Security theater

This guy does what I would do if I weren't chicken.  He tests and routinely skirts airport security to demonstrate that it is flawed.  Now when can we go back to the days of easier flying?

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/airport-security

A shattering moment in America's fall from power

The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over. [more...]

So says John Gray of the Observer. It reminds me plainly of words I heard from a Mexican friend living in Taxco, Gro. shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. "Your empire will fall," he said. I pondered those words. Empire? Yes, and nothing could be more demonstrative of our hubris than our invasion of Iraq on false pretenses without global support.

Gray says, "Meltdowns on the scale we are seeing are not slow-motion events," particularly regarding the financial sector falling apart, but as he points out, this meltdown has been in development for the last two decades as regulation has become unfashionable and the corporations have bought the government.

What a McCain Victory Would Mean

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/082608.html

"In judging the shape of a future John McCain presidency, there are already plenty of dots that are easy to connect. They reveal an image of a war-like Empire so full of hubris that it could take the world into a cascade of crises, while extinguishing what is left of the noble American Republic."

"...[W]hile Bush and McCain rushed off to war against Iraq over the distant possibility that Iraq might some day have the capacity to build a nuclear bomb, they allowed disorder to spread in Pakistan, a country that already possesses nuclear weapons."

Ready for King McCain? Let him appoint a few justices to the Supreme Court who will agree with the right-wing justices already there who are of the opinion that the President should have unchecked powers in wartime and wartime will never end.

This nonsense must stop!

The Reagan Legacy

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/article?f=/c/a/2004/06/09/BUGBI72U8Q1.DTL

Deficit spending with a smile, and it all works out... for a while. Bush is going by the same play book (as been for 8 years), and it will be our undoing unless we're very clever about fixing things.

McCain: More wars

Can we afford anything but an Obama vote?

Color-coded threats

Israel to bomb Iran

Word by way of Pakistan is that Israel (blue on the map at left) is very interested in attacking Iran (red) to stop the latter's nuclear ambitions. Writes the Daily Times, "...time is running out and ... if Israel is to attack Iran, it should be now when Bush is in office. [Isreal's war hawks] stress that there is now a 'favorable window of opportunity' that will close with the US presidential election in November, and that Israel can only depend on American support for as long as current US President George W. Bush is still in charge in Washington."

Now forgive me, but this actually makes a modicum of sense. Israel is literally up in arms over the Iranian nuclear ambitions, and Israel has some guns to make an assault. The United States has little motivation to embark on such a mission unilaterally, even with the precedent of attacking Iraq to stave off the fictitious WMD, but if Israel does it with the backing of the United States, well then we have a war on our hands! And what a conflagration it can be. Israel can use the United States' precedent of a preemptive strike as justification for their strike against Iran, and Iran will take up arms against Isreal. If this should somehow become a land war, guess who's in between! When will the insanity end? Once again, bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity.

Time to impeach.