Welcome back, everybody, all four or five of you. :)

I've revived this online journal (yes, I have it parked at a site that has *blog* in its name, but I was sick of the term a long time ago) mainly to gain attention. My old site, maintained irregularly and hosted on my personal space at cox.com is difficult to update, and has limited linking capabilites.

I thought about dragging all of those posts over here, but it would be a mighty mess - no way that I can see to create archives with them, so I'll leave it be.

To read the posts there (mainly between February and the end of July, 2004) click here.

I promise to be diligent in my ranting, lest any of you feel I'm backsliding.

All of my fabulous links will be making the move as well, it'll just take a little longer, 'cause I'm lazy.

Doh!

Notes on the Democratic Convention:

Day Two

Ann Coulter is crazy.

USA Today, in lockstep with most major media today, felt compelled to respond to the never ending drumbeat of right wingnuts to "include" more conservative voices in tv and newspapers by hiring Ann Coulter to write a humorous column from the convention. There are plenty of conservative writers who possess at least a passing relationship to reality, never mind the truth. The dominatrix of wingnut-ism is not one of them. Coulter made some shocking remarks in a column after 9/11 suggesting "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Later, she produced this gem, probably my favorite: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

Her inaugural column was killed when ediitors found it had "basic weaknesses in clarity and readability that we found unacceptable." Coulter ran to Faux News to spin a story about conservative voices being stifled, blah blah blah. Her main complaint is that the editors were incapable of understanding her brand of humor. I've read a number of her columns, and seen her on television enough to tell you she is as funny as a steel bar jammed up the ass.

USA Today ought to be bitch slapped for being stupid enough to think they could hire someone as batshit crazy as Coulter and get something resembling usable journalism in return. This ranks right up there with ESPN hiring Rush Limbaugh expecting sophisticated football analysis.

Notes on theDemocratic Convention:

Day Two

From Barak Obama's exceptional speech on Tuesday night:

Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And they want that choice.

Read the entire speech.

Well worth it.

Notes on theDemocratic Convention:

Day one, con't.

What's up with Ron Reagan?

The son of the late president Ronald Reagan, and his namesake, has popped up publicly in a big way over the last few weeks. He gave the eulogy at his father's funeral, then began appearing on the CableSpews channels advocating stem cell research. Careful always to declare himself neither a Republican nor a Democrat, he is nevertheless going to speak at the Convention on the stem cell research issue, one that the Republicans oppose.

Shortly thereafter, Ron was signed up by MSNBC as a political analyst. Smart move, keeping any political affiliation out of the public eye.

Then the convention started, and things have gotten very interesting. Not only is Reagan willing to speak counter to conventional wisdom, he conducted an interview with Michael Moore that was the best I've ever seen with Moore. More on that in a minute. Following the opening night's speeches, Reagan was on one of those goofy panels with the likes of Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, and Howard Fineman, a very sorry excuse for a journalist. (Read: pandering sycophant).

The subject was Al Gore's opening speech, where he made a few joking references to the 2000 campaign, but also sounded the serious theme that would be repeated all night: Every vote counts, and every vote must be counted.

Reagan, asked if the 2000 election was still a big issue with Democrats responded, essentially, "Of course. At the time they felt the election had been stolen, and now they know that Al Gore actually won Florida, " I'm paraphrasing here, but those comments launched a barrage of "how do you know that" and "it is still in dispute, depending on who you talk to" and whatnot. Reagan stuck to his guns, citing a report put together by a consortium of newspapers, who went back and actually counted every last vote. Gore took Florida in the only full recount that has ever been done. Major newspapers like the Washington Post ran the story under nebulous headlines suggesting that the recount proved Bush the winner, though the opposite was to be found if one bothered to read deep into the story, somewhere on page A39.

The Michael Moore interview was conducted very casually, the two standing up in a room or hotel lobby - hard to tell. It was fairly long, and to MSNBC's credit they ran the entire thing in two long segments. Reagan kidded Moore about the success of Fahrenheit 9/11, and laughed at many of Moore's responses. In fact, he laughed with Moore about many of the things both of them were saying about the upcoming election, the film, politics generally. I got the distinct impression Reagan lost the distance an interviewer should have with his subject very early on.

