September, Week 1 2007

Saturday  September 1 , 2007

Sunday  September 2 , 2007

Christy Cindy Autumn and I went to Colville, we had a mediocre lunch at the Italian place I said I would never go back to, we got Cindy's glasses fixed and the meeting over with and did some shopping at Wall-Mart.

The damn Chevy is being temperamental, it failed to start twice today, not sure why, A friend said it happens to him all the time, he just squirts a little ether in the intake and it starts right up... I bought some ether... works fine, wish I had known about it before I was forced to walk out of the woods last month.

 I stopped by Clarks to look at the pistol I think I want one of these... It's manufactured by Uberti in Gardone Val Trompia, Italy. in 357 or 45 caliber. I was trying out guns down there a few weeks ago and was really impressed by how comfortable and well balanced this gun felt.

(From an e-mail to Bill & Margaret...)

Monday  September 3 , 2007

Victory breeds enmity; the defeated live in pain. The peaceful live happily, avoiding both victory and defeat.
Buddha (c. 563-483 BCE)

I saw this online"

Rosa Brooks joins a long list of leftists who will forever refuse to take any responsibility for the genocide in Southeast Asia after the U.S. retreated, and who can't "make the connection" between that debacle and Iraq ("Comparisons with Vietnam not a positive," Tuesday). Perhaps a quote by former Syrian dictator Hafez Assad to Henry Kissinger - when Syria invaded Lebanon, shortly after the fall of Saigon — will enlighten them: "You've betrayed Vietnam. Someday you're going to sell out Taiwan. And we're going to be around when you get tired of Israel."

Regarding Vietnam, the capitulation to evil and the ensuing catastrophe could be chalked up naiveté on the part of the American left. Their attempt to orchestrate the same results in Iraq — with the full knowledge of historical precedent — is a disgrace.

Arnold Ahlert

I had to write back...

Arnold Ahlert joins a long list of Rightists who would have us sacrifice more lives to a lost cause. This war was begun under false pretenses. To prolong it to satisfy some "America Right or Wrong/ Love it or Leave it" dogma dictated by their vision of political responsibility is unsupportable.

His little condescending history lesson should have started at the end of The Great War.  Iraq was awarded to the UK, their first act was to join Basra and Baghdad together as one country. The UK enforced their rule with British troops and eventually turned the country over to King Faisal (A Syrian).

Inflicting the will of outsiders on Iraq has been tried for Centuries. If we stay there one year or a hundred years things will not change. Experiments like Czechoslovakia and Iraq are doomed to fail eventually, you can only keep the lid on a pressure cooker for as long as you keep the clamps on.

PS Rosa Brooks was born in 1970 it seems like a stretch to ask her to assume responsibility for the Genocide in Southeast Asia. The Genocide in Southeast Asia was the result of intervention by France and America, the only Genocide was in Cambodia and that was the Khmer Rouge which rose to power as the result of unrest due to Policies instigated by Prince Sihanouk, supported by America.

Now, according to my Gun-Guru I am supposed to get a Ruger Vaquero with a 4" barrel and Birds-head grip... I am told that the Uberti isn't beefy enough to handle the high-speed ammo... my other Guru says it is.

Tuesday  September 4 , 2007

An interesting article that will probably not get much play in the "Conservative Media"

Dick Cheney's Top Aide - 'We're One Bomb Away' From Our Goal

I went to Kettle Falls with Trevor to watch Calie and and her team play volleyball, if this game and the last are any indicator, this will be a long season

Wednesday  September 5 , 2007

Kids are all off to school, except Calie who will leave in about 5 minutes and Cindy who's school doesn't start for another week. We need to pay for her tuition that won't be a problem but it would be nice if we could get some assistance from the State, she is 18 and is talking about moving out (shudder) and if she does she is going to need more help than we can afford to give her... this is the beginning of another long saga I am afraid.

We ran errands early and I puttered around doing odd nothings for a few hours.

Great discussion with Pete Smolden this morning and another nice conversation with Rick & Don tonight...

Thursday  September 6 , 2007

A man is known by the silence he keeps.

Oliver Herford

I am reading more and more often about repressive tactics being used to suppress opposition. We have taken the laws created under the pretext of protecting us and used them to arrest and isolate protestors. Using laws designed to protect free speech they have oppressed it, not only Bush/Cheney but CBS apparently feels it has the right to stifle opposition too. It's really getting out of hand. Trying to have a discussion online about any of this brings out an army of Hate Mongers who have no argument beyond; "Do as your told", "Salute the flag or get the hell out of the country... how can you even hope to survive in this world if you can't even say "Hold on, lets think this through." without having your head handed to you. If you don't like Bush, your an enemy of the state, you are supporting the terrorists, your un-American, weak, "The blood of the victims in the next terrorist attack is on your hands ....." We have to kill all the Arabs, wipe out the Muslim Religion they are all trying to kill us so lets kill them first."

