Secretary of State John Kerry has admitted that the US will have to negotiate with the Assad regime:

The United States will have to negotiate with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for a political transition in Syria and is exploring ways to pressure him into agreeing to talks, US Secretary of State John Kerry told CBS News in an interview.

Washington has long insisted that Assad must be replaced through a negotiated, political transition, but the rise of a common enemy, hardline militant group Islamic State, appears to have slightly softened the West’s stance towards him.

In the interview broadcast on Sunday, Kerry did not repeat the standard US line that Assad had lost all legitimacy and had to go. Syria’s civil war is now into its fifth year, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions of Syrians displaced.

“We have to negotiate in the end,” Kerry said. “We’ve always been willing to negotiate in the context of the Geneva I process,” he added, referring to a 2012 conference which called for a negotiated transition to end the conflict.

This, and maybe putting a cap in the ass of Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who is the single most responsible for creating ISIS.

The US is under no obligation to support the House of Saud’s great game against Shia Muslims.

It’s not our fight, and, quite honestly, as bad as the Iranian regime is, Riyadh is worse.

I will remind anyone who is unclear on the concept that 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, and 0 of the 19 were Iranian.

So tell me again, which regime is a threat to national security?

And suddenly I have no urge at all to see the film:

A comedy film about North Korea that had its Christmas Day launch cancelled after a major cyber attack and threats against US cinema-goers is now to get a limited theatrical release, Sony says.

The Interview will be shown in some independent US cinemas on Thursday.

Sony Chairman Michael Lynton said he was “excited” that the comedy, about a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, would now be seen.

Two cinemas in Atlanta and Austin have already revealed screenings.

Any urge I had to see the movie has vanished, but I am now seriously considering Will Bunch tweeted tongue in cheek conspiracy theory:

Elevator pitch: Slapstick comedy about worst movie ever made becoming box-office smash when it’s hacked by North Korea
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) December 23, 2014

Not surprised. The District Attorney did his level best to throw the case:

A St. Louis County grand jury has brought no criminal charges against Darren Wilson, a white police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, more than three months ago in nearby Ferguson.

The decision by the grand jury of nine whites and three blacks was announced Monday night by the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, at a news conference packed with reporters from around the world. The killing, on a residential street in Ferguson, set off weeks of civil unrest — and a national debate — fueled by protesters’ outrage over what they called a pattern of police brutality against young black men. Mr. McCulloch said that Officer Wilson faced charges ranging from first-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter.

The prosecutor threw all this into the grand jury’s lap without a recommendation, a highly unorthodox decision, and even with that, it appears that his presentation was deliberately weak.

If St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch keeps his promise to release the proceedings to the public, and I don’t expect him to, as it will reveal what he did, or more accurately what he did not do.

Needless to day the message here is that black lives are downright cheap in Saint Louis County, and probably at a significant discount in the rest of the United States.

Of course there are also larger issues with policing in the United States, where, for example, Seattle Police were responsible for 20.6% of all homicides, and Utah, police kill more people than gangs, drug dealers, and child abuse.

The juxtaposition of a hyper-militarized constabulary with the prison industrial complex is truly disasterous.

It appears that for this election cycle a lot of Republican are keeping their wallets closed.

My guess is that the euphoria following the Citizens United decision has dissipated, and they have realized that, following the very expensive debacle of 2012, many of the Republican operatives are more about separating wealthy donors from their money than they are about getting Republicans elected:

Two things may be keeping Republican strategists up at night: money and the Democratic ground game. Perhaps the biggest untold story of this election is how so many Republican and conservative donors, at least those whose last name isn’t Koch, have kept their checkbooks relatively closed. In many cases, GOP candidates are not enjoying nearly the same financial largesse that existed in 2012, and in some races, they are well behind Democrats. While Republican candidates, national party committees, and super PACs are hardly starving, their Senate and House campaign committees have not been able to keep pace in fundraising with their Democratic counterparts. Their super PACs do not have nearly the funding that they had in 2012 (even allowing for the absence of a presidential race this year). And, in a number of key races, Democratic candidates, party committees, and their allied groups have been on the air significantly more than Republicans. GOP strategists have privately said that if it were not for spending by organizations affiliated with the Koch brothers, they might well be in really bad shape.

Many Republican and conservative donors appear to be somewhat demoralized after 2012. They feel that they were misled about the GOP’s chances in both the presidential and senatorial races that year, and/or their money was not well spent. In short, they are giving less if at all, and it has put Republican candidates in a bind in a number of places.

