Hollow weenie

A happy spooky day from me'n my very scaaary buddy Zomboo.



He ain't near as scary as these fuckers:

Californincineration

In case you missed it, Here's Jon Stewart skewering the last week's worth of 24/7 fire coverage extraneous spin and roasting it on a spit at high RPM:

I love America ...

Unfortunately, every group of immigrants to this nation has been shit on in the years following their arrival. It's the Muslims now:

...

But even as the specific event blurred into unspecific politics and symbolism over the years, it continued to affect individuals in concrete ways — ways that Fremont resident Hamid Sayadi claims he paid a price for.

...

"Oh, NUMMI hires terrorists now?" was the sort of remark he says he heard commonly. His presence among co-workers invariably brought about mention of jihad or terrorism. One day, he was told by a superior that his lunchbox needed to be searched. When he asked why, he said he was led to believe he was considered a possible suicide bomber.

"I just opened the lunch box. I was dumbfounded. I was so shameful. I didn't know what to say. That was the point when I should have said something to the media — 'Look what happened to me.' But I was so ashamed. I thought, maybe he's right. I'm from (that region), I deserve this."

...

Thankfully it's not everyone he works with, but I certainly wouldn't have put up with the crap for as long as he has.

...

What he first dismissed as ignorance gradually came to wear away at him. He grew depressed over what he describes as a barrage of insults. His son's art was removed from a wall where paintings and drawings from the children of other employees hung, he says. His tires were slashed one day. And, always, the insults.

Sayadi says he complained in writing to management, but that the only response was further humiliation. In one letter he still has, he took issue with a toilet-cleaning assignment he was given — retaliation for complaining, he says, and because someone from a "carpet-flying area" surely couldn't handle anything more complex. He came to internalize the contempt hurled at him.

...

The poor bastard. My German forebears put up with this when they came over here at the beginning of the last century. So did the Russians on my wife's side. Unfortunately for the Muslims, 9/11 has increased the weight of the baggage they must carry. For once, I wish Americans could welcome immigrants instead of fear them.

Off to work ...

Great thanks to our pal Cookie Jill for the link.

Listen up ...

There is no Social Security crisis.

Quote of the Day

Phoenix Woman on the Chimp's machinations in Iran:

Whatever you’re hoping to accomplish, George — besides high oil prices — I don’t think you’re getting it.

Ugh

Got this jewel via e-mail from my friend Bev:

An Indian walks into a cafe with a shotgun in one hand pulling a male buffalo with the other. He says to the waiter:

"Want coffee."

The waiter says, "Sure, Chief. Coming right up."

He gets the Indian a tall mug of coffee. The Indian drinks the coffee down in one gulp, turns and blasts the buffalo with the shotgun, causing parts of the animal to splatter everywhere and then just walks out.

The next morning the Indian returns. He has his shotgun in one hand, pulling another male buffalo with the other. He walks up to the counter and says to the waiter,

"Want coffee."

The waiter says "Whoa, Tonto! We're still cleaning up your mess from yesterday. What was all that about, anyway?"

The Indian smiles and proudly says,

"Training for position in United States Congress: Come in, drink coffee, shoot the bull, leave mess for others to clean up, disappear for rest of day."

The ? Gulf Name Game

An article in Asian Times about our 'allies' along the western side of the large body of water accessed through the Straits of Hormuz. Methinks the writer is not overly fond of them. But we certainly are. A 'recommended read'. The numbers in brackets are explained at the bottom of page two.

Various branches of the United States armed forces have issued directives to their members to use the "Arabian Gulf" when operating in the area. This is claimed to be due to increased cooperation with Arab states of the Persian Gulf, but also to follow local laws that ban the use of "Persian Gulf". In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which consists of seven emirates - Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm al-Quwain, public use of the name "Persian Gulf" is illegal.

The UAE is an exceptional example of gender inequality and barbaric economic exploitation; it's one of the last states in the world devoid of an electoral system, and it's a point of entry for US military expansion in the Gulf.

