april 29,2008:

oh what a tangled web we weave, etc. now that candidates from both parties are proposing a 'gas tax holiday' it's time to think more about--gasp--honesty. i know that 'honesty' and 'politics' are normally mutually exclusive sets, but this latest gambit is laughable.

gasoline prices are up one dollar per gallon from a year ago, up $1.50 from ten years ago. oil company profits are up by a higher percentage than that. and so, has anyone looked at taking a 'holiday' from the tax-breaks given to the oil cartel? it would be much more fair and would yield a greater drop in the price of gasoline.

i realize that an increase is the gas tax is political suicide at this point, but since Bush never asked the US people to sacrifice anything to support the war effort, we have rather lost the concept of shared national endeavor.

during world war II, americans had to use government issued ration coupons to buy nearly everything, shoes, meat, gasoline, everything was limited because it was being used for the war effort. what were we told for this iraq war, in fact what was the first call right after the 9-11 attacks? "come back to Manhattan and go shopping." that sickened me. i've been opposed to this war since before it began, but to hear some drastic tragedy combined with a commercial announcement was nauseating.

but back to the tax manipulation: it won't change prices, it has to come from your pocket or from the bulging deficit, it won't start until mid-2009 (safely after the election), and it probably will be ignored by that time anyway.

don't buy it, it is an utter load of shit. if we weren't voting in 6 months, no one would be talking about it. tell them all what fucking liars they are and that we see through it all.

march 12, 2008:

i'm getting a little tired of listening to arguments over "experience" and how much is required to make a candidate an effective president.

it doesn't take long to discover that sometimes 'experience' has gone along with a good president, and other times, having 'experience' has given us really awful presidents. you can look at almost any assortment of former presidents that you care to select and it is easy to see that honesty and effectiveness simply doesn't correlate to 'experience'.

march 07, 2008:

this video experiment might be fun, or it might be a disaster. it's easier than typing out long thoughts, but in most cases it makes the use of words less precise and less effective. so there probably will be typed entries between the video bits.

these video things won't be intricate and elaborate bits of cinema, they might as well be radio. but maybe from time to time i will get some fun out of editing in little graphics and other tidbits to entice people to have some fun. and with that disclaimer, here's one more lie that is coming on strong from at least two of the current three presidential candidates:

march 30, 2006: why iraq?

almost everyone has asked, "why attack iraq?" the WMD ploy was obviously fake, the links to al'quaeda were so far fetched as to be laughable. we all have asked, and most directly, helen thomas has asked when no other news reporter dared.

we may never get a truthful answer, but the voices need to get louder and louder until everyone on capitol hill, in shock of massive job insecurity, demands a real answer. or else they decide to censure the liar-in-chief.

read richard cohen on this matter here

march 28, 2006: what we are dying for in iraq...

i'm a few days late posting this, but better late than never.

media are continually accused of 'not reporting the good news from iraq', but even if you hype the hell out of a rebuilt school or the sale of more cellphones, the real, and very bloody, state of the 'free and democratic iraq' still pokes its ugly face through the door.

from the New York Times of March 26:

"Mohannad al-Azawi had just finished sprinkling food in his bird cages at his pet shop in south Baghdad, when three carloads of gunmen pulled up."

"In front of a crowd, he was grabbed by his shirt and driven off."

"...Mr. Azawi's body was found the next morning at a sewage treatment plant. A slight man who raised nightingales, he had been hogtied, drilled with power tools and shot."

"There were the four Duleimi brothers, Khalid, Tarek, Taleb and Salaam, seized from their home in front of their wives. And Achmed Abdulsalam, last seen at a checkpoint in his freshly painted BMW and found dead under a bridge two days later. And Mushtak al-Nidawi, a law student nicknamed Titanic for his Leonardo DiCaprio good looks, whose body was returned to his family with his skull chopped in half."

" 'This is sectarian cleansing,' said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of Parliament, who has maintained a degree of neutrality between Shiites and Sunnis."

