Murphy's Laws of Combat

1. If the enemy is in range, so are you.
2. Incoming fire has the right of way.
3. Don't look conspicuous, it draws fire.
4. There is always a way, and it usually doesn't work.
5. The problem with the easy way out is that it has already been mined.
6. Try to look unimportant, they may be low on ammo.
7. Professionals are predictable, it's the amateurs that are dangerous.
8. The enemy invariably attacks on two occasions:
when you're ready for them.
when you're not ready for them.
9.Teamwork is essential, it gives them someone else to shoot at.
10. If you can't remember, then the claymore IS pointed at you.
11. The enemy diversion you have been ignoring will be the main attack.
12. A "sucking chest wound" is nature's way of telling you to slow down.
13. If your attack is going well, then it's an ambush.
14. Never draw fire, it irritates everyone around you.
15. Anything you do can get you shot, including nothing.
16. If you build yourself a bunker that's tough for the enemy to get into quickly, then you won't be able to get out of it quickly either.
17. Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than yourself.
18. If you're short of everything but the enemy, you're in a combat zone.
19. When you've secured the area, don't forget to tell the enemy.
20. Never forget that your weapon is made by the lowest bidder.
21. Friendly fire isn't.
22. If the sergeant can see you, so can the enemy.
23. Never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down, never stay awake when you can sleep.
24. The most dangerous thing in the world is a second lieutenant with a map and a compass.
25. There is no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole.
26. A grenade with a seven second fuse will always burn down in four seconds.
27. Remember, a retreating enemy is probably just falling back and regrouping.
28. If at first you don't succeed call in an air-strike.
29. Exceptions prove the rule, and destroy the battle plan.
30. Everything always works in your HQ, everything always fails in the colonel's HQ.
31. The enemy never watches until you make a mistake.
32. One enemy soldier is never enough, but two is entirely too many.
33. A clean (and dry) set of BDU's is a magnet for mud and rain.
34. Whenever you have plenty of ammo, you never miss. Whenever you are low on ammo, you can't hit the broad side of a barn.
35. The more a weapon costs, the farther you will have to send it away to be repaired.
36. Field experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
37. Interchangeable parts aren't.
38. No matter which way you have to march, its always uphill.
39. If enough data is collected, a board of inquiry can prove ANYTHING.
40. For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism. (in boot camp)
41. The one item you need is always in short supply.
42. The worse the weather, the more you are required to be out in it.
43. The complexity of a weapon is inversely proportional to the IQ of the weapon's operator.
44. Airstrikes always overshoot the target, artillery always falls short.
45. When reviewing the radio frequencies that you just wrote down, the most important ones are always illegible.
46. Those who hesitate under fire usually do not end up KIA or WIA.
47. The tough part about being an officer is that the troops don't know what they want, but they know for certain what they DON'T want.
48. To steal information from a person is called plagiarism. To steal information from the enemy is called gathering intelligence.
49. The weapon that usually jams when you need it the most is the M60.
50. The perfect officer for the job will transfer in the day after that billet is filled by someone else.
51. When you have sufficient supplies & ammo, the enemy takes 2 weeks to attack. 52. When you are low on supplies & ammo the enemy decides to attack that night.
52. The newest and least experienced soldier will usually win the Congressional Medal Of Honor.
53. A Purple Heart just goes to prove that were you smart enough to think of a plan, stupid enough to try it, and lucky enough to survive.
54. Murphy was a grunt.

My Florida friend Susan. For 8 years she was the chief financial officer of the fastest-growing, most affluent community in Indiana. She was also the most honest, straightforward, no-bullshit elected official I covered in my 34 years in newspapers. 

This one always creeps my wife out. An audiologist is injecting a silicone compound into my ear canal to make custom molded in-ear stereo speakers for use when riding my motorcycle. My wife can't stand anything in her ears. 

I covered a rural house fire last evening. Here's the photo that ran big on the front page this morning. 

Here's another. 

After being inundated by Valentine's Day crap - weddings, proposals, fawning couples - on the morning TV talk shows, this is how I feel about V-Day. 

Shot from the pier at Flagler Beach, Fla., last Thursday. It was a chilly, gray, windy day but perfect for surfers. I didn't expect to see wave action like this on the Atlantic coast. 

Wrong number

I just got a wrong-number call on my cell phone from a woman at 317-357-1121.
Feel free to call her and say, "Oooops. Sorry, wrong number."

This is Florida?

It's 57 degrees, but the wind chill makes if feel like 52, with a heavy overcast and spitting rain here in beautiful Palm Coast, Fla.
Sunshine State, my ass.
It was like this yesterday and will be this way tomorrow.
If I wanted sunshine, I shoulda gone to Colorado.
The Honda del Sol performed splendidly on the drive down, delivering 34.6 miles per gallon. The addition of XM satellite radio to the entertainment options made the trip an easy one, even with a 45-minute crawl through a construction zone on I-75 north of Valdosta, Ga.
I'd envisioned driving around down here with the roof panel stowed in the trunk, but that's not gonna happen until Friday at the earliest and maybe not at all.
Took my friends to see Sideways last night. I enjoyed it and would give it at least an 8 on a scale of 10. It goes deeper into the dynamics of relationships than most movies do and is considerably more thoughtful than 99% of the films out there today. At the same time, there are outrageously funny moments. Whether it's Oscar material is another matter entirely, especially if The Passion of The Christ doesn't even make the nomination cut.
Whatever. It was worth the price of admission.
When we stepped up to the ticket booth, the cashier - a woman I'd judge to be in her 60s - asked if we wanted the senior citizen discount. I glanced up at the ticket price list and noticed the cutoff was 60. Only one of us - Susan's boyfriend - is over 60 and Susan just had a facelift that makes her look early 40-something, but I thought, "What the hell? Why not?"
Judging from the other theater patrons around us, I figured most of them got in at the geezer rate.
So our three tickets came to a modest $18.
I spent much of yesterday helping Ed, Susan's boyfriend, research ways to get his neighbor to stop parking his electrical contracting business vehicles in front of his (the neighbor's) house.
It's obvious the neighbor is running his business out of his home and, under local regulations, that means he cannot park vehicles with painted business signage, in front of his home.
We've determined that he has his business registered at an address in St. Augustine. Turns out he owns several residential rental properties in a white trash neighborhood up there, but our reconnaisance determined there is no electrical contracting business being done at any of them, including the one listed on his St. John County (St. Augustine) business permit.
This scheme to get around Palm Coast ordinances is made all the more interesting by the fact that the guy serves on a town council-appointed technical board for construction review.
So what he have is a government official flaunting the laws of his own community.
My suggestion is to pull together all this information, along with photos of the offending vehicles parked illegally in front of the house, and turn it over to some eager young newspaper reporter.
In the meantime, I need to get out and do some photography for our stock photo business.
*********************
I just answered the doorbell - Ed is out rescuing a buddy whose car broke down on I-95 a few miles from here - and found myself being schmoozed by a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses women. I closed the door in their faces as pleasantly as possible, explaining that I'm Catholic and am quite satisfied with my religion.
Crappy weather, evangelists, strategizing against a sleazy neighbor and now I have a sinus headache. What next?

Florida-bound, weather permitting

The flu hung on a day longer than I expected, but I'm back to about 95% and will head for a week-long photo expedition to Florida tomorrow.
I'll spend tomorrow night at the home of a seldom-seen cousin south of Nashville, Tenn., then on to the home of friends in Palm Coast, Fla., Monday night.
Watching the snow falling outside my office window makes it an easy decision to throw my gear into the trunk of my del Sol, crank up the XM satellite radio and head for the tropics.
Unfortunately, my wife can't come with me. She's saving her vacation time for later in the year and also wants to stay close to home because her Amish sister-in-law is expecting a sixth (!?!?!) child any day now.
So I'll just have to e-mail her photos of palm trees and me driving around with the top off of my car in the balmy Florida breezes.
If I have anything interesting to report, I'll blog it from Florida.

Goddamned flu

I have the flu.
I woke up yesterday morning feeling ever so slightly queasy and the condition intensified through the day. Lunch was a toasted cheese sandwich and cup of soup. By mid-afternoon, I'd run out of stuff to write and edit at my wife's newspaper where I was filling in. I felt sufficiently crappy that I came home and went to bed with body aches, chills and fever.
My wife and stepdaughter had bouts with this or a similar bug in late December and I had been congratulating myself on avoiding it. Obviously, my luck had run out.
My wife was laid low for nearly a week and her daughter was flattened for about three days.
Despite a fever of 100.4 last night and an inability to venture far from a toilet today, I feel pretty good and should be back to normal tomorrow.
It's been a couple of years since I've had so much as a cold, so I guess I shouldn't complain about a 24-48-hour knock-down.
I called my daughter-in-law the doctor when my wife was sick and got very useful advice - drink at least 8 ounces of fluid per hour. I kept the wife and stepdaughter loaded up with Gatorade and have been slugging down lots of the stuff myself. I have no science to back it up, but I think it does a better job of flushing out the debris and keeping me hydrated than does plain water.

