President Obama, Please Get FISA Right

Huffington Post Publishes Our News

mquintus-Mark of Baltimore — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:23:42 EST

The Huffington Post (Political News section) has just published my article:

Coalition Launches National Campaign: President Obama, Get FISA Right!

-Mark

Please Sign Our Patriot/FISA Open Letter and Petition!

mquintus-Mark of Baltimore — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:33:38 EST

The Patriot Act and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments are under reauthorization review in Congress and we need your help now. Please sign our Open Letter To President Obama and Petition to urge President Obama to tell Congress to provide greater Constitutional protections for all of us!

Here's the story:

Shortly after 9/11, major changes were made to U. S. intelligence gathering laws. These changes were intended to give the U. S. government more effective power to intercept and track terrorists. All of us want the government to be effective in keeping us safe.

Yet, like the unconstitutional and unnecessary wholesale imprisonment of innocent Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor, some provisions of these laws were wildly intrusive on innocent Americans. For example, the Bush Congress granted the executive branch the power to search your home not only without a court-approved warrant, but without your knowledge - and furthermore, the power to imprison you if you found out about the search and told anyone, including your spouse.

Such provisions, granted in the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments, still exist. The most controversial provisions are now being reviewed now by the Congress. To our astonishment, the Obama Administration wants these provisions renewed without effective civil liberties protections.

Senator Feingold and others have strongly objected.

The Get FISA Right group here on OFA has, since last July, urged then-candidate and now President Obama to repeal such provisions or to provide effective safeguards to protect us against over-zealous investigations and investigators.

PLEASE SIGN OUR OPEN LETTER AND PETITION asking the President to reconsider. (There are additional links to background information within our Open Letter.)

Many civil liberties organizations have worked with us on this campaign. By sending our respectful message, you'll help strengthen our founding principles for the future, while still ensuring government power needed to keep us safe.

Thanks!

P. S. We're passionate Obama supporters, too. There are over 23,000 hard-working Obama supporters in our OFA group.

Diamonds and Rust

James — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:28:09 EST

Closer To God

Diamonds and Rust

I carefully removed five more one thousand shilling notes and presented them to Wendy.

“That’s about one fifth the average wage in Kenya. It ought to get us dinner served in this cabin, and, unless my judgment about such things is sadly flawed, your natural allure ought to count for something.”

Wendy took the money. I saw a glint flash from her eye under raised eyebrow. I wondered how much of the five thousand would end up in the hands of the crew. She and Dingo headed out into the aisle.

“Who are you two?” I asked the remaining women.

“I’m Helen and this is Anice,” the blondest of the two blonds said, waving one hand toward her companion.

“Where you from?” I asked, making conversation while I thought about everything that had happened to us since stepping aboard the train.

“Troy,” she said, noting my lack of real attention.

“Helen of Troy…neat,” I responded with a smile.

“Why don’t you two join your friends at finding us all something to eat?” I said. I held the door open. Anice went by me, her short curly hair so thick and tight it resembled Velcro.

When they were out of the room I secured the one-sided deadbolt. I stood before Burt.

“Want to tell me about it?” I asked him, pointedly, my arms crossed. He watched the evening countryside go by for at least a full minute before answering.

“Ah, about what?”

I frowned. I was not accustomed to my team members withholding information pertinent to the mission, nor on acting independently.

“The three bad guys you forced to leap from the train. Take a close look at the window next to you. They’re safety latched, but you’d play hell at getting them open far enough to squeeze a full grown American through without using a lot of time and tools. Then there’s the terminal nature of what would have likely happened to guys. I don’t think you’d send three men to their deaths that way. I know something about you now. You didn’t force them from the window, so where are they?”

I watched Burt consider. I was determined not to be surprised at whatever he came up with. I didn’t know what had happened to our pursuers, but I knew Burt was lying about whatever had happened.

“I’m sorry, “ Burt apologized, But this isn’t a mission you know. Not anymore. I don’t have to report to you or do what you tell me. We’re on our own. I said I threw them off the train to impress the lassies. I haven’t been with a woman for awhile.” His eyes left mine to roam again across the moving Savannah.

In spite of myself, I was surprised. Burt was impressing young women while three guys, apparently still on the train somewhere, were trying to kill us for unknown reasons. I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to respond to that part of what he’d said, so I ignored it.

“Where are they?” I said instead, getting right to the point.

“Back in their cabin. Just like I left ‘em. One has a broken ankle and the other two broken wrists. They don’t have any guns. I threw their cell phones out the window.” Burt offered the last as if it made up for his earlier lie.

I glared at him, getting control of myself before speaking.

“This is a mission and I’m the mission commander, unless you don’t want to survive it. We’re not going to get through this by trying to impress young women. We won’t survive long doing stupid things like throwing their cell phones away either. Those phones had numbers and identities on them. Now you either accept that or you’re on your own. And, if you accept it, I don’t want any more of this crap. I make the decisions, on everything. That’s what I do. You implement those decisions in the manner I tell you to. That’s what you do. And you don’t keep anything from me. Got it?”

My voice had dropped in both tone and volume. Burt and I were in more trouble than I could calculate. I needed him, but I could reasonably survive without him. On his own, he wouldn’t last another day.

Helen of Troy’s voice could be heard through the solid wood door. She had one of those irritating nasal voices, but her looks were so great you tended not to notice when in front of her. I waited, my hand on the deadbolt, staring back at Burt.

“Alright. It’s a mission. I’ll do my part.”

I twisted the small brass knob. Four women filled the cabin, settling onto bunks and floor as if a gaggle of geese looking to forage.

“It’s done,” Wendy stated, proudly. “They’re bringing dinner in about an hour, between the early servings. I couldn’t understand their word for the meat.

I think its called Punda.”

“Punda milia,” I added, instantly sorry I’d spoken up. The words translated into striped ass or Zebra.

“Means beef, I think,” I recovered, looking over at Burt, who was staring at Dingo too intently to pay attention to me.

“About the sleeping arrangements,” I began, but got no further. Obviously, the Earth Mother’s had discussed more than dinner when they had gone to the dining car.

“You’re sleeping in my bunk. I’ll stay on the floor with Helen. Burt can have the padded bench, with Dingo on the floor next to him.” Wendy’s rapid delivery gave away the preparedness of her comments. There was silence in the room. The earlier arrangements discussed had seemed to include a whole lot more than just sleeping, but the amended plan suited me perfectly. The last thing any of us needed was more complexity, although I could not ignore the fact that the small room was going to occupied through the night by four attractive females and two men who had not known many women of late.

“The train is likely to stop soon,” I informed them. “While its stopped would be a good time to have dinner served. I’ll try to time it right,” I said, gesturing toward Burt to accompany me. Wendy frowned, but asked no questions.

“Wine, you have more wine. Might as well trot it out. We’ll be right back.”

I slipped out into the passageway with my last words hanging in the air. We didn’t need company with what we were about, and the Earth Mothers were just a bit too bright and adventurous. Keeping them from participating in anything would not be accomplished with force. Especially not since I’d allowed one of them to become armed. Our current and continuing presence in their lives was a risk to them, however, and I would not overlook it.

Burt led our passage through the dining car. I marveled at the old world charm of the décor. Red leather, deep brown wood and polished glass. It resembled some Hollywood director’s idea of what a dining car should look like, rather than what you would expect to find in a third world country. Eating in the cabin would be much less entertaining, but a whole lot more secure.

We made our way to the last car. We reached the last door, which Burt plunged right through, his weapon out and raised. I noted that the lock had been shot away, just like the one in our door.

Three men were in the room. Two sat on one lower bunk, opposing us, and the remaining man sitting on the floor, propped up against the wall. With the bunks down, there was not much floor space in a Fourth Class cabin. Burt moved deep enough into the space to allow me to sit on the lower bunk, across from the two men.

“Who are you gentlemen?” I asked, no threat in my voice. Burt’s gun was out and ready, but mine still in my pocket. They looked at me. The man on the floor had the broken angle. It was evident from off angle of the bones. The other two had wrapped wrists. One right wrist. One left wrist.

“Left handed?” I asked Burt, pointing at the appropriate man, but his attention was on the three men.

“Who are you people?” I inquired again. None of the three answered, each looking from one to the other.

I noted the very bottom of a tattoo sticking out from under the short sleeve of the one with the broken right wrist. I stepped carefully over the broken ankle of the floor positioned one. I pulled the sleeve gently upward. The tattoo was in blue. It was of the head of a water buffalo. Then I noted the age of the man. He was not young. Older than I, all three of them were, and I was old for the business.

“Thirty-two Battalion?” I asked. The man nodded once.

“Shit,” I mouthed to myself.

“What is it?” Burt asked, gauging the regret in my tone.

“Thirty-two Battalion is the old Boer Commando outfit, disbanded in 1993, I think. It was pretty hot shit. All three of you?” I pointed at the other two. I received no answer.

“Burt here will be glad to take your shirts off, and then break your remaining joints,” I offered. The one who had signaled before did so again.

“Who are you with now?” I inquired, not expecting an answer. I waited, but I knew I was wasting my time. The situation could only play out in one of two possible ways. Either the men were actually going to jump from the train, at high speed with their injuries, or they were going to see reason. I could only play the cards I had been dealt. I couldn’t change them.

“Okay. Have it your way. I don’t expect much. I know you guys. I was a United States Marine. I have a mission to perform. Either Burt here tosses you off the train or you tell me whom you’re working for. I’ll work something out. It’s not much that I’m asking. No names. Not even what this is all about. “ I waited, while once again they looked at each other. They had to be mercenaries. They worked for the money, so their loyalty was not to a cause. But their habit patterns where from the old school, and it would near impossible to break them down. I was not willing to resort to physical torture, and I didn’t really have the equipment for such an operation anyway. Physical torture always works. On everyone. No single human is immune, or tough enough to ‘gut it out,’ as that is the province of movies and television. But it comes with a high price, for the tortured and the torturers. I’d tortured. I knew the price, and I was no longer willing to pay it.

“Aegis,” the man said, his voice low. “Diamonds. It is about diamonds.”

I sat back stunned. Aegis didn’t bother me. It was one of the mercenary companies operating out of London. There were bunches of them. But his volunteering of ‘diamonds’ perplexed me. Tea, textiles, coffee and a few other things were exported from Kenya. There were no diamonds. Not that anybody had ever found or reported on.

“Where,” I asked, not sure what I expected to hear. And what I got I did not expect.

“Freetown.” We cannot tell you more. Our families will never be paid if we tell you.”

I liked the fact that the man was thinking about the money Aegis would pay out to their families following death. I had their full attention. There was no Freetown in Kenya. There was a Freetown in a place that had a ton of diamonds, however. Sierra Leone. A shit-hole of a place. The unadvertised, unclaimed, and nearly unknown, poorest country in Africa, which was saying something.

“We will talk no more. Do your will.” The man bowed his head. Without sharp instruments and a controlled environment I knew that I wasn’t going to get more.

“Lighten up, Francis,” I quoted from the movie Stripes. “You did what you were asked. Here’s the deal. I’m gonna pull the emergency stop.” I stood up and grabbed the single line running corner to corner near the top of the car. “The trains gonna stop. Only you three will be here. They’ll come in hordes once they figure out the cord was pulled in this room. Stopping the train is a First Class Felony in Kenya. You’ll be arrested, guarded, and taken to jail in Mombasa. When you get there one of you needs to confess that he did it. Claim drunkenness. The natives think all White Men are drunks. Or you can claim that you need medical care from the injuries you suffered fighting with one another. Once one of you confesses the others will be set loose. Strange Kenyan Justice. The two released can pay the fine for the felony, and then you can get some splints and treatment for your problems.” I stopped and looked at them carefully.

“If you don’t claim you did it, then there is going to be trouble. Burt here is going to take your going back on your word badly. You won’t survive this mission, I promise you. I want your word as an ‘Os Terriveis’” I stopped again. Portugal had contributed a lot of men to 32 Battalion, and had loaned it the name “Terrible Ones,” not without good cause.

“We agree,” the man said, this time without looking to the others for approval. I was giving them a rare gift, and the man seemed to understand. It would be safer to leave them for dead, strewn along the harsh landscape of the beautiful Savannah, then have them reaching their superiors to tell of their contact with us.

I pulled down hard on the cord. Squealing sounds came from the wheel brakes of our car. It was going to be a slow stop as the emergency cord only worked for the car it was pulled in. The train whistle blew long and loud. The crew had figured out that there was a problem.

I took out another ten thousand shillings and placed them firmly in the man’s good hand. “You’ll need this for the fine. They won’t take your cash when you’re in custody. Trust me, I know about custody in Kenya.” I then took my box of cigarettes out and offered one to each man. They sat there, each with a white tube sticking out of his mouth. Burt brought out a lighter and went slowly from man to man, keeping his suppressed automatic trained on each while he lit their smokes.

“Dankie,” the man said. Dankie is Afrikaans for thank you. He slipped the bills into his shirt pocket. Burt and I stepped out of the room, then made our way quickly back to the dining car, which was full. The non-stop train was slowing to a stop, which caused a lot of discussion from everyone around us as we made our way through.

“What if they try to lay it on us?” Burt asked, just before we reached the room.

“They’re screwed. Strange Kenyan Justice. They’re the ones in the room where the cord got pulled. The exact place is registered down by the side of the car, near the tracks. There’s no Crime Scene Investigation over here.”

“Will it work the way you told them?” Burt inquired, his voice evidencing skepticism.

“I lie when necessary Burt, but I’m not cruel. Those were brothers-in-arms, whatever path they’ve taken since, and, because of your ‘assistance’ they won’t be a problem for us anymore.” I didn’t mention any of the problems that might arise from they’re eventual report to higher ups.

Wendy welcomed us into the room, locking the door behind us. I noted another empty bottle of wine primly set against the far wall, where a partially filled one sat next to it.

“We’ve been wondering where you were. And the train is almost stopped, just like you said would happen. How did you do that? And, when are we going to get to Mombasa?”

I laughed at her tone and obvious gaiety rather than her comments.

“When is dinner served?” I asked. I was terribly hungry and so very tired. I looked up at Wendy’s upper bunk with longing.

“It’s coming. It’s coming, Wendy giggled, but first we want to sing you a song.

Dingo has a ukulele. It’s made from Koa wood carved in Hawaii.

I slunk down the wall between the bunks. I prayed that there were no more players aboard the Iron Snake. Our stopping had risk. Anyone paralleling the train on the Mombasa Road could use the opportunity to get aboard. We could only plan for so much, however. The Earth Mother’s started their song, the words brining an immediate rye smile to my face: “Well, I’ll be damned, here comes your ghost again…” The song was a Joan Baez thing from many years in the past. I knew that the final words were: “…and if your offering me diamonds and rust, I’ve already paid.” I hadn’t understood the words to that song any of the times I’d heard it. I could never figure out what diamonds had to do with rust, since diamonds are a crystal and rust is, well, rust. I listened to the words of the song flow over me, being sung from some of the toughest angels I’d ever come across, and I knew that diamonds and rust did indeed go together and that the amalgam was one of hardship and pain, just like the words of the song.

http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com

http://www.themastodons.com

http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com

RECONCILIATION: Should Be A Household Word !

Greg Jones' Blacks4Barack ! — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:58:21 EST

RECONCILIATION !
Should Be A Household Word

The Way Senate CAN Pass The Health Bill

By Greg Jones
Blacks4Barack

For some reason the media and even our politicians keep pounding the vital importance of the Senate obtaining 60 votes in the Senate to pass the health care reform legislation. There's the non-stop 'what will (Traitor) Joe Lieberman do'...or 'will they get (R) Olympia Snowe'...or 'will Harry Reid get the 60 votes he needs...'? 60...60...60 !!! That's all we hear. I'm not sure if the media is trying to add drama to the health care issue in an attempt to stimulate audience ratings or if it's an orchestrated tactic in hopes of keeping Americans ill-informed through the direction of our great politicians, but the FACT is, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid DOES NOT need 60 votes to pass the health care bill but in fact ONLY 51- a simple majority, which makes a huge difference-through a procedure commonly used and known as RECONCILIATION.

Reconciliation is " a legislative process of the United States Senate intended to allow a contentious budget bill to be considered without being subject to filibuster (only needing 51 votes to pass). Because reconciliation limits debate and amendment, the process empowers the majority party ". The reconciliation procedure is limited to being used for budget related legislation that costs or raises substantial amounts of money. In the case of the Senate health care bill, that would include the expansion of Medicare or Medicaid, revenue-raising tax provisions, and even the creation of a public health insurance option, depending on how it's written. So the reconciliation procedure CAN be used to pass the health care bill with only 51 VOTES !

The downside of the bill being passed through this procedure is that, due to a ruling known as the Byrd Rule, non-budget legislation designed to regulate the insurance industry could not be included in the bill and would have to be voted on in a separate bill which would need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. But there is a strategy that can be used to overcome even this obstacle as described by Ryan Grimm of HuffPo:

    But there's another alternative, according to Martin Paone. Paone, who served as a Democratic Senate floor staffer for 29 years, has been advising Democrats as they craft their legislative strategy. He proposes that Democrats try to get 60 votes to waive the Byrd Rule -- which would then allow the inclusion of those non-budget-related provision in one bill that would require only 51 votes for final passage.

    What's the advantage? And why would any senator who opposes the entire bill vote for such a waiver? The answer can be found in the specific proposals that would be in violation of the Byrd Rule. Mostly, those would include reforms to the way the insurance industry operates -- for example, a ban on using preexisting conditions to deny coverage, or a law that insurance companies can't drop a client just because they get sick.

    Those are wildly popular reforms. Getting 60 votes to support those policies is much easier than getting 60 for a public health insurance option, which Republicans and some conservative Democrats oppose.

    Conservative senators such as Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) or Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) could, in voting for a Byrd Rule waiver, put themselves on the record as being in support of popular insurance industry reforms, while still opposing final passage of the bill -- a political strategy that may be appealing to them.

So, as the media continues their daily rant of how imperative it is that EVERY Democratic Senator vote yes on the health care bill remember one FACT that they seem to want to hide from We The People. There IS a way for the Senate to get the bill passed WITHOUT 60 votes...without Traitor Joe...without Olympia Snowe...without Mary Landrieu...making them absolutely meaningless in the debate.

Now, WE must let Harry Reid know that WE know that this option is in fact available to him. Call...Email...and DEMAND that if he feels he doesn't have the 60 votes needed to block the filibuster, then We The People...

DEMAND
RECONCILIATION !

When they, our great politicians realize that WE KNOW that they have this option...they will be FORCED to use it...even if they had other intentions (like letting the bill stall or even fail). Help the word RECONCILIATION become a household word. Spread the fact that this IS in fact an alternate means of the Senate getting the bill passed. Since day one, President Obama has stated that he would not be able to create Change on his own...that he would need OUR help. Time to do OUR part by DEMANDING that our politicians do EVERYTHING possible, including RECONCILIATION, to stop 44,000 Americans from DYING each year due to the lack of access to quality health care, by passing health care reform-with a strong public option-for all.

Email the media to let them know that WE know
and are DEMANDING that our politicians
Get It Done !

Related Articles:
Gibbs: White House Not Ruling Out Reconciliation
(11/09/09)

Robert Reich Pushes Getting STRONG Public Option
Through RECONCILIATION
(11/13/09)

Greg Jones
National Director
Blacks4Barack (dotBlogspot.com)

Iron Snake

James — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:33:36 EST

Closer To God

Iron Snake

I grabbed the extended hand, going into a double wrist-lock for additional support. Burt’s arm retracted like a hydraulic ram coming up out of a ditch, and I was pulled straight to the top step of the car. I stuck my head out into the increasing wind as the train accelerated out of the sharp curve. I was the last aboard. A well-groomed conductor retracted the stairs, and then stood looking at us as if viewing zoo specimens. We were at the end of the last car. He blocked the aisle without seeming to do so. I produced our tickets, which he examined, clipped twice and pointed forward with, before returning them to my hand.

We’d waited an hour for the train under Ficus trees, called Mugumo locally, that lined the tracks, with an assortment of natives impatient to clamber aboard with us. Apparently, once aboard, the conductors charged a lower, negotiated price, than could be had at the ticket station.

Our First Class sleeping car was located just beyond the dining car. Most of the overnight train configuration was spent on Fourth Class Fare, which meant four bunks to a room. Burt and I had only two, the extra space taken up by a bench seat with a long private window.

We made our way down the aisle, situated along the left windowed wall of the car. The only cars with center aisles were the dining and day-seat cars. The creak of wood and clicking of wheels were comforting sounds of security. The room was a welcome haven from events of the day. At least it was until I looked at the door. I moved past it, raising one hand to stop Burt. We stood on each side of the door looking at the holes around the handle. Small bore bullet holes. The kind slow, sub-sonic silenced rounds make when they enter wood.

I looked at Burt. Neither of us brought out any weaponry, although there was nobody in the corridor with us. There would be no one inside the room, which I confirmed by pushing the now unlockable door open with my foot. It swung wide, allowing us to see every inch of the space. No one waited because they would have been waiting inside an inescapable trap, in the event of problems. We were up against pros, who wouldn’t expose themselves to the whimsy of chance unless they had to.

I went around the inside of the room, poking my finger into holes on the far side wall and then the frames of our bunk beds.

“Why’d they shoot out the lock? The doors don’t have keys. You can only lock them from the inside.” Burt asked, pulling the bottom bunk down from the wall with a thud, and then sitting atop the mattress.

“Not anymore,” I answered. “Kind of gives me the idea that we’re gonna have visitors later, and they don’t even care if we know ahead of time.”

“Cheeky bastards,” Burt sighed. “Why they treating us like citizens?”

Citizens are regular people. People who have no knowledge of intelligence work, guns, pyrotechnics, or real violence. We call ourselves, and others like us, players. Once you are a player you can never be a real citizen again. Most of us think we can, but in truth, it just can’t be done. “Paranoia bites deep….” the song goes.

“Maybe that’s all the intel they have. Maybe we’re just a hit to them. Maybe they don’t have a formal organization behind them,” I mused, taking a place on the bench seat. The scenery going by was the outskirts of Southern Nairobi. Broken blocks, tile and brick, mixed in with metal sheets in a state of angled falling rust everywhere. And dust. Tons of gray dust runneled through with dark rivulets of muddy water. And native peoples everywhere. Three stone fires sending up hundreds of single plum smoke signals wherever I looked.

Our door flew open. My left hand slipped straight into left front pocket, the forty-five bearing on the door open through the cloth of my trousers. A woman stood in the door.

“Evening mates,” she said, loudly and cheerfully, her rough but attractive face broken nearly in half by a huge smile.

“Hi,” Burt mumbled.

My hand relaxed out of my pocket. I was staring at an ‘Earth Mother,’ as we term them. Young women, mostly from England or Australia, some from America, who come over to Africa and then wander about the countries in their comfortable boots. They invariably wear shorts, long sleeve shirts and carry packs that have to weigh more than seventy pounds. Their lack of fear and sense of adventure has always impressed us.

“We got wine if you got an opener,” she stated, with a great laugh.

I was taken aback for a few seconds. An Earth Mother without a Swiss Army knife? I couldn’t picture it. Then I realized we were being invited over for social reasons. The bottle-opener was cover.

“Sure,” I responded, assuming that Burt had more tools behind the padding of his multi-purpose coat.

“Americans?” the woman asked.

We didn’t answer.

“I know from the accent,” she went on, turning to lead us to her room, as both of us had risen to our feet. “’Hi,’ like ‘Hey’ is strictly American. Then there’s the ‘sure’ comment. Another dead giveaway.”

She was Australian, I knew, from her own heavy accent, but I didn’t reply, only following her two berths down the aisle, where another door was open.

“Ever go see the Flamingos,” she inquired, but not waiting for an answer. “At that lake outside of town American tourists like to go to? Down there they always say the same thing when they see the birds: ‘Oh my God, they’re so pink.” She laughed heartily. I had to laugh too. Her impersonation of an American, totally over done, had been vividly descriptive and funny.

We filed into the room. The woman closed the door behind us, engaging the lock with a loud click. There were three other women in the room, all heavily tanned, all smiling broadly. I was humorously glad that I was armed. Burt produced his own Swiss knife, bottle-opener extended. He went to work on a bottle.

“Four of you in a two-bed First Class room?” I inquired.

“Sleeping bags,” the woman named Wendy, who’d invited us in, answered. “First Class room is two hundred shillings less than a four bed Fourth Class.” I marveled, as that amount of local currency was worth about three bucks, and then took a seat on the floor, my back to the outer wall so I could face the locked door. We’d already had a lesson in just how secure those were.

We drank two bottles of red wine. The label read ‘Terpenja Garnacha,” which I knew was Spanish, and surprisingly, not that cheap. Burt and I nursed ours in paper cups, knowing that there were other players aboard who’d have to be dealt with at some point in the night.

“They call this train the Lunatic Express, you know,” Wendy commented, her voice beginning to slur. “There was a lot of opposition to its being built by the British in the eighteen hundreds,” she slurred on.

“Iron snake,” Burt stated, speaking for the first times since we’d entered the cabin. We all looked at him. “Its what the natives call the train,” he followed, his expression showing surprise at our rapt attention. “Kikuyu. The natives are mostly Kikuyu, not Masai,” he finished, almost guiltily, eyeing the remaining wine in his cup.

I couldn’t believe that I had heard correctly. My formal education was in ethnology. Cultural Anthropology they used to call it, before they wanted everyone to think it was all about the study of fish or bugs. I understood the origins and interaction of the cultures in Kenya. I simply could not believe that a Knuckle-dragger, especially a huge dumb-looking one like Burt, would know anything about such things.

“Where the hell did you go to school?” I asked him, without thinking.

“Thornton Fractional,” he replied, proudly. I knew it to be a high school located somewhere in South Chicago. I didn’t know why I expected some center of higher education to come out of his mouth, but I had.

“You two don’t even know each other? Wendy inquired. “We thought you were companions.” The women all laughed, while Burt’s face grew red.

“I’m not gay,” he said, his voice small amid the raucous sounds filling the room around us.

“So, are you married?” Wendy asked me, directly, her first two words coming out as one.

I said I was.

“All the good ones…and all that,” she replied, then went on, “What’s her name?”

“Joan,” I answered, not having a clue as to why I lied, or used that name.

Burt almost laughed out load, held back only by the angry frown I sent across the room at him.

“Gotta use the loo,” Wendy said, unlocking the door. The other women paid full attention to Burt while she was gone, he having indicated that he was single. I presumed that they were merely practicing their skills, as Burt and I were a good fifteen years older than any of them.

Wendy re-entered the room. “Some Bogans down at your place,” she stated, offhandedly, before being surprised by Burt’s instant rise from the floor.

“What’s a Bogan?” he asked, opening the door a fraction, then drawing out his suppressed automatic. I joined him, the AMT Hardballer in my left hand, pointed down. The room went silent and still, the sounds of the train seeming to grow louder with each passing second.

“What have we got?” I whispered.

Burt held up one finger, then pointed aft, toward the dining car. His finger then tapped his own forehead.

“Okay, out you go. I’ll give you ten minutes.” I checked my wrist, but there was no Omega there. I cursed.

His gun disappeared. He was out the door and gone, seemingly more smoothly and quickly than a man his size could move. I slid the forty-five back into my pocket, then turned to face the women. They sat frozen, one with a cup of wine halfway to her lips. I slid down the door, sitting with my back to it.

“I wont stay long, just until Burt gets back. You’ll never see us again, once we hit Mombasa,” I said, my voice soft but flat.

“Mombasa,” Wendy replied, her voice no longer slurring. “It means ‘Battle City’ in Nandi,” she said, matter-of-factly. I didn’t reply, instead waiting for the inevitable question. It came, but not in the form I expected.

“Who are the others?” Wendy inquired.

“We don’t know,” I answered, truthfully. “They came at us in Nairobi because of something that happened in Mombasa. So we’re going there to find out. They don’t have good intentions.”

“That wasn’t a normal kind of gun, the one your friend has,” Wendy stated.

“We’ve seen a lot of guns on our Walkabout. That one’s not normal,” she repeated.

I had nothing to say. I didn’t care about lying to the Aussies, but I could see no reason to add anything I didn’t have to, other than about Joan being my wife, and I couldn’t understand what had made me say that in the first place.

“He’s the killer, so what does that make you?” Wendy asked, the other women opening a third bottle of the wine, as if they commonly spent time in enclosed spaces with gun-toting hitmen.

I again did not answer, setting my cup aside.

“You’ve drunk our wine. We’ve taken you in. You owe us something,” she said, slowly, with quiet expressive meaning.

I looked at all four of them, trying to decide what to say. If there was a code for such encounters, then Wendy was right. Our taking up with them had, at the least, saved a potentially violent confrontation, which might not have worked to our advantage. And she had warned us. I took out the wad of local currency and peeled off two bills.

“Two thousand shillings,” I intoned, putting the money in front of Wendy’s feet, since she made no move to accept it with her hand.

“More,” she said, with no smile on her face or in her voice.

I took another bill from the roll, but she held out her hand.

“Enough money. Tell us more.” She pulled her hand back, then filled her cup to the brim with red wine.

I sighed and put the roll back in my pocket. “We’re agents. It doesn’t matter what kind of agents. One of us got killed in Mombasa. Burt and I came to redress that loss, but nothing when right. When I inquired, these guys, who we don’t know, came at us. Shooting. We can’t go back and we can’t go forward until we know more, which is why were going down to where we lost that agent.” I finished, hoping that my explanation would be enough.

“Can’t exactly go back to your berth, now can you?” one of the other women said.

I had no answer. The woman was correct in her assumption. Unless I could be certain that none of our pursuers were on the train, it would be very risky to stay in the berth we’d booked. But it wouldn’t be any safer elsewhere on the train, unless it was in a berth nobody knew about. Like the one I was in.

“Since Burt isn’t married, he can stay with me, if he doesn’t mind the hard floor,” the woman went on.

“What’s your name,” I asked her.

“Ruthie,” she answered. “Ruthie Jorgensen,” she fluffed her bright blond hair, as if to indicate the obviousness of her Scandinavian heritage, then went on, “but they call me Dingo, because I don’t talk much.”