"Mr. Othman said there were atrocities on each side. 'But what is different is when Shiites get killed by suicide bombs, everyone comes together to fight the Sunni terrorists,' he said. 'When Shiites kill Sunnis, there is no response, because much of this killing is done by militias connected to the government.' "

read the whole article here.

does this qualify as civil war? perhaps, perhaps not yet. but if the 'new' government is connected to this sort of slaughter of supposedly fellow citizens, how is this any better than the Saddam regime? and what has our 2,000+ dead brought to the US? or to the iraqis?

march 24, 2006: the american talban, part II...

the absurdity of our king george and his fetish with a ‘democratized’ iraq and afghanistan is pointed up by the latest hot story from kabul.

we attacked afghaistan with the goal of ousting the talib theocracy. well, we did and we didn’t. the afghanis now have an alleged constitution (as does george’s second victim, iraq). but the constitution is essentially a document that codifies the same old theocracy. as i said long ago, western institutions are simply irrelevant in that part of the world. there is no history of, no experience with, and no real desire for a US-style constitutional government. george’s obsession to give everyone a republic like the US is about as logical as giving a 6 year old a kit to build a full-size Ferrari (with instructions in ancient greek): it is something that just cant be understood, much less accomplished.

so now that the US has ‘liberated’ afghanistan from the taliban and instituted a new constitution, we get this bit from our news: an afghan who proclaims his faith as christian, not muslim, is arrested and faces execution. the really funny part of this is that now the afghan court decided to give the man a psychiatric exam to determine his fitness for trial. “ ‘We think he could be mad. He is not a normal person. He doesn't talk like a normal person,’ prosecutor Sarinwal Zamari told The Associated Press.” read it here.

i also find it funny to read, on the same day as the article above, a piece about region and government in the US. “Under the auspices of its religion-based initiatives and other federal programs, the administration has funneled at least $157 million in grants to organizations run by political and ideological allies, according to federal grant documents and interviews.” read it here.

and so, are we any more free or more progressive in the US than the afghans are? perhaps only slightly. they have a de jure theocracy; we have a constitutional separation of religion and government, but we are still victimized by a de facto theocracy.

march 16, 2006: king george and the new, free and peaceful iraq...

just moments ago, the tv lit up with reports of “the largest US air attack on iraq since the war began”.

i have only one question: if iraq is so stable under the new ‘democracy’, if US troops have made such great strides, if the iraqi army and police have control of the nation, and if reconstruction is moving ahead on schedule, then why the fuck are we back to square one, bombing the shit out of this place?

march 10, 2006: king dubya? pope dubya? or der führer dubya?

in 1944, US vice-president Henry Wallace was asked about the dangers to American democracy from a Fascist regime. Read his response to the New York Times. i find some words of severe caution and some strong parallels to our current administration:

The Danger of American Fascism
By Henry A. Wallace
The New York Times
Sunday 09 April 1944

What is a fascist?
How many fascists have we?
How dangerous are they?

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.

The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America. The effect of the war has been to raise the cost of living in most Latin American countries much faster than the wages of labor. The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives. Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States. Following this war, technology will have reached such a point that it will be possible for Germans, using South America as a base, to cause us much more difficulty in World War III than they did in World War II. The military and landowning cliques in many South American countries will find it attractive financially to work with German fascist concerns as well as expedient from the standpoint of temporary power politics.

Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after "the present unpleasantness" ceases:

The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups. Likewise, many people whose patriotism is their proudest boast play Hitler's game by retailing distrust of our Allies and by giving currency to snide suspicions without foundation in fact.

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

Several leaders of industry in this country who have gained a new vision of the meaning of opportunity through co-operation with government have warned the public openly that there are some selfish groups in industry who are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage. We all know the part that the cartels played in bringing Hitler to power, and the rule the giant German trusts have played in Nazi conquests. Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us. The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. It was Mussolini's vaunted claim that he "made the trains run on time." In the end, however, he brought to the Italian people impoverishment and defeat. It was Hitler's claim that he eliminated all unemployment in Germany. Neither is there unemployment in a prison camp.

Democracy to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity to "make the trains run on time." It must develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels. As long as scientific research and inventive ingenuity outran our ability to devise social mechanisms to raise the living standards of the people, we may expect the liberal potential of the United States to increase. If this liberal potential is properly channeled, we may expect the area of freedom of the United States to increase. The problem is to spend up our rate of social invention in the service of the welfare of all the people.

The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan. Democracy can win the peace only if it does two things:

Speeds up the rate of political and economic inventions so that both production and, especially, distribution can match in their power and practical effect on the daily life of the common man the immense and growing volume of scientific research, mechanical invention and management technique. Vivifies with the greatest intensity the spiritual processes which are both the foundation and the very essence of democracy.

The moral and spiritual aspects of both personal and international relationships have a practical bearing which so-called practical men deny. This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy. Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum created by the power of modern inventions, we may expect the fascists to increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the world.

Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.

It should also be evident that exhibitions of the native brand of fascism are not confined to any single section, class or religion. Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or religion. It may be encountered in Wall Street, Main Street or Tobacco Road. Some even suspect that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac. It is an infectious disease, and we must all be on our guard against intolerance, bigotry and the pretension of invidious distinction. But if we put our trust in the common sense of common men and "with malice toward none and charity for all" go forward on the great adventure of making political, economic and social democracy a practical reality, we shall not fail.

march 2, 2006: how stupid are americans?

