As some of you may have sussed out, since November of 2007, I’ve been working 99% of the time out of my basement office…with a huge long line of doctor’s excuses, bases on either my non-healing foot wound, or my weak response to infections casing raging problems on and off.  The office finally said that they couldn’t do this as a temporary thing any more, and that I’d have to file for a ‘reasonable accommodation’ – i.e, a permanent excuse to work from home, giving me the right to get work to supply certain work-related things that I would need to do this.

The first step was the gathering of enough medical stuff to prove my case, which ended with me almost sending them around 300 pages of medical results from the last ten years.

The second step was in defining what I would need to work from home that the office would provide, and I was told to ask for whatever I legitimately needed.  This resulted in me asking for a work PC, with all the necesary web-crafting software, a color laser, various office supplies, and an office chair.

I haven’t had a proper office chair down here for a while.  Part of the problem is my weight, part my height and width and so on.  The office chair I had at the office was around $900, and I can’t justify that – but when you spend a LOT of time in it, as I do, you need something that is comfortable and works.   (Right now, I have a sturdy chair from the dining room, but it’s not built for the use levels.)

The problem now is getting all this stuff to actually get here, and that’s turning into more of a mess than I dreamed, as various people are doing a it’s-their-deal thing of tossing around the responsibilities of getting these items going.   Amazing bureaucratic nonsense, and I’ve been a bureaucrat for 26 years as of today and seen a lot of silliness in my time.

Another tricky element is the PC; since there were a flurry of situations a few years ago about government workers who were being schmucks leaving laptops around with a lot of personal staff info or patient info – the federal government has been on a bender on security issues.

Bruce Schneier can speak more to this than I can, but the powers that be seem to be going to considerable lengths on internal security issues, from the apparent concept of There’s No Such Thing As Going Overboard.   A lot of it seems to be more ways of getting things checked off of a checklist and getting gold stars from the Powers That Be that they were diligent than whether the measures taken are worthwhile or work.

So I have to get a mountain of paperwork and approvals for anything that goes on that machine, including software that the agency bought for me three years ago – and that’s just the start of it all.   At this rate, I’ll be lucky to get it here and working by March.

I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all.  But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to a limited cell of rumors and scares will support all sorts of wild stuff out of ignorance and fear, and fail to take this sort of thing apart and think it all through.

Nutballs in American political life were there from the beginning – look at the nastiness during the Adams and Jefferson administration, under Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Truman, and so on.  There’s been two big red scares (right after the first and second World Wars), and a lot of people fighting anything that smells like change.

They fought immigration from ‘those people’ – first non-English speaking Europeans, then non-Protestants, non-Europeans, and so on.  They fought changes in the laws to give anyone voting and citizenship rights…removing rules that kept Catholics, non-property owners and the like off the voting rolls.  Not to mention non-Christians.  And letting people who aren’t our kind into office?  Oh!

They fought taxation of any kind.  They fought any kind of consumer protection, including drug safety and food safety.  They fought public schools.  They fought paper money, banking, lending, interstate commerce, the internet and highways, and practically everything that they considered despicable progress.    They fought separation of church and state, because they desired their religion’s rules to trump everyone else’s.

They fought medicine and science and public health.  They fought innoculations, public water systems and sanitation laws. They fought educational reform; if the Bible and a switch were good enough for them, it was good enough for you.

They fought slavery in favor of indentured servitude (think serfs, and they were white and British) because they hated foreigners, and then fought against freedom for the black slaves that came over to America against their will, and they fought homesteaders.  And yes, there were fanatics like John Brown who fought against slavery but didn’t give much of a damn who died in the process, and bushwhackers like Quantrill and Jesse James who killed and laid waste in the opposite direction.

They fought freedom of expression and gun ownership by other people who didn’t fit their mind of real people.

