- Rampaging red squirrels in France
- Kashmiri militants, meet bear. Bear, eat militants.
- Dead bison stink really bad: South Dakota meat producer abandons meat storage locker full of 44 tons of kosher bison, and the power gets cut for nonpayment.
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The Federal Protective Service, tasked to provide security to US government office buildings (like the one that Susan and I work out of in downtown Chicago) is in trouble; the Government Accountability Office ran teams through and past the security at several such buildings, bringing in bomb materials.
Numerous US government web sites were downed or struggling under a 50,000 strong zombie PC DDoS attack thought to have begun from North Korean sources. As a government web person, this is not a happy thought…
The governments of Mali and Algeria are teaming up to smush a local Al Qaeda spinoff in the western Sahara. Of course, Algeria has been sponsoring Polisario in the Western Sahara for decades, but *that’s* the terrorists that they like.
The endless ethnic nationalist guerilla war against the central Burmese government goes on, as noted in this story about the Kachins.
Oil wealth, Chinese connections and the changes in Equatorial Guinea.
Archie Andrews goes to India; Bollywood film at 11. I wanna see how Sugar, Sugar translates into Hindi! Rang Rang Mere…catchy title.
…and I also find the idea of political murder and terror repugnant. I understand that you find Dick Cheney a sadistic MF, or a Army recruiter someone who is hurting your co-religionists by supporting the war, or you find Dr. Tiller a baby-killer.
Fine. Then work constructively to bring people to justice, or to outlaw abortions, or to end the war. Don’t go out and kill people over their politics or for doing things that are legal where they are done. Political murder and assassination is wrong. Such things lead to — the death of Gandhi himself, because he didn’t hate enough. It’s terror, no matter how you slice it.
…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.
I’m beginning to think that Dick Cheney and company can’t tell the difference between repeats of 24 and reality. Of course, it’s coming to look a lot like he had the idea from the beginning that there had to be a pony at the bottom of that dungpile - er, that there had to be a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam, and that nothing else made sense. So, even if those idiots in the field say X is cooperating and spilling his guts, let’s amp up the terror and torture the ‘truth’ about those links that Dick knew had to be there. And would justify anything else that they wanted to do later for the world and the American voters.
This really is the explosive charge, because it reveals the real danger of torture in the hands of big government: it means our leaders can manufacture facts to justify anything.
“You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.”
Or this:
If we eliminate the idea that torture works; if we eliminate the fact that the terror suspects who were tortured had previously revealed valuable information without being tortured; if we factor in the reality that these techniques were invented in order to gather intentionally false confessions; and if we look at the evidence showing that detainees were tortured so they would specifically connect Iraq and al-Qaeda, we’re left with no conclusion other than this. Or sadism as sport.
I cannot imagine what sort of dark cloud some of these people live in. Or the people who are justifying torture ‘just in case’ and ignoring the laws against it calling themselves civilized.
Some GIS professor thinks that by using his systems for tracking flora and fauna that he’s figured out where Osama bin Laden is. I think it’s crap, but he might find the ghost of Marlon Perkins.
Article about Michael Isikoff of Newsweek’s latest investigative direction: that the internal DOJ oversight office delivered a report to the Attorney General under Bush that said, essentially, that the DOJ’s legal papers from John Yoo and others that backed up torture with a film of legal justification were BS that were way off the line of legal research and were basically worthless; the AG sent it back with a ‘how dare you’ response and tried to deep-six it.
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.
Secret Service agent in nearby Naperville notes the terrible, snowy weather and all sorts of reports of terrible commuting situations this morning, and decided to take the commuter train this morning. Never took the train before. Suddenly realized ‘hey, I have a gun on me, I should figure out about train security’, so he says something like ‘Hey, I have a gun, what’s security like on the train? Any metal detectors?’ to the ticket counter guy at the Naperville station. Then, he gets on the train without IDing himself as a Secret Service guy or cop or anything. DING DING DING DING!!!!
He gets taken OFF the train by the Lisle (our town, next stop) cops at gunpoint with semi-automatic cop stuff. Schools call me at home and say they’re in lockdown. The entire commuter train line suddenly went into lockdown, stranding a zillion commuters. And the guy’s brain went into lockdown, apparently.
Be interesting to know how much trouble the guy got into with work over that one.
