smedleft's Blog

It's a trick, it's to see if people are stupid ... if he sees his shadow 1.5 months of winter, if he doesn't then just 6 weeks left... since the time is the same you can tell the stupid people by the ones that say "Oh good, just 6 weeks left." Never underestimate the value of being able to spot the stupid people.

Hi, How are things?
Well, here things are very observ-y.  What do I mean?  Well walk with me...
I went to collect some money from a friend that had bought something from me, a shoe rack to be exact.  It was kinda an odd purchase, but he's kinda an odd fellow, but maybe more about Peter later on.  The solid he paid me, though, was when I called to see if he was in he updated me that there was an obvious speed-trap over by his place and I should check the speed zone signs on the way over.  
When I got there I saw a police car sitting in the parking lot next to his house, "working".  By "..." I mean he was in the process of writing a ticket to someone that doubtless was speeding or swerving or running over babies, or nuns, or baby nuns, with puppies.  You know what, that's fine... GET IT? "FINE"! Haaa!  as long as that's what it was... more on that in a minute.  My friend assured me that car 287 was working a second stop since we had spoken and a third since he had gotten home.  Indeed, I spoke to Peter for 10 minutes at the most and the operator of car 287 finished in that time, drove off to the East and spun a screeching U-Turn West after another "perp" before I left.
Yes, it's fine that he's writing a ticket for speeing that's part of his job and for that I don't envy him, and I also don't envy his having to fill those traffic ticket quotas; WHOOP Dere It Iiis!  OK, I think I've set up enough fingers, now let's point them at something.
Yeah I have something to say about the ticket quotas and police work at this time...
I don't know about where you live, but the police here in Virginia DENY that there are monthly quotas for traffic tickets that they either MUST fulfill, are strongly ENCOURAGED to fulfill or perhaps some bonus or advancement DEPENDS upon fulfillment.  Buh, Buh buh, how can you say for certain? (asked of me) Well look at their behavior.  Actions speak louder than words, right?  and tied to that I will say there are two kinds of cops (DO YOU know how much I HATE those statements?! Yet here I think I can delineate thus,) There are diligent cops who get their ticket quota mostly fulfilled at the start of the month, in the 1st 4 days even.  Then there are procrastinator cops who donut their way through the month and then wake up delirious and crumb encrusted on the 26th and are all like, "Whoa, holy shit, I gotta get some tickets out there and now."  Again, I can demonstrate this.  The streets of Suffolk are CRAWLING with cops, and lo and behold, 'tis the 30th of August.  I see the police set up on the sides of Suffolk roads on all kinds of days of the week and all kinds of hours of the, wait actually I see them radaring pretty much in the daylight hours and then some into night through about 8PM.  but not so much after that... nope too much actual danger after 8PM-ish, can't do it then.  Nope.  Sure the rest of the month you can find the Suffolk PD doing stuff, mostly stalking about, IN their cars, in some of the less reputable neighborhoods.  I think that's called sweatin' 'em out, and I think it keeps decades old racial tensions hanging about just under the surface (in their own cars, ha).  But rest assured at the start of the month you'll find about half the Suffolk Police out ticketing and just about half the rest... well wait 2 1/2 weeks and you'll see them.
I have a further motivation for writing this looong overdue observation.
Car 287 was doing his thing, which is fine, except why is that his thing?  Oh yeah, we said quotas.  Well, I am concerned that the sweating over quotas might make the officer a lttle looser with his judgement calls, a little more likely to call something a violation that might not actually exist... but I'm not actually stooping to calling the procrastinator cops liars, I'm not there yet.  What I'm thinking is that the police here in Suffolk stack up some ill vibes and bod image with the OBVIOUS quota based enforcement, that MIGHT encourage bad coppitude.  And then I think of current events.
Current events?
Yes, we just had a hurricane. despite the horror and humanitary crisis that it has wrought upon New England with it's Tropical Storm force, Irene here was a Hurri-fukken-Cane.  Some of Suffolk is STILL without power.  Not like 2-4 days is some kind of record or something, but it is enough time to read that old so-and-so about how in Chinese the same word that translates to "problem" also translates to "opportunity".  I don't know for sure if that is true, but it sould like a good filter to hear things through.  I'll bet that some cops walking a beat in some of those "bad neighborhood" that they usually cruise through  would be an OK thing.  I'll bet them spending some time talking to the people that are out of power and worried about their homes would be a good thing.  I'll bet taking the time to visit with some elderly and handicapped to make sure that they're faring well would be great.  See hurricanes knock out power, power loss deactivates air conditioners, dead AC kills old folks, unless someone checks on them and makes sure they're OK.  Believe it or not it's possible to find out about these people, the rescue squads know where some of them live, the power company knows where some live, hell I'll bet that while you're cruising about in the air conditioned police car (number 287, for instance) that you see some residences with ramps and it's not rocket science to assume that those homes with ramps house ... come on ... you can do it... mobility challenged persons.  Imagine doing some good and, aaaand, and at the same time repairing some of that ill will that the sublimely racist enforcement and the lying about things like traffic ticket quotas has built up.  I'll bet that visiting with someone's grandmother, when they can't come to see if she's OK, or finding out if some handicapped individual needs emergency power would go a loong way to making the Suffolk PD an accepted part of Suffolk life.  Suffolk, Va is not unique in this, I know some other areas in my sprawling metropolis that could use this same philosophy about police services.  Maybe in your town this is the story, too.
To review; we don't have quotas, but you'll see a lot of traffic stops on the 1st and last four days of every month.  We can't be bothered to get out of our cars, but please refrain from feeling negatively about us while we give out more tickets and your crippled auntie roasts in her storm blacked-out apartment in the poorer section of town where we don't get out of our Air Conditioned cars.
I don't see a thing that needs changing, do you?
IDEAS people, IDEAS!
Accompanying song... 911 is a Joke