It is true that Ron Reagan has been quoted at least once saying the Republican party today, captured by the neocons and religious fundies, is not the Republican party of his father. I mostly disagree, as much of what they do today was originally implemented under the Reagan administration, and the philosophy isn't that much different today, just more virulent. I'll grant Ron Reagan an out on this, chalking it up to nostalgia, to the fact that no one likes to think ill of their parent, especially one recently deceased.

But somehow it seems Ron Reagan is a free man now, free to speak on any political subject, and so far, he seems to have an affinity for the truth. Let's see how long he can last.

A further word about the former president's son turned advocate.

His speech was well done, explaining in simple terms the underpinnings of embryonic stem cell research, citing examples that made the concept easy to follow. Reagan framed the debate as one between science and progress on the one side, and superstition and fear on the other. There is no doubt whom he believes are on which side:

Now, there are those who would stand in the way of this remarkable future, who would deny the federal funding so crucial to basic research. They argue that interfering with the development of even the earliest stage embryo, even one that will never be implanted in a womb and will never develop into an actual fetus, is tantamount to murder. A few of these folks, needless to say, are just grinding a political axe and they should be ashamed of themselves. But many are well-meaning and sincere. Their belief is just that, an article of faith, and they are entitled to it.

He goes on to say:

But it does not follow that the theology of a few should be allowed to forestall the health and well-being of the many. And how can we affirm life if we abandon those whose own lives are so desperately at risk?

And finally:

In a few months, we will face a choice. Yes, between two candidates and two parties, but more than that. We have a chance to take a giant stride forward for the good of all humanity. We can choose between the future and the past, between reason and ignorance, between true compassion and mere ideology. This is our moment, and we must not falter.

Whatever else you do come November 2nd, I urge you, please, cast a vote for embryonic stem cell research. Thank you for your time.

Full funding for embryionic stem cell research is part of the Kerry/Edwards platform. There can be little doubt which way the son of the godfather of modern conservatism is going to vote.

Later, interviewed by Tom Brokaw, he referred to a well known "conservative commentator's" remarks on the subject as "right wing bloviating.."

Notes on the Democratic Convention:

Opening day in Boston for the democrats went exactly as planned.

Al Gore was the first major speaker, reminding the faithful they were robbed of the presidency in 2000, a fact that honest people no longer dispute. The rest do to cover the greatest political theft in American history. He was self-deprecating, humorous, and more restrained then he has been over the past year, during which he gave several incendiary speeches crucifying The Shrub and his criminal cabinet for their behavior over the Iraq war.

He was followed by former president Jimmy Carter, a man known more for his activities since leaving the White House than for his achievements while occupying it. 80 years old and still soft spoken, he squinted into the lights, smiled, and dropped the hammer on the president's foreign policy. Words like "extremism" slipped over his lips with ease in his gentle southern accent as he laid out the point by point indictment against the war in Iraq and its wider implications. He lauded Senator Kerry for his service in Vietnam, going as far as to say that when called, at least Kerry reported for duty.

The audience for Carter was fairly quiet, possibly due to the oddity of the "aw shucks," smiling Carter using such hard language in a speech.

He was later followed by Hillary Clinton, a woman much loved or hated in this country, and there is no in between. Many of the party faithful wish she would run for president and it may be possible that in the future she will. I'd put a hefty wager against it, given the experience she had the first time around. She spoke of 9/11, primarily, then whipped the hall into a frenzy introducing her husband, the former president, Bill Clinton.

Arguably the greatest political speaker of the modern age, Clinton's arrival on stage was greeted with both a standing ovation and a deafening roar. Understanding his role as the one to lay out the sharp policy differences between Kerry and Shrub, he cut the ovation short, and got on with his speech.

Half scripted, half extemporaneous (as most Clinton speeches are), the acknowledged leader of the current Democratic Party spoke easily of the goals of the Republicans and his own party. As always, he managed to make specific points of policy sound like everyday conversation, a skill no other politician possesses, and an eerie one to witness. He divided his speech into several parts, each one coming together around a repeated phrase, in the best tradition of an old time southern minister. He even made reference to his own lack of military service, and that of Shrub's, in order to highlight the extraordinary fact of Kerry's own service, that of a two time volunteer from a privileged background. The contrast could not be sharper.

