licentious radio

Saturday, February 15, 2003
[8:32:38 PM]

Some licentious reports:

Duct tape for Homeland Security

Venture Capitalists Protest Naked

My parrot's adventure as a Sunday talking head

LucasFilms to go all-silent

Nation's fascists, political whores, and morons support pledge

Today's Terrorist Threat: Explosive Breast Implants

Bush: I am not a dumb-bell

[8:15:52 PM]
This is Day 515 of Dim Dubya's all-out, dead-or-alive man-hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Helen Thomas: This is the worst president ever. He is the worst president in all of American history.

[7:00:32 PM]
San Francisco marches to the drumbeat of peace tomorrow.

Somebody turned the rain on again, so bring your rain boots for some anti-war puddle-stomping. Our inside sources say the rain will stop in time for the parade.

[4:31:13 PM]
I asked for universal health care and all I got was this lousy stealth bomber.

[4:00:08 PM]
Today the story is that France is protecting Iraq in order to get new oil contracts. This is supposed to counteract the "blood for oil" rhetoric of the mamby pamby liberal weenie pacifists.

It's pretty weird when the propaganda spills out into the tech blogging community.

So how about it? 1) France and Russia already have the contracts with Iraq.

2) The US has been explicit in warning them they'll be cut out of the oil business in Iraq if they don't support Bush's war. Got that? Whether or not Bush *only* wants to grab Iraqi oil, he threatened to cancel Iraq's existing contracts with France and Russia. Bush is a crooked dirty blackmailer, plain and simple. But we knew that.

3) There are *surely* even more psychotic reasons for war than just the oil profits to Chevron. It's pretty clear there's a cabal of psychos that see knocking off Iraq as a step toward making the Middle East safe for Israel. But you don't see six aircraft carriers off the coast of Lebanon or Gaza.

4) The propagandists want you to focus on greedy -- that France is as greedy as Bush -- so you won't think of any other reasons for avoiding war. Maybe France wants to fight whacko-Islamic-terrorists that are a clear threat, not Iraq which has been more than contained for a decade?

5) The right-wing propagandists try to make you forget this: when the US administers Iraq, *we* control the spigot. We will be able to prevent any price rise, and even make it hard for others to lower prices. That's *exactly* the power we've wanted since 1972. It's *exactly* the goal of right-wing American cranks like Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.

6) The appearance of impropriety is blatant. Cheney came from Halliburton. Halliburton immediately got billion dollar contracts from Cheney. Halliburton is profiting big-time from the war already. Halliburton will profit even-bigger-time from contracts to rebuild Iraq after the conquest. Do you think there is *anything* Halliburton won't do for Cheney once he's off the federal payroll? If there were, in fact, no impropriety, Cheney/Bush could go a long way toward dispelling the war-for-oil notion by making decisions related to energy more transparent -- release all the information about the decision process and criteria for choosing between possible outcomes. Instead, they consistently choose secrecy, obvious and inept lies, and bombardments of propaganda. If people think Bush/Cheney are crooks out to steal Iraq's oil, it's because Bush/Cheney *act* like crooks out to steal the oil. At some point you have to say they've missed their chance to persuade the world of their "good intentions", and it's just time to shut them down.

[3:23:22 PM]
US and UN [presentdanger.org].

This article points out that the UN Charter prohibits Bush from attacking Iraq without *explicit* authorization from the Security Council:

"(It should also be noted that the United States was the principal writer of the Charter.) Articles 41 and 42 of the UN Charter specify that UN Security Council resolutions cannot be enforced by military action unless the Security Council as a whole determines that the government in question is in material breach of the resolution, that all non-military means of enforcement have been exhausted, and then specifically authorizes the use of force. This was reiterated in Article 14 of UN Security Council resolution 1441 targeting Iraq, that was introduced by the United States last fall, which states that the Security Council 'remains seized of the matter.' In other words, only the Security Council as a whole, not any single member state, has the right to determine what happens next."

"According to the UN Charter, the only other circumstance in which military force is allowed is under Article 51, which allows a member state to use force in the event of 'armed attack' until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.' In other words, the United States cannot make war against Iraq unless there is a direct attack by Iraq against the United States and only until the Security Council convenes and decides what to do about it. Customary law provides a slightly broader definition of self-defense to include a pre-emptive strike to repel a clear and imminent threat, such as troops massing along the border poised to invade. Neither Article 51 nor customary international law gives the United States or any other nation the right to launch a pre-emptive invasion of another country simply because it thinks that the other country might be developing weapons that they fear might someday be used against them. It was largely to prevent such offensive wars that the United States and its allies created the United Nations at the end of World War II."

[2:25:14 PM]
Zippy: "Yes, I admit it... I've been hacking into government search engines, looking for ripe produce." Mr. Toad: "Homeland security is not a plaything, Pin-man! Your boyish pranks may have raised us to an orange alert." Zippy: "Oh, no! This banana may represent th' innocence we may never have again!"

[1:26:48 PM]
George Bush: "I promised to be a 'uniter'. The Dumbocrats called me a 'divider'. But I believe today proves that I've kept my promise. The people of the world are united today. True, they're united against *me*, but I never said I cared what they think."

[1:20:44 PM]
Ridge said, "We have not received any additional intelligence that would lead us to either raise or lower the threat level at this time."

That's a hoot! In fact, when they issued the Orange Alert, they claimed to believe in specific threats that they tortured out of a captured prisoner. After the alert -- signed off on by El Stupido himself -- the threat turned out to be a lie.

Bottom line: they declared the alert for political expediency, without verifying the accuracy of their information. If they called off the alert now, they would look like idiots. Oopsy, we forgot to run a polygraph test. (Oopsy, we forgot to budget for aid to Afghanistan.)

