Casting Day at the American Political Theater

Ah, it's Election Day in the U S of A.  This is the day that Americans head to the polls to choose the actors for many roles in the political theater to follow for the next two years.  For WARRiors who click through from foreign lands, and for those Americans who still don't get it, the way this works in most states is you go to a polling station and enter your vote on an electronic voting device that is produced by private corporation with proprietary software that the public isn't allowed to inspect, don't have to produce auditable paper receipts, and are notoriously vulnerable to hacking, which has led many cases of vote tally irregularities since Bush pushed for the Help America Vote Act.

Electronic voting is definitely easier than the kind of skullduggery that the CIA used to get Buddhist-monk-killer Ngo Dihm Diem elected Prez of Vietnam in 1955 or the FNLA in Angola in 1964.  ...Not to mention all the trouble Jeb must have gone through to get his lil' bro' in office in 2000 by purging blacks from the voter rolls, or the strange case of ballot paper switch that led to the hanging chad fiasco.  Unfortunately, it most probably means that American democracy has been hijacked in the last few elections, according to professors from University of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley among others.  No wonder so many people in the U.S. are completely fed up with Congress going into this election.  They don't respond to what the voters want, because the voters aren't the ones who put them in office.

Dudley Do-Right Likes Beer! Happy Halloween, Eh!

I love my neighbors to the north.  That would be Canada, eh.  They really know how to incentivize good civic behavior.  Such is the story of this man, a modern day Dudley Do-Right who put himself in harms way to protect Canadian Parliament from an armed gunman.

 "Canadian mounted, baby, a police force that works..."  Alain Gervais, a government security guard, was rewarded for his heroism with...  A LIFETIME SUPPLY OF BEER!  And just in time for the holiday season, too!

The Obama Administration should take note of this, since a guy recently jumped the White House fence, sprinted past the guards, and made it all the way into the White House with a knife.  How he managed to do that when an old guy like me was getting assholed around by Secret Service just for standing on the sidewalk by the Eisenhower building this summer is beyond me.  More amazing is that it happened a second time weeks later.  Both men were returning U.S. Army veterans.  But that's beside the point.  Maybe instead of making our returning vets wait for months to receive critical services due to the backlog scandal at the Veterans Administration we should do as the Canadians do and give them all free beer for life.

That would certainly take the edge off of Gulf War Syndrome.  Then again I would much prefer that the U.S. government stops treating the American military as a mercenary force for some New World Order so international banking interests can profit while the American taxpayer foots the bill.  And don't fucking tell me I don't support the troops!  Most of them that I've talked don't understand what they Hell they are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan anyway.  Bring The Boys Back Home!  And give them free beer!  The way to fight fundamental Islamic terrorists is to send American hard core bands to the Middle East.

World War 1: Putin and Russia's New Perspective

I've been personally disappointed by the lack of recognition and public ceremony in the U.S. over the 100th anniversary of WWI, or "The Great War," as the Brits like to call it.  WWI is one of my favorite and most studied periods of world history and is still probably the seminal event of the last two centuries.  Obama and other European leaders gathered at the Menin Gate in Ypres earlier this year, but the even was largely ignored in America.  Russia had its own ceremony and the speech is really quite revealing of how Vladimir Putin and modern Russia and look back on its past.  Instead of venerating the Bolsheviks and murderers like Trotsky and Lenin, he calls them out for what they really were--not altruistic communists, but thieves who "sought only power for themselves."  Putin's view of the Russian Civil War of 1918, one can presume, is decidedly more White than Red.

Ebola: Did Dallas Nurse Have One of These?

The CDC is taking heat for blaming America's first case of ebola transmission on the Dallas nurse who caught it, saying it was a "protocol breach" of protective gear.  CDC Director Tom Friedman, might want to look in the mirror when it comes to protocol breaches.  Ebola is a  Bio-Safety Level 4 pathogen.  In addition to Dallas, hospitals in Seattle, Omaha, Washington, and Boston either have or are preparing to take ebola patients.  I don't think any of them look like this:  Popular Mechanics magazine took us inside a BSL4 facility in 2007 (notice PM in '07 mentions that ebola could even spread with a sneeze).

BSL4 protocol checklist....   Vacuum sealed suits?  Nope.  Building in a building?  Nope.  Compression chamber?  Nada.  Separate HEPA filter HVAC system that removes everything down to .0003 microns?  Nyet.  Separate water decon system?  Absent.  Okay...  So who's breaching protocol, Mr. Friedman?  According the CDC's own BSL standards checklist, it doesn't even appear that BSL2 was reached at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.

Fukushima Radiation vs Ebola Outbreak

The contrast between news coming out on the Fukushima nuclear meltdown and the ebola outbreak could not be more stark.  The mainstream media is completely saturated with news of the ebola virus outbreak.  The Obama Administration's refusal to restrict air travel from Africa is already becoming an election issue in America.  This is as it should be, because ebola is a very scary disease.  It is overwhelming west-central Africa and kills about 70% of its victims in short order.  Now Europe and America are experiencing their first cases of ebola.

On the other hand, radiation from the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown is already in the U.S.  It's also been revealed that mixed oxide fuel rods were in use at Fukushima and we can count deadly plutonium among the radioactive isotopes released.  The Vancouver Sun reported that seaweed samples taken off British Columbia had tested at 4x safe limits for radiation.  The New York Times reports "low levels" of radiation in U.S. milk samples.  There has also been massive mortality among fish on the West Coast, including sardines, starfish, salmon, and other sea life.  Mainstream media won't speculate on radiation, though it's interesting that radiation from the Fukushima 3/11 event arrived on the West Coast in March 2014, about the time these anomalies in the coastal ecosystem became present.  And about 80,000 gallons of contaminated water from Fukushima continues to pour into the Pacific each day to bioaccumulate in the food chain.

A Naomi (Were)Wolf in London

I like Naomi Wolf now.  Like me, she's a reformed OTT Devil Dog for a progressive charge, who at some point realized after charging into some No Man's Land, that it was not all it was meant to be.  Eye deep in Hell, she began to see things more clearly.

Naomi has long been a leader of the feminist vangard.  I bought and read her 1997 book, "Promiscuities," and understood it's point, but felt it was extremely one-sided.  Was my experience as an awkward, young stud-supposed-to-be really so different from the pressures she described for young women?  In this scene from An American Werewolf In London, she (Nurse Alex) confronts the wolf of man and in his demise, sees his tragic vulnerability.  She realizes then that he was cursed and that she loves the beast being hunted.

Cryogenic Future World?

A few weeks ago, the United States had rallies in many cities to draw attention to the threat of global warming, or more generally, climate change.  Now that is a subject itself, because what does one mean by "global warming?"  Does that mean "the earth's atmosphere is heating up and we need to understand and do something about it" or does it mean Al Gore's Imminent Apocalypse theory?  Might the reality of the situation lie somewhere in between?  My problem with such movements is when questioning the magnitude of the variables involved in climate change draws accusations of "global warming denial."  I didn't graduate with honors from a major research university for being a "blathering idiot," Congressman DeFazio.

Someday I'll go deeper into the global warming equation and models, but for now I'll go straight to the point that there's also significant evidence that the world is only a decade away from dipping into another Little Ice Age.