Clinton closed his speech exhorting the crowd, and those watching on television, to send Kerry to the White House. For a man whose disastrous personal life became a matter of public untruthfulness, he has an awesome facility to speak it in public, in a manner no other politician in the post war era has demonstrated.

I'll be honest: I'm no fan of John Kerry. I will vote for him because the alternative is four more years of deepening American empire, based on fascist premises that sane people should reject. It is a sorry state of affairs when the motivation to vote for someone is actually a vote against another. Kerry was on the wrong side of this war until too late, and it will be the issue that nags him all the way through this campaign, as it should. I can only hope he exhibits more political courage in both the foreign and domestic spheres should he be elected president.

Moment Of Honesty Amidst The Hype:

Following a harrowing address by a Muslim woman who lost two members of her family on 9/11, a 16 year old kid got up with a violin and completely silenced the hall with a nuanced, mournful rendition of Amazing Grace.

President The Donald?

As quoted from Salon:

Donald Trump on how he'd make a much better president than Bush, who he says has made a "mess" in Iraq and elsewhere: "[If I were president, Osama Bin Laden] would have been caught long ago ... Tell me, how is it possible that we can't find a guy who's 6-foot-6 and supposedly needs a dialysis machine? Can you explain that one to me? We have all our energies focused on one place -- where they shouldn't be focused."


Further Down The Rabbit Hole...

It isn't nice to be right all the time...

But my prediction that the Iraq war's weapons of mass destruction's failure to appear would be blamed upon the CIA and other intelligence agencies has come true today. The Senate Intelligence Committee released "phase 1" of an alleged two part report investigating the origin of intelligence used by the Shrubberies to perpetrate an illegal war on wildly false assumptions. The report cites all manner of failures attributable to the CIA, by implication exonerating the White House and most of the cabinet from lying through their teeth about the whole thing.

True to form, wimpy ass Democrats on the committee agreed to delay until after the November election "phase two," an examination of Shrub's role in the use of said intelligence to make patently false claims about the weapons that existed or were likely to exist in Iraq.

"The intelligence community's assessments of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's possession of prohibited weapons not only turned out to be "wrong" in hindsight, but they were "also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence" in the first place, said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the committee chairman, in summarizing the report." - Washington Post

"On one of the signal debates of the 2004 presidential campaign -- whether President Bush hyped intelligence to lead the nation into an unnecessary war against Iraq -- the Republicans may have already won an important battle. On Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee issues its much-anticipated report excoriating the nation's spy agencies for their dire -- and wrong -- conclusions about Iraq's weapons capabilities. The report shifts blame from the White House to beleaguered CIA Director George Tenet, whose resignation takes effect on Sunday." - Salon.com

To anyone who understands how fig-leafing works in Washington, none of this comes as a surprise. It fits right in with another favorite ploy, the "rogue elements" of the CIA whenever a covert operation goes wrong (is discovered to exist). In this case, an overt operation on the part of the administration to fabricate grounds for a war they were determined to engage since their first day in office.

Unfortunately, the disgrace masquerading as a free press has given them a complete pass, and now, so has the Senate.

Goldilocks

Who says John Kerry lacks a sense of humor? Speaking about himself and John Edwards as the Democratic ticket:

"We've got better vision, better ideas, real plans. We've got a better sense of what's happening to America -- and we've got better hair."


Pimping for Shrub

Another Republican surrenders his integrity.

Read this piece by Joe Conason in Salon. Well worth the day pass ad.

One mouth, two lies

Said by Republicans on the same day:

"Credible reporting now indicates that al Qa’ida is moving forward with its plans to carry out a large-scale attack in the United States in an effort to disrupt our democratic process." - Tom Ridge, Homeland Security

"[T]here’s, obviously, no reason for panic, or paralysis.” - Senate Majority leader Bill Frist.

So take heart fans, nothing to worry about, and make sure you remain terrified and anxious at all times. And for the fashionistas, no worries, you'll remain color coordinated, because even though the terrorists have new plans to destroy us, the threat color palette remains unchanged.

Banana Republic

From Salon.com:

A call for elections observers ... in the U.S.

