I forget how old I was when I was looking at the globe of the earth at Grandma's house. I noticed that the Soviet Union looked bigger that the US and asked Gma if that was right. She said yes, both the USSR and Canada are bigger than the US. I was shocked and outraged. It was one thing for "the Russians" to be bigger than US, they were the bad guys, but the fact that Canada was bigger seemed like a stab in the back. I felt that we had a right to be biggest but our so-called friends had plotted with the enemy to put us in third place.
Several years older, and marginally wiser, I was watching television at Gma's house. Walter Cronkite was sitting in front of two columns of numbers, like a scoreboard. He said that 1045 US soldiers had been killed in Viet Nam, 2114 South Vietnamese, and 3862 Viet Cong. I don't remember if that was for the day, month, or grand total, but I remember thinking "Good. We're winning".
We kept winning that war, racking up the numbers, for most
of a decade. When I reached draft age, I thought about
becoming a concientious objector, but they only granted that
if you could convince them that your religion forbade all
war. Grandpa had been in WWII and had told me what he
thought of Nazis. I got my Draft Card. I thought about
burning it at a public protest, but I didn't. I lost it.
-- Keith
Sometimes you have to do a little research to find the interesting factoids.
Exercise 1 (math): Count how many members of the current administration would have been jailed had they not been granted immunity from prosecution by the investgating committee or pardoned by President Bush the elder.
Hint: start with Admiral John Poindexter
*Exercise 1a: Same exercise, different administration and president.
Exercise 2 (history): When was this picture of Donald
Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein taken?
When did Saddam Hussein gas the Kurds? For what was he sentenced to death? What tales will he tell when dead?
Hint: George Washington University, National Security Archives, The Saddam Hussein Sourcebook
As I paged through it, I saw it was composed of two parts, a larger majority report, and a somewhat smaller *minority report. Unlike the 9/11 committee, the Iran-Contra committee was not able to reach a unanimous conclusion.
The primary author of the minority report was the Representative from Wyoming, *Dick Cheney.
That name seemed familiar, but who can remember the name of the congressman from Wyoming in 1987? Good thing someone wrote it down. Too bad the book is out of print and dusty.
The summary of the minority report said that "mistakes were made", but that President Reagan had taken steps to correct them, and that most of the problems were caused by congress.
Cheney didn't like congress even when he was part of it.
The VP's official biography mentions that he was elected to congress, but says nothing about what he did there. No doubt Cheney is proud of his work on the investigative commitee, but he can't write down everything he's ever done.
Last summer I heard Sibel Edmonds interviewed on the radio. She was a translator for the FBI, working on translating documents and phone taps from several mid-eastern languages.
But Edmonds says that to her amazement, she was told repeatedly by one of her supervisors that there was no urgency; that she should take longer to translate documents so that the department would appear overworked and understaffed. That way, it would receive a larger budget for the next year.
Even worse, she found that another agent seemed to be producing translations that deliberately left out information that might lead an investigation in certain directions.
Edmonds says she complained repeatedly to her bosses about what she'd found about the other agent's conduct, but that nobody at the FBI wanted to hear about it.
Is she speaking the truth, on a vendetta, or raving? I don't know, but some senators saw fit to investigate.
So, did the Senate get to the bottom of the matter? We don't know, because the FBI retroactively classified its congressional briefings about Edmonds, including any material resulting from those briefings.
The result is that several letters and a press release written by senators Patrick Leahy and Charles E. Grassley are now classified as state secrets.
Does this mean it is illegal to re-print the press release? Is it illegal to give somebody an old newspaper that contained the press release? Is it illegal to read it or tell somebody about it? I am not a lawyer, and nothing I say should be construed as legal advice, but if you want to read a classified press release, it is common sense to check it out at The Memory Hole Edmonds letters without delay.
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The Memory Hole is a web site devoted to copies of various publications that in one way or another have been anti-published. They range from funny, to historically important, to long and boring, to too frightening to even look at. |
On the other hand, we listen to Boston radio.
For several weeks, there was a court order that forbade the city to evict the Occupiers. That was challenged in court by the City and the Mayor, who argued that they should have the power to evict the campers if a health or fire hazard should arise.
During that time the Mayor was on the radio, repeatedly, to say that there were no plans to actually evict the protesters, but that it was an important principle that the city should have the power to evict them if need should arise.
