Grifters: the 'Stop Hillary' Scam

There is a brand new "Stop Hillary" PAC raising money from gullible anti-Clintonites. Far be it for me to try to stop con-men from fleecing dimwitted crackers but I feel obligated to point out that for the next two years this PAC will have absolutely nothing to spend money on except lavish reimbursements to their own officers and family members.

Even after election season begins I can't imagine the Stop Hillary PAC will donate any money to any Democrat running for President not named Clinton. They may buy a little TV time in Omaha overpaying themselves, or friends, for production costs to no effect. They probably will accept bribes, all perfectly legal payments, to channel money to Republicans primary candidates.

The fascinating thing is that nobody in the world is rooting harder for Hillary Clinton to successfully run from President than this new Stop Hillary PAC. Only if that happens will they make out like the bandits they hope to be.

American Police State: Clay Pigeon Division

We've had enough officer involved shooting in San Diego to identify how things are done. A single police officer who shoots an unarmed citizen generally finds himself in trouble. Questions are asked whether he used excessive force. Even after he is inevitably absolved by the District Attorney the officer faces civil suits.

That never happens when there are mass shootings. When a dozen police officers, or more, unload their weapons into a helpless victim their collective judgement is never called into question. This has led to an unwritten police policy, whenever one policeman discharges his weapon, every officer within range automatically fires all their bullets into the target.

While the Cleveland shooting may be an extreme example it is also an appropriate example, 47 bullets riddle two corpses, cops missed on 90 other shots. There will be some noise, perhaps some slight discipline, but in the end little will happen. When dozens of cops fire their weapons no individual is at fault. And police, yet again, get away with felonious manslaughter. 

American Police State: Definition Division

One of the defining aspects of any police state is that minor crimes against the state are considered far more hideous than major crimes against citizens. Take for example the acts of George Zimmerman and Bradley Manning.

Zimmerman shot an unarmed teenager on the street and it is considered a minor action not deserving any punishment. Manning revealed information that would have been in the public domain in any functioning democracy. He faces a possible sentence exceeding a century, although that sentence might be reduced by 112 days to compensate him for the torture he received in pretrial confinement.

What Manning Revealed:
• Military action that resulted in the deaths of children, journalists, and other non-combatants. Such action being illegal both by UCMJ and international law.
• Military operations within foreign borders of nations with which we are not at war. By law and the Constitution such actions require Congressional approval and public debate.
• A variety of inter-embassy gossip that mostly revealed US ambassadors are catty children.

In the eyes of a police state punishing Manning is considered justice. In the eyes of freedom loving individuals (an abhorrent thought to a police state) his actions are the least we would expect of a government employee.

First National Bank Robbers

I've been looking for the proper illustration of those folks at First National Bank of Wellston. You know the guys who broke into someone's home, removed and destroyed all her belongings, and now refuse to repay her for her losses.

Of course, if I had done such a thing I'd be held before the court for home invasion and grand theft. But I do not have the total immunity from criminal charges that bank executives enjoy. Taking someone's home without due process, destroying private property, and doing it with a perverse smile is all in a day's work for the jolly pirates employed at your friendly neighborhood banking institution.

Dept. of Homeland Security Headquarters to Be Derelict Mental Hospital

It's just so freaking appropriate it has to be a joke, you'd think the source would be the Onion or Stephen Colbert, but it absolutely true. The DHS is remodeling an insane asylum in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington D. C. to be the place where they discuss terrorist plots, spy on innocent Americans, and act out every paranoid delusion their crazed minds can concoct. (Breast Milk Bomb Scare)

DHS leadership conference

The only question I have is whether, a decade from now, we will still be laughing or will we see St. Elizabeths as a modern Lubyanka.

Doc Holliday Would Feel at Home in Modern America

Now that states like North Carolina are legalizing carrying firearms into bars, it is only a matter of time before the drunken saloon gunfight again becomes a staple of American life. Blood seeping through the floorboards of a bar is such a romantic image in sepia hindsight to Republican lawmakers they neglect to imagine what it will look like in full color photography.

One of the most famous saloon gunfights of the Old West was between Levi Richardson and Frank "Cock-eyed" Loving in Dodge City's Longbranch Saloon on April 5, 1879.

The Greatest Heroes of Randian Philosophy

Writer Fred Smith is an faithful acolyte of Ayn Rand. Like many such people, including Rand herself, he doesn't actually produce anything, he lives off the gullibility of others. All he has ever done is write and talk. He preaches that greed is godly, generosity a venal sin, and heartlessness is the ultimate achievement of mankind. Yet he would starve if it weren't for the heartfelt generosity of people who donate to the Competitive Enterprise Institute because they share its philosophy of heartless greed.

In all of literature their greatest hero Ebenezer Scrooge. Rather than being vilified, Smith believes Scrooge should be celebrated. He contends that Scrooge displays the ultimate is wealth generation and betrays society when he abandons his greed to help the crippled Tiny Tim.

What surprises me is that Randians never refer to the most unrepentant Scrooge in American history, Hetty Green. Green inherited a small fortune ($7 million) and turned it into a large fortune (over $100 million) through shrewd investment and miserly conduct. She tried by forgery to steal her aunt's money when she found out her aunt had willed it to charity. When her son broke his leg she tried to have him treated at a free clinic and, when she was recognized, treated his leg at home. Her son eventually lost the leg. She should be a hero of the Ayn Rand movement and I don't understand why they shun her.

The Zimmerman Verdict Fruit

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop. ~ Lyrics, Strange Fruit

Lyrics | Billie Holiday lyrics - Strange Fruit lyrics

Try as we might, some things never change.

