Adventures in Onionism

In light of the fact that the President can now unilaterally assassinate American citizens far from the battlefield without a shred of due process, I thought I'd share this piece from the NYT by Lawrence Wright, written in 2006, on what he thought we should do with Osama bin Laden when we caught him. (Hint: it wasn't to shoot him unarmed and bury him at sea.) It's probably for the best that he's dead and not captured, because I don't know of many politicians, or humans, for that matter, who actually have this much courage in their convictions, even if those convictions are due process, the rule of law, and justice.

http://mobile.salon.com/politics/feature/2011/09/25/schneiderman/index.html NY state AG insists on punishing bankers for wrongdoing.

From The New York Times: BIG CITY: Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim Demonstrators who occupied Wall Street had many causes but seemed to have at least one thing in common: a lack of hard knowledge about the system they were fighting. http://nyti.ms/oxSK5s God I love this article. I'm in Nairobi (at a coffee shop!) and headed to Atlanta and Chapel Hill for a couple weeks. Saw orphaned elephants this morning and had fun haggling at the Masai Market just now. I'm testing posting via my new Samsung Galaxy Mini smart phone. It will be good for navigation on long rides.

Cleaned my bike chain in methylated spirits (AKA denatured alcohol), spent $6 for installation of a new motorcycle horn, and Obama said something encouraging (complete with odd tilt-shift photography in the NYT-- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/politics/obama-vows-veto-if-deficit-plan-has-no-tax-increases.html .) Read more than you ever wanted to know about cleaning a bike chain at http://sheldonbrown.com/chains.html or http://www.nordicgroup.us/chain/ .

Dam Removal. Yes, please. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-0918-dam-20110918,0,5450869.story

I went to Kisumu. There were monkeys. They have bright blue scrota. My dogs almost ate a lizard. It fought back. Then I saved it. I bought a motorcycle. I'm doing a deep clean/tune of my bike. The rear brake pads are almost worn out after two months. I need to get some degreaser and clean all the components. The rear derailleur wasn't springing back to take up the slack when I was trying to shift onto smaller cassette cogs. The spokes are fine, so I don't really need to take this guy off, but it might be nice to have the nut for this just in case. I gave George another bath. Clouds here are awesome. Regarding the motorcyle, it's a 5-speed Chinese brand (Igo) 125 cc with the engine design ripped off of Honda. I was a little worried about 125 or 150 being too big since I'd only ever riden a 100 (and only once). Then a friend reminded me that 125cc is for scooters in the US, and real bikes are 700-1100cc. So my bike is wimpy, which is great since I'm a total beginn...

Video chatting with friends, comments on the IRB protocol at work (exciting!), a muddy bike ride, and dinner at Chauma.