Of the dynamics at work within Iraq and the empty-suit Mecca of Washington DC, none is more depressing than the ambivilance over a simple concept I refer to often as the “right tool for the job”. Whether you’re extracting seeds from cotton, fixing a sink or building a software program, to achieve a goal within a reasonable amount of time, just as much attention as is paid to motivating your people towards success must also be spent analyzing the methods and tools that surround them. In the same way that one would not attempt to change a flat tire without a jack and something to loosen and tighten the lugnuts, occupying a hostile country in hopes of building it up into something great should not be attempted without the proper tools. In terms of the material, intellectual and physical tools at our disposal prior to invasion on up until today, the United States has never possessed enough of any to succeed.

The US Army soldier and marine are both similar in that the mindframe they are taught repeatedly to embrace is one of a hard, emotionless killer who is just as attached in a spiritual sense to the person fighting alongside them as they would be a blood relative. Make no metaphorical jump into the rhelm of politics when it comes to this, because it has absolutely nothing to do with the makeup of this physical tool our government has crafted over time. There is a job to do somewhere, a boulder needs hauling, some people or structures must be destroyed, and in the world today you’re not going to find any better tool to get either job done. This country’s military personell are unmatched tallent-wise when it comes to physical labor, killing people and blowing things up. Part of what allows this to be true is the systematic erradication of whatever excuses might cause a mere civilian to either stop working or not pull the trigger. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military at 11:14 PM MST

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Hillary said that she was “in it to win it”, but I had no idea that meant something like this:

Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage? This is the question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campe is asking about Sen. Barack Obama. - Insight Magazine

Insight admits to not having checked out the backstory they were provided, but stands by the connection of this fabricated lead to the Clinton campaign. The immediate reaction I had was to connect Insight with NewsCorp and Rupert Murdoch, though it did seem like poor politics to set the bar so low at this point in the game. After a couple minutes of research, I realized that the connection here is much more grave, as Insight is under the control of a Korean I happen to consider more unhinged than Kim Jong Ill and Byung Hyun Kim put together, none other than the Reverend (cult leader) Sun Myung Moon. This lover of bulgogi is also the owner of a world renowned ‘nigger-hating’ standard bearer known as the Washington Times.

At this point I don’t know what to believe, but if there were ever a Japanese-American running for President, you can be sure that this organization would be photoshoping his/her head on every piece of animal porn they could get their hands on. Just put it out there, repeatedly, and understand that as long as the job gets done, whatever had to fall along the way…be it journalism, integrity or the faith of Americans in the inherent goodness of of their fellow man…at least no nigger, Jap or hyphenated loud mouth broad is going be delivering a State of the Union address anytime soon! Of course, if Condolezza Rice happens to run, they’ll give her a pass. The sniper rifle and noose can certainly be put up in her case.

Whether or not any of this plays out in a big way down the stretch is probably a given, as once the suits who own The Washington Times directs an editor somewhere else to run something, it is not whether the story is reliable or not, but just that it is out there in the first place. Do you think somebody like Michael Savage or Rush Limbaugh cares about whether or not a story is legit. Do you think the FoxNews network gives a story like this a second thought before making it part of their playlist for the day? Of course they don’t, and if the real story comes out, they’ll talk around it by throwing out the ‘liberal media bias’ argument and condemn journalism as a whole, then perhaps chalk it all up to ‘what goes around comes around’.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 12:37 AM MST

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The 16 month return was 34.86%, and at this point I decided to take profits in a few areas and reallocate funds. Trades are all considered to have been carried out based on the open price of today’s market:
———SOLD———
AAPL - 200 shares - $85.38 = $17,076 — PRLAX - 300 shares - $37.99 = $11,397
SSEMX - 350 shares - $23.17 = $8,109.50 — FKUTX - 700 shares - $13.52 = $9,464
Total: $46,046.50
——-BOUGHT——
BUD- 200 shares - $50.93 = $10,186.00 — NTES - 750 shares - $20.5 = $15,375.00
CAT - 175 shares - $61.29 = $9,193.50 — PRU - 100 shares - 88 = $8,800.00
Total: $43,554.50 ($2,492.00 remains unused)

The updated (fantasy) portfolio now looks like this: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Al Swearengen as Economics at 6:43 PM MST

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The holiday season was extended for my family, as the stomach flu that ravaged most of the northeast this past month happened to hit our relations near and far like something out of a Stephen King novel, pushing back the Christmas party in Weymouth. Max and Sam lived it up with their cousins, made their papa proud. Van Helsing’s oldest daughter MacKenzie played referee quite brilliantly, releshing the chance to shine as the “big cousin”, and perhaps was the only one in the house who could calm Maxwell down at any moment. He was looking up to her, taking direction from her, and smiling when she gave him a hug. Madison, her sister (closer to Max and Sam’s age but a year or so older), was uneasy about the boys having free reign with her toys, but she too seemed to be appreciative of the sense of order MacKenzie was providing. Helsing shared some of his stash, rare I.P.A. I can still taste, and on the drive home everyone slept. Even mama.

