perfidy

Associated Press is reporting a minor leak of trace amounts of sarin from a storage bunker in AL.

Sarin, for the uninitiated, is a chemical weapon of the nerve variety, meaning it messes with your nervous system and ultimately causes suffocation. Not so different from a can of Raid, except sarin has no odor or color. And presumably no flavor.

Thing is, last fall I took a slightly unorthodox vacation and was fussing about not far from those bunkers. The bunkers I was around were long abandoned, and USED to hold WMD munitions. The only one I was actually in was empty, but....

Maybe I should wonder about this rash...?

John Kerry on the American Urban Radio Network:

President Clinton was often known as the first black president. I wouldn't be upset if I could earn the right to be the second.

Two viewpoints: First, Leon Kass (bioethics council member) claims that the council is balanced and that politics are not involved.

Or, you could read this article, in which Elizabeth Blackburn (one of the ejected scientists) is quoted as saying, "I think this is Bush stacking the council with the compliant".

You might also want to read Glenn Reynolds' take on it. He's pretty harsh, and he's GOP.

As with foreign policy, economics, taxation and religion, this President doesn't like being inconvenienced by opposing views.

Now you know. If you need a gas mask, these people have an ill-designed website where you can acquire one. Then you need to learn the care and feeding of gas masks.

Bonus picture:

It is the centenary of the birth of Theodore Geisel, the man who made it possible for Jesse Jackson to read "Green Eggs and Ham" on SNL and permanently damage my brain. For all kinds of nonsensical activities involving crude and perversely drawn creatures and words that don't mean a thing but rhyme very well, go here, or here. 

"The Lorax speaks for the trees!" If there is anything aside from the sanctimoniousness, lies, arrogance and delusion that turned me away from the environmentalist movement, it's that phrase.

[wik] It has been pointed out that I got the quote wrong. Here is the correct quote, in context - we're all about context:

"Mister!" he said with a sawdusty sneeze,

"I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.

I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.

And I'm asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs"

he was very upset as he shouted and puffed

"What's that THING you've made out of my Truffula tuft?”

It should be noted that the Lorax' fear is overwrought. Clearcuts are, after all, only temporary meadows. Who hates meadows?

[alsø wik] While looking for the actual words the actual Lorax spoke instead of the wrong words in put in my quote, I found this:

Rejected Dr. Seuss Books:

1. One Bitch, Two Bitch, Dead Bitch, Blue Bitch
2. Herbert the Pervert Likes Sherbert
3. Fox in Detox
4. Who Shat in the Hat?
5. Horton Hires a Ho
6. The Flesh-Eating Lorax
7. How the Grinch Stole Columbus Day
8. Your Colon Can Moo---Can You?
9. Zippy the Rabid Gerbil
10. The Cat in the Blender
11. Marvin K. Mooney, Get the Fuck Out!
12. Are You My Proctologist?
13. Yentl the Lentil
14. My Pocket Rocket Needs A Socket
15. Aunts in My Pants
16. Oh, the Places You'll Scratch and Sniff!
17. Horton Fakes an Orgasm
18. The Grinch's Ten Inches

Yesterday was the Massachusetts Democratic Primary, in which resident dirtbag John Kerry stomped the opposition like Warren Sapp playing pee-wee league. Although I am unimpressed with Kerry (call it anti-impressed; null-impressed; I got my hate on) as a candidate, a person, and a user of valuable oxygen, I have been deeply impressed by the efforts of another Democratic contender: Dennis Kucinich.

Now, I know what you'll say. "He's crazy! He's incompetent! He'll get us all killed! Have you ever been to Cleveland?" And yes, he's all that and a box of hammers, and Cleveland was a stink-pit for a while there thanks to him, but consider this. In the weeks before the Primary, only one candidate's supporters were out stumping in my district. Only one candidate's supporters were flyering, signing, speechifying, and pressing the flesh. Only one candidate's supporters took the time to personally hand me a flyer and ask if I had any questions-- and then proceeded to answer questions. Only one candidate's supporters wrote my wife (a registered Dem) a very nice and poorly-spelled personal letter making a case for his campaign and asking for her vote. Guess who.

He might be crazy, but his organization cares enough to keep trying for the sake of their message. He might be incompetent, but of all the men running for President, Dennis Kucinich is the only one who has the courage to stick to his insane, dangerously radical convictions. He's got integrity.

Why's he the only one?

I will be mostly absent from this site for a little while: "real life" intrudes.

But I would like to take a second to plug Bravo's series "Keen Eddie," which is one of the best new shows on TV. Watch it in reruns this weekend, and start tuning in Wednesdays at 10:00. Really fantastic.

From murdoc, we hear that there is a new Heinlein movie-book-adaptation thingy in the works. Heinlein's classic juvenile novel Have Spacesuit, Will Travel has been given to the Oscar winning screenwriter David Reynolds (Finding Nemo) for conversion into what hopefully will be the first decent adaptation of a Heinlein book. No word on when the movie is planned to be released.

As I commented in mudoc's post, the track record for Heinlein movie adaptations is abysmal. %$#&^&#$#*ing Verhoeven crucified one of my favorite all time novels. He and his @#$%head screenwriter completely missed the point of the book. And worse, in the HBO 'making of' special, they went on and on about how this movie is a tribute to the master, and how much they admired his work. After seeing just the preview, I wondered if they had even read the blurb on the back of the book. The Puppet Masters wasn't quite as bad, but didn't go beyond mediocre.

What I would most like to see would be for some talented indie-type director to create a film noir version of Heinlein's novella "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag." First, because it's a great story. It's creepy, ingenious, and has some of Heinlein's better dialog. Second, because short works make better movies. A page of a movie script is equal to about a minute of film time. And also roughly equivalent to a page in prose. So, for a two hour movie, you need about 120 pages of text. Anything more, and you have to start cutting. Get a really big novel, and you have to cut a lot. This is one reason why Dick's stories make better movies - they are the right length. And also why Dune and LoTR are so difficult.

