I strongly recommend that you don’t call the police. If you do, because for some reason you have to, get the hell out of there before they arrive. Why? Because our Post-9/11 first responder philosophy is not the first responder philosophy you grew up with. First responders have one primary directive: Protect themselves, at all costs. Your safety is the cost. For firefighters and the like this means running the other way when there is danger, because of 9/11. Recently, a New York City fire chief was quoted as saying “Good thing we didn’t get here sooner” (or words to that effect) in relation to a gas explosion. In recent weeks somebody who did not get the memo called the cops for a “domestic disturbance” happening in a public park. When the cops arrive they killed a man that was trying to help. It goes on and on. The police, generally, will protect themselves before they protect you, even if it means gunning down people who are not really a threat to them.

Here is the video. Yes, the guy had knives. He was probably either a bit disturbed when the cops got there or became disoriented when they started shooting flash bangs at him. But they had him surrounded, run to ground, and it was only after he turned away from them that they gunned him down. After he was gunned down the police acted like he was a live cobra, but really, he was just some guy bleeding out on the ground where they dropped him.

I predict that this will be determined a justifiable shooting.

I’m quoting here from Daily Kos who quotes AP (the AP site is borked):

The illegal camper shot by Albuquerque police this week was turning away from officers when they fired at him, according to video released by Chief Gorden Eden on Friday.

The shots come after a confrontation in which the man, identified as 38-year-old James Boyd, tells police he’s going to walk down the mountain with them.

“Don’t change up the agreement,” Boyd says. “I’m going to try to walk with you.”

He tells officers he’s not a murderer.

Boyd picks up his belongings and appears ready to walk down toward officers. An officer fires a flash-bang device, which disorients Boyd.

Boyd appears to pull out knives in both hands as an officer with a dog approaches him. He makes a threatening motion toward the officer, then starts to turn around away from police.

That’s when shots ring out, and Boyd hits the ground. Blood can be seen on the rocks behind him.

Jonathan Stein and Tim Dickinson make the point that some of us have been making since the World Trade Center fell: If we become a nation motivated mainly by fear, we will become a militaristic police state.

But the blame for Iraq does not end with Cheney, Bush, or Rumsfeld. Nor is it limited to the intelligence operatives who sat silent as the administration cherry-picked its case for war, or with those, like Colin Powell or Hans Blix, who, in the name of loyalty or statesmanship, did not give full throat to their misgivings. It is also shared by far too many in the Fourth Estate, most notably the New York Times’ Judith Miller. But let us not forget that it lies, inescapably, with we the American people, who, in our fear and rage over the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001, allowed ourselves to be suckered into the most audacious bait and switch of all time.

Welcome to the party.

Read the essay here: Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

He also called in a Predator B drone.
source

The drone was used to locate the suspects, and determine that they were not armed. They were then arrested. That was the first time (that we know of) that this has happened, but not the last. Since last June, the drones in North Dakota have been used a number of times.

Local officials and the military claim that use by local law enforcement is part of the mandate of the deployment of these drones for border patrol, but at least one member of Congress, who was on the committee most directly involved in the funding and authorization of this program, says otherwise.

…former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), who sat on the House homeland security intelligence subcommittee at the time and served as its chairwoman from 2007 until early this year, said no one ever discussed using Predators to help local police serve warrants or do other basic work….”There is no question that this could become something that people will regret,” said Harman, who resigned from the House in February and now heads the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington think tank.

What do you think?

The seven Senators who voted against this bill are:

Coburn (R-OK)
Harkin (D-IA)
Lee (R-UT)
Merkley (D-OR)
Paul (R-KY)
Sanders (I-VT)
Wyden (D-OR)

I will probably get in huge trouble for this blog post. But, so it goes. But do have the sense before you attempt to tear me a new one that I do have a set of valid questions, and a rational argument, and that I’m perfectly happy to understand that people can be wrong about this much like how they can be wrong about going to church on Sunday or praying for a better life or buying a lottery ticket. I don’t expect people to make sense in everything they do.

