Weekend Update – Homeland Insecurity

I was unable to stay awake over here in Germany long enough to hear the live capture of the second Boston bomber suspect.  I had spent most of Friday listening in on the live feed of the Boston police department (thru a link on Twitter that led to a live UStream police scanner feed).  I hit the sack about the time the Boston police were shutting down their city wide dragnet.

There were so many reports of suspicious vehicles that I began to wonder if I was really listening to a live feed from the police in Boston, or if they had just put previously recorded conversations from troops stationed at Iraqi Checkpoints on continuous loop.

But I digress.

As I listened to the stream and followed Twitter hashtage #bostonscanner, it was obvious that the authorities were busy trying to disable the live feed.  I started seeing tweets from people watching the UStream via mobile phone apps that were finding their scanner apps shut-down.  There were tweets from the authorities imploring citizens not to retweet the very same information they were BROADCASTING all over the city (as if the suspect would read a Twitter feed instead of just listening directly to the cops themselves if so inclined?) The direct http feed from UStream that I was listening to on my computer never suffered from such blocking.

So let’s do a quick recap here. Homeland Security has spent billions of US taxpayer dollars in an attempt to “make us safe(r)’. We’ve seen countless stories and photos from every Podunk county sheriffs office in the US sporting military grade machinery and weapons.

Buying at all those fancy weapons, and seeing all those highly polished black boots obviously helped loosen the constricted sphincter muscles of a decidedly nervous nation, (while simultaneously enriching the military industrial arms dealers).  But as the incident with the Grand Theft Auto/Boston Bombers scanner feed on UStream shows, our intrepid terrorist warriors overlooked at least one MAJOR GAPING hole in the system.

Somewhere along the way, they forgot to upgrade the police radios of a major American city with police communications gear that can’t be intercepted by any 14 year old kid (or terrorist) with a $99 Radio Shack police scanner.

And to top it all off, this just popped into the picture : Boston Bomber Bin Laden Determined to Attack America.

The FBI and Homeland Security apparently STILL don’t have the manpower to track KNOWN targets of HIGH probability of terrorism or enough money to upgrade Boston police radios? We know they spent bazillions of dollars of Homeland Security money on tanks for the tri-county area of Tuscaloosa (and the like), but not properly following the trail of IDENTIFIED THREATS is WAY over the top.  The FBI, like the town of Waco, must have been lulled into a false sense of serenity as they sat in the cool shadow of their local fertilizer plant.

In the old days (before torture was “enhanced interrogation”) there would probably have been some sort of oversight or review set up to examine these failures, but since Obama decided on a FAIL FORWARD strategy of leadership, that seems highly unlikely.

Enjoy

Lady and the Scamp

I have been asked to reflect on my experiences dealing with a young lady named Julia Rose, who first caught my attention on Facebook a couple years ago. She has a Facebook tribute page dedicated to preserving and distributing the works, and highlighting the memories, of Peter McWilliams.

The Lady

Here is Julia speaking about Peter in a public YouTube video taken at one of the many rallies, conventions or speaking (and singing!) venues she attends.

The Scamp

The many uplifting stories of Peter, as well as his accompanying trials and tribulations, are too broad to relate here. I know I would feel blessed to have my own wikipedia page, let alone a youthful cheerleader like Julia, so long after my ashes are scattered. FWIW, I have chosen to honor my personal memories of Peter by ending all my correspondences with Enjoy. But I digress. Let us move on to my personal account of this energetic young lady.

Getting to Know Her

The first time I spoke with Juila was when she contacted me thru Facebook after seeing my New Year’s tribute to Peter here in this blog. She indicated that she was in contact with Peter’s mother who had inherited a great deal of Peter’s literary memorabilia, some of which she was letting Julia share on the web.

We chatted on Skype a couple times times after that. We communed over the ghost of Peter, his legacy and his works. She probed my calcifying neurons for first person recollections and stories from my calls and correspondence with Peter, the majority of which (sadly) came during the hectic months of his arrest and deprivations under the thumb of America’s fascist drug warriors.

Julia shared with me that Peter’s mom was reluctant to publicize the more risqué or controversial aspects of Peter’s political life. Julia’s main interest in honoring Peter was his poetry and self-help writings.

All that touchy-feely emotional hoodoo is just fine by me (and the 32.4% of me that is gay), but the rest of me negotiated stridently with Julia for a much more prominent emphasis on the politics of the subject that cost Peter his life. She agreed and promised to discuss the issue with Peter’s mom.

She seemed a rather shy and reluctant spokesperson at first, but as the last couple years have shown, her message and music have bounced to one event or the other all over the planet (or at least a tri-country area).

