Big Goodbye

Another installment of the Vay Con Dios Files. J.G. Ballard, who lived large in genre that was eventually labeled Transgressive Fiction, has gone to the great beyond. I supposed I would write a lot of f'ed up fiction too if my childhood had been like his. The movie and novel Empire of the Sun is based on his experiences as a child in a Japanese prison camp during the second world war. Aside from Empire of the Sun, a select few weirdos in this world are familiar with his book Crash, which is about car crash fetishists. I won't begin to explain that one. He definately slaughtered a lot of the sacred cows of fiction (and normalcy for that matter) and paved the way for the Chuck Palahniuks and Trent Reznors of this world. Adios amigo, it was weird knowing you.

Ares

Hopefully We're All Going To Die

Let the salivation begin. Pavlov has rung the bell and on cue the media outlets have begun to drool. There's a multi-national disease outbreak in the larval stages. Death and suffering that's photogenic soon to follow. “Flu outbreak could become pandemic” proclaims my local rag in that same voice that teenagers hoping to get laid use. Act I is people wearing surgical masks in public. Act II will be hospital shots and government press conferences. Some network, somewhere, will show the movie Outbreak before next week is out. My spam inbox will start piling up ads for antibiotics. Never mind that this particular organism has a very low mortality rate. Disregard that over 36,000 people die every year in this country from regular old fashion flu. Twice that many die from hospital screw ups. The rational medical professionals will get very little face time in the coming weeks. Reason, logic, and facts don't make for good numbers. Instead of specialists we'll get journalists that have written books providing prediction.

My favorite quote thus far: “How quickly can Swine Flu make you sick? About 90 minutes of CNN should do it.” Second favorite: “The virus does not travel at the speed of Tweet.” I'd love to sit here and pontificate some more but I've got canned goods to stockpile and money to hide in a mattress.

Ares

Tea

I have to admit I'm having fun watching people debate about what the debate means with regard to the Tea Parties. Because if there is one thing Americans are good at, it's talking about thinking about how the conversation is going. On the one hand you have legions of people that have only in the last 4 months found their voice about government spending, as if it all began in the middle of January. On the other hand you have people that six months ago were saying dissent is the highest form of patriotism, now rummaging through their Thesaurus to find new derisive descriptors. Running through all of this you have the media (sans Fox) conspicuously either avoiding coverage or deriding protesters. Anderson Cooper's indulgence in teabagging references dug the credibility hole even deeper. And as over half a million people protested on April 15th the New York Times did it's Marcel Marceau impression. Somebody tell the Gray Lady she ain't wearing any clothes.

I'm not pimping for either side here. I think everyone here is sufficiently infused with enough bullshit to strain credibility. The bigger worry is that with every corner of the national discourse propping itself up on foundations of sarcasm, hyperbole, and worst-case-scenarios how are we going to recognize authentic truths when they make an appearance?

Ares

Crack and Taxes

Brief aside here. Just read that former D.C. mayor and professional victim Marion the-bitch-set-me-up Barry owes $277,000 in back taxes. My first and last question is this: How does a city councilman that's legit make enough money to owe that much in taxes to begin with. Something tells me that crack smoking aside I made some wrong decisions about careers.

Ares

Tasmanian Devil Tuesday

Thought we'd change it up a bit.

Athena here: we loves 'em, truly, but is that thing wearing a diaper?

Marmot Monday

Marmot Monday

Marmot Monday

Who knew there were so many pictures of marmots out there?

Separated At Birth

More like separated in elderly life.

Marmot Monday

Job Market

Man the job market is getting rough.

Ares

Marmot Monday

Jamie's Magic Palace

Apologies for the overly long rant that's to follow. I feel if I don't hammer this out it's going to fester like a cognitive zit begging to be pinched. There was finally a ray of hope on the evening television lineup. Tonight's NOVA was about the National Security Agency and it's role “post-9/11'. (By they way, we took a vote and decided that 'post-9/11' is the most abused and overused term of the decade.) Unfortunately for me and the thinking public they gave James Bamford the keys to the show, letting him write and direct it. You may remember Bamford from such hits as his 1982 book The Puzzle Palace, or such ditties as The Agency That Could Be Big Brother in the New York Times. Bamford has fashioned himself a career by selling the NSA as the boogey man to fear in our technology-laden society whilst pandering to the dark reasoning of people that go out of their way to believe the worst about this country.

