Perception Management

Rendon Group : engineering consent. See this article in Rolling Stone. Paid 16 million by BushCo to fuck with your mind. Now look at the result.

Score one for Darwin

People are voting to stop the supression of scientific evidence. We are sick of bone-headed caveman rightwing bullshit attempts to put up twisted interpretations of the bible and twisted interpretations of reality as scientific theory.

From this article in the New York Times regarding recent schoolboard elections in Deleware [Pennsylvania, not Deleware]:

On Tuesday, the residents of Dover ousted all eight school board members running for re-election who had put their town in a global spotlight and their school district on trial for being the first in the nation to introduce intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in science class. In swept the full Dover Cares slate of eight candidates, which had coalesced to oppose the change in the science curriculum.

Watch The ACLU Freedom Files November 9th or 24th 2005 at at 8 pm EDT/PDT. Also available at www.aclutv.com starting November 11 2005. The American Civil Liberties Union is an important voice in this time when BushCo is stepping all over basic consititutional rights. This week's episode of the ACLU Freedom Files features Lewis Black - from Comedy Central's The Daily Show - providing a funny, biting commentary on the state of dissent in America.

White phosphorus

Nightmare.

And I thought the use of depleted uranium (which burns armor but then leaves behind radiation) was horrible.

See this story in the 11/7/05 UK Independant.

--Phosphorus bombs ("Willy Pete") and an enhanced form of Napalm known as Mark 77 were supposedly used over there, in Falujah, a year ago. All this according a documentary being released by RAI," an Italian state media organization, called Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre.

Was this really necessary? Are there better things our tax dollars should be spent on?

Who runs our country? Cheney does

And who fucks it up? Same person. That rat Cheney.

Who pulls the puppet strings? Why is this guy there? Beats me.

See James Carrol's 11/7/05 column in the Boston Globe for a pretty good rundown of Cheney career highlights going back to the Nixon days.

Let me tell you, this guy might make a pretty good petty tyrant in a McDonald's or a Walmart in Peoria, yelling at minumun wage employees and etc, but he should not be vice president and he should not be dominating the president.

Political Ringtones (via boingboing)

Now this is fucking wierd- at first glance. But it makes sense, and it's funny. "Brownie yer doin' a wonderful job" overlaid on the old song "City of New Orleans." -Every time your cellphone rings!!

How about Bush's "we wanna keep all options on the table" juxtaposed with an air-raid siren sample from that guy's website at www.airraidsirens.com? (cool site- full of air-raid siren samples, video, mechanical breakdowns of how they work, etc. If you grew up in the 60's like I did you remember them testing the sirens weekly all over town- it was on Thursdays, I believe, in Sacramento. These days here in Tucson they blow the air raid siren daily at noon on Davis Monthan Air Force Base- a mournful, chilling, deeply disturbing sound you can hear in my neighborhood about 3 miles away. This is nothing, however, compared to the sound of these fuckers going off all over town- shudder. There is a defunct siren not far from here that I see on my morning ride to work- I'll have to photograph it and post it here asap!!)

Anyways, we used to make sound cut-ups with Reagan crap years ago. I don't think there will ever again be a King of the Idiots quite as grand as Reagan was, although Bush is equally pitiful and a good bit scarier.

The UK Guardian calls it "pressure"

Jeeze: This article in the UK Guardian says it all right now: Eastern Europe former Gulag sites are apparently now being used by the good old US for storing "terror detainees." All the records of this should be public, but they are not. Secrecy in government once again shows its ugly face.

Secret Prisons

Secret prisons are not secret anymore. This just does not sound like my country. I just sense something really horrible and ill about this. Rundown of the story is here in Newsday. ...Once again AZ Senator McCain figures prominently, speaking out against torture and things that are just plain wrong.

C'mon people, where are our tax dollars going? Secret prisons? Is it not time we all start wondering about such things?

Plenty of conservatives (McCain is one) have had it with this crap. Another prominent idea that seems to be behind what I see as a split in the Republican party and a massive loss of NeoCon power is the idea that the military should be for defense, i.e. for defending the U.S, that the military should not be spread thin overseas, leaving us here at home vulnerable to some catastrophe or other. Maybe that's what they want. Who knows what the Neocons will pull when they are driven to the wall, and the pattern of dishonesty, deception, deceit, disregard for the law, and destruction becomes increasingly exposed.

Other thoughts:
How long will it be before we start seeing pictures of u.s. prison inmates in hoods? How long before prisoners are exposed to cold temperatures, shocked, threatened with dogs, exposed to extremely loud noise, etc?

The press is fuctioning, at least somewhat. Things that're happening are at least getting reported. What a ray of hope. You can bet the spin at Fox and thru Limbaugh and his clones is in a heavy gear. I ought to be comparing some of the statements from that camp w/ others, ought to be holding them both up to quick analysis vs. accepted principles of journalistic integrity, vs. recognized attributes of persuasion.