Republican donors realize that they are having smoke blown up on their ass, and they have yet to determine a way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Who knows, maybe Karl Rove will need to find honest work.

The Insane Terrorist Group We Armed and Supported Now Greater Threat to U.S. than 9/11

While in the White House, Richard Nixon discussed panda sex. (shudder)

I guess that there is a downside to the most recent release of Nixon tapes.

It seems that the CIA is spying on the emails of CIA whistle-blowers:

The CIA obtained a confidential email to Congress about alleged whistleblower retaliation related to the Senate’s classified report on the agency’s harsh interrogation program, triggering fears that the CIA has been intercepting the communications of officials who handle whistleblower cases.

The CIA got hold of the legally protected email and other unspecified communications between whistleblower officials and lawmakers this spring, people familiar with the matter told McClatchy. It’s unclear how the agency obtained the material.

At the time, the CIA was embroiled in a furious behind-the-scenes battle with the Senate Intelligence Committee over the panel’s investigation of the agency’s interrogation program, including accusations that the CIA illegally monitored computers used in the five-year probe. The CIA has denied the charges.

The email controversy points to holes in the intelligence community’s whistleblower protection systems and raises fresh questions about the extent to which intelligence agencies can elude congressional oversight.

The email related to allegations that the agency’s inspector general, David Buckley, failed to properly investigate CIA retaliation against an agency official who cooperated in the committee’s probe, said the knowledgeable people, who asked not to be further identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Once again, the US state security is completely out of control, and needs to be completely reorganized. (As in firing much of senior staff)

H/t Atrios

In his latest, someone, almost certainly not Edward Snowden, leaked him Jeremy Scahill, “The Secret Government Rulebook For Labeling You a Terrorist,” and finds a document that can be shortened to, “Because I said so.”

It’s truly horrifying:

The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept.

The “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government’s secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings. The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place “entire categories” of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to “nominate” people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as “fragmentary information.” It also allows for dead people to be watchlisted.

Over the years, the Obama and Bush Administrations have fiercely resisted disclosing the criteria for placing names on the databases—though the guidelines are officially labeled as unclassified. In May, Attorney General Eric Holder even invoked the state secrets privilege to prevent watchlisting guidelines from being disclosed in litigation launched by an American who was on the no fly list. In an affidavit, Holder called them a “clear roadmap” to the government’s terrorist-tracking apparatus, adding: “The Watchlisting Guidance, although unclassified, contains national security information that, if disclosed … could cause significant harm to national security.”

National security, the last refuge of scoundrels.

The rulebook, which The Intercept is publishing in full, was developed behind closed doors by representatives of the nation’s intelligence, military, and law-enforcement establishment, including the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, and FBI. Emblazoned with the crests of 19 agencies, it offers the most complete and revealing look into the secret history of the government’s terror list policies to date. It reveals a confounding and convoluted system filled with exceptions to its own rules, and it relies on the elastic concept of “reasonable suspicion” as a standard for determining whether someone is a possible threat. Because the government tracks “suspected terrorists” as well as “known terrorists,” individuals can be watchlisted if they are suspected of being a suspected terrorist, or if they are suspected of associating with people who are suspected of terrorism activity.

“Instead of a watchlist limited to actual, known terrorists, the government has built a vast system based on the unproven and flawed premise that it can predict if a person will commit a terrorist act in the future,” says Hina Shamsi, the head of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “On that dangerous theory, the government is secretly blacklisting people as suspected terrorists and giving them the impossible task of proving themselves innocent of a threat they haven’t carried out.” Shamsi, who reviewed the document, added, “These criteria should never have been kept secret.”

The document’s definition of “terrorist” activity includes actions that fall far short of bombing or hijacking. In addition to expected crimes, such as assassination or hostage-taking, the guidelines also define destruction of government property and damaging computers used by financial institutions as activities meriting placement on a list. They also define as terrorism any act that is “dangerous” to property and intended to influence government policy through intimidation.

This combination—a broad definition of what constitutes terrorism and a low threshold for designating someone a terrorist—opens the way to ensnaring innocent people in secret government dragnets. It can also be counterproductive. When resources are devoted to tracking people who are not genuine risks to national security, the actual threats get fewer resources—and might go unnoticed.

“If reasonable suspicion is the only standard you need to label somebody, then it’s a slippery slope we’re sliding down here, because then you can label anybody anything,” says David Gomez, a former senior FBI special agent with experience running high-profile terrorism investigations. “Because you appear on a telephone list of somebody doesn’t make you a terrorist. That’s the kind of information that gets put in there.