She’s some kind of a hippie-chick rock goddess guru within the medical marijuana community these days now that she’s embraced my early mentoring. I’m too old to even keep up with her frenetic pace on Facebook, but I proudly point her out as a protege and someone I knew before they got famous.

Enjoy.

Wall Street Versus the Euro

Wanna know why Wall Street is so keen on killing the Euro?

You can’t sell below cost in the Eurozone countries just to run your competition our of business, even if you have a billion dollars to give it a go.  Helps to level the playing field.  Gives the small guys half a chance to compete with the bigger players.

From this.

Enjoy.

Joe Washington

Watching and documenting the liars for Jeebus crowd has my bullshit sensitivity meter locked in so tight it was impossible to miss this right wing inspired gun nut Facebook post today:

The propensity of the Conservative party to lie about every other subject, coupled with the certainty that good old George never said anything of the sort set me to Googling. A search on that exact phrase, if it is indeed a Washington quote, should render hits from a plethora of serious presidential scholars. So, what were my results :

The quote is superimposed on one YouTube video:

It appears to be taken from a Christian Fundamentalist web page (Powered by “the Holy Spirit” the light within) posted by some guy named Joe Spenner, who apparently thinks putting quotes in the title of his web page makes his lunatic rambings attributable to Washington:

Be on guard for this kind of right wing tripe. It is pervasive and obnoxious but people are quite easily led astray by Republicans who then attribute it to the devil, or Obama.

Enjoy.

GOP Irrelevancy

Good morning all,

First off. housekeeping. Woke up 55 years old this morning. Happy birthday to me.

I’m just old enough to remember when all the “lazy blacks” in Detroit were so busy making cars that that moniker didn’t work so well.   A lot of people I remember fondly from my youth had good union jobs and lived well. Then Reagan came along and garrotted the unions in 1980.  Many believe Reagan also killed Disco, but Disco never died. Reagan stuffed it in a duffel bag and sent it to Guantanamo.

In any event, the country has been on a Republican built road-to-Hell since then.  Republican greed totally destroyed any chance for those of my generation to implement the dreams and ideals we all grew up cherishing.  Our fathers had just landed on the moon and we were poised for Mars just about the time the crazy old man got hold of the wheel and steered us off into the direction of Star Wars instead.

There’s still a ray of hope for our children and grandchildren, if we don’t allow them to drown in the slime pit of oil dependency and warmongering the Republicans have built into our system.  We’ll see.

Big shout out to all the Walmart workers who stood against the corporate tyrants.  Walmart can’t compete in an environment where civility and fair play are honored above institutional profits.  They fizzled here in Germany after pissing a billion dollars away, and at the end of the day, they weren’t even able to offer lower prices than their competitors!!

How Can the Republicans Regain Relevance?

Having graduated from high school in Fort Dodge Iowa (1976 – State of Iowa Scholar), I can say with some authority that what the Republicans need to do to become relevant again. I expect my suggestions to be received by the GOP with all the enthusiasm and applause as pre-election Nate Silver polls, but it might help if somebody from the great plains, who isn’t a highly paid (bought off) beltway insider adds a main-street view. I am pretty sure I have mentioned these things before, but the Republicans weren’t listening to me then and they likely won’t listen to me now, but if ever there was a time when Googling “mainstream viewpoints” and “U.S. voters” might interest a Republican, this seems a likely moment in time for that occurrence.

Republicans need to drop their crazy ideas on reproductive freedoms. This last election cycle saw things spin so far into crazy town that there were candidates actually advancing the cause of rapist’s rights in having their unholy offspring borne by our mothers, wives and daughters. I have a memory of Mississippi trying to outlaw condoms, but that might have been spin from their “rights of the zygote” legislation that failed, even in the bastion of the Baptist holy land. At the end of the day, the Republican adoption of the Christian Bible as a handbook for political and scientific guidance is as ill-advised, un-American and disgusting. Relying on faith over facts is not a road to success into the future.

Modern Republicanism is now 20 percent politics and 80 percent fundamentalist Christian Reconstructionism. This is something they used to know enough to hide because they knew it was a losing minority position. I remember noting the TRUE percent of “lunatic fringe” Christians when Pat Robertson ran for president. IIRC, it was about five percent, and I doubt the actual numbers are higher today (40% of US now “non-religious”).

What the Relignicans lack in numbers they try to make up for in astroturf and echo chambers. Fox (Faux) News is HELPING elect Democrats now that everybody isn’t afraid to laugh at the Naked Emperor.

I have an iPad mini to unwrap.

Happy Birthday to Me.

Enjoy.