Axxman300, All Around Tool

Falling for Me Instead of Instead of Falling for Anything

2011-11-05T21:33:00.000-07:00

Fear has fascinated me since I was a child. Not just the thrills of a good scare, but the way people allow themselves to become prisoners of their fear. I’ve learned that fear isn’t always obvious, isn’t always easy to address, and even once you flush your fear out into the open it is still difficult to get by. Fear creeps into the hard-to-reach places of your psyche and holds on as it spits irrationalities in your face.

My greatest fear is success. It took me 47 years to figure out why. In the beginning, way back when I had therapy in high school, I thought I had figured it out, and that I could hang my low-self esteem on my grandmother who was always happy to tell me how worthless I was. It was easy because she was a visible target. Not until I read "Falling for Me"- by Anna David

http://www.amazon.com/Falling-Me-Curtains-Learned-Traveled/dp/0061996041/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1305184996&sr=8-1

where she discussed her childhood bouts with anger, and how her family (her father in particular) dismissed her anger by making fun of her. As an adult she became a cocaine addict, and has sabotaged most of her relationships. She beat her addictions and struggled from one relationship to the next. Her engaging book details the journey she took to learn to allow her to love herself. It is a good book and well worth your time to read.

In my case I heard my experience echoed by Anna David. Growing up I was never allowed to have all my emotions. It was okay to be happy, but I was never allowed to be angry, and being sad was out of the question. Like Ms. David this is the root of my low self-esteem. Without access to all of my emotions from an early age I never learned to control them, so I ignored them, or I medicated them away. When I get mad I overreact, or I suck all of that anger in and hold it. I’m convinced my weight problem is a physical manifestation of this, and coupled with low self-esteem it is the perfect downward spiral. Anna David talks about how her temper kept men at a distance, and how cocaine allowed her to numb the negative feelings. Being drunk was my escape from myself too.

In Falling for Me Anna talks about not being able to blame her ex-boyfriends for the failures of their relationships, and instead beating herself up for the loss. I spent a lot of time letting people blame me for things that were not my fault. By the time I’d been laid off in 2001 I was used to being the company fuck-up, and in being the company fuck-up I was underpaid without question. So imagine my surprise when my first job as a temp was wiring control panels for Systems Integrated out at the Cal-Am water filtration plant in Carmel Valley. That job was the first time someone told me I could do an important job, and it was the first time I was complemented on my work. My self-esteem had made me a prisoner for so long that I’d just accepted when things went wrong it was my fault. Suddenly I began to look back and question this.

I went back to school in 2007 around the time I stopped drinking. At school I found I could do things, and I discovered that I’m smart. This was a new experience for me. I still don’t know how to cope with it, and every fiber of my id wants to curl up in a ball. In my writing class we had an exercise where I had to write about myself. I started out writing about why I write about monsters, and horror because of the things that had happened to me as a kid. I told my professor that I’d held back because it was kinda painful. He told me never hold back. Later I wrote a poem that was a ballad, and it bothered me. The poem was about a guy who’d been a hero but was condemned for crossing a line. The hero is called upon to save the day one more time, and just as he’s about to catch the bad guy he turns to walk away. The bad guy sets off a nuke, and the hero could care less.

This was the darkest thing I’d ever written. The poem was coming from some hard-to-reach place deep inside of me. In time I realized that I was angry for being used by so many people in my life, and I was angry at myself because my low self-esteem had made it possible. I’d always known there was a problem. I called it Knight in Shining Armor Syndrome were I was always fixing someone’s problems to boost my ego, and I the process keeping from fixing my own problems. This had spread into my love-life as I shied away from normal women to seek out damaged ones. I developed a pattern where I’d put some woman back together emotionally, and then she’d walk out of my life leaving me devastated. Looking back now I realize that I knew they’d all leave and that was fine because I didn’t deserve to be happy anyway. The new wrinkle was that I now realize that most of those women took advantage of me, and that while it was my fault in one way in another way I was victimized just a bit.

Now that I had that revelation in my writing class, and then the enlightenment from Falling for Me I have been able to flush my fear out into the open where I can begin to kill it. I intend to kill it with style too. The first thing I will do is submit a bunch of short stories to publishers. I am a writer now, and I will allow myself to accept this with pride. The other thing I plan to do is follow Anna David’s example and follow guidance from a classic book to improve my life.

In my case this book will be the U.S. Army Ranger Handbook. God help us all.

Guess What? We Were Warned

2011-09-10T18:09:00.000-07:00

I thought a lot about what I’d right for the 10th anniversary of the attacks of 9/11/2001. I started a number of pieces that soon turned into rambling. As the day approached the Department of Homeland Security issued warnings of potential attacks in the form a truck-bombs, and the targets could be New York or Washington D.C. Yet due to the vagueness of the warnings the response has been mostly cynicism from most Americans. This finally gave my thoughts focus. Ten years ago in the Spring of 2001 there are warnings that Al Qaeda was planning to strike the U.S. somewhere in the world, and that it was possible that their attack would take place inside of the United States. It was no secret. The warnings were there for those who read the middle and back pages of the newspapers. Few people read the warnings, and fewer took them seriously.

On June 9, 2001, the Associated Press’s Pauline Jelinek wrote an article about how Army bases across the country would tighten security and restrict access. The story cited a “system-wide review of security…started after October’s bombing (2000) in Yemen of the USS Cole…” as a reason for the directive. Then on June 22, 2001 the State Department issued a “World-Wide Caution” alert:
http://www.familymanagement.com/reports/travel/Worldwide-090701.html
This warning is quoted in its entirety:

Public Announcement
Over the last several months, the U.S.
Government has learned that U.S. citizens and interests abroad may be at
increased risk of a terrorist action from extremist groups. In addition, we have
received unconfirmed information that terrorist actions may be taken against
U.S. military facilities and/or establishments frequented by U.S. military
personnel in Korea and Japan. We are also concerned about information we
received in May 2001 that American citizens may be the target of a terrorist
threat from extremist groups with links to Usama Bin Ladin's Al-Qaida
organization. In the past, such individuals have not distinguished between
official and civilian targets. As always, we take this information seriously.
U.S. Government facilities worldwide remain at a heightened state of alert. U.S.
citizens are urged to maintain a high level of vigilance and to take appropriate
steps to increase their security awareness to reduce their vulnerability.
Americans should maintain a low profile, vary routes and times for all required
travel, and treat mail and packages from unfamiliar sources with suspicion. In
addition, American citizens are also urged to avoid contact with any suspicious,
unfamiliar objects, and to report the presence of the objects to local
authorities. Vehicles should not be left unattended, if at all possible, and
should be kept locked at all times. U.S. Government personnel overseas have been
advised to take the same precautions. In addition, U.S. Government facilities
have and will continue to temporarily close or suspend public services as
necessary to review their security posture and ensure its adequacy. U.S.
citizens planning to travel abroad should consult the Department of State's
Public Announcements, Travel Warnings, Consular Information Sheets, and regional
travel brochures, all of which are available at the Consular Affairs Internet
web site at http://travel.state.gov. We will continue to provide updated
information should it become available. American citizens overseas may contact
the American Citizens Services unit of the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate by
telephone or fax for up-to-date information on security conditions. In addition,
American citizens in need of emergency assistance should telephone the nearest
U.S. Embassy or Consulate before visiting the Embassy or Consulate. Department
of State travel information and publications are available at Internet address:
http://travel.state.gov. U.S. travelers may hear recorded information by calling
the Department of State in Washington, D.C. at 202-647-5225 from their
touch-tone telephone, or receive information by automated telefax by dialing
202-647-3000 from their fax machine. This Public Announcement supersedes the
Public Announcement - Worldwide Caution of June 22, 2001 to inform U.S. citizens
of unconfirmed threats against U.S. military facilities, personnel and
establishments frequented by U.S. military personnel. This Public Announcement
expires on December 22, 2001.

Yes, there’s nothing in there about hijacking passenger jets then flying them into buildings, but it is clear that the US Government was expecting an attack – somewhere – between June 22, 2001 and December 22, 2001. The holes in the national security machine (re: the CIA & FBI) have been painfully documented elsewhere, and will continue to be exposed as time goes onward. What has been lost in the cloud of dust of the collapse and two reflexive wars is another story from June 23, 2001. The Middle East Broadcasting Centre (MBC) had a reporter in Kandahar:

“"I met with bin Laden near Kandahar (Afghanistan) over the last few days and his main supporters said in front of him that there will be a big surprise over the next two weeks," the MBC correspondent said.Among the bin Laden supporters quoted were Abu Hafs, considered as bin Laden's right-hand man, and Ayman al-Zawahirit, the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.”

While the two week mark came and went it was common knowledge the US was in Al Qaeda’s crosshairs. At least it was common knowledge to the Arab press, and to people who tracked terror warning. For some reason the threats didn’t resonate with the American public, even though the World Trade Center had already been bombed in 1993, and the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City had been destroyed by a truck-bomb in April, 1995.

The talking heads on the national news desks and those on the cable news ghetto all begin their yearly 9/11 sermons with how naïve and innocent Americans were on the morning of 9/11/2001. This is bullshit. Americans weren’t naïve nor innocent, they were simply ill-informed. The national news media had collectively fallen asleep at the wheel. In the summer before the attacks the news universe was dominated by Congressman Gary Condit and his missing intern, Chandra Levy. There is also the Enron scandal that the media had also failed to detect in advance in spite of their multiple financial experts on staff. Just as they failed to look deeply into the Enron and the “Tech-Bubble” there was little interest in looking into threats from Al Qaeda. ABC’s John Miller seemed to be one of the few to understand Osama bin Laden to be a larger threat. His interviews with bin Laden can be found on ABC’s website, and are worth reviewing even now.

The point is that after the attacks fingers were pointed at the Bush Administration, and the bulk of responsibility rests with their disinterest in the subject of terror threats before 9/11/2001. Fingers need also to be pointed at the news media as well. The Time Magazine that hit the stands after the attacks contained amazingly detailed accounts of Al Qaeda’s movements inside the US, and their planning overseas. The only way this level of detail was possible was because reporters had already been following Al Qaeda independently, and after the attacks they quickly connected their dots. The question needs to be asked: Why was the news media so uninterested in Al Qaeda prior to 9/11/2001? The network and cable news pimps have no problem generating their own stories, and framing them in a way that they can be milked for weeks on end. Why was national security a back-burner issue?

The sad thing is that these questions will never be answered. I read the June 22nd warning in my local news paper, and on that morning when the towers came down I remembered that Al Qaeda had planned a strike on US interests. While I was shocked and horrified I was not surprised. There is much complaint about what has happened to America since the attacks, but the fact is that Americans have surrendered their responsibilities for their own security to the Federal Government. Nothing has been taken away by force. We haven’t lost anything, we handed it over. When the government asks Americans to be vigilant the response is to compare the US to Soviet Russia. If more Americans had been vigilant before 9/11 the attacks could have been headed off, and there would be no need for a Homeland Security. Yet in 2011 the average American can’t be bothered with security matters. For all of the histrionics the fact is that we are just as pathetic as we were on September 10, 2001.

In the Wake of a Beautiful Woman

2011-08-01T21:53:00.000-07:00

Beauty is its own reward or something along those lines. Today I went to my favorite Mexican restaurant, and as fate would have it I followed just behind a stunningly beautiful young woman. Instead of watching her I watched everyone else as she entered. There was a buzz as every male head turned to stare at her; say what you want about the speed of the internet, this young lady had it beat. The Latino men working behind the counter all smiled and blushed. The man at the counter was as professional as he could be with a big goofy grin on his face.

Magically the dishwashers appeared from the back to check her out as she stood carefree at the counter. She had the kind of beauty that gave the appearance of weightlessness. Her hair seemed to float, her blouse was fit to her upper body yet not tight, and her pants seemed as if they were painted on. Nothing she wore grabbed at her. The men around her seemed to float as well, as if they’d suddenly lost thirty pounds. I suspect this was the loss of mental weight as whatever thoughts had been running through their heads drifted away like Dandelions on a Spring breeze.

She sat down at a table near the counter as her order was to go. I smiled as many of the men suddenly needed to get up and refill at the salad bar which was nowhere near her. While there may have been vulgar talk about her at one of the tables I certainly didn’t hear it. Yes every guy in the place was lusting after her, but not in an aggressive way. It’s the kind of lust saved for that woman you hope to be stranded with on a Tropical island. The kind of lust where you know you would be the happiest man on earth being the one who woke next to her each morning. This kind of beauty has gravity, the kind of gravity that pulls from the inside out. As she sat there unaware of the stir she had caused the restaurant fell quiet as the men just watched as she scrolled through the messages on her phone.

Her order was ready (in record time) as was mine. We both stood and I paused to allow her distance before I followed her out. I was enjoying the view to be sure. The magic continued outside too. She got into her modest sports sedan and backed out. Usually the traffic here is impossible at lunch. It seemed as if a gap in time-space itself accompanied her as she drove away. Once her car was out of sight the spell was broken, cars lined up making my crossing of the street a chore, and the restaurant became noisy again to the point where I could hear it from the parking lot.

I won’t waste time trying to unravel this mystery. Partly because there are things that can never be known, but mostly because I don’t wish to take the fun out of it all. I’ve seen this happen before over the years with many other women, and it always fascinates me as men change gears to adjust to this angelic presence. It is the involuntary nature of this response is intriguing because it is counter-intuitive. For some types of beauty men become clowns, or jackasses. This kind of beauty causes them to become their better selves. That is the mystery, why can’t we men become our better selves on our own, and wouldn’t this attract this kind of beauty? Is there a fear that we can never measure up? Is being that better man a frightening concept?

Like I said, I’m not going to try to figure this one out, but you never know. If I do I’ll pass the secret along.

Midnight Ride of Paul Freakin’ Revere

2011-06-04T17:08:00.000-07:00

There were these guys called The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Massachusetts Committee of Safety who hired this guy named Paul Revere as an express rider to carry important shit to New York and Philly. On the night of April 18, 1775, this Dr. Joseph Warren guy calls Revere and tells him to haul ass to Lexington, MA, to tell Sam Adams and John Hancock that the British were on their way to bust them. Revere asks how the fuck Warren knows, and Warren tells him that the Red Coats had launched a bunch of small boats as they took the infantry and grenadiers off duty. Then Dr. Warren tells Revere to shut the fuck up and get moving.

His buddies had arranged a signal in the Old North Church where they’d hang one lantern if the Brits came by land and two lanterns if they came by sea. Well the Redcoats were coming both ways but they didn’t have a signal for that. Way to go, assholes. So Revere gets some guys to row him across the Charles River and goes to the home of his buddy, Deacon John Larkin. Most historians will tell you that Revere borrowed Larkin’s horse, but the truth is that Deacon Larkin kept the Batmobile in his stable. I don’t know, somehow it traveled time or whatever, but Larkin found it. Then Larkin briefs Revere on where the British check points are, but Revere tells him that he doesn’t care because he’s driving the fucking Batmobile. So Larkin says “Cool” and Revere does a wicked-hot peel out.

So Revere is doing like 125 down the road, and he’s yelling over the loud speaker “The British are coming, and not in the fun way!” Houses light up as he blows past them. He pulls up in front of the house where Adams and Hancock are staying. They come out and can’t believe what they see.

“Yo Revere! What the fuck is that thing?” Hancock says.

“What the fuck does it look like? It’s the mother fuckin’ Batmobile” Revere says. Then an argument breaks out over who should get the Batmobile from here on out. Revere thinks he should keep it because he needs to haul ass to Concord to warn the militia, but Hancock and Adams insist that they should drive it because they’re more important. Finally Revere agrees to give them the Batmobile for a keg a week of Adam’s wicked beer for the rest of his life. A fair trade? I think so. As this is goin’ on a second rider, William Dawes shows up. Revere gets a horse and rides off with Dawes towards Concord. As they ride down the road they’re joined by a third rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott. However they don’t get too far before they run into a British patrol and get arrested. That’s what happens when you blow off a mission briefing, but I digress.

Dr. Prescott escapes right off the bat by using the old “Your shoe lace is untied” trick, and rides off to Concord. In the confusion Dawes escapes too, but Revere stands there like a fucking dumbass. So the British start questioning him, and Revere tells them everything like a big pussy. The British officer wasn’t buying it so he pulls out his pistol, and puts the muzzle to Revere’s skull. Then for some reason he asks if Revere is the same dude who does the quality metal work and Revere says he is.

“Well Christ, Revere, my wife has all of your stuff. She fucking loves the silver tea set your people made. Look, get back on that horse and go home, I’d hate to have to shoot you.” So Revere gets escorted a few miles back towards Lexington before the Brits screw him by taking his horse. So Revere walks back to Lexington were he finds Adams and Hancock about a mile from where they’d started.

“What the fuck? You two gonads should be in Philly by now” Revere said. He was pissed.

“Hey, give us a break, ass-clown, it’s 1775 so we don’t know how to fucking drive yet” Hancock said.

“Okay, fuck it, I’ll drive. Move over.” Revere said. He got behind the wheel. About four minutes later they were at a house in Woburn four miles away. Now that they were safe, Revere hauled ass back to the Clark house to find out what the fuck was going on. When he gets there two riders show up and tell him that British soldiers are almost there. So Revere runs inside and grabs a trunk full of Hancock’s papers, drags it outside, and puts it into the trunk of the Batmobile. Just as he closes the trunk the British show up. Revere gets into the Batmobile and locks the door. The British soldiers form a skirmish line in front of the car, and the officer orders Revere to surrender. Revere flips them the bird. The troops open fire but the musket balls bounce off the car’s armor plating. Revere gets on the loud speaker and tells the Brits that they can lick his hairy ball sack. The Soldiers fire another volley, and Revere just laughs. Suddenly the car roars to life as Revere floors it in reverse, then he hangs a perfect bootleg turn, and he’s fuckin’ outa there.

I don’t know what happened to the Batmobile after that. One rumor says that the British captured it, and took it back to the Tower of London where it was kept up until 1870 when Queen Victoria crashed it into the palace wall while testing the air bag system. The other says that it was given to George Washington after the war, and on his death he willed it to be kept in the basement of the White House. Supposedly every President has driven the Batmobile at least once. That makes more sense, with great power comes an awesome car.

Ben Franklin said that.

The Follow-On Tragedy of the Arizona Shootings

2011-01-15T19:37:00.000-08:00

Now that the smoke has cleared from the shootings that occurred a week ago today it is clear that the shooter, Jared Loughner, is saner than the news media, and the many political talking heads of our country. In less than two hours the political voices in the country raced to plant their spin-flags among the corpses. Because the shootings happened in Arizona, and because the primary target was a Democrat the assumption was automatic: The shooter was a Tea Party activist and Sarah Palin was to blame. Almost as soon the right-wing marshaled their forces to defend themselves and point fingers at the left. This all happened before we knew anything about the shooter including his name. Even worse we witnessed respected media personalities fall victim to their own prejudices. Maybe it was fitting that the shootings happened in Arizona because of it is synonymous with the old west, and the media’s reaction was exactly that of an old-west lynch mob. Just like the aftermath of those old-western lynching’s the true culprit went unpunished.

The culprit at the root of this shooting is mental illness. That is what we need to be talking about. Our prisons are full of the mentally ill because we are failing to address this problem. I work in a job where I come into frightening contact with homeless people who are clearly mentally ill, and quite often my life is in danger. I am not trained to deal with the mentally ill, my police department has limited options about what they can do with the mentally ill, and more and more the mentally ill are either being shot by police or killing someone themselves. I don’t pretend to have any answers here, and my frustration is that because the political whores have prostituted this incident away from the actual cause, and instead they have decided to dress it up as their various boogey men.

Shame on them.

Americans hate to talk about mental illness because it is a complex issue that ultimately comes down to how the illness affects each individual. Americans like simple answers and cookie-cutter solutions. Mental Health is the opposite of both those and it … well it drives us crazy. Mental Health is also expensive on almost every level which automatically complicates the subject as the political-media industrial complex knee-jerks into action. Exotic medications, MRIs, CAT Scans, psychiatrists, and psychiatric councilors are all expensive prospects. Then you have mental health advocates who are well meaning, but in the end limiting the help that the mentally ill can receive. Their motivations stem from the 19th and 20th Century abuses of the mentally ill in asylums around the world. These abuses were such that as they came to light Americans demanded change, and most mental institutions were eventually closed down. What happened to their former patients? All dumped onto the streets.

All of this could be the center of discussion in the media today yet it is not. Although by Sunday of last week we knew that Loughner was mentally ill the news media had decided to continue with the angle that “vitriolic political language” was the cause of the shooting. The very people who are tasked with reporting facts (NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN) had instead stooped to innuendo. The idea that political activism had more appeal then having to discuss yet another troubled person with blood on his hands, and one has to question not only the judgment of those news editors they also must question their sanity as well. How is a discussion of gun-sites on Sarah Palin’s campaign website or Rush Limbaugh considered rational in conjunction with what we know about Loughner? It is clear that Loughner had stalked/targeted Representative Gabrielle Giffords but it is not clear he did so because she was a Democrat. As of now it is just as likely that she was targeted because she was accessible, and because she just happened to be the Congress person within range.

Jared Loughner is the first encounter with what will be a big problem in the 21st century. Loughner may have an under –lying mental illness but it has been compounded by Digital Retardation. Loughner didn’t watch TV, nor did he listen to the radio. Instead he was a creature of the internet. In my spare time I moderate a message board that is geared to video gaming and high-tech gadgets and issues. The posters on this board range from 13 years old to 75 years old with the bulk of them being college age. They do not read books on the level that their predecessors twenty years ago did, and this handicap is evident as even the brightest young people lack the ability to grasp complex issues on an adult level. The internet afford young people the ability to never come into contact with adults, and the result is that they either mature more slowly , or never mature beyond a 15 year-old’s mind set. The internet’s anonymity also allows antisocial behavior to go unchecked, so Loughner couldn’t understand why behavior that was acceptable on the internet was not acceptable in a college classroom. His handicap was compounded by the lack of intellectual maturity because he was able to feed his world view easily by frequenting websites where his delusions would be considered normal. The absence of rational adult input can only be guessed at for now but it is likely that is sped Loughner’s downward spiral.

As you can see Loughner represents a convergence of complex issues that require serious discussion. Once again Americans, when confronted with the uncomfortable problem of the mentally ill, have decided to change the subject. I can’t speculate as to why the news media went the way that it did. Unlike the responsible news agencies I can only address the facts as I know them now. When more facts come along I will adjust fire accordingly. Why can’t the news media do this? What I saw on Saturday and Sunday of last week was right out of the Salem Witch Trials. How did paranoia (and that is the only explanation) engulf so many educated and otherwise rational people? It was like watching Medgar Evers putting in a KKK robe. Why was it more important to hang their personal political agenda on Loughner’s act than simply deal with the facts? How did this help anyone? Don’t they realize that they undermine their credibility when they do stuff like that? To underscore the failure of the big media was the fact that a handful of bloggers were ahead of them in obtaining and reporting the facts.

So at the end of the day not only were six people dead but the credibility of the news media died off just a little more too. Yet those who work in the media fail to understand or admit their failures on every level. So instead of making this about the victims they turned it into political circus, and then condemned others in the media for turning this event into a political circus (complete with t-shirts at the memorial – that is another rant for another time). In doing this the nation lost valuable time on a serious discussion that affects our society on multiple levels. Like I said earlier, the real tragedy is that Loughner’s actions and the media response were equally insane.

Yet nobody is calling them on it.

Citizens of a Forgotten Planet

2010-12-07T16:59:00.000-08:00

Fort Ord was nick-named “Planet Ord” or just “The Planet” sometime in the 1950s. It has its own geomagnetic field, its own weather patterns, and because the fog line can move unevenly across the base a long road march would often seem to start in a different country. The Army opened Fort Ord proper in 1941; its roads and ranges were laid out under the supervision of General Joseph Stillwell. If understand Stillwell then you understand that Fort Ord was designed for foot travel. Used for basic training for part of WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam as well as being home to a variety of units lead to ten million men and women passing through this base by the time it was shuttered in 1993. The last group is what interests me, the 7th Infantry Division’s “Lightfighters.” They were my generation born from 1963 onward (known as the “Baby Busters”), and they represent a brief moment in US Army history when the Army seemed to get it right.

The 7th ID Lightfighter stood out for two reasons; the first being their distinctive rag-top helmet covers that lead to their various nick-names: Cabbage Patch Kids, Swamp Things, and Bob Marlies, and they stood out because of their above average soldiering skills. The 7th ID was the first unit to be built upon the lessons of the Vietnam War, and its many officers and NCOs were veterans of that war. The Army raised its standards for fitness and performance in 1984, and the new Lightfighters responded to the challenges and then raised the standards to a new level. At the same time the Army instituted the COHORT (Cohesion Operational Readiness and Training) system wherein entire platoons would serve their entire four year enlistment together from Basic Training onward. These platoons were usually the various weapons platoons such as the mortar crews, anti-tank, anti-aircraft, engineers, and artillery. These platoons received an extra three weeks of training on their weapons before moving to Fort Ord. Upon arrival those Vietnam era NCOs could take the freshly minted GIs and mold them into soldiers in their own image.

Hiking the maneuver ranges of Fort Ord (known as the “Back Yard”) can be a lesson in infantry archeology. Fighting positions (Fox Holes) can be found in the textbook locations at trail intersections all over. Where the Lightfighters made their mark is where they put their positions. Well camouflaged holes can still be found almost intact throughout the entire base. These are invisible until one walks right up on them. The mark of the Lightfighter seems to be the impossible fighting position that can be found on the steep canyon sides. Even more impressive is that after the position was occupied another team of Lightfighters attacked this impossible position; the spent shells of .556 and .762 rounds complete with the rusting detached belt links from the assaulting SAW (a light machine gun) along with four or five pulled hand grenade rings still lay where they fell.

Over the next ridge from this forgotten skirmish site is Fort Ord’s MOUT-Site. MOUT stands for Military Operations in Urban Terrain; Fort Ord’s MOUT-Site is named “Impossible City” because its design made successful assault on any building impossible without massive casualties. Unlike MOUT-Sites at other Army or Marine bases Impossible City is one square mile of densely packed buildings with many tight allies and only one road. Here the Lightfighters trained for potential battles in Korea, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, and Peru. Impossible City is today owned by Monterey Peninsula College for its police academy, and it is routinely used by various military special operations forces and SWAT teams from all over California. It is here where the Lightfighters excelled in gleeful ruthlessness as the attacking forces would encounter booby-trapped staircases, hallways, and alley ways. Blackhawk Helicopters would swoop in and the men would “Fast Rope” sixty feet down onto the rooftops. The mock battles sometimes ended up in actual fist-fights as the OpFor (Opposing Force) laid waste to the attackers. The MOUT-Site was where the majority of Fort Ord’s serious injuries occurred as soldiers went flying out of third-story windows, or dove down flights of stairs avoiding improvised explosive devices made from the plastic MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) packs that were armed with the charge from a practice grenade and stuffed full of unpleasant bodily excretions.

Booby-traps were the 7th ID Lightfighter’s signature. Lightfighters booby-trapped their booby-traps, and it is unwise to pick up anything one might find walking through the back country. A few years back I was hiking with a friend who had been stationed at Fort Ord from ’89 to ’93. As we cut through an off-limits swath of land he suddenly stopped and told me in a hushed voice to slow down, and to walk directly behind him. He had walked me into a kill-zone where his unit had once operated in a defensive action. They had strung the trees with practice Claymore mines and when I suggested that they must have been cleared by that time he pointed to a trip-flare still attached to the nearest tree. Then he pointed to the second wire that leads away to where a Claymore had once been placed. Over time even the aging charges inside practice munitions can ruin your day.

It is eight miles from the brigade area to the rear gate of Fort Ord. Round trip is sixteen, and with creative trail use this can be stretched to twenty miles. Lightfighters could cover that distance in four and a half hours. Not as fast as the Ranger Battalion’s mandatory four hours but still respectable. The twenty-mile ruckmarch was performed once a month, but because the 7thID had few trucks their Lightfighters often logged ten or miles each day under full 70+ pound packs. They bitched about it too. Once a year some brigades would land the men on the Big Sur coast, walk into Fort Hunter Liggett, and then once the exercise was over they would then ruckmarch the eighty-five miles back to Fort Ord. Lightfighters were in great shape, and when they weren’t training they could play just as hard.

Basketball and football could better be titled murder-ball and the death-bowl as rivalries between the companies were fierce. It was so bad that the different regiments rarely played each other out of concerns by command of crippling injuries. The Enlisted Man’s club today is CSUMB’s student center and store. The Army named it “The Rallying Point”, and up until 1984 it was also a topless club. The Lightfighters nicknamed it “The Punch & Jab” because fights broke out early and often and only the base stockade can boast more murders, but not by much. The classic fight at the Rallying Point came in 1987. The 2-9 Manchus were celebrating the regiment’s birthday, and some guys from 3-17 decided to crash the party. What ensued was out of a John Wayne western as tables were overturned, chairs crashed into heads, bodies flew through the air, glass broke, and a blizzard of fists filled the place. A call went out to every police agency, and soon sixty police officers descended along with fifty MPs to shut the festivities down. However the Lightfighter is always in combat mode; as soon as the first cops were sighted the men exited the building and into the Oak forest behind the club. Lightfighters were masters of night warfare, and even though there were estimated to be three hundred men involved in the fight only nine were arrested. The rest simply used the darkness and their comfort with walking long distances to evade capture by walking the longest way possible back to their barracks.

Today I wonder about the kids who attend CSUMB. Do they understand that there is a level of excellence that was established by the men and women who had once called this place home? Do they know what is possible if they push themselves? Do they know that the only limits they face are the limits that they impose upon themselves? For ten years the Army challenged the 7thID’s Lightfighters and the Lightfighters took it all in stride. The Army quit on the 7thID, not the other way around. Although the transformation from military to university is complete this is still a place of transformation. The lesson to be learned from the 7thID Lightfighters is to face the challenge, stick out your chest, and ask “is that best you got?”

Rock Guitarists Connections

2010-12-07T16:55:00.000-08:00

I have played the guitar since the third Monday of September, 1978. I bought my first electric guitar, and Ibanez Iceman, in 1979 and in doing so I joined a fringe element of mankind. Rock guitarists, I would discover, share knowledge of a handful of truths about the word, and about us that outsiders can never know. A rock guitarist is a creature that could only exist in the late twentieth century. We played a new kind of instrument and a new kind of music in a new kind of world. From the mid-1950s until the mid-1990s as the modern world moved away from serious spirituality towards religious materialism the rock guitarist would become an anathema. Classic rock music lovers today loudly ask where are today’s guitar heroes? The current batches of demigods are in their twentieth year of their career on average with not a lot of young guys coming up the pipeline. The reasons for this are subtle.
When Les Paul invented the solid-body electric guitar in 1940 it is doubtful that he fully understood what his creation would eventually unleash. As the solid-body guitar became mated with the powerful amplifiers of Hiwatt, Vox, and the sublime creation of Jim Marshall it evolved from a musical instrument into a portal that removed the barrier between the conscious, subconscious, and the divine. Most rock guitarists recognized this on some level, and even a few are fully aware of the secret. The act of playing the guitar at high volume creates a closed-loop vortex wherein the music flows from the player’s mind out through his fingers, and then is zapped back into his head. Plato talked of divine enlightenment, and the act of the creation of music is divine, and this is the secret element of this closed loop. To put it another way the guitarist is in direct communion with his creator via his guitar and amp.
How the electric guitar works is that electrical current is fed through magnetic coils called “Pickups”, and the pickups transmit the vibrations of the guitar strings out to an amplifier. The amp takes that signal and makes it louder by pumping the vibrations of the strings through (usually) 12-inch speakers. Once the amp is set to a certain volume a good guitar player can manipulate the exchange between the string vibrations, the magnetic pickups, and the magnets in the amp to cause sustain or feedback. Feedback is where the sound from the amp is cycled back through the guitar. If fire sang it would sound like a guitar feeding back. There is a second kind of feedback that occurs within the player’s head as the gifts of skill and knowledge flow out from deep within the brain, and then return through the ear seeming to inspire more creation. It is a form of fusion; which is what powers the sun, but instead complex heavy gasses being compressed it is ideas and inspiration.
I used the word demigod because that is what it feels like when standing in front of your fully cranked amp blasting cords, and unleashing screaming scales. There is a transmutation that takes place as the guitar is played, and the player temporarily becomes something more than mortal. Between the player and his audience there is transubstantiation as the listener becomes part of that divine closed-loop vortex which in turn unlocks parts of their mind. This process can actually have a negative effect on some guitarists as they try to reconcile the difference between the guy they are while they are playing and the guy that they revert to the rest of the time. Unaware of their inadvertent divine interface, many guitarists seek to recreate that high through the ingestion of artificial substances. This is what happened to Hendrix; almost lead Clapton to kill himself with heroin, made Page, and Van Halen drink like fish. The tragedy is that these substances become a barrier between the player and the divine, and the players that don’t end up prematurely dead face a harsher fate of becoming only a shadow of their former selves.
For the guitarist who has self control or has discovered the truth life takes and interesting turn. That connection to the creator provides a cushion between the hard realities of life, and the possibilities that exist here and beyond simultaneously. We can make people dance, smile, and even cry with our instrument. The rock guitarist intuitively understands that good music connects us to the larger universe and our deepest selves. Now rock guitarist may move on with their lives and put the guitar away, but their intuitive knowledge of deeper truths of man and the universe remain. We know that people are not bad but simply lost; lost from that connection with the divine. The rock guitarist may no longer play regularly yet when that guitar is picked up and plugged in it becomes a time machine as well. The feel of steel under the fingers transports the player back to the very first day they picked up the guitar. The connection is quickly reestablished and the act is much like drinking from a mountain spring.
Guitarists can also pick out other guitarists in a crowd, but they couldn’t tell you how. When this happens total strangers speak as brothers or sisters. They will discuss their guitars, crazy gigs, and other guitarists. I have never met a fellow rock guitarist who felt like a stranger. The reason behind this is simple in that the same divine thing that inspired me also inspired them, and because I was part of that divine loop I was connected at some level with every other rock guitar player who had ever played and will ever play in the future. It isn’t something that I can quantify; it is only something that I know it true.
I described the rock guitarists as an anathema because we are a threat to the current establishment of social cool. Today it is considered foolish to feel connected to the divine; it is popular belief that to do so is primitive, and backwards. The rock guitarist embodied a truth that people could connect to something pure through music, and this is a threat to the materialistic 21st centurions. So we wait and we teach the young. The revolution will continue one day when the time is right.

