i’ve stopped counting

Pictured above is LaVena Johnson, born on July 27, 1985. She grew up with three older brothers and a younger sister, all of whom attended Hazelwood Central High School - ‘Home of the Hawks’ - in Florissant Missouri, a northern suburb of St. Louis. A “cheerful, honest, and full of life person” who “made an impact on everyone that she came in close contact with,” LaVena played the violin, donated blood, and volunteered for American Heart Association walks. For her volunteer work and grades, she “received commendations from members of the Missouri Senate and Congress.” She was an honor roll student who earned straight A’s her senior year, graduating in 2004 as a “top-notch” student.

Her aspirations didn’t vary from that of her three older brothers, who graduated from Central and went on to college. She wanted to travel and go to college, but when her parents told her that they could come up with the money for school, she said, “No, I want to do this on my own.”

In the main entrance of her high school is a plaque “in memory of the Hazelwood graduates who died serving their country.” I doubt LaVena expected that plaque to also apply to her before her twentieth birthday.

Instead of being a junior in college, or anything else, LaVena now resides in South St. Louis County at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery. Among over 150,000 others on the 331 acre site, her burial place is marked with a cross and these words:

LaVENA LYNN
JOHNSON

PFC US ARMY
PERSIAN GULF
IRAQ
JUL 27 1985
JUL 19 2005
LOVING DAUGHTER
WE WILL MISS
YOUR SMILE
AND HUMOR

When her father left the army after three years of service, the army helped pay for some of his college education. And after that, he didn’t have to make a down payment on his first home. The recruiting brochure found in LaVena’s room said that through the Army, she could “earn $25,000 toward college.” And she was told it was ‘highly unlikely’ she’d end up in Iraq, so it only made sense to join the Army before continuing her education and starting her life. Recruiters got her contact information as part of No Child Left Behind, apparently the only aspect of that law that functions. When her younger sister became a senior, recruiters started calling for her too, despite LaVena already having been killed.

Despite what recruiters told her, LaVena Johnson was sent to Iraq immediately after basic training. Her military aptitude test performance led to her initial assignment being that of a chaplain’s assistant. And despite failing her ‘wet fire’ test in basic training, her lack of a driver’s license caused a reassignment to weapons supply manager for the 129th Corps Support Battalion.

There was no reason for LaVena to be in Iraq. She was told she wouldn’t be sent there. She had poor aptitude as a killing machine. She was female. She was human. Nobody should be sent to Iraq, and certainly not someone like Private First Class Johnson.

We hear every day about Al Qaeda fighters in Iraq, although they account for only one or two percent of the violence. We hear every day about fanatical Arab extremists or islamofascists or whatever they’re called this week. And we hear every day about deaths caused by Improvised Explosive Devices. But how often have you heard about violence and death originating from within our armed forces?

The mother of Pat Tillman (safety for the Arizona Cardinals who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, and whose death was muddled by the Army’s denial and fabrication) wrote:

“This is how they treat the family of a high-profile individual.
How are they treating others?”

LaVena’s body was found in her tent on July 19, 2005. She had an M-16 bullet wound to her left temple. Her nose was broken. One of her lips was badly battered. Two of her teeth were loose. Her shoulder or elbow was dislocated. There were signs that she was set on fire. There were signs her tent was set on fire. There was a blood trail outside her tent. She recently had a physical exam to be checked for an STD after a sexual assault, where her father believes she named the assailant.

The army’s resolution of these events was sadly predictable. Its report is that LaVena died of a self-inflicted suicide gunshot wound even though she was right-handed, 5′1″ tall, the weapon is 40″ long, and she had no weapon residue on her hands. The autopsy doesn’t mention any physical trauma apart from the shot to her temple, and the investigation is closed.

Back in basic training, LaVena Johnson told her friend, “You know girl, sometimes I get a bad vibe about being in the military, but I know that God will see me through.”

Philip Barron (Waveflux of Shakespeare’s Sister) has created a petition to reopen the Army’s investigation. His continued blogging effort and the one-time coverage of this story by Channel 4 KMOV and Channel 5 KSDK of St. Louis are pretty much the only primary sources of information for this story as it is being ignored by the national mass media.

