Tannishblog

My hometown of Chicago has unveiled a planned upgrade to its already extensive surveillance system. No longer the “Hog Butcher* to the World”, the City of Broad Shoulders is morphing into the City of Big Brother.

If that’s what helps us clinch the 2016 Olympic bid, I’m all for it. I’ve seen some of the cameras hanging off lampposts about town. The neighborhoods so decorated could use a constant eye. There’s a fine line between oppressive oversight and community service. Even the most well-intentioned neighborhood watch program is vulnerable to misuse. Until that occurs, I say: bring on the bots!

*Thanks, Travis

Filed under the tab of “I Wish I Wrote That,” is Chris Rowthorn’s blistering assessment of the Florida University Taser Incident as found on Smirking Chimp.

The four players in the present-day American political drama were all represented at the University of Florida on Monday:

1) Andrew Meyer writhing on the ground in agony represents the Constitution and the freedom of speech and the protection from unlawful arrest that it enshrines.
2) The police holding Mr. Meyer to the ground and inflicting torture with 50,000 volts of electricity represent the fascist forces in America led by George W. Bush and their attempts to kill the Constitution.
3) John Kerry droning impotently on in the background and allowing the torture to occur through his shameful lack of courage and principle represents today’s Democratic Party.
4) The majority of the students who sat passively by while one of their own was tortured for speaking out represent the largely apathetic American populace.

And, of course, after the fact, the fifth and perhaps most important player in the drama made its inevitable entrance: the press. Major press outlets and even some supposedly left-wing political blogs were united in suggesting that Mr. Meyer actually deserved to be tasered because of his history as a prankster. Thus, the American media has sanctioned the torture of an American citizen who exercised his freedom of speech. In this they stand firmly in the tradition of all fascist states, in which certain undesirables and those who dared to speak out were officially sanctioned as targets of violence.

After the smoke clears, no one is left standing. All the implemented capable have crept away. But that’s on the inside: on the outside, America has become a Terrorist Organization as well. From The Truth Will Set you Free comes a post called “Shake and Bake” that graphically illustrates (you’ve been warned) the effect of US Military policy in the 2005 pacification of Falluja. Apparently, Shake and Bake is the cutesy name for alternating rounds of high explosives and rounds of white phosphorus.

Although white phosphorus often has no effect on clothes, when it makes contact with a person’s skin, it will burn it down to the bone. If the gas is inhaled, it will blister the throat and lungs, causing rapid suffocation, burning the body from the inside.

How many gallons of blood does it take to refine a gallon of gasoline? How long will we remain the Apathetic Americans? How much longer can this go on? These are questions you should ask yourself. No possible answer can remotely satisfy.

Florida seems to be the testing grounds for the New American Century, wherein fear acts as crowd control and police brutality becomes de rigeur. It is become the breeding ground of the modern police state. Unfortunately, the crowd hasn’t quite gotten the message yet. The State that Tasers unruly children has turned its Protectors of the Peace against a more conventional target: liberal college students. From Chicago Tribune:

A University of Florida student was Tasered and arrested after trying to ask U.S. Senator John Kerry about the 2004 election and other subjects during a campus forum.

Videos of the incident posted on several Web sites show officers pulling Andrew Meyer, 21, away from the microphone after he asks Kerry about impeaching President Bush and whether he and Bush were both members of the secret society Skull and Bones at Yale University.

“He apparently asked several questions — he went on for quite awhile — then he was asked to stop,” university spokesman Steve Orlando said. “He had used his allotted time. His microphone was cut off, then he became upset.”

As two officers take Meyer by the arms, Kerry, D-Mass., is heard to say, “That’s alright, let me answer his question.” Audience members applaud, and Meyer struggles to escape for several seconds as up to four officers try to remove him from the room.

Meyer screams for help and asks “What did I do?” as he tries to break away from officers. He is forced to the ground and officers order him to stop resisting. Meyer says he will walk out if the officers let him go.

As Kerry tells the audience he will answer the student’s “very important question,” Meyer struggles on the ground and yells at the officers to release him, crying out, “Don’t Tase me, bro,” just before he is Tasered. He is then led from the room, screaming, “What did I do?”

