Archives for August 2021

Thursday August 26, 2021

I always thought a petard was a sort of spike, turns out it’s a small bomb. The phrase hung or hoisted on one’s own petard refers to the bomb maker blowing himself into the air.

And that’s kind of appropriate today as I revel in the fact that nine of Trump’s lawyers have been recommended for disbarment. This is rarely done, but their behavior was so egregious that a judge recommended that this be done. 

Among them is Sidney Powell who I have to wonder if she is on some sort of alternate reality drug. Part of what the judge said was you can’t come into a courtroom and make outrageous claims. You can’t lie to the court. And, you can’t bring a suit for the purpose of undermining our democracy, having no intention of winning and making no factual claims.

Imagine that! Now one of the lawyers is trying to say, “Hey, it ain’t me.” Claiming he was not really part of this cabal of nine. The problem with his claim is that in another one of their outrageous lawsuits he claims he was. 

I assume that none of the lawyers got paid, because the orange one always cheats people, like Rudy. So, not only will they get disbarred; they won’t get paid. 

Speaking of Rudy, disbarred in New York and D.C., one of his compatriots – Lev, has pleaded guilty to something. 

I keep waiting for these idiots and con-people to go to jail. One thing DJT has shown is that if you fight the law you can delay and or win. 

I want to see him in an orange jump suit. I think it will go well with his hair and skin tone.

Meanwhile, the greatest airlift in American history continues – 82,000 have been taken out of the country. Yeah, it could have been done better, but it’s better than any other time in our history.

Then there is the fascinating drama of people taking that horse dewormer because they were told it works against Covid. It doesn’t. Fox News keeps telling its viewers it does. But there is something that works. Yet, they keep pushing this idea of a deep state conspiracy. Imagine if they had been truthful. I think Laura Ingraham and the bunch should be brought up on involuntary manslaughter charges. 

I also think that hospitals should refuse to treat unvaccinated people. That would solve the overcrowding problem. Where should those sick and dying people go? To Rupert Murdock’s home and Tucker Carlson’s and Fox News’ studio. I mean they have the answers right?

Wednesday August 25, 2021

Okay, I don’t think they can be, but if not, what is going on?

Let’s leave that lie for a moment and take up the exciting news from Arizona! Yeah, the three week audit of the votes that took five months has wound down. How exciting. Now, we will learn the truth! 

Hold on Houston. There is a problem. The five person team has two people sick with Covid. This is shocking news. Not that they have Covid, but the fact that there is a five person team. A team that not even the person who asked for the audit knew about. 

Cyber Ninjas, the company doing the audit, is actually one person. So maybe it should be called Cyber Ninja? So who are the other four in the team? No one knows, but two or three are sick with Covid so we’ll have to wait for the report. Bummer. I really wanted to know the truth about bamboo in the ballots!

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania is trying to go ahead with a similar audit with the Cyber Ninjas. 

To call whatever they did an audit is a misnomer. “What it is ain’t exactly clear” Sorry, Buffalo Springfield. 

Meanwhile, Mike Lindell has revealed The Truth once again. Except he didn’t. We don’t get it, and he has all the evidence. Really? Wow. It’s amazing that the orange one isn’t back in office.

But then again, if he won, he can’t run again. Double bummer.

Moving on. 

I am sick and tired of headlines saying “Biden’s Debacle.” 

When you lose a war, getting out is messy and chaotic. Of course, when you had the previous president let the leader of the forces you are fighting out of jail, give away the country you are trying to save, and draw down the troops to near zero days before leaving office what could one expect? At first, it was chaotic. Maybe the President should not have depended on his intelligence folks, his military’s folks, and his foreign service folks all of whom said it wasn’t going to be like this?

So far Biden has gotten 70,000 people out of Kabul. That’s one of the largest airlifts in U.S. history. How does that stack up against Ford in Vietnam? I think he got out 69.999 + 1 more than Gerry did. I don’t remember the headlines being “Ford’s Debacle” back then. Maybe “The Debacle in Vietnam,” but not fingering the President directly.

Okay, now Nancy Pelosi has passed the huge infrastructure bill. Nine Democrats balked and threatened to blow the deal up, but they fell in line and voted for it. The Republicans were steadfast in their opposition. They don’t have anything, but hey, do you expect them to? I mean as John Boehner pointed out in the twenty five years he was there he never saw the Republicans come up with a health care bill. They certainly won’t come up with anything to help our infrastructure.