Fixing Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour, Because Why The Hell Not?

2010-10-29T20:05:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago my Creative Writing class was assigned to read three short stories. One of the stories was The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin which was written in 1894. The story covers about a page and a half. We meet Louise Mallard, a housewife who has just received news that her husband has been killed in an accident. After her initial shock she begins to contemplate her new life without her husband. She becomes excited at the prospect “[F]ree! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering. Louise is suddenly very happy at the news that she is a widow, and as she sits in her room “ drinking in the very elixir of life” her sister, Josephine, is on the other side of the door flipping out because she’s worried about Louise’s faint heart. Finally Louise opens the door and the story ends like this:

There was a feverish fire in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly
like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and together they
Descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.
Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard
Who entered, a little travel stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella.
He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know
There had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry;

at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.

But it was too late.

When the doctors came they said that she had died from heart disease –
Of a joy that kills.

Half the class didn’t like the ending. They didn’t like that Louise had her new freedom taken away from her along with her life. The people who didn’t like the ending were actually pissed off about it all. I liked it. It is good writing, and it is a good exercise in time-frame writing (like “24” takes place in 24 hours). It was fun to listen to the class exchange opinions about the story and how upsetting the ending was to them. That got me thinking; why not just fix the ending?

So for you, my loyal readers, I give you alternative endings in the styles of my favorite writers. The story will pick up where Mr. Mallard comes through the door and Josephine screams…

The Edgar Allen Poe ending:

…Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife. But it was too late. Aghast, Brently shouted at Josephine “ run and bring Doctor Howard, and be quick about it woman!” As Josephine’s sobs and footfalls faded in the distance Richards looked at Brently and said “She’s gone. My condolences.” Then Richards and Brently shared a smile as Richards dropped Louise’s lifeless hand to the floor and stood. “Will Dr. Howard be paying you directly for his fresh cadaver?” Richards asked. “Yes, $1500, and your cut will be $300 as agreed” said Brently. Richards thought to himself for a moment and then offered “Do you think that Dr. Howard would pay the full $1500 for a second body?” Brently was no in front of the Brandy reaching for two glasses, “Are you thinking of Josephine?” “Why not? I wouldn’t need the $300 share.” Brently nodded at Richards and handed him a glass. “You are a crafty one, good Sir” he said as he handed Richards the glass. “Cheers” said Richards as he gulped back his Brandy. Brently knew that Josephine would not be returning from Dr. Howard’s, and then he wondered how long the poison in Richards’ drink would take.

Jacqueline Susann ending:

Josephine screamed but Louise was strangely still. Brently stood at the bottom of the stairs with quizzically looking at Richards, then Josephine, and then his wife. Louise looked at Brently like he was a slice of bologna. Then she turned to Josephine and said in a calm voice “Fuck it, Jo, I’m going to go to bed” Then she turned and retreated into her room locking the door behind her. After she’d put on her night gown she sat at the vanity looking at her reflection. Then she reached for a medicine bottle and poor a single Quaalude into the palm of her hand. For a brief second she considered taking the entire bottle and ending it all, but as Scarlett O’Hara said “tomorrow is another day.” She stood up and turned towards her bed, but then turned and for the bottom right drawer of her vanity. Her hand found the vibrator and pulled it out. Louise clicked it on to check the batteries, and then climbed into bed and turned out the light.

Quentin Tarantino ending:

Louise looked at her husband and then at Richards. “What the fuck? When I pay for a dead husband I fucking expect a dead husband!” “Jesus Christ, Louise” Richards said “He was supposed to be on the goddamned train. I’m not a fucking psychic.” “Yeah, if you were a fucking psychic you’d see this coming” she said as she pulled the nickel-plated .357 from her thigh holster. BAM! Brently’s face was instantly covered with Richards’ brain matter as his body dropped to the floor like a sack of shit. “If you want something done right…” Bam! Brently took a shot to the balls, and then Louise walks down the stairs to place the muzzle in the base of his skull. Bam! “Whoa! That’s some serious fucking shit, Lou.” Josephine said from behind her. Louise turned to Josephine and hissed “What the fuck are you doing standing there like a fucking statue? Get your ass back upstairs and grab our bags. We’re switching to plan B.” Josephine paused for a second; her face looked like a goldfish, and then she spun and ran back to the bedroom. Louise looked out the front window to see if the gunshots had attracted attention, but everything was normal, and that was good because they would need to put thirty miles between here and the next town where the train still ran. Louise then went into the parlor and poured kerosene from one lamp onto the floor. She then grabbed the second oil lamp and emptied the contents over the two bodies. Just then Josephine came running down the stairs. She made her way around the bodies and went outside and tossed the bags into the back of Richards’ carriage. Louise stepped outside the front door, struck a match, and tossed it on her husband’s back. Flames erupted across the floor as she closed and locked the door. Louise climbed into the driver’s side of the carriage and whipped the horses into motion. “Why can’t I get a fucking break?” Louise asked to no one.

The Stephen King ending:

Louise put her hand over her mouth to stifle a gasp. Whatever was standing at the bottom of the stairs may have looked like Brently, but she knew that it wasn’t the same man who’d walked out of the house. In fact she knew that it wasn’t even human. A dim scent of sulphur entered her nostrils. When Louise Mallard had promised to sell her soul to take away her husband the last thing that she’d thought was that the devil would come to collect in person. The thing that was now Brently locked eyes with her and grinned.

The Frank Miller ending:

Richards looked at Louise, then frantically at Josephine, and then back at Brently. Louise looked at her healthy, living husband and let out a sigh. She turned around and walked back to her room. She walked to her vanity and pulled the .38 from the top-left drawer, and then stuck it in her mouth. “I’m fwee” she said as she pulled the trigger, showering the duvet with blood, brain, and skull fragments.

So there you go. I’ve fixed it. There should be an ending here that will make one feel better about Ms. Chopin’s little story.

My 12th Step: G.I.Joe

2010-09-12T22:19:00.000-07:00

I was never a raging alcoholic. In fact I would go weeks without a drink at times. I usually drank on my days off and the problem was that when I drank I drank too much. When I was younger this was all in good fun but as I reached my mid-thirties it was just kind of sad. This was in the late 1990s and there was resurgence if the 12 inch military action figures along the lines of the original GI Joes made by Hasbro in the 1960s and 70s. The company that spearheaded the revival was 21st Century Toy’s Ultimate Soldier line that featured modern uniforms from today’s military. They were a huge success which spurred Hasbro to reissue GI Joes in the 12 inch original size. This was great because Hasbro’s GI Joe is a top-quality body made to be played with. Ultimate Soldier featured cheaply made figures in first rate uniforms.
The figures ran around $20 each and I decided that if I spent money on action figures I wouldn’t have any left to waste on beer or wine. This seemed to work as my intake of alcohol dropped off to an occasional bottle here or there. The funny thing is that it wasn’t the money it was because GI Joe was filling a void in my life which made me feel better about myself.
You see, I could never win as a child. I could never get a break. This was painfully true on my birthdays when I would get some of the things that I had asked for or hinted at, but then I would be presented with an expensive game or toy that I didn’t want. I know this sounds selfish but I knew that my mother didn’t have a lot of money and it always burned me up that she would waste it on a toy or game that I would never play with. Worse still was when the new SEARS catalog came out and I would find out that for the price of that toy I could have gotten some kick-ass GI Joe command center or vehicle. I think the most GI Joes I had at one time was three, and one didn’t count because it was a talking GI Joe (“I have a tough assignment for you!”).
I had a few friends as I was growing up; it wasn’t like I lived in a cave. The problem was that most of the kids my age moved away around 1971 and the rest of my friends lived too far away to play with on a regular basis. Since I couldn’t always get permission to go down and play at the Carmel River I’d make do with our backyard which featured many locations that were GI Joe-friendly. I also suffered from asthma which often kept me at home as well and GI Joe was there to keep watch as I fought for air. I did have other toys and I loved to build plastic models but GI Joe was my go-to toy most of the time.
So when they reissued the 12 Joes I snapped them up. I didn’t save the boxes; the Joes were placed on display in my room. They made me happy and after a while I understood why this was. I was finally in control of my life; I could buy a GI Joe at will, and in the morning when I woke to see a growing army of little dudes on the top of my dresser it made me happy. I didn’t have to ask permission from anyone and I realized that now that I had control over the GI Joe thing I could also gain control over other aspects of my life. That’s when the drinking stopped.
Then one day I looked at all of the GI Joes that now dominated every flat surface in my room I realized that I had more than I would ever need. Technically I had too many. So I bought a couple of plastic storage bins and I put all but a dozen away into the closet. A few smaller Superman and Batman action figures have popped up to take their place but for the most part I have somehow moved into a happier life. It is funny how something stupid like a bunch of GI Joes can patch a hole in your life. I allowed myself to do something that made me feel good. Something that didn’t involve chemical alteration and something that was not destructive. By indulging in a childhood dream I ever so slightly righted my ship and put myself back on course.
The Joes are still packed away in my closet. Down the road I will give them away to some kids who need a friend too. Today I don’t drink and I haven’t bought a 12-inch action figure in over two years. I’m back in college working towards a degree. My life is far from perfect but it is far away from the person al disaster it could have been. Today my challenge is my weight and my crippling fear of success but now that I cannot hide behind a bottle success seems to be heading my way regardless of what I feel. I have reconnected with old friends and I am making a few news ones along the way.
I guess what I want you, dear reader; to come away with is that you don’t need to buy a ton of toys to make you feel good. However there are times when that kid deep inside of you screams out to be pleased. Maybe it means that you buy that stupid HALO action figure and put him on your desk at work. Perhaps it means just letting yourself have a banana split before you get home so you don’t have to share it. Or finally it might be as simple as jumping into a mud puddle on a rainy day or rolling on the lawn. If you can in some way undo that bad day you had as a child it could either break a chain that holds you down, or it can launch you to the next level.

Thanks for being there, G.I. Joe.

Do You Expect Me To Believe?

2010-09-10T22:55:00.000-07:00

As a reformed conspiracy nut, the 911 Truth movement (such as it is) has been an amusing side-show. Like a former alcoholic who walks past a bar on a Friday night and watches the drunks stumble out; thinking to himself how lucky he is to no longer imbibe, and how sad the drunks are, I view the 9/11 troofers with both disdain and pity. Pity because I was once a fool who would have bought into the bullshit that they pedal, and disdain because of the emotional pain that they cause the survivors and families of the victims of 9/11. They are not in the least bit interested in the truth, only their version of it, the one that advances their fucked up world view. As the ninth anniversary is upon us, I have a few questions for them:

1. Do you expect me to believe that the U.S. Government – under the leadership of George W.Bush – was able to pull off the greatest act of mass murder on U.S. soil and keep it secret for nine years? The same administration that couldn’t keep illegal wire-taps secret, couldn’t keep torture secret even though it was performed at secret foreign prisons (which they also couldn’t keep secret)?
2. Do you expect me to believe that operatives placed over 5000 pounds of explosives inside of the Twin Towers and World Trade Center 7, but nobody who worked there saw these people nor the explosive charges?
3. Do you expect me to believe that they put explosive charges in only three WTC buildings, but not the others?
4. Do you expect me to believe that the 123 witnesses you list as hearing explosions are right, but the 170+ witnesses who saw American Airlines 77 fly into the Pentagon are wrong?
5. Do you really expect me to believe that some secret government cabal staged to hijackings as a pretext for going to war in Iraq, but they couldn't frame one Iraqi national as a terrorist?
6. Do you really expect me to believe that the Thai intelligence service has never uncovered any proof that 9/11 didn’t happen the way we accept that it did?
7. Do you really expect me to believe that Dick Cheney would allow a plane to fly into the largest bond trading firm in North America that trades billions of dollars each day?
8. Do you really expect me to believe that the billionaire clients of that bond trading firm would not rest until no stone was left unturned in the search for the truth?
9. Do you really expect me to believe that if these billionaire clients once they had proof of government involvement in the attacks would not hesitate to burn the Bush Administration?
10. Do you really expect me to believe that the thousands of NYPD, NYFD, NY State investigators, FBI, BATF,NTSB, and other investigators at the Ground Zero and Fresh Kills sites either never saw anything incriminating in the tons of wreckage, or decided to keep silent instead of reporting directly or leaking information to the news media? This in spite of the fact that many of them had lost personal friends in the attack?
11. Do you really think that if Osama bin Laden worked for the CIA that we wouldn’t have faked his death by now in a very public way thus allowing the CIA operative to shave his beard and move to Aruba?
12. Do you really think that Dick Cheney would invade Iraq on the pretext of WMDs, and then forget to plant WMDs using our special operations forces (or just Halliburton aircraft)?

I could go on, but these are the biggest questions that I have for them. Belief in fairy tales take a lot of work to avoid reality. They have to be on constant guard to replace the insulation between their fantasy world and the real world. Not me. It feels good not to be a nut-job any more.

As a reformed conspiracy loon I do feel sorry for the Troofers. So wrapped up in their sad, sorry egos that they have lost all self awareness. In many way they are worse off than that homless guy with the hand-made sign that reads "The End is Near" because deep down that guy knows he's a freak. Troofers do not.

Creative Writing Class (I be in one)

2010-08-28T21:08:00.000-07:00

The few of you who read my stuff regularly have noticed that my posts have been few and far between. There are two reasons for this; I am back in college working towards a degree in Marine Geology so I am taking my general-ed courses so that I may transfer to CSUMB, and the other excuse is that I have been amusing my friends on Facebook with tales from my youth. Some of those stories may migrate over here in the future if I feel like polishing them up a bit.

The great news is that now I have a creative writing class, so much of what I write there will end up here after I get a grade for them. Three years ago I had been submitting writing for my book to various agents and publishers, and I never heard anything back from them. Then I got a short e-mail from one that said “you need to take some English and writing classes.” Ouch. Okay, so I signed up at Monterey Peninsula College (MPC, also known as “Elestero Tech” or “DMSU” [Dennis the Menace State University]) and went through the English 1A, 1B, and English2 classes. I lucked out and got a tough-grading professor who pushed my skills until I could integrate a quote with the best of them. I was also exposed to classic literature like Sophocles and Hemingway which gave me more options as a writer for tackling my 7th Infantry book.

The reason for taking the creative writing class is that I need to be pushed outside my comfort zone, and I need to bounce my work off the brains of people who don’t know me (friends are great, I love you guys, but I need to hear feedback from neutral or even hostile sources too). I already have a list of poets and poems to check out from our second day of class. Right out of the gate we have to write poems in the form of Haiku and Cinquain. I had never heard of a Cinquain before last Thursday. The Cinquain for is as follows:

Two syllables
Four syllables
Six syllables
Eight syllables
Two syllables
So you get something like this:

Boogers
Where to hide them?
Flick them out the window?
Stick them under the table-top?
Eat mine.

I am sure this is exactly what the guy was thinking when he invented this framework. This is the kinda stuff you guys will have to endure from me through December.

I am pretty stoked as my professor, Henry Marchand, actually knows who Ambrose Bierce is which qualifies him to teach writing in my book. Plus he went to Penn State as did my high school English teacher, Mr. Scheckler, who was the first important person ever to believe in my writing. There must be something in the water at Penn State. Mr. Scheckler pulled me aside one day after class and told me to write him stories. He said that they would be extra credit, and that I would still have to do the regular assignments too. He said that the stories would not be graded for grammar; instead he said “just write, tell me a story!” So I did just that. My spare time was spent writing “Twilight Zone” type stories about parallel dimensions, time travel, and a double-crossing drug smuggler who gets his in the end.

Henry Marchand seems to be in the same vein of teacher. He knows that there is some great stuff stuck in everyone’s brain and he wants to get it out onto paper. He says that we will end up looking deep inside ourselves as we explore the writing process. You guys know that I have already done this, and that work is archived here. The class is orderly yet comfortable so I can’t wait to see what comes out of my brain.

Stay Tuned…

More Confessions of a Former Conspiracy Theorist.

2010-08-14T19:26:00.000-07:00

My road to conspiracy kookdom began innocently enough. My dad gave me his copy of the Warren Commission abridged report along with a book of pictures that spanned that fateful day in Dallas. He got to see Kennedy in Florida as he reviewed the troops assembled there in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dad said in passing that he never believed the Warren Report or that Oswald was the shooter. I was eight or nine years old at this time and I was way too young to understand things like the Watergate story that was dominating the news around this time. When you’re a kid you tend to believe your dad. So in a way I was already handicapped as I approached the subject of the Kennedy assassination.
The first serious exposure I got into this conspiracy world was a documentary called “The Men Who Killed Kennedy”, and it featured most of the mythology that surrounds the event. It is a good starting place if you wish to understand how conspiracy theories feed on themselves and spin into competing theories that soon do battle with each other. The movie’s theory is that Kennedy was murdered by a professional French hit man hired by powerful Americans via the CIA, who used the mafia as a proxy for hiring the hit man. Why? Vietnam, Texas Oil, Cuba, and all kinds of evil right-wing stuff.
The Men Who Killed Kennedy features all of the standard elements that you can find in just about every conspiracy theory:

1. New eye-witnesses with fantastic stories.
2. Former government/intelligence insiders who are shot in silhouette who say that the assassination looked like a professional job, but either have no direct knowledge about the events of November 22, 1963 but “know a guy who told them everything.”

3. Both the new witnesses and the government insiders “‘fear for their lives”.
4. Interviews with “Experts” who aren’t really experts in the subjects that they discuss.
5. Frame by frame analysis of film of the event but the analysis has a narrow focus.
6. Informants. In this movie’s case they are Mob guys. Bottom line on Mob Guys is this: Mob Guys don’t talk. They sure as hell don’t talk on camera. The ones who do are full of crap.

7. The Men Who Killed Kennedy also features an interview with the alleged assassin, but of course he can’t go into detail. He writes a letter that is put in the warden’s safe with instructions that if he is murdered that only then can the letter be released to the press. Oh yeah, the assassin is already in a French prison and will only speak to investigators if he is moved to the U.S..
8. Enhanced photographs showing, well, showing nothing but a mess that is open to interpretation.

These elements are usually present in conspiracy theories and should be a giant BS-flag whenever they appear.

Conspiracies are real, they do happen, but they tend to fall apart which is how we know about them. Watergate is a prime example of a conspiracy and how it unraveled. It started with a break-in at Democratic head quarters in the Watergate building in Washington D.C. There were guys arrested soon after. Then the Washington Post got a tip that someone should take a closer look at the guys who were arrested. It turned out that they had interesting pasts. Then the source, who became known as “Deep Throat”, would lead the Washington Post to more evidence that eventually lead back to the Nixon White House. From there Federal Investigators jumped in and eventually Nixon resigned and members of his staff went to prison. At every step there was evidence that lead to more evidence. This evidence was solid. While “Deep Throat” remained anonymous to the public his identity was known to the Washington Post. The Post never ran with Deep Throat’s claims, instead they double and triple-checked them before they were printed in the paper. Nothing about Watergate was open to interpretation because most of the conspirators confessed.
If the “Plumbers” had been less inept, would Nixon have gotten away with it? It is hard to say, but probably not because it had too many moving parts. Nixon had ordered the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to steal records. The problem is that there would have been other break-ins after Watergate and with each one the odds of being caught would grow.
Of the dozens of books that I have read about the Kennedy assassination the best one is Live by the Sword, by Gus Russo. It does two things; the first thing is that it firmly establishes Oswald as the lone shooter, and the second thing it does is outline the actual cover-up after the assassination. The cover-up was not to obscure Oswald and his possible accomplices, but to separate the President (and his brother the Attorney General) from their clandestine operations to kill Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. Russo’s book isn’t perfect in that he falls into the trap of alleging that Cuba offered to allow Oswald to immigrate there as a reward for killing Kennedy. While he lays out his argument he has no actual evidence. However, the rest of the book is outstanding as it documents RFK’s suppression of evidence and shaping the investigation away from the CIA and Cuban nationals in the Gulf Coast area of the U.S.
I have written before about my conversion to reality. I had gone to Dallas to visit my brother and we went to the Dealy Plaza Six Floor Museum in the old Texas Schoolbook Depository building. Looking out onto Elm Street from the window next to the “Sniper’s Nest” one thing became immediately clear to me – it was an easy shot. Roughly 300 feet from the window to the fatal head shot, and with that rifle’s scope Kennedy’s head would have looked like a pumpkin. Then as I was checking out the famous grassy knoll the sound of a helicopter filled the plaza (they were filming the first X-Files movie a few blocks away) and I was stunned by the amount of echo the buildings cause. So those witness reports about shots coming from other locations around the plaza all made sense. In recent years recreations of the assassination have proven the devastating effect of the Mannlicher –Carcano’s round, and I have learned that the rifle was once sought after by Olympic marksmen and prized by elephant hunters because of the penetration power of the bullet. The Carcano was hardly the cheap piece of crap that conspiracy kooks had led me to believe. They also wanted me to believe that Oswald couldn’t shoot, which his Marine Corps records show otherwise.
Standing in front of the Texas Schoolbook Depository that day it became clear that I had been fooled and willingly so. This made me a giant douche-bag. Worse still was the fact that I had bought into other conspiracies too like UFOs and secret societies. After re-evaluating those I felt like a bigger chump. Why was I such a giant sucker? This was depressingly easy to answer: I like being smarter than everyone else and I like the idea that I am special. Being “In” on the biggest secret of the 20th Century made me feel special and I ate it all up. I was too clever for my own good. Today I have learned to wait until most of the facts are available before I express an opinion on an event.
By September 11th, 2001 I was immune to conspiracy-itus. I had watched the conspiracy rise up around TWA 800, and it followed the usual patterns of the government conspiracy. Mysterious naval movements, witnesses who thought that they saw a missile fired, and later Pierre Salinger would come forward with exclusive footage from a radar screen. The thing is that the FBI brought the plane’s wreckage up from the bottom of the ocean and reconstructed it in a hanger. There was no evidence of a missile strike. So as I watched the events of 9/11 unfold I wondered how long it would be until a conspiracy would be woven from that day. It literally started the next day. I stopped by my friend’s place to discuss the attacks. He told me that he had received a fax listing all kinds of anomalies and that we were being fed a lie. He told me that the footage of the Palestinians dancing in the streets in celebration of the attacks was actually four years old, even though one of the cars in the footage is clearly a 2001 model.
It wouldn’t be until after the invasion of Iraq that the “9/11 Truth” movement would pick up steam. The first book was written before the invasion by Thierry Meyssan called “The Horrifying Fraud”, and it claimed that the Pentagon was not hit by American Airlines 77 but by a missile. Meyssan also believes that the Beslan massacre was carried out by the CIA to gain control of the Caspian Sea. While he is an obvious nut-job, his book was a big hit in France (the French also think the Kennedy was killed by the CIA too) and gave rise the domestic 9/11 Truth gang. The premier zeitgeist of the “Truthers” is the film “Loose Change”. “Loose Change” was written and directed by Dylan Avery and produced with his buddies Korey Rowe, Jason Bermas, and Matthew Brown.
“Loose Change” is a piece of work, and it contains all of the red flags that I mentioned. The first version insisted that there was some kind of a pod under the wing of the plane that hit the South Tower of the WTC, and then suggested that this was proof of the plane being under remote control. Although the first version of “Loose Change” had been released in 2005; at which time the American public was well aware of the Predator drone, for some reason they felt that a pod was necessary to enable remote controllability. The movie has had to be revised three times as the claims are soundly debunked. It is nowhere near the masterpiece that The Men Who Killed Kennedy is. Avery and his pals produced their movie right after they graduated high school, and I can see myself in their rabid zeal to expose the truth. I suppose that if the internet had been around in 1982 that I would have done something similar because I had bought into the whole thing. I genuinely feel sorry for them because they seem like nice guys but they are oblivious to the pain that they are causing the survivors of those attacks and the families of those who did not come home on 9/11/2001.
There is a larger problem today as I see it. While the 9/11 Truthers are clearly nut, there is a secondary layer of kooks that operate freely within the media and politics. The myth of vaccines causing Autism is prevalent today in the US and Europe even though the original report has been redacted from the British medical journal because it was a fraud, and the doctor who wrote it has been stripped of his license to practice medicine. Yet even after all of this the subject is still treated with a serious tone by newscasters. The CIA is still given way too much credit for things it could never possible pull off.
Today I am free from conspiracy-itus. I no longer see the Illuminate behind every tree. I review the issues of the day on their own merits and the facts that surround them. It is liberating because I don’t have to find a way to make them fit into some larger, twister conspiracy framework. I am amazed at the level of stupidity I was gleefully willing to indulge in. I consider myself lucky for finally seeing the light. It is easy to get sucked into conspiracies; I need to warn you about this fact. They are presented with enough facts to make them plausible. Before you know it you have bought into some seriously crazy stuff.

Be careful.

Back in the Sadlle

2010-08-06T20:34:00.000-07:00

I can’t tell you how many times I have started and stopped trying to get into a simple exercise regimen. It is very hard to go from sloth to some kind of basic activity, I remember how hard it was the second time I began getting into shape back in 1993. I was trying out for the California Highway Patrol, and those first weeks were just a huge pain. It takes six weeks before the human body fully adjusts to a new physical tempo, as my doctor explained it to me in between sets at the gym. I am entering my second week of every-other-day sessions on the stationary bike and once again my body is feeling the change.
Suddenly I am walking with a little more authority and moving faster for longer. I am less winded climbing the stairs at work. My legs want to go places. The truth be told it seemed as if they swung themselves out of the bed and just dragged me along to the bike. I like the feeling I’m getting from my body, so I hope I am on my way to a healthier me.
Here’s what has made the difference from the recent failures. My boss suggested that I just put a colored dot on the calendar for every time I worked out. So each day when I get to work I see those blue dots accumulate I feel good, and adding another dot also makes me feel good. I’m kind of an addictive type, or a binge-type and right now I’m just building upon each session. This week I’m at 30 minutes on the bike, next week it will be 45. Then I will have to find stuff to add, and that will probably be weights at the Fitness Center once a week.
That is in the future. Right now it’s just one workout session at a time. Nothing fancy.

Carmel River Days

2010-07-04T23:02:00.000-07:00

From the age of 8 until I was 14, I spent most of my free weekend and summer days down on the Carmel River. For those of you who’ve never been there the Carmel River is a river during the winter months through about June, and then it dries out leaving a few shallow pools along the sides of the river bed. I lived about a mile from the mouth of the Carmel River where it empties into the Pacific Ocean. The river’s mouth is marked by a lagoon and marsh that are not very big. My area of adventure stretched a mile in either direction from the Highway 1 Bridge, which was one of the entrances to this other world.

I need to point out that I had been going down to the river since I was four years old, but that was always with my mother. When I was eight I was allowed to go down there by myself, something that I doubt the young kids who live in Mission Fields get to do in today’s world ruled by irrational fears. There were just as many dangerous people back then as there are today lurking near that bridge; fading drugged-out hippies were common in the hidden camp-sites that dotted the berry-bushes under the trees that lined each side of the river’s banks. I never had a problem with them, but I remember one guy who scared me pretty good. I had come down the riverbank under the bridge and had begun walking up the dry riverbed when I saw a pair of blackened feet. My eyes followed the legs up from those feet until they met the eyes of your standard burn-out hippie. He had the full Taliban beard, and was pretty sunburned. The thing that struck me was that his eyes were black, and as he stared back at me it was like looking into an empty hole in space. Today I know that his eyes were dilated from a psychedelic drug, but that day he just looked frightening. He didn’t move and he said nothing, he just looked at me. I turned and walked up the river until I knew I was out of sight, and then I ran like hell back home.

That was one of the few frightening moments I had. The river was a happy place for me. The main attraction for me was the reptiles that could be found there. The county had built up segments of the river bank with concrete brickabrack to reinforce it against flooding. They had also piled two mountains of sand in an area behind the Safeway. One pile was over thirty feet tall. I guess that the county would come along and load some of that sand onto dump trucks for use somewhere else. In the mean time between those sand piles and the concrete slabs I had plenty of hunting grounds for the Blue-Bellied Fence Lizards. I got pretty good at catching them with my bare hands, and often came home with two or three to keep in a terrarium for a while before turning them loose on our woodpile on the back yard. They kept the spider population in check.

Snakes were around too, but they were often too fast for me. Every once in a while I would get my hands on a Garter Snake, which I would soon regret because those things release a foul stink. I don’t know why they aren’t called Skunk Snakes instead. The grand prize was the Gopher Snake. Gopher Snakes look like Rattle Snakes because of their color and their size (Gopher Snakes can grow to almost four feet long). I learned early on that if you wanted to catch a Gopher Snake you had to accept that you were going to get bit. It made no difference where you grabbed them they’d whip around and take a chunk out of you. The trick was never to hold it too close to your face. I think that in my snake-catching career I caught four Gopher Snakes. I only brought one home because my grandmother had a fit when I did.

That area behind the Crossroads Center that stretched all the way to Rancho Canada had once been some kind of access road. There were three rusting hulks of 1950s Chevys hidden in the berry bushes that I and my friends would discover in our explorations. This road is still back there today but it is over grown. Back then it served as a dirt-bike track and motocross bike track. We’d ride our bikes up and down that road, and we’d build jumps so we could be Evil Knievel. The McCurdy brothers and Arlen Moore would take their dirt bikes down there too and race around. We would have to clear out when they came or they’d beat us up. Sometimes we’d hide out in the bushes and watch them ride.

The county suffered a four year long drought that ended in 1977. At one point the county dredged a mile-long section of the river bed to expose the water that ran about six feet below the sand’s surface. It was deep enough to swim in and we bought some inflatable mattresses at longs to float around on. This sudden water supply had a side effect that was awesome for a ten year old boy. Snakes converged on the water holes in the hundreds, and when you walked along the side of the pool it looked like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark in the snake-filled Well of Souls. With each step dozens of Garter Snakes would slither out of the way. I remember reaching down to grab one snake only to pull up three of them. The other thing that the water brought was thousands of baby toads. About three weeks after the dredging I had come down to the river and as soon as I reached the water there was a mass rush of tiny toads. It looked like D-Day. So I returned with a coffee can and filled it with more toads than I knew what to do with, and I took them home.

As I got older, around the age of ten I extended my range a bit to include the area that cut through the golf course. This led me up to Middle School where I discovered that the toads that lived near the lower baseball field were friggin’ huge. They lived in the holes dug by ground squirrels, and would liter near the entrance. To catch them you had to approach the holes from the blind side and then jam your hand down fast. Toads will pee first thing when they are captured, and I quickly learned to hold them away from me until they were done. I think that I personally de-populated a few square miles of toads. There was nothing like catching a big toad too, for me it was like catching a tiger.

When the drought finally ended I was there to watch as the river rose to about three feet below flood stage. There is a picture of me sitting on the river bank with a few other people watching the water flow past the depth marker that was painted on the first support pillar. I remember looking at all of that water rushing past and then trying to picture the empty river bed. Needless to say the following summer the river was all new again as the flow of water had reshaped much of the landscape.

As I got older I spent less time down at the river as my interests changed to other things. When I did go I found myself down in the lagoon area, back in the tidal marshlands behind the Carmel River School and Mission Ranch. There was easy access via a through-way between the school’s fence and the last house on the 16th Avenue. Between 1977 and 1978 I often went into the lagoon dressed in my military cammo pants and jacket. My grandma had bought me a nice set of binoculars, and I used them to indulge in my new passion of bird-watching. The lagoon was (and is) home to over two hundred different bird species, and that grows during the winter and spring migrations. Walking around through the marsh I learned to accept being wet all the time, but hanging out on the reeds was the best way to get up close to the Herons, ducks and other birds that sought privacy there. I learned that the channels were not too deep and could be crossed as long as I didn’t mind getting wet up to my chest. The reeds were also where the babies were hidden, and it was always a special treat to see them paddling along behind their mother.

As I became a full-fledged teenager I stopped going down to the river all together. The last time I ventured down was when I was twenty. I was working at the Crossroads Cinemas then, and I had an hour to kill before my shift started (I think that I was working a split shift). I walked the familiar trail down to the water’s edge. The river was flowing, but it was not too deep. I became nostalgic as the river gurgled its greetings to me like a long lost friend. The wind whispered through the trees making to late evening sun sparkle on the water. I was thinking that there was still magic in the world when I saw movement on the opposite bank. A Bobcat emerged from the brush; the first one that I’d ever seen, and it casually walked along its side of the river. Time seemed to stop as I watched that beautiful cat move along the river, and for a split second I felt like I was going to live forever and all that I had to do was stand in that spot. For that moment everything was perfect, I was part of some ancient dance between man and nature with the river and the wind providing the music. The suddenly the Bobcat caught sight of me and made his exit into the bush again, vanishing like a ghost, and leaving me there alone again on the river’s edge. I looked at my watch and turned around to walk back to the theater.

Today the old Carmel River Bridge is gone, torn away during the great flood of 1996. Parts of it are still lying on the southern bank of the river but they are slowly being buried by sediment and covered by plant life. The brickabrack that I spent hours on catching lizard has been buried completely by the river. Down at the lagoon the old channels that I’d cross in search of birds have all shifted as they’ve been filled in by sediment. All of the people, I grew up with in Mission Fields can no longer afford to live there and have moved off to new homes all over the world. The river is still there. The eastern side is often hidden these days by the trees on each side of the bank. If you are driving over the new bridge you should look west to the ocean if you want to see the river below. The Carmel River was my second home, but I don’t really miss it because it still runs wild in the back of my head. There in my head I stand upon a slab of cement brickabrack that once jutted out like a bowsprit over a small patch of the river. I am still nine years old and I am scanning the northern bank for pirates, Nazis, or the McCurdy brothers. The river was a place where I could find adventure, and if I couldn’t find it, it would find me.

