Greetings From Bizarro World

If the democrats are the Party of Peace, why is the city of Denver investing in riot gear in advance of their convention? It's certainly not because Denver is a nest of right-wing fascists; I've been there. I was born in Boulder, in fact, a dubious honor at best and a tradition I've carried on to the next generation by forcing my child to admit to having been born in Berkeley. Nope, they're all peace, love and cheap incense in Denver. The place that you'd think ought to be battening down the hatches is St. Paul, MN, host to the republican convention. Yet after a diligent five-minute search on Dogpile the most I was able to find was this protest site. They plan to 'Demand peace, justice, and equality.' They don't say for whom. Ron Paul intends to hold a parallel convention outside the venue if they won't let him speak inside. He could carpool with the peace guys.

Meanwhile, back in Denver, The police are investing in everything from the "brown gun," a sonic device that allegedly makes you -- ahem -- let yourself go, to pepper spray grenades. There is a group called Recreate '68 that plans to -- I forget. Do something, I suppose. Get high on Oaxacan ditch weed and run people down with their Lark Scooters, maybe. I'm thinking that the brown gun might have been money poorly spent. Certainly this is not the crowd to test it on.

What a freaking headache all the way around for poor Denver. Imagine the police brutality lawsuit after some fragile firebrand shatters a hip. Or the property damage done by their more vigorous great-grandchildren. Remember Seattle? Also, I'm sure the local criminals would never take advantage of the chaos downtown and the slower response times to carry on with their business in other parts of the the Metro Area. No wonder DPD is considering the logistics of carpet bombing and napalm. I'm kidding. They would never use napalm. The carbon footprint is huge.

Somebody really ought to explain to Denver how this is supposed to be an honor for them. I bet they forgot. In the meantime, St. Paul seems pretty sedate, considering they're hosting a group of folks quite a few of them disagree vehemently with. I wonder how that's going to go. Hopefully it will be dull. Republicans are very good at dull. I'll bet they clean the hall up on their way out, too. That would be cute, and it's happened before. With the passing of my dear grandmother last year I no longer have family in Denver. If you do, seriously, you should offer them refuge come August. The Peace Lovers are coming.

Meanwhile, Back in the Jungle...

Chavez to Order $2 Billion of Russian Arms, Kommersant Reports

By Lyubov Pronina
May 12 (Bloomberg) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez will order $2 billion of Russian weapons, including submarines, during a visit to Moscow this month, Kommersant reported, without saying where it got the information.
Venezuela, which has bought $4 billion of Russian arms in the last three years, will order four Project 636 diesel subs, Mi-28 combat helicopters and airplanes made by Ilyushin Co., Kommersant said.

Chunk-style has also been purchasing a variety of small arms and equipment, including night-vision goggles and other geegaws useful in guerrilla warfare. The boats are likely Varshavyanka-class submarines, also known as Kilo 636. The subs are powered with diesel fuel and equipped with six torpedo tubes, 18 torpedoes, 24 mines and eight surface-to-air missiles. They're also supposed to be extra quiet and the missiles they carry have a range of 7,500 nautical miles. Last June Chavez bought five of these subs.

Miami is 1360 miles away from the Venezuelan coast. DC is 2053 miles. NYC is 2127 miles, as the crow flies.

The Ilyushins -- troop transport planes, combat helicopters and small arms will come in handy, too, for intimidating the neighbors. Columbia and Brazil must be very...interested right about now. And see if Crazy doesn't involve himself in the tempest brewing between England and Argentina over the Falkands oilfields.

The argument can be made that Putin is unloading a lot of old junk on Chavez, but having learned from back when he used to buy his arms from us only to find we wouldn't supply him with spare parts, now he knows to buy the extended warranty. The boats are coming with parts suppliers, maintenance crews and trainers for the operations crews. In future the Kalashnikovs and their ammo will be manufactured in country. So he is bright enough to become self-sufficient. Sorry if you just lost the bet.

I wonder if this is what would have happened if Tony Montana were given a nation to run.

A Portal Into Another Dimension

Join me now as we travel to the Huffington Post. Scroll down past the teaser for Absinthe and the one with the headline about having a three-way with God (not making it up). See this week's "little kid steals grandma's truck and wrecks it" story? Watch the video if you like; I didn't. Check out the comments. They're like flipping over a rock. Every aspect of the child's life is dissected, from his given name to his weight to his home situation to wild speculation about the ages of his parents and grandparents.

Great. No conscience, no sense of right and wrong, ignoramus grammar, and
fat as a pig. They ought to just preregister him at the county jail because
that's where he'll end up. Grandmother has custody. That means mama is mostly
likely a druggie. Where's dad? And grandmama drives a big ole gaz-guzzling SUV.
I don't feel sorry for the family; they raised him that way. Videogames, lack of
supervision, bad diet. So many things wrong with this picture I can't even stand
it. They ought to start saving up for attorney's fees.

