Waste

Our guys out in Iraq don't get the recognition they deserve. Placed in impossible situations, surrounded by a country in which half the population hates your infidel guts, and the other half expects you to do their fighting for them, with impossible goals set by pencil-pushing political fuckwads back in Washington - they still manage to pull it out of the fire and make progress.

Case in point. Our military units in Sadr City have been tasked with helping the Iraqi Army take the lead in the fight against the Iran-trained and equipped "Mahdi Army" Shiite militia. So, when the other shoe drops and the bullets start flying, do the Iraqis step up to the plate?

Well, some of them do. Others? Not so much. They "bravely ran away", leaving a ragged hole in the combined Iraqi/American line for the militia to exploit.

[link] Major Sattar calmly explained that he was leading the remainder of his 80-man company away from the fight. As if to underscore the point, a convoy of Iraqi vehicles piled high with furniture was parked in front of the American position.

Abandoning the stronghold, however, would allow the militias to move in again and seed the road with roadside bombs. Other Iraqi units had stood their ground through several long firefights, and Captain Veath was surprised that the major’s unit was leaving after holding off another militia attack.

“You went through a whole battle and are now removing yourself?” Captain Veath asked incredulously. “Are any of your men dead?”

Major Sattar acknowledged that his unit had several wounded but none killed. But he and other Iraqi soldiers insisted that they were poorly equipped to battle the militias. Iraqi forces, they said, were short of ammunition, had only a few armored vehicles and were up against militia fighters they said were equipped and trained by the Iranians.

“We are not afraid,” the major responded.

He also complained that he had no means to communicate directly with the American troops.

“That is an excuse, and you know it,” Captain Veath shot back. He argued that one of the major’s platoons was situated just 100 yards from some of the American Stryker vehicles and that the two sides had agreed that the Iraqis could send a runner over to the vehicles to ask for help if necessary.

The Iraqi commander returned to his convoy and Captain Veath followed, promising a Stryker escort if the Iraqi soldiers would only return to their positions.

Dozens of excited Iraqi soldiers began to join in the discussion. As tempers flared and voices rose, Sergeant Angulo ordered the company’s soldiers to stay close to Captain Veath.

The Iraqi convoy drove off, and the Americans began to scramble to find a new Iraqi unit to plug the gap.

Look, folks, I wish this damned thing never started. Thanks, President Bush. However, the cold hard facts are that we are in this thing up to our eyeballs. We need to figure out a way to disengage from this war without completely destroying the country of Iraq, leaving it to the tender mercies of the Iranian theocracy. The regular citizens there don't deserve that.

What a clusterfuck.

I've heard and seen much mockery focused on the Tom Cruise Scientology video over the past couple of days. (I apologize if that link no longer works, but the video has been on and off the net and that's the best link I can find at the time of this article.) The truth is, while I believe that atheists (especially agnostic atheists), in general, have a leg to stand on in this case, I don't think the rest of the godders, or innumerable other groups, do. Let's look at a few things that Cruise says.

Tom Cruise: ...I think it’s a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist, and it’s something that you have to earn because a Scientologist does... has the ability to create new and better realities and improve conditions. Being a Scientologist, you look at someone and know absolutely that you can help them.

"But that’s what drives me... I know that we have an opportunity to really help... effectively change people’s lives and I am dedicated to that. I am absolutely, uncompromisingly dedicated to that.

Replace the words “Scientologist” with the words Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Nazi, Feminist, Vegan, vegetarian, socialist, communist, capitalist, geek, Sikh, or even self help guru and you'll see what I mean. This statement, minus the maniacal laughter, could have come from any of the groups I listed and a whole lot more. Let's move on to the next set; shall we?
more below the fold

That's the description applied to most of the Security Theater (Bruce Schneier's excellent term) nonsense at our airports by a commercial airline pilot writing at the NYT Blog Jet Lagged. From the piece by Patrick Smith titled "The Airport Security Follies", in which he discusses the fact that current security procedures are nothing but a sham:

No matter that a deadly sharp can be fashioned from virtually anything found on a plane, be it a broken wine bottle or a snapped-off length of plastic, we are content wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened, asked to queue for absurd lengths of time, subject to embarrassing pat-downs and loss of our belongings.