Time Marches On

I'm reading proof and writing editorials today at my wife's newspaper.
The editorial page is where they run the "Today in History" and celebrity birthdays and I was startled to discover that Eddie Van Halen tunred 50 today. Now he can join AARP and get senior citizen discounts at Motel 6.
Welcome to the downhill slide, Eddie.

No good deed goes unpunished

This post by a U.S. Navy officer aboard the U.S.S. Lincoln was copied from the Soldiers for The Truth blog: sftt.org
01-20-2005

Guest Column: No Relief in Sight for the Lincoln

By Ed Stanton

It has been three weeks since my ship, the USS Abraham Lincoln, arrived off the Sumatran coast to aid the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Dec. 26 tsunami that ravaged their coastline. I’d like to say that this has been a rewarding experience for us, but it has not: Instead, it has been a frustrating and needlessly dangerous exercise made even more difficult by the Indonesian government and a traveling circus of so-called aid workers who have invaded our spaces.



What really irritated me was a scene I witnessed in the Lincoln’s wardroom a few days ago. I went in for breakfast as I usually do, expecting to see the usual crowd of ship’s company officers in khakis and air wing aviators in flight suits, drinking coffee and exchanging rumors about when our ongoing humanitarian mission in Sumatra is going to end.



What I saw instead was a mob of civilians sitting around like they owned the place. They wore various colored vests with logos on the back including Save The Children, World Health Organization and the dreaded baby blue vest of the United Nations. Mixed in with this crowd were a bunch of reporters, cameramen and Indonesian military officers in uniform. They all carried cameras, sunglasses and fanny packs like tourists on their way to Disneyland.



My warship had been transformed into a floating hotel for a bunch of trifling do-gooders overnight.



As I went through the breakfast line, I overheard one of the U.N. strap-hangers, a longhaired guy with a beard, make a sarcastic comment to one of our food servers. He said something along the lines of “Nice china, really makes me feel special,” in reference to the fact that we were eating off of paper plates that day. It was all I could do to keep from jerking him off his feet and choking him, because I knew that the reason we were eating off paper plates was to save dishwashing water so that we would have more water to send ashore and save lives. That plus the fact that he had no business being there in the first place.



My attitude towards these unwanted no-loads grew steadily worse that day as I learned more from one of our junior officers who was assigned to escort a group of them. It turns out that they had come to Indonesia to “assess the damage” from the Dec. 26 tsunami.



Well, they could have turned on any TV in the world and seen that the damage was total devastation. When they got to Sumatra with no plan, no logistics support and no five-star hotels to stay in, they threw themselves on the mercy of the U.S. Navy, which, unfortunately, took them in. I guess our senior brass was hoping for some good PR since this was about the time that the U.N. was calling the United States “stingy” with our relief donations.



As a result of having to host these people, our severely over-tasked SH-60 Seahawk helos, which were carrying tons of food and water every day to the most inaccessible places in and around Banda Aceh, are now used in great part to ferry these “relief workers” from place to place every day and bring them back to their guest bedrooms on the Lincoln at night. Despite their avowed dedication to helping the victims, these relief workers will not spend the night in-country, and have made us their guardians by default.



When our wardroom treasurer approached the leader of the relief group and asked him who was paying the mess bill for all the meals they ate, the fellow replied, “We aren’t paying, you can try to bill the U.N. if you want to.”



In addition to the relief workers, we routinely get tasked with hauling around reporters and various low-level “VIPs,” which further wastes valuable helo lift that could be used to carry supplies. We had to dedicate two helos and a C-2 cargo plane for America-hater Dan Rather and his entourage of door holders and briefcase carriers from CBS News. Another camera crew was from MTV. I doubt if we’ll get any good PR from them, since the cable channel is banned in Muslim countries. We also had to dedicate a helo and crew to fly around the vice mayor of Phoenix, Ariz., one day. Everyone wants in on the action.



As for the Indonesian officers, while their job is apparently to encourage our leaving as soon as possible, all they seem to do in the meantime is smoke cigarettes. They want our money and our help but they don’t want their population to see that Americans are doing far more for them in two weeks than their own government has ever done or will ever do for them.



To add a kick in the face to the USA and the Lincoln, the Indonesian government announced it would not allow us to use their airspace for routine training and flight proficiency operations while we are saving the lives of their people, some of whom are wearing Osama bin Ladin T-shirts as they grab at our food and water. The ship has to steam out into international waters to launch and recover jets, which makes our helos have to fly longer distances and burn more fuel.



What is even worse than trying to help people who totally reject everything we stand for is that our combat readiness has suffered for it.



An aircraft carrier is an instrument of national policy and the big stick she carries is her air wing. An air wing has a set of very demanding skills and they are highly perishable. We train hard every day at sea to conduct actual air strikes, air defense, maritime surveillance, close air support and many other missions – not to mention taking off and landing on a ship at sea.



Our safety regulations state that if a pilot does not get a night carrier landing every seven days, he has to be re-qualified to land on the ship. Today we have pilots who have now been over 25 days without a trap due to being unable to use Indonesian airspace to train. Normally it is when we are at sea that our readiness is at its very peak. Thanks to the Indonesian government, we have to waive our own safety rules just to get our pilots off the deck.



In other words, the longer we stay here helping these people, the more dangerous it gets for us to operate. We have already lost one helicopter, which crashed in Banda Aceh while taking sailors ashore to unload supplies from the C-130s. There were no relief workers on that one.



I’m all for helping the less fortunate, but it is time to give this mission to somebody other than the U.S. Navy. Our ship was supposed to be home on Feb. 3 and now we have no idea how long we will be here. American taxpayers are spending millions per day to keep this ship at sea and getting no training value out of it. As a result, we will come home in a lower state of readiness than when we left due to the lack of flying while supporting the tsunami relief effort.



I hope we get some good PR in the Muslim world out of it. After all, this is Americans saving the lives of Muslims. I have my doubts.



Ed Stanton is the pen name of a career U.S. Navy officer currently serving with the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group. Send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.

What worries me tonight...