..of the Bush administration, a casualty of the war on terror, troubled and victimized soul that he is.
- Hedge Fund founder who lost a serious bundle in the Madoff ponzi scheme commits suicide, and no, he didn’t jump out a window.
- The radical Israeli settlers in the West Bank are a political nightmare that any government will have serious problems with and neither main party coalition wants to deal with. Of course, government policies for a LONG time promoting hardshell settlers with lots of government support and funds created this mess in the first place.
- Pat Robertson now thinks Bush is a bumbling schmuck who has mismanaged things terribly, and has nothing but praise for Obama. *faint*
HBO production and presently running on that network. My take on it is that it’s a once-funny; I have a hard time watching gangster movies because I really don’t get off on people beating and killing each other, especially if the people involved doing the beating are serious scum. This is SOPRANOS GO BAGHDAD; it’s really pretty well done, but not for anyone with an easily grossed-out stomach from the extreme violence. It’s good for what it is, but what it is the life of a sociopath monster. Three buckets of blood out of four.
Zimbabwe is a complex subject, and the complexities have gotten a whole lot rougher on the inhabitants as time passes by. Europeans under Cecil Rhodes marched in in the ned of the 1800s and took control of the land from the local chiefs, and passed out all sorts of claims to white settlers, who set up solid and profitable ranches and farms all over the colony. (It was one of the areas of Africa that Europeans could deal with the local bug population, let alone the climate, Kenya and South Africa being others, to a point where they’d be interested in settling down there in numbers. )
Eventually, Britain wanted to join the two (Northern and Southern) Rhodesias with Nyasaland into One Big Colony in the 1950s to create a new colonial nation-state under a white-minority rule, but the African nationalist groups that were on the rise didn’t want that at all. (In most of Africa, the Europeans were the creators of national/colonial boundaries, and those had zero to do with ethnic and cultural groups that were present before The White Guys came.) Eventually, the ‘federation’ broke up, and the three states were all slated for black-majority rule statues in the early 1960s.
Southern Rhodesia, however, wasn’t interested. The number of white settlers there were MUCH higher than the other states, and more were rolling in all the time. In 1927, the white/black numbers were roughly 40k/920k; in 1947 80k/1640k, and then the white numbers really jumped, to around 330k at the highest, but never exceeded 6% of the total population.
The Whites ran the show, and had a good life with about 50% of the land of the colony in their hands, and the colony prospered - most especially the white colonists. Finally, they declared themselves Independent of Britain in 1965, and intended to run their semi-apartheid state by themselves forever.
Yes, there’s a lot of similarities with South Africa. There’s a reason. The blacks in the majority never were allowed to have any political power, and about at the same time, the black nationalists went to the bush as guerrillas to armed battle with the government. In Rhodesia, the battle was aimed at the settlers on the farms and the raids and international shunning finally led to the white-led government handing over power to a new black-majority government in 1980.
The problem since then can be cut down to have / have not problems with the economy, and political power issues. Simply put, the people who have held power in Zimbabwe since the early 1980s were the black guerrilla leaders of the past who originally had (at least on the surface) Marxist leanings and saw the whites as the Oppressor Class. Problem was that the whites also had the capital, the education and the know-how to keep the economy humming, and after Zimbabwe became a black-majority state, the external sanctions came down and the country boomed.
Land ownership in particular was a sore spot, and land reform started after 1980 to return white settler lands to black ownership - with an aim to get small landowners set up on their own to make a good go of it. The problem was that not that many whites wanted to sell out, and that even after the whites were politically forced (including at gunpoint) to start selling out, the land didn’t go to the poor farmers-in-waiting - most went to big shots in the Single Party Revolutionary Fighters government and army.
The result was that the remaining whites fled with whatever they could take with them, and the One Big Party under Robert Mugabe, the surviving guerilla leader, ran the country as a brutal kleptocracy. And the result was that the business and farming that kept the country going went to pieces - cutting open the golden goose doesn’t get you any golden eggs and all that. The value of the currency has gone to nothing. Nobody has money to buy food or keep up sanitation, or get clean water, and a cholera epidemic is running wild in Zimbabwe, and businesses, schools and hospitals have collapsed.