Since the Gulf War of 1991, Jebel Ali port in Dubai has become crucial to US naval operations in the Gulf; it is the safest liberty port in the region and the only harbor in the Gulf deep enough to berth an aircraft carrier. [5] And the showcase UAE army, originated by the British-educated top brass, is a major financial lubricator of the military industy in the United States. [6]

US policy towards this super-wealthy stain of inequality and inhumanity is clear from the manner in which US institutions, from its military to its universities, play the naming game.

Why don't we call it the "Hindu Gulf", or the "Gulf of The Unknown Worker"? Let's pay respects to the millions of South Asian enslaved workers in the UAE and other members of Gulf Cooperation Council [9]; who's going to recognize them when their drained corpses are vomited back to the sub-continent?

Let's call it "Gulf of Central Command", or simply the "Gulf of America". Let's recognize the reality of the complete occupation of this invaded body of water by the 100-plus warships and missile-armed nuclear submarines, the bases and the Air Warfare School. But then, the old British name for the UAE was Pirate Coast, so how about "Gulf of Captain Hook"? In this way, American children's culture is memorialized as well.

Playing the inverted naming game, thinking of the Filipino domestic workers raped by Arab desert princes, and evoking an Iranian suggestion, "Islamic Gulf", and using a Koranic term, let's call it: "Gulf of a Thousand and One Kaniz [10]"! It is exotic, real and Islamic.

Please read the rest. If only a fraction of what this gent says is true, we're tied in with some awful, awful people.

Thanks, George.

'Marijuana is not a drug, it's a leaf,' says Schwarzenegger

The Independent (UK)

Already facing enough problems with the wild fires that have swept California, the state's governor Arnold Schwarzenegger may have stepped into a new row by claiming that marijuana is not a drug. In an interview with GQ magazine, the Hollywood star turned governor of California insisted: "I didn't take any drugs."

The interviewer, former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, put it to the star that he had admitted smoking marijuana in the past. In Pumping Iron, the bodybuilding documentary which launched his career 30 years ago, he was shown taking a drag on a spliff.

"That is not a drug. It's a leaf," said Austrian-born Mr Schwarzenegger, 60. "My drug was pumping iron, trust me," he added.

Finally, a highly visible Repug pol uses some common sense and tells the truth.

Boy, is he gonna get in trouble!

Straitjacket Bush

Rosa Brooks with a good read:

The president's warmongering remarks on the Iranian threat suggest he is psychotic. Really.

Forget impeachment.

Liberals, put it behind you. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney shouldn't be treated like criminals who deserve punishment. They should be treated like psychotics who need treatment.

Impeachment has pretty much been 'forgotten' by those who can, and should, do it.

Other than that, Ms. Brooks is far too kind to those two bastards. Yes, they're insane, but not in any good way. They're insane in a socio/pathological obsessive criminal way, where they'll say or do anything, tell any lie, fake any emotion, instill false fears in the gullible (of which there are still plenty), in short, do whatever it takes to continue their warmongering oil and power grab, all in the name of 'patriotism', and the Devil take the hindmost. The Constitution and the United States being the 'hindmost'.

Yes, they should be in straitjackets. They should be wearing them while dangling from a gallows frame.

I'll go along with merely institutionalizing them, though, if we can try my new 'treatment' which I concocted just for B&C and their neocon ilk, which involves lots of greasy, gassy food, a straitjacket, and scads of sneezing powder. Applied 'liberally', so to speak. A coupla months of that and they'll beg for the gallows.

But their pleas will go unheeded. At least for a while. Why spoil our fun? We'll get tired of it eventually and let them recover and clean up and get back to 'normal'. Then we'll hang 'em.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Bush Wants Another $46 Billion for Wars
Dems pledge to whine “even louder” before giving it to him.

Rice Asks Former Presidents Clinton, Carter for Advice on Middle East
They advise her to cut down on war crimes.

REMINDER
We only torture when our values are threatened.