CNN just ran the stupidest piece that i have run across in mainstream media. the premise of the story was that “film (specifically the academy awards selection process) is ‘out of touch’ with middle america”. (the piece was flawed from the start, assuming that the geographical center of the US—Lebanon, Kansas—represents the center of the american mind. this is as illogical as assuming that the geographical center of Asia—Kyzyl, Siberia—is the political and sociological center of Asia. but i will avoid that idiocy.)

this supposition that film should be in touch with middle america is absurd. all arts have at their basis a totally different conceit: art is a self-contained expression. art is not a popularity contest, it is not meant to placidly satisfy the greatest number of people.

film, indeed all arts, should be seen without interpretation, without any relativism, without conscious reference to politics, or personal belief, or private prejudice. even if the original motive of a producer or a studio or a politician is less than honest, less than artistic, creative expression can rise above baser designs to become art.

in the 1935 work “Triumph of the Will” and the 1938 work “Olympia,” Leni Riefenstahl created films that rose above the blatant nazi propagandizing. these two films exist today as masterworks of cinema. yes, if the viewer wants to interpret these with reference to Hitler and the nazi party, then they are truly offensive. who in their right mind would go out of the way to see an old nazi propaganda film? but when these movies are viewed strictly in their own context, they are brilliant and classic pieces of filmmaking at its best.

politics has often tried to impact artistic effort but it nearly always fails. in 1483, Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned to create an altarpiece that is now called “Madonna of the Rocks”. his first version did not comply with the standrards set by the monks of Milan, since the madonna was shown without

a halo. a second version was created with the halo that was called for in the contract. are both paintings really by Leonardo, or is the second one copied and changed by de Predis? it does not matter at all. if either work is to be seen as art and not as mere decoration (or worse, as propaganda) then it must be taken without regard to its popularity or its acceptance by the conventional thought of that time.

a decade ago, there was another absurd conflict over books in public school libraries in the US. while i won’t try to defend the many Stephen King books on the ‘banned’ lists, and i won’t get into factual books here, but a lot of great art was in this list: “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, “The Catcher in the Rye”,

“The Color Purple”, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, “James and the Giant Peach”, “Slaughterhouse-Five”, “Lord of the Flies”, there is a huge, huge list that is truly laughable.

the proposed banning of Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” is purportedly because of its descriptions of race in pre-civil war america. are we then to change the fact, and the art that often reflects life, and pretend that blacks were not treated as non-humans, treated as property in the history of the US? do we ban Holden Caulfield because we pretend that young people are never disaffected with societal conventions, that they never encounter a death or a suicide, that they are always smiley good boys who never use abrasive language? should america eschew Golding’s most famous book because it shows that people can behave like animals? would any of these things make the public more comfortable? maybe. would any of these things make these books better? or would making them more palatable to the masses simply make them vanish because their soul, their greatness, has been cut out?

so back to the CNN blurb that started all of this: in the video there is a little collection of blue-haired ladies, bell ringers from the local methodist church. and they admitted that none of them had seen, nor would they see, “brokeback mountain”. that is of course their prerogative. but when one of them, who never saw the film, who never read the annie proulx short story, said that she did not like all of the “sex and skin”, then we see exactly the problem with treating art and artistic awards as a plebiscite. if that old twat were to see brokeback, she would see more horse hide and sheep skin than human flesh.

ignorance perpetuates itself, ignorance it its own reward.

i know that hollywood is a business, and businesses have to please people in order to make money, and to survive. but to suggest that the MPAA members reward the films that satisfy the greatest number of people, whether or not those masses of people have seen a work, whether or not a film has artistic merit, is stupid beyond belief. even for a jackass source like CNN.

february 25, 2006: now i'm ready...

for those who don’t know, my site used to be independent of Badpuppy, with some of the cam hours and some of the videos offered to Badpuppy members. last month, i moved all of the content to the Badpuppy servers, so now Badpuppy members can get my 24/7 cam, and i can now offer the firefeed streaming cam for video and audio in my shows.

thanks to Lisa, Carol, Ferrell, and to Brad for helping me get this all set up and ready to go.

i am usually around my computer during most of the day, so drop in whenever you feel like it. if i am in the chat, say ‘Hi’. if i have time, i’d enjoy a chat (and maybe something more, you never know).

i’ll be announcing some shows next week, see you guys then.