1) “Exercising Congress’s Constitutional Power to End a War” - Senate Judiciary Committee - Senator Feingold, Chair - Tuesday, January 30 at 10:00 AM
2) Dusty has much love for Senator Hagel and TWO posts within a week on him. The first is a video of him gettin’ jiggy wit that leadership bug that’s going around, and the second an interview he gave that has to be read by anyone who is serious about “being informed”.
3) Jurassicpork drops it like it’s hot with his excellent piece on the difference between Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney - Halliburton Rising
4) Recently The Feed has been providing my daily sports fix - everyone should check it out.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 3:37 AM MST

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The US military just can’t help themselves when it comes to troops being killed. They lied about Pat Tillman’s death, and here’s another example: “Contrary to U.S. military statements, four U.S. soldiers did not die repelling a sneak attack at the governor’s office in the Shiite holy city of Karbala last week. New information obtained by The Associated Press shows they were abducted and found dead or dying as far as 25 miles away.“ Perhaps it’s out of shame or embarassment, but there is something that plays into this urge to supress the truth rather than deal with what these events actually mean. Is it so unbelievable that our enemy could kidnap four of our soldiers, drive away, kill them and never be caught? Or is that fact something we can live with, as long as the public doesn’t hear about it? I think the latter is right on, and the sad truth is that any number of US soldiers could be kidnaped, killed and then dumped on the side of the road like these four were, and to the bosses it wouldn’t cause anything a swig of peptol bismol wouldn’t fix.

Dick Cheney would respond to it like this, “Oh yea? Well you can tell the group responsible for this that they can kidnap and kill whoever they want, because we’re not leaving!” To some people that sounds like evidence of strength, but to me it’s just further proof that these troops that die at this point in the war really represent nothing more than the cost of doing business. Their deaths are something we as a society, along with the majority of our government, pretend to care about in the same way that we pretend to care about people who got cancer because their water was contaminated by a company’s pollution. Truth of the matter is, as a whole we simply shrug it off and go on with our day. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military at 8:20 PM MST

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Two election workers have been convicted of rigging the recount in Cuyahoga County to avoid a more thorough review. Jacqueline Maiden and Kathleen Dreamer were both found guilty of felony negligent misconduct of an elections employee and misdemeanor failure of elections employees to perform their duty. A documentary that was released in 2006 captured the very scene that has now been proven to be criminal, and having seen it myself, it was obvious from the start that the sample ballots provided for the recount were not chosen randomly. Hacking Democracy was aired on HBO and featured the story of someone I consider to be a patriot, a woman named Bev Harris, who will undoubtedly go down in history as one of those Americans we grew up learning about in school. When the teacher informed us of how incredible our democracy is, and how this is so based on the possibility of any one of us making a difference that could change our country for the better in enormous ways, most likely they were speaking of someone like Paul Revere.

Bev Harris is that type of a character in the history books of our great grandchildren, but unlike Revere’s heroics, she will not need the fictional puff-up of a Longfellow to earn her relevance. Anyone who is not familiar with this woman should check out Black Box Voting (permanent link posted under ‘Activism’), which is the organization she founded after having discovered Diebold’s source code in a public domain on the internet one night. The mission began as a fact finding search for any and all information pertaining to electronic voting machines, as she had read in the news that a machine in Florida had tallied negative votes for Al Gore in 2000 and was as flabergasted as the rest of us were. The difference between all of us and her though, is that she was determined to dig around and see what she could find. The executives of Diebold have often accused Bev of ’stealing’ their source code, though once questioned on the specifics, they certainly admit that they failed to secure it and that anybody could have done the same exact thing. Indeed, throughout this story Diebold has presented arguments that require only modest questioning in order to crack. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 2:17 AM MST

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From 9/13/04 - Only updated with photos and sadly, still relevant

The magical mystery jar of Vietnam history now has four hands grasping for the contents inside, with respective campaign riffraff of both the guilty fiends howling indictments at one another for stealing the classified cookies and exploiting their deliciousness for political gain. In terms of legitimate behavior of powerful men and women in this country, the campaign Mafioso, talking heads and the fiends themselves have managed to inspire dictionary publishers all over the world to engage in heated debate over the need for a completely new word to describe it. Scholars, writers and satirists are in a state of panic as these past few weeks of buffoonery have raised the bar, and many fear that old time favorites such as ‘farce’, ‘mockery’ and ‘ludicrous’ just won’t get the job done anymore.