Putting Pieces of a Puzzle Together

Stories that make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside:

Ex-spook cult now running most of Russian politics


Russian political life has been usurped by "siloviki" -- ex-spies -- who have apparently seized power from the small network of hyper-rich plutocratic "bankers" who rose to power after the Wall came down. The siloviki are a tight mafiyeh whose methods include high-profile international assassination of defectors (the assassins walk free and then run for high office).

Virtually all key positions in Russian political life -- in government and the economy -- are controlled by the so-called "siloviki," a blanket term to describe the network of former and current state-security officers with personal ties to the Soviet-era KGB and its successor agencies. The unexpected replacement of former Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov by former Federal Financial Monitoring Service Director Viktor Zubkov is the latest consolidation of this group's grip on power in Russia. Although Zubkov is not an intelligence officer by background, he has become one de facto during his years at the Financial Monitoring Service, and he has intimate knowledge of where the country's legal and illegal assets are to be found.

The core of the siloviki group, led by former KGB officer and Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Vladimir Putin himself, comprises about 6,000 security-service alumni who entered the corridors of power during Putin's first term. Now, as Putin's second term winds down, their clout is virtually unassailable. Their locus of power is in the presidential administration: deputy chief of staff Igor Sechin cut his teeth in the KGB's First Main Directorate, which oversaw foreign intelligence operations and has since been transformed into the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). Fellow deputy chief of staff Viktor Ivanov worked for the KGB's main successor organization, the FSB, which is responsible for counterintelligence operations.

Full story here.

and more:

StormWorm botnet lashes out at security researchers


The Storm Worm botnet (thought to be the largest network of compromised machines in the world) has begun to figure out which security researchers are trying to disrupt its command-and-control systems and knock them offline with unmanagable crapfloods from its zillions of zombie machines.

The worm can figure out which users are trying to probe its command-and-control servers, and it retaliates by launching DDoS attacks against them, shutting down their Internet access for days, says Josh Korman, host-protection architect for IBM/ISS, who led a session on network threats.

"As you try to investigate [Storm], it knows, and it punishes," he says. "It fights back."

As a result, researchers who have managed to glean facts about the worm are reluctant to publish their findings. "They're afraid. I've never seen this before," Korman says. "They find these things but never say anything about them."

And not without good reason, he says. Some who have managed to reverse engineer Storm in an effort to figure out how to thwart it have suffered DDoS attacks that have knocked them off the Internet for days, he says.

As researchers test their versions of Storm by connecting to Storm command-and-control servers, the servers seem to recognize these attempts as threatening. Then either the worm itself or the people behind it seem to knock them off the Internet by flooding them with traffic from Storm's botnet, Korman says.

Full story here.

Makin' progress ...

WATERTOWN, New York - Iraq war veterans now stationed at a base here in upstate New York say that morale among US soldiers in the country is so poor, many are simply parking their Humvees and pretending to be on patrol, a practice dubbed "search and avoid" missions.

...

[Phil] Aliff [an active duty soldier with the 10th Mountain Division] said he participated in roughly 300 patrols. "We were hit by so many roadside bombs we became incredibly demoralized, so we decided the only way we wouldn't be blown up was to avoid driving around all the time."

"So we would go find an open field and park, and call our base every hour to tell them we were searching for weapons caches in the fields and doing weapons patrols and everything was going fine," he said, adding, "All our enlisted people became very disenchanted with our chain of command."

...

They're just killing time, hoping to get out of there with their skins intact. The grunts know exactly what they're fighting for, what their friends are dying for, and they know it ain't worth it. It sure as hell ain't life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They're not fighting for the American Way because that was never part of the equation.

... "One of my buddies is in Baghdad right now and we email all the time," he explained, "He just told me that nearly each day they pull into a parking lot, drink soda and shoot at the cans. They pay Iraqi kids to bring them things and spread the word that they are not doing anything and to please just leave them alone." ...

Leadership ...

Athenae gets to the crux of the biscuit:

...

We kid ourselves a lot, you know. We tell ourselves that what we know is our moment really isn't, that somebody else should do it, that it's somebody else's job, but come on. You know. You know what you have to do and how you have to do it, and all you really have to do about it is listen to yourself, listen to yourself, and avoid the story in the future being about how you should have done something but didn't.