They closed their eyes to intolerance, poverty, hate, misery, ignorance and want, out-scrooging every Scrooge.  They become stooges, in many cases, for much more moneyed and wanna-be-powerful interests.  And very often, those interests proceeded to screw the ignorant over just as much and thoroughly as anyone else, because the powerful who used them didn’t care who got worked over.  They fought reforms of banks and recoveries from panics and recessions and depressions because they felt that the government shouldn’t help anyone.

They become shills, endlessly repeating total nonsense.  They get sucked into buying tons of extra ammo and gold and survival equipment by scare merchants who advise them that the Boogie Man is right around the corner – or become dittohead drones to people who advise them to trust Nobody But Them aginst All Those Commies Out There.

Here’s a sampling of some; cut to avoid disturbing your stomach.  I remembered plenty of this from my own experience, and had to do a little research to give specifically connected links.

I have no problem with political debate.  I have every problem with organizing people to shut down political debate with threats and screaming.  And it deeply bothers me to see how many people don’t think before they act, vote or rant about whatever.

I know Marxists, and nobody in the Administration’s top is a Marxist, unless your definition has no connection to real life.   I see people rant at town halls about the evils of socialized medicine, and go home and thank God for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and never realize the problem with this.   I see people gripe about potholed roads and collapsing bridges and about how there should be no local taxes and never get the connection that no taxes = no public anything.

And I am tired of politicians who lie through their teeth for political power, regardless of the cost to all but their buds – whether it’s Richie Daley trying to tapdance about how the Olympics won’t cost Chicago anything, or the GOP leadership / politicians refusing to  care about anything but trying to destroy Obama  as a lesson to the rest of us and pandering to the most whacked out elements of their base.  That was the reason why I left the Republican party years ago; I believed in government’s role for the general good, and in things like honest government for the general good, and the GOP leadership stopped doing that.

When environmental protection comes down to ‘don’t worry, the rapture is coming’, I can’t support that.

…from Think Progress.   Give it a look for a summary of why it’s major bad news, if you didn’t know that already…unless you think you’re Jack Bauer or something.

As Jesse Ventura said on The View:

“If waterboarding is OK, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what they know?” he asked. “If waterboarding is OK, why didn’t we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? … We only seem to waterboard Muslims… Have we waterboarded anyone else? Name me someone else who has been waterboarded.”

And no, I don’t care if half the Democratic leadership knew something about the bad stuff pulled off by Bush; they should have had the guts to stand up at the time and say - NO - but they apparently didn’t.  Them being gutless wonders is not a reason to excuse anyone else from prosecution.  The more in the dock or politically dealt with and squished on this, no problem.

My focus is on justice, the law, and good government.  Torture and other arbitrary government crap has caused an awful pile of hurt to most all of us in some form from the past; just ask a Japanese-American whose family was in internment camps during WW2, or blacks who had to deal with government-backed racism in the South (or North, and I’m talking the Bull Connor sort of thing), or those of us out there who have family who were destroyed in the Holocaust or disappeared in the Gulags behind the Iron Curtain.

Another note on torture issues.   This post seems to put it all together that the prime people who got good, reliable information in World War 2 were people who followed the same gold standard we followed before George W Bush changed things around; that torture is only good for causing people to suffer and say whatever you tell them to say.   To get them to lie, to get them to scream (and doesn’t it sound lovely?) while you get off thinking you’re Jack freaking Bauer.

There’s been a tag on this journal for a while - sep_reality - and almost all of the tag instances are for situations where people were living in fantasyland, where they could make their own rules and create their own world where you are little people and they are the Big Bad Boss.    Where they could  trick themselves and others into believing that they knew their butt from a hole in the ground, and were running the show with endless ease.   The best trick, of course, was getting you to not understand what they were doing, and think it was awesomely awesome.

Somehow, through mindless showings of 24, or Kyriakou’s ‘torture made them sing’ stuff, now proven to be false, people got the very wrong idea that brave torturers got the goods on the bad guys and made ‘em fess up, saving us all.    And then the secret memos from the insiders started coming out of the Department of Justice and other areas, basically saying that people using the gold standard of persuasion got everything out of the Al Qaeda dudes, and then People With Orders came in and tortured the terrorists many dozens of times in a month’s time, demanding more information.  Information they didn’t have.

