Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

The Associated Press reveals details behind the latest terrorist attack on the English-speaking world:

A packed Qantas jetliner lost the use of crucial flight instruments after an explosion aboard the aircraft last week blasted a large hole in its fuselage, an air safety investigator said Wednesday….

…The shrapnel‘s trajectory added new details to the frantic moments that followed what investigators suspect was an oxygen tank explosion aboard the jet.

Oxygen? Oxygen is to blame? This is yet another crucial resource that we have grown overly dependent on. (Did you know that most oxygen in America comes from foreign sources?) This is yet another crucial resource that has been used to attack us.

What will we tell the children? What does Oxygen have against us? Why does Oxygen hate us?

My theory: look at the bondage Oxygen is trapped in. Double bonds. Triple bonds. I say Oxygen hates us out of spite, out of envy for our freedom.

According to a May 17,2008 AP article, Alabama’s county sheriffs are are given $1.75 per day to feed a prisoner - and are allowed to pocket the difference, if they can do it cheaper.

The report says “critics charge that Alabama, in effect, is paying law enforcement to skimp on food and might be rewarding sheriffs for mistreating prisoners. “It’s a bad system, and it ought not be that way,” said Buddy Sharpless, executive director of the Association of County Commissions of Alabama.

I don’t understand the negative reaction to the fact that Alabama’s county sheriffs are allowed to profit by, in my opinion participating in what amounts to legal graft, by scrimping on food for prisoners. (Alabama jails bank on cheap meals - Law allows sheriffs to pocket leftover food allowance, AP May 17, 2008)

What’s the big deal? Isn’t this exactly what private prisons do? While condemning the practice by county sheriffs, I’m sure Mr. Sharpless would listen attentively to executives from Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) making their pitch to privatize public jails and prisons.

CCA claims to save states and counties money by negotiating a per-head fee for housing and feeding prisoners. They profit by pocketing the difference between what they spend and what they charge the taxpayers. Contracting-out public services had been a gold mine for ARAMARK, too. In addition to prisons, ARAMARK also turns a tidy profit feeding children attending public schools.

I agree with Mr. Sharpless opinion, “It’s a bad system, and it ought not be that way.” As a taxpayer I want to know my dollars are going to provide public services, not lining the pockets of CCA and ARAMARK.

Thanks to The Great Beyond for debunking a conspiracy theory that’s been making the rounds on the Internet lately. Some people have been saying that a new particle accelerator will create an exotic subatomic particle that will spawn a black hole that will swallow the Earth, or maybe even unravel the fabric of the entire universe.

That’s crazy, of course. After all, there are things in the universe that can accelerate particles at much greater speeds, and in much greater mass, than any puny human machine.

There are more important things to worry about, like the tuatara.

You probably don’t know what a tuatara is, do you? There’s a reason for that. Government officials have decided that it would be unwise to give appropriate publicity to the tuatara problem. They don’t want to see riots and the hoarding of goods.

Another article over at Nature explains the crisis, however, for those who care to know.

The tuatara, once belittled as a kind of primitive lizard, is actually outcompeting humanity, and will soon take over the planet.

“New Zealand scientists who analysed DNA harvested from fossils up to 8,750 years old now report that tuatara seem to do one thing remarkably fast: evolution. In a paper published this month in Trends in Genetics, the researchers show that the rate of molecular evolution in the reptile is among the fastest yet observed for any vertebrate.”

So, first we understand that tuataras are evolving at a greater rate than any other animal with a backbone.

Second, consider global climate change. It’s become plain that humans are adapting too slowly to climate change. Specifically, humanity cannot adapt its technology quickly enough to prevent disastrous consequences.

If human beings cannot provide the adaptation to deal with global climate change, who can? Apparently, the tuataras. They evolve faster than any other vertebrate, after all, and evolution is all about adaptation.

It will be the tuataras who develop clean energy technology, not humans.

Just think of what the tuataras will be able to do with their advanced technology. They’ll be able to do things that we humans never could do.

And just what have humans been unable to do with their technology? Let’s return to the subject we started with: The failure of human engineers to design a particle accelerator with sufficient power to trigger the creation of a black hole.