Heinlein's early novels tended toward short, most are less than 200 pages. Better targets for adaptation. Though they can still be screwed up, as witness the two Heinlein movies we have. (And I hope they never make a movie out of Stranger in a Strange Land) There is great potential in several Heinlein books. Double Star is a great political thriller - and could even be removed from the science fiction context and still be a great movie. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a ripping yarn about a revolution, an intelligent computer who likes practical jokes, and dropping really big rocks on the Earth. Starman Jones is a great adventure, as is Red Planet. The first half of Glory Road could be better than all but three fantasy movies ever made.

And frankly, I'd still like to see a real version of either Starship Troopers or Puppet Masters.

gwiawnt wobowt sowushowns gwowp: 

[hat tip: Mapgirl]
 

The Village Voice is reporting that John Kerry did some very, very bad things when he was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./ M.I.A. Affairs in the early nineties. The POW issue has been a contentious one since the end of the Vietnam War. Many people are convinced that the government in general, and the DoD in particular have acted to cover up evidence that the Vietnamese still had living American prisoners. And there is a lot of evidence to support that contention. The general apathy of a public eager to 'move on' and put painful memories behind them has contributed to an atmosphere where this is possible.

But this article makes the claim that Kerry actively participated in these activities when he was chair of the select committee.

In the committee's early days, Kerry had given encouraging indications of being a committed investigator. He said he had "leads" to the existence of P.O.W.'s still in captivity. He said the number of these likely survivors was more than 100 and that this was the minimum. But in a very short time, he stopped saying such things and morphed his role into one of full alliance with the executive branch, the Pentagon, and other Washington hierarchies, joining their long-running effort to obscure and deny that a significant number of live American prisoners had not been returned. As many as 700 withheld P.O.W.'s were cited in credible intelligence documents, including a speech by a senior North Vietnamese general that was discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar.

Here are details of a few of the specific steps Kerry took to hide evidence about these P.O.W.'s.

• He gave orders to his committee staff to shred crucial intelligence documents. The shredding stopped only when some intelligence staffers staged a protest. Some wrote internal memos calling for a criminal investigation. One such memo—from John F. McCreary, a lawyer and staff intelligence analyst—reported that the committee's chief counsel, J. William Codinha, a longtime Kerry friend, "ridiculed the staff members" and said, "Who's the injured party?" When staffers cited "the 2,494 families of the unaccounted-for U.S. servicemen, among others," the McCreary memo continued, Codinha said: "Who's going to tell them? It's classified."

  Kerry defended the shredding by saying the documents weren't originals, only copies—but the staff's fear was that with the destruction of the copies, the information would never get into the public domain, which it didn't. Kerry had promised the staff that all documents acquired and prepared by the committee would be turned over to the National Archives at the committee's expiration. This didn't happen. Both the staff and independent researchers reported that many critical documents were withheld.

• Another protest memo from the staff reported: "An internal Department of Defense Memorandum identifies Frances Zwenig [Kerry's staff director] as the conduit to the Department of Defense for the acquisition of sensitive and restricted information from this Committee . . . lines of investigation have been seriously compromised by leaks" to the Pentagon and "other agencies of the executive branch." It also said the Zwenig leaks were "endangering the lives and livelihood of two witnesses."
• A number of staffers became increasingly upset about Kerry's close relationship with the Department of Defense, which was supposed to be under examination. (Dick Cheney was then defense secretary.) It had become clear that Kerry, Zwenig, and others close to the chairman, such as Senator John McCain of Arizona, a dominant committee member, had gotten cozy with the officials and agencies supposedly being probed for obscuring P.O.W. information over the years. Committee hearings, for example, were being orchestrated to suit the examinees, who were receiving lists of potential questions in advance. Another internal memo from the period, by a staffer who requested anonymity, said: "Speaking for the other investigators, I can say we are sick and tired of this investigation being controlled by those we are supposedly investigating."
• The Kerry investigative technique was equally soft in many other critical ways. He rejected all suggestions that the committee require former presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush to testify. All were in the Oval Office during the Vietnam era and its aftermath. They had information critical to the committee, for each president was carefully and regularly briefed by his national security adviser and others about P.O.W. developments. It was a huge issue at that time.
• Kerry also refused to subpoena the Nixon office tapes (yes, the Watergate tapes) from the early months of 1973 when the P.O.W.'s were an intense subject because of the peace talks and the prisoner return that followed. (Nixon had rejected committee requests to provide the tapes voluntarily.) Information had seeped out for years that during the Paris talks and afterward, Nixon had been briefed in detail by then national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and others about the existence of P.O.W.'s whom Hanoi was not admitting to. Nixon, distracted by Watergate, apparently decided it was crucial to get out of the Vietnam mess immediately, even if it cost those lives. Maybe he thought there would be other chances down the road to bring these men back. So he approved the peace treaty and on March 29, 1973, the day the last of the 591 acknowledged prisoners were released in Hanoi, Nixon announced on national television: "All of our American P.O.W.'s are on their way home."

...A year after he issued the committee report, on the night of January 26, 1994, Kerry was on the Senate floor pushing through a resolution calling on President Clinton to lift the 19-year-old trade embargo against Vietnam. In the debate, Kerry belittled the opposition, saying that those who still believed in abandoned P.O.W.'s were perpetrating a hoax. "This process," he declaimed, "has been led by a certain number of charlatans and exploiters, and we should not allow fiction to cloud what we are trying to do here."

If this is true, and it seems plausible, then there we have another very big reason not to like Kerry. [Hat tip: Dad.]