State of Disgrace

OK, I'll come right out and admit it, I can't watch these spectacles anymore. I'm already on blood pressure medication, and such shameful displays from our government as George Bush's final State of the Union address, would just send my diastolic through the roof. I'll read the transcript and a few choice stories about it after the fact, but sit through it? No, I would sooner have some dental work done sans novocaine.

What honest assessment could conclude other than that the state of our Union is nothing short of catastrophic? It seems now that a substantial fraction of Americans have finally come round to this conclusion, judging from recent polling that suggests upwards of 75% of Americans feel the country is on the wrong track. Disaffection with the status quo can also be seen in the much stronger interest in the Democratic presidential race than that of the Republicans. But, you would not necessarily know this if you simply listened to, and worse yet, believed, any of the drivel coming out of Mr. Bush's mouth the other night. Indeed, given the long, documented record of Bush and Co.'s outright lies, distortions and abuse of the truth, one can fairly ask the question, should the media even be obligated to cover such a pathetic spectacle? For in doing so, a strong argument can be made that they are simply providing a platform for Mr. Bush to continue to "catapult the propaganda" (his words). At any rate, perhaps a compromise would be to agree to cover the speech, but only with proper warning labels; "viewers be advised, this speaker has a long history of really shoveling the shit!"

And what of the Senators, House members, and other select government pooh-bahs in attendance? Is it really their "duty" to applaud, indeed, provide the occasional standing ovation, for this mendacious mediocrity? Was there anything he said that was worthy of praise? The gross overstatement of "success" in Iraq perhaps? A "success" that has destroyed a country, and precipitated the death of upwards of 1 million of its citizens. Worthy of applause? I think not. If I should have found myself so unfortunate as to be present in the House chamber, my hands would have been sore from being sat upon. Shame on any Congress member to applaud such suffering; shame, shame.

This version was really more of the same old nonsense: cut taxes, bring the 9/11 perpetrators to justice (really, again, after abandoning Bin Laden in Tora Bora for the invasion of Iraq)! Democratize the Middle East, blah, blah. Predictably, there was also the usual dose of fear. Perhaps Bush's most audacious attempt to browbeat Americans into giving up yet more of their rights was his "threat" to veto a Congressional extension of the FISA law if it does not also contain retroactive immunity for the telecom giants who aided and abetted Mr. Bush's illegal spying operation. Forgive me, I misspoke, the terrorist surveillance program (sounds a lot nicer that way doesn't it). As Keith Olbermann has eloquently pointed out in a recent commentary, this one is truly astonishing. Bush wants us to believe that he absolutely requires the new FISA to protect us--a claim, by the way, that has been thoroughly debunked, most recently by Richard Clarke--but he's willing to veto it if it doesn't also contain the telecom immunity provisions. So, by his own reasoning, he's willing to put defending the telecoms from expensive litigation ahead of protecting us from terrorists! By immunizing the telecoms Bush is providing a de facto immunity for himself and his cronies in crime. Viewed in that light, such a gambit should come as no surprise to most Americans, it simply evidences the impunity and arrogance which have been the hallmarks of this catastrophic administration.

Miracle Amish Heater!

I was in Boston the other night on some work-related travel, and after a busy day and a nice dinner I went back to my hotel room to decompress a little before retiring. I usually don't read the USA Today, but since it had been delivered free of charge to the room, I thought I would just flip through and see what I had missed all day (if anything). Anyway, I came upon this full page ad in the sports section (shown here in these two images). The more I read through it the funnier it got. If you were not looking at the fine print you might at first think it was a story, right, it looks like a story, but the finer print indicates it is an ad. The title just really caught my attention, "Amish man's new miracle idea..." From the headline and picture you might think that this righteous Amish gentleman had just invented some new heater technology, and now he's bringing it to the rest of the world. Note the well dressed gent with the "coveted" Underwriters Laboratory sign (it actually says coveted in the caption)! However, if you guessed that you would be wrong! For one thing, it's incongruous, the Amish are famous for shunning technology, so how could he come up with some new heater concept if he wouldn't even turn a light bulb on in his lab! Heck, for that matter what lab, about the only thing he could have in there without violating half a dozen tenets of his faith would be a bunsen burner.

