On the Contrary

Mark Sanford won in South Carolina. I guess the fine folks of that state would elect a Republican chimp before a Democrat (and that would be a step up in this case). But hey, when they went for George Bush in 2004 after four horrible years, I guess they are untrainable. With what is going on in North Carolina in voter suppression, the refusal to look at evidence in Georgia in a rush to execute a black man, the NRA convention in Huston with Governor Rick Perry, and the reinventing of “Northern Aggression” instead of facing the abomination that was slavery, I can’t help wondering if we would have been better served if we had let them secede back in Lincoln’s day. The one thing I keep wonder is whether black people get out and vote. Because if they don’t, they have no one to blame but themselves.*

Update: The District was “re-districted” to be majority white. I would guess fat too as most fat white people, except me, are Republicans.

Okay, I have never been much of a fan of this event which seems like pomp and circumstance and talking heads for hours, leading up to a 3 minute event. Mint Julips, silly hats, people strutting around (mostly white people except for the people working in the stables and a first time black jockey. What year is this again?). Then a bunch of very rich people in the winners circle. All I can think of is that this is a classic example of the two Americas we live in and this one has very little to do with the common experience of most of us. I did like the horses though.

As I sit on my patio and look back over the events of the Boston bombing, I think some conclusions can be drawn. The media continues to cover it 24-7 in what appears to be nothing more (the victims would take issue here) than a sad crime of two kids. The “experts” need a jihadst plot because that is what they know and can be paid to provide advice on. But it isn’t. It is the sad tale of two lost souls who could be anybody. And maybe that is what scares them. This kind of mindless violence is almost impossible to detect and stop. Anybody see the Oklahoma bomber or Newton coming?

Forgive me for my irreverence, but this is a story of incompetence and amateur hour every step of the way. That does not just include the bombers and their friends, but the media and their experts seeing great planning and skill in this attack. I saw just the opposite and saw it as some kind of local attack of two young guys acting out some video game fantasy of empowerment and righteousness. So lets see how the data supports this.

• The bombs were crude and fairly easily constructed
• The target was not stategic or selected to make a real terrorist statement
• We find out that the original bombs were planned to go off July the 4th, but hey, they are ready early

Continue reading ‘Boston Bombing Conspiracy – Not!’ »

No posting today as I am taking my favorite person who can never be mentioned here to Oakland Coliseum to see the A’s. Oh and some fans on Amtrak getting an early start.

Okay, a little reality: It is time to understand what the real issues are and get focused, and there is ony one, the economy. Sadly on that one we have been doing all the wrong things and it looks like we are going continue down that path in the face of overwhelming data at this point that we are in a Keynesian world. But wait, we have serious issues facing us with bombing and now Syria you say. Baloney.

Let’s start with the bombing. It was two angry young men and amateur hour. If you want to be worried, then it just says the boy next door can be crazy and make bombs (How to make bombs in the kitchen of your Mom) and set them off, and there is not much you can do to stop them. Get over it. It was a horrible criminal act, but not a world conspiracy. Do you know how many we kill with guns every year? Do you know how many people kill each other while texting while driving?

Continue reading ‘Stay Focused’ »

When it became clear that the bombers in Boston had constructed their bomb out of a pressure cooker, I wanted to know more about it. My theory is that this whole event is two guys playing out some male fantasy much like a video game slaughter, more like the Columbine shooters or the Newtown shooter as opposed to some international terrorist plot. They may have been radicalized, but this was a local grown and executed stupidity in my mind. To see if the details of their attack matched my supposition, especially that the bomb materials were readily available, and that instructions were out there on the internet so this, in fact, could have been something dreamed up and executed by two guys surfing the net, I decide to search for those instructions.