We’ve already established that tuataras have the power to develop technology that is beyond anything that humans can imagine… and just what kind of technology have humans imagined? Particle accelerators that can trigger black holes, or even the unraveling of the fabric of the cosmos, that’s what. That’s exactly what the tuataras are working on, and they’re the species to get it done.

Government officials may be unwilling to speak about this threat, but I will issue this warning: If you see a tuatara at your local hardware store, call the police.

What’s really going on at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City?

The cover stories for the repeated failures of the opera Tristan und Isolde are appearing increasingly thin. Five different actors have had to be used in the title roles of Tristan and Isolde:

Gary Lehman
Ben Heppner
Mac Master
Deborah Voigt
Janice Baird

Now, there is to be a sixth: Roger Dean Smith… or so he says.

What’s going on? Performances of Tristan und Isolde have had to be cancelled more than once, due to “mishaps”.

The tenor has fallen off the stage. Scenery has nearly killed the singers. There have been mysterious plagues that the publicists are dismissing as “stomach ailments” and “viruses”.

Nobody believes it, of course, and Manhattan’s elite opera scene is abuzz with rumor of what is really happening behind the curtain of the newest production of Tristan und Isolde.

To understand today’s dramatic events, one needs to go back to the time of the composition of Tristan und Isolde. It was in 1849, and Richard Wagner had to flee the city of Dresden because of what the establishment describes, euphemistically, as The May Uprising. Conventional history says that the May Uprising was a political battle between a repressive government and a mob seeking democratic rule. Conventional history is wrong.

The truth is that Richard Wagner had been dabbling in ancient folklore a little bit too deeply, and he came across some folkways that should have been forgotten: The dark arts of necromancy. Richard Wagner thought that he was writing a new opera to celebrate the culture of teutonic peoples, but really, he was casting a black spell to raise the dead. The May Uprising was not about politics. The truth is that the battle was an attempt to defend the living residents of Dresden from a zombie seige.

Just look at the history books. After the zombies started rising out of Dresden’s cemeteries, Richard Wagner ran away, because he didn’t know how to control his creations. The government soldiers in Dresden are then recorded as making a last stand in the Zeughaus.

Do you know what Zeughaus means, when translated into English? It means “House of the Undead”. The government soldiers went to the heart of the problem, to find the answer for the dreadful question: How do you kill somebody when they’re already dead?

The answer to that question was lost to history, but obviously they found some kind of way to control the zombies.

Richard Wagner, in the meantime, set up his operations again in Zurich, and this time he finished what he had started. He finished a final, revised draft of Tristan und Isolde, which still included some elements of necromancy, but not as much as in his first draft.

So, that’s what the people at the Met are facing right now: Black magic. It’s not as strong as when Richard Wagner first tried it in Dresden, but it is potentially deadly nonetheless.

I can’t tell you what’s going to happen for certain, but I can tell you this: There are just a few more performances of Tristan und Isolde at the Met, and I won’t be setting foot in Manhattan until after they are done.

Do you doubt how serious a threat to American freedom it is that Congress is about to pass the FISA Amendments Act, unamended, and allow the President of the United States to spy against Americans’ emails, telephone calls and Internet use without any requirement to justify the spying, and without any congressional oversight? Don’t just listen to the warnings of us liberals over here at Irregular Times. Listen to the financial conservatives over on Wall Street.

Here’s what Rex Nutting, the Washington Bureau Chief of Marketwatch, has to say about the consequences of the passage of this law:

“If Al Qaeda is fighting us because they hate our freedoms, as President Bush often says, then they’re winning the war.

Pretty soon, we won’t have any more freedoms for them to hate.

Scratch the Fourth Amendment off the list of freedoms that we thought we had.”

Marketwatch is not some progressive publication like The Nation. It’s “a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dow Jones & Company”.

When Wall Street fiscal conservatives ring the bell of alarm about the imminent loss of American freedom, it’s time for even optimistic skeptics to listen, and move to action.

The Senate is due to vote on the FISA Amendments Act any time now. Get out of your chair and tell your senators to vote NO.

The number of the congressional switchboard is (202) 224-3121.