Still smarting from the 2000 Florida ballot debacle, nine legislators in the House sent a letter to Kofi Annan today asking for U.N. election observers to monitor the November presidential election. You might think that U.N. observers -- usually spotted in countries with questionable democratic credentials -- would be a tad unnecessary in the world's oldest extant representative democracy, but considering the 2,119 voters improperly listed as potential felons, who are ineligible to vote in Florida, maybe it's not such a bad idea. And if you think your name could be wrongly listed on the Florida felon rolls, make sure you check for it here, and call your county elections supervisor or call 1-866-our-vote.

I could write a noisy screed about Independence and the state of our republic, but this serves as a fine illustration of the handbasket we are in.

Tyranny Of Small Minds

Somebody in or around my neighborhood has no life.

This is the notice planted in our front yard last Friday. I admit that we are not of the Genus Suburbus Lawnus Nazius, but we do try and keep it from being our own little African Grassland. Thing is, in Oklahoma, you have to be careful of over cutting your grass, unless you are willing to waste a lot of water to keep it green. Another option for the long stretches without rain is to let it grow a bit so it doesn't simply burn up.

So it got a little ragged after it finally rained, but if you read the text of that notice it sounds as if we presided over a yard choked by giant mutant weeds issuing noxious odors and sheltering post-radioactive rats. This is comical in a perverse sort of way, since our yard is a pathetic mixture of dry dirt, tenacious flowering weeds, and scraggly grass struggling to survive.

I was really fucking pissed off when my wife discovered the notice planted in the yard, for all the neighbors to see. I felt like we were bad people, blighting our entire block with our sorry little lawn. I couldn't help wondering who exactly decided to call the Lawn Police and plotted ways to retaliate. Since the notice allows ten days to remedy the situation, I figured we could erect a sign easily visible from the street, advising the informant how tall the grass was and how many more days we had before we absolutely, positively had to cut it.

Fortunately my wife's cool head prevailed, and I gave up my devious plans to inflict similar humiliation upon the nosy culprit. Instead, we got the damn grass cut.

Today I called the inspector who placed the red badge of nonconformity upon my meager lawn, to ask her to come out and inspect, lest we still be out of compliance. She asked which lawn was ours. It runs out she placed somewhere close to fifteen such signs for various alleged infractions in and around our neighborhood. I asked her if someone simply called in, and she said that was exactly the case.

"I call them the get-a-life people."

I almost fell on the floor laughing. Some time later today she'll be by to reinspect, lest we again give the UberLawnVolk reason to call down the dogs of grass on our heads.

Fold it!

Distributed computing isn't a new concept, but it is becoming more widely known and used as a means to apply massive processing power otherwise unavailable to specific scientific and mathematical problems. One such project, called Folding@Home, uses distributed computing to investigate how complex proteins are folded, or created. A small program is downloaded and installed, running in the background, working on a tiny portion of a project, which in turn is part of the larger endeavor.

While it does ratchet the computer's processor up to 100% usage, it retains such a low priority that it doesn't interfere with normal computing tasks. If you're a rabid gamer, you'll want to pause its work in order to squeeze every last ounce of performance from your machine in order to prevail in the latest death match. Points are assigned to each work unit based on how complicated it is andf how loing it will take to complete.

Folding@Home is also a friendly competition, with multiple users joining teams to combine their processors and Work Units into one score. Keeps it interesting, granting bragging rights to those who can fold the most. I've only managed to rope two people into a team, but I'm working on a few others. :)

Lenin And The Airtight Coffin

Reaganolotry now ended, we can move on to more current matters.

Well, we can, once I have my say about it.

I don't miss him. Nor do I feel an obligation to engage in compulsory "respect" for his passing. Reagan was a bastard, a liar, and a war criminal. The Republican slow motion coup still in progress was begun during his administration, which eviscerated labor unions, worker protections, and kicked the long simmering class war in this country into high gear.

The Republican leadership in Congress and the White House, most of whom served under Reagan, engineered a Soviet-style event of "national mourning" replete with the body lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda. It was sickening, just another method to enshrine Reagan as some sort of American saint.

Just ask this simple question: In the current political atmosphere, had Bill Clinton died, would his body lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.

Nope. Bet your life on it.

Faux Outrage

Please spare me before I puke on my brand new shoes.