february 12, 2006: dickie, get yer gun...

ok boys, i know that i have not posted anything to my blog in months. but the news has just become an incessant stream of depressing horrors from the bush administration. and i have not been able to dredge up any words more vivid than the black humor that is the truth about our government.

but this was just too funny, so i must comment.

so our vice president dick cheney shot a guy. these sportsmen were out hunting quail, and, when one man, lawyer Harry Whittington, separated from the group to fetch a downed bird, Whittington was blasted by cheney’s shotgun fire as he rejoined the band of merry hunters.

the riffs on this are really too numerous to count:

• it gives new meaning to the old NRA line “guns don’t kill people, people do”. of course the implication in the NRA’s use of the word “people” is “other people, not us, bad people, evil people”. like criminals, maniacs, drug addicts, terrorists. and, oh yeah, the vice president of the united states of america.
• perhaps cheney was depending on CIA intelligence reports to keep him abreast of Whittington’s whereabouts? if they got the iraqi weapons of mass destruction thing so terribly wrong, then they could be excused for the failure to track a dozen men carrying guns in close proximity to the #2 man in our government.
• Joel Achenbach of the Washington post points out that, while quail hunting may pass for military service in the well-heeled ranks of the bush administration, what remains untold about this event is whether cheney got the bird or not. or did he do another iraq and hit the harmless while totally missing the real target, bin laden?
• (a curious side note is that Whittington was appointed by then texas governor george w bush to the Texas Funeral Service Commission.) i can’t even think of anything funnier than that. cheney just wanted to help an old friend reach ‘a higher office’.
• Katharine Armstrong, the owner of the ranch were the shoot-em-up occurred, said that cheney was “deeply apologetic”. well, at least that is something. cheney has had a number of heart attacks, and he seems to have even more frequent heartless attacks.

the one thing that is not funny about this whole ‘the three stooges go hunting’ episode is that it was kept hushed up for 24 hours. now if an insignificant thing like this needs to be kept sotto voce, just ponder what really goes on inside the white house walls that we never hear about.

october 6, 2005: threat to the constitution…

keep your eyes on the constitution in the next two weeks. no, not the US constitution, the iraqi constitution. our own constitution is assaulted daily under the guise of ‘security’ as defined by our misleader, but at least we have one; the iraqis do not.

by october 15^th, the population of iraq must ratify the contested constitution by a two-thirds majority of all registered voters in 15 of the 18 provinces, or else the document fails and the whole process must start again from zero.

the iraqi transitional government tried last week to tinker with the rules, effectively changing “registered voters” to “participating voters”. it’s hard enough to pass a constitutional amendment in the US where it requires two-thirds of the actual ballots cast; it would be almost impossible in the US to pass an amendment by two-thirds of all registered voters. under pressure from the UN, the iraqi legislature gave up on this plan to rig the vote.

the sunnis are only about 20% of the population of the nation, but they are a majority of the population in a number of the provinces. even if we assume that the kurdish minority—also about 20% of the total population—agrees to ratify the document, the sunnis have the power to block the constitution, provided that enough of them are registered. they don’t need to cast a ‘no’ vote, they just need to be registered voters, and then not show up to cast a ‘yes’ vote in their majority provinces.

i’m not going to guess what will happen, but I would gamble that the election results will be contested (remember both of the most recent and most painful presidential elections in the US?). depending on how that challenge is settled, i see one of two things in the coming weeks: the constitution will not be ratified, and that will be the end of the transitional government as a body with even limited legitimacy; it will take years or eternity to impose a new governing council on iraq. or the constitution will be ratified by hook or by crook (now the iraqis can learn firsthand how it feels to have an election stolen from the voters, they could live in florida and never know the difference), and this will set off a storm of internal violence with which the US will be totally unable to cope. either way, we can look forward to what has lurked among the ruins of iraq since the US interfered: an out and out civil war inside iraq.

a civil war has been bantered around among the pundits here for years, and it is always spoken of as the worst-case scenario. we are barely keeping the insurgent fighters at bay today; every day, they nibble away at US forces and at the laughable iraqi national security and police forces.

so stay tuned to your favorite 24-hour news station next week; the bombs will increase right up through the day of the election. and after a week or so, the vote will be or won’t be given the feeble imprimatur of the transitional government. then the main event will begin.

and keep your ears open: how will georgie and donnie, the ‘dummy and rummy road show’, spin this one?

september 9, 2005: brown taken to the woodshed

FEMA director Michael brown was recalled to Washington, and had been replaced in New Orleans by Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen. While the bush administration tried to put a smiley-face on this event, portraying it as ‘business as usual,’ its clear that brown has effectively been punished like the spoiled juvenile that he is, sent to bed without his supper, so to speak.

