Lock Them Up Forever and Throw Away the Key!

Unfortunately, this does have its very real cost.   I am not suggesting any particular solution at this point, but it is something worth thinking about -- maybe "one size fits all" justice has its limitations?

Book Review - Marching Toward Hell

I thought I would share a book review of mine from a few years ago that has been fairly well-received on Goodreads.  It is by a very knowledgeable author with a lot of experience in the Middle East.  If you want to understand why the US is so reviled in that part of the world and why everything we do over there seems to make matters worse...well, read on:

Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq by Michael Scheuer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A very slow, and at times frustrating read. Slow because sometimes you need to just stop and process the information, and a lot of the information/wisdom the author has to share is in the footnotes, of which there are many. Frustrating when you come to fully realize how completely, totally, and utterly wrong the US policy in the Middle East has been.

This is a book written by a justifiably angry, passionate man, who invested 20+ years at the CIA specializing in the Middle East, among other things creating and running the bin Laden unit and watching Clinton ignore opportunity after opportunity to take bin Laden out, or Bush II execute a half-hearted, ineffective war in Afghanistan and follow it up with a pointless, equally ineffective invasion of Iraq, while bin Laden celebrated his good fortune and the strategic victory that Iraq represented.

Indeed, one of the things I learned from this book is that bin Laden's publicly stated goals not only are very different from what US politicians spout in sound bites for the cameras, but also that they are very consistent over time and make a certain amount of sense relative to the realities of Islam and the Middle East.

Reading this book (and the others by the author) also taught me that there is no politician of either party that can be trusted to give anything like a true accounting of the events leading up to, including, and after 9/11. The 'ruling elite' (a contemptuous term used a lot in the book) of the US in both the executive and congressional branches is in either mass denial, or unfathomable ignorance and stupidity, or both. They are also guilty of a mass paranoia about what other countries think - they are convinced that we have to fight 'polite wars' where civilians are never hurt and a minimal amount of damage is done to the country, largely to keep in the good graces of European governments and special-interest voting blocs at home. The author makes a compelling, if squirm-inducing case for why we need to bring the full force and power of the US military to bear when it is used without tempering it, or apologizing for it.

The book has one interesting theme throughout, which the author returns to again and again, and finishes the book with -- and that is how far from the principles set forth by the founders of the American republic our policies in the Middle East have been...in many cases directly contrary to the wishes and warnings of the very gentlemen whose memories the neoconservative politicians who got us into this mess just love to invoke when they thunder forth about spreading American democracy anywhere and everywhere, appropriate or not.


View all my reviews

Supreme Court and Voting Rights Act

As most of you know, the Supreme Court today redefined and severely limited a major portion of the Voting Rights Act having to do with mandatory approval for nine states with particularly onerous records (in the 50s and 60s) of blatant racial discrimination in their voting laws.

First, I think this was a largely correct decision for this time, almost 50 years later.  The states involved have cleaned up their acts considerably and do not deserve to be held to task for the illegal antics of their ancestors.  (How would you like to be held to task in your life today for your weird Uncle Harry's penchant for 'forgetting' his pants in the 50's?).

I don't get what President Obama and the other 'ultra libs' are so steamed over, either.  Many of the comments center around so-called "voter-id" laws.  Well, sorry folks, but it is not good enough for someone to wander into a polling place off the street, with no identification, verbally claiming to be a citizen, and demanding the right to vote.   It is a perfectly reasonable requirement that you prove to some government body that you really were born in or otherwise have legally obtained US citizenship.  In our state, you cannot get a "learner's permit" for a driver's license without showing an original (not copy) of your birth certificate, or the equivalent.  Thus the "motor voter" registration process enacted by Congress pretty much guarantees that only US citizens vote.  Yes it is wrong (and should continue to be illegal) to charge some citizens $50 or $100 for the identification, but citizenship is not meant to be free either.

And finally, I really take exception with a large portion (majority?) of the media that characterized this as the SCOTUS "sidestepping" or "dodging" a  major decision. 

IT IS NO SUCH THING IF YOU UNDERSTAND THE SUPREME COURT AND ITS PLACE!