The judge agreed with that argument an lifted the order. Less that six hours later the Mayor was back with an ultimatum that the protesters must leave by midnight or face arrest.
Does he really expect us to believe that during the week he was arguing the case in court it never occured to him to actually evict them, but that he suddenly thought of it after the court had lifted the stay?
Was he lying to the judge about that? No, it's illegal to lie to a judge. Was he lying to the public? What could be the motive, given that he himself then admits the truth just six hours later?
Does he think we're too stupid to remember what he said six hours ago? No doubt many are.
Stick it in your memory-hole Menino! The web remembers (some things).
Two Irish film makers, who seem to have been doing a documentary on literacy programs in Venezuela (yawn) just happen to have been inside the Presidental Palace when some army officers marched in, kidnapped the elected president, Hugo Chavez, and installed a "transitional president", who assumed "emergency" powers.
One of the themes of the movie is the difference between what was on television at the time and what was taped from inside the palace. Both CNN and local televisions show "Chavez supporters shooting from a bridge into the crowd below". From the inside it is easy to see that there is no crowd below the bridge, and that the "Chavez supporters" are either (1) shot dead, (2) unarmed, or (3) taking quick potshots from behind the bridge pylon at a sniper across the empty street who has them pinned down.
Warning: this is not a dramatic re-enactment; people die on screen.
Colin Powel appears on TV to make some dubious statements.
It may not be easy to find this film though. As noted by
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1047
The well-coordinated campaign to pressure Amnesty International and other groups to censor the exhibition of the documentary is part of an effort to silence those who have denounced horrendous human rights violations that were committed during the coup d'etat against President Chavez and during the dictatorship that briefly replaced him.or, more succinctly by http://www.irishfilm.ie/cinema/sdispfilm.asp?SID=23&filmID=3806
For only $2,795 you can enroll in a three-day program where you will "learn how to apply our innovative approach to your own loyalty strategy for immediate results" and "discover how to generate maximum loyalty using three critical elements" and "examine a 5-step process for building a loyalty-focused business".
This program is presented by The Disney Institute. You have already missed the no-doubt-interesting session scheduled for September 9-12, 2001, but maybe they have another session scheduled for you.
Inside this brochure I keep the rest of my memorabilia, which consists of two newspaper clippings. One has the headline
Under a tentative contract between Disney and the Teamsters union, the workers will be assigned individual undergarments, which they can take home each night to clean themselves instead of relying on Disney launderers.
Some workers had complained about getting lice or scabies.
Many of the characters have to wear Disney-issued jock straps... Each night, they turn in the undergarments... They then pick up a different set the next day.
Disney officials had told the workers that they use hot water to clean the undergarments, but they apparently weren't doing so,...
So I reminded her of what Bush said two weeks after 9/11. She wanted references, so I sent her this message:
From: Keith Wright <kwright@free-comp-shop.com>
To: ???@cs.stanford.edu
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 14:30:13 -0400
CC: kwright@free-comp-shop.com
Subject: Bush-Disney-Airline citation
You asked about the source of the Bush quotation I read Sunday. As I said, it is a clipping from the local newspaper, but the whitehouse web site still keeps the complete text of the speech on-line. I don't know if they are proud of it, or afraid of drawing attention by removing it.
The newspaper clipping disagrees with the official version in that
the paper ends with "the way they want it to be enjoyed",
while the whitehose says "the way we want it to be enjoyed",
but is otherwise a word-for-word contiguous quote.
-- Keith
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
September 27, 2001
10:40 A.M. CDT
At O'Hare, President Says "Get On Board"
Remarks by the President to Airline Employees
O'Hare International Airport Chicago, Illinois
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010927-1.html
When they struck, they wanted to create an atmosphere of fear. And
one of the great goals of this nation's war is to restore public
confidence in the airline industry. It's to tell the traveling
public: Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and
enjoy America's great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in
Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be
enjoyed.
-- GW Bush
The quoted paragraph occurs about half-way through the speech. I have often wondered why, when listing "America's great destination spots", he mentions only Disney World in Florida, and not the Grand Canyon, the many monuments in the nations capital, or the site of the World Trade Centers in New York. I don't expect he will ever explain it to me.
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