Musing on the Zimmerman Trial

I don't have any delusions that Trayvon Martin's killer will be found guilty of anything. In the Deep South, for a long time, killing a young black male has not been considered a particularly serious crime. It really hasn't been a crime since the days that killing a black man was also destruction of private property. Randomly killing black men in the dead of night has long been considered a crime prevention technique.

Zimmerman will walk, it's tradition. He's already been declared a national hero for the act of killing an unarmed teenager for the crime of being a Negro in public.

The Saga of Lili Marlene

I've been Donnie Downer recently because of the news so now for something lighter.

Lili Marlene was one of the most memorable songs from World War II. It started as a poem written by a German soldier during World War I. The poem tells the story of a sentry on watch remember the beautiful prostitute he would meet under the street lamp outside the barracks. This soldier remembers his love for this girl, how he would rather have gone off with her than gone to war. He thinks painfully of who will be meeting her under the lamplight while he is gone and he longs for the time he can leave the battlefield behind and return to his lady of the lamppost.

Lale Andersen

The poem was put to music in 1938 and became wildly popular when performed by a 34 year-old Berlin cabaret singer named Lale Andersen and even more popular when she recorded it in 1939. The song was not at all popular with Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. He believed the song undermined the soldiers at the front with its longing for love and peace. Goebbels banned the song and forbade Andersen to perform anywhere. However, Andersen was too popular, he allowed Andersen to return to the stage but ordered her to not perform Lili Marlene. That didn't stop Andersen's adoring public from begging her for the song and when she refused the audiences would sing the song to her. In 1942, Goebbels ordered Andersen to record a martial version of the song.

The Allies had their own songstresses. Marlene Dietrich had been a Hollywood star since 1930 but by 1937 she was no longer the "German Garbo" and her films generally failed. Nazis tried to lure her back promising she would be the biggest film star in the Third Reich. Dietrich responded by immediately applying for US citizenship. After the war started Dietrich recorded both an English and a German version of the song. Her German version was the original song made famous by Lale Andersen and was broadcast frequently by the Allies to German troops in Europe and North Africa. Dietrich's English version was very different and more closely resembled Goebbels' pro-war lyrics.

When we are marching in the mud and cold
And when my pack seems more than I can hold
My love for you renews my might
I'm warm again, my pack is light
It's you, Lili Marlene
It's you, Lili Marlene ~ Marlene Dietrich's English language lyrics

England's songbird Vera Lynn recorded an English version that, while not a direct translation, was more in the spirit of the original poem. French singer Edith Piaf performed it too.

The song is haunting especially in German and you don't need to understand the language to feel the song. There are at least two statues in Germany dedicated to Lili Marene. There is one on the island of Langeoog where Lale Andersen lived and this one in the town of Munster.

Silliness, the Competition

What is sillier than making an imaginary gun a school expulsion offense? How about making a federal case out of it?

What's next, a federal law regarding imaginary suicide?

I guess we can describe it as an imaginary Second Amendment defense. Children play around with imaginary everything all the time. Only adults are immature enough to take it seriously. When will some Republican declare that a child sleeping with an antique stuffed animal is statutory rape?

Poor Teddy faces 10 years in prison and having to register as a sex offender.

Sister Sarah Is On the Grift Again

You know when Sarah Palin needs a new fur coat, designer handbag, or new tanning bed because she starts hinting at running for some office somewhere. A couple years ago Sister Sarah suggested she just might run for President, she raised almost $5 million for her SarahPAC and donated less than $300,000 to candidate campaigns, she spent nearly as much money just on travel expenses. 

This year is not an election year so donations from suckers marks loyal supporters are down substantially. Sister Sarah has to gin up the gifts she gets if she is to continue living the lifestyle to which she has become accustom. Hinting at running for office is a great scam. That doesn't mean Sarah won't actually run for Senate. While hinting is a great scam, holding a seat in the US Senate would be a goldmine for a thief as skilled as Sarah Palin. It's just that running for office might seem too much like work for Sister Sarah.

FBI Nominee Pours on the Bullshit

James Comey, President Obama's choice to head the FBI, has several difficult problems facing him during his Senate confirmation hearing.

His paper trail showed him approving torture while working for the Bush Administration. Yet, times have changed and he has to sound at least tacitly disapproving of torturing prisoners. Comey settled on the odd philosophical construct that waterboarding was awful and illegal but still lawful and necessary. There is little that someone with so flexible a mind can't wrap his brain around.

Comey believes that force feeding prisoners holding hunger strikes to protest inhuman conditions is the humane thing to do. He believes that people would accept domestic spying and the secret FISA court if only people were familiar with it; that people opposing it are simply showing their ignorance; and, of course, people cannot be allowed to know about domestic spying and the secret FISA court because of national security. He wonders whatever happened to the concept of "ignorance is bliss."


Obama has supported Comey for a Supreme Court slot as well as the FBI post. This is a surprise given that Comey is a rightwing Republican who share nothing with either the President nor anyone else in the White House. Comey also has a very weak resume. This all begs the question, what kind of blackmail information is Comey using to pressure President Obama to appoint him to high office?

American Police State: 3rd Amendment Division

One of the things that outraged our Founding Fathers was when the British used armed force to take over somebody's home and station their forces there. It was so egregious an act that when it came time to write a Constitution they included a clause, the Third Amendment, specifically outlawing such actions by the new United States.

Fast forward to 2013 and in these new United States the Third Amendment has taken its place along side the Fourth (unreasonable searches), Fifth (due process), Sixth (speedy trial, per-trial confinement often lasts years),  Eighth (cruel and unusual punishment), Fifteenth (voting rights), and Twenty-Fourth (requires payment of taxes or fees to vote) Amendments in the trash heap of history.