I don’t think of myself as a worrier, although my wife and my sons might have a different view.
But I’m starting to get seriously worried about the epidemic of methamphetamine use and meth-related crime I’m seeing.
It seems that almost every crime and aberration that crops up in this semi-rural part of the state is linked, somehow, with meth.
We live in a town of about 1,500 surrounded by farmland. An abandoned railroad right-of-way runs behind our house and on the other side of it is the local Farm Bureau Co-Op with three or four huge storage tanks full of anhydrous ammonia.
At various times during the year, area farmers apply ammonia to their fields using “nurse tanks,” big white torpedo-shaped tanks on wheels that they pull behind a tractor or a truck.
For the uninitiated, ammonia is a component used to manufacture methamphetamine. Of all the ingredients, ammonia is the only one that meth makers can’t walk into Wal-Mart and buy. So they have to steal it.
The tricky part is that guys who make meth are more often than not meth users, which means they spend a lot of time under the influence of this insanely addictive drug. That means we have inherently stupid people who have further impaired themselves with dangerous chemicals trying to break open valves on big tanks full of a highly toxic substance.
One night during the summer of 2003, one of these morons got in over his head trying to steal ammonia from the Co-Op and left a valve on a nurse tank open. My wife arrived home from work about 7 p.m. and noticed a strong smell of ammonia. It got progressively stronger to the point where we had to go inside and shut our doors and windows to keep it out. A Little League baseball game was in progress a block down the street on the opposite side of our house from the Co-Op. The town marshal called off the game and evacuated the ballpark.
The ammonia finally dissipated, but the episode left us with the disturbing realization that we could all be gassed in our sleep by some imbecile trying to filch ammonia to make meth.
A little reconnaissance revealed there is virtually no security at the Co-Op. No night watchman, no security light, no high fence. The nurse tanks are lined up in an area that opens onto a soybean field. Some bold meth head could easily drive through the bean field some moonless night, hook a nurse tank to his vehicle and make off with several thousand pounds of deadly anhydrous.
Now, I could go off on a homeland security tangent here and suggest that our nation’s unsecured agricultural ammonia supplies are an easy target for terrorists, but let’s stay with the meth angle for now.
I wrote earlier about a cop friend who was involved in a police action shooting that killed a young man who was spun on meth and made the fatal error of pointing a pellet gun at an officer in pre-dawn darkness.
Hardly a week goes by in the nearby county where my wife’s newspaper is based that a highly volatile meth lab doesn’t blow up and damage a house or some other structure. During the winter, meth makers look for abandoned structures or the homes of people vacationing in Florida to break into and set up their labs. I read a police report this week about a guy and his son who were making meth in the crawlspace under a stranger’s house. I saw another report about a 19-year-old and a 22-year-old – both meth heads – who decided to support their habit by passing bad checks. Now they face a combined 19 felony counts of forgery.
My pharmacist has a sister-in-law who is hopelessly addicted to meth – been in and out of rehab countless times but just can’t stay away from it.
Cops will tell you that almost all identity theft is meth-related.
My stepson’s cousin lives by himself in his great-grandmother’s house and my stepson says he’s starting to hang out with the meth crowd.
This week, my wife’s publisher had to fire the best photographer who has ever worked at that paper because of meth.
The guy and his wife moved here from the south a few months ago, pretty much dead broke because – the story goes – they spent the last year or so caring for the wife’s dying mother.
The guy went to work, shooting excellent news photos. It was immediately clear that he had the makings of a top flight photojournalist.
However…
His wife was a dirtbag slut. Soon after they arrived, she started hanging out in the sleazier bars and less than a month later, she disappeared with hubby’s car, having run off to Nebraska with a construction worker.
The photog moped around for a few days, then got back to work and was turning out some brilliant photography – spot news, features, illustrations, you name it – until the wife called and tearfully told him the boyfriend had beaten and abandoned her.
However talented the photog was, he had absolutely no judgment when it came to relationships. He drove to Nebraska and brought her home.
It was all downhill from that point on. Coworkers said they saw the couple out partying all night every night. He was later and later getting to work every day.
A couple of weeks ago, at a time when a nasty flu bug was running rampant in the newsroom, he called in sick on a Monday. His editor checked on him daily until Wednesday when his wife said she’s keep the office apprised of his condition. But there was no call on Thursday and by Friday morning the sports department was getting nervous about whether he would be available to shoot weekend sports or whether they needed to hunt up photo stringers.
My wife, having a good rapport with the police department, called the cops and asked them to drop by his apartment and do a welfare check just to make sure he was still alive.
A short time later, the photog called the newsroom – barely coherent but with his wife screeching in the background. It took the editor a good 15 minutes to explain to him that nobody was angry with him, they just got worried and also wondered what plans to make for the weekend. He didn’t have a phone and had turned off his company cell phone.
So fast forward to Wednesday morning when the folks in the newsroom hear police radio traffic mentioning the photographer’s name and something about a portable police scanner radio belonging to the newspaper.
The editor was off with the flu, so my wife and the publisher went to the police station where they identified the scanner radio as the one they had issued to the photographer.
Seems it turned up in the apartment of a meth dealer. Further investigation revealed that the photographer had earlier sold the meth dealer his Ford Explorer for two grams of meth. The closest we could get to an explanation of how the scanner radio got into the meth dealer’s apartment was that the photog said he’d given it to his wife while he was off shooting a high school basketball game because it’s impossible to hear the scanner in a noisy gym. So we’re left to suppose the wife went visiting and accidentally left behind a device that would be extremely useful to a criminal who wanted to know what the local police were up to.
My wife finally reached the photographer at his apartment – after he had been questioned by police – and told him the publisher wanted him in the office immediately. He tried to beg off, saying he was “too freaked out” at the moment. An hour or so later, the publisher ordered him to report to the office with all of his company-owned equipment within 25 minutes. Otherwise, the publisher would call the police and report the equipment stolen.
A staff member saw the photog park his car in front of the office with the left rear tire up on the sidewalk. His wife was in the car, applying makeup.
He turned in his stuff and was terminated.
His Nikon D70 had a 1 gig Compact Flash card that held 86 photos taken between 7:04 and 7:38 a.m. that same day. Most were of his wife posing seductively by candlelight. Since sunrise wasn’t until a little after 8 a.m., it was obvious that they had been up all night. It was equally clear that they were oblivious to the shit storm gathering around them.
It’s impossible for me to see this stuff happening around me and not be concerned.
What happens when the stepson’s cousin gets seriously spun on meth and tells his buddies about the burglary opportunities at my house? What happens the next time some idiot decides to crack a valve on a nurse tank behind my house?
Like I said, I don’t think of myself as a worrier, but I do have a heightened sense of danger.

Far-fetched, but an amusing thought...

Has U.S. threatened
to vaporize Mecca?
Intelligence expert says nuke option is reason bin Laden has been quiet
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Posted: January 7, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

Why hasn't Osama bin Laden's terror network executed an attack on U.S. soil since 9-11?

Simple, says Dr. Jack Wheeler, creator of an acclaimed intelligence website dubbed "the oasis for rational conservatives": The U.S. has threatened to nuke the Muslim holy city of Mecca should the terror leader strike America again.

On his website, To the Point, Wheeler explains how the Bush administration has identified the potential of wiping Mecca off the map as bin Laden's ultimate point of vulnerability – the Damoclean Sword hanging over his head.

..snip...Writes Wheeler in his members-only column: "There has been a rumor floating in the Washington ether for some time now that George Bush has figured out what Sword of Damocles is suspended over Osama bin Laden's head.

...snip...Completely obliterating the terrorists' holiest of holies, rendering what is for them the world's most sacred spot a radioactive hole in the ground is retribution of biblical proportions – and those are the only proportions that will do the job.

"Osama would have laughed off such a threat, given his view that Americans are wussies who cut and run after a few losses, such as Lebanon in 1983 and Somalia in 1993. Part of Bush's rationale for invading Afghanistan and Iraq – obviously never expressed publicly – was to convince Osama that his threat to nuke Mecca was real. Osama hates America just as much as ever, but he is laughing no more."

Wheeler says bin Laden is "playing poker with a Texas cowboy holding the nuclear aces," so there's nothing al-Qaida could do that could come remotely close to risking obliterating Mecca.

How bizarre

Ever stop to wonder how an aggregation of chemicals and subtle electrical impulses (you) have the capacity to wonder about anything? Or to know anything, much less have memories, emotions and values.
Pretty damned uppity for a wheezing bag of protoplasm, don't you think?

Also...

Oh, and by the way, the dirtbags kidnapped the Catholic Archibishop of Mosul today.
The sight of The Most Reverend Basil George Casmoussa, 66, in an orange jumpsuit getting his head hacked off is an image that would have cataclysmic consequences for Islamic fundamentalists everywhere.
It's hard to imagine a better way to set off a genuine take-no-prisoners 21st century Crusade.

Who needs an exit strategy, Part 2

Back on Oct. 20, I made this observation:
Has it occurred to anyone else that an unstated objective of the Iraq campaign was the acquisition of bases from which we could better deal with the rogue states of the region?
Naturally, it would have been foolish to state this up front as a reason to remove Saddam and conquer Iraq, but it’s looking more like a brilliant move with every passing day.
Yes, the insurgency in Iraq has made things a little messy and a short-sighted media has fixated on it at the expense of seeing the big picture.
Kudos to the Bush administration for thinking more than one move ahead in this chess game we dare not lose.
Another astute blogger pointed out this week that we have a 25-year-old score to settle with the mullahs of Iran - a little matter of Americans held hostage because a Democrat president couldn't command their respect. Or fear.
As I've said earlier, those who seek to destroy us should understand that - with our use of precision munitions and our concern for civilian casualties - what the world has seen so far is "us being nice." They don't ever want to see "us not being nice."

This story ran in today's editions of The New York Daily News:

Yank commandos already in place, mag says
BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - U.S. commandos are hunting for secret nuclear and chemical weapons sites and other targets in Iran, and have a plan to turn the hard-line Islamic country into the next front in the war on terrorism.
"It's not if we're going to do anything against Iran. They're doing it," an ex-intelligence official tells this week's issue of The New Yorker.

Since at least last summer, the U.S. teams have penetrated eastern Iran, reportedly with Pakistan's help, the magazine said.

"Iraq is just one campaign," the official told investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. "The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign."

The aim is to rid America and its allies of a major state sponsor of terrorism, Hersh writes.

"We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy," the official tells Hersh. "This is the last hurrah - we've got four years and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whom President Bush has asked to stay on in his second term, has been jockeying for more power to conduct covert ops without nagging congressional oversight.

"It's a global free-fire zone," said one Pentagon adviser.

Iran has fought tooth and nail demands that it open its nuclear energy program for inspection, fueling suspicion that the charter member of President Bush's "axis of evil" is up to no good.

That same secrecy also has heightened tensions with another axis member with nuclear ambitions, North Korea.

Pentagon neoconservatives - hard-liners who include Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz - believe that surgical strikes on a small list of military targets will minimize civilian casualties and may spark an uprising by reformers against the ruling fundamentalist mullahs, current and ex-officials said.

Hersh told CNN that if targets are lined up by this summer, U.S. attacks could soon follow.

They "want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible," a Pentagon consultant told Hersh.

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believe that, just as with some Soviet-bloc countries, "the minute the aura of invincibility the mullahs enjoy is shattered ... the Iranian regime will collapse," the consultant said.

Yet Rep. Peter King (R-L.I.) of the House International Relations Committee said, "I wouldn't assume the Iranian regime will just collapse."

With combat operations still raging in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the hunt for weapons of mass destruction came up empty, Bush would have to explain fully a new call for military action against Iran, King said.

