Nuclear Geo-Politics For Kids

The " End Of Ze World" video simplifies things a bit, but a little gory in the beginning, so cover those young eyes...or not:

Bush Is Right To Compare

Comparing Iraq and Vietnam can be a little scary at times, even for the Decider. His comparisons, like his view of the world is rather delusional. Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) actually made some sense yesterday when Petraeus made his way to D.C. for the anticipated (but not surprising) report on the war.

From Crooks and Liars:

Wexler: I vehemently opposed the surge when the president announced that last winter and instead I call for troops be withdrawn. In your testimony today you claim that the surge is working and you need more time. With all respect General, among unbiased nonpartisan expert consensus is far. The surge has failed based on most parameters. In truth, war related deaths have doubled in Iraq in 2007 compared to last year. Tragically, it is my understanding that seven more American troops have died while we’ve been talking today. Cherry picking statistics or selectively massaging information will not change the basic truth.

And please understand Gen. P., I do not question your credibility. You are a true patriot. I admire your service to our nation, but I do question your facts. And it is my patriotic duty to represent my constituents and ask you. question you about your argument that the surge in troops be expended until next summer, especially when your testimony stating that the dramatic reduction in sectarian death is opposite from the National intelligence estimate the Government accounting office and several other non-biased non- partisan reports.

I am skeptical General, more importantly the American people are skeptical because four years ago very credible people while in uniform and not in uniform came before this Congress and sold us a bill of goods that turned out to be false. And that’s why we went to war based on false pretense to begin with.

This testimony today is eerily similar to the testimony the American people heard on April twenty eighth nineteen sixty seven from General William Westmoreland, when he told the American people–America was making progress in Vietnam.

Wexler makes a very good point here. Iraq may not be a carbon copy of Vietnam, but there are many eerie similarities that make it seem like Bush and his team are taking the lessons of thirty years ago and repeating actions that have been shown to lead to failure. A small percentage of Americans believe Bush is exhibiting leadership in the Middle East, but it looks a lot more like insanity to me.

Hard Times For Westchester Mortgage Brokers Turn To Hot Nights

The basic premise of this story isn't entirely original. There are many incidents of people falling into rough times that sadly have to prostitute themselves in order to make ends meet. Many times, these social deviants end up being addicted to drugs, going to jail or a fate that is far worse. But we are talking about a couple of mortgage brokers in New Rochelle here, so here comes some uniqueness.

From WCBS-TV:

CBS) NEW ROCHELLE The downturn in the housing market appears to have driven two Westchester homeowners to desperate and illegal measures.

New Rochelle Police raided a 3-bedroom home on North Avenue Friday night arresting four alleged prostitutes and the homeowners.

The house, they say, had been turned into a brothel complete with heavy shades over all the windows and a red ribbon placed out by the sidewalk to indicate they were open for business.

Richard Werner and Heather Mezzenga are charged with promoting prostitution. The two are both mortgage brokers who moved out of the house roughly two years ago so they could begin renovating a home on Mountain Road in Pleasantville.

Desperate times call for desperate measures indeed. I'll be sure to think about how to finance my next home renovation after hearing this story. I've thought of innovative schemes for my general monetary welfare, but running a brothel....now that is entrepreneurship at its lowest/finest.

Rebutting Petraeus

Petraeus may be the current General on the ground, but there are plenty of experts who have been studying the conflict in the least biased way. Distinguished men and women such as fmr. NSA chief Richard Clarke, Jon Alterman, Mara Rudman and Rand Beers take a look at the realities of Iraq and what Petraeus is saying.

Am I A Hard-Wired Liberal?

Are you one? Are you programmed to think like a conservative? One random question in the universe may have been solved by researchers at UCLA and NYU. The answer is......yes. Their studies tested the brains of liberals and conservatives with a very simple test and the results were strikingly different. Now of course the researchers claim it does not mean being liberal or conservative is a bad thing...but, well....you know.

From The Los Angeles Times:

Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a flip-flopper for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

Hmm, sounds like there is a bias here. Scientists are more accepted by liberals, hence they cannot be trusted with God's creation....or something like that. Of course this information isn't surprising in the least. Conservatives are reluctant to the ever-changing world while liberals are open-minded and explore many different options whether it comes to politics or grocery shopping. The George Bush v. John Kerry example is one of many that you can look to see differences between libs and cons.

