Weather and politics

So you know that I'm only going to half-piss off half of you!
This morning, when I woke up before 6 to get to the van, I walked out to the kitchen for some breakfast, I noticed that we got a fairly light dusting of snow overnight, well under an inch. However, the recent fairly warm weather combined with that overnight moisture input to turn Albuquerque into an icy mess. The van did not arrive because nobody got on at the first stop (my advisor said that there was a half inch of ice on the parking lot), so we had to drive a car. We had the radio on in the car (conservative talk radio, but I guess I can't complain about not having to drive myself) and heard that they were not only closing schools due to the light snow, but apparently nobody could drive on the ice as there were numerous rollovers reported, and one of the main northern roads connecting the western parts of the valley (Rio Rancho) to main Albuquerque was closed. There was a three hour wait for tow trucks, and they were asking that, if you were in a minor accident, that you wait for awhile to report it so that you don't tie up the police's time. Crazy.
Also, I read short article today about history repeating itself. Now, of course the author is a raging liberal like me, and so I am more inclined to agree, but the facts are I guess undeniable. Two things kill me about this:
1. If this happened in the past with this same cast of characters, why did we let it happen again? Why do we learn nothing from history?
2. Why the hell have I never heard about this until now? The so-called liberal media didn't bring this to our attention back in 2003. Why? I think that if the American public knew that Cheney and Rumsfeld had already tried to pull the old bullshit maneuver in the past to increase "defense" spending, we never would have gone for it.
Depressing. Have a great day!

Two in a row!

I think this a pretty accurate metaphorical history of the past decade. Two in a row from Mr. Rowland!

OIC, it was ironic

OK, so this evening I watched Death Race 2000, a cult classic starring David Carradine (just after Kung Fu) and Sylvester Stallone (in the early stages of his career). This movie is the origin of the "point system" for running over people and things, where you score points for killing people based on their age and gender. Sounds off the wall, right? Well it was, sure.
However, it was also pretty terrible. If you like wooden dialog presentation, shallow writing, and lots of gratuitous female nudity, then perhaps this is the movie for you. I watched the brief "Looking Back" special feature that interviewed some of the people involved in the film (not anybody I had ever heard of), one of them referred to it as a "satirical ironic comedy." Like that's supposed to make it better. Look, Army of Darkness was a satirical ironic comedy, but it was actually well-conceived, unlike this movie. I want my 1.5 hours back.
The only redeeming quality of the movie is that I Netflix'd it, so it didn't cost me anything.

End of an era (eventually)

I've been thinking a little bit the last few weeks about the end of American civilization. We all know it will come eventually; anybody who denies it is just being foolish. The following webcomic by Jeffrey Rowland sums it up pretty well.

I mean, we live in a pretty OK country, comparatively. We of course don't have a pristine human rights record, and there are a lot of laws and quasi-laws/quasi-traditions that I would like to see changed to make us a more tolerant society. Am I proud to be an American? I guess so, but I also guess that if I were born into another country, I would probably be proud to be from there too. Hey Fundies! Isn't pride the number one deadliest sin?

Prepare to be SHOCKED!

...and maybe even AWED.

As the result of another tidbit I heard on Morning Edition today, I'm writing another angry blog entry today. Curb your enthusiasm, people, I'm only one man.
A group called The Center for Public Integrity released a report called Iraq: The War Card - Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War. I know, sounds pretty exciting! This group meticulously documented 935 (!) false statements by administration officials regarding Iraq in the two years after 9/11, especially concentrated in the months leading up to our invasion. Now I'm sure you could find 260 things I've said in the past two years that turned out to be false (Bush's total). Three differences being: (1) Nobody gives a damn what I say, nor should they, since I am not an elected public official; (2) When I say things that turn out to be false I don't generally know beforehand that they are; (3) The harm that I can do by lying is many, many orders of magnitude lower than that Bush was able to accomplish. Following are a few excerpts from the summary:

False Pretenses
Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose "Duelfer Report" established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.

..............................

