The American Police State: I Shot a Man In Reno Just to Watch Him Die

Arm the police with portable torture devices and some will use them to torture people. The latest incident was in Merced, CA where a cop twice used a Taser on a wheelchair-bound double amputee.

• In June police in Texas tasered a 72 year-old woman accused of speeding.
• In Phoenix police tasered and beat a pastor for resisting arrest for the crime of ... well he actually didn't do anything illegal except ask what he was being arrested for.
• In Seattle, back in 2005, a woman eight-months pregnant was tasered for not signing a ticket after a traffic stop.
• Certainly the worse case I could find was out of Boise, ID where police jammed a Taser up a man's rectum and fired.

Police have grown to love the Taser. It looks and feels like a gun but it doesn't kill (often, in the United States police using Tasers kill citizens on an average of once a week), instead it causes agony with the victim writhing in pain. Police have discovered torturing with a Taser is a lot more fun than killing with a gun. A Taser also doesn't leave bruises and wounds like beating a prisoner with a nightstick so there is less embarrassing television video.

Police seldom get in serious trouble for using a Taser. In Edmonton, Alberta a policeman used a Taser on two sleeping men and all he got was a 90-hour suspension. But, I'm certain they were sleeping in a threatening manner.

I'm always a little worried when I write about the American Police State. I fear a policeman may decide to electrocute me. The Taser has become a toy used by police for recreational torture. I even wonder if police consider it a sex toy. Here is another Texas story about an on-duty officer getting shot with his own Taser that sounds more like sex play gone wrong than an accident.

See also:
Torture by Taser
A report from Der Spiegel on American police Taser practices
Pam's House Blend's take

Oklahoma High School Students Couldn't Pass Citizenship Test

Seventy-five percent of Oklahoma high school students don't know that George Washington was the first president of the United States. A whopping 97% would fail the basics civics exam required of people to become naturalized American citizens.

I'll wager, however, that a big majority know that Adam and Eve were the first Americans, that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and that God wrote the Bible in English. So, it's not all bad.

Oklahoma Education News

• Proposal to force Tulsa Zoo to teach creationism
• Republican state party platform requires schools to teach creationism
• Students cannot be flunked if their ignorance of science is religion-based (state law)
• Hate in the Bible Belt
• Leading Science Foundation
• Board of Education Chairman Christian fundamentalist activist (okay, technically this is Baja Oklahoma, aka Texas)
  

Murder By Insurance Company

Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that that whole "death panels" meme was nonsense wrapped in a crock. It doesn't take any more common sense to realize that the current health care system is designed to kill off high risk patients.

The system is simple. You can't get treatment unless you are insured. You can't get insurance unless you are already healthy. If you were once healthy but later become sick the insurance companies will move mountains to prove you were always sick so they can drop your coverage, thereby not spending money treating you, while at the same time keeping all of the premiums you paid while you were healthy and didn't need the insurance. Insurance companies call this "win-win."

Because doctors tend to be compassionate all the really important decisions about medical treatment (i.e. anything that costs money) are made by insurance company clerks none of whom ever spent an hour in medical school and all of whom went to work at insurance companies because the only thing they every enjoyed in life was torturing people in pain and there were no job openings at Gitmo.

The end result is something called Murder By Insurance Company and every year this system needlessly kills more people than would fit in Petco Park.

Hate Like It's 1935 Again

I sometimes wonder where this nation will end up if the current class of Republicans regain power.

Segregation Now, Segregation Forever
That darling of the Right, Rush Limbaugh, yesterday openly called for racial segregation.

Only For Lack of a Rope
A white Georgian viciously beat and kicked an Army reservist in public in front of her daughter because the black woman had been uppity. A white judge was quick to drop the felony charges. We will see if any new felony charges survive Georgia's elected judiciary. The story would certainly have been different if that Cracker had had a good lynching rope in his pickup truck.

Stasi-lite

I don't know if I whether or not I should feel safe because there are a couple hundred thousand spies in the CIA/FBI stable (The Stasi, in 1989, had 91,000 employees and an additional 173,000 informants). I understand why President Obama wants to keep the Patriot Act spying powers Dick Cheney championed. It's the same reason why the son of a counterfeiter would want to keep his papa's phony engraving plates. I understand, but I don't approve.

Should I be afraid that the government is peeking into every aspect of my life to "protect" me? Or, should I stop worrying and start inviting my personal watcher to parties because he knows more about me than most of my friends?

Marines Playing Russian Roulette

Marines in Iraq have this game they like to play where they point their weapons at other Marines saying, "Do you trust me?" Sometimes they pull the trigger. Because Marines aren't nearly as competent with firearms as they'd like people to believe, sometimes they don't know if the gun is loaded so sometimes they shoot their best friends in the face.
While, officially, the Marine Corps outlaws this "Trust Game," the fact is that officers and noncoms will order soldiers under their command to play the game. When something goes wrong and a Marine dies the commanders never face charges for tolerating, let alone ordering the game. It is always the lowest soldier in the chain who pays the price; always with prison, never with treatment.

There is no getting around the fact that all these tours in Iraq, with the occasional sojourn to Afghanistan, with all the drugs they take to stay alert on long missions or deal with combat stress, American Marines are slowly being driven insane.

Art is "Solider in an Insane Asylum" by Conrad Felixmueller.

American Police State Update

El Cajon is a bedroom community for the city of San Diego. It is pretty much a nothing of a town and I should know because I live there. Their police headquarters are in a 40 year-old building which makes it "way old" in surfer jargon. For comparison, the Castleford Police Station has been in continuous operation since 1898.

Because their building is older than many of their officers the El Cajon Police Department has been lobbying for a new, bigger facility for the past 20 years. They are finally getting it.

The brand spanking new El Cajon Police Headquarters is going to be a cozy 119,000 square-foot facility on 5.7 acres. It is going to be bigger, fancier, and better landscaped than any any hotel in the town.