My guess is that as more things come out, the specific questions they wanted answered will come out.  And my strong bet is that the entire point of that torture was to get a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, something they could then present as a ‘Saddam did this, let’s get him’ excuse to invade Iraq.

I don’t know this, and I certainly have no love lost for Al Qaeda or Saddam.  But I don’t like it when people lie to me to get me to support them in something they wanna do because I’d never support it otherwise.  As an American, I would hope that we’re better than that.

And frankly, the people who gainsay ooh-go-torture forget the long history of this country towards the protection of the rights of the individual.  Watch this clip from A MAN FROM ALL SEASONS, about the need for the law, and you see, perhaps, that once you allow the law to fall, you may be the next one up when you end up on the wrong side of people who have more power than you do.   Manzanar can be rebuilt for new tenants anytime, and with less reason.

Gitmo: People reviewing the cases of prisoners are finding out that there’s really no solid files as such on anyone,  and that a lot of material is suspect or worthless - and scattered, disorganized and fifth-hand.   The realization is coming through that people were supposed to get confessions and information first and worry about anything else waaaaaaaay later, and that bunches of people in Gitmo and the other ‘black’ jails, like the taxi-drivers in Abu Ghraib, were just Joe Blows scooped up in a wide net and tortured at length for information they didn’t have.

25. The written statement allegedly containing Mohammed’s confession and thumbprint is in Farsi. Mohammed does not read, write, or speak Farsi. There are several factual assertions in the statement that are false, including Mohammed’s name, his father’s name, his grandfather’s name, his uncle’s name, his residence, his current residence, his age, and an assertion that he speaks English. The statement’s account of the grenade attack — the responsibility for which the statement ascribes solely to Mohammed — conflicts with the eyewitness accounts of the American victims. Yet, it was this statement that Respondents and their agents primarily relied on as a basis for Mohammed’s detention, and for the charges brought against him in the Guantanamo Military Commissions.\

That was written by one of the prosecutors, folks.

He was the lead prosecutor against a detainee, Mohammed Jawad, until he resigned last September. After spending over a year on the case, he became convinced that the government had no good case against Jawad, that Jawad had been badly mistreated and was suffering serious psychological harm, and that continuing to hold him was “something beyond a travesty.” (p. 1) That’s why he wrote the declaration in question, in support of Jawad’s habeas petition.

..of the Bush administration, a casualty of the war on terror, troubled and victimized soul that he is.

W. Mark Felt obituary in the Washington Post.

“As Deep Throat, Felt helped establish the principle that our highest government officials are subject to the Constitution and the laws of the land,” the prosecutor, John W. Nields, wrote in The Washington Post in 2005. “Yet when it came to the Weather Underground bag jobs, he seems not to have been aware that this same principle applied to him.”

Details after the cut.

From the Bailout plan: Sec. 8. Review. Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

So we give you 700 billion dollars without any kind of accountability or oversight?  To spend as you like?

This sounds like the rest of the Bush Presidency.  Profligate, no accountability, run by people who didn’t belive there was a real problem until a couple of weeks ago, and without any sort of a real plan whatsoever aside of ‘turst me’.  And heavy on the unlimited power for the hell of it.

The last time we did that with George W. Bush, the price tag was only supposed to be $50 billion, and the Iraqis would pay us back for it.

No.

Hell, no.

I know who I trust and don’t trust to have a frickin’ clue. and these guys are not clueful.  And they (’let the market be free of all these awful regulations, it will know best’) were part of the crew that created this mess (as are the people reviewing this in the Banking committees).   I’d feel more comfortable making Meredith the Czarina of all the Russias than to have these guys figure out how to blow 700 billion more for the benefit of the fat cats.