So I type into my search engine, “how to make a pressure cooker bomb” and then my fingers froze over the enter key. Wait a minute! Will I end up on somebody’s watch list because I was searching for how to build one of these things? Will I be flying some where and find out I can’t get on an airplane because I asked the question? Will I languish in some airport detained by TSA trying to explain that I am not a terrorist? Yes they do monitor all this stuff. Remember the secret room in the AT&T switch room back in the Bush days?

I see myself in an interrogation room with two Feds and the questioning goes something like this:

Fed: So why were you trying to find out how to make a bomb?

Me: I didn’t want to make a bomb, I just wanted to know how so I could write this blog.

Fed: Right. Knowing how to make a bomb frees up all your creative juices. Really how does making a bomb help you with your blog. Are you trying to pass it on to your fellow terrorists?

Me: No! No! No! I wanted to prove the two bombers in Boston could have done this without any help. I wanted to prove the “experts” wrong about some international conspiracy…

Fed: You mean those “experts” on the News? Everybody knows they are full of ….

Me: Right, but I wanted to prove it.

Fed: But that is self evident. Your story is full of holes. Cuff him Fred (Fred is the other Fed).

Me: No! No! No! Call my wife she will verify my story!

Fed: We already talked with her and she says she has no idea what you do in that office of yours. She says you have radical political ideas and you are always mumbling about what idiots everyone else are. Also you are damn messy.

Me: Wait! When has a Democrat ever done anything like that? We usually turn the other cheek and have you ever seen a Democrat actually be successful at organizing? I am a registered Democrat!

Fed: Hmm. Good point. Can you prove you are a registered Democrat?

Me: Ask anyone where I live, they all think I am crazy. They are all Republicans.

Fed: Crazy enough to build a bomb?

Me: No, but crazy enough to believe we don’t need AK-47s to protect us, that gay marriage is okay, we actually need to create jobs right now not cut the debt, immigrants are good for our country, and here is the clincher, global warming is real!!

Fed: Well Fred, I don’t think he is going to build a bomb because with ideas like that he would probably just blow himself up if he tried, so let him go. He is only a danger to himself. Of course in the old days we could have rendered him to a black site and finally had a confession for who actually moved all those WMDs out of Iraq before we got there.

Okay, back to reality. Now, the information is out there according to the news media, and in order to understand what they did and what expertise it would take, I really needed to know how to make one, and how to build a trigger. The explosions were about 10 seconds apart so were they timers or was that something like a garage door opener or cell phone that set them off? Several of the “experts” were claiming they would have had to be trained to pull it off, both to build the bomb and have them go off that close together. I wanted to see if that was true and In order to do that, I needed to understand how to assemble a bomb to see if they could do it.

Sadly, I choose not to continue. I am sure with a determined search I could have found it. And it is certainly information that is not classified. But I didn’t. I just did not like the idea of calling that kind of attention to myself and raising questions about who I am which is a fat old white guy who has a small vineyard and the term bombed in my mind refers to my state after too much fruit of the vine. I guess it is a sign of the times. I still like to know more about IEDs, how they are built, and how to defuse them, but maybe I will just take apart my lawn mower and pretend it is a bomb.

If you think about it, and you throw away all the radical jihadist plot theories, it really is amazing what two young men can do with legally available materials to shut down a whole major city, have more police in one place that I believe we have ever seen ever, take over all the news in the country, and have almost every agency in the federal government, including the Presidency, focused on their activities.  Is this a great country or what?

UPDATE: 4/18/2013 I watched the two suspects walk through the crowd and something said Columbine to me. We will know soon enough.

Watching the coverage of the bombing tragedy was painful at best. Speculation and conjecture ruled the airways and confused fact with opinion and the need to get face time on the air. I am always a little suspicious when the head of anything releases a statement and especially politicians. You know they are repeating second or third hand information to get their face on the television and you never know when they get their information mixed up and give us bad information or say something they shouldn’t. That coupled with my memory of the Atlanta Olympics security guard that the press picked as the culprit along with misguided law enforcement, makes me very leery of the reporting which resulted in ruining his life and his health. It turned out he really was the hero trying to save people when that bomb went off and the culprit was a right to life nut.

