Memnison Journal

The Bruce Schneier Action Figure!  At $100, it’s a steal!  Be the first on your block! Now, i’m just waiting for the RJ Johnson and Bill Roper Auctioneer Action figures…

My favorite conservative columnist, Daniel Larison, is hitting it on the head and out of the ballpark this morning about the mindless OMG’ing in the Beltway press and elsewhere about political dishonesty on national security issues. He brings up two main directions on this: if Group A is out of office, then Group B (who [...]

As some of you may have sussed out, since November of 2007, I’ve been working 99% of the time out of my basement office…with a huge long line of doctor’s excuses, bases on either my non-healing foot wound, or my weak response to infections casing raging problems on and off.  The office finally said that [...]

I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all.  But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to [...]

The Federal Protective Service, tasked to provide security to US government office buildings (like the one that Susan and I work out of in downtown Chicago) is in trouble; the Government Accountability Office ran teams through and past the security at several such buildings, bringing in bomb materials. Numerous US government web sites were downed [...]

Rush Limbaugh: Sanford was probably driven in desperation to cheat on his wife and get some small pleasure out of life by Barack Obama’s efforts to destroy America, as in what-the-heck-it’s-all-over-I’m-just-going-to-have-fun. Full quotes at the link.   At the other end of the world, Congressman Michelle Bachmann is suggesting that the Obama Administration is going to [...]

…from Think Progress.   Give it a look for a summary of why it’s major bad news, if you didn’t know that already…unless you think you’re Jack Bauer or something. As Jesse Ventura said on The View: “If waterboarding is OK, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what [...]

Another note on torture issues.   This post seems to put it all together that the prime people who got good, reliable information in World War 2 were people who followed the same gold standard we followed before George W Bush changed things around; that torture is only good for causing people to suffer and say [...]

Bristol Palin has decided that she’s had enough of Levi Strauss Johnston and chased him off to the Alaskan bush.  Details in the 10 o’clock news. Hedge funds, no longer magically able to make money from thin air, are laying off tens of thousands of employees.   Give them bonuses! The UK economy is looking at [...]

British discount airline mulls making their planes’ toilets PAY toilets, assume people have pound coins in their pocket. I assure you, I don’t carry major change in my pockets in US airliners – the metal detectors would go nuts. UK bankers have a fit over cuts in bonuses and whatnot; some say they’ll look for [...]

Gitmo: People reviewing the cases of prisoners are finding out that there’s really no solid files as such on anyone,  and that a lot of material is suspect or worthless – and scattered, disorganized and fifth-hand.   The realization is coming through that people were supposed to get confessions and information first and worry about anything [...]

Secret Service agent in nearby Naperville notes the terrible, snowy weather and all sorts of reports of terrible commuting situations this morning, and decided to take the commuter train this morning.   Never took the train before.  Suddenly realized ‘hey, I have a gun on me, I should figure out about train security’, so he says [...]

..of the Bush administration, a casualty of the war on terror, troubled and victimized soul that he is.

Hedge Fund founder who lost a serious bundle in the Madoff ponzi scheme commits suicide, and no, he didn’t jump out a window. The radical Israeli settlers in the West Bank are a political nightmare that any government will have serious problems with and neither main party coalition wants to deal with.  Of course, government [...]

W. Mark Felt obituary in the Washington Post. “As Deep Throat, Felt helped establish the principle that our highest government officials are subject to the Constitution and the laws of the land,” the prosecutor, John W. Nields, wrote in The Washington Post in 2005. “Yet when it came to the Weather Underground bag jobs, he [...]