Seems that the lack of vetting that McCain did was the same that Bush did. (starts singing from Fiddler on the Roof here)

Next time around, I suggest that they use a divining rod or the Urim and Thummim - especially if it’s Romney.

Julia Child, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Arthur Goldberg - spied for America. Amongst others…

Very good article that explains the real limits of Chinese power down the road.  Here’s a mix of his points and some of my thoughts on the matter:

• Cheap labor and fair access to markets is about their main strengths.  Quality is not as important if the manufacturers can slide by.
• Labor is starting to price itself out of the basement, and the real dirt-cheap producers are looking elsewhere - like Vietnam.  In some cases, the manufacturers are finding out that the endless parade of people in government wanting a cut of the action are getting to be endless.  And expensive.
• Chinese aren’t innovating, they’re just cheaping things out. 99% of what they’re doing is innovated somewhere else, in regards to true innovation.
• They’re depending on massive, continuous, unending growth. This is impossible. Eventually, the growth is going to hit a limit.
• The Chinese - both people and manufacturers - are consuming huge quantities of raw materials, stripping their own country bare and polluting the heck out of it. Long before they’re done producing, the quality of life and the lack of arable, unpolluted land is going to smother them.  Or upset the masses enough to say enough-is-enough.
• Health care is China is absurdly bad, and this and the pollution is going to catch up with them.
• The demographics are going to hell in a handbasket. Because of the one-child policy and the way it’s been implemented, there’s going to be a lot of unmarried guys unemployed and looking for work and women that aren’t available, and there’s going to be a ton of elderly with no visible means of support (in the hundreds of millions, reaching a third of a billion in the not-too-distant future). There’s no pensions as a rule or Social Security in China - you depend on your kids. What kids?
• Too much corruption means that there’s too much of a leakage on all costs - you put X amount into a business or a government project, and too much of it gets trickled off and too little gets done in an effective manner. This will only work out so long as the spigot is full and juicy. If it ever dies down, watch out.  The inner contract between The Party and the people is that the gravy keeps rolling in, and the party controls things. 
• Too much government control and corruption in government is a situation ready for a long-term collapse and a drying up of further innovations in favor of cash cows to keep the bribes flowing.
• The government is subsidizing a lot of things, such as gasoline and diesel, but this becomes a constant drain that can never be cut off without open revolts in the streets.

Susan and I recently added HBO onto our cable lineup to catch RECOUNT and the JOHN ADAMS series, amongst other stuff.  The RECOUNT-connected documentary HACKING DEMOCRACY was on, and we found it fascinating and troubling.

The story of the documentary was about a woman who founded a citizen’s group called Black Box Voting, which concerns itself with ways that US voting machines can be torqued around with by some clever guys to screw with the vote totals…and the start of the group’s activities involved the founder running into the software for a BIG voting machine company on an open FTP site of the company (right off their open website, apparently).

When the word got out that she had the software, there was an uproar from the company, needless to say.  As the documentary goes on, you learn that the company is big on secrecy and statements about how secure their systems are, and short on actually securing it.

Susan said something like - well, if we ran across that sort of a find, who the hell would we pass it on to?  Her answer was - Bruce Schneier.  (As I’ve known Bruce for around 30 years, since he was in high school, I thought that was an interesting idea…)  Or at least he’d know who to send it to…

Want a secret passage in your house so that you can decamp off to your Batcave or private library?  Try these guys.  They Don’t Work Cheap.

(h/t to Ysabetwordsmith, who is a golden god of blogging neat stuff.)

The Veteran’s Affairs Department’s head of mental health states that there’s no suicide epidemic amongst returning Iraqi War vets - and gets caught with top-secret internal emails that admit that the stated amounts are BS, and that around 1000 suicide attempts a month take place:

But in this e-mail to his top media advisor, written two months ago, Katz appears to be saying something very different, stating: “Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our metical facilities.”

Katz’s e-mail was written shortly after the VA provided CBS News data showing there were only 790 attempted suicides in all 2007 - a fraction of Katz’s estimate.