Hands in the air, expressions of surprise - "Who? Us? Couldn't be us, we don't do things like that."

I'm as disgusted as any one could and should be by the nasty pictures of grinning soldiers and tortured prisoners that have flooded television screens and the Internet. I am also not in the least surprised, and neither should you be.

Our military, government, and intelligence services have excelled at the extraction of information from unwilling subjects through the use of intimidation, humiliation, mental and physical abuse, threat of death, and just plain death. We've practiced these arts all over the world over the past 60 years in service of our expanding empire. I could list a bunch of countries where we've employed these tactics, but that is a matter of history - go read a book.

More importantly are the consequences of these acts, and the further consequences of the publicity surrounding these specific cases.

The former is something the rest of the world either knew or suspected, which is why liberating Armies sporting American flag patches are often seen not as liberators but as killers, oppressors. We the citizenry, believing every instinct we have to be a good one, fail to recognize how our military adventures are percieved by others.

In the latter case, our leaders are very disappointed - that those pictures ever came to light. "A few rogue soldiers" we are told. Those old enough to remember will recognize that phrase from the glory days of the CIA, when an operation that went horrifically wrong (as in, became public) would be blamed on "rogue agents."

Watching this play out has been highly educational, and not a little bit entertaining. We have Rush limbaugh equating the entire episode to a fraternity prank. While it is true that fraternity pranks have resulted in severe injury and death, that was not their intention.

Tonight, the Reident-In-Thief will once again appropriate the nation's airwaves to explain his policy in Iraq, as if therre is anything left to explain in the face of indiscriminate torture and murder. Remember that wedding celebration bombed by US warplanes? The one that the head of our armed forces in Iraq said was not a wedding celebration, but a terrorist conclave? That there were only weapons found, but no food or any evidence a wedding had taken place?

Now there is a videotape of the event. A video shot by a man killed in the raid. Scenes in the video, which show the celebration following a wedding ceremony, match those of the location where the bombing took place.

More importantly, faces in the video match those on the bodies in the morgue.

Indictments are in order, all the way to the top.

Repeat after me:

It's abuse, not torture.

This from Donald Rumsfeld, the man who chose to parse language over whether or not the fighting in Iraq could be considered "guerilla warfare" or not. A reporter reading from the Defense Department's own glossary called him out on that one.

Then came the word "insurgency." He denied it was appropriate until the fighting became more fierce, more like actual warfare than mere insurgency. At that moment, "insurgency" became the term of the moment.

Abuse, not torture.

Put Iraqi military uniforms on those doing the humiliating, plant American faces on those naked forms lying in heaps on the concrete floor, and ask me again whether this is mere "abuse." Remind me why the killing of four Americans and the mutilation of their bodies is any worse than the humiliation, berating and physical torutre of Iraqi prisoners, some of whom died, is any different?

From the beginning of this War On Terror and the sideline Pre-emptive War On Iraq the US government, particularly in the form of Donald Rumsfeld, has gone out of its way to repudiate international law and jurisdiction in any matter involving the United States. We could fight wars unprovoked, take prisoners and hold them for years without charge and without representation, and even brand our own citizens as "enemy combatants," and lock them up, incommunicado, indefinitely.

Rumsfeld made light of the Geneva Convention, which protects our own troops in the event of capture, and allows prosecution, for war crimes, by those who fail to follow its strict rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war. The US has established a worldwide network of extra-judicial prisons, beyond the rule of American and international law. The only comparison that comes immeidately to mind is the old Soviet gulag, where people went to disappear or be murdered.

This sums up proper handling of prisoners:

Prisoners of war must be humanely treated at all times. Any unlawful act which causes death or seriously endangers the health of a prisoner of war is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions. In particular, prisoners must not be subject to physical mutilation>, biological experiments, violence, intimidation, insults, and public curiosity. (Convention III, Art. 13).

The United States has participated in some of the most egregious tactics of interrogation and terror during our adventures in Guatemala and other places, where US officials, military and civilian not only engaged in such practices, but taught others how to emulate them.

The ugly truth in all of this is thet United States has, and is engaging in unambiguous war crimes. Donald Rumsefeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush are all responsible and should be indicted and prosecuted.

Good to be back.

The Seizure Jig has gotten the better of me lately.