Oh, and they're real worked up about that SUV.

Part of the reason I didn't look at the vid was I wanted to see if I could figure out what demographic the kid was part of just based upon the comments. We are a post-racial society, after all. Mr. Obama says so, and then Mrs. Obama smacks him in the head. How's she been, anyway? Haven't seen her in a while. At any rate, sixteen comments down the page and TA DA!!

This kid's got some of the qualities and tendencies of Your Typical
ReThugLieCon. Now if only he was white (or Clarence Thomas), he'd be afforded
the opportunities to hone his craft.

OOooo. Twofer. But he's not bigoted. At all. And that's not even the first post to blame 'society.' My favorite, and not just because he accidentally points out what might be a root cause of the little boy's resentment by misspelling his name:

So Latarina was out for a joy ride .... even though he is not of age
for a Driver's License, nor of age to get Car Insurance, nor is he of age to own
a car. But I bet anyone his driving abilities performed alot more better than of
those who are adults that goes out drinking and then drives. Sure, it shows he's
not growing up in a great environment that teaches him to be more disciplined
within his natural surroundings, a kid with no father figure perhaps, nor a
mother who teaches him right from wrong. This just clearly shows that, this is
the direction to where a country is going because the politicians are more
worried about corporate interests and their bank accounts, even at a time of
war. They could of done better things with their war money, such as give a kid
like Latarian a better living environment, not nooooooooooo .... that didn't
happen.Remember now, oppression is a dysfunctional disease brought to you, by
the country's political infrastructure.

I'm sorry; your what hurts? Shouldn't you be lecturing at a community college somewhere right now? Sociology, perhaps, or maybe pre-law? These are the people we share the roads with, the people blocking the aisle at the grocery store who give you that look when you try to go around them. The people who won't take their clothes out at the laundrymat when the machine is done running, like they're renting real estate. These people vote. They think they're right. About everything, all the time. Good thing that's funny.

Who Lets Him Out?

For everybody who voted Carter for President: Were you sniffing glue that day? Did your hand slip? Demonic possession, perhaps? Or were you momentarily distracted by something shiny? Seriously. I want answers.

The detestable old gasbag with the pinned-pupil thousand-yard Thorazine stare actually said this out loud:

"When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that's
the dictator, because he speaks for all the people. But in a democracy like
Israel, there is a wide range of opinions and that counterbalances the
disappointment that I have in not meeting with the people shaping Israeli power
now in the government."

He prefers dictatorships because they're more convenient. He only has to talk to the one guy. None of this futzing around pretending to care what the people think; a dictator will tell you what they think. It's right there in the job title.

I can see that. An old guy like him needs his naps, and unpredictable travel schedules can be colonically binding.

Going to a democracy is such a darn chore. All those people and their opinions. No wonder they never get anything done. Plus, nobody seems to be in charge of validating Jimmy's personhood. He won the Nobel, for crying out loud. Little-d democrats care not a fig for the guy who used to hold the job. Not like in a nice, old-fashioned dictatorship. They know how to show respect. All their former leaders have beautiful memorials.

Jimmy Carter is the Norma Desmond of American politics. Why are we paying for this man to have Secret Service protection when we ought to have protection from him?

Hairstyles and Attitudes

This post is not about freedom of religion or the nature of dissent or Tibet's right to exist or how all-round evil China is. It is also not about the Olympics or world unity or any of that hippie twaddle. San Francisco's pretty, pretty mayor did something that should outrage everyone who lives in the world's largest open-air looney bin: When confronted with potentially volatile political protesters bent on impeding the flow of traffic on city streets and the implicit threat of violence against the citizenry Mr. Newsom found a way to thwart their purpose and defuse the situation. There ya go, San Franciscans. He does have it in him, but only when he's worried about looking like a schmuck to the rest of the world. For you, every month, not so much.

The last Friday of every month with nice weather (I love their commitment) an enormous bunch of jackasses toss their bicycles in the back of the Odyssey or on top of the Forester and drive in from all over to block traffic in downtown San Francisco during the evening commute in a pointless little ritual called Critical Mass. They ride on both sides of the street and both sidewalks. Why should drivers be the only ones to fear for their safety? They vandalize cars and knock pedestrians down, and the police don't do a damn thing to stop them. I'm sure they'd love to, but they're not allowed. Mayor Haircut doesn't want the bad PR from hurting the feelings of some weekend white rasta from Danville with facial tattoos and plates in his earlobes. So everybody who needs to get on the bridge out of town because daycare in Oakland closes at 6pm -- for instance-- must sit and wait for the cyclists to work through their daddy issues. Its only redeeming feature is that it may cause some Bay Aryans to rethink their position on gun control.