as I note in the post below, brown—and the whole FEMA organization—is simply another impossible bureaucracy, like the IRS or your local DMV, so strapped in red tape and so accustomed to thinking inside the box, a very small box, that it is totally incapable of managing anything even slightly outside the routine. And for an agency whose job it is to quickly and effectively manage the unexpected and the emergent, this is a dismal, a horrendous way to do business.

but more than the obvious incompetence and cronyism that permeates the bush administration, brown exposes one more thing, perhaps a more critical one for the long term:

not one bush appointee has the vaguest concept of how real people live in america. Like his daddy’s shock at seeing a UPC scanner on his first photo-op visit to a supermarket, sonny bush and his buddies have no concept of how americans live in even the most routine of circumstances, and the post-Katrina New Orleans is the most un-routine of situations.

I can’t say it any better than brown said, when quoted about his plans for the immediate future:

I'm going to go home and walk my dog and hug my wife, and maybe get a good Mexican meal and a stiff margarita and a full night's sleep…

Parse his words with respect to how the people of New orleans would read them: I'm going to go home [how many in New Orleans still have a home that is not flattened or flooded?] and walk my dog [how many pets just drowned or starved following the failure to evacuate the people and drain the city?] and hug my wife, [wives without husbands, husband without wives, children without parents, either dead or simply ‘misplaced’ in the late and disorganized evacuation] and maybe get a good Mexican meal [a meal of any sort that might have forestalled the starvation, calmed a tiny bit of the desperations, served, not, piping hot on a tablecloth as brown’s will be, but out eaten clinging to a rooftop, above the flood, from a vinyl MRE pouch, cold and damp] and a stiff margarita [margarita? but in New Orleans thousands were slowly dehydrating—yet surrounded by undrinkable water—while FEMA turned away 3 Wal-Mart truckloads of bottled water, saying that ‘no one needed it’] and a full night's sleep…[something that no citizen of New Orleans has had since august 31]

the brown response, as well as the insular rich-boy gone bad attitude of the entire coterie that comprises the current administration, almost makes Marie Antoinette’s ‘if they have no bread, let them eat cake’ seem noble.

august 28, 2005: more vatican hypocrisy. so what else is new?

his holyshit pope benedict XVI (maybe it is really benedict XXX-rated) is drafting a document that will try to prevent gay men from becoming priests and discharging those gay men who are currently priests.

so why do I see this as hypocrisy not just bias? because if all priests are supposed to be celibate, ‘married to god’, then why does their sexual orientation make any difference at all?

or does this document then prove that the whole celibacy issue is not a matter of faith, but instead is a personnel policy, designed from the beginning to be a simple facade and a lie?

it's too easy to punch holes in your doctrinal logic, benny-boy, try again, dude. but think next time. at least make your lies marginally convincing.

august 21, 2005: four more years! four more years!

this week, the traditional re-election chant of ‘four more years!’ takes on a new tone and a new, far less celebratory voice.

General Peter Schoomaker, in discussing the planning for a withdrawal ‘target date,’ confessed that “We are now into '07-'09 in our planning…”.

Schoomaker…made no predictions about the pace of political progress in Iraq. But he said he was confident the Army could provide the current number of forces to fight the insurgency for many more years. — © Washington Post

since no one can chant ‘four more years’ for our prezdint (even if anyone, save a few Exxon execs, would dare wish this on our nation), His Royal Slyness, George the Dub, will be gone long before our dismal and futile commitment in iraq has ended. it's sort of like stepping in dog shit on a hot august day; you can scrape your shoe on the doormat, but you can’t get rid of it: the turd may be gone, but the smell lingers on. the big difference is that, in this case, we, the citizens of the US, are the doormat.

so, General Shoomaker, if there are ‘no predictions about the political progress’—the provisional government, so despised and mistrusted by those governed, the failure to agree on a constitution, the infighting over oil wealth, over tribal and religious differences, over power-sharing, and the constantly increasing ‘insurgent’ (read: disaffected citizens formerly of privelege, unfathomably diverse anticolonialists, indistinct nationalists, and relgious zealots of varying loyalty) the daily attacks, and the total lack of stability and security—then what do we have here? well I can make a few predictions about political progress, but since I already did this back in april 12 of last year, i won’t go into it all over again. just read my 18-month old assessment. “iraq always has been, and always will be, totally ungovernable as a single, united democracy.”

