Rants

Maybe it is a rainy day that is affecting my mood. Maybe cuz I had to ride the bus after biking for the last 2 months to work. But I'm feeling down.

I watched some of the Olympics last night. I've had my fill for a few years. As a lover of sports, I found myself pretty turned off at the modern Olympics. I saw some volleyball matches (US beating Cuba), a few floor routines from the Chinese gymnasts, and a couple of swimming races.

While I enjoyed the sports I saw (handpicked by NBC for whatever reason they want), I was utterly dismayed at a lengthy infomercial promoting China. It seemed like it was done by the China Dept Tourism rather than NBC. They probably collaborated on it.

I don't want to be another naysayer focusing on all the problems of China rather than the Olympics, but I find it hard to watch an event held in China, promoted by Exxon Mobil, when the two represent much of what is wrong with the world rather than what the Olympics are supposed to promote.

But so it goes. And China should be celebrated for bringing so many people out of poverty in such a short time. Of course, it will give many of them cancer in the coming years due to the massive pollution it creates continuously. But to see NBC salivating at the chance to collaborate with another government ("Wow, distributing Chinese propaganda is different from distributing American gov propaganda!") rather than actually fulfill the ostensible purpose of the media, which is to search for the friggin' truth and tell people about it.

But whatever.

So Russia has invaded Georgia. Well, I guess it has stopped now? I dunno. I haven't really been following it. I'm taking a break from learning such things and reading fiction for a little while. Well - literary fiction to be clear. I mean, who the hell isn't reading fiction at this point? Can anyone really believe what Bush has done? That the Vice President is not welcome at the Republican National Convention and Bush bragged about being the #1 polluter last month? Fiction cannot compare to reality. Maybe it never could.

What I want to hear is how Russia invading Georgia is different from U.S. invading Iraq. Or, owing to the fact that Georgia is actually bordering Russia whereas Iraq is literally on the other side of the planet from us, how does their Georgia invasion differ from our invasion of Panama 20 years ago?

I'm making a moral equivalence because I continue to trust our own deeply flawed gov more than the Russian Putin-stan setup. But nonetheless - how do the invasions compare?

Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as "the worst of the worst."

But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.

...

While he was held at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base, Akhtiar said, "When I had a dispute with the interrogator, when I asked, 'What is my crime?' the soldiers who took me back to my cell would throw me down the stairs."

He is hardly an isolated instance. Looks like we will only be attempting to prosecute less than 10% of those we held at Guantanamo. Not because we have too many liberals whining about how we treated them, but because we sent a bunch of farmers and goat herders to be tortured while the Bush Administration claimed they were the worst of the worst.

As for the torture policies - who came up with that? Was it anyone who had any experience in gaining intelligence? No. From what is emerging, it sounds like the green light for torture came from a bunch of idiot lawyers led by idiot-extraordinaire Gonzalez who have never been on a battlefield, much less dealt with interrogations. But they may have stayed in a Holiday Inn Express once or twice and they have seen 24, so they were pretty sure it was the smart thing to do. Those who led the interrogations of the Iraqis following the Gulf War were horrified but mostly have had to protest from outside the Administration cuz no one likes a party pooper in Washington - some details here.

I know, I know. You are tired of reading about the Bush Administration and what our government is doing. You are just waiting until he gets out of office. And probably, if you run into someone who thinks the Bush Admin is doing a good job mostly, you just ignore them rather than challenging them too much.

Well fuck that. I'm sick and tired of hearing how soldiers protect our freedoms. They have. But mostly it has been citizens and groups like the ACLU and even NRA, no matter how much you hate either one. And citizens who are too busy to know what their government is up to should move to China where you do not have the burden of living in a free society.

McClatchy newspapers have done an incredible story on Guantanamo Bay and what really happened there. That is what the above quote comes from. Diane Rehm recently did two incredible shows on Gitmo - one on Prosecuting detainees and one on detaining terrorism suspects.

Finally, the March/April issue of Mother Jones has a great series of articles on how the U.S. came to be a country that officially embraced torture (while actually torturing the definition of torture).

