Republican War On The Free Press

The war against the press continues in Congress. And the press has fought back by rolling over and giving up.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House on Thursday approved a Republican-crafted resolution condemning news organizations for revealing a covert government program to track terrorist financing, saying the disclosure had "placed the lives of Americans in danger."

What's really sad about this story is that the operation isn't covert at all. The White House has been bragging about it since 2001. The organizations under attack, have been simply reporting information given out in White House press briefs and releases.

There's a good recap of this at, 'Keith Strikes Back Against NYTimes Bashers'.

The press itself could easily counter these allegations and defend themselves, but either they forgot who their public sources are, or they want their noses bloodied, as the Republican War Against Freedom, now takes on the Fourth Estate.

Flaming TraIns

Granted it's a pretty pic. I assume that's supposed to be a sunset behind the train, but it also resembles a hot fire, belching smoke.

Perhaps DART needs to pass these pics around a bit before they are approved?

The Pharoah

I just saw a segment of bush on CNN, telling us his opinion of the Supreme Court Ruling on our prisoners in Gitmo.

The Supreme Court argued that the Geneva Convetion applies to these Prisoners of War and that we may not use military tribunals to judge them.

In answer, bush informed us that he was going to work with Congress to get the military tribunals going, so these POWs can be tried.

Essentially bush gave the Supreme Court the finger and let them know that he'll do what he wants to do. That they have no jurisdiction over him or his wishes.

I guess he'll issue a signing statement that will nullify their decision.

Some have called bush the King and some have called him America's Pope. He calls himself 'The Decider'. I'll call him 'Pharoah', as it nicely sums up all of these titles.

Bush Commits Treason

The new story going around, is that the press leaks about the Bush administration illegally spying on Americans without cause or warrant, helps the terrorists.

The meme going around is that telling the world about any illegal activities conducted by our government is in fact treason and only traitors tell the world what tactics we use to hunt terrorists dow with.

Yet it's ok for own government to side with the terrorists. Bush aided and abetted the terrorists who want to destroy America, when on September 24, 2001 he said, "We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them against each other, rout them out of their safe hiding places, and bring them to justice." After he said that, the terrorists knew we were after them. Clearly they didn't have a clue before that.

Further, this fact sheet was released that reads, "The President has directed the first strike on the global terror network today by issuing an Executive Order to starve terrorists of their support funds. The Order expands the Treasury Department’s power to target the support structure of terrorist organizations, freeze the U.S. assets and block the U.S. transactions of terrorists and those that support them, and increases our ability to block U.S. assets of, and deny access to U.S. markets to, foreign banks who refuse to cooperate with U.S. authorities to identify and freeze terrorist assets abroad."

Everytime the White House Residents get caught smearing their feces on the US constitution or just outright breaking the law, they scream at us that, they have to make feces sandwiches out of the US Constitution and eat them, and further they have to destroy our freedoms, in order to catch the people who want to smear feces on the US Constitution and destroy our freedoms. Further, they go on to explain that terrorists are incredibly stupid and ignorant people who don't know how telephones work, and fly jumbo jets around with the country with skill. Further, they don't understand finance, so we have to sift through everyone's financial records in order to track their cleverly hidden financial activities.

The administration, keeps contradicting itself, everytime it get's caught committing crimes against the US Constitution, breaking numerous laws and working against the interests of America. Essentially, they flip flop and backflip everytime they get caught helping the terrorists destroy our freedoms.

So who's the traitors here? The criminals that are trying to destroy our freedoms or the people who report them?

Seems to me that reporting the treasonous activities of this White House Administration is an act of patriotism.

But the short memory of the press makes most of them too ignorant to even know when they're screwing themselves and helping Bush and the terrorists destroy our country. They are now arguing whether they committed treason by reporting on the White House's traitorous activities! They forget that the White House announced with pride, the same story in 2001! If it's treasonous to report these things now, it was treason in 2001, when the White House broke the story.

Kudos to Dan Froomkin for pointing out what every person reporting on current events since 9/11 should already know.

If the mainstream press and the folks writing letters to their local newspapers are any indication, most Americans get a lobotomy on a regular basis and can't remember some of the most extraordinary events of this century.

Perhaps the lobotomy box in our living rooms is the cause?

Have Fun, Enjoy My Viagra!

The Rush Limbaugh story is a sordid one.

Coming back from the Dominican Republic, a nation known for it's use of trafficking of child sex slaves, to attract rich tourists from around the world, we was found with a prescription bottle of Viagra and other drugs that were not prescribed to him.

He argued that they were prescribed to his doctor for privacy reasons.

We may never know why he took a bottle of Viagra, that was not prescribed to him, to a nation that is well known for prostitution, but we do know that he broke the law.

1. It is illegal to use prescription drugs that are not prescribed to you.
2. It is illegal for a doctor to write a prescription for himself, then give the drugs to someone else.
3. It is illegal to give prescription medication to someone else to consume.