Consider, for example, these false public statements made in the run-up to war:

* On August 26, 2002, in an address to the national convention of the Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney flatly declared: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." In fact, former CIA Director George Tenet later recalled, Cheney's assertions went well beyond his agency's assessments at the time. Another CIA official, referring to the same speech, told journalist Ron Suskind, "Our reaction was, 'Where is he getting this stuff from?' "
* In the closing days of September 2002, with a congressional vote fast approaching on authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, Bush told the nation in his weekly radio address: "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. . . . This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year." A few days later, similar findings were also included in a much-hurried National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction — an analysis that hadn't been done in years, as the intelligence community had deemed it unnecessary and the White House hadn't requested it.
* In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: "Sure." In fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of "compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda." What's more, an earlier DIA assessment said that "the nature of the regime's relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear."
* On May 29, 2003, in an interview with Polish TV, President Bush declared: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." But as journalist Bob Woodward reported in State of Denial, days earlier a team of civilian experts dispatched to examine the two mobile labs found in Iraq had concluded in a field report that the labs were not for biological weapons. The team's final report, completed the following month, concluded that the labs had probably been used to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons.
* On January 28, 2003, in his annual State of the Union address, Bush asserted: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to colleagues in the intelligence community laying out why he believed the uranium-purchase agreement "probably is a hoax."
* On February 5, 2003, in an address to the United Nations Security Council, Powell said: "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources." As it turned out, however, two of the main human sources to which Powell referred had provided false information. One was an Iraqi con artist, code-named "Curveball," whom American intelligence officials were dubious about and in fact had never even spoken to. The other was an Al Qaeda detainee, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had reportedly been sent to Eqypt by the CIA and tortured and who later recanted the information he had provided. Libi told the CIA in January 2004 that he had "decided he would fabricate any information interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government]."

The false statements dramatically increased in August 2002, with congressional consideration of a war resolution, then escalated through the mid-term elections and spiked even higher from January 2003 to the eve of the invasion.

..............................

The cumulative effect of these false statements — amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts — was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war. Some journalists — indeed, even some entire news organizations — have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, "independent" validation of the Bush administration's false statements about Iraq.

The "ground truth" of the Iraq war itself eventually forced the president to backpedal, albeit grudgingly. In a 2004 appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, for example, Bush acknowledged that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. And on December 18, 2005, with his approval ratings on the decline, Bush told the nation in a Sunday-night address from the Oval Office: "It is true that Saddam Hussein had a history of pursuing and using weapons of mass destruction. It is true that he systematically concealed those programs, and blocked the work of U.N. weapons inspectors. It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As your president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. Yet it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power."

Bush stopped short, however, of admitting error or poor judgment; instead, his administration repeatedly attributed the stark disparity between its prewar public statements and the actual "ground truth" regarding the threat posed by Iraq to poor intelligence from a Who's Who of domestic agencies.

(All emphasis mine.) Am I the only person driven to blind rage by this? They lied knowingly on hundreds of occasions, or at least distorted the truth. The end result of this? Here are some statistics taken from some sort of Liberal Politics website using numbers culled from reports from The Brookings Institute:
- $600 BILLION taxpayer dollars spent on the war, with another $200 BILLION requested this year. (Holy shit! We're in a recession? Seriously? I wonder if each household would want its $4,100 each back right now.)
- 3,927 U.S. Troops killed so far. (Less 18% killed by non-hostile causes leaves 3,220 soldiers killed in combat.)
- Almost 29,000 U.S. Troops injured, 20% seriously
- 30% of troops develop "serious mental health problems" within 3-4 months of returning home
- At least 50,000 to 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed, and maybe as many as 600,000 (for comparison, about 625,000 Americans died during the Civil War, although a full 2/3 of those deaths were non-combat; total combat deaths equalled 213,000 - and we were the antagonist and protagonist).
- Approximately 4.4 to 4.5 MILLION Iraqis displaced internally and to Syria and Jordan.

All of this happened because our administration made a concerted effort to mislead its own citizens. And now they refuse to even make a mistake. I personally want all of our troops out of Iraq A.S.A.P. I realize, of course, that we broke it, and therefore we should fix it. But do the Iraqi people need more of our brand of fixing? Signs point to our recent activities making some improvement, but it has been too long, with far too great a cost of both money and lives, for our continued presence there to be accepted any longer. Yet even the most popular Democratic presidential candidates refuse to state unequivocally that they would pull us out posthaste.

If I had my druthers, my ideal solution would involve a total troop withdrawal accompanied by a public apology from our president for what he has wrought. That would, of course, not bring back any of the almost 4,000 dead Americans, or any of the $600B we've frittered away, but it would at least prevent further waste.

I have a number of conservative friends, but I expect that they avoid my blog like the plague because it probably makes them as angry as I am when I write my entries. But if they read, I'd like their take on this administration, and their reply to my statements.

