Early this morning around 5:00am, I cautiously walked through the pre-dawn darkened neighborhood and out into the middle of the nearby golf course. I've always been interested in astronomy, but I've never taken the time to learn very much about it or try any stargazing. In other words, I think it's cool, but I'm completely ignorant.
When I heard the news about the Perseid meteor shower being very visible because of the darkness of a new moon, I thought I should check it out. I didn't need a telescope, I didn't have to know very much about astronomy to see the phenomena. While I only hung out for about 30 minutes, it was pretty cool to watch.
The other cool thing about the meteor shower is that everyone everywhere can see it. Any idiot, even you, should be able to follow these instructions.
1. Tonight, go somewhere as dark and unlit as you can find outside. 2. Face North. 3. Raise up your right arm to your right side. That's East. 4. Now, turn yourself about halfway in between. That's North East. 5. Look up.
Now, I just stood there in the dark watching the half dozen shooting stars that I could see and then grew tired and walked home. I've read some things on the web since then and I'm going to bring a chair with me tonight. Hopefully, the weather will co-operate and keep the clouds away.
I learned a few other things about meteor showers. Basically, the Earth passes through the tail of the comet Swift-Tuttle every year about this time. The icy debris in the comet's tail hits our atmosphere at speeds up to 130,000 mph, burns up, and appears as a shooting star.
The weird visual phenomena in a meteor shower is very similar to driving a car during a snow storm. The snow flakes appear to come at your car's windshield from the center of the road directly in front of you, even though they're falling from above.
Welcome to my mystery lost-and-found grab bag of barely describable stuff containing the things that often bounce around my mind and keep me awake. Dip your hand into the unknown without fear and discover something new. Don't be afraid. Fear is the mind killer. Sweet dreams are made of these.
Frankly, I decided that I need a place to purge lost and unblogged things. I need a better junk drawer of ideas. I hate to leave loose ends lying around. I am compelled to follow-up and even make corrections. Sometimes things will make sense to you and other times an inside joke is going to fly right over your head. I don't care. You'll figure it out sooner or later, or not at all.
I've started a thematic Project Playlist for my Insomniac entries. Listen here.
Yesterday was my nephew's birthday. He was born on 08/08/88. I haven't seen him since he was a toddler and he's a grown man now. I always imagine that fate made him a lucky person.
Someone in Finland @ 192.100.116.142 [saprx01x.nokia.com] methodically scanned my entire blog yesterday as if they were copying the contents of it. It wasn't a denial of service bot requesting the same file repeatedly. I watched as that one IP address seem to spider and then request each successive entry every 2-3 seconds. That single IP caused my page requests to jump about 400% compared to any average day of traffic. Given the topics of my last two entries, the paranoid in me is not that surprised. My frellin' ISP provides satellite systems for the Department of Defense.
Apparently, I'm not alone in my disappointment with the Democratic party legislators concerning the "Protect America Act of 2007 (S. 1927)." A constitutional lawyer and civil rights litigator whose opinion I cited last year about the "Military Commissions Act," Glen Greenwald, has gone from relative blogspot obscurity to a regular columnist at Salon.com. He was on Democracy Now! on Monday and C-Span's Washington Journal on Tuesday talking about the implications of this new law of Bushworld.
Here are some of the links I was too tired and frustrated to put in Sunday's "Protect America Act?" blog entry and some newer related links:
NSA's Echelon program - the SIGINT precursor (wiki)
Also yesterday, the space shuttle Endeavor successfully launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida for mission STS-118. I use the adverb successfully because I think people sometimes forget that two space shuttles have been completely destroyed killing everyone onboard since the start of the shuttle program more than two decades ago. I watched Challenger explode during the launch phase and Columbia disintegrate during the re-entry phase of both of those missions.
I still get nervous watching the launch preparations and the launch itself. Endeavor will dock with the International Space Station on Friday afternoon (eastern). Read about the poignant 21-year-long wait for our teacher-in-space, Mission Specialist Barbara Morgan, onboard Endeavor.
42 - the answer to everything
I'm really happy that I was able to go grocery shopping today. Honestly. I bought about two dozen packets of Kool-Aid. It's also tedious not having entirely edible food in the house to eat. So, grocery shopping is awesome as an idea.