...

Update:

Before I'm late, X has more on the subject at Creature's place.

Fred Thompson is plain ol' un-American

And there was thunder, thunder over Thunder Road
Thunder was his engine, and white lightning was his load
There was moonshine, moonshine to quench the Devil’s thirst
The law they swore they'd get him, but the Devil got him first.

Ballad of Thunder Road

LATimes

But a review of the 88 criminal cases Thompson handled at the U.S. attorney's office in Nashville, from 1969 to 1972, reveals a different and more human portrait -- that of a young lawyer learning the ropes on routine cases involving gambling, mail theft and, in one instance, talking dirty on CB radio.

There were a few bank robbers and counterfeiters. But more than anything, Thompson took on the state's moonshiners and a local culture, rooted in Tennessee's hills and hollows, that celebrated the independent whiskey maker's battle against the government's revenue agents.

Twenty-seven of his cases involved moonshining -- more than any other crime.

I read that and it got me to thinkin' (uh-oh!) - ain't nuthin' more American than the manufacture, transport, commerce and consumption of untaxed whiskey.

From the song "Copper Kettle" which I'd heard by Joan Baez but didn't know was also done by Bob Dylan until just now:

Get you a copper kettle, get you a copper coil,
Fill it with new-made corn mash and never more you'll toil.
You'll just lay there by the juniper while the moon is bright,
Watch them jugs a-filling
In the pale moonlight.
Build you a fire with hickory, hickory, ash and oak,
Don't use no green or rotten wood; they'll get you by the smoke.
We'll just lay there by the juniper... etc.
My daddy, he made whiskey; my granddaddy, he did too.
We ain't paid no whiskey tax since 1792.

1792, of course, was right around the time of the Whiskey Rebellion of local distillers against the federal imposition of a tax which would have cost them any profit on their product.

What's more American than that?

A little more ominously, from "Rocky Top":

Once two strangers climbed ol' Rocky Top
Lookin' for a moonshine still
Strangers ain't come down from Rocky Top
Reckon they never will

It musta scared the crap out of the feds! To this day, they'd rather tax citizens than manufacturers of almost anything.

One only hopes that the living memory of some of the 'shine boys back there in Tennessee will cost Thompson the 'untaxed whiskey' vote fer bein' on the side of the revenooers.

Go see Moonshine Runners, History, and Their Cars. Good story, cool photos.

Afterthought:

The early Americans used lotsa distilled liquor. It was handy as a cleaner and an antiseptic, and was used as currency, but mostly they drank it. They weren't stupid - they knew it might kill 'em, but they also knew that the natural untreated water of the day surely would.

Rummy's High-Speed Au Revoir

Pensito Review

On Friday, while former Defense Sec. Donald Rumsfeld was visiting France, human rights groups based there and in the United States filed complaints against him, charging him with approving torture:

French prosecutors were said to have the power to pursue the case while Rumsfeld was in the country.

One source cites unconfirmed reports that Rumsfeld was abruptly whisked away from a breakfast meeting on Friday in order to avoid his arrest:

The report said Rumsfeld fled to Germany because similar charges were dismissed against him there in the spring.The German court ruled that Rumsfeld’s criminality was an internal matter for the United States.

Germany's right, until we sign onto the International Criminal Court. The main reason Bush didn't and won't do that is so our war criminals will be safe inside the U.S.. And Paraguay, of course.

This incident further illustrates just how stupid, or senile, or both, Rumsfeld is, as if the way he master-minded the Iraq flusterpluck wasn't enough. Every other U.S. war criminal who no longer has diplomatic immunity, from Kissinger on down to the present, knows not to go to countries where they might be arrested.

Flyin' MRAPskis...

Shown: An-225 and a Space Shuttle

Army Times

The Air Force has been forced to use Russian commercial cargo jets to rush mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles from the U.S. to Iraq because it does not have enough C-5 and C-17 planes to do the job, the service’s top civilian official said recently.

