observations, comments, findings—factual and fictional— beliefs, and thoughts about the world and its creatures started and maintained as a way to keep amuse and possibly edify the world's pilgrims on their journey to we know not where
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Bushbuckers and Lapdogs
If the lapdogs and Bushbuckers read anything, they would know that the terriors have turned to traditional 'informal money transfer systems,' as they are sometimes called, like the Indian hawala, precisely to avoid scrutiny. This February 2005 Congressional Research Service report on terrorist financing, one of several done since September 11, 2001, lays it out, chapter and verse. Martin A. Weiss, the report's author, calls them 'informal value transfer system,' and gives different names for different countries. He also talks about cooperative efforts the U.S. is engaged with to monitor financial transactions including those passing thorugh the infomal ones.
The Bushbuckers know where the action is in terrior financing, and it ain't the formal system.
But why not exaggerate and bash the Times, unless the rabid lapdogs on it. That's much easier and more fun than facing reality.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Find Somebody To Hate
Saturday, June 24, 2006
They've Got To Be Kidding--Or Goose Up Those Polls
In his role as house cynic, the Dog must ask whether this whole fiasco was intended to goose up someone's poll numbers? He also wonders what happened to the search for the real terrior who sent anthrax to people. While he's about it, he would remind the attorney general that the U.S. has long and painful experience with home grown terriors, many of them recently of the white supremacist variety. Perhaps, he should refocus on those 'warriors.'
But the Dog knows that this bust of the Liberty City 7--hereby named for the poor, historic black section of Miami where they apparently lived in a run-down warehouse--fits in with a pattern in the Bush War on Terriors of picking up groups of ethnic men and charging them with conspiracies that always prove less than advertised. These acts have a precedent in American history--and here I thank Jeff Donnelley, historian and teacher--the Palmer Raids of 1918 to 1920, when the feds under Woodrow Wilson's attorney general, Alexander Michael Palmer, used the newly enacted Espionage and Sedition Acts to attack, incarcerate and deport socialists, communists, and radical union workers, particularly those in the IWW, by the thousand. A very young J. Edgar Hoover led the shock troops.
The War on Terriors might be a new kind of war, as the Bushbucker-in-Chief says and the press echoes, but to this old Dog is has the putrid smell of past fear-and-hate inspired campaigns.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
That Same Old Song
This Dog has howled at that change of thinking line bfore, but now comes Ron Suskind's book, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, to amplify. Suskind says outright how hard it is to get face time with uncurious George, especially when he's in Crawford. There he was in August 2001 when on the 6th, he was handed a memo, "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US," followed by several other visits by CIA analysts, all telling him something big was coming down. Suskind reports that after one such briefing, the Bushbucker-in-Chief, the Decider who trusts his gut, "looked hard at the panicked CIA briefer.
"'All right,' he said. 'You've covered your ass, now.'" [The misplaced comma is in the text--or if it's not misplaced, something is elided. "You've covered your ass, [pause] now [do x, y, z, all of which, if history is a guide, spell, 'bugger on off out of here']."
Now flash to Vienna or one of the other recent, everything changed after September 11 performances and look at the gestures and listen to the voice again. Here is a man who knows at some primal level that he fucked up bigger than ever before--thus the disappearance down the rabbit hole--and the only way around that is to convince himself--the world is secondary--that September 11 was a history-alering event beyond what anyone could have imagined. Recognizing that, he, W, has seized the moment, seized the time, to fight a new kind of war, and he is egged on by Cheney and company purusing a distinctly old agenda. In fact, the war looks like the old types with the same themes. But the Bushbucker-in-Chief believes it's new and is too ill-informed to ever learn otherwise. (As the Dog has previously noted, W followed the same pattern with Katrina, only it didn't sell. Indeed, maybe Katrina helped expose the fraud surrounding Iraq and September 11, if only because it awakened the MIA press.)
The horror is that he is the Decider, and how to end that horror before more innocents suffer, I haven't a clue.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
"We don't torture..."
The problem is that under the Emperor Boy torture was and is an accepted American form of 'interrogation.' The practitioners can call it hard questioning, harsh questioning, or whatever else they want, but by every extant definition, the Bushies are torturing people. It's proper and necessary to call for an immediate end to the practice. It is inhumane. Since study after study has shown that torture is ineffective as a way to extract information, it can only be seen as cruelty and burality exercised to inflict pain and suffering
But, as this Dog has said before, it is also necessary, if America wants to call itself a civilized nation of laws--even, take note religious fanatics, a moral nation, by any definition of morality--it must allow all those who are party to this torture, including and especially those who ordered it, to be brought before an international court of justice for crimes against humanity. "Allowed"--wrong word: America must itself bring those people to court, and the sooner the better.
Note: The Dog thanks his loyal readers for their concern in the face of his silence. He's been busy attempting to manage his comeback, and although he is progressing, he is still considerably slower than his previous slow. He promises to try to be more regular.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
urban plan
1. take the huge, under utilized golf course at the center of the beach--the miami beach golf club--and turn it into a tropical urban park, which includes a large off-leash dog area, indigenous plantings, water, jogging, biking paths and so on--the central park of miami beach.
2. put mega parking garages at the end of each causeway, where all cars are left. people move around the beach by electric golf cart, bike or other human-powered conveyance, or foot.
do those two things and watch property values go through the roof.
Monday, June 05, 2006
Torture, Reprise
Friday, June 02, 2006
testrun
so we be gonna try this word processing program works on wysiwyg or so says but not clear it does footnoes but it do colors, and who can complain about, and it does hyperlinks, and then it publishes the damn things, says you can post to blog too, so i'll be goddamned on that one, nearly 8 weeks into my fractured femur with its tricked out titanium rod, i'm finally physical therapy and trying to fix my shoulder (right) that went all spastic with the walker and now has knots the size of golf balls and let me tell it like it is as howard cossell used to say, when he would drive nuts those who couldn't tell it like it was and knew that howard wasn't either that had he done so he'd have been driven off the air, never to return for speaking truth is seldom rewarded--we all want approximations, some of us closer to the bone than others and some want only the deceits and deceptions that portray for them the world they want, and i think we all--me and the few readers of this blog know who i'm talking about, but i'm not here to kick the bushbucker-in-chief, but rather to ask who comes next from the putative other side--gore looks best if he be gore but he didn't fight for it the last times--hills be a weasel --obama a disappointment--and the rest--please--and let's not do the 'anybody but' routine, fact is american politics be bankrupt--duh--questions are how to fix it, who will fix it--and let's not say 'the people,' though clearly they play a part....