It is hard to tell exactly what has happened from the news reports so far. To establish some perspective, I’d like to lay out the following possibilities:

1) The body of a US soldier, found dead on the battle field, is brought to Dover along with the other bodies collected around that time. This particular body is then incinerated without checking with the family first, and the ashes are dumped in with other incinerated medical waste. The collection of ashes is then shipped off to whatever facility is used to dispose of this sort of waste.

2) An ear, or something that might be an ear, probably but not necessarily of a human, all burned up, is found among the dead and wounded at a battle site in Afghanistan. It is put in a bag which is in turn stashed in a body bag with a mostly but not entirely complete body of a soldier. The whole mess is shipped back to Dover. All of the remains that came in that day are sorted out. Most are just bodies, or at least, 90% or so of a body, and they are identified. There are a few other body parts; A hand here, a foot there, and they are matched up with the mostly whole bodies and stored with them. Those remains will be sent to the families. But when that is all done, there is still this thing that may or may not be a human ear, and maybe a few other bits. Those bits are put in with the medical waste and incinerated, the ashes shipped off to the usual facility.

3) Something, you tell me, in between scenarios 1 and 2.

Scenario number 1 did not happen. There were no “bodies” per se incinerated and sent to the dump. Nobody’s son or daughter’s body was mixed in with medical trash. Scenario number 3 almost certainly happened. The personnel at Dover did what they could, and there were some bits left that could not be further sorted out to any reasonable degree of accuracy.

If that is true, that is bad. But not that bad. The normal procedure should probably be to put all the human-like parts which may or may not be human in some place where you can say later that you did something special with them. In a hole at a military cometary, labeled “Grave of the various bits and pieces” or words to that effect. Perhaps saying it in Latin will make it seem less like what it is: A futile effort to impose one of a subset of burial traditions on what might be a fragment of a ferret or might be a misidentified burned up mushroom or might be a part of an actual soldier, but not even clearly of one nation’s army or another’s, let alone of a particular named individual.

There have been times in war where large numbers of bodies were left on the battlefield to rot. Bodies have been bulldozed into big holes and later randomly distributed among smaller graves on which markers are placed, giving the impression that individuals were sorted out. There have been bodies buried under a grave stone, labeled correctly to match the body, but where this or that body part is actually from some other body, which in turn is also buried with a part or two missing or replaced with a bit from another corpse. And so on.

In one report on this story, we hear the following:

The Air Force said it first cremated the remains and then included those ashes in larger loads of mortuary medical waste that were burned in an incinerator and taken to a landfill. Incinerating medical waste is a common disposal practice but including cremated human ashes is not, according to funeral home directors, regulators and waste haulers.

Oh really? Funeral directors in the united states don’t send their miscellaneous body parts they end up with at the end of the day off in the trash? Could that be because they generally handle one body at a time, and most funeral directors will go an entire career without having to worry about matching battlefield remains with ID tags? Are waste haulers really experts on this? Regulators? Regulators of what?

I have no problem with saying that the Air Force has been doing it wrong, but I am very unimpressed by the indignation and rending of cloth that typically goes along with this story. Listen: Our sons and daughters have been getting blown to bits, along with their Iraqi and Afghan allies and enemies, for years now. Be indignant about that. Not about some burned up piece of tissue that may or may not be someone’s ear lobe. Or a mushroom.

In the end, the Air Force will start to dump the incinerated remains of the orts and bits into the sea instead of into an approved landfill. I wonder what the “Regulators” think of that?

Source

Those remarks were made shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Almost ten years later the same man who made these remarks was shot to death by US special forces agents in a raid on a residential compound in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad. And just like Osama bin Laden, the former engineering student¹ who made those remarks, also a businessman, and ultimately, the world’s most serious terrorist ever (and no relation to me), I also have a hard time believing that it happened. But it did happen and the fallout from that event is still with us, and in fact, getting worse.

