Resource Name: The Truth Laid Bear
Resource URL: http://www.truthlaidbear.com (I wish...)
Responsible Party: N.Z. Bear
Resource License #: REVOKED !
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July 28, 2014 2:21 PM
Sorry for the posting gap. Tracebots have been getting a little too close for
comfort, so I decided it would be best to lie low for a while. Somebody in DHS
is below their quota, I'll bet --- haven't seen them out in force like this for
months.
New RURL for today, of course, and I'm leaning on at least twenty or thirty open
dvaults to keep my bits spread thin and wide. Relying on the kindness of
strangers, as always. And a pain in the ass, as always. For you too, of course;
and I must thank my loyal and dedicated readers for their persistence.
www.truthlaidbear.com is a long and distant happy memory, but as long as Glenn's
still running the big board, I'll pop up now and then. I remain baffled as to
how he stays online... maybe they think he's too high profile to squelch. Or
maybe he's got something on the DHS boys he's holding back for that rainy day
that they show up on his doorstep.
Maybe both.
Traffic's nice and high today though --- already thirty visits and it's only
noon. Not bad, even for a Monday.
More later; this RURL should last at least another eighteen hours or so; then
it's time once again to fade away.
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June 17, 2014 8:02 AM
I haven't heard from Meryl in six weeks. Her site's been frozen for just as
long.
I know she said she was expecting trouble getting to her stateside server, but
still... there's always a few routes left open between here and Israel. She
should be able to get through; at least for a brief post.
That last update she sent worried me more than I let on. I can't believe the
Brits would pull out now, but then again, I never thought we would, either.
Be safe, Meryl.
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June 7, 2014 6:21 PM
There's been another rebreak. They've got twenty cases over in Arizona; some
town called Deacon Creek.
I've been sitting on it for the past few days as the rumors have come in, but I
just got a confirmation from a source I trust.
CNNBC has got nothing, of course. Still waiting for clearance, I assume. Any
wagers on the chances that they actually get it?
My source says every one of the cases was up to date on their vaccine series.
CDC swooped in long enough to say they're pretty sure it's jumped sequences
again, take some samples, and then got their asses out of there.
DHS troops have a cordon in place; nobody in, nobody out. My source managed to
slip past right as they were closing up their tac net.
He said CDC promised an airdrop of supplies later in the week.
I looked up Deacon Creek's population. It's 1,243.
Today.
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May 22, 2014 7:05 AM
Well, I just looked at the calendar, and it's been exactly six months since they
pulled my license. Those first few weeks were dicey, but I think I've settled
into a nice little greyspace routine, don't you? A bounce here, a bounce there,
a dodge, a weave... catch me if you can, boys. How did the bunny god put it
again? "All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a thousand enemies" ?
And when they catch you, they will kill you.
Well, maybe not kill me. But definitely make life awfully uncomfortable.
And not all the world, of course. Just some bureaucrats who think they're cops
because they've forgotten who the real enemies are.
Happy anniversary to me... Happy anniversary to me...
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May 19, 2014 3:34 PM
News from the southland: the boys are claiming they've got 98% containment on
the border.
Of course, they fail to mention that our friends to the south have effectively
annexed the territory up through a hundred miles *north* of the border. Last I
heard, refugees outnumbered residents ten to one in San Diego. I'm not even sure
there is a local government left there --- at least, not one that answers to
Sacramento. Or Washington.
It would be good to get home again, but I don't think SoCal is going to be prime
real estate again for a while.
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May 2, 2014 12:34 PM
I got word from Meryl. She says that reconstruction is going well; New J is
taking shape even faster than she had expected. And they got some more good news
--- the latest survey team found the readings aren't as bad as they had
expected, and they've revised the Tel Aviv no-go zone inward by about a mile
along the radius; Israel just got back a few square miles of usable territory.
Every little bit counts.
The bad news is there's rumors the Brits may be pulling back. The cost of empire
(again) is wearing thin on the homefront (again) -- and Labor is kicking the
shit out of the PM for even considering extending the mission. This is not good:
the IDF's recovering fast, but they're still not what they used to be. If the
Brits break camp and Syria decides to make a play for it... sounds like it might
be an even fight. And that's not counting if Egypt decides they want to join in
and see if they can even things up for '67.
At least the U.K. had the balls to stay for the long haul; we'd be talking about
a Second Holocaust by now if they hadn't held the line for the last few years.
Damned shame I can't say the same contribution was made by a certain other
nation that will remain my own.
In other news, the Knesset declassified another piece of the Tel Aviv report
last week. Notable tidbit: seems they're now convinced that Al-Hadra wasn't part
of a long-term sleeper cell after all.
He --- and the bomb --- crossed the border from Lebanon just two weeks before
the attack. Two weeks before that, he was in Baghdad --- and the nuke was still
in the Ukraine.