Here is the kicker:

The nomination system appears to lack meaningful checks and balances. Although government officials have repeatedly said there is a rigorous process for making sure no one is unfairly placed in the databases, the guidelines acknowledge that all nominations of “known terrorists” are considered justified unless the National Counterterrorism Center has evidence to the contrary. In a recent court filing, the government disclosed that there were 468,749 KST nominations in 2013, of which only 4,915 were rejected–a rate of about one percent. The rulebook appears to invert the legal principle of due process, defining nominations as “presumptively valid.”

(emphasis mine)

Half a million people put on the list every year, and they have no obligation to prove you guilty.

The term Kafkaesque comes to mind.

The Intercept has published the whole document on their site, and I have embedded it after the break.

Note correction.  I did not loook at the byline.  It was Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux, not Glenn Greenwald who broke this story.

In his bid for reelection, Rahm Emanuel is behind his virtually unknown opponents by 22%:

For the past couple of weeks, Karen Lewis has been saying she is “seriously” considering running for mayor.

It turns out voters are taking the fiery Chicago Teachers Union president’s potential candidacy seriously as well.

And Mayor Rahm Emanuel probably should, too.

At least that’s what a surprising new Early & Often Poll suggests.

If the mayoral election were held today, the lightning rod union leader who was the architect behind a 2012 teachers’ strike would beat Emanuel by 9 percentage points in a head-to-head contest, the survey found.

Lewis was leading Emanuel 45 percent to 36 percent with 18 percent of the likely voters undecided.

And Emanuel could face an even steeper hill if he faces Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, long considered his most formidable challenger.

A head-to-head contest found Preckwinkle in a romp vs. Emanuel by a stunning 24 points.

Preckwinkle dominated with 55 percent of those surveyed. Emanuel notched just under 31 percent.

I don’t think that Toni Preckwinkle got anything going by way of a campaign right now, but Karen Lewis is, having set up an exploratory committee.

Neither of them have a whole bunch of name recognition beyond the fact that they fought with Rahm, and they are still kicking Rahm’s ass.

The Emanuel campaign is claiming that it is no big deal, but I kind of figure that his

Details below.

I am watching TV, and an ad comes on, and the cat Tardar Sauce, better known as “Grumpy Cat,” advertising Honey Nut Cheerios^®.

I don’t know why, but this is wrong in some very profound ways.

It’s almost H.P. Lovecraft wrong.

We have the natural food manufacturer Eden Foods:

The slogan for Eden Foods, which describes itself as the “oldest natural and organic food company in North America,” is “creation and maintenance of purity in food.” Its CEO and founder, Michael Potter, has been prominent in debates over labeling of organic food and GMOs. But the company has been quietly seeking in court another form of purity — to Catholic doctrine about sex being solely for procreation. That goes not just for Potter, but for all 128 of his employees.

That is, Eden Foods — an organic food company with no shortage of liberal customers — has quietly pursued a decidedly right-wing agenda, suing the Obama administration for exemption from the mandate to cover contraception for its employees under the Affordable Care Act. In court filings, Eden Foods, represented by the conservative Thomas More Law Center, alleges that its rights have been violated under the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

Eden Foods, which did not respond to a request for comment, says in its filing that the company believes of birth control that “these procedures almost always involve immoral and unnatural practices.” The complaint also says that “Plaintiffs believe that Plan B and ‘ella’ can cause the death of the embryo, which is a person.” (Studies show that neither Plan B nor Ella interfere with fertilization, which is the Catholic definition of the beginning of life, if not the medical one. In other words, not the death of an embryo. Also, at that stage, it’s a zygote, not an embryo — let alone a “person.”) The filing also said that “Plaintiff Eden Foods’ products, methods, and accomplishments are described by critics as: tasteful, nutritious, wholesome, principled, unrivaled, nurturing, pure.”

Until now, Eden Foods’ conservative advocacy litigation has remained mostly under the radar, even as their marketing seems designed to appeal to liberals, from the slogan ”Organic agriculture is society’s brightest hope for positive change” to the ’60s imagery and the use of the word “revolution” in some of its print marketing. The company’s mission statement includes its goal to “contribute to peaceful evolution on earth,” “to maintain a healthy, respectful, challenging, and rewarding environment for employees,” and to “cultivate sound relationships with other organizations and individuals who are like minded and involved in like pursuits.”