If I were to complain about it at all, I'd just say that shopping in the middle of the day when it is 95F/35C/308K degrees outside is not the best environment for schlepping Banquet frozen dinners around town.
1. You put the item in your shopping cart, then 2. Out of the cart, onto the cashier's station. 3. Off the station, back into the cart. 4. Out of the cart, into the trunk of a car. 5. Out of the trunk, into the house. 6. Off the counter and into the freezer.
After all of that, both me and my frozen dinners were too wiped out to be of any use.
I did buy several pairs of shorts, a six-pack of socks and some sunglasses from the Dollar store to outfit myself for future forays into the daytime public at large. I was cajoled into buying stuff because of a back-to-school tax-free special sale. I already have a number of really great shirts that the widows have procured for me during their volunteer work at the battered womens' shelter thrift store.
If you want to know how I felt today, watch the movie "Powder." In addition to simple physical pain, I was extremely uncomfortable walking around the crowded stores during the daytime. I was absolutely agoraphobic. The only nice thing was that we (my neighbor and I) spotted Rocky (our pineapple guy) working in the Winn Dixie grocery store and we chatted with him for a few minutes while he stocked produce.
If Rocky can deal with all the Soylent Green people during the daytime, then there may be hope for me yet. I still prefer the night, though.
Late Saturday night, the U.S. Congress decided to enable the Bush Administration to spy on you without a warrant. The president will surely sign the "Protect America Act" into law and everyone in national politics will have an Orwellian good time during their monthlong August vacation.
I have been paying attention to the U.S. intelligence community since I first read James Bamford's "Puzzle Palace" as a teenager. During my military service, I attended U.S. Army Signal Corps schools that required a top secret security clearance in buildings with no windows and was often loaned out to support Special Operations Command during the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations for their many declared and undeclared military interventions.
This personal experience has given me a healthy respect for the people who work in the intelligence business, no matter what their job title happens to be. The majority of these people are true patriots and go to work everyday with the sincere belief that they are protecting the country that they love. Even if one were to exclude military service members, there are thousands of people risking their lives in their endeavors.
Given my respect for the military and civilian personnel, I'm keenly aware how politics seems to have inserted itself into the intelligence process over the years. I'm aware that not everyone believes that the constitution is helpful to their activities. I'm aware that some people in government service will step outside the law because of loyalties to their organization, or political party, or even personal relationships. These people are eventually discovered and held to account.
Since the Bush adminstration has come to power, they have had a quirky way of simply changing the laws to allow previously unnacceptable behavior by government. Torture, and Abu Ghraib, and rendition, and secret detention, and dungeons in the 'Stans, and national security letters, and mass deportations, and spying have all been sold to the American people under the Bush-Cheney bumper sticker slogan of "Fighting the War on Terrorism" but the actual legislation made into law can be applied to any citizen of this country. These laws affect you and your family, here at home, not some bearded ex-CIA asset we call Tim.
For the first six years of the Bush administration, the Republican-controlled legislative branch was labelled the "rubber stamp" Congress. Last night, 41 Democratic representatives wanted to go home more than they wanted to honor their oaths of office to protect and defend the constitution.
The media will sell this as "Bush wins over Democrats to spy on terrorists." However, the so-called "Protect America Act" allows the federal government to read your email, listen to your phone calls, and intercept any of your communications that the government chooses with no judicial predetermination of cause or congressional oversight on these spying activities for at least the next six months.
The intelligence community does need a technology-neutral legal framework to help protect the country against its enemies. However, the legislation (S. 1927) approved last night was lazy, over-reaching, and codifies into law further removal of your civil rights. You should thank the 41 House Democrats who made this possible.
Further reading:
Meh. I was up too late last night to do your work for you. Highlight something and Google it yourself. It's your country too, if you want to keep it.
The story of Sibel Edmonds is a sadly typical example of corruption run amok in the Bush Administration and the revolving doors of power in our nation's capitol. Ms. Edmonds' story began when she was hired as a contract translator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shortly after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. Her story continues today as Bush administration officials protect themselves and other Republican party cronies by gagging her with the "state secrets privilege."
