LJ – Smirking Chimp

Posted on February 7, 2012 by bluedepth

From 6/26/2003

Saw this on www.smirkingchimp.com, reprinted from America Held Hostile

The facts do not support George Bush’s or Colin Powell’s statements. These two men testified before all of the people of our great country and the representatives of other nations falsely.

The document that purported to show the connection of Iraq seeking enriched uranium had been declared a forgery long before George Walker Bush uttered those words in his State of the Union Address in January 2003. The “intelligence” documents that Colin Powell waved in the air were plagiarized from the thesis of a college student that was more than twelve years old.

The proof of their statements has been shown to be false in the weeks following George Walker Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003.

On June 21, 2003, George Walker Bush said “The intelligence services of many nations concluded that he had illegal weapons and the regime refused to provide evidence they had been destroyed. We are determined to discover the true extent of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs, no matter how long it takes,”

That’s a far cry from his earlier testimonies of quantities of WMDs. Now we are looking for papers and documents of past “programs,” not actual weapons.

The “mobile biological weapons labs” have been found to be units sold to Iraq by Great Britain for the purpose of inflating artillery balloons with hydrogen.

We have found fertilizer factories, swimming pools and vacuum cleaners.

We have sacrificed the lives of almost two hundred of our best and bravest. We have caused the deaths of approximately 10,000 Iraqi civilians.

We have found no weapons of mass destruction.

We, my friends, have been played for fools. We have been lied to.

I feel so patriotically ashamed… but it’s the Shrub at the wheel and I’ve got a good idea about how and why he was selected president and I will never ever vote for any republican candidate, no matter who his rival is. Anything is better than the GOP that drags the nation into Hell.

LJ – Shrublet In Hell

Posted on February 3, 2012 by bluedepth

From 3/17/2003

Here we all sit, on the brink of war… and all I can think of is “We are a Nation of Peace” as a flying image, colliding with the notion that we are essentially going to flood the Euphrates and Tigris rivers with blood. We’re going to most likely bomb Iraq into the stone age – so much for being a nation of peace. I see Dubya’s new anti-war stance not as some honorable position but rather it’s the “Get the Hell out of Dodge” policy, that it’s just about Dubya and Saddam. Why don’t they simply just sit down like civilized people and try to bludgeon each other to death with their own hands? I’d go so far as to say that this may very well be Generation Y’s Vietnam. Our proud soldiers go off to fight some foreign battle and what of them when they come back? How many Vietnam Vets came back to a chilly America? How many “Rumble in the Sandbox” troops will come home facing a public that doesn’t believe in them because they fought a war against one single man and an idea? Where is good old fashioned 20th century thinking? Ah yes, right here in the enlightened 21st Century. I suppose it’s better to bomb Iraq into the stone age and create thousands more little Saddams than it would be in pursuing a more peaceful and more lucrative solution, say, flooding the middle east with American goodwill. Hah, fat chance of that happening now. The best way to battle terror is to blindly lash out, that way you can create destroy it with a war.

I sit back and think upon loftier thoughts because all of this depresses me, and I find my mind wandering towards what Jesus Christ said, that the solution was to not kill, but rather to forgive and to love. I find it quite engaging to hear Dubya invoke a God he is currently plotting on rendering moot. What footing does any good Christian have if they in good conscience allow this war to proceed, knowing that they have turned away from the teachings of their God because of laziness? It’s far easier to bomb and kill and murder than it is to forgive. I can just imagine the knot in the pit of the Pope’s stomach when the first bomb falls on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

In brighter news, the Yahoo! main page is a cavalcade of good news items:

Bush Says Saddam Has 48 Hours to Leave or It’s War
U.S. Raises Terror Alert Level Due to Iraq Crisis
U.S. Sees Signs Iraq May Use Chemical, Bio Arms
Turkey to Debate Helping U.S. on Tuesday
Annan Orders UN Staff Out of Iraq
Deadly Pneumonia Defies Global Health Experts
Charges Delayed in Elizabeth Smart Case

The part that particularly drew my attention was this one: * Deadly Pneumonia Defies Global Health Experts. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

Eight Ball

Posted on January 10, 2012 by bluedepth

I’ve about had it with gasoline companies. The prices change daily and nobody is very clear as to why that has to be. I suspect it has more to do with price fixing, gouging, and generally being nasty to the public than it has with supply and demand.

