Purty leaves

Yeah, I know comments on the weather probably don't really make for incisive blogging... But damn it's gorgeous here today.

Our climate doesn't always get much of an autumn. Some years, it's summer, then a week later it's winter. Blink, and you miss the leaves turning.

Not this year. Another gorgeous spray of colour all along the streets today, beautiful, clear autumn skies, bright sun... and this sorta thing has been going on for what seems like many weeks now.

Guess that's enough time inside then, for now. Later, all.

Uncle Karl's Vewy Scawy Petting Zoo

The mad mob in the Atrios thread commenting on the 'vewy scawy puppies' ad are makin' me laugh. Thought I'd pass it on.

Downloaded the bit, too. Ver' odd. Is actually some quite lovely forest 'n wolves footage. And while I ain't quite one to dismiss wolves as harmless (my sister lives in a very rural area where there are some around, and they can be pretty rough on dogs, at least), yes, I'm afraid the wolves in the Bush spot are, well...

Kinda cute.

Puppies of mass destruction. Brrr...

Shouldn't read too much into the Crossfire audience's response, but ya know me, I gotta read something into everything. And it is intriguing to me that they actually laughed out loud. Really is starting to look like maybe the 'be scared... terrorists... Boo!' thing isn't workin' so well for BushCo™ anymore.

Call it paranoia fatigue.

And folks, anyone out there thinkin' of voting for these clowns, think this over: this crowd is still gonna be beatin' that drum in four years, if you let them. The inner city schools could be crumbled to dust, the gap between rich and poor could have got to the point where most of the continent's a war zone, broken up by gated community enclaves, and Bushco™'s campaign ads will still be doing the 'beware the scawy puppies...' schtick..

Or hell. Given the chance, they'd probably still be doing it in forty years. Bin Laden could be long retired, hobbling about the old age home for interenational terrorists, and these yutzes' campaign line will still be 'Be scared... terrorists... Boo!'...

Yeah, logically, someone is gonna take another crack at the US population, sooner or later; you can probably count on it. It is, as I noted in a previous post, something of a given, something that follows from the very layout of the world these last decades. But it doesn't then follow that you want a coupla smarmy demagogues in office who harp on it every six hours to camouflage the fact that they actually have no competence in governance whatsoever, nor responsibility to their actual population... unless, of course, we're talking about the segment of the population with significant holdings in Halliburton...

And considering this crowd's track record on this vastly overemphasized issue of late--this crowd, the bunch who turned 'go slow' to 'no go' in investigating Bin Laden and company--I really don't see what the margin is for the US citizenry in keeping them around to do more damage.

Yep. Beware the scawy puppies, kiddies. Beware the scawy puppies.

Sure they do, dahlinks...

Heh. Now this is chuckleworthy: the screwup-in-chief's campaign is now running a bit that implies the terrorists want Kerry to win.

Riiiight. Sure they do, dahlinks, sure they do. Of course the Islamists want the Bushies out... I mean, when the yutzes in the West wing squandered the good will of the world toward the US in the wake of the September 11 atrocities by using the attacks as a (bizarrely, transparently ridiculous) pretext for going after a state unrelated to the attacks, damn, that musta hurt their cause terribly. Musta just been terrible for that bunch to have a world once united against them now looking to the US and saying, collectively, 'What the fuck?', and backing outta the whole business... Musta just got their knickers in a dreadful twist, too, to have the Bush administration so utterly alienating the whole of the Moslem world with the Iraq debacle... I mean, how are they gonna get enough militant madrasas organized in time to keep up with demand?

Gotta wonder. What colour, d'ya suppose, is the sky in these wankers' world?

All I want for Christmas...

Heee heeeeee....

...a US electronics expert is selling a tiny remote-control device that he claims can switch off any television at the push of a button.

The device runs through some 209 infrared codes which control more than 1,000 models of TV, and ought to disable most sets within 17 seconds.

— see story at BBC news

No, I don't have a major problem with too many TVs blarin' at me in my life... though I do have one nephew whose addiction to the box means conversation in his proximity is usually an impossibility.
But the thought of walking into a TV store and having every box within twenty feet of me go black--like I'm some kinda alien CRT-destroyin' monster or something--that's just fun...