So I've been fixing other people's computers and buying computers for other folks. Not sure how I wound up doing so, but it has been both rewarding and immensely frustrating at one and the same time. One I did for a friend of ours was well worth any trouble - they're good folks who run their own business and have two little ones. Buying a new computer was not really high on the spending priority list, so they asked me to look at it, and I told them I could make it run in stable fashion by wiping it clean and installing Win2000pro. Endless pop ups, redirects, and freezes were plaguing this thing, making it unusable.

It worked, at least at my place while undergoing testing - I don't know if they have set it up yet.

A computer at my wife's workplace needed replacing and they had gotten some quotes in the $600-$700 range, high for what they need to do. The box being replaced was an overbuilt monster IBM P-III 400mHz which weighed an even ton. I surfed on over to MWave.com, where computer parts abound, and they'll build and test it the way you like it served. I configured and bought my own machine from them, and they did an excellent job. This was a fun task - assembling a computer on someone else's dime and knowing it would be a solid, reliable box for years to come.

Also at her workplace is an HP Pavilion 6630, an all-in-one discount special, based on an Intel Celeron 500mHz processor, and everything else planted on the motherboard. Unfortunately, that old adage about getting what you paid for applies to this pathetic little wimpy ass computer. Slow, slow, slow, and now it appears the on board graphics are failing. It is alleged that using an old PCI video card will interrupt the on board graphics system, replacing it.

Uh, yeah.

I did pretty much all I could, but the PC card would freeze at the startup screen even though the computer continued to boot normally. Very weird, and likely cannot be fixed without getting down to component level on the motherboard, and paying a tech to do that would buy a nice Athlon - based box.

Guess I'll be buying another computer...

Ok, so I like watching NBA games. I have since I was a kid, enamored of the Celtics and the Knicks, and later, Dr. J, David Thompson, and a long list of amazing players and revered teams. The end of season playoffs to determine the overall professional basketball champion was a time to look forward to, and to treasure as the best battled the best for the crown.

Unfortunately, over the years, NBA officials have seen fit to include more teams in the playoff draw, watering down the competition and extending the playoff run to a mind dulling two months each year. Including teams that barely break .500 is absurd - only the National Hockey League, a tragic joke whose death draws near, held the distinction of including a majority of its teams in post season play.

An additional and cynical change was to convert the first round of series play to a best of seven format, as opposed to the earlier best of five. My memory may be fading, but I seem to recall somewhat distant past when best of three was the opening round format, but don't hold me to it.

On top of playing 82 regular season games, NBA players who make it to the championship series will have played over a hundred games,, and more if they are taken to seven games in more than one series.

Ridiculous, in my view. Sure, they make mad cash, but the point of post season play is to pit best against best to determine the king of the heap for that year. Watering it down with irrelevant early round series by adding teams who don't deserve a shot at the championship is nothing more than a ratings ploy that serves to undermine the credibility of the entire playoff system. It also serves to wear out the players, leading to sometimes uninspired play and multiple injuries.

Kinda reminds me of baseball, where teams used to have 162 regular season games to get their shit together to make it into the post season, and one step from World Series play. Now there are preliminary rounds of play, longer post seasons, and falling TV ratings. Sports are, by their very nature, an arena for competition, victory and loss. Those who excel in regular season play ought not to have to wade through a sea of also-rans just to get to one another to determine who is truly the best.

'Nuff said.

A Plague Of Stupidity


I believe stupidity is a disease, and it's spreading.

The wife and I were on a foraging expedition at Walmart. (okay, okay, I know they're evil, exploit workers worldwide, all of that. We are on the thin edge of poor, and they have too many things we need at far lower prices than anyone else). Rachel drives slowly in parking lots because other people often fail to pay attention when backing out or turning into an aisle.

Today, a different kind of inattention nearly resulted in severe injury to a child.

We were crawling down a row of parked cars to reach a space far from the store itself - we don't mind the walk and hate to cruise looking for that one car actually leaving to take that space. On our right was a railing behind which were paving stones and bags of fertilizer. At the end of that row was a bunch of shopping carts. As we approached the mass of shopping carts, a little girl came running at full tilt from behind them, chased by a boy of roughly the same age. She popped out right in front of us. Rachel slammed on the brakes, and the girl retreated, still laughing, saying "sorry!."

