Things as they say, have a habit of going wrong at the very worst time. "Proximity" has a way of leveling out the odds when it comes to providing a good "plan b" when what was "plan A" just got turned into wet spaghetti on the nearest desktop fan.

“Get there first-est with the most-est” the man once said about how to win a battle, and he was right.

Its not Iraq, but there is another war sitting out there in the fog of "subatomic quantum ether" which is sometimes called “the future”.

It’s the future war with Iran, and its going to be a bad one, and like it or not, we are going to fight it. The question isn’t weather or not it will be fought, but under what circumstances.

So now that we’ve set up the quantum pool table for a little game of cosmic billiards by hitting the “what if“ Queue-ball into the “eight-ball” that is Dubai World Ports, let’s see where the game of cosmic possibility spins the ball.

As they say, “the law of unintended consequences, she is a bitch”.

And remember Mr. Hewitt, you are the one who mentioned "risk" being the key factor.

...try and imagine a future google news search page.

American Navy denied port access to Dubai after shootout with Iranian Anti-ship missiles.
Los Angeles Times, USA
Dubai, UAE –
After a shootout with Iranian Navy Silkworm Anti-ship missiles, the badly damaged US Navy Amphibious Assault Ship USS Kearsarge was forced to withdrawl to facilities in Diego Garcia leaving US Marine forces currently engaged at the port of Bandar Abbas without sufficient helicopter support…

Worldwide economic slowdown continues as goods bound for US ports are delayed.
San Jose Mercury News, USA
“It’s a bit like the blue flu”, said a spokesman for the Manila port authority. “Its not official policy, but its clear that the folks at DPW are involved in a work slowdown and its playing havoc with our scheduling”. Scheduling of port facilities is a intricate dance that involves every level of transportation in a country, and when one part of the transportation train is impacted, the entire economy suffers…

UAE declares neutrality in Iranian conflict
New York Times, USA
Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahayan announced today that after meeting with the ministers of the members of the UAE, an official government policy of neutrality had been declared. “All combatant forces must leave the country within 72 hours or face impoundment by the Government”, said the defense minister. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is currently flying to the region in last ditch attempt to salvage the relationship between the two countries. Speculation is ramapant in Washington that a large number of US troops and military resources necessary for the relief of the stalled assault on Bandar Abbas will be lost as a result of the impoundment…

Kuwait, Oman and Yemen join UAE in Neutrality in Iranian conflict
New Zealand Herald, New Zealand

Foreign Ministers from the around the Persian Gulf region today announced their intent to declare neutrality in the Iranian conflict. “We welcome the steps that our brave Muslim bothers have taken to help bring peace to the region” said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

US Navy and Marines running short of supplies in battle for Bandar Abbas.
Scotsman, United Kingdom
“Supply lines are certainly stretched, I can tell you that” said US Marine spokesman Lt. Col Dan Feldspar from the Bandar Abbas battlefield. US Troops landed two weeks ago, only to suffer attacks by Iranian Silkworm missiles that left the fleet in peril by effectively cutting its seaborne forces in half. With the declaration of neutrality from most Persian Gulf countries, US Navy planners were forced to improvise supply lines to the far off base of Diego Garcia, nearly 3,000 miles to the south.

Lockheed Martin announces layoffs due to cancelled F-16 Deal
International Herald Tribune, France

Lockheed Martin was forced to layoff 4,000 workers on the last remaining F-16 production line as the UAE announced its intent to cancel the F-16 Deal, while at the same time, France announced today that the UAE has reached a tentative deal to purchase the Eurofighter. “We welcome this opportunity to assist the UAE with its air defense” said defense minister Michèle Alliot-Marie. Sources say that the French government official stance of neutrality in the Iranian conflict was central to the deal, and not the long soured relationship between the US and the UAE.

...end snip.

You see, today we are all concentrating on "our ports", when the ports that just might matter the most in the near future are "their ports". For the moment while we are in "their ports" we are their guests. Let us hope we do what we can to ensure that cooperation in the future, or the consequences might be very serious indeed.

Iran Delenda Est...

Well Mr. Hewitt, I enjoyed the ride into the future to see what role "risk" might play in our future. At least we at home can feel certain that "our ports" will be safe.

Posted @ February 23, 2006 08:09 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (7)

It's Friday morning in Iraq

For those of you speculating about the possibility of an all out 'Religious civil war' in Iraq, remember that its friday morning, this is the key day of the week for Muslim countries, like our Sundays. We'll know a lot more in about 8 hours whats going to happen, until then its impossible for "us outsiders" to be able to tell.

I do not care to speculate. If you have a diety, I suggest you take a moment and pray to it and if you dont, you should probably get one.

Posted @ February 23, 2006 08:02 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Shall I once again...

...risk being called a "wetnose" by Bill Quick by responding to his challenge, or shall I simply assume that this as been answered and move on?

Let me ponder this while I finish my work for the day. In the mean time, the best response so far has been by my friend and former co-worker Rich Galen. ( ok we didnt actually work "together", we worked for the same company at the same time, in the same building and we knew some of the same people. It counts as the very least as a "brush with greatness" but it counts and he answers my email which is more than I can say for most of you....so there!)

Rich is a genuine good guy and smart guy as well. My only question is why isnt Rich working for the Administration in the areas of press communication, because, damn! they sure could use the help!

I think I may have already answered my own question.

Mr. Quick is a fine man, a good mind and an inspiration to us all, but for some reason on the subject of "Bird Flu" and the "Port Scandal", we just seem to be at polar opposites on the issue, and that's ok I suppose.. ( and by the way, when he called me a "wetnose", I thought it was funny and I took it the right way. I'm a big boy, I can take a punch...)

Posted @ February 23, 2006 02:56 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Is it this weeks "Miers Moment" or is it just a "Mindless Kerfuffle"

Last week it was Shotgun Dick Cheney and his Texas Six Shooters.

This week, its the "Who's running the ports?" controversy. Pour in equal parts verdant racism, add a little simple every day pig ignorance about complex business issues, and what do you get? Hours of talk radio blathering on about how the President wants to make "Supporters of terrorists responsible for securing our ports".

I've been thinking about it all day. At first, I was pretty surprised that such a seemingly dumb thing could have been allowed to happen by so many smart people. But as the day went on, I began to think that there was a lot about this that did not seem to hold very much water.

So, after a day of thinking about it, here is my "list of greivances" with the current "Bush is a bumbler" meme surrounding the support of the UAE buying the british company P&O. A company that has a port facilities management line of business in its portfolio.

1. The UAE is a supporter of terrorists.

Ok. let's say that this is true. Are we prepared to blockade and invade and overthrow the UAE for the crime of having citizens that helped terrorists in the past? Before you answer, remember that the UAE supported and supports wholeheartedly the invasion of Iraq. Dubai in the UAE is the biggest port facility in the Arab gulf that is supporting the US Navy. Ok, so we lose Dubai and the UAE as a friendly staging ground in a decidedly unfriendly part of the world. Fine, go ahead, lose Dubai so you can remain pure in thought. One port is as good as another, we can always get more Arab allies to take their place, right?

So let's now also extend the judgement of "supporters of terrorists" to a few other countries. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Djibouti, Egypt all have less than spectacular records with regards to terror suppression, a cynic like me might even consider calling these countries "supporters of terror". Wow, thats great!,if we treat each of them like we did the evil faction of the UAE, that means, well, let's see... let me get my slide rule out, oh 25% of our oil supply stops tommorrow. But hey, atleast we can be sure that the only people we work with in the world are as clean as the church pews on Sunday morning. We will rest comfortably on that as our fleet sits idle in port, and our aircraft sit on the ramps of the worlds air bases, due to a lack of fuel.

So, let's walk away from this crap about how the UAE is a supporter of terrorists and not worthy of business, shall we? Are there people and factions in the UAE that don't like us and dont have our best interests in mind? Sure, thats true, but its also true of Mexico, Canada, Venezuela, Germany, Spain and so on. You dont have to go to the UAE to find supporters of terrorists, in fact, you need only go as far as Lodi, California or Cleveland, Ohio to find supporters of terror.

The UAE is allied with the United States. This comes at great risk to the people of the UAE. They have problems with terror, they live in an area of great instability and tumult, but despite all the risk, they have invited the heathen infidel into their country with open arms.

Those "heathen infidels" by the way, are us.

Oh, and we since we sold the UAE our top of the line fighters, the F-16, something we wont even do for Venezuela or Spain, we might as well stop this fiction that the government and people of the UAE are not a very,very good friend indeed. If they are good enough to sell a major weapons system and train their Military Officers here in the United States, then they can be said to be on the "good guy" list.

2. We are handing over port security to "those people".

No, we are not. We are handing over port facilities to a company that is owned by foreign nationals. We are simply changing one set of foreign nationals for another. More correctly, we are simply changing the holding company that owns the company doing Port Facility Mangement, its doubtful that any employee of P&O would ever see any change in their day to day work except the bank that their paycheck comes from every other week.

So we must ask ourselves, is this new or unusual? Hardly. What's more the case, almost every ship in every port in the United States is crewed by foreign nationals. Those oil tankers, the LNG tankers, the big containers ships out there in SF Bay and New York Harbor are all crewed by people who didnt go to your high school. The seaman of the "Merchant Marine" that we think of as peopled by rough "Humphrey Bogart Dashiell Hammett type guys" is today a business handled largely by people of the third world. People who come from places like, oh let's say, Indonesia and the Philippines for example, places that are far more likely to involve the daily interractions of terrorists than that produced within the strip malls of port of Dubai.

Port facilties by the way, are almost always either owned or controlled by those who own the ships that dock at the port, and here's where we pick up another clue.

We don't own ships anymore. The Chinese own ships. The Koreans own ships. The Japanese own ships, the Swedes own ships. We don't own ships, we just rent them. Every time you are going down the freeway and you see a blue shipping container with the name "COSCO" on its side, that my friend is a container from a Communist country, shipped here on a Communist ship, crewed by a third world crew, unloaded by foreign nationals, and now driven on the roads of America by a good old American teamster.

The grand old shipping companies of the past now make a great deal of money running the ports themselves as the ports have been greatly modernized via containerization. This modernization effectively removed the crime ridden and gangster filled ranks of the longshoreman from our ports.

But Port Security is and remains a Coast Guard and a Customs function. This is the Department of Homeland Security. Who owns the company running port facility changes nothing in the ways of Port Security. Whether its COSCO or Hapag-Lloyd or P&O , be it British or UAE owned, it changes nothing.

3. Them sneaky little Arab debbils will be putting them thar WMD's right here in the good old USA.

Sure. This is a big argument for invading, overthrowing and removing creeps like Saddam Hussein. Its a big argument for being active and fully persecuting the war on terror. But its not an argument against the UAE owning "P&O" instead of the British.

If you want to start to lose sleep, start thinking of the ways that you could sneak WMD's into the United States. I do this all the time, it always scares the hell out of me. Remember, all you need to do is conceal an object about the size and weight of your average double door refrigerator.

You try it, and come back in 15 minutes with your list of smuggling methods. Now tell me, how many of them involve spending BILLIONS of dollars buying a port facility manangement company, just so you can sneak Ali and Jabril into a port with their big refrigerator sized handmade atomic bomb?

You want to sneak a bomb into the US, make a big container ship into a bomb and compromise the crew. It's cheaper, and more likely to succeed. (please see: The Halifax Explosion for reference.)

Make an aircraft into a bomb and fly it into the country( If I remember correctly, I think this has already been demonstrated in Manhattan).

Go and buy lots and lots of fertilizer and diesel oil from all over the US and set the fertilizer bomb off in a rented Uhaul truck. (again, been there, done that, bought the T-shirt, didnt need P&O to be owned by the UAE to do it. All that was needed was a redneck hick with time on his hands and a penchant to kill kids in a day care in Oklahoma City. )

My point is, you dont need to spend a billion dollars leaving your fingerprints all over the scene of the crime by buying P&O from the British so that you can get your agents into the port so you can do nefarious terror crimes against the host country. All you have to do is get to the Human Resources department for any existing port facility and have your men hired. You can save the billion or so dollars you were going to spend buying P&O and spend it elsewhere, like perhaps actually making or stealing an atomic bomb!

I'm not arguing that Port Security is not important, or that it doesnt need more funding and care, I'm simply arguing that the arguments of P&O being owned by UAE presents a bigger security risk to the US rather than the British ownership of P&O, border the dark twin swamps of the irrational and institutionally racist mind.

In summary, I cannot find a better argument that befits my current state of mind on the subject than this statement on National Reviews " The Corner"

I've had the pleasure of working in the transportation industry in Dubai for almost 5 years in the late 90's. I am currently based on the US West Coast. Given my choice of depending on Dubai World Ports or the ILWU (the longshoremen's union that has the entire West Coast transportation system held hostage to its demands) to provide better port security, my money's on Dubai.

What security measures are in place now at these East Coast ports, regarding the hiring of people for sensitive positions, that are going to be REMOVED by the folks at Dubai Ports World? Do they even have any SAY over those measures? Somehow, I would think that the US would retain rights to approving employees at certain positions after security checks on their background.

Besides, if the UAE were intent on getting something nasty into the US, I think they would just put it on one of the Airbus 340's that fly directly from Dubai to NY twice a day. Pop a nuke at 35,000 feet, and you get the added bonus of an EMP that would make the East Coast power outage of a few years back look like a nothing more than a tripped fuze.

I think that, once again, we have all let our collective imagination run away with us. There are too many real things to worry about to spend time inventing new things to be afraid of. Just take a look at your list of "ways to smuggle WMD's" for example.

Posted @ February 21, 2006 09:14 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (5)

The Bonfire of the Goons

So last week I go and write a little post that pokes fun at the Cartoon Jihad. Not the Jihad itself, but the goons who held up signs that said things like “Crush, kill, exterminate, butcher… Get ready for the real holocaust, 9/11 is coming again”, you remember those signs right?

Well, the other day on Powerline, I catch this one:

And that one picture struck me dumb and here’s why. First, it’s very legible and its in English. Its quite deliberate, this isn’t some last minute thought that was badly considered and hastily posted. This is exactly what this protester wanted to say and more importantly wanted you to see.

Second, this protest – is in the streets of Germany!

Now I’ve always been lead to believe that modern Germany isn’t exactly “down with the H-man”. So, I had to ask myself, if the poster is written in English, and its being displayed in a street protest in Germany, just to whom is this aimed at? Just who is the intended audience? and why?

Now while I’m engaged in a little background investigation on that subject, I start getting some very interesting trackback and comments on the previous post that I made on the protesters. Now, I want to be clear here, at no point did I ever post the dreaded Danish cartoons, what I did was to post pictures of the jihadi goons and their world wide protests over the cartoons.