About that bigger part. El Cajon only has 119 sworn officers which means there will be 1000 square feet of office space for every single officer in the force. At $65 million (Any bets the final cost will be twice that?), it will cost more than a half-million dollars per policeman. It would be cheaper to build a brand new home for every officer on the force.

They are not wasting a lot of space on criminals, there will only be 12 holding cells. For comparison, Mayberry had two. This is not a place to coddle prisoners. Oh, no. Almost all of the space will be dedicated to the comfort of the working police officers. Why it is going to be so plush they will never want to leave to actually, you know, patrol.

Life's Little Lessons

I just learned something I should have already known. When the truck comes to empty the porta-potty that has been part of my neighbor's endless remodel, close your windows. Emptying a porta-potty smells exactly like you'd expect it to.

Afghanistan Failure

Doonesbury on Afghanstan

Afghanistan was Russia's Vietnam. Of all of the Bush Wars the Afghan conflict was the only one I felt was justified. Yet now, eight years in, we are stuck in the same hopeless quicksand that sunk the Soviet Union. It's time now to cut our loses and bug out.

Criminal Activity
The recent Afghan election is setting records for blatant fraud. America's man in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, isn't even trying to hide the ballot box stuffing. The American options are either to continue to back a petty criminal and drug dealer as Afghan president or organize a coup, knowing how badly that worked out in Vietnam.

Corruption
The orgies being held in the US embassy in Kabul are just the tip of the iceberg. United States military drug use is rampant as well. The Afghans used drugs to destroy the Soviet occupation army thirty years ago just like the Vietnamese used drugs to hobble the US Army in the 1960's.

We Are Losing
The Afghan War started to punish the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It has devolved into a colonial struggle where we are trying to "win the hearts and minds" of a nation we occupy. It didn't work in Vietnam and it isn't working here.

There are many Afghans, perhaps even a majority, who want to like the United States. But we keep killing innocents, stupidly killing innocents, because our soldiers are too over-stressed, over-worked, and over-medicated to bother trying to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys.

What To Do
We could stay in Afghanistan for decades and even, perhaps, over time compel a certain compliance but it would not the worth the cost in either men or money. Or, we could pack up, cut our loses, and get out.

On going we should leave behind a few blunt warnings - 1) Any al-Qaeda camps erected in Afghanistan will be obliterated as soon as we find it; 2) If the Afghan government supports al-Qaeda or other terrorists in any way then those government officials should expect short lives with messy deaths; 3) in short, stay out of our way and you will be left in peace.

I would prefer that the United States be liked but sometimes all you can hope for is to be feared.

California Heat - Twilight Zone(ish)

The Southern California heatwave has entered its second week of 100 degree F plus temperatures. The fires north of Los Angeles continue to burn. There is little work being done during the day if it requires stepping away from an air conditioner. There is little sleep at night if you are not sleeping next to an air conditioner. We have no hope for relief until sometime next week.
Today I was talking with a friend and mentioned I had been thinking about an old Twilight Zone episode. She quickly replied, "The one where the Earth is getting closer to the sun." She was right. The episode was "The Midnight Sun" with Lois Nettleton (above) and written by Rod Serling.

If you are interested, veoh.com has the full episode available. It will give you a hint what we are going through.

Joe Klein's Hissy Fit

I admit I don't read Time Magazine's Joe Klein. He represents the worst of modern journalism. He is a cocktail party journalist who is "too important" to do mundane tasks like research, too Daiquiri-addled to understand the issues he covers, and too attached to his C-List Beltway status to ask tough or even any questions at all so he simply parrots back whatever he is told by his betters. Klein is the kind of journalist that H. L. Mencken would spit in the face of.

Still, I had to stop and read all of the links from this Rising Hegemon post.

Klein got his diapers twisted because Salon's Glenn Greenwald caught wind of Klein's behind the back email attacks on Greenwald and posted them on a tidbit blog Greenwald keeps. How dare he, screeched Klein, repeat "private communications."

Anyone over the age of three knows never to write in an email anything you wouldn't want to see published on the front page of the New York Times (advise I was giving 20 years ago). Email is not a quiet whisper between the stacks of the Political Science section of the library, it is shouting to a friend on the street from a third story window. In this instance one of the many people Klein sent his attack to passed a copy along to Greenwald. That's exactly what I would hope any friend of mine would have done.

The most interesting part of Klein's whiny-assed posting is the comments. Out of scores of comments Klein found only one defender -

Joe Klein is a great asset to the media ~ #49 awb75 (probably his girlfriend)

and one guy who hates them both equally -

Klein and Greenwald are both secular Bolsheviks not real Jews. ~ #40 dencal26

• Klein's email attack (via Greenwald)
• aimai's (the "pathetic woman acolyte") posting, she happens to be the granddaughter of I. F. Stone.
  
• Greenwald's twit on the subject
• Klein's hissy fit
• Greenwald's response to the hissy fit
• the "pathetic woman acolyte" response
• John Cole chips in
  

California Warming

As California continues to suffer under triple digit temperatures, drought, and massive wildfires we are becoming the poster children for Global Climate Change.

Drought
The warmer air is the more water it can contain. Outside of the tropics, the easiest way for rain to form is for water to coalesce around ice crystals. Warm air, no ice, no rain this way. Rain also comes when the atmosphere is saturated. One hundred percent humidity equals rain but as the air gets warmer it take a lot more water to reach the rain percentage. You need very warm oceans and/or moist tropical rainforests and the right air convection working together for this to happen. It is obviously a lot more complex than this. Read the Physics of Precipitation or How Does a Raindrop Grow. There is also Precipitation Patterns for a less dense explanation.

Bottom line, hot air tends to be dry air.