Why would the Bush Department of Justice (DOJ) make Sibel Edmonds the most gagged citizen in the history of our country? Why would they retroactively classify her public testimony to Congress? What are they trying to hide, keep secret, or cover-up?
Some of the very basic facts are:
1. Sibel Edmonds monitored certain FBI wiretaps and translated them. 2. She also re-checked previously translated documents for accuracy. 3. She alleged that her co-worker, Dickerson, committed various crimes. 4. She alleged that her supervisor, Feghali, ignored these crimes. 5. She alleged the FBI fired her because she was a whistleblower. 6. She sued the FBI and took her case all the way to the Supreme Court. 7. The Bush Administration has hid behind "state secrets privilege." 8. She testified to the 9/11 Commission but was ignored. 9. She tried to work within the system but the system failed all of us.
The cast of characters:
Sibel Edmonds - The whistleblower Melek Can Dickerson - Edmonds' co-worker Mike Feghali - Edmonds' supervisor Robert Mueller - Bush-appointed FBI director John Ashcroft - Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney General Thomas Kean - Bush-appointed Chairman of the 9/11 Commission
The raw story:
The best independent reporting of the Sibel Edmonds' story was done by David Rose. His article is the source for many of the points along the timeline below. He published "An Inconvenient Patriot" in Vanity Fair magazine in September 2005:
Love of country led Sibel Edmonds to become a translator for the F.B.I. following 9/11. But everything changed when she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish nationals. Fired after sounding the alarm, she's now fighting for the ideals that made her an American, and threatening some very powerful people.
In Washington, D.C., and its suburbs, December 2, 2001 was fine but cool, the start of the slide into winter after a spell of unseasonable warmth. At 10 o'clock that morning, Sibel and Matthew Edmonds were still in their pajamas, sipping coffee in the kitchen of their waterfront town house in Alexandria, Virginia, and looking forward to a well-deserved lazy Sunday.
Since mid-September, nine days after the 9/11 attacks, Sibel had been exploiting her fluency in Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani as a translator at the F.B.I. It was arduous, demanding work, and Edmonds—who had two bachelor's degrees, was about to begin studying for her master's, and had plans for a doctorate—could have been considered overqualified. But as a naturalized Turkish-American, she saw the job as her patriotic duty. (read the rest of the article)
The Timeline
For people who are completely unfamiliar with ongoing saga of Sibel Edmonds, a timeline of events is helpful to view the events of the narrative in some chronological order. This timeline is compiled from and linked to cooperativeresearch.org. Clicking the headline below will take you to the synopsis of that event in this timeline with citations of original source links for further research.
Now that the Democrats are in charge, where are the Congressional hearings about this national security matter?
Contact Chairman of the Government Oversight Committee, Henry Waxman.
Contact the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Tell them you want them to hold a hearing on this important matter of national security. While the Sibel Edmonds story may only be one of many Bushworld cover-ups, they seem to fear what she has to say enough to gag her testimony in order to keep the lid on their Pandora's box of lies.
The two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have been exploring the red planet for the last three-and-a-half years. They were originally designed and engineered to only survive a ninety day mission. This upcoming Saturday, NASA has planned to launch a third Mars rover named Phoenix from Patrick AFB in Florida. The Phoenix spacecraft is currently sitting atop a Boeing Delta II rocket. After the Phoenix launches at 5:26-6:03 a.m, it will make the ten-month-long journey, and then land in the north polar ice cap region of Mars on May 25th, 2008.
The main reason to explore the polar region is to see if life could, does, or did exist below the surface hidden from the harsh Martian conditions. The basic science with this mission is a major motivation for embarking upon it.
First of all, it is rocket science. Launching a spacecraft to another planet and landing it there is an amazing feat of engineering technology that incorporates just about every major engineering discipline.
Secondly, burrowing under the Martian permafrost and looking for forms of life brings geological, chemical and biological scientific disciplines to the mission. For example, simply discovering traces of methane in a soil sample doesn't necessarily mean that the methane was produced by biological processes since methane can be trapped there from geological processes.
If the Mars exploration missions interest you, here are my suggested links:
