Even a minute is a very long time. Try holding your breath. See? I used to be able to swim a 50 meter pool in one breath, but not so much anymore and my Breast Stroke splits for the distance ran in the high 40s.

Not that it excused me from IM because I had ok times in Fly (100 and 200) and Backstroke and Freestyle.

We weren’t a terribly thick team and so I got 3rd string calls in IM at all distances including the Relays as a ‘Fly’ specialist (what can I say, my Coach hated me and made my life miserable in every way that he could), Freestyle likewise and the ‘B’ team in the 4×50 and 4×100, Backstroke if everyone else was sick or having fun. Oh, and Fly all the time at whatever (what can I say, my Coach hated me and made my life miserable in every way that he could). 4×400 pyramids (100, 200, 400, 400, 200, 100- that’s 3 Miles right there folks and it was only the warmup, a light one at that) with a minute between.

That minute didn’t seem very long at all.

Khashoggi screamed for 7 minutes as they dismembered him alive. I think those were longer but yet too short.

Saudis confirm Khashoggi’s death, claim he died in ‘fist fight’
By NAHAL TOOSI and BRENT D. GRIFFITHS, Politico
10/19/2018

Saudi Arabia confirmed on Saturday for the first time that Jamal Khashoggi died in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul earlier this month, claiming that The Washington Post columnist‘s death came after an argument and a “fist fight” with men in the facility.

The Arab state, which originally insisted Khashoggi had left its consulate alive, also has arrested 18 Saudi nationals suspected of involvement in Khashoggi’s death, according to its Foreign Ministry. Media reports, meanwhile, said a top Saudi intelligence official and a top royal adviser had been fired, apparently for their alleged connection to the episode.

Khashoggi’s death has badly strained relations between Washington and Riyadh, both of whom view each other as key strategic allies. But the new Saudi announcements — which seemed to cast Khashoggi’s death as accidental — may not be enough to repair the damage, especially amid strong suspicions that the country’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had a role in Khashoggi’s death.

The crown prince appears to remain in the good graces of his father, King Salman. According to the announcements from Riyadh, the king has placed the crown prince in charge of a new ministerial committee designed to overhaul the rules, regulations and structure of the country’s primary intelligence apparatus.
…
To say that I am skeptical of the new Saudi narrative about Mr. Khashoggi is an understatement,” tweeted Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. “First we were told Mr. Khashoggi supposedly left the consulate and there was blanket denial of any Saudi involvement. Now, a fight breaks out and he’s killed in the consulate, all without knowledge of Crown Prince. It’s hard to find this latest ‘explanation‘ as credible.”

President Donald Trump said Friday evening the Saudi announcement was “a great first step,” adding that he thought the statement was credible and he hadn’t been lied to by Saudi leaders, according to pool reports.
…
Trump had said earlier Friday that he believed Khashoggi was dead, despite the earlier Saudi denials. The Saudi government said the king had ordered a fuller report into what happened, due within a month.

In a statement, the White House said it “will continue to closely follow the international investigations into this tragic incident and advocate for justice that is timely, transparent, and in accordance with all due process.”

The State Department deferred comment to the White House.

Some Saudi sources had earlier floated the possibility that the monarch and his aides would lay the blame at the feet of the country’s deputy intelligence chief, Ahmed Assiri. Some media reports out of the region Saturday indicated that Assiri had been fired. A highly influential adviser to the crown prince, Saud Al-Qahtani, was also reported to have been fired.
…
Khashoggi’s remains have yet to be found.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Saudi Arabia and Turkey earlier this week amid intensifying outrage. Afterward, he said the Saudis needed a few more days to do an investigation and figure out what happened.

Trump himself has hesitated to be too critical of the Saudi government. Riyadh is a key partner in Trump’s desire to crack down on the Iranian regime. Trump also ruled out the possibility of stopping U.S. arms sales to the oil-rich Arab country, saying that would hurt American jobs. Trump was scheduled to speak at a rally later Friday.