And:

Interesting... It appears that Ray Comfort has a blog. Here's his take on the recent mall shooting in Omaha.

[link] If the secular world insists on saying that there is no God and that we are the products of evolutionary chance, they are saying that they have no idea where we came from, what we are doing here, or where we are going after death. Robert A. Hawkins is the tragic result of that meaningless existence.

This is in response to a line in Hawkin's suicide note which read:

[PDF] "I've just snapped I can't take this meaningless existence anymore I've been a constant disappointment and that trend would have only continued."

The tragedy at the mall in Omaha was terrible, but blaming it on the "secular world" is a mistake. There has been no indication that Hawkins' was an atheist, or a Christian, or anything at all so far. (It's a good bet that he was a Christian, though. His parents and step parents issued press releases through their churches.)

But here's the thing, Ray old chap. Even if the kid turns out to be an atheist, this says exactly nothing about whether or not your god exists. People have been killing people and themselves for as long as we've been "people". Human being are animals that kill - sometimes for what we think are good reasons, and sometimes for not-so-good reasons. Hawkins' brain was broken, obviously, and his reasons were very, very bad, but the existence or non-existence of a magical man in the sky does not have anything to do with them.

*Sigh*

I'd hoped we were beyond this: government-sponsored mass incantations to appease the weather gods.

Via the Bad Astronomer, word that Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia will hold a prayer service next Tuesday at the State Capitol. From the news article:

Heather Teilhet, his spokeswoman, said the governor began talking about wanting to host a service to pray for rain on his way back from Washington D.C. last week.

* * *

"Georgia needs rain. The issue at the heart of our drought problems is a lack of rain," Teilhet said. "And there is nothing the government can do to make that happen."

You're right, Heather. There is nothing the government can do to make that happen. And indulging your superstitions won't make one whit of difference.

Jim Downey

Seriously - this is like something out of a comedy sketch:

FBI Hoped to Follow Falafel Trail to Iranian Terrorists Here

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

Here's an even better idea for the FBI/NSA/Omega Sector: just plant RFID tags in the falafel mix. Then they can trace exactly who buys it, follow them around after they've consumed it, and even know what bathroom facilities they like to use. Man, you could set up monitoring equipment to record their bowel movements!

Genius!

Jim Downey

So. Would you be at all surprised to find out that over the last 50 years your tax dollars have gone to support such things as remote viewing, spoon bending, even attempts to walk through walls or kill with a thought?

Probably not, if you've been paying attention to what your government has been up to, and the strangeness that surrounds any authoritarian organization such as the US military and (so-called) intelligence agencies. But to see it all nicely wrapped up in three one-hour long programs for the UK Channel 4 is something else altogether. From the Google video site hosting the programs:

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Three years in the making, Jon Ronson’s Crazy Rulers of the World explores the apparent madness at the heart ... all » of US military intelligence.

OK, as noted in another thread, I like things that go boom, things that burn, all that 'rapid oxidization' stuff. Now, remember from your high school chemistry class that fun demonstration (do they still do this these days?) of what happens when you drop a piece of metallic sodium into water? Well, how about dropping 20,000 pounds of the stuff into a lake?

As someone mentioned in the MeFi thread where I came across this, it brings to mind the delightful segment from Brainiac where they played with small amounts of rubidium and cesium. Good times, good times...

Jim Downey

We all want a cleaner America, but corporate America wants us to do it for them.

It is interesting what happens when you read American news in foreign publications. I found the following article on the BBC news website. A NYC family stopped using all modern conveniences, including turning off the power in their apartment for one year. I found this intriguing, and started reading up on their progress. The Father created a blog called 'No-Impact Man' to track his progress.

On their blog, there is a post about the organization 'Keep America Beautiful,' which I remember from my youth as the organization with the Indian spokesperson. It always seemed like a good idea, with good motives. However, I found out something very disturbing about this group;

“Keep America Beautiful was founded in 1953 by group of businessmen from the beverage and packaging industries who were concerned that government would make them responsible for solving the litter problem by regulating their industries.”