I just don’t know what grand thing to say about this. I’m not very optimistic that the Army’s treatment of our soldiers will improve, especially that of unknown female minority soldiers murdered by their own peers. I can’t figure out how to segue into these next two articles, but they’re important to read: First is an article about the general failure to treat veterans properly. Second is a disturbing look at what women go through in today’s military.

Sources:
lavenajohnson.blogspot.com
waveflux.net
www.kmov.com
www.ksdk.com
www.fallenheroesmemorial.com
en.wikipedia.org
maps.google.com
www.hazelwood.k12.mo.us
welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com
mirroronamerica.blogspot.com
www.alternet.org
www.alternet.org
www.alternet.org
iraq.pigstye.net
www.stlamerican.com
www.truthout.org
en.wikipedia.org

In the wake of the American military body count in Iraq passing 3,000, Bush is readying a plan to be unveiled later this week that includes a troop surge of up to 20,000 more soldiers. The soldiers are going to be used for a goal of cracking down on militias and death squads - the same militias and death squads that we created and armed.

There are so many things I want to scream from my rooftop about this but I haven’t figured out how to get up there yet, so my blog will have to do.

First and foremost, any kind of escalation of war ignores the will of the American people. We voted against the war two months ago, and the staffing changes we mandated took place last week. Tossing out respect for the will of the majority of his employers so soon after an election is a great way to turn a lot of the people who don’t think impeachment is warranted. That Pelosi is able to hint at denying him war funds is evidence for this.

Secondly, this plan ignores the Iraq Study Group’s recommendation of a gradual troop withdrawal. Think back to the weeks before the ISG report came out - the administration was waiting on their decision. For a few weeks it seemed like every Tony Snow response in the white house press briefing was something along the lines of, “Let’s wait for what the ISG report has to say about that.” The ISG basically gave Bush a ‘Get out of Iraq free’ card that he could hide behind and salvage any sort of credibility. Not playing that card indicates that he doesn’t have any desire for the war to end.

Third, we have already tried troop increases of more than 20,000. The only result was more violence and no real progress. If an increase of more than 20,000 doesn’t do any good, how could next week’s plan do anything? Additionally, twenty thousand more soldiers is a drop in the bucket. We have around 140,000 US troops there already. We have 100,000 contractors there, not counting subcontractors, many of whom are there for military action. Add to that an unknown number of gray-market mercenaries. These groups combined may mean the troop surge isn’t even noticeable.

Fourth, we simply don’t have the troops available for the surge to be real. The Army and National Guard are already stretched thin and have been for some time. The 20,000 soldiers will come from shady tactics such as stop-loss, reduction of training time, and recall of veterans for yet another tour of duty. None of those new troops will be as effective as the ideal rested and well-trained soldier, and the incredible demands on those soldiers will only increase events like the 14-hour deadly standoff this Christmas between police and a PTSD-suffering reservist. I’m pessimistic enough about it to expect reports of Vietnam-style fragging incidents.

Fifth, there doesn’t seem to be a purpose for the new troops. The chance of the troops being used to train Iraqi security forces to replace them (per the ISG recommendation) is apparently “off the table”. It seems like whether to surge has been decided without any plan for something for those bodies to do besides perhaps filling pine boxes.

Now, I’m all for transparency in government, but this transparency is the ‘I can see right through what you’re doing’ variety. This escalation is clearly political spin nonsense to delay until the next president comes around in two years to figure out how to get out of the mess, which will probably only consist of airlifting survivors off of rooftops. And, of course it’s war for oil, which is starting to crop up again here and there as the administration begins to run low on excuses, even though anybody in power has been falsely claiming that oil never had anything to do with it.

At the end of last year, the AP released results from a poll of the biggest heroes and villains of 2006. Bush topped both lists, hero with 13% and villain with 25%. On the villain list he even beat satan who frankly should have done better than 1%, considering his experience.

Here’s my prediction for 2007. Bush will announce plans for a troop surge next week, without providing any sort of rationale. This will lead to the Democratic house refusing to approve any increase in funding for that action. As the only 2 bills passed from the 11 bills needed for 2006 were for the military and domestic security, Bush will smear those funds around to fund his troop surge without anybody’s help or approval. The whole surge strategy will fail miserably while Bush’s approval drops into single digits, and pundits will have aneurysms as they realise that Nancy Pelosi (speaker of the house) will ascend to president if Bush and Cheney are impeached.