The Beanie Baby Wars

2010-06-27T22:27:00.000-07:00

Somewhere between 1997 and 2000, the $5 bean-bag animals called “Beanie Babies” exploded into a national phenomenon. While there were dozens of animal styles the most coveted were the bears. They were coveted because of their perceived value, with certain bears selling for as much as $500 on the secondary (re: black) market. While not everyone who bought Beanie Babies were buying them as an investment to be sure, but most of them were. It was the first time I got a good look at the darkness inside of average people too. Let me tell you about it.
Working at Thinker Toys usually insulated us from the many fads that came and went in the toy world. Transformers, Go-Bots, and the various other mass-market trends passed us by because as a small toy store we couldn’t afford to carry such items. Not that we wanted to because Thinker Toys specialized in games, high-end plush, European wooden toys, educational toys, and various hobby items (model trains, die-cast cars, and models). We also didn’t carry toys that glorified violence, no guns, swords, or even plastic army men. So while we sold a lot of toys, we most sold the good stuff. So imagine our surprise when we found ourselves in the eye of the storm of Beanie Baby loons.
The first warning that we had was one summer day when a nine year old girl from Illinois discovered our basket of Ty Beanie Babies on the real plush table. She called her parents over to the table and excitedly pointed out all the Beanies we had. Her parents bought all eleven of them, and told us that they were the next hot thing. So my boss, Mark, called up Ty and ordered a bunch more. They showed up about ten days later, and we priced them and put them on the plush table again.
While they continued to sell, people were freaking out because we put a price-tag on the Ty heart-shaped tag. “It lowers the value” one lady hissed at me. Soon we had to move the Beanie Babies behind the counter because they were getting stolen. Soon people began calling us to ask if we carried the Beanie Babies. This is where the nightmare began. They’d ask if they could be notified when the Beanie Baby shipments came in, and stupid us, we said “Sure”. The thing is that they’d call us before the boxes had been opened. In the early days of the Beanie Baby craze the Ty boxes were proudly marked with their logo, and people would follow the UPS trucks around noting where they’d stop. Some would even quiz the UPS drivers as to where the boxes were going, and this would result in people calling us up before the boxes had even arrived. Eventually TY stopped marking its boxes to prevent theft.
As the craze grew, we found that the Beanie Babies would end up on back-order. This pissed off our customers to no end, and many accused us of hording them for the re-sale market. The problem was that as the Beanie Babies grew into a phenomenon everyone started to sell them: butcher shops, tobacco shops, beauty salons, hardware store, and so on. So we never knew when we’d actually get them and when we did they would be in quantities of six to twelve. The bears almost never showed up.
The day I realized that the Beanie Baby thing was out of control was the day of a powerful storm. Trees were coming down, and the power was out in Carmel as the rain and wind hit us like a story from the Bible. In the middle of all of this came the UPS truck, and low and behold there was a single Ty box onboard. We popped it open and to our surprise we found twenty-four “Peace” bears inside. The Peace Bear was a tie-dye fellow with the peace symbol on his chest; he was made to commemorate the passing of Jerry Garcia. Anyway, we put them up on the shelf and while we did have a small list of people we needed to call we couldn’t because the power was out and the phones were down. As it was, all but a few of those people came in anyway because they knew the phones were down and they didn’t want to miss out. San Carlos Street was blocked off while this was going on because a large pine tree in front of Wells Fargo was showing signs of coming down, and a tree cutter was out there cutting it down. The wind blew and the rain came down in sheets. I went downstairs for lunch because there was nothing else to do, and Mark and Nancy ran the front counter. The power came back as I returned from lunch. I sent Nancy on her way, and I noted that all of the Peace Bears were now gone. We had a two-Beanie limit so the word must have gotten out somehow. Now that most all of the Beanies from this shipment were gone I had a pretty quiet hour or so until the phone rang. “Did you get Peace bears today?” to which I stupidly answered “Yes, but we’re sold out.” The woman on the other end of the phone; calling me from Pennsylvania, flipped out and just went ape-shit. She actually threatened to scratch my eyes out, to which I told her that threatening people across state lines was a federal crime. She huffed and hung up the phone. Wow, just freakin’ wow.
From there we developed a system and because I was smart I made sure that I had nothing to do with it. I made it clear to Mark that I had no sense of humor about the Beanie Baby craze, and if a customer threatened me again I was going to tear their arm out of the socket and beat their skull in. So I was just never around when the new Beanies went out onto the floor. Nancy handled the Beanies and the customers, she had a list of names, and she would go through the shipment and pull the desired Beanies for each customer. Were these customers happy? No, they gave Nancy grief anyway, and Mark eventually had to ask some to never return to the store. I often asked Mark if it was worth it because most of the Beanie Baby customers were not buying anything else in the store, and he’d just shrug saying that it was hard to say what the long-term effect would be.
Although I had managed to stay clear of most of the Beanie Baby crap, I was still amazed at the things that I did learn. First there was Cancer Lady, she told us that she was dying from cancer and that the Beanies made her feel better. So Mark made a point of getting her the hot Bears first, to which she was grateful. Come to find out the bitch didn’t have cancer, and she was using the same BS line on a dozen other gift shops to get the valuable bears, and then she was selling them for $50 a pop at the Flea Market in Santa Cruz.
Then there were the two adorable nine year old twin girls who came into the store on Christmas break. We happened to have a Peace Bear or two that day, and they marveled that it was only $5. As their mother bought them each a bear at what they thought was a bargain price she told us that they had spent their Christmas money on a pair of Princess Bears. I asked how much they paid, and the mother told me that they paid $200 each. Unfucking believable. I told her that while we only got 24 Princess Bears we only sold them for $5 too. The mother just shook her head. The Princes Bear was Ty’s first attempt to cash in on the hype. Venders were only allotted 24 bears each, and only 2000 would be produced. Some people paid up to $1000 for a Princess bear, and this made me realize that some people were too stupid to have $1000 in the first place.
Beanie Babies cost .35 cents to make. Their wholesale price was $2.49 and they sold for $4.95. Anybody who paid more than $5 for a Beanie Baby is a moron, and if you are offended by this because you bought one for some ridiculous amount well tough shit. What’s that Beanie worth now? .50 cents? Less? Shrewd investment there, Forbes. I have no problem with those folks who bought the Beanie Babies because they thought they were cute; they were pretty neat, and they were a valid stuffed animal. Just like baseball cards, die-cast cars (Hot Wheels, Johnny Lightning, etc), comic books, and baseball cards that all got the “Collectable” treatment Beanies are pretty much worthless today. There is a reason for this fact. Things become valuable because they are rare and hard to find in “mint” condition. The first Superman comic book and Mickey Mantle’s rookie card are worth a ton of cash because there are not that many of them floating around out there. When that first Superman came out in the 1930s kids didn’t keep them around too long because they usually got traded with friends or got destroyed from the usual wear and tear of childhood. When Mantle was a rookie kids bought the cards to get the bubble gum, and those cards often ended up in the spokes of bicycles. The kids who actually took care of their comics or baseball cards often came home from college, WWII, or Vietnam to find that mom had tossed their collection out or gave it to the kid down the street. This is why baseball card and comic book collectors celebrate Mother’s Day as a religious holiday.
The fact that Beanie Babies were produced and sold to people who were collecting them as an investment made them worthless before we had even taken them out of the box. The Beanie Babies were a symbol of everything that was wrong with the economy of the mid-1990s through 2008. Beanie Babies were seen as an investment, and some people did make money off of them. The problem is that they were making money off of speculation; speculation that was not supported by any reasonable facts whatsoever. The demand for the Beanie Babies was fueled by media hype of people getting rich quick from the sales of the rare bears. Soon the secondary market grew with the help of the growing internet population, and by 1998 there was a national black market network of Beanie Baby collectors nationwide. Soon people who had no prior knowledge of the collectable toy market were sucked into the Beanie Baby frenzy, and they were throwing away money on them right and left.
I knew that Beanie Babies would mostly be worthless, and I tried to tell every customer who told me otherwise. I never once sold a Beanie Baby to anyone with the promise of future riches, and neither did anyone else at Thinker Toys. We had so many people tell us that we were stupid because our Beanie Babies sold for $5 when so many other places were selling them for more. The rival gift shop in town actually never put their Beanies on the shelves and instead sold them online for outrageous prices. To my boss’s credit, Mark would respond by saying that we were a respectable business, and we were a proud seller of toys. He said that eventually the Beanie craze would end, and the reputation that we were over-charging for them (essentially ripping off people) would kill off our long term business. He was right too, Thinker Toys is still around in a world where independents are being crushed by the giant corporate trash stores.
A few months ago I was on Cannery Row and I walked into one of the gift shops. They had shelves full of Beanie Baby bears. I guess Ty had reissued the classics. They were selling for $5, as they always should have been. I asked the lady behind the counter if they were still hot sellers and she told me that there were a few die-hards who still came in, but for the most part they were no big deal. There is a number of morals to this story. There is no such thing as easy money. The only smart investment is in the bond market – not toys fresh off of the truck. Just because everyone thinks that something is going to be worth money doesn’t make it so. Always do your homework and never pay more for an item than it is worth in the present, the future price is always unknown. Buy something because you like it. Nobody ever got rich by buying retail. If this didn’t involve children it would be funny, but kids got ripped off. Some people would say that they learned a valuable economic lesson. I think people that say that should die in a fire because ripping off children leads to children not trusting adults, or thinking that ripping off people is okay. I can walk away from the Beanie Baby wars knowing that neither I nor my employer stole money from children or those sad people who lined up in our store. I can smile today knowing that I was right about the long term worth of the Beanie Babies as well.

Humping.

2010-06-13T20:06:00.000-07:00

My day off found me back out at Fort Ord. While it was a sunny day the wind kept the temperature at around 57 degrees. Right off the bat I my outing was handicapped as I had forgotten to remove my rucksack from my truck before leaving the house that morning, so I would have to wear it on my hike. It is loaded with my school books and weighs a bit more than I’m used to carrying for the kind of range and terrain that I planned to cover. Since I refuse to turn back, or hike somewhere easier I clipped my hydration bladder to my ruck (adding ten pounds to it) and slung it over my shoulders, and after loading film into my Canon SLR and double checking for my meds I was off.
I had walked maybe twenty yards before encountering a woman coming down the hill. “That’s a lot of clothes for such a hot day” she says, and I reply “yeah it is.” I was wearing my woodland cammo BDU pants, my assault boots, a tan BDU shirt with a black t-shirt underneath. This is pretty much the same thing that every soldier wore out at Fort Ord going back to 1914. I wonder if she was trying to be helpful or if she just had no clue. Anyway, I end up removing my BDU shirt about half way up and shoving it into my ruck because the wind didn’t slip into the canyon so the temperature here was in the upper 70s. This kind of thing is why Fort Ord was called “The Planet”, or “Planet Ord”, the place has its own weather patterns.
My climb up the switchbacks was hampered by cramps as diarrhea made its presence known. Taking a duce outside is not one of my favorite things, and the larger problem was finding a spot to deal with this. I clenched my way to the top of the ridge, which is a saddle between to taller plateaus, and I urgently began to look for a suitably remote spot to let fly. I notice a small rise above the trail, a spot where a good soldier would set up an observation post (OP), and sure enough after a mercifully short distance up this hill there was a suitable clearing to take care of business. I backed up to the sage, making sure that a rattlesnake was not relaxing underneath, and I dropped my pants and then released the Kraken. I felt 100% better now. I must admit that taking a dump out in the open in front of God and Mother Nature is empowering. The world is my toilet. Having no toilet paper I pull my boxers way up and then pull up my cammo pants, not the greatest feeling in the world but them’s the breaks. As it is still my intention to write about the 7th Infantry Division’s Lightfighters, the need to experience a minor case of “Monkey Butt” is necessary…I guess.
I hike around the rim of the small box canyon and then begin my return leg. The climb back to the top of the ridge is not as steep, but as fatigue has set in the climb is still a challenge. Humping. Every infantryman I have ever spoken with referred to the act of marching with a rucksack as “humping”. To a civilian the act of humping is a slang term for having sex, and there on that trail the feeling was far from even bad sex. Sure there was sweating and heavy breathing, nothing beyond that. All I felt was the drag that the extra weight placed on me, and the straps digging into my shoulders.
I stop at the end of a spur trail that overlooks the parking lot, Salinas River, and the Salinas Valley all the way to the Santa Cruz Mountains. I unsling my pack and sit down on the bench that was there. The breeze from the ocean filled my lungs, and my head cleared a bit. I knew that the best way for me to spur weight loss would be to hike or walk with that ruck on my back. So sitting there on that bench I made my mind up one last time that I would get into shape again. I don’t know if it was fatigue from the extra weight, or the surge of real-manliness from taking a dump in the great wide open but out there in the back nine of Fort Ord I suddenly had a grip on things. I needed to get my weight off, period, end of story.
I stood up to stretch, and take in the view one last time, and then turned to grab my ruck. I noticed a fast-food to-go cup next to the bench, half full, and this angered me briefly. I walked over and knocked the cup over to spill the contents out on the hot ground. As I crushed the cup and picked it up to fold, my anger turned to pity for the idiot who had left it. I slid it into the cargo pocket on my right leg and then began my return jaunt back to my truck. I return to the purple BLM rope and work my way down to the saddle. From there it is a pleasant and lazy stroll down the hill under the welcome shade of oak trees. As I walk down I think about the litter bug and his/her cup now in my pocket. The litter bug had to walk over a mile and up a steep hill to leave their garbage. How empty must their soul be to sit on that bench and take in a spectacular view, and then leave their crap to mar the scenery? Sure, I took a dump, but so did 3 million other guys out at Fort Ord. It blew my mind that someone carried that cup up there, and then left it. Why even go on a hike? It is obviously lost on that sad person, so why go to such great effort to pollute?
I decided that that cup was just another sign that our society was already dead. That the reason that zombie movies have such appeal is because they are actually an accurate mirror on where we are at as a people, and that we have become nothing more than bodies going through the motions like chickens with their heads cut off. In this case, my litter bug probably wanted to go on a hike or bike ride to get into shape or stay healthy; yet before they were even out of their car they had loaded crap into their body, and thus any benefit from their outing was already lost. Then I thought of my own pre-hike meal from the burger place, and that just reinforced my decision to get my personal act together. Even as I neared the end of the trail I realized that I was now on a longer road.
I returned to my truck and got my ruck off my back, and then tossed it into the cab. I dumped some water on my head, it felt great. I then got in and fired my truck up and pulled out of the parking lot. As I drove home I began to formulate a plan to get in shape. This was not going to happen overnight so I didn’t rush into anything. I would put together a plan over the next three week.
On a final note, the next day I went to school for my last regular class of the semester before I had my final exam. I got out of my truck and pulled my ruck out and slung it onto my shoulders. Although I have had this ruck for two years; when I put it on this time it actually hugged my back, and this strange feeling came over me. It was like that ruck was now a part of me, and it now sat against my back in a strangely friendly way. As I began my walk to class the ruck seemed to move as though it was an extension of my back muscles, seeming to now move with my body. This is when it finally dawned on me; I was now humping my way to English class. From here on out every time I put that ruck on I would be humping it. It made sense, at least to me, and I found myself smiling as I walked to class.

Reality Matters and Reality TV in general.

2010-05-29T19:25:00.000-07:00

So I just finished the book Reality Matters, edited by the lovely Anna David, which is a book featuring top-drawer writers dishing on their favorite reality TV shows. Each writer explores not only each show but how and why they relate to them. It is a kind of voyeuristic theme that is a main appeal of this book for me. I know what some of you are thinking, “Axxman? Reality TV? You?” and you might be right in questioning my sanity but hear me out.
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, followed by the Iraq War, and then the banking/mortgage/economic collapse of 2008 America has begun to change. What Reality Matters illuminated for me were some of the deeper causes of the cultural change as each individual writer expresses very real connections to these shows, and then reveals some positive under lying change in them. To be honest, when I talk about a cultural shift I confess that I cannot put my finger on what exactly it is, but I get the feeling that what is shooting through the undercurrent of American society is akin to the regret and horror people feel the morning after they’ve rioted. The realization of just how out of control we have been as a people at every level of society from the nightclubs of Hollywood and Miami, the exclusive offices of Wall Street, the Mortgage guy at your bank that you thought that you could trust, and Washington D.C..
While the Tea Party is the most visible reaction to this awakening I would point to the election of Barak Obama to the Presidency as the left’s version of the Tea Party. However I submit that reality TV has played a big part in this awakening as well. Instead of pretty actors pretending to be somebody that they are not, reality TV pointed cameras at a wide variety of real people and gave us a new version of reality. Sure most of those shows are scripted, and all are edited for enhanced drama yet they ring true. Desperate Housewives is a well written and wonderfully acted show, but on many level The Real Housewives of New Jersey was far more decadent and juicy. Plus you could feel better about hating characters on Real Housewives because they are themselves, where as when the director yells “cut” on the Desperate Housewives set those women disappear as the actresses who portray them wander off to their trailers. One time I met J.T. Walsh, who played the evil Sgt. Major Dickerson in Good Morning Vietnam, and he was just the sweetest guy you could ever want to meet. Conversely when I met Michael Bean, who played “Hicks” in Terminator as well as many other “Cool Guy” roles, Bean turned out to be a dick. Generally with reality TV stars you are getting what you see.
I think that this underlies the cultural shift, while we still enjoy good fictional TV shows we also want to see what the neighbors are up to. When we watch those idiots on Jersey Shore we are confirming that our society’s decadence needs to be replaced with something else, something more real. Okay, when the two cast members tried to light charcoal on a gas bar-B-q I was indeed hoping that it would explode and disfigure them. I’m not going to try and tell you that there isn’t a gutter-level of enjoyment to reality TV.
My first reaction about reality TV shows is disgust. This reaction is based on MTV’s stable of shows headed by The Real World, which always bothered me and has continued to degenerate into worse anti-social behavior with each new season. What Reality Matters did for me is force me to think about the shows that I do watch, and low and behold many of them are reality television shows. I have sat through the Military Channel’s Making Marines and BUDS: Class 234 multiple times. Both shows took an often traveled road and used a reality show-style format to present their stories. Recently I sat through the Discovery Channel’s Two Weeks in Hell about the first two weeks of U.S. Army Special Forces selection, and this show also used the reality show-format. Compared with the Discovery Channel’s classic show: Navy SEALs, the Silent Option, Two Weeks in Hell new show offered much more insight into the men who try out for Special Force, and featured much more of a human connection.
Then I am forced to admit that my favorite TV shows are Deadliest Catch, and Ghost Hunters. In many ways Deadliest Catch is a thousand times more manly than “24”. The show features rugged dudes risking their lives to catch Alaskan King Crab, man against the sea, man against man as nerves and fatigue wear away nerves, and all around man-stuff (smoking, drinking, swearing, not showering, and missing their women). Ghost Hunters features a Rhode Island paranormal research team headed two Roto-Rooter plumbers. Each episode consists of the team rolling up to a haunted historical location, unloading the van, setting up the equipment, and running around in the dark saying “Shhh! Did you hear that?” The climax of each show is called “The Reveal” where they unveil the findings from the investigation. The show is a lot of fun and sometimes they don’t find anything. Both shows feature regular people doing extraordinary things in scary places.
As the 21st Century takes shape and we dust off the residue of the decadence of the last 20 years of the last century; I believe that reality TV will be a proven factor in our progress as a culture. I know that this sound wild, crazy and more than a little stupid, but I think that there is a connection. I think that as we search for the new “Truth” that reality TV offers us a glimpse; either as a window onto a world that we want, or a world that needs to be discarded.

Personification of Nature or Awakening to Possibilities?

2010-05-08T21:48:00.000-07:00

I remember a morning about twelve years ago. I was hiking at Garland Ranch and it was around 7:30a.m up on the Mesa. I hiked Garland early in the morning because it was the best time to spot Mountain Lions (I never did), and while the lower trails could be busy with joggers the upper trails were usually empty of people. It usually took me about forty minutes to reach the Mesa from the parking lot; while it was just under a mile and a half the hike involved a steady, and in some parts – steep climb. My route took me across the flood plain, into the oak and buckeye forest, and across a mid-section of the park that was a central highway for the big cats. As I used to hike Garland once a week I was able to note patterns of movement of Mountain Lions within the park and this mid-section was my personal barometer. This morning showed no recent cat activity and I made my way to the Mesa.

The Mesa sits at about 1000 feet above the Carmel River below. Once it was to become a subdivision of nice homes but fate and water rights left it to be donated to the county. There is a pond that was once intended for cattle and now provides water for wildlife. It is fed by a well, which is about 100 meters up the hill, and the Park pipes the water down using gravity. The pond is home to a couple of large Bullfrogs, a mating pair of turtles, and water-borne insects. In the fall, migrating water fowl feed on the baby frogs. The pond is a great source of information about animal activity as they many creatures who come to drink will leave their footprints in the mud. Raccoons, Coyotes, Opossum, Skunks, White Tail Deer and Turkey tracks can be found on the shore of the pond. I look for the Mountain Lions and Bobcats. The Mesa is my last stop before dropping into Garza’s Canyon, so I took my time that morning.

As I came around the curving trail that feeds onto the Mesa I was met by a dazzling scene. The dew caught in the grass and trees made the Mesa sparkle in the bright morning sun. It looked like a thousand diamonds had been sprinkled across the Mesa’s meadow. I paused to take in the view. Next I circled the pond to see what secrets it might reveal that morning and aside from panicking the Bullfrog I found nothing more than deer tracks. As I made my way back to the trail I saw the most interesting and amazing thing. Between me and the trail there was a bush. A small Western Meadowlark had perched itself on an outcropping branch. The Meadowlark was signing away and I stopped to watch it as it put on a show. The bird would pluck at the branch to pull it towards him and then let it go. This caused the dew-drops to spring from the leaves and the result was that the Meadowlark got a shower. I watched the bird shower, popping the branch back and then puffing up its bright yellow feathers, and then chirping out what I realized was a rhythmic cadence. Once it had finished “showering” the Meadowlark hopped up to the highest branch (about chest high) and began to sing and flap its wings in a pattern that served no other purpose than as a rhythmic dance.

There on that bush, facing the sun above a dew-sparkling spider web, that Meadowlark sang a greeting to the morning sun. The bird was doing a joyful dance, possibly a ritual or worship to the sun, and I was there to witness it. It may have been an instinctual thing caused by thousands of years of evolution. Maybe it is just something Meadowlarks do. Yet I was aware that the bird was happy, and that this dance was out of pure joy.

The scientist in me says that this is nothing more than anthropomorphism, and that bird was just cleaning itself. I admit that my observation of this type of bird is limited, and yet the bird was alone. Since this was early October the mating season had long passed this bird by, so his song and dance had no purpose to attract a mate. I know that animals do not think and feel as humans do, but I also know that they do think and feel. That Meadowlark was seeing the beautiful Mesa the same way I was seeing it on that spectacular morning. He was thanking his maker for it too. In the years since that morning I have never seen any other animal perform like that Meadowlark, so the event may have been a one-of-a-kind, but somehow I doubt it.

I don’t mean to imply that there is a spiritual aspect to nature. The meadowlark may have just been happy to see the sun, but there was an element of joy in his act. I have seen birds hunt, forage, and flee and this was entirely different. The meadowlark was responding to an aesthetic and not to a concrete reality. It was a beautiful sun-lit morning and it chose to dance and sing. That vision has always stuck with me, and whenever I hike I hope to catch another glimpse of this kind of behavior. I suspect that one day I will experience this again. I suspect that this kind of thing goes on in secret in meadows and forests all over the world every day.

What Al Qaeda Should Do Next. (Winning The War on Terror: Part 1)

2010-04-23T16:43:00.000-07:00

Al Qaeda is on the ropes as a terrorist organization. They lost in Afghanistan, they got their ass handed to them in Iraq, and are not doing all that hot in Somalia. So I have a solution that will allow Al Qaeda to evolve into a more profitable enterprise while still occasionally terrorizing people.

Al Qaeda should start their own airline. Call it AQA.

AQA would have many advantages over the other airlines in that their entire staff would be former and current terrorists. So right off the bat the company would save money on security background checks. They would most likely be popular with travelers because AQA would have no security checkpoints whatsoever, and thus check-in would be a breeze. They wouldn't serve booze during the flights, and the flight crew will stop to pray at the appointed times (the plane would be on auto-pilot). Kids would once again be welcome to visit the unlocked cockpit and talk to the pilots, after which they would receive the honorary pilots wings and a red bandanna that says "Death to America and Israel" in Arabic embroidered upon it.
The pre-flight safety briefing would consist of a video of a guy in an orange jumpsuit kneeling in front of five or six AQA employees wearing balaclavas and armed with AK-47s. The flight attendants would be all male, and would have the option of wearing either the red bandanna or a black balaclava, or a combination of both. The scariest looking Al Qaeda fighters would be assigned to the check-in desk at the airport, just like Delta Airlines does. The AQA check-in counter would feature a hand-made banner (another money saving idea), and the check-in clerk would have a couple of guys behind him dressed in black and wearing masks. The threat of physical violence should make check in much faster, and this in turn will make the airline that much more popular, especially with business travelers.

Because Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization, they will inject terror into the AQA travel experience. I see this as a benefit. For example standard airlines will turn on the "Fasten Seat belt" sign as the pilot quietly warns the passengers of turbulence ahead. The result of this is that many passengers ignore the warning and either get hurt themselves or injure others. On AQA, the pilot would simply start yelling "Allah Akbhar" into the intercom and put the jet into a brief nose-dive. It is safe to assume that all seat belts will be on within seconds. The passengers might need to change their underwear, and AQA could accommodate them upon landing. The baggage handlers could place simulated IEDs into the passenger's luggage before returning it to them. When the passenger finally opens their suitcase, the IED "explodes" sending confetti and small candies into the air along with little fortune cookie-sized messages that read: Thank you for flying AQA, death to America, death to the infidels!" They could include vanity luggage tags that read "I flew AQA and all I got was this stupid luggage tag, and a death threat." Perhaps they could have their own private lounges where alcohol could be served. There they could sell t-shirts that proclaim: "I got bombed by Al Qaeda at [insert foreign airport name here]." At their lost luggage claims counter there could be a poster featuring Osama bin Laden with the slogan "Hey, if they haven't been able to find this guy, your suitcase is history."

In short, AQA would be much like the other major airlines, only they could wear their disdain for humanity on their sleeves.

Guitar Players Need to Grow the Hell Up.

2010-04-03T21:09:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading the Guitar Player Magazine interview with Orianthi, which I recommend to anyone who plays guitar. She seems to be a player with her head on straight and a realistic balance towards pop and instrumental guitar music.

Cool.

What pissed me off were the references to the problems that women - still - face being taken seriously as guitar players. GP even adds excerpts from their Facebook debate which reads like a bunch of long shore men sitting in a bar in 1969. I have been away from the guitar community for 21 years, so I am more than a little shocked to see that my male guitar-playing brethren are a bunch of pencil-dick-slack-jawed-ass-backward-knuckle-dragging-asswhipes.

Let me get this straight, in 2010 women fly F-15s, 16s, 18s, 117s, B-52s, B-1s, and drop 1000 pound bombs on Al Qaeda and Taliban scum. Women are Nobel Prize winning scientists. Women are among the top surgeons in their respective fields in every country around the world. Our last three Secretaries of State have been women. The Speaker of the House is a woman. Women occupy almost every kind of job that is available in the United States. Yet if those same professional women pick up a guitar and master it they are not to be taken seriously, and are instead to be treated as a novelty.

Are you guys out of your fucking minds?

You can't play guitar with your dick, I know I've tried and there is bleeding and blisters involved. Seriously, the guitar doesn't care if the person playing it has a penis or a vagina, and all that should matter is the music. That would be all that mattered if guitar players would fucking grow up. Do you guys still wear pajamas with feet? Does your mommy still do your laundry?

Are you guys afraid of cooties?

It is disgraceful that in 2010, guitar players seem to occupy the lowest wrung of the evolutionary scale. I'm a conservative guy, but if a woman is good at something then you support her and let her do it. Everybody wins. Worse, some of these misogynous dinosaurs consider themselves liberals and progressives. Shame on them. I didn't like this crap back in 1983, but at least then women were just breaking into the greater world and were still treated as second-class citizens. In 2010, when 70% of popular music on the radio is made by women, some of them even writing their own songs, then the male guitar player needs nut up and shut up.

I could point out that there is a name for men who only want to hang around other men, but that would be an underhanded cheap shot.

Is big bad Orianthi a thwet to your wittow ego? Does the fact that a girl plays better than you somehow undermine your fwagile manhood?Does the idea of someone who uses tampons and can play as well as you and your hairy-assed buddies somehow diminish all that you have worked for? Have you ever considered that this is why you and your band will never get out of the garage? Have you given any thought to the fact that your narrow-mindedness is why you are an abject failure in life? How many ex-girlfriends have you had? Let me guess, it was always them and their problems, right? And those of you who are divorced? Same thing, she never saw it your way?

Let me clue you in , Scooter, you are an immature buffoon. You are a walking, talking cartoon character of a man. Well, sort of a man, because you have never made psychologically it off the kindergarten playground. You are a sad and pathetic waste of male genitalia.

Any time a new talented guitarist shows up on the scene and has success the rest of us guitar-playing types should rejoice. Orianthi is out there inspiring new guitarists, this is a great thing for the instrument. I would point out that all the great guitarists wouldn't care less about a woman playing guitar, and maybe this is why guitar playing has vanished from the real world and now only exists in video games along with dragons and ninjas. Pete Townsend, Eric Clapton, Andy Summers, and Steve Vai are all grownups.

It is a sad day in Mudville when in 2010, guitar players cannot deal with a chick who is as good or better then them. Sad indeed.

Letting Go Of Hate (part 2)

2010-03-28T20:28:00.000-07:00

I was having a discussion with an old friend about the past, and the subject of the neighborhood bullies came up. There were four guys in our neighborhood who could be counted on to make your life miserable. The two worst had a cop as a father. My friend became pretty worked up as he recounted getting roughed up by the brothers. I understood his rage, they were bigger than the kids that they terrorized, and they seemed to get away with it all.

I pointed out that in the end they really didn't get away with anything.

One brother left to live in the Midwest, never to return. His older brother became a heroin addict. At one point he was passed out in the backseat of a car while his friends were burglarizing a house. They ended up murdering the home's owner with an axe. So the brother became an assessory to murder and did time in prison. It took years for him to get clean, and today he lives a simple life.

I had forgiven them for their crimes against me years ago. I had a realization that I had no clue what it must have been like to grow up in their home with their father. It couldn't have been that great if one son fled the state and the other dulled his pain with narcotics. Not that it justifies their stupidity, but there was most likely an explanation for why they did those things.

See, what people need to understand is that the past is something that exists only in their minds.

As I was emotionally cleaning house, I found that I was holding onto hate and anger over things that had happened 25 years before. I had to really think hard about why I was still holding onto those negative feelings, and how was holding onto them effecting me? Was it helping me in any way? The truth was no, they were not. Some of the process was involuntary, those feeling were something that I had just stored in my brain, and eventually had become part of my operational approach to life. When began to re-evaluate those old wrongs I found that the only reason that I had kept those thoughts in my head was that they helped justify my questionable behavior. I was easier to go through life doing a half-assed job when you feel victimized. The fact was that while some of the things that the brothers had done were bad, they weren't THAT bad, and that the feelings that I had surrounded those events with in my memory had taken a life of their own.

In short, I was being willingly held prisoner by phantoms of my own design.

So once I had figured all this out and let go of the anger the phantoms disappeared for good. I have to admit, it is one thing to be liberated, but it is another thing to free yourself from your own mental filth. So every once in a while since those days in the early 1990s, I stop and take stock of my various motivations to see what I can cut loose. A regular house cleaning. I am often surprised to find that there are still things floating around deep in the old coconut. I find that letting go of thoughts that don't work is keeping me young.

It feels good to be free from my dark side.

Seriously, 9/11 "Truthers" Need a Swift Kick in the Ass.

2010-01-30T20:43:00.000-08:00

I've probably said this before, I am a reformed JFK Assassination Conspiracy loon. I used to devour the latest books with the latest "New Found Evidence" proving that the CIA, Mafia, General Dynamics, DAR, LBJ, Nixon or the Bush family was behind the murder of the late President. I liked the idea of having "Inside Knowledge", knowing stuff that only super-duper CIA big-wigs, and international corporate banker dudes knew. I admit that for a brief time I wondered what would happen if the wrong person found out that I knew "Too Much"? I really liked knowing things that the general public was unaware of, because I liked the idea that I was smarter than everyone else.

In short, I was a stupid douche bag.

I probably would still be lost in fantasy land had I not gone to Dallas to visit my brother. He took me to the Sixth Floor Museum at the Texas Schoolbook Depository. I stood on the curb at the exact spot of the fatal head shot, and then I looked back at where Lee Oswald had been on the sixth floor.

It was an easy shot. I mean ridiculously easy.

When I returned home to California I got rid of most of my JFK conspiracy books. None of those authors had been in Dealy Plaza on that day, and few of them had never even set foot in Dallas either. The day I was there the X-Files movie was being shot a few blocks away, and they had a helicopter flying around. The first thing that I noticed was that Dealy Plaza has a wicked echo, and it was impossible to tell in which direction the chopper was coming from. I would imagine that three quick rifle shots would be a thousand times more confusing to pin-point the source. So the fact that some witnesses thought that those shots came from elsewhere is no longer surprising. Now there WAS a conspiracy, RFK closed down avenues of investigation mostly to protect his and his late brother's image. All of that is now open-source material at the National Archives, and no big secret.

9/11/2001 brought the worst terrorist attack upon U.S. soil. I can tell you that within days the conspiracy nuts were hard at work. I was told by a well-meaning paranoid friend that the footage of Palestinians dancing in the street was actually vintage footage from 1995, this in spite of the fact that a 2000 Toyota minivan can be seen prominently in the video. Then there was the van of Israelis that was stopped on one of the bridges just before the attack, which later turned out to have never happened. Eventually the first seriously constructed conspiracy book , written by a French millionaire, was published and it was off to the races. YouTube is now full of morons who have posted their expose' about what really happened on 9/11. You have the controlled demolition crowd, Pentagon was hit by a missile crowd, Bush let it happen crowd, and so on.

Now I could point out that thousands of police, fire fighters, iron workers, FBI agents, FEMA agents, Customs agents, and investigators from the city and state of New York poor all over Ground Zero. Later many of them also surveyed wreckage at the Fresh Kills landfill where the ruins of the WTC were trucked piece by piece. Just by the sheer volume of personel on site at both locations it is certain that had something been amiss it would have been reported. Not every government agent (FBI, FEMA, NTSB, etc) is a Republican, in fact the ideological split mirrors what you see in the rest of American society. The idea that some FBI agent withheld evidence that would implicate anybody other than the Al Qaeda hijackers is crazy. That agent would become a rock-star, they could name their price and the FBI would roll out the red carpet.
Then the idea that any NYPD or NYFD investigator would turn his back on the lives of his/her fellow officers who died in the collapse of the towers is...obscene.