Liberals may decry Republican double standards, citing the proliferation of prostitution whenever the Republicans are in power. I say,  bring back the hookers.  It lets the interns off the hook.

There were many who said that Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions were a personal problem and had nothing to do with the way he was able to govern the country.  I thought that too, until I became part of the federal government through the United State Peace Corps.

Think of this: Monika Lewinsky was an employee, an intern.  Bill Clinton was her boss.  Is any employee ever really free to turn down the boss?    And when the CEO of a corporation is doing something, can the rank and file ever really say there is anything wrong with someone else doing it?

The culture within the federal government during the time I was associated with it said no.  If you turn down one of those Washington types, the current wisdom went,  your career wouldn’t last. Maybe that’s why the Peace Corps publicizes it’s surveys about “feelings” instead of the actual number of assaults or its fifty percent attrition rate, which they try to hide from the public.  Sexual harassment within the agency is a totally taboo subject–the people most likely to do it are the same people responsible for reporting and stopping it. Maybe that’s why Peace Corps volunteers feel pressured to find a romantic interest with local clout as soon as they are in country. Or why the Peace Corps–and Chris Dodd–worked so hard to defeat the Peace Corps Safety and Security bill that would have established an Ombudsman for volunteers as well as an independent Inspector General.

Can you imagine–the IG, the guy responsible for oversight of the agency, reports to the agency’s director.  That might be all right for agencies where those making judgments have some job security in the form of civil service protection, but Peace Corps is under a five-year rule. Most employees have their contracts renewed every two and a half years, up to a maximum of five years, a good formula for producing rubber stamps.

Bill Clinton didn’t just have an affair, like former President Harding and presidential hopeful McCain.  He got involved with an employee, and he got away with it, creating a predatory atmosphere for female employees throughout the federal system.  His actions paralyzed his administration and its ability to enact any of its ideals in his second term.  Hillary Clinton did not have any good options.  If she stood by her man, she would be an enabler of something corrosive in the political system.  If she didn’t, she would lose everything she had worked for in her entire political life, as well as the opportunity to make a difference in the future with her considerable talents. I have nothing but admiration for the way Hillary Clinton has carried herself and served the country.  But I have a bad taste in my mouth about bureaucrats who are sexual predators and the corporate cultural that lets them get away with it.

Let’s get that out of the government offices and back into the brothels where it belongs.

A spaceship sent from Earth to explore the planet Mercury has discovered a giant spider living there. The creature is 40 kilometers wide.

Scientists writing for the magazine New Scientist (what happened to the old scientist, I’d like to know) admit that they categorize the meeting of the spaceship and the spider was a “close encounter”. Yet, trying to be coy, so as not to provoke panic among Earthlings, the scientists merely called the spider a “strange spider-shaped feature”.

Well, let’s think now. What is most shaped like a spider? Answer: A spider! Clearly, the most obvious explanation for this “spider-shaped feature” is that it’s a spider.

Besides, the name of the Earth spaceship that was sent to Mercury was Messenger. Any fool can understand that one does not send a messenger to a place where it is believed that there is no one to hear a message. Scientists, it seems, have known about the giant spider living on Mercury for some time, and they have reason to believe that the Mercury spider is intelligent enough to understand out language.

What else can this giant spider do? Travel through outer space, perhaps?

The bad news: There is not believed to be very much for spiders to eat on the planet Mercury. That goes double for a giant spider.

Earth, on the other hand, is filled with food - enough to feed even a giant 40-kilometer spider for years.

We can expect that giant spider from Mercury to visit the Earth soon, and we should expect it to be very hungry.

Prepare your underground shelter now.

En lieu of the recent posts on the main blog about the FISA ordeal, I thought I should share this little story I came across when I logged on to Yahoor today.

(Link)

Senate delays eavesdropping vote
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 39 minutes ago

The Senate on Thursday signaled support for granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that helped the government conduct warrantless eavesdropping, a sign that the contentious provision may be headed for approval next week.

On a strong 60-36 vote, senators rejected an amendment that would have killed the immunity provision and strengthened the powers of a secret court to oversee the surveillance of phone calls and e-mails that involve people inside the United States.