So, Arecibo needs money. Not a lot of money. More than I have. But not a lot of money, as such things go.

Yes, the National Science Foundation has told the folks who run the Arecibo Observatory that they need to come up with outside funding to the tune of half their annual budget, or they will be shut down. How much is this? $4 million. From the news report:

But among astronomers, Arecibo is an icon of hard science. Its instruments have netted a decades-long string of discoveries about the structure and evolution of the universe. Its high-powered radar has mapped in exquisite detail the surfaces and interiors of neighboring planets.

And it is the only facility on the planet able to track asteroids with enough precision to tell which ones might plow into Earth -- a disaster that could cause as many as a billion deaths and that experts say is preventable with enough warning.

During the course of my life (I'll be thirty mid-August) I've often wondered why my perspective on various issues differed from most of the other people I've met. Skepticism has, of course, played a major roll in why I view the world as I do...but I don't think that's all there is to it. I think, and I hope, that part of the reason that my worldview is outside of what's considered "normal" is that I don't buy into any particular ideology. As it says under my portrait, I'm a "liberal libertarian with conservative leanings". What that ends up meaning, government wise, is that I want to leave the parts of government that I think work and ditch the parts that I think are extraneous or don't work. The same idea applies for me philosophically.

It seems to me that when most people buy into a philosophy, religion, or even just a course of action they commit themselves wholeheartedly to it. When RAH's book "Stranger in a Strange Land" was released people bought in and formed "nests" of their own...despite the fact that a "nest" by itself leached off of the society around it for support (much like any cult or religion). In my short time on this planet I've had some things change my perspective. One of those was reading Ayn Rand's books, particularly "Atlas Shrugged". John Galt is and was an inspiring character and I can indeed see the "virtue of selfishness". Despite loving the book , I can still see the flaws in the idealized system that Rand seems to be extolling. They're as obvious to me as the flaws in any communist, socialist or laissez-faire capitalist worldview. When everyone is a hero, the ideological system always works and seems fabulous.

The point is that I think people end up finding something that their comfortable with and then buy into that idea completely, including any flaws. Yes, I'm accusing most people of being intellectually lazy. Whether it's Objectivism, Christianity, Islam, Liberalism, Libertarianism or a conservative worldview I want to be able to take the positive aspects of each and leave the chaff behind. I welcome people that challenge how I view the world and would really like it if the rest of humanity would accept the challenges that they encounter too; without just disregarding them because they don't fit nicely within their ideologically limited window of perspective.

I'm for a flat tax and a balanced budget. I'd like to see a constitutional amendment mandating both as well as a maximum percentage of your income that can be taxed. In my opinion no more than 15% of our income should go to our governance for federal, state and local taxes. That's it. No exemptions at all, and if the government(s) don't have the money to support a program it just won't happen. This applies, of course, to individuals income. A business and it's income could, and should be treated differently.

I write fiction. Science fiction. Weird stuff with alien artifacts, psychic abilities, and crazed fundamentalists. But I would not have the nerve to make this up:

WASHINGTON - The Transportation Security Administration has lost a computer hard drive containing Social Security numbers, bank data and payroll information for about 100,000 employees.

Authorities realized Thursday the hard drive was missing from a controlled area at TSA headquarters. TSA Administrator Kip Hawley sent a letter to employees Friday apologizing for the lost data and promising to pay for one year of credit monitoring services.

You have got to be kidding me. And these are the people to whom we have supposedly trusted the security of our entire transportation system? To whom we've allowed almost unfettered access to our personal data in order to create 'no fly lists' and screen out terrorists?

The United States military Chaplain Corps has had a privileged place in the American military system ever since it was formed in the First World War. Theses are our shamans, our witch doctors, casting chicken bones and invoking the protection of the god of war to protect our warriors.