Rush Limbaugh was already on probabtion for drug related crimes. He had spent three years and $600,000 on oxycotin abuse, and helped establish an illegal drug ring to market the stuff. He became partially brain damaged from the overdoses, and this finally manifested as deafness, at which point his addiction was uncovered. All the way he railed against his own kind, arguing that drug addicts were the worst scum of the Earth and should be locked up forever. He got drug rehab and probabtion for crimes that would send most folks to the big house.

At this point, it's clear that the doctors who prescribed these drugs, needs to have their medical licenses revoked. They committed a crime, and their negligent behaviour could put people's lives at risk. Giving people prescription drugs without documentation could lead to complications if that person is hospitalized. With no paperwork describing the treatment and medications a person is receiving, an emergency care physician may make the wrong call, in life and death situations.

Rush Limbaugh might not have the wherewithal to read the label on the bottle, where it clearly spells out that he is breaking Federal Law by taking medication prescribed to someone else, but his doctors knew. They should be arrested, and have their licenses to practice medicine revoked.

Rush Limbaugh is clearly a drug addict that needs serious help, and probably some prison time, but his doctors are clearly the enablers here. They also need to pay for their crimes.

Or is Rush just lying about the prescription. Perhaps he just stole the drugs?

Who knows with that guy?

A Planetary Experiment

Suppose you were approached with the idea of performing an incredible experiment, to study population growth? Suppose the experiment went like this...

1. Take a large stadium and place in it a dozen children.
2. Seal the exits, never let them leave.
3. Drop in food an water daily. As much as is needed to keep them healthy.
4. Watch the population build over the years.
5. When the stadium is full, cut back on the food and water per one ration daily.
6. When there is a dozen people left, the experiment is done.

Would you participate in such an experiment?
Would you donate your own children or grandchildren as subjects for the experiment?

What if the experiment were done on a larger scale and you knew that your children would live out their lives before the experiment went stale, only your grandchildren would suffer, would that be better? How about your great grand children?

How about doing on a planetary scale? Let's say you do the same thing for a planet. You open up vast but finite resources to a stable population, and watch them swell in numbers and then run out of resources and drop back to a small population again from famine, pestilence and disease. Would you participate in this experiment?

Would you like your children to participate?

Would you feel better, if the bad stuff only happens to your descendants after you've passed on?

What if the those in the experiment knew about the experiment, and continued to outbreed their resource base? Would they be more or less culpable for continuing the experiment than you for setting it up?

Well the experiment is real. We're in it. We've been given a bounty of 100 million years worth of fossil energy. We've used it to build a vast civilization and to feed billions of people in an ever growing population. We still work to increase our population even as we watch our resource base disappear. We still work to increase our consumption of finite resources as fossil fuels, fresh water, clean air, fish an oceans and our ecosystems on land are exhausted and run out.

And there's nothing left that can replace these things. We can argue and discuss subsidy driven alternatives, but even the energy positive ones are like shaking out sofas for lose change compared to the bounty we've enjoyed in fossil fuels.

We're running low on so many resources that now our world grain stocks are running periously low. We're approaching the exciting part of the experiment now. We now produce less food than we eat. Over the coming years, we'll produce less and less food.

Long ago, we were told what would happen. Malthus worked it out and described population crashes. The Club of Rome was remarkably accurate in their timing, even with incomplete data. As they argued, the models were the real key. They showed that the timing of the crash was only loosely effected by the quality of the data.

So all along, we knew what was coming, and we denied it. Now, it's our generation that will pay the piper. Do our ancestors bear any responsibility? Do we? Are we responsible for our children, grand children and maybe great grand children as this grand planetary experiment winds down.

I say we do, if we truely believe we are more than animals. We are the first creatures on this planet that we know of, that can consciously shape our own destinies, and we used it to be as unknowing animals, and propagate into overshoot.

And perhaps, that's our only excuse. We've just come out of the jungle. We've made our first faltering steps toward higher noble goals, yet we brought the jungles and plains with us, expressed in our subconcious and our instincts. Our brains are still tuned to watching for tigers and leopards, while our glands tells us we must outbreed the predators. No one ever told our genes that the predators are banished. We never evolved, past the point where our animal drives stand on equal footing with our intellect.

Perhaps, we're due to go back to nature and take another spin along the evolutionary roller coaster.

And we are on a roller coaster, going over the top. It's a little late to get off, so hang on and enjoy the ride!

But isn't it exciting, to be here? To be where we are now? To sit at the very apex of the greatest civilization mankind will likely ever know? We are the stuff of dreams and of future legends.

Enjoy the ride!

Take your place on the Great Mandela!

This our time to live, to shine! Revel in it!

Someone had to be here, it may as well be us!

US Military Gives It's Secrets Up To The Insurgency!