yes, the General is a military planner, not a political scientist. but he touched on the principal factor that forces us to look to 2009 and beyond as the time frame for our continued military presence in iraq. ‘no predictions about the political progress’. There will be no political progress, at least as far as we in the US call things ‘political progress’.

and as much as people refuse to equate iraq to vietnam, just wait 2 more years: everyone, save the few leftover, necrotic neo-cons, will be linking the two terms in their minds, and in their speech, and in their votes.

oh yeah, i almost forgot: the weapons of mass destruction, which were our justification for deposing saddam in the first place? vanished, like Ozymandius’ realm. perhaps a bit more on this last subject tomorrow…

august 18, 2005: new look

this site needed a few updates, and a little ‘cleaning up’ for a long time. early this summer, my friend, Steve, finally took it as a challenge to get this project started. so he came up with a new color and style theme for the site. (a million thanks, and a million kisses to you, steve).

i still desperately need to add some new photos, but i don’t have any yet; i am working on that next. i have added a few videos here and there over the past months and will add more as i get them ready.

as i noted on the homepage, and have said in my webcam FAQ for years, the server IP addresses and the internal links may change from time to time, so you should only bookmark and enter from the www.david7.com address. After any site updates, any bookmarks other than the homepage may not work.

thanks again to Steve for all the work on the new update.

august 5, 2005: aol wouldn’t do it, so i did

i’ve had a few persistent hackers/bandwidth thieves lately; they’ve been fucking with my cam transmissions. this few miscreants all traced back to aol ip addresses. now, i’ll admit that some poor dumb schmuck of an aol user could have had his non-secured computer hijacked by someone in ukraine or bahrain or wherever (i can’t really conceive of an aol user as having the brains to be a legitimate hacker; maybe it's a tech-savvy 13 year old, using mommy's computer), but that’s not my problem. it’s aol’s problem. and to a small degree, it’s your problem.

so after a month of inaction by those single-digit-IQ aol tech support folks, i have blocked a whole, big ol’ range of aol ip addresses from my cams. if you’re just an innocent dupe of the world’s most outdated and inadequate isp, then i pity you (for more reasons than one), and i’m sorry that my cams are switched off to a lot of you.

most of these addresses seem to be ‘aol for broadband’ ip’s (and what, may i ask, is the point of that? aol does not have any broadband infrastructure, never had any, never will: aol for broadband piggybacks the aol browser onto another cable/dsl provider’s system. so instead of paying your local cable/dsl provider for direct access, you are paying the broadband provider and paying aol a premium on top of that for the use of their horrid browser, and their ludicrous, underperforming email service.)

i have no options but to defend my own network. aol could defend theirs if they had the cash, the time, enough mentally acute personnel to do it, or enough pissed off subscribers to force them to do it. but they, as yet, have neither the motivation nor the resources to do it. you, of course, have the option of getting connected via a real isp, one that has some tech support service and some real security practices. (and if you use aol for broadband, you could get better email service and save yourself $25 bucks a month by using you local provider and skipping over the added ‘aol for broadband’ fees).

so don’t bitch to me, bitch to aol, (or to your dog, who may actually care more and listen better.)

aol sucks, it has always sucked, and from the looks of it, it will continue to suck until it hemorrhages enough subscribers to collapse under its own weight and inertia.

july 29, 2005: and, they’re off…

bill frist announces his 2008 presidential bid!

ok, ok, so he didn’t exactly use those words, it is very clear that this is his intent

senator frist has unabashedly supported the strict limits imposed on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research that were imposed by the bush crazy-christian coterie in 2001. he strongly defended the bush position as recently as july 18th of this year (that is less than two weeks ago, gang.)

but in light of the fact that frist can no longer hitch his political wagon to pope george dubya, and in light of the fact that poll results show an increasing bloc of americans are in support more federal funding of stem cell research, frist has little choice but to drop (or double-talk) his ‘moral’ position for the ‘politically popular’ position.

in the abc/washington post poll of april 2005, 63% of americans supported increased stem cell research, 28% opposed it. a newsweek poll of november 2004 showed that 50% favored federal funding of embryonic stem cell research and only 36% opposed it. and there are about three dozen other polls that show similar findings. that’s a big shift in a very shirt time, when the last elections have been decided by a very few percentage points.

not wanting to be the senate leader who votes against an upper house that seems poised to vote in favor of less tight-fisted and less tight-assed funding, the senate that will hand the white house a super-majority vote to override the bush veto of the bill, frist is getting his ducks in a row for a 2008 presidential bid. it will be interesting to see how he avoids the dreaded ‘flip-flopping’ charges that will surely follow him into 2008. i guess that it all depends on what ‘is’ is.