Instead, as a reformed conspiracy loon myself, I will point out how their conspiracy theory contradicts larger conspiracy theories.

The World Trade Center was home to banks, law offices, shipping companies, and other high-end commerce businesses. It was also home to Cantor-Fitzgerald, the bond trading firm. Some of the most important people in the world made phone calls to the WTC a couple of times a week. Some of the wealthiest and powerful men in the world were on the phone to Cantor-Fitzgerald daily. As a conspiracy loon I would have once told you that rich people only care about their money. So why would they allow an attack on the people who manage it? Seriously if 9/11 was an inside job so that the wealthy and powerful could line their pockets then why target the place where their assets went through and kill the people who managed their wealth? Also, rich people hire private investigators. The conspiracy loon inside me would add that they hire the dangerous kind of PIs, the kind who are not frightened or intimidated by government assassins. I am supposed to believe that none of these dangerous PIs have not been able to find out the "Truth" behind 9/11? With the thousands of people that need to be involved in keeping the big secret, I'm supposed to believe then none of them have talked?

The rational part of my brain believes that it is indeed possible that a few private investigations into the attacks of 9/11/2001 have taken place. Friends of powerful people were lost, allegations have been made that might have warranted a closer look. Yet nothing has come to light. Politics is a blood sport, and there is a long list of powerful people being brought down by anonymous sources (Deep throat). George W. Bush would certainly be an easy target, yet the "Truth" movement has found nothing. The media has found nothing.

The WTC was also home to the Thai embassy. Thai intelligence has not discovered anything to discount the official story of the events of 9/11.

I feel sorry for the "Truthers". I also do not. What they are doing is taking Al Qaeda out of the terrorist attacks, and then inserting their own political agenda. They are terrorist by proxy.

Shame on them.

Osama bin Laden: Glory Hound

2010-01-25T17:37:00.001-08:00

This week Al Qaeda CEO, Osama bin Laden, took credit for the Christmas Day ass-bombing attempt on a Detroit-bound jet. While a Yemen branch of Al Qaeda is responsible for the attack, the fact is that bin Laden probably had no idea that the attack was going to happen. It would be like John Madden taking credit for Jamarcus Russel , which is a whole other kind of terrorist strike, but that will be dealt with in another blog at a later date. Bin Laden has a history of taking credit for stuff his people had little or nothing to do with, the best example is the shoot down of the two US Army Blackhawks in Somalia back in 1993. He would have you believe that after Al Qaeda training the Somali militia skillfully brought those birds down. The fact is that if you talk to the 160th SOAR pilots who were in the air that day they will tell you that sky was lousy with RPGs. So the odds of being hit were good, but most RPGs missed and fell back into the city (probably killing someone on the ground). However, since the October 3rd, 1993 raid has become immortalized in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down" bin Laden has been happy to ape the event and sling it under the Al Qaeda "WIN" column.

What a douche bag.

Here are some suggestions for bin Laden to take credit for in future communications:

Windows Vista
"Jersey Shore"
The Jay Leno/Conan O'Brien fiasco
Obamacare
John & Kate Plus 8
Carbon Credits
France
The Zune
The Nissan Cube
Adam Lambert

I could go on but this list should be enough to ensure Al Qaeda's place at an international trial for crimes against humanity.

Alah Akbar...

God, Al Qaeda, Pat Robertson, and Mark McGwire

2010-01-16T18:38:00.000-08:00

I'm an Episcopalian, I have not set foot inside of a church in thirty years, and I have no plan to do so in the foreseeable future. I tell you this in the interest of disclosure because I'm going to talk about God and you deserve to know where I'm coming from.

God is the grand architect, the great creator, the dude/dudette/entity that made everything. If you are religious you believe this. Yet do you UNDERSTAND this? Have you ever thought about what kind of power it takes to create an entire universe, and then populate it with thinking creatures? I will keep it short here and just say that God has power that we cannot even comprehend. So because we cannot comprehend God's power it is a wise move to just to shut the hell up about what God can do. It is also wise to not assume we know what God wants, in fact God instructed his children not to use his name in vain. That means you cannot run around telling people what God wants, or worse doing things because God told you too. To do so is a sin, you go to hell, and God kept it simple with only ten commandments. So when you have someone running around using God's name to advance stupidity, or to do awful things you know that you are dealing with first-class douche bags. Let's explore this idea...

Al Qaeda has been crapping on the name of God since 1990. They think of themselves as Muslims, but in fact they are mostly bore rich assholes who use Islam to advance their evil, and warped view of the world. People who kill in the name of God, or who kill for God amaze me. Why? God kills people every day by the hundreds of thousands. You know, old age, disease, traffic accidents, floods, hurricanes, and last week he took home a bunch of Haitian. Man cannot trigger a 7.0 earthquake. God pulled it off on his coffee break. God also knocks passenger jets out of the sky too, as in the case of that Air France Airbus last year. God doesn't need Al Qaeda to hijack airliners or to blow them up in the air. He just does not need that kind of assistance. True story... Down on Highway 101 a few years ago there was this woman who was driving south. Her tire blew and she lost control of her car. She spun off of the road only to smack into a tree which then launched her back onto the highway. She was okay though, the airbags and seat belts had done their job, but as she was dialing 911 her car was hit by another speeding SUV. Her car was knocked 500 feet down the highway where it came to rest on the railing of an overpass. The woman was still unhurt. She climbed out of the car, but in her dazed state she then walked in front of a semi-truck and was crushed to death. The moral of that awful story is that when God wants you dead - you're dead.

So where does Al Qaeda come off killing people for God? That is blasphemy. What Al Qaeda is really saying is that God doesn't know what he/she/it is doing, and that they are doing God's work for God. I don't know about you but I hate it when people second guess me. Death threats usually follow. I notice that Al Qaeda has had one devastating defeat after another since 2001. They have had terrorist acts pulled off in their name, but most of those are Al Qaeda wannabees. for the most part, Al Qaeda's leaders cannot go outside for fear of a Predator drone nailing them with a Hellfire missile. Islam has begun to rethink how it relates to the world via Jihad, and more and more Al Qaeda finds itself on the outside of the Muslim world. Way to go, gang...

Then there is Pat Robertson, another religious extremist, who said that the earthquake in Haiti was because of the Haitian people's political views, and probably voodoo (or hoodoo). That is not how God works. The Soviet Union was atheist, yet no huge disaster befell them. The Nazis didn't kill everyone in Russia, and the United States never nuked Moscow. The earthquake happened because Haiti sits next to a subduction zone where the Atlantic plate slide beneath the North American plate. That's why you have all those volcanoes in that region. You also have violent earthquakes there from time to time. It would have made no difference to God who lived in Haiti. That earthquake was happening no matter if the Haitians were all born again, or if not a single human being lived there. Pat Robertson once ran for President, which meant that Pat had to make a deal with the devil as well. Why didn't God strike him down on the spot? Maybe God kept Pat alive to make him look like the douche bag that he truly is, as an example for the more faithful as a way NOT to act.

Finally there is baseball legend, Mark McGwire, and his revelations about steroid use. Mark defended his baseball record by saying that "The man upstairs gave me the ability to hit this baseball, gave me the hand/eye coordination...", and thus the steroids had nothing to do with his home run total. Really? How the hell will we ever know? God may have indeed given you the gift of hitting a curve ball, but those steroids made that ball fly further than it would have if he had not used them. What does that say about Mark's attitude towards God anyway? "Hey God, thanks for this gift, but I'm going to spit on it in favor of cheating nature. I have a guy who will inject me with stuff that will make my body better than the one you (God) gave me. Guess what, Mark? God did give you a gift, and you threw it back in his face. In doing so your precious career is all a lie, and all of those little kids who lined up get your autograph, had your poster on their wall, and wanted to be like you have all had their world undone. Way to go, Mark. What about those kids who used steroids to be like you? Was that also part of God's gift? To poison a few thousand young men by example? Hey Mark, if you could have talked to God before you injected yourself with that shit for the first time, what do you think God would have said? I think know know damned well what God would have told you. So why try to hide behind a God that you so blatantly turned your back upon to defend yourself?

I do not speak for God. I do not do things because I think God wants them done. I do things for me, and when I speak(or write) an opinion it is solely on my own behalf. So Mark, on the off chance that you are actually reading this, let me show you how God actually works...

On October 17th, 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake struck Northern California at 5:04 pm. The San Francisco bay area was devastated yet the fatalities were light, there should have been dead numbering in the fifty thousand range, but that didn't happen. You see, back on October 9th, the San Francisco Giants were playing the Chicago Cubs for the National League Championship. The winner would play McGwire's Oakland A's in the World Series. Anybody who knows baseball will tell you that 1989 should have been the Cubs year to win the World Series because they had a great team. Yet in the 8th inning of the 5th game of the NLCS Bielecki walks Candy Maldonado, then he walks Brett Butler, and then walks Robbie Thompson. Then with bases loaded, Will Clark (another guy put on the earth to play baseball by God) singles just over the second baseman's head into center field, and Maldonado and Butler score. The Giants would win that game and the series. That turning point was Clark's fly ball to center field, and if you ever watch that play theball just floats and then drops. Baseballs are known to do funny things, and on that warm, sunny day in San Francisco that ball landed exactly where it needed to. Exactly where it needed to so that on October 17th, all of those freeways that would have been bumper-to-bumper with commuters heading home were instead relatively empty. Exactly where it needed to fall to get families together to in one place, or friends together in a special location all to watch a classic once in a lifetime event. Right where it needed to fall to make sure that more people have extra food, batteries (to listen to the game on the radio), and beverages in stock for what surely could have gone seven games.

You see, God is not fire and brimstone. God does things subtly, without notice. God was able to get as many people off of the highways and into their homes with their friends and families simply by floating a baseball into center field. People still died, and that is not because they were some how bad people. They just were not baseball fans, or just had bad luck/timing that day. It speaks to God's limitations too, that earthquake was going to happen, and I would suggest that God could not stop it. I suspect that God has rules that must be followed just as we all do, but God found a way to save as many people as possible. It is ironic that it was Will Clark, a man who never used steroids, and exploited his God-given gifts as a baseball player that God chose(?) to put that ball into play. Will Clark is a simple man, a fierce baseball player, and a good guy. Will Clark isn't perfect and he is the first one to admit this. That is what makes him great, than and he would never hide behind God.

So to Al Qaeda, Pat Robertson, and Mark McGwire I simply ask this question. Why blame God for your shortcomings? You guys all were given gifts by God, and you chose to use them for Evil. I wonder what God will say about that someday?

The Going To War Check-List

2010-01-10T20:07:00.000-08:00

Back in the 1980s the United States had a doctrine that served as a quick test to be used before the use of military force. It was called the Weinberger Doctrine, and the idea was that before forces were committed the situation needed to meet criteria:

1. Forces should not be committed unless the vital interests of the U.S. or its allied are involved.
2. Forces should be committed wholeheartedly only with the intention of winning.
3. Forces only with clearly defined objectives, and the means to achieve those objectives.
4. The size and composition of the force should be constantly reassessed and adjusted as necessary.
5. Forces should only be committed to battle only with a reasonable assurance of the support of the Congress and the American people.
6. The commitment of military forces should only be considered as a last resort.

Later on it became simplified by Colin Powell and bore his name as the Powell Doctrine:

1. Military force should only be used as a last resort. Only if there is a clear risk to national security by the intended target.
2. Force, when used, should be overwhelming and disproportionate to the force used by the enemy.
3.There must be strong support for the campaign by the general public.
4. There must be a plan for disengagement of forces.

Both are quality doctrines, and should be written in stone at the Pentagon and on the wall of the Cabinet Room in the White House. However, there are other questions that should be addressed in advance of future conflicts.

1. What happens after we win? - Okay, so we kick Yomommastan's ass and our tanks are patrolling their capitol. Now what? We have to feed people, stand up a police force, pick up the garbage, get the electricity/water/phones working, and keep the peace. That is expensive, and labor intensive. Forget the larger strategic issues like: Did we just make life easier for the dictator next door, or did we just make a 50 year military commitment? We need to focus on getting life back to normal as quickly as possible so that the people get back to work ASAP. The faster things get back to a normal standing the faster we can leave. Plus, if people have jobs then they aren't free to join an insurgency.

2.Do we even want to win? Is it worth it in the long run? - There is just no way to look cool while beating the crap out of some third world country. You never hear about the U.S. intervention in Panama back in 1989 and the main reason is that it seemed like a difficult victory to "Feel Good" about. The Panamanians were not match for US forces, and during the initial invasion the slum area around the international airport was burned to the ground. Even though it is a prime example of the Powell Doctrine, "Operation Just Cause" has dropped off the radar of armchair generals and even the Department of Defence. 20 years later, Panama is a thriving democracy with a healthy economy. All of that was made possible by the removal of General Manuel Noriega by the United States. For all of the whining by the anti-war left, the United States lived up to its treaty obligations and handed the canal over to the Panamanian government, stuck it's colors and went home. It was a worthwhile endeavor.

3. Have we done our homework? - Are we really going to be welcomed as liberators? Is there a social dynamic that we might be missing that is going to cause problems while we occupy the country? Is our intelligence as solid as it can be?

4. Do our Rules of Engagement (ROE) make things more difficult for our forces and easier for the enemy? - In Vietnam we had sanctuary zones that were off limit to air strikes and other US attacks. The enemy knew this and took advantage of those areas to stage attacks. In Afghanistan we cannot bomb mosques, so the enemy uses them to hide out in, and in Iraq they used the minarets to coordinate attack on US troops. When you invade another county you are going to piss people off anyway. It is hard to say that you are sensitive to a culture while you blow up everything except the local mosque.

What? Nothing About Tiger Woods?

2009-12-14T22:46:00.000-08:00

Yes, I have nothing to say about Mr. Woods. Alright, that's not true. I never liked Tiger Woods, he dropped out of the At&T Pro/Am here at Pebble Beach because of he couldn't handle Bill Murry's antics and all the photographers. Boo hoo.

So all I will say is this: I am enjoying watching Tiger squirm.

That's all I have to say.

A Rough Year Draws to an End.

2009-11-29T21:28:00.000-08:00

George Clooney observed that everyone has a year where they age ten years. 2009 has been one of those years for me. I lost a good friend and I hate a mild heart attack, and both left me in a deep funk that has been hard to climb out of. I figure that the best way to beat this depression is to write about it, and once it's out in the open I can put it away. In the last ten days there has been a slow turn around, so I ask you to bear with me as I spew what is most likely emotional gobbledygook.

Last December I came to work and was told that my friend/coworker, Tim, had died in Chicago a day before. This was doubly sad because Tim had just finished four months of Chemotherapy for esophageal cancer, and was 100% cancer free. He had beat it. The problem was that it takes almost a year after chemo for the body to fully recover, and Tim had decided to take a road trip with his wife. He died in their hotel room a day after Christmas.

Tim was a great guy, he was in his mid-fifties, and had been around the block a few times. He loved to try new things (he had many tattoos and piercings), and he loved to fuck with people whenever he could. Since Tim was 6'5" he was an imposing presence, and he could tell someone off with the kind of authority I could only dream of. Tim never sugar-coated anything, and I learned a lot from that. Tim was also a great cheerleader for his many diverse friends, and was always reaching out to help someone. He often lent his cell phone to strangers to make emergency calls, and he gave more than a few surprised guests a ride in his Jeep to Santa Cruz or San Jose just for the hell of it. Tim's many friends included ex-cons, Air Force pilots (he was in the USAF), homeless guys, porn stars, bus drivers, and everything in between. He was a master of figuring people out, and could tell me what made them tick. Every day was a party, and he was always telling me that I deserved to treat myself better especially since the world never seems to want to.

When Tim died I was mad at him. That's the only way to put it. He had beat cancer, and then went on a road trip that killed him. What an asshole (this is what Tim would say if the situation were reversed). That anger masked something deeper; not only had a lost a friend but I had lost a mentor. I'm heading into the last half of my life and Tim seemed to be getting the most out of his. I could have learned so much more. I realize that this is selfish, but as Tim would tell you...why the hell not be selfish about it? He would tell you that some people don't feel anything and that I should be glad that I have any kind of emotions whatsoever. As the year has progressed I find myself missing Tim more and more. All the stupid things that we laughed about, all the crazy things that he loved are still going on without him. I've tried to enjoy them without him, but it all seems so hollow. Everyone has to deal with grief in their own way, and I have dealt with Tim's death the way I thought that Tim would want me to. That has made it a little easier, but it doesn't work as well now. So I'll just be honest and say that it hurts me that Tim is dead, I lost a special friend, and while I was lucky to have him in my life I am sad and angry that he is gone now.

Then there is the small matter of my heart attack...

I almost joined Tim in March. I was on the back end of a cold, and it had got into my lungs. Since I am asthmatic this is bad. I woke up around 9:00am and had taken a shower when my chest just locked up. I went to the ventilator and popped in some medication hoping to free up my breathing. After the ten minutes required I was still no better, so I went into my room to get my rescue inhaler. I took a lung full and then dropped to my knees, and I stayed there for almost forty-five minutes curled up in a ball. Everything was wrong. Sparks were flying through my eyes, and my breathing was exotically labored. There was a strange fire in my chest that hurt like a mother. There is no way I can describe this to you. I hit my cheap backup inhaler a couple more times and my chest eased up. I got up off the floor and sat on my bed, I was thinking about going to the hospital. I can't afford the hospital, and I was feeling better. So I got dressed, and I got in my truck and went to work. In late April I was at the gym, and I ran into my doctor friend. I'm telling him about my near death from asthma, and after I give him all the details he tells me that I'm lucky, and that it wasn't an asthma attack but a HEART ATTACK. Well fuck me six ways from Sunday, a heart attack. While I'm glad to be alive and all, it added to my depression.
Heart attacks are supposed to be for old people, I was 45. I guess that's old. So I found myself withdrawing from the world. I haven't hiked nearly as much as I did the year before, and I don't seem to enjoy a lot of things that I normally enjoy. I think almost dying makes you afraid to live a normal life. The thing I kept thinking as I was curled up on my bedroom floor trying to breathe was "I don't want to die now, not this way", and I felt so helpless about it all. Looking back on it now I see that some of my depression is based on that fear. Fear I can deal with much easier than grief. So already the weight on my brain has begun to lift.

As the semester draws to an end it will free up some time. I can use the extra time to start exercising again, something I loved to do all the time , but I have abandoned in the last year. I only have one class for next semester so I can really step things up. Tim was all about seeking out joy and bringing it into your life, and that is a gift that he has given me that I plan to use to the fullest. As 2010 approaches I am optimistic for the first time in a long while.

English Romanticism and Early Modernism’s Warnings for the 20th & 21st Centuries.

2009-11-28T21:58:00.000-08:00

The poems of English Romanticism warned of the dangers to mankind as we moved away from nature to indulge ourselves in the industrial revolution. The “Romantic Crisis” was seen as the loss of imagination as we disconnected with nature. John Keats said “Beauty is truth and truth beauty…”, and in the century that has passed since he wrote those words it is clear that western society no longer can recognize neither truth nor beauty. Worse, society no longer even seems to care that it cannot grasp these concepts, and it seems perfectly happy fabricating its own truths, and its own definition of beauty. The Romantic Crisis bore itself out at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century. This is best witnessed in the writings of James Joyce, and in the early work of Ernest Hemingway. Joyce’s “The Dubliners” is a stark, depressing look at life in Dublin at the turn of the last century. People are without joy, they have lost their faith in their church, their families, and themselves. There are repeated themes of emotional paralysis as we see people not only unable, but unwilling to improve their lives by reaching for better things. Hemingway’s “In Our Time” is a collection of short stories that revolve around the zeitgeist of disillusionment. Disillusionment of home, marriage, family, and society are explored in brief vignettes. This paralysis and disillusionment by society at large would open the door to Communism, Fascism, and Nazism in the 20th century.
The First World War had a devastating impact on western societies both in Europe, and the United States. In Europe cities were destroyed, and in both Europe and the US lives were destroyed. Men returned home to the United States changed by the Great War. In Europe after the war, veterans of both sides wandered the cities and countryside of France, Spain, and Italy. The popular notion is that these men were mesmerized by the pleasures that these places offered, and were not in a hurry to return home to Kansas or West Virginia. The truth was that they needed to come to grips with what they had seen, and what they had done as soldiers in the war. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was called “Shell Shock” in those days, and has taken almost a full century to be understood. The men didn’t know that they might be sick, but they sure knew that they weren’t well. So they wandered Europe trying to find themselves before they returned home. Adolf Hitler was one of those men, who like Hemingway, was wounded in the war, and found himself disillusioned after the war. Hitler chose to fill the void of disillusionment with anger and hatred. In Munich, Germany, Hitler would find other disillusioned war veterans to sell his vision of a new Germany to.
The danger of mass disillusionment of a segment of a population is that as they reject a belief system, they will embrace another almost without question. Hitler was a decorated war veteran, in the mind of those wayward German vets he had earned his bones, and thus they gave him the benefit of the doubt. Hitler took their disillusionment in their government, and turned it into anger towards their government. Hitler took advantage of the universal anti-Semitism in Europe to further fix (or put a face on) the target of all the things that were wrong with Germany and the world. Earlier, while the war was going on, Communists took over Russia in a fairly popular revolution. The Russian people had grown disillusioned with the Czar and his many failing, and the Communists were able to take advantage of this just as Hitler would sixteen years later.
Today there is much disillusionment again in the zeitgeist of America. Our economy has failed because smart people in finance bought into an economic model that was a lie. We will have spent seven years in Iraq after been told that their former government had stockpiles of WMDs. Many people view 9/11 as a failure of religion. So they want to throw the whole thing out.
All I ask is that you be careful that you think about what you are going to replace it all with before you throw the NOW out.
Let’s look at the Tea Party movement. The root of this movement is disillusionment of the government. Last summer over a million people converged on Washington DC to protest with little or no external organization. A second, smaller demonstration was convened a few months ago almost on the spur of the moment. The mainstream media belittles them, and barely mentions them in their broadcasts. They should be looking at this because just as in Munich in 1921, there is an opportunity to turn disillusionment into anger. In Arizona, some Tea Party folks showed up to a Presidential speech with their AR-15 assault rifles.
What if the million + that went to Washington DC last summer had all been armed? How would the government stop them if someone yelled “Charge!”.
I’m sure that most of the Tea Party people are fine, honest, and patriotic Americans who want to work for change in the government. I support this. Yet there has been a fracture within the movement because some do not believe that it is aggressive enough. They want to take more action. At the moment, the Tea Party movement has no direction, but that can change. All they need is a leader. One man or woman who can relate to the disillusionment, and then turn it into anger, and then things will get interesting.
We have become lost in our synthetic world. We no longer recognize truth, and we are blind to beauty. These are most dangerous times, my friends.

Unintended Consequences of Well Meaning People

2009-10-20T18:36:00.000-07:00

I make $24,000 a year before taxes. In Monterey County a person needs to make around $34,000 to be considered "Low Income", and that makes me "Poor". I'm not complaining, I made a series of bad life choices that kept me in poor paying jobs that had no future. Today I am taking classes at the local junior college with an eye on a degree, and I hope to be able to finally have a job where I take home at least $2000 a month.

That said, in the last few years after I had been injured I found myself in "The System" of employment aid, various state and federal programs that are designed to help "The Poor". For the most part they were beneficial to me; I received an education in computers, and I managed to get an assistance check whenever I was desperate. That system was the "One Stop" employment assistance program that the state of California runs, and if you are out of work I recommend that you give them a shot. However the real story that I want to tell you about is a little incident that happened to us about three years ago this coming December.

I live in a mobile home with my mother, who is partially disabled, and my younger adult brother who is almost completely disabled. My mother lives on $1000 per month pension, and some money she makes from a part time job. Her rent is $1200 a month, which I help out with. She also has a mortgage payment. So we don't have extra money for things. If something breaks it is up to me to fix it. If I can't fix it, it stays broken. We had some serious water damage that had lead to floors collapsing, and I know nothing about repairing floors. My mother was discussing our home problems with a friend of hers from church, and she came over to see for herself. She decided to "Help us out"; she rented rooms to men who work in construction, and she arranged for them to come over and fix our floor. Great, right? Initially, yes it was great, the guys came over and showed me how to fix stuff as they replaced the damaged segments of flooring. My mom also arranged for a former plumber come over and coach me through installing a new toilet.
Had this stopped with the new flooring everything would have been great, but this woman friend decided that since we were getting new floors that we should get new carpet as well. There was a charitable program through the church that would give us new carpeting for free. Sounded cool, BUT then she decided to push for new linoleum too. So I find myself tearing out the old linoleum in the entire house, and then hauling it to the dump at my own expense. In fact, there was a growing tab on my dime for this "Charitable" operation. I had to buy paint, because this woman decided that since we were getting new carpet that we should repaint everything too. Since I am disabled I had to buy special polls for the paint rollers. Then some electricians show up and I find out that I'm paying them $400 too. Then we need more plywood, so I go and buy four more sheets. Since this is my home, I buy the best stuff because good wood lasts longer than cheap wood.
Then the carpet guys come, and for some reason the lady has them only carpet HALF of the living room. They tell us they will return once the lady has made up her mind. Also, they cannot put linoleum over the cheap plywood floor that the guys had initially used. So we would need to tear out the floors completely. An argument broke out between the lady and my mother because this was all too much for her. My mother is in a pre-leukemia stage, and stress can push her into full-on cancer, and this haphazard remodel job was killer her. So the lady just stopped everything.
So half of our living room had a carpet, the rest is covered by carpet remnant that my brother scrounged. Our kitchen and bathroom floors are bare wood. This charity ended up costing me around $1,500 which is on my Visa card. My mother is now gun shy about accepting any help from anybody, and I can't say that I blame her.

So I guess there are a couple of messages that I hope you take away from this story. If you are receiving some kind of help, don't be afraid to ask question first. Make sure the project is defined in advance and then stick to it. Make sure that the people involved actually know what they are doing. Make sure that you have your own set of contact numbers of all the people who are helping you out in case the leader quits. Help out as much as you can so that you can learn to repair things on your own. People who are kind enough to help out those in need should understand that while those folks are grateful they will feel bad about receiving help. So pushing them around will only make them feel worse about themselves, and if you have done that you aren't really helping anyone are you?

Of Oaks and Fog.

2009-08-01T20:03:00.001-07:00

Hiking the Central Coast can be rewarding on many different levels. If you want a leisurely stroll along the sea shore you can do that. If a demanding hike that requires some skill is your thing, Monterey County has some great places for you too. The gentle rolling hills of Steinbeck country are dotted with California Live Oak and Valley Oak trees. They cluster themselves into thick forests where the Santa Lucias begin their sharp rise to the sky. While their neighbors, the Coastal Redwoods, dominate the canyons and valleys where water is a constant either from spring-fed streams, or heavy rainfall; the Oak's deep root system allows them to drink from deep underground sources. So the Oaks make their home in the more arid places in the county, which is MOST of the county, and their commonality tends to make them invisible. While people flock from around the globe to see the Redwoods, the Oaks are mostly ignored except by landscape painters.

This is exactly how the Oaks like it too.

Redwoods are a social tree. They grow in clusters, and the talk to each other. If you have ever been in the Redwoods you know what I say is true. As the wind blows throw the tree tops, the Redwoods creek and groan. Their needles are groups to tightly that even the slightest breeze creates a hiss, and from the ground this sounds as if they are whispering to each other. They drop their needles on the ground, which makes for a comfortable carpet to walk on. The Redwoods are hospitable, and they are friendly. Oaks are different. They are quiet, and they space themselves evenly from each other. Their leaves have barbs so they jab those who walk barefoot, and as the leaves dry they crunch loudly as one walks over them. While Redwood is a soft wood, oak is hard. Oaks initially offer little in the way of hospitality. It is as if they desire to move visitors quickly from beneath their shade so that they can be left alone. The Coastal Live Oak often seems to invite Poison Oak to grow on the ground beneath it's canopy for the express purpose of driving the uninvited away.

The Oaks have have a weakness. They are vain. They secretly love the attention, and they love to be admired. The key is to subtly praise them as you walk in their shadow. Speak aloud about how beautiful they are. Over time they come to recognize your presence, and then they will begin to show you things. Oak forests are places full of secrets. Barn and Great Horned owls find the seclusion of the Oaks to their liking. It is not uncommon to be walking though a thick Oak forest and be startled by a large raptor who has been startled by you. The large bird will quickly vanish behind the thick Oak canopy, and you must look sharp if you want to identify what species it is. Once the Oaks know you they begin to show you these birds. For some reason the sun will shine differently, and a Barn Owl comes into view on an upper branch. The Oaks even become better hosts than the Redwoods. Low hanging branches reveal themselves at a height that makes for the perfect park bench. Their hardwood is cool as you sit down on a hot day.
Once accepted into this secretive Oak society you come to appreciate their silent cabal. You then learn their greatest secret, that Live Oaks have a mistress: The Fog. Oak trees are very different on a foggy day, they are much more relaxed. However, it is in the low misty fog that the affair is revealed. The Oaks seem to blush as the fog weaves through their branches, and the Fog seems to caress and tickle the Oaks. It's not obscene, it is the act of two ancient lovers who's time together is limited. While the Oaks remain silent, the Fog whispers as it moves through the leaves. While this is going on (and there is no other way to say this) the Oaks seem to smile. It's a secret smile, revealed only to those of us who they have allowed into their world. The water in the Fog quenches the Oak's thirst, and the Fog then becomes lighter. If you have ever walked in an Oak forest on a foggy night then the affair becomes more visual. The Fog, driven by the sea breeze, will dance amongst the Oak trees. It is like some witches ballet. The Fog takes on shapes as is swirls around the Oak trunks, and then flies up into the branches. The uninitiated would see this as maybe ghosts, but this is simply ancient primal romance. As the Oaks are ignored, the Fog which is mostly scorned by the children of the sun has found a grateful partner. While in an open field, the Fog will just sit, but within the Oak forest the Fog becomes a thing of beauty.
It took me almost twenty years before the Oaks let me in on their secrets. Maybe you can see these things too but I suspect not for a while. The Oaks admire persistence, and they will reward those who return to admire them. So be patient.

Of Oaks and Fog.

2009-08-01T20:03:00.000-07:00

Healthcare Costs Explained

2009-07-03T20:33:00.000-07:00

Doctors are expensive, but so are plumbers. Granted a plumber bill rarely exceeds $2000, but for a lot of people that is expensive. Yet nobody is advocating for "Plumbing Insurance", and I think that we should look at the reasons why. So imagine that plumbing insurance was as wide-spread as medical insurance...

First off, you would need to find a plumber who took your insurance. Then after that you would need to make an appointment, since your insurer is one of the more popular ones it will be about ten days until the plumber can see you. Because people have plumbing insurance they call the plumber for all kinds of little things that they never would have dreamed of before plumbing insurance. So the plumbers are all over-worked. So you'll have to use the kid's bathroom until the plumber can come.

Thanks to plumbing insurance, the plumber's rates have gone upwards to almost 15 times what they were before insurance covered them. This is because the insurance companies simply refuse to pay for certain plumbing procedures because they feel that they are unwarranted. The people at the insurance companies who make this judgement calls have no plumbing experience, or have a plumbing advisor who was a plumber in Guatemala back in the 1960s.

Since insurance companies have lawyers, plumbers have to carry malpractice insurance, and this also adds about 35% to 60% to the cost of fixing your sink.

As plumbers become over-worked, they begin to specialize. Some do toilets, some to garbage disposals, and others do water heaters. So what happens next is that you will have a primary plumber, whom you will see first, and then he will refer you to a specialist plumber. So now you can tack on another week to that initial ten day wait.

Then the government will be pressured to step in to cover those who can't afford plumbing insurance. With the government plan will come a ton of new rules for the plumbers to follow. The government will negotiate with plumbing supply companies to get lower prices for replacement parts. The insurance companies will also do this too. In order to cover costs that they lose under the government plans they pass a higher rate along to the insurance companies AND the general public. So a copper elbow joint that was once $1.37 before insurance and government plumbing assistance will now run around $12. Americans anticipating plumbing repairs would soon turn to purchasing replacement parts from Canada or Mexico. In Canada, they have a single-payer plumbing care system, but they don't regulate replacement parts. In Mexico, you're never sure if you are buying counterfeit plumbing parts. After a while the elected officials hold public hearings to get to the bottom of the plumbing costs that are now skyrocketing. They will make a big show out of it and blame the plumbers for being greedy.

Right now, if you go into your local plumber's office you will see maybe one or two administrative staff. Someone to answer the phones and someone to do the billing. Some plumbers have no office , and they work from home. After the advent of plumbing insurance they will need a staff of for or five administrative people for each plumber. The paperwork will be overwhelming otherwise, and this staff will also drive up the cost of plumbing. Then when the government steps in, the plumbers will need to hire at least two additional administrators just to deal with government paperwork.

Fun right? Way to go, right?

I didn't think so. Yet we have done this with our doctors , and our hospitals.

Doctors have a mountain of paperwork that they need to file to get paid. Then the insurance companies pick and choose what they feel like paying for; which precipitates a back & forth battle as each side haggles over how much a treatment should cost. Insurance companies make no such options available to their customers.

Because people have insurance they can get treatments that they could never pay for themselves. What most doctors tell me is that these treatments are unnecessary, but they have to provide the treatments/tests because they run the risk of lawsuits AND the treatment/tests are required by the insurance companies for payment. So we have people taking up the doctor's time getting tests or treatments that they don't need. We also have people who need tests or treatments but cannot get them. This is all due to insurance companies.

This is going to sound weird but the single best way to get health care costs down is to get rid of general health insurance, and end government programs like Medicare. Then once the prices have settled, offer a catastrophic medical insurance for car wrecks and cancer. Then look at what the government can do to help poor folks pay, but without the red tape.

A Quick Thought About Michael Jackson, And How The Media Still Sucks

2009-06-26T18:27:00.000-07:00

Michael Jackson died yesterday.

My brother told me as I was on a break from the X-Box 360, and on my way to the kitchen. It was a surprise, the news at the time was saying that he had died from a heart attack. I told my brother that as this story worked itself out that Jackson was probably abusing prescription drugs, and that the death would be more seedy in the end. As it turned out this is the case.