The Supreme Court's place is NOT to rewrite laws or to divine the intent of political parties or whatever.  The vast majority of Supreme Court decisions throughout its history have been incremental interpretations, nudges, clarifications of the laws that are to be passed by Congress and enforced by the Executive.   US citizens need to stop expecting the Supreme Court to clean up the messes they create by continuing to elect the brain-dead to Congress in particular, and take hold of 'their' branch of the government.  The Supreme Court is NOT of a temperament nor is it their role to do the "people's bidding". 

Which is why I think the absolutely STUPIDEST place in Washington DC for various groups to protest, wave misspelled signs, shout nonsensical slogans is in front of the Supreme Court.  Not only is it by definition going to be ineffective...it shows your ignorance of your own government, and will not be effective.

  

The F-35 Drain

The F-35 program continues to prove an astonishing example of how to not do anything right.  Not only was production begun before it was even tested (essentially making a test pilot out of every pilot) the program is predicated on a 35-year life cycle.  Just who is going to need or want the thing is a significant question, and now there are those in Washington who say that it just might be too expensive to even finish. 

There are those in the Pentagon who still insist that it is a 'critical' part of the arsenal, but I guess they forgot that in the last three "George's wars" in the Middle East there was essentially no usage (nor need for) a "tactical fighter".  There are already no other countries with serious Air Forces that could challenge the current US Air Force.  China is supposedly trying to piece together an aircraft carrier, but as far as anyone knows they don't have any modern planes to put on it.  (They are probably waiting for the F-35 to get done so they can steal its plans).

The Popular Media Follies

Just to show how banally stupid, unintelligent, and unthinking the "popular" media has become, look at this whopper from nbcnews.com.  Because they can change their 'headlines at will I can't link you to their original ridiculous item that was headlined "Will Snooping Doom Obama? It's Complicated".

I would submit that it is only complicated for the ratings-chasing idiot "news sources" on the Internet like 'nbcnews'.

Let us consider the fact that they reach the conclusion in their own article that only the NSA "scandal" reaches as far as Obama....and he was handed that mess by none other than George W.; that great destroyer of the Constitution!  

Does anyone at nbcnews.com have a real job...or a real "journalism" degree perchance???  Does anyone there actually THINK for a living???

Accidents of Birth

I could not help but reflect yet again on how your place of birth can make such a difference in your life...or in this case specifically your gender and your place of birth:



My daughter started driver's ed training this week - appreciate where you were born sweetheart and the rights it gives you...there are a lot of women in the world who would love to have the same opportunity. 

(Oh, and please don't hit anything just yet!!)

Science Rules Again

Uh-oh!  Science once again wins over religious/conservative/talk radio wackos with no evidence.

US Congress - Forced to Work???

Gosh, the US Congress may actually have to stay in the nation's capital and WORK for a change!

Finally! Thank You PBS!

Starting this fall (September 7 actually, so I guess it is late summer!) PBS will be bringing its quality journalism to the US weekend with a half-hour newscast on Saturdays and Sundays.  I have long been frustrated at the lack of a quality news source for weekends. 

(In case you didn't know...Saturday and Sunday in the US are Sunday and Monday in Asia...and very little of the rest of the world even adheres to the US/Western concept of  "weekends").

Who is Really Democratic?

Does anyone else see the discontinuity here?  We have been going in and destroying Middle East countries for the last decade-plus and yet to my knowledge we have yet to hold an election in the United States with anywhere near a 72% turnout rate like "evil empire" Iran just did????

Thanks George!

George II and his Republican lackeys decided that outsourcing everything possible concerning government work was a good idea. 

At least  the latest NSA "non-scandal" has apparently aroused a few folks to think twice about it.

Another View of Middle East Reality

If one ignores the inaccurate and laughably inarticulate Middle East coverage of the last several years on cable news channels (excepting PBS of course), you can still find a few people who know what they are talking about.  While the "ratings press" continues to milk the "Arab Spring" for all it is worth (personally, I think we are well into 'winter' now) the fact remains that the area is probably looking to an unprecedented time of instability and continued war and destruction. 

The various 'new' governments have all failed miserably to bring anything approaching the artificial stability that the US-supported despot dictators they displaced (usually as a matter of iron-fisted suppression of their people...using US-supplied arms of course).