Further action on the legislation was delayed until Monday, pushing Congress closer to a Feb. 1 deadline for enacting a new law. If a new law is not signed by the president by then, some eavesdropping practices that are now legal would be prohibited.

The Bush administration is insisting that any new law also protect from potentially crippling civil lawsuits those telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on Americans after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, R-Nev., blamed Republicans for the delay, saying they were trying to block a series of amendments majority Democrats sought to offer.

“It appears the president and Republicans want failure. They don’t want a bill,” Reid said.

The draft bill, written by the Senate Intelligence Committee, would update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The law, first enacted in 1978, dictates when federal agents must obtain court permission before tapping phone and computer lines inside the United States to gather intelligence on foreign threats. Agents may tap lines outside the country without court oversight.

It was the second time in six weeks the Senate had taken up the FISA modernization bill, only to see action stymied. Reid abruptly closed down debate in December when it became clear the Senate couldn’t finish work before the holiday break.

Most vexing to the intelligence agencies, without an extension of the law the government would return to needing individual court orders to listen in on any communication that passes through U.S. telecommunications switches and computer servers — even those that are between people who are outside the country. This is not required by FISA, according to legal experts, but became the practice over time to provide firms with legal protections.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., on Thursday proposed extending the existing law for 30 days to buy the Senate additional time to produce a bill. The House completed its version of the bill last fall.

In a move to resolve the immunity issue, the key impasse on the legislation, the White House ended months of resistance Thursday and agreed to give House members access to secret documents about its warrantless wiretapping program.

The Bush administration is trying to persuade the House to agree to retroactively shield from liability those companies that helped the government eavesdrop on Americans without the approval of the FISA court. About 40 such civil lawsuits are pending against telecommunications firms, and the administration says if the cases go forward they could reveal information that would compromise national security. It also contends that the companies could be bankrupted if the lawsuits are successful.

The companies were helping the administration carry out the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program, a still-classified effort that intercepted communications on U.S. soil without oversight from the FISA court from Sept. 11, 2001, to Jan. 17, 2007.

Reyes and Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House intelligence panel, requested access to the White House documents in May. House Democrats say they will not support telecom immunity without seeing them first. Some senators were given access to the documents last fall.

The documents include the president’s authorization of warrantless wiretapping, Justice Department legal opinions going back to 2001, and the requests sent to the telecommunications companies asking for their assistance.

I’m trying really hard to be surprised these days…really hard…

I’m still lazy, so here’s another comic;

I should make a big noteworthy post, being the first one after the record ice storm came through my town, but I’d rather post a comic:

December 1, 2007 - Saturday

1705 days into the war

U.S. MILITARY DEATHS IN IRAQ: 3881
U.S. MILITARY WOUNDED IN IRAQ: 28582

IRAQI CIVILIAN DEATHS
(MINIMUM): 77353
(MAXIMUM): 84502
(LANCET ESTIMATE) 600,000

COST OF THE WAR SO FAR (ROUNDED TO THE NEAREST MILLION): $473,314,000,000

Please note that the above figures, from the IBC website, are NOT estimates of total Iraqi civilians killed as a result of the US invasion and its aftermath. Rather, they are a count of Western-reported verifiable violent deaths, and likely to be a small percentage of the true figure. Les Roberts, author of the Lancet Report, believes the actual number may now be as high as 1,000,000.

RED DAVE

November 25, 2007 - Sunday

1700 days into the war

U.S. MILITARY DEATHS IN IRAQ: 3875
U.S. MILITARY WOUNDED IN IRAQ: 28530

IRAQI CIVILIAN DEATHS
(MINIMUM): 77327
(MAXIMUM): 84244
(LANCET ESTIMATE) 600,000

COST OF THE WAR SO FAR (ROUNDED TO THE NEAREST MILLION): $471,621,000,000

Please note that the above figures, from the IBC website, are NOT estimates of total Iraqi civilians killed as a result of the US invasion and its aftermath. Rather, they are a count of Western-reported verifiable violent deaths, and likely to be a small percentage of the true figure. Les Roberts, author of the Lancet Report, believes the actual number may now be as high as 1,000,000.