Wildfires
Hot dry conditions lead to more wildfires. That is Common Sense 101. Fire, in turn, consumes oxygen and releases carbon dioxide. That is Chemistry 101. This, in turn, increases the ratio of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere while removing the best air scrubbers ever created, plant life. That leads to still more warming which leads to more fires in a classic feedback loop that brings still more drought and more fire. In simple terms...

Fire bad. Tree pretty. ~ Buffy Summers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

My apologies to rightwing deniers who believe marketing experts and TV clowns over scientists.

110

Yep, that's the temperature (in Fahrenheit, only 43 degrees Celsius) today in my corner of Hell. I notice that Juneau is 56 degrees with rain. Envious much?

Climate Change Denier Clown

The latest hero of the climate change deniers is Professor J. Scott Armstrong. Professor Armstrong is not a professor of climatology or meteorology or biology or chemistry archeology or even history or geology. He is not a scientist of any fashion. Why, he isn't even a TV weatherman. No, no. Armstrong is a professor of marketing.

Armstrong's analysis includes comparing global temperature changes to US postal rates and using the Intrade betting parlor as scientific data. Reading his PowerPoint slideshow is a hoot and a half. As scientific research goes it is just as valid as Doink the Clown's.

Pictured is either J. Scott Armstrong or Doink, I have trouble telling them apart.

Why I Don't Believe the Stock Market

The stock market has been absolutely giddy recently and with no good reason. I don't believe this stock rally. Within depressions, the stock market's hope exceeds reality frequently. I would not be surprised if this rally collapses below the April, 2009 lows.

On a personal note, the temperature has been way over 100 degrees F for several days now and is predicted to stay there over the weekend. These are times when a smart person curls up in his den and waits out the weather.

Cheney's Tangled Web

Every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

I don't debate with liars. ~ Evo Morales

The skill of a professional liar is a wonder to behold. Dick Cheney is such a professional. A professional sticks just enough truth in his lies so no one can tell where the lie begins. Take this example:

The documents released Monday, clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda. ~ Dick Cheney

True, in that everyone who gave useful intelligence was later tortured. A lie in that the torture itself produced no new information and many false trails. The intelligence came through traditional interrogation. The torture was unproductive and was only done to give Cheney something to masturbate to.

A Great Quote

My new all-time favorite rightwing nutcase quote.

After 8 years of a president sent by God to lead the American people and rescue us from the horrors of 911 and Islamo-fascists, it now boils down to this? ~ Kristen Atkinson

She wrote this defending her announcement that Barack Obama's mother-in-law is a practicing voodoo priestess from the people at Wonkette laughing at her.

Old West Gun Control

Personal Story: While in Ketchikan, Alaska many years ago I witnessed two people trying to pull into the same parking spot. The man in the red pickup truck got out and placed his hand on the gun he had holstered in plain sight. The gunman got the parking spot.

One of the hidden truths is that old western town like Dodge and Tombstone were centuries ahead of the modern United States when it comes to gun control.

While the NRA teaches that the Wild West was a place where everyone wore a gun on their hip, that is a lie. By the 1870's Dodge had a city ordinance forbidding anyone to carry a gun north of the Deadline. Abilene's ordinance was enforced by Wild Bill Hockok. There were no "concealed carry" exceptions. Resisting Tombstone's 1881 ordinance led those well know Second Amendment advocates, the Clanton Gang, to their famous shootout at the O.K. Corral against Wyatt Earp.

As the west civilized they quickly realized that the people toting guns were mostly thugs and criminals, if everyone was allowed to carry guns no decent person was safe. The NRA's position is a perversion of that very common sense.

Dodge City's Deadline: So called because anyone senseless enough to venture across the line was risking death. Dodge set the line as the railroad tracks. To the south, the wrong side of the tracks, was the Red Light District. There is where the lawless ruffians could carry guns, drinking and whoring and killing as they wished. Should they dare travel north of the tracks, however, the law waited to arrest them, for even carrying a gun north of the Deadline was against the law. It is passing strange that the NRA wants the whole of the United States to be like Dodge's Red Light District.

Conservative Hypocrisy -Swimsuit Edition

At left is a swimsuit from 100 years ago. It is not very different than Muslim burkini (look down a bit).

Conservatives hate the burkini. It has been banned in France as unhygienic and before that it was banned in Holland because it might frighten children. In a northern Italy town the ruling fascist party has imposed a $700 fine on any woman appearing at a swimming pool or beach wearing a burkini.

(a dirty, evil, frightening burkini --->)

Conservatives are, in fact, terrified of the burkini and consider it part of a Muslim war on western culture. This being the only time in my memory that conservatives have approve of either the French or French topless beaches.

The hypocrisy comes in when you consider that those stellar conservatives, devout Mormons, share exactly the same opinion on what is appropriate swimwear as devout Muslims. Mormons are taught to wear nothing more revealing while swimming than their temple garments (underwear). Truth be told, Mormon swimsuits (below) are more modest and less sexy than the burkini.
Now, I love a skimpy bikini and a nude beach even more, but it is insane to force Muslim, or Mormon, women into a Brazilian cut to take a swim. As long as guys like me enjoy leering, women should be allowed to wear whatever they want.

The Pro-Trash Lobby

In the ocean plastic bags look like jellyfish, are eaten by and then kill marine life. On land they are a visual blight as well as a killer. Plastic bags degrade sometime between 300 hundred years and never making them a near permanent source of pollution. But that doesn't mean there isn't plastic bag love out there.

Seattle has a modest proposal on the ballot to impose a recycling fee of 20 cents on plastic bags. The businesses who make over 500 billion plastic bags a year are spending millions of dollars fighting it. It is looking like all of that pollution profit is going to swing the election and defeat the bag fee.

It's a funny thing about evil. Evil is very rich and seldom ever loses.

Why Income Inequality Is Bad for the United States

Look at the chart in the previous post and it is obvious that less inequality coincides with times of economic prosperity (the Roaring '20s, the 1950's and 60's). Greater inequality leads to economic decline (the spike in 1928-29 leading up to the Great Depression). The persistent growth in inequality that began in the mid-1990's has lead to the prolonged economic distress that has plagued the United States throughout the 2000's.