(That’s of course the optimistic prediction. The bad one involves war with Iran where Israel does a few preemptive nuclear strikes and the US military, already largely in position in the persian gulf, follows suit with an aimless air campaign, knowing that it doesn’t have many ground forces to spare. Iran retaliates by sinking both of our aircraft carriers in that region. Russia and China get involved while the US drops a couple big nukes. Then America itself dissolves into Civil War II.)

So the 2006 mid-term elections are over and done with and I got a restful six week nap. The election results were basically a landslide mandate against the war. Arianna Huffington said “the GOP lost for three reasons: Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq”. In my opinion, that was the majority of the motivation, but the Democrats squeaking out a Senate majority (51-49) by a couple thousand votes in several races also owes thanks to things like the crumbling economy and corruption (Mark Foley, Tom Delay, etc). The numbers show that about 30% of the evangelical right actually voted Democratic this time around.

A notable statistic in the election results is the flawless* victory of the Democrats over the Republicans. In the House, the Senate, and (if memory serves) all Governor races, no Democratic seats were lost to the Republicans. (The asterisk is for Joe Lieberman, the sore loser who lost the Democratic primary for the Connecticut Senate seat and became an independent, ultimately retaining his seat by beating the anti-war Ned Lamont with the help of a majority of the voting Republicans. He promises to caucus with the Democrats, but his political past mandates that promise is recorded on single-ply toilet paper.)

The savage beating taken by the current administration this past November seventh was even described as what could be “The End of the Neocons“. I dearly hope that ends up being the case. The neocon vision of western superiority - a.k.a. Manifest Destiny or ‘God picked us because we are us’ - is really getting old. It was wrong a thousand years ago, and it’s more obviously wrong now.

Roughly speaking, I’m overjoyed with the election results. The only part I worry about (if you haven’t figured out yet) is Lieberman still being in government. I’d almost prefer some random Republican yes-man because at least that way you can plainly expect them to vote the wrong way on everything. But since the American people screamed NO to the war in Iraq, the mainstream media has actually started fracturing from its united pro-Bush drumbeat. Keith Olbermann is looking to pull ahead of Bill “bag-of-crap” O’Reilly, Jack Cafferty is more and more vocal about Bush’s failures, and even ex-Republican representative Joe Scarborough is daring to speak with logic and honesty.

As the ramp-up to the 2008 presidential elections continues, I really hope John Edwards builds up the momentum he deserves to landslide against whatever pro-misery windbag the Republican party is bound to choose. Edwards actually gives a crap about the economic problems all over the place, and has actually done things to show that. Here is a great blog entry covering Edwards’ importance. Check youtube for some Edwards videos if you need more convincing - he would do an amazing job in a presidential race not having to follow in another candidate’s shadow.

My uncle recently emailed me this quote from economist Max Bazerman’s Smart Money Decisions:

To see the kind of money mistakes people make, consider the problem that I created for a group of executive students who were attending one of my lectures. I took a $100 bill from my wallet and announced the following:

‘I am auctioning this $100 bill to the highest bidder. All members of the audience are free to participate or watch the bidding of others. Participants are welcome to bid in multiples of $5 until no further bidding occurs. The highest bidder pays the amount he or she bids for the $100. This auction differs from traditional auctions in that the second-highest bidder must also pay the last amount that he or she bid, although he or she will obviously not win the $100. For example, if Warren bids $15 and Charlene bids $20, and then the bidding stops, Charlene will pay me $20 for the $100 bill (earning an $80 profit), and Warren, the second-highest bidder, will pay me $15 and get nothing in return. Who will bid $5 to start the auction?’

I have run this auction many times with undergraduate students, graduate students, and executives, and I have sold $1, $10, $20, and $100 bills. The pattern is always the same, regardless of how much money is at stake. The bidding starts out fast and furious until it reaches the $70-$80 range (on the $100 bill). Then, everyone except the two higest bidders drops out of the auction. The two bidders then begin to feel trapped. One bidder has bid $65 and the other $70. The $65 bidder must either bid $75 or give me $65 (and receive nothing in return). The uncertain option of bidding further (a choice that might produce a gain if the other bidder quits) seems more attractive than the sure loss, so the $65 bidder bids $75. This continues until the bids are $95 and $100.