Must have been some questions!

Liberal use of Tasers on liberal arts students conjures flashback images of the police in Valve Software’s brilliant near-future PC adventure Half Life 2, wherein masked and black suited militia freely use stun batons on the oppressed citizenry.

It’s an odd coincidence that such behavior occurs in Jeb Bush’s former territory. Rigging election results was just an appetizer for an insidious creep toward greater martial control. Be forewarned.

The Washington Post notes a contradiction between General Patreus’ testimony and actions taken by his commanders in New Halliburton:

A week ago today, Gen. David H. Petraeus started his rounds on Capitol Hill, reporting that security in Iraq was improving to the point that a small number of troops could begin coming home by year’s end.

But 10 days ago, his commanders in Baghdad began advertising for private contractors to work in combat-supply warehouses on U.S. bases throughout Iraq because half the soldiers who had been working in the warehouses were needed for patrols, combat and protection of U.S. forces.

I see a precedence occurring here: Respond to the Cries of the American public, media and congressional pressure to lower troop levels by replacing them with Mercenaries.
That’s right! We’re not supposed to use that word; private security companies don’t like it - it gives them a bad image, or something…

But since the dictionary says:

mer·ce·nar·y /ˈmɜrsəˌnɛri/
–adjective
1. working or acting merely for money or other reward; venal.
2. hired to serve in a foreign army, guerrilla organization, etc.
–noun
3. a professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army.
4. any hireling.

I can only assume a corporation willing to work in a foreign nation as part of an outside army (albeit from the same nation, but NOT enlisted in that nation’s armed forces), willing to provide tactical and logistical assistance to a national military, can indeed be defined as a Corps of Mercenaries.

So while the quagmire continues and public support wanes, the Administration is orchestrating a bait-and-switch by replacing one set of soldiers for another. All they have to worry about is how to funnel the cost of their Shadow Army into the defense budget. Shouldn’t be too difficult.

Today’s Washington Post reports on the resurgence of Al-Qaida. They haven’t been sitting idle while We’ve been distracted by George Bush’s Excellent Iraqi Adventure. On the contrary; while the American Media has been obsessed with the scene in New Halliburton, our "friends" in Nuclear Pakistan have been harboring terrorists. Remember Bush’s tough talk about nation who would stoop so low?  How we wouldn’t tolerate that? Just another in the long list of little white lies emanating from the White House.

Dodging the U.S. military in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, al-Qaeda Central reconstituted itself across the Pakistani border, returning to the rugged tribal areas surrounding the organization’s birthplace, the dusty frontier city of Peshawar. In the first few years, Pakistani and U.S. authorities captured many senior leaders; in the past 18 months, no major figure has been killed or caught in Pakistan.

As for the War on Terrorism ™, we’ve had the same luck as we’ve had on the War on Drugs ™ or the War on Poverty ™; bad luck. In fact, I can’t remember American winning a war since Korea. We did win that one, right? It seems the days of America winning all of its wars is long past.

Today, al-Qaeda operates much the way it did before 2001. The network is governed by a shura, or leadership council, that meets regularly and reports to bin Laden, who continues to approve some major decisions, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official. About 200 people belong to the core group and many receive regular salaries, another senior U.S. intelligence official said.

"They do appear to meet with a frequency that enables them to act as an organization and not just as a loose bunch of guys," the second official said.

We’ve been led to believe otherwise:

"Thanks to President Musharraf’s leadership, on the al-Qaeda front we’ve dismantled the chief operators," Bush said. Although bin Laden was still at large, his lieutenants were "no longer a threat to the United States or Pakistan," Bush added.

But then as Keith Olberman noted, the President has been "playing" us.

Six months later, Musharraf was nearly killed in an assassination attempt by al-Qaeda operatives. Shortly afterward, a group of al-Qaeda leaders held a summit of their own in the Pakistani region of Waziristan, where they plotted fresh attacks thousands of miles away in Britain, including targets in London and financial institutions in the United States, according to Pakistani officials.