There is no rioting, mass panic or spontaneous combustion to report from all of this just yet, but experts predict that a few more baseless statements and they may have to raise the nation’s irrationality alert level to red for the first time in nearly four years. State governors were notified of the potential crisis and some immediately instructed public access stations to roll continuous emergency broadcast episodes of ‘Mr. Wizard’ and ‘3-2-1 Contact’ in hopes that the swelling would go down.      Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 3:20 PM MST

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When years go by as they have, with nerve endings pounding out this sense of shame from encrusted workings inside, utterly unshakable without damning the thoughts that come about around the time of acceptance and future endeavors and mind over matter, that toolbox of good advice more often spoken of than anything else these days, like a corner-man shouting at his fighter to stop thinking about the pain, man up, and stay away from the carbohydrates. Thus stalked by shocking reality video in his sleep, flashes of images and sound played backwards and then forwards, leading to screaming, shouting, running, curling up into a ball, with the vivid stench of excrement and urine the only thing that remains of you, all over you, inside your lungs, coating the insides of your sinuses, reminding you that life is happening all around you, within you, whether you can move or not, and the sounds that make their way into your world are the footsteps moving towards the door, ending the dream at that point for the 349th time, pillow soaking wet, eyes open and adjusting to the darkness that surrounds, nostrils still spiked with the tinge of that ultra-personal aroma five panicked gasps later, on through the life and times of a survivor.

Tell some people about what is done in their name by our government, and you get a faithful recognition that it’s all over their head, that reasons exist for everything that happens, and the spooks are keeping all of us safe in ways we are best not knowing about at all. The competence of whoever is providing the actual back-story to all of this isn’t something to be questioned, and to elaborate on the person I am writing about, it is common for the competence of government to be both assumed and considered inconsequential at the same time. Tortured an innocent man? Necessary. Left thousands to die in the hot New Orleans sun? Wasn’t the government’s responsibility. Convenient for the all-star lineup of stooges able to count votes of this persuasion without a single deed, but so often what is lost in all this is the very soul of our Republic.

Bring up the idea that such suffering is avoidable, and prepare to have “personal responsibility” spoken at you in response, which ultimately boils down in the end to this faith that the ends justify the means, and that when the United States imposes its will on someone, it is always the right thing, always to be supported, and always less of a blood bath than the leftists make it out to be anyways. Abu Gharib was the story of a single National Guard unit with poor leadership…as the story goes, on the historical fringe of reality now not as thick with believers and power, but still loud, absurd and convinced of the fact that to feel shame in response to the story of a man like Maher Arar being abducted by our government and outsourced to Syria on a whim to be tortured, would for some reason be tantamount to admitting defeat. The slippery slope, just like the domino theory and all the other choice scraps of bullshit eaten raw by the handful throughout the Republic, it is largely a lie such as this that tears down our humanity and exposes instead an apathetic lot of lazy-minded drones who are too cowardly and consumed by entertainment to bother considering whether the lessons of right and wrong learned at the earliest age happened to have accompanied them on through to adulthood, or were they largely chucked aside and considered quaint years ago?

Luckily the heart of Senator Patrick Leahy remains in tact, and at a specific point in his Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last week, the topic of Maher came up:

Leahy: He’s a Canadian citizen, he was returning home from a vacation. His plane stops at JFK airport and he is detained…He was deported to Syria…Those sending him back must have known he was going to be tortured. The US approved his deportation to Syria, and does not express any remorse about any of this. Why is he on a government watch list if he’s been found completely innocent by this Canadian commission which used information provided by us?

Gonzales: I’m not at liberty…I can’t do it today, I just can’t uh, badeep-badeep-badeep.

Leahy: Why was he sent to Syria instead of Canada?

Gonzales: Well, ah ah badeep-badeep-badeep.

Leahy: Can you tell me whether you took steps to make sure that he wouldn’t be tortured?