“Well, that’s more than kind of you Dingo, but Burt’s much older than you. Women don’t take to men like us, and they usually have better judgment than to marry us,” I warned her.

“Except for Joan, that is,” Wendy said, drinking her whole cup of wine down, before going for another.

“I’m not married, since we’re trying to talk truth here. I lied, to fit in better."

"Joan," I said, and then I paused. I could not minimize Joan, “Joan’s a real woman, but with somebody else. And yes, you’ve shared your wine, your room and your friendship with us. That deserves something, which is what I’m trying to give you. Our problems are not your problems, and our problems are very serious.”

“Than you can sleep in my bunk,” Wendy said. “I mean, since your not really married.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Far from rejecting us, the women were welcoming us into their lives, at least while we were all aboard the train.

“Listen to me. We lie for a living. Violence is our stock and trade. We’re not good men. We’re just tools, guided around out here by people who don’t necessarily have the best interests of humanity at heart.”

“Is that part the lying?” Dingo asked, her face serious. I massaged my face with both hands. I had never encountered Earth Mothers, except in passing, and I was finding the experience frustrating and difficult to deal with. I also noted, when I was done talking, that the two thousand shilling notes were no longer on the floor. Wendy smiled, as if in thanks. I wondered, by the time the train hit Mombasa, whether Burt or I would have any currency left between us.

There was a very soft single knock on the door. I felt it rather than heard it.

The bad guys would not be knocking, and there was also no way they could know which cabin we were in. I stood and opened the door. Burt slipped in, and then took his place near Dingo where he’d originally sat.

“What’d you find?” I asked him.

Burt looked at me, then at the women, then back at me, without speaking.

“They’re in,” I told him. “We’re staying with them. Don’t ask how or why. Talk to me.”

With an expression of reservation written across his face, Burt talked. “They had a Fourth Class room let. There were three of them, all Caucasian. They decided that it was in their best interest,” Burt stopped, looking around the silent room carefully, “to leave the train before we got to Mombasa.”

“This is a non-stop,” Wendy stated, analytically.

“Any blood? Clean-up? Disturbance?” I asked, ignoring her.

“No. They were in the last car. I popped the emergency latches on their window, and out they went. Had some duct tape, so the window won’t flap, or anything like that.”

“You made them jump from the train?” Wendy asked, obviously stunned. “But the train is going a hundred kilometers an hour.”

“Would have been nice to talk to them. You didn’t question them, did you?” I interrupted.

Burt looked at me, his expression showing guilt.

“No, but I did get these,” he said, laying two RAP automatics on the seat between he and Dingo. She immediately caressed the surface of both pieces.

“Parabellum?” I inquired of him. He said nothing, confirming my analysis. The guns were nine millimeter’s produced by a small company in South Africa. That company supplied the local police forces. The weapons were not normally available on the private market outside of that country.

“Boers. Shit. What the hell do the Boers have to do with this?” I said the words to myself, thinking. “You find the suppressor?”

A gray, powder-coated cylinder joined the two automatics. I stared at it for a moment. “SAI,” I asked. Again, Burt did not answer. “Shit,” I said. At every turn with these unknown assailants we were being confronted with an abundance of capability and quality material. SAI was a company out of Denmark. They produced a ‘carbon’ silencer superior even to an oil-filled device, but they were usually more expensive than the weapon they were fitted to.

“Get rid of them,” I said, concluding there was nothing more to be learned from the weapons.

“Can I have one?” Dingo asked.

“Me too,” Wendy followed, instantly.

“Alright, take them, but not the suppressor. That goes out the window.” I was unable to keep the exasperated tone from my voice. I was traveling from Nairobi to Mombasa in the middle of the night aboard the infamous Iron Snake, trapped in a room with people equally as crazy as I, if not more so. The thought did not give me comfort.

“Way cool,” the supposedly silent Dingo intoned, using her caricature of an American accent. “What about dinner. You can’t go to the dining car can you, I mean with those others having gotten off the train early?” She stroked here new acquisition while she talked. Burt smiled at her, and then produced a magazine filled with cartridges. I looked from one of them to the other, wondering which one of them was in more trouble.

I took out my wad of shillings. “These seem to work wonders here. I think we can manage dinner in the cabin.”

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"Were Going To Mombasa"

James — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:55:48 EST

Closer To God

“We’re Going To Mombasa”

We didn’t make it to the Railway Station, instead stopping the small van down around City Central near Kenyatta Avenue. The driver, conductor and two other teen passengers had remained silent during our trip, not that it would have made much difference with rock blasting from all the speakers. The conductor had rotated once to look at us, with attitude, but something about us had kept him from commenting, or doing anything else.

Burt and I were broke. We had to have cash, which meant we needed an ATM. A few businesses would take credit cards, but not many, even in a large developed city like Nairobi. Africa was third world, outside of a very few places. Our Teeny Matata plunged back into the ‘fishball’ of traffic as soon as we were out. I watched my Omega disappear with a glum expression.

“Got a cell phone?” I inquired of Burt, hoping that I had not been wrong about his over-supplied pack rat nature. I was not disappointed. He handed a small phone over to me.

“Will it work here?” I said, opening the Star Trek flip cover. I wasn’t sure why I’d asked the question, as I already knew the answer. Burt didn’t bother to reply.

I examined the phone. It gave the time of day in big numbers on the screen. I knew that young people did not even wear watches anymore. They got their time from cell phones. I wasn’t that young.

“Agency?” I went on.

“Safaricom chip,” Burt said back. That meant the phone was on a local system instead of any international. It was a relatively untraceable way to communicate, but I wasn’t thinking of calling anyone until we knew more of what we were involved with. Phone calls would give more information out than I was comfortable with. I wondered what other toys Burt had. The mission had been cadged together at the last minute. There had been no clearance meetings, or even initial planning sessions. Things like ingress, egress, communications, armament,

and even financing, had been thrust upon us instead of being homogeneously put together with forethought and design. I put the phone in my pocket. Now I had a bulge on each side, but high fashion was not something common to Eastern Africa.

“Braclays is over in Queensway House on Kuanda,” I pointed out.

I walked in that direction, looking around to see if any of our pursuers had picked us up. If they were Agency personnel we would not have much time on our own. The Agency was terrific at surveillance, and two white guys in downtown Nairobi would not be too hard to find no matter who was looking.

We walked into the lobby of the bank. There were private security guards stationed everywhere, including one on each side of a bank of ATMs. I inserted one of my Visa debit cards, punched in the four-digit code and hoped. Local shillings were all we were going to get from any ATM in the country, which was okay, except for the fact that the largest shilling note issued was for a thousand. With the exchange rate running at about seventy shillings to the dollar, that meant a

Thousand-shilling note was only worth about thirteen dollars.

I used four cards to get a total of sixty thousand shillings out of the machine. The stack of bills was over an inch thick. I shoved the folded wad into my back pocket and we headed for the door. Nine hundred bucks, or so, would have to do.

There was nobody noticeable on Kaunda Street, so we crossed to the Catholic Basilica. We went straight in through a huge gothic entrance. The place was straight out of the dark ages, with tourists gathered together in small guided clumps.

I took Burt all the way to the front of the huge old church and sat him in the front pew. Unconsciously, I genuflected before taking a seat next to him. The lighting was dim to the point of darkness. The place was perfect.

“Stay here. I’ve got to berth us aboard the train going east tonight.

I’m less noticeable alone. Whatever we ran into started down there, where Smith died, so we’re going back to the scene of the crime, if we live that long.”

I looked over at the big man, wondering what the hell he was doing. I was known for my rather unconventional behavior, which had gotten us into the mess we were in, but it was uncommon for wet workers like Burt to be anything but sticklers for following Agency directives and rules.

“What about the woman? You told her to meet us. You don’t think she’ll come?” Burt asked. I rubbed my forehead, thinking for a moment.

“I do think she’ll come, but I don’t want to take her to Mombasa on this, not that she would go. I wanted her to meet us so I could talk to her about what she knows. We can’t drive all night down to Mombasa. We’d be sitting ducks on that rough road. The Agency has drones. We have to hope that whoever is after us will calculate that we’ll run to Jomo and fly out as quickly as we can.”

“We’re going to Mombasa?” Burt asked.

“Yes, we’ve got to get out of Nairobi.

“We’re going to Mombasa,” Burt repeated, this time with a strange tone of enthusiasm. I had more questions about his involvement but they could wait until we were on the train.

I left him there, heading of across the downtown common area for the station. I realized that I should have asked to see if he had a second phone, when the cell phone in my pocket rang. It was Burt.

“I have another phone. The number’s on the dialer, titled King Kong.”

I thought about his self-derived nickname he had given himself. I tucked away a thought to examine his phone to see what he’d chosen for me.

“Thanks,” I responded, not knowing what to say. The man was proving to be an enigma, like maybe a bear with human intelligence would be. Burt hung up. I waited until I was tucked into a corner alcove of the Kenya Bank, right across Haile Selassie Avenue from the station, and then flipped the phone open again. I called Staff Sergeant Stevens, hoping he was still around. I was compromising the cell phone by calling the Embassy, but I had little choice. I had to have more data. I did not believe that the Agency had sent men to kill me. It was just not done. There was no need. They could just recall me and lock me up any time they wanted. They didn’t need to kill field agents. They had worse punishments. Imprisonment and loss of retirement were much more feared punishments, and very commonly applied. In the final analysis, when Burt had been instructed to shoot me, he had refused. Field agents did not kill field agents. There was no career left to an agent who participated in such action, and we all knew it. It was not even entirely believable that he had been ordered to do such a thing.

“I can’t tell you anything at this point,” Stevens said, without preamble. I held the phone out and stared at it for a second. Whether Burt’s phone was already target material, or whether Stevens had been waiting for an unknown call, I did not know, but there was no point asking. Stevens was a Marine, first and foremost, above wife, country and even God. It resonated through him.

“Is she coming?” I asked.

“Tower, in twenty,” he said, and then hung up. I turned to my right and looked up at the tallest building in East Africa. The Times Tower. That was the tower. Twenty, in Marine parlance meant twenty minutes. She was coming. I was relieved, and intrigued, by her conduct. I hadn’t been absolutely sure that she would come. Not nearly as certain as I’d led Burt to believe.

Seeing no one of any consequence over at the long cinder block construct of a railway station, I crossed the street and entered the facility. I was always surprised that it was clean. Even the bathrooms were clean. And the rain earlier in the day had helped, giving the place a fresh, although local, scent. I went to the line of booths under a sign that said “Kenya Railroad Berthing Allotment.’ I could not help looking around suspiciously as I approached the attendant behind his bars.

“Two, first class cabin for Mombasa.” The man looked at me, the black visor of his blue cap shined to a high luster. As a former Marine myself, I could tell that it was polished leather and not the fake Corfam junk. There was one train to Mombasa every night. It arrived there, from Nairobi, early in the morning. Tickets were booked in advance, and for cash.

“Papers,” the man said, primly, holding out one hand toward the slot

under the bars.

I took out my wad of shillings, peeled off four of them, then slid them through the slot. The 1st class fare to Mombasa was posted on the chalk board behind the man. It said nine hundred shillings. I waited. He stared down.

“For two,” he said. “Private room with clean bedding and first service in the dining car.” The money was gone when I looked down. I had not seen the man’s hands move. He took two tickets from a drawer, shoved them toward the slot, then looked behind him and made believe he was concentrating on something else. I let him, taking the tickets and walking back toward the platform, until I saw the woman.

A white woman stood out form the building, peering up and down the platform, as if looking for a train. But there was no train, nor would there be until the evening run was ready to be made at around seven. The events at the Safari Park had occurred so quickly and intently that I could not recall if the woman was the same as the one with the camera crew. But she was looking for something. And I knew I was being looked for. I went into the restroom without going out onto the platform. From a stall I called King Kong and filled him in, about the woman and about Joan’s pending arrival, now only fifteen minutes away. Burt’s analysis was better than mine. If the woman was there, then the others would be in the area. We decided that I would try for the Railroad Museum just north of the station.

Before leaving the bathroom stall I removed a full roll of toilet paper. I carried it with me in my right hand.

The station was not crowded, which was unfortunate for my purposes, although no one gave me the slightest glance as I went out to the street side, gained the far edge of the building, and then darted across a twenty yard concrete expanse. The Railroad Museum was right there, with an old engine and cars lined up next to it. I hid behind the cars, kneeling to look up from under them. I did not observe any extraordinary interest or pursuit. After a five-minute wait, I did see the woman. She stood at the outside lip of the wooden platform. She gestured with one hand toward someone who seemed to be in the direction of my position, but I couldn’t see who she might be waving at. Finally, I went through the door into the museum.

The object of the woman’s attention was obvious once I was through the door. A large white male stood in front of me, his arms extending up and outward, as if to engulf me. Without thinking of the potential of terrible repercussions, my left hand went down. I brought the small forty-five up out of my pocket, flicked off the double-sided safety and walked right into the arms of the huge man. His attempt to grasp me never reached conclusion. I jammed the AMT into the side of the toilet paper roll, pressed the arrangement hard into his belly and squeezed the trigger.

The sound was not nearly as loud as I thought it would be.

The toilet paper roll shredded, but the man, amazingly, did not go down. Instead he held both hands to his stomach, an awful expression of pain on his face and a mewling grown coming form his open mouth. I marveled. The man appeared to be made of something tougher than hide, gristle and hair.

I ran, using a casual lope, which covered ground quickly but made me look more like a jogger than someone running from something. The gun stayed clutched in my left hand, so small it was invisible to anyone who might have been looking my way. I could not have run with a two-pound chunk of metal in one front pocket.

One thick hand waved from around the far side of the bank building, as I approached.

“What happened?” Burt asked, when I pulled up next to him, reseating the gun out of view.

“What in God’s name are you using for ammo?” I shot back. I had never known a forty-five round, at close range, fired into a man’s torso, to leave him standing and complaining0.

“Shot-shell,” Burt said, rather ruefully. I waited, looking back around the corner for some sign of pursuit, but there was none. When my head swung back I spotted the Pajero across the side street, just pulling up to the steps of the Times Tower. Burt saw it to. We started out together while he talked.

“I load a cartridge of birdshot as the first round. In all my guns. I’ve had a few occasions where I shot the wrong guy. A few years back I decided that I’d rather apologize for causing pain and misery than live with the other result.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The man was demonstrating an application of intellect and good judgment that I had never seen from any gun or pyrotechnics expert I had ever met. His forethought had saved the day. There would be no unexplainable dead body at the museum. No Caucasian ‘tourist’ slain by terrorists or robbers. The man I had hit would be marginally injured and very likely ambulatory. No cordons. No investigations. Our train trip was still possible.

“What’s the second round, some sort of nuclear device?” I asked, not entirely kidding. Burt didn’t answer. We were upon the car, which was not driven by Joan.

A young blond male with short hair sat behind the wheel. I got in behind him, while Burt went around. The DCM was in the front passenger seat.

“Drive into the traffic,” I told the kid, assuming he was one of Steven’s Marines. Without a word he wedged us in among the Matatas, trucks, and other conveyances trying to get from Kenyatta onto Mombasa Road. I looked behind us, but could not make out anything, but realized we had been either followed to the Railway Station without our realizing it or our behavior had been predicted.

“Thanks for coming,” I said to Joan, “and who are you?” I followed, rapping the youngster on his right shoulder .

“Corporal Sam Hill, Sir,” he answered. “I got the week off for leave but nowhere to go. Sergeant said I might come with you guys, if that’s okay.”

He looked to be a teenager to me, but most Marines do, as I get older.

“A guy just got shot back at the museum, and we’re being hunted by people we don’t know. Are you sure you want a piece of this?” I retorted. I didn’t mention that I’d done the shooting.

“Yes, sir,” the boy-child replied, filled with enthusiasm.

“Why’d you come?” I asked Joan, noting that her medium cut brown hair was perfectly combed. It seemed to float around her head. When she turned to face me, it bounced on its own a few times. I felt a warm glow. She’d carefully prepared to see me again.

“I wasn’t doing anything else,” she said, then smiled for the first time since I’d encountered her. I had a million questions I wanted to ask her but none of them had anything to do with our current situation.

“Thank you,” I repeated, getting control of myself, enough to find out what we needed to know. “How did your husband get involved in a CIA operation?” I asked her, directly.

“He’s not my husband, and I don’t know, but I know he did. What was it all about?” she asked me, in return. I noted that the nails of her left hand, draped over the side of the seat, were manicured, and painted to a high gloss. I could not tell the color, as blue was the only color I really saw well at all. Her eyes were intensely blue, with thick brows over them. I could see those. She had a stunning presence.

“What happened to Smith, down in Mombasa?” I countered, ignoring her question.

“It didn’t’ start in Mombasa,” she replied. “It ended there, down in that prison outside of town.”

“Shimo la Tiwa?” I asked? I knew the prisons of Kenya. Not hellholes like the prison typified in the movie Midnight Express, put out in the seventies, but dirty bad places to try to survive in, especially for a Caucasian.

“G.K,” she said, shaking her head, “I think it was called, from what I heard.”

G.K. were the two letters mounted above the iron grate entrance to Shimo prison. I’d never found out what they stood for, but I said nothing to Joan. We had a location to work back from. It was also instructive that Smith had been in prison, not in jail. It spoke of an unlikely permanence.

“Where did it start?” I asked her.

“What?” Joan replied, not focused on the data I was trying to get from her.

“Smith. You said all of it started somewhere. Where?” I asked, patiently.

“Oh,” she answered, taking her time. I wondered if it was because of perplexity or evasion. “At the Embassy. Smith came to see Paul at the Embassy.

Neither of them were happy about the meeting, but I don’t know what they talked about.”

“Was your Communications Director present for the meeting?” I inquired, wanting to know if the local CIA ‘cowboy’ stationed at the Embassy was involved.

“That guy?” she came back. “Tyrell? No, why would he be there?”

I couldn’t believe that the DCM of a major embassy could remain unaware of the facility’s only CIA operative, however ceremonial his role was, but I let it pass.

I would deal with Tyrell later.

“We’re going down there, to Mombasa,” I told her, not really understanding why I was giving her any information whatsoever. I just felt that I had to trust somebody and, for some reason I could not fathom, I found the DCM to be imminently trustable.

“The train. You’re taking the train tonight, aren’t you?” she correctly assumed. “You’re going after Rafiq, aren’t you?”

I didn’t answer. Rafiq Salim was the name of our Lebanese target from the mission. I tried to think of why Joan would think we would pursue him down in Mombasa. The Agency had informed me that he lived in Nairobi where he ran a jewelry business. Without prompting, she gave me the answer.

“He lives down there. His family runs one of the ferries.”

I almost groaned aloud. Whatever we were involved in just kept getting more and more complex. I couldn’t seem to find any truth in anything.

“What do you want me to do, sir?” the corporal asked.

“Well for one, Sam Hill, I want you to stop calling me sir. My name is Jack.” I didn’t make the obligatory joke about ‘Sam Hell’ as I presumed he had been living with that all of his life. “Then, when we’re done here, I want you to drive this vehicle down to Mombasa. You have a cell phone?” The boy handed me a white card, like the generic Marine Corps card Staff Sergeant Stevens had given me. There was a Kenyan number on it in pencil. A ton of numbers really, but they seemed to work.

I noted that he was attired in a worn canvas outfit, with lots of pockets. He looked like an assistant to a tour director for one of the tourist ‘safari’ adventures, or maybe one of the redemption-seeking workers for an aid agency. In Kenya to seek redemption from living a life of spoiled ease and meaninglessness.

Joan’s information, if it was valid, changed everything. Mombasa was revealing itself as the key to our mystery, or at least the place where the key might be found.

“When you get down there, and you should arrive hours before us, go to the Inter-Continental and hang out. I’ll call you. We need a car down there, and it might as well be this one.” I could not rent a car for cash in Kenya. Renting another car, no matter what the bribe, would take a host of paper and plastic backup I was not willing to give out. I no longer believed that the Agency was after us. But somebody with assets and motivation was. I was not going to give them anymore than I absolutely had to.

“The embassy is locked down,” Joan said.

“How’d you get out?” I asked, but then didn’t wait for an answer, already knowing that Stevens was at work. The Ambassador would be howling mad when he discovered his ex-wife, his DCM, was not there. “When you going back?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll catch a Matata home. I don’t understand any of this and I need to think, and maybe drink half a bottle of Grey Goose while I do it. Can we go somewhere and talk? Do you have time? Is there some place?”

I was surprised by her request. I was also surprised, however, that she had gotten out from under an embassy lockdown. The woman was starting to amaze me even more than Burt. We had several hours to kill before getting aboard the train, and we needed to be someplace where we could be off the streets. The bottle of Grey Goose sounded wonderful, but it was not to be.

“The Java House, on Argwings, just off Kenyatta, you know it?” I said to the corporal.

“Kinda,” he answered, biting the sir off before it came out of his mouth. He made me feel old and slow, totally unlike what I got from Joan.

“Make it so,” I said, emulating Jon Luke Piccard from Star Trek.

“Engage,” he laughed back, diving out of the traffic, across two medians and reversing our course of travel. I noted that another vehicle tried the same maneuver but only managed to create a massive traffic tie-up behind us. Whoever they were, they were persistent and good. Just not as good as a crazy teen-aged Marine driving a Pajero in downtown Nairobi.

“What changed?” I said to Joan, as the Pajero rocked back and forth, avoiding all manner of obstacles I tried not to pay attention to, only too happy to be taking the train instead of riding with Sam.

“What changed about what?” she retorted, holding fast to the sissy bar mounted above her window.

Communicating with the woman was maddening.

“We’re going to Mombasa,” Burt said, unaccountably.

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Psychic computer shows your thoughts on screen

Soleilmavis — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:16:27 EST

Psychic computer shows your thoughts on screenFrom The Sunday Times November 1, 2009
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/living/article6898177.ece

Scientists have discovered how to “read” minds by scanning brain activity and reproducing images of what people are seeing — or even remembering.

Researchers have been able to convert into crude video footage the brain activity stimulated by what a person is watching or recalling.

The breakthrough raises the prospect of significant benefits, such as allowing people who are unable to move or speak to communicate via visualisation of their thoughts; recording people’s dreams; or allowing police to identify criminals by recalling the memories of a witness.

However, it could also herald a new Big Brother era, similar to that envisaged in the Hollywood film Minority Report, in which an individual’s private thoughts can be readily accessed by the authorities.

Jack Gallant and Shinji Nishimoto, two neurologists from the University of California, Berkeley, last year managed to correlate activity in the brain’s visual cortex with static images seen by the person. Last week they went one step further by revealing that it is possible to “decode” signals generated in the brain by moving scenes.

In an experiment which has yet to be peer reviewed, Gallant and Nishimoto, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology, scanned the brains of two patients as they watched videos.

A computer programme was used to search for links between the configuration of shapes, colours and movements in the videos, and patterns of activity in the patients’ visual cortex.

It was later fed more than 200 days’ worth of YouTube internet clips and asked to predict which areas of the brain the clips would stimulate if people were watching them.

Finally, the software was used to monitor the two patients’ brains as they watched a new film and to reproduce what they were seeing based on their neural activity alone.

Remarkably, the computer programme was able to display continuous footage of the films they were watching — albeit with blurred images.

In one scene which featured the actor Steve Martin wearing a white shirt, the software recreated his rough shape and white torso but missed other details, such as his facial features.

Another scene, showing a plane flying towards the camera against a city skyline, was less successfully reproduced. The computer recreated the image of the skyline but omitted the plane altogether.

“Some scenes decode better than others,” said Gallant. “We can decode talking heads really well. But a camera panning quickly across a scene confuses the algorithm.

“You can use a device like this to do some pretty cool things. At the moment when you see something and want to describe it to someone you have to use words or draw it and it doesn’t work very well.

“You could use this technology to transmit the image to someone. It might be useful for artists or to allow you to recover an eyewitness’s memory of a crime.”

Such technology may not be confined to the here and now. Scientists at University College London have conducted separate tests that detect, with an accuracy of about 50%, memories recalled by patients.

The discoveries come amid a flurry of developments in the field of brain science. Researchers have also used scanning technology to measure academic ability, detect early signs of Alzheimer’s and other degenerative conditions, and even predict the decision a person is about to make before they are conscious of making it.

Such developments may have controversial ramifications. In Britain, fMRI scanning technology has been sold to multinational companies, such as Unilever and McDonald’s, enabling them to see how we subconsciously react to brands.

In America, security agencies are researching the use of brain scanners for interrogating prisoners, and Lockheed Martin, the US defence contractor, is reported to have studied the possibility of scanning brains at a distance.

This would allow an individual’s thoughts and anxieties to be examined without their knowledge in sensitive locations such as airports.

Russell Foster, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, said rapid advances in the field were throwing up ethical dilemmas.

“It’s absolutely critical for scientists to inform the public about what we are doing so they can engage in the debate about how this knowledge should be used,” he said.

“It’s the age-old problem: knowledge is power and it can be used for both good and evil.”

More information about mind reading, go to:

http://peacepink.ning.com/forum/topics/information-about-mind-reading

Hakuna Matata

James — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:32:52 EDT

What the hell, I'll put it on her anyway. What are they going to do, kick me off?

Closer to God

Hakuna Matata

III

The reinforced double-steel door of the underground parking lot slowly retracted sideways across our view. It was too impossibly heavy to rise vertically. We sat waiting in the Pajero, DCM next to me in the passenger seat and Burt just behind her. Staff Sergeant Stevens pushed another button and rock barriers at the top of the drive began to sink into pre-formed slots. He held up one hand, watching the stones, until they were gone, replaced by metal grates that snapped loudly into place. His hand moved and became a salute. The kind only a Marine is capable of making. I nodded at the man, putting the Nissan into gear. Mrs. Haggerty waved to him, as well, but I knew the salute was intended for me. I smiled my appreciation. His arm came down. He pointed at the windshield as I drove by. I looked at the small white card under the wiper, then reached my hand around through the open window and claimed it.

Bright afternoon sun had replaced the rain, and a cooling wind blew through the Pajero’s open windows, as we waited to take a left onto Limuru Road. Traffic was heavy, and Kenyan’s gave no quarter when it came to driving. We plunged into the melee but didn’t have far to go. Muthaig’s crowning feature was the Safari Park, Kenya’s only real five star hotel with any local flavor.

We waited to take the turn into the hotel.

“May I call you Joyce?” I asked.

“No, you may not,” the DCM shot back, not looking at me, instead examining the wedding band still located on the appropriate finger of her left hand. “You can call me Joan,” she relented. “I hate the name Joyce.”

“You look terrific, Joan,” I said, quite truthfully.

“Fuck off,” Joan stated, her voice evidencing disgust, “don’t try your smooth, urbane, man-of-the-world crap on me.”

I checked the rear view mirror, to see Burt trying to cover his smile with one hand. He avoided my eyes.

“Thank you,” she followed up, unaccountably. The woman was confounding me. I was afraid to speak, but felt somehow, that she wanted me to say something.

I was in a verbal minefield.

“How long have you been divorced?” I tried, figuring that almost every divorced person I had ever met loved to talk about the divorce, and how rotten the other person was.

“None of your God damned business,” she hissed, massaging her wedding band hand, but looking out the side window. I waited for more, but nothing came.

“Two years?” I offered.

“Two years?” she turned on me, speaking the words loud enough to make me raise my right shoulder and wince. “Two years? What kind of idiot are you? Oh, I almost forgot, you’re a spook. One of those Southern-Fried-Chicken-University types who populate Langley. What’d you major in, Bo Weevil Mating? If I’d been divorced for two years, do you think I’d still be the DCM for that idiot?” Spittle hit my cheek.

I heard a barely audible giggle from behind me, but I didn’t look in the mirror. I finally hustled the Pajero through the broken ‘tiger-teeth’ jam of the opposing traffic.

“Ah, no,” I blurted out to her series of questions, driving as fast as I could manage to get to the hotel as quickly as possible.

“No, what?” she yelled. “No, you have a degree is something else, like maybe Burro Husbandry, or ‘Poor-White-Trash’ farming?” I shook my head, in agony.

The huge pyramidal structure of the Safari Park main building appeared and I headed the car for it like it was a laser-guided smart bomb. Supposedly the willow reed thatched buildings had been designed with clues taken from native Kenyan hovels, but in truth, there was nothing in the country that looked like the place.

Without meaning to, I skidded the Pajero to a halt directly in front of the lobby, and jumped out. I moved around the vehicle to get Joan’s door, but one of the bellmen had already attended to that. She stood waiting. Burt was out and leaning against the back fender, as if ready to enjoy more of the show. The show being my complete humiliation.

Joan headed straight for the lobby. I followed closely behind her, noting how powerfully she strode, her black pumps clicking loudly across the tiled floor of the entrance. Burt ran into me, because I had run into Joan. She had stopped too suddenly for me to avoid her. The three of us grabbed one another and swayed.

“Oh great, slimed by a Halloween spook,” she exclaimed, pushing herself from my fumbling grasp.

“Would you stop that?” I said, as quietly as I could to her retreating back.

“Look what happened to the last guy who got outed on your watch?” I followed up. She flinched, but kept walking.

“Good one,” Burt whispered behind me, which made me frown.

We trailed behind the fast moving woman through the lobby and out the back, around a great blue pool surrounded with palm trees of all sizes, and on past the cascading series of wonderful waterfalls that gave all the interior rooms of the establishment a special serenity. The Hilton, and the Sarova hotels have better rooms than the Safari, but none can come close to matching its ambiance. I knew where we were headed. The Nyama Choma Ranch Restaurant was the only thing left between us and the Muthaiga jungle forest. It was simply the finest African food restaurant in Kenya. Nothing else was close. I yearned for an Ostrich steak covered in Monkey-brain gravy. No monkeys involved, of course. Its only a name.

Under one side branch of the falls I caught a flash of movement. Then it was gone. It had been part of a head, sticking out of the bushes, viewing our arrival. I slowed. Burt stumbled into me. I was a little shaken, as I came to a stop, while Joan disappeared into the opening of the restaurant.

“What?” Burt inquired, backing up a step.

“I wouldn’t take an oath on it, but I think the Lebanese just checked us out from beyond the falls.” The water pouring down upon the rocks made talking difficult, but Burt got my message. He turned automatically, putting a palm trunk between himself and the falls.

“You still got that hand cannon under your coat?” I asked, remaining in the open. If we had walked into an ambush no thin palm tree was going to save us.

Burt nodded, but did not make any moves to access it.

“Got anything else?” I asked, feeling a bit naked.

Burt showed me three fingers, held down at his side. Special Forces hand chatter. I always liked the one where the leader takes two fingers of one hand and aims them at his own eyes, so everyone will look at him. In practice, however, I’d found that the gesture, like so many, was all for show. Anybody who could see the gesture was already looking.

“Three?” I said, in amazement. “The Mau Mau’s were put down in 1960, for Christ’s sake. Give me anything small.”

Burt leaned down by genuflecting on right knee, hand sweeping back to flick the bottom of his pant leg upward. Quickly and smoothly, like an unfolding python, the thick muscular man rose up and delicately inserted a .45 Caliber AMT automatic into my open left hand. I stuck it immediately into my front trouser pocket. The five shot auto was small, yet as thick as a full blown Colt. The bulge was noticeable, but I had little choice. Klingon’s preferred to die fighting in combat, or so they said on Star Trek, and I was not going down unarmed.

“What does it mean?” Burt whispered, his eyes never leaving the area of the falls.

“I don’t know. Not good. What would he come here for? If Haggerty decided on Executive Action, then why would the man come where the man is? He’s a U.S. Ambassador, for God’s sake. And how would he know where he was? I haven’t been able to make sense out of anything since we were out there on the Serengeti.” Joan came back out of the restaurant, looking even more impatient then when she’d walked in.

“What the hell are you doing?” she hissed, clicking up to us.

“Admiring the falls,” I covered.

“Oh great, a gay spook and his cultured Troglodyte,” she complained, in exasperation. “Paul’s in there having lunch with one of his mysterious companions.

Should I announce you or do you want to make a grand entrance?”

“We’re coming. Please show us the way,” was all I could say. The woman did not elicit lengthy response, not without dealing out considerable pain.

“What’s a Troglodyte?” Burt asked, from behind. I was about to answer when I had another thought. I stopped again, this time with the four-top table, where the Ambassador sat with some unidentified white male, in sight. “Back out Burt, this could be a hit on Haggerty.” Why else would the Lebanese not take a taxi home, but instead head straight for his antagonist. Who was the Lebanese? He’d acted as prey, very convincingly, but he wasn’t acting that way anymore. Burt backed up to the restaurant entrance, and then disappeared into a hidden alcove. I moved to Joan’s side at the table.

“What’s this?” Paul said, slowly getting to his feet. He stared at me in surprise, and recognition. I stood stunned. The man could only have recognized me if he had a file photo. I relaxed a little as I realized that someone might have called him from the embassy. Cell phones worked amazingly well in Nairobi. I didn’t carry one but I was willing to bet that Burt had three or four under his “Q” designed safari rig.

“Sit,” I commanded the DCM, pulling out a chair for her. She hesitated.

“There’s danger here, sit and act like everyone else,” I continued. She took the chair. I sat at the one next to her, across from the two men. The Ambassador joined us.

“What,” he began, but I held up my right hand. I slid my left hand into the .45 pocket at the same time. The automatic was double action, I knew. In the silence over the table a distinct metallic click sounded. The automatic was off safety. All four of us sat frozen.

“You can worry about me later Paul,” I said, conversationally. “The same Lebanese, the subject of our attention a few hours ago, was out by the falls a few minutes ago. I let him off near the airport, where he was supposedly going to go into hiding. I might have erred and cost you your life, but I don’t want Joan here, or your friend, to go out with you. What do you think?” The waiter came over and placed water, without ice, in front of both Joan and I. We sat in silence.

“Ah, how sure are you,” Paul began to ask, but I cut him off.

“This is the Choma, and the waiter just brought us glasses of water, not bottled water like you have.” I smiled, wondering if the man would get it, as I prepared to go to the floor and attempt to crawl behind some nearby decorative rocks. If anybody opened up I could count on Burt to provide intense covering fire, but his ammo wouldn’t last long. The only safety might be found in staying less than a foot off the ground. An assassination at such a notable hotel and restaurant would have to be over in seconds. Surviving the first few seconds would be everything.

“The waiter’s not a waiter?” Joan said in a low tone, her voice shaking. “What have you done Paul? What are we in?”

“Alright,” the Ambassador said, ignoring his ex-wife and speaking directly to me. “Maybe I was wrong about you. I apologize. What do we do?”

I was amazed. The man was apologizing for attempting to kill me. I sighed.

Being an operational agent for the Agency could not be taught in schools or learned in books. It was too bizarre for that.

“We leave. Slowly, without fanfare, you move toward the kitchen over there Paul, while your friend heads for the washroom in back. Joan, you’re going out all the way to the street, where you’ll wait in the Pajero. You drive. I’m going to knock my silverware onto the floor, then lean down to pick it up. If there’s fire, then you all drop and stay where you are, without moving at all. If there’s fire, it‘ll probably be at me, here at the table, where they intended to shoot. The silverware hitting the floor is your cue. Got it?” Nobody said anything. “Tell me you got it?” I instructed.

Joan murmured something, while Paul and his companion said yes at the same time. I pushed my fork onto the floor. It hit with the sound of a ringing bell.

Everyone moved. I went to one knee, then leaned under the table and fell to my stomach, turning to bring the .45 out and up. I had no more time than that. The phony ‘waiter’ stepped out of the bushes holding an old-fashioned double barrel shotgun. The ends of the barrels looked huge, as he stood only two feet over me.

My AMT was only inches from his stomach. I laid there, looking up into his eyes while taking all the slack, and a little more, out of the .45’s trigger. Slowly, he moved the shotgun aside, cocking his head, as if in question. I gave him back the thinnest of smiles, wondering what Burt was thinking, since he wasn’t doing anything. The man stepped back into the bushes and was gone. I breathed for the first time since I’d hit the floor. I then crawled to the front of the restaurant, right past the host at the front desk. He looked down at me in amazement, until he saw the automatic in my hand. Then he dropped down and disappeared.

I got up and began loping back through the areas of the falls and pool. I saw nothing of anyone, save a few tourists laying near the water or taking pictures of everything around. At the main entrance I paused to observe some kind of film crew who were set up down near where cars circled to let people off. The Pajero idled near their large, tri-pod mounted, camera. Several large Caucasian men milled nearby, and one long-haired young woman. The passenger door snapped open. I saw Joan at the wheel and Burt’s hand sticking out from releasing the door. I jumped in.

“I think we’re gonna be famous,” I said, but nobody laughed.

Joan jerked the Pajero into gear and tore off back around the circle, headed for the traffic mess on Limuru Road. “What happened back there?” she asked.

I was about to answer her when Burt made a comment.

“The woman. I saw her. At the airport in Joburg. I think she was on my flight.”

I twisted around to face him, letting go of my seat belt.

“You flew direct from Johannesburg, and she was on the flight?”

Where where you flying to? You came down from Lake Victoria.”

I watched the big man closely. I had come to trust him, but I didn’t know just how far yet.

“Zurich. Then Zurich to down here. I met Walt up at the falls, to check it out. We had a couple days.”

“Shit,” I said, out loud, turning back to face Joan. “Pull down into the traffic, and then stop. Burt and I are getting out. You take the car to the embassy. You should be alright. I pulled Staff Sergeant Steven’s card from my shirt pocket.

Give me your cell phone number.” I took out my pen to write.

“Are you crazy? You’ll get killed out there. All this because somebody was on the same plane? And that whole restaurant thing? You’re looney and paranoid, and maybe dumb as a post.”

“The number,” I repeated, patiently. “There was a guy with a shotgun at the restaurant. I think he was there for your husband.”

“Double gun.” Burt added, from the back seat. I looked back to him in question.

“Looked like one of those Holland and Holland things. Big bore.

Elephant gun.”

I whistled. A gun like that would sell for a cool twenty-five thousand dollars, if not more. Whoever was involved in the mess we’d stepped into was very well heeled. And that was bad news indeed.

“He’s telling the truth?” Joan asked of Burt, her voice going up.

“Yes, Ma’am,” he replied. “Donner is the best there is. Not well liked, but the best there is.”

I would have commented but the back window of the Pajero blew out, along with the rear driver’s side glass. There had been no sound, except the whoosh and tinkle of breaking glass. Joan screamed, then drove recklessly right out into the middle of Limuru Road. Cars, vans and trucks careened and honked, but no contact was made. The SUV stalled out. I looked out the back, through the gaping hole, over the seat where Burt crouched down. The camera crew had scattered to cars and vans, now fighting one another to get out of the narrow driveway.

“The Railroad Station. We’ll wait there. When I call you, come get us.”

I flew between the seats and shot out the driver-side passenger door, Burt behind me.

“Like hell I will,” Joan yelled, “and you don’t have my number.”

I stood and put my hand up against the flow of traffic, which flowed around us like a thick school, of metallic fish. I liked the woman. She was tough as iron and she wouldn’t abandon us after we’d stood up for her. She’d figure it out.

A red mini-van, with a strange hand-painted poster of The Lion King splashed across its front, screeched to a halt, almost touching my hand. A gold stripe ran around the van’s body. I’d stopped a Matata, one of the thousands that constantly prowled the streets of Nairobi. They came in three kinds, regular, gospel and teeny. The regular one’s were for regular people, like most tourists. The gospel one’s blared reborn gospel music at impossibly volumes. The teeny ones were even worse, pumping out acid rock and rap. The latter two were mostly for locals.

Joan got the Pajero started. She joined the traffic flow. The side door of the Matata opened and a young hand waved. Burt and I crawled inside. There were already three teens inside, plus the driver and his ‘conductor,’ who collected the fare. Matatas had gotten their name from their original fare of three shillings. Now, the prices were variable, going all the way up to fifty shillings or more. Fifty shillings being about seventy-five cents American. The Matata didn’t move. Teeny conveyances were weird. They would carry people they liked, or thought were cool for free, or not let you in at all if they didn’t like your look. I could tell that the conductor didn’t like our look.

“You got any money?” I asked Burt. He shook his head. I stared at the evil looking teenager in front of me, trying to ignore the blast of horrid rap coming out of the Matata’s speakers. We had to get the hell out of there. I took off the Omega and held it up.

“Omega, Speedmaster, Astronauts took to the moon, four thousand U.S.” I said. The kid looked at the watch.

“Sare,” he said, then grabbed the watch. Sare, I knew, meant ‘free’ in the local street slang called Sheng. The kids spoke it, like pigeon in Hawaii.

“Sare, my ass,” I responded, angrily. “Railroad Station, right now.”

I tried to see out the windows of the mini van, to see if our new band of followers were there. They had to be. But I also knew they’d never be able to stay on us unless, somehow, they’d been able to attach a GPS unit to our specific Matata. Not likely. Not likely at all.

Matatas were the locusts of Nairobi streets, and they were nearly indistinguishable in outer appearance. We drove Limuru toward Mombasa Road in a veritable sea of them, our vast overpayment of fare overwhelming the driver’s natural tendency to stop for anyone else. Our teenage riders stayed with us to the station, without complaint or comment.

“Who were those guys, anyway?” Burt asked.

“Don’t know,” I answered. “They’re Caucasian, all of ‘em, and I don’t think they’re with the Lebanese. They look like Agency. And they fired on us.”

Ironically, a piece from the Lion King soundtrack blared out from the radio. Hakuna Matata played. I looked around at my fellow passengers. They didn’t seem to get the irony at all. Then the words of the song hit me. “Hakuna Matata! It’s a wonderful phrase. It means no worries for the rest of our days.”

Making Love Out of Nothing at All...

James — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:08:16 EDT

I put my latest chapter of the espionage novel called "Closer to God," on the other blogsite I maintain: http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com, simply because some people have complained when I have put fiction on this site. Not that anybody seems to be reading much on the Obama site anymore. I never get comments at all. You could say that maybe my writing is just not good enough to elicit commentary, but I don't think that is it. The grassroots wonder of what was established by the initiation and continuation of this site before and right after the last election was quite something, and great fun to be a part of. But our population loses direction easily. Our culture bores even more easily. And being fickle today, at home and abroad, defines most Americans and most American policy.

We are making believe our money is worth something, and it is still working...marginally. We are making believe that there are actually jobs to perform in this country, instead of in China, India and Indonesia...where we sent them. Friedman stated, last week in the NY Times, that the fault for that is simply that Americans did not properly prepare and educate ourselves for the future, when they had the chance. The man is a liar and low-life cur, making millions while he laughs about why American's should quite justifiably be paid the same as Chinese peasants. And he golfs with the president, when he should more properly be water-tortured in Gitmo. But there is no real justice in the universe. There is only the eternal movement of information packets. Quantum mechanics. And there is no mercy, consideration, or even intellect at work in quantum activity. We are the merciful, the considerate and the intelligent part of this universe...when we choose to be. Right now, in this period of time, we are choosing to be dumb as hell, and reaping the benefits of that stupidity.

We are so busy admiring, and holding up to high exaltation, the phony 'stars' of our world, that our world is falling apart around us. In the Chicago Tribune, yesterday, the headline was all about people (including families, women and children) living in storage lockers, garden sheds and abandoned cars. The tragedy of it. Above that headline was a four inch column across the page, with a photo of a fifteen million dollar a year baseball player smiling out at us. The Sports section took that photo and made it the size of the whole page. How many people got the subtle distinction of the idiocy illustrated by that presentation? I wonder. Bret Favre is actually given tons of sympathy as he awaits the big Packers/Viking game on Sunday. Sympathy? How many million is he getting to play for two hours? I love his interviews, however. The man is a drooling idiot when it comes to discussing anything other than his 'game.' Its pretty funny, at least.

We are still in Afghanistan. We are fighting the Taliban. We are at war with the Taliban. What the hell happened to declarations of war and Congressional approval? Gone. We now go to war at a whim, or the opinion of a president. We actually are dumb enough to say that we are depending on our generals in the war theater to tell us whether we should increase or decrease our presence in the war! Now that is as dumb as asking Bret Favre! What general in his right mind is going to say "Oh, cut my troops in half please!!" What do generals do? They make war. How do they get advancement and more power? They make war. And they do it like Bret Favre, by being exposed to about as much danger as a taxi driver or deliveryman. Others are fighting and dying, or coming home with PTSD so bad they will never have any bliss in their lives. We are torturing the wrong people. We have a whole line of bankers, generals and even sports stars whole could profit us all mightily with just a few turns of the screw.

Maybe, one day, prior to the coming disaster in 2012 (Oh please God, bring it on), the common man can celebrate the common man again. They guy or gal working to actually make cars, the people building our roads, the nurses, baristas, waiters and cooks. And those people living in storage lockers (until they are outed and thrown in the streets, because you can't be allowed to live in a storage locker!) who are somehow trying to held life together instead of becoming insurgents.

And that is what is next if we do not make some changes. We will have insurgency here in this country, and we will be no more able to stop it here than we were able to in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. We have a fiction of stopping it in Iraq, and we are going to try applying that same fiction to Afghanistan. We fortify the main population centers, then construct armored conduits to connect them, travelled by heavily armored vehicles. Then we claim that our 'surge' has worked. The natives laugh at us, as they properly should. We are not at war with Iraq or the Taliban. We are at war with our own self-imposed ignorance, and our willingness to glorify the ephemeral stupidity of stardom.

http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com

http://www.themastodons.com

http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com

"Sea of Heartbreak"

James — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:01:00 EDT

CLOSER TO GOD

Sea of Heartbreak

The water has always meant a lot to me. Off the beaches of Oahu I made my mark, surfing Queens and body-surfing Sandy. Victoria Falls called me from the far Northern canyons of Upper Kenya. Its thunder only evident form reports spoken by people who’d been there. I was not one of them, but I was going to be. I just knew it. But I couldn’t go before I finished what I was about.

Jomo Kenatta Airport in Nairobi is a mess. But so is the whole country. I drove the Pajero there, following my drop of the Lebanese. I had dumped him on the edge of town, to be taken back to where ever the hell he was going to hide out, by local taxi. Burt, Tom and Walt were my concern. I needed them gone in order to consider and act upon what I had learned from the nearly dead Lebanese. I threaded my way through traffic in front of the airport, easily and fluidly, like a man piloting a vehicle in which he really did not care who he violated or struck. I was all of that.

I pulled over at the SAS sign. I waited for the three men, who had been my mission companions, to depart. They too could take cabs to wherever they were going, as they would not be getting rid of their armament in the airport proper. Tom and Walt got out without comment. Burt stayed in the font passenger seat, however. I motioned for him to go, but he simply shook his head. I shrugged. What could I do? The mission was over. The team dispersed independently following a mission. There was no precedent for the way the man was acting.

When the Pajero’s doors were closed I sat in silence, the car’s tiny six cylinder engine humming quietly.

"Well, what the hell is this? Where do you want me to deliver you?" My questions had merit and made sense. Burt chose not to interpret things that way.

"Take me wherever you're going," he said, nonsensically.

I massaged my forehead with my left hand. Some local in uniform pounded on the car’s curbside fender. I put the shift lever in first and pulled away into the sea of chaotic traffic I so much enjoyed swimming in. I did not drive with a purpose. Instead I eased along with the other ill-mannered drivers avoiding contact.

“I’m headed toward the embassy,” I said, not comprehending why Burt was still in my car.

“Figured…” he replied, “but that’s probably a bad idea.”

I was stunned by his response. I pulled the Pajero to the side of the road, running two wheels up over a cracked and broken curb. We sat there. Women walked by with stuff piled four feet high atop their heads. Passing cars beeped in anger at the slight blockage our vehicle left by the side of Outer Ring Road. They were not without complaint. Only Mombasa Road was busier.

“Is Burt your real name?” I asked, not looking at the man.

“Is Jack Donner yours?” he replied. I nodded.

“Bertram Lauren, like the clothing guy, Burt said. I gave him my hand and he took it.

“You want to tell me about it?” I began, hoping for anything, but not expecting the response I got.

“You have a reputation, with that big brain of yours,” he began, telling me without saying it that he had known my real name all along. Burt was removing himself from the realm of normal Knuckle-dragger stock very quickly. “Back there, out on the Serengeti, you missed something. I thought you’d catch it, but you didn’t.” He didn’t go on, although I waited.

I thought back to our operation.

“The suppressor,” I said, tentatively. I had caught it subliminally. We had been given an assignment out on the Veld of Africa. There was no need for a suppressor. Silencers were large, uncomfortable to carry and difficult to properly conceal. They also identified anybody who had one as a potential professional killer. Why had Burt carried one, then installed it with me by his side? I turned my head to look at the bigger man, for the first time since leaving the airport. I felt a slight taste of fear. I didn’t like where our conversation was going. At all. But I said nothing. There was nothing for me to do but wait. I was unarmed and trapped inside a vehicle with someone who was not only well armed but a coldly-capable professional killer.

“I don’t work for State. Whatever that guy said once about a warm bucket of spit, well he should have been talking about State.” Burt spoke the words in obvious frustration, not looking over at me. “And you’re an agent for Christ’s sake. We don’t do agents. Not ever.”

“John Garner, Vice-President under Roosevelt,” I replied, still uncertain of what might happen. “He was talking about the Vice-Presidency as a job, but I understand what you mean.” Burt’s comment about me being an agent, therefore not target material, had jarred me. I had responded from the analytical quadrant.

“Why’d you talk to the guy? The mission brief said that we were, under no circumstances, to question or listen to the man.” Burt made his comments as if under great duress. I hoped that he was not still making up his mind about what he would or would not do.

“I found our instructions to be questionable,” I replied, honestly. “The mission is mine once the operation begins. You know the rules. The dead agent was named Smith. Ex-Marine. Decorated. Class act. He had a wife and three kids. You?”

Burt looked over and met my eyes.

“No, I got nobody,” he stated, his voice flat.

“Me either,” I replied, my voice pitched to the same tone.

“For them, then,” I finished. Burt shook his head.

“Brain damage would be too light a phrase to use for this kind of thing. More like brain death. We don’t know anything. We have nothing. What the hell can we do?”

I breathed easier. It didn’t seem, for the moment, like I was going to die on the front seat of a rental Pajero in downtown Nairobi. The car’s air-conditioned interior was, again, cool enough.

“Haggerty. He’s who we have,” I said.

“Just what do you know?” Burt asked.

“The Lebanese was dead on Haggerty’s orders. He was the one sent in to out Smith. That’s what he said, and I believe him. But what the hell was Smith doing in that prison? And why did he get taken out for the revelation? By who? No, all we have is Haggerty. What were your instructions, and from who?” I waited for Burt to consider. The kind of thing we had become involved in was off the books. There was no Agency support or approval for what we were discussing.

“My Control Officer told me that there was a possibility that you might go rogue,” Burt said, his mouth twisted into a strange smile. “Its not unheard of you know, especially with…well… your track record.”

Somehow, Haggerty, probably with the support of one of the many Assistant Secretaries of State, had reached deep into Agency Operations. The violation was monumental. I reflected for a moment. Such things happened in movies, like ‘Three Days of the Condor,’ but not in real life. Not in my experience, or the experience of any of the senior agents I had ever known.

“I’m going to the embassy. You in or out?” I put my right hand on the knob of the center shift lever.

“I don’t know,” Burt answered, but his own hand did not grab for the door handle. I put the Pajero in gear and headed North on Outer Ring. I drove the car carefully, trying to think of every detail of what had happened.

“Why was the Lebanese out there in the game park? What was he doing with the Masai? They aren’t normally violent, but they had him pretty painfully tied,and in bad shape.”

I talked to myself, as Burt made no comments at all. The roads to the embassy took us through Muthaiga where the Safari Park Hotel was located. Once a retreat for British Army Officers it had grown to be my favorite hotel in all of Africa, when I could cheat the Agency out of enough money to stay there.

The embassy loomed up from one side of the road we took winding around the Kenya Teachers facility. The place was built like the concrete and steel blockhouse it had been intended to be. The previous embassy, taken out by terrorist bombs years before, had been downtown by the Railroad Station. The embassy was totally obvious in its American ugliness, even without the huge U.S. flag waving out front.

I drove around the side of the structure where a big driveway led to the underground garage. It was blocked near its entrance by huge movable chunks of stone. I stopped to wait. We didn’t wait long. A Marine Staff Sergeant walked up the ramp to our car. I sighed in relief. It was Stevens, the contingent commander. I’d known him in Hong Kong when he’d been a Buck Sergent. I wondered if he’d recognize me.

“You packing, sir?” he asked, making no motion to salute, instead moving up and down the side of the Pajero to see what he could of the vehicle. I said that we were.

“Get out and go down the driveway. They’ll see you on the camera and let you in. Leave the keys.” We did as instructed, my faith in the United States Marine Corps once more confirmed. Once inside we waited for the Staff Sergeant to return, while a PFC and a Corporal stood silently by, checking us out but not being invasive about it, or patting us down. The Staff Sergeant was buzzed through the steel door. He tossed the car keys to me, then walked past us through an open door.

“Better see the DCM about what to do. The Communications Director is out of embassy,” he threw over his shoulder. I moved to follow him, waving Burt to accompany me. The Deputy Chief of Mission was second only to Ambassador Haggerty himself. I understood the Staff Sergeant’s predicament. The Communications Director was code for Embassy CIA contact. Every embassy and consulate in the world had one. Without him to front for us, someone of upper management power would have to make decisions, which fit into my plans exactly.

Three flights of stairs up at a run brought us to a hallway inlaid with exotic woods, common to Eastern Africa. Burt and I stood catching our breath. Stevens saluted crisply, pointed at an open office doorway a few yards away, then departed back down the stairway. I walked into the office, its floor covered with a beautiful baby-blue rug so thick that my entrance was made in complete silence.

A middle-aged woman sat at a large desk facing the door, flanked by two smaller desks nearby, where two younger women sat. None of them paid immediate attention to our presence. I noted that atop the larger desk was a small nameplate with the word “Haggerty” carved across it, and presumed we were in the Ambassador’s outer office.

“Is Haggerty in?” I asked, deliberately failing to use the man’s title. I wasn’t in a formal mood. The woman looked up. A Bose Sound Machine behind here played some country tune as she appraised us. “How did I lose you, oh where did I fail…” came out of the expensive little device.

“Who’s asking?” she asked, “And what are you doing up here unannounced?”

“I’m Jack Donner and this is Burt,” I waved one hand back, as I spoke, my tone mildly respectful. I ignored her second question. I also noticed her color and expression change.

“Who let you in?” she asked, as if inquiring about pet animals, her voice becoming more demanding. The other two women stopped working and looked at us, reacting to her tone.

“Is Haggerty here or not?” I overrode her, raising my voice slightly.

“I’m Haggerty,” she shot back, standing. I noted that she was a beautiful well-formed woman.

“You’re Paul Haggerty?” I was shocked.

“No, I’m his ex-wife, Joyce. I’m the DCM.”

“They allow that?” I squeaked out.

“Who?” she said, leaning aggressively toward me, putting her hands down on the surface of the desk. I just shook my head, nonplussed, then decided to regroup. State was a weird place I hated and would never understand.

“I’m here about Smith, who died a few days back. You probably heard something about that.” I moved a step closer to her.

“Leave us,” she stood, sweeping her arm toward the two other women, who instantly filed out, closing the thick wooden door behind them. “I presume, for whatever misplaced reason, that you’re here to report the accomplishment of your mission?”

I stared at Joyce Haggerty in wonder. I had never been a part of any direct mission discussions with embassy staff before. It was unheard of in my experience.

“It would seem that just about everyone knows about that mission,” I countered, indicating my surprise, as I thought more deeply about it.

“Did you perform it successfully?” She said, crossing her arms, and looking back at me with a severe expression.

“Maybe you misunderstood something, either before, or right this minute,” I said. “I don’t report to you. I don’t take orders or mission assignments from you, and I sure as hell don’t discuss the results of such matters with you, or your husband, for that matter.”

“Ex-husband,” she said, raising her own voice. “So what are you doing here then?”

Her comment stopped me. What was I doing there? I was coming right back at a man who had somehow co-opted operations people at CIA to risk taking me out if I failed to perform to specification on a mission. But I wasn’t going to say that.

“The Lebanese told me Paul sent him in, to give the information about Smith.”

Slowly, Joyce returned to her seat, looking pensive.

“What are you going to do?” She asked, after a minute. I was surprised again. She was giving me nothing by her responses. Did she know? What did she know? How deep was she in? It was almost like being debriefed by an Agency Control Officer. You gave, you did not get. I liked her. She was bright, good-looking, enough miles on her to give her wisdom, and she didn’t take any shit.

“Paul and I are going to have a little talk,” I told her, truthfully.

“About what?” she came back.

“About what Smith was doing in that prison. About what the Lebanese was doing in that park. About why an experienced agent was killed in an allied country that couldn’t give a damn about his affiliations. And some other personal stuff.”

I didn’t tell her that I was going to have a possibly terminal discussion about someone who had ordered me dead.

“Don’t,” she stated. I saw honesty in her expression. “Go your way and leave it alone. It isn’t your job or your fight. Get on an airplane. You don’t want to be anywhere near this. You’re not that good, no matter what your reputation, otherwise you’d have just done your job.”

She knew I had not allowed the Lebanese to be killed. The longer I was in front of the woman the more she was getting out of me.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“He’s not here,” she responded, shaking her head.

“That’s not what I asked, I pushed her. Burt moved to my side.

“I’m not telling you. I need him undamaged, for the moment, and I don’t like the look of your pet gorilla.” I marveled at the woman’s courage, even if she was in her own office inside a U.S. Embassy. She knew she wasn’t in front of regular diplomatic personnel. She also had let me know that she either knew, or had guessed, that I might have good reason to be violently disposed toward her ex-husband.

“You know this is going to resolution in some fashion. I can’t let it go, not and survive out here. Look at us. We have nowhere else to take this, and I think you know it.” I looked at the man standing next to me, to make sure Joyce had not reached him emotionally, but I need not have bothered. Burt had reverted to his Knuckle-dragger role. He stood impassive, as if there had been no insult intended by the woman’s harsh words. I looked back at her, and we waited.

The CD repeated its play, the same song coming up again; “…the lights in the harbor don’t shine for me…” played quietly through the room.

“What is that song?” I asked.

“Its called ‘Sea of Heartbreak,’ she answered.

“How very appropriate,” I said. She sniffed, but I saw a fracture in her visage when she did. Quickly, she turned her head, then leaned forward to take a call. Somewhere inside the hardened career woman was a heart.

Burt and I waited some more. Finally, she was done.

“I’ll take you to him,” Joyce relented. She stood, then walked around the desk. She wore a knee length blue dress. Classy. I liked the effect, but I gave no indication. I didn’t have to, as she read me anyway.

“I don’t like people who do what you do, or in your line of work, so don’t bother with the phony charm. You have no morals left, if you had any to start with.” I could not help smiling at that. Not that she was wrong, I hadn’t resolved such issues for myself yet, but that she would say it to my face made her more attractive still.

“Just tell us where he is and you can avoid being seen in our company,” I said, not being able to avoid smiling at her last insult.

“He’s at the Safari Park Hotel, not far from here, but you’ll never find him without me, and besides, I don’t trust you…and Brutus here,” she pointed at Burt. “Nobody else out there will know what you are. None of you people look like you should.”

I wondered how I should look. We followed her, as she opened the door and headed for the stairs. It was fun to follow her. For some unaccountable reason her company made me feel human for the first time since the mission had begun.

Blood might flow across the wooden floors of the Safari Park but I would endeavor to see that it wasn’t hers. She moved fast down the stairs, getting ahead of us.

“How did I lose you, oh where did I fail…” I sang, almost inaudibly.

“On the sea of heartbreak,” Burt whispered, coming down the stairs right behind me.