When Pelosi was asked what deal she cut with the nine “moderate” Democrats she said, “What deal? All I did was to clarify …”

Yeah. 

Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where the Republican Party actually wanted to help people in this country? It would be, but that’s not happening.

Let’s return to Mike Lindell for a moment. There was a great interview with him. Gordon Kleeper from The Daily Show interviewed him. It was at a rally. Lindell was off to the side of the crowd. Gordon would ask Lindell something and then after Lindell gave an answer Kleeper would say some of the same kind of ridiculous stuff back to Lindell. Lindell’s pitch was he had all the evidence and the media wasn’t covering it. Kleeper would mention some of the talking points that the right wing spouts as if he fully went along with all of it in an “everybody knows this” kind of mode. Lindell got pissed and stomped off.

Ah me.

Now I have to ask myself how many people have to die from Covid in Florida and Texas before the governors of those two states will do something? In the case of Florida the answer is they can keep getting sick because their governor is getting money from one of the makers of the monoclonal anti-bodies. So, he’s not going to stop them from getting sick. In Texas, I’m not sure. Even with the governor getting Covid he’s not changed his tune.

I keep asking, “did these people fail 6th grade science?” Were they asleep during class? WTF?

Tuesday August 24, 2021

I saw a piece from a Kansas City newspaper the other day. It was a veteran who had served two tours in Afghanistan. He said that he had reported that things were not as good as had been stated. He gave lower marks than the current status. He was not allowed to change to the lower status!

This sounds preposterous, that is until you’ve been in the corporate world, and let’s consider the military as a corporate entity for this discussion, because they are a fighting force but that is only the tip of the iceberg. The Pentagon is a huge building devoted to management just like a corporation. It is big, slow to change, and mired in red tape. In such environments looking good is more important than being good.

I was in a corporation and they had been sold a new system. At the time the buzz words were “Better, Cheaper, Faster.” You had to be at least one, if not all, of these things in order to bring change. Or so the current crop of gurus spouted. The system they were purporting to bring in was none of these things. It was not promised to be faster. In fact, the sales people and technical folks that accompanied them would not say what the speed of the system would be. It was bloated. Anyone could see that. There were technical analysis done by the corporation’s own technical staff that said it was bloated, slower, and more expensive. They saw no reason to get it. Yet, that didn’t matter. The decision had been made. Who made the decision was never clear to me.

I watched as more and more equipment had to be bought to support the new system. I kept asking why. 

In this corporation the tech heads laughed and said that no system ever failed here. Everything was a success. Stop trying to fight it. They want it. Screw the cost. Yeah, it makes no sense, so what? Put it in.

There were documented cases of other companies who had put in the system. Same thing. Expensive, confusing, terrible design, slow, and yet somehow this piece of garbage was seeping into the infrastructure.

I was raised by my father to believe that as long as you were making money for the company and improving things for the customer you were doing a good job. None of this was true in this case. You basically had to hold your nose, say everything was great and keep trudging forward. It was soul crushing.

To make matters worse the manager of the project for the software company putting in this system got hired by our company and within a few months he found ways to deliver an ultimatum to me. 

I had done the cutover, moving the old data to the new system. It was over a weekend and went off without a hitch. This despite the software firm telling me that I needed to stay up all night and bring a sleeping bag because they did the transfers manually through a PC. I didn’t. I used big computers and direct transfers. I wrote a script to do it automatically. I got little credit for that.

The managers really didn’t understand the technology and had no interest in learning. This was obvious because if they had understood they never would have gotten this monster. The thought of upper management was they’d make decisions and if it was a problem someone would bail them out. In the meantime they’d put up green lights, 95% completion status reports, and attend endless meetings.

Then the new system went into effect.

It was a joke.

Everyone who used the new system treated it as a black box that would respond in the next five minutes or so. The old system had been instantaneous. 

But the new system was hailed as a success.

A success until it came up against reality. And that is, and was, the problem in Afghanistan. For twenty years.

Saturday August 21, 2021

I watched Rachel Maddow’s show last night and I can’t remember being this infuriated in a long time. I know some people don’t like her and I’ve never understood why, but that’s on them, not me. I would suggest anybody should watch her show and see if you don’t come away troubled and upset. It’s not about her but what she reported as happening and having happened. Not in one segment, but in every segment.