Apparently that got someone’s attention because based some of the comments I have received since then it would seem there is a ‘fatwa’ against Salman Rushdie, Danish cartoonists and yours truly. It has come to my attention thanks to the small number of literate “cartoon goons” that they are just as upset that I am poking fun at them as they were of the cartoon depictions of their spiritual guide.

Well strike me dead with a bolt of lightning to find out that not only can you not poke fun at Mohammed, but if you dare pour a little comedic limelight on the jihadists themselves and cause them any sort of embarrassment, then that’s just as bad in the minds of these thugs as spray painting a mosque with a Star of David.

I was at lunch the other day with a friend, a good guy but a regular foil of mine. We got into a discussion about the ‘Cartoon jihad’ and his take was essentially that “we need to show respect to other cultures because its our disrespect of these other cultures that has caused all the problems with hatred against us in the first place”. This of course got me to thinking. So I asked him in return; “ then you must also be of the opinion that the European Jews certainly must’ve done something to deserve all that hatred from the Nazis, right? It couldn’t possibly be something else that caused the Nazis to hate the Jews, by your way of thinking, the Jews must’ve done something to deserve their fate at the hands of the Nazis, right?“

My friend is not a bad guy, he has simply done what most people do when faced with irrational hate, and that is try to put an understandable rational face on it. But here’s what it comes down to kids, this whole thing has nothing whatsoever to do with cartoon depictions of Mohammed or Islam, this is the politics of the playground, the strategy of the schoolyard bully. The 'Cartoon Jihad' has nothing to do with “correcting a grievance” or protesting the treatment of Islam at the hands of an infidel power, it’s about intimidation. It’s about a group of people filled with impotency expressing themselves in the only way they feel they have left to bring honor to the dishonored.

All of this stuff, the whole Cartoon Jihad is the whole brownshirt street thuggery crystalnacht show, only this time, You and I, the Danes and anyone else who dares to stick out their necks against the goons, are the Jews of this particular pogrom.

I’m not at all bothered by street level goons and I’m not really surprised when I see them in action. I know this breed well. I went to 14 schools in 10 years before I went away to college and in every school I ever went to there was group of these goons. They travel in packs, they do their work with an deserved, yet oversized reputation based on acts of intimidation and extortion. They are the small loudmouth boys surrounded by even smaller boys all trying to act bigger than the next kid to them in the pack and scared to death to be seen as the cowards they truly are, always willing to do any amount of violence in an attempt to hide that cowardice from public exposure.

But the force that gives the goons their real power and what they depend on in each and every case is the ‘good and decent people of the world’ who don’t want to make any waves, who aren’t violent, don’t want any trouble and always assume a bit of their own guilt in the creation of these little monsters.

We’ll leave you alone to your bully games you poor child, now you do the same to us and leave us alone too. ok?

You see the goons I can handle. It’s the craven cowards that make up a great number of otherwise decent people of the world that really get under my skin.

I can’t tell you the number of times in various schools where I ran up against a group of goons, only to have the “so called decent folk” get mad at me for supposedly making the bullies angry, as if it was I who was creating the problem in the first place! “ You must’ve done something to make them mad” the school authorities would say, knowing full well the whole sordid history of the goons that existed before I arrived. No matter what school it was, the story was always the same.

"Don’t upset the goons, you must’ve done something to deserve their anger, you are as much at fault as they are.”

My all time favorite one liner from a clueless school Vice-Principal was this one:

“You brought it on yourself”...
I hated that one more than all the others. I still do.

“Don’t make waves Frank. You don’t know who these guys are” people would say, always afraid that it was my defiant actions against the goons were what was really making things worse and not the intimidation and extortion at the hands of the goons that was in fact the real problem.

I knew back then who those guys were and I still know now. Some of them are now visiting my site leaving comments of intimidation and threats. But the real people I worry about are the so-called “decent people of the world” who are now spending a great deal of time once again doing the dirty work of the goons. The EU is doing its level best to now write new laws to ensure that “Islam is not defamed”; Editors have been fired, newspapers have been shutdown, and here is yet another example of where I am deeply and horribly appalled at the actions of otherwise decent people helping feed “the goon bonfire” - a former President and Vice President of this country have gone as far to call for the original cartoonists to be arrested and persecuted according to the law (can you say “a chill wind blows” Tim Robbins? Well I can.)

There have been serious death threats and bounties on the lives of anyone in any way associated with the Danish cartoons, all while decent people “tut-tut” and say with a straight face that somehow the people who published the cartoons must’ve deserved all the violence that has been generated. (“don’t wake waves Frank, you might make them mad at us”. It’s a phrase that cries out to me through the ages when I hear "appeasement" and I’m sad to say that I'm hearing it now all too often.)

I’m appalled at the goons and what they do, but I’m even more appalled at the rest of us and what we do in response to these goons almost as regular as clockwork.

Let's get this straight, These protests are not about "blasphemous cartoons", its not even about Islam. It’s about the goons. It’s about the mob, and the mentality of the mob. But more importantly it’s about how we give in to the mob. It’s as if we want them to like us and every time we try to make them like us by being nice in response to their intimidation, we strengthen them.

We, as "decent people" just cant believe in the irrationality of hate, that sometimes the brownshirt just needs a target to focus its anger and any target in a pinch will do. The mob the individual goon hides behind and the hatred they all live within don't need a rational reason when picking targets of opportunity. This time it was the cartoons, next time it will be "eating with your left hand" or not wearing a headscarf or some other alleged grievance that will justifies the mob in its need feed on the blood of ‘good and decent’ people.

But just so you know I’m going to go on making fun of the "Cartoon Jihadis" because I think they deserve to be held up to ridicule. Whenever I see a picture of a placard put up by a Jihadi that honors Hitler, you can count on me to point out that there isn’t a dimes worth of difference between that picture I placed at the top of the post and what you used to see displayed at skinhead KKK rallies.

I don’t think anyone would argue that black people must’ve done something to get the Klan angry at them and are therefore partially responsible for the outpouring of hatred that comes with a cross burning, but there are many people willing to say that I must’ve done something to justify the ‘cartoon goons’ hatred of me, the hatred of my country, and finally to make the goons hate my very existence.

I didn’t do anything to make the Jihadists mad at me, and I’m not responsible for being their target, but I am responsible for how I respond to being a target for their hate.

Unlike many of the Jihadis, I am a free man. I am free to choose, what I do, what I say how I say it who I say it to and when I say it. In this case, I choose to not be intimidated. I choose to not be terrorized. I chose not to have my freedom approved by living under their standards according to their approval; the adult equivalent of paying these goons my lunch money for the priveledge to eat in peace at recess.

I will eat with my left hand; I will eat pork that has been bar-be-queued with some form of alcohol based sauce. I will hang out and befriend Jews, Buddists, Hindus and even the heathen Scientologists, I will watch movies with women who are not my wife; I will look at women who do not have a headscarf or even a bra for that matter. I will eat Danish Cheese and I will even stoop so low as to drink Danish Beer.

I am the Infidel. koo-koo-ca-choo...

I will do as I damned well please and all the while I will laugh as hard as I can at the 'bully boys' in Pakistan, Iran and Syria who think that I am somehow worried at what they might think of me and my infidel ways. I will also, despite everything they have done to make me believe the opposite, continue to believe that the mass population of Muslims worldwide are made up of people just like myself who only want to live in peace.

I will also do everything I can to help mass population of Muslims do exactly that, but I will not live in fear of the goons and I will not live in Sharia law in my own home unless its my idea in the first place (but don’t get your hopes up boys...)

Today, I was reminded of a time in history when another group of goons were busy intimidating the world and the good and decent people in it, while the people of the world laid prostate in fear in front of this mob. One man, an artist, took the position that this particular pack of goons deserved not to be feared, but to be mocked and held up to ridicule.

His name was Charles Chaplin. His work was called “The Great Dictator”.

Chaplin plays an unnamed private soldier in a fictional country called “Tomania” as a parallel of Nazi Germany. The leader of this parallel country has also undertaken to persecute the Jews. Mr. Chaplin uses the film to lampoon the leaders of the European fascist movement, from Hitler, to Mussolini, to Goebbels, to Goering, no one is left out of his sights.

It’s a good movie, one of about half a dozen that I remember that made light of Hitler and his particular brand of goons. But that’s not what I was remembered as being important about that movie. What was important about that movie is that is was made in the “age of appeasement”, while all the others came after the war was well under way when it was finally safe and expected to mock Hitler. But when Chaplin made the movie, the “good and decent people” such as United Artists and the British government tried to stop him from making it or even distributing the film. Imagine that! That there was a time when "good and decent people" said you shouldn’t anger Mr. Hitler and the Nazis. They tried to censor someone from making a simple parody about Hitler,somehow not wanting to bring shame on the Nazis. Imagine what they would do today! (wait you don’t have to imagine, its happening again all around us! )

The movie was a risk, a financial, professional and personal risk. Chaplin took that risk; he refused to be intimidated while the great leaders of Europe were willing to let a man take a beating from the goons. Imagine the intimidation for one man to stand against, but imagine all the other artists who felt that if the great Charles Chaplin could not speak, then what chance to did they have to speak?

This is the power of the mob. The power to silence. A power they dont have, but we give them.

I also remembered a bit of the closing speech that Charlie Chaplin gives in the movie to tie it all together. It says all I want to say to "the mob", any mob and any group of goons or cowards who want to empower the goons by "looking the other way".

Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it is written that the kingdom of God is within man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They cannot fulfill that promise. They never will! Dictators will free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to the happiness of us all. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us unite!

Charlie didn’t give in to the mob or the goons and he didn’t give in to the intimidation of the ‘good and decent' cowards either. He was a free man and he when he saw evil he called it for what it was, and so should we. The goons don’t deserve our fear, but the do deserve our ridicule as do the cowards who meekly assist them in their work.

It’s not about the cartoons, dear reader. It’s about how far you are willing to let the goons push you into doing what they want. You power the mob, you make the goon.

Heil Hynkel!

Posted @ February 20, 2006 11:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (7)

Todays secret word is....

Prednisone.

"Better living through chemistry", as I always say...

And apparently, its not poison oak, but a wide spread skin infection that is making me go crazy.

I spent the morning at the hospital. Apparently when I announced that I was having trouble breathing, it got everyone excited and I had to go to the emergency room, where all the really sick people go. I'm just midly uncomfortable but apparently breathing is not considered an elective activity. I went right in with no waiting, got the funky hospital gown treatment and everything. 6 hours later I'm out and with my new grocery bag sized presecriptions to all sorts of fun steroids, I'm sure if what ever it is doesnt kill me, I'll be able to look buff as I decline.

As soon as the Prednisone is dissolved I'll be following Benadryl chaser. Benadryl of course, is the Absinthe of our times. Hopefully, the steriod and the antihistamine will cancel each other out and I will be awake for awhile.

Oh and one emergency room observation that I must pass on to you.

"NBC's Today show was on the Emergency Room TV. Katie Couric was flogging the "Shotgun Cheney" story and interviewing Mary Matalin when the entire room let out a groan. After Katie started with the "let me read to you a few reactions.." line of questioning to Mary; a senior citizen threw a magazine across the room at the TV and shouted "isn't it illegal to beat a dead horse"?

Everyone laughed.

Posted @ February 16, 2006 01:48 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6)

How to tell when the "Shotgun Cheney" story is over

When you hear someone in the press say that Dick Cheney is calling in President Bush for an infusion of some badly needed "gravitas".

Posted @ February 15, 2006 06:28 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Andreas Katsulas: 1946--2006

A Fine Actor, who has unfortunately died today.

His IMDB biography has one line:

"He does not own a computer".

Perfect.

I honestly never took notice of him until I saw him in Babylon 5. His role and the way he played it simply floored me and in several scenes moved me to tears. What follows is a speech his character gave during the series which I think are some of the finest I have ever heard in the defense of freedom and liberty and he delivered them with the full depth of character.

Citizen G'Kar: No dictator, no invader can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power tyrants and dictators cannot stand. The Centauri learned that lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Although it take a thousand years, we will be free.

Substitute the word "Centauri" with any tyrant you like, if it helps.

The words are powerful, but this man poured his heart into the scene. I have rarely seen a moment in television that was as moving as that scene, acted by that man.

His character Gkar also had the best way I think anyone has ever had for saying "the final goodbye".

"I believe that when we leave a place, part of it goes with us and part of us remains. Go anywhere in the station, when it is quiet, and just listen. After a while, you will hear the echoes of all our conversations, every thought and word we've exchanged. Long after we are gone our voices will linger in these walls for as long as this place remains. But I will admit that the part of me that is going will very much miss the part of you that is staying.”

You know, it doesnt matter who wrote the words, when you can emotionally move people when you are wearing 4 pounds of plastic prosthetics on your face, you really are one hell of an actor.

Posted @ February 15, 2006 05:47 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (5)

Crossing the Paddies (A true story)

It was early autumn in the Valley, summer hadn’t quite gone and the wet winter was still a month off. The valley floor was bone dry after a row of 100+ degree days, the dry rice paddies lay covered with the stubble of the rice harvest that had gone to market leaving nothing but their burned remnants in the fields to mark the passing of another year. It was Pheasant season again and my two older cousins, my father and I all set out across the drained rice paddies in “finger 4” formation in search of our game as we had a dozen times before. My cousin Dale and I were on the far right, his brother Gary and my father over towards the left, with about 50 yards distance between the two of us. We hunted in a curved line, each covering our own zone, careful of the sweep of each of weapons as we moved across the field. After a few miles into the walk we crossed a small uneven berm that was covered with star thistle. Star thistle is a hellish weed that grows in thick heavy brush and is as close to a living version of barbed wire as anything ever has been. Its only redeeming feature is the way it sends off a sweet scent in the summer that is a very nice and distinctive aspect of living here in the valley. No matter how it smells, you don’t walk through it; you go around it whenever you can and that’s just what we did.

As we crossed around the berm, Gary and my Dad split up and as a result they momentarily moved out of each other’s field of vision. After he crossed the berm, my cousin then stopped and faced towards Dale and I with his shotgun cradled in his arm when at that exact moment, four large pheasants suddenly flushed out of the berm that was now behind him. Gary quickly wheeled around, took aim and shot towards the pheasants that were by then at the very edge of his range.

Only he didn’t hit the pheasants, he hit my Dad.

My Dad was facing away from Gary and the edge of the scatter caught him in the shoulder, upper right arm and lower neck. The force of the shot knocked him off his feet, where his weapon discharged into the ground. In the area where he had once been standing, a cloud of goose down now filled the air.