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Give Me Strength

James — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:01:37 EDT

CLOSER TO GOD

Give Me Strength

God is out there somewhere. I don’t know where. Once, when I was in an African prison I yelled back at some would-be reborn Christian preacher: “God has never come to my bunk.” He had been, as is the custom of reborn preachers, ministers or flock-leaders, indicating that God had spoken to him in the night, and instructed him regarding something I ought to do. For some reason God never instructs His acolytes in what they ought to do on their own, other than raise money and make members of the flock serve them.

It does not say, anywhere in the Bible, that God will not give you a burden too heavy to carry. That common saying is just pure bullshit. Think about the death camps in Germany, just for a second, and consider such idiotic God-driven nonsense. I do not believe you can ‘Trust in God,’ or even ‘Let go and let God.’ I think those are buzz-phrases created by reborn idiots. I do believe that if you pray to Him for strength, however, that He will definitely send you more problems so you can grow stronger in attempting to deal with them. My own life is proof of that little homily.

Nobody knows I smoke. Not one soul living on this planet. A couple of people used to know, but they died shortly after they discovered my secret. I don’t like to execute people without some ceremony. Instead of offering the intended victim a cigarette, however, I have one myself. They get the extra time while I finish the process of smoking it. That’s only fair. I smoke Marlboro cigarettes. The long ones with filters. Like the guy on the horse in those old ads. He died of lung cancer, I heard sometime back. I don’t think I’m going to die of lung cancer. I picked a career, or rather it picked me, that will likely preclude that.

It was raining just beyond my tucked-in corner of the railroad station. I smoked there because the station was filled only with members of the native population.

They knew I was nearby, back pressed firmly into the peeling wooden boards, but they made believe I didn’t exist. To me that was the same as not knowing anything.

About my smoking secret, I mean. The natives were like Knuckle-draggers, they didn’t count as living souls. They were just there, like the rocks, the trees or even the rain. I’m not prejudiced on the basis of color. I’m just prejudiced on the basis of the business I’m in.

When it rains in Nairobi, it rains for quite some time. The water coming down is clean, however, unlike the rest of the dusty dirty city. I love Nairobi, don’t get me wrong. And I love the rain in Nairobi because it drives everyone inside, then cleans the streets and universally broken sidewalks. I walk in the rain. I breathe it in. Plus its cool. Nairobi is pretty hot most of the time. I like it cool, but I don’t get many assignments up on the Bering Sea, or down in Tierra del Fuego. Africa is kind of my beat. And I’m not a Knuckle-dragger either. I don’t do the wet stuff at all. I’m one of the rather more rare guys who have guys who do that sort of thing. Maybe there are a few women who do what I do, I don’t know. I’ve never met one, or even heard of one, but these are changing times. Some of those guys, the Knuckle-draggers, were who I was standing near the rain waiting for. The train was overdue out of Lake Victoria, stopping in Nairobi, before making its way down to Mombasa.

Across the tracks I could see old rusting steam engines sitting on bare ground. Steam had given way to diesel ten years back. I remember riding the steam- powered train down to Mombasa, so long ago. The night had been filled with burning cinders, falling down and away past the dining car windows. It had not seemed romantic at the time, but in retrospect it was all of that, and more. I wistfully drew in the last of the Marlboro smoke, then pinched out the stub and replaced it in my red and white cardboard pack. I would leave no evidence of my secret behind, not that anyone around me cared. Kenyan natives are great. They pretty much respect and appreciate white folk, like me. They give deference and they don’t get in your face, as in some other cultures.

The train came in. Just like that. No whistle of warning. I was not in Europe or America. The rules were different. The old cars rocked slowly to a stop, compressed air hissing out from the brakes, resembling steam, up and down the line. I waited.

The natives crammed aboard the train as the passengers tried to get off. It was a mess of water-soaked bedlam, but it wasn’t noisy. The people of Kenya are a quiet lot. Another feature I like.

My guys climbed down just as the whistle of the engine finally sounded, indicating that the train was pulling out. Conductors in blue sweaters and black caps pushed and pulled stragglers aboard. The train creaked as it eased from the station. I turned and headed for the gray Nissan Pajero parked illegally in front. It was an old rental thing with a five speed, unlocked because there were no locks, only holes in all the doors. But I had left nothing inside. I carried nothing except my cigarettes, money and a passport. The rental papers for the car were not even there, as I wouldn’t return the vehicle, just call and tell the agency where to pick it up. My guys would have stuff. It was what they did. If they got caught with any of it, then they’d have to count on some other operatives to get them out of trouble. Or not.

I drove. Two of them in the back and one up front with me. We didn’t talk. They knew the mission. We were not, and were not going to be, friends. If there was to be violence I didn’t want to be grieving over the loss of any of them, or they of me.

Fucking New Guy Syndrome we’d called it, after the Nam. And it had its proper place in our work.

I drove fast. As fast as a three liter Pajero would go, which was not that fast at all.

One hundred and forty kilometers per hour was about max, which was about seventy miles an hour, or so. The roads out of Nairobi were built for about half that, however, so it was a rough scary ride. The guys gave no indication of discomfort or fear, however. It was that kind of business.

We were headed for a village just South of the big National Wildlife Park outside of Nairobi. I never could remember the park’s name. The village is a Masai place. The Masai are tall lanky natives who wear weird throw-back attire and carry long ugly spears. The men, anyway. And they stink to high heaven, as they never ever wash. Ever. I like them, but then, my former wife had once told me that I had no sense of smell. I guess didn’t have much taste in women either. I’d never found any who trusted me. And I couldn’t be around people who didn’t trust me. If they were ‘inside the wire’ kind of women, part of my tribe, then my trustworthiness should have been beyond question. I trusted them. But women don’t trust so easy, I discovered. So I was alone. I worked in a field that did not lend itself well to either trust or believability. Alone was not okay, but it simply had to do.

The village appeared next to the road about twenty clicks on the other side of the park. The inside of the Pajero was filled with dust, even though the rain had done a lot to cut it back. The park had been nothing but dirt roads and dust. Rain only sealed the top inch of the dust, and the dust went down a good four inches deeper than that. The village was a ram-shackle affair of branch constructed hovels, mud huts and half-thatched roofs behind flimsy fences. The fences were to keep animals in, not out. No self-respecting lion would ever allow itself the indignity of being speared full of holes on the interior open plaza of a Masai village.

I drove through a likely hole in the fence. Chickens and a few dogs scattered. I knocked down a few small pieces of stacked junk, and maybe a three-stone fireplace or two. I parked in the center of the village and shut off the engine. We sat. Nobody appeared. The Knuckle-dragger next to me spoke for the first time.

“I’m Burt, and these are Tom and Walt,” he said, as he pointed toward the back seat.

I didn't laugh when a cloud of dust formed near the end of his extended finger.

“Hey,” I responded, looking carefully at each of them. We would not be friends, but our mutual survival was now dependent upon the performance of each of us. Missions involving violence seldom ever went smoothly. Aberrantly strange things were always cropping up.

“The target is being held somewhere nearby. I don’t know where. Our contact is supposed to meet us here." I said the words with finality. We were not going to go social at this tense point of the mission.

I looked at my Omega. It was the same watch the astronauts had worn to the moon. Or so the salesman had told me when I’d purchased it. It was pretty damned accurate, I had to admit. Our source had twenty minutes to make contact or I’d scrub the mission. While we waited, we were targets ourselves. It was a risk that came with the territory. We waited in the vehicle. It wasn’t likely that any force was going to take out four white guys, armed to the teeth, sitting inside a rental four-wheel-drive in the middle of a pacified Masai village. Getting out could lead to booby-traps or other hidden hazards. We waited inside.

A tall Masai warrior appeared between two of the hovels to our front. He motioned with his characteristic spear. The four of us got out of the vehicle. I looked at my guys to assure myself that nobody was coming out locked and loaded. Violence escalates from the things you do before violence happens, I knew. We needed to be just four white guys walking, escorted, across the Serengeti. Everyone was cool.

We followed the nearly seven foot tall native through the saw grass just East of the village. It was a well-beaten path so we had no trouble. We could have followed the tribesman with blinders on, as his aroma was that overpowering, even twenty feet back. I do have a sense of smell I thought, sending a mental message to my ex-wife.

We came upon a clearing at the base of one of those huge Baobab trees, its trunk at least twenty feet thick. A man lay on his side next to the tree, his hands tied behind him with what appeared to be vines. The man was white, wearing the phony safari gear so common to visiting tourists. Even his canvas hat was there, on the ground next to him. I was surprised by that, as the Masai are known for stealing anything not tied, glued or welded down. The warrior stood next to the laying man, planting the base of his spear down on the man’s torso. He looked at me, but said nothing.

I pulled a two inch stack of Kenyan Shillings from my back pocket. I’d exchanged two hundred dollars worth of U.S. currency at the rail station. I handed the warrior the cash. He grabbed it, then walked away immediately, back toward the village. I waited until the five of us were the only humans evident out on the Savannah. Then I crouched.

“You alive?” I asked the downed man. His eyes opened. He nodded vigorously. I stepped back. Automatically, Tom and Walt grabbed the man by his shoulders and roughly seated him, back to the Baobab trunk. They backed away.

“Burt,” I whispered. Carefully, Burt took a medium sized automatic out from under his rain coat and handed it to me. Then he reached inside the coat a second time and came out with a polished black cylinder. I handed the automatic back. Burt finished assembling the silenced killing machine.

“We’re not supposed to talk to you, but what the hell, I never do exactly what they tell me to do anyway,” I offered to the man against the tree, by way of passing time, as I moved to get my pack of Marlboros out.

“I did it,” the man whispered out. “I know you’re his people. I did it. I went to that prison and told them about him. I admit it. But I had to do it. If I didn’t do it he’d have ruined my family. Our business would have been gone. We have nowhere to go. We’re Lebanese. We’re not welcome anywhere. We don’t even have passports.

I even dressed like a tourist, just like he told me.”

I sat on my haunches, no longer reaching for my box of cigarettes. The mission was to take out the man who had deliberately informed on one of our agents, getting that agent very dead, indeed. Payback was uncommon to the intelligence business, I knew, at least payback in violence, but there were certain circumstances. This had appeared to be one of them, as the dead agent had also been a highly decorated former Marine Officer and well connected politically. Unlike myself, he’d also been rumored to be well-liked. The fact that I’d been instructed not to talk to the target had not gone down well with me, although I had not remarked at the time. If I have to be involved in someone’s passing, I like to make certain that some sort of justice in the universe is being balanced.

“What have you got for me?” I asked. The Lebanese just looked back at me.

“If we are not to end this all right here, then you have to give me some reason why your passing should not take place.” I stared into the man’s black eyes, seeing nothing but truth. Everything thing he’d said so far had reeked of truth, and that made me very uncomfortable.

“I don’t have anything,” the man said, his chin sagging to his chest.

“Who was going to destroy your family?” I prompted him. He looked up. Then he looked from Burt to the other two Knuckle-draggers, then back at me. I stood, both knees and the small of my back in pain at the same time. I grunted.

“Take a hike out on the Serengeti for a bit,” I said to Burt. He grimaced, then handed the suppressed weapon to me. I took it. I knew the three of them probably had six more weapons among them, or more. Knuckledraggers were big on toys and equipment, cramming diplomatic sacks with all manner of pyrotechnics.

I waited for the guys to get a good thirty yards down the path, before I squatted back down.

“Paul Haggerty,” the Lebanese expelled with one soft breath. I said nothing back.

I didn’t have another question. I was too shocked. Paul Haggerty was the American

Ambassador to Kenya. Ambassadors never ever get involved in operational agency business, at least I had never heard of it happening before. For an Ambassador to be involved with the killing of a field agent was almost too impossible to consider.

“I understand that you have to kill me. But my family. They won’t be hurt, will they?

I have a wife and four children.” He tried to go on but I held up one hand in front of his face.

“Do you have any idea why Paul would want the agent dead?” The Lebanese shook his head violently. “Do you have any idea who killed our man?” I followed up, beginning to wonder exactly what had taken place in that prison outside of Nairobi.

Kenya was not exactly an enemy of the United States. The Soviets were long gone.

Terrorism was mostly a geographically limiting situation, excepting 9/11, of course.

Why the revelation that a man was an agent of the CIA would get him killed in a place like Kenya had no comforting answer that I could come up with.

The man shook his head again. I believed everything he’d told me. But I didn’t know what to do with it.

I rose to my feet once again with same groan. I stepped away from the Baobad and saw Burt pacing in the distance, nervously. If I got myself killed it would not look good in the after-action report, for him, or the other guys. They had to do what I said, but they also had to protect me. I waved him back.

“Cut him loose,” I said, when the three had shambled back. I handed the silenced weapon to Burt. “We won’t be needing that.”

Tom and Walt got the Lebanese to his feet and cut through the vines. The man glanced around him like he was some sort of hunted bird, looking for the next direction of attack.

“What do I do?” he asked, finally. I took the eighteen remaining hundred dollar bills of mission cash from my front pocket. I put the small stack into his hand.

“We’re taking you back to your family. Then you’re going to disappear for a few weeks while I get this all sorted out. And I mean disappear. Do you understand?”

“You did not know?” the Lebanese asked me, looking at my three guys, without going on. I shook my head.

“There will be trouble, I think,” he said, with an air of finality.

The village was as dead when we returned, as it had been when we’d arrived. It was obvious that no one had touched the Pajero. The villagers wanted nothing to do with us. As I drove madly toward Nairobi, the Lebanese wedged in between Tom and Walt in the back seat, I supposed that nobody in the U.S. Embassy was going to want anything to do with us either.

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Rally for president Obama, tomorrow, Courthouse, Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia

jsq — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:45:22 EDT

This happened at Jack Kingston's Health Care Town Hall, Valdosta, GA, 28 Sep 2009: a veteran was booed for saying respect the president. To Kingston's credit, he shushed the crowd.The speaker was George Rhynes, who is one of the organizers of a rally tomorrow, Saturday 17 October 2009, on the Lowndes County courthouse steps, Valdosta, Georgia. Invitations on

Democrats.org and Facebook.com. But you don't need an invitation: just show up!

Time to HIT THE PHONES: Bring JUSTICE to the PATRIOT Act!

mquintus-Mark of Baltimore — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:48:42 EDT

Your A C T I O N is urgently needed! We have only a few days to "help" the Senate Judiciary Committee restore civil liberties to the PATRIOT Act and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Doing this will reign-in unchecked and unconstitutional authority used to collect information on innocent Americans, while preserving needed provisions to track down and stop suspected terrorists. Here are the facts:

Shortly after 9/11, bowing to requests from the Bush Administration, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act (Public Law 107-56). It contained provisions to allow the government to intercept, search, and track information possibly (and possibly not!) related to terrorism against the United States.

Although many provisions of the PATRIOT Act and FISA changes were needed and constitutional, other provisions granted virtually unchecked government powers ranging from overbroad "sweeps" of information to unconstitutional affronts to a free society.

The PATRIOT has 3 major "sunset" provisions - set expiration dates, to force Congress to review the laws before extending them.

On September 17, a bill was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) and 9 other Senate pro-Constitution cosponsors to correct PATRIOT and FISA problems. This is the proposed JUSTICE Act (JUSTICE standing for Judicious Use of Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts, S. 1686). It represents a comprehensive reform of the most intrusive parts of both the PATRIOT Act and FISA changes. Thirty-seven organizations, ranging from the ACLU to People for the American Way have thus far enthusiastically endorsed the JUSTICE Act.

On September 22, however, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill (S. 1692), cosponsored only by Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-MD), to extend the sunset provisions of the PATRIOT Act with some modification, and to modify some of the most troubling standing provisions of the Act.

This Thursday, October 1, the Senate Judiciary Committee will "markup" the Leahy-Cardin bill. (Markup is a Congressional process where committee members debate and amend a bill, and then report the amended bill for further action.) It is imperative that Sen. Feingold's bill be incorporated into the Leahy-Cardin bill.

Here's what to do:

1. Call/Email Sen. Patrick Leahy with the following basic message (If you are a resident of Vermont, it is vital that you so identify yourself.):

“I urge you to fully incorporate the JUSTICE Act (S. 1686) into the proposed PATRIOT Act Extension (S. 1692), to reign-in unchecked and unconstitutional authority to collect information on innocent Americans, while preserving needed provisions to track down and stop suspected terrorists.”

PHONE: (202) 224-4242
EMAIL: senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov

2. Also send the above message to the following senators: (Again, if you are a constituent, so identify yourself)

Specter: (202) 224-4254 Email: send from Specter Email Page
Cardin: (202) 224-4524 Email: send from Cardin Email Page

3. Call your own senators, and urge them to cosponsor the JUSTICE Act NOW!

4. Give us your best ideas in reply/comment to help us win this battle.

The Justice Act

mquintus-Mark of Baltimore — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:26:48 EDT

Today, a group of progressive Senate Democrats led by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI, Chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution) introduced the Justice Act, to fix the horid Patriot Act, protect your liberty, protect your privacy, and restore Constitutional principles.

A complete copy of their announcement follows. I will keep you posted as developments proceed; you will need to support this legislation with your own Senators and later, Representative.

- Mark Dorlester

-----

Press Release:

SENATORS INTRODUCE PATRIOT ACT FIXES TO SAFEGUARD AMERICANS’ RIGHTS

JUSTICE Act, Introduced on Constitution Day 2009, Would Fix Long Standing Problems with the PATRIOT Act and Other Surveillance Laws

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jon Tester (D-MT), Tom Udall (D-NM), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Daniel Akaka (D-HI) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) have introduced legislation to fix problems with surveillance laws that threaten the rights and liberties of American citizens. The Judicious Use of Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts (JUSTICE) Act would reform the USA PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendments Act and other surveillance authorities to protect Americans’ constitutional rights, while preserving the powers of our government to fight terrorism.

The JUSTICE Act reforms include more effective checks on government searches of Americans’ personal records, the “sneak and peek” search provision of the PATRIOT Act, “John Doe” roving wiretaps and other overbroad authorities. The bill will also reform the FISA Amendments Act, passed last year, by repealing the retroactive immunity provision, preventing “bulk collection” of the contents of Americans’ international communications, and prohibiting “reverse targeting” of innocent Americans. And the bill enables better oversight of the use of National Security Letters (NSLs) after the Department of Justice Inspector General issued reports detailing the misuse and abuse of the NSLs. The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Wednesday, September 23rd, on reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act.

“Every single member of Congress wants to give our law enforcement and intelligence officials the tools they need to keep Americans safe,” said Feingold. “But with the PATRIOT Act up for reauthorization, we should take this opportunity to fix the flaws in our surveillance laws once and for all. The JUSTICE Act permits the government to conduct necessary surveillance, but within a framework of accountability and oversight. It ensures both that our government has the tools to keep us safe, and that the privacy and civil liberties of innocent Americans will be protected. When he was in the Senate, President Obama was a strong ally on these issues, and I look forward to working with his administration to find common ground on commonsense reforms.”

“The Government must use every legal tool available to protect us from the threat of global terrorism. But when those tools override Americans’ fundamental rights and liberties, we run the very real risk of never getting them back,” Durbin said. “As we move toward reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act, we’re proposing commonsense changes to better protect our most basic constitutional rights. Our bill strikes a careful balance between the law enforcement powers needed to combat terrorism and the legal protections required to safeguard American liberties.”

"Like a lot of Montanans, I have serious concerns about the PATRIOT Act and how it was implemented,” Tester said. “What this bill will do is add commonsense so we can fight terrorism without ignoring the Constitution and without invading the privacy and civil rights of law-abiding Americans."

“In recent years, I believe our government has failed to protect the constitutional right to privacy for American citizens,” Tom Udall said. “The JUSTICE Act strikes the right balance between respecting the needs of our law enforcement to pursue suspected terrorists and upholding the rights of law-abiding citizens to live free from unnecessary government intrusion in their lives. I firmly believe we can keep our nation secure without infringing on the inherent rights of the American people. ”

“We must provide law enforcement with the tools they need to protect our country, and do so in a way that also safeguards Americans’ rights. This legislation addresses both of these important objectives by ensuring our security and upholding our cherished constitutional protections,” Bingaman said.

“Every American understands that we have got to do every single thing we can to protect the American people from terrorist attacks. There is no debate about that. Some of us believe, however, that we can be successful in doing that while we uphold the rule of law, while we uphold the Constitution of this country, which has made us the envy of the world,” Sanders said.

Senator Akaka said: “The JUSTICE Act will allow intelligence agents to monitor terrorism suspects while putting checks in place to ensure that law-abiding Americans’ privacy and civil liberties are protected.”

“The JUSTICE Act rights some of the basic wrongs of the PATRIOT Act, which became a poster child for the Bush Administration’s lack of respect for Americans’ privacy rights,” said Wyden. “This bill is designed to keep every law-abiding American free from arbitrary government surveillance. At the same time, it gives law enforcement the agility needed to go after actual terrorists and spies who would do our country harm.”

Fact Sheet JUSTICE Act Of 2009

The Judicious Use of Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts (JUSTICE) Act would reform the USA PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendments Act and other surveillance authorities to protect the constitutional rights of Americans while ensuring the government has the powers it needs to fight terrorism and collect intelligence.

Title I – Reasonable Safeguards to Protect the Privacy of Americans’ Records

Sections 101-106 – National Security Letters

The bill rewrites the National Security Letter (NSL) statutes to ensure the FBI can obtain basic information without a court order, but also adds reasonable safeguards to ensure NSLs are only used to obtain records of people who have some connection to terrorism or espionage, and to provide meaningful, constitutionally sound judicial review of NSLs and associated gag orders.

Section 107 – Section 215 Orders

The bill would reauthorize the use of Section 215 business records orders under FISA, but with additional checks and balances to ensure these orders are only used to obtain records of people who have some connection to terrorism or espionage, and to provide meaningful, constitutionally sound judicial review of Section 215 orders and associated gag orders.

Title II – Reasonable Safeguards to Protect the Privacy of Americans’ Homes

Section 201 – “Sneak & Peek” Searches

The bill would retain the Patriot Act’s authorization of “sneak and peek” criminal searches but eliminate the overbroad catch-all provision that allows these secret searches in virtually any criminal case. It would shorten the presumptive time limits for notification, and create a statutory exclusionary rule.

Title III – Reasonable Safeguards to Protect the Privacy of Americans’ Communications

Section 301 – FISA Roving Wiretaps

The bill would reauthorize roving FISA wiretaps, but eliminate the possibility of “John Doe” roving wiretaps that identify neither the person nor the phone to be wiretapped. It would require agents to ascertain the presence of the target of a roving wiretap before beginning surveillance.

Section 302 – Pen Registers and Trap and Trace Devices

The bill would retain the Patriot Act’s expansion of the FISA and criminal pen/trap authorities to cover electronic communications, but would allow pen/traps to be used only to obtain information about people who have some connection to terrorism or espionage. It would impose additional procedural safeguards to serve as a check on these authorities.

Section 303 – Telecommunications Immunity

The bill would repeal the retroactive immunity provision in the FISA Amendments Act.

Section 304 – Bulk Collection

The bill retains the new warrantless authorities in the FISA Amendments Act but would prevent the government from using that law to conduct “bulk collection” of the contents of communications, including all communications between the United States and the rest of the world.

Section 305 – Reverse Targeting

The bill would ensure that the overseas warrantless collection authorities of the FISA Amendments Act are not used as a pretext to target Americans in the U.S.

Section 306 – Use of Unlawfully Obtained Information

The bill would limit the government’s use of information about Americans obtained under FISA Amendments Act procedures that the FISA Court later determines to be unlawful, while giving the court flexibility to allow such information to be used in appropriate cases.

Section 307 – Protections for International Communications of Americans

The bill would amend the FISA Amendments Act to create safeguards for communications not related to terrorism that the government knows have one end in the United States.

Section 308 – Computer Trespass

The bill would guard against abuse of a warrantless surveillance authority in the Patriot Act that allows computer owners who are subject to denial of service attacks or other episodes of hacking to give the government permission to monitor trespassers on their systems.

Title IV – Improvements to Further Congressional and Judicial Oversight

Section 401 – FISA Public Reporting

The bill would require limited additional public reporting on the use of FISA.

Section 402 – Use of FISA Evidence

The bill would apply the Classified Information Procedures Act to the use of FISA evidence in criminal cases, and allow the use of protective orders and other security measures in civil cases, to ensure that courts have discretion to allow litigants access to information where appropriate while still protecting sensitive information.

Section 403 – Nationwide Court Orders

The bill would permit a recipient of a nationwide court order to challenge it either in the district where it was issued or in the district where the recipient is located.

Title V – Improvements to Further Effective, Focused Investigations

Section 501 – Domestic Terrorism

The Patriot Act’s overbroad definition of domestic terrorism could cover acts of civil disobedience by political organizations. The bill would limit the qualifying offenses for domestic terrorism to those that constitute a federal crime of terrorism.

Section 502 – Material Support

The bill would amend the overly broad criminal definition of material support for terrorism by specifying that a person must know or intend the support provided will be used for terrorist activity.

Is this the change we fought for and are going to get?

Fred Sullivan — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:01:16 EDT

A health care plan to expand the insurance industry and hurt the sick and the poor. It sure does look like special interests are going to win. I am not sure that it has been everybody sitting at the table transparently. It does not even seem like the American people really had representatives just our corporations. I guess it is a good thing corporations are imortal and really don't need health care.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29988909/sick_and_wrong/7

It looks like we are going to have a health care bill everyone will hate other than the health insurance industry and pharmacuetical countries.

Time to Get the Job Done

jsq — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 07:38:45 EDT

On this Labor Day morning I sent this feedback through whitehouse.gov:

I campaigned for you, like many others. We elected you and majorities of Democrats bigger than Newt Gingrich ever saw to get the job done: end the war, close gitmo, end warrantless wiretapping, implement universal health care, and the other things you said you would do.

I'm sure it's hard once you get there, but gitmo is still open and there's a lot of talk that you're thinking of abandoning the public option on health care. A public option is already a compromise. The real solution, as you yourself once said, is single-payer. Medicare for everyone!

You can't please everyone. You really can't please Republicans in Congress, because they're not bargaining in good faith: their only goal is to defeat you by defeating health care and anything else you propose. Trying to do it in a bipartisan way was laudable. It didn't work. You held out your hand and they bit it. Time to get the job done.

FDR didn't pass the New Deal by asking Republicans to approve every detail. He accepted opposition and actively campaigned to defeat it and to defeat those Congress members in the next election. His biographer Jean Edward Smith said recently:
“This fixation on securing bipartisan support for healthcare reform suggests that the Democratic Party has forgotten how to govern and the White House has forgotten how to lead.”

LBJ didn't pass Medicare by giving away the store to the Republicans. He said what he wanted and he twisted arms until he got it. If your Blue Dogs are standing in your way tell them to get in line if they want your support for their next bill or at the next election.

You're losing us, your progressive base. We are the great majority of people in this country who want real health care reform, not some compromise with the profit-gouging insurers. Nobody else should have to die so a CEO can get a bonus.

It's time to lead, Mr. President. It's time for you and the Democrats in Congress to do the job you said you would do; the job we elected you to do.

ISSUES with Health Care Insurance Lets break it down

Food Fascist — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:33:28 EDT

BANKRUPTCIES
Every year one million Americans
claim bankruptcy due to a major medical issue
Senator Bernie Sanders,
Thom Hartmann Show 8. 2009

INSURANCE CAPS
Once your cap is used say in a major medical
you are virtually uninsurable afterwards.
Representative Slaughter, Ron Reagan
Show 9/1. 2009

POST CLAIM UNDERWRITING
You pay your premiums faithfully but
when you have a major medical matter,
the company drops you from your policy.
Ex insuance broker, Stephanie Miller Show
8/17. 2009

CLAIM DENIAL
You pay your premiums faithfully, something major happens. Your claim was denied.
A bonus was paid to the employee for denying
your claim. Caller to Stephanie Miller Show8/17. 2009

LOSE YOUR JOB LOSE YOUR
COVERAGE / PORTABILITY
Then, if ill, this becomes a lapse in coverage
and a possible pre existing condition.

PRE EXISTING CONDITION
There are disabled persons and others
for whom will never be insurable.
How could this happen in America?

WORKMANS COMP/ MALPRACTICE CASES could be virtually be eliminated.

COST INCREASES TIES UP COMMERCE
The average business can spend as much
as 20% of their costs on health insurance making
them unable to compete with companies from
other countries that do have nationalized coverage.
USA 18-22% GDP is health care while other

THE COST OF NON INSURED
The average insured can pay as much as 1000. Per year more to compensate for those who are uninsured and relegated to using the emergency room as a source of primary care for which a tooth abscess can become a 250,000 surgery.

american needs new dimension of human being in action..

OSHO REVOLUTION — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 06:28:12 EDT

visit hariomaggrbharti's blog or write hariomaggrbharti@gmail.com or visit www.oshorevolution.blogspot.com

"Pretty Woman"

James — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:54:28 EDT

I keep thinking about the movie I saw recently regarding Julia Child. Julia Child was a 'regular' woman. A bit too tall, too broad, too heavy and filled with way too much hilarious intellectual insight. She would never get a television show again, and I don't care how great a cook she was. We are well into the 'pretty woman' culture, which has been served up to us by Hollywood and the mainstream media. We get Kelly Rippa, and her 'right in your face' sexual presentation. She is another human twig, trotted out as an example of what women should be, in order to appear attractive at a distance. That she is unhealthy in her thinness is never even discussed, except in rare tabloids. In other shows, and in movies, we get the same thing. five foot eight women who weigh a hundred pounds or less. They, of course, also serve in very macho roles. They kick butt on all manner of men, in spite of the obvious fact that they would break like twigs if ever faced with a real man in a real physical situation, and I don't care how much study and practice might be honed into the woman using martial arts techniques. the marital arts are subject to physics like everything else.