Such a pity the only thing the citizens of San Francisco have to offer the mayor is their vote. He seems to think that's worth so much less than face time on CNN.

How old I am

Ordinarily I don't give a rat's what those darned foreigners think of our politics, but this is funny. I live for the day when Hill makes reference to her wife....eh... Morgan Fairchild...

Extremely Creative Writing

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0325081sabatino1.html

This is a story about some oaf incarcerated in Florida, I think, who for reasons known to God alone would like to insinuate himself into the murders of some rap 'musicians' some years ago. Big whoop. Even as a pudgy white boy, do you need street cred if you're off the streets? Just asking. He lied to the L.A. Times about it, and they ran with the story without checking the facts. Again? Yawn. Some of the purported evidence was in the form of FBI reports that turned out to be fabricated by the oaf himself. OK, neat. Shows initiative. TSG lays out in minute detail how these reports differ from real FBI reports, in case you wanted to know how to avoid making the mistakes this brain surgeon made. And now you have my attention.

Exactly how retarded are the people at TSG that they'd spell out effective methods for forging FBI reports? OK, the mug shots are cool, and I loved WMOB, but there is such a thing as being too hip. Saying that the reports were forged is one thing. Leaking exactly how on the Internet? When your stock in trade is dissemination of authentic (public) legal documents? Leaving aside the myriad nefarious uses to which people could put that knowledge, didn't you just make your fact checkers' jobs like a million times harder? How long till this bites you in the behind?

Shoot, shovel, and shut up.

One of the arguments made by the limp-wristed surrendering class for giving up on the Global War on Terror is that our actions only serve to create more jihadis. Kind of like Mongo from Blazing Saddles, the huge caveman-looking guy who terrorizes the town. Gene Wilders' character says,"Don't shoot him, you'll just make him mad." I'm not saying jihadis go around hitting horses in the face and knocking them down or anything. They have San Francisco "peace protesters" to do that for them. You never know which way a horse is going to fall.

Anyway, it turns out even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while. They were right. Some of our actions do, in fact, encourage more acts of terror. According to researchers at Harvard University, yet, when the media cover criticism in the United States of the war, or public opinion polls about the conflict -- which always seem to say that the public is against the war -- these media cycles are followed by an increase in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq. They've even come up with a snappy name for it -- an "emboldening effect."

So when your elected representatives blather on about how they support the troops but not the war, when some poisonous harpy from CodePink gets invited to a congressional hearing so she can get hauled out screaming on CSPAN, when every network wails and moans about this or that milestone casualty, the world is, in fact, watching. Watching and planning. When the media gives jihadis the impression that public sentiment is against the war, then more Americans and more Iraqi civilians die. Not that they care.

Comparative religion

Muslims don’t believe Jesus was crucified:

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20080320-125807/M

It seems that the idea of having body doubles around to take your whuppin' for you is one of those grand old Islamic traditions. How very brave they are.

Like they care

The big, above-the-fold, one-inch headline on my local paper this morning is moaning about the fact that our military casualties are disproportionately from the rural areas of the country. Oakland has not lost a single soldier in the last year while Tracy has lost three. Three soldiers from San Francisco have died compared to 20 from Stockton. Berkeley hasn't lost any, but a couple of Marines have been threatened. On Shattuck Ave. The point of the article, I think, is that it's not fair that so many of those people out in flyover country are getting killed so we should just stop fighting and come home. Incidentally, 'flyover country' begins in Walnut Creek; they should just put a sign up at the end of Hwy. 24 that says "Here there be Tygers."

The cities of San Francisco and Berkeley and the county of Marin are mostly populated by the people who were run out of every decent community in the rest of the country. Many act as though their crowning achievement in life was to move here. The local news calls this place "the best place on Earth." No lie. When do you suppose was the last time the Bay Aryans cared about what happens to other, lesser people? They think forcing you to recycle accomplishes something and that observing Cinco de Mayo, the Mexican Arbor Day, means they embrace other cultures. Plus it shuts the help up.

Maybe the people in Tracy and Stockton and Modesto and Antioch care more about this country than people in Oakland or Kensington or Palo Alto. Maybe "rural" people (Stockton's a university town, btw) don't sit around and wait for stuff to happen to them. Maybe they know about good and evil and have no concept of "situational ethics," or they believe in The Truth rather than 'their truth.' Either way, they're protecting SF's butts (which is more than they'll ever do) and making it possible for the menopausal acidheads of Berkeley to stomp their tiny feet and cry for the camera. I only wish we could deport citizens.