When prices are this variable, to say nothing of being this high, I start to think about ways I can manage my money when it comes to buying fuel. I often times will drive on an empty tank using the range metric from the cars computer as a gauge to determine when I should buy fuel or not. Last night while driving home from the gym it struck me. I allocate $40 a week to gasoline in my budget and I can make it from week to week quite well on that money. Instead of buying fuel in one $40 transaction which today would only really get me three quarters of a full tank from empty I have decided that I am going to buy gasoline in $8 increments. That gives me five opportunities to fuel until I hit my budget cap. So, the last time I fueled, which was last night, I bought $8 worth of gasoline. That won me about 100 miles in the range metric, but since I refuel around 30 miles on that metric it’s actually about 70 miles. Of course the metric is based on a LOT of highway driving so the minute I go back to city driving the MPG will drop through the floor and this mythical 70 miles worth of gasoline per stop will actually turn out to be around 30-40 miles.

With this plan, I don’t have to feel like I got gypped by the variability in gasoline prices. I don’t care about credit card transaction fees on small purchases hurting the vendor. I lack sympathy for the devil.

NDAA 2011 – HR 1540

Posted on December 23, 2011 by bluedepth

Bill HR1540, the NDAA for 2012 has gone through many revisions as it came from the Senate, and snaked it’s way through the House and soon to land on the President’s desk for his signature. The biggest issue with this bill has been the sections 1031 and 1032, which deal with “Detainee Matters” and the ACLU got really bent out of shape when people came to the conclusion that these sections enabled the government to suspend Posse Comitatus and indefinitely detain American Citizens.

This of course is a huge red-button issue. Nobody wants their rights trampled on and even the whiff of this is enough to enrage the citizenry. I have gone to OpenCongress.com and looked up the bill that is being discussed. HR 1540. I then went to the THOMAS site at the Library of Congress and the bill as it is ready for the President’s signature has changed the section numbers of these two parts that upset people. Instead of 1031 and 1032, the new sections are 1021 and 1022.

People are alarmed at this bill and I can tell you that I have read this bill and these two sections and there are two parts, here’s the part for 1021:

(e) AUTHORITIES.—Nothing in this section shall be construed
to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of
United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States,
or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United
States.

And then here’s the part for 1022:

(b) APPLICABILITY TO UNITED STATES CITIZENS AND LAWFUL
RESIDENT ALIENS.—
(1) UNITED STATES CITIZENS.—The requirement to detain
a person in military custody under this section does not extend
to citizens of the United States.

And I’ve looked over this bill and can’t find loopholes that mean that US Citizens can be indefinitely detained at all! The bill clearly states in both sections that nothing in either section applies to US Citizens!

So does it matter if the President Vetoes this bill? No. It doesn’t. We are protected by these two sections. The people who claim that we are in peril need to point where in the bill these two paragraphs no longer mean what I think they do when I read them.

If nobody can produce text proof that this bill is dangerous to my civil rights then I insist that people STFU about it!

Senate Bill 1867 Sections 1031 and 1032

Posted on November 30, 2011 by bluedepth

Sometimes cleverness is a valuable trait and sometimes it’s just more bullshit. In this case, I revise my earlier statement about the ACLU claiming that S.1253 could lead to the indefinite incarceration of US Citizens in light that the actual bill has been resubmitted and altered as S.1867. It would have been helpful to know that this bill was what the ACLU was carrying on about and not S.1253.

So what is the problem with S.1867. Section 1031 LACKS the paragraph that S.1253 Section 1031 had. In both bills, 1032 still has it’s prohibition however the difference is quite upsetting.

According to OpenCongress.org the bill is still being considered by the Senate. It is important to clear up the confusion between these two bills. It appears that S.1253 is dead and S.1867 is moving forward.

Now that the confusion has cleared up, the ACLU was correct to raise an alarm for S.1867, but not for S.1253. These bill numbers are important!

Senate Bill 1253 Sections 1031 and 1032

Posted on November 30, 2011 by bluedepth

I caught myself in a mistake that I’m trying to correct. I accidentally shared a link to a web article that states that Senate Bill 1253 (Also apparently Senate Bill 1867) which is called the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 has two sections which have everyone really bent out of shape, including me, erroneously, until I READ THE BILL.

Section 1031 has most peoples attention, the bill text excerpt online lacks a vital section that exists in the raw material of the bill itself. For this I blame THOMAS at the Library of Congress for omitting it.