The internet is not helping either. Internet porn is about forty percent of the traffic out here I have read. The women who are used in the videos and still photos are all the same. They all look like Kelly Rippa in some way or another. How are real women to compete with these sick miniaturized Amazons? How is our species to continue, at least in this culture, if men find regular women unattractive? And how can regular women be treated with respect if they have to stack themselves up against the caricatures presented in all forms of this pervasive media? Hence the latest attacks on women's rights. These attacks are shunted off into the area of reborn Christian revival, but in reality, they are all over the place. Just like many of these protests about health care, which are not protests against health care at all, but attacks against Obama (in particular, about the race of Obama), attacks on Roe v. Wade are attacks against women. They have little to do with the life of the unborn. Any more than the health 'opponents' really care about health care. Look at the makeup of the audiences of those town hall meetings. Almost all the people there are well past the age where they depend upon private medical care at all. They are on medicare. So why are they at the meetings? One might think it is because fears have been built up about the aged losing their benefits because of the coming national plan. But that is not true at all. The old people are not really worried about that. No, they want that black guy out of the White House. And they are supported by armed idiots carrying assault rifles all around them. Why we do not have a national law that reads "no guns are to be carried or possessed by citizens within one mile of the president, unless he is just passing through the neighborhood," I have not a clue.

But back to women. Have you noticed that all the new newscasters coming aboard are lovely young women? Almost one and all. Older men are titillated. And what can anybody really say, without it seeming that the complainer is prejudiced against women having these high paying jobs with such grand visibility (at substantially lower wages than their male co-anchors, I might add)? But the move is more of the same we are having pushed at us. The women are all cut from the same cookie cutter template. Thin. Young. Beautiful. Examples of how all women should be. Without that ever being said.

I want regular women back on television and in the movies. I want people like Julia Child. I want women that I can look up to because they are smart and verbally adroit. I want to observe and think of women with intellect and style. I am sick of Hollywood plastic. Sick of flat foreheads with not a single line. Sick of bust lines that are just idiotic. The creatures of Hollywood are abnormal, unhealthy and do a disservice to all women in this country. And I am sick of them being shoved in front of me at every opportunity to be held up as some sort of goal for all to emulate.

It reminds me of what has happened to us with sports stardom. Bret Favre. Tiger Woods. And all the rest of our professional 'sports' players. They are among the highest paid beings on this planet and what do they do? They move a ball, whatever kind of ball, up and down a measured piece of turf in some controlled way. They have been doing that, and only that, all of their lives, since they were small children. They are nothing else. They are ball controllers and movers. And our culture goes nuts over them. They are our people of courage, our people of worth, integrity and honor. Which they are anything but. But the truth does not matter. There they are, with all that money and power, and the bully pulpit anytime they want to stand up and take hold of it.

Our culture is frozen in time. We have run into a barrier we could never have conceived of. We have run into the monster of creation we invented to entertain us, but which now is slowly and inexorably forcing us to accept mythology over science, lies above truth, and scripted fiction over reality. We are fast becoming a culture of entertainment where the word 'work' is applied to others, located just outside (having come up from Mexico) or much further away (think India and China). And the results of this rapid glacial shift are coming in. This economy is not coming back. Got that? It will only come back when the engine of work, reality and results that built it is restarted, and then run with renewed vigor at high rpm.

http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com

http://www.themastodons.com

http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com

Alternative Invocation

thepoetryman — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:34:25 EDT

Through flood… and quaking earth
And winds, those before our grand machinery
Anointed the solemn granite
With our foundation, left great trust in the future
Of their manuscript here
Upon our country's doorstep,
That such swaying of the pillars toward failure
Be remedied in the steadfast parchment.

On this day of days
Let us consider love,
Compassion, freedom, hope.
The sky, ocean, seas, soil,
Home to our limbs and joy
Long misplaced and low,
A glee sunken in our brow
Like the whisper of our end
Bending the corners of our mouths

Misplaced in the shadow of sand and war.
Let this day be remarkable with its coming,
Daring our better selves to stand upon
The shoulders of history and predict our future
With its smiling on the children of peace

In one long, joy filled stride.
We have but to embrace ourselves; the wish
We formed at this day’s birth
Beneath the sun, reaching down to us, above
The staining of men in trenches
Whose lives wait in favor of ours.
Holding for a rise from ashes,
To cleanse this; our foul-bred hunger.
Equipped with mercy

And kindness
The prayer need rise out of us, but no further
Than we might travel among the poor.

No further than the broken,
The weary, hunkered down, begging
Of our hands to fetch them up.

All of us, our strength, a sturdy column
Unbent by the weight of courage,
Tempests in the empty halls of power,
Rumbling a refrain of unity
As we break open the shackles of misuse
Long left to fester on the people’s steps,
Find that this dawn is upon our shoulders,
It is we, who now negotiate with our own death,
Our girth of indifference.

Rise now to greet this day,
Our moment elevated from spirit,
Breathing, throbbing, ready,
Not for one, not for country,
But for love.

Use it for more than our self-seeking,
Use it as if it were the breath of mercy kneeling down.
Indulge its hunger, it has been waiting so long,
Hunkered down, bound and bleeding, ready
For our rising shoulders to hoist it tall again.

© 2008 mrp/thepoetryman

Public Option is a must!

Fred Sullivan — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:45:10 EDT

Public option is a must in health care reform! The house bills are closer to what is needed. Coop's unless seeded with billions of dollars and millions of members will not be able to offer plans in a more affordable way than a private insurer.

1. They will not have enough members to negotaite better rates

2. They will not have suffcient capital

So plans would be structured with huge deductables and copays which make people put off preventive care.

I really think it is time for the president to take a leadership role say he will not sign a bill with a strong public option. It will help us in the field to state clearly the benifit of reform. Many lives are at stake 18,000 die because of limited access to health care. We fought war of choice for 3 trillion and 1000's of lives. It is time to fight a real enemy it is in our border our broken health system.

The 3 princples 1 affordablity, 2. choice, 3. cost reduction are fine. I have canvased for with these points are a start but they will not be realized with out the public option. Maybe the wishy washy stance on the bully pultpit is just to get the bill out of the senate. But is does not seem like clever strategy is the answer. Clever strategy is not leadership. With out a clear method of achieving these it weaken both the desire and will to work for this plan.

Our base can turn out with leadership it is forthright and honest and counters mis information. Our president really needs express leadership and let the public now that only viable and simple mechnism is a public option. The american people need and desire leadership and true reform!

Let's keep working. I am glad the my rep. who i visited Rep Ablbio Sires took a leadership stance and wrote a sign the letter to secretary of HHS and let it be know he will stand with the people and support the public option.

As an entrpenuer one knows it is a huge burden if even possilbe to offer health care in the first 2 years. It is a risk start ups and start upemployee's are often put in when creating jobs. A national healthcare option would allow small business to create many more new jobs if there was a public option! Also allow our large corporations to compete.

Prologue to "The Bering Sea,"....final edit

James — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 15:47:28 EDT

Prologue

Joshua Boatwright sat patiently, sipping from his small espresso cup, unsure of how he had come to be where he was, tucked into the back corner lobby of the Sheraton hotel in Crystal City. He looked out a floor-to-ceiling window onto a well kept courtyard. No, it was not his place to be there. Analysis was what he did, not personal liaisons. His calling in life was to assemble the smallest shards of data and form sweeping mosaics of truth, in a world filled with lies. Joshua was proud of his nickname, "Tevie," a shortened version of the motto he lived by. "Triple Verfification" was that motto. Three sources to establish the veracity of each shard of data he added to his mosaics, to produce pictures of sanity in an insane world. His team of analysts, located four miles away, at CIA's Langley complex, had not conferred the nickname because of his work, however. Unknown to Joshua, they had given him the name because of their knowledge of his only recreation, which was watching television non-stop when not at the intelligence facility.

Diminutive and fidgeting, he sipped and fretted over the tops of his prescription glasses. They had jet black frames, for affect. He did not need them to read or drive. But they gave him a distinguished look, or so his ex-wife had told him, and they did help when examining the tiniest detail of photo intelligence. The Agency's electronic surveillance, although not legally allowable for personal use, such as tracking one's spouse, had proven ruthlessly effective, just after she'd commented on his spectacles.

A big man entered the lobby near its grand entrance. He wore an expensive blue suit. Its Italian cut did nothing, however, to disguise his morbid obesity. Joshua flicked his eyes towards the man, then grimaced. The man's florid complexion, bulbous nose and polished smile gave his identity away. The Senior Senator from Iowa stopped in the center of the large foyer, to take the place in. No assistants or attendants of any sort accompanied him, which did not surprise Joshua at all. The Senator noticed him sitting alone in the corner. Joshua glanced at him before looking down at a folder he had placed very exactly on his table. Noticing a slight tremor pass through his left wrist, he quickly tucked it down between his thigh and the arm of the chair. Never had he encountered anyone as an Agency representative, and certainly never a sitting senator, much less one who chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee.

"There's no shame to having a little bit of fear here," he whispered inaudibly to himself, breathing deeply inward as he heard the powerful senator's approaching footsteps. Joshua squared his shoulders imperceptibly, his back ramrod straight. He had the weight and reputation of the entire Central Intelligence Agency behind him. He would neither genuflect nor grovel before anyone.

"You'd be their man?" the senator inquired very calmly, stopping astride Joshua's chair. Joshua started to rise and raise his right hand. He quickly caught himself, however, putting it down and reseating himself. He was not there, at a clandestine meeting, to be social, or to even appear social.

"Stay seated," the senator said, paternalistically, his voice soft and silky. He lowered himself with visible difficulty into the narrow chair Joshua had purposely placed at right angles to his own before a low coffee table.

"Got something for me?" the senator asked into the silence between them. His tone this time flavored with a likability that the analyst instantly hated.

Before any reply could be made, the senator picked up an unmarked but highly classified file Joshua had placed on the table. Neither man said anything while he read its contents. Joshua noted that the lobby was completely empty, save for two clerks working registration near the entrance. The waiter, who had brought his expresso to him had never returned. Joshua hoped he wouldn't, for fear of having to touch the cup and allow the senator to see him shaking. Minutes passed. A bead of perspiration ran down his hairline behind his right ear. Fortunately, it was the ear opposite the senator's position.

"Says here that you boys are gonna go ahead and help me out," the big man in the blue suit intoned, before plopping the file back on the table.

"The usual Agency drivel," the senator commented, acidly.

"You gonna tell me what the plan is?" he inquired.

Joshua cleared his throat to steady himself, then followed his instructions.

"Your nephew is being justifiably imprisoned by a foreign government. His violations, meriting that imprisonment, are in keeping with what we normally associate with serious criminal behavior in our own country. The Agency does not normally involve itself in such matters, particularly where such deviant and anti-social behavior is involved." Joshua halted, having delivered his own righteous version of the background information he had been given during his briefing. After a few seconds of silence he realized that something was amiss. Without looking over, he felt the heat of tremendous anger flow toward him from the direction of the senator's chair. Instinctively, he dropped his left shoulder a millimeter or two in defense, before he caught himself.

"Just cut to the chase son. Don't make me come after your career." The senator's threat was issued in a low tone, more akin to that of an oversized cat purring than of a human voice. Joshua's throat froze, a tendril of fear coursing through him at the mention of his career. He finally cleared it by swallowing several times.

"We're sending our best man," Joshua gasped. "He's resourceful, violently equipped and experienced. No expense will be spared in this operation. But we're sending him in alone. We can't afford, no matter what measures you may or may not take, to have this operation rise to the level of an international incident. Not now." Joshua averted his gaze from the direction of the man from Capitol Hill as he finished his memorized message. He waited for a response, again trying to fathom why he had been selected for the role he was playing. He was in the dark, but Joshua sensed the reason. It was about the fact that his analysis group had provided the data which sanctioned the mess-of-a-mission the so-called 'best man' had pulled off, against all odds.

He heard the senator arise from his chair. He looked up, but the man was already walking away, his manufactured smile once more plastered to his politician's face. He had made no comment at all, not even in dismissal.

Joshua's shoulders pressed inward, and his head sank to the point that his jaw nearly touched his chest. His trembling fingers grasped the espresso cup handle. He took a shaky sip. He thought of the 'best man' the Agency was dispatching, then smiled weakly for the first time that day. That 'best man' had just come out of West Africa under the bloodiest of circumstances, having improbably accomplished his mission. The skewed manner in which his mission had been conducted would no doubt have the Agency looking like a stone cold, heartless and uncaring beast, and no one in analysis was taking that lightly. His grip steadied as he pondered over what he'd just done. He'd sent a low-life field agent off to save a drug-dealing nephew of a corrupt scumbag senator. This time not the remotest possibility of the mission's success existed.

Joshua Boatwright stood up straight, tucked the classified folder under his arm and strode across the lobby. His mind was already lost in formulation of the final mosaic, as it would appear, when the details of an illegal and doomed mission crossed his desk.

Health Insurance Reform

Jane Anne Jeffries Johnson — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:38:35 EDT

I retired from the Los Angeles Unified School District in February. I felt it was my civic duty to give up my job and live on my retirement, since the economy is struggling. I moved to Friday Harbor, Washington, where the economy is doing better than in California. I am able to keep abreast of the changes President Obama is making toward a more viable society and economy. I urge everyone who voted for him to continue to support him now. The sharks are swarming, and there is blood in the water. It's time to come together as a force for change.

"Sitting on the Dock of the Bay..."

James — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:51:52 EDT

We have just had another of those strange flight travel incidents, which nobody seems to be able to explain or resolve in any way. It seems that a Continental plane pulled into Rochester, Minnesota because of bad weather, then sat on the tarmac, about fifty feet from a gate, for twelve hours. Everyone involved has diligently and rationally absolved themselves of fault in this situation. Again. The passengers suffered pretty badly, with just one bathroom. That bathroom was clogged up and inoperable. No food and no drinks were served by the one flight attendant, while all this went on. The Airport says that the terminal was open and available, but the crew of the aircraft would have had to request clearance to dock. The Airline says it knows nothing at all about any of what went on. The crew of the plane says that the terminal was closed and they had no place to dock. That someone's lying here is being totally ignored.

But it is vitally interesting to listen to interviews of the passengers after they were finally deplaned. The succession of lies that they were told by the crew of that plane is unbelievable. It is almost of daytime soap opera caliber stuff. They were told that the terminal was closed. They were told, time after time, that they would be flying out very soon, until they started to be told that a bus was coming to take them back to Minneapolis (60 miles away). Then they were told that the bus had broken down. They were served nothing by the lone flight attendant, but a pack of self-serving lies. There was no bus. There was no flight clearance. The crew never contacted the terminal to ask for docking privileges. There could be only one motivation for all the lying and misrepresentations. Money. Why else would anyone perform like that crew performed?

Flight crews start getting paid as soon as they pull away from the gate. That crew was well into overtime pay while that plane sat there on the tarmac. Not only that, but the crew was using up hours of 'air' time which would give them time off in the weeks ahead, because of the way flight rules are structured within the industry. The passengers were 'gamed' by that crew. The media allows this to continue by not letting the public know about the true motivation behind this kind of miserable flight violation.

And you might think that the passengers kind of deserved what they got because they did not get violent or complain to the point of intolerance? Think again. Post 9/11. Yes, think TSA. Think about the expressions you yourself observe on many of the near-moronic faces of airport security 'officers.' You cannot, as a passenger, encounter flight personnel, or security personnel, with an 'attitude' anymore. You will be charged with a felony, and our ridiculously skewed court system will find you guilty. It happens more than three thousand times a year in this country. The passengers had to do what they did. They had to stay quiet and take the lies. They probably even knew that they were being lied to. And there is the cell phone issue I heard brought up this morning. Once you pull away from the gate you are not allowed to use your cell phone on the aircraft. Only the crew could give you permission to do that, and guess what. Yes, you guessed it. The crew said no cell phones.

The crew will not be fired or punished for their behavior. Anymore than Officer Crowley will be punished for his illegal harassment, humiliation and arrest of Professor Gates. In fact, they will all be rewarded. The flight crew will get the off time and overtime pay, while Crowley will get promoted and have some badly written book published. Some injustices that occur in our culture are actually rewarded. I am not sure why, exactly. Maybe it is just that Jupiter is in transit, or Venus is trining Mars. But, if the airlines do not stop supporting outrageous behavior committed by their flight crews, there will be an occurance of violence at some point. One of these days, or nights, an overheated and fully stuffed aluminum tube is going to explode like a bratwurst left too long on the grill. That coming event is so easily preventable, but, sadly, I don't think anything will be done. Our whole culture is sitting on the dock of the bay, watching .....

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Its a Wonderful Life

James — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:03:03 EDT

They're back. Oh not those two chicks who did whatever the hell they were doing on the border of N. Korea. No, I mean Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Al arranged for the great swooping rescue by the great swooping rescuer (that would be Bill) so both of those two "whatever the hell they are now" guys are talking like crazy inside a private airline hanger to CNN and the world. Al has introduced Bill, telling us all what a heartfelt sacrificing individual the big galoot really is...to go over and save two young American women from the clutches of that horrid simian dictator. Al smiles that wonderfully vapid Gore smile (which certainly had something to do with his having his election as president stolen) and says great things about Bill. He then introduces the man, expecting, without a doubt, that the great rescuer will say great things back. And Bill does not fail in that department. With one minor exception. He says great things alright, but he says them about himself. Clinton, strange faux blue dog democrat that he is, will go down in history as the greatest credit taker of all time. Al Gore, if he could have maintained the "I'm the guy who invented the internet" phrase credibly, would have secured that title. But no. We get Bill instead. His white hair almost iridescent inside the well coifed hangar, his body thin and in good shape. Gore nearby, sweating, with used car salesman hair and the 'I really am losing weight' girth.

It was also stated, prior to the huge plane rolling in, that Bill was on a private mission (totally unsupported by the U.S. government) to save those girls. I don't know why they bother with such giant introductory lies at events like this staged Hollywood production. Look at the plane! Its a 767, flying all over the world. That alone is about a million bucks of expense. Then there is the protecting of the plane because a former president, with Secret Service protection, is aboard it. How about five million or more to make sure Bill gets to and returns from a hostile country like North Korea. Who is paying all that money? We know damn well it is not Bill or the families of those girls. You and I are paying. Once more. The girls have been 'bailed out.' Now they too can write their books. They do need to take a little time to come up with a story though. Wandering about the country side near the N. Korean border isn't really going to fly.

I am very happy to see that the democrats have done a better job of getting the news away from healthcare, however. That last story they stuck in the way worked wonderfully well, but it did carry some ugly baggage. The Gates affair. This one has more positive elan. Young beautiful ladies of asian extraction saved from the world's most notorious pint-sized dictator. What if the girls had been black? You can tell that I write for Hollywood. Black would have been over the top.

Diane Sawyer, playing her well rehearsed role as the idiot-reporting blond, had the best question though. She posed it to the television audience when the plane was very slowly and majestically rolling into the hanger: "Do you think that Bill Clinton had a chance to discuss succession with Kim Jong?" I did get a kick out of that. I can picture the meeting in my mind. The somber Bill (his affected role for the exchange) leaning to the brightly smiling Kim (his affected role for the exchange) and whispering: "...so,when you're dead, soon who's getting the nod?" I liked the mental image of that. Thank you Diane. Kim is a generous man. I know he will leave that rocky mess of a country to his son. Unlike Bill. Bill would just take it with him. And Bill is still talking as I finish writing this. Al Gore is smiling that silly smile and darting his eyes sideways, waiting for Bill to say something great about him. Bill Clinton is talking about Bill Clinton and Al Gore is waiting for somebody to say great things about Al Gore. It is indeed a wonderful life.

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"Ushuaia" A story of hope...

James — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:03:40 EDT

“USHUAIA”

El Prat was never really finished properly, following the twenty-fifth Olympiad in ninety-two. Not the last part of the last terminal, anyway, where the tattered and beaten Montenegro Airlines plane had dumped me from the flight in. Barcelona was supposed to be one grand city, but I was not going to see it, and that didn’t bother me in the least. As cold and rotten as the rain had been at Golubovci when I had shambled aboard that morning, Barcelona’s warmer overcast sky, visible just beyond the terminal windows, seemed to offer little better.

All the other passengers had filed dutifully toward baggage claim, somewhere else, probably a long ‘somewhere else’ inside the vast facility. Instead of following along I had taken a nearby seat and fallen into it. I had no baggage. No checked and no carryon. Going home in disgrace did not require luggage or belongings of any sort. Your body was required to make the journey, so you could stand and be told what a sad human being you had turned out to be, and, without it being directly said, how it was not their fault that you were such a miserable representative of species homo sapiens.

But I did have cigarettes. American, no less. The good stuff, not that cheap burning Balkan crap. If I’d had drugs…well hell, I didn’t, so, as with the remainder of my life, it didn’t much matter. The people from the plane were mostly gone. Stragglers here and there, straggling aimlessly, like so many people do at airports around the world. I observed them by habit, as I didn’t care at all about them. No players among them, I knew. Even deep covered operations specialists were not difficult to spot, if you had been in the business, and the field, for awhile. I’d been both.

9/11, back home and so many years back, had changed everything, I thought, as I began looking around for a place to smoke even the smallest part of a cigarette. Airports were hermetically sealed environments following 9/11, where smoking had gone the way of the pay phone, and the coin-metered parking out front. I watched a beautiful, but stressed out, woman head toward the opening to the washroom. Barcelona, not home, so it was one of those single unisex things I didn’t care for. Although the woman was dragging a seven or eight year old girl along with her, I mostly noticed her. Tall, elegant, and wearing a beautiful knee length black dress. I noted that she walked powerfully, moved strongly but gave the appearance of somehow being wounded at the same time. I was a predator, and she had the look of prey. I smiled, turning away. Fortunately, for both of us, I was neither a predator of women nor children. Unless it was required of the mission. And there would be no more missions.

I had a decision to make. The greatest decision of my life. The decision about my life. And I needed a cigarette to help me along. I looked back toward where the woman and her child had disappeared into the unisex bathroom opening. Just beyond that opening was a large metal door with yellow writing angled across it. Spanish was not one of my languages, not the writing of it anyway, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the message was a ‘keep out’ message. I could not see any lock on the door’s surface.

Looking around carefully first I arose from the chair and headed for the door. I took out my pack of Marlboros, to use as a cover in case I was encountered. Even so, just trying to use a door marked not to be opened might be a huge violation, not explainable by a person simply wanting to have a smoke.

“Screw it, like it makes any difference at all,” I said to myself in disgust, pushing down on the European-style door lever. I pulled. No alarm. I opened it all the way, stepped into another world, and looked around in surprise. I gently closed the door behind me, leaning down to make sure that there was no hidden device or lock along the height and depth of its edge. I took out a Marlboro and lit it. I leaned against the hard concrete wall opposite the door. I suddenly realized what I was in. I was in a long walled off corridor open to the sky. At one time the corridor must have led somewhere, but the vagaries of construction , and probably security, had caused both ends to be walled off. I looked up at the gray sky. The walls had to be over thirty feet high.

I heard the sound of deep sobbing. I walked a short distance down the long enclosed length of the concrete box. The sound was coming from a vent just above my head, as I stopped. I blew out a great puff of smoke and watched it swirl right into the vent. A child coughed lightly from inside the vent. The vent led into the bathroom I concluded. The woman was sobbing, with her child nearby.

“What are we doing, Mom?” I heard the child say. I listened intently. After a moment of more quiet sobbing, there was silence. Then the woman spoke in a whisper loud enough for me to hear.

“Get on your knees. We’re going to pray to God. We‘ve been deserted hereand have no money. If the authorities take us in it won’t be long before they have us back in that horrid country with those horrid people.”

The accent was American I concluded. The world was a hard place. I imagined one of the countries the woman must be talking about. Saudi, Iran, Jordon. Cultures that were implacable, with respect to their women and children. Rendition had been invented by them, and the Israelis, not by Americans. To be on the run from one of those countries was to be in terrible jeopardy. I drew in more smoke, then watched it snake back into the vent. I heard no more coughing. Instead I heard praying.

“Please Lord,” the woman intoned, followed by the little voice of her child, repeating the same words. “We are in deep trouble. Please send someone to help us. Anyone. We can’t make it on our own.” I heard all the words twice, but it was the little girl’s that went in toward what was left of my soul. Then I shook my head, threw the cigarette down and ground it out with my foot. It was a cold cruel world.It took its toll on all of us and I had my own problems. I tip-toe'd to the door, opened it noiselessly, then slipped back into the real world again. I moved away quickly, until I was well down the terminal corridor.

It seemed like a half-mile walk to the main building where the counters were located. I had an electronic connecting ticket to Washington but I had already made my decision about that. I wasn’t going back there, so I needed a ticket. I picked the United line, as it was fairly short and my original connect had been on it. Maybe they had a flight to South America that did not connect in the United States.

I felt someone behind me, but then, I was in line at an airline counter. Instinctively, I glanced back anyway. I almost groaned aloud. It was the elegant broken-down woman and her child. I quickly turned my head, but not quickly enough. The little girl spoke up at me.

“You’re him, aren’t you?” I grimaced down at her, in question.

“Huh?” I said, intelligently.

“You smell like him," she went on. I stared, having nothing to say to such a comment.

I looked at the woman, but her attention was on everything else around. Her eyes darted all over the place, like those of a cornered animal. The girl kept staring at me, waiting for something.

“I smell?” I finally asked, against my better judgment. She nodded, knowingly.

“My Mom and I prayed for help. I smelled you when we prayed. You’re him, the one God sent.” I stared, my expression one of total disbelief. The girl had coughed at the smoke from my cigarette while in that bathroom I realized, then picked up the same aroma from my clothes. My mind raced. A lot of people smoked, especially in Europe. The girl could not possibly know that the smoke was from me personally. I started to comment, then stopped, looking into the steady deep pools of her eyes. She knew. I knew that she knew. She knew that I knew that she knew. No words needed to be said.

“Por favor?” a woman’s impatient voice said, from the side. I jerked toward the sound. I was next. The counter clerk was motioning toward me. I looked up at her, then back at the child, who smiled, her knowledge and confidence in my role total and complete.

“Jesus Christ!” I whispered bitterly, taking my wallet from my pocket, and then approaching the counter. I took out my personal Visa, the only credit care I owned myself. The Agency cards were not going to work to get me anywhere, I knew, not anymore. My last ten thousand dollars was invested in the Visa card. Or at least my only ten thousand, and it was all credit. I shrugged. What did it matter?

“Here,” I said, shoving the card across the counter, “fly these two people anywhere they want to go.” I pulled back. The woman moved to the counter.

“What?” she asked. “What’s going on? What are you doing?” The woman looked from the clerk to me, than back again. The clerk shrugged like I had, but with more meaning.

“Here, you need tickets out of here. Use my card. Take care of your child.” I said the words in embarrassment, as the woman stood staring at me in silence. I watched conflicting expression flow across her face like the surface of a river’s white water rapids.

“We needed help Mom, and God sent him,” the small girl said, in her penetrating little voice. She pointed up at my chest. I could tell that the woman did not know what to do.

“Take the tickets. Get the hell out of here,” I said sharply. The woman’s face broke, then she caught herself, thankfully stifling a sob. I stepped away, to give her room. The little girl stepped with me.

“Where are you going?” she asked me, conversationally, as if what was happening was just a normal part of her everyday life. I sighed.

“Ushuaia,” I said, thinking that that would stop her, but it didn’t.

“Ushuaia?” she intoned, getting the pronunciation all-wrong. I didn’t correct her, preferring to wait until she and her Mom were out of my life.

“Why are you going there?” the girl went on, as I wondered that she had not even asked where Ushuaia was. I answered as if she had asked.

“Its in South America, down near the tip, in a place called Terra del Fuego. There’s a bar down there I’m going to drink at. I’m done. I’m all done. “ I finished saying the last words with my eyes closed, imagining the total relief I would find down, in that weird wind-swept place, as there was just no point in living on anymore. The bar in Ushuaia was as good a place to end it all as anywhere.

“Can I draw you?” The little girl brought me back with her odd question.

“Huh?” I said, returning to my earlier intellectual response. I noted that the girl had produced a small notepad and pencil from somewhere.

“I don’t care what you do,” I answered, truthfully. I moved to the side to wait. Until I had to sign something. I did not have to wait long. The clerk gestured, the woman stood aside, and I signed the credit card slip, then some other papers. I accepted my card back, but did not put it away.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” the woman began, as I tried to shake my head and stop her. “No, without you I don’t think we would have made it," she went on, "you saved our lives and I don’t know how to thank you.”

“I don’t need any thanks, just get your child back home, or wherever you’re going.”

The woman nodded. I knew she was aware of my discomfort. She took her papers, turned, then turned back and kissed me on the cheek. She smiled for the first time, as I shrank back in surprise, bringing my hand to my cheek. The woman grabbed the little girl by one hand and made to depart. The girl pulled back.

“Wait,” she yelled, then held up the other hand to me.

I took the piece of paper she pushed at me, then watched as both she and her Mom half-walked and half-ran out into the main terminal area. I watched until they were gone.

“Por favor?” the United clerk said, once again.

“Connect me all the way through to Ushuaia, Argentina,” I said, pushing the Visa back across the counter. The woman went to work. I waited for almost ten minutes. All at once she looked up.

“The card’s no good. You don’t have enough money for that trip.”

I stared.

“What?’ was all I could say for a moment. “But I had ten thousand of credit on that card,” I said, in a shaky voice.

“Oh,” the woman said. “Now I understand. That woman and her child used up nine thousand dollars of your credit.” I stared, my eyes going round.

“Where the hell did she buy tickets to, Timbuktu?” I could not believe what I was hearing.

“Washington D.C.” the woman said, flatly.

“D.C.” I almost yelled. “It doesn’t cost that kind of money to fly from Barcelona to D.C.!” I waited for a reply, fuming.

“It does in first class. You said fly them anywhere. They were going to D.C. At the last minute and with a full plane, first class is all that was available. Do you want to fly somewhere else?” I shook my head, still in total shock. I took out my electronically issued boarding pass the Agency had assigned me. I handed it across the counter.

“Are they on that same flight?” I asked, knowing the answer. The woman checked her computer. She nodded, as I knew she would.

“Please tell me that they don’t have seats next to mine,” I murmured, all the strength of my voice gone.

“Oh no,” the woman replied, brightly. They’re in first class. You’re back in economy.” I just looked at her, slowly taking my boarding pass back. “You better hurry, you’re flight leaves in twenty minutes,” she finished.