Then, to everyone’s surprise, the decision to bid $105 is very similar to all previous decisions. The $95 bidder can accept a $95 loss or continue and reduce his or her loss if the other bidder quits. Of course the rest of the group roars with laughter when the bidding goes over $100, which it usually does.

Obviously, the bidders are making money mistakes. But which bids are the mistakes? Twenty-dollar auctions typically end between $20 and $70. However, I have sold a $20 bill for $407, and I have had eleven $20 auctions hit the $100 mark. I once sold a $100 bill for $505. In total, I have earned over $20,000 running these auctions in classes over the last decade.

Then the explanation:

The key to solving this problem lies in indentifying the auction as a trap and, therefore, choosing not to make even a very small bid. The bidders are making three mistakes: failure to consider the decisions of other parties, escalating their commitment rather than accepting a loss, and wanting to beat the other party no matter the cost (i.e. ego).

After a few queries on “The” Google, I found this is a variation of something called the dollar auction, which involves irrational escalation. (Side note: Why do I bother searching for anything else? It seems I always end up at Wikipedia.)

Unforseen losses in this game start off with simple and seemingly obvious decisions - “I’m gonna win $100 with a $5 investment!” Then there’s a simple decision based on mitigating risk or losses - “Well, if I continue further, at least I’ll probably win the $100.” Eventually hope for profit is lost, but the logic continues - “Damn! I was outbid. I’ll make a $120 bid and only lose $20 compared to having to lose my last $110 bid and go home with even less money.” When one of the bidders finally decides to stop the madness, it comes with a sense of relief - at the cost of a little pride and acceptance of bad decisions in the past, potentially endless future losses are averted.

The math nerd in me is excited by logic problems like this one. If you are always willing to make things a few percent worse, things seem manageable but can get out of hand rather quickly.

Take for example, Harry the Hiker. Harry is on a hiking trip, but is lost. He’s only a mile from camp. Since Harry can easily traverse a mile in a half hour, the situation isn’t a big deal. Plus with Harry’s unmatched foraging skills, he can find food and shelter. What Harry doesn’t know is that he really sucks at finding his way around, and he gets six percent more lost every day. After a day of wandering, Harry is just over 300 feet further from his destination, but who cares - I saw Michael Vick throw a football that far in a Gatorade commercial. After a week, Harry is half a mile further than he started. Not a big deal, if he finds a tall enough tree to climb his problems are over.

After a year goes by, Harry ends up 1.7 billion (yes, with a B) miles from camp, his car, and the nearest search & rescue team. He’s well on his way to Pluto, and the sun is now small enough to confuse with other nearby bright things. After taking a moment to reflect on how he traveled nearly a hundred million miles in the last twenty-four hours, Harry suddenly realizes he’s ill-equipped for space travel and explodes in the pressureless void. Harry should have read Max Bazerman’s book.

If Don Knotts was available, he’d have told Harry the Hiker to ‘nip it in the bud‘ before things got really bad.

Real-life situations like the dollar auction happen frequently and on different levels. Maybe you haven’t been to the dentist in a while, and after gradually increasing amounts of procrastination, you undoubtedly have an embarassing number of cavities. Maybe you need a haircut and have needed one for months, and everybody around you ponders whether your ‘do constitutes a mullet. Maybe the nation you cheer for commits to some impossible goals and gets mired in someone else’s civil war.

These real-life situations end often after some moment of clarity - some kind of eureka event - and you finally decide to do something about it. You notice half of your teeth are transparent. Your unkempt mane gets caught in an escalator. You check the paper and find that the army you’re so proud of has killed 655,000 people in order to prosecute someone for killing 148.

It’s not a simple realisation, and the eureka moment doesn’t instantly come with joy and rainbows and ticker-tape parades. It can actually be heart-wrenching, tear-jerking, and otherwise difficult. But the decision to do something about it comes with more than just a silver lining - it comes with a relief of conscience, an end to the downward spiral, a chance to fix things, and some pride in actually taking responsibility.

When I finally told my family I was an atheist after years of pretending otherwise, I could finally breathe easier. Suddenly each day was no longer shrouded in the dread of ‘how will I tell them?’ And I didn’t have to worry about the next white lie. That was easily one of the best decisions I’ve made.