I don't have a problem with Jamie B believing what he wants to believe about the world or the government. The distressing issue was his soiling a once great brand (Nova) with his personal neuroses. On a plate that cries out for balanced reasoning and thoughtful analysis we were served slick visuals and multiple money shots of his books. The first half of the hour touched on a few of the 9/11 hijackers and what they did inside the US. Bamford posits that based on their communications the NSA should have intercepted the plot and therefore stopped 9/11. Mind you, the communication Bamford references are calls made from within the US, so there's that whole pesky 4^th Amendment issue. Also, prior to 9/11 I'm not sure they actually broke any law by calling a house in Yemen. Mere association doesn't get you on the domestic legal system dance floor in a pre-9/11 America. It did, however, usually get you a date with a deportation hearing and a one way ticket home. That is, if the NSA is allowed to tell INS, which they aren't. The truly asinine aspect of the issue was the FBI had agents assigned to the NSA, and NSA was aware that some of the hijackers were associated with Al Qaeda. But due to legal restrictions, put in place by the Clinton administration, those FBI agents were forbidden from telling the FBI about the hijacker's existence. Never mind all that, says Bamford. Someone should have known what was going to happen and broken the law to bring the hijackers to the FBI's attention.

I think at this point I actually yelled at the TV. Because of Bamford's book The Puzzle Palace even cave-dwelling Koran thumpers are well aware of the NSA's collection methods and capabilities. As a result of this the hijackers and their overlords never discussed operational matters via telephone or e-mail. The communication restrictions are even outlined in the Al Qaeda training manual. So what, exactly, was the NSA supposed to know if no one talks about anything related to the plan?

The second half of the hour glossed over, from about 10,000 feet, how the NSA has changed 'post 9/11'. Of course, Bamford trotted out how it was wrong, wrong I tell you, for the NSA to ignore FISA. Mind you, the intercept targets that circumvented FISA were calls originating overseas from 'known associates' and NSA was doing so under Executive Orders. Those were facts that clogged up Bamford's well rehearsed speech...I mean show...so he didn't bother introducing them. There was a repeated tone of indignation at the idea the NSA would monitor calls inside the US. (Whereas it was this exact failing that was trotted out in the first half our as Bamford's reason why 9/11 happened.) Somewhere around this point in the program Mrs. Ares, who is by all measure a layman on this topic, saw the distinct nakedness of the show's intellectual emperor.

Again, I don't give a snot if Bamford believes what he cares to believe. But tonight Frontline and an infomercial had a baby and it was called NOVA. I know that the P in PBS stands for Public. But given that PBS is taxpayer funded can't we call down some thunder against X-Files rejects dressing up like smart people and beclowning the good name of NOVA? PBS is supposed to be the last refuge of thinking Americans that actually still turn on the television during prime time. It's our 10 acres of palm tree-covered beach in an ocean of American Idol and Desperate Housewives. And thanks to Jamie Bamford, it just went condo.

Ares

Marmot Monday

Rendition

Interesting little blurb percolated its way out today. Seems the Obama administration has issued an executive order allowing the continuation of the practice of rendition. For those unfamiliar, rendition is where you turn a terrorism suspect over to a third party government for interrogation. The practice actually goes back to the Clinton administration, but we don't like to talk about that. The interesting part of this little development has been the silence that has met the announcement. The New York Times and Washington Post, two outlets that flogged the last president for the practice, are conspicuously silent on the new ruling. I guess it's only bad when someone you don't like is ordering it.