In Nevada, police wanted to quarter officers in the home of Anthony Mitchell to keep watch on his neighbor. Mitchell refused. Police forces then invaded Mitchell's home, attacked and arrested him, and took possession of his home for their own uses. And abuses as the police ate the Mitchell's food and left a mess behind when the concluded their occupation. The consensus opinion is the Nevada will claim that armed police forces do not qualify as "soldiers" and that in denying police demand to surrender their home to police was an act of obstruction justifying both the warrentless arrest and physical punishment.

What about the criminal the Nevada police wanted to keep an eye one? He wasn't a terrorist, murderer, or Mafia don, he was suspected (suspected only) of domestic abuse. Apparently, the only people arrested in this affair were the innocent homeowners. 

Postal Spy Network

Let's make a couple of simple points first, the price of postage could be halved if the NSA didn't insist on logging all the data of every piece of mail sent. Postal delivery would be faster too.

This isn't the first time the US government has intruded on the privacy of the mail. During World War II, mail sent home by soldiers was opened and read by censors to insure no secret war plans were revealed. The big difference is it wasn't done in secret, everybody knew the government was censoring the mail. Every single piece of mail was clearly stamped to show a censor had handled it before it was delivered.

The current NSA postal spying is part of their effort to build comprehensive dossiers on every American in the event they might, one day for some reason, want to arrest someone.  And the NSA does this in secret because they last thing they want is for the American people to know how much of their lives are being recorded by the government with the intent of using it against them at some point.

Technology allows for so much more in depth spying on citizens. In the old days, for example, the East German Stasi had to keep millions of reel to reel audio tapes of every citizen's phone call that had to be listened to by secret police officers.  Today, the data can be kept digitally and monitored by complex algorithms looking for patterns. Computers can choose who to target for intimidation with minimal human involvement.

Its a brave, new world we live in and one that Erich Honecker could only dream of.

The Snowden Terror

The Snowden Terror© keeps getting more and more bizarre.

Today the plane carrying the President of Bolivia was forced to land because of the rumor (false) that Edward Snowden was on the plane. Four European countries refused passage for the presidential plane, a violation of basic diplomacy. The Bolivian plane was apparently searched by Austrians, another egregious violation of diplomatic protocol. Imagine Russian authorities demanding the right to search Air Force One.

The implied, if not outright, threat was that military forces would shoot down the presidential plane. Perhaps not strangely, this is exactly what the CIA is alleged to have done in murdering the President of Ecuador a quarter century ago.

The Snowden Terror is revealing a shocking level of American thuggery. Whole nations are cowering in abject horror over what the Americans might do because of this single young man.

What Does the NSA Have on Them?

From such beginnings of governments, what could be expected, but a continual system of war and extortion? ~ Thomas Paine

Witnessing Vladamir Putin folding like a cheap tent gives some hint at the kind of pressure the NSA-led US government is putting on anyone who might provide asylum to Edward Snowden.

I assume President Obama has not threatened nuclear war if Russia provides sanctuary to Snowden (I can't think of a lesser threat that would scare him). So that means the NSA must have some pretty powerful info stored in their databases to cower Putin so thoroughly.

In Ecuador it is commonly accepted as true that the US assassinated a beloved former President of their country thirty years ago. If that knowledge was insufficient to scare off current President Rafael Correa, then what threats did Vice-President Biden convey to President Correa that terrifies him so.

The Washington Post of Woodward and Bernstein Watergate fame, the same paper that, with the New York Times, published the Pentagon Papers, has betrayed their heritage by editorializing that government secrets are sacred and that leaks are horrible. The NSA must have some very juicy secrets about the Post publishers.

Diplomatic channels must sound a lot like a back alley in South Chicago during the 1920's. The threats, veiled and otherwise, a going hot and heavy. And make no mistake, the NSA is running this show, not President Obama. Obama is as much a victim here as everyone else.

Austin and Egypt

Two very different societies, two very similar situations.

Texas rally against the Governor's anti-democracy actions.

In both, religious radicals have gained control of the government. In both the people are aggrieved by a government intent on imposing its own, particular brand of religious orthodoxy upon the people. Their governments, conversely, see the people as bothersome obstructions to enforcing religious order.

In Egypt, the government tried and failed to use police intimidation to quell the people. In Austin, Governor Perry is planning on using a massive display of armed police power to prevent the people from having access to the legislative gallery.

I have high hopes for the people of Egypt than the people of Austin.

Who Isn't an Enemy of the US?

Between Republican lawmakers, our Democratic President, and NSA spooks, pretty much nobody.

• Russia and China, according to Snowden haters.
• Ecuador, Iceland, and Venezuela according to government types afraid Snowden will find a place of refuge. 
• North Korea and Iran according to Republicans jonesing for a shooting war somewhere.
• Afghanistan, Algeria, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Mali, and Yemen according to the nerds killing people with Predator drones. 
• The other 38 majority Islamic nations on earth according to Republican xenophobes.
• The 28 nations of the European Union according to the NSA which spies on all of them.
• Mexico, according to the Republican Party. 
• Cuba because it's tradition.
• All of Central America and the Caribbean, plus Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru according to the DEA.

If you add them all together, the United States considers more than three-quarters of the globe to be potential enemies. No wonder the US spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined and has a more invasive spy network than the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany combined.

The American Police State: Booze Division

This is something that wasn't done during Prohibition.

Even when Eliot Ness took on Al Capone.

A mob of Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control agents in plainclothes surrounded a young woman and her two roommates late one night. The men pulled their guns, jumped on her car like crazy people, waved what looked in the dark like toy badges, and demanded the young women get out of their car and submit to the armed men's every demand. The women, terrified, drove away from the scruffily clad gang and dialed 911 to report the incident. When the women discovered the men really were law enforcement officers they surrendered peaceably.

