The BushCo Legacy

I think we're realizing what it was all about now.

Civil liberties violated in Washington, D.C.

Isn't it a bit creepy to have to answer to the police when you're just driving down the road minding your own business? Wouldn't it be better, if in Washington D.C. they turned the officers loose in the neighborhood to look for criminal activity based on reasonable suspicion, that is, let the police do their jobs, rather than, relying on already weak precedent, add one more crazy step to the blanket destruction of civil liberties? It is very wrong to order police to investigate everyone.

According to this article on the AP wire police in Washington, D.C. have been ordered to stop all vehicle traffic on a specific street, look in vehicles, demand identification, and permit or deny passage. Citing nothing except a crimewave in a torn inner city neighborhood, police decision-makers have crushed your freedom of movement. If you drive down this street, you will have to speak to police, answer questions, show identification. Then they will say whether or not you can drive down the fucking the street.

The final straw is that someone somewhere has decided to play like it's legal for cops to say, "Well, Mr. Jones, we're not going to let you drive down this street, you're going to have to turn around and get out of here."

It's a very old police tactic in poor neighborhoods to find a reason to stop someone and start asking questions about what they are doing there. This is usually because police are suspicious about something criminal.

What's new here is the blanket-approach, first legitimized by sobriety checkpoints, a blanket suspicion where everybody at a certain point gets checked for alcohol consumption. Police devote millions of dollars in overtime wages for this legally shaky activity, while statistics show they find several times more drunks by pulling over people driving like maniacs.

However, with this lazy, scatter-shot approach to law enforcement, in bending civil liberties, whoever it is makes these decisions accomplishes 2 objectives. One, they create what they apparently believe is a deterrent to drinking and driving, although if this kind of thing keeps on going, it will in reality be more like a deterrent to leaving your own house. Two, they believe they score a publicity victory. In their mind, nobody can say they're not tough on alcohol-related crime, by God, just look: they stopped 8,000 drivers in one night and found 15 drunks.

So on one hand you've got ruling by fear, and on the other you've got cop-theatre. So you're not only afraid to leave your own house to pick up that six pack, but you're apprehended on the way to the Quickie Mart, and held up as a shining example of how hard the Police decision-makers are working to prevent drunk driving. Who cares if you've not had a beer since last Thursday? Certainly not the person (more likely a committee, i.e. not just one bonehead but multiple boneheads) who decided to allow this wholesale invasion of privacy and blatant violation of constitutional rights.

But the American people do care. According to the article, Civil Liberties groups, that is, patriotic and gutsy American citizens, will also speak to the folks who are stopped. They will gather data, and eventually will fight, legally, to restore trendy damage to principles that have made the United States of American a wonderful, and free, nation.

Insanity and guns in Arizona

A guy with a geranium in the cranium pulled a cross-town shooting spree Sunday. He poured dozens of shots into the front doors of his back-fence neighbors, and proceeded to drive across the north side of Tucson, managed to shoot 4 policeman, 2 of them in the head. While driving. Using a military-style rifle. One of the officers, who died, had served 21 years in the military and had decided to work for TPD. The kind of cop who is there to serve, to help.

Our governor here in Arizona has vetoed several of the psychopathic bills presented by right-leaning Arizona congresspeople that would have allowed such things as waving your gun in someone's face whenever you want, carrying concealed guns on school campuses, and concealing guns in your car.

The support for such bills seems to come from a kind improvised-cowboy mentality, as if some schmo driving down the road is going to have a chance against a crazy guy with an assault rifle, the kind of guy who not only managed to shoot 4 policeman in an hour on city streets, but whose acquaintances said was way off the deep end and clearly needed to be in a psychiatric hospital.

The signs were everywhere. The guy's mental health is described in this article in the Arizona Daily Star. (Their links only last a couple weeks) He had threated to kill at least 3 people, including the poor girl who went to a highschool prom with him 7 years ago. She had called police, encountered an administrative wall of do-nothingness, and had ended up telling everyone she knew that if something happened to her, to look for this guy.

All this craziness was clearly illustrated on his MySpace page, the focus of the Star's article in the link above. That this guy should have been in a rubber room with a few straightjackets in the closet was clear.

But what happened instead. Looks like his parents bought him a house, nobody lifted a finger to intervene in spite of the obvious signs of serious mental illness.

It may be true that popular trends in mental health care may result in someone like this going away for a month or two but they have a tendency to come back, get scooped up by the police and end up in the jails instead. In this case the only thing to be thankful for was that his over-the-backfence neighbors weren't home, and he did not end up at the University or some other puplic gathering place, like the other horrors we've all read about recently.

Everybody knows there's a problem with folks like this. The poor guy just has a very serious mental disease, adult-onset schizophrenia, it was obvious to everyone he was off his rocker but for some reason he was out walking around, had a car, a house, no need to work. The article said he came over the neighbor's fence to complain about BarBQ smoke. The MySpace page had a photo the crazy guy had taken of the neighbor, along with the death threat.

There's not much of a point to made here, but an obviously insane person should not have had military rifles. It's mostly just sad, and it seems preventable. Mental health sevices, law enforcement, need to change their ways, to look for the signs of someone who is just gone and can't change. Have you ever had to call the police and had the dispatcher say, "well we can't do anything until they hurt you?"

Proliferation of guns is not the answer, the instant cowboy is not the answer. And you don't need a rifle capapble of destroying the house across the street to defend yourself against the kind of people who kick in you door in the middle of the night.

If anything the key lies with acknowledging this kind of thing happens again and again, defining what you see prior to that, and committing some individuals for at least 10 years, forget about helping healthcare organizations maintain their profit margins by letting these poor crazy souls go. It seems like popular medical theory is under corporate influence here. As if it's a sin against corporate dogma to realize that some folks are obviously dangerous. Protecting the rest of us means a life at shady acres is necessary for some folks.