The situation has deteriorated to such a degree that soldiers — Mr. Mugabe’s enduring muscle — rioted last week on the streets of the capital, breaking windows and looting stores, after waiting days in bank lines without being able to withdraw their meager salaries from cash-short tellers. A midlevel officer who participated in the mayhem, but spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of prosecution, said troops were enraged that they could no longer afford to buy food or send their children to school.
The response to this is - more brutality, and statements about how either there is no cholera, or it’s really a British chemical bioweapon aimed at bringing the state to its knees, or it’s some other type of invasion plot by foreigners. And regardless of the beatings and the rhetoric, the people suffer and die.
From the New York Times…one more place for fear:
The origins of India’s Jews remain uncertain, but according to some accounts they may have come as emissaries from the court of King Solomon. They established communities and lived peacefully with Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and, later, Muslims. The absence of anti-Semitism throughout this history has been a source of pride in India.
“This is one of the few countries where Jews never faced discrimination and persecution,” said Ezekiel Isaac Malekar, a leader of the Jewish community in New Delhi.
Jews played a prominent role in several coastal cities, but nowhere more so than in Mumbai. Jewish merchants from Iraq, Syria and other Middle Eastern countries arrived in the late 18th century in what was then British Bombay and quickly established themselves as leading businessmen, opening textile mills and international trading companies.
Only about 200 of these so-called Baghdadi Jews remain in Mumbai, with the rest having immigrated to Israel, Britain and the United States. But their legacy endures: synagogues, libraries and schools, many of which serve Jews and non-Jews. They also financed the construction of several city landmarks, including the Flora Fountain and the Sassoon docks.
Today, most of Mumbai’s Jews have roots in a group known as the Bene Israel community, which claims to be descended from seven Jewish families who were shipwrecked on India’s shore while fleeing persecution in the Galilee during the second century B.C. Over the centuries, they adopted Indian language, dress and cuisine. Since India became independent, these Jews have often played influential roles in Indian society, including in government and Bollywood.
“We always felt we were Indians first and Jews second,” said Mr. Malekar, a Bene Israel Jew.
OMG. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade just got Rickrolled. By Astley himself. Totally SFW, and hilarious if you get the whole rickroll joke.
And reformers can be undone by machines, when they trade their aspirations for power:
Guy in Florida decides to take out a billboard, showing the Twin Towers on fire and promoting his song “Please Don’t Vote for a Democrat” on it. Photo of the billboard, some lyrics after the cut.
I’d take the stupid song apart with a cleaver, but after having to deal with that New Yorker cover, I want to Whack At Stupid all over the place with Mr. Louisville Slugger.
…and besides, unlike the wife, I’ve never gotten through his works.
Regular readers will note that the tags I put on posts are plentiful and sometimes sound goofy; that may be because it’s conceptual shorthand to me. ‘kubler-ross’, ‘renmin’, or ’sep_reality’, for example. The first has to deal with posts on death and dying, the second has to deal with the corruptions of the Chinese Communist Party system, and the last has to do with who think they can make up their own reality as they go along, and has most pointedly been used against George W Bush and his pals for this sort of thing:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
I have studied this at length. Maybe it’s because of my love of understanding The Big Picture, maybe my love of historical alternates, my love of politics, or a number of allied areas. Certainly, it’s from my deep dislike of people’s approaches to life that involve huge amounts of denial and fantasy to avoid things. I can understand a little of it; but I’ve seen too many that let it take over their lives.
The central component of the Bushian approach is to use propaganda, PR and control of the methods and means of communication to build up a shining concept of what they’re doing that will ensure, as my grandmother would have put it, that ‘their $h!t don’t stink’. If someone calls you on it, pull out the blackjacks (metaphorically speaking) and either pressure them into silence or drown them out in loud catcalls.
Of course, the problem with this approach is that such people are sure of their situation, sure that they’re going to get away with whatever, and will scrap to the end to push it. They are not terribly interested in doing something for the public good, but for the good of their bloc of supporters and their internal safety net, and loyalty to The Vision, whatever the party line happens to be today, is paramount.
Which means that while they can and will hire good, expensive lawyers to throw at you as necessary, anyone inside that group tends to have a poor and unclear notion about what’s *really* going on. Competence isn’t important if loyalty is, and having your internal idea that the world is supposed to work this way because the party line requires it will blind you to the oncoming truck on your side of the road.