anyway the first horse is in the gate and waiting for the starter’s bell to ring.

it’s post time…

july 28, 2005: i guess that nasa really doesn't have a clue

well, last week, i asked if nasa knew what the fuck they were doing, and apparently the answer is ‘no, we’ve have our heads up our asses since the 80’s, and can’t see enough to get them out’.

two and a half years since the previous shuttle incinerated itself and its crew, we were one hour from lift off again and then ‘oops! is the gas gauge stuck on full when it should read empty?’ so it was another few weeks to test things out, and all the while saying, ‘we will never compromise safety; we will solve these problems before we fly again’. so they looked. and tested. and looked. and re-tested.

finally, they seemed to change their definition of ‘never compromise’ and ‘safety’, stating that, ‘we can’t find or reproduce the fuel sensor problem, so we will just ignore it next time (and cross out fingers that nothing on this flying bomb blows apart)’.

cool for me, if it is cool for them; i’m used to government departments lying and ‘redefining’ problems away. (you know, like way back, when the ford administration announced that ‘since a crisis cannot go on for this long, then there is no more energy crisis’; or when a few generals in iraq say that they do not have enough manpower and equipment to do the job, and rumsfeld just spins his head on his shoulders and misses the point entirely: ‘if any general asks for more, then he will get what he needs’. so are they not asking, rummy? or are you just spinning your words so fast that you cant hear?)

so this shuttle lifts off safely and all seems well. until they look at the videos: after 2.5 years, plus two weeks of delay, when all of the problems were supposed to be fixed (or deliberately ignored), at two minutes into the flight, another hunk of foam insulation falls off of the fuel tank. and this time, instead of denting the wing, does only ‘minor damage to the shuttle’s tiles’.

a few comments on the foam failure from today's New York Times:

NASA identified the area on the tank that shed the latest piece of foam as a risk, but put off redesigning it.

the deputy manager of the shuttle program, said that if the Discovery foam had been shed earlier, "we think that it would have been really bad."

A NASA engineer who has been involved in the return-to-flight effort said: "It's an ugly story. It's a mess." The engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issues involved, added, "Everyone's really, really disappointed," but continued: "It is what it is. Physics doesn't lie."

The Columbia and its crew were lost because a 1.67-pound piece of insulating foam that had fallen off the external tank during liftoff crashed through the leading edge of the shuttle's left wing... But NASA had noticed that the bipod arm ramp tended to shed foam and decided to redesign it. They planned to replace it [later]... The new piece of foam ...sheared off another 0.9-pound ramp on the external tank... NASA engineers estimated that no piece of foam would come off the external tank that was larger than three-hundredths of a pound, and said they hoped to see no foam debris larger than one-hundredth of a pound.

so let’s assess this again:

• each $2 billion shuttle was supposed to have a 10-year life span, and some of these birds are now seriously past their 'sell-by' date.
• each shuttle was supposed to do 7 - 10 launches per year for 10 years (30 – 60 flights per year for the whole fleet). the whole fleet has done 112 launches so far over the more than 20-year life of the program; this is not even close to the estimated minimum expectation of 25 flights per year.
• each mission was estimated to cost somewhere between 10 - 20 million per flight, not 600 million per launch.
• the original turnaround time was supposed to be two weeks, then the shuttle would be ready to fly again. it really takes about 5 or 6 months, and that does not count any big delays like accident investigations.
• and unlike the more primitive (but more successful) mercury, gemini, and apollo programs, it was never designed to have a crew escape feature.

so with the rest of the fleet grounded, and set to shut down completely in 2010, we will see if this flight lands, or is forced to park the crew in space until a Soyuz rescue vehicle can get them back to ground. a great vision, brought down by narrow-minded design.

and the whole thing fails due to a hunk of a beer-cooler styrofoam that wont stay stuck to the steel of the fuel tank.

give it up, boys.

july 25, 2005: throwing gasoline on the fire

just to remind us that we sparked a lot of this 'terrorist activity' that has this month, popped up globally:

What Bush Doesn't Know

By BOB HERBERT

I remember the arrogance that accompanied the "shock and awe" bombing campaign that kicked off the war in Iraq more than two years ago. The war was supposed to be quick and easy, a cakewalk. The enemy, we were told, would fold like a dinner napkin. And then, in the neoconservative fantasies of some of the crazier folks in the Bush crowd, the military would gear up for an invasion of Iran.

In one of the great deceptions in the history of American government, President Bush insisted to a nation traumatized by the Sept. 11 attacks that the invasion of Iraq was crucial to the success of the so-called war on terror.