I nodded again, saying nothing. I stepped away, hearing “por favor” behind me.

I walked numbly toward the center of the terminal. I stopped under the flight display to find my gate. I remembered the piece of paper in my hand. I unfolded it. It was a wonderful little pencil piece of some expressed talent. It was a drawing of a smiling man bending over to talk to or accept something from a female child. Under the drawing were written the words “Not Done.”

I could not help smiling to myself. I didn’t believe in God. If I did believe in God I wouldn’t have liked Him. But I walked toward the United gate smiling, with a strange new purpose in my step. I talked to Him, whom I did not believe in, while I walked. Indeed, it appeared I was not done.

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God bans Mind Control/EM weapons abuse and torture

Soleilmavis — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 08:20:49 EDT

Proverbs

Warning Against Enticement
1-8 Listen, my son, to your father's instruction and do not forsake your mother's teaching.
1-9 They will be a garland to grace your head and a chain to adorn your neck.
1-10 My son, if sinners entice you, do not give in to them.
1-11 If they say, "Come along with us; let's lie in wait for someone's blood, let's waylay some harmless soul;
1-12 let's swallow them alive, like the grave, and whole, like those who go down to the pit;
1-13 we will get all sorts of valuable things and fill our houses with plunder;
1-14 throw in your lot with us, and we will share a common purse"--
1-15 my son, do not go along with them, do not set foot on their paths;
1-16 for their feet rush into sin, they are swift to shed blood.
1-17 How useless to spread a net in full view of all the birds!
1-18 These men lie in wait for their own blood; they waylay only themselves!
1-19 Such is the end of all who go after ill-gotten gain; it takes away the lives of those who get it.

Warning Against Rejecting Wisdom
1-20 Wisdom calls aloud in the street,she raises her voice in the public squares;
1-21 at the head of the noisy streets she cries out,in the gateways of the vity she makes her speech;
1-22 How long will you simple ones love your simple ways? How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools tate knowledge?
1-23 If you had responded to my rebuke, I would have poured out my heart to you and made my thoughts known to you.
1-24 But since you rejected me when I called and no one gave heed when I stretched out my hand,
1-25 Since you ignored all my advoice and would not accept my rebuke,
1-26 I in turn will laugh at your disater; I will mock when calamity overtakes you--
1-27 When calamity overtakes you like a storm,when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind,when distress and trouble overwhelm you.
1-28"Then they will call to me but I will not answer;they will look for me but will not find me.
1-29 Since they hated knowledge and did not choose to fear the Lord,
1-30 Since they would not accept my advice and spurned my rebuke,
1-31 they will eat the fruit of their ways.and be filled with the fruit of their schemes.
1-32 For the waywardness of the simple will kill them.and the complacency of fools will destroy them;
1-33 but whoever listens to me will live in safety and be at ease, without fear of harm.

God had already shown wisdom to people with a special way, and wisdom had already awared some people to call aloud in the street with wisdom together.

Even people were not willing to believe that Wisdom was calling aloud, but they could see that there were some people had been awaring by wisdom and calling aloud in the street.

Mind control abuse and torture are (1-11) "wait for someone's blood",and "waylay some harmless soul"; (1-12) "swallow them alive, like the grave, and whole, like those who go down to the pit".

God condemned such terrible mind control abuse and torture. People should not ignore victims calls and reject to help victims who were calling the same with Wisdom to "stop terrible mind control abuse and torture"

Mind control abuse and torture is the most sinful thing in the world. God also condemned those who supported such crinimals and who ignored all complaints of victims. These criminals were very waywardness and complacency.

People in the world, please be awared of such terrible crime. don't ignore.
(1-32) For the waywardness of the simple will kill them. and the complacency of fools will destroy them;

"The Fakery"

James — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 15:32:10 EDT

I read the Sunday New York Times today. I was sorry to see that Maureen Dowd, brilliant as she can be, wrote near unprintable drivel. That didn't bother me. Most of the columnist's spend so much time doing everything else but writing that I expect to see their 'staff work' much of the time. What bothered me was the article in the middle of the front page, just under the photo from Afghanistan, which poignantly illustrated it. We just had our worst month over there, with a ton of kids having lost it all in our names. The article was well written. It was all about the problems that the 'living' returning veterans have in coming home. How difficult, or near impossible, that return can be, depending upon the horror of what the particular veteran whet through to get home. There was no fakery in any of that. PTSD is a killer, and when it is not killing directly, it is a destroyer of marriages, family relationships, friendships, sleep and all appetites. It causes drug addiction and acoholism. The worst part is that it is damned difficult to diagnose, very hard to treat, and embarrassing difficult for a combat 'hardened' veteran to admit. No fakery.

But read on in the same issue. Half way through the first section is a long article about this 'problem' that we have with people making up war stories, the places they did or did not serve, decorations or even units served with. We have a federal law that now attacks anyone who is caught even lying verbally about those things, or, and this is a grand bit of fakery, of not being able to prove what he or she said is true! Yes, said! Like in the first amendment freedom of speech 'said.' Wild times. That this article would be in the same section with the PTSD article from the front page is deeply droll. Gallows kind of humor. You see, most civilians do not make up any of that veteran junk! They usually don't even know enough to make credible stuff up. No, the preponderance of fibbers are veterans themselves, embellishing stories and maybe just demonstrating mental damage. Many many of them are veterans returning with PTSD, just like the kids pictured in that photo on page one! Do you know that there are even volunteer groups of other veterans who pursue these fibbers to catch them, label them on the internet and then turn them over to the feds for prosecution? The law is called the 'Stolen Valor' law, and it is one of the most deceptively damaging laws against veterans ever passed in this country.

Let's take a group of these woeful, and deeply hurt, returning veterans, and lets hold them to a standard which no civilian (except a complete idiot civilian, probably on drugs or alcohol) would be held. Where does stuff like this come from? Has the lead content in our water supply increased substantially? Or let's take a geriatric veteran who has PTSD stuff come out late in his life, and gets it all wrong. Are our Congressmen and Congresswomen completely out to lunch? And the veterans who go along and investigate, mostly their fellow veterans, who are these people? I was a Marine Officer in Vietnam, shot three times and brought home on a gurney, barely alive. I won't even tell anyone, ever, what decorations I received. "Let's have that fact-checked," somebody might say. Then I can allow beads of sweat to form as the report comes in. Is the report missing something I said I had? Did I give the proper unit and place? Yes, I know all that stuff by heart and I've got the medals in my closet. But, you know what, I don't want to go through the 'vetting' process. You know, in many ways, it is better for me to say that I did not serve at all. This 'Stolen Valor' law is all about that. I am not ashamed of my service on your behalf. I am just ashamed to admit it to you, or around you. PTSD has caused me to be 'hyper-vigilant,' and I am. I am hyper-vigilant of you. You can, and may, hurt me.

What fakery is up next? The new G.I. Bill! The one that gives vastly huge benefits to the guys and gals who served following 9/11? But not the veterans before? Yeah, that sure seems fair! Thanks again. And how about preferential treatment at V.A. medical facilities for returning Iraqi and Afghani veterans? A bit more thanks is due there, from those of us who bled our asses off in prior wars (and I was at Yokosuka Naval Hospital in Japan first, then Oaknoll over in Oakland, CA, and then the Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton, CA....go 'fact-check" it!)

But this new fakery is not just directed towards veterans. It is all around us. It is in the press portrayal of that black professor named Gates, and that police officer named Crowley. The media, with the governments support, changed the whole thing all around, into complete fakery. The black guy lipped off and the cop broke the law, numerous times. That the black guy gets to lip off to the police in his own home (except about any decorations or units he might have or served with!), nobody is much arguing about his right to do that. But nobody is talking about the simple fact that our police, across this entire land, and definitely including Officer Crowley, may not arrest people for that. Fakery. Crowley got to stand up to the President of the United States and thumb his beer foamed nose. I do so hope that Obama has a long long memory.

And the H.R. 3200 fakery. I wouldn't want to pass on that. We started out with everyone talking about health care for all Americans at affordable cost. The insurance companies, and the medical providers (yes, that is the hospital in your neighborhood, and your doctors and dentists in town) do not want this. And they have a ton of influence on those Congress people I was writing about earlier. So much so that the watered-down version of this bill we are hearing about now has just about one thing left, as a solid feature of it. 47 million uninsured Americans will be paying premiums to these rotten insurance companies, except those companies will have Federal Punishment built into the collection system. And the insurance companies will still decide on who gets real coverage, what coverage and when. This is the fakery that is descending upon us in health care. If you think those Federal Punishments for not paying your new medical premium are in any way humorous, then think again. How about no air travel if you are not up to date? How about no driver's license renewal? How about garnishment? Through fakery, lies and just pure bullshit we are being led along like the bovine, press-driven, creatures we are all beginning to resemble, physically and mentally!

A lot of the things I have discussed here are not going away. The bills have been passed. The procedures are in place. Even H.R. 3200 is just about a done (and rotten) deal, thanks to the Blue Dog Democrats and the usual assortment of Southern Fried Republicans, and the big health money people. But can we recognize what we have done? And what we are doing? Can we sit and think about the reality of these things, without just being sold on all of it by that melodious voice coming from the television? If we do not pay attention to the past we are not doomed to repeat it. We are doomed to having everything become a whole lot worse! Over the course of the last ten years have things really been getting any better, anywhere? Think about it.

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It Official - Barack is not trying to kill Grandma

Food Fascist — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:24:04 EDT

Dear Friend,

If you’re like most Americans, there’s nothing more important to you about health care than peace of mind.

Given the status quo, that’s understandable. The current system often denies insurance due to pre-existing conditions, charges steep out-of-pocket fees – and sometimes isn’t there at all if you become seriously ill.

It’s time to fix our unsustainable insurance system and create a new foundation for health care security. That means guaranteeing your health care security and stability with eight basic consumer protections:

No discrimination for pre-existing conditions
No exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles or co-pays
No cost-sharing for preventive care
No dropping of coverage if you become seriously ill
No gender discrimination
No annual or lifetime caps on coverage
Extended coverage for young adults
Guaranteed insurance renewal so long as premiums are paid

Learn more about these consumer protections at Whitehouse.gov.

Over the next month there is going to be an avalanche of misinformation and scare tactics from those seeking to perpetuate the status quo. But we know the cost of doing nothing is too high. Health care costs will double over the next decade, millions more will become uninsured, and state and local governments will go bankrupt.

It’s time to act and reform health insurance, drive down costs and guarantee the health care security and stability of every American family. You can help by putting these core principles of reform in the hands of your friends, your family, and the rest of your social network.

Thank you,
Barack Obama

ACTION TIME ! Say NO to Co-Ops !

Greg Jones' Blacks4Barack ! — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:52:42 EDT

MUST WATCH:

Here's Howard Dean explaining why Co-Ops (baby Public Options per state) instead of a true, strong Public Option Plan are just another con tactic of the insurance/drug companies and well-bribed politicians.

WATCH THEN SHARE EVERYWHERE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2Sjxj7XosA

It is of vital importance that EVERYONE learns the truth about this 'Co-Op thing'

p.s. President Obama yelled out 'I Want Public Option' during today's N. Carolina health care town hall. It is up to We The People to SPEAK OUT in unison ! Contact The Blue Dog Dems...Shout "WE MUST HAVE PUBLIC OPTION" !!!

We Didn’t Just Fail To Support President Obama And Professor Gates; We Failed To Support The Common Sense Values We All Share As Americans.

H. Smith — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:46:27 EDT

We Didn’t Just Fail To Support President Obama And Professor Gates; We Failed To Support The Common Sense Values We All Share As Americans.

The president of the United States made a straight forward common sense comment about the Gates’ arrest at a national press conference. I’m sure he assumed that there would be universal common sense understanding throughout the media and our society about the injustice of arresting a middle-aged man within his own home for being rude to a police officer. Sadly the media, law enforcement, political institutions and race baiting public in this society allowed this common sense evaluation to spiral out of control. The minority population in this country has always and will always need a coalition of proactive citizens with a similar sense of values in this society so injustices can be expressed without chaos, political unrest or violence. That has been the basis of every minority civil rights movement of our country. The president acknowledged an obvious injustice at a national press conference and expected common sense police officers, nurses , doctors , teachers, the media, politicians and everyday citizens to understand and support his outrage at the injustice and humiliation Professor Gates endured in his own home. Common sense values dictate that no one would want their dad or grandfather to be arrested in their own home for being rude to the police. But instead, this society debated and continues to debate whether Professor Gates should have been humiliated in such a manner by a professional police officer. President Obama is president of the United States, but he is also a member of a minority group of citizens in this country, and he has to navigate in ways someone who is not a member of a minority will never have to. As a member of a minority group, just as in the civil rights movement, President Obama's voice on injustice in this country, is and will only be as strong and as loud as the courage, strength and volume of the coalition of common folks who elected this president to office. Without common sense folks repeatedly speaking out loudly and confronting an obvious injustice, the president’s voice will be drowned out by the race baiting fringe groups, media and other institutions that know his voice is only as strong as yours. The radical fringe wants everything about President Obama, from birth certificates to pre-school, from friends to religious associations, marriage, political appointments and opinions to revolve around race, so that the voices of common sense folks with common sense values and issues can be drowned out by fake controversies, chaos and political unrest. If we empower the president's voice on common sense issues within this country, we will mute the divide and conquer tactics of these racists fringe elements in our society that surely benefit from political unrest and racial strife in the United States. The president spoke out about an obvious injustice to one of the most respected scholars in the country. It is our responsibility as citizens to back the common sense approach and determination that the president came to, repeatedly and loudly. In this democracy our president is a reflection of who we are and what we represent as a society. If we fail to speak up and support this president’s common sense approach on issues of injustice and policy in this country, the president we elected will have no voice, and neither will we.

H. Smith

"Screaming Into the Darkness"

James — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 14:56:09 EDT

When I toured Europe, some years back, I was kind of surprised by the size of the old churches, relative to the size of everything of age which surrounded them. I went inside many. Huge resounding open areas are common to all of them. And every one of them has, as an integrated part of its construct, a great high and elaborate podium. I realized something. For a long time there was only the spoken word for the passing of information. There was writing, but Guttenberg took some time to really get print off the ground. And people had to learn to read. So, where did people go to get the news of the day? Or of the week? To the church, where they sat or stood down below an 'announcer,' or News Anchor...although he was officially titled a minister or a priest. No wonder the power of religion is so strong, even extending to and through this very time. The 'anchor' of those times could reach hundreds of people, potentially thousands, at one setting. Nobody else could come close to that.

Here we are today. We have the same problems with reaching the people, although everything has dramatically changed in scale. Who has that podium, microphone, or television transmitter controls what is transmitted as the news. And messages beyond the news? Those are delivered in papers, books, the television and the internet, although they cross all over one another in content and kind of delivery.

So how do you get a message out to 'the people' if you do not already have possession of one of those 'podiums?' You beg. You cajole. You appeal. You attempt to cast yourself as an interesting enough voice to be of value to whoever and whatever it is that controls ascension to the podium. And it is unbelievably hard to do any of that. The myth is that only the best work gets to the top. The truth is that only those who have some sort of access, or can angle some sort of access, get their message heard at all. In fact, it is so very very hard that only a very tiny percentage of people ever get 'read' at all. To be 'read' is to be considered for publication or airing, not to be given the podium.

The internet is marginally changing things. You can get read by writing blogs. You can Twitter. You can comment on Facebook. You can get viewed by making a video for Youtube. Those things are advances which are new and most unusual. But those advances do not get you in front of 'the people.' You might get twenty or thirty 'hits' a day on your blog if you develop a following. You might get a few hundred views of your Youtube video. To really reach any of the public at all, you have to be 'touched by God.' I once talked to Jacqueline Mitchard, just after she had written Deep End of the Ocean. I told her that I believed that her book would become a bestseller. She responded with something completely prophetic: "...from your mouth to God's ears..." God touched her through Oprah. Oprah picked her novel to be her first book club selection. And that was it. Mitchard is the top speaker at the Hawaii conference I will be speaking at in September (I am a lowly entity compared to her, although I really like her so I don't mind). Somehow, I do not think Jackie is going to recognize or remember that guy who stopped to comment so long ago at Barnes and Noble in Madison. Fame is not especially complimentary to long term memory.

You can have a voice out here, true, but it is more like being a town crier on a soap box, compared to having the podium. People stop briefly, look at you funny, and then pass on by. Your only message, probably, is that you are a weird person standing atop a box as people pass you by. You have a message, and it might be the single most important message anyone could have, but it matters not at all if nobody hears or sees it.

Competition is extremely stiff. Everyone is shouting into that darkness. And you will note that the greatest stuff is not like the cream rising to the top. Note that every word that Sarah Palin says is duly reported, over and over again. It does not matter what she says. The same is true for Joe the Plumber. No matter how stupid, vapid or idiotic their strung together words are, they have the podium. How do you persevere through all this? How do you get a shot at the podium? I am not sure. I am still down here with you, the few, thinking about it and wondering myself. I reach many more than most who try, but my numbers are really small too. The message on House is influenced by a large writing staff and a bevy of producers, not to mention the director. It is not really mine, even if some people think it is. And I am constantly asking myself another valid question: "why is that I think my message is important enough to be considered by 'the people' anyway?" That is, indeed, a good and valid question of merit. I ponder that, day after day. I believe I do have a message. A message of compassion, concern, intellect, tribalism, work, thought, relationship, love, honor, integrity, and losing causes. I have traveled far. God did touch me with His finger when it came to that. But is it enough to get atop that podium and tell it all to you? As i said, I sit here, with my coffee and my laptop, and I ponder.

http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com

http://www.themastodons.com

http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com

"The Brutal Culture"

James — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 13:04:58 EDT

This week's news story of note, aside from whacked out coverage of the medical expenses issues set before the Congress, is all about a black Harvard professor who was accosted inside his home by a white police officer. Barack Obama has chimed in with some comments of his own (to the effect of labeling the police officer 'stupid' for taking on a citizen inside his own home), and the press has decided that this event, and all the stuff that surrounds it, is the story that should occupy our culture for two weeks, or so. It is what television is doing to us these days. They decide, and you sit here, with me, and get only what they vomit out over that screen. We get almost nothing international. We get no real substance on anything nationally, and the medical costs issue is a typical example of that. Has anybody really talked about what doctors, dentists, and hospitals are really making in actual take-home cash? Is anybody talking about why it is perfectly legal for medicine to use extortion (you pay or you die) to collect money, and make profits from such behavior? Is anybody talking about why these drug companies can charge whatever they want for any drug, even to the point of copyrighting our very genes as their own property, and selling them back to us in a tube? Nope. Nothing. Nada.

We get all this crap about a truly stupid-acting police officer (whatever his merit as a human being and intelligent person may be) who encounters a black professor in the professor's home, does not like the professor's attitude, so illegally and unethically violates him. This story should occupy small news slots locally, not occupy all of us, nationally. The police officer should be promptly indicted, arrested, and then relieved of his badge and gun after being released on bond. He, most probably, broke at least three laws. He entered a private home without the owner's permission (that is criminal trespass, even for a cop). The police officer placed the professor in handcuffs, against the professor's will. That is assault (yes, even for a police officer, as cops must act within the law at all times). The police officer removed the hand-cuffed professor from his home, forced him into a police car, then transported and held the man in a cell at the police station. That is called kidnapping. Yes, the big felony. Police officers are specifically denied the right to do just what this cop did, every step of the way. He should be charged and then prosecuted for his crimes. The onus of the legal system (called our system of justice) should fall with a terribly weight upon this man's shoulders, and life.

What will really happen? Nothing. Most probably, the professor will be awarded some sum of money for the embarrassment he went through. The only saving grace of the entire affair is that the professor is black and the police officer is white. Only race can keep this affair in the spotlight, not that that spotlight should be national. The spotlight is needed to illustrate that policemen, especially post 911, cannot be allowed to brutalize citizens. Ever. And this kind of behavior is going on all across the nation. Our citizenry is afraid of the police. How has this come to be? It has come to be because of a surrender of public trust. Our police have come to resemble skin-headed thugs, dressed up like Star Wars soldiers of the Imperium, and acting like out of control school yard bullies. Thank God nobody got shot at the professor's home. These school yard bullies have guns!

When a police officer deals with a citizen of this country, any citizen, he or she should do it with respect and full consideration. If that police officer wants to enter private property, then he or she should ask permission, and, if denied, consider getting a warrant if the situation merits it. The other officers who showed up, at the site of the Harvard professor's arrest and kidnapping, should also be taken in. They permitted a felony to be committed in their presence. They, the police standing around outside of the home, should have sprung into action to stop the illegal series of events from going any further. They did nothing. They acted just as actively stupid as the arresting officer. Now, the Chief of Police (behind this errant acting police office) is standing behind the man and stating that he was acting within the scope of his authority. The Chief of Police reduces himself to just another stupid acting cop.

It is regretful that our President has chosen to withdraw most of what he said about this series of illegal and unethical behaviors. I expect more of him. He now throws the professor into the same puddle as the dumb cop, by saying that both men 'over-reacted.' Bah! Humbug! The professor can say anything he wants to the cops...within the privacy of his own home. That is speech protected by our Constitution. You can call a cop a pig and not get arrested! I was a cop. I was actually trained to accept talk, directed my way, of this kind. But no cop can break into a residence, enter it against the will of the owner, cuff the man, drag him from his home in front of the entire neighborhood (and most of his fellow-idiot-acting police officers) and incarcerate him in a prison cell far from home. Those things are not 'over-reactions.' Those things are crimes. We are a nation of laws. If our enforcement officers do not act to support that then we do not have a nation (not as we know it) anymore. We have a police state.

Meanwhile, the health issue resolution (or, so it is hoped) languishes on the sidelines, almost ignored by the media. Will we ever be graced with a regular newscast that seriously takes apart our legislation and makes its provisions apparent and understandable to us? Before and after the voting? A long time ago, when a man I now despise (Rush Limbaugh), took a piece of legislation apart (it was called NAFTA) on the radio I was so very impressed. I had never had anyone go through a bill, page by page, and make me aware of what was in it...both good and bad. I did not even mind the man's obviously skewed opinion. I just enjoyed getting in on the front end of a coming vital piece of legislation. I have never had that experience again. Neither on television, nor on the radio, does anyone do this. Instead we get idiotic sound bites which usually have nothing at all to do with the bill's potential effect. The Medical mess is all about over-charging. It is not about uninsured Americans. It is about such things as the 'rent' for a surgery theater being fifty thousand dollars an hour. The surgeons, other doctors, tools, x-rays, chemicals, medications, and all other things are add on charges. An X-ray is five hundred dollars. The surgeon gets three thousand for ten minutes work. And so it goes, on and on. But nobody is talking about any of that. And all of that is outrageous.

I was a police officer myself, as I stated. I do not lack respect for the profession or for the problems endemic to doing that job. I understand it. I admire many of the people who wear the uniform. But, and especially since I am a former cop, I am very demanding of the requirements which must lay at the foundation of performing police services. We need the police to be friends of our citizenry, acting in partnership with the societal public. They cannot be the 'parents' or the 'guardians' of our cultural values. We, as citizens, must never surrender our position as purveyors of those values. We must create the rules by which we live. We must insist, from our servants (in this case, the police), on the manner of how those rules are enforced. The police do not get to decide. They get to follow up on the decisions we make

http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com

http://www.themastodons.com

http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com

"MYTH"

James — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:21:22 EDT

Joseph Campbell was interviewed years ago by Bill Moyers. The product of that interview became known ad the Power of Myth. Mythology is vitally important to the success strategy of the entire human species. We a deep need to believe in things in order to fully apply the magnificent intellect were have been given. Any living organism can respond or react to stimuli. It takes belief to fully engage the intellect, and then change the very environment within which we live. Lately there have been studies which have elevated the status of other animals who inhabit this earth. From apes to elephants and dolphins, among larger mammals, and even among birds. These other animals are toolmakers and users, like us, but within certain limits. They are social and capable of self-awareness (in narrow testing) and communication. But only one animal reshapes the environment around it. And that is us. We have homes, cars, computers, heat, air-conditioning and space craft. We have tools so complex that only some of us understand what they do. We have specialties and study. We have books and electronics of such complexity that it takes years of schooling just to read or come to terms with them.

And all of this is because of belief. We believe we can do it. We believe that we are the pre-eminent species on earth, and so we are. We believe we are the pre-eminent species among the universe, and so we are (so far). We believe that things will get better, and so we get out of bed every morning and attempt to make that so. We dream from believing, and then come to believe from our dreaming. There is nothing like us and there never has been, that we know of. And, more amazingly, we are even capable of dreaming and believing that there might be greater creatures than we are. We can dream and believe that anything might be. We have the power of myth as an integral part of over very being. The power of myth is the spine of every culture existing on this planet, and none of those cultures, or the myths, are the same.

But the power of myth causes us great problems, as well as it allows us great advances. For example; we come to believe things that are not true. That is okay if a culture is believing in a supreme being of mysterious origin. But it is not okay if that same culture is believing what it is being told about something as seemingly simple as profits. Yes, profits. When you make something and then sell it, after you have subtracted the costs of manufacture and sales, then you have money leftover, if you properly charged a good price for the product. That leftover amount is called profit. What has profit got to do with myth? We just had two of our huge remaining banks declare multi-billion dollar profits, following a lengthy period of giant losses and government bailouts. Where is the myth? Part of the financial problems we are experiencing today is because of these kinds of mis-stated (lied about) profits! The bank managers and financial house gurus figured out that they could ask for a big chunk of any enormous profits they made for investors over the past twenty years. Then they sat down with their mythically responding accounting firms and lied about how great the profits were. They inflated everything, then gook great gobs of the mythical profits as their own. Their fair share, so to speak. Mythically speaking.

Now, here we are again. There simply is no way in this current market to make huge profits. But, they have gotten together again anyway, waited a little bit, and simply created new numbers to demonstrate mythical profits. The bonuses will flow again across the Madison Avenue conduits. The liars and mythologists will cream great gobs of non-existent profits and take them offshore, or convert them into Bentleys, hundred foot yachts, G-4 private jets and opulent residences. Once again. A few months from now, or a few years from now, more bail-outs will have to be made. After all, we cannot allow these big banks to go down. The damage to our mythical financial structure would be too great. Or so the same rotten and powerful thieves mythically claim.

This is where the power of myth hurts us. And this is where television will not allow itself to be used to help us. Television (remember, Marrow, Cronkite, et al) has been emasculated. It cannot penetrate, will not penetrate, this area of mythology and reveal to the world what is going on. And so I curse the damn thing, as I watch it, because I too have nothing else.

I am also still hurting over the loss of mythology that has doomed our space program to a tattered broken future. We are unlikely to go back to the moon or on to Mars. Our children will watch Chinese astronauts or Indian spacemen make those trips. And I hurt deep down over this loss. The power of myth is such a many edged sword. Will this comatose and sleeping culture arise from it's collective couch, put down the Miller Lite, set aside the glass of wine, and rise back into consciousness? Will the sword of the power of myth once again be wielded by this brash collection of made-up men and women to swing outward toward the universe in great expressive thrusts? I don't know. I do know that we cannot allow the finances of this country to be used only for the self-enrichment of a very few. We must get our act together. If we do not then that couch, and that tankard of beer, or that glass of wine, is all we will have, that and the bland nothingness of a thousand blaring channels of droolingly stupid 'reality' television to guide us on into a meaningless death.

Cry, this beloved country! Stand up! Look around! Do something! Anything! Throw these bastards in Congress out. Make Obama lead us to a better future. You deserve it. Our ancestors paid for it. I deserve it. I want it. Do you? Well, just how bad?

http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com

http://www.themastodons.com

http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com

We need a Washington Daily Brief

Food Fascist — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:59:49 EDT

Why are we not sending press releases out regularly to the smaller media such as KGO Radio and Progressive Radio and on line boards such as Yahoo News, Google Etc, Huffington Post. There should be a daily brief for which we can refer to so that when something happens in the news, we can know to go to the Daily Whitehouse Brief to get the truth. Maybe have a column in the Huffington post to support the people who supported you. In turn, People can subscribe to it. You ought to be on Thom Hartmann and Randi Rhodes in addition to Schultz with call to action. They ought to be on your list as with others to get your daily brief. You ought to state at least Thom's / Randi's name in the mainstream press to give him/ Air America Ron Reagen some recognition. These people can explain and bridge between what is real truth and what is not in the media. Newspaper reporters around the nation should receive this daily brief. So when the right wing radio says this will be Obama's Waterloo, we all know about it. I have yet to see in writing what is being proposed in term of health plans right now.. Its all a mess, all kinds of propaganda is out there. So good job by holding a national press conference tonight, but for those of us who work all the time, we will not see it but may see The Daily Whitehouse Brief.

"GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY"

James — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:29:26 EDT

Over a hundred years ago a phrase came into our lexicon. It was called 'Gunboat Diplomacy,' and it was a phrase dedicated to the use of naval forces to effect decisions or change in favor of the nations who used it. It might possibly have best been used by Teddy Roosevelt when he sent the Great White Fleet around the world to prove that there was muscle behind the words of his foreign policy. We need to see a return to this form of intentful communication among nations. Maybe not all nations, but definitely a few. I am not writing about Iraq or Afghanistan here, or even Iran or North Korea. I a writing about gunboat diplomacy to effect the surrender of hidden asset and deposit information. So my ideas for the new form of gunboat diplomacy would be effected against such places as Lictenstein, the Channel Islands and even countries running up and down the Carribean. Throw in Switzerland. Nobody has threatened Switzerland (militarily) in quite some time.

We need to recover the lost assets of this nation. The liquidity which has been purloined from our banks, insurance companies and even top manufacturing companies. Financial instruments, devices and shadow accounts have been used to hustle many many trillions of dollars to these offshore havens. We need the money back. But before we can even consider getting it back we need to know about it. You read this blog and your belief level is low. I have no account data, institutional names, or even real suspects. All I know is that we are missing about three hundred trillion dollars and that that money has been drawn down from our financial institutions and companies over the past twenty years. Where did it all go? What is it doing now? What form is it in? If it is not in an account then where was it transferred? Who are the people who took the money? Where are they living now?