Well, if you read the fine print, and look at the rest of the ad (pictured below), you will see that they are in fact hawking heaters, the "Heat Surge" fireless flame (whatever that means) in fact, and from the China coast to boot (wherever that is)! But, the wacky thing is that you don't buy the heaters, you get the heaters for "free" if you just purchase a genuine Amish mantle! According to the ad, the Heat Surge is a $249 value, but if you purchase the genuine Amish mantles, then you get the heaters for free, and it just so happens that the mantles cost $249 too! You have to act fast though, because they are imposing a strict limit of only two per household, wouldn't want someone to get too warm I guess. Apparently "entire communities of Amish craftsmen are straining to keep up with winter demands..."

If we go back to the headline, one wonders what the Amish man's miracle idea was to begin with, teaming up with the UL suit in the main photo perhaps? I like the photo on the right showing a pair of heaters being shipped out by horse and buggy! Also note the US map with the Frigid, Cold and Frost zones, with the Frost zone extending all the way down to balmy Miami.

I don't know if it's funny or sad the way that these advertisers try to "sell" using the Amish "brand." Also, the ad is so over-the-top in almost every respect that one wonders if it's all just a scam and the Amish are not really making the mantles. There is a web-site, but if you look you will see that "mantels" is mispelled, and the English usage is poor in spots, so that suggests to me that they may just be trying to scam on the good reputation of the Amish as excellent craftsmen.

Drive-by Spam

Since a few months ago, this is what my driveway looks like after only a few days! Suddenly, and I do mean suddenly, we have become the target for every flier, news-daily, pamphlet, you name it! I don't subscribe to any of these periodicals, and in general I don't even look at them, but I do have to pick them up and recycle them, or throw them in the trash because they have gotten soaking wet (which is at least 50% of the time). Although it may seem trivial, there is literally something there everyday, so it becomes a pain to have to deal with it.

I guess I first noticed the increase in these pamplets just prior to the end of daylight savings time. I'm not sure what triggered the onslaught, because prior to then I can only remember getting two such fliers in a week, both local Laurel community newspapers. I didn't read those regularly either, but at least it wasn't a major effort keeping the driveway clear. I've only seen the deliverers of this "driveway spam" on several occasions, but never when they were gracing my driveway with their wares. One time was further up my block, I was driving the other way, and the guy was just hurling them over the roof of his car. Apparently the acceptable "drop zone" is anywhere within about 20 feet of the end of the driveway. Perhaps there's a way to get the deliveries stopped, but I haven't quite reached the level of frustration required to get it sorted. Anyway, if you happen to be driving by my house or pulling into the driveway, watch yourself as you get out, you just might have to duck an incoming pamphlet!

Don't get fooled again...

Early Monday morning in the Straits of Hormuz several Iranian Navy patrol boats approached or encountered US warships. The subsequent media accounts of the encounter are now well known, and, undoubtedly many Americans believe that the Iranian ships approached the US ships with aggressive intent. The standard media narrative perpetuated by CNN, Fox News, CBS News and others, is that the US ships were within seconds of opening fire on the Iranian boats, and that the Iranians had broadcast a message threatening the US vessels with explosives. Several high-ranking officials in the Bush administration commented on the Iranian "provocation," including Bush himself, and attempted to use the incident to further support the notion that Iran represents an imminent threat to peace in the region. Aside from the quoting of anonymous Pentagon and administration sources, the primary evidence supporting this narrative were rather unspecific video images of the Iranian boats as well as a partly garbled radio transmission suggesting some threatening action. However, nowhere in the video is there any direct evidence of the boats "running at" the US ships. And the audio "threat" is of such dubious quality that it is hard to take it very seriously. This is all beginning to sound like another fictitious naval "attack," that ostensibly occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin, and that was used to justify the bombing of North Vietnam, isn't it?