Welcome to the anniversary edition. The September 11th  10th anniversary ...uh... celebrations have begun in late August.  And why not?  With so much to tout and roll out I'm sure that you can't start soon enough, just like the way X-mas stuff starts appearing in stores on Sept 12. Well here's a thing that maybe some people have missed since it's a day that celebrates things that got missed, let's not forget to miss these;
-- Ramzey Yousef indicated to the CIA that there would be another attempt on the Twin Towers while he was under arrest.  He and other Al Qaida agents under torture indicated that there were members in training in US flight schools as far back as1996.  Some of these confessors caved in to torture in the Philippines, BUT some spoke of this to US CIA agents as brags, not confessions under torture.  Some of them even went into detail that their plans included crashing a jumbo jet into to CIA headquarters, and a separate attack, later, that would use 10 airplanes to simultaneously destroy 10 targets (a much larger Sept 11.)  These were the previews, these told the operative officials of the US that these things were possible, that they were to look out for these things.
-- 1-2 months before Sept 11 Condoleezza Rice, as a part of her duty to deliver the president's morning security briefings, TOLD GW Bush that there was a credible threat that some terrorists might be contemplating hijacking airliners to use to crash into buildings.  This plot was not new on the landscape since it had appeared in fiction in the 1990s and even using an aircraft to kill masses of civilians appeared in the book Black Friday in the 1970s.  The psychological and disruptive effects of bringing down skyscrapers was discussed in the movie Fight Club.  If no one remembers these references then how could they have become bestsellers and resulted in 4 film awards.  Don’t ignore!
-- GW Bush was meeting with a brother (he actually has many) of Osama bin Laden ONE WEEK before Sept 11, 2001.  Although he has many brothers it is odd that one of them would be in the White House, in a closed-door meeting with the president that soon before the attack.  Some theorize that the president was told of the attack at that time, it's details and operatives, and asked to plan for the safe repatriation of high ranking Saudis after the attack.  That repatriation is a fact.  In the days right after Sept 11, 2001, when NO AIRCRAFT were permitted off the ground a set of flights did leave the USA with only Saudi Arabians who had been individually offered the chance to depart.
-- A great number of blanks left unfilled, that have only gotten wider and more convoluted since the interviews have aired, about how GW Bush reacted to the attacks.  Or more precisely about how he failed to react.
-- The summer of 2001 the FAA was informed 52 times of potential terror events that involve at least hijackings, and possible bombings by known terror groups including Al Qaida.  TWO of the warnings even specify suicide events.
-- Terrorist chatter was so thick by the end of summer 2001 that agencies knew something was coming within weeks and decided to filter out some of the most glaring statements that will pan out to be the actual ones.  Are you saying that all the terrorists need to do is talk a lot and then the CIA will be "deafened"?
-- A kid in a school room in NJ will even know ahead of time that the WTC will be coming down within a week.  The FBI will investigate something he told his teacher and confirm that he did tell her that information, but they do not follow through enough to find out exactly who told him.  WHERE DID HE GET THAT THOUGHT?
-- A week before a woman in her 20s living in Florida, where she recently moved, receives a letter from her relatively new boyfriend in the Middle East.  In it he tells her to not be on an airplane around the second week of September and on for a couple of weeks.  I worked with this woman's mother in Virginia and heard this through that second hand, true, but to me, knowing that coworker, this was credible information.  I seriously doubt that this boyfriend was affiliated in some way with terrorists, and so if this information was so common in the street talk of the Arab states then I would think that our agents would have come up with the same kind of data.
-- ON Sept. 11 when the 1st 3 crashes had happened there was a tendency to assume that it was over.  Then the 4th crash should have showed that it was NOT over, but still there is a tendency to assume that four was it, enough, done, complete... WHY?  Why would it be done at four.  When YOU do something and you do it more than twice, do you stop at three?  Do you stop at four?  When do you, a human stop.  What's the psychologically logical number of times you do something to prove you can do it and do it at will?  One? no.  Two? Maybe.  Three? less likely.  Four?  Even less likely.  Look. At. Your. Hands.  What do you see?  What number is encoded in your very body and mind?  THAT'S right FIVE.  Follow on to the next...