Her mother, loading groceries to our left, looks back over her shoulder and says, nonchalantly, "sorry," in a singsong kind of voice. I yell at the kid, "watch what you're doing! You're going to get yourself killed." We drive on to a parking space, exit the car, and start walking back

The mother has her kids in the minivan and is leaving the parking lot, As she passes us one row over, she says to us "You didn't have to yell at her. Now she's upset." We countered with, "She nearly got hit." The woman repeats herself, then drives on.

This is wrong on so many levels, I don't know where to begin. Had we been as inattentive as she was, and so many people driving in that parking lot often are, that little girl would have been struck, and likely injured, even though we were going slow. The mother didn't see it happen, she turned around at the sound of our brakes, and by then the girl had stepped back behind the shopping carts. She had no idea how close it actually was.

So, she yells at us.

Anyone with a lick of sense wouldn't let their kids run amok in a Walmart parking lot full of over sized trucks battling for parking spaces, a parking lot full of frazzled parents trying to manage a cart stuffed with groceries and a coterie of children, or just trying to get the hell out of there and go home. It is a definite recipe for injury or death. It is not surprising to me, thinking about it now, that the mother thought we were out of line, not for nearly hitting her unsupervised kid but for yelling at her out of our own terror over the sudden near miss. I chock it up to the the whole "my kid can do no wrong" attitude that too many parents seem to exhibit. I hold little doubt the woman would have sued us, our insurance company, and Walmart had we even nudged her child. The cynical side of me says "thank god" there are security cameras in those parking lots - we would have won the case.

A case that almost resulted in an unnecessary tragedy.

Noted is the death of former football player and Arizona Cardinal's safety Pat Tillman, who walked away from a multi-million dollar career in the NFL to serve with the 75th Ranger Regiment in Afghanistan. Tillman quit football in early 2002. He avoided media contact after his decision to join the Army became public, saying only that he felt he needed to give something back to his country.

Tillman's life is no more or less worthy than any other American soldier who is serving or has been killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, it is his willingness to give up fame and fortune to do so that strikes me as unusual in modern America.

----------

Speaking of the dead, a Freedom Of Information Act request has pried loose hundreds of photographs of flag draped coffins containing American military dead being transported back home for burial. These are the pictures the Pentagon and this administration have been keeping away from the public eye, claiming a right to privacy for the families and relatives of the dead.

It was once tradition to allow pictures and video to be taken from a distance of the coffins as they arrived at Dover Air Force base and were unloaded beneath the watchful eye of a full color guard. Unfortunately, the Shrubsters have denied any access to the pictures or the air base, turning what would have been low key, respectful coverage into a contested political symbol. Shrub's true rationale was to keep this aspect of war out of the newspapers, while gladly handing out positive pictures of beaming soldiers in the desert, or video of our end of firefights.

But this cynical mindset is nothing new, not for an administration who has lied it's way into this war, and cannot seem to lie its way out, not for lack of trying. Iraq is where they wanted to go from the start of their time in office, and so they have dragged the rest of us along for the bloody ride. I think it only right and proper that every American see the stark, undeniable photographic evidence of the true cost of this war, of the lives given freely by those who serve in our armed forces, forces intentionally sent to their peril to fight an unnecessary war.

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Quoted from the Washington Post about the Republican smear campaign concerning John Kerry's military service:

The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum has a tale of two soldiers:

George Bush, fresh out of Yale, uses family connections to join the Air National Guard in order to avoid serving in Vietnam. After serving four years of a six-year term, he decides to skip his annual physical, is grounded, and heads off to Alabama, where he blows off even the minimal annoyance of monthly drills for over six months.

Conservative reaction: why are you impugning the patriotism of this brave man? He got an honorable discharge and that's as much as anyone needs to know.

John Kerry, fresh out of Yale, enlists in the Navy and subsequently requests duty in Vietnam. While there, according to the Boston Globe, he wins a Purple Heart, and then follows that up with more than two dozen missions in which he often faced enemy fire, a Silver Star for an action in which he killed an enemy soldier who carried a loaded rocket launcher that could have destroyed his six-man patrol boat, a Bronze Star for rescuing an Army lieutenant who was thrown overboard and under fire, and two more Purple Hearts.