I'm not a Michael Jackson fan by any stretch of the imagination. However I did buy "Thriller" in 1984, mostly because Eddie Van Halen played the guitar solo on the song: "Beat It". The album itself was a solid offering of high quality Quincy Jones-produced pop music, and most of the guys from Toto played back-up for Jackson. "Thriller" became background music for my friends and me during the summer of 1984. My friend, Bruce, had a 1968 LTD station wagon, and "Thriller" was almost always in the cassette player. Since Bruce was good looking the rear seat of the LTD was usually packed with girls, and as we'd taxi them to the beach Michael Jackson's music usually got them grooving. Girls in bikini tops grooving is a good thing.

Bruce's place was party central, and by June there were a few guys who could "Moonwalk". 1984 was the first year that you could order MTV in stereo, and needless to say Bruce had it. So MTV was always on during the party, and Jackson's videos usually warranted scrutiny by just about everyone there. Michael Jackson ended up being an important part of one of the greatest summers of my life, and for all the stuff that has happened with him since there is no denying this.

Whenever I hear a song off of "Thriller" I smile.

The thing that is disgusting me now is the wall-to-wall coverage by all the networks, with special segments now dedicated to telling Jackson's life. This is ironic because the media has spent the last few years destroying Michael Jackson. Sure, Jackson gave them ammunition, his problem with young boys is well documented. However, the media went beyond the facts, and printed/broadcast almost every allegation without due investigation as to their truthfulness. Stories about Jackson symbolized the legitimate news media's descent into tabloid journalism.

So now that Jackson has died, the media is now milking him for every ratings point they can. His funeral will probably be an epic. Not an ounce of shame will be displayed on the part of the news outlets who will cover it live. Then in the coming months and years we will be flooded with tell-all book that will make Jackson look like a Saint, or Jack the Ripper.

I am not a Jackson fan. I like one of his albums. I was hoping maybe the media in the age of Obama, and economic crisis was going to grow up. I guess not.

Thinking About Anger.

2009-05-31T16:27:00.000-07:00

I was an angry young man. I didn't know this at the time. I did a lot of crazy, and self destructive things to myself. There was almost no forethought before I did things, so I just did them. It is funny that people can exist in a clueless condition, completely unaware of themselves.
It is also frightening to me to think that I could have gone on much longer without even getting a clue to my underlying motivations.

I had bad things done to me as a child by a family member, but at an age when I was too young to fully understand what had happened. When you are a child you think that those things are somehow normal, even though you know that you don't like them. Then in your pre-teen years you begin to understand your body, and you get some sex education in school then suddenly you are forced to confront some ugly things. It is like a time-release poison because just as you come to grips with one incident, you then remember something else, and so you are thrown into another whirlpool of emotional confusion.
I was lucky in that I got help in my sophomore year in high school. I was directed to a psychologist who was able to guide me in evaluating my feelings. Which lead to my ability to understand the underlying motivations behind some of the stupid things I was doing. I reached a point to where I felt in control enough to stop going to this doctor. I think I had gone as far as I could anyway. I then entered the second phase of my life. I became a musician and pursued a brief studio career. I began playing guitar in my Freshman year in high school, and I practiced four to six hours every day. EVERY DAY. I took theory classes at the junior college, as well as private lessons. When I listen to the old tapes from those days I hear an intensity that is missing from my playing today. I have said before that I would eventually quit from the stress of studio work, and the hassles of being a guitar player. I still play today but there is no drive for me to take it out of the bedroom.

Something changed in 1990.

My dad (the offending family member) died. We would find out through his autopsy that his actions were caused from brain trauma. So he had no real control over his impulses. This was liberating for me because I feared that my father's behavior would be transmitted to me in much the same way as a werewolf curse. With the knowledge that my father's condition was organic and exclusive to him I was able to relax. The other thing that happened was that I was no longer angry at my father, and I suddenly felt a great weight lifted from me. What I didn't expect was that this revelation would lead to the next phase of my life, and in many ways it would be much harder.

With my deep-rooted anger gone, my life had no foundation to orbit around. The anger of my past had so much defined who I was that without it I lost all direction in my life. I suddenly had nothing to prove, no chip on my shoulder, and I no longer walked with the swagger of an angry man. The problem was that I found that I had lost my ability to assess certain situations and judge people. So I was soon taken advantage of by people that the "Old Me" would have seen coming a mile away. So I began to withdraw from people. My social life evaporated, and my life became work. In 2001, I was laid off after a devastating injury, so I found myself angry once again. I picked up and wore my anger like one would wear a favorite set of clothes from their youth that still fit perfectly. My anger quickly gave me direction again and I was soon learning new things, and began research on my book. It has lead me back to school, and driven me to study hard.

While I hate being angry all the time, I like what my anger does for me. I have a direction again, and I'm moving along with great velocity. I'm not drinking booze nor using drugs, and I'm not using my anger in social settings to justify using women (as I did when I was younger). I go to school, then go to work, and then I come home. The only expression of anger is on my TV screen as I blast Nazis on my X-Box360. What I worry about today is what else is my anger doing to me? Since I was so unaware of how anger affected my life when I was young, it is not unreasonable to assume that I still have a blind-spot. Am I ignoring a chance a love? Have I turned a blind eye to a life-changing opportunity?

I guess that because I'm writing this I may actually be in good shape. That I can still self-evaluated is probably a good sign. I have my fingers crossed.

The Central Intelligence Agency: Reform of Replace?

2009-05-22T21:23:00.000-07:00

Following the attacks by Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. there were many questions raised about the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) ability to effectively provide the intelligence needed to protect the United States from international terrorism. It took the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission to get the ball rolling on reform, and even then it took: “… [A] bruising fight on Capitol Hill for Congress to pass a reform bill addressing the issue of intelligence failure” (Fessenden). While many reforms were passed into law, including the creation of a new intelligence office, almost none of them address the CIA’s consistently uneven performance in intelligence collection, dissemination, and distribution of vital information to the government bodies it serves. A few question if the numerous flaws can ever be reformed, and suggest that the CIA be replaced altogether with a new agency.
The failure to head off the attacks of 9/11/2001 is probably the CIA’s greatest intelligence failure, so analyzing the events that lead to that tragic September morning reveals the fundamental flaws of the CIA. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, in the summer of 2001, “The system was blinking red” (254), The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) even had a man named Zacarias Moussaoi in custody (273). Moussaoi would later be convicted as the twentieth 9/11 Hijacker. However, at the time of his arrest, the CIA didn’t reveal that Moussaoi‘s association with key Al Qaeda figures, thus the FBI was unable to present an urgent enough case to search his lap-top computer. Had the CIA been forthcoming with vital information the FBI could have at least had a clearer picture of the coming attacks (Wright 397).
The CIA’s unwillingness to share information with the FBI was only matched by its unwillingness to share information between different offices, or provide resources within the CIA itself. The Agency’s hierarchy is inter-competitive often to the point of endangering national security. In April-May, 1998, the CIA’s dedicated Bin Laden unit “Alec Station” was ordered to be shut down and consolidated. This was done without the knowledge of the Director of Central Intelligence’s (DCI) knowledge, and when he found out about it he countermanded the order. However, this created confusion within the unit, and while they continued to do their jobs they were distracted as uncertainty prevailed. This may have contributed to the successful bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania a few months later on August 8, 1998 (Scheuer)
One would think that after the deaths of eight Americans and over 450 African civilians that the CIA would have poured resources into Alec Station so that it could better, and for about a month the leadership complied with many of the requests for Alec Station. All too soon, assistance like complete transcripts of recorded communications between Al Qaeda operatives instead of summaries dried up. Direct assistance from the U.S. military to plan strikes against Al Qaeda targets, never materialized; while the Armydid send two officers to Alec Station, neither had special operations experience, and both were experts on Iran. In fact after 1999, Alec Station was run by Directorate of Operations (DO) personnel who had had little or no knowledge of Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda (Scheuer).
It’s not that the CIA was doing nothing. In his testimony before the 9/11 Commission in 2004, George Tenent listed a number of successful CIA counter-terrorist operations against Al Qaeda:
The third period of peak threat was in the spring and summer 2001. As with the Millennium and Ramadan 2000, we increased the tempo of our operations against al-Qa‘ida. We stopped some attacks and caused the terrorists to postpone others.
We [the CIA] helped to break up another terrorist cell in Jordan and seized a large quantity of weapons, including rockets and high explosives.
Working with another foreign partner, we broke up a plan to attack US facilities in Yemen.
In June, CIA worked with a Middle Eastern partner to arrest two Bin Ladin operatives planning attacks on US facilities in Saudi Arabia.
In June and July, CIA launched a wide-ranging disruption effort against Bin Ladin’s organization, with targets in almost two-dozen countries. Our intent was to drive up Bin Ladin’s security concerns and lead his organization to delay or cancel its attacks. We subsequently received reporting that attacks were delayed, including an attack against the US military in Europe.
In July, a different Middle East partner helped bring about the detention of a terrorist who had been directed to begin an operation to attack the US Embassy or cultural center in a European capital.
In addition, in the summer of 2001, local authorities, acting on our information, arrested an operative described as Bin Ladin’s man in East Asia.
We assisted another foreign partner in the rendition of a senior Bin Ladin associate. Information he provided included plans to kidnap Americans in three countries and to carry out hijackings.
We provided intelligence to a Latin American service on a band of terrorists considering hijackings and bombings. An FBI team detected explosives residue in their hotel rooms
The problem is that none of these actions brought the CIA closer to the inner circle of Al Qaeda, and none of these successful operations prevented the attacks of September 11, 2001. Reform would be needed and that meant that Congress would have to step in. The attacks of 9/11/2001 and the subsequent failure to capture bin Laden as of this date should not be a surprise to anyone. This should be especially true for Congress, who can produce a long list of committee and commission reports and recommendations on how to reform the CIA dating back to the 1970s
After September 11, 2001, the House and the Senate intelligence committees began work on legislation that would lead to the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). After a hard fight, a compromise was reached in December, 2004, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was created. While this is viewed as a step forward for national security it is also an acknowledgement of the failure of the CIA.
The DNI’s mission is to be a central clearing-house for intelligence, intelligence collection, and intelligence policy which then reports to the President and the National Security Council (NSC). In short, the DNI is a central intelligence agency, which has the same task that the CIA was supposed to control, and for the most part still has. Lost in the debate of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendation to create the DNI was the question of weather the CIA was still up to the job of keeping the United States safe from attack. The National Security Act of 1947 called for the creation of the CIA with the purpose of preventing another Pearl Harbor style attack. The eleven-story deep hole between Liberty and Vesey streets in Manhattan, New York, is mortal proof that the CIA failed to do its most basic mission. The war in Iraq was based solely on Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) intelligence gathered by the CIA. This intelligence turned out to be as much an estimate about Iraqi WMDs based on a formula (60 Minutes) as it was traditional intelligence collection procedures. The Bush Administration’s rushed to invade Iraq, which put off or diluted any immediate short-term reforms.
This has become apparent with the revelations that the CIA was sending captured Al Qaeda operatives in secret to foreign prisons to be tortured by the local intelligence entity. Also the “Water Boarding” of suspects directly by the CIA, and other interrogation techniques that were traditionally viewed as torture. The torture issue was emblematic of an Agency that still refused to share information and tactics with other intelligence
agencies.
The U.S. Army Intelligence and Naval Intelligence had amassed years of doctrine on interrogation dating all the way back to the Civil War. Their tactics had been honed and refined after each war or conflict, and was the most up-to-date as far as Islamic extremists were concerned based on their experiences in Somalia and the Balkans. Although the CIA had a reliable doctrine via the Army, it instead chose to bow to pressure from the White House to use more questionable methods to extract information from suspected Al Qaeda fighters. The revelation of torture has lead to calls that the CIA be abolished. In an editorial in Slate online magazine, Christopher Hitchens argues: “The next stage, very often, is that certain inconveniently damaged secret prisoners have to be made to "disappear," as in the death-squad regimes of Latin America…” (Yet Another).
This is not to say that the CIA is completely useless, since the “War on Terror” began in October, 2001, the CIA has seen many success stories. Most of these stories come out of Afghanistan, where the CIA spearheaded the counter-insurgency movement to drive the Taliban out of power. Afghanistan had been the scene of the CIA’s greatest Cold-War triumph; it had organized Afghan freedom fighters, called Mujahedeen, into a cohesive fighting force which they trained, and equipped with modern Soviet weapons the new “Stinger” anti-aircraft missiles. With the CIA’s backing, the Mujahedeen were able to defeat the Soviet army, and retake the country.

So almost fifteen years later, many of the same CIA veterans from the first Afghan war returned to duty, some even coming out of retirement to strap on boots and operate in the high mountains of Afghanistan (Bernsten 72-74). Their number being less than twenty, they secretly infiltrated Afghanistan on helicopters, and then linked up with old friends in the Afghan “Northern Alliance”. They set up introductions between local warlords and members of U.S. Army Special Forces “A-Teams”, these A-Teams would then train, assess, equip, and assist the various warlords and their tribes so that they could better defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda(Bernsten 79).
This turned out to be a winning combination for the defeat and overthrow of the Taliban. Northern Alliance tanks rolled into the capitol city of Kabul in November, 2001, less than seven weeks after the beginning of the U.S. lead drive to defeat the Taliban. At the same time, Al Qaeda along with its leader, Osama bin Laden, found themselves cornered at a mountainous region called “Tora Bora.” During the Afghan War against the Soviets Tora Bora had been a Mujahedeen strong-hold and hideout. Bin Laden had designed and built many tunnel systems within the mountains here, and the Soviets found it to be impenetrable. The U.S. special operations teams did not.
On the Pakistan side of the border, the CIA began working with the Pakistani Government to hunt senior Al Qaeda leadership. Within 14 months of the September attacks, the CIA would capture or kill:
Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, al-Qa‘ida’s operations chief and the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.
Nashiri, the senior operational planner for the Arabian Gulf area.

Abu Zubayda, a senior logistics officer and plotter.
Hasan Ghul, a senior facilitator who was sent to case Iraq for an expanded al-Qa‘ida presence there.
Harithi and al-Makki, the most senior plotters in Yemen, who were involved in the bombing of the USS Cole.
Hambali, the senior operational planner in Southeast Asia. (Tenent)
However, there was a four year gap void of CIA “Predator” drone action within Pakistan, and it was not until the appointment of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense in December, 2006, that U.S. covert activity on the Pakistan side of the border escalated. Secretary Gates had worked at the CIA for 27 years, and would become the only career CIA officer to ever serve as DCI (1991-1993). Since August of 2008, the CIA has conducted over 55 attacks on Al Qaeda safe-houses in Pakistan using “Predator Drones” that fire guided missiles (Hammond). These constant attacks have affected the surviving Al Qaeda Leadership to the point that they have begun to flee to Yemen and Somalia (Maclean).
In a way, Gates embodies everything that the CIA needs in it leadership, he is willing to take risks and is prone to deal with problems directly. Former Alec Station Chief Michael Scheuer wrote in an open letter to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees complaining:
In the CIA's core, U.S.-based Bin Laden operational unit today there are fewer Directorate of Operations officers with substantive expertise on al-Qaeda than there were on 11 September 2001. There has been no systematic effort to groom al-Qaeda expertise among Directorate of Operations officers since 11 September ... The excellent management team now running operations against al-Qaeda has made repeated, detailed, and on-paper pleas for more officers to work against the al-Qaeda—and have done so for years, not weeks or months—but have been ignored ...
The U.S.-based Bin Laden unit, Alec Station, was deactivated for good in late 2004. Former CIA agent Robert Baer sites that much of the CIA’s senior leadership lacks and foreign experience whatsoever (Getting the CIA), and that since the end of the Cold War, the Agency has shifted away from recruiting new assets overseas. Baer says that instead, the Agency relies too much on technical data and foreign intelligence services.
All of this draws into question weather the CIA can ever be fixed so that it becomes more effective. The Agency has demonstrated that it can collect intelligence when it wants to, and that it can conduct proactive covert action, again when it wants to. The problem is that too often, senior officers don’t want to do anything. At least not anything that would jeopardize their careers. The senior case managers at the CIA are largely risk-averse, which protects their own careers but does little to protect the country.
I would argue that the smart move would be to dismantle the CIA altogether, and create a new spy agency. It would be an agency that would be much smaller and somewhat less reliant on electronic or technical intelligence gathering, and focus more on human intelligence (HUMINT). The CIA has never had the ability to directly infiltrate an enemy’s strategic center to obtain vital intelligence. The CIA never penetrated the Soviet Politburo, the leadership of Cuba, or other enemies of the United States. Instead, the CIA relied on luck, a chance encounter or the defection of a key foreign leader to the west. Both the U.S. Army and Navy’s special operations units have long practiced infiltration of enemy installations. The Navy has detailed bathometric maps of harbors in North Korea, Russia, Iran, Libya and Venezuela. These maps are all hand-drawn by Navy commandos. The U.S. Army successfully infiltrated southern China during the Vietnam War, to kidnap or assassinate Chinese military advisors who were training North Vietnamese army officers (Pearson). This new agency would draw upon this country’s rich immigrant population, and the military as the backbone of the operational arm for intelligence gathering.
With the creation of the ODNI, there is no need for supplemental covert action policy development as there is now at the CIA (which used to be the principle developer of policy), so this new Agency would have a flexible operational doctrine since would not be directly intellectually invested in a set doctrine. This way the new agency could more rapidly adapt to changing world threats to the United States. The CIA is weighed down by its middle and senior management. It is operationally inbred. A new agency would not be handicapped by outdated operational policies that no longer make sense. The new agency could take the things that worked at CIA, and discard the things that did not.

The CIA has many talented, gifted and dedicated people who work hard to protect this country. Unfortunately, because of weak policies that promote the inexperienced to key management positions, the CIA is restrained from doing everything within its capability to gather information. Worse, this leadership has proven that when the White House suggested illegal (or questionable) interrogation practices, they were reluctant to say “No”. Inter-departmental games denied Alec Station vital intelligence assets even after the catastrophic attacks on the US Embassies in east Africa. The CIA dragged its feet on drone attacks in Pakistan for almost four years. Even after the CIA’s extreme caution have proven to be fatal to innocent Americans, they are still constricted by a pre-9/11 mind-set. The country would be better served, and in safer hands with an all new intelligence agency.

Works Sited:

“At the Center of the Storm”. 60 Minutes. CBS News. New York. April 29, 2007
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/25/60minutes/main2728375.shtml
Bentsen, Gary. Puzzulo, Ralph. Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander. Crown. 2005.
Baer, Robert. “Getting the CIA Back in the Game”. Foreign Policy. New York.
March 2005.
Fessenden, Helen. ”The Limits of Intelligence Reform”. Foreign Affairs; Nov/Dec2005, Vol. 84 Issue 6, p106-120. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mth&AN=18680595&site=ehost-live
Hammond, Jeremy R., “Pakistan: Half a Million Refugees as Fighting Continues in Swat”, Foreign Policy Journal. May 13, 2009.
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2009/05/13/pakistan-half-a-million-refugees-as-fighting-continues-in-swat/
Hitchens, Christopher. “Yet Another CIA Failure”. Salon.com. April 27, 2009.http://www.slate.com/id/2217002/
Maclean, William. “Pakistan Instability Draws Foreign Militants”. Kuwait Times. May 10, 2009.
http://www.kuwaittimes.net/read_news.php?newsid=MTE0MTIwNDk1OQ==
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report. W.W. Norton & Co. New York. 2004.
Pearson, Roger. Major. US Army Retired. Personal interview.
Scheuer, Michael. “How Not To Catch a Terrorist”. Atlanic Monthly. New York. 2004.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200412/anonymous
Tenent, George, Written Statement for the Record of the Director of Central Intelligence Before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. 2004. CIA.gov.
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/2004/tenet_testimony_03242004.html

Starships Or Submarines?

2009-02-07T17:18:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s my loyalty was divided between two fictional TV Captains. On Star Trek the star ship Enterprise was commanded by James T. Kirk, who along with Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy and the rest of the crew zipped around the galaxy seeking out strange new worlds. The Enterprise was cool. It looked cool, it had cool weapons, it had cool technology, and it had hot women in miniskirts. My other escape was the SSN Seaview, the fantastic submarine of the show "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea", where Captain David Crane ran the show. Captain Crane lead a crew of interesting guys such as Chief Sharky, Ensign Blake and Admiral Nelson (who actually built the Seaview as part of the Nelson Institute) around the world from adventure to adventure. The Seaview was cool. It looked cool, it had big windows on the front, it made a cool sonar noise, and it had a flying sub. As a boy, the idea of a big star ship that went faster than the speed of light was a concept that could only be rivaled by a big submarine.

"Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" was a fun show that was created by Irwin Allen; the creator of Lost In Space, Land of the Giants and director of "The Towering Inferno", Allen was an interesting character himself who was legendarily cheap. He was the king of stock footage and recycled special effects footage and monster suits between his various shows. As a result, "Voyage" doesn't hold up too well over time as Star Trek has. "Voyage" also was handicapped by bad writing and some lame story ideas. Star Trek used SciFi writers as well as first time writers to generate interesting and compelling stories for the show. This doesn't make "Voyage" a total dog though, there are a handful of great shows in each season that keep it from becoming a total joke. The average story line either involved international terrorists or an uncharted island. Sometimes the show featured an environmental disaster which ring more true today than it did in 1966. Terrorists threatening America was also a concept that was ahead of it's time. As a young boy none of these concepts mattered, all that mattered was that Captain Crane ran a tight ship and if he had to put on his yellow wetsuit and lock-out of the Seaview to kick some ass then that's what he'd do. The Seaview's crew were regular guys who got scared and sometimes had no idea of what to do, especially when the Seaweed monster got loose in the missile bay. As a kid I could totally relate to them because I grew up near the sea and it can be a scary place. Today as I re-watch the show on DVD it is pretty hokey. They spent no money on the show and often the 20th Century Fox back lot doubled as a top secret facility run by a mad scientist. The stories often repeated themselves (how many times was the Seaview stuck below crush-depth with no hope of escape?) and the special effects were pretty lame. I still love the Seaview and I think that Captain Crane was a well fleshed-out character.

Star Trek's appeal is obvious. The show was ahead of it's time in every way and featured high quality writing that is as fresh today as it was when it first aired back in the 1960s. Captain Kirk was everything I wanted to be, good looking, smart, cool and fearless. The Enterprise represented a future that I wanted to become real. Much has been written about Star Trek and there isn't much that I could add to the admiration of this show. I liked that the crew came from all walks of humanity and they were each accepted on their own merits. As a kid I liked the hand phasers. Set to "Stun" was a great concept that was very progressive for a Science Fiction show, this is true even today where the hero still is more likely to shoot first and shoot later. On Star Trek is was "Hey, we don't need to kill these guys if we don't have to," and I like that even when the aliens took the first shot at the Enterprise; Captain Kirk would still go out of his way to try to understand WHY they were shooting, and then try to work out a peaceful solution. This is still (sadly) a very sophisticated concept even in today's world. As I grew into a young man, Star Trek's tendency to cast hot women and dress them in slinky outfits helped keep me loyal to the show, granted for more prurient reasons.

In the end it came down to two Captains. I didn't have a father so David Crane and Jim Kirk became my male role models. Captain Crane was a tough but fair guy. He was very hands-on but he also had earned the respect of his crew. Kirk was clever and brave. Both men were fair and patient with people and chose to do the right thing even if it was hard to do. They both also got the hot women. What helped me was that both Captains were great at avoiding trouble and talking their way out of ugly situations. It has been a long time since I've looked to either Captain for guidance, I've become a man with my own ways of dealing with challenges and I've long since left my youth behind. Still, every once in a while the little boy inside of me comes out and looks at the man I've become; he then measures me against my boyhood heroes, and between the one on the Star ship, and the one on the Submarine I sometimes come up short. I don't see any harm in looking to those guys as I head into the second half of my life.

I sure couldn't do any worse.

Into The Green Again

2009-01-02T17:35:00.000-08:00

New Years Day, 2009, I decide that I'm just going to go on a hike just to get my fat ass outside and moving. I put on my boots and drove to Fort Ord again. I had no plan, no objective and I didn't even bring my camera. I just wanted to move and I wanted to get some sweat out of it. So I locked up my truck and slung my hydration bladder onto my back and started moving.

It was a beautiful day, around sixty degrees with the sun in the sky. There were many mountain bikers and horseback riders out and why not? I couldn't think of any place where I'd rather be once my hike was under way. I had decided on a three mile loop that would take me up and down and up and down the hills of Planet Ord. I also figured that if an opportunity presented itself I would explore. Almost right off the bat, as I had descended to a road in a shallow canyon I veered off into the Oak trees that lined an open area. I have walked by this place hundreds of times but I'd never explored the opposite side. Needless to say that as soon as I was in the shade of the Oaks I was surrounded by fighting positions, some still had their green sandbags in place. The recent rains had exposed dozens of spent .762 shells. As I moved beneath the trees I found the white splatter droppings from a large bird-of-prey. I quickly spotted a "Pod" from an Owl and then looked to the branches to locate the bird. This is a fun exercise as your eyes scan for an animal who will remain invisible until it moves. I guess I made it nervous because a Barn Owl broke cover and flew a short distance to another stand of trees. It's massive wings made no sound. I then cut across the field which had once been the site for M.A.S.H., CPs and LZs for choppers. I saw spent simulated .203 rounds and other remnants of the Army dating back to the 1940s.
I then moved up a ridge, moving close to a gully that has been slowly eroded into the hillside since 1994. I do this to look for unexploded munitions and other goodies that may be revealed by the rains. I found nothing new by the time I got to the top. From the top I looked down onto another road that lay about 200 feet below me. I followed a secondary trail down to the road and rambled down to an area just past the ancient plow. There has been clearing of this area for development, which is sad, so I wanted to see what the clearing had revealed. As it turned out, not much had been hidden by the thick brush. After a quick look I began another climb up the ridge adjacent the clearing zone and made my way to the top where I was soon enveloped by the Oak trees at the top. The Oaks are thick here and the angle of the Sun paints everything in a green halo. Many plants are starting to bud which means that we are in a drought. I moved down the trail to begin to return to my truck, which was about a mile and a half from here.
I love moving through the green. Everything smells good and the green light makes me feel thirty years younger. My mind wanders in different directions. For a while I think about when I was a kid and how I loved to ride my bike in places like this. Then I think about the Army that trained here and I wondered if a place could have an impact of the quality of soldier and I decided that it did. Every man and woman who was based at Fort Ord loved being here. In Vietnam, Fort Ord graduated always stood out. I wondered if a place could make you a better person? Maybe, it was making me feel better at the very least. I moved easily through the trees and along the trail. Birds sang and rodents rooted through the underbrush as I passed by. I finally broke out into the open again and I made good time back to where I was parked. Once there I paused a few minutes to enjoy a little floor-show put on by a Turkey Vulture and a Raven. The Vulture had perched upon an electrical tower and the Raven didn't like it one bit. So the Raven puffed up his feathers until he was almost as big as the buzzard and eventually he decided to leave.

It was a good day and it felt good to vanish into the green light of the Oak trees of Fort Ord for a couple of hours.

Getting Over Hating People

2008-12-06T21:50:00.000-08:00

Since I drive a long way to school and work I have a long time to think about stuff. Last week the radio station (yes I listen to the FM radio, my tape deck died years ago and I don't have money to get a CD player) was having a "Totally 90s Weekend" and they played that one Blind Melon hit. I'm not a fan. The thing that I'm ashamed of is that I was happy when I learned of the death of their lead singer, Shannon Hoon, in 1995. At the time I hated the music of the 1990s and the retro-hippie shit/grunge thing that was going on. So when I heard that Hoon had died of an OD I laughed.

So last weekend when I heard the song and I remembered how I enjoyed the singer's passing I felt bad. I felt bad about myself, so I spent the next few days thinking about this concept of hating people that you have never met for reasons that really have no direct (or even indirect) effect on your life.

I never met Hoon, Hoon never did anything to me and yet I celebrated his death. At the time I was a hard-rock guy who was having trouble dealing with the fact that the 1980s were gone and the music went with it. Still this is no excuse. It was a shitty thing for me to do and I'm sorry about it. It wasn't fair to Hoon, the guy needed help and was probably a lost soul long before he OD'd and there I was applauding his failure. The guy had a family who loved him and he had fans who loved his music, his life was as valid and valuable as mine. It wasn't just Hoon either, Kurt Cobain's death made my friggin' week. His band hammered the nails in the coffin of a brand of music that I was too stupid to realize was long since dead. Those kids gathering in the park to mourn him was a huge source of amusement for me. What an asshole I am. Kurt Cobain was another guy who I'd never met and had never done anything to me personally. Worse, he didn't do anything to anyone else but himself. I hated Nirvana back then and yet today I have a couple of their albums. The guy was an original.

So where does this hatred come from? Was I so much better than those guys? No, not really. On top of making me a giant douche bag it also takes a lot of energy to hate people you've never actually met. I wonder what that hate did to me physically? Did it make my ugly? Shorten my life? Make me fat? Today I don't really hate as much as I used to and I'm making an effort to let what hate that I do have go. I think the big change came when I learned to be happy for other people and their success. When I was young I had a lot of jealousy and resentment and I've made a great effort to let all of that go because it came from a bad place to begin with. I wish I'd learned this earlier in my life.

So to Cobain and Hoon I offer my apology, I'm sorry I felt the way that I did and I'm genuinely sorry that you guys aren't still around.

The Show "Life on Mars": How Would I Handle Something Like That?

2008-11-08T20:38:00.000-08:00

ABC television debuted a show called "Life on Mars" which probably won't be around too long because it's over the heads of a lot of people. The story is that NYPD Detective Sam Tyler gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. He's still a cop but everything else is different. The series also stars Harvey Keitel and Michael Imperioli and has a great supporting cast and cool music. The show itself is a solid police drama but it has it's fun side as Sam has to adjust to the world of 1973 New York City.

I have always loved the idea of time travel. Mostly going backward in time to witness events like the Constitutional Convention, Gettysburg, the JFK Assassination, Titanic and other events in history. Then sometimes I wonder what if I did go backwards in time somehow? How would I cope in what has to akin to living in an alien world? I was born in the mid-1960s so going back to the 30s,40s or 1950s wouldn't be too much of a stretch but what about the 1840s? The shoes must have been uncomfortable and the clothes scratchy. People smelled bad because they bathed once a week - MAYBE. Work for a nickle a day? .25 cents if I was college educated? Mattresses were mats stuffed with straw on a rope frame, which would suck if my oil lantern ignites.

Oh, and crapping in a chamber pot that I either keep under my bed or in a night stand next to my bed. I have an image of Mary Todd Lincoln getting up in the dead of night in the White House and pulling the chamber pot from her side of the bed and curling a long one out and then placing it back inside the nightstand and going back to sleep. Yeah, I can't even stand to think about it let alone living that life.

Then there are the diseases like Small Pox, Measles and Polio. What if I get sick? 1840s medical care makes the back of the average ambulance look like the Mayo Clinic. There's a lot of things to think about if time travel ever becomes a reality. I think that depending on the year I would be equally lost in the past as I would if I were to go 150 into the future.

Heck, think about life in 1960...

You had to walk into the bank to withdraw cash and the bank opened at 9:00am and closed at 5:00pm (banker's hours). Few people wrote check fewer businesses took the two credit cards that were available (Master Charge and Diner's Club). Gas was cheap but your car didn't have seatbelts. Sneakers were not worn in nice restaurants and everyone wore a tie on a work day. TV was black and white and your music was played on a record player with one speaker. The television networks signed off at midnight, usually to the national anthem. Smoking was allowed just about everywhere. You had a lot of restrictions that you do not have in 2008.

Time travel still sounds fun just as long as it's not too far backwards and I can return to the present when I want to.

A Random Hike Can Be Good For You

2008-07-05T21:47:00.000-07:00

The thing that I hate about being a grown-up is that I always have something to do that isn't fun. Most of the time it's five or six things that I have to do. So my fun time during the week is pretty slim. I'm lucky if I can squeeze in an hour of video games here or a chapter of a book there. The danger of this is that I quickly become stuck in a rut and I seem to stay in that rut until I force myself out. The evil fact is that ruts are comfortable, even the ones that suck, and this is because people like routine. So every once in a while I have to shake myself out of yet another rut. School was a great way to break out but once Summer break started I can't seem to drag my ass out of bed before 10:30am . I wouldn't mind this except that I'm not really enjoying sleeping late.

So Wednesday came and I had to drive into Monterey to deposit my paycheck and I thought maybe I'd get in a short walk somewhere later. On the way back from the bank I found myself in Borders trying to find a DVD to buy so that I could blow off my walk. This made me mad, once I realized that this was what I was doing I left the store and drove to Fort Ord (my home away from home) and parked my truck. I grabbed a bottle of water and hauled ass into the tree-line. I decided that I would walk down to East Garrison to survey the development of that part of the base. I'd heard that it was stalled because of the housing crunch but I needed to see the damage for myself and this was a great excuse to do a long walk. You see, it's about 3 1/2 miles from where I'd parked to East Garrison so I was looking at a minimum of six miles to walk round-trip.

Cool.

It was a perfect day, in the upper 70s and no wind. I had my jungle boots and boonie cap and I figured I was set. I quickly discovered that in the five weeks since school had let out that I had slipped out of shape but this just made me mad and I pushed myself harder than I probably should have. Fort Ord will kick your ass. The first mile was a gentile uphill grade that lead into rolling hill country. Worse, about every 500 yards there are patches of sand that can stretch for 50 yards just to kill your momentum. Still, it was nice to be out on the Oak trees and moving. I didn't see a lot of animal life this time around except for lizards which I mostly heard zipping thought the oak leaves on the ground. I kept an eye out for Rattle Snakes but all I would find were their unique tracks in the sand. I was also not too thrilled to find a nice set of Mountain Lion tracks heading the same way that I was. Mountain Lions love to circle human housing developments, I think they are just curious but I'm sure they're also stalking prey. Still, I didn't see one or come close to one and that's just fine with me.

I made East Garrison in two hours and saw that it had been graded into a generic set of lots for the future homes. About half of the old buildings are still there and that's good but they're fenced off and who knows how long it will be before I can get close to them again. I hate fences. I then decided to continue to the Pre-Ranger site and survey the grounds there. This called for some serious bush-whacking and since this was a "Walk" I didn't bring my compass. However, I knew where I was and I knew that I'd eventually hit a main trail but it was interesting navigating the maze of Poison Oak and coastal Sage as I wove my way through the Oaks. It's a great way to test my nerves because it can get confusing in the bush and if I lose my cool I'm in for a bad time. No problem this time, I followed a game trail (bad idea in Mountain Lion country) that lead me to the trail above the old civilian firing range and down to the road that would take me to the pre-Ranger site. The site is still untouched and that made me feel good. The old sign is only hanging by one D-ring but it's still readable. I walked up the road and did a quick survey of the Monterey Pines (since Fort Ord closed in 1993, there are 40 new trees out in this one location) and found that there were 24 saplings reaching for the sky.