-- I have asserted since Sept 12 that there were FIVE planes.  It makes sense, it is logical, there is evidence.  ON Sept 11th all planes were ordered to the ground by the time the 3rd crash happened.  When one plane did not reply to the order appropriately it was flagged as the fourth plane and plans were drawn to shoot it down, it came down on it's own as you have heard.  At the same time, less noticed because of the attention being expended on the fourth plane, another plane that was already on it's way to runways in Chicago reported an onboard incident.  This incident was on the news before the fourth plane hit the field, and it largely disappeared afterwards.  The incident involved persons described as two Middle Eastern males, and seemed to break out WHEN the plane began descent on Chicago O'Hare Airport.  Was this an attempt to seize plane FIVE?  Was that twarted by the air crew who were ready for something to be out of the ordinary because they had already been told to be on the lookout?  Was this attempt at takeover done half heartedly because the terrorists already knew the plane was in descent and they didn't knew for sure if they could take over in time and get the plane past air defenses if they're already on alert?  Next pointer is related -- All the planes hijacked were headed to California, Los Angeles and San Francisco.  Two days after the airplane hijacks a train running from Chicago to Northern California crashed in the Utah desert.  That train was crowded with people trying to complete their journey to California that they started in the morning of Sept 11.  No deaths were reported in the train wreck of September 13, 2001 in Wendover, Utah, but there were two male passengers missing from the rosters when the survivors were recounted.  Somehow two people escaped the train after the accident and faded into the Utah landscape at a time when accounting for travelers across America was at it's best.  Was that the hijack crew for a fifth plane?  Anyone want to ask?  No?  Then good, let them complete their journey and wreak havoc another day...
-- Then the Airports, no, the ARRIVAL Airports... Don't forget that Sept 11 was an operation, with people playing roles and things happening on timetables.  All in all it was rather complex, involved some member substitutions and some pretty heavy commitments on the parts of the plotters.  The plotters operated in clusters called cells, that to some degree involved the participants not knowing who else was involved.  The leaders of al Qaida knew most of the participants, the one ringleader in of the four known crews did know msot of the members of the other crews, but maybe not all, but most of the members of any one cell didn't know who else was in a cell except that one organizer.  There is a reason for this operational blindness, it is a failsafe.  
Cell members had roles; pilot, the carrier of the "bomb", the knifers or muscle men.  NOW, knowing there are failsafes and blindness is built in between cells and that there are roles.  Leads me to this... Checkers.  Yes as in one who checks. These were suicide missions, NO chance of even accidentally surviving, not even a little.  Most Americans I think would admit that knowing something like that would bring some hesitation in their completion of the mission.  In fact I think that everyone would have some moments of self doubt when faced with that possibility and might take a chance to get out of it if such presented itself at the right moment.  One of the London terrorists of 2005 was NOT in his place, instead he was on a bus and survivors recalled later that there was a young man who clutched his bag nervously.  Last minute cold feet?  Why not, even ravenous suicidal terrorists are human enough to have a moment of self doubt; Is this the right cause? Can I pull it off? How will my mommy really feel about this? What if it hurts?  That's the kind of thing that could totally blow the mission, and someone not completing the Sept 11th mission could easily blow the al Qaida organization right to the top.  SO, How do we keep cold feet from killing it?  
Like I said checkers.  Al Qaida is (was?) not a fly by night operation, it was a collection of experts at what they do (did?)  I would think there would be one more task that the cells would have been aware of, or suspected... at the destination ariport there were most likely people in place to make sure that those planes did not come in, and if they did come in then make sure those plotters did not deplane, and if they did deplane then they would make sure that those plotters, unsuccessful at their tasks, sis not need a ride to the hotel... you get it?  There would be someone at the SF and LA airports,waiting with photos to see who got off planes and what planes did not come in.  Maybe they'd be sitting in the baggage claims areas and on the taxi lines.  They would surely have had guns, and maybe some kind of back up in cars waiting in the garages...  I mean this is how drug runners do it right?  If you strap a million dollars worth of coccaine onto someone's thighs then it pays to have a system for ensuring the arrival at the destination, right?  Then why are terrorist masterminds not held to a similar standard?  So when the news came through that the four planes had crashed and that all the other planes were being forced toland at other airports their job was over.  These quality control personnel would then just slink away with other people being ordered to evacuate LAX and San Francisco Int'l.  That means that there are still teams of terrorists loose after Sept 11, waiting for reassignment... idle hands and all that.  I thought again on this in 2002  when a man of Egyptian extraction shot up the El Al counter at LAX, originally news had reported a pair of men with machine guns were the perpetrators.  The official report was that it was a single man with no terrorist organization affiliation, but still the shooter is labelled as a terrorist since he targeted Israelis at the El Al counter.
As you can already tell I do not come predisposed to accept the party line, the official explanation and the easy pill to swallow.  It's not that I reject authority, I actually think a little authority is a good thing.  BUT I am vexxed when the leadership fails to think things out.  It vexxes me further that the USA, a very advanced country, can fall under the dictates of either deceptive leadership, corrupt leadership that might allow a horrible tragedy to happen so that they can capitalize on the fallout and chaos from that disaster (also see Katrina in New Orleans), or leadership that is just not smarte enough to be leadership.  Want this to not happen again?  Well watch who you vote for AND aaannnddd watch who you give money to.
Thank you and good night.