"He'd have to get the people behind it," King told the Daily News. "But you'd have to factor in that the American public would be somewhat suspicious."

But Bush aides are "compulsively optimistic" that the mullahs have a fragile hold on power, and they are sure to strike soon, predicted defense analyst John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org.

"I think they're going to do it," he told The News. "I'm skeptical that diplomacy will succeed."

While presidential counselor Dan Bartlett complained that Hersh's story was "riddled with inaccuracies," he notably did not outright deny any of it.

"No President at any juncture in history has ever taken military options off the table," Bartlett told CNN's "Late Edition." "What President Bush has shown [is] that he believes we can emphasize the diplomatic initiatives that are under way right now."

This Made My Day

Dirty Harry’ star Clint Eastwood told an awards ceremony in New York that he would “kill” Fahrenheit 9/11 filmmaker Michael Moore if he ever showed up at his front door with a camera, according to a report on Ananova.com.

With Moore sitting in the audience, Eastwood said, “Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common - we both appreciate living in a country where there’s free expression.

“But, Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera — I’ll kill you. I mean it.”

Eastwood, a Republican, made the comments at the National Board of Review awards held in New York where he picked up a Special Filmmaking Achievement prize for Million Dollar Baby.

A report in the New York Daily News, said Moore, who received a special “Freedom of Expression” award for his anti-Bush documentary, appeared to laugh off Eastwood’s comments.

Reason #726 why it's safer to live in the Midwestern United States. 

Favorite Bumper Sticker

Give France back to Germany

A brief lament

The last quarter of 2004 saw my two favorite businesses go under.
The local BMW motorcycle dealer closed his doors, largely because of idiotic policies of BMW Motorrad USA forcing him to take new bikes faster than he could sell them.
And Galyan's - a broad-spectrum sporting goods and adventure outfitter that started several years ago in Plainfield, Ind., and eventually expanded into several states nationwide - fell on hard times and was gobbled up by aptly-named Dick's.
My New Year's wishes are for a new BMW dealer and new stores by REI and/or Cabela's.

Makes you proud

The U.S. and the Australians are doing all of the heavy lifting and providing the quickest and best response to the needs of the tsunami victims according to reports on The Diplomad, a blog by career U.S. Foreign Service officers.
This, according to Diplomad, is occurring against a background of United National floundering and attempts to take credit for the hard work of the Yanks and Aussies.
Read all about it here:
http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/

A wake-up call

As horrific as it was, the Sumatra tsunami was just a ripple compared with the megatsunami waiting to scour the U.S. East Coast.

I've posted on this subject before, but there has never been a better time than now to raise awareness of the ticking time bomb at La Palma in the Canary Islands.

Earthquake-generated tsunamis are nothing compared with those triggered by massive landslides and volcanic islands are the primary cause of these rare but inevitable cataclysmic events.

The trigger will be the collapse of the western flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma. There is already a massive fracture that slipped a short distance during an eruption in the latter portion of the 20th century. The speculation is that the next time the volcano cranks up, a major eruption will cause all or part of the western flank of the volcano to plunge into the Atlantic Ocean.

Scientists predict the collapse will generate a train of a dozen or more very large waves spreading out in an arc that will strike the eastern coasts of North and South American, as well as the Caribbean.

As we saw with the Sumatra event, the wave height increases as it moves into shallower water. It was estimated as high as 20 feet and reached as far as a quarter-mile inland in the Indian Ocean tsunami.

A La Palma megatsunami would generate waves as tall as 160 feet (8x the Sumatra size) that would reach as far as 12 miles inland all the way from Greenland, down the densely populated U.S. East Coast to Brazil and beyond.

It is estimated that the northeast coast of Brazil would feel the impact first, some six hours after the collapse, with Haiti, Cuba and the U.S. East Coast following in rapid succession.

Take a look at a map of the U.S. East Coast and notice how much population is concentrated within 12 miles of the shore from Maine down to Miami and you begin to appreciate the almost inconceivable destruction.

Think of the massive traffic jams caused by Florida residents fleeing hurrincanes and then imagine the futility of trying to evacuate that danger zone with little more than six hours' warning.

Scientists say there is no way to predict when the La Palma collapse will occur - only that it will occur. Maybe in 1,000 years, maybe tomorrow.
Here's a place to start to learn more:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/mega_tsunami.shtml

Maria and I bought her daughter a Zire 72 for Christmas - PDA, camera, MP3 player - way cool. Just the thing for a college student, eh? 

Christmas 1967: My parents opening presents 37 years ago. Dad loved to look goofy for the camera. 

Ghosts of Christsmas Past: Sean (left) and Steve relaxing in their Winnie the Pooh chairs amid the debris of a Christmas gifting frenzy. 

Yes, we really did wait until 6 days before Christmas to get a tree. We had to wait that long for it to snow at the tree farm. It was 10 torrid degrees when this picture was made. 

A motorcycle orphan again

Whatever cheer I might feel this Christmas is tempered by the knowledge that my local BMW motorcycle dealership is going out of business.
This is the third BMW motorcycle dealer to fail in this city since I started riding BMWs in the early 1980s.
My friend Bill will end his 4½ years as a BMW dealer at 7 p.m. Wednesday. I’m sad for Bill, who really gave it his all, but in the end was brought down by a weak economy and a corporate shell game that forced him to take motorcycles from BMW faster than he could sell them – all because the top management at BMW Motorcycles USA wanted to make their numbers look good and never mind what it did to the dealers.
I’m also sad for myself because, with more than a year to go on my K1200GT’s three-year warranty, I now have to ride more than 100 miles to the nearest authorized BMW service department for maintenance and repairs.
I have plenty of company. I estimate there are at least 500 other BMW motorcycles under warranty in this area and their owners are in the same fix.
Bill announced his decision to close last Tuesday morning and sent out the word that he’d rather sell his inventory of parts, accessories and apparel at cost or a loss to his regular customers than hand the stuff over to some inventory liquidator. Consequently, my friends and I have been doing our level best to help him while, at the same time, behaving like respectful vultures.
I helped him dispose of a couple of used bikes that would have otherwise been turned over to the liquidators and also found about $350 to spend on a new rear tire, luggage and other assorted stuff.
All this comes at a time when he is going through a very unpleasant divorce. He sold his house this month and moved into an apartment with his two young sons today.
I gave him his first dollar in business and desperately hope he can get through this with his sanity intact.

Overrated stuff

Old Navy anything. It's become the uniform of the Ordinary American - people with follow-the-crowd sheep mentalities. The styles are ho-hum, the workmanship is purely Third World and the colors are consistently unattractive (to me, anyway).

Rolex watches. Was it the James Bond connection that made them so desirable among the unimaginative? Maybe they're ok for women, but the men's styles are foofy. Give me a Breitling any day. Now there's a man's watch.


Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream. Great, if you want a heart attack, but certainly not worth the damage it does to your cardiovascular system.

Godiva chocolate. Gimme Lindt (& Sprüngli) from Switzerland. The previous item notwithstanding, I could eat Lindt chocolate until I explode or lose consciousness.

9mm handguns. Give me the knockdown power of a .45 any day.

O'Charley's. What a stupid name for one more chain of fake Irish bars.

Nike sports shoes. They're just shoes. You're paying extra for the logo.

Sheriff's Capt. Ken Campbell uses an electronic metal detector to check out a student at my stepson's high school this morning. Everyone coming into the building got "wanded" as a result of a threat received yesterday afternoon. Yes, it's finals week and some idiot kid apparently thought this would be an amusing prank.& 

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

As I drove down the interstate this afternoon, I found myself thinking about how absolutely astonished I would have been if, at the age of 10 or 12, someone would have told me what was coming in the way of technology.
Take cars, for instance. When I was 10, we had a 1955 Ford. It was a freaking deathtrap by today’s standards: hard steel dashboard, no seatbelts, no airbags, drum brakes. It lacked power steering and power brakes and you actually had to crank the windows up and down. And, oh yeah, no air conditioning. The sound system consisted of an AM band radio and a single speaker in the dashboard that reflected its sound off of the inside of the windshield. Radial tires were decades away, so the handling and suspension were pretty much garbage.
Imagine my surprise if I had known that my future held a sleek 2-seat car with removable hard top, complete with power steering, power brakes, radial tires, AC, power windows, seatbelts, airbags and a four-speaker stereophonic sound system that played discs read by a concentrated beam of coherent light and got digital stereo radio signals from a pair of satellites more than 22,000 miles out in space. Absolutely unbelievable then, but utterly ordinary today.
Or what if someone had told me most people would have pocket telephones and that I would have one that electronically held hundreds of phone numbers, a powerful calculator, my appointment calendar and to-do list, a couple of games and the complete texts of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and James Joyce’s Ulysses? And it gave me instant access to a worldwide computer network and the vast information repository it represented, not to mention the ability to send electronic mail instantly to anyone on the planet. Of course my pocket phone is a bit behind the times because the newer models have more storage capacity and include a color digital camera.
Can you imagine how amazing that would have been to a kid living in a small town where we were still making operator-assisted phone calls and paying long distance charges to phone someone in the nearest city of any consequence, only 20 miles away?
I suppose this shouldn’t really surprise me, considering that my father was born just seven years after the first transcontinental automobile journey and the Wright brothers’ first flight. Dad grew up on a farm without electricity and indoor plumbing where much of the field work was done with horses. That sounds like something out of a Third World country, but we’re only talking about a couple of generations ago right here in the United States.
One of the interesting consequences of being around nearly 60 (ack!!!) years is the perspective it gives you. My wife’s teenage kids have never known a time without home computers, cell phones, compact discs, ATMs, video games, fiber optics, lasers, microwave ovens, color TV, cable TV, pocket calculators, TV remote controls, FM radio, cordless phones and halogen lighting. These are all things that have come into being during my lifetime and I’ve only been around since 1945.
Assuming technological advances continue at the same rate – or at a constantly accelerating rate – the future world of my 5-month-old granddaughter will be every bit as inconceivable from a 2004 vantage point as today’s world was from 1910 or even from 1955.
How cool is that?