What was the original crime that the agents felt warranted drawing their guns and threatening death?  The agents thought the women may have been under 21 and buying beer. The women were 20 years old college students, but had only bought bottled sparkling water. No crime had been committed but even if there had been beer it didn't warrant an armed assault.

When the agents discovered they had screwed up they arrested the women anyway and charged them with felonies for fleeing the terrifying attack. Fortunately, the district attorney applied common sense and dismissed the felony charges. But his common sense is limited as he also refused to chastise the mob of agents for their extreme behavior when the worst crime they suspected was a woman may have been a few months too young to buy beer. It could have been worse. The agents could have gunned down the unarmed women for the crime of suspected underage drinking.

I don't understand why Alcoholic Beverage Control agents carry weapons. It's not like modern Virginia is plagued with gangsters smuggling bootleg hooch. What other Virginia agencies unnecessarily arm their employees? Is the Board of Accountancy packing heat? Certainly the Tourism Board issues Glocks to their employees.

I don't understand why the ABC agents approached the women as a mob, brandishing guns and issuing threats. Why didn't just one agent politely ask the women if they were old enough to buy beer? The whole matter would have been resolved peaceably in thirty seconds.

Actually, I do understand what the agents were doing. They were trying to provoke an incident where they could have made the young women submit to an invasive pat down. The agents saw an opportunity to feel up some cute, young co-eds.

Jim Crow Stampede

This photo was taken in 1925. Republicans hope by 2025 to return black and Hispanic voting patterns to those halcyon days.

The rush of Confederate states to reinstate Jim Crow voting restrictions following the Supreme Court's ruling invalidating the 15th Amendment is stunning. The ink was not even dry on the ruling before half of the Confederacy jumped to institute burdensome restrictions that will, magically, mostly be applied to minorities, students, and the elderly.

Add in the Citizens United case and the Supreme Court may have dealt death blows to the concept of universal suffrage. The vote will soon only belong to the rich whites (In my first draft I Freudian typed "rich shits" which, come to think of it, is also accurate). Although I have to give Chief Justice John Roberts credit for hiding the destruction of voting rights behind a limited, and likely short-lived, expansion of gay rights.

The Great Disenfranchisement in Pictures

What little that has been gained in the Supreme Court, the right of gays to marry their partners, is far out-shadowed by what has been lost, the now quick erosion of the right to vote for blacks and Hispanics throughout much of the country.

Texas has already begun an effort to disenfranchise millions of citizens through gerrymandering and voter restrictions.

Forcing voters to jump through a myriad of ever shrinking hoops to make it to the ballot box is a time honored tradition of Jim Crow in the Southern US. Question 20 of this Louisiana test reads: "Spell backwards, forwards." Whites who took the test always got this question correct. Blacks, even college graduates, never answered correctly because there is no correct answer. Such ambiguous questions made the literacy test an effective disenfranchisement tool.

Requiring specific identification papers is another hoop in the disenfranchisement arsenal. But is also allows an opportunity for poll watchers to intimidate voters, "This looks like a fake ID to me."

The Voting Rights Act worked which is specifically why it is so despised by Republican lawmakers in the old Confederacy.

In Texas and Arizona they are terrified of spics gaining control. Now that the Supreme Court has effectively declared the 15th Amendment unconstitutional, the Deep South as well as states like Ohio and Pennsylvania that have long sought to manipulate election results only to be thwarted by voters can rewrite the laws to force the results they want.

I suggest gays not celebrate their victory yet, it may be short lived. As Jim Crow is reinstated the anti-sodomy laws can't be far behind.

Snowden and the Law

A few people, both libs and cons, are criticizing Edward Snowden for not nobly allowing himself to be arrested so he could practice civil disobedience from an American jail. Unfortunately, as Bradley Manning has shown us, political civil disobedience from jail is no longer an option.

If American justice got its hands of Snowden...

• He would be incarcerated for years before there is even an earnest attempt at a trial. Manning was imprisoned for three years before his trial began.
• He would not be in solitary confinement but isolation confinement. No family nor friend visits and lawyer visits restricted. Even his jailers would treat him as an unperson and refuse to speak to him.
• He would be subject to an array of psychological tortures designed to drive him insane.
• He would be denied writing material - there would be no "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" for Snowden.
• If he held a hunger strike, as Gandhi was famous for, Snowden would be strapped down, a tube shoved down his throat, and he would be forcibly fed.

The United States government has learned a lot about imprisoning enemies of the state from the primitive days of  Bull Connor and P. W. Botha. The US government knows that the most important thing is to turn the prisoner into an unperson, someone who effectively ceases to exist and that psychological torture is more effective than physical torture. I am confident that the Hoover Building has a secret Room 101 waiting for Snowden.

IOKIYAD

It's been a long standing hypocrisy that Republicans will forgive any misdeed, however egregious, if the perpetrator is a "family values Republican." Newt Gingrich can discards used wives like tissue paper, David Vitter can consort with hookers, and Mark Sanford can abandon his family to chase Argentinian tail and then get caught stalking his ex-wife and all their deeds are forgiven by Republicans. It's so common it has been abbreviated IOKIYAR - It's OK If You Are Republican.

It is only fair to acknowledge that Democrats play the same game. President Obama's NSA has been caught spying on just about everybody in ways Dick Cheney could only dream of. If the Bush Administration had done such things we liberals would be screaming bloody murder. But a Democrat is in the White House and suddenly it's okay.

The argument appears to that it is better to get a needle in the eye than a stick in the eye. Me? I think getting stuck in the eye is bad no matter who is doing the poking. But being consistent in your outrage is just so out of fashion.

When President Obama Channels Dick Cheney

If it wasn't for my pissing on the Constitution you'd all be dead, dead, dead now. ~ paraphrasing

This is such a Republican concept that it's extremely disappointing to hear it coming from a Democrat.