But having said that, and in the spirit of wild irresponsible conjecture that pervades the airways and having as much insight as the “experts” we have been listening to, let me just say that my gut tells me this thing was local. Now remember that my gut told me to marry my first wife and to have that third dozen raw oysters, and neither turned out well so judge this accordingly. I think it was local because it was the Boston Marathon and you have to ask yourself why? Why not Fenway earlier in the day (or the crowds outside the park)? Why not the T in an enclosed and contained area? In other words there were better terrorist targets. And the target area was swarming with cops. I could not help wondering why you would not hit the start of the race if your target was the runners themselves.

Second, why four hours into the race. Some speculated that this was when many runners were finishing and their friends and relatives would be gathered, but who would know that? Someone local and familiar with the race would, but a person of interest described as a Saudi national? And as much as Bostonians like to think of this as a big international event, it is really a very big local event, of great interest to many American runners, but it really is not some giant international competition where I would think you would want to make some international statement. That is why my gut keeps saying a local perp with a local grudge.

There are other things that bother me. The original news reported a powerful explosion and one expert told us how well coordinated this was. Really? Two fairly crude devices going off within 10 seconds of each other and maybe others that failed (we now know there weren’t any others)? What we know now is that the bombs were fairly small (but lethal) and were not constructed of high explosives like plastique. They were described as unidirectional indicating maybe pipe bombs (this morning indications of pressure cookers). It would seem to my gut that these were homemade devices of fairly simple construction, not some grand scheme of an international terrorist organization. They were placed in trash cans (I think) along the finish line. Again this makes my gut think a lone perp with a grudge to say something domestic to Boston and America did this.

But of course I am probably totally wrong just as all the speculation on the television. We ought to let the facts settle out before we make these kinds of judgements shouldn’t we? Of course where would the entertainment value be for our news media if we just reported the facts and tried not to leap to giant conclusions or identify persons of interest? How would all those high paid anchors and experts get their face time if they could not speculate based on nothing, like I just did? But I write a blog that nobody reads. These people have the nation’s focus. Kind of scary isn’t it?

Oh and for those gun nuts, right after the explosion I saw lots of drawn guns, It didn’t do much good did it? What we needed were more camera’s in public places, but of course that would violate our right to privacy because you might catch me stepping out on my wife with my girl friend (full disclosure: I do not have a girlfriend except the one I am married to) . All and all a horrific day. And if you noted the time this was written, no I can’t sleep with the thought of this horrible tragedy banging around inside my head. Why are people so cruel to each other when life is hard enough as it is?

And one last thought. While the investigation continues, why doesn’t the media cover all the stories of Bostonians helping out each other and the visitors to the city that were displaced by this tragedy. That is the real story about this attack on this City.

For someone like me, who is a news junky, it is hard to understand the political events in the United States today, or more to the point, how could Americans elect these morons to our Congress who prevent even the simplest of common sense measures from being implemented? To wit, you have to wonder why:

• It is such a big deal that we even get to talk about gun legislation reform in the Senate
• Middle America and the South are trying to turn back women’s right by 70 years passing laws that severely restrict access to legal abortions or even contraception counseling, and are clearly unConstitutional
• Immigration reform is a no brainer and I would love for “them” to take my job in the vineyard if I could find any of “them” to do it (yes I have a small vineyard). And don’t get me started on how important the DREAM Act is
• Austerity is a proven loser, yet both the President’s budget and the the Republican’s budget plan are simply austerity lite, and austerity full bodied
• Global warming is real, oil and gas companies are the most profitable companies in the world, and we can’t even talk about a carbon tax to compensate for the damage they are doing to the environment
• And don’t even get me started on the tax code and how we are transferring wealth to the wealthy or wanting solve our deficit problem totally on the backs of the poor