How to make a cop shoot you...

A police officer friend of mine killed a 20-year-old kid yesterday morning.
Maybe.
T was one of two Special Response Team (i.e. SWAT) guys who fired when the kid pointed his weapon at other officers. Only one bullet hit the kid and I’m betting it was T’s. He’s thoroughly professional, has a firing range behind his house and trains almost constantly.
It all started about 4:30 yesterday morning when an officer noticed this kid speeding in a nearby county seat town. Over the next hour, he led police from several departments on a three-county chase, running over several stop-sticks that punctured three of his tires. He was running on three rims by the time he abandoned his car along an interstate about 14 miles west of where we live and struck out on foot.
Officers said he was waving a pistol and a knife as he ran through corn stubble and harvested soybean fields in the darkness.
They followed him about a mile and a half, crossing a state highway and moving north on a county road. As he walked along the county road, a sheriff’s deputy followed at a discrete distance, illuminating him with the patrol car’s headlights while a police negotiator tried to persuade him to drop his weapons.
The kid was jabbering incoherently and cutting his arm with his knife.
All the while, T and another SRT member were following along with their M-16s – T flanking him in an open field and the other officer walking up the road.
In an apparent moment of clarity, the kid told the officer, “Tell my mother I love her.”
Then he raised the pistol and brought it to bear on the negotiator.
True to their training, T and the other SRT officer, raised their assault rifles and fired to protect their brother officer.
One shot went wide, but the other caught the kid in the chest. He was pronounced dead minutes later at a nearby hospital.
The autopsy and toxicology reports are still pending, but the kid had needle tracks on his arms and his behavior was consistent with that of a meth head.
The kicker is that his pistol turned out to be a pellet gun.
My wife and I took a plate of cookies over to T’s house last night and it was clear that he was taking it kind of hard.
“I arrested that kid a week ago, but I didn’t even recognize him this morning,” he said.
Turns out the kid had been admiring a friend’s stereo just hours before it was stolen and it turned up in the kid’s garage, so he had a burglary charge pending when he committed “suicide by police” yesterday morning.
It wasn’t until two hours after the shooting that T learned the kid was waving a pellet gun.
“It looked like a long-barreled .357 to me,” he said.
We won’t know who fired the fatal bullet until ballistics tests are done.
Either way, T is going to be unhappy. He doesn’t especially want to have the distinction of being the first officer on his department to kill a perp in more than a quarter century. But, on the other hand, he doesn’t want to be known as the guy who missed.

My granddaughter Lisa is ready for her first Christmas. I got her to cooperate for about 250 photos yesterday afternoon. 

Astrology

Just in case anyone cares about my astrological pedigree, here's the poop:
Sun 21° Cancer
Moon 18° Virgo
Mercury 16° Leo
Venus 7° Gemini
Mars 24° Taurus
Jupiter 23° Virgo
Saturn 15° Cancer
Uranus 15° Gemini
Neptune 4° Libra
Pluto 9° Leo
Ascendant 18° Taurus
My first wife was a Scorpio, as are both of my sons. My second and final wife is a Gemini.
If you have a Palm Pilot and are looking for astrology software, I heartily recommend Delphi v2.01. Astonishingly, it’s free and you can get your copy at http://jove.prohosting.com/~delphi29/
It calculates natal charts with great precision, including angular relationships and synastry. Runs on Palm OS 3.5 and later.
Way cool.

I wonder if Richie Havens ever got dentures...

I flipped over to the ‘60s channel on XM Satellite Radio just now and find myself listening to some Richie Havens concert song.
Richie was one of the featured performers at Woodstock. He was boring then and he’s boring now.
All of which is apropos of nothing in particular.
I had an exchange of e-mails this morning with my cousin Sam, the son of my mother’s sister Ruth. Sam was the youngest of four kids and is a year or two younger than I. His oldest sister, Joanne, was almost a contemporary of my mother. Next in order was Kay and then Susie and Sam.
Susie, who was five years older than I, was all flash and brass. Disarmingly glamorous with a startling directness. I remember my parents being taken aback when she called them by their first names, instead of “Uncle Charles” and “Aunt Eileen.”
I thought she was beautiful and cool and had a crush on her during my pre-school years.
My chronology may be off a bit – I was only in junior high school – but I think she got married during her senior year of high school because she was pregnant.
She married her boyfriend and he went on to be a successful attorney. They moved to Michigan and she occupied herself being a model and doing television commercials.
Somehow, though, it all started to slip and the next I heard of her she was drinking heavily, had crashed her marriage and was living with her widowed father in Indianapolis.
A short time later, my parents told me Susie had attempted suicide with sleeping pills and was in an Indianapolis psychiatric hospital.
I visited her several times, renewing our friendship despite the confusion and memory loss she was experiencing from electro shock therapy, intended to zap away her chronic depression.
After a few weeks, she was released and I lost track of her until one winter night when I got a call from a guy who turned out to be her current boyfriend/drinking buddy. He and Susie were holed up in a fleabag motel on the Westside of Indianapolis and Susie was drunk and out of control. Would I come out and help, he asked.
When my (first) wife and I arrived, Susie was in bed, slamming down vodka like it was water and jabbering incoherently. At one point, she tried to drag her into bed with her with obvious amorous intentions. My recollection is that we somehow got her into detox, at which point I realized she was way beyond my ability to help.
Her brother and sisters had pretty much washed their hands of her years earlier after she used them and stole from their homes to get money for booze.
The last time I saw her, she was apparently semi functional – the encounter was her father’s funeral and I think it was about 20 years ago.
So when my cousin Sam mentioned this morning that he had passed through Indianapolis last Friday and visited Susie – he calls her Sue – I asked how she’s doing.
His response:
Sue is in an assisted living facility on the westside of Indy, just north of the airport. Health is declining, largely due to her continuing smoking and crippling arthritis. She basically "vegetates," having no interest in anything. All she has is (our) side as her kids haven't attempted contact in years. An extremely sad set of circumstances but, unfortunately, largely self-imposed.
Jeez, the twilight years of the Golden Girl of my childhood. How freaking depressing!

I was very sad when the U.S. Postal Service raised their rates and obsoleted this stamp. Did I mention how much I love Big Sur? 

Flakes!

Flakes!!
Flakes!!
They don't do no good
They never be workin'
When they oughta should
They waste your time
They're wastin' mine
California's got the most of them
Boy, they got a host of them

Swear t'God they got the most
At every business on the coast
Swear t'God they got the most
At every business on the coast
They got the

Flakes!!

They can't fix yer brakes
You ask 'em, *"Where's my motor?"*
*"Well, it was eaten by snakes..."*
You can stab 'n' shoot 'n' spit
But they won't be fixin' it
They're lyin' an' lazy
They can be drivin' you crazy

Swear t'God they got the most
At every business on the coast
Swear t'God they got the most
At every business on the coast
*[Take it away, Bob...]*

I asked as nice as I could
If my job would
Somehow be finished by Friday
Well, them whole damn weekend
came 'n' went, Frankie
*[Wanna buy some mandies, Bob?]*
'N' they didn't do nothin'
But they charged me double for Sunday

You know, no matter what you do,
They gonna cheat 'n' rob you
Then they'll send you a bill
That'll get your senses reelin'
And if you do not pay
They got computer collectors
That'll get you so crazy
'Til your head'll go through th' ceilin'
Yes it will!