Sound familiar? We have to kill all the (Heathens/ Witches/Heritics/Jews/Japanese/Russians/Sioux pick your boogyman) before they kill us, they want to take your money and freedom, the whole thing is the personification of evil. It seems to be a truism that people with the weakest argument and the most to lose are the ones that use fear to manipulate, use fear to gain power and wealth, use fear to stifle opposition.

Friday  September 7 , 2007

Do you know what a pessimist is? A person who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

George Bernard Shaw

I went to Spokane to see Romeo A. P. my Cardiologist, Romeo says I'm fine, no enlarged heart, Cholesterol, blood pressure all of it just fine, there is one chamber larger than the others but that's not new.  or something but that's been there all along... something to monitor, I will get another Stress test in October.... I hate stress tests. tedious and difficult... but it's only once a year.

Lexi is having a Baby Shower, Christy wants to participate, Mike invited her but she never got an invitation from Lexi, Christy wants very much to have Lexi come to her... but she is holding back, bashful? I don't know.

I am really tired of folks on both sides using labels to dismiss alternative points of view out of hand. He's a Republican/Democrat, Lefty/Righty, Wimp/Bully. Nobody I know can be confined to one label. People, just because they disagree, are not that two dimensional. I have a hard time dealing with contradictions within myself. I wish I could come down on one side of the fence or the other all the time but most times when I do I have to take it back. To me there are four unforgivable sins, Hypocrisy, Greed, Apathy, Willful Ignorance. The "Decalogue" provides 10 commandments designed to provide, somehow,  the followers of Judaism, Christianity with an ethical code to live by. Most of those edicts revolve around giving power to the officers of the organization to punish the followers if they don't knuckle under, one actually deals with greed the others are sort of strange... I like "Love thy Neighbor as Thyself" and "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

Saturday  September 8 , 2007

Somebody does somethin' stupid, that's human. They don't stop when they see it's wrong, that's a fool.”

Elvis Presley, 20th-century American celebrity singer

Went for a 250 mile ride, the old bones feel it too. Four other guys and I went up to Nelson, BC to see a car show, pretty cars but boring after a while. We left there and went north to Kaslo then across some mountains to New Denver and sown to Crescent and back across to Nelsen again, Me and one of the other guys went straight back to Metaline and the others had a beer in Nelson before heading back

"The Boy" and Monica didn't come home last night, "The Boy" is one thing but Monica... I finally found her at 04:30 with a bunch of her girlfriends (thank Goodness) over at the apartments in Metaline Falls... Grrrr Mom will have to deal with her, I'm too disappointed.

Sunday  September 9 , 2007

A belief is not [merely] an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind.

Robert Oxton Bolt (b. 1924), English writer

I picked pears with Autumn and Cindy, they are getting pretty big and they are to the point where the book says pick them. The book says lift the pear to 90degrees and give it a half turn twist, if it comes free from the branch it's ready... some do not come free but I suspect that an about 3 days they will all be picked... the apples aren't even close.

The Baby Shower was today at 1400, I should have gone to take pictures but I didn't. Christy says it was a nice party, the only downer was that Lexi's mom didn't attend. Christy said that someone said she wouldn't come because there "...were too many people."

