Please excuse the redundant title.How stupid would we have to be to allow Bush/Cheney to repeat the Iraq war in Iran given that:

• The financial health of the USA has been decimated by vastly increased spending (trillions of dollars being spent in Iraq)
• The US military is already stretched thin dealing with the mess in Iraq
• The national health care/insurance crisis is leaving more people without health care

I don’t see how we can afford another war either financially or logistically. Not to mention the cost in human life which is conveniently ignored by most of those who are not at risk.Of course, it does seem that every action made by this administration has benefited either Cheney’s former employer (KBR/Halliburton) or large donors to their campaign. Another, larger war would certainly be a boon to the likes of KBR, Blackwater and gang. Have they done anything to make life better for the average US citizen?I also don’t understand why the President of Iran was denied permission to pay his respects at the site of the world trade center, so maybe I’m just out of touch.

Do it now. Or feel the wrath of Mike Lee.

Here’s an interesting bit of US history that it seems like I should have learned in school. Until now I was also under the impression that the focus of the protest at Boston Harbor was a tax increase.

Hewes, who was a teenager at the time of the Tea Party (which he named in 1834), tells that the whole point of this million-dollar (in today’s terms) act of vandalism was to protest a tax cut — a corporate tax break — that the British had given to the East India Company, which would allow it to unfairly compete with and wipe out the thousands of small entrepreneurial tea importers and tea shops that dotted the colonies.

I’d thought I remembered from school that the Tea Act of 1773 was a tax increase, so I had to check the Encyclopedia Britannica, which, sure enough, said that the Tea Act was a tax cut. So what the colonists were protesting was the principle of taxation without representation, but what they meant was what today would be termed “tax breaks for multinational corporations while the average person gets screwed.”

From an interview on buzzflash.com with Thom Hartmann, author of Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights.

An entity known as Pastabagel posted an interesting theory:

When taken together, the desire for and generation of audio and visual noise, what you have is the psychological antithesis of a zen garden. It is the Noise Garden.

It explains a lot about me and some of the people I know. Now to turn off the music, clean my desk, disable twitter updates and get back to work.

via a.wholelottanothing.org

…will be thwarted by firewalls and deemed broken

Security Theater from GovernmentExecutive.com:
Muellers book is filled with statistics meant to put terrorism in context. For example, international terrorism annually causes the same number of deaths as drowning in bathtubs or bee stings. It would take a repeat of Sept. 11 every month of the year to make flying as dangerous as driving. Over a lifetime, the chance of being killed by a terrorist is about the same as being struck by a meteor. Muellers conclusions: An Americans risk of dying at the hands of a terrorist is microscopic. The likelihood of another Sept. 11-style attack is nearly nil because it would lack the element of surprise. America can easily absorb the damage from most conceivable attacks. And the suggestion that al Qaeda poses an existential threat to the United States is ridiculous. Muellers statistics and conclusions are jarring only because they so starkly contradict the widely disseminated and broadly accepted image of terrorism as an urgent and all-encompassing threat.

via Bruce Schneier

Read this for a well written example of how telcos and their lobbyists (aka the FCC) are looting the public treasury in the United States.

It is just one more example of the brazen profiteering of US corporations at the expense of the public. The scariest example seems to be the huge number of private contractors that are doing the jobs that the military used to do in Iraq. There are almost as many private individuals representing the US in Iraq as there are military personnel. Some claim that these private firms are doing the grunt work so that the military can focus on what they do best, but that doesn’t explain why they are paid many times more than the soldiers who are taking higher risks. Is it a coincidence that the corporation that profits the most from the Iraq war is the one that was led by the current vice president? The man should be in prison. Not just any prison, but the deepest, darkest, hellish nightmare hole of a prison.

Forget that wussy orphan guy, this is how a real hero talks. In the immortal words of John Smeaton:

“me and other folk were just tryin to get the boot in and some other guy banjoed him”

Don’t take my word for it, hear the prophet Smeaton himself:

Also on CNN

I’ve picked some some really great music lately… not necessarily new releases, but great stuff that is worth checking out:

Kinky – Reina – Really fun mix of electronic and analog. Great Mexican band.

Gomez – Liquid Skin and Bring it On. Just unbelievable music. wow.

Gruff Rhys – Candylion. Jesse and I caught his show at the Liquid Room at the end of April. Some light/acoustic stuff from the Super Furry Animals lead singer. The person who took these videos must have been directly behind us.

There is an article in the latest UVA alumni magazine about Conor Grennan, a graduate of UVA (around the same time as me) who started an orphanage in Nepal and helps to reunite trafficked and otherwise lost/stolen children with their families. He has left behind the “American dream” of huge SUVs and McMansions in order to improve the lives of poor children. From the article it seems that he was a typical UVA undergraduate. Who would have thought he would become one of my heroes?