I'm a moron, 'n' this is my wife
She's frosting a cake
With a paper knife
All what we got here's
American made
It's a little bit cheesey,
But it's nicely displayed
Well we don't get excited when it
Crumbles 'n' breaks
We just get on the phone
And call up some flakes
They rush on over
'N' wreck it some more
'N' we are so dumb
They're linin' up at our door
Well, the toilet went crazy
Yesterday afternoon
The plumber he says
*Never flush a tampoon!*
This great information
Cost me half a week's pay
And the toilet blew up
Later on the next day-ay-eee-ay
Blew up the next day
WOO-OOO

We are millions 'n' millions,
We're coming to get you
We're protected by unions
So don't let it upset you
Can't escape the conclusion
It's probably God's Will
That civilization
Will grind to a standstill
And we are the people
Who will make it all happen
While yer children is sleepin',
Yer puppy is crappin'
You might call us
Or something else you might coin us
But we know you're so greedy
That you'll probably join us

We're coming to get you, we're coming to get you
We're coming to get you, we're coming to get you
We're coming to get you, we're coming to get you
We're coming to get you, we're coming to get you...
Francis Vincent Zappa, 1979


This song from Frank Zappa’s Sheik Yerbouti album is on continuous loop in my head today as I spin my wheels trying to get people to do their jobs.
At the head of my list is American Modern Insurance, the company I have paid $962.59 in premiums to in the past 23 months for motorcycle insurance.
When I got rear-ended by a moron in an SUV in California last July, I opted to have American Modern settle my claim immediately, less my $500 deductible, which I expected them to recover for me from the moron’s insurer, Farmers Insurance Group.
American Modern paid the repair bill, less my deductible and then promptly stopped communicating with me.
I’ve sent them three e-mails and left more than a dozen voicemail messages with their Claims Department since Sept. 18. How many have they returned? Zero.
I called again today and got a nervous young man named Travis who, after hearing the elements of my problem, told me I need to speak with Tara Osborne. That’s what I was told Tuesday and I left a voicemail for her that day, I said.
She was off sick Tuesday, Travis tells me, but she’s in today. Unfortunately, she’s on her phone. So Travis promised he would write my name, phone number and issue on a slip of paper and place it in front of her on her desk. He assured me this action would guarantee a prompt callback. Well, it’s 5 p.m. and they close up shop at 4:30. Did I hear from Tara. Nope.
So I roll “Badger American Modern” over to tomorrow’s to-do list on my PDA.
Then there’s the matter of the Ebay vendor who charged me $21.52 for two 2 ounce bottles of KL Homme Eau de Toilette I bought for $6.01 each. Yes, that’s $9.50 for shipping and handling based on a disclaimer that all items are pre-packed for shipping. So how come both bottles showed up today in a single package that cost nowhere near $9.50 to ship? And when I open the package, I find two 2-ounce bottles of KL Homme After Shave, not the Eau de Toilette featured in the ad.
When I e-mailed the vendor suggesting we do an exchange with her picking up the shipping both ways, I got this terse response:
Hello, I was not aware that these were any different from cologne.....I have many bottle of this KL Homme.....some where after shave and some were Eau de toilette...and that informs me of nothing...as for the shipping...yes it is firm....so now I am to refund you all your money.......and I will be out the origianal shipping charge.... the listing fees ....the final fees.....the Paypal fees.....and the cost of you returning the item to me ......at this point and time, I would rather send you the proper item...equivalent to 4 ounces of KL homme (cologne)...this is my offer....I am trying to work with you so that you get your item...and I am not out all the charges that I have allready paid for......
I responded by suggesting that if she is going to peddle this stuff, she needs to know the terms and supplied her with comparative definitions of cologne, eau de toilette and after shave, along with this explanation from frangrancenet.com:
What is the difference between Perfume, Eau de Parfum, Eau de Toilette, and Eau de Cologne?
The differences are simply a matter of the amount or concentration of oils in the fragrance. These oils are called "juice." The highest concentration of "juice" is in perfume (or parfum). Next would be Eau de Parfum, then Eau de Toilette, and finally Eau de Cologne.
Actually, Eau de Toilette and Eau de Cologne are generally interchangeable, particularly in Men's fragrances. After Shave has the least amount of oils. The higher the concentration of "juice" the longer your fragrance will last, and the less you need to apply.
Now there’s the matter of reminding the local street department that they were directed by the town council six months ago to cut down the three aging maple trees that shed limbs and menace my house every time a strong wind blows.
And on, and on, and on…
Flakes!

I think I'd like to be back in the Florida Keys today... 

We awoke to our first snowfall of the season yesterday morning. This is how it looked along the county road south of our house. It's all melted now, but it was beautiful while it lasted. I'm ready for spring now. 

Worth two in the bush... My dad when he was about my age (59). I look much younger. Really. 

Overworked cliche

I'm really tired of blues songs that begin with, "I woke up this mornin'..."
Didn't most of us?
Well, now that I think of it, my dad didn't. He died seven years ago today.
Happy Thanksgiving.

Puzzling Evidence

For the benefit of the ladies who are unfamiliar with the layout of restaurant men's rooms, a lot of establishments put something on the wall above the urinals to give us something to read while we're otherwise engaged.
Some places post the sports page of the local paper, some post a page from USA Today and some stick advertising there.
I found myself staring at one of those ads today.
It was an ad for a company called Big Slick Attire and they make clothing for gambling. Yeah, who knew?
The ad directs the reader to their website: www.bigslickattire.com There, you can see the various t-shirts, tanktops, caps, hoodies and other stuff created with this rationale:
Big Slick Attire was created for players, by players. Our shirts are not only classy, but relevant to the best poker game invented, No Limit Texas Hold'em.
Jesus! Talk about a niche market.

And now for something completely different: This couple are regulars at a rollerskating rink in a nearby town and they always bring their 3-foot tall Barbie doll skating partners. The Barbies have bendable limbs, so they put them in chairs at the snack bar when they take a break. They also have child seats for the Barbies in their SUV. Strange? 

No, they're not all latent liberals

I really ought to be doing something useful this Monday morning, but I must share this piece I pirated from Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom site.
It gets right to the heart of the fallacious assumption that all of those heretofore silent non-voters were latent liberals and Democrats. That has always been the touchstone of Democrat ideology and, to some extent, believed/feared by those of us in the Center and on the Right.

Writing in the Weekly Standard, associate professor of political science at UVA Gerard Alexander argues that, in election 2004, “there wasn’t a huge untapped pool of Democratic voters, after all.” From “The End of a Left-Wing Fantasy” (subscription required, so I’ll quote liberally):
It’s not difficult to detect a level of demoralization among some Democrats that can’t be explained by the loss of a single presidential election by three points. One reason may be the death, on November 2, of a myth that has long nourished the hopes of the American left--the idea that tens of millions of non-voters (if only they could be turned out) were an ace up their sleeve.
For decades, liberals and progressives pointed out that Americans vote at much lower rates than Europeans. Since non-voting is especially high among groups that normally lean to the left--minorities and those with the lowest incomes and formal education--this meant that the building blocks of a more liberal, even social democratic, politics existed in the United States. But these people (so the thinking went) were excluded from the political process by complicated registration procedures and the failure of parties and candidates to raise issues that motivated them. To many on the left, it was a reassuring image: Outside the political system, looking in, were enough potential voters to swamp conservatives (and moderates for that matter). It meant history was still on their side, since ways would surely be found sooner or later to mobilize these citizens.
Many Democrats shared this belief, which is why they joined progressives in passing the “motor voter” registration law in 1993. Many journalists were believers, too, regularly reporting that high turnout naturally favors Democrats.
But there were always two things wrong with this line of argument. It exaggerated the number of non-voters and it mischaracterized their likely political views. Because turnout ratios are typically calculated as a percentage of all adult residents of the United States, the number of non-voters misleadingly includes millions of people who are not eligible to vote because they’re not U.S. citizens or, in many states, because they are convicted felons. There have always been millions fewer non-voters out there to be mobilized than was suggested.
More important, the myth mischaracterized non-voters politically. It’s true that minorities and the very poorest Americans have historically voted at disproportionately low rates. But it doesn’t follow that the average non-voter falls to the left of the political aisle. For example, U.S. Census Bureau data suggest that non-voters who didn’t finish high school at most made up one in five non-voters in 2000. The same data suggest that up to 30 million non-voters in 2000 had either some college education, a bachelor’s degree, or an advanced degree. In other words, non-voters included many millions of middle-class Americans. In other cases, the myth-making left politically miscategorized groups that historically voted at low rates. African Americans might vote overwhelmingly Democratic. But politically sluggish young people come close to splitting evenly between Democratic- and Republican-leaning views, despite 1960s memories to the contrary. Hispanics are turning out to be much more politically diverse than some hoped (and others feared), even if we aren’t sure exactly how many voted Republican this year. Finally, the ranks of non-voters have also included millions of rural and small-town residents--many of them religious--whose incomes might connote urban poverty but whose political sympathies don’t. In sum, it isn’t obvious at all that most non-voters would be heavily inclined to support left-of-center candidates if they entered a polling place.
The 2004 election results bear this out and may lay the myth permanently to rest. The campaign caused a healthy increase in turnout, but at least as many of the new voters cast Republican ballots as Democratic ones [...]
[...] And if we compare how many votes George W. Bush added to his 2000 totals with how many John Kerry added to Al Gore’s 2000 total, it’s clear that Bush gained heavily among these new voters, even though Kerry had the easy pickup of many former Naderites to his totals.
Much has been made of the impact of the Evangelical Christian voting bloc, but I suspect the real swing in George Bush’s favor this November came from erstwhile liberals who woke one morning to find they were suddenly more comfortable with the conservative label—progressivist Democrats having hijacked the Democratic party, and with it the home to traditional liberal moderates. For me, this realization occurred in the course of debating my progressivist friends in the academy over things like affirmative action, or diversity, or gender-based pedagogical theory. To my mind, a real commitment to egalitarian concerns had been eschewed by progressives in favor of a faux egalitarian impulse that sought to foist a superficial statistical “equality” on the American public by constantly jiggering policy to achieve the proportional results it idealized. And the ends justified the means. Which is how we ended up with illiberal liberalism—a liberal progressivist political culture that justifies racial quotas and free speech zones, hate crimes legislation and increasingly anti-male public education practices.
It’s worth remembering that Martin Luther King, Jr., a Christian civil rights advocate (and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from its founding in 1957 to his death in 1968), would today be pilloried by the progressivist left as a red state Uncle Tom—an “inauthentic” Black Bible thumping creationist whose dream that people be judged not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” would be dismissed as anti-Black “code”—or rather, as the right’s usurpation of the language of “fairness" to keep minorities permanently oppressed by removing from the social equation historical contingency. Which critique, of course, is a big steaming load of self-serving horseshit.
No, in the final analysis, I think the American liberal spirit is alive and well, just as it’s always been; but because much of that spirit resides in the ideals of modern conservatism, and because conservatism finds its home in the Republican Party, an increasingly “red” country has simply continued its principled embrace of classical liberalism. And until the Democratic Party recognizes that such a rebranding is in fact taking place, they’ll continue to lash out at what they perceive to be backward heartland rubes in a facile attempt to caricature those who embrace a constitutional liberalism that respects the separation of powers—and which places the will of the people over the slim partisan dictates of some or another activist judge hoping to cement his or her own judicial immortality.