Section 1031’s Prohibition

20 (d) CONSTITUTIONAL LIMITATION ON APPLICA-
21 BILITY TO UNITED STATES PERSONS.—The authority to
22 detain a person under this section does not extend to the
23 detention of citizens or lawful resident aliens of the United
24 States on the basis of conduct taking place within the
1 United States except to the extent permitted by the Con-
2 stitution of the United States.

Last I checked the only exception that I can reason out is the set of laws established by the US Constitution. I have lived quite well under those old laws and I don’t see how this text has ANY wriggle room to do what the ACLU claims it does.

Section 1032’s Prohibition

(b) REQUIREMENT INAPPLICABLE TO UNITED
12 STATES CITIZENS.—The requirement to detain a person
13 in military custody under this section does not extend to
14 citizens of the United States.

This one is utterly inescapable. It’s printed in BLACK AND WHITE. I can’t for the life of me see how either section would enable the government to indefinitely incarcerate any US Citizen at all. Such a thing would be a gross violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, to say nothing of violating the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the United States Constitution!

After reading this blog, which pretty much states what I see as a gross display of fear-mongering by the ACLU and adherence to the bombastic bullshit claims that this bill somehow puts our civil liberties at risk. The text is clear for both sections, if you read the text itself!

I did a cursory search on Google for the phrase S.1253 and there are just too many sites all repeating the same bombastic bullshit. Claiming that the ACLU knows, or that Lindsey Graham said this or that, but nobody can show me in the text where the proof of their argument lies. I have read the bill and those two paragraphs, for both sections seem to me to be perfectly acceptable when it comes to protecting my civil liberties as a US Citizen.

If I am right, that means that the ACLU is guilty of misleading the public and engaging in misinformation. If that is the case, I can’t trust anything else they say because if they lied once, what proof could there possibly be that they are honest about anything else? They put their necks on the line over this bill. Frankly, just the fact that I doubt the ACLU’s veracity on this subject makes me reject everything else they say – but when it comes to the court of public opinion, if they are caught, it could ruin their credibility.

Biltmore Estate, Asheville, North Carolina – September 2011

Posted on September 30, 2011 by bluedepth

Last week, Scott and I went to visit my mother and stepfather in Rock Hill, South Carolina to celebrate my stepfathers 80th Birthday. We drove the whole way from Michigan and it took about 14 hours to get there. We were with my nephew, Steven Ryerson and his wife Lacy Hall Ryerson. We enjoyed moms wonderful cooking and had a wonderful time. That Sunday, Steven and Lacy had to return home to Virginia Beach and I have to admit that it was very nice seeing that part of my family. I haven’t seen Steven since 2004, and before that, since he was a little kid, the year itself is rather lost to my foggy memories. I’ve missed out on all of my nephew and nieces lives as children and now know them as adults. It’s quite akin to the feeling you have when a soap opera character you knew as a child has become a young adult in just two seasons. Wow they grow up fast!

That Monday, we all awoke early and loaded into the car and headed to Asheville, North Carolina, about two hours northwest of Rock Hill. We arrived at the Biltmore Estate, which was built in 1895 by George Washington Vanderbilt for his family.

Here is the main structure. To call it a home is rather inaccurate, it is a chateauesque castle! The building is immense and carries with it a presence of awesomeness that simply floods over you and overwhelms your senses. The grounds are impeccable, the building itself has been conserved amazingly well for its age and a majority of the contents have also been conserved (preserved?) expertly by the Vanderbilt family. It is a private residence still, and the fee is rather steep to gain access, an adult pass is $55 for the pleasure of wandering this amazing place, the buildings and the grounds. Upon entry from the front doors you are immediately inundated with the grand scale of it all, especially some of the interior,

This arboretum is where you land after first entering this castle. The room has a glass window cap which floods the entire area in natural daylight. There are hallways that stretch on in every direction from this central arboretum. Once you stop here, you proceed on to the main dining room, then on to the various rooms, bedrooms, and special purpose rooms that populate this castle. Amongst the first things you come across is the Loggia, which runs for a good portion of the rear length of the castle and is a covered overlook to the grounds that are behind Biltmore,

All that you see in this picture was planned. Every tree and shrubbery was put there by human hands. The designer of the landscape, Olmsted knew that the grounds would start with a human-meddling look to them, but he counted on the natural growth and development of this landscape to transform a forest-on-purpose to what looks like a natural forest that just happened to play out behind Biltmore and roll along under the Loggia. The entire property is 8000 acres so pretty much everything you see in the picture above is a part of Biltmore, and so was planned.