Many U.S., Pakistani and European intelligence officials now agree that al-Qaeda’s ability to launch operations around the globe didn’t diminish after the invasion of Afghanistan as much as previously thought.

As American’s learned during the Cold War (did we win that one?), a government can get  away with anything once a "clear and present danger" can be seen to exist. As we’ve learned to our dismay during this presidency, the danger need not be real. Repeat after me: "Weapons of Mass Destruction." Very good.

Al-Qaida is a real threat. Perhaps that’s why we let Osama Bin Laden escape into the unruly hills of Pakistan, so our leaders can perpetuate the Cold War mentality among the American people so lucrative to what’s left of America’s industrial base, i.e. the Defense Industry.

So as long as the bullet makers need to sell bullets, America needs a bad guy - a bogeyman - to sell to its voters as a National Security threat. If enough people fear, not leeway is given lawmakers to erode freedom, promote questionable business practices abroad, and to invade sovereign nations. If the people fear enough, America can be morphed into a police state in the mane of Homeland Security. That is not the America the veterans of World War Two we’re dying for.

Let us not forget that the last nation that rallied its people "for the Fatherland," used the same tactics we see today. Zieg Heil!

That’s exactly what I asked myself as I clicked the link at Digg.com. The resulting Wall Street Journal article highlights the emerging netroots efforts surrounding the Republican dark horse Presidential candidate. Not having paid much attention to the Re-thug-lican party, I hadn’t heard of him.

Further along the page of hot Diggs is another mention of Ron Paul, this one from a blogger concerned about America’s emerging governance trend. Here I find an article by the man himself, snipped for rapid propagation. I’ll highlight what caught my fancy:

Our love for liberty above all has been so diminished that we tolerate intrusions into our privacy that would have been abhorred just a few years ago. We tolerate inconveniences and infringements upon our liberties in a manner that reflects poorly on our great national character of rugged individualism. American history, at least in part, is a history of people who don’t like being told what to do. Yet we are increasingly empowering the federal government and its agents to run our lives.

Terror, fear, and crises like 9-11 are used to achieve complacency and obedience, especially when citizens are deluded into believing they are still a free people. The loss of liberty, we are assured, will be minimal, short-lived, and necessary. Many citizens believe that once the war on terror is over, restrictions on their liberties will be reversed. But this war is undeclared and open-ended, with no precise enemy and no expressly stated final goal. Terrorism will never be eradicated completely; does this mean future presidents will assert extraordinary war powers indefinitely?

Is this man the John Galt of our era? Probably not. But he’s got my attention.

So. Alberto Gonzalez is out. People are starting to flake off this presidency like a leper’s skin. Gonzo’s perhaps the flakiest of the bunch.

Perhaps that’s not the best metaphor. Did you ever see cockroaches scatter when the light switches on? The longer the roach light shined, the less Gonzo could remember. Pictures of him last week had him looking like a deer in headlights. But that confounds the imagery.

The spotlight on Alberto must have been too much for the guy George Bush has so much confidence in. Has anyone asked the President about what is he confident? Could it be in Al’s ability to politicize the Justice Department? Or His willingness to take the hatchet?

I’m not saying the Democrats going after this cockroach are enlightened, but the pointed questions are so overdue. We may never get to the bottom of the dung heap people like Gonzalez are sacrificing their careers to obfuscate. And time is running out.

Why should Alberto stay anyway? He’ll be replaced by the next administration in a few month’s time; he’ll not be able to get real work done now that his credibility is in question. What’s the point? On the other hand, why leave? Our “Resoloot” leader will install another hack to continue the deal. If the Democrats screech, as is likely, then the few flakes that are left can cry about obstruction - whatever.

It’s all so stupid, really. One thing’s for sure: none of this, from either camp, serves the American People. That’s a shame.