Now today we learn that the US version of events is indeed unraveling. Gareth Porter reported today several startling revelations concerning the incident:

1) It appears that US officials spliced the audio containing the alleged "threat" onto the video of the patrol boats, in an attempt to suggest that the threat came directly from the Iranian boats. It appears that such audio "chatter" among ships and boats in this war zone is rather common, perhaps not surprisingly so, given the nature of hostilities.

2) US naval commanders in the region confirm that none of the US ship commanders felt their ships to be threatened and felt no need to issue any warnings to the Iranian boats that they would be fired upon.

3) The Iranian government has released videotape (with audio) that suggests a much less confrontational encounter between the US ships and Iranian boats. Just for laughs, this is what one of the Iranian boats looks like. It really is a boat, and not a ship! While fast patrol boats can represent a real threat if armed with torpedoes or anti-ship missiles, these boats are not in that category, and it is difficult to believe that a seasoned US ship commander would regard such a craft as an imminent threat to the safety of his ship.

Based on these revelations it now appears rather likely that the episode was "engineered" by the administration for the purposes of attempting to escalate the rhetoric against Iran, perhaps to politically support Bush's weakened position with his Mideast allies in the advent of the release of the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) indicating that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program. It seems reasonable to presume that the Iranian boats did encounter or approach the Navy vessels, but that nothing particularly sinister happened. The event was then seized upon by the Bush administration for its own political purposes, and the servile US media were more than happy to run with the story and blow it completely out of proportion.

Indeed, it appears that it is easier to dupe the mainstream US media than it is to steal the proverbial candy from the baby. How many times has the Bush administration fed the media a pack of lies, and had those lies spread across the front pages? Let's just name a few, WMD in Iraq; Saddam in cahoots with Al Qaeda; and most recently, Iran on the verge of nuclear weapons! Based on these examples, one can safely conclude that the media consider it their duty to simply report whatever Government officials tell them to report, with essentially no independent verification. And the more confrontational and sensational the "story," then so much the better for their ratings. This is more like the behavior of a State-run press, rather than a free one. After the WMD fiasco a number of major media outlets expressed regrets for "missing" the story, and published their obligatory mea culpas, and then it was back to business as usual, "..let's get fooled again."

What other insights can we draw from this incident? Several worthy of deeper inspection are the deeply ingrained stereotypes and double standards exhibited by our media, but also by many of us with regard to other peoples and nations. Consider, for example, the response that would ensue if Iranian naval vessels were to take up patrolling positions in international waters off the coast of say, New York or Washington? We know what the response would be, it would be considered an act of war and it is not hard to imagine that hostilities would inevitably result. Nevertheless, we expect that when we send large Naval task forces into the territorial waters of another nation, a nation we have threatened and whose neighbor we have invaded, that they should show the utmost restraint and respect. The double standard, the arrogance of our position is truly astonishing. Only the brain-washed or willfully blind could fail to see it. Unless we can overcome such deep-seated prejudices, our future as a Nation will continue to be filled with war.

18.5 minutes

Perhaps the most famous case of destruction of evidence is the 18.5 minute gap that appears on one of the Nixon White House tapes associated with the Watergate scandal. After the existence of the tapes had become known, and portions of them had been subpoenaed by special counsel Archibald Cox, White House secretary Rose Mary Woods testified that she may have "erased" upwards of five minutes of conversations accidentally. However, the Advisory Panel on White House Tapes subsequently concluded that Ms. Woods 5 minute gap was inconsequential, and that the 18.5 minutes of erasure was deliberate. To this day it is still not known if any incriminating evidence was destroyed by the erasure.