Nascent: Weasel Word of the Week

nascent (adj) - Beginning to exist or develop

I've encountered this word more often in the past two days than I have in the last decade. Probably the best synonym is embryonic. It was used by two different American spies for two very different purposes. Nascent is a word few Americans are familiar with, even I had to look it up to be sure of its meaning. It's one of those words used to obfuscate not illuminate.

A nascent elephant

FBI director Robert Mueller used the word as an excuse for the fact the while the FBI is using drones to spy on American citizens the FBI doesn't yet have any policies for directives for their use. Is some jealous FBI drone operator using one to stalk an ex-girlfriend? There certainly isn't any rule, regulation, or law forbidding it.

Yesterday, deputy NSA director Sean Joyce use to word to disguise the fact the "plot" to blow up the New York Stock Exchange was not a plot at all. A "nascent plot" is one that has not gotten beyond the "wouldn't it be cool if we..." phase of plotting.

Nascent is one of those go-to words for government spies trying to hide their activity.

Defending NSA Spying Fails

President Obama says the NSA spying program is "transparent." That's actually true but not in the meaning Obama suggests, openly operated. It is anything but that. The NSA programs is transparent in that it is invisible, unseen, and unseeable. It is so hidden that when a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer wanted to explain in general terms the oversight process both the White House and Congress pissed their collective pants and forbade her.

The NSA head says their spying program has stopped "potential terrorist events over 50 times." Yet he can only give a couple of examples neither of which is very convincing. He claims the other examples are all top secret, which is another way of saying they don't exist at all or are even less convincing that the two public examples.

President Obama says "we should take pride" in the government's ability to spy on our daily lives. He thinks we should celebrate the fact that the United States has the largest, most intrusive, most comprehensive spy network in the history of mankind. We are better than the KGB, Stasi, and Gestapo were in their prime. USA! USA!

President Obama says the government "cannot and have not" spied on Americans. Except when they can and have with rubber stamp permission from a secret court or when they have done it by accident, through the numerous loopholes in the system, or just whenever they thought it was a good idea.

Congressman Mike Rogers has denounced opponents of government spying as "our enemies within [who have] become almost as damaging as our enemies on the outside." Since polls show 53% of Americans oppose the government spying that means that a majority of the nation is being classified as enemies of the state.

Fire Pierre McGuire

NBC's hockey coverage is just fine except for their main "Inside the Glass" guy.

Pierre McGuire, unlike every other color commentator in sports, never played professionally at any level. The most he ever accomplished was two pathetic losing seasons as an NHL and ECHL head coach and a handful of years as an assistant coach, mostly at the college level.

Like every career loser, McGuire spends most of his time whining about how the sport is being unfair. The ice is unfair, the officials are unfair, the rules are unfair.

That last one is particularly annoying. The NHL has a rule that if a player flips the puck out of play from his defensive zone it is a penalty. It's a great rule that keeps the game going at a quick pace and makes for a more exciting game.

McGuire hate the rule because it punishes unskillful play. Like any career loser, McGuire believes the rules should take pity on incompetent hockey players who lack the ability to control the puck when clearing it from danger. He wants the penalty forgiven if the player's actions were "accidental."

That could be forgiven if McGuire were interesting. He is the most boring voice in sports. It is said, accurately, that baseball's Vin Scully can make reading a grocery list sound like Shakespeare (I've heard him do it). McGuire makes a sport as viscerally exciting as ice hockey sound duller than reading the phone book.

Besides the constant whining, McGuire is obsessed with player's resumes. His comments are frequently nothing more than a recitation of names and locations. Where someone played junior hockey and who his coaches were, who his junior line mates were who never made it to the NHL. If McGuire were reading the phone book we would at least get some numbers to dial to alleviate the tedium.


McGuire is an abomination who we will probably be stuck with forever. He is the singular reason I prefer the CBC broadcast whenever I can get it.

Punking the NSA

I've been thinking about pranks I can pull on the NSA. You know, make them think I'm a terrorist even though I am perfectly innocent. I figure I could really mess with their minds with a few strategically chosen Google searches while sending out e-mails with a handful of key words included.

Then I figured out that by the time they realized I had been playing a joke on them I would have been shot several times, waterboarded within an inch of my life, and spent a few years in an isolated cell where the only other humans I would see would be my torturers. Kind of a...

So I will confine myself to heaping foul scorn on everyone involved, including both the current and past presidents, and not believing a single fucking word they or their minions say.

How the US Helps the Syrian Rebels

Not powerful enough weapons to actually make a significant difference because those weapons will likely end up being used by jihadists.

Just enough weapons to insure the civil war continues in perpetuity because nothing benefits Israel more than watching one of her border states bleeding itself to death. If either side wins that side will see Israel as its enemy so the goal is to insure neither side ever wins.

I'm not saying this is necessarily bad only that the assistance is based entirely on geopolitics and has nothing to do with humanitarianism.

The Queer Mind of Scalia

Antonin Scalia wrote one of the most bizarre concurrent opinions in the history of the Supreme Court in the decision that corporations could not patent human DNA.

Concurrent opinions are reserved for justices who agree with the ultimate judgement but disagree on some fine point of law within the judgement. Scalia didn't do that. He wanted preserved in the history of the court for posterity that he did not understand nor believe in molecular biology.

It was an odd thing to do. Was he slyly chiding his colleagues? Was he saying the court should have avoided the case because none of them understood the science? It's the kind of arrogant SOBish thing he would do. But I don't think that's it.

Scalia has based his entire career on the theory that neither man nor science has changed in the last 250 years. Molecular biology is one of those newfangled sciences that didn't exist when the Constitution was written. Scalia, quite simply, refuses to believe in it. He put that in writing because in some future case, probably having to do with gay rights, he intends to rely on denying the basic facts of biology.