It started with the new lies by the former president. She showed tapes of him boasting that he started the withdrawal process in Afghanistan and that he did it such that it couldn’t be stopped. Then it showed him complaining that it was happening. ( Let’s not forget that he had the leader of the Taliban released from jail so Mike Pompeo as our Secretary of State could tell that man that the U.S. was leaving. This allowed the Taliban to negotiate with the Afghan army and local officials to give up without a fight. Then Trump drew down our troop level to 2,500, days before the inauguration, leaving the incoming President no choice. )

Rachel moved on to the crisis in the south over Covid. Alabama is out of ICU beds. Mississippi is in a similar crisis, but to make matter worse they are also facing a surge in poisoning from a treatment for deworming horses that people are taking. Why are they taking it? She showed clips of four different Fox News hosts claiming that it worked on Covid. It doesn’t. But that didn’t stop Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Steve Ducey from claiming that it does. How irresponsible!

But all this was just a warm up to the bigger story. Rachel had on the woman who worked for Mike Pence and finally quit. This woman claimed, and it has been corroborated, that Steven Miller actively worked to sabotage the visa program set up to get our Afghan allies out of that country. He had people in every branch of government overseeing the special visa process to gum up the works. The number of people who got those visas in the four years that Trump was in office went to zero or close to it. It didn’t matter if you were a Senator pleading a case, a veteran, or the head of the Joint Chiefs no one got through. Miller should be put in jail for life. That is if he can’t be executed for treason. Maybe he can be executed? I mean we were at war and he was helping the enemy, so what’s the problem?

There was more. But that’s maybe enough, except for one more thing. If people say that the withdrawal is a mess ask them when has such a thing been done any better? Ford in Vietnam got out no one. Yeah, it could have been done better, but with racists like Miller there to make sure it didn’t what can you expect?

PS India, learning a new way to salute.

Thursday August 19, 2021

The other day I saw a piece on Rachel’s show that pointed out that the head of the Taliban had been in jail and Trump let him out so he could have Pompeo “negotiate” a deal.

Mr. Art of the Deal gave away Afghanistan to this man and Pompeo got a photo-op. What a deal!

Now I’m hearing these stories of former military trying to get their interpreters out of the country. It’s a mess. I remembered that Stephen Miller had worked to make it harder for the interpreters to get out. He pushed through some rule that said they had to have worked for the U.S. for two years. If you worked for the U.S. for a day the Taliban will kill you. Now I’ve read a headline that an ex-CIA says Miller should be charged with war crimes over this. 

I wonder if any of these criminals will be brought to justice.

Don’t forget:

Trump let the head of the Taliban out of jail.

Trump told him we’d leave Afghanistan. This allowed the Taliban to negotiate the take over of the country without a fight.

Trump then drew down the troop level in that country to 2,500 just before the election making any other alternative impossible, except another surge.

I saw a photo yesterday of girls in mini-skirts walking the streets of Kabul in the 1970s. Now? There are women covered head to toe in blue burkas.

I’ve read about the loyalty and help that various interpreters have given to our troops. I’ve read how the upper echelons in that country were corrupt. I’ve seen how the Taliban has been willing to fight for years, decades even. How can there be such a division? 

How can one side be so dedicated and the other so incompetent and corrupt at the upper levels? The same was true in Vietnam. 

I remember seeing a bumper sticker near Fort Dix that said, “Give Was a Chance.” A play on John Lennon’s song, “Give Peace a Chance.” 

Jimmy Carter wrote that our nation has been at war for most of its existence. That there are only 16 years we haven’t been at war. 

I’d say we’ve given War a chance. It hasn’t worked out so well for us. 

I’ve traveled around the world and we are admired, not for our military but for our way of life. People see the houses and the TV shows and movies. They know that what we have for individuals is different than what they have. They admire it. They want something like what we have.

In most of the world people are oppressed in one way or another. It might be a dictatorship. It might be a weak government and a crime syndicate, or a religious ideology. Whatever it is, most people live in much different conditions than we do. Roads are narrow and unpaved. Yards are dirt. Houses are small one or two rooms affairs. Sanitation is spotty. Most countries there is a small trash can next to the toilet for you to put your used toilet paper in. The sewage system can’t handle the paper. The pipes are too small. The world is different than the America of the United States. 

It’s time we started helping people, especially those who live everyday lives. Giving money to their leaders doesn’t work.

PS River scene – The Ganges at night