They are also a closely held company, so according to five of the so-called Justices on the Supreme Court, it’s their right, but do not buy their products.

F%$# them and the horse they rode in on.

The Fox News blond has called out both Dick Cheney and John Bolton for being insanely wrong on Iraq.

So, Megyn Kelly gets that they are miserable failures, and that they have nothing to add to any discussion on Iraq, but, for some reason, the folks who book the more mainstream Sunday shows, don’t understand this.

I think that part of the reason for this is that she does not personally have skin in the Iraq game.

When the rest of the media was actively cheer-leading the upcoming war, Kelly was still working as a lawyer, so her critique requires neither self-examination nor an admission of wrongdoing.

Eric Cantor just lost his primary for reelection to a Teabagger:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.), the chamber’s second-ranking Republican, was badly beaten in a primary contest Tuesday by an obscure professor with tea party backing — a historic electoral surprise that left the GOP in chaos and the House without its heir apparent.

Cantor, who has represented the Richmond suburbs since 2001, lost by 11 percentage points to Dave Brat, an economist at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va. It was an operatic fall from power, swift and deep and utterly surprising. As late as Tuesday morning, Cantor had felt so confident of victory that he spent the morning at a Starbucks on Capitol Hill, holding a fundraising meeting with lobbyists while his constituents went to the polls.

He did not just lose, he got shellacked.

With the possible exception of John Boehner, whose dislike of, and rivalry with, Cantor was very tangible, the Republican establishment must be profoundly unhappy now.

To paraphrase Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), reports of the Tea Party’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Not sure where the Dems will go from here, but reaching across the aisle would not be my suggestion.

Obama’s nominee for the district judge in the 11^th circuit, (specifically, the noreth Georgia bench) Michael Boggs, has encountered a lot of resistance from Senate Democrats for his antediluvian attitudes on basically everything.

The latest revelation is that he vowed to oppose gays in the Boy Scouts:

New revelations could create more trouble for President Barack Obama’s embattled judicial nominee Michael Boggs.

Boggs, currently a state appeals court judge, apparently ran a staunchly anti-gay campaign for the Georgia state House in 2000. In a flyer from his campaign, obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Boggs vowed: “I oppose same sex marriages, I oppose homosexual Boy Scout leaders, and I support voluntary prayer in schools.”

He billed himself as “a conservative Democrat with conservative values” who’s running on “Christian values,” and suggested he’d have more power and influence as a Democrat given that Democrats were in control of the majority.

His voting record on LGBT rights, abortion, the Confederate flag, etc. is all far right, but somehow or other, Obama saw fit to nominate him for a lifetime position on the court.

Un-Dirtyword-Believable

This time at a Fedex in Kennesaw, Georgia:

A FedEx Corp package handler armed with a shotgun opened fire at a shipping facility in suburban Atlanta early on Tuesday, injuring six people before killing himself, apparently with his own weapon, police and hospital officials said.

Three people were in critical condition, two of them with life-threatening injuries, after being shot by the 19-year-old gunman just before 6 a.m. EDT at a FedEx warehouse near the airport in Kennesaw, Georgia, about 30 miles northwest of Atlanta, police and hospital officials said.

The shooter, identified as Geddy L. Kramer of Acworth, Georgia, drove up to the security guard shack at the warehouse and shot the guard before entering the warehouse where he shot the other five people, according to police.

FedEx employee Liza Aiken told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution she was correcting addresses on packages when she saw a colleague dressed in black and armed with a knife, gun and a cartridge belt strapped across this chest.

“He had bullets strapped to his chest like Rambo,” she told the newspaper. “He looked like he was heading into war.”

The kicker, Kennesaw, Georgia has a mandatory gun law, which requires heads of households to own a firearm and ammunition:

Gun law

The town is noted for its unusual gun legislation. In 1982 the city passed an ordinance [Sec 34-21]^[19]

(a) In order to provide for the emergency management of the city, and further in order to provide for and protect the safety, security and general welfare of the city and its inhabitants, every head of household residing in the city limits is required to maintain a firearm, together with ammunition therefore.

(b) Exempt from the effect of this section are those heads of households who suffer a physical or mental disability which would prohibit them from using such a firearm. Further exempt from the effect of this section are those heads of households who are paupers or who conscientiously oppose maintaining firearms as a result of beliefs or religious doctrine, or persons convicted of a felony.