Or, Scalia is just a raving loon.

US Society Is "The Prisoner"

People compare the NSA domestic spying program to the novel "1984." But that society is a bleak place. A more accurate comparison would be the British TV show "The Prisoner."


There is lots of pomp and music, a mirage of constant celebration.

Most everyone appears content and happy because they have meekly acquiesced.

We have the illusion of democracy but no matter who is elected nothing much ever changes.

We are numbers and not free men. We all have 10 digit government issued numbers without which we cannot work, cash checks, or basically exist.

We may have the illusion of freedom but every waking moment is controlled by the government, our employers, the banks.

And we are watched. All the time. It is for our own good, we are told. National security. We are instructed to be happy we are under constant surveillance.

But,....

Step out of line, the man comes and takes you away.

Computers and Domestic Spying

The US government's All Seeing Eye.

The big difference between J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, East Germany's Stasi, and 2013's NSA is the modern ability of computers. In the old days dossiers and wiretaps required human eyes and ears. The Stasi is estimated to have employed one-sixth of East Germany's population as informants. Information was stored on paper, even the most interesting wiretaps were transcribed to paper. There was a limit to how much data government could acquire.

Nowadays the information nearly unlimited. Your grocery store records everything you buy and analyses the data to predict what you will want to buy in the future. Amazon does the same thing with your reading material. MasterCard compiles your entire shopping history. Google records every single search you've done. Your ISP knows what websites you visited and how long you've been there. GPS allows your car to know everywhere you drove and your smart phone to know where you have been. Your phone also knows who you've talked to and for how long.

Then there is Twitter and Facebook where people voluntarily spy on themselves, informing those corporations of every intimate detail of their lives. The kind of information that would cause Hoover to orgasm repeatedly.

Did you notice the pattern here? The government initiated none of this datamining. Corporations did it all. They do it to sell you shit or to sell that information to other corporations intending to sell shit to you. Or, as is the case with car and phone GPS chips, they do it just because they can on the off chance the data will become valuable someday. All of this personal information about you and me is being mined and collated by corporations for their own very selfish interests. Sears doesn't care if you are a terrorist, they just want to help you find the perfect pressure cooker for your bomb building needs.

For government apparatchiks who believe it is their sworn duty to keep tabs on everything every American is doing lest somebody somewhere does something naughty, all this corporate information collection is better than Nirvana. They grab the data, usually not even bothering to pay for it, and build fancy search algorithms that even the corporations never dreamed of.

Of course there are hole in the data. Cash transactions are hidden as are people who use low-tech phones. In the end 99.9999999999% of the data is useless. Still, the government gathers it and studies it. And because so much is useless they gather more and more information about Americans. They hope somewhere in all that worthless dust there will be a few specks of gold.

And the price is, at any given moment your government knows more about you than you do yourself. But so do the businesses you use. Privacy is a joke. If you buy your condoms with a credit card MasterCard knows how often you have sex. Verizon knows who you are probably sleeping with. And Walgreens knows if you have missed your period. What corporations know the government can know too.

Spies and Agent Provocateurs

The US federal government has a long history of domestic spying. While some of the targets have been legitimate - the Mafia, Nazis, Communists, jihadists, and the KKK - most of the targets have committed only one crime, not acquiescing to political orthodoxy.

Most of the spying has been done by the FBI but in recent years a whole alphabet soup of agencies (including the NSA, DIA, NRO, OICI, CIA) have been created and tasked with spying. Lots of that involved domestic spying for the simple reason it is easier and cheaper.

Military Spying

Current and planned military drone bases inside the United States.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has been caught several times spying on Americans. There have certainly been other occasions when they were never caught. When the DIA in 2007 was discovered spying on Americans opposed to the Iraq War such as the Quakers. They shut down the program (called TALON) only to quietly reopen it under a different acronym (FICOR). The program compiles data of individuals, domestic and foreign, who are suspected of being disloyal to US war policy.

The Pentagon has scores of domestic surveillance drone bases. The bases are officially for training but they can and do "accidentally" collect intelligence on US residents. Since the Pentagon routinely lies about its domestic drone activities it is likely commanders are not very resistant to the urge to watch over people they don't like.

The CIA
Like the military, the CIA is forbidden by law to spy on American soil. Like the military, they ignore the law whenever they feel like it. The CIA has secretly tested drugs on Americans (Project MK-ULTRA). Born out the fear the Soviets were ahead of the US in brainwashing technology, the CIA began a decade long program of selecting unwitting people at random to test mind altering drugs on them. The only thing that came of it was to convert LSD from a minor therapeutic medicine to wide spread street drug.

Operation Chaos, whimsically named after the bad guys from the TV show Get Smart, ended up creating the men who committed Watergate. For a long time the CIA was jealous of the FBI's right to spy on Americans so they formed their own domestic program. During the Vietnam War, President Johnson tasked the CIA with spying on anti-war activists. They did everything but targeted assassinations although there are many people who believe it was the CIA domestic program that murdered President Kennedy.

The CIA is still at it. It was revealed in 2011 that the CIA recruited the New York Police Department to do a joint, and totally illegal, spying operation that probably has a cute code name that is still top secret.

FBI
The granddaddy of domestic spying agencies. The FBI has been spying on American citizens since the J. Edgar Hoover days. Hoover wiretapped every president from FDR to Richard Nixon. He began wiretapping the Supreme Court in the mid-1930's. The FBI spied on civil rights organizations, student and anti-war groups during the Vietnam War, and anyone ever vaguely suspected of being friendly to communism.

But the FBI didn't just spy. Their CONINTELPRO program went out of its way to defame people they didn't like. Actress Jean Seberg supported the civil rights movement. That led Hoover to conclude that she must be a "sex pervert." The FBI fabricated rumors about her and harassed her until she committed suicide. The program's criminal activity was revealed in 1971 and a decade later Ronald Reagan issued a executive order legalizing their crimes.

The programs, under other names, continue to this day.

Agent Provocateurs

The biggest problem all these agencies have is that there just isn't enough terrorist plot to justify their budgets. They have resorted to fomenting the plots they uncover. We may never know how many terrorist plots are just FBI fabrications. Stories abound of people being led by FBI informants into committing crimes, sometimes doing all the work for the suspects. Other times the informants just make up shit to justify their pay.

The Occupy movement was replete with agent provocateurs sent in by the FBI with the specific goal of committing crimes to discredit the citizen protesters.

American Police State: Spynation

Of course the government is spying on me. I'm not outraged only because outrage requires a certain degree of surprise and I've know about government spying for a long time. I hate it. I'm angry about it. Livid really. And I have been since before I was born.

Defeating Datamining
First a little proof that the NSA practices useless voyeurism. Datamining looks at lots of information looking for key words or phrases. The way to defeat it is to communicate in a simple code. If you use the word "baby" instead of "bomb," for example, then the NSA would have to filter through billions of parenthood chatter trying to find a terrorist plot.

Why They Spy
The point of NSA spying is exactly the same as the reason the Stasi spied on East Germans. We millions of common folk are out here doing shit the government doesn't know about and that terrifies small minded career bureaucrats like NSA director James Clapper. They always say they are looking for "enemies of the state," but the fact is they consider every citizen a potential enemy.

Who Runs the NSA
James Clapper has been a Peeping Tom all his life. He worked his way up the ranks in the military spying on people. Not feet on the ground, James Bond type spying, but the high tech equivalent of the creepy neighbor with a telescope spying. Clapper is also a particularly bad spy. He screwed the pooch on Iraq WMD and the Libyan Civil War. He got caught lying to Congress (Lying is expected, getting caught is dumb.). Looking through his career it is impossible to find anything he has done right except getting promotions which suggests he has devoted considerable effort to spying on his bosses like that other American Peeping Tom, J. Edgar Hoover.

The Hoover Legacy
The bureaucratic propensity to spy on Americans was developed and perfected by FBI legend J. Edgar Hoover. Copying techniques from Felix Dzerzhinsky in Soviet Russia and Heinrich Himmler in Nazi Germany, Hoover build dossiers on millions of Americans from presidents, leaders of Congress, and the Supreme Court to everyday Americans, teachers and workers. Nothing has changed since Hoover died, the American government continues to spy on her own citizens with the same intrusiveness.

Isn't Domestic Spying Illegal?
Yeah. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution forbids it. Congress passed laws allowing them anyhow. Congress even created a secret court system to rubber stamp domestic spying. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is a misnomer since the targets of thousands of approved wiretaps are Americans living in the United States "suspected" of being foreign agents. But the government doesn't even bother with the charade of a warrant for its massive datamining program. They just do it, cite "national security," and fuck the Constitution.

I've Been Bugged
In the late 1980's I was working for an anti-establishment candidate for the San Diego City Council. My telephone line developed a mysterious noise on it that continued throughout the campaign and stopped suddenly the day after the election. Everybody working on the campaign experienced the same thing. It's possible I've been bugged on other occasions and just never noticed.

Obama and Bush
The program, PRISM, under attack was implemented by President Bush Jr. but enthusiastically continued by President Obama, Obama even appointed a Bushite to oversee the program. Both are equally to blame. Most of the Republicans and Democrats who are currently outraged by the program voted, in secret, for it. Republicans condemning it now approved of it when Bush was the spymaster. Hypocrisy abounds.

What Should We Do?
Domestic spying will continue unabated, it has too many decades of momentum to be stopped now. We should live our lives like East Germans did during the Communist era. Assume our phones are tapped, our emails are being read, our internet search patterns are being studied. Because they are. Never say or write anything is private you wouldn't want the police to read because they probably are.

If you are up to something nefarious use simple precautions. Communicated in code. Use pirated or public Wi-Fi, hack some innocent's computer so it looks like they did your suspicious searches. The NSA is much more interested is peaceful dissidents than in actual terrorists.

UPDATE: James Clapper is director of National Intelligence and not chief of the NSA. That just means Clapper is a higher ranked Peeping Tom. The head of the NSA is Keith Alexander whose resume is even thinner than Clapper's.

The Wacky World of E. W. Jackson

It takes a whole lot of crazy to be a Republican and you have to be deeply demented to be a black Republican. I mean, you go to party gatherings and everyone assumes you're there to clean the dishes or polish their shoes. After you've introduced yourself as the party's candidate for lieutenant governor you'll experience extensive fawning with everyone treating you like a four year-old who has proudly spelled "cat" correctly. "Isn't he special, bless his heart." It takes a unique person with a bizarre outlook on life to exist in that kind of world without ever realizing that everyone, including you friends, are laughing at you.

E. W. Jackson is that kind of person.

Yoga spells Satan.

 I was really attracted to Jackson's statement that yoga opens people up to satanic possession. That would certainly explain my shingles if you reject that unGodly chicken pox science stuff. I've done yoga for years so it was only a matter of time.

Jackson hates gays with the obsessive enthusiasm that only a closeted poof can manage. He claims that gay rights is worse for black Americans than the Ku Klux Klan and slavery.

He wants a law requiring women to report miscarriages as a homicide and punish any woman who fails to promptly report a miscarriage to police. Most women don't immediately know if they have miscarried but that doesn't make them any less murderers.

He has called President Obama an "atheist Muslim." Which is an oxymoron; he can't be both.