As good as that decision was, I don’t think that relief would compare to the relief of once again having something as simple and crucial as checks and balances in government.

Picture such a world with me. When our troops are mired in harm’s way for a lie, the people would have a mechanism in place to say to the President “hey liar, get them out of there”. When your children get sick and need medical attention, it would be provided here just like it is in pretty much every other industrialized country in the world, and it wouldn’t completely bankrupt you. And when the president refers to the Constitution as “just a goddamned piece of paper” we’d have actual representation with the courage to show him exactly what that piece of paper can do.

I’d like to live in that world. And tomorrow, assuming there’s not enough tampering, we just may decide to live in it again. And we’ll all breathe easier.

I’ll end this rambling with a little George Michael and a reminder what Tuesdays after the first Monday of every other November are for.

I’d like to write about ponies and rainbows, but I’ll have to push that topic back a little.

I was just perusing WRH during my lunch break, and I found this article. Alia Ansari, an Afghan-American mother of six, was fatally shot in Fremont, CA last Thursday when picking up three of her children from Glenmoor Elementary School. She was a block or two from the school “on Glenmoor Drive near Central Avenue” (source / map). According to the police, she was shot for no apparent reason. The only guess why she was killed so far was that this was a hate crime, since she was wearing a traditional muslim head scarf. That it was probably a hate crime is in my opinion the reason why this hasn’t seen much media attention. (Go ahead and try to find mainstream national coverage.) If the shooter was a muslim and he killed a white (or black or Latino) American mother in the same circumstances, you better believe it’d be the front page story on every newspaper and headline on every tv news show with the title ‘Terror Strikes in America’.

But as a hate crime, events like this might offer some insight that the endless war drums and ethnocentrism might possibly be misguided. They also might cause people to stop believing the official spin and give some thought to articles such as this one that suggest the anti-Arab sentiment isn’t only magnified by the mainstream media and government, it’s wholly manufactured.

While the media avoids coverage of the shooting in Fremont, the mainstream networks NBC and CW are also avoiding the new documentary “Shut up and Sing“, the story of the Dixie Chicks after they were officially/unofficially blacklisted for the comment from lead singer Natalie Maines that she was “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas”. NBC’s reason for not airing commercials for the film doesn’t mince words: it “cannot accept these spots as they are disparaging to President Bush” (source). In an entirely predictable yet disappointing way, the mainstream press is blacklisting the documentary about people being blacklisted. You can’t see, but I’m making my ’sarcastic surprise’ face. I think it’s funny the Dominican Today article got the title of the movie wrong - I find in that a little bit of cynical irony.

Speaking of segues, Aaron Russo’s film “America: Freedom to Fascism” is up on google video. In it is information about those green pieces of paper in your pocket and what they represent.

I know this story broke over a year ago, but I never heard much of it before today, so here it is in case you’re in the same boat.

In June of last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr published an article in Rolling Stone, titled Deadly Immunity, describing the widespread use of thimerosal in vaccines and its possible link to recent increases in autism and other neurological problems. It mentions that the autism rate in children has increased from 1 in 2,500 to 1 in 166, or in other words, we are making over fifteen times as many austistic children as we were in 1991.

Thimerosal contains significant amounts of ethylmercury, while different from methylmercury neurotoxin, is argued (via reference to a National Institutes of Health study) to be more dangerous and more lasting in developing brains. (Remember the Mad Hatter?) And it was a significant amount - the three inoculations routinely given to two-month-olds contained an amount of ethylmercury equal to 99 times the EPA’s daily limit of methylmercury. Even if ethyl- isn’t 100% as bad as methylmercury, I doubt it’s less than 1% as risky. Thimerosal is currently banned from children’s vaccines in Russia, Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain, and Scandinavia.

How the hell is this not a concern of our government? Short answer - our lawmakers care about money and not your children (see war in Iraq, Congressional Page Scandal, Abramoff bribery scandal, destruction of healthcare system, destruction of education system, etc). Long answer - it is a concern of our lawmakers. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and friends were concerned enough to put into law the “Eli Lilly Protection Act” which basically gave the vaccine makers immunity from any penalty related to brain disorders they caused. In what I am sure was an unrelated show of patriotism, the pharmaceutical industry bought 5,000 copies of Billy’s bioterrorism book and gave him over $800,000. The ELPA was part of a Homeland Security bill, using the excuse that if the pharmaceutical companies could be sued, it’d prevent them from being as capable to defend America from bioterrorism.

