Timetable Vs “Event-driven withdrawal”

The conventional “wisdom” among policymakers in Washington is the assumption that if we were to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq the insurgents would simply wait us out and then renew their efforts to wreak havoc. Recently, the Bush League has put out the idea of an “event-driven withdrawal (EDW).” The idea being that we will begin a phased withdrawal when certain conditions are met. Further withdrawals of troops will be driven by events on the ground. This is their attempt to counter the growing popular demands to bring our troops home.
What none of the geniuses in the punditocracy seem to be able figure out is the fallacy of the conclusion in the argument that rejects the timetable. If the insurgents were inclined to wait us out, it would make more sense for them to stop the suicide bombings, lay low for a few months - until we have withdrawn the bulk of our troops and equipment - and then attack with renewed ferocity and ruthlessness to cause maximum damage.
If we’re to believe Mr. Bush (If you do so, you do it at your own risk) the “Islamo-fascists” hate our freedom and their goal is to destroy us. If that’s the case then they want our troops in Iraq where they can more easily kill them. If Bush’s premise is right, then announcing a timetable for withdrawal would heighten the urgency of the insurgency. Bush's logic (how's that for an oxymoron?) has always been flawed, and he's shown an uncanny ability to fool most of the people most of the time, but why does everybody in the media unquestioningly accept his arguments?

The God of war nears lunacy...

Moon and Mars on Monday Night,
November 14, 2005.
These pictures were taken with my JVC camcorder.

Now seeing double
Change the focus, change the view
Peace reigns in the sky!

Bush's Hair Is On Fire, Cheney's Already Burned Off (or, the vice president is a dick)

On page 202 of Plan Of Attack Bob Woodward says:
"The draft said that 'On Saddam Hussein's orders, opponents have been decapitated.' The CIA said the evidence was that the opponents had been executed, not decapitated. But decapitated stayed in the final speech."
This is smoking gun evidence that the Bush administration deliberately misled us in their efforts to lead us into war. But it's only one of the many lies that are documented in that book. George Bush is a proven liar, and he continues to lie, all the time pointing fingers at his critics and calling them liars. The book, which Woodward wrote with the help of unprecedented access to the Bush League, clearly demonstrates the war fever that gripped the administration since January 20th of 2001, the day GW was innaugurated.
An open minded reading of the words and events that dragged us into their unholy war reveals that Dick Cheney was the driving force in the march to war. He's also a big fat liar. On page 164 Woodward quotes Dick as saying: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction ...that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us." Clearly a lie, that statement shows that the administration's policy was to instill fear as part of the plan to suspend rationality. Fearful people don't behave rationally, that's how Bush was reelected.
An interesting insight that Woodward recounts comes from the man who once upon a time was the only honest man in the Bush League, Colin Powell. He who will forever regret letting them make a liar out of him said that he "detected a kind of fever in Cheney. He was not the steady, unemotional rock that he had witnessed a dozen years earlier during the runup to the Gulf War. The vice president was beyond hell-bent for action against Saddam. It was as if nothing else existed."
Clearly, the vice president is irresponsible and reprehensible in his strained relationship with the truth. It makes one wonder, does he know when he's lying?