G.W. Bush's big 10th anniversary of Sept 11 interview is on right now.
I often cannot distinguish when people are trying to deceive me.
however
THIS man is as full of shit as he was in 2001.
I have been particularly interested in why he sat for several minutes of the attack in an elemenatry school reading classroom.  He is indeed revealing information on his briefing that had not been let out before and then adding explanation about the lapse of time... and seriously he is not helping his case.  The main revelation is that he's had 10 years to think of a better spin or explanation and in that time he's just managed to dig it deeper.

Someone once confided in me that GW is a recovering alcoholic, which is regrettable, but that explains many of his behaviors as president and within the context of this interview.  The rote repetition of certain phrases and sticking to certain convictions set up by his words, that's a recovering alcoholic behavior.  On the other hand the projecting emotion into the camera with the assumption, no, surety that everyone on the other end is experiencing the exact same thing -- that's a sociopath thing.

The next BS thing is here; he jokes with a driver that Al Quaida was not there to worry about... but they did not assert that Al Quaida was responsible for several hours after that.

Be mad at me if you like, but the fact is that the timing makes the man a liar, or is it the man himself?

This guy walks into a bar with an alligator on the end of a leash.  He heads right to the barstools and sits and the 'tender comes over, "Uh, hello sir.  What can I get you?"
The man asks, "Hi, tell me, do you serve lawyers here?"
"Yes, sir, yes we do."  Said the bartender thinking this will lead to an explanation about the gator without his having to ask.
"Great," says the man, "I'll have a beer and my alligator wants a lawyer."