In recent years, in response to soldiers complaining that their own faith was marginalized or that they were proselytized to, the Chaplains Corps has attempted to transform itself into a more secular organization that provides not only equal-opportunity magical incantations to our soldiers, sailors, and airmen, but also "counseling" in the field of war, and during wartime. Think "Father Mulcahy" from M.A.S.H. Untrained, bigoted "counselors" who have direct and unfettered access to our soldiers at the lowest, most vulnerable points in their lives.

Here's the kicker: We pay for them. You are paying the salary of a person who dismisses you as a hellbound liar. Someone who makes the claim that you aren't really an atheist and an agnostic, but instead just someone who pretends that there isn't a god so that you can go out and sin like crazy without feeling guilty. Someone who states in a smug voice that there are "no atheists in foxholes", like they just made it up on the spot.

Think I'm kidding?

[link] But as a military chaplain, Father Jaramillo ministers to all the soldiers of his unit, regardless of their denomination.

"I know we have soldiers of all persuasions and religious bents," he said in an e-mail to The Leaven, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Kansas City, Kan. "We have two agnostics, one atheist and one Wiccan listed on the roster. I would bet anything that when push comes to shove, the four of them will come knocking on my door or seeking a higher power for some peace of mind."

The Chaplain Corps will probably never go away. As long as there are religious folks, the majority will force the rest of us to pay for supporting their stone-age superstitions and their own magical shaman. The military shamans will continue to dehumanize and ridicule the atheists in their foxholes, the only sane ones in the bunch. In the long run, there's really not much we can do about it except to complain. Both ours and their numbers are just too small to really make any sort of real difference.

But, it sure rubs me the wrong way every time I hear or read about one of these prancing, deluded witch doctors pontificating about some obscure magic spell - and I realize that I'm paying him to talk nonsense like that.

Yes, I realize that in the big picture, the long view, the Chaplain Corps doesn't really matter much - but as a veteran I can't not speak up when this sort of thing happens. I have too much self respect to stay quiet.

This election is not about a botched Kerry joke.

It's about a botched war (two, considering that since Junior cut and run from Afghanistan, the Taliban have taken over basically everything except the Kabul green zone) that has pointlessly sacrificed thousands of our troops and trillions of our tax dollars.

It's about botched foreign policy, with Iran and North Korea going nuclear while the US is an international leper, the most hated nation on earth.

It's about a botched hunt for Osama bin Laden, whom Junior lost interest in. And botched national security, with the regime putting nuclear cookbooks on a public accessible website! Good friggin' grief! How infinitely stupid are they? This is a thousand times worse than Al Qaqaa.

It's about a botched response to the Katrina disaster, with Junior more interested in rebuilding Trent Lott's beachfront summer mansion (on our dime) than the city of New Orleans.

I heard him say it again. It was in the last couple of days, but when he said it doesn't matter. In fact, exactly what he said doesn't matter. He once again equated the war in Iraq with the "War on Terror". If, by some odd chance, you don't recognize who I'm talking about...it's Bush.

Here's my main beef: Why does the public continue to allow Bush to equate the "War on Terror" with the war in Iraq? It's madness. It's more than clear now that the terrorists did not arrive in Iraq until after our attack. No no...let me stop you there. I'm not saying that removing Sadaam wasn't a good thing. But let's call a fish a fish. Removing Sadaam has no bearing on the "War on Terror".

The "War on Terror" started as a response to an atrocity. 9/11 was a tragic, terrible event. The initial response was appropriate. But by allowing the Bush administration to add Iraq to the tally they've been given a free pass. The Taliban is experiencing a resurgence in Afghanistan. If we'd not stopped paying as much attention to our initial objective (The Taliban), who were clearly involved in harboring terrorists, instead of redirecting our efforts towards Iraq, who only had the potential of maybe helping terrorists along the way (and turned out not to have to much to do, if anything, with the attack against the US), perhaps we could have "won" on that front.

The point is that the correlation between Iraq and terrorism is clearly dishonest and should be readily ignored. What should not be ignored is that the Bush administration should not be allowed to make this assertion unchallenged. We've wasted too many resources and lives chasing the phantom of terrorism in Iraq and the waste should be stopped.

