Memnison Journal

..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 policies [...]

HBO production and presently running on that network.  My take on it is that it’s a once-funny;  I have a hard time watching gangster movies because I really don’t get off on people beating and killing each other, especially if the people involved doing the beating are serious scum.   This is SOPRANOS GO BAGHDAD; [...]

Zimbabwe is a complex subject, and the complexities have gotten a whole lot rougher on the inhabitants as time passes by.   Europeans under Cecil Rhodes marched in in the ned of the 1800s and took control of the land from the local chiefs, and passed out all sorts of claims to white settlers, who set [...]

From the New York Times…one more place for fear:
The origins of India’s Jews remain uncertain, but according to some accounts they may have come as emissaries from the court of King Solomon. They established communities and lived peacefully with Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and, later, Muslims. The absence of anti-Semitism throughout this history has been a [...]

OMG.  The Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade just got Rickrolled.  By Astley himself.   Totally SFW, and hilarious if you get the whole rickroll joke.

And reformers can be undone by machines, when they trade their aspirations for power:

Guy in Florida decides to take out a billboard, showing the Twin Towers on fire and promoting his song “Please Don’t Vote for a Democrat” on it.  Photo of the billboard, some lyrics after the cut.
I’d take the stupid song apart with a cleaver, but after having to deal with that New Yorker cover, I [...]

…and besides, unlike the wife, I’ve never gotten through his works.
Regular readers will note that the tags I put on posts are plentiful and sometimes sound goofy; that may be because it’s conceptual shorthand to me. ‘kubler-ross’, ‘renmin’, or ’sep_reality’, for example. The first has to deal with posts on death and [...]

…according to a Tennessee Democratic central committeeman.
“My statement that Senator Obama ‘may be terrorist-connected’ was incorrect and I apologize for making it,” former state Rep. Fred Hobbs said in a letter to fellow Democratic Executive Committee members.
Mr. Hobbs, a former Eagleville mayor, said his comments “did reflect questions I had after what I had seen [...]

I know that there are people out there who have a bunch of questions about Obama’s stance on the military and the war.  I decided to look up his initial statement in 2002 as an Illinois State Senator - a speech where he said what his feelings about war and the military were.
I work about [...]

Chicago Tribune obituary for Ross Cascio, the founder of the Lincoln Park Pirates - er, Lincoln Towing Service in Chicago, that mentions the above as the church where his funeral was going to take place…
ross_cascio_obit (PDF, 350 K)

NYT: Libya is cozying up to Big Oil and the Bush administration with a deal; get us off the hook for paying compensation for our past terrorist acts, such as Lockerbie (about 3-6 billion US worth of hook) and we’ll let Big Oil back into Libya with sweetheart deals. Whadya say? So [...]

The real reason that Bush is demanding the Telco immunity clause in the FISA-oid act has nothing to do with suits against the telcos that helped him spy on people - in regard to the telcos being hurt monetarily by the suits.  The telcos were indemnified by Bush.   What the result of the suits [...]

NYT: The militant Afghani nutballs and so on that the Pakistani military intelligence funded, supported and built up over the years are now turning against the Pakistani government.
ABC: 308,000 barrels of oil were sold and supposedly shipped to the US strategic oil reserve.  At present prices, that’s $308 million bucks worth of oil.  Nice retirement [...]