Many have spoken of the Post Patriot Act world, affecting day to day life in America, the wars, our treatment of our fellow humans at Gitmo and untold secret prisons around the world, the rise of the most expensive bureaucracy ever, all that. Icons of post 9/11 loom over us largely, and also exist in a small way in every nook and cranny of day to day life. And it rarely makes sense.

I once told you about a rural Iowan, who felt trapped and scared in the Big City, calling an elderly African American homeless wheel chair bound gentleman a “Terrorist.” That was an example of regular people substituting mundane daily fears, in this case, the “inner city” the “Black man” and I suppose “Wheel chairs” … oh, and we were in a “deli” run by “middle eastern people” so there was that too … with the largely made-up bogeyman of “Terrorist.”

One day last summer criminals drove down our street and carried out a criminal act before our very eyes, so we called 911. The police showed up way too late to matter and with way too many cops to make me think they were anything but frightened to go out alone, and the first thing they did was to demand to see my identification. I’m standing in my yard at the Weber, coals hot, brats cooking, a long bbq style fork in my hand and an apron that says “A Man and his Grill” on it and the cop is asking me for my identification.² I blew him off with a stern look, and he went away. (Our cops are fairly meek. That would not have worked everywhere.) But that has become the norm: When the cops show up, you better damn well assume we live in a police state at least for that moment, or pretty soon you’ll be assuming the position just for standing there. Yes, folks, more and more people are being treated just like black folk in this country always have been. That should tell you something. One step backwards. Then a few more steps backwards.

I used to be a guy who called 911, when appropriate, and probably more than others on average. Now, I only call 911 if someone is in physical danger or needs medical attention. If I’m going to get shaken down for helping the coppers, the coppers can help themselves, thank you.

When an accident happens, or even some crap falls off a truck and causes an obstruction in the road, the First Reponders show up and close more lanes than they need to and they saunter. Yes, that’s what I said. Instead of rushing in and managing the situation safely and effectively, they saunter around in full view of the drivers who are all forced over onto the shoulder to get by the scene. One day I sat in traffic for a half hour going north on State Route 169, and for the last six or seven minutes of that I could clearly see the two fire trucks that were blocking most of the lanes of traffic and the first responders sauntering around with absolutely nothing going on, no debris, no inured citizens, no other vehicles, nothing on the road to clean up, no “investigation” in progress, and they were passing around coffee. I’m sure there were donuts somewhere. I’m a fairly observant person and I’m not especially paranoid, and I’m pretty sure that I’m right: Post 911 first responders think they are the shit because hundreds of them died in the World Trade Center. This change in status and attitude is seen everywhere in our culture, I don’t need to convince you of that. Here, I’m just adding in that extra bit of unnecessary and costly sauntering at scenes that should be cleared. Because the cultural details matter even when they are small.

Do you know that during the late 1960s, when the US was in the throes of an unpopular war and a on the edge of revolution at home, there were an average of well over one hijacking of a commercial airplane flying out of a US based airport every month? Do you know what the reaction to that was? Metal detectors, and eventually baggage screening. Society did not change. It just got slightly harder, but not much harder, to get onto an airplane. Post 9/11 changes have been enormous and far reaching and pervasive. Now, I’m not trying to equate, or even compare, the scores of hijackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s with 9/11 and related acts (such as the attack on the Cole and the earlier WTC bombing, etc). There is no way to make that comparison. What I am trying to compare is the reaction, then vs. now. And, I’m not even comparing the reaction, exactly. What I’m trying to point out here is that in the 60s, the governmental and societal reaction to a significant spate of hijackings was to address airport security. The more recent reaction (to 9/11) was to shift all of society and almost every aspect of American culture, the activities of ever government department and agency, the expectations and rule sets, the budgets, the procedural manuals, and everything else to a paranoid modality and to institute what is essentially a low-level police state. That’s a difference worth noting. And worth complaining about.