Not surprisingly, Thomas Friedman brought up a different point in a recent column - the situation of Israel which faces being surrounded by unstable (or completely non-functional) governments after a period of at least a tenuous, stable balance in the area.

At first I didn't know if I was going to agree with Mr. Friedman in this column, but in the end I did.  It seemed to me at first that he started out being a bit too sympathetic to Israel, but they do have some very unstable neighbors now...and they just watched their latest "friends/enemies/sort of friends again" (Turkey) destabilize and we really don't know how that is going to turn out. 

I have always been (and still am) of the opinion that Israel is the spoiled brat of the Middle East and should have been taken out to the woodshed and thoroughly paddled by the US at least 20 years ago.  Unfortunately our political system in the US produces neither intelligent thinkers nor conviction in our presidents so we have continued to placate the Israeli lobby and just say "aren't they cute" like embarrassed parents about Israel's illegal shenanigans while the rest of the world is getting increasingly impatient with their arrogance.

Enjoy That Steak

It has been known for some time that food production is yet another looming catastrophe for the world.  Climate change, plus the wasteful practices of the western world (the US throws away or never harvests almost half of its food,  and the rest of the world is not much better) is a major part of the problem. 

But it turns out the biggest problem may be prosperity -- with more countries successfully raising their living standards, the tendency is to migrate toward more animal-origin food sources.  This article talks about research in one particular area -- substitutes for chicken eggs.

In its typically informative and fact-based manner, PBS has formed a joint effort with Public Radio International's Center for Investigative Reporting to study what else is being done about the problem.

The Idiot Press

This is how desperate the ratings-driven, truth-is-a-casualty, facts-don't matter cable and newspaper 'entertainment' press have become. 

In a column Tuesday, David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun wrote an article that is truly a monument to arrogance and how far journalism has fallen as a profession.  You will note the article page is heavily laced with irrelevant commercial messages and links, and has no real feedback mechanism other than buttons to "like me" on several sites.  I want some "this is stupid blather" or "hate me" buttons for this kind of tripe!

The gist of the article is that PBS NewsHour apparently laid off some folks and adjusted their staffing, and he saw a golden opportunity to lay into their integrity. 

Needless to say the folks at the NewsHour were more than up to the task, and I will let them make their fact-based and eloquent reply themselves.

Anytime Zurawik or anyone else wants to take on PBS...I am ready.  How he can think that the obviously biased and uninformed reporting on cable news holds any kind of candle to PBS is astonishing.  I personally think all of the major broadcast networks should just cancel their newscasts -- 21 minutes per night (the amount of content in a 30 minute newscast after commercials) is ludicrous. 

Finally, I can't resist pointing out the segment of the comment by Kathleen McCleery,  Deputy Executive Producer of the PBS NewsHour:

The PBS NewsHour gets high marks for trust. In February of this year, Public Policy Polling found "that there's only one [TV News] source more Americans trust than distrust: PBS." That means a lot to us and to our viewers. Our reporting has earned acclaim, too. Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism has called our international coverage, "The PBS Difference," noting in 2012 that we provided "one-third more coverage of international events over the last year than the media overall." Media Matters took note of our climate change coverage, which included Hari Sreenivasan's "Coping with Climate Change" reporting from around the country, observing that "PBS NewsHour devoted almost twice as many segments to climate change as the other networks combined."

So rest assured Zurawik...thinkers aren't ready to roll over to your brand of bland, uninformative, biased, factless, spectacle-based news anytime soon !

Word for the Day

It is always a good day that lets me expand my vocabulary with a 'real' word (not a made-up "Internet word" that is going to die a deserved death in a few months) particularly if the word is concerned with science.   Today's word is definitely derecho.

Thank You NRA!

I sure rest easier at night knowing that whackos are assured of having as many rounds as they think they might need...courtesy of your resistance to any kind of reasonable limits on ammunition or guns. 

(Oh yeah...guess he might have conceivably needed this much to "defend himself" against....maybe....the Zombie Apocalypse...nah bullets don't work; maybe the third bad Red Dawn movie???)

Americans Need To Make Up Their Minds!