A public health project comes to mind: put a high-power infrared emitter on the roof, hook it up to this thingy...

And turn off every TV for several city blocks...

(wanders off to his lair, deep in a volcano, to draw up schematics...)

Damn, that sings...

See Stabbed in the back for a marvellously incisive review of the efforts to tar Kerry, Winter Soldier, and whitewash Vietnam... brief quote:

The revisionists on the right want to paint Kerry as a radical activist who opposed the war and sullied the military to forward his ambitions. They want to discourage the investigations into the abuses and scandals of their adventure in Iraq, as illustrated by the shameful comments from Sen. Inhofe described here. They also have the hidden agenda of slurring the entire left in their invocation of a new “stabbed in the back” mythology. Already, as they see both their hopes for retaining the White House and their hallucination of Middle East gunboat democracy fade, they are starting to re-interpret events to run from their own mistakes and fantasies, as evidenced by the shameful distortions of Safire and Podhoretz... The motivations for this “stabbed in the back” fallacy are the same as they were in Germany: to escape the consequences of their own mistakes and miscalculations, and to mislead the public by manipulating their fears and prejudices. The right wing militarists used their "stabbed in the back" libel to take control of German politics and drag it into the horror and shame of WWII. Allowing our present day revisionists to create a new "stabbed in the back" slander, whether it refers to Vietnam, Iraq, or Abu Ghraib, would be the real disgrace.

Damn. That sings.

Been in the Vietnam zone the last little while, working through stuff on Winter Soldier and human rights violations in general, as time permits... general impression: the writer above pretty much nails it. Winter Soldier had a flaw or two, a lie or two, and some slightly overheated rhetoric. But it was a pretty damn overheated situation, folks, with a lot of blood on the floor. And the overall picture painted is borne out by multiple sources. Human rights violations and war crimes on the part of US military personnel do appear to have been fairly common, and were frequently encouraged by official policy, whether or not that was the stated intent of those policies. It's difficult with the passage of years to verify the individual accounts (more than a hundred) given, but again, they do fit a context independently confirmed. The post above quotes the US army's own human rights people (see study here, referencing My Lai but giving also an overall context, and context as cause) with good reason... see the comments on Westmoreland's 'meatgrinder' especially.

I know this might seem ancient history to some (it ain't, it's more like 35 years ago, and that's far from ancient), but more and more, I come to think: this does matter. If this bunch thinks they can chase away a man who once stood up and declared his opposition to such atrocities, by shouting him down, declaring him a traitor, the outcome is: nothing was learned here. Millions dead (including some sixty thousand Americans) in an inhuman conflict, and this bunch is still trying to sweep their own and their nation's part in it under the carpet...

I fear for our civilization if they succeed.

Missing query

So another of my queries (I'm trying to sell a book... there are other posts on this somewhere way back there) has gone AWOL. When it never showed up, I called the agent, they told me it definitely shoulda been back by now... They have has no records, can't tell me if they ever saw it, but it never came back.

No real mystery here, probably, so much as the vagaries of international reply coupons and the fact that a query with the first 30 pages and synopsis can get kinda substantial postage-wise. Still, it's frustrating. Squeeze in a few minutes, research the agent, write the query, post it, and... nothin... No idea where the damn thing is, or if I'll ever see it again...

(obligatory political reference coming...)

Suppose this musta been how Dubya's National Guard unit felt.

Dirty iceballs

There are days I wonder why I even read Nature. Gives you just way too much to worry about.

Anyway, in the one more thing to worry about file, we now have this:

The dark comets would present a major challenge to astronomers searching the skies for objects that might collide with the Earth. "They're so black you can't see the damn things," says Napier. "These things will just come out of the dark and hit you with no warning. It looks as if we're dealing with a substantial impact hazard that people haven't clicked into yet."

...and I have to say, that's just wrong. Everyone who's been to grade school knows it ain't nice to pack rocks into your snowballs... let alone tar.

Let there be Fark

Well, it's got sex toys, and it's got a shoutin' reactionary 'pundit' with sticky fingers...