Chicken head

Another blogger recently used the expression "chicken with its head cut off" to describe a state of extreme excitement and it triggered a nostalgic flashback about my mother.
My mom was raised on a farm and had a farmer's sensibility about animal rights - essentially, "We own the animals and can do whatever the hell we want with them." Sort of a Book of Genesis "dominion over the animals" perspective that still makes sense to me. Except for dogs, of course. Dogs are simple little people trapped in hairy bodies who just want to make us happy.
There's an old American Indian legend that tells of a time when the Great Spirit split the human and animal worlds apart and, at the last moment, only the dog leaped across the expanding chasm to be with man.
But I digress.
When I was young - in the single-digit age range - my mother occasionally bought a live chicken as part of her grocery shopping. I don't know where she got it. I don't remember ever seeing live chickens in the little IGA grocery store where we shopped.
At any rate, she would take the hapless hen out into our back yard and, with one deft and practiced two-handed twist, rip its head off.
I watched in amazement as the headless chicken dashed blindly around the yard, its wings beating wildly and a fountain of crimson spouting from its neck, until it flopped over in the grass.
That was the first time I witnessed death - not counting insects and other lower life forms - but it wasn't until much later that I grasped the irony that it was being dealt by the same person who gave me life.
You still hear and read the headless chicken metaphor these days, but it's an abstraction to most people born since 1950 - certainly to anyone not raised on a farm.
I have no idea why my mother chose to kill and dress her own chicken rather than just buy it ready to cook from the grocery. I don't know if fresh-killed chicken is supposed to taste better or if it was just cheaper or if she just did it out of nostalgia for how she was raised. And she's not around anymore to ask.
She's gone to the land of the headless chickens. Let's hope they don't hold a grudge.

Faves

Another blogger’s list of favorite things got me thinking about my personal list. So here, in no particular order, is my personal list of stuff I like or can’t do without:

BMW Motorcycles – I’ve been riding BMWs since 1981 and have more than a quarter-million BMW miles in my mirrors. I love them because they’re reliable and generally on the technological cutting edge and because they set me and my friends apart from the beefwit biker lifestyle Harley-Davidson crowd. My current ride is an ’03 K1200GT which has 19,165 miles on the odometer as of this afternoon’s ride.

My Subaru Forester – We bought an ’02 Forester S in March after an elderly woman with macular degeneration totaled my late mother’s ’92 Buick LeSabre that my wife was driving. It handles beautifully, gets decent gas mileage (23.11 mpg) and can go about 330 miles on a tank of regular. It’s great for hauling around our camera gear and we can even sleep in it, if need be. We’re eager to see how it handles in the snow with all wheel drive.

Breitling watches – I inherited a 1940s Breitling Premiere from my late father-in-law. It was a WWII bring-back and I had it cleaned and put back into running order. I splurged about four years ago and bought myself a titanium Chrono Avenger that looks terrific and keeps excellent time.

Nikon cameras – I had a couple of Nikon point-and-shoots for my motorcycle trips and was content with them until my girlfriend (now my wife) bought a Nikon N50 SLR back in the late 1990s. I had a Pentax SLR and lenses dating from the ‘70s which I sold on Ebay to get into the Nikon line. I started out with an N90S and the Tamron 28-300mm lens, later transitioning to an F5 before we made the jump to digital and bought a couple of D-100s. Between us, we have a pretty complete range of lenses from the digital 12-24mm, through a Tamron 90mm macro to a funky Phoenix 500mm.

XM Satellite Radio – I’m listening to XM as I write this, having finally received the free home kit that I ordered when I bought my first XM Roady in June. It’s such a luxury to have this incredible variety of music without commercials.

Diet Coke – We go through a couple of cases a week. Goes well with Bacardi Puerto Rican Rum, too.

Beck’s Dark Beer – My favorite, although – truth be told – after the first two, any beer will do. My taste runs to the darker beers and porters and stouts, but I would never turn down a Molson or a Labatt’s. While in Mexico a few years ago, I developed a liking for a brand called Superior, which I’ve not been able to find here.

Swiss Army knives – I’ve carried one or another for most of my adult life and use it daily. I’ve eyed the Leatherman tools, but can’t get excited over their bulkiness.

Windstopper garments – I discovered windstopper technology about 8 years ago when I bought a jacket made by Columbia and found it needed very little layering to keep me comfortable in bitter cold weather. A friend turned me on to Willis & Geiger clothes shortly before the Lands End bean-counters killed the company because it wasn’t making enough profit. I was able to snarf up some great W&G gear, including a Diaplex sweater that has an excellent wind-stopping shell.

Windows XP – I’ve been a Windows user since v3.0 in the early 1990s and, while it still has its problems, XP is the most reliable version yet.

Dell Computers – My Dell has performed remarkably well and so has the one I bought for my step-daughter to take to college. My wife’s Gateway, in contrast, is less reliable especially when it was running Windows 2000. I upgraded the memory and the operating system to XP and it’s almost as solid as my Dell now.

Instant oatmeal – A one-serving package, two-thirds of a cup of water, 90 seconds in the microwave and breakfast is served. It’s only 3 Weight Watcher points and I like to think it’s lowering my cholesterol.

DSL – When I moved to this little town of 1,500, I had to give up my high-speed internet. After a year of dial-up, my prayers were answered when the local phone company offered DSL. Since I live only 5 blocks from the switching office, my service is very fast and I’m a happy camper.

My Handspring Treo 300 cell phone/PDA – Yeah, it’s been obsoleted by the Treo 600 and 650, but it only cost me $70 on Ebay, works great and uses lots of free software.

Nepenthe – The restaurant in Big Sur, Calif. My all-time favorite place to eat and chill out.

Hello Direct telephone products – I’ve used their headsets for years. They’re very comfortable and are far superior to the Plantronics crap you get in office supply stores.

Our Hot Tub – It’s a CalSpa and it’s like taking a mini-vacation to soak in 102º F water when the outdoor temperature is –10º and my hair has ice crystals in it. We got it early in 2001 and the heater failed this summer. It had a lifetime warranty and, since I’m still alive, they replaced it free.

Ebay – I’ve used it to sell more than $3,100 worth of parts from my old bike (’91 BMW K100RS) and love to shop for good deals there.

KL Homme cologne and aftershave – It’s out of production, but I can still find it on Ebay, along with the discontinued KL fragrance for women.

Be careful what you wish for, my Canadian friends

A lot of disgruntled Kerry supporters are considering moving to Canada rather than remain in the U.S. for the next four years of George Bush's second term. They will not be missed.
And Canadians have put up a website to tout the Great White North as a new home for America's sore losers at www.canadianalternative.com.
Canadians: Please accept our apologies in advance. Don't expect them to add much value to your nation or your culture. They couldn't function in a Democratic society here and they probably won't do very well there either.