My favorite righty blogger friend sites an article exposing a Y2K bug data glitch in US temperature data graphs used to project climate change as the Holy Grail of truth to prove her long-held hypothesis that global warming is a scam. I don’t blame her, though. She’s entitled. Most bloggers only rely on sources they are predisposed to agree with to parse their rhetoric. I do it all the time…

What alarms me is how she clearly ignores other signs of climate change. The recently exposed islands in Greenland that, so long covered in thick ice, had always been thought to be connected to the main land mass. The satellite photos of recent large-scale fractures in Antarctic Glaciers. The sinking of small island-states like Trinidad-Tobago. Even the changed migration of Canadian geese, much noted here in Illinois where we both live, is a fact ignored in favor of an irrational belief.

And what about the problem-that-shouldn’t-be-named? No one mentions pollution these days. That shopworn buzzword of the last century is taboo in the tabloids lately. My aforementioned friend lives in a semi-rural small town where, I surmise, she can forget the sight of sunrise over the Kennedy Expressway in all it’s brownish, hazy glory. Nor, I think, can she envision the silt of airliner fuel exhaust that coats my car every evening, as I leave the industrial park that nestles next to O’hare Field. While her neighbors dream of corn fields of ethanol-grade hybrid grain, I awake to the reality of human congestion flavored by addiction to fossil fuels.

Global Warming, as a catch-phrase, has unfortunate connotations. Replacing it with Climate Change is, while more accurate, less visceral, and less likely to get our fat arses out of the easy chair to take action. What needs doing is simply to open our eyes. When we can see for ourselves the thickening of our thin atmosphere from our own collective wastes, then perhaps we can make pollution the center point of a political movement to care for the fragile ecosphere we all rely upon. Only through politics will America take up the sword against our most insidious of enemies: ourselves.

The right may scoff. Let them. When we can gather enough steam to provide purchasable alternatives to old-school technologies, then the market to which Conservatives pray will put out of business whole industries that refuse to ride the forefront of ecological stewardship. When hit in the wallet, they will finally listen. As for the exurbian naysayers; the brown skies will find then soon enough.

The White House proposes a $20 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia. Can you believe this? The same nation that birthed Osama Bin Laden is offered high-tech weapons and upgrades to fighter jets by the nation that suffered from the same man’s obsessions: Freaking brilliant.

It’s just business as usual for the military-industrial Corporatocracy. "Who?" you ask. (Or maybe "What’s he getting on about?") You know, the people who have the money to influence elections, buy presidencies and profit on war and bloodshed; the people who really run this country. I cannot imagine that the founders of this country - in their worst nightmares - would have imagined the nation they strived so hard to create fall into the role of an unscrupulous gun seller. Kind of give new meaning to "Wild West."

Can our government get more out of touch with the will of it’s people? Can it get more arrogant? More defiant?

Yes. Things can always worsen. But I believe the bottom has been reached. The political pendulum is swinging away from rampant capitalism, pre-emptive aggression, and wanton destruction. We are moving away from the narrow, selfish greed of a well-placed few and steering the the nation back toward a sense of stewardship of it’s people and their needs.

Congress must stop this deal. But even the Democrats in congress will accept this hypocrisy if the American people don’t make a lot of noise against this move. Our unwillingness to cry foul in the face of political idiocy has gotten us into the mess we’re in. Will we, in our silence enable our nation to continue to be the butcher of the world through it’s insistence of selling war material to anyone who will pay?

What kind of future will that bring? There is only one logical end to such maneuvering: traffic in the tools of blood, and blood is the product. Only by a concerted effort of millions of Americans will this cease. Let’s make a new America: one that doesn’t profit from destruction.

Don’t expect congress to do this for us.

The NY Times’ Quote of the Day illustrates how broken our legislative process has become:

"Coal and nuclear count their lobbying budgets in the tens of millions. We count ours in the tens of thousands."
RHONE RESCH, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association

Where there is money, there is corruption. Our government no longer cares about steering the ship of state, nor is it concerned about helping it’s people. It gives no thought to securing a future of any kind, let alone a visionary future like the kind we dreamed during the space race.

The concern of our government, comprised of millionaires and elitists, is to further the padding of their wallets. Our congressmen (and women) are slaved to their own greed, puppets of corporate interests and are sold to the highest bidder. They are commodities in a futures market of votes as volatile as any exchange market on Wall Street. They have lost their way.

And people wonder why so few Americans bother to vote…