Here is the interactive map of how the crazy guy drove across our pretty foothills neighborhood and filled the town with lead directed at his imaginary adversaries.

Sheldon Brown, 1944-2008

THE bicycle guru Sheldon Brown died in February. He'd been diagnosed w/ MS but apparently it was a heart attack that took his life. If you've never heard of him, he was famous for his encylopedic bicycle website out of Harris Cyclery in West Newton Massachusetts. If you ever need to unstick a stuck seat post, set a proper chainline on a singlespeed, build a wheel, tighten a loose cone, put on new brakes, well you can look it up there and find it explained in clear language with good photos. He was famous in biking circles as a great great mechanic, bicycle advocate, a talented and practical man who shared everything he knew. Before I do anything major to any of my 5 bikes, I always consult his site.

Thank you Sheldon, you continue to be a great influence on all of us riders, and have helped many of us develop decent bike mechanic skills.

Wikepedia has a nice entry on Sheldon, with a good list of relevant links. Here is the gear calculator, a real masterpiece, which you'll certainly appreciate if you're at all geeky about bikes.

Quadruped robot

I think we are finally getting there with the quality of our robot technology. It's like in the 50s they write, "yes we will eventually build robots that move in a fashion eerily similar to animals..."

Boston Dynamics created the robot. But hey, don't kick it, that just seems wrong. Sure it's just a machine that can walk on ice or hustle through the forest, but would you kick your new Prius or your brand new mountain bike?

This thing can carry 340 pounds, climb a 35 degree slope, has a gasoline engine and some nice computers. More about Big Dog here.

Yes I read about it on the wonderful Boing Boing

BushCo National Security incompetency

Philip Shenon's new book The Commission : The Uncensored History Of The 9/11 Investigation fingers Condoleeza Rice in the Bush administration's national security failure of 7 1/2 years ago. This excerpt from Shenon's book published in The Sydney Morning Herald shows the U.S. intellegence apparatus doing its best to warn the Administration about Bin Laden's crazies and just how dangerous they were. The book paints Rice as almost a highly-paid do-nothing, choosing to ignore intelligence and focus instead on promoting the administration, focus on what appears to be PR, game-playing, a big show. As the book follows the 9/11 commission one Richard Clarke emerges as a true soldier, intent on protecting the country. Clarke was at the time the National Security Council's counter-terrorism director. He'd been demoted by the time of the attacks. From the excerpt:

Other parts of the Government did respond aggressively and appropriately to the threats, including the Pentagon and the State Department. On June 21, the US Central Command, which controls American military forces in the Persian Gulf, went to "delta" alert - its highest level - for American troops in six countries in the region. The American embassy in Yemen was closed for part of the summer; other embassies in the Middle East closed for shorter periods.

But what had Rice done at the NSC? If the NSC files were complete, the commission's historian Warren Bass and the others could see, she had asked Clarke to conduct inter- agency meetings at the White House with domestic agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI, to keep them alert to the possibility of a domestic terrorist strike.

More:

Repeatedly in 2001, Clarke had gone to Rice and others in the White House and pressed them to move, urgently, to respond to a flood of warnings about an upcoming and catastrophic terrorist attack by Osama bin Laden. The threat, Clarke was arguing, was as dire as anything that he or the CIA had ever seen.

He pushed for an early meeting in 2001 with Bush to brief him about bin Laden's network and the "nearly existential" threat it represented to the United States. But Rice rebuffed Clarke. She allowed him to give a briefing to Bush on the issue of cyber terrorism, but not on bin Laden; she told Clarke the al-Qaeda briefing could wait until after the White House had put the finishing touches that summer on a broader campaign against bin Laden. She moved Clarke and his issues off centre stage - in part at the urging of Zelikow and the transition team.

Shenon's book seems to offer a thru-the lens glimpse into a shameful and tragic chapter of U.S. history: the bumbling incompetence of an administration created by the most hated and destructive U.S. president of all time.

Amazon.com's reference to Shenon's book is here.


This guy is a hell of a journalist. It should be hilarious to hear what Limbaugh and the other highly-paid fart-generators say about him.

About the author, quoting Amazon:

Philip Shenon is an investigative reporter with The New York Times, based in Washington. He was the lead reporter on the investigation of the September 11 commission and has held several of the most important assignments of the Washington Bureau, including chief Defense Department correspondent, diplomatic correspondent, Congressional correspondent and Justice Department Correspondent. He was one of two Times reporters embedded with American grounds troops during the invasion of Iraq and worked in pre-war Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran for Times foreign staff.

Buddy Miles

Buddy Miles, Hedrix' drummer in the outrageous Band of Gypsies, died Tuesday in Austin Texas, his home. He was 60, died of heart failure. He was also a stroke survivor.

Buddy Miles was one of those singing drummers, playing well and singing well, being the heartbeat of the band and its voice simultaneously. Miles founded the Electric Flag in the 60s and in the 80s was involved in TV advertising-music, singing in the animated claymation ads in the California Raisins.


Band of Gypsies was a milestone in Hendrix' career after the Experience broke up. Three black men playing soul-influenced funk, marked by Hendrix' indelible guitar-power were a bit of a new thing in those days, and reflected the music Hendrix was working on when he died.


"machine gun" pt.1
Black and while uTube videos of the Band of Gypsies are out there, but somehow putting on the original record album, holding the album cover in your hands and looking at its vivid color photographs shows how the music really is, vivid and transfixing and timely.



"them changes" Buddy Miles