U.S. lawmakers have floated the possibility that if the Trump administration does not act, Congress can mete out its own punishment to the Saudi government, including imposing sanctions. The congressional anger over the Khashoggi case follows years of increasing unhappiness with the Saudis among U.S. lawmakers, many of whom are critics of the Saudi role in the war in Yemen.

Califorina Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that the new Saudi explanation is “not credible.”

“If Khashoggi was fighting inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, he was fighting for his life with people sent to capture or kill him,” Schiff said. “The kingdom and all involved in this brutal murder must be held accountable, and if the Trump administration will not take the lead, Congress must.”

Why, yes.

But don’t hold your breath.

Cooo oo cooo ook coo coo. Cooo oo cooo ook coo coo. How about a beer and some Back Bacon eh? Or at least some totally legal bud. Now look a little left. Strange Days.

Alaska governor Walker suspends campaign, endorses Democrat Begich
By DANIEL STRAUSS, Politico
10/19/2018

Alaska Gov. Bill Walker, an independent, suspended his campaign for reelection on Friday and endorsed former Democratic Sen. Mark Begich — scrambling the state’s three-way gubernatorial race with just over two weeks until Election Day.

The move, first reported by the Alaska Dispatch News, comes just days after Walker’s lieutenant governor, Byron Mallott, resigned, citing “inappropriate comments” he had made to an unidentified woman. Walker appointed state Department of Health and Social Services Commissioner Valerie Davidson to the post and vowed to press on with his reelection campaign.

But, on Friday afternoon, Walker announced at the Alaska Federation of Natives Convention that he was ending his bid for a second term and posted a statement to his campaign’s website. He said the decision to abandon his campaign was “not the first difficult decision I have made this week, but it is one I know I must make.”

Walker’s decision could boost Begich against Republican Mike Dunleavy, a former state senator. Recent poling showed Walker and Begich hovering at around a quarter of the vote, with Dunleavy well ahead, with support over 40 percent. Walker will remain on the ballot, with Mallott as his running mate, though neither is an active candidate.

In his statement, Walker said, “I believe we cannot win a three way race.”

“This week I have talked to many Alaskans to determine whether I or Mark Begich had a better chance of running a competitive race against Mike Dunleavy,” Walker added. “The determination was made that, at this point, Begich has the better odds. Alaskans deserve a competitive race.”

National Democrats celebrated Walker’s decision. In a statement, Elisabeth Pearson, the executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, called it a “game-changer” that puts Begich “in a strong position” to win next month’s election.

Frankly I don’t know what this means in terms of outcomes but it sure is interesting.

Zeigen mir ihr Papiere. Jetzt!

TSA Announces Plans To Subject Domestic Travelers To Biometric Screening
by Tim Cushing, Tech Dirt
Fri, Oct 19th 2018

As promised/threatened, the DHS is moving forward with expanded use of biometric scanning at airports, including facial recognition and fingerprint matches. What was touted as a way to combat international terrorism and illegal immigration will now include those on the home front, as the tech spreads to include US citizens on domestic flights. But the TSA doesn’t see this as an unwanted incursion into the lives of innocent citizens. Instead, it pitches it as a useful tool to speed up security screening at TSA checkpoints.
…
Yes, the paying members of the TSA’s Pre✓ program will be the first to “enhance” their “travel experience” by feeding their faces into a database the TSA controls, using tech prone to erroneous conclusions. Other travelers won’t be able to opt out of biometric screening, however. They’ll just be subject to the non-enhanced travel experience where TSA and CBP officers ask a long series of invasive questions and infer suspicious behavior on the part of travelers who bypass the biometric kiosks.

It’s true that traveling in the US has always been a “papers, please” experience. But prior to the 9/11 attacks, this simply meant presenting a ticket before boarding. Now, it’s everything about everybody, no matter how useless this information is 99.9% of the time. Rather than move towards smarter screening methods, the TSA has decided to subject everyone to the same level of screening with the same arbitrary rules stemming from airborne attacks the TSA failed to prevent.