Gun rights activist David Kopel stated that there is evidence that this gun law has reduced the incident rate of home burglaries citing that in the first year, home burglaries dropped from 65 before the ordinance, down to 26 in 1983, and to 11 in 1984.^[20] The overall crime rate had decreased by more than 50% between 1982 and 2005.^[21] Another report observed a noticeable reduction in burglary from 1981, the year before the ordinance was passed, to 1999. A 2001 media report stated that Kennesaw’s crime rates continued to decline and were well below the national average, making citizens feel safer and more secure.^[22] The city’s website says that the city has the lowest crime rate in Cobb county.^[23]

Remember what Wayne LaPierre said about the defense against a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun?

Not so much.

Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras will be visiting the United States to accept the Polk awards:

Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, two American journalists who have been at the forefront of reporting on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, will return to the United States on Friday for the first time since revelations of worldwide surveillance broke.

Greenwald and Poitras, currently in Berlin, will attend Friday’s Polk Awards ceremony in New York City. The two journalists are sharing the prestigious journalism award with The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill and with Barton Gellman, who has led The Washington Post’s reporting on the NSA documents. Greenwald and Poitras interviewed Snowden last June in Hong Kong as he first revealed himself.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Greenwald said he’s motivated to return because “certain factions in the U.S. government have deliberately intensified the threatening climate for journalists.”

“It’s just the principle that I shouldn’t allow those tactics to stop me from returning to my own country,” Greenwald said.
Greenwald suggested government officials and members of Congress have used the language of criminalization as a tactic to chill investigative journalism.
In January, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggested that journalists reporting on the NSA documents were acting as Snowden’s “accomplices.” The following month, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claimed that Greenwald was selling stolen goods by reporting stories on the NSA documents with news organizations around the world. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) has called for Greenwald to be prosecuted.

Greenwald said the government has not informed his legal counsel whether or not he could face any potential charges, or if he’s been named in any grand jury investigation tied to the NSA disclosures.

My guess is that they will have to drive to the US, because they are both on the no-fly list, and I would expect all sorts of bureaucratic and law enforcement harassment.

I would place the chance of an arrest on the basis of the Espionage Act, or something similar to be about 25%.

Barack Obama had a joint news conference with the Dutch PM, and when he talked about American support for human rights, the audience response was profoundly underwhelming:

Responding to a question at The Hague’s for the Nuclear Security Summit, President Obama concluded the event with an anti-climactic few moments in which he looks to Prime Minister Rutte, seemingly expectant of some way to wrap-up the event without applause.

“The good news is that I’m very confident that it can be achieved, and I’m also confident that the core values that America has always believed in, in terms of privacy, rule of law, individual rights; that has guided the United States for many years and will continue to guide us into the future,” Obama concluded, before nodding and looking to Prime Minister Rutte.

Obama is seen nodding at Prime Minister Rutte again, seeking confirmation that the conference has ended he says, “okay.”

Despite only the rustling sounds of people standing to exit, a single person can be heard slowly – but steadily – patting out a few claps to conclude the event.

“Thank you very much everybody, thank you again,” says the president, as he walks off stage with Prime Minister Rutte.

Trust me, the when you slice the bullsh%$ that thick, people notice.

I do not think that people in the current establishment in DC realize just how compromised our image is world wide, and how much damage this will do to future attempts to prosecute our agenda in a multilateral manner.

The biggest threat to the United States these days are our state security and foreign policy apparatuses.

Some Aviation Buffs took some photos of what they thought were B-2’s over Texas.

It appears that they weren’t B-2’s:

Sitting on a secret is a hard thing to do – and not only for me but the Pentagon as well.

But now the secret is out and the speculation is running rampant on the Internet, so it’s time to tell the story behind Aviation Week & Space Technology’s Bill Sweetman’s story:

………

As aircraft bums are want to do in their spare time, on March 10th I found myself at Amarillo International Airport with my grandson and three other “Interceptors” enjoying a a nice spring-like afternoon photographing military jets doing practice approaches and sipping ice tea at our hangout the Old English Field House restaurant located at Rick Husband International Airport on the far east side of Amarillo.

………

I recognized the voice immediately whom (because of his government job) I will refer to as “Tom.”

“What’s up Tom?” I answer.

“Hey – Steve are you still out at the airport?” he asks.

“Yes – I was just about to head home.” I replied.

“Look out to the southwest – there are three planes flying in formation – you can see their contrails.”

I told the rest of the gang and we headed to the front of Old English to (as we say in Texas) take a gander.

They weren’t hard to spot. The sky was severe-clear and the three contrails stood out like white chalked exclamation points across a deep blue sky.