Jackson says that Democrats are the Antichrist, which means that half the nation is evil incarnate.

Jackson doesn't think everything is evil. He has a special love for rich folk. He believes that charity ought to be reversed. He advocated that the poor should give their money to the rich because the wealthy are more deserving of charity.

Sandy Adelson Is the New Al Capone

Sandy Adelson tried valiantly to buy himself a president. He invested $150 million in presidential candidates, first Newt Gingrich and later Mitt Romney, only to see it all wasted.

Not Sandy Adelson. I know this because Al Capone was both better looking and a better person.

To some extent he lost the money the same way he got it, gambling. He put a shitload of chips on double zero (Newt) only to watch that political salamander crap out (I know I'm mixing my gambling metaphors). Then, like any addicted gambler, he doubled down his bets on Mitt and lost that too.

Of course, Sandy wasn't just placing bets, he was trying to purchase a president. See, Sandy Adelson is a crooked little SOB, up to his over-sized earlobes in bribery and money laundering allegations. Sandy wanted to own himself an Attorney General and the best way to do that is buy the president.

Since that didn't happen Sandy faces the possibility of spending the rest of his miserable little life hiring a phalanx of expensive lawyers to protect his ill-gotten gains from John Law on several continents. And, of course, Sandy will hit the political roulette tables again next presidential cycle gambling that his billions can elect some other corrupt politician, like Bobby Jindal, to the highest office.

Shingles!!!

No, not the roof covering. I wish. I have the other kind of shingles, the revenge of chicken pox shingles.

I had the vaccine a couple of years ago. Still got shingles. I didn't get them in one of those annoying but otherwise mundane location like the chest or back. Of course not. My shingles appeared on the face. Specifically, the first rash is adjacent to my right eyebrow.

That location runs a risk of attacking my sight. Not to mention if the rash runs rampant I could end up with a face perfectly designed for the role of Erik in the Phantom of the Opera.

Fortunately, I did have the vaccine which should limit the severity of the rash. I caught it early (given it was staring me in the face when I looked in a mirror) and was able to start an anti-viral medicine quickly. That also should limit the severity. Also, years of practice at meditation is allowing me to quietly tolerate the irritation without picking at the lesions and causing scarring.

Chicken Pox
Back in the olden days there was great relief if the pox you caught was chicken and not Small Pox or Great Pox (syphillis). Few people lived long enough to suffer from shingles. All in all, chicken pox was a relative romp. The virus does its thing for a few days until the human immune system beats it back. Then it goes into hiding in nerve cells near the spine. There it waits for decades for the immune system to lose its vigilance. The virus then follows a bundle of nerve cells to reach the skin and take another shot at reproducing.

It's all very wondrous, this complex dance of species, unless it's happening to your skin.

Government Security Is a Joke

The whole alphabet soup of federal security agencies have become silly.

Take the TSA. Their pat down procedure is specifically designed to punish anyone who ops out of the X-ray scanner. It is invasive, abusive, and done in public for the amusement of others. Women are frequently chosen for the "enhanced" examination based not upon the possibility they are carrying a bomb and entirely upon how sexy they are. And they are completely useless, violate the Constitution, and amount to a sex crime. Horror stories abound.

Other airport security is even worse. The US Customs, for example, employs people who are not aware that Puerto Rico is part of the United States. They will search private planes with a casual disinterest because they have to log a certain number of searches but desperately not wanting to find anything because of all the paperwork that would follow.

Border crossing is equally bizarre. The San Ysidro (San Diego) border crossing often requires two and three hour waits what with the need to show passports and answer questions designed to identify smugglers, questions like "where were you born?" People who cross the border frequently, like smugglers, can purchase a SENTRI pass. For $122.25 they can skip the long waits with access to a special Fast Pass lane, avoid those annoying questions, and zip through the border with a flick of a fancy RFID card.

The government has spent billions building a Great Wall of China-like security fence along the border with Mexico. Before it was half finished drug cartels were digging tunnels under that wall using slave labor. In the past five years over 70 tunnels have been discovered. Very many more go undiscovered and continue operating. The fence has successfully prevented wildlife from crossing the border but humans remain undeterred.

Cynical Much? Memorial Day Edition

The only reason we have a Memorial Day is because of our habit of sending young men off to die in some unreasonable facsimile of Hell.

Although, we never stop to remember the millions of innocents who died as collateral damage.

Civilization Older Than We Think

There is a massive man-made structure at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee. The speculation is it was build on land that was later submerged which would suggest that the date of the structure could be as old as the last glaciation - about 10,000 years ago.

In southeast Turkey there is a obviously man-made structure that required the labor of highly skilled stone carvers that has been dated to 12,000 years ago.

Gobekli, Turkey

The Great Sphinx in Egypt shows weathering patterns that date carving of the monolith at between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago.

Dwark, India has the remains of a city now underwater that was submerged by the rising sea 3,500 years ago and may have been build over 12,000 years ago. 

Gold mines and adjacent communities in South Africa have been discovered that have been dated to 200,000 years ago which would make them almost as old as the species Homo Sapiens.

All these dates predate what was supposed to be the beginning of human civilization. According to traditional scholars mankind at the beginning of the Holocene Era were just beginning to gather into settlements. Farming and simple structures were just starting. The most advanced people were beginning to make tools out of metal (bronze) and not just stone. Still, the communities were thought to be just a gathering of nomads and the kind of organization necessary for massive building projects were thought impossible.

And at the time that gold was being mined 150 miles east of Johannesburg mankind was supposed to be hunter-gatherers less interested in digging for useless rocks than they were in downloading songs on iTunes.

Of course, these discoveries have encouraged speculation about aliens or Atlanteans. But it does suggest that human civilization is much older than we have supposed and that there is a whole chapter of human history left undiscovered.