(Insert Super-Awsome Blog title here)

So Chrys Tagged me, and while I appreciate being included in the fun, I’m not going to do it. The assignment was to pick up a book near you and open to a certain page and post certain sentences. It’s an interesting experiment in randomness and I suppose the goal is to create a serendipitous insight into my reading habits. Here’s the problem: I’m sort of a dishonest person who is inclined to manipulate the results. I picked up the nearest book and turned to the page and read the sentences and decided It wasn’t interesting enough. (Or, to be fair, I probably felt that it didn’t make me look interesting enough.) So I went to my bookshelf and picked a more interesting book that reflected the way I wanted the readers of my blog to see me. When I turned to page 123 and looked at sentences 5,6 and 7, I still wasn’t satisfied. Sometime in the middle trying the fourth non-randomly selected book I realized how ridiculous I was being. I was attempting to completely ignore the original intent of the blog tag Chrys invited me to.

I suppose I could have returned to the original book and done it right, but it was too late. I ruined it in my head. So instead you get this rant.

thanks again for tagging me, though.

I just finished re-potting a new bonsai. I think this is the best one I’ve ever done, so of course I have to share it here. the tree is a Montpelier Maple that I bought from a local nursery early this last summer. It was in a one gallon pot and intended as a young landscape tree. I think i paid under $20 for it. It was way too hot to transplant it so I trimmed it and I have been wire training it in it’s original pot for months. The weather here has only just cooled off enough for me to feel safe to re-pot it.

First thing was to carefully comb all the dirt out of the roots and trim them up just the way I wanted them.

Under the soil I found some really thick roots that are perfect for a root over rock style that I’ve always wanted to do. I trimmed the small roots off the higher thicker roots, effectively turning roots into trunk.

For years I haven’t realized just how important soil composition is when growing a bonsai. I guess I just thought i knew how to spot a good potting soil and that it would be good enough. I’m only just starting to realize that I can’t use any potting soil at all. Nobody sells the right composition so I had to make my own.

since I’m planting a maple, I had to go with 1/3 organic material and 2/3 inorganic material (rock). The other consideration that is very important is particle size. So I bought a bag of regular potting soil for the organic material, a bag of pumice, a bag of some sort of dark lava rock, and a bag of vermiculite. I bought a soil sifter with 1/8 inch screen to sift out all particles larger than 1/8 of an inch. Then I made another sifter with regular window screen to sift out all particles smaller than 1/32 of an inch. I sifted each material separately then mixed them in the correct ratios. I’m sure I’ll fiddle with the recipe a bit for future projects, but i believe i now have a near-perfect soil.

I then selected a rock that seemed to fit my tree, and planted it. The tree ended up a few inches taller than it would have been since I raised it out of the soil and turned some roots into trunk.

I really wish I had a digital camera so i could represent this tree better. It turned out even better than I had hoped. If you look closely you can see the wires all over the trunk and branches. They will come off in the spring and I will only be training it through trimming after that.

You hear a lot about America’s conflicting interests that come back and bite us in the ass years later. It’s pretty much common knowledge that the US has a severe problem interfering in any and every entanglement in the world and often starting fresh ones to serve our own interests. I do believe that our involvement is usually well intended, but the outcome is never what we want/expect. It amazes me that our great country hasn’t yet learned the law of unintended consequences. A couple of examples: We helped put Saddam Hussein in power by supporting a military coup in Iraq that gave the government to the Ba’athists. Some say we helped create the monster that spent years in a pointless war with Iran, Invaded Kuwait and caused the Gulf War, and ultimately put us where we are today, mired in violence in Iraq.

Another example would be arming the Taliban against the Russians, which created another monster that we had to deal with later. (see: war in Afghanistan)

This article makes it clear we not only haven’t learned our lesson, but are compounding our mistakes in real time so that instead of waiting a decade to find out we supported the bad guys, we just support everybody.

The meat:

So. To keep score. The United States is supporting: the Shia government, which funnels money and arms to Shia militias, death squads, and insurgent/terrorist groups; the Sunni opposition, which funnels money and arms to the Sunni insurgency; the Sunni insurgency directly, so that they will combat the Shia militias as well as al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group of Sunni terrorists supposedly supported by Shia Iran; the Saudis, who fund Sunni insurgents as well–almost surely–as Sunni terrorist groups; the Iraqi Kurds, who have their sights set on an independent nation that includes a de-Arabized Kirkuk; and the Turks, who have their sights set on never, ever seeing an independent Kurdish entity anywhere, anyhow, anyway, ever, amen.

Can anyone say blowback?

On top of that, I’ve heard that a third of the weapons we have given the Iraqi security forces have disappeared, which likely means they fell into the hands of the insurgents.

I can’t say any more. This just pisses me off.