Bursting Bush's bubble

By Rosa Brooks
Special to the Los Angeles Times

Salt Lake Tribune

The president is a lonely man. Once, he was surrounded by admirers and acolytes. There was Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and Alberto Gonzales and Condi Rice and Karl Rove - many of them better known inside the White House by the affectionate but often unprintable nicknames assigned by their playful president. (Rove, you'll recall, was "Turd Blossom.")
    Yale University forgave Bush's mediocre student record and gave him an honorary degree in 2001, and bright young Yale law graduates at the Justice Department struggled to acquire Texas drawls and develop legal rationales for White House criminality.
    Those were the days.
    It's all so different now. Cheney is still there, but most of the rest of the rats are off the sinking ship. Rumsfeld and Gonzales walked the plank, but Powell marched off in disgust, as did a host of others. Rove left last week on a mission to find and destroy some other planet, and even the still-steadfast Rice hasn't referred to Bush as her "husband" in several years.
    The bright young Yale lawyers haven't been very enthusiastic lately either. One of them, Jack Goldsmith, has a book coming this month with some choice things to say about the personalities and legal theories that once gave the Bush administration its Titanic-like illusion of unsinkability.
    Goldsmith ran the Justice Department's office of legal counsel for nine months in 2003- 04 (and was briefly a colleague of mine at the University of Virginia School of Law). He and his book, The Terror Presidency, are quoted extensively in a Sept. 9 New York Times Magazine article. Key take- aways: Bush and Gonzales had little appetite for substance; Cheney's staff ruled the roost and insisted that the law was supposed to bend to their wishes; and top Cheney aides such as David Addington were every bit as contemptuous of their GOP colleagues in the executive branch as they were of Congress, the courts and their Democratic critics.
    For instance: When Goldsmith tried to explain to Addington that terrorists and insurgents might be covered under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which applies to civilians (rather than under the Third Geneva Convention, which covers prisoners of war), Addington reacted with fury: "The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections. You cannot question his decision." That's the rule of law, as understood by Cheney's office.
    Later, Goldsmith got an even stronger rebuke: "If you rule that way," Addington informed him, "the blood of the 100,000 people who die in the next attack will be on your hands."
    A few months after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Goldsmith had had enough. Defying Cheney's office, he withdrew the infamous 2002 "torture memo." Drafted by John Yoo before Goldsmith joined the Justice Department, the memo had been widely condemned for seeking to develop a legal rationale for interrogation techniques that arguably constituted torture and war crimes - at least under the federal laws in force at the time. Goldsmith issued a statement informing federal agencies that the Yoo memo could no longer be relied on - and submitted his resignation the same day.
    Like so many other recent accounts of life inside the bubble, Goldsmith's raises the question of how the Bush administration juggernaut lasted so long. From the outside, the administration looked powerful and dangerous, a finely tuned machine capable of rolling over any opposition. But it was hollow and illusory - and on the inside, many people knew it.
    In the end, Goldsmith concludes that the administration insiders most determined to increase executive power actually undermined it. By relying on tactics involving "minimal deliberation, unilateral action and legalistic defense," he writes, this White House has weakened the presidency as an institution. Future presidents from either party will face a suspicious Congress and skeptical courts, and will find it more difficult to advance their agendas.
    Goldsmith may be right - but critics of excessive executive power shouldn't be too quick to start cheering. Bush may be the butt of jokes on late-night TV, but don't expect Congress or the next administration to take serious action to reverse the damage his administration did to our constitutional fabric. On military commissions and secret surveillance, Congress has handed the president pretty much everything he asked for. On Iraq, too, Congress seems cowed. And it goes without saying that nothing can reverse the death and destruction the administration unleashed in Iraq.
    Admittedly, the president's not all that happy about the way things have worked out either. As he confides to journalist Robert Draper in Draper's new book, "Dead Certain," "I cry a lot."
    Don't we all? ---
    Rosa Brooks is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. E-mail: rbrooks@latimescolumnists.com

Deceptions and Insipid Sentiments

Troop Support

By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

"American Special Operations forces conducted raids in the area on Friday and Sunday, and on both occasions they called in airstrikes when they encountered armed resistance, the military said. It said in a statement that it had killed 136 Taliban fighters, including some who were trying to flee across the river."

"Aerial bombing of a valley in western Afghanistan several days ago by the American military killed at least 42 civilians, including women and children, and wounded 50 more, an Afghan government investigation found Wednesday. A provincial council member who visited the site independently put the figure at 50 civilians killed ". . . some women and children were drowned in the river, and it was maybe in the heat of the moment that the children and people wanted to escape and jumped into the water"."

New York Times, June 3, 2007

Who do you believe about the killing of Afghan civilians? Do you believe official US military statements, brought to us by the people who fabricated the story about Jessica Lynch and lied contemptibly at the highest levels about the killing of Pat Tillman? Or do you believe the Afghans who investigated the bombing?

The military gave a precise number for the number of supposed 'Taliban' killed by air strikes, so there are two points to be considered. First, in such circumstances how could they know the number and that all those killed were 'Taliban'? That is impossible. Second, the military tell us smugly that they don't do body counts. Then they feed the media with supposed exact figures of dead "enemy". How can we trust people who produce such garbage? But this atrocity, like so many others, will vanish into the dust of history, speeded into oblivion by the lies of the Pentagon.

In another example of deception the military mind-benders went a bit too far. They made up identical quotes from an "Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified" concerning two entirely separate incidents. Here are the official announcements:

July 13, 2005: "The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the children and all of Iraq," said one Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified. "They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists"."

and

July 24, 2005: " "The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] and all of Iraq. They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists," said one Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified."

According to CNN "Lt. Col. Clifford Kent, spokesman for the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division, said use of the quote was an "administrative error." He said the military was looking into the matter." Yeah, right, Colonel.

It so happened that on July 11, 2005 Bush had declared "In the face of such adversaries there is only one course of action: We will continue to take the fight to the enemy . . .", and it looks as if the phrase lodged in what might possibly be called the minds of the Pentagon's robots. The Department of Defense PR machine was working hard, and the lying moron who concocted the press releases and disgraced his uniform and the Constitution of the United States has probably been promoted. But he had good examples to follow.