When we exited the Loggia, we proceeded through the various rooms and it is obvious that Vanderbilt money was considered inexhaustible. These are after all the royalty of America and they made sure their humble abode shined with every ounce of prize and finery. The library is breathtaking, with two floors joined by a carved wrought-iron spiral staircase and filled with built-into-the-wall bookshelves holding original works in eight languages. As you tour, the impressiveness rots through your mind like drain cleaner. There is so much here to see, so many treasures, so much history. It’s a lot like folding The Louvre Museum and Versailles together and smoothing it out in rural North Carolina.

As I passed through GW Vanderbilt’s bedroom it struck me just how much this “home” is built to overwhelm. It contains nothing that is ugly or unsightly. Everything here is a beautiful treasure, the carvings, the artwork, the tapestries, from the floor to the ceiling and quite often even the floor and ceiling are in and of themselves works of art. Knowing all this, seeing all this, knowing it was open to the public and for a fee you could tour this overwhelming monument to wealth, excess, and ultimately the deadly sin of greed it was both a breathtaking experience of beauty and a gut-wrenching filthy display of greed, vanity, and pride.

I was moved by the artwork, overwhelmed by the library and the dining room. By all the art loaded into this building and while walking through what is called the “Halloween Room” which is actually a part of the basement that was painted by the Vanderbilt children in Halloween motifs a new thought struck me. For all of the amazingness of it, for all the wonder and grandeur, and all the other words that indicate excess and stunning I was assailed by the lesson of Biltmore, for it does have one. That lesson is, “You cannot take it with you.” GW Vanderbilt is dead. He could not take his treasures with him. All the beautiful things that line this place are kept things. Yes, the Vanderbilt family still owns Biltmore, but it has evolved out of being a home and into being a spectacle. It’s a warehouse for sad objects that are kept, the beauty concentrated in this one place and stuffed behind an entrance fee for a for-profit management company.

I earlier made a connection between Biltmore and The Louvre. Both are palaces, grand chateauesque castles. One of them is in the new world and one in the old world. There is a fundamental difference, The Louvre honors what it keeps and is open to the public for the betterment of everyone who visits. Biltmore keeps what it keeps and is open to the public, and benefits the rich family who maintains it. Both are gilded cages for beautiful things, except one shines just a little bit brighter.

In the blazing light of excess and splendor it struck me right between the eyes, the inanity of keeping things. Yes, all of what is in Biltmore is beautiful, impeccably conserved, and it contains many wonderful things, but it in the end turns the stomach. Too much sweetness and wonder all gathered up becomes saccharine and sickening. The flood of overwhelming beauty keeps a lot of this sickness out of your mind while you are actually there, exposed to it all. Eventually when you come down from the high and begin to think about the why and wherefore behind what you experienced, only then do you feel your skin crawl, and then the shame sets upon you. Or at least it did to me. In 1895, and for the intervening years until 1930 this place, Biltmore, was the private residence of people who one could argue fully realized a kind of American Dream.

The Vanderbilts didn’t really earn their vast sums. Many of them inherited their fortunes. This took the vigor out of the family, sapped them of fight, strength, and in many ways, it also sapped them of honor. Yes they were wealthy beyond thought, but they were too comfortable, too couched. Too much. It wasn’t that any of them actually had to start from rags, they stood on a giant moneymaking machine and rode it through to the start of the 20th Century. This Biltmore Estate is a testament to a kind of gut-wrenching disgustingness. All the beautiful things jailed to die very long deaths of monomaniacal keeping. It wasn’t until the cork of the West fell out of the bottom during the Great Depression did the Vanderbilt family decide that Biltmore should be made open to the public. I can only imagine back in 1930, with all the unemployment and all the hungry people, in the face of all that suffering that it had to make their stomachs do backflips when they sat in the Tapestry Room, looking out the windows, past the Loggia, to the 8000 acres of planned woodland. Then they did the only thing they could bear to do with their deep guilt, and that is secure the property and open it up and let the rank and file proles wander through. A little scrap, and an even more abstracted version of “You cannot take it with you”, for as the Vanderbilts died and couldn’t take Biltmore with them, the lame proles who wander through like cattle can’t really take what they see with them, except in their memories.

But for all of this lofty talk, there is more to show. Of course, what castle would be complete without statuary?

