“It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.”
– Rod Serling
Tags: Quote of the Day
“Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”
– George Burns
Tags: Quote of the Day, George Burns, family
(I apologize if some of the pictures are a little dark. I tried to use natural light because the flash washed them out. I’m much better at taking landscape photographs.)
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Tags: Thursday Thirteen, bloghopping, blog meme, Christmas, decorations, ornaments
If you haven’t had a chance to catch Patrick Stewart’s new series on BBC America, The Eleventh Hour, you’re missing out. Stewart plays Ian Hood, a physics professor who’s a modern day Sherlock Holmes working for Britain’s Ministry of Science (I think) with a young blonde bodyguard as his Watson, Rachel Young, played by Ashley Jensen.
The show’s first season only had four 90-minute episodes (including commercials) with their third episode having aired this past Monday (9pm EST), but I’m sure BBC America will be re-airing them.
The show itself
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Tags: BBC America, The Eleventh Hour, Patrick Stewart, Ashley Jensen
Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading.But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.
“Even Saddam Hussein had more legal counsel than I ever had,” said Mr. Vance, who said he planned to sue the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, on grounds that his constitutional rights had been violated. “While we were detained, we wrote a letter to the camp commandant stating that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves.”
American guards arrived at the man’s cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep.
The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.
It’s not like we were overpowered. We weren’t outmanned or outgunned or outstrategized, hence we weren’t defeated in any “traditional,” kick-ass, take-names, sign-the-peace-accord way.
It wasn’t because our can’t-lose military didn’t have the latest and greatest killing tools of all time, the biggest budget, the most heroic of baffled and misled young soldiers sort of but not really willing to go off and fight and die for a cause no one could adequately explain or justify to them.
We still have the coolest, fastest planes. We still have the meanest billion-dollar technology. We still have the most imposing tanks and the most incredible weaponry and the badass night-vision goggles with the laser sights and the thermal heat-seeking readouts and the ability to track targets from 2 miles away in a dust storm. It doesn’t matter.
What we don’t have is any idea what we’re doing, not anymore, not on the global stage. We lost this “war” and we lost it before we even began because we went in for all the wrong reasons and with all the wrong planning and with all the wrong leadership who had all the wrong motives based on all the wrong greedy self-serving insular faux cowboy BS that your kids and your grandkids will be paying for until about the year 2056.
Maybe you don’t agree. Maybe you say, “Wait, wait, wait, it’s not over at all, and we haven’t lost yet. Isn’t the fighting still raging? Can’t we still ‘win’ even though we’re still losing soldiers by the truckload and thousands of innocent Iraqis are being brutally slaughtered every month and isn’t Dubya still standing there, brow scrunched and confounded as a monkey clinging onto a shiny razor blade, refusing to let go and free us from the deadly trap, ignoring the Iraq Study Group and trying to figure out a way to stay the course and never give in and “mission accomplished” even as every single human around him, from the top generals to crusty old James Baker to the new and shockingly honest secretary of defense, says we are royally screwed and Iraq is now a vicious and chaotic civil war and it’s officially one of the worst disasters in American history?” Oh wait, you just answered your own question.
Yes, technically, the war is still on. The fighting is not over. And, yes, you can even say we (brutally, tactlessly) installed ourselves with sufficient ego to give us a modicum of violent, volatile control over the gulf region’s remaining petroleum reserves — which was, of course, much of the point in the first place.
But the nasty us-versus-them, good-versus-evil ideology is over. Ditto the numb sense of Bush’s brutally simpleminded American “justice.” Any lingering hint of anything resembling a truly valid and lucid and deeply patriotic reason for wasting a trillion dollars and thousands of lives and roughly an entire generation’s worth of international respect? Gone.
What’s left is one lingering, looming question: How do we accept defeat? How do we deal with the awkward, identity-mauling, ego-stomping idea that, once again, America didn’t “win” a war it really had no right to launch in the first place? After all, isn’t this the American slogan: “We may not always be right, but we are never wrong”?
It’s still our most favorite idea, the thing our own childlike president loves to talk most about, burned into our national consciousness like a bad tattoo: We always win. We’re the good guys. We’re the chosen ones. We’re the goddamn cavalry, flying the flag of truth, wrapped in strip malls and Ford pickups and McDonald’s franchises. Right?
Tags: detainees, Donald Vance, Iraq, terrorism, violence, soldiers of fortune, private military, torture
One of the big things I’ve had to try to cope with in the last year in coming to terms with whether or not I had fibromyalgia was the fact that I simply wasn’t capable of doing everything I wanted to do. I felt like I was “talking big” and not getting anything done and I’ve felt as though people, some people in particular (N2 for one and maybe even PW) were judging me. I’ve wondered how many people have considered me just plain lazy. My father, I think. He’s even commented that he thinks
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Tags: fibromyalgia, goal setting
Tags: Pug, the puppy, Christmas, costume, photo blogging
“We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.”
– Sir Arthur Eddington
Tags: Quote of the Day
Yesterday I saw a banner at the local McDonald’s: “2 for $3 Sausage McMuffin with Egg”. Remember when you got an Egg McMuffin and could pick whether you wanted ham or sausage? When did this change?
Tags: McDonald's, McMuffin
My physical therapist told me that her employer sent out an email warning its employees to beware of a possible UPS impostor in the area. Apparently someone is following UPS trucks, picking up delivered packages left at doorsteps and returning later to “redeliver” them. The email indicated that it’s not known if the person, who does where a UPS uniform but doesn’t drive a UPS truck, is trying to case the homes for possible break-ins or looking for women alone to assault.
She said that coincidently one of her co-workers happened to answer the door when a UPS guy knocked to
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O.K. Now that I’ve gotten someone (my mother) to admit that I’m probably right (the movers probably did take things from my house during the move for whatever reason — to sell on ebay), I’m ready to move on. I just wanted someone to admit that I wasn’t crazy and that there was just too many coincidences for me to somehow to just be overlooking these items in the house.
I finally got my mother to stop saying, “Well, you know, there’s still stuff I haven’t found from our move 5 years ago…” by cutting her off with “But I
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Tags: little red house, ClosetMaid
“I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.”
– Agatha Christie
Tags: Quote of the Day
Seriously.
There are at least seven items missing from my house after the move. I shall describe them for you.
Tags: paranoia, robbers, movers, ghost, the puppy
People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing-that’s why we recommend it daily.
-–Zig Ziglar
Tags: Quote of the Day
Looking back in hindsight, the pain actually started Wednesday night. I mistakingly thought it was due to doing to much as is sometimes the case with my fibromyalgia. I had been going through boxes. O.K. I had gone through every single unopened box left in my house from the attic eaves to the basement to the garage. Every hiding place, trying to find some missing items that I suspect my have been “taken” by either the moving men, the cable guy(s), or the phone repair man. Anyway, my back had starting hurting and I
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Tags: Gallbladder Surgery, ER, agony
“Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic.”
– Dan Rather
Tags: Quote of the Day
“You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.”
– Robin Williams
Tags: Quote of the Day, Robin Williams
Check out the nifty socks Mac sent me. 
Tags: none
Today is a Murphy’s Thursday Thirteen.
Tags: Thursday Thirteen, blog meme, bloghopping
“I always wanted a happy ending… Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.”
– Gilda Radner
Tags: Quote of the Day, Gilda Radner
The Naked Truth
& Other
Discombobulated Thoughts
of a displaced Southerner in New England -- from just daily annoyances to conspiracy theories to political views.
The Dark Side of Christian History by Helen Ellerbe
The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir
Marley and Me by John Grogan
The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby
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