I really think BushCo is on the run -always has been, in fact. That's what happens when a company weaves a web like that. But what will they pull next? I mean, it's getting popular for people to say, "hey, it's about time for one of their famous diversions of public attention!" -jokingly. The point is this strategy, knowledge of it, that is, used to be kind of esoteric. So, I think it'll be a "take wind out your sails argument-" maybe doing nothing, making no comment while working furiously to fix things behind the scenes, or else some crisis, real or otherwise, to divert people's minds from our fucked-up invasion, our fucked-up reasons for doing it, and the fact that people are not so divided as the Neocons want us to be.

Divided over a canard. I've said it before- we all want the same things: safety, family life, jobs, the chance to excel, succeed, do something good with our lives, socialbility, health, happiness, freedom. I used to think people were coming together when Clinton was president, then I started seeing us all somehow divided, mostly over a bunch of bone-head, primitive, old fashioned ideas that don't even deserve public debate.

Update to Road Rage

Saturday I headed west and joined Daily Ride for a trip up and down the Santa Cruz river. Afterward I took the road SS up A Mountain and felt pretty strong for a change. Took the previously mentioned route home via the industrial Aviation Corridor. Found the connecting road link to the Golf Links Rd. bike trail and the route home. The hell, I connected with the same route I use to get to Fantasy Island (when I ride out there rather than drive) and goddamn if I couldn't take a mountainbike on this city ride and hit F/I on the way home.

Road Rage

After the meeting yesterday it was noon and I knew I was a free man for the rest of the week. Naturally I headed to No Anchovies for a couple of slices and a glass of Nimbus.

I decided even tho I didn't have my bike shorts I'd take a long ride home. I settled on the Aviation corrider via 4th Avenue. Not bad at all. You get to cross the snake-bridge and go thru that odd neighborhood south of the Country House (now called Chafin's- it's the place that used be a Sambo's, and where you still get huge amounts of potatoes with your eggs and kind of bad, wood-tasting coffee). Hit the corridor and it's kind of uphill along the route across from the tracks. It looks like you're riding in a storm drain in some places, and there's graffiti, and it smells like sewers. You pass thru neighborhoods of people who have a lot of cars in their yards, home-made hand-welded barBQ's, and industrial places like car repair shops, fleet maintenance businesses and etc.

If you follow the trail to the end you get dumped out by the west edge of the base, about a quarter mile from Nimbus brewery. It's inhospitable w/o a mountain bike around that part, but not inacessible. I kind of had a tough time getting to the bike trail that follows along Golf Links, but it *looks* like if you catch 36th st. near the end of the corridor, 36th will dump you off right across from the bike trail, and there's a traffic light to get you across the howling, anonymous concrete stretch of highway.

In fact, that whole area looks like something out of a J.G. Ballard book, highways going everywhere, concrete walls, and patches of land in between with nothing but mesquites- no trash, no homeless, no rocks, just totally forgotten invisible patches of dirt, mostly triangular in shape. Ballard's book I'm thinking of is Concrete Island- people get stuck in one of those places and have to live there indefinitely.

So, you get to follow the bike trail east along Golf Links along a huge rock filled wash, thick w/ mesquites. There are fake rocks along the trail here and there, w/ graffiti, one of them smashed so you can see its hollow inside. Swan is a mile. You cross, head north thru a huge deserted park and past more backyards of an inexpensive neighborhood, across 29th, across 22nd, and as you approach Broadway you see the big dumb skyscraper you can see from my backyard. From there it's a half mile to my house. About 15 miles, I believe- I can't find my detailed city-map to check it out tho.

Anyway, a pretty good street ride, but it's over too quick- a half hour after you get warmed up, in fact.

Adding to the ride would be along the lines of, say, starting from my house, heading north to the Rillito river trail, catching it at Craycroft, then going west. There is a mile of dirt between Country Club and Campbell- nothing street bikes couldn't handle. Near Campbell, there are dozens of variations on a foothills street hill-climb-loop that can be added. I think then down Mountain, hit No Anchovies for beer and food, west to 4th ave, go south and hit the Aviation Corridor, and home via the route I just described above. If it's a festive occasion, hit Nimbus on the way home for more beer!!

Other options are adding a loop up A Mountain. Or heading to the end of the Rillito in the west, then south to the downtown/ UA area. The (street) connection between the west end of the Rillito and paved part of the Santa Cruz river trail is fuzzy, but it's there. Someday they'll pave the stretch of the trail north of Grant; they're definitely planning that.

Anyway the point is that this street ride is something approaching your San Fran city loop, in terms of distance, difficulty, and the idea of circling the whole city.