Maybe I'm just mad because I bought a Mountain Dew out of the machine and it came out goddamn frozen. Who is in charge of these things? It's sitting on my office floor right now in an effort to have some diffuse solar radiation and sensible heat flux help out the melting process.

DeLay: McCain = worst thing evar?

I heard a brief snippet today whilst riding home on the van that a certain former house majority leader (Tom DeLay) went on a rant on that bastion of independent media, Fox News about the Republican candidate who appeals most to independents and moderates, John McCain. Now, I am not going to do much defending of McCain; in fact, I could write a fairly vitriolic blog about what a phony he is, but that's a subject that would be best left to Alison's energies and angers. No, instead I am going to take this time to make fun of Tom DeLay (awfully french-sounding name, don't you think? Oh, it's irish? Dang.). Go watch the video; I'll wait.

OK. DeLay makes some criticisms of John McCain, and I would like to lead your attention to a few of them (Is this unfair? Should I keep in mind that this statement was not prepared and written down, but was instead ad lib and that he may have said some things that came off a little different from his meaning? After all, I do that constantly. What's that? I was never elected to public office? You make a good point. Touche.).

"John McCain himself killed our ability to drill in ANWR." - I realize that the audience for these comments is not the left, or even the center. But with the recent polar bear news and the administration's efforts to keep them off the ESA, I think that drilling in ANWR is going to become a less and less attractive option to mainstream America. In case you had not heard, the Fish and Wildlife Service decided to delay a ruling on whether or not to post them on the ESA until February 6, which gives the administration enough time to sell off all of the oil leases in the Chukichi Sea of Alaska, which is important polar bear habitat. I wish more people paid attention; this is not a coincidence.

Joseph Lieberman is "one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate." - With the Democratic Party very close to a Senate majority, Lieberman lost his Democratic primary in Connecticut, and, rather than take it like a man, he decided to run against winner Ned Lamont as an "independent" and somehow won his Senate seat back. Lieberman now labels himself an "Independent Democrat" and does not necessarily vote party line. There's nothing wrong with not voting party line, but anybody who refers to Joe Lieberman as "one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate" is clearly off his rocker.

"I think McCain has done more to hurt the Republican Party than any elected official I know of." - The stupidity of this statement should be self-evident. Let me direct you toward a photo:

Now to the quote again: "I think McCain has done more to hurt the Republican Party than any elected official I know of."
Photo:

Now, even considering the fact that McCain is only a self-proclaimed "straight talker" (Alison would certainly beg to differ, and I agree with her), I love the implication that straight talk (i.e. telling people the truth) is damaging to the Party. This does not surprise me in regards to the GOP. Here's a fun game: can you think of any elected officials who have done more to hurt the Republican Party? I think I can name a few.

The weather in Quito

My wife is near Quito for two weeks, and as it didn't break the freezing mark here in Abq today (high of 30 degrees F; felt like 21 F), and as it is supposed to get down to 14 F (feels like 3 F) tonight, I thought I'd check into the weather in her area. At the time of this writing, it is a brisk 52 F in Quito, with an expected low around 50 F. Tomorrow's high is to be 62 F. However, it does look like there's a chance of rain pretty much every day. Oh, and the humidity is 100%. At least here, it's a dry cold.

And resolutions too.

I made some New Year's resolutions this year (I don't usually, since I believe I should have my life together enough that I don't have to use some occasion as an excuse to improve myself), and forgot to mention them in my two posts today. They are:

1. Stop cracking my knuckles. I am worried about the arthritis, and I think I already have it to a certain degree. But maybe I'm just being paranoid...
2. Reduce my sugar intake. After the diabetes scare with my mother right before my wedding last year, I'm a little worried about the future, considering how much Mountain Dew (oh my god, check out that page - "Mountain Dew’s name is a previously-existing euphemism for moonshine, which likely traces back to Ireland (see the Irish folk song “The Rare Auld Mountain Dew”), and has generally been marketed to highlight its potency. It was originally marketed as “zero proof moonshine” and had pictures of hillbillies on the bottle until 1973.") I drank as a child.
3. Make significant progress on my research. I am now 1.5 years in, with not enough to show for it. This semester I need to do lots of field work, and build the base level of any models that need to be made, and actually start writing.

I think there was at least one more, but I cannot remember now. I think that I have done a decent job on the first two. A couple Hershey Kisses per day, soda once in awhile. Less knuckle-cracking, although I didn't go cold turkey of course. It's funny, I've been doing it for so long that I now feel very uncomfortable when I don't crack them. And then, of course, when I give in and do it, it hurts. Research has not been as much of a win for me. I've gotten so little done this past couple weeks, it's pathetic. I've been questioning myself a lot lately on this count, and I don't understand why I just can't seem to focus on work.