I'm glad the AF is using every resource to get those rigs to our guys, but I find it ironic.

Go see more about the Antonov An-124 and its even bigger brother.

I wonder if the AF will contract for these to fly the 'missile shield' stuff to Eastern Europe?

Colonoscopy as a Terrorist Interrogation Technique

Go see The Smirking Chimp. This lends a whole new meaning to 'liquid alert'.

Now for the even better news. In the subsequent hours, as you consume more and more clear fluid, you will be experiencing many, many openings of your own personal anal dam valve. All this will be taking place many hours after you have stopped eating any solid foods whatsoever. Think of yourself becoming progressively hungry, weak and totally evacuated.

It is as if some ingenious person has figured out a way to connect a hose to a fire hydrant and feed it directly into your gut, and then opened the hydrant up repeatedly. Talk about a terrorist suspect spilling their guts!

Now tell me, can’t you imagine the impact of this experience on a stubborn, silent terrorist?

I would dearly love to be the 'valve man' on a fire hose enema for Cheney and Bush as well! I have a lovely visual of really wide eyes and six jets of high pressure water...

Add some soap flakes and colored lights and it'd be a sight to gladden the soul.

Adjustments ...

As all of you know, Mrs. F and I are avid cruisers. In July, I alerted you to a trip we booked for next October, transatlantic from Rome to NYC. Well, sometimes things go awry. It seems Holland America changed the itinerary after we booked (not a rare occurrence in the cruise industry), enough to give us second thoughts (they changed a few ports, dropped others, including ending up in NY, switching to Ft. Lauderdale). We canceled it and began shopping for something else.

What we found was a Med cruise (Amsterdam to Rome) aboard Holland America's Prinsendam. Though we're still flying to and from Europe, the ports and ship (Prinsendam is tiny and intimate) make it worth the hassle.



During that search, we came across another we already booked for March. It runs 13 days from New York to the Panama Canal and back, aboard Cunard's Queen Mary 2, an old friend from our London/Transatlantic trip in '04.



If you feel like joining us on either, email me and I'll give you booking details and hook you up with our travel agent (who's just opened her own office).

Disclaimer: As always, I point out these cruises and invite you along because they are different from the run-of-the mill Caribbean, Mexico, or Alaska fare and I feel the itineraries and ships reflect the true spirit and tradition of cruising. They are refined elegance. If you want a party boat, call Carnival or NCL. Also, I'm not a cruise director or tour guide. I'll be on vacation too and I'm not into babysitting or hand holding, though I am always more than happy to meet a reader over a drink or two (which I've done more than once in the past) and share my experience with the ships and ports. Click pics to embiggen.

Quote of the Day

A 'comment' on a post at The Carpetbagger Report about the Flip wingnut & Co. throwing shit at George Soros and hitting themselves right in the face with it:

You know, Michelle Malkin isn’t even the kind of Olongapo boom-boom-short-time girl you’d pick up if you walked into the bar totally shitfaced.

Maybe she's a Benny Boy? Somebody with a strong stomach please check this out.

We've had too many of these ...

Dix Hills – Suffolk County Executive Steven Levy has presented the Suffolk Medal of Distinguished Service to the families of five Suffolk soldiers who died in service to the country while fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan.

At a Veterans Appreciation Ceremony, held at the Brentwood campus of Suffolk County Community College, Levy presented the Suffolk Medal of Distinguished Service to:

Richard and Laurie Baylis, parents of Army PFC Matthew Baylis of Oakdale;

Richard and Nicole Lundin, parents of Army Cpl. James Lundin of Bellport;

Jose and Elsie Pacificador, parents of Army PFC Paulo Marko Pacificador of Shirley;

Patti and Kevin O’Neill, sister and brother-in-law of Army CW4 John Engeman of Northport;

Tim and Janet Scherer, parents of USMC Cpl. Christopher Scherer of East Northport.

...

I'm sick and tired of my neighbors losing sons and daughters in this misbegotten war.