I didn’t see any of it; I heard the shot, thought nothing of it and continued moving forward watching my zone. Then I heard Dale, my other cousin, who was watching my towards my left call out “ Oh God, Gary shot your dad!” Well, that got my attention and I turned in their direction to see the cloud of goose down where I had to assume my Dad had once been.

Dale and I took off running towards Gary and the cloud of goose down at the tail end of the berm, which was blocking any view of my now wounded Dad. Gary, being the closest to the scene arrived at my Dad first. He stopped for a moment and then stepped slowly backwards and took off like a shot running in the opposite direction, passing Dale and I as we ran towards where my Dad was now laying. Now Dale and I didn’t know what to expect. The look on Gary’s face as he passed us was one of pure fear and we feared for the worse.

We came over the berm and there was my Dad. There he was, on his knees, shot wounded with the pellets having torn into his vest and jacket all the way down to the skin, his hair and neck matted from the blood which was now also covered incongruously with goose down. The scene was accompanied with a sound that anyone who’s grown up in a Navy family would know, a stream of deep invectives and cursewords that could strip rust from steel, and they were all aimed directly at my cousin who was now running quite literally for his life in the other direction from my wounded father. You see, my father wasn’t just sitting there tending his wounds but was methodically trying to reload his shotgun all while calling down the “Gods of thunder” on poor cousin Gary with his bellowing out as loud as can be:

You stupid a**hole, you G*dDamned F**king idiot, you get you Candya** back here and get shot like a man, where do you think you are running to?, I got the G-Dammed keys to the truck you Stupid Sh*t! Don’t make me come after you, GET BACK HERE NOW…!

It went on like this for 20 minutes, without him stopping once to catch his breath.

He was standing there in the fading daylight, covered with bits of jacket, feathers and blood, shaking his fist on one side and holding his shotgun on the other and he looked generally awful, but I knew when I heard him cussing at the top of his lungs that he was fine. Dale and I checked him out and found that for all the blood, it was just surface level wounds and no real deep damage was done, it looked far worse than it was. We both then sat down on the star thistle berm and watched and laughed ourselves horse as my Dad continued his verbal rant against the poor aim and bad field judgment of my still fast running cousin. We laughed at my Dads rants and we were relieved that it was the very definition of a near miss instead of what we at first feared was a direct hit. The old man it seemed, would live another day.

After awhile, we all started walking back to the truck, Dale and I holding our sides in stifled laughter, while my dad continued to rant under his breath at his nephew Gary and his marksmanship. Every other step or so we would hear something that sounded like the words “G*ddamned”, “Stupid" or “ Jackass” followed by low guttural growls from the man who wounded but clearly not defeated,who was always known by everyone as ‘the old man” no matter his actual age or their relationship.

The walk back did the old man some good because when we finally arrived at the truck, he was calmed down enough to hand me his shotgun and to go off and talk to Gary, man to man. Gary was actually pretty frightened that he may have in fact seriously hurt my dad, and felt pretty bad about it. My dad could see that Gary was upset and brought himself back to the reality of the moment by consoling with Gary on the back bumper of the truck. There was no anger heard over the whispers that Dale and I caught between Gary and my dad at the far end of the truck. In the end, all was forgiven and as men often do, they went on about their business with nothing but a firm handshake and the forgiveness that comes from a nod of understanding cementing the fact that no real harm had been done and no ill will was felt.

It was an accident, no more, no less.

The ride home was very quiet with the exception of my Dad occasionally taking a moment to calmly lecture his young nephew for what had happened. Well, it was quiet, until Dale and I broke up laughing at poor Gary, who having just shot a man now found himself the point of endless parental lecturing from his former target. It was a long ride home for Gary, and in the end I think he would have preferred being the one who was shot.

After we got home, we all agreed that it was best to never discuss this event again, and we never did.

To this day, neither my mom nor my aunt knows anything about this event.

Posted @ February 14, 2006 05:16 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

A Bad Day

I have lots to write about but two things are keeping me from it.

First, I'm covered with a rash from exposure to poison oak.

Second, on Sunday, this happened down the street and I havent quite recovered from the shock of it. For the record, we are 10 miles from the nearest airport, and not in the flight pattern of any airport or near any sort of aircraft navigation beacon. People here accept the local train yards as a major potential threat to life and property, but not aircraft. When you pause to think of ways that you children might die, you never think that its possible that it will be while they are safe at home in their own bed as a result of a one in a million chance that passing an aircraft just happens to fall out of the sky right into your house. Especially,when a passenger on the crashed aircraft was one of the neighbors as well.

Yeah, as a pilot and a person who has built a homebuilt aircraft I have something to say about the event, but for right now I'm utterly speechless. I'll be back as soon as I find a gallon of benadryl for my skin and some quiet reflection to calm whats going through my mind right now.

Posted @ February 13, 2006 10:48 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Its Jimmy that made me a Republican

While tastefully injecting politics into a funeral, something that has always worked well in th past for Democrats, Former President Jimmy Carter said this about the Rev. King and his recently departed wife Coretta:

"It was difficult for them then personally with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated as they became the target of secret government wiretaps."

Here's a test:

1. Who ordered the wiretapping of Rev. King, and why?

Here's a clue, it wasn't George W. Bush, or his father, or his grandfather or his great-grandfather or Richard Nixon or their distant cousin Adolph Hitler.

There are days when I forget what it was exactly that caused me to become a Republican( in high school no less, long before it was cool like it is today! In those days, Republicans were the crazed moonbats, and we were really good at it too! Back then people didnt say they were "Republican", they just said they werent voting for that "moron", but we all knew what they meant...) but it was this guy, President James "Jimmy" Carter and the wake of chaos this single man has caused in the direction of Western civilization that ended any hope of my ever being a Democrat, a party that by all rights of which I should be a loyal member. His fellow partner-in-crime, California Govenor Jerry Brown had a hand in it too, but Jimmy is what pushed me over the cliff into the depths of conservativism. It takes a moment of grotesque stupidity and crudeness like this one for me to be reminded of just how much that man made me who I am today.

Uh oh... I think I feel a rant coming on...

Posted @ February 07, 2006 01:48 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (12)

I heart Hollywood

From the blog "Freedom Folks" - Actor Billy Zane speaks out on his role in the Turkish Anti-American propaganda film " Valley of the wolves Iraq".

"This screenplay is not against my country's people... I am doing this movie because I am a patriot. I'm against all wars, because wars don't have happy endings"

You'll remember Billy Zane from his role in the boating safety film "Titanic". Because as we all know that unlike wars, disasters at sea always have happy endings.

When people say "why do they hate us"?, do they ever wonder if it just might be that firehose sized stream of sewage that comes from the film industry and paints America as a land populated knuckle dragging baby eating goons? is it possible that the bootleg DVD of "Natural Born Killers' that is a source of alot of worlds perception of who we are?

Just think, Billy gets paid by making the jobs of our guys on the front line just a little bit harder.

Try to keep that in mind the next time dead people start falling all over the streets of Mahattan.

Posted @ February 06, 2006 04:53 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (12)

Todays Banner

From 'The Dissident Frogman'.

Do you get the feeling sometimes that we in the west have been fighting these Persian fellas for a very long time?

Posted @ February 06, 2006 04:31 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Notice

Extremely light blogging today.

Its a lovely day, about 70 degrees and I've got a dog that loves the water; it would be a crime to sit around the house on a day like today. And if you think I'm sitting around the house watching a football game today, think again. Even when I actually played football, I couldnt stand watching it on TV.

But dont let me spoil your fun, enjoy the game everyone!

Posted @ February 05, 2006 10:49 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Four Points to Ponder

Point #1. I'd like to point out something about the Danish flag that the Islamic world has suddenly found so popular to burn.

That white thing in the middle is a cross, the emblem and representation of a major religion in the world, that being Christianity. Yet, within Islamic countries those who practice this religion are routinely subject to persecution by the state and the religion therein. Churches and other places of Christian worship are forbidden within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and those who preach Christianty in Saudi Arabia are subject to summary execution. Those who are not Muslim are not allowed into the City of Mecca, and if they are discovered illegally entering into the city, they are executed for this crime. Anyone of any religion who is found by the religious leaders of Saudi Arabia to have taken part in any act remotely similar to burning a flag with an islamic symbol on it will also be executed for the crime.

Yet when you burn the symbol of their country that contains an emblem of their religion, The Danes will simply ask you to not litter and to get a permit for your protests.

Who is the 'Religion of Peace' again?

For a great ( and very long )story on the history behind the Danish Flag the "Stutflag" or the " Dannebrog", click here.

Point #2. Is it possible that the protests have nothing to do with "cartoons" but everything to do with Iran getting sent to the Security Council? These cartoons were 6 months old, all of a sudden, just this week, it suddenly becomes such an issue that has resulted in death and distruction around the world.

In my opinion, these protests are nothing but a loaded gun that has been laid on the table of every European Government and the mesage is clear:

"Back off Iran, or we will set your cities aflame".

These protests are angry and they are aimed not at generating sympathy or seeking redress from the population at large for a "wrong that must be righted", that is not the message on those placards.

They want blood. They want to be clear to anyone watching that they are dangerous, for that is their clearly stated message. You dont words like "Slay", Butcher" and "exterminate" if your interested in changing government policy. The use of violent public protest is on a par with the suicide bomber, its a weapon we havent quite figured out how to fight, and the Islamists know this. We assign automatic virtue to any protest and the Islamists also know this.

In my opinion, this is no more about "Blasphemous Cartoons" than the reichstag fire was about the German Communist Party.

I'll say this for the Persians, they play a mean game of chess. I just hope we arent playing checkers here.

Point #3. Why, out of all countries in the European Union pick on Denmark? Is it possibly because of "the Jews" once again?

During World War II, Denmark was forced to capitulate to the Nazis but while many other countries cooperated with the Nazis in deportation of their Jewish populations, the Danes managed at great risk to themselves to hide their Jewish population from the Nazis. As many as 8,000 Danish Jews were sent through the "underground railroad" to neutral Sweden, in an unprecedented act of civil disobedience against the Third Reich.

What is it about the tolerance and acceptance of others different than ourselves that makes the fanatic so angry and flled with hate?

Are these acts of violence by Fascist Islam simply a way to remove one of the Nations of Europe who, through their acts in the past, have shown that they will not accept the rules that the tyrants now wish to set?

Few countries in world history have shown themselves to be as tolerant and accepting of outsiders as the Danes, yet the Danes did not give in to the Nazis. In the mind of the fanatic, this cannot be tolerated. If you wish to take over Europe, this culture and this idea must be the first thing to go. If Denmark cannot stand against the Islamists, then can we expect other far more anti-semitic nations in Europe to stand in opposition to the Islamists desires?

Point #4. What next? This time its supposedly a protest against cartoons that they have interpreted as "blasphemous". So what will it be next time? The serving of alcohol? Pork? uncovered women? Will those of us who are critical of Saudi Arabia or Iran be silenced by the claxon call of "blasphemy" that is now being rung like a firebell by the Islamists? If they do this over a cartoon, what will they do when they read "Little Green Footballs"? If Google will block certain words for access to Chinas market, what will Google agree to do for Islam?

Again I ask, how far will it go?

I like what we have here in the decadent West. I like church picnics and I like topless beaches even though they almost never occur at the same time. I like San Francisco and I like Salt Lake City. I like baby back ribs, I also like a good salad. I like an Ice Cold Beer when its 110 degrees and deep dark hot coffee when its 20 below. I like the scent of cocoa butter when it mixes in with the scent of barbequed hot dogs and spilled cherry Slurpees as it all cooks together in mixed company at the public pool on a Sunday in mid July. I like Ray Charles, I like Johnny Cash, I like U2, Elvis (Costello that is),Pink Floyd and I get weepy over Beethoven. I like a written constitution so small it fits in my pocket and says in rule #1 that I can say anything I damn well please and rule #2 says I can carry a gun to back it up. I like a country that routinely treats the violation of traffic laws and housing easements as a matter of personal pride. I like a country where just about anyone and everyone can decry the goverment, and instead of going to prison or fearing for their lives, they get a job on "Air America". I like the fact that I live in country where the "B" team players all work in government jobs, while the "best and brightest" go out and work in the real world and the average working guy in the factories are busy outperforming the Japanese and if you really screw up, you start a company of your own. I like the fact that our current biggest company comes not from New York, but Arkansas. I like people who are free to find their own religion and then do so over and over again, I also like people who find they dont want to be a part of any religion at all. I like the idea that my daughter is a full member of modern life and society, capable of holding the highest honors in the land. I like the fact that she's also free to give it all up and go paint seascapes if she so chooses. I like being insulted. I like insulting people. I like to be surrounded by people who think for themselves even though most of the time, I think that most people really are idiots.

In short, I like being free and intend to stay that way. It's taken us in the west 2000 years to get this particular mix of cultural flavors cooking in the crock pot that is the modern world. Its taken a lot of sacrifice, a lot of loss, and a lot of work to get it this way. It didnt happen by accident. It would be a shame to give it all up because of the death threats and extortion-like actions of a small group of illiterate inbred hillbilly thugs who havent picked up a desk calendar, a bar of soap or a new idea since 900 AD.

I'm not willing to give any that stuff of up just because some jackass gets a few of his pals together and decides to torch my countries embassy, boycott my countries goods and services, turns off the oil or burns my countries flag or its leaders in effigy. They may even goes so far as to try to kill me or anyone else they can (including themselves) to get us all to change our minds and see their side of things. But even if we were to decide that the "cartoon blasphemy" must stop, we also know it wont end there. This is not about cartoons, its about control. If we give Fascist Islam the right to tell us what we can or cannot do in our countries, then how far will it eventually go? What will we say next time? And sure as their is Sudetenland before a Poland, there is always a next time.

Posted @ February 04, 2006 11:54 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

One Airman No Longer Missing

The remains of an airman who was lost in November 1942 were finally identified today.

22 Year old Leo Mustonen of Brainerd Minnesota, an airman who's body laid undisturbed for 63 years in a California snowpack, deep in the High Sierra, was finally identified positively after its discovery in October 2005.

From TheState.com

Snip...

It was Nov. 18, 1942, when Leo Mustonen, two other navigator cadets and a pilot left a military airfield in Sacramento on a routine training flight.

There was no sign of the Beech AT-7 training plane again until 1947 when a climber scaling the Mount Mendel Glacier in Kings Canyon National Park found one of the twin engines in the snow at an elevation of 13,700 feet, 200 miles off course.

A search party found the second engine, scraps of clothing, a piece of dried flesh and one of the cadet's military dog tags. And that was all, until last fall.