Generation 9/11. History will be at least a little embarrassed by us.

Recently, we’ve been discussing the State Mandated Recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools. The reason this is becoming increasingly enforced around the US is because of various state laws passed in time to be in place for today’s anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, or more generally as part of a post 9/11 culture. In one of our local schools, students had interesting responses to this happening on their turf, expressed in a school paper’s “debate” layout. The printed views were even … same number for and same number against. Those against the pledge requirement made all the usual and generally quite convincing arguments and did a great job. Those in favor of the jingoistic approach were, well, jingoistic, but, with an interesting and very positive twist; Most of them gave sway to atheists and agnostics. They said that they fully supported people leaving off the “under god” part and totally understood why they might do that. And none of the pro-pledge opinions were dripping with religious commentary or reference. It is important to note that of all the high schools in the region, the one to which I refer to is in the top four or five with respect to conservatism of the area served (it is in a Michele Bachmann clone’s Congressional District), and in the top two with respect to per capita wealth of the residents, and is probably the least diverse district in the state.

And that is interesting because the average high school kid is about 16 years old, meaning that they were 6 when the 9/11 attacks happened, and therefore, the attacks themselves are not necessarily part of their own cultural composition to the same degree that it is with older folk. These are kids that grew up in the post 9/11 world without necessarily feeling the powerful disbelief that many of us felt, followed by whatever fear or rage or helplessness or sense of dread or revenge that affected so many. The bad news is that this generation has become accustom to a much, much lower standard of freedom than many older people have, but this also means that when they confront this lack of freedom they may be more willing to rebel against it because they related less directly to the Defining Moment.

Sauntering firemen and cocky police officers are not the end of the world and they are not the Nazi’s or the Bradbury’s Salamander. They are, rather, puddles of dried blood from a minor wound. When you get into a bad accident, you may get a major wound that could kill or maim you, but you will also get a lot of minor wounds that on their own would not mean much. But you know that the accident was truly traumatic when the minor wounds add up to a plethora but are uncounted or ignored because they are just background. Sauntering firemen, cocky police officers, and Iowans who label homeless wheel chair bound African American old guys as “terrorists” are the tiny scrapes and bruises on a battered corpse.

And now might be a good point to ask the question, “What has risen from the ashes of the 9/11 attacks?” There was much talk at the time, and since then, and again today, about how great America is, how great Americans are, and how we will move forward and become better and stronger and so on and so forth. But it is just talk. What has happened instead is something entirely different.

The giddy fear and sense of dread that comes from a violent moment clouds the mind, of the individual or more broadly but also the collective social mind. The disorientation that caused that lady from Iowa to mistake the wheel chair bound homeless man for a “terrorist” represents an internal derailing of logic. The guard rail is down, the road is slippery, and rational thought has spun not just into the ditch but across the highway into oncoming traffic. The playbook has become garbled and the Quarterback is running the wrong way. The general, gone mad, is locked up on the army base with the launch codes. Twelve Angry Men, Lord of the Flies … stop me before I metaphor again! I think you get the point. There are a lot of people who benefit from our present social pathology, and that surely has been a factor. But also, it is simply a social pathology that we are experiencing, a terrorist victory, a lack of character on our part as a nation.

But the scary part is what comes out of it, and by now you have probably guessed my point. The Tea Party and things like the Tea Party. Strongly held anti-social illogical destructive beliefs with no hope of critical self evaluation, in a large and organized part of the population. It is obvious why this happened in the Republican Party and not the Democratic Party, but people on both sides of the political aisle have contributed. Literalist, libertarian, paranoid, self-centered, easily frightened, reactionary, sub-average in intelligence, deluded in self worth and unmovable in conviction and belief despite all evidence to the contrary. The lady from Iowa, the sauntering firemen, the sheep who welcome being harassed by the TSA agents at the gate, the people who are happy to click “I agree” when confronted with a 43 page EULA that, somewhere in there, tells you the thing you just bought and paid for is not yours; A general social willingness to be told what to do, fear of not being told what to do, cynicism that we can think of what to do on our own, and utter disbelief that collective progressive action any longer has potential or meaning.