Anyway you get the drift. We have real problems with simple solutions and nothing happens. And then last night I finally understood why and it is not because Americans are stupid. Well, some of them are. How else do you explain Michele Bachmann, Alan West, Rand Paul (reinventing history in front of the students of Howard University), Louie Gomez, and Joe Wilson, to name a few? It is because most Americans are simply not paying attention. They don’t know the facts. Apparently they don’t get up in the morning and start the day with three newspapers, Kugman, Wonkblog, Plumb Line, Beat the Press, and a few other blogs, then listen to the news and analysis during the day. They have lives and they are busy trying to make ends meet while raising their families. They are worried about enough stuff and want a little less aggravation in their lives.

My insight came from listening (yes another news show I never miss) to a Rachel Maddow interview with Nicole Hockley, one of the Moms of one the kids murdered at Newtown. This brave*, well spoken, and intelligent woman was putting her emotional well being out there to try to make a difference, “to summon the strength to lead us”. Rachel was questioning her on how that personal involvement had made all the difference when it came to overcoming the filibuster in the Senate and she said:

I have been told we are making a difference. To me this is just common sense. So when we started off going to Connecticut and we were told this is what is going to happen and we pretty much think it is stopping here. We wanted it to go a little further. It did not go quite as far as we hoped and then the provisions were strengthen and that was a really good result for a bipartisan committee to come together like that and deliver the strongest gun legislation in the country. And in the Senate, yeah, going this past week and I would admit I did not even know what a filibuster was and when I understood what it was I thought what a ridiculous concept that the government would not even debate this….

Here is a woman who I think is more intelligent and well spoken than I am for sure, and yet really, until this tragedy, had no concept of what was really going on in Washington. Now hopefully she is pointing it out to the rest of America. But that is really the issue here and I don’t know the answer. We have a participatory democracy the depends on an informed electorate and it takes this kind of horrible and unspeakable evil to get us to pay attention? It just occurs to me that all the other really stupid stuff we are doing right now and all the important stuff we are not doing is probably because most of us are not paying attention and thinking critically about these events. We all have lives, and families, and we don’t want our days consumed with politics. Yet if we don’t pay attention, government runs amok. Somehow, we have to get reconnected so we put people in office who are making sense, and we don’t get blindsided by their stupidity when something like this happens and we find out how bad things have gotten.

UPDATE: SENATOR MURPHY OF CONNECTICUT: “Murphy said it was hard, flying down on Air Force One with the trepidatious Sandy Hook families, to explain that they would be lobbying to get a vote on a vote. “They thought they were coming down here to argue for a ban on high-capacity magazines and universal background checks, and we told them that they were coming to argue to avert a filibuster and allow us to debate,” he said. “And that was really heartbreaking and deflating for some of them. But they rose to the occasion, and it was wonderful to see them at the end of the trip feeling like they had made a difference.”

*I lost a daughter so I know her pain and I can not imagine her courage to reopen that pain every day to make politicians see the human impact of their policies. I would give anything to bring back all their children, and that certainly starts will all my guns. It is so little a price to pay for what is really important in our lives.

I was reading the papers this morning (actually reading their e-editions) and it occurred to me that they are giving us three truly important rules to live by:

• If you want a policy to fail, compromise with Republicans (See Loopholes in gun laws allows buyers to skirt background checks (note in this article that Republicans have passed legislation that prevents the ATF from keeping data on effective enforcement policy, and Rough outlines of Senate immigration reform emerges
• If religious conservatives don’t like it, it is probably a good idea. I could mention gay marriage but what is most interesting was this article about establishing basic scientific educational standards, that of course they oppose (New Guidelines call for broad changes in science education. The corollary to this rule is, if the South or middle America doesn’t like it, count me in.
• Oh and my favorite, If a proposal is bipartisan and centralist, it is paid for by the poor and middle class, is a capitulation to the Right, and even so, is going nowhere. See The President’s Budget

I believe we have some real wisdom to live by. Who said reading the news just depresses us?