Cell phone tracking helped find al-Zarqawi
U.S. military: Terrorist alive briefly after airstrike

Friday, June 9, 2006; Posted: 2:07 p.m. EDT (18:07 GMT)

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Intelligence from cell phone technology helped U.S. forces find and kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said an Iraqi army colonel Friday in an exclusive interview with CNN.

Col. Dhiya Tamimi said he worked with U.S. forces to monitor al-Zarqawi and his associates' cell phones, helping to lead to Wednesday night's airstrike on a safe house near Baquba.

Well isn't that special? It wasn't that long ago that warmongering pundits were arguing that giving away our methods, just teaches the insurgency how to beat us.

Remember when we found out that the White House had the NSA use a private and commonly hacked data mining corporation, to monitor our phone records, and to record and unspecified number of calls? Remember how when it was discovered that our calls were being recorded without a warrant, the whistleblowers were accused of helping the terrorists, because otherwise they wouldn't know that phones could be tapped?

Even though law enforcement all over the world has been listening in on phone calls since the phone was invented, we've been able to keep that information from bad people. I guess we don't let terrorists watch black and white detective movies.

And now, here's our own military, explaining to the bad people, the techniques they use to track them down and kill them.

What will the Cheerleaders For War, say about this? How will they flip flop this time?

Remembering Vietnam / War Scores

I remember the Vietname war just a bit. I was born in 1963, so was too young to serve. But my whole life has been lived in the shadow of that war and among veterans that have been my friends and mentors.

I remember watching Walter Cronkite on the evening news, giving the Vietnam death scores. Night after night, the scores would be posted on the screen telling us how many Viet Cong died, and how many US Soldiers died.

The Viet Cong were always reported as being higher numbers. Something like ten to one. So I asked if that meant we were winning, and the answer was, 'No'.

Now we know that the higher Viet Cong death rate was compiled partly as a fiction and partly by simply counting every non-American causualty. Every man, woman or child killed, for whatever reason or how, was a Viet Cong. Many people probably knew it then, but I was being sheltered.

By the time this was going on, and I was old enough to understand any of it, we had gone from a war in which we were told we were fighting for noble goals, to one were we were fighting, because we didn't want to lose. We couldn't win, so we fought to keep fighting.

Iraq is there now. It's no longer about helping Iraq, or building a government, or WMDs or anything else. We have to stay because we don't want to lose. And we can't win. There is nothing to win. We can't give them a democracy, because we have to enforce stability first. We can't have stability because we have to kill everyone to make them stop fighting back. As long as the Iraqis live, they will keep fighting to get us out of their country. They will fight us for revenge. They will fight us to win their freedom back. So in order to kill to give them Democracy and Freedom, we have to kill them all. And killing them all does nothing toward accomplishing some of the original but very fluid goals. That is, to free them from tyranny and give them a peaceful and stable government that is friendly to the US. We already failed in ridding the nation of WMDs and the nuclear weapons program, as they didn't exist.

Now in Iraq, just like in Vietnam, we're playing a numbers game. Our troops are expected to make their quotas of dead insurgents. So they kill to fill numbers. Any dead Iraqi is now a dead insurgent. It doesn't matter what they did in life, we hunt them now to make our numbers. That way, when the war scores are posted, our team has the best numbers.

bush has said in speeches that previous administrations started this war and he'll hand it off to the next administration. He makes it clear he's bored with it now and doesn't think much about it.

So we're in maintenance mode until after 2008. For now, our mission is to kill Iraqi Men, Women and Children, faster than they kill US Soldiers. Then in a few years, someone else can make the decision to change course.

One other thing I remember about Vietnam, is all of the amputees. I remember a quadruple amputee in Safeway, being pushed around by his mother. He looked like a teenager to me, even though I wasn't but seven or eight. I laughed and he started crying. I felt bad right away, though I remember laughing mostly out of surprise. I asked my mother why he was like that and she explained it to me. I asked why he would go to war to have his arms and legs amputated. She told me that wasn't why he went. I remember that it didn't make any sense to me, but my impressions of what war is for, began to change that day.

Since then, most of the worst cases have committed suicide in one fashion or another. Some with a bullet, some with a bottle.

Lately I'm seeing more amputees on the train, in stores, out in public. Young men and women, missing an arm a leg, or more. I know I'm not seeing the worst cases. My wife volutneered one day at the local VA hospital, then cried all night.

And for what? It's just to make the numbers. It's the cold hard accounting of human lives.

Until bush leaves office, we have to kill Iraqis faster than they kill Americans, so that bush isn't embarrassed by bad statistics. bush is a baseball fan, which is a game flush with statistics. He's probably right at home counting deaths as if they were ball scores.

So for now, we hunt Iraqis and kill them. They hunt us back. We do this, because stopping would be quitting. That would hurt bush's self esteem. We can't have that. We gotta keep the scores up so the home team looks like it's winning, whatever it is we're trying to win.

Residential Natural Gas prices

Quick graph I put together from EIA data.

It seems prices overall have been going up, even though the spot prices jump around.