During the barbarous obliteration of the town of Fallujah by US forces in 2004 it was stated by witnesses that in the course of their malevolent savagery US troops fired White Phosphorus (WP; what we old soldiers used to know as 'Willy Pete') shells which are terror explosives that kill people in the most hideous way. This was denied vehemently by Washington. One self-righteous official rebuttal was that:

" . . . some news accounts have claimed that U.S. forces have used "outlawed" phosphorus shells in Fallujah. Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. U.S. forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters. There is a great deal of misinformation feeding on itself about U.S. forces allegedly using "outlawed" weapons in Fallujah. The facts are that U.S. forces are not using any illegal weapons in Fallujah or anywhere else in Iraq."

Well . . . , perhaps not quite all the facts, because the US Army's Field Artillery Magazine then recounted, embarrassingly, that :

"The munitions we brought to this fight [in Fallujah] [included] illumination and white phosphorous (WP, M110 and M825) . . . . White Phosphorus proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions . . . and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE. We fired "shake and bake" missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out. . . We used improved WP for screening missions when HC smoke would have been more effective and saved our WP for lethal missions."

The official Pentagon lie was "they were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions" but the army inadvertently revealed that they were fired to "shake and bake". In ordinary language that means to terrify and incinerate. A tiny morsel of WP burns instantly into flesh and cannot be stopped in its fiery chemical plunge deep into the body. There is no remedy. Victims die in shrieking agony from the effects of ammunition that the Pentagon boobies tell the world was fired "into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters." They lied. They are beneath contempt.

These people have forfeited all trust and credibility, especially as it seems they tell their lies for political reasons.

The military are supposed to be non-political. They owe allegiance to the Constitution. Their duty as citizens in uniform is to be representative of all Americans, no matter what politician is in the White House; no matter what political parties indulge in puerile antics in the House and Senate. But it appears that the generals have become politicized. Facts are acceptable only if they help the White House, and if convenient facts can't be produced it's easy enough to conjure up some cockamamie claptrap that will be believed by an amazing number of Americans, if by nobody else. Take, for example, the latest news about the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.

We are supposed to believe that a boy who was thrown into jail in Afghanistan at the age of fifteen is a major and potent enemy of the United States. It is claimed that he is guilty of "conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, spying, and proving material support for terrorism." At fifteen years of age he was in a compound that was bombed by US aircraft. He was the only survivor and, appallingly wounded (he lost an eye), he threw a grenade at US soldiers who came in to finish things off. They beat him up and he was then subjected to the most vicious torture before being sent to the Gulag cells of Guantanamo Bay.

Don't these people understand that by conjuring up such twaddle they are making their nation an object of ridicule and hatred?

When the American public is urged to "support our troops" there is automatic positive reaction. There is not a US politician who would dare criticize the military, even when presented with irrefutable evidence of hideous atrocities. There is a plenty of "regret" and suchlike insipid sentiment. But you'll never get condemnation. It is unthinkable to even hint that the military can do wrong.

There is little wonder that the military in Iraq and Afghanistan disguise facts, manipulate the truth, and tell downright lies. They have the example of the rancid Bush Administration, none of whose members have ever heard a shot fired in anger, yet have the light of battle in their steely eyes. They simply follow their leader, one of whose most absurd and blatant lies was that "We gave him [Saddam] a chance to allow the [nuclear] inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in." This preposterous fabrication has not been challenged by any prominent public figure because of the deep-seated national belief in the myth of presidential probity, no matter what evidence may be presented to the contrary. It's on exactly the same lines as the blind, mindless repetition of "support our troops".

The lie was repeated on June 5 by Republican Mitt Romney, word for word, and was unchallenged by any other candidate for the devalued post of president of Washington-on-Oil. The commentator Larry Beihart recounts that "Wolf Blitzer, moderating the debate didn't correct him. The so-called journalists asking questions didn't seem to notice. The CNN post debate commentators didn't mention it. The New York Times and The Washington Post, in today's stories on the debate, didn't mention it. A web search this morning [June 6] didn't reveal any comments on Romney's astounding statement."

The Pentagon's lie machine is working well, but Washington doesn't realise how much damage is being done to the credibility of the United States. The liars might hope and imagine they are protecting their president from condemnation, but all they are doing is creating worldwide contempt, ridicule and loathing for their country. By manipulating facts and downright lying they are doing the reverse of supporting the troops. But once the leader lies, it's downhill all the way.

Brian Cloughley is a former army officer who writes on political and military affairs. His website is www.briancloughley.com