We've always known that Bush held off the attack for nearly two months past the
original ready-go-date, while Annan (on the outside) and Powell (on the inside)
pressured him to try and work out a deal in response to Saddam's "offer" to
discuss handing over power peacefully.
I think we can now say with certainty that this was the worst decision an
American president ever made.
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April 20, 2014 5:32 PM
USA-OPEN got renewed again in the Senate; the House is expected to be a lock as
well. So it looks like we'll all be continuing along our straight, unencrypted
ASCII way for the foreseeable future.
Just on a lark, I tried to post my old logo graphic the other day in a few image
formats. Never made it past the routers; the hardware filters seem to be just as
good as they say.
I didn't have the guts to actually try to send anything with actual encryption;
I'm curious, not stupid.
There's talk that somebody's got a program to do ASCII steganography, you know.
Give it a plaintext cover message, and the message you want to encrypt, and it
re-writes the cover message using different phrasing, encoding the private
message within it.
Might be the excuse IHS has been looking for to shut down the private net once
and for all. They convinced Congress to inflict USA-OPEN on us to keep
everything in plaintext and ban any images that might be used for steganography
--- why not go all the way?
I think I'll blog smoke signals if they do, just to be ornery about it.
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April 19, 2014 1:05 AM
DoctorPundit says he's got the goods on the legendary vaccination study on the pox.
It may be still classified, but our boy claims to have gotten a hold of a copy,
bless his black little heart.
The CDC numbers are pretty staggering:
- A fully executed program of "first-responder" vaccination --- focusing on
frontline emergency services personnel --- had it been completed in time, would
have resulted in a lowering of U.S. casualties by 20-25%
- Voluntary vaccination, assuming an uptake of 50% in the general population,
would have dropped the fatality rate by 75%
- Mandatory vaccination of the entire U.S. population would have limited deaths
to under 500,000, nationwide. (The study doesn't address the obvious question of
whether the attack would have happened at all, had Saddam known we were
prepared).
The figures are all for the U.S. only, of course --- global impact was beyond
the scope of the study. But you have to assume that had we been able to stop the
spread faster, the rest of the planet would have stood more of a fighting
chance. South America and Africa in particular might be much, much healthier
places.
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April 14, 2014 8:02 AM
The President is considering sending an expeditionary force to clean house in
South Africa. SA's current president-cum-dictator-cum-generalissimo has pretty
well admitted that what's left of the government there is fully aligned with
RARC and its associated terror-group wannabes in "their struggle against the
oppressive forces of the Western world who have left the people of Africa to
suffer for their sins."
Sounds like my earlier conclusion on SA's ability to export trouble might have
been premature: RARC is apparently getting full access to the old SA military's
toybox. This is not good.
The President has announced he's going to push for a task force to go in and clean house. Our beloved Congresscritters, however, are pledging to oppose the force. Observe
Senator James R. Underwood (D-Cluelessville):
"The focus of the American military must remain above all on the defense of our
nation. The time when the United States could act as policeman to the world,
intervening in every local conflict that cried out for our attention, is over.
The place for American soldiers is here, on our soil, defending American
citizens."
If the mission does go forward, it would be the first time we've had troops
overseas in five years.
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April 9, 2014 6:25 AM
Another day, another coup in Riyadh. Seems we're back to a Caliphate again: the
new guy in charge is claiming direct lineage from Mohammed.
Yawn.
You know, times like these I almost miss the good old evil House of Saud. Sure,
they paid for a weapon that wiped out a city --- to name only their last, most
heinous crime --- but at least I could keep track of them. These days, even a
scorecard doesn't help; we've had what, six supreme leaders/Caliphs/Kings in the
past year?
As for the esteemed Saud family, I often wonder about the looks on their faces
were when those nice Special Forces gentlemen came for them. I'll bet they even
thought, for a moment, that they were going to be arrested.
Then I picture the moment when they realized that Special Forces doesn't *do*
arrests.
And I "have a little holiday in my heart", as Mr. Hitchens used to say.
Damn shame we didn't take care of them before Saddam, instead of after. History
might be a lot different.
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April 7, 2014 9:40 PM
I was thinking the other day about what a joke DHS was when they first cobbled
it together out of bits and pieces of the old federal bureaucracy. Remember Tom
Ridge? Remember all the nut-job rules he and Congress came up with for airline
security back in '02 and '03? Davis-Moran was going to save us all; a nice neat
little bill that would ensure all the nice neat little state drivers licenses
databases were all linked together. Between that and barring plastic utensils
from airlines, the skies would be safe again.
Davis-Moran wasn't a completely stupid idea in itself, really; I was never a
diehard opponent of a national ID card.