The TSA pitches this as a paperless airport, but it’s really just another way for the government to compile a massive database of identifying info and of citizens’ movements. The DHS likes to talk about its 96% accuracy target, but has released no information about actual accuracy in test runs, so concerns about false positives/negatives aren’t going away anytime soon.

The government has responded in the worst way to terrorist attacks in the US. It has made freedom of movement a hassle — one that diminishes Constitutional protections and turns every traveler into a potential suspect.

As I’ve been warning, they’re coming for you too. I hate flying not because of my acrophobia (which is very real but not disabling), instead because of the mind numbing inconvenience of arriving 2 Hours before my flight, then being trapped in a tin can for who knows? and spending another 2 Hours getting from the airport to where you want to be.

Oh, and you don’t have a car when you get there unless you rent one (which is kind of a good thing to do for longer trips anyway if you can afford it).

Instead I drive. 9 and a half Hours to Michigan, you can do it in a day if you start early and drive non-stop. Miami is 21 Hours, you’ll want a relief driver. These are both places I’d normally drive doing an overnight at some skeezy fleabag.

Were I headed for LA LA Land or various places in Fly Over Country normally I’d take a plane (the formula is, take your trip time driving, subtract 4 Hours, and if the result is 24 or less hop in the car- no baggage charges and you eat real food, road food but real food).

No more.

Los Angeles is only 3 and a half days away if you drive (12 hours a day which is a lot but I could do more if the urgency was great), everything else is some fraction of that and you have the anonymity of the road (better if you don’t use Highways), a Car, and all the crap you can squeeze into it. C’mon. It will be fun. Like Budapest.

You and I remember Budapest very differently.

You’ll be sorry you asked.

U.S. commander in Afghanistan survives deadly attack at governor’s compound that kills top Afghan police general
By Pamela Constable and Sayed Salahuddin, Washington Post
October 18, 2018

A gunman wearing an Afghan army uniform opened fire Thursday on participants in a meeting with the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, killing three top southern provincial officials and wounding at least three Americans. But Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, the target of the attack claimed by the Taliban, escaped unharmed.

Among those killed in the attack inside the governor’s compound in southern Kandahar province was the region’s top police general, Abdul Raziq, who was seen as the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan.

U.S. military officials confirmed that a U.S. soldier, a contractor and another civilian were wounded in the attack, which occurred shortly after a high-level meeting attended by Miller.

In a news conference later Wednesday, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani confirmed that Abdul Raziq and the Kandahar provincial intelligence chief “were martyred” in the attack. He said he has sent security authorities from Kabul to assess the situation.
…
The attacker opened fire as the officials were in the governor’s compound following a security meeting about crucial parliamentary elections on Saturday, officials said.

The lone attacker was killed after fatally shooting Abdul Raziq and wounding several of his bodyguards, Afghan and U.S. security officials said. He was reported to be a member of the provincial governor’s security team.
…
A slight and youthful-looking man, Abdul Raziq earned a reputation for brutality and corruption in the border police beginning a decade ago. But in recent years, as a top police official and ruthless anti-insurgent fighter, he was widely praised for bringing Kandahar and the surrounding region under government control. His forces received Western training and funds, and U.S. military officials often consulted him.

Last year, a United Nations report said the worst torture in Afghanistan took place in police jails in Kandahar, and the U.N Committee Against Torture called for the investigation and prosecution of Abdul Raziq. A decade earlier, a 2006 U.S. State Department study found that he had been removed from his post with the border police for arresting and tormenting a group of men from a rival clan. In 2011, the Atlantic magazine quoted two men who described being tortured with electric shocks in a prison operated by Abdul Raziq, who by then had been promoted to a senior police post. He categorically denied any wrongdoing.

Miller, 57, took over last month as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, replacing Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr. A veteran of some of the U.S. military’s most secretive combat units, he formerly served as commander of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command and participated in numerous combat operations, including in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001.