Empirically, this should be obvious. As income is concentrated among the least productive members of society, the idle rich, the incentive to work decreases. Why work hard when my family will still starve and I'm just making the bastards richer?

Inequality means a larger proportion of the GNP is consumed by unproductive activities such as monetary speculation. As demonstrated in 1929 and 2008, when the economy becomes dominated by the wealthy playing at financial jiggerypokery, a collapse is inevitable. The financial speculation that created the current recession (depression) was a worthless exercise. It created nothing of value. It was just playing roulette with billion dollar chips.

Inequality disrupts politics as the Super Rich can afford to buy entire political parties. This creates a society where corruption reigns and democracy suffers.

For those of a scholarly inclination, here is a study of Income Inequality and Economic Growth in the U.S.

The bottom line is if the inequality that concentrates so much income to 30,000 elites is not corrected then the weak signs of recovery will pop like a thin soap bubble and we will descend into an even deeper economic depression.

Tax Like It's 1919 Again, and Again

Really, even the Gilded Age was not this bad. This is just 30,000 people pulling down a full 6% of the nation's income. It is time to tax the shit out of these fuckers.

The Truth About Barack Obama

The truth that the health care debate was designed to hide is out. Barack Obama has a 10-inch tail, absolute proof that he is a human-reptilian hybrid. Now that the truth is out I can reveal the full depth of the conspiracy.
As this photo of his left ear clearly proves, Obama is not of this earth.

Other evidence, he is left-handed, all of us hybrids are left-handed.

The charge has been out there, thanks to David Icke, that we are intending to take over the world for our full-blood reptilian masters. (Icke is a human-furrie hybrid, the sworn enemy of us reptiles.) Our plan, now that there are enough humans to make a fair sized fricassee, is to eat the human population of this planet (We don't like chicken.)

People have been noticing Obama's reptilian attributes, such as his eyes, and have been calling for Obama to prove he is fully human. Something had to be done. So we have had our sub-human hybrid slaves start riots at townhall meetings as a distraction (That's why most of them look like shell-less turtles). But, now that the truth about the President's tail is in the open we've been found out, we will just have to release our swine flu and cull you that way.

See Freedomhaters.org
See also Do Reptilians have the right to kill us and drink our blood? (The answer is "yes.")

Bats!!!

I'm working on something else but I had to stop for this blog about a bedroom invaded by bats and I can't help remembering a 2005 made-for-TV movie about a killer swarm of vampire bats that starred my beloved Lucy Lawless.

h/t to Booman

Tax Like It's 1919 Again

The government is all at sixes and sevens trying to figure out what to do with CEOs who pay themselves and their co-workers exorbitant bonuses and salaries for sitting around screwing up the economy. It ain't that hard, just bring back the 1919 tax rates.

• Bottom tax rate, with deductions, is 4%.
  
• That bottom tax was on the first $4,000 which inflation adjusts to $50,000.
• At $250,000 ($20,000 in 1919) the tax rate is 17%.
• At one million dollars ($80,000 in 1919) the tax rate is 47%.
• The top tax rate is imposed on people taking in over $12.5 million (one million 1919 dollars). It is 73%.
  

There, done. And we'll balance the budget, too. This tax rate won't hurt the economy, in 1919 this exact tax rate ushered in the Roaring Twenties. True, Dick Cheney and George Bush will have conniption fits, that's just an added bonus.

Matanuska Valley Hypocrite

With one breath, Sarah Palin denounces (actually kinda rightly) people who attack her through her children. With her very next breath Palin uses her own child as a political pawn. If Palin wants to protect her children from the political wars she ought to stop dragging them into the middle of the battlefield as human shields.

This whole "euthanasia" line is the stinkiest red herring I've smelt in my life. It's an absurd Blood Libel and Republicans know it. The only human on the face of the earth who has, even for one moment, considered euthanizing innocent little Trig Palin is Sarah herself when she dreamed up her libel.

There Will Be Blood

It is inevitable that a rightwing extremist will shoot up a public meeting or union hall somewhere. They are now being urged to bring their guns to townhall meetings, and use them. There have been threats of violence against union members and death threats against congressmen.

The goal, clearly, is terrorism, to frighten Americans away from their Constitutional right to peaceably assemble.

What began as astroturfing has devolved into an uncontrollable mob thirsting for blood. When the blood is spilled the debate over healthcare will change overnight into a movement to confiscate the mob's guns and indict those who have incited the violence (Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, et. al.) for second degree murder.

Is This a Sign of Recovery?

Habitually, unemployment stats peak at the end of a recession.If that holds true now for the worst economy since the Great Depression, then the fact that unemployment ticked down a hair last month is great news. Certainly the stock market thinks things are improving, it's up over 40% since the March, 2009 low.

The pessimist in me knows that there were several head fakes, several false recoveries, by both the market and the unemployment stats between between 1932 and 1938. I'm cautiously optimistic.

My Official Kenyan Birth Certificate

via Kenyan Birth Certificate Generator.

Read Booman

Sometimes the best thing I can write is to tell you to read someone else. Booman Tribune has a couple of outstanding articles.

How Wacky Was Bush, Anyhow
George Bush Jr. was not just some addled-brained preppy, although his certainly is. He wasn't just some religious nut, although he is. And Bush was nowhere near as smart as his supporters claimed. The proof lay in his argument pitching the Iraq War to French President Jacques Chirac in 2003.

Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. ~ George Bush, 2003

Chirac had to hunt down a theologian to explain what the hell Bush was babbling about.

Bush was more demented then we ever imagined and we had imagined a lot. If he hadn't had a rich daddy and a plethora of handlers manipulating him like a sockpuppet, George Bush Jr. would be standing today on some Dallas street corner, unwashed and ill-fed, shouting incoherent fire and brimstone at passersby.