Edit: 4. Be nicer to my wife. If you're reading this and don't know her, she's great. Not sure how I'm doing on this one so far, since she's in Ecuador.

Taking the plunge

I finally spent some (way too much) time today trying to figure out for whom I should vote in the Democratic primary coming up on February 5 (Tsunami Tuesday) here in New Mexico. The Washington Post has a candidate quiz that actually gives the candidates' answers to a questionnaire. This quiz has one extremely mega-major flaw, in that it only provides answers by Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, neglecting my favorite candidate, Dennis Kucinich. Of course, I know that he has no chance, and I may end up voting for him anyway if he's still in the race, because of my quiz results.
Not surprisingly (to me), the quiz tells me that I should vote for John Edwards (29 points) because of a variety of things. Clinton and Obama come in second and third at 16 and 15 points, respectively. If Edwards is somehow out of the race by that point, it appears that there will be no major candidates about whom I am particularly excited; in that case, ol' Kucey gets my vote. Things I like about Kucinich: he wants to impeach Cheney; he wants to form a Department of Peace; he's been against the war in Iraq from the beginning; he wants us to sign onto Kyoto (the ONLY developed nation not to do so now); and he supports same-sex marriage.

Of course, I found a second quiz, which has given me different results, as these things often do. This one includes all of the minor candidates, and is much much faster to do (and therefore probably less accurate). Edwards comes in a whopping 6th on this quiz. The order, with their point totals:
Kucinich (69)
Gravel (54)
Obama (40)
Clinton (39)
Dodd (38)
Edwards (36)
Biden (33)
Richardson (24)
Paul (-6)
Giuliani (-22)
T. Thompson (-22)
McCain (-26)
Cox (-35)
Brownback (-40)
Huckabee (-47)
Romney (-56)
Tancredo (-63)
Hunter (-67)
If you don't know much about the candidates, this should be a good demonstration that Kucinich is the most whacked-out liberal amongst the group. Again, unfortunately he will not get the support he deserves.

Hello....internet.

Every day I check my favorite blogs to see whether there have been any new posts. This includes my wife's blog, even though I should theoretically know exactly when she writes a new blog, us living in the same house and everything. I mostly do this out of a desire to not do anything worthwhile, which is apparently my life goal. The reason I say this is that I have realized that it's been about 3 weeks since I last posted a blog. Hypocritical, yes. It's not that I haven't had anything to say - that is, anything more to say than I usually do when posting here.
Since I last posted we of course has Christmas (actually, we had like 4 Christmases - we opened stockings on the 20th, opened some presents with Alison's family Christmas morning, opened more presents with my family Christmas afternoon, and finished when KC and BC showed up on Dec. 29). New Year's -- we went to bed before midnight. We had the pleasure of driving home to ABQ on New Year's day; at least there was very little traffic. Oh, I did get to go to a Phoenix Coyotes game with MD in which the Coyotes won in a shoot-out, the first shoot-out I had ever seen (not getting cable -- which really wouldn't help very much).
Since then, not a hell of a lot has gone on. Alison left on this past Friday to spend two weeks in Ecuador on a volunteer vacation with her sister. They're staying at an eco-resort and spending their days building trails or something, she wasn't entirely sure what they would be doing. This is definitely the longest I will have gone since I met her without actually talking to her -- even when I was in Canada for a summer I only spent about 4 days at a time in the field. It's a weird thing to suddenly not have any contact with her, and kind of depressing. I have not gotten enough work done so far with her gone. I've spent some time playing Evil Genius, one of the greatest computer games ever created, and good training for myself and the other horsemen (you know who you are brothers!). I also did some house cleaning last night, taking down our Christmas decorations and such. I went running the past three days in a row, and boy am I sore; this is my effort to be a little thinner when Alison gets back.
Today I surprised myself by actually getting up in time to get to the van and come down to Socorro. Trying to go to sleep last night (not very successfully, as I slept in pretty late on Sunday), I gave myself maybe a 25% chance of actually getting up in the morning. Maybe this will be a good start for me. This week I have to get writing more on a proposal I have to have done in a couple months, as well as doing some GIS work for my research. I also have to apparently get ready for the class that I am apparently going to T.A. this coming semester. Finally, I have a few secret blogging projects in the mental works that I'd like to get firing up.