Then it was time to turn around and head back. By this time I was hurting, my feet were sore and my right ankle was in a little pain thanks to my boot. I headed back as best I could and I just let my mind wander. This helped with the pain and made the time pass a little faster. The thing I hate about Fort Ord is that there's always one more hill to climb, it takes the fun out of the return trip on a long hike because it never fails that I find myself cresting a steep hill and find that I have to climb yet another steep hill. The worst part is that I don't remember this next steep hill being here on the way in. Fort Ord is a unique place in many ways in that there are geologic features that occur only within Fort Ord and nowhere else on Earth. One of the main features is Fort Ord's magnetic field, according to the U.S. Army, the old base has the greatest magnetic declination from true-North of anywhere in the U.S.. The normal declination in Monterey is 15 degrees, but it's 18 degrees at Fort Ord. The reasons for this are that Fort Ord is a geologic hinge that sits between to faults. As the Peninsula pushed northwest away from the coast the land that is Fort Ord was shoved eastward into the base of the Santa Lucias and then twisted south by the San Andreas, which lies to the east. Fort Ord's soil has a high Iron concentration and all of that Iron is what drives compasses crazy.

Anyway, sometimes I think that the screwy iron-rich soil plays tricks on my head because it's so damned easy to get lost out there. The hundreds of trails twist and turn and the rolling hills disguise small gullies and ravines that make no sense. I found six more small canyons on this hike alone that I'd never seen in all my many missions on the base. I'm always puzzled as to how I could possible miss large geologic features but that's just the way it is on Planet Ord. This just added to my growing aggravation as I slowly made my way back to my truck. I reached my vehicle as the sun started to set and I dumped a bunch of water on my head and changed my shirt. It was nice to get back to my vehicle. Then I climbed in and started up my beast and slipped it into gear and began my take-off roll towards the front gate and the highway.

In spite of being sore and sunburned it was a good day. I'm glad I did it.

Advice For Those Returning To School After Many Years Away.

2008-06-08T21:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, Sports fans, I finished the Spring semester with 2 "A"s and a "C". Spanish was the "C", it kicked my butt because I farted around too much the first half of the semester. I had to downshift into high gear to save the class. I'm already signed up for Fall, I have Spanish and Marine Biology (and I may add an English class too but I'm not sure yet). Most of the folks who read this blog tend to be over 30 so I'm going to share some tips about returning to school. I'm doing this mostly for myself while things are still fresh.

1. Think about your schedule. If you are taking more than one class, try to arrange them so they don't conflict. Example: I had a Communications class that followed my Spanish class, so all that cool Spanish stuff just dribbled out of my brain. If I were to do it over I would have taken a later Spanish class and then parked my ass in the Language Lab for an hour afterwords.

2. If you can avoid early morning classes, do it. Two days a week I had to climb out of bed at 5:45 and while it isn't the end of the world it did suck. It did get me into the language lab for a full hour in the morning but I'm not sure that it was the better move. I had to work around my job so I had no choice.

3. By a serious backpack. Running back to your car is for the birds. A cheap backpack will let you down. I bought a cool pack with all kinds of side compartments to store cool stuff and stuff I needed.

Cough drops. These things saved my life.
Extra pens and pencils. I went to Staples and bought them by the box.
Masking tape and glue sticks.
Stapler.

4. Ask questions if you are not clear about something. I actually missed my first homework assignment because I didn't bother to clarify what she expected from me.

5. If you think that you need extra gear to get through class, buy it. It became clear early on that I would need a protractor, a compass set, rulers and colored pencils for my Marine Science class. I also bought a special organizer that had a built in calculator and a clear plastic clip board with a ruler on the side. All these things just made the labs so much easier and gave my work standout quality.

6. If your study partner sucks, get another one. Nice guys get a "C" in Spanish.

7. Don't wait for the teacher to tell blabbing students to shut the fuck up. Hey, you paid good money to be in this class, those two airheads are screwing you out of an education. You can bring your concerns to the teacher or you can confront the offenders after class and politely tell them to knock it off.

8. Figure out a way to get in more studying time. I thought that I could get time in at work, and I did but I couldn't count on getting that time on a daily basis. I tanked my Spanish mid-term because it came after Spring Break. I was so busy that I had zero time to study. I'm also buying a third pair of reading glasses to keep in my room to have at the ready.

9.Idiot-Proof your routine. Adults are masters of sabotaging themselves, I know I am so I developed a ruitine that kept me focused. The big backpack was one, since I had all of my books I had no reason not to study in the lab or the library or both. I had more pens and pencils than I needed in my pack so I was always ready. I made sure that I was a ready as I could be.

10. It's easier to get there early than to stay late. My Marine Science class was at 11:00am, so if I got to school at 8:30 I could kill an hour in the Language Lab and then study my notes in the library for an hour and a half before class. I know that I bitched about getting up early but there is a difference between being there early and HAVING to be there early. The flip-side was that on my days off it was all that I could do to stay an extra hour to study. I was thinking about all the other things I needed/wanted to do and I'd quickly develope happy feet and haul ass out of there.

If you're thinking about going back to school then do it. Take a class, even if it's just for fun. Plus, young people make you laugh.

The Blackhawk X-1 R.A.P.T.O.R. Backpack. (A Review)

2008-05-16T20:38:00.000-07:00

In April I bought myself a birthday present. One of the smartest buys that I have ever made. I bought the X-1 RAPTOR from the cool folks at Blackhawk!.com and I love it.

As you know, I returned to school in February and found myself trucking around $350 in textbooks. I had a day pack that I use for hiking and it was quickly pressed to it's limit. As school progressed I found that I had to spend more time in the language lab to study. This mean that I had to hump around my Spanish textbook, workbook and notebook every day along with my Marine Science gear. My poor budget pack popped the chest strap one day and I knew that I needed something more serious. Since I've been researching my book I've become familiar with all kinds of military load-bearing equipment and for a while I used to wear web-gear when I hiked because it was perfect for day hiking and it scared the hippies. Sadly, my web-gear was stolen and I've used a $20 backpack to get around. I became aware of Blackhawk! from the Cav Store when I was looking for Nomex gloves (another story) and I sent away for their early catalog. Blackhawk! had great catalogs with cool pictures of Navy SEALs doing Navy SEAL stuff and they were the closest thing I'd experienced to the old Sears catalog as far as repeated cover-to-cover reading.

So once I decided I was getting a new pack I gave Blackhawk! the first look. At first I thought that I'd go with one of their hunting packs because I wasn't sure how well a military-style pack would go over on a college campus. They make nice hunting packs but they didn't look like they could pull off the dual-role mission. So I looked through the combat packs and settled upon the X-1 because it was big enough but not huge and the price ($230) was in my range. I ordered it in Olive Green so it would be neutral, they make it in desert tan and Army MARPAT camo pattern but OG seemed the way to go. I ordered it with Next Day delivery but there was a snafu. I e-mailed customer service and they e-mailed me right back (within ten minutes) and explained the situation and told me when to expect my pack. Well damned if it didn't show up exactly when they said it would, so I was happy even before I opened the box. I used to be in sales and I'm big on customer service and Blackhawk! has that covered. They should be proud. So I open up the box and lay eyes on my new backpack. I have to be honest, it wasn't love at first sight but that would soon change. This thing has a hydration bladder that holds 100ml of water, I didn't know that when I bought it and I was concerned about how this would effect the load carrying capacity. The inside of the main compartment features straps to secure gear, I assume for silent movement on a mission and I wonder how they will factor in my stuffing this thing to the gills.

So I load it up, I put all of my books in the main compartment and then put my Spanish dictionaries in the secondary compartment. Yes, that's right, it has a secondary compartment. I load all of my pens, pencils and reading glasses into the left side compartment. This compartment is clearly designed for M-16,M-4 magazines and features internal bands that are perfect for clipping my pens on. On the right side it has two thinner compartments. One that is clearly for a flashlight or maybe a sniper scope. I loaded a flashlight into that one. The second one is larger and has Velcro and an elastic chord, I assume this would be for either a radio or GPS or some kind of important piece of equipment that you don't want to lose. I stuffed a stapler, scissors and scotch tape into that one. Finally there is a small outer compartment that I stuff my cough-drops into. I assume you would put maps or MRE's in here. So once I had it loaded I waited until Monday to see how things went.

Monday I grabbed my pack and headed out the door. I stuffed it behind the driver's seat and it sat there like a Sumo wrestler, very cool. When I got to school I hauled it out and slung it onto my back. Good fit. I went to tighten my shoulder straps and was surprised to find that I could do this easily. This is the heaviest amount of weight I've had on my back since my operation and while it's not a combat load or anything close it is heavier than my old pack could handle. The easy adjustment makes the load comfortable to carry since I can shift the weight into my sweet-spot. The pack has an innovative foam back panel that is ventilated so I don't sweat like a pig during the long walk from my truck to my class. It is just a damned comfortable pack to wear. As it turned out, it is also much larger than I first though. I have actually "Lost" my Spanish dictionary in it because I forgot which compartment I'd put it in. The pack is solidly constructed from 1000 denier nylon and breaks-in well. The compartments are zippered and pretty quiet. I've been hauling the pack around every day and I'm really happy with it, I cannot wait to get it out on a hike if for no other reason then it won't be as heavy as it is during school.

I would argue that this pack has made my grades in Spanish go up because I can now hit the language lab every day without walking the quarter-mile back to my truck to swap out books. I think I'm going to have this pack for a very long time.

Screw Tibet

2008-04-18T19:32:00.000-07:00

I have been watching the hypocrisy that is the Olympic Torch protests and shaking my head a lot. The kicker came last week when the torch came to San Francisco and the city did something right for once and changed the route at the last moment. Protesters had a hissy-fit for the rest of the week because they were denied something or other and that San Francisco played into the Chinese propaganda machine.

Screw them and the horse they rode in on.

Here's my problem. Less than ten days before most of those same people who were out there protesting Chinese oppression were in the streets protesting the war in Iraq and demanding the U.S. withdraw. Six years ago the people of Iraq (the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south) were also living under the exact same oppression that the folks in Tibet live under today. Sanctions had not worked, innocent Iraqis were being tortured, raped and murdered and President Bush wanted to believe that Saddam's ties to international terrorists made him a threat to the National Security of the United States...so he invaded Iraq. He invaded Iraq and freed the oppressed people of Iraq from the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein. No, there weren't any WMDs and Iraq's over-all threat to the U.S. will be the subject of debate for the rest of the century but that honest fact is that Bush did a good thing. Any true American recognizes this. Now Iraq isn't going to turn into Omaha, Nebraska. Not ever. Whatever it does turn into it will be much different than what the White House had envisioned but there is a chance to establish a true democracy in the Middle East and this makes our continued presence in Iraq paramount to allow the new government to take flight.

Yet these people protested this fact. They protested against liberty.

During the second faze of Iraq, when the insurgency started, the protesters in San Francisco marched in support. This in spite of the fact that the insurgency was targeting educators, doctors and intellectuals which in other countries always draws a huge outcry; yet the SF protesters marched in support of the insurgents. Then last week they march in opposition to China for doing the exact same thing that their Iraqi Insurgent heroes continue to do. What is it that the protesters believe? Why is oppression and murder okay when committed in Iraq by our enemies but not okay when committed by China? What am I missing here? Alright, I'm not actually missing anything. These people are so socially and politically inbred that they are intellectually dead. No person who's intellectually living thinks that pulling out of Iraq is a smart idea. They may not like the war but they understand the bigger picture.

Let us examine the history of these morons. It underlines their hypocrisy.

Remember when most of these folks started marching in the streets? It was during the Vietnam war. We were fighting to keep the Communist North from taking over the South. All that Communism was coming from both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China and it was spreading into Laos and Cambodia. It wasn't being spread by a willing population but by brutal tactics. For some reason the college kids thought that this was okay, I suggest this because they would often march carrying posters of Chairman Mao. For some reason the U.S. was the bad guy in the war and we needed to get the hell out of there so that those poor Vietnamese folks could determine their own future. So eventually we did just that. Let me underline what the anti-war toads were saying:

"What ever communist countries do in Asia it's fine by us!"

This should include, if I follow the logic, the way China deals with Tibet. We were fighting the way China does business in SE Asia, that was the god damned point. So you cannot turn around and feel bad because of Chinese oppression in Tibet. Those protesters of the 1960s sealed Tibet's fate.

Either America is in the liberation business or it is not. You can't have it both ways. If you want us out of Iraq then Tibet has to suck on it too. Seriously, what are the grand plans to get China to leave Tibet? Sanctions? China makes everything and has enough backdoor deals to get the stuff it doesn't make. Maybe a strongly worded letter from the UN? Oh, do please try that one, I love to watch Chinese people laugh. China isn't going anywhere, Taiwan is talking about re-establishing relations and the US is in debt up to it's eyeballs to China.

Why should China listen to us anyway. If you're not willing to send guys with guns to free Tibet then they've got nothing to loose.

Grow up.

My Brilliant Plan To Reform Washington - Green Friendly!

2008-04-07T15:40:00.000-07:00

Our founding Fathers had figured it out; put the nation's capital in the middle of a swamp and it will deter folks from getting too comfortable in the seats and corridors of power. It worked for about 100 years too and the few career politicians were so slimy that they belonged in a swamp.

The problem is that the founding fathers didn't anticipate air conditioning.

So today, Washington D.C., instead of being filled with poisonous snakes, mosquitoes and toads is now overrun with even lower forms of life. There seems to be no way to dislodge them either.

Thus I have devised a plan:

Outlaw AC within Washington D.C. and mandate that no lawmaker take a vacation between June and October.

It's so simple, we can simply turn up the heat on these people and make them go away. Not just lawmakers will succumb to the heat either; lobbyists and career upper government management types will wilt in the heat and leave DC for cooler climate. Think of the energy the East Coast will save as well. I'm not sure of the exact ratio but removing one career politician from Washington D.C. is like putting 10,000 Americans back to work.

I don't know why I have to think of this stuff. Get on this you people.

I Want Clinton To Take It To The Convention

2008-03-29T19:56:00.000-07:00

Don't quit, Hillary.

No way.

The Democratic Party needs a good dose of DEMOCRACY for once. The choice is not clear and there should be a debate and maybe even a full on fist-fight on the floor of the convention. That's the way it used to be and it's refreshing to see it looming once again because the Party needs to decide what it is to become and what direction it will go in the future. The first President Clinton moved the party away from is weak, leftist ties and moved it towards the center and this allowed it to become a realistic option in 2006 to replace a screwed-up Republican Party in the Congress. Democrats elected in 2006 were not far-left freakazoids but (YIKES!) fiscally responsible, level headed thinking types. These were not Howard Dean/Nancy Pelosi flakes but serious roots for a productive and respectable Democratic Party of the future. Obama represents a giant step backwards to the policies and philosophies that brought the party down and turned it into a bad joke. To force Hillary out of a race that is clearly not settled shows a darker side of the Democratic Party that for some reason the party leadership can't understand how much this turns the average American off. Fair is Fair.

Then again, if the Democratic Party was at all interested in fairness they would have counted Florida and Michigan primaries. Instead the Party decided to - PUNISH - the voters in those states for making the choice to move up their primary elections so that they would have a say in the choice of candidates for the White House. PUNISHED. PUNISHED for exercising their right to vote and when they damn well please to.

What a wonderful message to America: "Fuck you, it's our way or the highway".

That is the message to Floridians and Michigan voters, if you otherwise you are a fool. Speaking of fools, all of this can be laid at the feet of Howard Dean, the Democratic Party Chair, a man who is in the wrong position at the wrong time and is undermining the Party's forward progress with every decision he makes. The downward spiral will speed up with an early Hillary departure as Americans would then focus on Obama, who is a troubled candidate in so many ways.

This process should be taken to the convention floor where a genuine debate might actually take place. I think that this would be a bright moment in US history as the democratic process gets a full workout for the first time in a great while in the United States.

Point Lobos, Because I Can

2008-03-22T21:24:00.000-07:00

Wednesday found me with four hours to kill on the Big Sur coast. I was in a great mood because I had just had my breaks done and I'm now mobile again. My Marine Science class had intended to go on a field trip but it was rained out half way through so we scheduled a make-up session and I chose to tag along with the PM class so I could have Thursday off all together. This meant linking up with them at Garapada Beach at 6:30pm and since my last class wrapped up at noon I had to figure out how to kill all of that time. I have no money so shopping was out and I needed to begin a new fitness regime so I headed down to Point Lobos.

Since 2001, I haven't been on that side of the hill. Carmel is my home but it sure ain't my town any more. Driving through the city I silently grieved for my home town that has lost it's way. The building of over-sized homes in Carmel is an obscenity and I'm glad I don't live in a place where such vile tackiness is allowed. I drove past my boyhood home and the folks there are keeping te place in great shape. I then headed down Pacific Coast Highway 1 to Point Lobos. Since I'm a broke college student I parked on the highway and walked into the park for free and first went to the east side of Whaler's Cove. The place has been overgrown with young Monterey Pine which were planted by the state to replace the ones killed by the Pitch Canker pandemic that wiped out thousands of pine trees. I made the shoreline and I began my transformation back into the spiritual creature that I keep hidden from the world and spent time photographing rock formations as the ocean hissed it's ancient song to me in the background.

Once I'd seen enough at this location I turned and went south on a trail the bisects the park at it's widest point and too me into the beautiful Forest. It has begun to bloom so in the mid-afternoon light the forest glowed green with highlights of purple wildflowers. I could hear cars speeding past the park a hundred yards away and I felt sorry for those people because this place is so amazing and they were missing it. At the mid-point of this trail I encountered a dead Monterey Pine that was still standing tall, it's branches weathered and bare. I stopped for a second to really think about what I was looking at; this was a tree that sprang to life about 120 years ago and had seen many changes. Even though it was all but dead it wouldn't surrender to gravity, at least not now and stood there defiant in the forest daring God to knock it down. It made me think about if I had been alive 120 years ago, how would I have defined myself in the world? Who would I have been back then? Would I be so different? I mulled over these questions for the rest of the hike until I made it to the south shore of Point Lobos. I never answered those questions either, I just didn't have a clue.

I worked my way along the shore photographing rock formations. Ansel Adams and Edward Weston photographed many of the same places 60 years ago and I already know that I will return soon with black & white film to duplicate some of their work. I stopped at the tide pools and lost myself for a while inside of the mini-worlds offered in each one. Tiny fish, Hermit Crabs and larger crabs seemed to lounge around as they waited for the sea to return. Then it was time to head south so I walked the mile back to my truck and drove down to Garapada. When I arrived the sun had begun to drop making a quarter of the horizon vanish into a bright, shimmering light. The wind was cold and I bundled up. I went down to the beach to shoot pictures in advance and then decided to get back to my truck because it was freezing. Once I returned to the road I looked out and saw the spout of a whale about 500 yards off shore. I grabbed my binoculars and saw the giant tail disappear into the water. So I decided that I would sit in the bed of my truck and count whales until the gang showed up and that's exactly what I did.

I counted 28 Gray Whales. Just a great way to kill an hour and a half if you ask me.

I love it here.

Science...Who Knew?

2008-03-13T22:29:00.000-07:00

I'm now heading into my seventh week of school and it turns out that Marine Science is my strong suit. I mean, it's a great class and I'm doing great with the subject. I mean today we looked at rocks but not they're not just rocks they're Igneous, Lithogenous or Biogenous rocks. Holy crap, those were three words that weren't in my vocabulary let alone being able to tell you about them.

It seems I've found my major.

Monterey is Disneyland for Marine Scientists of every stripe, I'm going to be one of them.

I'm still writing my book and all but Marine Science looks like something I can make a difference in. It seems that most scientists are so focused on their specialty that they have little knowledge of other things. Subjects such as local history and folklore would give scientists of every discipline an advantage in their studies. I can bring that to Geology and study of the Marine environment.

This is going to be fun.

So I Watched "Outfoxed" In My Communication Class...

2008-02-22T18:20:00.000-08:00

I'm taking Communications at my local Junior College and it's a cool class. I figure that since I'm writing a book and I'm thinking about doing something with film or TV I should get a serious background and I'm learning a lot of new stuff that I didn't know before. So today we watched about an hour of "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism", the intention being to show the influence of Fox News upon the cable news industry. You can tell from the title that it's not a favorable portrait of Fox News but the film is flawed in many ways. In the end the hypocrisy of the story telling overwhelms a very important message about the sad state of what passes for journalism today.

To be fair and balanced (he he) I should tell you that I don't like Fox News over all. I like Sheppard Smith and I will watch Bill O'Reily once in a while depending on what story he's covering because the guy can be entertaining and even right about certain issues. Beyond that I find that Fox News gives me mental diarrhea. Working in a Motel with the TV on for eight hours has given me a front row seat and since I'm a news junkie I have one of the three cable news outlets on at any time (unless LOST, Smallville or The Office is on) and I have seen everything that passes for Cable News at one time or another. Fox's morning show, 'Fox & Friends" is so vapid that it actually sucks IQ points from my brain. The hosts are the stupidest humans in North America and I didn't think anyone could beat the Today Show in that department. I picture the office manager for Fox & Friends deciding to stalk the supply cabinet with the kind of paste they use in Kindergarten because the Hosts are prone to eating glue. Gerraldo Rivera? What can I say? Fox News and Gerraldo are a match made in Heaven. Fox News is my main source of missing college kids, murdered housewives and scary news stories. So "Outfoxed" should have made my day, but it didn't.

The problem with the movie is that all the source material comes from Left-Wing and FAR-LEFT organizations and even thought the film starts off well it quickly slides into an unfocused mess. At about the half-hour mark the film loses it's focus on journalism and heads into political issues. Fox has never tried to hide their point of view, they're like a Right-Wing Pravda and there's no point in emphasising the obvious. Yet the director cannot help himself and it quickly becomes a shrill, anti-Bush, anti-Republican, anti-Christian rant. From here there is a sad, intellectual blindness that hurts the film's credibility. The prime example is an on-air confrontation between Fox's Bill O'Reily and an anti-war activist named Jeremy Glick, who was using the fact that his father had been killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center to give himself legitimacy. O'Reily has a patriotic hissy-fit and everything that comes out of Glick's mouth just tick's him off even more. O'Reily kills the interview and they have security escort Glick from the studio. Not Bill's best day. The problem is that the documentary tries to say that O'Reily then misstated what Glick had said on the broadcast. They dispute O'Reily's claim that Glick claimed that Bush (George HW Bush) was to blame for the attacks of 9/11 and imply that Glick hadn't even implied this. Yet when you check the transcripts that is EXACTLY what he implied:

Glick:...is that in - six months before the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, starting in the Carter administration and escalating while Bush's father was head of the CIA, we recruited hundred thousand radical mujahadeens to combat a democratic government in Afghanistan, the Turaki government.

Later:

Glick: Why would I want to brutalize and further punish the people in Afghanistan...

O'Reily: Who killed your father!

Glick:...didn't kill my father.

O'Reily: Sure they did. The Al Qaeda people were trained there.

Glick: The Al Qaeda people? What about the Afghan people?

O'Reily: See, I'm more angry about it than you are!

Glick: So what about George Bush?

O'Reily: What about George Bush? He had nothing to do with it.

Glick: The director - senior as director of CIA.

O'Reily: He had nothing to do with it.

Glick: So the people that trained a hundred thousand Mujahadeen who were...

Later:

O'Reily: As respect - as respect - in respect for your father, who was a Port Authority worker, a fine American, who got killed unnecessarily by barbarians...

Glick: By radical extremists who were trained by this government...

**I'll comment on this at the bottom**

The film shows this exchange in it's entirety and yet the film then tries to tell you that he (Glick) didn't say what he said. This is sad and a telling commentary about the true power of Fox News.

As Fox News rose in rating's prominence the competing cable news channels and even the network news agencies took notice. When I say they took notice, what I mean is that they began to freak out. CNN, once the most reliable news source in the world, has now become a sad, cowering shadow of it's former self. No longer news-driven, CNN now frames it's news into packaged stories just as Fox News does and they populate the morning with pleasant talking heads who seem to be gunning for Fox's reign of vapidness. Or is it vapidity? Anyway, CNN is like a sinking aircraft carrier, you hate to see it go but you cannot help but watch. I should state that CNN' downfall stems from other factors as well: relocating from Atlanta to New York and the sale by Ted Turner, who's maverick outlook on life was reflected by his news network. CNN is competing with MSNBC in the race to see which one can become the Liberal answer to Fox News. MSNBC's actions are probably less forgivable than CNN's because of it's lineage to NBC News, and there was a time when NBC was the best television news for about twenty years. MSNBC is a mess. They have decided to directly counter Fox News' flagship shows with alternative programming. Keith Olbermann runs opposite Bill O'Reily and just like O'Reily there is very little credibly news and a lot of opinion. So for that hour there is no real news discussed on two of the three cable news networks. MSNBC does have Chris Matthews, who's been around the track enough that you can get information from him that you can't get elsewhere.

The problem is that instead of being quality news outlets, CNN and MSNBC are trying to play Rupert Murdoch's game and we viewers are the ones who are losing out. Because Fox News's format is profitable the other cable news networks ( specifically the corporations that own them) are losing their grip on credibility from all of their drooling as they chase Fox's money train. The greatest evil today is that news agencies (papers, TV and radio) are owned by companies that do not understand news and need to make higher profits. While it is possible to get rich with a news organization you (if you are smart) have to live with about an 8% to 12% profit margin. Those margins give regular companies a heart attack, so when some corporation buys a news organization and they look at the books they immediately try to figure out how to boost that margin to 19% to 25% (or more). So they first start to cut positions and consolidate the newsroom. The first thing to go are the foreign correspondents. In the 1960s and 1970s viewers then could count on reliable coverage from just about anywhere in the world. ABC, CBS and NBC all had foreign correspondents all over the globe. They were invaluable because they lived in the countries that they covered and we able to offer perspective and insight that is lost today. The next to be cut are editors and with them go little things like common sense and rational thinking. Stories today just aren't as well sourced as they once were and this has eroded credibility with the public as increasingly stories run my major network and cable news outlets are proven to be wrong. The Internet today features dozens of blogs that do nothing but correct news stories and the bi product of this is that the public has begun to turn to blogs to get their news.

This is all due to Fox News and it's business model: Political one-sidedness+ sensational stories+sleazy stories+ loudmouth pundits = $$$. Who cares if any of it is correct of even true?

"It's not a lie if you believe it" George Costanza, Seinfeld.

Mr.Glick is confused, as many Americans are about who the Mujahadeen were. More specifically he is clueless as to who the CIA trained.

The CIA trained Afghan refugees in camps along the Pakistan/Afghan border. Foreign fighters were usually on their own and this included the Arabs. Osama bin Laden had been contacted by a third party and asked if he desired assistance from the CIA and he said no and for two reasons: 1. He felt that this was a Muslim cause and the west should but out and 2. He hated the United States even back then. So Glick's assertion that the CIA trained the men who would later make up Al Qaeda is false.

The Taraki government was not democratically elected. He came to power in a Communist coup. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan as his government began to fail. Glicks assertion that we had over-thrown a lawful government in Afghanistan is false. Worse, he overlooks the mass-murder of civilians by Soviet forces during their occupation.

George H W Bush was director of the CIA from 1976 to 1977. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. It wouldn't be until 1981 that the CIA would get serious about training the Mujaheddin.

Once again Glick is wrong.

Al Qaeda is a sophisticated organization run by very smart men. Their capabilities are matched only by their sense of dramatic irony. The fact that their pilots all trained in the United States speaks to both.

Junior College 22 Years Later

2008-02-08T21:34:00.000-08:00

The last time I walked out of a classroom at the Junior College it was 1986 and I had finished Music Theory. I got a "B".

I was not a serious student when I was a teenager, the only reason that I'd even sign up was so that my mother's medical insurance would cover me. I took Arabic and did well in that class but my college transcript is a wasteland of drops and incompletes. Then my family situation changed and I was forced into working full time. Working full time meant that I no longer paid attention to the semesters and time of year so by the time I'd think about registering for a class it was too late. Time went on and I just settled into my life.

Then last December I was goofing around on the Net and went to the local JC's website and looked at the classes and schedules. I then registered and then signed up for three classes: Spanish 1A, Introduction to Communications and Marine Science. This week I went back to school for the first time and it has been fun and not the stressful encounter that I thought it was going to be. The teachers are all really great at what they do and I can already fumble around greeting people and asking them where they are from and where they live in Spanish. The biggest suprise has been Marine Science because it is shaping up to be the most fun of all three classes, this to the point of maybe making Marine Science my major. The teacher is really into his subject and interested in his students which makes for a positive environment.

The coolest thing about this turn at education is that there isn't the social pressure that I felt when I was a kid. I don't know anybody here now and I'm older than 95% of the students and thus I am free from the soap opera that underscored school in my youth. You know, worrying about how cool people think I am, worrying about looking lame in front of women and just the whole post-Highschool social pecking order that I'm no longer involved in. The saddest thing about the local junior college (or any local JC) is that you will have students who try to maintain their highschool's social climate. It's sad because they still act like it's highschool and they disrupt classrooms as they insist on talking durring lectures and they take their show to the student common areas where they perpetuate their immature behavior. I paid for my enrollment with my VISA card. I wonder how the hell they paid for their classes?

Anyway, I am a free man. A Grown up. I'm going to school to work for my future.

It feels good

The Bullwinkle Question

2008-01-28T21:28:00.001-08:00

There has been a serious push to draft Bullwinkle into the 2008 Presidential race. I understand to felling behind it, the ugliness of the Democratic race and the snore fest that is the Republican Party, but is Bullwinkle really the answer?

Bullwinkle has always been a hack and the only reason he’s anywhere today is because he’s ridden Rocky the Squirrel’s coat tails. During his college days at Wattsamatta U, Bullwinkle spent most of his time in his mohair jacket partying and going to football games. He has never addressed the rumor of joining Skull & Bones even to this day. Worse, there are rumors that while in Indonesia, Bullwinkle J. Moose attended a madrassa and that the “J” of his middle name stands for “Jihad”. It is no surprise that Bullwinkle would team up with one Rocket J. Squirrel; perhaps they met at the same radical mosque.

Supporters point to Bullwinkle’s success in fighting Pottsylvanian terrorist Boris Badenov as his chief qualification to lead the United States in its war on terror. However, documents made public under the Freedom of Information act show that Bullwinkle’s success was largely due to Badenov’s incompetence and not any tactical or strategic prowess on Mr. Moose’s part. Some charge that the whole conflict between Bullwinkle and Boris Badenov was staged and funded by Israel’s Mossad as a “False Flag” operation. Whatever the truth may be one fact remains, Bullwinkle’s anti-Pottsylvanian operations cost the American taxpayer untold amounts of money. These days Bullwinkle can’t seem to make a speech without mentioning Badenov and this is yet another sign that there is no THERE there. If you take away Boris Badenov from Bullwinkle’s past and what do you really have?

Yet people seem to be attracted to his populist ideals. Me, I see his folksy charm for what it is: Buffoonery. Go ahead, draft Bullwinkle if you must but don’t expence me to get on board with this one.

Oh, and if he says anything about pulling a rabbit out of his hat? RUN!

The Bullwinkle Question

2008-01-28T21:28:00.000-08:00

There has been a serious push to draft Bullwinkle into the 2008 Presidential race. I understand to felling behind it, the ugliness of the Democratic race and the snore fest that is the Republican Party, but is Bullwinkle really the answer?

Bullwinkle has always been a hack and the only reason he’s anywhere today is because he’s ridden Rocky the Squirrel’s coat tails. During his college days at Wattsamatta U, Bullwinkle spent most of his time in his mohair jacket partying and going to football games. He has never addressed the rumor of joining Skull & Bones even to this day. Worse, there are rumors that while in Indonesia, Bullwinkle J. Moose attended a madrassa and that the “J” of his middle name stands for “Jihad”. It is no surprise that Bullwinkle would team up with one Rocket J. Squirrel; perhaps they met at the same radical mosque.

Supporters point to Bullwinkle’s success in fighting Pottsylvanian terrorist Boris Badenov as his chief qualification to lead the United States in its war on terror. However, documents made public under the Freedom of Information act show that Bullwinkle’s success was largely due to Badenov’s incompetence and not any tactical or strategic prowess on Mr. Moose’s part. Some charge that the whole conflict between Bullwinkle and Boris Badenov was staged and funded by Israel’s Mossad as a “False Flag” operation. Whatever the truth may be one fact remains, Bullwinkle’s anti-Pottsylvanian operations cost the American taxpayer untold amounts of money. These days Bullwinkle can’t seem to make a speech without mentioning Badenov and this is yet another sign that there is no THERE there. If you take away Boris Badenov from Bullwinkle’s past and what do you really have?

Yet people seem to be attracted to his populist ideals. Me, I see his folksy charm for what it is: Buffoonery. Go ahead, draft Bullwinkle if you must but don’t expect me to get on board with this one.

Oh, and if he says anything about pulling a rabbit out of his hat? RUN!

Movies I’d Like To See.

2008-01-14T21:41:00.000-08:00

The 300 To Yuma - Famed outlaw Ben Wade is captured by the law in Bisbee. Rancher Dan Evans is tasked to take Wade to the train in Yuma. When they get there they find the city under attack by Spartans and then the Rancher and the outlaw pool their resources to save the city and defeat the Greek invaders.

The Bourne Superbad Ultimatum – Jason Bourne is brought out of hiding by two bumbling teenagers who are trying to by booze for a party that they’ve been invited to. Bourne agrees to help them get laid but then is forced into action by two inept cops who are part of a secret CIA project called Operation Blackbriar. The people Bourne doesn’t kill get laid. Matt Damon stars.

Spiderman vs. Zodiac – The webslinger’s crime fighting abilities are called into question when the Zodiac comes to town and starts murdering people. Super-strength and the ability to walk up the sides of buildings prove useless as the Zodiac’s body-count increases. The Zodiac taunts police and Spiderman by writing letters to the Daily Bugle where Peter Parker works. Further confusion is spurred by the Bugle’s new cartoonist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who is kidnapped by the Zodiac because he mistakes him for Toby McGuire.