Conservatives Fearing Justice
Booman predicts the next great Radical Republican panty pissing occasion will be Hillary Clinton's suggestion that the United States join the International Criminal Court. While the news is still too new to have sunk in, we can expect outrage at the notion of Dick Cheney and John Yoo in the dock at the Hague for their war crimes.

Blackwater Prison Blues

When I was just a baby,
My Mama told me, "Son,
Always be a good boy,
Don't ever play with guns,"
But I shot a man in Reno,
Just to watch him die,
When I hear that whistle blowin',
I hang my head and cry. ~ Folsom Prison Blues

File this under Not the Least Bit Surprised. You own the world's most famous mercenary army, Blackwater (now called Xe). Your people have allegedly gotten away with murder and child prostitution in Iraq. You are a religious fanatic with an Aryan taint and Christian megalomaniac. You find out that some of your former employees have turned state's evidence and are spilling your beans to the Feds. What do you do?

The two men claim Blackwater’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. ~ Democracy Now!

Maybe, you decide to snuff the stoolies, silencing them while at the same time making an example of them. Why not? Hell, with God on your side anything is possible.

I feel irrational, so confrontational
To tell the truth I am getting away with murder
It is impossible to never tell the truth
But the reality is I'm getting away with murder ~
Getting Away With Murder

Kenyan Birth Certificate

Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see. ~ Ben Franklin (although I first encountered this wisdom in a 1950's Disney comic book)

The Birthers obsession with an alleged Obama birth certificate from Kenya is just hilarious. In this era of Photoshop, computer graphics, and high-end printers, forging a forty year-old government document is child's play. Sadly, No! shows how easy it is to prove that George W. Bush as actually born in England.

Aging a document is trickier, although coffee, an oven, and patience will do a nice job. A well schooled forger can create a document that will keep experts guessing. The authenticity of the Maybrick Diary, that alleges to be the diary of Jack the Ripper, has been debated for years.

As forgeries go, this is a poor one. It can be proven a forgery six ways from Sunday, although for me there is one outstanding point of illogic that proves it a fake. Barack Obama Sr. was a Kenyan from the region of Victoria Lake of the Luo ethnicity. Why would he choose to take his wife to Mombasa, in Zanzibar in 1961, for the birth of his child? It makes no sense, Nairobi was actually in Kenya and close to his family. And since Obama Sr. was a student in Hawaii at the time, and had left another wife back in Kenya, wouldn't it have been smarter to have stayed put in the Aloha State?

So, why do these fakes keep popping up? There is money in it. Quick and easy money.

Native and Natural Born Citizenship has done the best research into this circus. If you want to see what batshit insane looks like, here is Birther Orly Taitz on MSNBC.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Update: Proof that John McCain is a Kenyan, too.

Scary Tales of the Summer Sun

End of the spring and here she comes back
Hi Hi Hi Hi there
Them summer days, those summer days
That's when I had most of my fun, back
high high high high there
Them summer days, those summer days ~ Hot Fun in the Summertime

When I and my brothers were children so many years ago my mother would tell us to go outside, the fresh air and the sun was good for us. As we grew older the air became more and more polluted and there were many summer days when it was simply dangerous to breath the outside air.

Then the doctors discovered ultraviolet radiation and became obsessed with the notion that sunlight was a hazard and children should not be exposed to the sun's radiation lest they get skin cancer and die fifty years later. Mothers were taught that even a little sun was a horrible thing to inflict upon a child. Use sunscreen, reapplying it every half-hour. Force your child to wear wide-brimmed hats and thick, dark clothing. Instruct them to hide in the shade as much as possible (WebMD advice). Doctors taught that by the time your child showed the first signs of sunburn it was too late, he was doomed to die a horrible death. Being in the summer sun became a joyless experience. It was far safer letting them sit in front of the media center all day.

Now, doctors have discovered that all this hiding away from the Evil Sun had raised a generation of sickly children. More than two-thirds of all children have a vitamin D deficiency. Rickets, virtually wiped out by the time I was born, is making a comeback.

The prescription is my mother's old advice - get your children off their fat asses and let them have fun running around in the summer sun.

Well, That's Disappointing

I'm back after taking several days off to ...
(a) recharge my batteries, and
(b) do something more interesting than hitting square, black keys with the tips of my fingers.

Five days off-line and the world did not collapse into anarchy like it should have without my guidance. What's an egomaniac to do?

Oh, things happened. There was the beer summit where opinion-meisters invested hundreds of thousands of words on the political/economic ramifications of who drank what while desperately pretending the event was important when it was a meaningless photo-op, albeit a smart one by Obama's people.

California's economic mess only got worse when Arnold, our Clown-in-Chief, victimized the youngest, poorest, and sickest in the state with his line-item veto, breaking negotiated deals in the process. I don't hold out much hope for a successful veto override session for two reasons. One, California Republican legislators are, individually and as a group, insanely dedicated to the total ruination of the state to punish it for being Democratic. And, two, California Democratic legislators just want to get out of Sacramento, which is miserable in the summer, and have lost the will to fight.

Iran has begun the predictable mass show trials to be followed by soccer stadium mass executions that will not diminish the hatred by the Iranian people for their bloody dictatorship. Meanwhile, three Americans crossed the border from Kurdistan into Iran and were arrested. If they were student tourists, as is claimed, then they are abysmally and possibly fatally stupid; I can think of about a million better vacation spots than two nations where murder is a leading recreational sport. Given their ages (27 to 36), I suspect they are clumsy spies.

Ahmed Awa, where the hikers got lost.
It this a view worth dying for?

More Things That Make Me So Angry I Could...Aw, a Puppy

Quintuple the Tax on the Super Rich
At right is Larry Ellison's, the CEO of Oracle, smaller yacht. The modern Super Rich have boats that would have made John D. Rockefeller blush. See Pimped Out Yachts and HuffPost's slideshow of mega-yachts.