In October, with the glacier receding, climbers came upon the frozen body of a fair-haired airman. He was removed from the glacier in a coffin of ice, carefully thawed and flown to Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, where the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command worked to identify him.

DNA testing was problematic because few of Mustonen's relatives remain. His parents, Finnish immigrants, are long dead, and his only sibling, a half brother, also is deceased. The closest remaining relatives are his half brother's wife and two daughters, one of whom is Sister Mustonen, known as Ona Lea Mustonen before she took orders as a Benedictine nun.

To identify remains genetically, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command lab most frequently uses mitochondrial DNA, or a piece of DNA that people inherit mostly unchanged from their mothers.

Authorities found female relatives of the three other airmen on board the doomed flight, tested their DNA and determined that none matched the man. Through that process of elimination, physical characteristics and a corroded military nametag on his uniform, authorities concluded the man was Leo Mustonen, his niece said.

Military officials have said the frozen airman would be eligible for interment with honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

But Sister Mustonen said she and her family, who all live in Florida, intend to bury Mustonen near his mother and father in Brainerd's Evergreen Cemetery.

"All our family is still there, cousins all over the place," she said. "It's where he belongs."

When the family will be able to claim the airman's remains is unknown, but his niece said they hope it will be in time to bury him next month.

Buzz Bereuder, a World War II-era veteran active in the Brainerd American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars color guard, has been following the story since the body was discovered last fall.
"I feel good about it," he said Saturday of the remains being identified as Mustonen. "He was a hometown boy, and he's got a place here."

End snip...

The world that exists today could not have been imagined by those who were alive in 1942. The war was deadly serious and was far from over. The concept of nuclear power was something that the odd people who wrote pulp science fiction magazines used to fill over the rough parts of the "far out" story plots, but it was not the stuff that serious people considered to be real. Polio was still a significant threat to the lives of everyday people in the world of 1942 and the miracle of pennicillin was just coming into general use. Radio was the "high tech" of the day, and I cant help but note that telegrams were the email of the era, and only this week they have finally ceased to be. Even the science and technology that was used to determine the identity of his remains did not exist in 1942. DNA was still unknown at the time this man died. They didnt use the popular psycology term "closure" in those days, and there never would be any for the family of Leo Mustonen, until today. The war eventually came to an end and the men who survived it finally came home. As the years went on, more wars came and went. "Men from the Planet Earth" even went to the Moon. Other men orbit the earth today in spacecraft, something that is so common to the lives of children today that they hardly make note of the names of Astronauts or watch when they are launched into space. In Leo's time, "Space" was a long way off, in our time, space has become almost commonplace. In 63 years, the world has moved from Leo's world to ours at light speed.

Mr. Mustonen saw none of it. He died one November day in 1942 at 13,500 feet and remained there for 62 years while the world went on just a few miles away from the cold snowy peak that reached out of cloud and slapped his aircraft out of the sky.

One November day in 1942, a young man went to work and never came home. The hole he left behind in the fabric of his families daily life must have been very difficult for them to survive. I'm sure that for years afterwards his family sat and wondered where their son, their brother, the hope of a generation went to. Was he dead?, was he alive?, was he hurt in some way?, no one would ever know for sure.

Every Christmas, every Thanksgiving would eventually bring the out the unspoken question in everyones mind; " I wonder where Leo is?" followed by those who would remember Leo in their own quiet way, and every time they did, the hole he left in their lives would get just a little bit bigger. With no grave to grieve over and no answers with which to complete the story behind his disappearance, they probably did what all humans usually do. They filled in the blanks with their own stories. Yet all of them would fall short in filling the dark hole his disappearance, left in their lives.

Other men disappeared in the war and never came home, but they were overseas, over "where the war was" and somehow those losses made more sense than the disappearance of Leo Mustonen. I'm sure that the loss of their loved one within the borders of the benign State of California bothered them to no end.

His remains were found just a few miles from Yosemite National Park. I imagine that at some time in the past 63 years, the family of Leo Mustonen may have visted that popular park, and yet they would have never known that their lost brother was just a few miles away, sleeping peacefully on a nearby mountain peak with his fellow airmen. All the while they visted the wonders of Yosemite, not knowing that the object of their loss laid silently on that mountain on the horizon.

Leo Mustonen is just one man and the Mustonen family just one family of all the men who went missing in World War II. There are 78,976 men that are still listed as officially missing from the United States Armed forces during World War II.

Tonight, we can lower that number by 1.

Welcome home Mr. Mustonen. May you now rest in peace.

Posted @ February 04, 2006 09:22 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

The Messenger

Many people have decided to show "the Danish cartoons" on their websites so that they can stand with the Danish people against the Islamists. I've decided that a better strategy might be to hold up a mirror to the thugs that are threatening the people of Denmark for all the world to see. So, here goes...

Oh big brave Islamic Street, attacking the gigantic superpower that is Denmark. What?, you were afraid that mighty Switzerland might be too big for you to handle? And picking a fight with Vikings? Well, I'm here to tell you, this is not a smart move...

This one is submitted without comment...

I see your blasphemous cartoon, and raise you one posterboard sized hate crime.

Years of cow-towing to Islamic thugs and paying protection money, and this is all the French Politicians got for their money.

This guy was probably born into poverty in the Middle East and was forced to leave the country of his birth to survive, only to arrive in Christian infidel England where he was given asylum, human rights and a monthly stipend from the good people of the United Kingdom and Her Majesty, the Queen. All that work and sacrifice, just so he could go into "Shiny Londontown" and protest "freedom"; something he probably craved to do every day back on the streets of Cairo, but never had the right to do and if he did his fellow righteous Islamic brothers would have simply had him killed for speaking out. But here he is, enjoying more freedom and wealth than he has ever known in his life, so what does he decide to do? Thats right, in the words of Groucho Marx "he's against it". Of course he has no intention of returning to a place that has no freedom, because "that would be wrong".

Irony, thy name is "Ali"( or is it: Confused, thy name is "Ali"? or Blithering Idiot, thy name is "Ali"...).

There is nothing the endears me more to a political ideal than the ability to express it in a rhyme. This phrase almost begs me to say "Burma Shave" at the end, which totally spoils its ability to frighten me...

"Butcher", "Behead" and "Slay". Hmmm, that could be the name of a law firm. And hey, two of you fellas is carrying the same sign and all of those signs look like they were written in the same handwriting, what are the odds of that? Someone might begin to think this wasnt a completely spontaneous protest.

You know its easy to say things like this when you know the two cops in front of you arent carrying any guns. And exactly how much respect can you get as a policeman when you have to wear those stupid hats and those damn emergency yellow safety vests? Can you see LAPD Det. Sgt. Joe Friday bouncing around town in that getup?

You know, I didn't like Aaron Brown either, but I didn't get in a huff, I just turned the channel (like everyone else). I didnt run down in my burka and throw a protest over it. Come on folks, its on CNN, its not like anyone is watching it or anything. CNN is like a lava lamp with only slightly better audio.

Apparently, there are no "Stairmasters" or low fat/high fiber diets in Islam. Maybe they are also considered "blasphemous"? Jenny Craig - Infidel Blasphemer! Weight Watchers is Pagan Idolatry! Dr. Atkins advocates the eating of unclean pork!

What's that poster on the left saying? Are they calling out the "Fantastic 4" to help them? Are they kidding me? What, they couldnt get Aquaman? How about Gumby and Pokey for cryin' out loud. I think those folks need to swab out the bongwater in that hookah they've all been smoking. Here's a clue hadji, the "Fantastic 4"?, its a cartoon, a graphic novel and finally a movie, and not a very good one at that. It's not real, ok? You see, thats whats missing in Islam, a really great superhero. Well, they probably had one, but they wont let anyone show pictures of him without everyone going street level insane which really puts a crimp in comic sales...

Dear Mr. And Mrs. Islamic Jihad. I might be on your side about blasphemy and hold your values with more respect if you didn't hold so many of these utterly abhorrent ideas so dear to your day to day life. Look at those posters, you see those words "Kill" , "Destroy" , "Butcher" , "Beheadings", "Slay"?. Is this really the language of the "religion of peace" or the language of something else?

I'm not impressed by street violence, or street theater. You cant change my mind with a threat. Come talk to me about blasphemy when you learn how to feed your people. Come talk to me about blasphemy when you teach your children that suicide is always wrong. Come talk to me about blasphemy when you have something besides a sword to show the world.

We are not afraid of you. We stand with the Danes.

Posted @ February 03, 2006 05:34 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (29)

Open the Pod Bay Doors HAL

A stunning bit of video from the ISS. Mysteriously, I find myself humming "A Bicycle built for two"...

Posted @ February 03, 2006 04:50 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Im off the hook

From United Press International:

Some US troops question Woodruff coverage

Good. I was worried it was just me who felt that way.

Posted @ January 31, 2006 09:38 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

I’m calling for a unilateral pullout from Iraq

My response to Christianne Amanpour...

This week has finally done it for me. I’ve had enough. The fine reporting of Christine Amanpour and Peter Arnett has finally shown me the error in my ways. How many more young men do we need to lose in Iraq before we get the message? Our people over there are simply not going to win no matter how many people we throw at the problem. It's not like our people over there have been the least bit successful in changing public opinion. The war goes on as if nothing they do matters. We have suffered loss and after loss, kidnapping and death after death and still the war still goes on as if our efforts have had no effect. Its time to pull out.

Of course, I’m not talking about pulling out US Troops, but the reporters and journalists of the Western Media.

After the stunning attack on an Anchorman and his camera operator (which has finally personalized the war in the mind of the great reporters of CNN), it is clear that the enemy has no respect for common decency and the rules of warfare. If they are going to attack a prime time anchorman who was in the process of reporting the ineffectiveness of the Iraqi Army, then I ask you, just who is safe in the face of these barbarians? If they will attack a celebrity journalist, then who amoungst the rest of us is safe? It is time to finally pull our brave journalists out of the Green Zone in Iraq and the bars of Kuwait as they have been wholly unsuccessful in their mission. Despite their valiant efforts, they have failed at every turn. The journalistic efforts in Iraq are nothing less than a complete “quagmire” the likes of which we haven’t seen since the free elections in Nicaragua which threw out the journalists friends the valiant Sandanistas, despite the continued best efforts of celebrity semi-journalists Bianca Jagger and Jackson Browne.

As it turns out, Iraq wasn’t the Vietnam the journalists hoped for, but the Nicaragua they feared it would be.

The best efforts of journalists in Iraq have left them unable to sway opinion of the Jihadi and the American viewing public who regularly discredits them for their elitist leftist bias. It is simply not worth the cost in journalist lives to continue to report from Iraq. For all the risks they take with their reporting, and for all the change in public opinion that it generated, it would have been just as effective had the reporters stayed in Boca Raton and made the whole thing up, which truth be told, many of them did.

Can anyone fault the reporter who refuses to man his station at the International Hotel Bar in Kabul or The Green Zone in Baghad? Well neither can I.

How can any Vice President of Network News ask the last stringer to be the last man to die for another story on Halliburton and its obvious crimes against the Iraqi people when that story can be performed with just as much bias and yet much more safely from Ft. Lee, New Jersey rather than the horrors of the Iraqi desert?

Years of training, vocal cadence, serious eyebrow arching and exotic cosmetic surgery go into making a Network news anchor the finely tuned tool of public opinion that we need them to be. These talents should not be wasted in a lost cause like the war in Iraq. The war is over, and sadly for CNN, the newsmen lost.

It is time to bring the boys home. No more blood for ratings.

( Yeah, I know. I crossed a line somewhere, but tonight after listening to reporter after reporter cry their eyeballs out on this evenings reports about how a "brave fellow reporter got hurt" in light of all the unrecognized bravery and sacrifice of all of our men and women who have given their lives and fought not for ratings but for freedom and democracy, it just made me flip out a little bit. This poor reporting was done while at the same time the men and women who volunteered to serve their country have died in Iraq are given "the stinkeye" by the same news organization. So I'm sorry, the whole thing just got to me a bit. )

Posted @ January 30, 2006 10:53 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6)

NSA Releases transcript of warrant-less wiretap

The NSA has released a transcript of an intercepted phone call from possible al-queda operative and a domestic phone number. I think this transcript makes clear why some people are so hesitant to have any sort of NSA wiretaps in the US.

SNIP...

Unidentified foreign caller: Uh, hello, is this Stephanie? It’s Dr. Z, how are you my darling? Say, is my man Howard in the house?

1st Domestic receiver: Oh yes Dr. Z its good to hear you are doing ok. Let me put you right through.

Unidentified foreign caller: Oh, Thank you dear. And my wife would like me to tell you that your Banana Bread recipe was wonderful and we thank you. Allah be praised, you will be last up against the wall when the Jihad finally comes to America.

1st Domestic receiver: Oh why thank you Dr. Z, I really do appreciate that.

< Call transferred. >

2nd Domestic receiver: Hello? Howard here.

Unidentified foreign caller: Howard?, Dr. Z here. How are you my friend?

2nd Domestic receiver: How am I? I’m broke that’s how I am. You’d think that someone on my staff would have had the sense to trademark that damn “yelp” I let out on the campaign for a little extra cash, but no. Damn socialists never miss a chance to lose money.

Unidentified foreign caller: Don’t I know it. Say listen Howard; I need you to help me "pump up" this little Jihad video I have to make in a few minutes. Your man George went and totally wrecked my summer house in Waziristan last week, and I have to respond or the “band of brothers” here will start to think I’m weak or something.

2nd Domestic receiver: Yeah, what happened with that?

Unidentified foreign caller: Hey, how do I know, we just about had the fondue ready to go, Ali had the pot of cheese boiling real good and so I get up to go take a leak and I’m walking out to the outhouse and BOOM! up goes the whole house in a flash! At first I thought it was just a bad can of propane but when the Predator began doing barrel rolls overhead, I knew it was one of those infernal killer robots you guys created.

2nd Domestic receiver: Buddy, that was close. You’re ok though, right?

Unidentified foreign caller: Oh sure, I just moved in with the old ladies mother for a bit, you know she’s an old nag, but she’s nice enough I guess. She keeps the beer on ice, cooks the lamb a little spicy for my tastes, but she doesn’t fall to the floor and yell “PREDATOR!!!” every time someone starts a lawnmower like Ali and the boys used to do.

2nd Domestic receiver: Ok lay it on me Z-man. I gotta rush this one out with you because “Teddy and the boys” are in the Senate right now putting a new face on the phrase “pointless, pathetic and impotent” which as you know, has become the new catchphrase party motto around here, and I have to get some sort of face saving press release out or the old ladies wont send us any more money. Nobody loves a loser, you know what I mean?