This is so my perv... err... purview.

Let there be Fark.

Going upriver

I saw George Butler's Going Upriver yestereve--did the BitTorrent thing, downloaded it.

Not a bad little film. And honestly have to say, the more I find out about John Kerry, generally, the more I like him.

I mean, I've the same healthy suspicion a lot of folk have, I suspect, with regard to people seeking public office--and, I suppose, the same low expectations--the expectation that probably, anyone with the acumen to get anywhere has developed entirely too good a game of playing to the gallery, and might have a poor to iffy relationship with their conscience at best.

And I'm not saying some of that isn't true of Kerry--as is the usual game in an election year, he and his party seem so determined to strive for the middle that one wonders, at times, what the real distinction between them and their principal rivals will be (less annoying, slightly less arrogant, somewhat less incompetent, I'm hoping, really, and anything else is pretty much gravy).

But that film, there's a few things in there. It's nice to see the man proved he had principles at one point. As to courage, there ain't much question there at all. Ballsy guy, then and now, really.

Reassuring. The US could do a lot worse. Sure, he's kinda a mass market product now. But at the very least, it would appear he's actually based on a true story...

So go John, go. I got a feeling you're gonna make a pretty damn good president, as presidents go.

Oh, and yeah, I did go looking for Stolen Honor too, thinking hey, at least I might give it a viewing (and then probably fisk the livin' daylights out of it, sure). But no dice. They want money for an online viewing, and no one's putting up torrents. So nothing to report on that yet. Ain't no way I'm payin' for my propaganda.

Civil liberties

The Bush campaign, apparently, is agin’ ’em.

Janet Voorhies said she was curious to see how Republicans would react when she and two other women showed up at President Bush's Central Point rally wearing T-shirts stating "Protect Our Civil Liberties."

She got her answer before the president even spoke. The three women were ejected from the rally and escorted from the Jackson County Fairgrounds by state police officers who warned them they would be arrested if they tried to return...

Yep, according to Voorhies, a campaign worker called her shirt ‘obscene’.

I see. Yep. Lotta people feel that way about civil liberties, I’m sure. I mean, no one wants to see that, lady... There are children present.

Now, I'm sure there’s a rational explanation, of course. Probably, they just got in the way of the crew shooting a documentary at the rally, or something...

I mean, I’ve heard that Ms. Riefenstahl can get awfully bitchy about that kinda thing...

(Goose-steps out...)

More war crimes

... from the sixties, again, a little something from Chomsky’s ‘wild men in the wings’, though the articles therein make some references, here and there, to the contemporary context... And apologies to all of you looking for another ‘the Czech is in the mail’ bit, I’ll talk to my doctor about prescribing some more uppers. In the meantime, however, see the History News Network’s page on Vietnam war crimes. I’m particularly fond of this article, which, I think, makes a number of essential observations, including this one, on the things that never change:

While Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon have touted the “clean” weapons used in Iraq, the fact is that aerial cluster bombs and free-fire zones have continued to be part of present-day military operations. Villages throughout Iraq, from Hilla to Fallujah, have borne and are bearing U.S. attacks that take a heavy civilian toll. Occasionally, criticisms of the type of ordnance used in Iraq found its way into the mainstream press, especially when left-over cluster bomblets looking like yellow food packages blow up in children’s hands or depleted uranium weapons are dropped inadvertently on British soldiers. However, questions about the immorality of “shock and awe” bombing strategy have been buried deeper than any of the cluster bomblets.

Also some interesting stuff in there on Winter Soldier and Kerry... essential reading for US voters, I'd say, if those Sinclair hacks go ahead with the Stolen Honor thing.

Should add--this article from The New Republic (no less) is notable as well.

All it needs is a snappy name...

... I think I'm gonna go with Fruit-of-the-loom gate.

My friends, they will not catch me. Though I may be on the run, and I may never be able to return home to my beloved Michigan, I make this solemn vow to you and yours: The slackers of America shall not be denied their noodles, they will proudly wear their clean underwear as free Americans, and they will vote Bush out of office come November 2nd (though they will not show up to the polls until well after noon)!

Now there's a man!