The three aircraft were approaching from the southwest and they weren’t in a hurry. They seemed to be heading right for the airport.

We readied the lenses on our cameras and hoped to get a clear shot of them coming overhead.

Since we are all aircraft spotters – we knew they most likely weren’t commercial aircraft and had to be military, hoping maybe they were something cool like an F-22 or F-15s that we often see flying over the Amarillo VOR but have yet been able to coax down for some gas and grub.

Both Dean Muskett and myself were shooting with similar lenses – a 70 to 300mm zoom, I with my Nikon and he with his Canon.

………

Dean and I reviewed our photos on our cameras to try and identify the aircraft type.

“That’s a B-2” Dean said excited. “It’s a flight of three B-2s.”

I looked at mine, zoomed in, but I wasn’t so sure. Something about it looked odd. The shape wasn’t quite right but on my tiny LCD frame in bright daylight I couldn’t really see it well.

I rushed home and imported the photos into my computer. I then looked at the frames where the aircraft was flying in and out of the lead contrail and zoomed in using Photoshop.

My grandson (who was leaning over my shoulder watching me work) jumped when I shouted. “The trailing edge is wrong!” I must have said it three times.

It goes on, and he notes that the airspace around this formation was cleared for about 150 miles, and reviewing his aviation band scanner, came across a call sign, “SIENNA,” which appeared to correspond with the flight.

His guess is that it is a stealth transport.

I’m dubious on that. I think that a stealth transport program would be too big, it would be a major competition between Boeing and LM, to be anywhere near black.

I do think that, whatever it is, that the USAF, whoever, scheduled this flight did so with the intention that Mr.Douglass, or some other aviation buff, to get those pics so to float out whatever it is.

The 2^nd member of the Arisia founding “Gang of Five”, Mary Robison, just died.

It was at her New Years Day party where I made the joke that started the con.

I did not mean it seriously, honest. It was a John Swift-like (I wish) essay called, “A Modest Proposal on NESFA and Boskone.”

I never expected anyone to take it seriously.

Tom Fish died last year, so it’s just Chris Shuldiner, Brian Cooper, and me who are left.

I always figured that I would go first, even though I was the youngest (by only a LITTLE).

BTW, I just realized that the essay is not visible on “The Google”, so I am posting it here, where it will be indexed. (After the break)

I printed it out on a dot matrix printer, and seeing as how I do not have a dot matrix font on my blog, it is in Courier.

If you don’t get the context, which dates back to 1988 fandom bullsh%$ or so, count yourself lucky, and do not Google it.

A Modest Proposal

Concerning the Problems

with NESFA and Boskone

Matthew Saroff

Over the past few years, the character of Boskone has changed considerably. Some philistines have even suggested that the quality of the convention has declined. The official response on the part of NESFA has been to tell people who differ with them that they have the option of going elsewhere.

I would never consider it my place to disagree with an organization with the long and illustrious history of NESFA about the exclusive nature of their once preeminent science fiction convention, Boskone. They believe, and who are we to disagree, that it is their conven­tion, and that they have the right to redirect the focus of their convention.

We should be eager and happy to help this august group in their attempts to redefine their convention. For those who feel that they would prefer a conven­tion more similar to the old Boskone, an effort should be made to present these people with an alternative. This will get these unappreciative ruffians out of NESFA‘s hair.

We are obligated to NESFA for the service provided to the SF community by putting on Boskone all these years, and we should provide an alternative to all those ungrateful brutes who forget everything that NESFA has done for us.

Now comes the time to repay the favor. We should provide an alternative closer to what these ungrateful people want. A convention in Boston on Presi­dent’s Day, 16-19 February 1990, weekend with a focus closer to the focus of earlier Boskones. To stay in the proper E. E. “Doc” Smith spirit, we’ll call it Arisia.

We owe it to NESFA. They have their hands full trying to run Boskone, and having all those pesky fans are a problem. They harass the guests with ques­tions and autograph requests, crowd the events, eat the con suite food, drink the booze at the Boxboro Fandom party, and create a potential security problem are a problem for convention staff. We have a moral obligation to help them get rid of this problem. As shown by the Boskone XXV, NESFA is making a game effort to do this, but they need our help. Let’s help them get those fans out of Boskone and into Arisia. It’s the least that we can do to help them.

Notice:

IF YOU ARE CAUGHT WITH THESE DOCUMENTS YOU ARE INSTRUCTED TO EAT THEM

(It works best if you delicately saute them with butter, garlic, and parsley.)