Gonzales: It is part of the public record that John Ashcroft has stated that we sought assurances…

Leahy: Oh…Mr. Attorney General, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to treat this lightly, WE KNEW DAMNED WELL IF HE WENT TO CANADA HE WOULDN’T BE TORTURED, HE’D BE HELD AND INVESTIGATED. AND WE KNEW DAMNED WELL THAT IF HE WENT TO SYRIA HE’D BE TORTURED, AND IT’S BENEATH THE DIGNITY OF THIS COUNTRY, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured. You know and I know, that has happened a number of times in the last five years by this country. It is a black mark on us. It has brought about the condemnation of some of our closest and best allies. They have made those comments both publicly and privately to the President of the United States And it is easy for us to sit here comfortably in this room knowing that we’re not going to be sent off to another country to be tortured, to treat it as though, ‘well, Attorney General Ashcroft said he got assurances’. Assurances? From a country that we also say now, ‘we can’t talk to them because we can’t take their word for anything’.

The question I have is whether or not it’ll become something for all of us to think about, the folly of our aggression towards progress as a human race, and how a pathological sense of entitlement has caught a hold of our country in the years since 9/11, to the point where an innocent person can be stolen, broken and tossed out with the garbage, and it takes years before they are provided even a hint of justice, a whiff of it to cut down on the night terrors and that horrible smell of one’s waste and fear mixed together, inside the pores, the brain, the nerve endings…

This is Maher Arar with his children. He was murdered by our government. His body remains alive today, but what good is it? What right do we have to deny this man justice? How are we more noble or righteous than the terrorists when this can happen and our government hasn’t even an apology to offer?

ADDED MATERIAL 6/21/2007 - Video of the Gonzalez-Leahy exchange transcribed above:

Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Al Swearengen, Military at 12:22 PM MST

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1. Van Helsing emailed a link to a great article that ran in the Wall Street Journal about a handicapper whose skill in picking winners has made him a target of Las Vegas, with lines changing up or down based solely on his picks being published on his website or emailed to his subscribers. The bookmakers in Vegas subscribe to his site and when his picks are announced, spikes in the betting on those specific games will show up…check this out: The Man Who Shook Up Vegas

2. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has been a favorite of mine for quite some time, and he’s getting louder by the day having taken over the top spot on the Judiciary Committee from Arlen Spector. One document I have here is a bill he’s introduced to go after war profiteers - Statement on Introduction of the War Profiteering Prevention Act of 2007 (1/4/07) - He’s also been on AG Gonzales about his idiotic interpretation of Habeus Corpus (Video) - As well as the case of a Canadian man who was apprehended in an airport and sent to Syria where he was tortured (Video - I’m looking for the 60 mintues from a year ago on this story) - Several clips from last year I’ve archived and will seed if anyone’s interested in acquiring all of them - but here are some links to earlier posts on Leahy - Senator Leahy 3/31/06 - Book Burning at the Associated Press 3/23/06 - Senate Hearing on Warrentless Wiretaps 2/7/06 - Stay tuned, as Leahy isn’t running for President, but is going to make more of a difference this year than anyone who is.

3. The End of Football - Jim from Borrowed Suits banged out a great read pertaining to the end of this season for the Patriots. Dr. Thompson shows up for a paragraph at one point!

4. I generally resist posting on what I’m currently listening to, but this one show I pulled the other night, currently seeding, is from 1969 - Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash Studio Sessions - and for any fan of music on any level, I’d highly recommend you hop on this torrent ASAP!

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 2:56 AM MST

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If there’s a nightclub within all of Baghdad that one might desire entry to, it is a well known fact that once you say to the bouncer, “I am here to see Moqtada”, the list in their hand is meaningless. Whether it be a Sunni, Shia or Reggae club, al-Sadr’s potential arrival is worth taking chances for. Many a venue has experienced booze shortages and money at the door like they’ve never seen with nothing more than a simple half-hour visit from this Iraqi legend. The party kicks into gear, and those who were lucky enough to have been inside before the man arrived, experience a phenomena that can only be compared to gremlins in a swiming pool, only instead of gremlins it’s hot horny jail-bait ass from wall to wall. Seemingly out from nowhere they emerge, with hungry eyes aimed right at you, a distance growing shorter every second as they maintain eye contact all the way through the crowd, arrive and ask, “can I buy you a drink?”