But I've often wondered whether the Saudis that pulled off the SAM strikes that
spring were carrying theirs as they brought those six planes down.
One thing we do know: their visas were in order. Never let it be said that State
didn't know how to stick to its guns back in those days. They kept their beloved
visa approval power despite the infant DHS's attempts to wrestle it away ---
back then DHS actually lost turf wars in Washington occasionally, you'll recall.
And they kept right on minting visas for our 'friends' the Saudis...
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April 2, 2014 4:41 PM
Are we still at war?
Hard to say, really. There hasn't been a significant strike on U.S. soil in the
past year --- with 'significant' defined as large enough to make it impossible
for the good-news-only crew at CNNBC to ignore, cover-up, or otherwise gloss
over. (Are they officially on DHS's payroll yet, or do you think it's all still
just a gentleman's agreement?)
The IMU seems pretty well finished, even in the 'stans. Between the P.R. and
Russia's cleanup efforts, that neighborhood is starting to look vaguely
civilized. The Persians are even talking about shifting some of their troops out
of Turkmenistan; the provisional government there seems to be getting on its
feet nicely. (And the Afghans seem pretty serious about finally finishing the
pipeline --- good economic news for them and the rest of the 'stans).
So maybe Chicago was the last we'll hear from the IMU; we can hope. But I'd sure
feel better if our we had some of our own troops on the prowl over in that neck
of the woods. Remind me again why we didn't take care of the 'stans after we
were done with the Taliban?
Africa though... Africa keeps me up at night. The only good news --- and a
horrifying kind of good news it is --- is that the worst trouble spots (Congo,
Zimbabwe, South Africa...) don't have much technical infrastructure left to
export any serious trouble. They also don't have enough infrastructure left to
feed, clothe, house or otherwise support their populations, diminished as they
are... but that's not *our* problem, right? At least not until they scrape up
enough cash to come knocking on our door again.
Anyway, I'm not ready to call the war over just yet; just because the bad guys
haven't managed to pull off anything major recently doesn't mean they're not
still out there. There are a lot more places to hide now then there even were
back in the early days.
You'd think we would have learned that lesson back in '02 --- you know, most
folks tend to forget that even *after* the WTC, there were plenty of people
arguing that we weren't at war.
Tel Aviv and the pox kinda put a rest to that line of thinking, didn't it?
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March 22, 2014 5:45 AM
YALP is back! I thought they had pulled his license, but I guess he was just
playing possum for a few months.
Our favorite (well, one of them) Legal Pundit is apparently in a nostalgic mood,
since he's given us a great "where did we go wrong" analysis looking back on the
legal and judicial history of DHS and the SoEmergency regs.
The overview is great --- good refresher course on USA-OPEN, the travel regs,
'net licensing, and even the old USA-PATRIOT act. But his money quote is in the
conclusion:
"We have carefully created an edifice of law and judicial precedent that, while
following the letter of the Constitution at every turn, has betrayed its spirit
at the deepest level. Driven by the frustration at our inability to stop those
who would do harm to this nation and its citizens and by the ever-present need
for government officials to be seen to be Doing Something About The Problem, we
have transformed ourselves from a society which places respect for individual
liberties at the heart of our culture into a state which considers every citizen
to be a terrorist-in-waiting, presumed guilty and to be monitored, restricted,
and controlled at all times."
"The Founding Fathers labored long and hard to ensure that the power of the
government was restricted at every turn, so that the United States could never
become the kind of oppressive regime they so loathed in the English crown. We
now know, however, that even their brilliant counterweights and careful checks
on the power of government were no match for the decade-long efforts of a
federal bureaucracy fueled by paranoia, and cheered on by a public that had
feared for their lives so badly, they surrendered their liberty and their
pursuit of happiness without complaint."
"Our enemies in this war have failed time and time again to destroy America,
despite their best efforts. But some days, I feel that we have finished the job
for them."
Yeah.
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March 19, 2014 10:20 PM
I'm in a down mood tonight. Not sure why. I keep thinking, and wondering,
whether there was anything we could have done different.
Not Congress, not the President.
Me. And you --- hapless fellow blogger, you foolish, anachronistic creature.
Still here after all these years --- haven't you learned your lesson?
I know we tried; we fact-checked every idiotarian ass we could find. But maybe
even that wasn't enough. We should have pushed harder; sounded the alarms
louder. Not just on the blogs; at the polls, in the universities, at work and at
home and at school. Shit, even in the streets.
Maybe if we had focused more on actually changing things; putting action behind
our words (and oh, there were so many words!) --- maybe things would have turned
out different.
Or maybe I'm just a tired old blogger who's had a glass of wine too many
tonight, and wishes he were still back in the days when he thought he could save
the world.
Still... do you think we could have?
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