We must be honest with ourselves. The "War on Terror" is a nebulous war and one that can never be won. All we can do is work to minimize the threat. Unfortunately, the current American response doesn't come close to mitigating the possible damage. A change in leadership is in order, if only to stifle the damage that could still be done.

I’m not usually pleased with the coverage and commentary that I get from the media. I’ve almost completely ceased watching any television news, but I do read quite a bit of news online as I get the opportunity. There has been one shining star for me over the last few months and his name is Olbermann. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen the man on television, but one of his latest tirades is definitely worth reading.

We have lived as if in a trance.
We have lived as people in fear.
And now—our rights and our freedoms in peril—we slowly awaken to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.

He points out other examples in the United State’s history where civil liberties have been abused in the name of security and points out that as it was clearly wrong then, it’s clearly wrong now. Now this is media I can get behind.

Kevin Tillman is Pat Tillman's brother. Kevin and Pat joined the Army as brothers in 2002, and ended up serving together in Afghanistan and Iraq. On April 22, 2004, Pat Tillman, the former NFL football player and atheist, was killed while serving in Iraq.

Kevin, who was discharged from the Army in 2005, has written an incredibly powerful and moving article in anticipation of his brother's birthday coming up on November 6th.

I strongly encourage you all to read the whole thing.

[Kevin Tillman] It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we get out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

I have this question for you:

If you recycle and conserve, and I recycle and conserve, and everybody in our neighborhood recycles and conserves ...

But the total number of consumers (population) in the neighborhood steadily rises ...

What is the point of recycling and conserving?

I mean, really ... if there are 50 cars in the neighborhood this year, and 55 next year, and 62 the year after, what have we gained? The net consumption of metal, rubber, glass, plastic, gas, oil and water has still risen. The net extraction from the earth and the ecosystem has still increased.

The only real change, it seems to me, is that you and I and all our neighbors have all committed ourselves to working progressively harder to get through the day.

We work harder to conserve and recycle.

We work harder to make enough money to afford the progressively more expensive cars and energy (since continuous extraction makes everything scarcer and thus more expensive).

And, just by the by, we work harder to provide progressively-higher levels of taxes for the public roads and schools and progressively-more-well-paid government workers needed to serve our continuously-expanding population of neighbors.

In the Kingdom of the Half Blind is a beautiful piece by Bill Moyers. In about as harsh a tone Moyers can muster, he chastises the Bush administration on its secrecy.

Moyers, a long time journalist, puts us into LBJ's shoes at the beginning of the Vietnam war and what happend to drive the US into that mess.

With this as a backdrop and the the role of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Moyers paints a bleak and scary picture of the current administration and the press. He also tells the story of his own run-in with the Bush administration during the production of his PBS program Now with Bill Moyers.

A key quote from the article:

It has to be said: there has been nothing in our time like the Bush Administration's obsession with secrecy. This may seem self-serving coming from someone who worked for two previous presidents who were no paragons of openness. But I am only one of legions who have reached this conclusion. See the recent pair of articles by the independent journalist, Michael Massing, in The New York Review of Books. He concludes, "The Bush Administration has restricted access to public documents as no other before it." And he backs this up with evidence. For example, a recent report on government secrecy by the watchdog group, OpenTheGovernment.org, says the Feds classified a record 15.6 million new documents in fiscal year 2004, an increase of 81% over the year before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. What's more, 64% of Federal Advisory Committee meetings in 2004 were completely closed to the public. No wonder the public knows so little about how this administration has deliberately ignored or distorted reputable scientific research to advance its political agenda and the wishes of its corporate patrons. I'm talking about the suppression of that EPA report questioning aspects of the White House Clear Skies Act; research censorship at the departments of health and human services, interior and agriculture; the elimination of qualified scientists from advisory committees on kids and lead poisoning, reproductive health, and drug abuse; the distortion of scientific knowledge on emergency contraception; the manipulation of the scientific process involving the Endangered Species Act; and the internal sabotage of government scientific reports on global warming