The little puddles of drying blood are everywhere, splatter evidence not from the 9/11 attacks but from our national and social flailing about and rending of cloth and flesh as aftermath. It isn’t just that the terrorist won on that day; It is much much worse than that. First they beat us, then they recruited us to do ourselves in.

Happy Anniversary 9/11

_____________________________
¹Apparently there is some question as to whether or not Osama bin Laden was actually an engineering student, but we’ll roll with it for the present purposes. Here’s the video of him making the remarks I paraphrased:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkdFNLqJajM&w=400&h=330]

²I’m exaggerating. There was no apron. But I was wearing my Darwin I Think Cap.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force. They may be scary looking but they are cartoons, not terrorists.

On September 11th, 2001, George Bush made one of the most significant and critical errors of his presidency.

Personally, I think George Bush is a total boob, and he has made many mistakes and we will all be paying for some of them for years to come. This particular mistake, though, is one that a lot of other people in the Office of the Presidency may have made, so I don’t want to lean too hard on Ol’ George for this one. But it was a mistake. Here is what happened.

A well trained and well funded group of nineteen criminals hijacked four airplanes. They flew three of them into buildings and a fourth into a cornfield in Pennsylvania, having been thwarted by an impromptu attack by the passengers on the plane (they had planned it seems to fly that plane into a public building in Washington D.C.). Thousands died.

The mistake that Bush made in concert with his advisors was to ground all nonemergency civilian aircraft for a number of days. This had immediate and long term economic effects and it underscored the interpretation of this attack as a terrorist act as opposed to a criminal one.

I have no problem with the idea that this was a terrorist act. However, treating it like a terrorist act instead of a criminal act was the beginning of a series of events … many of which may have been appropriate responses to terrorism but not to a criminal act … that have changed world politics, the US and world economy, and society itself.

Six years after “911” an advertising firm working for Turner Broadcasting company placed several dozen devices in urban areas across the United States. Some of these devices were noticed in Boston by people who jumped to the conclusion that they were bombs. The bomb squad in Boston detonated several of them. Mayor Menino is on the verge of calling for human sacrifice of the perpetrators. Turner is being threatened with a law suit. On hearing of this reaction in Boston, Turner ordered the advertising firm to immediately remove all of the devices from the numerious cities around the country where they have been placed. (See this article for typical coverage of the fiasco.)

I remember the days after 911 when the sky was so strangely quiet. I lived in South Minneapolis under one of the flyways. A day after the grounding of the airplanes, it was eerie to have the neighborhood be so quiet. At one point I heard a jet flying, and looked out to see a military jet fighter streaking by. The grounding itself made everyone think and act and feel differently to almost as much of a degree as the images of the World Trade Center Towers going down.

A few weeks after 911, I went down to the local deli to pick up some sandwiches. There was an older African American guy in a wheelchair in the deli. He is a local fixture, semi-homeless, a bit crazy but basically a nice guy and what one would call “harmless” (whatever exactly that means). He was leaving the deli at the same time as some folks were coming in. These folks were not from the neighborhood … actually, visiting from the Dakotas their daughter the college student in her new apartment. There was a bit of a tussle as they were coming in the deli and guy-in-wheelchair was trying to make his way out the door. No big deal but it flustered the visitors. They were already a bit nervous being in the city, and I strongly suspect people of color were not a familiar site to them. One of them mentioned to the other, along with a sigh-like letting out of breath one expresses after a close call … “Eh, I thought that guy was a terrorist,” and the other one said “Yea, me too.”

An old crazy guy in a wheelchair trying to make his way through a too-narrow doorway. What a threat.

Because of 911.