“This 12,000 attempted suicides per year shows clearly, without a doubt, that there is an epidemic of suicide among veterans,” said Paul Sullivan of Veterans for Common Sense.

And it appears that Katz went out of his way to conceal these numbers.

First, he titled his e-mail: “Not for the CBS News Interview Request.”

He opened it with “Shh!” - as in keep it quiet - before ending with
“Is this something we should (carefully) address … before someone stumbles on it?”

1. Yes, the man’s a ferocious hypocrite, and what he did was unethical and illegal and he prosecuted people running prostitution rings as a DA.
2. But why isn’t David Vitter’s butt similarly on the line?  Both of their involvement was as johns only, and both portrayed themselves as Defenders Of What Is Good and Right.   The NY state GOP is screaming for him to resign at once, but we sure didn’t hear that elsewhere from them about - oh, Giuliani, for one - or other people who did it in bathrooms, did Congressional pages, etc?
3. Why are major efforts going on from the FBI, the IRS and the DOJ to uncover someone in bed with hookers (and expensive ones, too!) who happens to be a crusading Democrat while they refuse to prosecute Republicans - and, in fact, fire a bunch of US attorneys because they weren’t sufficiently politically motivated in their prosecutions?
4. Especially after the Siegleman case in Alabama, this whole major effort to catch a john and charge him with the christly Mann act (taking women across state lines for immoral purposes, which was supposed to stop mobsters and the intrastate shipping of prostitutes en mass to big-city brothels) just amazes me.  I can’t remember the last time they did that one.
5. Major efforts by the feds to catch some local hookers?  No, they admit they were going after Spitzer and happened to run into the hooker stuff.  So why not just pass that on to some local?
6. I think about those rooms that say FEDS IN HERE KEEP OUT in the telco offices, and wonder at what they’re picking up and about whom, and how it gets passed along and for what.  As in, what if the idea is that the same information they swear is going to be gently treated and used on terrorists from abroad starts being applied to ‘how to sink our political enemies and political threats”?
7. The problem is that once the idea of the DOJ being used for political prosecutions starts up, it’s really hard to avoid the thought that anyone is fair game thereafter. Justice becomes ‘who do you know and what sort of leverage do you have with them’ and the People In Charge don’t worry about obeying the laws; they control the enforcers.

The real reason that Bush is demanding the Telco immunity clause in the FISA-oid act has nothing to do with suits against the telcos that helped him spy on people - in regard to the telcos being hurt monetarily by the suits.  The telcos were indemnified by Bush.   What the result of the suits would be is that the telcos would say: “George Bush was asking us to spy on Rich Rostrom, Jim Rittenhouse, and all the rest of the citizens of the USA, without any connection to terrorism’, which is screamingly illegal.  Bush never wants that to see the light of day.

Someone page Dick Cheney and the Glomar Explorer. Five undersea cables that carry internet traffic in the Middle East have been cut one by one in sequence. I thought this was weird, and Terry Karney is telling us what his thoughts are - as in someone wanted to tap the suckers. Can’t imagine who.

The rundown of cut cables in the region includes the FLAG Europe-Asia cable near Alexandria, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran, SeaMeWe-4 near Alexandria, SeaMeWe-4 near Penang, Malaysia, and FLAG near the Dubai coast.

See also this map and article. I don’t know if I buy all of the stuff in this article, but there’s some interesting further details there.

Bruce Schneier blogs on this.   More interesting postings here, here, along with a Neil Stephenson story on laying cable in Wired, and an article on the UK interception of the Zimmerman telegram due to undersea cables being cut.

There was a fire in Cheney’s office this morning. The shredder must have overheated with all those tapes from the CIA going through it.

The reviewers say: two thumbs up with special merit for sinking fast in the Potomac.

“It is by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer has done what has been done.”

Cardinal Richelieu, in The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

See inside for an analysis of the fallout  I expect from the CIA  torture tapes destruction.