Yeah! Go to the Cox & Forkum site - www.coxandforkum.com - for more great editorial cartoons! 

Yasser has left the building

I always suspected he was really Ringo Starr with a rag jauntily wrapped around his head. I almost asked U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick about it at a press conference in 1988.
He will not be missed. Except by those who hoped he would give up the secret Swiss bank account numbers where he had $2-3 billion in PLO money stashed.

The Man

I like to see who reads this stuff, so be advised that if you comment, I'll return the favor by reading your profile and at least some of your blog.
Anyway, I saw something in a commenter's profile that reminded me of this:

About a year ago, my wife had a major headache - felt like her head was exploding.
She got a call from her youngest brother Raph, who is an Emergency Medical Technician with a suburban fire department. In his job, he deals with a lot of stupid people whose lives are a cascade of bad choices.
His advice - bartiburates and whiskey.
"Yeah, they tell you not to mix alcohol with barbiturates, but that's just The Man trying to keep you down," he said with a chuckle.

Cockfighting goes mainstream! 

Chicken Shit

I never much cared for Burger King's food.
Their Croissandwich usually made me queasy about an hour after eating it and I couldn't get excited about their burgers or other fare.
But I have to give them credit for having one of the most bizarre promotions going with their guys in chicken suits.
I first became aware of this strange, kinda creepy scene when a friend e-mailed me the URL to The Subservient Chicken. The BK sponsorship is very low key and some visitors to the site probably never even notice it. It features a guy in a chicken suit standing in what looks like an apartment living room. You're invited to type in commands - whatever comes to mind - and he'll do it. He'll sit down, he'll fall down, he'll turn around, he'll leave the room, and on and on. But if you tell him to do something he considers inappropriate, he... well, I won't spoil the surprise. He appears to be wearing women's garters, which gives the thing a sorta kinky vibe along with the power trip of being able to give orders to a guy in a chicken suit.
BK upped the ante this fall with their loopy spin on cockfighting at www.chickenfight.com. It's all about the presumed fight between BK's Tender Crispy (T.C.) chicken sandwich and the new Spicy Tender Crispy (Spicy) chicken sandwich.
T.C. and Spicy go at it in a cage match straight out of the WWF school of theatrics. Pay close attention to how the ringside announcers dance around the obvious term for how the match is won.
I was about to say the promotion hasn't got me thinking about dining at Burger King, but it is almost lunchtime and a Spicy Tender Crispy chicken sandwich doesn't sound all that bad. As long as I don't imagine that I'm gnawing on any part of the guy in the chicken suit.

This is the week for birthdays. My son Steve (left) turned 34 last Sunday and his brother Sean (right) is 37 today. Considering that I followed the Homer Simpson school of parenting, they turned out amazingly well. Happy Birthday, guys! 

My wife shot this photo of a Cooper's hawk Wednesday moments after it killed a pigeon. 

Clearing the air

I have deleted the more rabid of my pre-election posts. I feel better now.

Winners and losers

Curious about which of your neighbors contributed to political campaigns and which ones they supported?
Check out this website. It's complete from Jan. 1 through Oct. 13, but be sure to come back later after the final reporting deadline.

http://www.fundrace.org/

I couldn't resist. Here is a county-by-county map showing results where 100% of the vote has been tallied. Lots and lots of red. 

Here's how it shook out in 2000. Notice Gore did considerably better than did Kerry in '04. 

Forget politics, let's visit the Garden of Eden

I'm sure those who frequent this place have found the last few days' offerings very tedious and perhaps objectionable. Sorry. I get that way sometimes.
So, as an antidote of sorts, I offer this travel piece that I wrote for a motorcycle magazine a few years ago. It's about the Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kans., one of my favorite travel oddities:

You’re headed west on Interstate 70 through Kansas, leaning into a stiff prairie crosswind blowing up from Texas and counting the mile markers to the Colorado line.
Your day started in Independence, Mo., and the rising summer sun warmed your back as you put Kansas City in your mirrors. Somewhere around the Ellsworth exit, you notice you’re 200 miles deep into Kansas and grimace with the realization that there are more than 200 miles to go before you can say goodbye to the Sunflower State.
This would be a good time for a break and, if you’re willing to bend your schedule a little, there’s something amazing just over the northern horizon.
The only clue to the passing rider is a standard-issue interstate point-of-interest sign at the Kans. 232 interchange announcing something called the “Garden of Eden” up the road in Lucas.
The 18-mile ride to Lucas is an eye-opener after hours on the superslab. The two-lane blacktop snakes its way north over undulating hills, topping out at an overlook surveying the 9,000-acre Wilson Lake Reservoir. It doesn’t take long to realize there’s more to Kansas than what you can see from I-70. You may wonder if the Kansans didn’t choose the route to keep the rest of us moving on through. Following the signs, you turn left on Kans. 18, then left again down Lucas’ Main Street. Another left and a jog down a side street and you are face-to-face with S.P. Dinsmoor’s claim to immortality.
Samuel Perry Dinsmoor began life in Ohio in 1843 and served in the Union Army in 18 Civil War battles. He taught school in Illinois after the war, then tried farming in Nebraska. By the time he got to Lucas in 1891, he had a wife of 20 years – a wealthy widow named Frances he married on horseback – and a reputation for quirkiness.
His neighbors’ first clue that Dinsmoor was, shall we say, a little different came in 1907 when, at the age of 64, Dinsmoor built what he called the Cabin Home.
Wood was at a premium on this windswept stretch of the plains, prompting farmers to hack fence posts out of the native limestone that lies just below the sod. It made perfect sense to Dinsmoor, then, to build a “log cabin” of logs hewn from limestone. The 11-room cabin, completed in 1910, is built of brown limestone logs – many of which are 27 feet long – painstakingly fitted together to form walls 22 inches thick.
The Dinsmoors – S.P., Frances and their five children – lived in the basement that included a kitchen, dining room and living area, but they slept on the top floor. The main floor was a showcase for Dinsmoor’s collection of curios and woodworking handicraft. Dinsmoor’s Cabin Home was the first house in Lucas with running water and electric lights.
Frances Dinsmoor died in 1917, leaving her husband lots of money and spare time.
Over the next dozen years, the aging Dinsmoor turned his attention to the space outside his limestone walls.
One of his first projects was a pagoda-like mausoleum in the back yard surmounted by a concrete angel. It was Dinsmoor’s plan to be entombed there with the late Frances, but local authorities denied his request to have her body exhumed from the town cemetery. Undaunted, Dinsmoor dug up Frances’ casket one dark night and transferred her remains to the mausoleum. The cement over her crypt was curing by the time the locals realized what had happened.
With Frances tucked away for Eternity, Dinsmoor set to making concrete his thoughts on religion, philosophy and politics.
Strung around the west and north sides of the property are a panoply of larger-than-life figures, anchored by the images of Adam – wearing a Masonic apron to cover his nakedness and looking suspiciously like his Creator Dinsmoor – and an impossibly wide-hipped Eve. Sons Cain and Abel are just to the north, making offerings to God. Abel is offering a sheep but Cain’s sacrifice is, in the Gospel according to Dinsmoor, a “rotten pumpkin” and Cain is trying to cover a hole in the side with his foot.
The tableau continues with the discovery of Abel’s murder by his wife and his dog. The dog, also a Dinsmoor invention, is the picture of canine horror with its front paws extended and its mouth wide open in a frozen howl of despair. High above the scene, the all-seeing eye of God gazes down from a concrete stalk and, with one slender arm, points accusingly at Cain and his wife who are skedaddling out of town with their belongings in a carpetbag.
Around the corner on the north side of the yard, Dinsmoor gives us his sermon on the way of the world: a worm nibbles a leaf at the end of a concrete branch, oblivious to the bird about to devour him. A cat-like creature stalks the bird, only to be pursued by a dog. From a nearby tree, an Indian aims an arrow at the dog, unaware he is in the sights of a solder’s musket from the next tree to the west.
Over by the mausoleum is “Labor Crucified,” an allegory in which the working man is tormented in his agony by the doctor, the lawyer, the preacher and the banker.
Dinsmoor took time off from his magnificent obsession in 1921 to wed his 20-year-old Czechoslovakian housekeeper. He subsequently wrote, “An old man needs a nurse, a young man wants a companion. I got both.” Although in his 80s, he fathered two children by his second wife.
Dinsmoor died in 1932 at the age of 89. According to his wishes, he was entombed in a glass-topped coffin in the mausoleum with this promise to future visitors: “If I see them dropping a dollar in the hands of the flunky, and I see the dollar, I will give them a smile.”
About 10,000 travelers visit the Garden of Eden annually and many take the $4 tour that includes a chance to search Dinsmoor’s withered face for that promised smile.

The Garden of Eden is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., seven days a week, from April through October. Hours are from 1 to 4 p.m. from November through March. The phone number is 785-525-6395.
The Garden of Eden has a web site: http://www.garden-of-eden-lucas-kansas.com