This is hilarious. Some guy remixed the 911 call from that cop in Michigan who called for rescue after he and his wife ate marijuana brownies. This case was all over the news but if you haven’t heard the original 911 call yet, here it is.

By the way, the cop from the original 911 call was allowed to resign his job with no charges brought against him. Even though i’m sure the persons whom he confiscated the marijuana from in the first place were charged. I imagine that the many thousands of people currently sitting in prison for marijuana related offenses would have loved to have just lost their jobs.

How in the world does anybody as incredibly stupid as this end up a Senator? This guy, Joe Heck, a Senator from Las Vegas, has introduced one of the most rediculous bills i’ve ever seen or heard of. He’s proposing that we increase the penalties for growing even a SINGLE marijuana plant in a home where children are present. Under his bill, a person could get up to 15 years in prison for one plant!

Observe the stupidity, from Heck’s own mouth:

“If a guy has a couple of (marijuana) plants in there (now), he could be out in a week,” Heck said. “But if there is a child present, with this, now he could serve five to 15 years for exposing that child to the dangers of this activity. The very behavior of small children puts them at risk around these materials, including marijuana,” Heck said. “As any parent knows, the first place a toddler places anything they find is in their mouth. What if this object is a marijuana plant?”

First of all, injesting a marijuana plant would not be inherently toxic even for a small child; the stem and leaf plant matter is not toxic. If they did happento put a bud from a mature plant in there mouth, they wouldn’t even be able to metabolize the THC (assuming you even consider THC a toxin). Secondly, people grow all sorts of houseplants around children, many (if not most) of which are toxic. Poinsettas, for example, are extremely toxic and can even be deadly if enough is injested. One of the most common houseplants in the world, Diffenbaccia, is also very toxic.

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So there goes his main argument. Any other argument that could possibly be made for such a bill falls apart upon any inspection. The dangers he mentions that children might be exposed to stem solely from the fact that the plant is illegal. Really, that’s the only thing that’s dangerous about growing a marijuana plant; you risk getting caught. I agree that it would be very reckless parenting to grow marijuana in a house with children, i mean, you put them at risk of being shot in the face by a storm trooper on a raid searching for a pot plant.

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So in order to protect these children from accidently ingesting a harmless plant, Senator Joe Heck wants to deprive them of their parents for 15 years? I bet you could get your toddler drunk and not get anything more than a few counseling sessions. Hell, i doubt most of the worst kinds of child abuse will get you even close to 15 years.

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I know i don’t get a lot of traffic on this site, but i encourage anybody reading this to write Senator Heck and ask him tto justify a 15 year prison sentence for adults who choose a safer medicinal alternative to alchohol in the privacy of their own homes, and how he thinks the children of said adults will be better off if mom and dad are locked up.

Senator Heck’s email address: jheck@sen.state.nv.us

PETA has alienated me, and I am, presumably, part of their exact target audience. Not that I was ever a hardcore supporter… i suppose i’ve just always felt vaguely sympathetic to their cause. I mean, I’m a vegetarian and I used to volunteer for the Humane Society when I lived in Vegas by working on adoption drives on the weekends. Animal cruelty as I define it pisses me off. But it turns out PETA and I have very different notions about what ethical treatment means.

Check this out.

Basically, some PETA employees are on trial right now charged with animal abuse. At first I dismissed this as an isolated incident; there’s thousands of PETA members, of course a few would turn out to be bad. But then i read more on the website petakillsanimals.com. Turns out their adoption programs are a complete failure. I’ve worked on adoption programs before. The whole point is to save as many animals as possible by finding them good homes. Maybe a couple get put down, usually the dogs with severe personality problems, but not like this. (that’s a PDF in case you don’t like to open pdfs in your browser) PETA kills 90% of the animals they take in. 90%!!. (see below, 90% in 2005, 80% overall)

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The issue is simply that PETA sees even well-treated, happy pets as prisoners and they sincerely feel that a dog would be better off dead than be a slave to a human owner. This idea makes my blood boil. I love dogs so much. I have a dog and as far as i’m concerned Roxy is a person. Albeit less intelligent, but no less valuable to me than any of my friends or members of my family. If a dog has to be put down for extreme behavior or health problems and because there really is no home for that dog, then so be it, but killing dogs without exhausting every effort to find them a home is murder. PETA spends a lot of money campaigning to stop companies testing their products on animals, so much that they can’t afford to run no-kill shelters?! Their propaganda is more important than lives.

I am so stoked about this picture:

These faces are priceless. I hope that little girl’s face is representative of the feelings of the entire republican party. The kid on the right looks like he just found out exactly what the homosexual community has been using his last name to describe. The girl in the back is going to cut herself when she gets home. Santorum’s wife really looks like she needs a drink. If i only i could see what the boy on the left is doing… booya! he’s flipping me off!

I wonder why they don’t have little Gabriel with them. ok ok. i know that was low even for me. I’m ashamed.