Unidentified foreign caller: Oh man. Howard I just have to say, every time I think I’m hosed, I just have to look at your situation and I get myself cheered right up. You are so screwed man!

2nd Domestic receiver: Yeah, keep a cot in the cave open for me; I think I’m going to need it.

Unidentified foreign caller: Ok, so let me ask you, does "Butcher Bush" sound worse than “Bush the Bumbler”.

2nd Domestic receiver: hmmm, tough call. We sort of wore out our knees with the “Bumbler Bush” thing and we never got anywhere with it so you probably want to go with “Bush the Butcher” but knowing that guy, he’ll turn it into some “badge of honor”.

Unidentified foreign caller: He sucks doesn’t he? He just drives me crazy.

2nd Domestic receiver: He does suck, and he drives ME crazy. I can’t believe I’m losing to that guy.

Unidentified foreign caller: Dude, you lost to Kerry.

2nd Domestic receiver: Do you want my help or don’t you?

Unidentified foreign caller: Oh sorry. Sore point. I didn’t mean to go there…

End Snip...

Posted @ January 30, 2006 04:48 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

New Blog Goodness

On Tap: Not Looking out for you since 2006.

I've always said that a good blog is like a well run party. This blog is more like a well run bar.

In a seedy part of town.

With the local mafiosa holding court at a table in the backroom.

The kind of bar you have to visit 10 times to be told that there are pool tables in the backroom. Funny thing is, you didnt even know there was a backroom.

Where the entire bar goes silent and everyone stops to look at you when you come through the door because, well you just dont belong in here sonny...

Posted @ January 30, 2006 09:02 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Let the Caterwauling begin

This just in from AP:
snip...

The U.S. Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of "leveraging" their husbands into surrender, U.S. military documents show. In one case, a secretive task force locked up the young mother of a nursing baby, a U.S. intelligence officer reported. In the case of a second detainee, one American colonel suggested to another that they catch her husband by tacking a note to the family's door telling him "to come get his wife."

...end snip.

I'm floored by the simplicity and genius of this tactic. But dont you just know that the left is just going wet themselves over this. (ed note: so it works on two levels! how cool is that!)

Oh, and dont you just love how they make a case about how we "locked up the young mother of a nursing baby..." Yes we did, you idiots!, its called "Child Protective Services" and every City and State government in America does this.

Posted @ January 27, 2006 01:52 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Det. Harry Callahan Explains "The Bush Doctrine"

From the 1971 Eastwood police thriller "Dirty Harry" we see the following scenes of "clarity" to help us illustrate the core of the Bush Doctrine.

Scene 1: Harry is getting a dressing-down for his most recent arrest, where he tortured a psychotic killer so that he would reveal the location of a kidnap victim. The victim is found in the revealed location but by the time the police arrive, she is dead.

District Attorney Rothko: You're lucky I'm not indicting you for assault with intent to commit murder.
Harry Callahan: What?
District Attorney Rothko: Where the hell does it say that you've got a right to kick down doors, torture suspects, deny medical attention and legal counsel? Where have you been? Does Escobedo ring a bell? Miranda? I mean, you must have heard of the Fourth Amendment. What I'm saying is that man had rights.
Harry Callahan: Well, I'm all broken up over that man's rights!

Later in the same movie, Harry has to explain why he shot a man.

Harry Callahan: Well, when an adult male is chasing a female with intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard. That's my policy.
The Mayor: Intent? How did you establish that?
Harry Callahan: When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher's knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn't out collecting for the Red Cross!

The Mayor(to the DA): He's got a point.

If Hollywood got it in 1971,why cant it get it in 2005? Hollywood should also take notice that unlike Syriana, Dirty Harry made money for its producers. Coincidence? I think not...

Posted @ January 27, 2006 10:43 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Hamas Election

What do I think about the Palestinian Election?

Peoples Front of Judea or Judean Peoples Front?

Hamas or Fatah, can anyone give me a dimes worth of difference between the two? If you can't either then nothing has really changed. I am happy that they have managed to have an election. But elections and free societies as Venezuelans will agree are two different things.

Ladies and gentleman, in times of controversy where you cant quite seem to make sense to the world, I point you to the first "Rule of The Bush Doctrine":

If you are a terrorist, or if you harbor terrorists, we shall make no distinction.

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you Hamas-istan!

And as a result, I think this is a good thing. The problem with al-queda is we've never had a country called al-quedastan to directly attack, so we always have to go through these proxies to get to the real enemy,but you see with Hamas now formally in charge of Palestine, its "one stop shopping".

You see, you can sit around and pretend that the bad actors are just a bunch of criminals that you can't stop but you cant do that if they are in the government. At that point, you are one and the same.

Is it an indictment of the idea behind democracy in the middle east? not at all. Democracy is not perfect and its not meant to be, but Democracy is accountable. "The People" are free to make choices but they are also to be held accountable for their actions,both good or bad. You cant elect Hamas and pretend you didnt know they meant to take you to war, thats precisely WHY you elected them. You cant play the victim if you have a crowbar and a molotov cocktail in your hands.You is the victim-izer baby!

The Germans once elected Hitler and the Nazis via a Democratic election. They knew what they were getting for their ballot. They also paid the price for that democratic decision. After it was settled up, they returned to Democracy, even with the possible risk of the "Nazi Problem" happening all over again.

Democracy for all its faults was still better than the alternative not because it could avoid "the next hitler", but because it was accountable.

Hamas has simply removed its own human shield from its arsenal. Nice move, jackasses.

Posted @ January 26, 2006 10:23 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (5)

What crossed my mind...

On October 22, 1962, President Kennedy announced what would come to be known to history as the Cuban Missile crisis. It was a sober and direct message explaining to the American people the direct, specific and dangerous actions that were being taken by the enemy against this country and an outline of what our country would expect in response from the russians. It was a serious time, handled by serious people. During this mornings Press Conference with President Bush, the following scenario crossed my mind:

What if President Kennedy faced this lame-assed Press Corp that we have today, during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

What follows is how that might have played out.

...Snip
JFK:My fellow citizens: let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can see precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred. Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead -- months in which our patience and our will will be tested -- months in which many threats and denunciations will keep us aware of our dangers. But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.
The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are -- but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world. The cost of freedom is always high -- and Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that Is the path of surrender or submission.
Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right -- not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere, and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved.
Thank you and good night.

Reporter: President Kennedy – a few questions if you please?

JFK: Certainly, you there, second row.

Reporter: Sir, can you please clarify for us your relationship, if there is one, with Marilyn Monroe?

JFK: I thought we were going to talk about Cuba? Can we stay on subject here? Marilyn is a great artist and a friend of the family. Next question.

Reporter: Sir, about your health. Some White House sources say that your back condition is much more serious than you have revealed publically, is there any truth to that?

JFK: Cuba gentleman, Cuba. Atomic Missiles 90 miles away?, can we please stay on topic here hmmm?. Ok, next question.

Reporter: Sir, many pundits have opined that “Jackie” is spending far too much in the renovation of the White House, do you care to comment on that?

JFK: First, its Mrs. Kennedy, not “Jackie” and second, for Gods sake gentleman, can we please focus?

Reporter: Sir, There have been allegations of direct ties to the mafia to a close friend of yours, an entertainer known as Mr. Francis Albert Sinatra. You have even been seen publically with him with on several occasions. Several reporters have also noted that he has been an active financial supporter of your administration, including running many fund raising efforts that netted several hundred thousand dollars for your presidential campaign. Sir, are these allegations true and will you now formerly denounce the mafia and your association with it and will you return the money he raised?

JFK: Did the microphone not work? Did anyone in this room hear me just a few minutes ago discuss the serious fix we are in here? Global Thermonuclear War?. Toe to Toe with the Russkies? Does that ring a bell? It's serious folks, I'm not joking.

Reporter: Sir, the Republicans say that every time your administration runs into trouble with its domestic programs that you overplay the threat from the Russians in a bald attempt to improve your sagging ratings. Is there any truth to that allegation?

JFK: un-freaking-believable.

Reporter: Many people, such as Vaughn Meader and Gore Vidal, think you sound funny when you talk. When you say “CUBA” you sound like you are really saying “CUBER”, is that a result of your your rich upbringing or are you just, well how do I put this gingerly... ignorant? Apparently when you spoke in Berlin, you also mistakenly announced in german that you “were a doughnut” making yourself the object of mockery to the German press. Do you care to comment?

JFK: ok, I'm outta here.

Reporter: Sir, when will you apologize for your short sighted speech in Berlin which unnecessarily inflamed tensions with the Russians?

End Snip...

Posted @ January 26, 2006 09:06 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Fisking Osama

From todays message from Osama. I Hereby Commit "A Fisking".

The Transcript taken from the BBC Translation page.

My comments are in Bold...

My message to you is about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the way to end it.

Well now, that’s interesting. Saying “way to end it” is significantly different that pounding on your chest and talking about victory.

I had not intended to speak to you about this issue, because, for us, this issue is already decided on: diamonds cut diamonds.

Diamonds cut diamonds? What the hell does that mean? Either A) We (Bush and I) are both strong warriors or B) Only I am strong enough to take on the great Satan. Which one is it? I don’t know. But lets listen for other signs of what’s going on behind the scenes.

Praise be to God, our conditions are always improving and becoming better, while your conditions are to the contrary of this.

He’s talking to us now. He’s setting the stage.

However, what prompted me to speak are the repeated fallacies of your President Bush in his comment on the outcome of the US opinion polls, which indicated that the overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of the forces from Iraq, but he objected to this desire and said that the withdrawal of troops would send a wrong message to the enemy.

Osama apparently is a subscriber to the New York Times. I think the war would be over tomorrow if the man had a laptop, internet access and a blog aggregator.He is watching us, and its his opinion that we are a divided group.

Bush said: It is better to fight them on their ground than they fighting us on our ground.
In my response to these fallacies, I say: The war in Iraq is raging, and the operations in Afghanistan are on the rise in our favour, praise be to God.
And I say to you Osama, you didn’t answer your own question. If we are fighting in Iraq, is that not what Bush set out to do, and you have yet to stop us from doing?

The Pentagon figures indicate the rise in the number of your dead and wounded, let alone the huge material losses, and let alone the collapse of the morale of the soldiers there and the increase in the suicide cases among them.
Don’t’cha dig it when Osama talks in Washington-speak? “Pentagon figures”? Who talks like that? More importantly, note that he talks about the “huge material losses” and the “collapse of morale”. Again, someone is getting a monthly DNC newsletter with a hand written “thank you for your contribution” note attached to it.

So, just imagine the state of psychological breakdown that afflicts the soldier while collecting the remnants of his comrades' dead bodies after they hit mines, which torn them. Following such situation, the soldier becomes between two fires. If he refuses to go out of his military barracks for patrols, he will face the penalties of the Vietnam butcher, and if he goes out, he will face the danger of mines.
Well Osama, why don't you try to imagine this; a “friend” invites you to dinner in the next village and just as you sit down to eat, the next thing you know the building explodes around you as a missile fired from a flying robotic drone that’s been watching your every move for weeks flies unfettered overhead. Or how about this for size, how about living in a cave with goats and rats for 3 years while US Army Sharpshooters sit 3 miles away with 50 caliber rifles and shoot anything to goes in or out of it; or how about hunkering down under the barrage sent down from an AC-130 Gunship. How about being forced to send badly recorded audio tapes to Al-Jazaera from payphones in Peshawar to get your message out while the average slacker in the western world can send a post halfway around the world without leaving his sofa. How about waking up every day and seeing contrails in the sky, knowing that not one of them will ever be from planes controlled by you and yours? How about losing and losing and losing for 5 long years, not just Afghanistan, but Iraq, and Lebanon and Libya? How’s that feel anyway? Hey, what does Napalm smell like anyway? Does it really smell like victory like they say? Well it probably doesn’t when it gets dumped on you, now does it. Hows that for "imagining the state of psychological breakdown?"

So, he is between two bitter situations, something which puts him under psychological pressure - fear, humiliation, and coercion. Moreover, his people are careless about him. So, he has no choice but to commit suicide.

Yes, of course. Just like all those Marines that all committed suicide around the Baghdad airport when they were slaughtered by the thousands by the Great Saddam, ah yes “Stalingrad on the Tigris”, I remember it well.

What you hear about him and his suicide is a strong message to you, which he wrote with his blood and soul while pain and bitterness eat him up so that you would save what you can save from this hell. However, the solution is in your hand if you care about them.

This dear reader, is just plain weird. He really REALLY thinks things are going spectacularly bad for us. There’s an old management saying about “ the fish rots from the head down” and I think it applies here. I wonder if Osama is suffering from his people giving him the information that he wants to hear because he does not allow anyone around him to give him contrary information which he may find upsetting. An interesting dynamic to study in Business School; “ The culture and management of an International Terrorist Cadre”.

The news of our brother mujahideen, however, is different from what is published by the Pentagon.

Oh, of course it is! Because “The Pentagon” goes out of its way to rarely, if ever, discuss enemy casualties except at the periphery of the story. “Would that it were” that the Pentagon would start to publish the actual numbers of Jihadis that are killed in battle. Notice he says “The Pentagon”, as if it were in charge of and controlled the spread of information. This is a fundamental misunderstanding that many many people make about how our system works.

This news indicates that what is carried by the news media does not exceed what is actually taking place on the ground. What increases doubts on the information of the White House's administration is its targeting of the news media, which carry some facts about the real situation.

Neither of these sentences makes any sense, so I’m assuming that its some form of translation anomaly. I think he’s upset about the media,. (Get in line pal…) yet he uses opinion polls in the media to reinforce his statements about how things are going.

Documents have recently showed that the butcher of freedom in the world [US President Bush] had planned to bomb the head office of al-Jazeera Space Channel in the state of Qatar after he bombed its offices in Kabul and Baghdad, although despite its defects, it is [Al-Jazeera] one of your creations.

Again with the “Document have recently showed”? Who talks like that? Michael Moore talks like that, Harry Reid talks like that, Sean Penn talks like that, and now apparently so does Osama! Now what’s he talking about, he’s talking about the now discredited account of the US wanting to bomb the Al-Jazeera headquarters. This is significant because it gives us a good timeline for when he was alive to hear that message. I like the mental image the phrase “butcher of freedom”. Somehow I think that Osama thinks “Bush The Butcher” deals strictly in pork products.

Jihad is continuing, praise be to God, despite all the repressive measures the US army and its agents take to the point where there is no significant difference between these crimes and those of Saddam.

Wow. Saddam committed Crimes? Shhh. Don’t tell Ramsey Clark!

These crimes include the raping of women and taking them hostage instead of their husbands. There is no power but in God.