What a sad day for America. And it has not come because our troops failed. We have failed. The citizens of the United States have refused to improve upon the country we inherited. How have we progressed in the last 20 years?

For the last hundred years, the U.S. has made impressive gains. Women's suffrage, civil rights, social freedoms, and a modest improvement toward achieving equal status for gays. We have a long way to go on all of those issues, and our foreign policy over the entire history of this country has never been as enlightened as we pretend.

Nonetheless, I cannot think of a worse Presidential Administration, where the country gave up so much and lost so much. We have not gained riches while allowing the government to do what it pleases without oversight. In fact, our economy is falling apart.

True, we have had no terrorist attacks in the past 5 years. But Bush's policies have bankrupted the country financially and morally. Killing more troops in a bullshit war than died in 9/11. And maiming enough others to account for 100 9/11s. We have no moral high ground as Bush brags about being the world's top polluter (which isn't even true for fuck's sake). What a day for America.

I'm sure some would respond to this by saying we have to do everything we can because this terrorist threat is the worst threat we have ever faced. Even if you accept this judgment (which is utter bullshit and demonstrates the wretched knowledge of history most Americans exhibit), consider what Bush has done. From the McClatchy investigation:

A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam — thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them — and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists.

The radicals were quick to exploit the flaws in the U.S. detention system.

Soldiers, guards or interrogators at the U.S. bases at Bagram or Kandahar in Afghanistan had abused many of the detainees, and they arrived at Guantanamo enraged at America.

The Taliban and al Qaida leaders in the cells around them were ready to preach their firebrand interpretation of Islam and the need to wage jihad, Islamic holy war, against the West. Guantanamo became a school for jihad, complete with a council of elders who issued fatwas, binding religious instructions, to the other detainees.

In a funny movie called Canadian Bacon, Michael Moore is in a bar when they hear on the news that Canada has taken some Americans hostage. He says: "Gentlemen, there is time to think, and there is a time to act. And this, is no time to think." Nailed it.

Seriously?

People are upset at a satirical cover on the New Yorker magazine. This seems like much more of a 24-hour media phenomenon than anything. Talking heads need something to gush about and apparently it is hot enough in all the TV studios for them to have lost all sense of humor.

I liked the damn cover. I thought it was well done and satirical. But for those who did not like it, I think Jon Stewart offered the absolute best answer to the cover the Obama campaign could have given.

Obama's campaign seems to have morphed into a rather average Democratic Party affair. He has jettisoned the idea of doing things differently (mostly - he has still refused to take money from lobbyists). But I remain convinced he is the best hope for our sad government.

Never assume you cannot get more annoyed at a Clinton. I thought Andrew Sullivan summed it up:

The speech tonight was a remarkable one for a candidate who has lost the nomination, though not remarkable for a Clinton. It was an assertion that she had won the nomination and a refusal to concede anything to her opponent. Classless, graceless, shameless, relentless. Pure Clinton.

Hillary's supporters rail on a sexist media. Maybe some are sexist, but I wonder how many of them have given her a pass on her slash-and-burn strategy long after it was clear she could not win. I cannot imagine the cries of sexism if the roles were reversed and Obama - a black man - had the temerity to attempt, over and over again, to derail the campaign of the first woman nominated to run for President and demanded to be #2 on the ticket just cuz.

(or how I stopped caring about the profits of oil companies)

Every time I hear someone (usually liberals, bless their hearts) blame oil company profits for the high cost of oil, I want to rip the wings off a butterfly. Politicians love grandstanding on it - grilling these execs as though it will reduce the price at the pump.

Meanwhile, conservatives are trying to blame environmentalists for the lack of spare refining capacity - but I don't see any of those Republicans moving downwind of one (even with the enviro regs we have pushed over their objections).

High oil prices hurt. It is like burning yourself on the stove. Short term pain for long term gain. You learn a lesson. In the larger sense, Americans need to learn to be more efficient with fossil fuels. We could have learned it decades ago, but we chose to be irresponsible instead, hoping that prices would always stay low - which may be as naive as hoping Republicans won't hit on you in the bathroom.