George Has Some Terrorizing Friends

I heard some time ago that George Bush wants terrorists dead or alive, but then again, he doesn't think too much of them anymore. Well not thinking about someone and being best buds are two very different things. Sattar Abu Risha isn't your average Irfaqi citizen, so maybe that was why our President sat down to meet him. Abu Risha heads the Anbar Salvation Council, a group that promotes civic participation his own quest to be a local warlord. So what would these two be meeting about you ask?

From Abu Aardvark:

....That's our guy. That's the pillar of America's Sunni strategy, and a key player in Fred Kagan's fantasy life.

And I didn't even mention the widely discussed, sensational rumor that he had skipped town with $75 million in American cash - which evidently wasn't true, or else was just a "misunderstanding" which has been "resolved", but does speak to endless circulation of unpleasant rumors about the guy's corruption and mercenary behavior. I wish I could have been there as Abu Risha nodded along sagely while Bush promised to funnel large-scale American economic development funds in Anbar, perhaps offering the services of his own highly professional office in seeing to the disbursement of the funds. It's kind of humiliating to watch an American President get rolled by a two bit, corrupt petty shaykh.

But that's not even the worst of it. According to one widely disseminated account of their meeting, Bush acted shocked when Abu Risha complained about Sunnis being killed in Baghdad because of their names, claiming he had never heard of such things. It's impossible to know the accuracy of this account, since it comes out of an Iraqi press not known for its fealty to professionalism or standards of evidence. But if true, what an astonishingly depressing admission of ignorance of one of the most important aspects of the Iraqi situation: he has never heard of the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad.

Highway robbery? Ethnic cleansing in Baghdad? Jiminy Crickets! Who woulda thunk it?

Katie Couric Hearts George Bush

If you don't already know or believe it, then watch this video. It isn't hard to hear his talking points coming out of her mouth.

Petraeus Gets His "Blah Blah Blahs" On

General David Petraeus finally submitted his long-awaited (and previously leaked) report on the status of Iraq today. Surprisingly (to no one) it furthered the mission of the President and did not address the realities both militarily and politically in the war-torn region. Congressman Lantos didn't buy it and neither did I.

From The Huffington Post:

Rebutting charges that he was merely doing the White House's bidding, he said firmly, "I wrote this testimony myself. It has not been cleared by nor shared with anyone in the Pentagon, the White House or the Congress."

Petraeus said that a unit of about 2,000 Marines will depart Iraq later this month, beginning a drawdown that would be followed in mid-December with the departure of an Army brigade numbering 3,500 to 4,000 soldiers.

After that, another four brigades would be withdrawn by July 2008, he said. That would leave the United States with about 130,000 troops in Iraq, roughly the number last winter when President Bush decided to dispatch additional forces.

Petraeus said a decision about further reductions would be made next March.

With all due respect that is a very weak rebuttal. You can say "nuh-uh" all you want, but that doesn't mean anyone is going to believe you. March could bring another increase in troops for all we know. The only constant here is that our men and women are being killed and injured. The monetary toll keeps rising as well and the bullshit indicators are through the roof.

Like I mentioned before, Congressman Lantos called Petraeus on the BS...but will Congress act appropriately and end this war? That is the question.

Changing Our Ever-Changing Planet

Earth has been changing it's topography and composition ever since it formed in the cosmos billions of years ago. Mountains have risen, seas formed, continents broken off and merged back together again. Yet that change has usually taken eons to make a noticeable difference. With the growing impact of man, cartographers have to work overtime to map all of the changes caused not only by earthquakes and volcanoes, but by our very own society.

From The New York Times:

In the new edition of “The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World” (Times Books, London, 2007), for instance, there are before-and-after views of the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest lake. It shriveled as Soviet-era irrigation projects siphoned off the rivers that replenished it. A dam completed in 2005 now prevents water from flowing out of the lake’s northern lobe, which is expanding as a result.

The lake’s vanishing and rebirth, easily visible from space, are the work of people.