But, the Rich Need Our Sympathy
At least that is the message of the Wall Street Journal's Wealth Report. Every time I start feeling soft all I have to do is read it to inflame my anti-capitalist rage.

Cops Aren't Racist
Sometimes they are just arrogant SOBs. Again from HuffPost are a couple of cops plotting to blame a policeman's auto accident on the (white) victim. Remember this and never forget, just because a policeman says it doesn't mean it is true.

I Don't Have a Short Attention Span, I Just...oh, Look, a Kitty

Another Reason
to tax the hell out of corporate executives. They are setting a record for greed.Conservatives Biggest Worry
is that the new G.I. Joe movie will not be jingoistic enough. First the Birthers, now this. Is it any wonder I just can't take them seriously anymore.

Sister Sarah's Descent
Okay, I know some (all, more than all) are sick to death of everything Palin. Still, Gawker's study of her descent into babbling idiocy is fascinating. Apparently, it is contagious.

David Frum and all you D.C. insider Republicans walking around with a hoity toity corncob securely wedged might want to consider too, your mind blindness. ~ Right Wing News

Is Rahm Killing Health Reform?
Whether fairly or not, the failure of any effective health care reform will be laid at the feet of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Maxine Waters and John Conyers have already begun that meme. I am not certain it is unfair. Emanuel has been undercutting Obama on his health care initiative for some time. I've seen it before where a CoS sells his own agenda ahead of his boss' priorities.

Tax the Corporate Elite

Tax the hell out of them.

The only sound argument for not imposing higher taxes on corporate executives is that there are not enough of them to make a significant difference. The chart over there ---> explodes that myth. In our current oligarchic economy where a tiny handful of executives horde unto themselves a third of the nation's income, the corporate elite are the single best source of funds.

Now, I know what my conservative friends will say, if we tax corporate executives it will remove their incentive to work. To which, my answer is, what do executives actually do?

Like the lilies of the field, "they toil not, neither do they spin" yet they are nowhere near as pretty.
They party like Roman patricians (at left is Dennis Kozlowski's (then CEO of Tyco) 2003 birthday party, paid for by stockholders. They play golf. They play a lot of really expensive golf. Comerica, while sucking over $2 billion out of TARP, gifted its CEO with a $202,928 country club membership perk. Rather than working in their offices they are always jetting about hither and thither at shareholder expense.

As the class currently functions, corporate executives are a drain upon corporate earnings and shareholder dividends far beyond any small benefits they may produce in their spare time. Taxing their excess income would injury nobody of importance.

A field of Tiger Lilies -
more valuable than all the CEOs in the country.

Confronting the Police

Considering the Sgt. Crowley - Henry Gates situation.

Many (many, many) years ago I was driving home after one of those endless Sierra Club Executive Committee meetings. It was after midnight, I was hungry and tired, and I was less than interested in the legal speed limit. A Highway Patrolman's lights flashed behind me and I pulled off the freeway to take my speeding ticket.

Rather than ticket me, the cop tried to goad me to anger. While outwardly calm, the cop threatened me. He threatened to handcuff me, he threatened to arrest me. Not physically but verbally he was pushed me hard, trying to get me to react, to defend myself. If I had I would have found myself face down on the pavement with his knee on my back.

Had I gotten scared or angry I would have spent the rest of the night in jail. I used the same techniques needed for facing a vicious dog; I can't claim that as a deliberate strategy, it was an instinctive reaction. I looked the cop in the eye, remained calm, and displayed neither aggression nor retreat. After about ten minutes the cop backed down and left without even writing a speeding ticket.

The difference between my encounter with the police and Mr. Gates' is: 1) I'm white; 2) I didn't react when the policeman tried to goad me into a confrontation. I am certain that it took both conditions to keep me out of jail that night.

Like my encounter years ago, I believe Sgt. Crowley was pushing Gates, trying to induce a fear/defense response that would justify an arrest. It is a common police technique taught at the academies. Crowley wanted the encounter to end in an arrest. A simple test whether race was involved is whether Crowley, in his long career as a police officer, has ever arrested a white man in circumstances similar to those of Mr. Gates. I suspect probably not.

Translating the News

I could make a career out of translating new articles into common sense English. Here are some excerpts from a Washington Post article titled Wall Street Jacks Up Pay, edited for clarity.

Executives of Wall Street's biggest banks are setting aside billions of dollars more to pay their executives.

So far this year, the top six U.S. banks executives have set aside $74 billion to pay their employees themselves, up from $60 billion in the corresponding period last year.

He [Chief Financial Officer Colm Kelleher] said the ratio of revenue to compensation would have been close to 50 percent if Morgan Stanley were able to exclude a $2.3 billion charge it took arising from an accounting rule related to the company's debt. had just phonied up its accounting like Enron used to do.

"Unfortunately, this means that Q2 was a pretty good quarter for the employees, but not so for the shareholders," Hintz said. Morgan Stanley stockholders are ignorant sluts we reem whenever and however we want.

Rainmaker traders and bankers take home millions of dollars a year while secretaries settle for much less. do all the real work for slave wages.

They [investment banks] continue to benefit from use a variety of other emergency federal programs to pay for these bonuses.

Several bankers noted that the amounts set aside are not a perfect measure of what will be paid out in bonuses at year-end. They will be much higher.

And an AP article about civilian contractors doing translation for the US military in Afghanistan. The whole article can be shorted to:

The Pentagon would rather have out of shape, elderly (some in their 60's and 70's), and indolent civilians who don't speak the native language than someone who is competent, fit, and gay.

Incest at Treasury

We already know that the Treasury Department bleeds Goldman Sachs blue. Treasury officials are also developing incestuous relationships with lobbying firms.

Take former DC-based PR flack Fred Baldassaro, now with Treasury (in Washington DC there are only eight cents worth of difference between public relations and lobbying). In his old job Baldassaro provided PR interference for Wal-Mart's slimy practices among other less than stellar clients.