Back to the point - oil prices are high because there is a fixed amount and LOTS of people want it. It takes a decade to really increase the supply on the market, which means when demand suddenly accelerates, the cost must go up (to make sure what is available goes only to those who really want to pay for it).

Executive pay has nothing to do with it. Oil companies are making insane profits. If they were forced to lower prices, we would see shortages. How pissed off would you be when rolling up to empty gas stations? Want to drive another 10 miles to find a gas station with gas?

There is another factor - one I am pissed I do not see enough taking seriously. The cost of oil has doubled in Euros but quadrupled in dollars. This is because the dollar has dropped significantly in value. The Bush Administration has thoroughly trashed this country - and the Republican nominee (McCain) admits he knows nothing about the economy.

Great. And he'll probably be elected because he wants to put women back in their place, encouraging the government to make decisions about their body if they become pregnant. And the people that elect him will continue bitching about tax-and-spend liberals while chickenhawk Republicans borrow to fight stupid wars around the planet and liberals bitch about oil companies.

I just wanted to briefly remind everyone that iTunes is a singularly horrible piece of junk. I was reminded of this recently when I was asked to once again upgrade iTunes by downloading the entire new application. Most programs (which is to say pretty much all of them) upgrade by sending you patches.

This avoids the hassle of downloading large files that take far longer to install than any other software you own. But no, iTunes - in a giant F-U to anyone on dialup - forces you to download the whole damn program to get those bug fixes and new features you will never use unless you own the rip-off iPhone.

So then you reinstall it and you find that shortcuts you put in your shortcut bar for iTunes no longer work and you have to set up a new shortcut. Funny how no other program I have ever used has this problem.

I almost forgot - if you get a corrupted podcast downloaded (as seems to happen frequently with Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me from MPR), there appears to be no way to force it to download a corrected version.

Apple: Do you intentionally do everything wrong as part of some grander message from Fuhrer Jobs?

Subscribers to Foreign Policy can read "The Next Generation of Terror" by Marc Sageman.

The article strikes me as credible - basically saying that al Qaeda has been reduced to not much of a threat. We have to credit the Bush Administration for not totally failing at everything because al Qaeda is now less of a threat.

However, the Bush Administration's incompetence means that there are far more people who would love to execute successful terrorist attacks against the U.S. The War on Terror has weakened al Qaeda while creating far more enemies. This strategy is like starting the rest of your house on fire to starve the fire in the kitchen of oxygen. I love unwieldy analogies.

At any rate, there is a good chance that the next attack will come from a group of people who are not making phone calls to Afghanistan or Pakistan, who are not really connected to al Qaeda but are inspired by them.

As for what they want to achieve, well, like most religious crazies, their creations suck.

The few times its aspirations have been translated into reality—the Taliban in Afghanistan, parts of Algeria during its civil war, and more recently in Iraq’s Anbar Province—were particularly repulsive to most Muslims.

Which makes me wonder ... I wonder if we would just hand Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, and parts of Texas to the "Christian" conservative warriors, would they leave the rest of us alone? Maybe they would stop trying to force the rest of us to live by a moral code they preach (but mostly ignore as well - check out divorce rates among the loudest "Christian" conservatives) if we gave them a bit of terrority to set up their Evangelical Caliphate.

Back to the article - it points out that the Republican response to 9-11 (which has largely been unchallenged by Dems) is rather counterproductive. The Bush Administration has declared a high profile war on these small-minded cave dwellers and massively publicizes the few near-victories his administration has achieved.

Each of Ashcroft's asinine press conferences validated the al Qaeda chickenfuckers by making it appear that they truly were a major threat (on par with the nuclear weapon toting commies, if you listen to the rhetoric) when they are actually a small rag-tag group of assholes who got lucky because the Bush Administration considered China a bigger threat than terrorists and put a higher priority on ballistic missile defense than anti-terror intelligence.