And so we come to gunboat diplomacy. We have this one thing going for us which we ought to seriously consider. We are the pre-eminent military power on this earth. I mean, however, only if the very people who are running the country and in charge of our military are not heavily involved (if they are, then we are simply screwed). We can get the information we need to find the answers to those questions if we use gunboat diplomacy. It probably won't even involve the loss of many lives (we lost forty troops in Afghanistan this month, so far, alone!). All we have to do is aim our cruise missles, and maybe even some of the bigger stuff. We call a bank in the Channel Islands and tell them that we want all their records. That our people will be there in 24 hrs to audit the institution. If they say they can't, or won't, do that then we send a cruise missile and blow the bank off the face of the earth. Then we call the next bank. Somewhere, as we proceed through our list of banks out there, we are going to begin to get compliance. If the countries behind these financial holding banks and companies protest, we simply offer them the same deal, or go to war. We have not gone to war for any of the right reasons for the last fifty years. We will have a good reason to go to war if we are denied the privileges of having this secret information on our own citizens. A much better one than we used for Vietnam, Iraq or even Afghanistan. We will be going to war to save our culture. To save our way of life. To save our children and their children to come.

Why won't we do it? Most probably, I mean. Well, why do we still have PayDay loan places located in 35 states? They are allowed to charge unlimited interest from the poor people who use them. Some charge five hundred percent a year or more! They lie to the people borrowing the money, of course. How could this be? How could we, as a purportedly free country, allow this sort of horrid death-dealing unfairness to go on? We do though. I imagine we will not pursue these outrageous robber barons who have stolen the country blind either. And for the same reason. The people who did this are the same people as the ones who own the PayDay loan places. They are evil bastards, and they have a lot of power within the political structure of the United States. Credit card companies are fully involved, as well. How can they possibly get away with the outrages they pull? They deliberately hold bills until the payment is late. Then they charge late fees on the bill, and change the interest rate of the card holder from twenty per cent a year to thirty or more! The other credit card companies hear about this 'default increase' and increase their rates too!! How can this happen in a purportedly fair country?

So, I don't think we will be using gunboat diplomacy to fix this mess. Unfortunately, for you and I, that means there is only one other way out. If we can't or won't get that money back, then the U.S. currency has to eventually go down. Yeah, that's right, the dollar goes away to be replaced by some other instrument. The new money is issued and then a conversion factor is used to convert old dollars to the new. When people convert to the new currency they have to reveal where they got the money they are converting. That fixes the problem (unless those people are not asked!). But that is a mighty painful way to solve the mess. If we don't do that then the rest of the world is going to create a 'World Dollar,' which we will have no control over and will have to convert to, as well, in order to do any international business. No more printing money to get ourselves out of trouble. But no more secret stashing offshore either. This kind of trouble is right around the corner. The 'bail-outs' are not working. They are not nearly big enough. We don't have enough money to make the bail-outs big enough. We can't even print enough money to fix the problem (what do you suppose printing a couple of hundred trillion dollars would do to the world economies?).

I like the gunboat diplomacy solution, however. It has some real justice, with teeth, at its foundation. Like the United States of old.

http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com

http://www.themastodons.com

http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com

"Magnificent Desolation"

James — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:58:26 EDT

I stare out from my home in Southern Wisconsin, over the magnificent desolation of the United States of America. The moon landing, which occurred as I was standing at a huge television screen in Disneyland...my first outing from the hospital after becoming ambulatory from my wounds received in Vietnam, seemed to go a long way toward making up for a really lousy nineteen sixty-eight, and the few years rotten which had proceeded it. There was hope that hot July day. There was celebration. There were some damn good reasons to dig in and participate in my culture and in life itself. And what have we, just now, right out there beyond the panes of my window? I am living in the best financial time of my life. I have never been more successful. I am, in years, well advanced in wisdom, having made so many mistakes that I just had to learn from them or die. And here I am. What do I lack that I had when I was back in that amusement park, my wounds still seeping, my one year old daughter gurgling away in my wife's arms. I had no job and no prospects of finding one. I had an apartment with two months of rent due to a kindly old and gentle landlord. Yet I had great high hopes, and a sense of participating accomplishment. Those guys on the surface of the moon, a quarter of a million miles away, were beating new trails for me and about me. Things mattered. There was 'magnificent desolation' on that rocky airless body, but there was a great future on planet earth far below.

Even Charles Krauthammer, a man whom, like Bill Bennet, I have vilified over these past few years for being a self-serving, silver-spooned, big mouth, possessed of little real life experience, seems to 'get it' when it comes to what I am writing of. Where the hell has out hope gone? Why have we allowed our leadership and our media to treat the future of humanity, and our culture, as if it is simply another sound bite? How do we get our "Mojo" back? Yes, I am back to discussing the electronic medium of television as part of the great evil here. We have allowed this channel into our hearts and souls to become the purveyor of our belief systems. And that medium is all about sales. Pure and simple return on the investment of a dollar is the only thing it is about. What sells ads gets on the television and stays there. You might as well redefine Fascism using only that one word: Television. The companies that can afford to buy the time get to shape the programming. They determine what programs their ads will run during. They decide what news programs will be supported by their ads. Who but they can spend three million dollars for a small bit of time for an ad on television? And so we have Fascism, which was a word coined prior to WWII to describe society run by corporations and business alone. It was an evil sounding word created to describe just how unjust and cold a culture can be if it is run strictly for commerce and by people who respond only to financial concerns. Have you watched that television over the past six months and viewed bankers? Have you watched our government throw trillions at these 'fascists' to little or no effect, other than that they take the money, declare more 'profits' and then wait for the next 'bailout?' You are watching fascism unfold all around you.

Krauthammer, in his column today, did not indict the media. He blamed us. We are weak. We do not understand, and without his saying it directly, we are stupid. We, the audience of that television media conglomeration, is whom Charles is referring to.

Were you alive when men walked on the moon? If you were not alive yet, do you still thrill at the idea, the videos and the interviews with the people who went there? That feeling of nationalism, Americanism, and humanity that comes over you is the feeling I want to write about. I want to believe that we can get it back. I want to believe that we can take this whole financial mess and turn it around just because we want to. I want to believe that we can go after these banking and investment thieves and take that money back from where they have sent and spent it. I want to believe that the worker in this country is our hero. Those guys on the moon only got there because of unions, scabs, workers working for little and workers working for a lot. And the public that sent them up there is not, and was not, stupid. We were just joined in a cause then. And now we are alone. We all sit in front of that tube and watch alone, or with only a small group nearby. We are not together on anything except hope. And fear about our future and the future of our families and friends.

We should have rebuilt those goddamned towers and built them bigger and better. We still can. Screw all the plans and the private investors and City of New York. They are part of us too. Let's build real airplanes, tough, modern and economical, which we can fly without taking off our shoes to get aboard or huddling afraid, with our little plastic baggies of toothpaste and makeup clutched to our chests. We can go back to the moon. Big time. And we can do it in a lot less than ten years. And we can do in such a manner as to make our own children stand there at Disneyland, like I did that day, with little or nothing except an overwhelming feeling that they are going somewhere with a bunch of winners. We owe it to these kids and the one's coming. We owe it to the world, and to all those people out there counting on us to be what we, indeed, really are. We are a singularly great culture that came out of the muck. We are made up of ancestors who fled prison, execution, famine and disease to come here. And look what we have become out of that! We have become a people who can do anything. We are the only people on earth who can right now. If we will.

Now we need to get off our craven little asses and get busy. We need to make our great leader, and yes I believe that Obama is all of that, give trillions to these projects. We can even throw in highway bridges and the proper generation of intelligent energy. There are no limits. Trillions for these things and no more for any banks. Not one damned cent. If I lose my accounts and my cards, well, I'll be right there with you...and, if I have to go back to Disneyland at my age and stand there with nothing again, then I will do it, if I can watch that giant screen and see hope, pride, and a future projecting out of it and deep back into my hurting soul. Are you willing to risk it and stand there with me?

http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com

htto://www.themastodons.com

http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com

Pres Obama a big disappointment

Bluejane — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:15:23 EDT

It's been exactly a year since my last post and since then Pres Obama has betrayed us on FISA and has refused to bring Bush-Cheney crimes to justice. AG Holder might investigate torture but only "beyond" what was "authorized" by Yoo and Bybee memos, giving credence to those absurd rationalizations. Obama and Holder appear to be willing to overrule the Nuremburg principle which refused to accept following an illegal order as a defense.

They must think we are little children.

The president's appointments have been pathetic (Judd Gregg for Commerce who fortunately resigned) to bordering on criminal (Geithner and Summers to manage the economic crisis whose beginning they oversaw and did nothing about). He seems like a Wall Street "insider wannabe," letting Goldman Sachs rule the roost and benefit by public money while speculating in the oil market and raising gas prices while also rapid trading to inflate Goldman's profits sky-high. He is about to open up a new potential "bubble" in the cap-and-trade market which Goldman Sachs will dominate. Obama has catered to the coal industry, refusing to stop mountain top stripping and even allowing the coal industry to use a portion of his speech about "clean coal" in a nationally aired TV commercial (Most energy experts believe there is no such thing as "clean coal" and this is a mere marketing PR scam). Pres Obama has refused to release visitor logs showing coal industry execs' visits to the White House (just like Cheney). He appointed Dennis Blair to the top intel post despite abundant evidence of Blair's complicity in mass killings in East Timor.

The list goes on and on. I'm a moderate progressive independent who voted for Obama, largely to avoid letting McCain and Palin get into the White House. I was concerned about Obama's weakness of leadership long before the election, based largely on his FISA vote and his disingenuous and even misleading statements surrounding his vote.

Pres Obama has been a passive leader, letting healthcare reform get out of control in the hands of corrupted Dem Senators in the pockets of private insurance companies like Sen Baucus. The bill is not yet final but so far it is shaping up to give us a public option, which won't kick in for 4 years (2013), based not on Medicare or even a "Medicare-like" national public system but on the already overburdened state-based Medicaid system which will create a medical welfare system in which we have to prove ourselves poor. Then he says he will cut Medicaid to help pay consumers' premiums for private insurance. OUTRAGEOUS!

Pres Obama should have insisted on a full healthcare overhaul to single payer. His standard line is we can't "disrupt the employer-based healthcare system" but in this disastrous economy so many employers are laying people off that millions of workers are losing their healthcare anyway and so many companies are going out of business that now is exactly the right time to change the system to single payer which will save companies millions of dollars and thus save jobs and provide healthcare in the bargain. Single payer is not just a health plan but an economic plan.

At this rate, I and many of my colleagues and friends are looking for a way to vote for a different candidate for president in 2012. We're working on a concept for a non-party movement to influence voters and candidates on 3 main issues: Clean elections (public financing of elections and purge lobbyists from Congress); media reform (create a parallel noncommercial public information/news system; break up media monopolies); and bring about universal public healthcare based on single payer with a commonly shared view toward decorporatizing these three vital areas of our democracy and getting back to "putting people first."

Read this and weep. We're still young and we're going to get this done. Lead, follow or get out of the way, Pres Obama. This is where we're going.

Thumbs Up for the President and the Congress Today!

Food Fascist — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:42:34 EDT

Great work Mr. President and congress. Just a few scraps to the masses and we don't have to live like rats. Lets be sure though people do not party too much and begin having kids left and right- we need to maintain an ecological ethic bearing in mind foot print and quality of life in terms of having enough resources for everyone until we can take over another planet. Lord knows we could use a few more!

Good work on health care reform today! 500 billion over the next 10 years by just a small 1% tax on those over 350,000 and maybe 2% making did the congressman on Ed Schultz say one million...!?

The Heritage Foundation's "Survey" on the Obama Agenda (HILLARIOUS!)

Alan Paradis — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:36:14 EDT

http://www.myheritage.org/surveys/2009-survey-obama-agenda-washingtontimes070809.html

Donate to The Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation's Survey on the Obama Agenda

Your answers to this important survey will help America's leading conservative policy organization further develop our response to the liberal agenda promoted by the administration and Congress. And it will allow us to refine Leadership for America, our ten-year campaign to get the nation back on track through a return to sound, conservative principles.

Survey Questions

1. How do you think President Barack Obama is governing?

as a moderate, trying to unite Americans
as a radical, moving America to the left
moderate in some areas, radical in others

2. Are you worried that the left will make good on its threats against conservative speech?

Yes
No
Undecided

3. Do you believe the left presents a threat to our national security?

Yes
No
Undecided

4. Do you think leftists in and outside of Congress will succeed in prosecuting Bush administration officials for “war crimes”?

Yes
No
Undecided

5. Do you think leftist policies are putting our free-market economic system in danger?

Yes
No
Undecided

6. What do you think are the most important issues for conservatives to focus on in the coming year? (You may check more than one.)

blocking confirmation of radical judges

blocking leftist attempts to weaken our national security

promoting free-market solutions to our economic problems

preventing liberals from raising taxes

preventing a government takeover of our health care

stopping amnesty for illegal aliens

preserving free speech for conservatives

promoting a strong effort in the war on Islamist terrorism

protecting traditional marriage

blocking measures that give labor unions massive power

producing more oil, gas, and nuclear power

7. From which media do you get most of your news? (You may check more than one.)

The TV networks

Cable news stations

Newspapers

Magazines

Radio news

Radio Talk Shows

The Internet

"Dignity be Damned"

James — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:11:12 EDT

I read David Brooks column in the New York Times this morning. The Times still gives me plenty of material to analyze and consider, even if it is only a vestige of its old 'get them the objective news and get it to them right now' self. David Brooks wrote a very fetching article about dignity and manners, and how we have, as a culture lost both of those things. He used the incidents of Governor Sanford's blatheringly stupid comments about his own infidelity, Micheal Jackson's conduct of a child-like life, and finally Sarah Palin's applied confusion about life itself, as his examples of a culture gone to the dogs. There is no dignity left, he asserts. There are no manners, public or private, which are consistently followed or applied. It is all out here right in front of us. Brooks rails against self-promotion, even to the extent of running for the office of President of the United States (that insults the dignity of the candidate). But then he turns, in typical, and very modern Republican form, to use Ronald Reagan as an example of a relatively current public figure who had dignity. A bigger self-promoter there never was, except maybe P.T. Barnum, but that is ignored by Brooks.

The entire neo-con rant by Brooks is about being wealthy. You can ignore everything if you are wealthy. You do not need help, or money, or even much in the way of relationship, if you have enough money. That is the man's basic forlorn tenant. He harkens back to a day, George Washington's, to be exact, when a man like our first President could exercise all of the well-mannered characteristics of not promoting himself or herself, speaking when spoken to, standing when spoken to, and, of course, not requesting or even accepting help from anyone. That George Washington was extremely wealthy is not mentioned at all.

You read an article like the one I am discussing and the material almost sounds rational. You almost pine for those old days when such great-seeming principals of conduct supposedly ruled all of social life. Until you begin to think about it. Washington's family had droves of slaves and tons of servants. I wonder how they conducted themselves with respect to the 'rules of dignity.' There were throngs of struggling new Americans trying to barely get by or survive on subsistence farming or in slave-like manufacturing jobs. We still had bond-servant versions of slavery all over the countryside. What a load of dignity they possessed, and displayed.

Today, we are all trying to make it. We are trying to feed our families, just like before. There is absolutely no dignity whatever in not paying your bills or being foreclosed on. None. Not one shred. Try it, if you think there is. I encourage anyone in dire financial straights to self-promote the hell out of him or herself. I absolutely encourage them to ask for assistance from their friends and family before putting their children in shelters or onto the mean streets of our downtown cities. Dignity be damned.

David Brooks is wealthy. Can you tell?

http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com

http://www.themastodons.com

http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com

"AND THEN THERE WERE NUN...."

James — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:49:58 EDT

I read the New York Times this day and was not surprised. On the left side, all the way down the front page, they began a story about protesting Catholic Nuns. There are about sixty thousand of them left out there in the world. At one time there were many many more than that. They, apparently, do not wear the revealing (and respect demanding) habits of the past. I kind of knew that from somewhere, but it hit home with this article. The substance of the article was about how the leadership of the Catholic Church (read Pope Ratso) is opposing the Nuns because they have kind of gotten together to argue against a few idiotic things still supported by the Roman Catholics of Rome. They oppose, for example, the required celibacy of priests. The Pope is still big on this malformed and unsuccessful doctrine. And it is not, or at least I do not think so, that the sixty thousand remaining nuns are simply horny and want all those priests for their own. No, I am afraid that the nun's logic is more factually grounded (however fun it might be to think otherwise). It seems that, over time, the celibacy thing just has not worked at all. Priests have been out there screwing just about any human they could get their hands on for many many years. The Catholic Church is currently paying out billions in reparations because of the failure of celibacy among its priests. It seems that the pent up sexuality of these guys has led them to exploit young boys under their care. But the payouts have not fazed Ratso. He contends that celibacy works and must be kept in place. All priests must be male and they must not have sex. The male only thing is another piece of studied stupidity that the nuns oppose.

I was raised a Catholic and went to Catholic schools all the way up through my undergraduate degree in college. My elementary school nuns were the most noteworthy of my teachers. It was Hawaii right after the big war. The nuns at St. Augustine Elementary School, just off Waikiki, had just returned from surviving the entirety of WWII in Japanes prison camps. Those nuns were in no mood to take any garbage from elementary school children. Later, I was to train and then serve in the United States Marine Corps. The Corps had nothing on those nuns. My D.I., SSgt. Baines, could not have gone one round with Sister Michael Marie (a.k.a. Sister Joseph Louis), much less the dreaded Sister Gregoria (called the 'Flying Black Axe' for reasons unknown).

I am a writer today because of those nuns. I miss their disciplined learning techniques. Techniques no longer applied to school children anywhere. I learned the ABC's, how to decline a sentence, phonics, and the Chicago Style Manual of English. I learned them by trial and error, and the studied application of attentive pro-active pain. Those nuns did not have to strike often. They used a form of willful psychology and parental support no longer existent within the confines of our culture. I learned to speak in front of groups and to overcome embarrassment and failure. I got a C Plus in English at the end of 5th grade. And I still write very regularly to Sister Michael Marie and Sister Gregoria. In fact, when my book was recently published, I sent Sister Michael Marie a copy of the book (lovingly inscribed) and a copy of my fifth grade report card. I high-lighted the C Plus I received in English with a yellow marker, to point out the error of her conclusion. That was a month ago. I got a letter yesterday. She sent me the report card back with a note stuck to it. "You have improved" it said, and there was B Plus written in red over the crossed out C Plus. She also noted a few grammatical errors in the final production hard-cover novel! I suppose that is why I, and my publisher's editors, did not get an A.

The Catholic Church has not supported nuns in any way for fifty years. The older ones live in near poverty under poor conditions in run-down care facilities. The few younger ones do not even get habits to wear. They are allowed to work for the Church for free and get by as best they can. It is a shame. The value those women provided to millions of children across the world goes unrewarded and barely even thanked. Yes, they did it for the love of God, but come on! The Catholic Church is run by men. By White old men living in splendor inside stone chateaus. They are just like human leaders everywhere on earth. There is no difference, and there is about the same level of compassion exercised and exhibited toward those whom worked to put and keep them there, as exists in the civilian world outside.

I loved those nuns and tried my heart out for them. I did that because I knew, down inside, near the bottom of my little well of souls, they wanted the best for me. I really believed that they wanted me to succeed and enjoy life, and a good measure of bliss. They wanted me to be successful, simply because, well, in their prayerful and hallowed way, they loved me. They loved God above all, and then all the children in their charge. They still do. Their belief in me, and my belief in them, sustains me to this day.

The numbers of nuns are dwindling rapidly, as the older ones die off and no new ones come aboard. This is part of the design of the Catholic Church. I do not know why. Maybe, like most male leaders everywhere, Ratso and his Italian Mafia fear women. I just don't know. But I lament their passing. They have been a force for good and love out here, across the surface of this troubled earth. Those nuns left now deserve honors and a great retirement. The young ones, the few, deserve our endearing support...financially and emotionally, because it is good for us all. I am not much of a Catholic anymore, but I know a good thing when I experience it. I love those nuns, and you should too.

http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com

http://www.themastodons.com

http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com

Help Impeach Mayor Vilagosa

Los Angeles Next Mayor — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:35:32 EDT

Help me impeach Mayor Vilagrosa. L.a needs a Mayor we can trust. If he can't fix his marrage then how can he fix L.A? It's immpossible.

Of Persian Pursuasion

James — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:46:30 EDT

The drums of the Middle East keep on pounding away, far off in the distance, but routed direct through television to the living room of our homes. Year by year, month by month...right down to moment by moment, the twisting turns and sinuous paths of those vibrations are changed to meet the behavioral control needs of a very few. We, those of us who think of ourselves as intelligent interpreters of this jumbled mess of communication, are nearly as stumped as the rest of the population, as to who those few are. We are not sure, either, of what real direction they are caging us to follow. Is the combined power of the media really simply the beast of finance? Does it only respond to what makes it money? Or are there other motivations as to the messages channeled so personally into the heart of our very lives? And where, among all these messages, across all the mediums, is there any truth at all? We watch the network news, looking for clues (or maybe just laying there...senseless after a very hard day's work for too little pay), then move to the cable channels for more. Some of us listen to the radio, attempting to 'true up' any of what we have received from the other sources. Near the end, there are the newspapers. All those sources of supposed news contain 'vetted' stories, which means that someone has looked them over and checked them out to make sure they have some semblance of truth in them. Finally, there is the internet. From blogs to YouTube, and then down into the Facebook and Twitter stuff. And what are we to make of it all?

Iran has had an election. Some kind of election. We are never sure of any of that anymore. We have such deep suspicions about our own elections to the point that now, when we see or hear the word 'election,' we take the information in with a skeptical, barely contained, sneer of disdain. The message streaming from almost every source tells us that the current leader of Iran has stolen his re-election bid. The loser really won. We are given no figures because we have nobody, at all, in Iran (from any part of the mass media). The few that were there merely filmed what they could from hotel windows before they fled to the airport and got the hell out of there. Since Iran is connected to the internet, we have gotten YouTube footage and Twitter reports. But what can we make of them? Anybody can say or do anything on the internet, using video as well, if they are schooled in the technology of its use.

But lets look at the overall message we are getting from almost all sources. Iran's leader is bad. He stole the election. People are protesting. The runner-up should be crowned leader. Iran's leader should step down. All peoples everywhere have the right to peaceful assembly and protest.

Now re-read that paragraph. What is the message we are supposed to be getting? Maybe we should get more elemental than that. Okay, let's ask a more elemental question. Why should we care one whit? The current leader of Iran is just as big a hater of America as the runner-up! Yeah, the other guy was running around with that same screwy Iman who spear-headed the whole hostage crisis which catapulted Reagan into office. And the peaceful protest garbage! What is that? We don't have the right to protest here in the U.S.! Have you not noticed? Our cops and Secret Service have carte blanche to arrest and incarcerate anyone who assembles to protest, if that protest is anywhere near any of our big leaders. At the presidential conventions last year the protestors at both events were relegated to cages specially built to hold them, miles from the actual events! And this is in America! There is no right to peaceful protest of big leaders anywhere in the world. So what the hell is going on? This nonsensical 'reporting' is just like the idiocy that gets printed about torture. We decry all forms of torture...except the torture we commit as a nation. Yes, your nation and in your name.

We hate the Arabs. As a culture we hate them. We don't really want to, but we do. We hate Iran, Iraq, Libya and even Afghanistan. We are scared crapless of islam and everyone over there who follows its teachings. If they come here, to our country, we accept them...conditionally. But not over there. We have given Israel (now there is a bunch of cool-headed clever dudes living in a desert oasis!) nuclear weapons and every bit of high tech weaponry we can make. That is how scared we are. And so our news reflects this fact. There were supposed to be tons of YouTube tapes and Twitter comments about the riots in Iran. Those did not materialize after they were predicted. What do you suppose our vaunted mass media had to say about that? They said that Iran had gotten really good at internet suppression! All those Youtubes and Tweets were there, but suppressed by the brilliant internet hackers from under the sand in Iran. Oh please.

What humor, if you sit back and look at it. There were no YouTube tapes or Tweets because there were no real riots of any kind. I think you can pretty much take that to the bank (well, a bank in the Channel Islands, if you have connections and are smart). Oh sure, there was some demonstrating and crowd interaction. But that was it. And we are not even sure what any of that was about because our own media high-tailed it the hell out of there.

We believe the the Persian's hate us. And we keep asking the question about why they do. The question is meaningless because the premise is bogus. They do not hate us. They are frightened to death of us! How would you feel if a monster country, possessing more nuclear weapons than any combination of countries in the world, hated you? A monster country that has proven it will indeed use nuclear weapons if it fears and hates you enough? We need, as a culture, to begin asking the right questions. Why do we hate them? What exactly is it about them that we are so abominated by? Why do we fear these small groups of strange believing peoples living in awful desert conditions so very much? If we can't even ask ourselves those things then what are we to do? Wait for just the right opportunity to blow them all into oblivion? Is that any kind of answer at all?

Osama Bin Laden. There are all kinds of small groups around the world who want power. Individuals crave it. We are hard-wired by sociobiology to crave it. The leaders get to impregnate more females (if they are male) or secure a quality future for their spawn (if they are female). Just look at Michael Jackson as an example. He was one miserable human being. I don't think that that can be denied. His personal life did not exist. But he craved public attention right up to the end. Osama does too. Cheney does too. These people never go away, unless it is to 'write' another book and then return. Or make another video. We must understand, as a culture, that this will always be the case. There will always be an opposition party. There will always be militia groups and terrorist outfits. It is hard-wired into our genetics. Evolution will only allow that to change if 'survival of the fittest' no longer includes getting rid of those presumed to be weaker. I, personally hoped, when I was younger, that technology would eventually allow us to vault up from the murder pit of amoral evolutionary expedition. As I age, I wonder, and the wondering is not a good thing.

We are so hurtfully directed to success. We are driven by fears so deep and dark that we cannot ever discuss them. If they are revealed by others we deny them and put down those others or label them losers or the weak. Only success matters. It permeates our financial sector, our trading mercantile sectors, our sports and even our television shows. It is all, and only, about winning. And it means that most people have to be losers. Do the math. "There can only be one Highlander," is a favorite expression of mine.

We must all be of Persian Persuasion in order to stop hating them. We must know them to care for them and about them. It is applied anthropology. Anthro, closely followed by history, is one of those disciplines, however, which interests many but is practiced by only a few, and almost none of the few are leaders of any sort. If we had paid attention to the anthropology of Iraq we would not be there. If we had paid attention, right after WWII to anthropology, Iraq would never have existed as a country for us to attack. Anthropology is about understanding other cultures. Amazingly, once you understand other cultures, guess what? You come to like them. So, in reality, our problems with the Middle East are all about schooling. We don't teach the right things in our educations system here, and then the media fails miserably to educate when we are done with that formal system.

This internet 'cloud' phenomenon, as some are terming it today, may be our only hope. Only here can words be written and read everywhere. They are not read everywhere for most of us who write here, however. There is just no easy or simple way to get people's attention to be read. That attention is being consumed by the famous. The Krugmans, Krauthammers, Coulters and Limbaughs gather the people in, but in becoming famous, they surrender telling the truth about what they are communicating. They communicate to stay famous and become more famous. Until they too are ready for their last shot of Demerol. But then, maybe, it only takes a few thinking human beings to influence the course of events. I pray that is so.

http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com

http://www.themastodons.com

http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com

Duty Calls

Los Angeles Next Mayor — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:57:47 EDT

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. JFK There was a time for change, but now we need to change the results.

Janet Nepalitano Will the soliders keep them out or us in?

Food Fascist — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:20:43 EDT

I am with the pentagon. There be no reason to simply not enforce the laws in place against illegal hiring. Rather, you continue with Naomi Kline Shock Doctrine and you call the military to keep us in.

The great inversion

Southsidejohnny — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:01:51 EDT

The strangest city I ever lived in was Houston, Texas. By far. I moved there in 1980, prodded by a friend who went there before me. I had the idea of working in the construction trades, gaining enough experience to eventually return north and become a union member.

I had taken a class in electrical wiring, and had some wiring experience, so working as an electrician was my likeliest option for finding work. I was lucky. The first employer where I applied, Joe Swartz Electric, offered me a job immediately, for the lofty wage of $5.00 per hour. Joe Swartz was the largest residential electrical contractor in Houston, putting fifty trucks on the road daily, each with three man wiring crews aboard.

It was unbelievably hard work. I worked on "rough" wiring, running wire in stud frame walls before the drywall was installed. The three man crews I worked with wired four houses every day, working from one new house to the next on the same street.

Very few of the workers at Joe Swartz were licensed journeyman electricians - at the most about five, including the managers. The standards in Houston were so low that it didn't matter if you had no experience. As it turned out, the electrical wiring was probably the highest quality work done in the houses built at the time. The buildings were rush jobs, with corners being cut on inspections, materials, and code compliance. The wiring was done safely and according to accepted standards.

The crew of "electricians" at Joe Swartz were from diverse locations, mostly from southern states, but some from Colorado, Michigan, New York, California, and other northern and western states. They got along pretty well, but the native Houstonians were probably the least qualified, and from the most marginal backgrounds.

One day I was assigned to work with an "underground" crew. It was simple work. The crew leader used a "Ditch Witch" - a small bulldozer-like vehicle - to dig a narrow trench from the power source to the house under construction. Rubber coated electrical cable was placed in the trench, about six inches deep in the ground. My job was to lay the cable and do whatever hand digging with a shovel was necessary.

The crew leader was something of a hothead, and supposedly had spent some time in "Huntsville." This meant that he had been an inmate at the main state prison, which was located in Huntsville, Texas. Huntsville is notorious for its many executions, and the prison itself is much feared among men in Texas. When you go to Huntsville you do hard time.