“You couldn’t even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe.” “It’s just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken. If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage.”
- Dr. Boyd Haley, Chemistry department head at the University of Kentucky

So it seems fairly obvious to me at least that thimerosal isn’t a good thing and really doesn’t need to be in vaccines. Food can be distributed and safely consumed without preservatives, so it seems thimerasol is similarly unnecessary except as a method cost reduction. But if it comes with the risk of destroying the livelihood of the patient, why bother?

The article continues: “In 1977, ten babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords.” And it mentions that the vaccines we send to developing countries are the autism-inducing variety, noting that there has been a recent spike of autistic disorders in India, Nicaragua, and Argentina.

After a quick Google search, I found an article (part 1 here and part 2 here) that argues against the Kennedy article. It’s very nit-picky, but the discussion in the comments is worth looking over to better understand the talking points.

A few weeks after Kennedy’s article, Rolling Stone’s editors published this article defending the original.

From the ‘put my money where your mouth is’ department, I found this related challenge. Jock Doubleday, directory of a non-profit health group, will pay $75,000 to any of the pediatricians or corresponding pharm CEOs if they consume a mess containing a weight-proportioned amount of the thimerosal, antifreeze, disinfectant, formaldehyde, and aluminum that can be found in what we routinely inject into six-year olds. Nobody has accepted, probably because consuming that garbage is a bad idea.

In a successful attempt to further become a left-wing stereotype, I decided today that the most horrifying Halloween costume possible this year is one of a Republican congressman. And now I’m going to blog about it! Pretty soon I’ll have no choice but to crank-call Bill O’Reilly from NAMBLA headquarters and buy Janeane Garofalo a hemp-burning Segway in celebration of my war on Christmas.

So here it is - my simple twenty-six point strategery on how to become the most convincing Republican congressman ever.

First, you’re gonna want to put on about two hundred pounds. Think of your waistline as a direct representation of your love for America. And if you’re seventy-five feet eleven inches around, that’s a good excuse to put “911″ on your underpants. The extra weight also helps disturb left-wingers in the event you get busted for pedophilia and they have to think about you being in a ‘tight squeeze’.

Next, get in the habit of blaming Bill Clinton. Terrorism? That’s an easy one - Bill Clinton didn’t do enough. Child sex scandals? Easy - Clinton’s sexcapades with Monica set a bad example for the congressional pages, and their Satan-driven advances were irresitable by simple-minded people like Mark Foley. With sufficient training, you’ll be able to blame Clinton for things like cancer and the extinction of dinosaurs.

Third, you should verbally crush your opponents with the blinding wit of a thousand suns. Did your opponent lose her legs in Iraq? Tell everybody she wants to cut and run. Did your opponent break his back in a car accident? Mock his poor job attendance. See a brown person? Call him “Macaca” and welcome him to America.

The next step is optional, but makes your disguise that much more convincing. Become a fiercely closeted homosexual. It’s tricky, but you have to be extremely obviously gay while seriously hating any and all homosexuals. Live with your chief of staff while demanding an end to gay rights. Host a gay prostitute in the White House while commanding, “do who I say, not who I do.” Basically you want to be as overtly fabulous as possible while decrying fabulosity as unnatural. You can still say ‘You go girl,’ but only to Bay Buchanan. If you ever get revealed as a totally insane person, just blame it all on alcohol. Or Bill Clinton (see above).

Fifthly, speak only in talking point catch-phrases. Stay the course there so you don’t have to fear the axis of evil from God-fearing sea to shining sea. Beware that the talking points can change significantly every day - for example, ‘abortion is wrong’ can change to ‘abortion is wrong except when it’s forced in Saipan’.

Next, spend your free time planning what to do when your problems go away. For instance, earmark 20 million bucks for a humongous party in Baghdad when the violence spontaneously ends. Don’t worry about finding ways to make your problems go away - science shows that everything in history that isn’t still happening has ended, so the war in Iraq must end as well.