Sicko Hostel 2 – Two attractive young women are lured into a nightmare of torture and disfigurement. Turns out it’s just the county hospital. The real horror begins when the get the bill and their insurance refuses to cover it.

Rambo Driving Miss Daisy - Tormented Vietnam veteran John Rambo takes what he hopes will be a quiet job driving around a cantankerous old woman. Little does he know but her scheming grandchildren are planning to kill her and take her fortune. They didn’t count on Rambo being in the mix. Rated R for violence and incoherent mumbling.

23 Dresses – Catherine Heigel is a perpetual Bride’s maid who is stalked by a madman (played by Jim Carrey) who is obsessed by the number 23.

Harry Potter and the Black Snake Moan – Harry is forced to chain Hermione to a radiator in a secluded corner of Hogwarts when he discovers that she is under a spell cast by Lord Voldemort. Harry has to find a way to break the spell while resisting Hermione’s sexual advances.

Grindhouse Atonement – 13 year old fledgling writer Briony Tallis and her family live in an enormous mansion in the English countryside. She has a crush on the housekeeper’s son, Robbie Turner, but he only has eyes for her older sister Cecilia. When the two finally fall for each other, Briony accuses Robbie of a horrible crime. Robbie is forced to join the Army. There he meets Bruce Willis who becomes the young man’s mentor. After his leg is blown off, Robbie has it replaced with a machine gun. After the war, Robbie and Bruce Willis return to England to clear his name and even the score. After Robbie kills Briony in a hail of bullets he learns that Cecilia has been kidnapped by Kurt Russell and they are now driving fast across the English countryside. Robbie and Bruce Willis steal a motorcycle and take off after them.

My New Hero

2008-01-12T14:39:00.000-08:00

John Hockenberry is my new hero for pulling up the skirt of NBC and MSNBC:

http://http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/22004/

Don't forget to click the link to the original story at the bottom.

When Did People Go This Soft?

2008-01-10T21:20:00.000-08:00

Man, just when I think that I can't be any more disappointed with my fellow man reality pulls up her skirt just a little higher and grosses me out.

We just came through a nasty Pacific storm, 7 or 8 inches of rain and up to 70mph winds made the Monterey Peninsula a semi-war zone. The wind knocked down Pine trees and they knocked out power. This was the case throughout Northern California and PG&E said that it was a record for lines down. In California we can count on these kinds of storms every three to five years, usually El Nino (El Ninyo) induced and usually in March when our rainy season kicks in. As far as storms go it was a big deal but not up there on the all-time list. I came to work last Thursday about three hours before the storm died and I wasn't expecting too much in the way of business because of the harsh travel conditions. I was honestly surprised to get a small number of guests who lived on the peninsula but we without electricity. Now over the next four days we would get more but in those cases those people had been in the dark for three or four days and that's different. No this first night the power had only been out five hours.

Five freakin' hours...

The one that got me was a lady who had an address that was maybe five houses down from the house I grew up in. She had bought the home about six years ago. I checked her in politely but my blood boiled silently inside of me. I couldn't believe that I surrendered my home to someone like this, the longest we went without power was three or four days and it was no big deal because we had a fireplace. Right now I live in a mobile home that has no heat and a leaky roof (oh yeah, baby, I get to replace a whole segment of rooftop all by my lonesome) and this person couldn't bear to spend one night in the dark in a well-made tract home in a great neighborhood. Hey lady, I will trade you right now, straight up. Unreal.
Then the next part I will add just to understand what is sticking in my craw (whatever that is), these people live in homes that average $1.5 million or more and they ALL asked if we had a "Local's Discount", which we do not. I don't get a local's discount at the Dentist or when I got to get new breaks for my truck, so the insult was just that much greater. My God, people, it wasn't like Hurricane Katrina, where you had dead bodies floating down the street and roving gangs of looters. You people chose to live in a nifty place, nifty because it's near the ocean and has all kinds of trees everywhere you look. Guess what, Sherlock? Some of the most terrifying storms you will ever see come off of the Pacific Ocean and they knock over those nifty trees. Guess what? If we get a shitload of rain the Earth starts to slide, and that means that highways could be closed for months. The longest Highway One was closed was 18 months. The Central Coast is not a place for wimps and the soft-hearted because it is a very unforgiving place. It's how we weed out the undesirables, just as they do in Texas, Oklahoma, the Gulf States and Alaska where you can get serious weather. Your character isn't judged by how much money you blew on your house but on how you roll with the punches and deal with the little stuff. Your power being out for a few days is little stuff.

Dumb Luck Shouldn’t Be Our Counter-Terrorism Strategy

2008-01-06T21:58:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while you will hear someone say “There hasn’t been a successful terrorist attack inside of the United States since 9/11/2001” or words to that affect. Usually it’s in defense of the Bush administration and their spastic counter-terror (CT) policies in both foreign and domestic application. Guess what? That has as much to do with Al Qaeda (and other terror groups) and their in ability to mount an organized strike within the US as it does with anything the government has done to stop them. First off, to be fair, Al Qaeda fucked up by attacking the US before it had firmly established outposts in the South Pacific, North Africa, Central and South America in which to train and stage future attacks. They assumed that either the US wouldn’t attack Afghanistan or that America would suffer the same fate that the Soviets did in that God forsaken land. No, I don’t know why. Okay, I sort of do; ideologues tend to over-estimate their own abilities and under-estimate their enemy’s will and prowess. Usama bin Laden is a snob who thinks that his crap emits no odor, a typical rich kid turned revolutionary to which we should be thankful because had he and his crew been smart they could have seriously checkmated the United States.

No, I’m not going to outline how. Whose side are you on?

Besides, this is about how the United States has spent a ton of money on Homeland Security but in the key positions (the FBI and CIA) little has changed, not about Al Qaeda.

The first big clue as to things not being right (outside of the invasion of Iraq) came in a June 20, 2005 New York Times article by David Johnson quoting a 15-page letter to three US Senators a lack of detailed understanding of terrorism by past and current FBI counter-terror officials.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/20/politics/20terror.html

Quote:

“In a 15-page letter, the lawyer, Stephen M. Kohn, wrote that the F.B.I.'s top counterterrorism officials said in sworn depositions that they did not know the relationship between Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah, a South Asia offshoot of the terror network. Nor were they aware of the link between Osama bin Laden and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a spiritual adviser to Mr. bin Laden with whom he had been associated since the 1980's.”
The article then goes on to explain that in spite of 9/11, the FBI doesn’t see experience in counter terrorism as the top qualification to lead their CT department. This is like an NFL team hiring a head coach that has no experience in football. There had been other stories too, stories about the FBI still being too slow to hire Arab linguists and even firing the ones that they had and stories about how the majority of FBI agents still not having access to the internet (where terrorists like Al Qaeda can be found with a few key-strokes. They’ll even answer your e-mail questions) but not hiring experienced CT professionals is the most telling as to the potential trouble the US can find itself in. 9/11 was as much a failure of the FBI as it was a successful terrorist operation. In-fighting between the FBI’s counter-terror desk (The FBI had both a Counter-Terror desk and a bin Laden desk. They didn’t speak to each other) and the CIA’s “Alec Station” (the special CIA unit tasked with tracking Al Qaeda and bin Laden) left gaps in information that both sides needed to get a clear picture of Al Qaeda’s activities inside of the US. It became a battle of egos as Michael Scheuer and John O’Neil as they argued over petty issues of procedure and jurisdiction. Things only got worse when the White House’s Richard Clark waded into the mix and things were so bad that Al Qaeda could have hijacked 20 planes that morning. It is clear that the FBI is more interested in protecting the status quo of it’s infrastructure than modernizing and retooling to meet the modern terrorist threat. They still see terrorism as a crime instead of an ideology and while terrorist share many common traits as criminals they tend to be better educated and highly driven to succeed.
The CIA is just not up to the task of CT, they are still tooled and structured to fight the Soviet Union. The prime example being the destruction of the video tapes showing interrogation of two Al Qaeda prisoners, the problem isn’t that they were destroyed (that was smart) but that they even recorded them in the first place (or that anybody outside of the prison even knew that the tapes existed). The CIA had such great success in Afghanistan in the 1980s, yet after the Soviets withdrew the CIA also turned away from that country as well as not even thinking to keep track of the various foreign Arab and Moslem fighters who’d come to kill Infidels. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and end of Communist rule in Russia the CIA under the Clinton Administration had turned to Industrial Espionage and using it’s abilities to steal contracts out from under European companies (Airbus for example) and giving US firms the edge during negotiations. The irony here is that the airlines almost went under after 9/11. After the Director of National Intelligence was established by Congress, the CIA’s reaction was predictable, four-year-old-girl-who-can’t-have-a-pony-like, lots of huffing and puffing with a list of excuses for non-performance. Adding insult and injury was the Bush Administration’s Deputy Secretary of State, Dick Armitage, leaking the name of Joe Wilson’s wife to a columnist and then the President himself laying the intelligence failure on Iraq squarely on the back of the CIA. In their defense, the CIA had been re-tasked in 1992 away from Iraq; they stripped the country of all but one American agent who also covered neighboring countries, and left the bulk of intelligence gathering to spy satellites and other technical assets. The Clinton Administration’s National Security Council (NSC) felt that Saddam Hussein made the perfect “Boogie Man” to entice investment in both Black Sea Oil futures and the new massive pipeline that was being built at the time. While technically Hussein was “Contained” he represented a threat to the region’s oil supply due to his unpredictable nature and his admitted WMD stockpile. So bad (worthless) was our intelligence on Iraq, during the initial days of the 2003 invasion US Army units ran head-long into Republican Guard tank divisions that they had no idea were in front of them. Thankfully they were no match for American armor and they were quickly dispatched. Some of this was due to what the CIA felt was a rush into war, they had an entire warehouse of captured Iraqi documents from the first Gulf War that they had never translated and they ere being pushed by both the White House and Congress, the latter rushing the vote to authorize force against Iraq even faster than even Bush had desired. While the Republican Guard targeting information isn’t the CIA’s direct responsibility that incident underscored the extent that we were blind in Iraq and it reflects the black hole that encompassed our knowledge about the strategic goings on of the Baath Party.
I once asked a gentleman who had served with the US Army Special Forces in Vietnam and then as a field agent with the CIA what needed to be done to fix his former employer. He replied without hesitation: “Fire everyone at CIA and close it down”.
The NSA is just overwhelmed and vexed. Tasked with the intercept of foreign communication signals (Telephone, radio, government and military communication), the NSA was trying to keep up with the explosion of international cell phone use before 9/11, but since the attacks the NSA has been strained in it’s mission to keep and eye on the various bad guys around the world while trying to add protocols for the new targets in Central Asia and North and Central Africa. 9/11 even caught the NSA flat-footed although it was the NSA that issued the lone advanced warning of Al Qaeda’s plans to hijack commercial airliners in August of 2001. They just didn’t know where the planes would be hijacked, so the warning was issued through the State Department as a warning for Americans traveling overseas. The revelation of domestic “Wire Tapping” has contributed to their vexed feelings as domestic eavesdropping is not something that the NSA does. Their massive antenna point outwards and to intercept inside of the United States would require a number of logistical steps and a mountain of legal hurdles that the NSA just was not equipped to initiate. Worse, when the story about “Warrentless Wire-Taps” was leaked, the key agency involved, the only agency that had legal permission to eavesdrop within the United States and the agency that leaned on the NSA to fudge the Constitution was never named. This is because the same agency probably leaked the story to the NY Times in the first place. I won’t play games, it’s the FBI is the only agency that can spy inside of the United States but they don’t have the kind of equipment to monitor on the scale that the NSA does, so the NSA was enlisted against their will and then when the FBI found out the size of the NSA’s net they closed up shop and ran to their source at the Times. So the NSA finds its reputation needlessly tarnished because the FBI, once again, didn’t know what it was doing and eavesdropping occurred in a way that didn’t have to happen. Then the FBI points its fickle finger at the NSA and the NSA is left hanging because the NSA just doesn’t discuss what it does or what it doesn’t do outside of secret Congressional hearings – period. The tragedy here is that the NSA is probably the best suited to track terrorists and the NSA is a key player in tracing their various recruiting and financial networks. The problem is that a number of stories in the news have revealed some to the NSA’s capabilities and folks like Al Qaeda went dark. They now use curriers, men with written or oral messages, who travel directly between cells so that no phone calls or e-mails can be intercepted. So even after 9/11, the FBI is still making enemies inside of the intelligence community.
The Director of National Intelligence has just made things even worse; who does the President call in an emergency? In a time when a clear line of communication is needed the Government has chosen to make a complex machine that barely works even more complex still. The 9/11 Commission was the generator of this bad idea, they were hailed as the gold-standard as to what was wrong inside of the intelligence community but they were the third commission to make recommendations for changes in the US intelligence services, the other two were in the 1990s and there have been as many as forty before those. The CIA and the Pentagon have been at each other’s throats since Vietnam and that rivalry has only gotten worse. The Pentagon pushed hard after 9/11 to be given its own intelligence agency, and was rewarded with one in 2002. So the CIA has just engaged in one giant hissy-fit ever since then. To make matter worse for the CIA, the military has been successful in rolling up Al Qaeda, Syrian and Iranian insurgencies between 2006 and 2008. They were able to do this thanks to a number of factors but primary amongst them was good old fashioned detective work. Since the surge of 2007, new Al Qaeda cells are shut down as soon as they appear. Yet this is great if you’re in Iraq, not so great if you’re trying to get out. It is unclear if the Pentagon’s intelligence agency has the ability to see big-picture trends and it’s likely that they don’t share their intelligence with their civilian counterparts. The events of 9/11 were made possible because of loop-holes and sloppy government practices that extended well beyond the DoD and Intelligence services, issues such as expired student visas and the specter of racial profiling that kept airport security from listening to their hunches. None of these problems have been addressed, a few years back the government issued a student visa to Mohamed Atta, the man who had flown the American Airlines 767 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center a few years before.
The United States needs to grow up, we can have a robust counter-terror strategy that is effective and doesn’t violate the Constitution. Just by giving the various agencies that already do exist the recourses to do their jobs (money, equipment and properly trained personnel) Americans could sleep well knowing that they’re as safe as possible.

Your Goddamned Cell Phone

2007-12-28T20:06:00.000-08:00

This is not an anti-technology rant, it really isn’t but it is a rant about a piece of technology: The trusty old cell phone. This isn’t about the morons who drive while talking on their Yak-Box nor is it about the people who talk on them during a movie theater and why it’s okay to kill them. Nope, I just want to enlighten you to what a pain in the ass many of you cell phonies are to the rest of society.

I work in a job where I have to answer the phone as part of my dealings with the general public. Today, just as it happens every day, the phone rings and I drop what I’m doing to pick it up. I say ‘Hello” and the person on the other end drops off the line. What has happened is that they’ve lost their cell connection because they are hurtling down the highway at 75mph or they are walking around town and stepped into an artificial canyon created by a couple of tall buildings. This call came while I was in back refilling coffee, which meant that I had to stop in the middle and rush back to the phone. After the line had gone dead I sat there for a moment and it dawned on me that I’ve lost hours of productivity at work and hours more at home in lost football and live TV time thanks to someone who’d called me while on a cell phone and driving or walking around. There is nothing more annoying than dealing with this situation either because you know that they’ll eventually call you back so your life is suspended as you wait for them to get into range of the next cell. Every once in a while, one of these people will get angry at me because of the dropped call, as if I hung up on them instead of rationalizing that their cell phone service is shit.

Here’s an idea: Stop moving!

Yes, that’s correct, pull your car over or sit your ass down when you decide to call someone up. Why? You are the intruder when you place a phone call. The person that you are calling is doing something else so you owe it to them to complete your call in one sitting whatever the reason for your call. Otherwise you become a pest; face facts, there are some of your friends whom you can only reach by voice-mail and the reason is because you have become a pain in the ass. They like you as a person but they don’t talk to you on your crappy cell phone. Cell phones have forever ruined talk radio as well, every day some caller will be in the middle of making an interesting or important conversational point when they vanish from the airwaves. It’s so fucking rude.

Look gang, if you are making a phone call treat it as the most important thing you’ll do all day. Not thinking about where you are or how long you’ll stay connected makes you a selfish puke, you’re telling whoever you’re calling that their time doesn’t matter.

I wish I could bill the phone companies for dropped calls.

Merry Christmas...Seriously.

2007-12-24T17:39:00.000-08:00

It's Christmas Eve, 2007. It's quiet here at work so I thought I'd take a second to thank you, whoever you are who stops in to read my ramblings. I hope that I amuse you.

I'm not religious in the standard definition of the word, I'm an Episcopalian but I haven't been to church in years. I worked in a Toy Store for 17 years and I have a jaded view of the holiday season, the only thing that got me through each year was the kids and their amazing sense of wondrous excitement. I suffer from depression during the holidays, mostly because of my small income and the commercialization that reminds me of how much money I don't have. Still, I manage to get through it without ruining it for other people. Which is something that a growing group of assholes really needs to learn how to do. I'm talking about the various anti-Christmas activist-types.

I'm not talking about the Nazis at the ACLU pushing holiday displays off of government property, I'm talking about the dorks who protest everything about Christmas. Who are these people anyway? What could they possibly protest about Christmas? I'm pretty sure that they are simpletons assholes who just hate everyone. Just look at Christmas itself...

The holiday is based around the birth of Jesus Christ, in Christianity it's a distant second to Easter in importance. It's the J-Man's death on the cross that set him apart and not his birth. Some folks argue about the Gospels and how the Nativity is only covered in one of them; others point out that Jesus was born in July and there's all kinds of imagery that's open to debate from being born in a stable to the Star of David. Most all of this hoohaw misses the point of Christmas, which is to take a day and think about your fellow man for a second, lay down your arms for a few hours and help those less fortunate than yourself. Before Jesus, most religious holidays were based on fear and had a terrifying story at their base. The birth of Christ is about the hope of PEACE and a call to love your neighbor.

What kind of piece of human shit would protest that?

That question answered itself.

Anyway, to those of you who don't suck, Merry Christmas!

Defending Ben Affleck

2007-11-24T20:02:00.000-08:00

Look, it's not his fault.

Okay, I know that there's an entire industry that has built up like a Silver mine boom camp around making fun of Ben Affleck and putting the guy down. I just want to know why? Seriously, what did Ben Affleck do to warrant the derision that is now heaped upon him whenever he does a new movie project? Did he run over a puppy?

Look, the guy never expected to end up on the "A-List", he just wanted to act in movies and write one here and there. The problem was that his first major efforts were actually very damn good and compounding things was the fact that he's a good looking dude. He was offered a bunch of high paying leading-man parts in what turned out to be crappy movies. You would have done the same thing? No? Bullshit! You expect me to believe that if some Hollywood producer offers you $7million to be in a movie where you play a fighter pilot and make out with a hot actress babe that you are going to tell him no? If so, why are you even reading my blog? Jeez, give me that money and tell whats-her-face to buy birthcontrol because I'm going to give it my all, beeeaaaaytch! Ben just did what any guy with half a brain would have done in his place, so why crusify the man?
It can't be because of his high-profile romances. No way. Come on, they guy dated Gwyneth Paltrow back when she was still hot. Then he got to nail Jennifer Lopez (with the ass that launched a thousand ships) at a time when she was miss hotstuff. Then Jennifer Garner straightened his ass out and he married her. The man is not a dipshit. Plus, who makes fun of a guy for dating the hottest women on the planet anyway? What the hell is wrong with you? Ben should be issued some kind of a plaque or have a statue built or something.

So what's the deal?

Maybe it's because his good friend is Matt Damon and Matt has made different choices with his career and has gone the opposite direction from Ben. At least it depends on how you look at it. Ben seemed to have picked his movie roles based on how much fun the movie was going to be to make while Matt was willing to push himself into different directions. At their core they're both good actors it's just that Ben plays "Dom" to Matt's Joe DiMaggio, that's all. In the long run I think Ben's going to do some more good stuff and eventually folks will start picking on someone else.

Ben's a good guy and he's going to be okay.

Finding The Wall

2007-11-24T18:37:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since my third back surgery and more than six years since I pulled off a long-range hike. Mostly because I haven't had the time but I have to admit that the idea of being disabled bugs me and I don't know how hard I can push myself any more. So about three weeks ago I grabbed my camera and my day pack and drove out to Fort Ord and parked up just past the old hospital. I was only planning a two hour field movement in which I was going to hunt down artifacts left over from the Army and photograph them. I'd bought new boots and I wanted to break those in as well, so I head into "The Back Yard", of Fort Ord with no real plan or time frame.

After the first mile I was feeling great and I decide to make a push deep into the old base in order to locate a remote canyon. This canyon had once been the location of a full-size mock-up of a Vietnamese village. The Army used it to train soldiers headed to Vietnam back in the late 1960s and while it is long since gone I've found that the Army always leaves something behind and because it was the Army and not the BLM who tore the place down it's possible to find goodies to photograph. So I'm feeling good, my boots are comfortable and the weather is passable , thus I forge up to the top of the first ridge and follow a game trail down to the road that descends to the bottom of Eucalyptus canyon. Once I reach the road at the bottom I'm just over three miles away from my truck, I take a second to take stock and decide that I feel good and so I boogie down the road to where it intersects with a trail and head off along that. The trail winds along the south-east side of the canyon ridge and heads to a gap where a road cuts across into the last deep canyon of the old base. Once I reach the gap and begin to climb I decide not to take the road and instead I take a trail that climbs up along a small box canyon to "Lookout Road". As I climb this trail I'm looking at this small canyon and I quickly realize that this is the target canyon! Hot dog! I continue up the trail because it gives me a great view of the entire canyon and I take mental notes on how I'm going to search it in the future. I finally get to the top of the canyon and it does look out onto the great canyon below. I stop and take my pack off and eat some breakfast bars I'd stowed inside. I then refill my canteens and take in the view. Then I look at my watch.

Oh shit...

It's 4:30pm, I'm six miles from my truck and I have an hour of daylight left. Oh shit. I am standing in the middle of Mountain Lion central all by my lonesome. Oh shit! Well, okay, I'm not totally screwed because I have my day pack, which means that I have a warm sweater and two flashlights. So I put on the sweater and clip one flashlight to my shoulder strap and put the other in my cargo pocket and I gear up and start the long move back. It took me forty minutes to climb back down to the road at the bottom of the second canyon and reach the road that would take me out. The problem now is that the forty minute/three mile hike had thrashed my legs and feet. My lower body was now a symphony of pain as each muscle group sang out and my right leg was shaking uncontrollably. I could feel blisters on both feet. All this would make the next mile no fun because because I would be climbing a 20% grade the whole way.

Somewhere before I reached the top the sun went down.

At the top I tried to kick it into gear but my legs were just done. I had two miles to go and it was 5:30pm. I just lunged down the road thankful for the darkness because I now looked like Frankenstein's monster as I thudded my way back to my truck. I swept the sides of the road with my second flashlight in order to catch the reflection of eyeballs that might be looking at me. Early on I did manage to catch a large cat in my beam of light but I'm pretty sure that it was a Bobcat and not a Cougar, either way I wasn't going to hang around and get a closer look. It's amazing how your world changes in the dark, especially when you are under stress; everything becomes impossible and every noise becomes a threat. I tried to sing but everything quickly boiled down to "Shit,Shit,Shit,Shit". The few times that I stopped for water I found that I paid for it in new kinds of pain as my muscles locked up. Usually I can daydream to take my mind off of the pain but not this time, I was living each and every moment as they came. I was never so happy as when I saw my truck.

I closed on it and opened the door. I slid off my gear, dumped my canteen out over my head and then sat down behind the wheel. Ahhhhhh! Oh baby, you know what I like. I had found my wall, somewhere out around the seven mile mark and I passed it and discovered a world of pain. When I got home I found that my socks had disintegrated at the toes and I had big blisters on both feet. I ended up removing the nail on my little toe, which actually came off pretty easily. The next day was no fun as I dealt if stiff muscles and foot pain but a few days later I felt great...really great....like a new man kinda great. I picked up 4mph on my exercise bike and I felt better than I had in a long time. The body is a strange thing because the whole way back to my truck I'm cursing myself for being so stupid to even think about hiking that far and now all I can think about is getting back out there and maybe even going farther.

I think I'm brain damaged.

Want To Screw Defense Contractors?

2007-10-29T19:24:00.000-07:00

This is a subject near and dear to my heart, it also underlines everything that is wrong with Washington D.C., so bear with me.

I used to be a hobby buyer for a small toy store and I’m also a life-long builder of plastic models. I’ve built almost every plane in the US Air Force inventory, a fleet of battleships, destroyers and aircraft carriers. I’ve mastered 1/35 scale armor and figures and made cool dioramas. I’ve built the Starship Enterprise from A to E, the Millennium Falcon and all of those cool Aurora movie-monster kits. I’ve even done a few dinosaurs.

I love building models. Almost as much as I love blowing them up with firecrackers. That’s another thread.

The most common question that I used to be asked was where are the modern kits? You could find the M1 Abrams and Bradley but only from Tamaya (a Japanese company and very expensive), the UH-60 was only made in 1/48 and 1/72, but not in 1/35. You couldn’t find a 105 Howitzer or 90% of current US military hardware. It was frustrating because I could never get an answer. Eventually new Chinese based model companies started to pick up the slack and I could finally stock Los Angeles-Class submarines, Arleigh Burke destroyers and funky Oshkosh fuel trucks. I even stocked prototypes of the F-23, which was never built.

The thing was that these kits were always more expensive than their Russian counterparts by 15% to 25% and that never made sense to me because the details for a T-72 are a tougher cast than an M1. A modern Destroyer model, which has less clutter on its deck, was more expensive than a WWII battleship, which has all kinds of guns and deck items to detail (thus more plastic). Then, for every modern vehicle introduced model companies would release 7 to 15 new WWII kits. You can buy every variation of the Tiger tank; you can buy Nazi prototypes and even German tanks that only showed up on the battlefield in the last months of the war. The reasons that WWII kits are more popular vary; some of it has to do with the fact that WWII tanks, fighters, bombers and warships are just more interesting as a subject than modern equipment. I’ll never get tired of building B-17s, PT boats and the F4U myself so I understand this. Then there is basic politics, Japanese kids (who dominate the model building world) aren’t as hot on American stuff as they are on WWII German stuff. Some countries even restrict the model industry to only that country’s weapons systems (France), or that a percentage MUST be domestic kits. That’s why Heller makes some great, unique French stuff.

Then I found out the main reason that it’s so damn hard to get modern stuff. It turns out that the reason modern US kits are few and far between is due to Defense contractors demanding a licensing fee from model makers. Not just the primary contractors either, even sub-contractors have gotten into the game. Even if that sub-contractor’s equipment is not represented in the model (the numerous black boxes on an F-22 for example) they still sick their lawyers on the model companies. That slows everything down and drives the price of the kit up. Why would any model company want to produce the new armored cars, for example, when it’s just easier, cheaper and more profitable to roll out yet another sub-type of the Super Tiger from WWII?

This sucks, here’s why…

Who pays for the F-22? Who pays for those little black boxes in the F-22’s avionics bays? WE DO! Yep, John Q Taxpayer owns those F-22s and those little black boxes inside of them. In fact, if it wasn’t for Mr. & Mrs. Taxpayer, the F-22 wouldn’t exist and neither would all of those little black boxes. These defense companies are double-dipping, they are getting paid twice and it’s wrong. I paid for all of those Blackhawks and if I want to buy a 1/35 MH-60 variant I shouldn’t have to reimburse Hughes for a box that nobody could see even if it was part of the kit. In fact, that particular box is classified; if I have to pay Hughes then I want to know how it works and what it does.

This is just sleazy.

Now New Jersey Congressman Andrews has introduced a bill to end this scummy practice:

http://www.hmahobby.com/talking-points.html

It’s not going to save the world, end the war or make healthcare affordable but it IS a quality of life issue. It’s also a chance to set a small wrong back to right again.

Sorry to vent but this is something I’ve followed and feel strongly about.

"Party Girl" by Anna David

2007-10-27T21:54:00.000-07:00

Okay, I know what you’re thinking, WTF? Axxman, what are you doing reading a book about some hot Hollywood reporter? Well, everyone in a while I like a good novel that takes me into a different world. Now, the last three books I’ve read were a couple of books by James Joes about Counter-Insurgency and “Blood & Thunder” A Tale of the Old West. In the last five years my life has been consumed by all things United States Army, Counter-Insurgency and Counter-Terrorism. Essentially reading about how good men train to kill other, not so good men and it can be very depressing at times. Now, I like to take a break here and there and one of my favorite ways to break up the military stuff is to tune into G4’s “Attack of the Show”, which is a silly, snarky show that covers video games, computers, technology, movies and other pop-culture stuff. It’s an hour long and a pleasant oasis of non-serious activity. On Wednesdays the do a segment called “In Your Pants” which covers sex and relationship advice and the co-host of this segment is a cool lady by the name of Anna David. She writes columns for a variety of magazines about sex and relationships and she comes across as being wise beyond her years. A wisdom that can only come with mileage. She’s usually dead on with her assessments and has an amazing ability to articulate how a woman feels during certain physical acts as well as how the female mind often perceives the world differently than men. So when I read that she had her first novel come out I made a point to hunt it down and buy it.

I’m glad that I did and I think that you should grab a copy too.

Through her character, Amelia Stone, Anna David slips the reader through those red velvet ropes of Hollywood, beyond the red carpet and into the world of a Gossip Magazine reporter. Using the fictional Amelia, Anna incorporates her biographical accounts into a story of a smart, educated young woman who’s keen and hilarious observations of the Hollywood party scene juxtapose harshly against her failure to realize that she has become a Cocaine addict.

The story starts at a wedding where Amelia’s adventurous nature, fueled by coke, gets her into an encounter in a pool house bathroom and later she finds herself in bed with two men. Definitely a great way to open a book if you ask me. From there we follow Amelia as she works a Movie premier, here Anna shows some skill as a writer because this brief chapter sets the tone and style for her story because buried underneath the humorous observations about certain actors and the catty remarks about skinny actresses it becomes apparent that Amelia is simply biding her time until she can get into the lady’s room and do coke. From there, Amelia ends up at a small party at a Malibu beach house where a game of “Truth or Dare” breaks out.

From there we follow Amelia as she goes to some Rock Star’s house where he insists that she interview him in bed. Shortly afterwards we watch as Amelia is surprised as she’s fired from her job because of her cocaine use. It is here where Anna David’s story-telling shifts into a different gear because this kind of story has been told a zillion times before and she manages to keep it original and true to her character, which is very hard to do even for someone who’s writing from personal experience. To be blunt, Anna does a masterful job of writing from an addict’s perspective as Amelia goes from a good paying job at a magazine, where all she does is go to parties and premiers and next finds herself picking up dog crap from a pet of a high caliber Hollywood exec for $10.00 an hour. Amelia’s coke-fueled rationalizations leave her oblivious to her circumstances as she spends what money she has left on more cocaine.

I can relate to this. I’m an alcoholic and it wasn’t until I’d stopped drinking that I began to realize that the reason my life sucked was due to booze. While I was a drunk this fact escaped me. It never occurred to me that these amazing women in my life kept dumping me because I had a drinking problem.

For the first half of the book, the only reliable man in Amelia Stone’s life is Alex, her coke dealer.

Anyway, from there we see the inevitable crash and Amelia passes out in her own vomit next to a dumpster following an amazingly dangerous encounter that I’ll leave for you to read about; and then it’s off to Re-Hab. Once again, Anna David keeps this story from becoming a cliché fest as she cleans herself up even though they’re all in here. This is due to this being more autobiographical and Anna’s sense of humor and honesty keeps the story above average. Often, writers who stray into re-hab stories either over dramatizes, over emotionalize or over do the whole event. Sure, it’s often a life-changing event for them but too often these stories end up dripping with self-indulgence that Anna manages to skate over in a classy way. You get enough emotion so that you get a good feel for Amelia’s transformation (more of an escape, actually) from coke-head to sober person without being beaten over the head or having our intellect insulted.
Once Amelia’s out of re-hab the story then becomes another challenge as she is hired to write a column about her crazy adventures for a prestigious magazine, crazy adventures she doesn’t plan on having any more in her new and sober life. She learns that the re-invented Amelia Stone can have just as many wild nights sober as the old Amelia Stone did.

“Party Girl” is a darn good book and an excellent first novel from Anna David. It’s a book that people who’ve dreamed about going to Hollywood to “Be a Star” should read. It’s a book that someone who’s smart and at risk should read, maybe you could get it as a gift for them. The narrative about cocaine use is bluntly honest and unglamorous and illustrates how a smart person can find themselves in trouble quickly and not even know it. Anna shows that as an addict, people become unaware of themselves and will rationalize all kinds of destructive behavior in their quest for their next fix. “Party Girl” is also a wonderful look at Hollywood and the people that populate the entertainment industry and the industries that feed of the entertainment industry. People who don’t believe in other dimensions should read this book because Anna illustrates the netherworld of the “Special People” of Hollywood, who move through the night like Vampires and hide in the shadows of the spotlight. There’s an insightful remark Anna makes about watching old TV shows; she becomes depressed because:

“These people were once this town’s big deal. They ate at all the right restaurants, and got invited to all the right parties, and had their names in Variety and were adored, and I’ve never heard of any of them, and now they’re gone and who the hell cares about them today?”

If I were governor, I’d have that written on a giant plaque and put it just below the “Hollywood” sign.

Smart Stuff.

Smart book.

Check it out.

Kinda Blue

2007-10-27T21:23:00.000-07:00

October has always been a time when I start to feel a little down. I don't know why. As a dude who loves a good ghost story I should be stoked because the TV and newspapers are full of true ghost stories. Then there's all of the Halloween parties with the slutty outfits that the ladies wear (I use 'Slutty" in a good way) yet I don't seem to get anything out of it like I once did. I think it's because the year's almost over and that means I pissed away another year of my life. At least I have my book which keeps me going but that has been slow because the Army doesn't keep records as well as you'd think that they do. If it were a fiction piece I could have been done already but I need to document and check facts and that just takes time.

So I'm frustrated , I'm frustrated in October. Yay.

Then the holiday season comes and I'm reminded again about how much money I don't make and the number of friends that I have who appreciate Christmas as a time for simply being with the people you love and sharing yourself have thinned out and all that are left are the materialists. As I've aged I tend to embrace the Christian aspect of the Holidays as a time of hope, it makes me feel like a better person and it's much cheaper.