During our visit to Biltmore, another hallmark of American Plenty was on display. Tiffany and Company had a display of some of their lamps:

And finally, one last parting glance at Biltmore:

It is a beautiful place, the Vanderbilts should be thanked for preserving such a thing and all the wonders it contains. Most of my comments come from a very deep place that finds this kind of excess troubling. While the Vanderbilts wanted for nothing and arguably couldn’t even get rid of their money if they wanted to, there were millions of others who were clustered around cookfires and standing in long lines looking for work and struggling with the ache in their empty stomachs, while people like the Vanderbilts went for a swim in their indoor lit-and-heated swimming pool. The disparity leads to despair, at least for me. How much good could have been done if Biltmore wasn’t built, but the funds that might have gone into it and all the things in it went to feeding the teeming masses of unemployed hungry? How can anyone with a straight face declare that obnoxious wealth is defensible when there are hungry children clustering around cookfires with their unemployed parents? It’s the heartache of the liberals. This place, Biltmore, is a shining example of why I hate rich people with every single fiber of my being. So wealthy that life lacks any challenge, then faced with people who know nothing but challenge? The question comes in my mind: “How dare you!” and this I like to think will drive the coming conflict between the rich and poor in the coming years. Like all inequalities, it will be resolved with time and suffering. At least Biltmore will stand, perhaps as a place to conserve beautiful things, and maybe as a symbol of wretched excess and the hazards of allowing greed to overwhelm humanity.

Reflexive Response

Posted on September 21, 2011 by bluedepth

An hour or so ago Scott told me that a Marine Corps recruitment detachment went to a gay resource center somewhere in Nebraska.

I was immediately upset, sure I was going to hear about gay bashing, or some unfortunate gun-related injuries or fatalities. The first words I said after hearing Scott mention this was “Oh God, they’re hunting” and all I could think of were all the regular citizens about to be victimized by “The Military” out of control.

Turns out, they were just recruiting. After the end of DADT, there apparently wasn’t any ill intent.

I got to thinking about my response, that I assume that if the word “Military” or any of it’s synonyms are used, like any of the branch service names, that innocent citizens are at risk of being hurt or killed. My attitude towards the military is really close to my attitude about police. I have no say in the powers that society has bestowed upon them, but I really distrust both. While the police are a general nuisance, a kind of endurable pervasive threat, the military is somehow worse. Perhaps it’s because of what we ask these people to do for a living, hunt and kill others on our behalf, that when they come home, we can’t shake the feeling that their original mandate to kill hasn’t stopped.

I still really don’t understand why anyone who is gay or lesbian wants to serve in either structure, Police or Military. Why walk into such threat and general unpleasantness if you can help it? You know that they don’t like who and what you are, so why endure it if you don’t have to? The same reason you don’t walk into any southern baptist church on Sunday (technically any church, but I digress). Why expose yourself to risk if you don’t have to?

I think that these attitudes will stay with me, likely because I’ve culturally iconified military and police homophobia and bigotry to such an extent that I can’t think of them as anything but threats to my happiness and safety. It’s very similar to the homophobia, bigotry, and hate pouring out of religions. I wouldn’t be caught dead in spitting (or stoning) distance of a church, just as much as I’d avoid a military recruitment detail. You don’t leap the fence at the zoo to pet the lions, tigers, and bears!

I’m sure this entire post is going to upset the usual suspects who don’t like my attitude about the police, the military, or churches. To them, all I can say is a lifetime of menace has done a number on me, and other people who feel as I do. You may not like it, and that’s too bad. You can’t really undo thirty years of menace and fear just by repealing an unpleasant law. This is going to take a few generations to work itself out. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting…

Perfect Halloween Costume

Posted on September 5, 2011 by bluedepth

LiveJournal 10/13/2003 –

Perfect Halloween Costume:

One surplussed flight suit
One used and broken parachute, with the chute wadded up next to it
Various small twigs in your hair
One convincing lost-but-hunted look

—

“Ding-Dong”
“Trick or Treat… ummm”
“My my my, what are you supposed to be?”
“AWOL Ma’am, hungry too… spare some candy?”

—

Then just to round it out you’d stage 3 friends carrying fake hollywood hatchets and they’d wear Dubya, Dick, and Rummy masks… running after you after you got the candy… they chase you off, they trick or treat, and then follow you.

It’s a group trick-or-treat! YAY!

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