I got along with the crew leader, in spite of his attempts to irritate me. He would say things he thought would bother me, but I just laughed. I remember one time he said to one of the other guys at lunchtime, "You know, Billy (or Jimbo, Red, Bobby, Shorty, etc.), I just about hate a God damn Mexican worse than I do a nigger." I laughed out loud, it sounded so stupid. The sentiment was one thing, but to just say something like that out of the blue seemed moronic. He didn't like my reaction, but I didn't laugh with malice or derision, so the conversation moved to other topics, like drinking, getting stoned, and driving fast.

A few weeks later I found myself in a more serious situation. The hothead guy wasn't a real criminal. He was a young kid with a wild streak who got in trouble with the law, for drug possession, if I remember right. Another guy showed up one day, someone who had worked there before, but who had just gotten out of Huntsville after serving a sentence of longer duration, over five years. His last name was Alexander. I never knew his first name. He was of a different sort. He had the predatory eyes and menacing grin of a career criminal, a sociopath. He was about six foot one, solid build, and was older than almost everyone at Joe Swartz, probably in his mid-forties.

I didn't give Alexander much notice. He wasn't on any of the crews I worked with. But for some strange reason I was sent out on a truck with him one day to do some cleanup work on a few unfinished houses. For various reasons some tasks got left incomplete, or had to be done over before a house is approved in a final inspection.

While traveling from one house to the next, Alexander turned to me and said, "Are them niggers runnin' things up there in Michigan?" As a matter of brief explanation, you don't engage in a lecture about racial equality or proper language on a construction job in Houston, Texas, if you have any intuition at all. Meeting him half way, I told him the Laborers union in Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti was controlled by a "black" bargaining agent. I was hoping to explain that there was a certain justice to this circumstance, because "blacks" had a hard time getting into the skilled trades - carpenter, electrician, plumber, bricklayer, etc.

Before I could elaborate, Alexander eased out the response that "Down here we have the Nazis and Klan to take care of things like that." Without hesitation I replied "I don't go for that bullshit."

The quiet was palpable. Alexander said no more, but drove in a different direction from where we were going, turned down a side street, and stopped at a house that was older and occupied. It was in the area of the Astrodome, one of the worst parts of Houston. There was no work to be done there. He got out of the truck and told me he would be back in a few minutes. He went into the house, and I sat there waiting. After about an hour, he came back, and it was too late in the day to start any more work, so we returned to the company office.

Though I was uncomfortable working with Alexander, and a bit concerned about his side trip, it wasn't until much later that it occurred to me that I had been in great danger. Alexander probably knew about the Nazis and Klan because he was one of them. He was a genuinely worthless individual, menacing and foul-natured. By now he is likely dead or in prison, having continued in his criminal ways until the great balancing force finally caught up with him.

What got me thinking about Alexander were the recent murders of the abortion doctor and the Holocaust Museum guard. There's a bit of a trend going on, with one of the leaders of the "Minutemen Civil Defense Corps" anti-immigration group being arrested for murder and robbery in Arizona. With her partners in crime, the accused, Shawna Forde, apparently posed as a Federal agent, and robbed and killed a man of "Mexican" descent, and his young daughter as well.

The mainstream news media, and even the "alternative" media portray the people who commit these crimes as "racists," religious zealots, "white" supremacists, and "right-wingers." It always has to be couched in some kind of ideological terms, for the internal purposes of the news media. They have a narrative, a story line for everything that happens in the world, and what are known as "hate crimes" have to conform to the story line of ideology.

In truth, these perpetrators are criminal sociopaths, just like the zealots of the Bush criminal regime, and just like Alexander of Houston. They kill people because they want to kill people. Their righteous beliefs are mere excuses. The essence of what they do is murder. The woman from the "Minutemen" is suspected in other crimes, committed partly to finance her anti-immigrant activities.

These people are given cover by the news media. They also are egged-on by the news media, especially "Fox." Some may object to Fox News being referred to as a news organization, but it is only different from the others by degree. Minions from National Public Radio, including "senior news analyst" Juan Williams and "national political correspondent" Mara Liasson, appear regularly on Fox News.

I could go on and on. Fulminators like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity fuel the fires of hatred against perceived racial minorities, and hysterically rail against our perceived "black" president, Barack Obama, claiming that he is not even a citizen of this country. As a result, gun and ammunition sales since Obama's election have increased drastically.

These fulminators are criminals. They should be in jail, working at hard labor. For some reason, in the social and legal matrix that constitutes the "United States of America," these criminals are not only not in jail, but they are millionaires many times over.

This inversion of morality and ethics is holographic - the part revealing the whole, and that is why I can say with confidence that our failing system will not be revived, no matter what stimulus package, stop-gap measure, band-aid, or recovery plan is enacted. If we are institutionally incapable of prosecuting serious crime, then we are doomed. As long as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity are walking free, we have a fake legal system. With a fake legal system, and a corporate news media system that supports it and feeds off it, we are doomed.

And, needless to say, the Polar ice caps are melting.
_______________________________________________________

This song is for Alexander.

Here's a tune from Woody Guthrie. It's a message for those among us who think they are "fascists."

This song just might open the doors of perception.

Don't forget what your good book says. Learn about it here.

Here's Willie Nelson with Ray Charles. And, for good measure, Waylon & Willie.

This Ernest Tubb song is worth a listen.

Here's some Freddy Fender. Here's some more.

The Texas Tornados. Before the Tornados, Doug Sahm fronted the Sir Douglas Quintet.

And, to finish up, Archie Bell and the Drells, from Houston, Texas.

That's IT! President makes great come back

Food Fascist — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:22:36 EDT

Q Why have a national health care plan?

Its a tool to discipline the health insurance companies.

Q How are you going to pay for it?

The health care dollars are already in the system and all that needs to be done is to re allocate those dollars elsewhere.

An option for you to choose that is not profit driven.

President makes great response to 'Won't a government run health care system put the private insurers out of business."

A If true as the private insurers say that government can't run anything, they won't have any competition.

Q How will we pay?

A We already pay

ps one trillion now, aren't we already paying two trillion? projected estimates are 4 million according to Organic Consumers Association see this link http://foodfascist.blogspot.com/2009/06/organic-alternative-recipe-for-survival.html

Feinstein and Daschle on the take ! Health Care cant Reform when even the Democrats are Dirty

Food Fascist — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:04:22 EDT

Ellen Ratner reported on Thom Hartmann today at the very end of the show that Diane Feinstein is on the take from the health care industry as well as Tom Daschle, whose wife is a pharmaceutical lobbyists like Chris Dodds wife.

I would love to be wrong, if I am, show me the proof.

Americans are getting pissed off enough to vote for Kuninich, I tell you.

Tell Gov Pawlenty to stay out of Al Franken's win

Food Fascist — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:04:09 EDT

Contact Governor Tim Pawlenty and Lt. Governor Carol Molnau, please write, phone, fax or e-mail.

Mailing Address:

Office of the Governor
130 State Capitol
75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
St. Paul, MN 55155

Other ways to reach our office:

Telephone: (651) 296-3391
Toll Free:    (800) 657-3717
Facsimile:   (651) 296-2089
E-mail:        tim.pawlenty@state.mn.us

Open Letter to the President

Jerry from Austin, TX — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:49:24 EDT

Mr. President,

As a gay man in Texas, I was filled with hope during your presidential campaign. I spent hours talking to family, friends, co-workers and neighbors about your views on gay rights and how we might finally be seen as equal under the law. While you were explicit that you believe marriage should be an institution entered into by one man and one woman, you expressed a desire to see all loving couples afforded the same rights and privileges as married couples.

Imagine my surprise and dismay when I read the brief your Justice Department submitted backing the constitutionality of DOMA! My committed relationship of over 10 years was compared to both incest and pedophelia.

If this is truly your administration's view of my relationship, then I made a terrible mistake. I trusted you and you betrayed me.

Mr. President, you have lost more than just my future vote. You have lost my respect.

Sincerely,

How is Wylie Drake like Charles Manson?

Food Fascist — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:23:06 EDT

Buena Park City Hall
6650 Beach Blvd.
P.O. Box 5009
Buena Park, CA 90622-5009
(714) 562-3500
E-mail: cityhall@buenapark.com
Hours: 7:30 - 5:30 Monday through alternating Fridays

Re: How is Wylie Drake like Charles Manson?

My understanding is that Reverend Dr. Wylie Drake, VP of the Southern Baptist Convention Church has called for the assassination of President Barack Obama.

I am outraged no one has taken action to contain this vile outlandish decrepit being. I will boycott Knott's Berry Farm and Buena Park and make sure everyone knows that Reverend Wylie Drake lives in Buena Park where obviously a bunch of backward hicks must live.

I will also be contacting the secret service today to bring this situation you have allowed to grow in your community.

I will also be putting this letter into the blogosphere.

Thank you,

Signature

We Create the World We Live In

Ray T: Secret Service Arrest Wylie Drake Audio

Food Fascist — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:54:32 EDT

A must here powerful oration by Ray Taliafero, San Francisco's most beloved Civil Rights Activist Listen to these audios and call to action: Hour One http://members.kgoradio.com/kgo_archives/50200.mp3 Hour Two http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post_edit/_new/rNkpT

"ICARUS"

James — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:31:45 EDT

We have come so far and flown so high that it is nearly inconceivable we may have gone right beyond our areas of normal expansive and progressive interest. Flight. Ever since I was a child I have loved flight. Any kind of flying machine, or person who operated a flying machine, was of great and endearing interest to me. My father was in the military, which allowed our family to fly from duty station to duty station across the land and over oceans. And I loved it all, from the aluminum framed web seats, to the loud piston engines of mixed dependabilty...and even the boxed chicken lunches, which were commonly distributed. Although planes were not on time or always able to take off due to weather or mechanical problems, it was okay. Airports had few services and little in the way of entertainment while we waited, interminably, to fly.

But we waited and we waited willingly. We loved to fly, and we loved all the preparation that went into the process. We loved the unseen 'John Wayne' pilots, and we loved the stewardesses in their wonderfully stylish attire. We loved the big aluminum monsters that flew us through the air. Most of us knew them all, by airline, model description put out by the airline, and even the manufacturer.

So what the hell happened? United is losing money...again. The rest are losing money, or making little, while they shrink the number and length of their flights. And that is all over the world. The airlines are all complaining about falling revenue and passenger miles. And they are correct. So what happened?

We don't like to fly anymore. We fell out of love. Flying today is a bitter experience of humiliating phony service. It is a series of unending embarrassments, to those who fly economy, and almost intolerable in first class, which is so expensive as to be almost humorous. We have horrid parking at airports and worse intra-airport transportation. Just the act of dropping somebody off or picking them up is to be avoided at almost any cost. Homeland Security is rotten. Rotten attitudes and stupidly rotten procedures. More humiliation. Once aboard an aircraft it is just as bad. Less room for carry-on, if any room at all. Charges for everything. Crammed planes outfitted with ever smaller seats and spaces. Tickets that cannot be changed. Tickets that cannot be returned. Fear of being run through some security system and denied the right to fly. Fear of everything connected to flight or the geographics where it occurs.

We don't like to fly anymore. That is what happened to revenue and passenger miles. We attempt to avoid it. We take a car or a train, but, more and more, we don't go at all. And it is getting worse. With less disposable income, we fly only when we absolutely have to. Our hatred for the experience is obvious to all around us at the airport, making matters all the worse. We hate the security guards, even though we understand their work. We hate the airplane crews even though we know that it is not their fault. We hate the dirty unsafe equipment we see all the time.

And so, we are beginning not to fly. It is the airlines fault. It is our governmental leadership's fault. It is the caving in to vapid stupidity at fault. There are not going to be any 9/11's because no passengers will allow it anymore. Heard of any hijacked airliners lately? Me neither. But I think it is maybe too late for the current airlines to recover. Flight will have to change. We won't accept it the way it is. We will kill it off, by not going. Then something will replace it. Like cars. I noticed, the other day, that I was standing at a Borders bookstore magazine rack in the automobile section. I have always bought automobile magazines. I looked and then bought nothing. My love affair with that method of transportation is dying too. I used to love to read about powerful sports cars, the faster the better. Now I think they are a joke. I do not want to pay for gas to support a 500 horsepower engine. An engine that will spend all of its time idling in traffic, or in the very very unlikely event that I can drive fast at all, idling by the side of the road as the ever-more aggressive highway patrols write me expensive tickets, accompanied by idiotic morality tales about safety.

And the other car stuff is boring. Oh, I know we gotta have the hybreds and the electrics. It is for the good and economy of all, not to mention, green of all. But those cars are boring. You just can't read very far into an article about a Prius. So the cars are going to go too. We are driving less. We are driving less for the same reason we are flying less...because we don't like to do it anymore. We are so simple to figure out, if you take the time and trouble to study us...the people...the fabric of the culture. We work because we have to, and because we believe in work as a part of our foundation of worth. We play because we want to. We'll continue to drive the trucks and cars for work, and fly for work, but we won't do those things for fun anymore. Unless there is just no other way to get there, and then we may not go at all.

http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com

http://www.themastodons.com

http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com

President Obama’s Cairo Speech swayed Lebanese voters to vote pro American

Food Fascist — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:29:33 EDT

The Thom Hartmann thesis that President Obama’s Cairo Speech swayed Lebanese voters to vote pro American is brilliant and true. The World loves President Obama and this takes hate as a tool away from these bizarre creepy fear mongers; those that truly do not love what America is all about.

Arae you still not listening to Thom Hartmann?

Go here M-F between 9 and noon or find podcasts here: http://www.thomhartmann.com/

Want more? Twitter Cairo as the search term and see the good feedback the President is getting on his speech.

John Rothmann’s analysis of President Barack Obama’s World Address Cairo, Egypt

Food Fascist — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 10:29:02 EDT

John Rothmann has the uncanny ability to take you back in time and bring you

up to date all in the same breath. As an author, lecturer, teacher, archivist, and political consultant, it's easy to see how he keeps up his end of the conversation. In fact, there's never a dull moment with John.

Using audio tools to convey important issues in a clear, interesting, and exciting way, John makes the radio come alive. The show might start with the day's headlines and then move on to revisit and capture a historical moment through original sounds. You name it, John can find the recording of it, and callers love to reminisce along with him. He inspires recollections you didn't even know you had! "The people that tune in to my show have strong opinions, are highly intelligent, and are very sophisticated - and that's the secret to why the show is so much fun!" says John.

A frequent lecturer on American politics and the Presidency, John has spoken at over 150 campuses throughout the United States, Canada, and Israel. He has been involved in many political campaigns on the national, state, and local levels, including Richard Nixon's in 1968. He has also published a wide range of articles on American political history, the Middle East, and education. John's personal love is his 15,000-volume library - one of the finest private libraries in the country - specializing in American political history and political biographies. All of these experiences, combined with his San Francisco heritage as a fourth generation native, make John a warm and captivating host for Bay Area listeners.

Click here: http://members.kgoradio.com/kgo_archives/60400.mp3

NOTE: There are about 10 minutes of news and advertizing that are at the top of the analysis that the station does not cut from the archive and so I am sorry that these simply must be waited through before you will actually hear John's voice.

John’s show is on weekends from 1AM to 5AM Friday and 1 AM – 6 AM Saturday mornings on the West Coast on various stations and also heard over the internet at http://www.kgoradio.com Archives are posted for one week so if you miss the show you can download the show during the day. Lately, he has been covering the M-F 10PM – 1AM slot as well.

BTW- in the case you would like to hear the full program..... here are all the links. The show happened to be all about WWII, with the Obama Cairo Address interwoven to reflect also the dedication of the day of honoring WWII veterans.

Click here:

http://members.kgoradio.com/kgo_archives/60200.mp3 1- 2AM * Edward Murrow recording

http://members.kgoradio.com/kgo_archives/61500.mp3 2- 3AM

http://members.kgoradio.com/kgo_archives/60400.mp3 3 – 4AM * Analysis of President Obama’s Cairo

http://members.kgoradio.com/kgo_archives/60500.mp3 4 – 5AM

Please Exploit Your Extraordinary Skills

Richard from Elmwood Park, IL — Sun, 31 May 2009 21:38:40 EDT

President Barack Obama,

Let me begin this communication by revealing the fact that I was not enamored with your candidacy during the primaries. I would have been far happier with (among the declared candidates) Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards or (among the non-candidates) Al Gore or Russ Feingold. I knew that you were not, and would not become, the person who would champion the repair of the destruction to our country with the passion and energy with which it has been destroyed over the last 40 years and, in particular, during the Bush administration.

I did, nevertheless, respect your intelligence and your integrity. I am very sad to say that you have not lived up to my limited expectations in either of these areas.

As for your intelligence, I am amazed that you have been so blind as to put in charge of the economic recovery the very people who caused the problem in the first place. Yes, I know that you have some friends from the University of Chicago, and I know that the School of Business there has been lauded with a number of Nobel awards. Nevertheless, I would expect somebody of your intellectual capacity to see beyond what was clearly a set of decisions couched in the popular culture of the time – these awards could well have been delivered by the Enquirer, given the shallowness of the assessments. Since those awards were bestowed, it has become abundantly clear how inappropriate they were at the time. In response to the abject failure of the implementation of the theories of Hayek and Friedman, the awards are now going to the more Keynesian economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. Have you missed the message? Hayek and Friedman, as well as the Chicago School of Economics, are failures. Dismiss them and their protagonists from among your financial advisors (Summers, Geithner, Volker, Rubin, et al) immediately and bring in people who will change the mindset to one that will be (and, historically, has been) capable of restoring economic sanity!

Most recently, you can simply look at the failure of Iceland, which implemented the kinds of economic policies that you are allowing to be pursued, and which has failed miserably, and then look at the successes experienced by Sweden, which has implemented dramatically different responses and has been orders of magnitude more successful. For crying out loud, Ronald Reagan was a complete incompetent, and his administration was (after having created the problem in the first place) successful in staunching the bleeding that resulted from the S&L debacle. The Reagan administration took over the failed S&Ls, dealt with their problems, and then re-privatized them. In contrast, you (or Geithner) throw money at the failures and allow those failed execs to fritter away billions wherever they would like to. They won't even commit to defining how they will return to health or when they think they will manage to accomplish it. You are letting these bastards lead you down the garden path, just because they threaten to undo you if you don't toe their line!

As for your integrity, I need not go far to describe my complete and utter disappointment in your performance. I was quite ready, once you won the Democratic presidential primary, to go to the ends of the earth to support you. Then came the body blow of your vote on the renewal of the FISA law. At that point, I was no longer able to go out and knock on doors and otherwise support you. Yes, I voted for you as an alternative to voting for the continuation of the Bush administration. I ask you: do you understand the difference between voting for your candidate as opposed to voting against the alternative? I was reduced to voting against McCain instead of voting for Obama. I was far less than proud of my decision than I had hoped to be.

Since your election, you have substantially betrayed your promises of reestablishing civil liberties, reestablishing open government, and upholding the Constitution of the United States of America. Just because Chief Justice Roberts completely screwed up your Oath of Office does not mean that you are not still bound by the intent of that oath. Your Constitutional responsibility remains. You do not get to choose whether war criminals are prosecuted. You do not get to choose whether those who overtly broke Constitutional and Federal laws are prosecuted. It may be politically unpalatable, but it is not a choice of which you are allowed to avail yourself. You have Constitutional officers whose responsibility it is to deal with such lawbreaking, and it is not within your purview even to comment on the appropriateness (which is beyond question in the first place) of such investigation and prosecution.

It feels so uncomfortable for me, unschooled in Constitutional law as I am, to lecture a professor in Constitutional law in how this professor should comport himself. You have been described as a pragmatist, but I'm afraid that I can only view your actions as political. In this area, I consider myself far more pragmatic than you have shown yourself. The pragmatist simply looks at the cards dealt and plays them. You have been dealt a hand in which your predecessor administration has clearly committed egregious criminal acts. A pragmatist looks at this situation and simply deals with it dispassionately and lets the chips fall where they may. The process may take political allies down, but the system and the Constitution itself will emerge stronger, and the Nation will be seen again, the world over, as the ideal to be emulated. To continue along the path that you appear to have chosen will do nothing less than to continue to bring shame upon our Nation, our Constitution and our people.

The saddest thing about the entire situation is the fact that it is so unnecessary. You have the skills that will allow you to do things that would be unthinkable by lesser individuals. You have an intellect unmatched in a generation for assessing and countering the opposition. You have the oratorical capacity not seen since JFK, and before him, FDR, which you could use to sway the American people to your support, making your detractors suck your dust. Despite these gifts, you compromise your position in some 'kum-ba-ya' effort to generate some kind of consensus approach to governing. Again, I am amazed at your inability to take advantage of your intellectual capacity. Since 1980, it has been very clear that the GOP, or something that calls itself 'conservative', is immune to 'kum-ba-ya'. They have their agenda, and they will pursue it ruthlessly. They will not be satisfied until they have a completely fascist (in the Il Duce definition) government, and even having established that goal will then continue to press forward. Open your eyes and you will see that they only understand power. Establish your own power position. Demonstrate to them that they only have power derived from your power, and when they are appropriately cowed, we can move forward as a unit.

Exploit your oratorical skills. Stake out radical (radical only given the false establishment of the last 40 years) positions on economics, health care, civil rights, Constitutional law, anti-trust, labor and comportment in foreign affairs. Do the work necessary to re-establish the manufacturing capacity of the nation in contrast with the 'get obscenely rich quick' approach that the über-wealthy have been pursuing. This, as much as anything else you might do, is a national security issue – what is our national security if we need to import ball bearings during a wartime blockade? Extend that to any commodity that we are no longer capable of producing because of the selfish actions of the modern robber barons and what do you see?

Newt Gingrich likes to present himself as an historian. Perhaps he is. He knows, from history, how to destroy the country for the benefit of the well-heeled. It was done in the early 1860s. It was done in the early 1890s. It was done in the late 1920s. Every one of those periods culminated in a depression – the last of which was called 'The Great Depression'. Can you be the one who uses historical memory to benefit the general welfare? Can you be the one who will hold accountable the criminals in the prior administration? Can you be a leader?

Mr. President, please make me proud of having voted for you rather than just being complacent in the thought that John McCain was not elected. If, after a year from now, you have not dealt with the criminality of the prior administration, then I will have no choice but to begin exhorting Rep. Quigley to present articles of impeachment for your continued abetting of that criminality through your inaction.

Mr. President - enough of the cover-ups, why do you hide the truth

Heinz Rainer — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:31:31 EDT

Today Reuter reports Bryan Whitman, Pentagon spokesman of entering the 'lie parade' we knew so well from the Bush era.

In particular he claims that "...that news organization (Daily Telegraph' : Thursday's Telegraph quoted retired U.S. Army Major General Antonio Taguba, who conducted a 2004 investigation into abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, as saying the pictures showed "torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.") as lying.

If it all was a lie, then why don't you come out on the open, and give the public access to those pictures ?

The newspaper said at least one picture showed an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Others were said to depict sexual assaults with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

In an interview with the New Yorker magazine published in 2007, Taguba was quoted as saying that he saw a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.

Let me just say this one thing : "I do not have a doubt about the authenticity of this report."

And to make the 'Daily Telegraph' look like a stupid school Boulevard paper does not serve the purpose.

If you do not come out with all the truth, and clean up the past, public opinion on your presidency stands to be tarnished.

We need answers, and we need them for good.

No more cover-ups, no hide behind the truth, no lying to the American and international public.

This way you can only restore the confidence in our nation, our international image.

Without this, we have no right to point our fingers against other human rights violaters, we are no better in fact.

You are talking endlessly about reforms, how to deal with the financial crisis, but you do not want to bring justice to those

who have been abused.

Our own confidence is vaning in your policies, what you stand for, and what you have promised to do.

You falter in front of those who have told you not to reveal the truth. And one day the truth shall be known,

so let it be known during your administration.

Mr. President, you and only you can, and must lift the lid on the accusations, and call those who have been

accused to face their judge.

Do it now, Mr. President. Don't wait any longer.

"TORTURING!"

James — Thu, 28 May 2009 11:58:01 EDT

There is a damned good reason why the investigation of all torturing done by the United States, and its allies, is vital to our current and future cultural health. That reason is simple, yet responding to it may be one of the most complex undertakings of this new 'mired-down' administration. The reason we must investigate fully is to know. We must first know what was done. We cannot evaluate data we are not given, or allowed to know exists at all. If we cannot analyze and evaluate, then we support what occurred. Tacitly, we go along with what took place. Our sense of justice, outrage or even understanding, is suspended...and our future becomes bleaker because this. The United States Government, under almost every administration, has been right up there near of the top of the pile of controlling social orders. The public has been treated like it consists of cows, bunched into herds, fed hay, watered, pastured, but told nothing. After all, what could cows possibly understand? By treating the public this way (think the Kennedy Assassination, TWA 800, 9/11) the public is left totally out of any possibility of being part of decision making. Okay, so we don't know who killed Kennedy, really. We don't know what the hell happened to 800, really. We don't know what happened about the towers, really. We just know that we don't know the truth. It rankles inside of us. The 'us' who are not conspiracy theorists, even.

But, we also know that we voted for people who we wanted to run things. We gave them the ability to know things we cannot. We gave them the ability to make decisions for us when we could not. We trusted them. Not all of us. Most of us. It is how it all works here. Occasionally, however, there are things that happen which we need to be involved with. Our leaders fall into habit patterns, now supported by this whacked-out media, and tell us less and less. That is what has happened here. And we must protest. Torture is not an event. Torture is a putrid infection that forms a crack in our social order. It works its way in and then festers, eventually killing the cultural being we have fought so hard to grow and mature. It spreads. It spreads slowly and insidiously. We must find out what happened, no matter how terrible (and hundreds, or thousands have died terribly painful deaths), and then we must confront these acts. We do not even need to punish the real physical perpetrators. Public revelation would probably more than deal with that. No. We need to confront our fear. The fear that allowed us to allow our leaders to direct such acts in our name, and then to deny they did it, or cover up the very acts themselves.

If we can bring all this out from under the black cloak of intended secrecy, then we can rise up and apologize. Yes, apologize to the world and to the survivors. For our good, as well as the good of all. After apologizing we can put this horrid diseased Genie back in the bottle. We do not need to punish those who acted, but we can certainly establish and isolate some of our draconian imprisonment penalties for future perpetrators. We are a nation of laws. But those laws are interpreted by, and applied by, men and women. We need to direct these people by law, and then let them know what is in store for them if they ever commit, or allow to be committed, acts like this again. This is called taking a stand!

We cannot heal this potentially terminal infection by putting a bandage over it, even if the bandage is skin colored. We must clean the infection out, then provide antibiotics to actively fight the remaining tendrils that run through our cultural body. Laws are the antibiotics. Laws without exceptions for this area. We, as a country and a people, cannot go through life being known allow such things as 'rending' other people, or tearing them limb from limb, or drowning them, or delighting in their pain, for the simple reason that we wanted something from them. We have raised up quiet, and not so quiet, enemies against us. You know it and I know it. And I'm not writing about the stupid 'war on terror,' or any of the other Orwellian terminology adopted to keep fear in control of the masses out here. I am writing those men and women who are the families, relatives and friends, of the tortured by us, the missing under our care, the dead because of our studied sadism. Those people are coming, ever coming, and we are going to have to deal with them. We have empowered them by acting like frightened school children. We have been cowardly. And we cannot simply ignore them or provide them with silence and denial. They know. We know. We must come out of this closet. Let the healing begin.

And then there is the rest of it.

Where the hell is the new World Trade Center? Why are there not two towers standing this very day, twice the size of the old ones, in central Manhattan? You think American would not have collected and paid for such a demonstration of cultural will and strength? Where the hell is Osama? You really believe that if a country like our country, of its size and power, could fail to find one man on this earth for eight years? Where is my beloved space program? (for Christ's sake, we are about to 'rent' Russian space vehicles for the next ten years to put our people in space!!!!). Where are our factories? Where are our car companies? Where are our bridges and roads? Where is the money that all these hedge-fund and derivative executives have stolen and hauled away?

Where the hell are you and what are you going to do about it? Get off your couch and your butt and do something, even if it is just to write and say something about it all. I am not the voice of this culture. I am merely a participating observer, like you. But I am writing about it and I am asking hard questions. And I am mad as hell that my present, my future and my children's future has been stained, soiled and trampled under foot by selfish thieving bastards. And its all happened on my watch.

Our newspapers are failing because they will not write this. You need to read this. You need to think about these things. You need to reflect, argue, complain, disagree and take action. Our television media is a morass of mediocre crap fed to us daily by weak-kneed pitiful people who could not work effectively in a General Motors assembly line. You need to scream at Obama, Roberts and all of them.

I want my honor back! I was a Marine Officer. I am still a Marine Officer. But I am supposed to be that proud being, not because of the honor of the Corps, but because of the honor of the United States of America. I want my honor back. I want those things back that allow me to have bliss, and to share that bliss with the world. I want to know I am doing the right thing. I want the Christmas Eve feeling of waiting for the morning, and what I will find under the tree! But I want that back, about life itself. Have you ever lived a time when you could just not wait for tomorrow because it was going to be so great? You just knew it! I want that time for my children and my grand-children, and yes, even for me. Help me get it back. Help yourself in getting it back, or maybe having it for the first time.

I wrote a book called "The Boy." It is about honor. Honor lost. Honor won. About internal honor. Getting it, and then holding on to if for dear life. The book is going to be a movie (at least, as of yesterday!). I am not encouraging you to buy my book. I am encouraging you to write your own! To think. To write. To take action. This is all about you out here so start acting like it.

http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com

http://www.themastodons.com

http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com

I love the Marine Corps. I love America. And I love you.

Deal with the Past

peter fuhrman — Sat, 23 May 2009 03:04:03 EDT

Before our government can go forward it must deal with the past. A past that involves torture, unconstitutional detention, black sites, and Guantamamo. Until we face the past we will not be free. The Bush administration got us into this mess. We elected Obama, to break the chains of the Bush administration misdeeds and to lead us forward. This can only happen after the past is faced and dealt with in it's entirety.

It is very seductive to say we have an economic crisis, a health care crisis and other pressing problems that are more important and that we must deal with them first. But, the reality is that until the past is honestly faced it will control the future resolution of these pressing problems.

Facing the past is painful but the pain is a necessary part of our growth as a free country.