The people promoting the new Mission: Impossible III movie thought it would be cool to stick little electronic music devices in newspaper vending machines all over Los Angeles, rigged so that the movie’s theme would play when people opened the door.

Naturally, given just the slightest surprise in their daily lives, people freaked out.  Big time.  Pretty soon, the bomb squad was called in.  Well, obviously.  The logic is impeccable: Wires?  Music?  Aieee!  BOOM!

My tax dollars were just spent blowing up a musical newspaper rack.

Supposedly this was understandable, what with a box and wires being found in an unexpected place.  Yuh-huh.

But this “bomb”… was actually playing the Mission: Impossible theme.  Out loud.  Does anyone think Al-Qaeda would really do that?  Rig up bombs to play clich

Here’s Bush describing Azerbaijan yesterday, according to the White House website:

[A] modern Muslim country that is able to
provide for its citizens, that understands that democracy is the wave of
the future. 

Um… Ilham Aliyev’s government engages in arbitrary
imprisonment of political opponents, torture of persons in custody, and
government-wide corruption which prevents any real reform.  Just ask Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, or Bush’s own State Department, whose most recent report reads like a laundry list in Hell:

• restricted right of citizens to peacefully change their government
• torture and beating of persons in custody, leading to four deaths
• arbitrary arrest and detention, particularly of political opponents
• harsh and life-threatening prison conditions
• police impunity
• lengthy pretrial detention
• pervasive corruption in the judiciary
• some restrictions of privacy rights
• periodic interference with media freedom
• excessive use of force to disperse demonstrations
• limited instances of violence and societal discrimination against women
• trafficking in persons
• limited workers’ rights

Read the U.S. government’s own report.  It’s terrifying.  No honest and/or sane person would call this “democracy.”

But Azerbaijan has oil.  And a bigass pipeline.  

So.

There’s Chimpus Maximus, just yesterday, welcoming this Saddam wannabe with open arms, saying he “understands that democracy is the wave of the future.” 

Bush has a truly interesting definition of the word “democracy.”

As you’ll see from clicking the links, Aliyev’s government also uses a variety of means to circumvent international
law, manipulate elections, and limit the media’s ability to report the
truth.

And
Aliyev only came to power in an election so filled with one-sided
irregularities than most objective observers considered it rigged.  (Even Bush’s own State Department dryly calls it “an election that did not meet international standards.”)

This is apparently what Bush means when he says Azerbaijan is developing as “a modern, secular, democratic country.”

We share the same
values.

Bush actually said.

Indeed.

(For other recent dictator love, see here, here, here, and here.  Or just click over to the growing collection.)

Haven’t pudublogged in a while, but I suspect they’d enjoy the island
I just spent a week exploring.  (Rough life, I know.)

Until I actually
get around to writing up my thoughts, here are a few pics for the
curious:

Tobago from the air, yesterday morning, facing south, from an airplane passing over the Buccoo Reef.

Englishman’s
Bay on the island’s leeward coast.  If you ever need to stare into
space for a few hours, thinking about nothing but how the air feels on
your back, this is a very good spot for it.

French angelfish near Store Bay, flanked by what I believe are
immature clown wrasses.  But I know very little about tropical fish, so
I should really write “blue-faced servingtrayfish, plus a bunch of
yellow panicdarters.”  That’s what I actually called them when I was in
the water.

Americans rarely visit Tobago for some reason, but
it’s a fairly popular destination for folks from Canada, Europe, and elsewhere in the Caribbean.  There have been some serious
concerns lately about safety in the news (scroll down past Jamaica, which is also kinda how you find Tobago itself) and in various government travel advisories (e.g. Canada, Australia, the UK),
but the major problems seem mostly to be on the sister island of
Trinidad.  (Which, you notice, I reluctantly decided not to visit.)

For now, Tobago still seems cool if you don’t make yourself a target by large displays of wealth or perhaps by screaming “I curse you, steel pan music!” at the top of your lungs.  I walked alone all the time and never once felt my feelers twinging.  Obviously, the tourists mentioned in the government advisories had a different experience.

That
said, many of the reefs are in real trouble, American-style franchising
is on its way, and the inability of the police to handle increasing
drug-related crime is so bad that they’ve actually asked the Colombian
cops for advice.  Oy.

So I did have a sinking feeling the whole time,
sensing that I was seeing an island which won’t be the same in the
not-too-distant future.

Somewhat like Earth itself, the way things are going. 

More later.  Gotta unpack and stuff…

Home from Tobago (about which more shortly), I go online today to peek at what I’ve missed, and holy crap — this government’s constant lurch into a lunatic parody of a corrupt third-world regime remains unstoppable:

About $4 billion in Iraq war spending “could not be tracked,” although the war party illegally hijacked $2.5 billion to prep for the Iraq war while Bush was claiming he was still seeking peace.  Meanwhile, after the deadliest month so far this year in Iraq — a war that is supposedly going to stop terrorism, remember — we find a worldwide three-fold explosion in terrorism.

Didn’t see it much on CNN or Fox, but a bipartisan Senate investigation has just blamed Bush — by name — for a delay in the response to Katrina.

But there’s sure plenty of noise from the usual morons about people who love this country wanting to sing the anthem in Spanish.  Lo siento que tan muchas idiotas en mi pa

An acrostic (click to download a better-quality .pdf file) based on a quote from this very site, composed by kind reader Arsino