Open Letter To G.W. Bush

Mr. President
When are you going to stop lying to us? You repeatedly assert that we were not in Iraq on 9/11 in an effort to deny that your counter productive war in Iraq is making more terrorists. While it may be technically true that there were no American boots on Iraqi soil on that date, we’ve had planes controlling 60% of Iraq’s airspace since 1991. What is relevant to Bin Laden’s attacks is the fact that we did have troops in Saudi Arabia, too near Mecca for Islam’s fundamentalists. Your dad put those troops there after he used April Glaspie to sucker Saddam into invading Iraq by telling Saddam: “But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” If you were honest you would admit that your obsession with removing Hussein had more to do with your dad’s refusal to “finish the job” than with your alleged love of freedom.
Your current lie of the month seems to be the one about the Democrats having the same intelligence that you did when they voted to give you authority to go to war. That’s clearly false on two levels. Your IQ is in single digits if you really believe half of the shit you spout out. Unless you sleep through the daily intelligence briefings (which Senators and congressmen don’t get) or are too stupid to understand them, you had more “intelligence” available to you than the members of Congress did.
Ironically, you’ve been pandering to Christian fundamentalists in your unholy efforts to create a neo-fascist tyranny. The agenda of the religious right has nothing to do with freedom as defined in normal dictionaries. Their agenda is to codify what their faith requires. If you give them half a chance the Ten Commandments will be written into the law books. In a free country one is free to sin his or her way into hell. Your public displays of religious zeal are antithetical to freedom.
We can only hope that Americans continue to get wise to your bullshit and vote your sycophants out of office next year. If the Democrats take control of Congress then maybe we’ll see you get what you deserve, impeached.

Long time no Blog!

The first thing that happened was that Frank strongly recommended Dan Brown’s Demon’s and Angels (D&A) so I went out and bought a paperback copy. It thoroughly sucked me in for the duration; the TV didn’t go on for about three nights in the final stages of the story. Like The daVinci Code (dVC) the story involves, an ancient cult, lots of chicanery committed by the Catholic Church and Robert Langdon using his vast knowledge of symbology and art history to solve the murder mystery.
There were a few too many similarities to the setup of dVC in the early chapters - the corpse with a message, a significant character in a wheel chair and the insistent references to ancient brotherhoods (Knights Templar and Illuminati) in mortal combat with the papist church.
Among the symbols discussed in D&A are the Masonic symbols on the back of a dollar bill…
“The pyramid is an occult symbol representing a convergence upward, toward the ultimate source of Illumination.” Above the pyramid is another symbol, called a ‘trinacria,’ the eye inside the triangle which, according to Brown is an illuminati symbol…”They called it their ‘shining delta.’ A call for enlightened change. The eye signifies the illuminati’s ability to infiltrate and watch all things. The shining triangle represents enlightenment. And the triangle is also the Greek letter delta, which is the mathematical symbol for change, transition.”
In the dialogue that follows Brown claims that the symbols are a call for a new world order. Then he points out that the words beneath the pyramid, ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum,’ mean New Secular Order a phrase that “blatantly contradicts the phrase beside it, ‘In God We Trust.’”
While it’s true that there’s an apparent contradiction (no doubt that’s why the holier-than-thou crowd chooses to ignore the Latin phrase) I see no reason why we can’t believe in God and insist on a secular world order. A look at the world situation is enough evidence to show the dangers of letting religious fanatics codify their religiosity.
Speaking of religious wackos, Pat Robertson is at it again…
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. Nov 10, 2005 — Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson warned residents of a rural Pennsylvania town Thursday not to be surprised if disaster strikes there because "you just voted God out of your city" by ousting school board members who favored teaching "intelligent design."
"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said Thursday on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "The 700 Club."
The tragedy is that millions believe his bullshit. This is truly a case of the blind leading the gullible.
The other thing is that I've been backing up the entire Futurama collection onto DVD-R so the kids can watch them in Ireland and the originals will stay with me, in good shape. That's an ongoing project - I should finish the third season tonight.
There, I hope that satisfies the readers who've been clamoring for more posts. Just kidding.

Time is an Ocean

Time is an ocean ,it comes in waves,
Non linear and unpredictable.
Lapping and ebbing incessantly,
Memories mix with fantasies
In previews of tomorrow.

Time’s tidal pools reek of fecundity.
Life in full bloom, in full cycle.
Birth through death, and back again…
Dreams, memories and reflections,
Flotsam on the tides of time,

Suspended in time, the seeds of eternity
Will sprout when waiting is ripe.
Ecclesiastes in a reggae rap.
A time to sow and reap
Like the Rasta Man said.