el peregringo

The Nation is one of my favorite sites, though I find they don’t update as often as I would like. Today I found a gem written by Calvin Trillin, The “Deadline Poet” entitled Presidential Eating Preferences. Here’s a selection:

So what does this Bush eat? We just don’t know
We do know, though, what he won’t eat is crow–
As if some allergy or something makes
Him sprout a rash if he admits mistakes.
“Just have a taste,” say critics of the war.
“It’s much like quail, which you and Dick adore.
One bite? This dish is yummy, and homemade.
Admit it was an error to invade.”
He won’t eat crow. No crow. No, not a bite.
He’s never wrong, cause Jesus makes him right.

I simply can’t believe how bad it has become to live in the US. As some of you know, my family and I have just moved to Spain, and while I’ve long gotten the majority of my “printed” news from El País, while I’m here in Spain, I’ve subscribed to the International Herald and Tribune.

I just read an amazing report of US government goons going overboard. It seems that a Mr. Jim Benson, from Alton, IL, went to a hearing about fish ladders on the Mississippi, and the various alternatives. One such alternative is to remove some of the dams, and apparently, in the presentation, a photo of a different dam being blown up was presented to illustrate that option. At the end of the presentation, Mr. Benson rose to speak out in support of removing the dam.

Some local intrepid reporter mis-quoted the hapless Mr. Benson as “wanting to blow up the dam,” and shortly thereafter he received a visit from the FBI.

You know, I want to be protected from terrorism, but for crying out loud, can’t the Bush administration and their lackeys come up with better filtering than this? How much do we citizens pay in taxes to get this kind of piss poor protection?

Thomas Greene, at The Register, analyses what it would actually take to make a liquid bomb by mixing chemicals as suggested by the Bush administration. Among his sources: 2004 study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) entitled “Decomposition of Triacetone Triperoxide is an Entropic Explosion.”

Some highlights:

• actually mixing the chemicals has to be done in an ice bath over the course of hours drop by drop
• once mixed, the stuff has to dry for a couple of hours
• any deviation from precise temperatures will produce an explosive that might–maybe–kill the mixer in the lavatory, if the flight staff hasn’t wondered why you’ve been in the john for 2-4 hours.

His conclusions should bring tears to the eyes of anyone with more than a couple of firing neurons:

It should be small comfort that the security establishments of the UK and the USA - and the “terrorism experts” who inform them and wheedle billions of dollars out of them for bomb puffers and face recognition gizmos and remote gait analyzers and similar hi-tech phrenology gear - have bought the Hollywood binary liquid explosive myth, and have even acted upon it.

We’ve given extraordinary credit to a collection of jihadist wannabes with an exceptionally poor grasp of the mechanics of attacking a plane, whose only hope of success would have been a pure accident. They would have had to succeed in spite of their own ignorance and incompetence, and in spite of being under police surveillance for a year.

But the Hollywood myth of binary liquid explosives now moves governments and drives public policy. We have reacted to a movie plot. Liquids are now banned in aircraft cabins (while crystalline white powders should be banned instead, if anyone in charge were serious about security). Nearly everything must now go into the hold, where adequate amounts of explosives can easily be detonated from the cabin with cell phones, which are generally not banned.