[1:11:06 PM]
Man. The New York Times must get some kind of tax rebate for dissing anti-war protests.

So many people turned up in New York City, that Robert McFadden couldn't get away with rejecting the 400,000 estimate out of hand. He had to settle for quipping that it's just guesswork.

Well, look here, Bobby: you count the people in a given area (several areas of known size), multiply by the total area with that density, and estimate the turnover, and the size of the crowds the cops turned away. We're only after a ballpark figure, but we can get it, and it matters.

The last protest in SF was at least 200,000, probably more. That's a little different from "tens of thousands" reported in the New York times.

A paper you could trust would also mention a tendency by police to undercount. The San Francisco police embarassed themselves with a wildly unrealistic estimate for the last march -- 55,000. That was so far off you couldn't help but wonder if it was Bush propaganda. Over a period of days, the cops had to give up higher and higher estimates, until they admitted that 200,000 would be a reasonable estimate if the parade route and the rally area were full. In fact, because of the turnover, probably 50% more people participated during the day.

Police estimates in Berlin were more like 500,000 than Bobby's report of 200,000. Bobby probably chops the London total by half or more, too. 500,000 to 750,000 is probably the lowest conceivable range. 1.5 million probably isn't out of line for London. And did we mention 500,000 in Rome and 200,000 in Damascus (!!)? Bobby didn't.

[11:30:01 AM]
Salon.com became the enemy. They started out well enough. But when the crunch hit, they proved to be old media. They led the charge for charging for websites. That's a very bad idea, and every high-profile proponent lended support to the campaign to break the internet.

Even so, they could have done it respectfully, but they chose to do it in ways that broke the fundamental value of the internet. For example, when you click on a link, you should know you will get the advertised content. Salon didn't reveal that you had to pay, until after you clicked on a link.

You might say that's a small issue. You might say $30 isn't much money. But there's a saying -- they might have it in Texas, too -- that all progress is made by unreasonable people. Sometimes you have to throw the bastards out, even if you want to like them.

The highpoint of Salon for me was the coverage of the revolution in Serbia. The mainstream media mostly censored it, but there was a country where the Supreme Court tried to steal the election, and they threw the bastards out. If only we had done that here.

So I'll miss Salon. I'll miss them the same as I already miss them. But frankly, I'm glad we'll have them as an example that charging for website content is a failure. I wish they had been smarter, and had succeeded.

[10:58:24 AM]
Robert Fisk [independent.co.uk]: " In the end, I think we are just tired of being lied to. Tired of being talked down to, of being bombarded with Second World War jingoism and scare stories and false information and student essays dressed up as 'intelligence'. We are sick of being insulted by little men, by Tony Blair and Jack Straw and the likes of George Bush and his cabal of neo-conservative henchmen who have plotted for years to change the map of the Middle East to their advantage."

[10:30:18 AM]
This is not the reason to march, but it is clearly an added benefit: protests in the streets make it clear to potential terrorists that the people of the north and west are not directly the enemy.

In the same way that Bush's warmongering increases the risk of terrorist attacks, people marching in the streets *decreases* the risk.

[7:47:21 AM]
Let's be clear about one more thing. If Bush/Blair had made a persuasive case for conquest, these protests would not be huge. When Iraq invaded Kuwait -- apparently at Poppy Bush's urging -- the elder Bush made a reasonably persuasive case that no country should be allowed to conquer another country. Despite Bush's lack of diplomatic efforts to prevent the invasion, and numerous other dubious propaganda tactics, a lot of people were persuaded, and Poppy got his war.

*If* there were a good case for war, Bush/Blair/Powell should have made it. Instead we see lies, and transparently phony propaganda. These guys have practically unlimited resources, and all they can do is whine about bogeymen. If there *is* a good case for war, they have done the world a horrible dis-service with their incompetent lying.

The UN Security Council gave them one last chance to make a case for war, and Powell just made a fool of himself. At some point, you have to say that they've run out of time to make their case, and they just can't be trusted with these kinds of decisions any more.

[7:34:34 AM]
Protests in Europe are huge [cnn.com].

Poor Tony Blair. CNN quotes him as saying: "I rejoice that we live in a country where peaceful protest is a natural part of our democratic process.... As you watch your TV pictures of the march, ponder this: if there are 500,000 on that march, that is still less than the number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for. If there are one million, that is still less than the number of people who died in the wars he started."

But if there are 5,000,000 people in the streets today, that is more than died in all of the wars Saddam started. And let's remember that the two million deaths in the Iraq-Iran war were sponsored by Reagan/Bush as "containment" for Iran. Bush gave Saddam materials for poison gas, biological weapons, and even set up Iraq's nuclear program.

If only 100,000 march in your city, that is less than the number of Iraqi teen-age conscripts Bush/Cheney/Powell carpet bombed to oblivion, and buried anonymously in the sand in the desert. If only 200,000 people march in your city, that is still less than the deaths caused in Poppy's Gulf War and when Saddam afterwards crushed the rebellion Bush asked for and promised to support -- but didn't.

If only 500,000 march in your city, that's probably less than the number of Iraqis who have died since the Gulf War because the US embargoed the chemicals and equipment needed to make drinkable water.

When Blair supports Bush on the war, his hands are as bloody as America's, and our hands are not dripping with blood, they're awash.

The good news, though, is that the world is waking up to Bush's expansionism. The people of the world are against appeasing Bush. No conquest of Iraq. No conquest of North Korea, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Somalia. No global Terror Americana.

And even the Republican-owned media has to run the story.

Good morning, America! It's your turn now.