Finally, remember the only important date in the history of time - 9/11. Say it early, say it often. 9-11 say it twice in one sentence 9-11. Never say the year, since that doesn’t really matter and detracts from the important message that we were attacked four seconds ago. If you want to sound sophisticated, say “September” instead of “Nine” - practical knowledge of our calendar is a surefire way to secure the MENSA vote.

Yes, I know fifthly isn’t a word. I interspersed that vocabularium on porpoise.

I snuck out of work a few hours early today to attend the Austin World Can’t Wait protest and to try out my new digital camera. I took around 400 photos, but narrowed the list down to 158 of them before uploading my favorites to Flickr.

The most memorable part for me relates to this photo, which corresponded with a new speaker taking the mic. He started his speech by passing out that and other photos from Iraq, telling people not to be shy to take one because ‘there are plenty more where those came from.’

When he said that, the reality hit me. We’ve lost over a dozen soldiers since Monday while Iraq has probably lost another couple hundred people. And for what? Everybody (minus George and Dick) knows that our presence in Iraq is consistently making everything worse. More dead soldiers, more dead Iraqis, more hatred of American occupation, more excuses. Even the “stay the course” people have revised their position to “stay the course, just not in Iraq, at least not near any populated areas.”

Of course the administration isn’t getting the troops out today or tomorrow. It’s election season! Well I won’t hold that against them - clearly struggling to keep their own stranglehold on power is more important that overseeing and possibly preventing the continued death of the people they so often claim to care about protecting. They’ve got contributions to farm, commercials to approve, pages to blacklist.

That reality hurt for a moment, but I managed to repress it enough to continue with the picture-taking.

Lessons learned today re: photgrapherizationing:

• Camera shape means everything when getting someone to stand still and hold up a sign. I’m convinced not getting the ultra-compact camera was a good idea.
• You can’t fix a decapitation - zoom out a little or pan up instead of ruining the shot.
• ‘Oh my camera case couldn’t possibly flip over and dump out’ is not a smart thing to believe.
• Read the manual. I really had to just hope that I was actually recording the pictures today. I got lucky, but there was a very real chance that I was just killing batteries and fooling a lot of people.

According to this CNN report, during Bush’s closed-door meeting with Republican senators, the war in Iraq wasn’t discussed. Yawn, no surprise there. Who wants to talk about that? But that’s not the interesting part - after being asked whether Iraq was discussed, Trent Lott went on to say (referring to the media asking him)

“You’re the only ones who obsess on that. We don’t and the real people out in the real world don’t for the most part.”

A senator thinking the war in Iraq isn’t a big deal is a big deal, especially when sixteen American intelligence agencies identified the war in Iraq being the “cause celebre” for anti-American violence (source). Isn’t ending anti-American violence the primary concern of the average American lately?

But that’s not the really interesting part either — here’s what he said next:

“It’s hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what’s wrong with these people. Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israelis and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.“

No seriously, that’s what he said. They all look the same to me. That faint scratchy sound you hear is MLK trying to claw through the coffin lid.

In related news, Bill O’Reilly (or Orally as KO likes to call him) had this gem to offer:

I don’t care what Iraq was, I don’t care what it will be. I just don’t want them killing anybody or helping Al Qaeda. OK? Couldn’t care less about the country. That is the no-spin honesty that you all come to expect from me.

Sentiment like that might explain why the US has been fighting in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II, or as history may rename it, “The Skirmish Overseas from Which We Learned Nothing”.

Speaking of segues,

Rep. Mark Foley (R, duh) stepped down from the house Friday after his sexcapades with a minor were uncovered. Strange irony that he was the guy who wrote the sexual predator provisions on a child protection law this year. While leaving office seemed a totally obvious move, it turns out the G.O.P. knew last year that he was involved in the emails. But why kick the pedophile out when he’s helping hold on to your majority? Makes perfect sense to me. Bonus points if you put 2 and 2 together in this paragraph and noticed that he wrote the anti-pedophile stuff after his actions were quietly uncovered. To hopefully end my rant on this topic, I’ll give the first of many ‘Tied for Douchebag of the Century Awards’ to FOX News’ Brit Hume, who completely overlooked the whole pedophilia angle and described Foley’s actions as “inappropriate behaviors towards subordinates“, putting them on par with Clinton’s Lewinsky affair.