Come on folks...this whole business about the 'spying on Americans' thing in the media frankly reminds me more of how far the American media has fallen in credibility than anything else. 

The media were fine with George II and his cronies passing all kinds of intrusive abuses of the Constitution partly because they called it "The Patriot Act" which made for good headline material, and partly because we were in the "War on Terror" (which has never made any sense to me or anyone with more than a junior-high education, but again it makes for good headline material).

Now, however, the media's collective knickers are in a twist over a program that has largely been reported and documented in books and other "non-media" venues.  It is a well known fact that the government has had an ability to monitor at least the metadata of all phone traffic since soon after 9/11.  Through court order (the "secret court") they can intercept actual content.

The creation and authorization of this "secret FISA court" was part and parcel of the original George II shenanigans concerning the Patriot Act.  Remember George directing his AG to write a 'finding' that the Constitution basically "did not apply" in these cases?  

Where was all the media concern and righteousness then? 

What President would dare say "this is un-American and we must return to our principles" and shut down the operation?  Obama tried it with that stinking, repugnant, un-American mess called Guantanamo, and what did it get him?

President Obama had it exactly right the other day when he said (but perhaps not forcefully enough) that the following are completely incompatible with each other:

• 100% security from terrorist attacks
• 100% privacy
• 0% personal inconvenience

[Update] Thomas Friedman has an annoying habit of writing his interesting columns faster than I can get around to reading them!  As usual, he came up with a very concise and I think correct approach on this subject last week.

Make the choices folks - think! - and figure out the balance and make sure you elect to Congress people who are bright enough to 1) understand what you are saying; and 2) do something about it.  (This probably eliminates the current Congress entirely unfortunately).

An Intelligent Discussion on the NSA "spying" on Americans

I have been trying not to laugh hysterically at the absolutely ridiculous, ignorant, (and frankly hysterical) media coverage of the "monitoring American's phone calls" scandal (we need a catchier name for one if we are really going to blow this up into a firestorm). 

I first read about this capability in a book in the mid-2000s decade after George II rammed it through in the wake of 9/11 as part of the bizarrely named "Patriot Act".  The only "new" part is the ability to compel major Internet providers to fork over data...but even this has been the subject of many news items and debate on the web for years.  

My point here is ignore all the crap your local paper, Fox News, or MSNBC is feeding you and listen to probably the only intelligent analysis that will come out of this,  courtesy of PBS of course and Shields and Brooks in particular.  I would wager that you are not likely to hear a more useful or thoughtful analysis than this.  (Judy Woodruff even slips in a coy mention at the end that PBS News first talked about this in 2007!).

Watch Shields and Brooks on NSA Data, Christie's Election Maneuver on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

The Pentagon is Still At It

The most arrogant cabinet-level organization in the US government has to be the Pentagon.  Full of leaks, horribly managed, and proudly un-auditable it continues to just spew money out of all five sides.

There was one glimmer of hope last week when the Pentagon actually asked Congress to stop buying things it doesn't need or want...you know, like the "Star Wars" program that can't hit anything, or planes that go into mothballs right away or tanks that are lining up in the desert.  Of course the F-35 is something the Pentagon wanted...and it continues to auger itself further and further into the ground although the pace will slow down some if the Pentagon's latest "guesstimate" for fixing all the problems it has found so far has gone down slightly. 

Of course...thinkers may want to ask why the 'retrofit' costs are needed at all (or how accurate they could be) on a plane that has yet to be delivered in full operational, fighting readiness to any service. 

Syria - A Mess in More Ways Than One

As usual, many in Washington DC are staking out ignorantly simple, ideological positions on the mess in Syria.  (Yes, I mean you for one, John McCain).

And as is usually the case in the real world (anything outside of DC) the situation is much more complicated.  The media has fallen down yet again on this, barely scratching the surface and portraying Syria as just another 'Arab Spring' participant. 

Leave it to Tom Friedman to actually travel there, ask some questions, and investigate the roots of the issue.  I guarantee they are different from anything you have seen on cable news or any other 'popular' media outlet and will make you think.  The last three paragraphs of the column touch on all of the reasons for the Obama administration's caution in diving in on one side or another -- here is no guarantee in this case that the rebels are either right, or will make things better for the people of Syria.