Ares

Update: Someone with way more time and smarts than I followed through on this. Professor Hutchison of the Dissenting Justice blog posted some before and after statements by Human Rights Watch. This is the before:

The US government should:

Repudiate the use of rendition to torture as a counterterrorism tactic and permanently discontinue the CIA's rendition program;

Disclose the identities, fate, and current whereabouts of all persons detained by the CIA or rendered to foreign custody by the CIA since 2001, including detainees who were rendered to Jordan;

Repudiate the use of "diplomatic assurances" against torture and ill-treatment as a justification for the transfer of a suspect to a place where he or she is at risk of such abuse;

Make public any audio recordings or videotapes that the CIA possesses of interrogations of detainees rendered by the CIA to foreign custody;

Provide appropriate compensation to all persons arbitrarily detained by the CIA or rendered to foreign custody (emphasis added).

This is what was issued after by Human Rights Watch:

"Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place" for renditions, said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "What I heard loud and clear from the president's order was that they want to design a system that doesn't result in people being sent to foreign dungeons to be tortured -- but that designing that system is going to take some time."

Note to Human Rights Watch: Turn off the lights & lock the door. You're now hacks instead of advocates. Mind you, I'm actually in favor of the practice of rendition. But when a group that advocates something as basic as human rights twists sideways in it's seat merely because of who occupies the Oval Office they've ceased to be useful. Co opting is it's own form of corruption.

Pox Populi

Like everyone else in this fair land I've been a passenger on this ride we call America for the past few months. Thus far the most intolerable aspect of this entire Tilt-a-Whirl hasn't been the economy or the election. It's the incessant yapping of just about every corporate news source. Those who frequent this humble space know this has been one of my whipping boys from the start. But as I've said before, we seem to be exploring new ground. The sense of masturbatory glee, emanating from the endless exploration of the possible permutations of how each new development is going to make your life worse, is reaching a pitch I've only seen previously in church revivals. Earlier this week the Seattle Times (it's superiority to the AJC in skill and class can be measured in Angstroms) ran a front page picture of a Depression-era shantytown and went elbow-around-the-ass to tie it in to current events. Not to be outdone, a local television station dedicated the lead that night to the “Deepening Financial Crisis”, then spent 10 minutes waxing about how it was going to make your life worse. If the media were a religion right about now we would all be wearing Nikes, holding pudding cups, and searching the heavens for the comet. To which I ask one of my million rhetorical questions: What are they going to do when life doesn't cease to exist?

Meanwhile, I've been dedicating my unemployed time to self-productivity. Aside from playing a lot of Call of Duty: World at War I've been reading & researching. I recently finished Cool It, an updated and Cliff Notes version of The Skeptical Environmentalist by that modern Martin Luther, Bjorn Lomborg. Lomborg uses a phrase I absolutely love, Catastrophe Porn, in describing the fascination/fixation with doom, death, and destruction. Talking to people about Bjorn Lomborg reminds me of the Christians I knew growing up that abjectly refused to read Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian. Speaking of religion, up next on the reading stack is Heavy Metal Islam. Report to follow.

On the research side I've spent some time digging into the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the stimulus that is currently making its way through the governmental large intestine that is congress. Kinda pathetic overall. I think I would entitle it the No Lobbyist Left Behind Act, but that title was already taken. High points: $1000 payroll tax cut for couples (gotta have a job for that to kick in), $7500 tax credit for first time home buyers (good luck getting financing), $102 billion for welfare/unemployment (probably gonna wear that one out), $30 billion for highway construction (doesn't buy a popcorn fart's worth of infrastructure, beside we did this x10 4 years ago), $19 billion for clean water & flood control (could always use that), $20 billion for health care information technology (so much for the private sector making it's product better), and $6 billion for weatherizing modest income homes (does that count condos that have been flipped a dozen times & can now be bought with a Sears card?). Those are just the high points. I'm sure there's a hemp research grant or interstate visitor center buried somewhere in there. One other key point: Only about 10% of the money actually gets spent in 2009. The rest over 2010 & 2011. Overall it doesn't give me a warm fuzzy, and I'm not alone. Rasmussen puts the latest approval for the plan at 42%.

And finally, lest we look too serious, we here at Ares and Athena offer a glimpse of our kinfolk. Just to clarify, our familia is the guy on the mower, not the cop.

Ares

Marmot Monday

One Last Kick

Economists Warn Anti-Bush Merchandise Market Close To Collapse

Marmot Monday

Marmot Monday