We let the congress pass the Patriot Act. Quakers and Unitarians are infiltrated by the FBI. We let them go to war in Iraq. We now routinely torture most of our prisoners (instead of just now and then). One has to be careful what one says.

Because of 911.

And now a crazy advertising scam with a cartoon character giving you the finger and some bells and whistles to attract your attention shuts down Boston and has the usually very sane Mayor Menino foaming at the mouth.

But not just because of 911. Rather, because 911 was the most successful terrorist attack ever, instead of merely a horrendous criminal act. We are like a woman in a physically abusive relationship who winces whenever her husband makes a quick move, or a dog treated so badly it cowers when a shadow passes across its eyes.

This is what George Bush should have done: I thought this at the time, dammit, and probably many others did too. He should have, in concert with the 50 governors and the mayors of the 100 largest cities (these people are organized to some degree, FEMA has their phone numbers and there is a way of communicating, so this is not unrealistic) ordered law enforcement officers onto every plane taking off for the indefinite future, maybe a few days, until this was figured out. Since the attacks seemed to be without major weapons and a matter of overpowering the crews, a few beefy guys and gals in the front of every airplane would have thwarted any further attacks. A few hours of grounding to get this organized followed by 12 hours of steadily increasing flights thusly guarded, would have still had an effect on air travel but the long term psychological effect would have been the exact opposite of what actually happened.

It would have been “Screw you” rather than “I just peed in my pants.” George Bush peed in our collective national pants when he caved to the terrorists at the first possible opportunity.

Instead of becoming a stronger society, we have become a society that is so skiddish that we can’t go to the deli without fear of terrorist attack. We can’t see a piece of junk in the corner and not think it is a bomb. And we are engaged in a long term war responsible for tens or hundreds of thousands of casualties because we are so skiddish we allow our government to talk us into anything.

If those planes had flown later that day, next morning at the latest, and we stuck our collective middle finger in the air at these criminals, hunted them down and captured them of course, but as criminals, traffic would have been a bit lighter yesterday in Boston.

African American Leaders celebrates the diversity, history, and accomplishments of African Americans in North America. Used widely in schools around the nation for educational purposes. This is a Really Big Educational Coloring & Story Book!

and Dinosaurs …

Dino’s has 32 exciting pages of Dino coloring, including Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus, Seismosaurus, Pretty Jaw and much more. This book includes two pages of Dino cutouts, Dino plants, and a Dino forest. A Really Big Coloring Book!

But also Noah and the Ark ..

Noah and the Ark is one of the best known and most beloved stories of the Old Testament. In addition to telling the traditional story, the coloring book includes many animals for children to color. The Noah coloring book has been used as a teaching tool.

and Blessing of the Pets Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception Custom Coloring Book, whatever that is, and Story of Creation and the Ten Commandments

This book describes to children the story of creation and lists the Ten Commandments. The commandments are all listed on one page and then each commandment is written seperately on 10 different pages. A Really Big Coloring Book.

But I digress.

Part of the description of the 9/11 book is:

The September 11, 2001 attacks on America are now commonly referred to as 9/11. It was a series of coordinated attacks by a radical Islamic Muslim extremist terrorist group who call themselves Al Qaeda. They were self-proclaimed Jihadists; many American people refer to them as homicide bombers. Their leader was a Saudi national named Osama Bin Laden. He and his men used hijacked U.S. airplanes as weapons. A total of 3,000+ innocent people from over 70 countries were killed. There were no survivors from any of the airplanes.

And it includes this picture of Seal Team Six killing Osama bin Laden and his family:

The Guardian reports that

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has condemned the book as “disgusting”, saying that it characterises all Muslims as linked to extremism, terrorism and radicalism, which could lead children reading the book to believe that all Muslims are responsible for 9/11, and that followers of the Islamic faith are their enemies.

And, here’s the promotional video for it:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nJlk_Em7xY&w=500&h=311]

I have no comments at this time. But I will. I’m saving them up.