Easily understood as to why the people outside and especially inside the Iraqi government appear loyal to al-Sadr before all others. Notice the front row seat he managed to score for the lynching of Saddam:

So without having to load this piece up with more words than it needs, all you need to know is that an ‘al-’ is bound to be dead soon in Iraq, and every pundit from flower to ball gag will have a take on it. All I know is, the bouncer trick that worked for months isn’t working now, as owners are wary of those US satelites and missiles. Simply put, life is ROUGH in Baghdad, in a way that makes Compton in 1990 look like a theme park.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Military at 12:50 AM MST

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770 - Number of detainees held at Guantanamo since 9/11/01 (1)
10 - Number of detainees charged with a crime (1)
9 in 10 - Chances that a Guantanamo detainee was turned over to Coalition forces by an Afghan or Pakistani citizen (11)
5,000 - Average dollar reward that leaflets airdropped over their countries promised for every “terrorist” turned in (11)
5:3 - Supreme court vote delcaring Bush’s military tribunals unconstitutional (2)
51 - Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s job approval rating (3)
70 - Number killed in the bombing of a university in Baghdad yesterday (4)
50 - Number of active duty military officers delivering an Iraq pullout petition to Congress today (5)
74 - Minimum number of days before US bombs Iran according to the Arab Times in Kuwait (6)
1 - Number of pilotless US spy planes shot down by Iran in recent days (7)
3,300,000 - Number of dollars George Michael made on New Year’s Eve in Russia (8)
75 - Number of minutes he had to perform for the money (8)
2,130,000 - Number of Google results on a search for “Britney Spears pussy photo” (9)
754,000 - Number of Google results on a search for “Britney Spears crotch photo” (12)
620,000 - Number of Google results on a search for “Britney Spears beaver photo” (10)
650 - Number of posts on deadissue (including this one)

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 3:18 AM MST

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As a developer I definitely look down upon Microsoft’s strategy of exclusivity regarding the inability of other operating systems to run applications built using the .NET framework, but as an investor or an employee of the company it would most likely allow me to sleep better at night. The fact is, no other single software firm in the global market could survive doing what Microsoft has done with .NET, and while regulation is lax here in the United States, in Europe it’s a different story. As of today Microsoft has produced the court ordered source code it had avoided producing in the past, possibly avoiding a daily fine of 3 million euro, backdated to July. Whether or not this satisfies the European courts, or provides Sun Microsystems and Linux the information they need to remedy the compatibility issues remains to be seen.

It’s a given that in spite of this issue, KnowToys Inc. will continue to utilize .NET mostly because our databases were all built using Microsoft Access. The data stored through the use of our shipping application is grounded in Access and our reporting work is done using SQL, so to build applications in say, Sun Microsystems’ J2EE rather than .NET would be borrowing trouble in my opinion. This isn’t the case when we’re building from the ground up though, as there are considerable advantages to using J2EE depending on the situation. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 10:10 PM MST

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Not only does this government institution have it’s own Pauly Shore movie, but now thanks to Sonicrusk, I’ve come to find that it has it’s own stamp as well!  In keeping with the theme, perhaps their next one could feature the public defender - looking sharp in that business suit, underarms stuffed full of file folders with papers falling out, hands pinched on the tips of inside-out pockets.  Another could celebrate over a hundred years of rape in overcrowded prison cells.  Indeed, they’re merely scratching the surface with this concept.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 10:04 PM MST

3 Comments »

I think what it all came down to was one in-depth expose too few for Ladainian Tomlinson this past week. He’s got the Walter Peyton hill in his back yard and had the entire NFL color squad from coast to coast (minus the Boston area) shouting out the kind of thoughtful endorsements that would prompt even Deion Sanders to turn the volume down on his television prior to gameday. But of course it’s not about the quality of the first expose or whether the ego remains chubby by the last one. Shawn Merriman’s shriveled testes could absolutely agree with the notion that in the end, the San Diego Chargers simply could not garner enough praise leading up to this game, and for my money the blame for their losing falls squarely on the shoulders of Boomer Esiason. One commentator had the audacity to suggest that the Chargers wouldn’t win this one going away, and once word that everyone in the entire sporting press wasn’t backing them made its way into the huddle prior to kickoff, in my mind their collective psyche was rattled.        Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Al Swearengen as Sports at 1:02 AM MST

10 Comments »

I cannot understand what it is about coaches in this league sometimes, how they figure to surprise their opposition by playing away from the defined strengths and weaknesses of the two teams on the field, making haste with calls that need not be made, and ultimately directing a team that could run the ball for most of the second half (being down by no more than 6-9 points throughout most of it) to instead take to the air like their namesake and attempt to peck out the eyes of the hayseed stampede down below, rather than simply punching out their teeth the old fashioned way. Billick comes out of halftime and on the first posession it’s three and out, all three plays are passes. They get the ball back and again he’s telling McNair and the offense to do what they’re not good at doing, and for some reason not realizing that every time you drop back to pass, you voluntarily play to the Colts strength on defense. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Al Swearengen as Sports at 11:22 PM MST

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