Maybe “Rape” doesn’t translate across very well here. Because I remember the way they were repeatedly "raped" by being forced to vote in elections for the first time ever. I remember how they were "raped" by taking city council seats for the first time ever. I remember how they were "raped" by becoming full citizens of their country instead of glorified farm animals like you would like them to be, oh great and mighty Osama.

The torturing of men has reached the point of using chemical acids and electric drills in their joints. If they become desperate with them, they put the drill on their heads until death.

Note to self: Buy more 'Black and Decker' stock right away.

If you like, read the humanitarian reports on the atrocities and crimes in the prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Oh and rest assured Osama, we will! You see we here in the “decadent West” CAN read! We can also disagree without fear for our lives. And get this buddy, EVEN OUR WOMEN CAN READ! Let's try that with the people you pretend to protect, shall we? Whats the Arab Muslim world at for percentage of the population being literate? What, 2 out of 10? Oh, I know, the numbers go up if you don’t include women. Well you see pal,that’s the thing, we do include women. We include them so much in our lives that one of the "terrible terrible people" who did the "torture" at Abu Ghraib was also a woman. And the commander, yeah, you got it - a Woman. You want to do something for Islam? Try opening a school to teach people how to read, like weve been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan for example, instead of trying to kill everyone who doesnt agree with you.

You remember "women" dont'cha Osama? Those are the things your pals in the Taliban used to take out for target practice in the Kabul Stadium back in the "salad days" of the Jihad. Ah, those were the days, werent they? Go head and talk to me about “Humanitarianism”, see if I care. When the word pops out of the mouth of a butchering madman like yourself, its like getting dating tips from Ted Bundy. I notice we didn’t have to elbow you out of the way to help Muslims after the Tsunami. What?, you could even send a crate of bottled water to your fellow Muslims? Shame on you. Be a man and admit you dropped the ball on that one. Chalk it up to Allahs will and all that.

I say that despite all the barbaric methods, they have failed to ease resistance, and the number of mujahideen, praise be to God, is increasing.

And they are also dying in increasing numbers, more and more at the hands of other Arabs who hate your guys even more than they hate us "decadent infidels", but we'll get to that later.

In fact, reports indicate that the defeat and devastating failure of the ill-omened plan of the four - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz - and the announcement of this defeat and working it out, is only a matter of time, which is to some extent linked to the awareness of the American people of the magnitude of this tragedy.

Apparently Osama voted for Gore.

The wise ones know that Bush has no plan to achieve his alleged victory in Iraq.

You mean the plan where he takes an Army of 150,000 men 400 miles across a desert and two rivers in hostile enemy country, captures intact a "Key Capital City of the Arab Muslim" world; which immediately causes Libya to give up its Nuclear programs out of fear of the same thing happening to them and also allows Lebanon to overthrow its Syrian overlords, then goes on to helps the Iraqis create a secular modern Democracy all without the help of the UN and then he manages to gets re-elected afterwards, all while having the fastest expanding American economy since 1945?

Yeah, that all happened by accident. Happenstance. Kismet. Karma even.

Saddam was on his way out anyway and would have gone fast if we had only left him alone. Democracy in the middle east was well under way until Bush came in and muddied the water with all this talk of "victory". The Taliban?, poorly understood young men of society who are actually very similar to our own Jaycees. They only wanted what was best for Muslims. Their methods might have been poor, but they "meant well". Feh...

If you compare the small number of the dead when Bush made that false and stupid show-like announcement from an aircraft carrier on the end of the major operations, to many times as much as this number of the killed and injured, who fell in the minor operations, you will know the truth in what I am saying, and that Bush and his administration do not have neither the desire nor the will to withdraw from Iraq for their own dubious reasons.

Wow. It finally hit me why Bush went into Iraq. Bush went into Iraq just because it bugs the living crap out of Osama. Jealousy – thy name is Osama. Hey, you dont have any of those Aircraft Carrier thingies to make your own "false and stupid show-like announcements" from do you? Oh thats a shame, because we have 12. Basically, we have one for every month of the year and they have nothing to do every-single-day but look for your skanky goat loving ass.

To go back to where I started, I say that the results of the poll satisfy sane people and that Bush's objection to them is false.

Can you dig that! He sounds like Kerry getting upset about the Ohio Exit Poll Projections versus the actual counts of the votes! Next thing you know, he’s going to start talking about how “We need to investigate voting in Ohio”

Reality testifies that the war against America and its allies has not remained confined to Iraq, as he claims.

You are right, it also goes into Lebanon (which you lost) Afghanistan (which you lost) Pakistan (which you lost) Kuwait (which you lost) United Arab Emirates (which you lost), Qatar ( which you lost), Indonesia (Which you lost), Libya (which you lost)

In fact, Iraq has become a point of attraction and recruitment of qualified resources.

That’s true, apparently Election Poll watchers and vote tabulators in Iraq is now the fastest expanding area of employment.

On the other hand, the mujahideen, praise be to God, have managed to breach all the security measures adopted by the unjust nations of the coalition time and again.

and once they do "breach Security Measures" they are often promptly killed, en masse. I wonder if Osama wants to publish his recruitment and retention figures like the US Army does. I wonder if Slate will do a nice “why our troops are dolts” piece for Osamas highly qualified Mujahdeen?

The evidence of this is the bombings you have seen in the capitals of the most important European countries of this aggressive coalition.

One – Spain. 300 killed. Spain elections go towards socialist who like all socialists, immediately surrenders.

Two – London. Impact to war - Zip. Hard to threaten people with a few sticks of C-4 when they have been bombed from the air by Hitler for 6 years and the IRA for 70 years.

This, is what he points to as a "success". I might consider calling it a "Jihadi quagmire" but that would be mean.

As for the delay in carrying out similar operations in America, this was not due to failure to breach your security measures.

Oh of course not. It was due to his deep and personal love for the people of America that caused the delay.

Operations are under preparation, and you will see them on your own ground once they are finished, God willing.

We are watching. We are listening and every single day we get closer to capturing your coal black soul, you’ll know its us by the whoosh of the helicopter blades over your head. Sleep well...

Based on the above, we see that Bush's argument is false. However, the argument that he avoided, which is the substance of the results of opinion polls on withdrawing the troops, is that it is better not to fight the Muslims on their land and for them not to fight us on our land.

Opinion Polls? We talk Missiles, firepower, boots on the ground. He talks about how “Well, The New York Times Sez…” He sounds like fricken Maureen Dowd.

We do not object to a long-term truce with you on the basis of fair conditions that we respect.

Now we come to the whole point of this entire message. Truce.

He is not offering it to us, but if we were to lighten up and offer it to him, he says he would agree not to kill us anymore.

We are a nation, for which God has disallowed treachery and lying.

However, Allahs support of genocidal tyrants and butchery of civilians is considered perfectly "ok".

In this truce, both parties will enjoy security and stability and we will build Iraq and Afghanistan, which were destroyed by the war.

Second time he says "truce". You leave me alone, I'll leave you alone. Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ll say this for Osama, he says “Afghanistan” more than Democrats do.

There is no defect in this solution other than preventing the flow of hundreds of billions to the influential people and war merchants in America, who supported Bush's election campaign with billions of dollars.
Howard Dean, Call your Office. Someone stole your blackberry.

Hence, we can understand the insistence of Bush and his gang to continue the war.
Future News Flash – Bush announces intent to Run for 3rd term. Osama found in garage with door closed and car running.

If you have a genuine will to achieve security and peace, we have already answered you.

Translation: please stop hurting me. Our Response? to put another shift on where those fancy flying robot killers are made.

If Bush declines but to continue lying and practicing injustice [against us], it is useful for you to read the book of "The Rogue State", the introduction of which reads: If I were a president, I would halt the operations against the United States.

I’m already looking this up on Amazon. This is amazing. Is he talking about the Chomsky Book “Rogue States”. Oh wouldn’t THAT be precious! Osama writes liner notes to Chomskys next book!

First, I will extend my apologies to the widows, orphans, and the persons who were tortured. Afterwards, I will announce that the US interference in the world's countries has ended for ever. But more importantly...

I note again the need for this question, Is Osama actually jealous of Bush?

Finally, I would like to tell you that the war is for you or for us to win. If we win it, it means your defeat and disgrace forever as the wind blows in this direction with God's help.

Well clearly something "blows" here, but its not the wind if you catch my drift.

If you win it, you should read the history. We are a nation that does not tolerate injustice and seek revenge forever.

You might win, but you will still lose because then we can win. Psychotic.

Days and nights will not go by until we take revenge as we did on 11 September, God willing, and until your minds are exhausted and your lives become miserable and things turn [for the worse], which you detest.

News Flash Osama: 5 years into the war - Dow at 11,000. GDP 3.5% Sales of SUVs at all time high. Wealth of Americans at its all time highest levels in history. Biggest American complaint so far is the lack of content for HDTV and a discernable plot of ABC's "Lost".

As for us, we do not have anything to lose. The swimmer in the sea does not fear rain. You have occupied our land, defiled our honour, violated our dignity, shed our blood, ransacked our money, demolished our houses, rendered us homeless, and tampered with our security. We will treat you in the same way.

But, I thought we were losing? If we have done all that and you haven’t stopped us, how could we be losing? And “tampered with our security” doesn’t belong on the list. Its like saying ‘ you burned down my house, killed my family, raped my dog, and dammit, you left the refrigerator door open.

You tried to deny us the decent life, but you cannot deny us a decent death. Refraining from performing jihad, which is sanctioned by our religion, is an appalling sin. The best way of death for us is under the shadows of swords.

Well, we only carry swords for fancy dinner parties; however if you would like to die in a hail of depleted uranium shells, please make an appointment with the United States Air Force for one of their fine aircraft to render you into fertilizer at the first possible opportunity.

Do not be deluded by your power and modern weapons. Although they win some battles, they lose the war. Patience and steadfastness are better than them. What is important is the outcome.

For once in my life, I agree with Osama.

We have been tolerant for 10 years in fighting the Soviet Union with our few weapons and we managed to drain their economy.

Dude, We are not the Soviet Union. You might notice that we beat them too, only we didn’t get ground into paste doing it like you did.

They became history, with God's help.
And a little nudge from Ronald Reagan thankyouverymuch oh and about 500,000 steely-eyed Members of US Armed Services.

You should learn lessons from that. We will remain patient in fighting you, God willing, until the one whose time has come dies first. We will not escape the fight as long as we hold our weapons in our hands.

And we will keep living and expanding our influence around the world, while you and your hillbilly cousins have a reach that expands only to the range of your rifles. We build cities, spaceships and little tiny telephones. You build coffins and over the last 5 years you build them increasingly only for yourselves.

I swear not to die but a free man even if I taste the bitterness of death. I fear to be humiliated or betrayed.

Humiliated, like say the humiliation of Saddam? Or Humilated Like Al-libbi?, or Khalid Shiek Mohammed? Please be specific because we are measuring your cell for curtains as we speak.

Peace be upon those who follow guidance.

Die, you gravy sucking pig.

UPDATE: Rogue State By Blum, Not Chomsky. Blum, in all his leftist America hating glory protested againt our attack on Afghanistan. This cat goes way back in the land of leftist hate of America. Where is there a connection between Osama and the left? Well Osama just gave it to us, Osama apparently subscribes to the Mother Jones' Book of the Month Club. When you hear Osama bleat, its to a tune written by Marx( Karl, not Groucho).

Posted @ January 19, 2006 05:24 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (9)

Station HYPO

I'm parsing the latest intercept from Osama.
To survive the process of reading and interpreting this indecipherable gibberish, I'm channeling the spirit of Joe Rochefort

A few quick thoughts:

1. He's still alive.

2. Who is he talking to and why?

3. I haven't seen Michael Moore around in awhile and most of this stuff reads like the liner notes to the directors cut of "Farenheit 9/11", Coincidence?

Be Back Later...

Posted @ January 19, 2006 12:23 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Quickies

1. A picture is worth a thousand words. Exhibit A:

In this photo released by China's Xinhua new agency, Chinese President Hu Jintao, right, shakes hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, left, at Beijing's Great Hall of the People on Tuesday January 17, 2006. North Korean leader Kim Jong Il told China's president he is committed to a peaceful resolution of the standoff over the North's nuclear ambitions as he wrapped up a weeklong, secrecy-shrouded trip to his last major ally. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Rao Aimin)

Who is smiling in this picture? and who looks like he has a live ferret jammed into his shorts? It tells you everything you need to know about what has been going on with our Mr. Kim.

From ABC.com

quote:
Kim's trip ended the same day the main U.S. nuclear envoy was in Beijing to meet with Chinese officials over the nuclear issue. News reports said Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill also talked with his North Korean counterpart, but Hill made no mention of any such meeting, and said no date had been set for the arms negotiations to resume.

During Kim's visit, North Korea and China "unanimously agreed to consistently maintain the stand of seeking a negotiated peaceful solution" to the nuclear issue, the North's official Korean Central News Agency reported.
However, Kim also mentioned "difficulties" facing the talks. The North has refused to return to the negotiations unless Washington ends financial sanctions imposed over Pyongyang's alleged illegal activities. U.S. officials have rejected the demand, saying the matter is a criminal issue unrelated to the nuclear talks.
In September, the North agreed to abandon its nuclear programs in exchange for aid and security guarantees. Talks have been stalled ever since.

"Difficulties" translates into english as "Counterfeiting" and "Drug Smuggling", which the Bush Administration has recenty brought to a standstill and is causing great economic distress in Mr. Kims Playground.

2. Jim "Will leak for lucre" Risen. I wonder if he can get Judy millers lawyer at a discount since it will be the same sort of case. Tom Maguire - Call your Office!

3. Hello? Yes, Can I speak to the President of Pontiac Motors? Could you tell him I think I've found a sure fire way to sell the Pontiac Aztek"? Yes I'll hold.

heck, with that kind of promotion, you could even sell the AMC Pacer.

Posted @ January 18, 2006 10:08 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Subliminal Man

Oh Goody!, Al Gore is on a day pass from the 'Institute for the very-very nervous' and is talking publically again! It must be part of "Karl Rove evil plan" to ensure that the Republicans keep the House this year, because there is no better person to start talking about how bad the other guys ethics are than former Vice President Albert 'No Controlling legal authority" R. Gore.

From a Krauthammer article from 1997:

"Controlling legal authority." Whatever other legacies Al Gore leaves behind between now and retirement, he forever bequeaths this newest weasel word to the lexicon of American political corruption.

Bang. And there you go.

The thing is, I love that phrase so much it slips into my inner dialog every time I hear Al talk. So instead of him making some dramatic " gosh I just gotta vote Democrat now" point, all I hear is something like this ( My inner dialog in bold)

From a speech he made today:

Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens-Democrats and Republicans alike-to express No Controlling legal authority our shared concern that America's Constitution is in grave danger.