Only one more topic I promise…

This Friday, the House passed a bill titled the Public Expression of Religion Act. All it does is prevent the winning of attorney’s fees in cases brought against the government regarding the First Amendment’s clause regarding establishment of religion.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

(I actually had to look it up. I suck.)

This bill if enacted, would seriously deter lawyers from fighting for constitutionally-protected religious freedom. The ACLU explains it better than I can. This sucks. It widens the door for the government to blatantly violate the First Amendment, just so long as they don’t violate it significantly enough for people with large amounts of money who can afford to spend it.

Let’s see … (counting fingers) May, June, July, August, September .. holy crap!

Okay, so it’s been an eternity since I updated. I realised that sometime today and decided to finally do something about it. So here’s a bright and shiny WordPress blog for your tired eyes. I still need to port the comments (minus the spam) over somehow, but all the posts have been ported. (I can’t believe how much random linux/php stuff I remembered.)

I really need to get back into posting my thoughts on the interwebs. When I wrote that last post, I was really down and feeling a bit hopeless. The building of American concentration camps hit me pretty hard and took some wind out of my sails, but consider my sails re-winded.

Since the last post, I’ve improved upon my reading material and my temper, by how much remains to be seen. I’ve been reading Shakespeare’s Sister, Crooks and Liars, and DailyKos. Shakes has a lot of political ranting, often with LGBT-related viewpoints, a perspective I’m not familiar enough with. C&L is like a highlight reel for the 24-hour networks, offering videos of the 3-5 minutes of daily content that is buried among the yawns on CSPAN. Kos’s site takes a lot more concentration to get through, so I usually scan over it in a couple seconds to find bold text and embedded YouTube videos.

On TV, thanks to yotogi, I added Olbermann’s weekday Countdown to my TDS/CR crack habit. His special comments are second to none (none still employed anyway), and he shows videos of newborn pandas.

Air America has replaced pirated mp3s in my headphones lately although it, like KO’s show, has more commercials than I’d really care to endure. So I frequently switch between the a downloaded C&L clip, if available, or WinAmp (Beck’s ePro or Tripod’s Oasis Medley).

The political ranting hasn’t exactly been nil if you’re curious, it’s just been stewing in a handful of essays in my head, one of which is half done. I intend to get into a habit of writing political essays/articles/whatever, ideally every other week though I’ll say now that’s a pipe dream. The first topic is Hezbollah, the Lebanese group that American media has been saying such nice things about lately.

Other topics for future articles follow. Please pester me if I take too long between them.

• 1930s Germany in Comparison to 2006 America
• Corporations, Groupthink, and Authoritarianism
• Well-Armed Cowardice
• Religion-something (to be narrowed down)
• Sleeping Giants
• The Struggle for Truth in The Struggle for Truth

And a series entitled “How to Do Your Job” with episodes for congressmen, the White House Press Corps, religious leaders, and conspiracy theorists. I had a self-mocking thought today that I rule so much I should just tell people how to do their jobs, and then thought that might actually be an interesting thing to try to write.

The last article idea I had was a generic ‘letter to friends and family’ sort of thing detailing lost liberties as if it was just ‘what I did last summer’. It should also be a good exercise - more practice in writing with irony and sarcasm while trying not to froth at the mouth.

Today the Senate passed a bill, I think it was called “Terror Terror Vote Republican Terror Terror Booga Booga”. The politicians advertised the legislation as a demonstration of how its supporters are strong on dealing with terrorists, and how those who voted against it must have been the polar opposite - Osama’s BFFs. They of course conventiently overlooked a few things - the vast majority of people killed or arrested by the multinational (in the sense that me myself and I are a trio) coalition are not terrorists, the majority of Iraqis want the US out of there and support attacks on our soldiers, and torture does not provide valid information.

In the dust storm of “I’m more Uncle Sam than you are! Are not! Am too! Are not times infinity!” the legislation wound up with an evidently insignificant problem. It grants the President the power to detain anybody who he views as a threat of any sort indefinitely and without court review. Yeah, just the wholesale elimination of Habeas Corpus. Or the right to say “Dude, WTF?”

But I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. I mean, the president has been honest with the American people, and he’s really genuine about protecting our nation against the terrorist menace, right? Right?

What, he’s not?

Uh oh.