As a Treasury official Baldassaro is helping Ed Gillespie's lobbying firm recruit new clients by flacking for Gillespie at an off-the-record breakfast meeting at the lobbying firm's offices. Among the things promised for the meeting is advice on how to game the new ethics rules (however, being skilled PR people, they don't phrase it that way).

Dollars to donuts bet that in three years Baldassaro will revolving door himself into a cushy job at Quinn Gillespie. Takers?

Life As Music

Sarah's 19th Nervous Breakdown
You're the kind of person
You meet at certain dismal dull affairs.
Center of a crowd, talking much too loud
Running up and down the stairs.
....
You better stop
Look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes
Here comes your nineteenth nervous breakdown.
(Rolling Stones)

San Diego's Anti-Seal Judge
there alone and late at night I'm dreaming
Of the disgustingness that seems to be driving me
I get it all and then I kill some more
and i always love it like I did before
Ahh there's blood on my hands will I be forgiven
(How I Club Seals - Malcolm Higgins)

Max Baucus - Political Whore
This time you fooled me, you played all the ticks
Now it's no wonder why they called you slick
You saw what pissed me off & did that no more
A sign of the times, a political whore
I have been taken by words I was told
I bought a package that's not what you sold
Lies become facts when you word them just right
(Lies In the Balance - Zaxas)

Police Taser Children
Life is based on power, authority, control
Hero with a badge or a fucking asshole?
Take an egomaniac with a meaningless job
Give him a gun and he thinks he's God
(Support Your Local Police State - Evil Empire {no link, the rest of the song sucks})

Financial Carnivores

They feed on living flesh. They are as compassionate as they are scrupulous, which is to say they are neither. If their acts are not criminal it is a fault in the law.

These soulless creatures described in this New York Times article spent the early part of the decade suckering people into take on insane amounts of debt in incomprehensibly complex sub-prime mortgages contracts. Mortgages designed to drive people from their homes down the line.

Now, these leeches are attacking the same victims, promising to modify their debt burdens, too often including mortgages they wrote in a previous incarnation. Of course, first the victims has to pony up obscene amounts of money and the modifications tend to have a success rate slightly worse than a San Diego Padre pinchhitter.

I feel the need to apologize to leeches at this point because leeches are nowhere near as bad as these serial financial rapists.

White Men Can't Think

This has been a country basically built by white folks. ~ Pat Buchanan

South of the Mason-Dixon Line this country was entirely built using the sweat and blood of black folk. This is a country built through the wholesale slaughter of red folk. This is a country that could not feed itself today without the stooped labor of brown folk.

I am a white man of Finnish-German-Irish heritage and, yes, I am proud of that. My pride does not require me to pretend that the melanin content of my skin makes me better than someone else. I don't belong to the same race as Pat Buchanan; I probably don't even belong to the same species.

Republican Insurrectionist

We have the chance to fight this battle at the ballot box before we have to resort to the bullet box... That's the beauty of our 2nd Amendment rights.

Catherine Crabill is a Republican candidate for the Virginia state legislature. Before moving to Virginia she was part of the New Mexico militia movement. She believes that Timothy McVeigh was innocent and that Janet Reno blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. She believes that if Republicans don't win elections they should use their Second Amendment rights to take the government by force. You know, by, like, blowing up federal buildings.

Even a few Republicans believe she is batshit insane. Although, if you read the comments you'll realize that sanity is a rare commodity among Republicans nowadays.

The Ft. Collins 14

More proof that war, any war, all war, is an evil, soul sucking endeavor.

Upon returning from Iraq (I started typing "Vietnam" because this is not a new story) fourteen soldiers went on a crime spree, killing eleven people including an infant daughter. What is most disquieting is the excuses the Army is giving.

• 65 percent of violent crimes committed by soldiers were done by troops who had not been to war (So the Army is claiming that basic training is enough to turn normal young American boys into homicidal maniacs)
• pervasive substance abuse among some troops
• mental illness already present in recruits (Drug-addled lunatics are our best recruitment source)
  
• the failure of Army leaders to get soldiers the help they need likely contributed to the violence (Our commanders are a bunch of fuck-ups)

I keep coming back to the notion that war is an insanity performed by the demented for the depraved.

Slavery 2.0

There is a fascinating, if incredibly disturbing discussion at The Atlantic regarding creating a market for the buying and selling on human organs. Some excerpts from the comments.

• We need quasi-market mechanisms to attract more living donors ~ From the author, Megan McArdle
• if the courts were to recognize property rights in organs, making it is possible to sell organs within the legal system, it would become very, very difficult to stop all kinds of illicit "chop shops" from emerging. ~ a lawyer
• You're ignoring the beneficial aspects for the financial markets if we could build derivatives such as credit default swaps based on kidneys. We could also have people mortgage their kidneys, and the mortgages could be collected into collateralized debt obligations, which could be sold to secondary markets. Your kidney could be rated AAA, AA, A, based entirely on a ratings agency ~ I'm not quite sure who this guy is except he is a free-marketeer and totally insane
• it was about your rights when you sold, or received a kidney - a situation more similar to buying or selling a motor car. ~ (responding to the lawyer who noted that there would be no adequate compensation for someone defrauded out of an organ) from someone needing a kidney transplant
  
• Another idea is to get rid of mandatory motorcycle helmet laws, with the proviso that riding without a helmet is prima facie consent for organ donation. ~ From someone waiting for a cadaver donation of kidney and pancreas
• We should grow fetuses that would otherwise be aborted to harvest organs from. We could have entire organ farms and no one would need to die waiting for a spare part. ~ don't know if this guy is serious

India allows for the buying and selling of organs and, as a consequence, has an active criminal black market in body parts.