I’ve been getting into a couple of arguments lately about torture; specifically, whether or not the United States Government should be torturing anybody for any reason. I was told by a classmate yesterday that the only reason I’m opposed to torture is because I’m the type of person who is always looking for any reason to criticize the Bush administration. That’s right, I would have been perfectly comfortable with the secret and summary kidnapping and subsequent beating and torture of humans who haven’t been convicted or even accused of any crime, for the purposes of forcing a false confession of vague ties to terrorism if John Kerry was president. Sure…

A few minutes into these kinds of conversations and it becomes clear to me that so many Americans view torture the way TV portrays it. They see Jack Bauer towering over some sniveling terrorist henchman, expertly manipulating the dirty muslim into revealing the location of the bomb so he can disarm it minutes before it’s set to explode in an elementary school. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine the kinds of situations where the United States might use torture without figuring (hoping) that the most extreme methods of interrogation would be reserved for the most extreme and desperate cases of national security.

But consider Bush’s track record. His largest concern as President of the United States isn’t national security; it isn’t the economy, or education, or the federal budget. I think most of Bush’s strategic energy is spent figuring out how to keep people scared. He needs to keep people believing that we’re fighting a global war on terror. Speeches full of vague references to this threat or that, jumping at the chance to reveal every foiled terrorist plot (even when it’s obvious there was never any real threat), constantly increasing security, Invoking 9/11 at the most irrelevant moments, etc. The man has built his campaign on fear. So, could there be another motive for the use of torture? Maybe because in his desperate search for suspects’ names to fill the newspapers with, he’s coming up empty handed.

Logical solution: Torture someone until they are broken will say anything, then make them say they are a terrorist, then tell the public, “Look, I caught a terrorist”. As long as you keep the evidence against the suspects classified, you can make it look like you’ve got all sorts of terrorists behind bars.

Ok, so I’m starting to sound like a conspiracy nut. But what other conclusion could you come to after reading this. (I linked to the story written by arar himself, but in case you don’t trust that source: here and here are more credible articles) I’ll sum it up. Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen is kidnapped by the INS while on a layover in NYC. He’s flown to Jordan and then driven to Syria, where he is held in a dungeon and tortured for a year. As soon as they realize he’s not a bad guy, they force him to lie and say that he’s been to Afghanistan. The Canadian government later cleared Arar of all suspicion of terrorist activity. The guy was completely innocent. Pretty stark contrast from the way Jack Bauer uses torture.

At the end of the article, Maher Arar says that all he wants now is to know why this horrible thing happened to him. Why would they go to so much trouble to distroy this mans life and force him to make false confessions? So that Bush can show the world that he is doing something. So that the administration can continue to justify the war in Iraq by showing that there really is a terrorist threat.

Can you still make an argument for torture knowing this is how it’s being used?

A year ago it sorta looked like at least one good thing was going to come out of the Kelo Vs. New London supreme court ruling. Public awareness. There was quite a bit of public outrage at the decision and about the details of the case. I mean, it was appalling what the city of new london did to those residents, and people were pissed. There was a wave of proposed legislation in states all over the country, trying to reign in the powers of eminent domain unleashed by the ruling. I even remember some large bank making a public announcement that they would not consider any construction loans on projects where eminent domain was used. Well, most of that has died down. Much of the proposed legislation failed. Some states did pass laws restricting the use of eminent domain, but I’d say it was just so much posturing since none of the states actually banned private to private seizures (a few counties and cities did).

The Kelo taking was particularly disgusting for a few reasons. Many of the homes that were condemned were far from blighted, Susette Kelo’s, for instance, was a newly renovated, beautiful home. 15 of the homeowners fought the taking, which they have every right to do. They were in litigation for almost 2 years, so when they finally lost the case, they were paid a two year old market value for their homes. Anybody who’s been paying attention to real estate in this country knows that during that period, two years of appreciation can be a huge amount of money. Worst of all, the development company decided to charge them 2 years of back rent for the period of time that they fought to keep their homes, claiming that technically the homes had been acquired back then, and the money had been sitting in escrow. All for an outdated, 10 year old development plan that the city thought would bring in more tax revenue than private residences (the city is broke and desperate, and hasn’t traditionaly brought in a lot of tax revenue becuase most of it’s land is comprised of colleges, churches, hospitals, and city-owned land).  Of course, Coast Guard Museums don’t bring in a single dime in tax-revenue. That’s right, part of the 90-acre development plan includes a government funded, $15 million Coast Guard Museum, which is the only part they’ve actually started on. The New London Development Company still hasn’t even secured financing for much of the remaining parcels.

Here’s a list of current ED cases. Goes to show that the supposed property rights movement didn’t accomplish much. I hate that so many of these are in California.

Here’s information about the actuall development plan involved in the Kelo case.