In spite of our No Controlling legal authority differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of No Controlling legal authority executive power.

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared No Controlling legal authority that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses.

It is imperative that respect for the No Controlling legal authority rule of law be restored.

So, many of us have come here to No Controlling legal authority Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.
It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people.

On this particular No Controlling legal authority Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped- by Democrats No Controlling legal authority one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The Democratically controlled and dominated FBI privately called King the "most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country" and vowed to "take him off his pedestal." The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that Wanted to say its my idea but everyone would just laugh at me again law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable No Controlling legal authority and valued means of according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue.

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on "large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States." The New York Times Owned and operated by the DNC reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program "without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection."No Controlling legal authority

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret Until some blabbermouth told everyone, the President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission No Controlling legal authority is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place.

But surprisingly, the President's No Controlling legal authority soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.
At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic surveillance Hopefully more people will continue to act like traitors. What we do know about this pervasive No Controlling legal authority wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently. And it should be me up there Dammit.

A Republican president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government . Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of No Controlling legal authority laws and not Republican men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of Republican men."
An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution - an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King Who should be me from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of Democrat Heaven tyranny."

You see, once my mind locks onto his voice all I ca think of is that phrase and after that the poor guy doesnt have a chance to make his point.

Posted @ January 16, 2006 04:01 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

White Courtesy Phone

Dear Leader Kim Il Sung, Please pick up the white courtesty phone...

This guy is "out of town" for 14 days, no one really know where, but apparently visiting areas of China that are growing and prospering, using something the foreign devils call "capitalism". You know, when the Leader of Communist China is showing the leader of North Korea how to run a capitalist economy - even one that is very, extremely marginally capitalist, its a final sign that Communism just-doesnt-work.

Apparently President Hu is going to lecture the lad on the evils of counterfeiting as well.

Watch this closely...

Posted @ January 16, 2006 03:46 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

I guess it really is about the oil…

I’m just about to haul off to bed when I read this little tidbit on drudge:

Iran's economy minister, Davoud Danesh-Jafari, said the country's position as the world's fourth-largest oil producer meant such action would have grave consequences….

Snip.

…Any possible sanctions from the west could possibly, by disturbing Iran's political and economic situation, raise oil prices beyond levels the west expects," he told Iranian state radio.
Mr Danesh-Jafari's warning added weight to veiled threats by Iran's president on Saturday. Iran had a "cheap means" of achieving its nuclear "rights", Mr Ahmadinejad said, adding: "You [the west] need us more than we need you. All of you today need the Iranian nation."

Well, that certainly gets your attention, now doesn’t it! This is like reading in the summer 1941 that the Japanese Navy is meeting in secret to discuss “options for retaliation against the Embargo”. You just know that this isn’t going to end well even if you don’t know the specifics of what is to come.

This would be bad enough by itself, but then I remembered something else. I remembered this odd little picture from November:

(Hugo chavez and Ahmadinejad in November commemorating a Statue to Simon Bolivar)

For the record, Iran is 4th in world oil supplies. Venezuela is 5th.

Venezuela and Iran are now close allies, in both name and action. Any action we take against Iran will now very likely cause a reaction by Venezuela in the form of “boycott”. Venezuela and Iran have now decided to use the time honored tool of “trade war” to influence the world and its policies.

There are a lot of possible outcomes to this, but this is not going to end well no matter how it goes.

When it comes to dealing with Iran there are a lot of people gassing about that the “Israelis will take care of it” assuming that they can take out the Iranian nuclear facilities ala the Iraqi Osirik operation in the 1980s. Well maybe they can and maybe they can't, but I wish to counsel all of you that the results of that action are not going to be without consequences. If you remember back to the 1970’s the Arab world decided that the only way Israel could have won the Yom Kippur war was that the US intervened on the side of Israel. The result was the Arab oil embargo nearly pushed the US and World economies into an actual full on depression. What actually did occur was a deep recession and the rise of an ugly economic species called the “stagflation”. This was something that lasted nearly 10 years but still causes reverberations in world markets even today. As someone who was around back then, I can tell you that it was not pretty and it is not something I want to ever see again. Those of you who think that we had a bad economy over the past three years are in for a real shock when you see what a full out oil embargo can do to an economy.

But here’s the real kicker in this story, thanks to the incredibly stupid policies of the environmentalists who have done everything they can to ensure that we don’t have enough domestic oil production or refineries as well as our own personal desires for cars and trucks that are far larger than anything we drove in the 1970s, we now use even more Arab oil than we did before. Am I exaggerating the impact? Well Ok, last years Hurricanes took out only 5% of our production and look what happened. Today we look at $2.10 a gallon as cheap. Now imagine the impact of a 45% reduction in oil. can you say $5.00 a gallon? maybe $7.50?

It's time to dust off that moped in the back of the garage kids, daddy’s gonna have to park the Hummer for awhile...

Park a hummer here or there, stop buying this or that, and guess what you got? that's right kids, a recession. And if it drags on awhile, you get a full on depression.

Now if Israel were to step in and “take care of Iran” its entirely likely that Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and yes, Venezuela would all take part in a boycott of the same sort that occurred in the 1970’s against the United States. There is no free lunch for us to have “Israel do the deed”, so lets stop all that speculation as it’s really a non starter to begin with. It doesn’t make the situation any better and in many ways, it makes it worse. I’m also very sure that Israel has at its disposal one or two of its own discreet ballistic submarines with nuclear tipped missiles on which they can guarantee their security, whether or not Iran gets a nuclear weapon, so they are covered no matter what the world does. Israelis are not stupid; they know damn well what happens when you depend on "the kindness of strangers”.

Unlike the oil embargo of the past, today we have two of the oil producing countries actively working to “overthrow the US hegemony”. One is working 24 hours a day to build an atomic bomb behind which they can continue their repressive government without fear of reprisal from the West. The other is working 24 hours a day to create a Marxist Leninist Socialist Tyranny in Latin America so as to challenge the United States.

We can’t hit Iran without Venezuela going into play, and vice versa. Its like OPEC with a big chip on its shoulder.

Now if you think that the threat of the possibility of an embargo is aimed at the US alone, think again. This threat is not necessarily aimed just at the US, its also aimed at Europe. The US will certainly suffer as the result of an embargo, but to Europe it will be a catastrophe.

Recently we watched Russia try the same sort of thing with the Ukraine. While Russia’s use of GAZPROM was aimed at trying to change Ukrainian policies it had a horrible effect on European markets. In a similar way, this is what Iran is trying with the Europeans now, which is to put it in the vernacular of the streets “ do what we say and no one gets hurt”.

Once governments begin to use the trade of strategic materials as a way to influence government policy, you are already 2/3’s of the way into a real live shooting war whether you want it or not. This is something we’ve tried ourselves back when we decided to tell the Japanese that they couldn’t have any of our oil so long as they were going to exterminate the Chinese. 6 Months later, the Japanese destroyed Pearl Harbor, invaded the Philippines, Indonesia and most of the South Pacific. We didn’t start the war, but we did light the fuse. Iran it seems, has just lit the fuse.

The problem is this. Let’s say you decide to go all leftist hippie and give into the Iranian demands this time rather than do the "Bush thing" and use force. Let’s say you decide not to do anything about Iran because, what the hell, half a dozen other countries have the bomb what’s one more here or there. I mean why shouldn’t a country who’s government not only doesn’t believe that the holocaust didn’t happen, but even if it did, the Germans should’ve finished what they started. Nice fellahs, the mullahs…

What happens next time they want something? And of course, there is always a “next time” as Prime Minister Chamberlain can certainly attest. What happens when Iran comes out and says; “ We think the Shiite portion of Iraq is really part of “Magna Persia” (…ahem - and so do you, if you get my drift France and Germany, and you too Belgium). Or “The Persian Gulf really is the Persian Gulf and you need our permission to enter and leave, and permission is granted on a paying basis”, or how about this “ Anyone who does business with Israel, gets no oil from us”. Where do you end up drawing the line after you’ve given into something like ‘ oh sure, go right ahead and build an atomic bomb, you holocaust denying 9th century throwbacks..”.

See, once you give in to “one little thing”, you can’t stop. Once you decide to give in to their demands, once you show them that it works, they will use it every time. There’s only one way to stop being extorted, and that’s to stop paying the extortionists.

Once they have ”the bomb” and the control of a large amount of the worlds Oil, just who is going to say no to them? Once they have the means, motive and opportunity to kill all of us, what’s to stop them from doing just that?

Back in the 90’s, the world went to war with Iraq because Saddam took it upon himself to threaten the worlds oil supplies by taking by force the little Emirate of Kuwait and directly threatening the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The question we have to worry about today is will the world react in the same way once they understand that the threat that has now been aimed at us ( and them!) by Iran and Venezuela is every bit as bad if not worse than the threat by Iraq to the world in the 90’s.

Now, for those of you who still aren’t on board for the Iraq Theatre of Operations in the War on Terror, try to imagine what might have been had Iraq fallen into the hands of Al-Qaeda, who working in collusion with Iran had conspired to control not just two countries, but three of the worlds biggest oil suppliers.

Things are about to get very interesting.

I guess it really was about the oil after all. Because in this case, the Iranians have made clear their expressed desire to to get their own WMD's and no one seems to care or notice very much. But maybe they will care about the destruction of their economies by a country that admires Nazi Germany and hopes to be the next best thing.

Posted @ January 16, 2006 02:03 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (8)

And hold your manhood cheap...

From an article in the Army Times, I found this story about an American who makes me feel both proud and yet somehow undeserving of being his fellow countryman:

...Sar grew up in Cambodia under the oppression of the Khmer Rouge, which separated his family members by age, he said. His father was prosecuted by the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese, and his older brother was executed by the Vietnamese.
Speaking in a quiet voice, Sar said his mom and two little brothers died of starvation.

He came to the United States in 1981, became a U.S. citizen five years later and has been in the Army for 20 years — the past 15 in Special Forces.

“I tell you, I love this country more than my birthplace,” Sar said. “I came from Cambodia and I lost (a lot) of my family there, and nobody here can tell me what it’s like, the loss of freedom. ... This country gave me so much, and this is a small price to pay, the long deployments away from home.”

Now go and read the rest already...

(...This day shall gentle his condition And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.) Amen Willie, Amen...

Like JFK said, Where do we get such men as this?

Posted @ January 13, 2006 09:16 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1)

Huzzah

From N.Z. Bear:

We are bloggers with boatloads of opinions, and none of us come close to agreeing with any other one of us all of the time. But we do agree on this: The new leadership in the House of Representatives needs to be thoroughly and transparently free of the taint of the Jack Abramoff scandals, and beyond that, of undue influence of K Street.

We are not naive about lobbying, and we know it can and has in fact advanced crucial issues and has often served to inform rather than simply influence Members.

But we are certain that the public is disgusted with excess and with privilege. We hope the Hastert-Dreier effort leads to sweeping reforms including the end of subsidized travel and other obvious influence operations. Just as importantly, we call for major changes to increase openness, transparency and accountability in Congressional operations and in the appropriations process.

As for the Republican leadership elections, we hope to see more candidates who will support these goals, and we therefore welcome the entry of Congressman John Shadegg to the race for Majority Leader. We hope every Congressman who is committed to ethical and transparent conduct supports a reform agenda and a reform candidate. And we hope all would-be members of the leadership make themselves available to new media to answer questions now and on a regular basis in the future.

Signed,

N.Z. Bear, The Truth Laid Bear
Hugh Hewitt, HughHewitt.com
Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.com
Kevin Aylward, Wizbang!
La Shawn Barber, La Shawn Barber's Corner
Lorie Byrd / DJ Drummond , Polipundit
Beth Cleaver, MY Vast Right Wing Conspiracy
Jeff Goldstein, Protein Wisdom
Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
John Hawkins, Right Wing News
John Hinderaker, Power Line
Jon Henke / McQ / Dale Franks, QandO
James Joyner, Outside The Beltway
Mike Krempasky, Redstate.org
Michelle Malkin, MichelleMalkin.com
Ed Morrissey, Captain's Quarters
Scott Ott, Scrappleface
The Anchoress, The Anchoress
John Donovan / Bill Tuttle, Castle Argghhh!!!

and little ole me...

Posted @ January 13, 2006 02:12 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Thats It???

That's it? Thats all they brought? Thousands of man hours, Senate aides working through the night, private investigators pouring through everything that the man has touched or stood next to in 40 years, and this is all they got for it?

Is this the "Big Bad Democrat Machine"? This is supposed to make me quake in my conservative right wing fanatic boots?

Are you kidding me? It's like hearing Kerry is running for President again, you salivate for this sort of match.

Ted Kennedy, Pat Leahy, Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden, the Mt. Rushmore of modern liberalism.... ( no wonder their party is going into the dumpster faster than undercooked airline food).

Why would anyone ever give a dime to support these frauds? Its not like they get anything for their money, These guys arent even "good TV".

I cant get over the asinine nature of the questions they asked. Did they really think that he would just pop out there and say " Yes Senator, I want Womenfolk to be barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen cookin' me and my menfolk a nice big possum supper every Sunday"

Come on.... 24 minutes of posturing, with Alito answering the issue in about 30 seconds, only to have the gasbag Senator say " you didnt answer my question". Only he did, and it was obvious to everyone that he did.

Every public display of pompus bloviation from Teddy is worth another electoral vote for the Republicans. Everytime Biden smiles, its another 100,000 votes for Republicans. Everytime Schumer looks over his glasses, another Generation X kid says 'whoa, dude. Youre harshing my mellow..."

I was worried about Miers getting through the dreaded "Democrat Gauntlet" but after this pitiful display I think one of the Bush twins could get in.

Why would any liberal give money to a Democrat? I mean if you are going to lose anyway ( and after this sad pathetic display in a long series of sad pathetic displays you have to finally agree that you are going to lose), why not give money to a Green or a Socialist which is where you heart is anyway? If you are going to lose, you might at least go down fighting for something you believe in, even I can respect that idea. How can anyone believe anything these frauds say?

These guys are just pathetic. But I didnt vote for them and I dont support them. I wonder how someone who has supported them in the past feels about their heroes now?

This is the day the Democrats finally lost their "moral authority" badge. It took them kicking a man in the face and humiliating him while his wife watched for them to do it, but the finally showed the world for the disgusting power drunk bullies that they really are.

Posted @ January 12, 2006 03:46 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Ralph Peters Explains it all for you...