"Some have argued that confronting the threat from Iraq could detract from the war against terror," said Mr. Bush in a speech in the fall of 2002 that was designed to drum up support for the invasion. "To the contrary, confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror."

In the speech, delivered in Cincinnati, Mr. Bush said of Iraq: "It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."

I've always urged politicians to be careful what they wish for. The president got the war he wanted so badly. But he never understood an essential fact that Georges Clemenceau learned nearly a century ago - that "it is easier to make war than to make peace."

So where are we, now that the real world has intervened? The military is spinning its wheels in the tragic and expensive quagmire of Iraq and there is no end to the conflict in sight. A front-page story in The Times on Sunday said the insurgents "just keep getting stronger and stronger."

As for the fight against terror, the news runs the gamut from bad to horrible. The Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik in Egypt was traumatized by a series of early-morning terrorist blasts on Saturday. London is trembling from the terror attacks on its public transportation system that have claimed dozens of lives.

Here in New York, where the police have begun random searches of the backpacks and packages of subway riders, there is an odd feeling of resignation mixed with periodic bouts of dread, as transit riders struggle with the belief that some kind of attack is bound to happen here.

Interviews over the past few days have shown that subway riders in New York almost instinctively understand what the president does not - that the war in Iraq is not making us safer here at home.

"No, in fact I think it makes us less safe here," said Edmond Lee, a salesman who lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "We went over there with no real plan. No real thinking about what we'd be able to do."

He said he was concerned that "what happened in the London Underground might happen here."

Memories of the destruction of the World Trade Center are still etched, as if with acid, in the minds of New Yorkers. Very few people are dovish when it comes to the war on terror. But Mr. Bush's war in Iraq is another matter.

"Our soldiers being over there make it worse here," said Michael Springfield, a 32-year-old engineer from Brooklyn.

One of the people encountered in the subway was Andy Dommen, a musician from Germany who was pushing a shopping cart filled with luggage. He made the fundamental distinction between Iraq and Al Qaeda and said the war in Iraq was a distraction that "was taking the public eye off" other important problems, namely the fight against terror.

"Messing up other countries," said Mr. Dommen, "doesn't make the world or America safer."

There is still no indication that the Bush administration recognizes the utter folly of its war in Iraq, which has been like a constant spray of gasoline on the fire of global terrorism. What was required in the aftermath of Sept. 11 was an intense, laserlike focus by America and its allies on Al Qaeda-type terrorism.

Instead, the Bush crowd saw its long dreamed of opportunity to impose its will on Iraq, which had nothing to do with the great tragedy of Sept. 11. Many thousands have paid a fearful price for that bit of ideological madness.

(c) 2005, The New York Times

July 12, 2005: does nasa know what the fuck they are doing?

it’s just funny now, not a tragi-comedy, just a good old slapstick, keystone cops bunch of idiocy and ineptitude.

just a few minutes ago, after a two and one half year wait, the much vaunted space shuttle was apparently all set to take off tomorrow on what is essentially another very expensive test run. With a 7 billion 760 million dollar budget, and costs of about $650 million dollars per shuttle launch, you’d think that these boobs would either give up on this keg of airborne dynamite which has a remarkable propensity to turn itself into cinders if the outer shell is so much as scratched, or close up the shop entirely. (If cars blew up each time a bug hit the windshield at 60 mph, I think that I’d ride the bus.)

so what happened this time, with less than 24 hours to launch and only a 10-minute launch window to work with? A plastic covering for one of the windows fell off and hit the fatally frail tiles. No, not during launch or re-entry, not during a tropical storm, the bloody thing was just sitting there, and a hunk of plastic falls off the window and bashes the tail. (If the windows can withstand the 3000º temperatures of reentry, why do they need a plastic cover in the first place? A bird-shit/visibility problem maybe?)

if the whole ‘manned spaceflight’ thing has some sort of national ‘feel-good’ implications, well, it does make me laugh with little idiot fuckups like this one. I don’t feel any national pride at this space-borne edsel, but it is getting to be a good, running joke.

but while the unmanned vehicles like the mars explorers have been great technical achievement at very modest cost, there is a nasa history of fucking up even relatively simple projects. Remember the famous Hubble Space Telescope? The one with the nearsighted, made by GM mirrors (OBJECTS MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR!)? After another $650 million shuttle flight to fix the mirrors, the thing is now nearly dead because it is so dependant on the regular shuttle flights that its orbit is now flawed and soon will be unrecoverable.

close the books and the chain of embarrassments on the befuddled shuttle and start over guys. You’ve had more than enough chances to save this ruptured duck of a project.