I think that the real issue is that this is going to be my 43rd October and this year is seemed to show up right after April. Time has its way with everyone and I am no exception, I feel like I'm watching my life through the window of a bullet train. WHOOSH! Its not all bad though, I'm losong weight and I have an exercise routine that is helping with that. Things have been quiet at home and stuff seems under control. I'm not even as down as I have been in the past so who knows, maybe this October thing is just a mid-life phase.

I hope.

Into The Woods Again.

2007-10-13T21:06:00.000-07:00

I love to hike.

Before I wrecked my back I used to love long-range monster hikes where I'd cover 14 miles in 6 hours. I have no idea why, I think it was just the idea that I could haul ass through some serious terrain with no problem. I also think it was because I secretly hoped I'd just keep walking and never come back; just live out there in the woods and become a wild-man. That just never happened. Since I live in Monterey County I have access to all kinds of environments to explore and enjoy. I have the Central Coast Savannah, which is the low rolling hills filled with Sage and Oak Trees and mostly brown grass. All that it's missing are Zebras and Elephants and it could be Central Africa. Then there's the Coastal Mountain ranges and canyons. Seriously steep ridges that rise sharply to a height of 2000 feet. Certain times of the year you can see migrating whales. Then there are the Redwoods.

The Redwoods can be found either down in Big Sur or up in the Santa Cruz area. There are more tourists down in Big Sur but up in Santa Cruz it's more of a local mix. The park I like will remain nameless but it's the only one in Aptos, CA., so if you need to know the Google is your friend. The Redwoods had been in the back of my head for a few months but I'd always find a reason not to go. So on my last day off I just forced myself to drive up and I'm glad I did. Wow! It was the perfect day.

It was the day before we would get some rain and if you've ever been in a forest before a storm you can feel the trees exhale in anticipation. So as I started my little jaunt I was greeted with the rich aroma of Redwood bark as the trees prepared for a good drink. The Redwoods drop their needles which creates a carpet to walk on, you make no sound as you walk and so long stretches of the hike are almost silent. The wind becomes your partner as if whispers through the trees, I wonder what secrets I would learn if I spoke it's language because the trees seem to not only understand but they were having quite a conversation. The Aptos Creek runs along the side of the canyon and it leisurely babbles it's wonderful song on it's way to the sea.

It's the kind of day that makes you believe in Magic.

I had a secondary motive for coming here. The epicenter of the 1989 Earthquake is right under the park and that earthquake was landmark event in my life. It was one of the things that lead me to stop playing guitar and to pursue more serious things in life. I'll have to tell that story later but coming here is to me just like those old guys going back to Vietnam or Normandy. Something happened here that almost killed me 18 years ago, I like to come here every once in a while and say "Howdy". The great thing is that my last back surgery did the trick and I was able to move around without pain and that means that I'm coming back here again soon. The earthquake was the first life-changing event and my back injury was the second so knowing that I can enjoy the outdoors again has been a great relief to me. Maybe I'll get my foot speed back too, who knows.

The one thing that came to me on this hike was how sad that it is that there are people who'd come here and think "What a great place to build a shopping mall!". I genuinely pity these people because anybody who could stand in a forest like this and only think of cutting it down is spiritually dead. I felt true sadness for people like that because when they win, and get to tear down places like this, they lose and lose big. Well, one can always hope, right?

The rains came the next day and this means that next week that creek will be a little deeper and much faster. I can't wait to return.

Why I Don't Hunt Ghosts Anymore.

2007-10-12T20:19:00.000-07:00

I used to hunt ghosts. Really. I'd go to people's homes or businesses and check out their claims of things going on that didn't make sense. Out of eleven "Cases" I was able to explain to the folks what was really going on. In ghost hunting you learn quickly about heating and plumbing issues as well as general construction. Most of the people were relieved but a few were bummed out that they didn't have a ghost. Back in the 1980s, before Electra Magnetic Field detectors and affordable infra-red cameras an investigation was done in the library and at county records pouring through microfilm. Then you went to the house and did a perimeter walk and then inspected each room and then interviewed the inhabitants. Often times the problem was an over-active imagination coupled with a plumbing problem and since the average plumbing job at that time was 40 years old you had all kinds of sounds being made. The thing that I loved the most was the history aspect of it all; forgotten crimes, Spanish land-grants and all sorts of colorful people made it all worthwhile even though I never found a spook.

Don't get me wrong, I've run into a few ghosts. They are certainly real, they're just not what everyone thinks they are. That's another post.

Now, I don't know if I've ever talked about getting kicked out of M.U.F.O.N. for being a government spy (which ticked me off because Spy's make three times as much as I do ) but the short story there is that they weren't interested in facts and became hostile when I suggested that whoever was flying around the night skies might not be friendly (again, it's a long story). This is when I learned what JFK Assassination Theorists already knew, out here on the wacky fringe things get ugly when your theory contradicts some other guy's theory. That's because often the other guy has written a book, does conventions and your theory is a threat to his livelihood. Go to a Psychic Fair or UFO Convention sometime and you'll see what I'm talking about, there is a lot of petty ugliness between "Researchers". However bad the UFO guys are the worst of the bunch are ghost hunters as far as immature reactionaries go.

Oh man, where do I start?

First off, you have the groups that are ruthlessly territorial and are almost gang-like in the way they protect their turf. There are stories of one group hoaxing another as well as tales of cars being vandalized. Then you have the groups that charge people for an investigation, these guys are frauds because there is little accepted proof that ghosts exist so it's akin to an exterminator charging to get rid of Fairies. Then there are the ghost hunters who are just green with envy when another group gets it's picture in the paper or is featured on TV. Man, these people can just ruin your day.

I'm glad I'm out of that world. Now, I need to stress that not all ghost hunters are assholes, it's about half that fit the bill these days. The thing that has those guys all in a twist these days is the "Ghost Hunters" show on SciFi. All kinds of names are thrown around and accusations of frauds and hoaxes are thrown in the direction of the TAPS crew. Basically though it boils down to jealousy, the TAPS guys are on TV and they're not. Boo Hoo. Check the boards sometimes and you will see some petty stuff written about the guys from Rhode Island, it's pretty sad to say the least and worst of all it speaks to the over-all unprofessionalism of many ghost hunters. At the end of the day it's just TV, you turn it on and have some fun, there is no reason to make such a big deal out of it. But some people just can't help themselves.

I enjoy "Ghost Hunters" for what it is and I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the show beyond that. I don't think that the TAPS guys would want me to either.

Captain Old Guy

2007-10-10T15:20:00.000-07:00

I had to whip into Monterey to deposit my paycheck which is something I enjoy because it involves a seven-block stoll through downtown. It's a nice October day and that means that there's fun mix of people on the sidewalk. Perfect day too, no line at the bank or at the drugstore so I was able to finish my business quickly. As I was standing at the corner waiting for the light to change I notice an old guy on the opposite corner wearing a Captain's hat, you know like the 'Skipper" on Gilligan's Island? This got me to thinking:

At what point did this guy look in the mirror and say " I've got it, a Captain's hat!"

See, I grew up around a lot of retired military and none of those guys ran around in their Caps once they'd retired. You'd think that the guy who'd commanded the Enterprise in WWII would wear his Admeral's Cap and a t-shirt that said " I Commanded the REAL Enterprise in a REAL war, so suck on it you dirty Hippie", yet he preffered Flannel and sometimes a fishing hat (when he was going fishing). You'd think a guy who'd shot down 12 ME109s over Germany would dress like Colonel Hogan every friggin' day but he didn't. So what promted 'Captain Old Guy" to dawn a $25 Captain's hat and wear it when he goes out on the town? Does he sit at the bar and tell stories about the sea and the "One that got away"?

In Monterey, CA, there are maybe fifteen old-timers who can be spotted wearing Captain's hats. To be fair, some of these guys are retired Sardine and Squidboat Captains and to be sure they'd earned those caps but what about the other guys? Sometimes I go down to the Warf and watch the fishing boats pull in and I've noticed that today nobody wears a Captain's hat, today they wear Giants or 49ers ball caps. I wonder how many of those guys will one day exchange their sports cap for a Captain's hat? I don't know what would be worse, guys sitting around in their Captain's hats or walking around Monterey one day and noticing that the old guys wearing those caps have gone and nobody has replaced them.

You go, Captain Old Guy!

Maybe We Should Just Bring Back Lead Paint

2007-10-06T19:15:00.000-07:00

You know, for a great many years there was Lead in paint. The paint in your house, the paint on your car and just about everywhere else. If it is so toxic then how did modern man survive? Seriously, why isn't making extinct? Lead paint was everywhere and yet those people who grew up in homes with lead paint went on to cure Polio, develop Heart Transplants and fly to the Moon.

Maybe it's because they weren't stupid enough to eat lead paint chips? I think so.

Look, being exposed to Lead isn't healthy and taking it out of paint and gasoline was a smart idea but the presence of lead paint IS NOT An IMMEDIATE THREAT TO YOUR HEALTH. There is an entire Environmental Cleanup industry that has grown up around this myth and has even perpetuated it. They would have you believe that by simply walking into a building painted with lead paint will cause you harm. That's just not true. Think about the guys who won WWII, even their ships and tanks were painted with lead paint. Ike, Truman and Kennedy all grew up around lead paint with Kennedy even over-seeing the painting of his PT-Boat and inhaling fumes. If you buy into the hype then JFK should have been a brain-damaged vegetable before the Japanese sank his boat, yet somehow he was able to save his injured crew members and work out a rescue, not to mention that whole getting elected to the Presidency thing.

Maybe we should feed our kids lead paint chips...

We have become a race of fraidy-cats, yet our Lead-Fueled Grand parents weren't affraid of anything. They ate produce sprayed with DDT, they rode motocycles without helmets, they used to get into bar fights and up until 1966 they didn't even make cars with seat-belts. They just woke up every morning and walked out the door into this very dangerous world without a second thought. They most have been seriously tweeked from all that lead in their environment because not only did none of this stuff scare them they never filed a single lawsuit about having their feeling hurt. Poor bastards. Worse, if their Congressman had suggested regulating this stuff our Grand Parents would have lynched them.

How did we make it this far?

Hey De Palma, I Have an Idea for a Movie

2007-08-31T20:59:00.000-07:00

Hey Brian, can I call you Brian? Anyway, I just read about your latest crappy movie about US troops raping a young girl in Iraq.

I have an idea for a follow up movie.

Since you already did “Casualties of War” and now this flick I perceive a theme: Out of control people, drunk with power abusing and damaging the lives of people under their control.

Okay…We do a movie about a famous Hollywood director who lures a 13 year-old girl to the empty home of an actor friend. There he slips her a Quaalude and rapes the hell out of her. Then he uses the fact that he was a survivor of Nazi concentration camps as an excuse to undergo psychiatric tests, then when he’s supposed to be sentence he flees to France and becomes a Hollywood folk hero. You can end with footage of Hollywood giving him a standing –O after he wins an Academy Award thirty years later.

No?

How about a film about a famous Record Producer who beats the shit out of women who invites an aspiring actress back to his estate where he attempts to put the moves on her, a struggle ensues and he shoots her in the head and kills her.

No?

How about a story about a Hollywood Director who’s shooting a movie and he’s violating basic safety procedures AND Child Labor Laws, then he ends up pushing too hard and an accident happens where a helicopter crashes and kills the lead actor and to children – ON SCREEN. It’s pretty gory, you’d love it!

No?

Okay, how about telling the story of a shady Hollywood Private Detective who does all kinds of dirty work for Hollywood’s most powerful people. Stuff like wire-taps, intimidate witnesses; threaten reporters and all kinds of nasty stuff.

No?

Why?

These stories would give the “Wrong Impression” about Hollywood and paint the hard working and talented people in a negative light? REALY?

I should point out that the soldiers who committed this crime are all in prison and will be there for a very long time. Not a prison like rich Directors would go to, a serious prison. See, unlike Hollywood, the Military doesn’t condone nor accept criminal acts and punishes those in their ranks who commit them. The “10% Rule” applies in the military just as it does in Hollywood, it’s just that the military eventually catches its defectives and puts them away. But that would ruin your morality tale now wouldn’t it?

I know your movie will fail and I will be glad when it does.

The "New" Al Qaeda Threat ?

2007-07-15T21:50:00.000-07:00

So this week we saw Department of Homeland Security, Michael Churtoff, say that he had a gut feeling that Al Qaeda would try to attack somewhere in the U.S.. Then ABC News reported that the there had been a "Graduation" of Jihadists in Pakistan and that they were now headed to the West. There were other stories in the news, usually from unnamed Justice Department and Department of Defense sources that confirmed a variety of nightmares to come.

My only comment is: When were they never a threat?

See, I'm not saying that Al Qaeda isn't planning a strike on the U.S., they're ALWAYS planning a strike on America, it's just that this story plays into the media's theme of failure in Iraq and specifically that our involvement there has been a boon to Al Qaeda and is now enjoying a resurgence. While Iraq hasn't helped the fact is that Al Qaeda had 20,000 men in their training camps in Afghanistan back in October, 2001, and 10,000 of these men scattered to the winds before we started attacking the camps. Some of them have turned up in Iraq but most of them are unaccounted for. 9/11 was carried out by only 24 men. That 10,000 number, even if it's high, should give wise people pause because they can be anywhere today.

So while all this attention is probably good (the State Department Travel Warning of August, 2001, stating that Al Qaeda was planning to hijack civilian jetliners went largely unnoticed by the news media), I think that it's too bad that the press still hasn't figured out that the terrorists declared war on us first and that they have yet to call it all off.

Welcome to the party.

How To Get The News

2007-06-20T15:45:00.000-07:00

Back in 1980, when I was sitting in my high school Journalism class , someone asked why the newspaper never covered the "Hard News". My teacher, Mr. Walsh looked at this guy like he was a dipshit, and then he proceeded to tell us that the news was there and that you had to know how to find it. Even back then, the important stories weren't on the front page, they were buried in the back pages near the classified in postage-stamp sized columns. So Mr. Walsh pulled out that day's paper and sure enough, on the page where the classified adds started were stories about problems in Africa and Argentina.

This revelation changed my life in that I always was one step ahead of my peers about world events that continues to this day. The Falklands War? Saw it coming. Marine barracks bombing in Beirut? Wasn't a big surprise. 9/11? Guess what? The government (in the form of the US State Department) actually issued a travel warning about Al Qaeda threatening to hijack commercial airliners. No...it didn't say anything about crashing them into American buildings, they thought this might happen in Africa. This warning was issued in August, 2001. For all of the grief the mainstream news outlets get, the fact is, they do a good job. Could it be better? Hell yes, but in all if you know where to look and how to look you can find all kinds of interesting news.

Take the tragic fire in Charleston. Someone complained that there wasn't enough news coverage on the TV and on Internet sites. They forgot that most newspapers are now online and all they had to do was go here:

www.usnpl.com

And then click on the proper state's link. Bingo! More news than you can possibly use.

The sad thing is that places you'd expect to find current events, the Network and Cable news networks, are painfully lacking. I've talked about this before, Cable News has embraced the tabloid mentality in their quest for ratings so instead of the daily events in Congress or Iraq we are presented with missing pregnant women and Paris Hilton. The problem today is that the Networks have given up and they use the Internet as an excuse. I like to think that this attitude comes from outside of the Network news department , a short-sighted mandate from the corporate Spread-Sheet-Nazis and not from the editorial staff. Since 1981, the major networks have closed their foreign desks simply to save money. This means that for the most part they rely on freelance journalists and this isn't always good. Most of these freelancers are European and they lack a basic understanding of America, this means that they lack the ability to tell the stories in such a way that engages American viewers; who always ask the question : "Why should I care?". The other problem is that when events blow up and the networks finally send an in house reporters to the scene, they often lack knowledge about the situation's back-story and they lack knowledge of the nuance found in the local culture that can better explain the underlying situations. As a result, Americans get a handicapped version of the events by reporters who don't know better.

The worst part of news today is the Tablification of the mainstream. This is a direct result of the OJ Simpson trial and the wall-to-wall coverage that it received from every network. It was a giant set backwards from the highpoint of Cable news: The start of Desert Storm on CNN. CNN's downward spiral can be traced to it's relocation to New York City from Atlanta. The advantage CNN had over every other network was that it wasn't based in New York, so there was no inbreeding with the other networks and this gave them a better view of the world. That's gone today as CNN has sold it's soul for ratings.

So this means that it's up to you, loyal reader, to develop a foundation of knowledge on a wide spectrum of issues so that when you come across a small story buried in the newspaper you can treat it like you would a box-score from a baseball game. The Box-Score was an exercise from my high school Journalism class. You had to write a narrative of a baseball game using only a box-score. Obviously, the more you know about baseball the better job you'll do but even with just the definition of the abbreviations and symbols anybody can write a basic run-down of the game. It's not fair that we all have to work harder but the good news is that it's harder for the news to pull something over on you.

Evolution Continues

2007-06-03T22:09:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in my car eating lunch. It's a nice sunny day and the parking lot is about half full and I watch the world go by as I take in the news that's on the radio. My eyes drift around and take in the familiar surroundings and I spot something hopping around the SUV parked across from me. I focus in to see a small bird, a Finch possibly, hop up onto the front bumper and begin surveying the grill. It then plucks a fat bug from the radiator grill and then flies off. I then notice that there's a small army of birds hopping and popping around inspecting every car for bug-kill and I see that they're ignoring other parts of the car and concentrate on the front grill.

That's because the heat of the engine cooks the bugs.

I think about those birds that hang out on the backs of African Crocodiles picking off ticks and parasites. It makes me wonder how these birds might evolve in the future. I wonder if they will evolve to eventually understand the automobile enough to one day repair them.

I then think about what the impact on these birds will be when cars go the way of the horse. Will their taste for cooked butterflies be such that they cannot go back to regular old insects?
Either way, I think that it's cool when nature figures out a way to live with us instead of the other way around.

Stuff I Always Wondered About Superman.

2007-05-04T22:15:00.000-07:00

What if Superman gets a boner? Does it punch out through his shorts, or does he get his shorts from the same people who make the Incredible Hulk’s pants?

If he get’s diarrhea, can he use a regular toilet? Or does he have to fly all the way up to the fortress of solitude to use a special Kryptonian shitter? Could Superman use his diarrhea as a weapon? If he doesn’t quite make it to the Fortress Of Solitude, can he use a volcano? If he goes in his pants, will the force of his Kryptonian diarrhea blow his boots off?

If Superman craps his pants, can he wash them in a regular washing machine?

If you break it, you’ve bought it. How much has this cost Superman over the years?

Since Krypton’s sun was more powerful, does Superman’s snot dry? Ever?

When Superman farts, how long does the stink last?

If his farts smell real bad, does he have to fart in space?

What if Superman’s farts smell good? What if they smell like Popcorn, Coffee or Cinnamon? If they did, do you think he’d tell anybody about it? I mean, every time someone made a fresh pot of coffee they’d be all “Jeez, Superman must have had Tacos last night!” Worse, Lex Luther would give him an embarrassing nick name like “Redenbacher”.

How it is that Superman never gets a wedgie?

Do you think that Superman’s sperm is powerful enough to get a woman pregnant even if he bangs her in the ass? If a baby was conceived in this way, would it grow to love Superman? Or would it grow to hate him because it was a butthole-baby?

What kind of super powers would a Butthole – baby have? Would the fact that it was conceived in a colon instead of a uterus negate the half that is Kryptonian?

Does Superman use the Justice League’s super computer to download really good porn?

Even though he can fly, do you think Superman drives to work to the Justice League headquarters? If he does, will he use his own parking spot or does he park where ever the hell he want’s to because he’s Superman, bitch!

Iraq: The Way Out.

2007-04-28T21:14:00.000-07:00

It's time to blow this taco stand.

We've done everything that we can for Iraq. There's a point in a military operation where you have to ask the questions : "What will change if we stay?" and "What will change if we leave?".
If the answer to both questions is "Nothing" then the operation has reached it's null point.

I supported this invasion and I still think that it has been a worthwhile mission on our part. The way I see it we've had all the success that we're going to. Anything more relies on the Iraqi people and they've demonstrated that they're not willing to step up and function as a society. They've regressed into a tribal state and it's like balancing a marble on a two by four to keep any kind of peace in that country. I know Al Qaeda's there, I know that they have tax-collectors and torture shops set up in various towns, but the locals know where they are and they're not telling our forces where they're located. I know Iran is asserting itself, but I think Iran is making a mistake that it will pay for in the future and it will have nothing to do with us.

Hand it over to Special Forces and the Air Force.

If all we need to do is train the Iraqi Army then we need to hand this task over to Special Forces. Army SF guys are the best at this task anyway as it is part of their job as is counter-insurgency. If the only forces left in Iraq are the most qualified to deal with the problems as they are now then it puts the US and Iraq in the best situation. What is need isn't a complete with drawl but a visibly smaller footprint, a draw-down to a smaller force of Special Operators and a Quick Reaction force of Rangers and/or armored Cav should do the trick. Part of the problem now is that it sucks to be an Iraqi right now and every time they see a tank, helicopter or convoy they find an easy target for their anger. It doesn't matter if the anger is justified or not, we're the visible factor and we're foreigners so we're easy targets. If we draw down to a few forces, who are based out in the desert, then our presence will no longer be as obvious and Iraqis will look elsewhere for solutions. Iraqis can be clever when they want to be and our large numbers there allow them to be lazy about their own situation. If they don't see us on the corner any more and they realize that their problems are now THEIR PROBLEM then we will get progress in that country.

Here's the bad news...

We're going to still have forces in the Persian Gulf even after we leave Iraq, just as we have since 1979. Iran is still a problem and the situation that we'll be leaving in Iraq will require attention from time to time (yes, we might even have to go back in at some point). A draw-down frees up manpower for Afghanistan and takes pressure off of the National Guard and reserves.

We've done a lot of good in Iraq. Our forces have much to be proud of and in the end, taking Saddam Hussein out of the picture has made this whole expedition worthwhile. Our soldiers have prevailed in spite of some lousy leadership at the Pentagon and have succeeded in what should have been impossible missions. It's just that aside from the Kurds, there's nobody in Iraq left worth dying for. Turning the situation over to a small, elite force gives the bad guys there fewer targets to hit, and it will allow us to continue the mission in a way that will make that has the most promise for all involved. This plan would allow the President to "Stay the course" and it would also allow the military to take a breather and it gives the Democrats news images of soldiers coming home. Everybody wins.

Wasn't that the idea to begin with?

Virginia Tech, Can the Media Hit A Record Fo Milking A Subject?

2007-04-19T20:40:00.000-07:00

The cable news networks were in rare form this week.

They had a tragedy land about 4 hours away from media centers in Washington DC. They had their cookie-cutter templates ready and they had a subject (Hand guns) that they already had an angle and experts whom to call. The only thing more out of control was the shooter (no, I won't mention his name. Fuck him) were the reporters who decended on that poor campus before the bodies were cold. While the tragedy stands alone, the tragedies to follow because of a rabid and frothing news media will be countless.

I could give my usual breakdown of media failings and overkill but out of respect for the fallen I'll wait and see how it developes.

Expcet:

Computer animations recreating where everyone was shot.

Interviews with wounded students.

Lots of "Expert" commentary about security and mental health.

Plenty of crying.

You just watch....or better yet - change the channel

Keeping Busy

2007-04-08T18:25:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in a while. I think this happens to a lot of normal people who blog.

In my case, there's just been a lot of chaos around the Axxman household. My Mother and brother are ill, and some crazy do-gooder decided to "Help" us by tearing out our floors and putting in new carpet. At least that was the plan, we did get new carpet in the front of the house but not the back. The guys who put in the floor didn't know what they were doing (evidently there are "Floor Guys") so the linoleum people couldn't put down the new floor. The floors WERE in bad shape, there has been serious water damage and since I'm disabled there is no way I can repair them without help. The thing is that I actually have the tools to do this part, I just need someone to coach me through the set up. So, now I get to repair the repairs.

The best part, all of this "Donated" work cost me around $1200. So I'm looking for a second job to pay off my credit card.

So my book writing has gone to shit. When I'm at home I feel like I've got a million things to do and they're all sitting on my shoulders. I'm thinking of taking my laptop out to Fort Ord and sitting under an Oak tree or inside one of the barracks and writing there. I'm at the point where I just want to finish this and go back to school. The only reason that I don't quit all together is because I owe the men of the 7th Infantry Division, they're counting on me. So I will drive on.

I hope I don't come off as depressed because for some reason I'm not. I've lost 30 lbs and things have been much worse. I think I'm just overwhelmed.

So a Former Centerfold Died Today

2007-02-08T22:11:00.000-08:00

I’m at the computer writing and listening to the radio when around noon the announcement about Anna Nicole Smith being found dead in her hotel room comes. I’m not surprised for a variety of reasons and I continue working. About an hour later, as I’m fixing lunch I switch on MSNBC and to my horror they’ve got wall to wall coverage of her death. Then I switch over to CNN and damned if Wolf Blitzer and his team aren’t doing the same damned thing. He’s got their house doctor speculating on how she may have died, as if he’s psychic, instead of being professional and waiting until they had the facts. The local news had scrambled a helicopter so they could get footage of her body. I’d expect this from the tabloid media, but NEVER from mainstream media (i.e. Professional news departments), worse than that, there was no hint of guilt. They all jumped on this story like…flies on shit.

Can any professional journalist or news person answer these questions?

Can you name ONE movie that she starred in?

Other than the Playmate of the Year (Playboy), what significant achievement had she accomplished?

If she had not married a 92 year old Texas Billionaire, would she have captured the imagination of the media?

What did Anna Nicole Smith do to warrant a helicopter fly-over to photograph her dead body being loaded into an ambulance?

For those of you who are of average intelligence, you already know the answer but for you professional journalist/serious reporter types, let me give you the answer:

NOTHING.

Not a goddamned thing. The only reason Anna Nicole Smith was famous is because the MEDIA decided she was good for business. Without Anna, there’d be no Paris Hilton, another vapid, drug-addled, no-talent skank. Cold blooded? You bet! Anna Nicole Smith sold her soul to the only thing worse than Satan – the Hollywood Entertainment Industrial Complex. She didn’t care who or what she had to do to stay in the small spotlight she was in. Her “Reality Show” was a depiction of a brain-damaged woman walking around in Hollywood, the only place in the world where nobody noticed nor cared about her obvious handicap, a town where intelligent people make decisions that only someone with a serious brain injury would make. Instead of getting this woman serious help, they made it into entertainment and then everyone else could Yuk it up. Then she had plastic surgery and then endorsed a diet supplement for big bucks, at least until she put weight back on. Then she dropped out of the spotlight for a while only to drop back into it when her sun died from drug-related complications. She then used her son’s death to pull that spotlight back onto herself, granting interviews to “The Insider” and “Entertainment Tonight” (ET) as well as MSNBC, FOX and CNN. She was oblivious to the fact that this spotlight showed that she had surrounded herself with people who obviously didn’t have her best interest (health) at heart. In the last week before she died. ET and the Insider both were in her face, asking her if her new husband had murdered her teenaged son. They were grilling her hard to. Like she was some kind of master criminal, I mean the USC marching band could have come into her hospital room and killed her son with a chainsaw while playing the theme to Shaft and she wouldn’t have caught on.

But she did understand what they were accusing her of. So she hit the meds, maybe the booze too. I don’t know. Maybe she tripped and fell. I will wait and see what the cause of death is.

The thing about this goes back to my central problem with the news media. I never saw the Vice President grilled like Anna Nicole Smith was by ET. I’ve never seen any public official in the last 15 years get a serious interrogation like Ms. Smith received. She was a NOBODY, at best a Playboy Playmate; she never controlled the fate of millions of people. Her finger was nowhere near the nuclear button; she never sent men off to war or raised our taxes. She didn’t cure disease, she didn’t write laws; defend the poor or even act. Yet she was a star, a D-List star, but a star and only because the media said so. So the media made her and then killed her.

This over-coverage is a form of misdirection, they’re diverting our attention to the real culprits behind her death – them. The media killed a stupid woman today. A woman who was maybe intellectually 10 years old. Did they head off a war? No. Did they uncover a great fraud? No. Uncover government waste? No.

They killed a fat Barbie Doll.

I Want Answers! Damn You!

2007-01-29T20:21:00.000-08:00

Okay, a question was asked over at the Van Halen Links forum about the latest issue of Guitar World magazine’s interview with Eddie Van Halen. The guy wanted to know why they didn’t ask about a bunch of non-guitar stuff, which is a fair question, but then others piled on demanding that “Hard Hitting “questions be asked of the legendary guitarist. Questions about his *alleged** drinking, why he had fired Michael Anthony and a bunch of other stuff. I have to ask why Eddie should have to answer these questions. They’re only going to piss off the haters anyway and the answers won’t make much sense to anybody but Eddie. The actual interview focused on the creation of his infamous red & white striped guitar , nicknamed “Frankenstein”, which Eddie had constructed himself back in 1976. It’s a good article and any guitar playing Van Halen fan will get a kick out of it. It’s understandable that since Eddie has been out of the spotlight for a few years that fans will have questions, but Eddie is usually a pretty open guy and he will get around to filling in the blanks.

But it got me thinking about something that has pissed me off for a while now.

What the hell is anybody doing asking a 50-something Eddie Van Halen, or any other celebrity for that matter, hard-hitting questions? What possible good will it do if you knew what Eddie’s been doing IN HIS PRIVATE LIFE? Some magazine writer is supposed to nail Eddie to the wall for feeling sad because his Mother died? Because he had cancer? Because he divorced Valerie Bertinelli? WHY? How do the answers to any of those questions move the human race forward? How does knowing the depths of Eddie’s suffering enhance his music? A decent person wouldn’t ask those questions because morally they’re obscene. Yet in most major celebrity rags this kind of crap is now standard. Worse, some celebrities indulge the media with their legion of personal flaws. Some celebrities have become celebrities purely because of their personal life (Anna Nicole Smith is at the top of the list) and the media and a frightening number of people go along with it. Worse, they expect other celebrities to degrade themselves too. So when an old-school guy like Eddie Van Halen doesn’t view his divorce or his mother’s death as a reason to call up VH-1 and arrange to film a reality TV show around his suffering; a disappointingly large number of Van Halen “fans” have turned the simple guitarist into a cross between Joe Stalin and Gene Simmons. It is a sign of our society’s declining civility that these angry fans are unaware just how immoral and inhuman they are.

I give points to Eddie Van Halen and his brother Alex for having the good sense and self respect to keep their personal issues out of the public domain. It means that their late mother raised them well.

My other problem is that while Matt Lauer is grilling Tom Cruise about a subject that neither one know enough about to write a freshman 1st quarter paper, no journalist are asking hard questions in interviews with important people. The people who run our banks, hospitals, health insurance, highways, schools, and the Pentagon seem to get a pass except when a situation develops. Nobody questioned the accuracy of US intelligence on Iraqi WMDs. If they had asked, oh say back in 1998, when President Clinton bombed Iraq for failure to comply with UN resolutions and deal a serious blow to Saddam’s ability to produce, store and threaten his neighbors with WMDs, what is the intelligence for these raids? You might have found out that the Intel came from satellites and Iraqi ex-patriots with questionable backgrounds and motives. We might also have found out that the United States had only ONE CIA agent inside of Iraq during the 1990s and that Iraq had been relegated to the back-burner in the US intel world, leaving thousands of Gulf War documents untranslated and literally rotting away at a Virginia CIA storage facility. Nobody asked in 1998, nobody asked in 2003. To be fair, the Iraqi Army thought that they had WMDs in 2003 too, but we might have gotten a better picture of how fucked up our intelligence agencies were (and are). We might have even headed off 9/11. Who knows?
Why is it that nobody asked hard hitting questions from the Dotcom industry before the Tech-Bubble burst? Why was Bethany McLean the only financial journalist to look at Enron’s numbers and then ask “What the fuck?” just like many of the same financial journalists failed to notice the whole S&L scandal thingie of the 1980s? The news media has been patting itself on the back since Watergate, so they’re out looking for the next big story instead of doing their jobs and reporting on the little ones. Watergate started as a little story about a break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters, today’s Washington D.C. press corps and beat reporters would never have caught on to Nixon and his crew because they … well… suck. They confuse buzz and common wisdom with facts, so they screw up almost every story that comes out of Washington. The war in Iraq cannot be won, they tell us, even though it is being won right now. You know things are bad when the National Enquirer can do a better job covering a news story than NBC or CNN can.

So, while sad little men are demanding answers from Eddie Van Halen that are nobody’s beeswax , nobody’s watching the store in Washington D.C, your state’s capitol, your city hall or your bank.

A Quick Thought On Iraq

2007-01-20T20:12:00.000-08:00

Even before Bush made his announcement, the political games had started. The Democratic Party is hell bent on loosing the White House and they Congressional majority as quickly as they can. When I say games I mean GAMES. The President doesn't need Congresses permission to send more soldiers to Iraq or anywhere else, they know this but they can't help playing games. A "Non-Binding Resolution Against More Troops In Iraq"? That's simply hot air, a do-nothing, feel-good move on a questionable principle.

Then Harry Read(D, asset,Nevada) makes a statement that the President cannot make a move on Iran without permission from Congress. What a fucking moron. The President can invade any country he wants to for 90 days, at little thing called the "War Powers Act" says so. Plus, and this is the saddest thing, the President isn't planning on making any moves on Iran, nor has he even threatened Iran. However IRAN HAS THREATENED US.
So who's fucking side is Read on? Ours or Iran? If he sides with Iran, why? Is it because Iran has pledged to wipe Israel off of the map? I doubt Read is anti-Semitic, I think he's a dipshit.

Lost in all of the Capitol Hill BS is this fact, Rumsfeld is gone.

We have a SecDef who understands counter-insurgency, we also have a SecDef who would have kept us out of Iraq had he been in charge in 2003. Bob Gates talked the President out of a massive troop increase and down to the 20,000 that he now plans to send. These 20,000 troops are mission specific, have specific tasks and have a limited time table in country. In short, this is smart. As soon as Gates took over, things on the operational level in Iraq changed. We have been attacking insurgent and terrorist strongholds intensely every day and have become more aggressive over all. We will see a draw down of those 20,000 plus an additional 30,000 by the end of this year. Things are getting back on track in Iraq, thanks to Bob Gates, the democrats should shut the hell up and give the President this one last shot.