Randon Thoughts

Summer Schedule
With summer, my computer spends more time idle, a concession to the fact it is a heat generator during a time when there is way too much heat already, thank you. So, if the occasional, or frequent, day goes by without my writing here it is just my small effort to fight global warming and has nothing to do with my grabbing a book and a beach blanket (and a beach) and being irresponsible.

Explainin' Palin
Sister Sarah keeps being thrown up in our faces for the same reason we can't seem to escape Paris Hilton. They are celebrities, although there is no rational reason why. Some people will cross burning coals on their bare knees to see them, although there is no rational reason why. They are attractive, in a slutty, trailer trash kind of way. Their IQs, combined, add up to moron. They both seem to enjoy putting their social and moral dysfunction on public display. They attract attention in the same way people can't look away from a freeway accident. It's not right, but there it is.

Life Is a Bad Bond Film
A View to a Kill is generally considered the worst of the James Bond film. The story has an evil genius (is there any other kind), Max Zorin, plotting to use explosives along the San Andreas Fault to make California disappear into the Pacific Ocean. His reason: to increase the value of his computer chips (and, because he is an evil genius).

Today, AltaRock Energy wants to use explosives along the San Andreas Fault to break up the bedrock and release geothermal energy that they can sell. They have tried the technique in Switzerland and caused so many earthquakes the project had to be shut down. AltaRock has been keeping the Switzerland failure secret from U.S. regulators. California is one of the most seismically active regions in the world (which is why they want to play here) and has had some of the most damaging earthquakes in world history. A perfect place to play with earthquakes, if you are a evil genius in a second-rate movie.

Republican Schism?

I think we may be witnessing the breakup of the Republican Party. The Republican coalition (anti-tax wealthy, neo-cons, religious fundamentalists, and Southern racists) is to dogmatic too hold up as a minority party. Each wing bitterly hates the others.

The Base seems to have coalesced around a Southern, openly racist philosophy that is leaning toward regional secessionism. Non-racists Republicans, the RINOs, are being ruthlessly attacked, but they are many of the party's leaders and most of their funding sources. The tea parties now routinely boo Republican politicians. The neo-cons and the movement conservatives are in open warfare now they don't have a real war to forge a common bond over.

When Sarah Palin said she will campaign for non-Republicans it is being interpreted as meaning she will campaign for select conservative Democrats. That is a mistake, what she was saying in a not very subtle way is that she will back the formation of a third party. The Vanity Fair article and her quitting as governor immediately after mark her irreconcilable break with the Republican Party.

If Palin keeps her promise (always problematic) then she may well do to the Republican Party what the Locofocos did to the antebellum Democratic Party. Sister Sarah is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

Banking Alchemists At It Again

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. ~ Rita Mae Brown

From time immemorial the goal of alchemists has been to turn base metal, like lead, into gold. We, in these times of science and reason, have assumed alchemy is now only the stuff of fairy tales. We would be wrong.

Bankers drove the world's economy to its knees by practicing a form of alchemy where worthless debt was repackaged (securitized) and sold as gilt-edged investments. While there were certainly flimflam men involved, most of these bankers truly believed they had magically turned garbage into gold and were honestly shocked when the alchemy turned out to be a fool's dream.

Well, the bankers are at it again. They are taking financial rubbish (Baa2-rated securities), packaging them into CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) and through the magic that is the banker's mysterious arts those CDOs become AAA-rated debt. Anyone with his feet on the ground would realize immediately that this is utter foolishness. No one can take lots of financial lead and, by the simple act of bundling it, turn that lead into gold. But modern bankers are not bounded by the laws of nature or logic.

Which brings me to the concept of Bankslaughter. Bank executives should be held legally liable if their attempts at financial alchemy blows up in our faces. There was a time when to be a banker was to be the epitome of prudence. If people aren't naturally prudent they ought to enter another line of work, such as shark wrestling.

As for the argument that Bankslaughter "deters the normal but doesn’t touch the reckless until it’s too late," may I point out that all laws do this. Manslaughter laws save lives because the vast majority (the "normal") are deterred. The reckless are still reckless but with laws society has the ability to get their sorry asses off the streets and into prisons where they can't repeat their recklessness.

Whites Only Pool (Updated x 2)

Racism. Worst yet, racism against children, in Philadelphia, PA - July, 2009
The Creative Steps Day Camp paid $1900 to the Valley Swim Club in the Philadelphia suburb of Huntingdon Valley to use their facilities for 90 minutes per week. Huntingdon Valley is old (average age 46), white (94%), and Republican.

When the children, with adult supervision, arrived the club authorities took one look at their dark skin and ordered them out of the pool and forbade their return. It seems, according to club president John Duesler, the kids threatened the "complexion" (his word) of the club. Too many black children, you see.

To do this to children is beyond evil. There is not a level of Hell deep enough to house Duesler and his minions. I join with the good people of Pennsylvania who believe that every day that the Valley Swim Club remains open is an affront to all that is decent in this nation. Close them down. Now.

Update: Via DailyKos - Protests of the Valley Swim Club are being organized. Girard College is stepping up and providing pool access to the children. The ice cream shop Gumdrops & Sprinkles is treating the kids to a free day of candy and ice cream making. There are good people on this Earth.

Second Update: In the comments, Anonymous just sort of naturally assumed that the children in question were "misbehaving" and "causing a commotion" and "disruptive." This is an old excuse for segregation, those people are just too uncivilized to be allowed around decent white folk. Sorry, not buying it. I'm sure the children were behaving as all children everywhere, of any skin tone, do when they come in contact with a swimming pool.

And, yes, I did use a photo from Selma, Alabama dated 1931 because the Valley Swim Club hearkens back to those benighted times.

Sweet Dreams

Palin ... can now become Barack Obama’s worst nightmare. ~ Erick Erickson, Redstate

If the worst threat to Obama's naptime is the fear of what Sarah (Department of Law) Palin might say next then the President will never need a Sominex or a glass of warm milk again. No retorical Freddy Krueger she.