The brazen attack followed a spate of insurgent and political violence during the run-up to parliamentary elections scheduled for Saturday. The Taliban has threatened to “severely disrupt” the elections and warned Afghans against participating in what the radical Islamist group regards as a pretext for perpetuating U.S. intervention in the country.

The Taliban warned students and teachers in particular to stay away from voting places, many of which are located in schools. But the group said it would seek to avoid harm to civilians.

The attack in Kandahar narrowly targeted senior U.S. and Afghan security officials, as well as the provincial governor and intelligence chief. The lone attacker reportedly opened fire at close range as those officials were finishing a meeting in the government compound.

But the lethal shooting seemed likely to have a chilling effect on voter participation Saturday, especially in the south, where several candidates have been assassinated.

On Wednesday, a prominent candidate, former army general Abdul Jabar Qahraman, was killed in neighboring Helmand province by a hidden bomb that exploded while he was holding a meeting at his campaign headquarters in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. Qahraman, an ardent opponent of the Taliban, was the 10th candidate killed during the campaign in the past two months.

In a suicide attack later Wednesday near the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan, a bomber killed two Afghan civilians and wounded at least five Czech soldiers belonging to the U.S.-led NATO coalition in the country, officials said. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the bombing near Bagram air base about 30 miles north of the capital, Kabul.

Top Afghan Leaders Killed in Attack That Misses U.S. Commander
By Taimoor Shah and Mujib Mashal, The New York Times
Oct. 18, 2018

One of the most devastating Taliban assassination strikes of the long Afghan war killed top leaders of Kandahar Province on Thursday, in an attack that missed the top American commander in the country, Gen. Austin S. Miller, just two days before national elections that had already been undermined by violence.

Inside the provincial governor’s compound in Kandahar City, at least one attacker fatally shot the region’s powerful police chief, Gen. Abdul Raziq and the provincial intelligence chief. The gunfire wounded the provincial governor, another police commander and three Americans, Afghan officials said.

General Raziq, who had survived dozens of attempts on his life, was widely considered to be an indispensable security chief with influence across critical areas of southern Afghanistan, in the Taliban heartland. He was valued by American commanders as a fierce ally against the insurgents, but human rights advocates criticized him for brutal tactics that at times swept up innocent civilians as well as militants.

“At 3:30 p.m., after a meeting about the security of elections, when the high-ranking participants were heading to helicopters, an enemy infiltrator opened fire on them,” the deputy minister of interior, Gen. Akhtar Mohammad Ibrahimi, said at a news conference. “The police chief, General Raziq, and the provincial intelligence chief, General Abdul Momin, were killed.”

In a statement, the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it had specifically been aimed at General Raziq and General Miller. The American military released a statement confirming that General Miller, who was in the compound at the time of the attack, was not hurt, but that three Americans had been wounded.
…
Coming ahead of nationwide parliamentary elections on Saturday, the loss of the Kandahar leadership casts a further shadow on a political season already marred by bloodshed. One-third of polling stations will not open because of security, and at least 10 candidates and dozens of their supporters have been killed. The Taliban have threatened to attack polling places.

Another major attack last year inside the Kandahar governor’s office took a heavy toll on officials, killing a deputy governor, the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates, and members of Parliament. The governor at the time survived with burns and wounds. General Raziq had just stepped out of the room.

I’ll repeat myself. The U.S. military prescence in the Middle East is counter-productive and ineffectual, merely exposing our weakness. Did you know that recently the U.S.S. Essex steamed into the Persian Gulf without any operational Fighters at all? This is because the F-35 boondoggle once again was/is grounded because of software glitches and catastrophic safety failures. Yes, all of them.

Things will be bad if we leave but things are already bad and show no signs of getting better. U.S. Out. Now. Completely.

Donald J. Trump’s Guide to Republican Greatness

Seth has been off this week, but he did post this Internet Exclusive.

C’mon, don’t you think Sam Bee is innocent? I mean, sure she has 3 kids but they were virgin births. Jason Jones had nothing to do with it

Why doesn’t it work? It’s not supposed to.

What do poeple that don’t vote think? Who Cares!