RED DAVE

November 23, 2007 - Friday

1699 days into the war

U.S. MILITARY DEATHS IN IRAQ: 3874
U.S. MILITARY WOUNDED IN IRAQ: 28530

IRAQI CIVILIAN DEATHS
(MINIMUM): 77323
(MAXIMUM): 84240
(LANCET ESTIMATE) 600,000

COST OF THE WAR SO FAR (ROUNDED TO THE NEAREST MILLION): $471,065,000,000

Please note that the above figures, from the IBC website, are NOT estimates of total Iraqi civilians killed as a result of the US invasion and its aftermath. Rather, they are a count of Western-reported verifiable violent deaths, and likely to be a small percentage of the true figure. Les Roberts, author of the Lancet Report, believes the actual number may now be as high as 1,000,000.

RED DAVE

A follow-up to the story of the Saudi government punishing a rape victem located here.

News Article

Saudis defend punishment for rape victim
Wed Nov 21, 9:19 AM ET

The Saudi judiciary on Tuesday defended a court verdict that sentenced a 19-year-old victim of a gang rape to six months in jail and 200 lashes because she was with an unrelated male when they were attacked.

The Shiite Muslim woman had initially been sentenced to 90 lashes after being convicted of violating Saudi Arabia’s rigid Islamic law requiring segregation of the sexes.

But in considering her appeal of the verdict, the Saudi General Court increased the punishment. It also roughly doubled prison sentences for the seven men convicted of raping the woman, Saudi news media said last week.

The reports triggered an international outcry over the Saudis punishing the victim of a terrible crime.

But the Ministry of Justice stood by the verdict Tuesday, saying that “charges were proven” against the woman for having been in a car with a man who was not her relative.

The ministry implied the victim’s sentence was increased because she spoke out to the press. “For whoever has an objection on verdicts issued, the system allows an appeal without resorting to the media,” said the statement, which was carried on the official Saudi Press Agency.

The attack occurred in 2006. The victim says she was in a car with a male student she used to know trying to retrieve a picture of her. She says two men got into the car and drove them to a secluded area where she was raped by seven men. Her friend also was assaulted.

Justice in Saudi Arabia is administered by a system of religious courts according to the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Judges have wide discretion in punishing criminals, rules of evidence are vague and sometimes no defense lawyer is present. The result, critics say, are sentences left to the whim of judges. A rapist, for instance, could receive anywhere from a light sentence to death.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack avoided directly criticizing the Saudi judiciary over the case, but said the verdict “causes a fair degree of surprise and astonishment.”

“It is within the power of the Saudi government to take a look at the verdict and change it,” McCormack said.

Canada’s minister for women’s issues, Jose Verger, has called the sentence “barbaric.”

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said the verdict “not only sends victims of sexual violence the message that they should not press charges, but in effect offers protection and impunity to the perpetrators.”

I’m sorry, but you can try to make any excuse you want to explain away this type of behavior but I can’t view this sort of thing as anything less than the most outrageous, disgusting, immoral perversion of justice that I’ve seen in a very, very long time.

November 20, 2007 - Tuesday

1696 days into the war

U.S. MILITARY DEATHS IN IRAQ: 3873
U.S. MILITARY WOUNDED IN IRAQ: 28489

IRAQI CIVILIAN DEATHS
(MINIMUM): 77305
(MAXIMUM): 84222
(LANCET ESTIMATE) 600,000

COST OF THE WAR SO FAR (ROUNDED TO THE NEAREST MILLION): $470,210,000,000

Please note that the above figures, from the IBC website, are NOT estimates of total Iraqi civilians killed as a result of the US invasion and its aftermath. Rather, they are a count of Western-reported verifiable violent deaths, and likely to be a small percentage of the true figure. Les Roberts, author of the Lancet Report, believes the actual number may now be as high as 1,000,000.

RED DAVE

Pentagon Cover Up

By MIKE WHITNEY

The Pentagon has been concealing the true number of American casualties in the Iraq War. The real number exceeds 15,000 and CBS News can prove it.

CBS’s Investigative Unit wanted to do a report on the number of suicides in the military and “submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense”. After 4 months they received a document which showed–that between 1995 and 2007– there were 2,200 suicides among “active duty” soldiers.

Baloney.

RED DAVE