Another element here is that you can’t deal with Bad News. You don’t admit that it exists. If the house is on fire because you were smoking in bed, you can either deny that the dropped cigarette and lighter caused it, or blame it on an outside plot, or deny that the house is on fire at all.
It’s a funny sort of morale thing. Bush has said over and over that he doesn’t admit to mistakes except in the most empirical manner possible, and admitting defeat openly would cause everyone in Bushco, troops, whatever, to lose hope in the greater vision, so you don’t admit that either. There’s no recession coming, no oil crisis, no failures in Iraq, no nothing. Unless he can figure out a way to blame it on the people he opposes.
When it was pointed out that drilling in the coastal regions and ANWR would not produce any extra oil for many years, and not much at that, McCain said - well, yeah, but the psychological impact of knowing that that oil would be on the way someday would cause everything to be all right in the oil markets now, so it’s the only answer to the crisis. (Bush has said that sort of thing tons of times before, as if believing that there’s no crisis will fix things.)
Going over McCain’s campaign stuff, it’s obvious that there’s a major disconnect in what he says to which people. The only things that seem to be constant are re-iterations of Bush’s policies - which he gives to red-meat Bush followers.
To the rest, he throws out references to his older stands in an oblique ‘trust me, you know I’m a good guy maverick’ manner that leans on his 2000 race. But if you start trying to pin him down to specific policies, especially ‘what do you do to fix Bush’s mess’ or ‘how do you differ from Bush’, the specifics vanish. Everything becomes very vague or aspirational (”I’d like to have the war over by 2013″ ) with no plan as to how you get there.
Even how he intends to maintain the burden of the tax cuts (and more tax cuts) and the war and whatnot is vague. He keeps going on about cutting pork, but so did Bush, and it sure didn’t happen.
Solving any problem becomes a matter of applying message control. Tell the EPA you don’t want to read their email that says CO2 needs to be regulated. Set up a photo-op but neglect to send help. Deregulate to ‘get the government off the backs of business’ to the point that business can do anything it wants - put out contaminated food and drugs, inflate the price of oil, you name it.
Right now, hearings are going on where the the regulators of oil and other commodities are admitting they haven’t a clue as to what’s the ‘real’ price of oil or how much the commodity traders and hedge funds have pushed the prices into the stratosphere. Part of it is that they’ve been told at the highest levels and through controls placed on them by Bush and McCain (such as the ‘Enron loophole’) that they’re not really supposed to regulate or enforce the regulations in any meaningful way, so why should they keep that close track of things?
But the real situation comes back to bite at the worst times.
Spend no money on government programs that don’t include sizable rakeoffs for your supporters…and borrow rather than tax. If you can endlessly spend and borrow more, who cares about paying it off someday?
But no money for vital infrastructure, and roads, bridges, canals, levees, dams and whatnot fall apart. No money for education, and the level of the schools goes to hell.
Ignore the injured and damaged warriors, and you don’t have to spend any money on the saps that bought the part about ‘fighting for freedom’ while you gut the Constitution and let your pals get rich from war profiteering. Ignore the hurricanes and the floods and the damage therefrom and have your battier supporters blame it on God’s Wrath that we don’t toast faggots over an open fire and let them Parade In The Streets - rather than spend money on the little guy.
This isn’t Republicanism. This isn’t Conservativism. This is just blind greed and a sloppy, stupid will to power. This is ’screw-you-jack-I-got-mine’ at its worst.
And there’s a very good chance that people are seeing through this because it’s gotten pretty damn obvious enough that they can’t run the country anywhere but into the ground. Now, if we can just keep people from going on about Flag pins or who-knows-Osama-might-kill-you-if-you-do
Or if it isn’t coming, scare people into believing it might, and that a black guy with an ay-rab name might just join in and show his deep moo-slim self.
Some issues-oriented campaign.
…according to a Tennessee Democratic central committeeman.
“My statement that Senator Obama ‘may be terrorist-connected’ was incorrect and I apologize for making it,” former state Rep. Fred Hobbs said in a letter to fellow Democratic Executive Committee members.
Mr. Hobbs, a former Eagleville mayor, said his comments “did reflect questions I had after what I had seen reported on Fox News, but I should have taken some time to check the accuracy of what I saw on television before speaking publicly.”
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