“The impactful thing is the size of some of these changing features,” Mick Ashworth, the editor in chief of the atlas, said in a telephone interview from England.

The atlas charts the shifting coastline of Bangladesh, for example, where land has been lost to rising sea levels. It identifies islands that are likely to be subsumed by the seas, Tuvalu, Vanuatu and the Marshall Islands among them, and coastal communities that may be forced to move. One of them is Shishmaref, Alaska, located on a narrow island along the Bering Strait, where the break-up of sea ice has left the village more exposed to storms and the sea is advancing at a rate of 10 feet a year.

Climate change, diverting water for farming and industry has taken a tremendous toll on our planet. Watching the near-death and rebirth of the Aral Sea is but one example of how quickly we can force our planet to change its look. The Dead Sea, noted since biblical times has only a few short decades left before it becomes nothing more than sand like the desert around it. The North Pole's ice caps are expected to be gone during the summer in a similar amount of time. Closer to home, the marshes of Jamaica Bay are rapidly disappearing and are expected to be gone altogether in only a few years.

What will it take for people to wake up and start effecting real change?

Get Your Magnetic Yellow Ribbons

If George Bush can't save us, maybe those magnetic yellow ribbons will:

Winning Hearts And Minds Or Just Pocket Books?

Exporting democracy to the Middle East is hard work, as George Bush knows so well. It is important to win the hearts and minds of the locals so that they embrace our western way of life. In turn, they'll happily sell their oil and other natural resources at ridiculously low prices while throwing flowers at the feet of the oil executives at Shell, BP, Exxon-Mobil, etc.

Ok, now it is time to wake up from this delusion.

President Bush went to Anbar last week because he was in a safe remote location, far from the hellish streets of Baghdad, Basra, Fallujah, Mosul....I could go on and on. The reality of the situation with the Sunnis and Al-Qaeda is that for now, the U.S. is paying the former to fight the latter. The insurgents need money to finance their operations and if the United States is willing to bankroll them, then they are more than happy to go along.

Both sides win in the short term. The United States (i.e. George Bush's Administration) gets to look good for the commoners back home with reduced casualties in the region and the Sunnis aren't attacked from the skies and by U.S. backed operations. Meanwhile they get additional funding to fight the Shias (and the U.S.?) at a later date.

Sheer fucking brilliance.

Nas Calls Out O'Reilly's Racism

You don't have to be in politics to know that Bill O'Reilly is a racist bastard. It isn't so much one particular moment on the Falafel Factor, but a continuous assault on those that look different from Bill O. Case in point, O'Reilly slammed the rapper Nas for performing at a benefit concert to memorialize the victims at Virginia Tech. Nas was one of many performers, yet he was the only rap artist.

Why pick him out of a line up that includes Dave Matthews, Phil Vassar and John Mayer? Probably because rap scares Bill in his secluded Long Island home that is far from the ghettos that Nas talks about. We wouldn't want to shatter O'Reilly's image of his 1950's Americana delusions. Well Nas had something to say to the loofah master, something called 'the truth.'

From Yahoo News:

In an interview with MTV, he said: "Everybody has a marketing plan; his marketing plan is racism.

"It just shows you what bloodsuckers do: they abuse something like the Virginia Tech [tragedy] for show ratings. You can't talk to a person like that."

The rapper defended his lyrics as a reflection of the reality of America's streets and ghettos.

He added: "I had a best friend killed, plenty other friends killed. I been through it. I seen it.

"I think that's what makes it important that I come through and show love to those people [at Virginia Tech]."

Nas hits it right on the head. O'Reilly appeals to an older conservative crowd where many of his fans want to hear that tired old theme that America was better in the 1950s. Before black people had power, when whites could do whatever they please to whomever, before the youth began to fight for the civil rights of everyone in this country.

The only thing is that a lot has not changed. There are still many institutional problems in America. The ghettos are still poor, still dominated by minorities and still ridden with crime. Nas is one of many rap and hip-hop artists that tell it like it is (not the bling-bling artists of course) and speak up for those that are not heard from. Hearing about the realities of those on the other end of the socio-economic scale is frightening to Bill and his followers. They do not want their bubbles burst......to that I say, too bad you &*%^ #*^&*%.