Conservative reaction: Hmmm, that first injury wasn't very serious. This is something that deserves careful and drawn-out investigation, and it would certainly be unfair to impugn 'craven or partisan motives' to those doing the impugning.

Are these guys a piece of work, or what?

Last night the Resident was trotted out for a dog and pony show to prop up the mountain of lies threatening to crumble down on his soft little head. Soldiers are dying in the highest numbers since this ill conceived war began and Iraq is edging closer to civil warfare over the assumption of sovereignty due to take place June 30.

Given all of the noise about the September 11 commission and the Shrub's own strategy of basing his re-election on his status as a "wartime president," one would think he has some sort of reflective answer to the following question:

Toward the end of the news conference, Bush was asked what lessons he had taken away from events since the Sept. 11 attacks. He stopped, shook his head, looked quizzical and then came up empty, although it was the kind of question he must have been told to prepare for.

"I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer," he said. "But it hasn't yet."

Holy Shit.

This will serve as my last post on Rwanda.

Read this.

Hard on the heels of my outburst about the Rwandan genocide of 1994, a principle player who sat on the sidelines while the wholesale slaughter went unopposed has written an editorial for the Washington post, "reflecting back."

Much as The Post can be useful, to avoid having you register, I've quoted the entire apologia on my own page. Notice he repeats himself several times, saying only "those of us who did not do enough." There are many reasons to find Bill clinton lacking in his performance as President, but none are so revolting as this.

Enjoy!

We recently traded in our standard cable box for a DVR box, one which allows the recording of programs and movies even while watching something else. (Cannot be done on a digital cable system with a VCR). Beats VCR tapes and hassles everyday of the week.

I can record programs I've not always been able to watch, especially programs considered too nerdy by my wife, like a recent NOVA program on tornadoes that centered on the University of Oklahoma and the National Storm Prediction Center, both of which are here in Norman. She actually wound up watching that one with me - tornadoes terrify her as much as they fascinate me, and I equate her sitting transfixed by the images of natural destruction with the look in the eyes of a mouse just before the snake strikes.

So I recorded Frontline last night without really reading the description of the show. Frontline is one of those programs worth watching, regardless of topic. "Ghosts Of Rwanda" is a two hour retrospective on the genocide of 1994 that annihilated at least 800,000 people in a premeditated mass slaughter. Western nations and the UN stood by as day after day, week after week, people were murdered, shot down, beaten, and hacked apart by machete. The interviews are gut wrenching, the pictures horrifying and sickening, and the response of the US nearly incomprehensible. I say "nearly," for in the news footage included on the program are clips of the State Department spokesperson giving the US government's take on the mounds of bodies piling higher by the minute. She contorts herself around the term "genocide," avoiding its use as long as possible, and finally caving as far as the phrase "acts of genocide."

"Acts of genocide."

As opposed to just plain "genocide."

I was reminded of Secretary Of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's difficulty with the term "Guerrilla Warfare" in relation to the violent resistance to the US occupation of Iraq.

The term genocide carries specific legal definitions in the context of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, of which the US is a prominent signatory. Under the Convention, combined with the UN Charter, member nations are required to act to end genocide wherever and whenever it occurs in the world. By avoiding the word, the US and European nations could abdicate their responsibility to act to intervene in a situation that fulfilled all of the definitions of the term genocide.

I quote:

Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The events that began on April 6, 1994, and continued until July of the same year could only be defined as genocide right from the start. In less than 100 days, greater than 800,000 people are destroyed, more than 8,000 every single day.

The Frontline program ends with clips of a series of visits by UN officials and US officials after the genocide was ended. It is nauseating in the extreme to watch as they expiate their own guilt by traveling to Rwanda to gaze upon the piles of bodies and scattered remains. President Clinton chose not to act, stating that the United States has no friends, only interests, and participating in international interventions will only occur in light of the extent of US interests. In 1998 Clinton traveled to Rwanda in a trip billed as an "apology" for choosing not to act. Not once in the brief speech he gave in Kigali did he use the word "apology" or the word "sorry."

I remember feeling sick at the time. Watching it all over again last night, I was very, very angry.

"Never again?"