It is equally crucial not to place terrorists who are arrested or killed in the limelight. The temptation to hold press conferences to publicize another “major victory” in the war on terror must be resisted, for it only transforms terrorist criminals into jihadist heroes. The United States underestimates the value of prosecutions, which often can be enormously demoralizing to radical groups. There is no glory in being taken to prison in handcuffs. No jihadi Web site publishes such pictures. Arrested terrorists fade into oblivion; martyrs live on in popular memory.

The only fear I have with trials of high profile terrorists is the temptation for their comrades to take hostages and attempt to trade prisoners. I hope that whoever finds Osama puts a few rounds into him, pisses on him, drowns him in liquor, and strikes a match. Good riddance.

In a just world, we would do the same to Bush - a man who did 20x the damage to this country in response to 9-11 than the attack did.

Spitzer: What is the BFD? Aside from his hypocrisy, I do not believe he has violated any trust I put in him. Of course, I haven't put any trust in him...

I cannot believe that with all our problems, we still criminalize prostitution. Seriously. For every stupid law we attempt to enforce, we make it harder to enforce laws that are actually supposed to be protecting people.

Prostitution? Really? I cannot figure out why an ostensibly free society allows you to sell damn near anything but you can't rent your privates for a few hours. You can pay people to rub you for an hour to help you relax and loosen your muscles ... but if that person touches you in a certain area, BOOM - it is ILLEGAL!

In no way am I defending predatory pimping or abduction and forced prostitution. Obviously, just as I can pay someone to clean my house, I cannot abduct them and force them to do it.

Some may claim prostitution is exploitation. Well, so is paying poor wages to illiterate people to roof your house rather than going with a unionized shop that has crucial things like FRIGGING HEALTH CARE. What is more dangerous?

I suspect the only real reason people can come up with to keep prostitution illegal is because too many religions tell us that doing stuff that feels good is somehow immoral. Well, it isn't. It is immoral if you violate a relationship you are in. It is immoral if you spread an STD. But pleasing yourself (and ideally, the other person/people you are with) is not immoral.

Prostitution is a victimless crime. The problems surrounding it (mostly issues of health) are better dealt with policies that do not involve prison and pushing it underground - where women (and some men - but mostly women) are more likely to be victims of violence.

As an Obama supporter, I do not want this to look childish. However, I am horrified to hear Rush Limbaugh calling for Republicans to vote for Hillary in an attempt to subvert the democratic process. Not surprised, but horrified.

I have long suspected that Rush has no respect for a democratic society and is instead more obsessed with his demagoguery and personal fame.

I hoped that his listeners would either be too lazy or have respect for the democratic process but they apparently are not and do not.

There is substantial evidence that some Republicans are attempting to deceitfully choose the Democratic nominee.

Fortunately, they may not have turned out in enough numbers to have changed much - I suspect Obama could have still put Hillary away in Ohio and especially Texas if he responded more effectively to her bullshit kitchen-sink attack tactics. But they are clearly having some effect, eroding the number of delegates Obama is getting from these states.

At this point, I have to wonder if Democrats will even have a chance to screw up their historic opportunity or if Republicans will just screw it up for them.

These fuckers are not content to have just flushed the last 7 years down the toilet, they are determined to ensure it will continue declining just as rapidly as possible.

At one point, these Republicans laid claim to patriotism and the rule of law. Now they are stealing bully tactics and a win-at-all-costs mentality. They have no respect for the democratic process or the rule of law.

I fantasize about living in a country that is outraged when Rush Limbaugh calls on his followers to subvert our elections. In that country, other conservative hosts at least act horrified and distance themselves from this call to illegality (many states have laws against this type of fraud). But we do not live there.

Hey Hillary, if experience is so important and Obama is not prepared (a charge you only make when he is not sitting next to you ... when he is, you cannot defend your words) then we should be supporting the following people over you because your experience in government pales compared to...

• John McCain
• Joe Biden
• Robert Byrd
• Bob Dole
• Dick (head) Cheney

The problem with experience is that it reveals who you are and why we do not support you to run this country.

Now, please continue your stupid attacks because I can put up with them for one more week as long as you knock it off after you lose the next two primaries.