Just to cement the points I made yesterday in my review of "State of War", Ralph Peters says this:
Quote:

"My fellow Americans, the real threats to your information security are Google, eBay, chat rooms, credit applications, junk mail, etc. And the Democratic National Committee holds vastly more information about individual American citizens in its files than do all of our intelligence agencies combined...."

snip

"Self-interested renegades posing as whistleblowers aren't patriots, they're traitors. Not one of the recent "anonymous sources" has been able to cite a single example of an innocent American harmed by our intelligence campaign against Islamist terrorists."

Go and read thusly. Registration required.

Posted @ January 09, 2006 09:08 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

PJ Reviews "Dog Days"

P.J. O'Rourke reviews Anna Marie Cox's new novel "Dog Days" and finds it lacking.

My favorite bit:

"Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words "Write what you know" is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad , how much combat do you think he saw?"

Posted @ January 09, 2006 08:49 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

"State of War": Summary

Imagine you are a US Intelligence officer and it is September 1st, 2001. One day a call comes in from a from a friend in a local police department that a suspect was apprehended in a matter that has nothing to do with national security but in the process of investigating that crime, information was retrieved that may very well have something to do with National Security. The suspect has a laptop, an internet and email account, a cell phone, a bank account, credit card bills with plane tickets to various US locations over the past year as well as an answering machine that has been receiving calls since the suspects arrest from other parties who are asking for contact for an operation that is going to happen soon.

So what do you do? Well, you probably tell your friend that it sounds interesting, but legally, there’s nothing you can do but if the suspect starts to reveal any information about anything involving national security, that he should make note of it and give you a call.

Then 9/11 happens. So what do you do now? You call your friend at the local PD, and he tells you that one of the names left on the answering machine was one of the guys that hijacked one of the aircraft.

So do you follow the letter of the law, or do you do your duty?

Quite by accident of relationship you have been provided with information on the network that launched an attack that killed thousands of Americans. With phone records and their relationships to other individuals based on calling patterns, you can work with the NSA to track down locations, identities and relationships, the times and dates of contact for other people who were involved with this attack. With bank records, you are able to determine the source of funds, with each piece of information provided by your local PD friend, you have uncovered a vast trove of information about the terror organization that can be used to help take it apart. From the fingerprints on the doorknobs to each phone number that was dialed out of their house, you’ve stepped into the “source data” that can reveal all of the other parts of the terror organization. As each “node” in the network is uncovered and apprehended, the relational database of information on the terror network and each of its nodes will grow until the network itself is so compromised that it can no longer function.

Welcome to the first Database War. He who has the source data and the correct relationships between it – wins.

But Again I ask; Do you follow the law, or do you do your duty?

Because of the data you uncovered at the first node, you start rolling up more and more of the nodes. When you capture people, they are given to the CIA to be detained to help you in your task to find and reveal each of the nodes in the terror network. They are detained in hidden locations for two reasons. First, to not reveal to the terror organization that one of their nodes is missing and compromised which gives you time to either spoof the network or to continue retrieving information on the next node in the network. Second, so that they cant reveal to the organization what method was used to get them captured in the first place. Were they informed on? Who or what was their source? Did someone in the chain rat them out? Or is it something that they are doing that is getting them pinched.

Things are going along well until a colleague, an old timer who has been left out of the operation becomes aware of what’s been going on with your program. He cares not for the security of the nation, but for the size of the budget of his department and his career and since you and your team have been getting results, you are now also getting the budget, the attention and of course the recognition and promotions to go along with it.

After years of work, after all the "sucking up" to political appointees after every election, he’s about to be lapped by “the new kids” who are violating every rule you followed in the previous 10 years when you had the project. He decides he can’t compete with these rules and the culture that comes with it and the results that are expected, so he decides to even the game in the only way he can.

He decides to have lunch with a friend; a friend who just happens to work for the New York Times.

He relates a shocking tale of an intelligence organization spying domestically. He tells how the United States has access to all sorts of internet traffic and phone traffic and it also has the means to “snoop” on all of it, supposedly in the name of National Security.

In the war against al-Qaeda, the effect of this public release of information has the same effect as it would have been had a World War II OSS officer met with the Japanese before Midway to reveal that the United States had broken their Naval codes. Set aside the loss of manhours as people now have to undergo investigations by congress, you now have a bigger problem. After this is revealed to the public all of a sudden the network goes silent and you quickly find your leads have all dried up.

Within a year, the network has as many nodes up and running as it did in the days before 9.11, only because you haven’t penetrated it enough to determine the network or its nodes, you have no idea who, what or where anything is going on regarding terror in the United States.

All this happens because someone talked to the New York Times and revealed the methods of your team not as a way to help the country, but as a way to hold onto power within their organization.

This sort of thing happens every day in every company where people in their jobs feel threatened in their careers. However, when it happens in a National Security Organization, we all pay the price for these selfish acts not just the organizations the discontented employees worked for and wish to take revenge.

And this is where James Risens “State Of War” comes into play.

This is a book written on the backs of angry intelligence officers who have been passed over for promotion, lost prestige and who feel just a little bit guilty at once again failing to deliver results for their country. By their own inaction and incompetence caused the very war they now see happening all around them. It stinks of the flop sweat of the failed career and begs for revenge at the hands of public indignation for the actions taken by the President, which resulted in the loss of prestige for former “big time operators” in the Intelligence community.

But the book fails to deliver on that idea. In fact, the book makes a surprisingly clear case for the Bush Administration and why they have taken the steps they have in the War against Al-Qaeda. The PR on the book makes it out that this book into a testimonial against the Bush Administration, but the real villain in this book is former CIA director George Tenet, who is savaged in nearly every chapter of the book. President Bush’s greatest crime seems to be allowing Tenet to stay in his job.

Don’t get me wrong; the author is clearly on “the other side” of the President in this book. He refers to conservatives only as “ neo-conservatives” and blames Bush for as much as he can as often as he can but very often his arguments against the Bush administration fall far short of anything close a convincing argument. I often found myself reading the book wondering if the author was in fact a Bush supporter who had been forced by his editor to write an “anti-bush” book and in the end had the book edited to express that idea rather than his actual findings.

The most famous part of the book, the release of information about the NSA “wiretapping” seems contrived and added at the last minute. It simply doesn’t fit into the rest of the book in a seamless way. It's almost like an appendix to the basic theme of the book rather than the central case being made.

The NSA section of the book is also the most troubling and it gets to my biggest complaint about the book. Whomever it was from within the intelligence community who revealed the NSA program information to Mr. Risen should be put on trial for treason, along the lines of what was done to Christopher Boyce in the 1970’s. While I disagree with the idea of doing so, Mr. Risen is within his rights as a journalist to reveal it but for any serving or former intelligence officer to even breath any part of this program to a journalist is without conscience or consideration for the damage that will be done as a result of their self serving and utterly traitorous behavior. These people are not whistleblowers any more than the Walker Gang were advocates for peace with the Soviet Union. That being said, if Mr. Risen and his editors were to be more interested in the security of this nation than he was his career, he would have considered the damage the release of this information would do before he published it because the revelation of this program to the world will probably in all likelihood cost lives. Civilian lives. American lives. Innocent lives.

It seems that Mr. Risen and I live in two different ethical standards, one that puts the nations security first and one that puts career first. I sleep very well at night with my choice but I wonder how Mr. Risen does with his.

One thing Mr. Risen makes clear through the book is the incredible bureaucratic headwind that anyone has to walk into to accomplish anything in the intelligence business for the security of the country. In fact he says that very thing repeatedly throughout the book. At one point in the book, he points out that the National Security apparatus is ill suited to fight a war on terror, and gives the best evidence as the information found in the 9/11 report, which says much to that effect.

Yet over and over gain Mr. Risen excoriates President Bush for not taking the advice of the very organization he works so hard to discredit by publishing this book, that being the CIA. The CIA comes across as a disorganized, disheveled group not even capable of doing a job as even as competent as FEMA did in Hurricane Katrina. Yet, President Bush gets a finger wagging from Mr. Risen for not listening to these learned men whom even Mr. Risen clearly marks as having dropped the ball and left the nation lost and dithering during its dire time of need.

Throughout the reading of the book I kept asking myself what I would do if I were President and I was faced with a CIA that was contradictory in its intelligence findings, inconsistent in its delivery and sometimes working overtime against my administration by leaking to the press outside of any consideration for national security.

I wondered how we could be so lucky to have elected a man who had the patience to put up with that kind of crap and still manage to get the job done with such dignity and grace.

Posted @ January 08, 2006 08:52 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Liveblogging "State Of War"

Page 6 of the Prologue reveals this lovely nugget regarding how far the CIA had collapsed during the 1990's:

"Thanks to Vice President Al Gore, for example, the CIA briefly made the global environment one of its priorities."

Let me get this straight. At a time when the United States had already been attacked in 1993 with the first WTC bombing, when terrorists were blowing up our embassies in Africa, When the USS Cole was attacked, under direction by the Vice President - the CIA was looking into how our insatiable desire for SUV's was ruining the "global environment"? un-freakin-believe-able...

I'd like to see more on this. I'd love to see the source for this.

Posted @ January 08, 2006 10:02 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

2006 'Nostradamus' Predicts

Sure I’m late with this but I was on vacation last week, so here it goes...

Summary:

For those people over the age of 40 2006 will replace 1968 as the most pivotal year in our lives.

I believe we are sitting on the edge of conditions that are similar to the very worst and most dangerous years of the cold war.

Also, this year marks the beginning of the retirement of the baby boomers and the effect on the economy will be staggering. Each year of the next 10 years will result in a condition that almost none of us has ever seen except in a temporary basis; a shortage of workers. Those that are employable will find 2006 the beginning of very good times indeed as we are entering an era of a severe shortage of workers. This is not paradise, it has its own problems and we have almost no idea how to deal with them.

2006 will also mark the most significant change in the nations press as a public revolt will occur over the continued release of classified information in vague hopes of “getting Bush” will be increasingly seen to be working against the interests of the public. Shareholder takeovers of several failing media organizations will result in some organizations undergoing a political realignment.

Here’s the general breakdown of some of the things I think might happen in 2006.

The Good

- There will be a military strike against Iran. It will be sudden and it will be comprehensive, similar to Operation Desert Storm. It will not be the Israelis who do it, it will be the US, under UN sanction as a result of Iran doing something that cannot be sanctioned by anyone anywhere and that is 'embarrasing the Europeans'. Afterwards, the government of Iran crumble.

- The German Government will indict Gerhard Schroeder after scrutiny of his actions with GAZPROM. The result of the investigations will ignite a scandal, which will spread across all European governments.

- Fidel Castro will die. With any luck, it will also be a painful lingering death.

- Democrats will lose seats in the House and the Senate, but Howard Dean will proclaim it as a success. After losing yet another “cant lose” election, Howard Dean will be removed as head of the Democrat Party. The effect will be to split the Democrats along ideological lines, which will require a generation spent in exile to resolve.

- All charges against Scooter Libby will be dropped.

- Bush will lose his temper at a Press Conference. His angry response will cause his ratings will go up 10%. It will mark the beginning of a public war against the press by the administration.

- Several reporters will be jailed as a result of the release of classified information. Several members of the CIA and the NSA and the judiciary will also be indicted for espionage as a result of their efforts. It will have what is called a “chilling effect” on the press. While the press will be irritated beyond belief, American public sentiment will rise against the abuses of the press.

- The Bush Administration will begin to release recordings of tapped phone calls that are intercepted between Terrorists. One recording will be of an active member of the western press talking to a known terrorist.

- Zarkarwi will be killed by Iraqis. Zawahiri will be captured by Americans. Bin Laden will be found to have died by his own hand. All thee actions will be immediately ignored by the press.

- Several ‘big media’ organizations will undergo severe ideological transformation due to management changes brought on by shareholder revolts as a result of continued losses. Some will become even more leftist under the argument that they can provide the market with the “opposite of Fox”, while others will work to “outfox fox”. Bloggers will be increasingly integrated side by side with so called “professional” journalists further blurring the lines between the two.

The Bad

- General Motors will declare bankruptcy as a way to negate the hideously stupid contracts with the UAW. General Motors will come out of bankruptcy, lean, mean, efficient and profitable (not to mention smaller) but it will mark the end of the UAW as a force in American political life. The bankruptcy will rock the stock market for months.

- An American Military officer will be arrested by a European Government for “War Crimes” as a way to put President Bush on trial by proxy.

- Hugo Chavez will begin to openly support the revolt in Chiapas and will begin funding Communist revolution throughout Central America. He will begin to court Americans to support his “revolution”. There will be many who support him supplanting their previous support for the now dead Castro for support of Chavez.

- While Castro will die this year, nothing will change in Cuba as Raul Castro steps in to take his brothers place.

- Cheney will leave office for health reasons. His replacement will not be a Senator.

- Nancy Pelosi will step down as House Minority Leader.

- Harry Reid will resign from office.

- John Kerry will announce a significant health event that will impact his holding of the office of Senator. Ted Kennedy will suffer a life threatening and career ending stroke or heart attack. The state Government of Massachusetts will make extraordinary moves to ensure that Democrats replace both Senators, rather than a choice made by their Republican governor.

- The Canadian government will topple this year. Twice. It will come into question whether Canada can be governed. For the first time, serious consideration by Canadians will be given to the breakup of Canada.

The Ugly

- The economy will slow, not because of oil prices, inflation, taxation or global warming, but because of a lack of available employees to allow companies to grow fast enough to maintain revenue.

- Iran will explode a nuclear weapon before the end of the summer. The result will be isolation of Iran by the International community. The world will stand on the brink of nuclear war for the first time since the Cuban Missile crisis.

- Israel will demonstrate a sub launched missile system.

- President Bush will have at least one attempt on his life this year, not by terrorists, but by a ‘crazed lone gunman’. The press will bend over backwards to excuse the act of the madman as somehow “justified” further inflaming public ire against the press.

- China will invade North Korea after Kim Il Sung is killed in a Chinese sponsored coup. China will not call it an “invasion”, but that’s what it will be. The Chinese Border will be blockaded by China and the invasion will come from the sea with the aid of the Russian Navy. It will possibly be dressed up as an attempt to relieve the famine. America, South Korea and the world will look the other way. North Korea will remain isolated, but it will essentially become a prefecture of China.

Ok, they are all 'Wild Ass Guesses', but at least I didnt do what this meathead did.

Posted @ January 06, 2006 11:47 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6)

Coal Mining Deaths

Now that everyone has decided to play a game of j'accuse with the American Coal Industry, I thought I'd toss out a few facts that are not being dicussed in regards to the record of American Coal Companies.

Coal mine accidents killed some 2,700 people in the first half of 2005 alone in China, where c