Now we have learned that the CIA has "out-Nixoned" Richard Nixon, likely by many hours, if not days! Officials at the CIA have admitted to destroying video tapes of the interrogations of several high profile Al Qaeda suspects. It has virtually been admitted that the tapes contain graphic footage of the abuse and torture of these individuals, probably including details of the administrations' interpretation of waterboarding. CIA head Michael Hayden, in a statement that would make Orwell turn over in his grave, informed us that the tapes posed a "serious security risk," and therefore had to be destroyed. This is so patently false that it barely warrants refutation. For one thing, if true, what would it say about the CIA's ability to keep National Security information under its control protected? Or does the agency fear an inevitable leak of the material by one of it's own employees? Either way it doesn't paint a very comforting picture of supposedly the nation's top intelligence outfit, does it? Of course, the only risk involved in the existence of the tapes, and the real reason for their destruction, is the very real risk of criminal prosecution to those who ordered and carried out the torture allegedly captured on the videos. Moreover, since these suspects were purportedly "big fish" operatives, it would also seem likely that in this case the chain of command went up pretty high, perhaps as high as the "torturer in chief" himself.

As usual, Congress has fiddled and done nothing. Republicans that had been informed of the existence of the tapes, and their destruction, didn't even bat an eye. This is par for the course for the "Rubberstampicans", but it also appears that the handful of Democrats so notified, including "Lieberman-wannabe," representative Jane Harmon (she of the recent "Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act"), and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Jay Rockefeller, also turned a blind eye. Let's hope that some kind of investigation is initiated, after all, Nixon got far worse for a lousy 18.5 minutes.

Chaos

If you have kids then you know that they can be like little "Maxwell Demons," exuding massive quantities of entropy at fantastic rates. For the thermodynamically challenged, "Maxwell's Demon" was an imaginary agent introduced in a thought experiment by the famous physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell hypothesized that the actions of such a demon might lead to a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This law states that in any closed system entropy always increases. If you're also a little fuzzy on entropy, then just think disorder, or better yet, chaos. As can be seen in these photos, if you regard my house as a closed system, then my two youngest kids always see to it that entropy never decreases.

The physical quantities that seem to create the most entropy in my house are "toys" and "laundry." Here, laundry is to be considered any article of clothing that has been worn for at least 5 minutes, and or removed from a drawer and not replaced within an hour. Invariably, through a process that can only be revealed on a need-to-know basis, these articles make there way to the bottom of the basement stairs, where they accumulate until it becomes nearly impossible to pass by without twisting your ankle. Then they are moved to the hallway in front of the laundry room (as in the photo on the right), and eventually, hopefully, are laundered and put back in the correct clothes drawer, ready to begin the process anew. I shudder to think what fraction of our electric bill is due to laundry!

While laundry is a cyclical process, "toys" can be a more persistent source of chaos. They get taken out, distributed around the house, and often mixed together, so that it becomes difficult to keep pieces of a given toy in the same area, or even floor. One then has a "melting pot" of trains, cars, balls, weebles, you name it. And once the weebles get mixed in with the country bumpkins, then all bets are off! Eventually, a critical level of confusion is reached, and then it's more than likely that the whole pile of offending items will be bagged up together, and eventually removed to an undisclosed location, which I would not give up even under the most extreme torture. The most annoying items are those large things which can end up dominating a room, as in the collapsible house in the photo above. At least now it's in the basement, and not occupying half of the living room! Toys are an especially touchy subject these days, as it is only mere weeks before a whole new set of objects will be entering my life. Happy Holidays!

One turkey to another

One turkey pardons another. This is one of the Thanksgiving "traditions" that rather irks me. Are we supposed to think that Mr. Bush is as beneficent as Oz because he ostensibly pardons a single turkey on Thanksgiving? The origin of the turkey pardon is unclear. Some suggest that Truman inaugurated the practice, but solid evidence of this is lacking. I wonder what Iraqis would make of this bizarre stunt? The man with a heart big enough to spare a pair of turkeys seems to not have the same concern for them, or kids with no healh insurance, for that matter.

Have you ever wondered what fate befalls these lucky birds after their photo-ops? Actually, the birds are provided by the National Turkey Federation (NTF), and they are raised and groomed solely for their presidential appearance. Afterwards, they are given plum posts at petting zoos or farms, but the birds are often so large that they don't live to turkey old-age.