Rusted Sky

Unfortunately, CA and NV are a bit far to go at lunchtime.

The Hidden In-N-Out Burger (aka In and Out Burger) - The Most Accurate Secret Menu

Looks like it'd be worth the trip, though. (Drool.)

J.

Civil War in Iraq? Or no? To listen to the MSM, it's just days before the Sunnis and Shi'as grab their rifled muskets and minie balls and start formin' up behind their respective Grants and Shermans. But is that what's really going on? Apparently, opinions differ.

New York Post Online Edition: postopinion

NO WAR IN THE STREETS

By RALPH PETERS - In Iraq
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

March 1, 2006 -- THE reporting out of Baghdad continues to be hysterical and dishonest. There is no civil war in the streets. None. Period.

Terrorism, yes. Civil war, no. Clear enough?

Yesterday, I crisscrossed Baghdad, visiting communities on both banks of the Tigris and logging at least 25 miles on the streets. With the weekend curfew lifted, I saw traffic jams, booming business — and everyday life in abundance.

Yes, there were bombings yesterday. The terrorists won't give up on their dream of sectional strife, and know they can count on allies in the media as long as they keep the images of carnage coming. They'll keep on bombing. But Baghdad isn't London during the Blitz, and certainly not New York on 9/11.

It's more like a city suffering a minor, but deadly epidemic. As in an epidemic, no one knows who will be stricken. Rich or poor, soldier or civilian, Iraqi or foreigner. But life goes on. No one's fleeing the Black Death — or the plague of terror.

The bombing made headlines (and a news photographer just happened to be on the scene). Here in Baghdad, it just made the average Iraqis hate the terrorists even more.

You are being lied to. By elements in the media determined that Iraq must fail. Just give 'em the Bronx cheer.

One - will it hurt Bush? ("Calling Dan Rather! Your print job is ready!")

Two - will it help ratings?

As I've said before - good news doesn't sell. Blood and pain get people to tune into network news, so the emphasis on ANY news, whether it be the local evening news or international, is going to be on things that are painful to someone else. A fire, car wreck, shooting, death, accident - THOSE are the attention grabbers. Any good news is presented at the end of the newscast, in a 30 second clip that'll be eminently forgettable.

Reality, or the perception of it, is malleable - and when the MSM is willing to twist reality to fit their own scripts... how are they different from the Ministry of Truth in '1984'? A lot of folks like to accuse Bush of running a '1984' style scam with the media... but it looks a lot more like the media is running it on us.

J.

Don't mind selling your soul to Bill Gates? Then go to Mystery Solved, read the three bullet points on Windows's licensing and click on the Flash Drive picture to the right of the points titled 'Valuable Information'. Log in through the Microsoft .net passport process, and answer 4 questions.

(And if you didn't pay attention to the bullet points, the question answers are B, True, True, and True. At least, in the test I took.)

And they'll send you a flash drive with info. How big a drive? Who knows? And I realize I'm trading personal info for a cheap USB flash drive - but what the heck. I'm one of those rare people who had a legal copy of Windows 3.1, who upgraded ton Win95, then upgraded to Win98, then upgraded to XP Pro - legally. If I ever have to start from scratch with a new drive, I'm screwed - I have no idea where my Win 3.1 disks are. Or the Win 95 and Win98s...

Ah heck. Might as well buy a full copy of Vista when it comes out. I know Lockheed'll be shifting to that in about three or four years anyway... (We've gotten all the bugs out of all the apps we use with XP. Time to upgrade!)

J.

Switchable paint. At least, at cell-phone frequencies.

United Press International - NewsTrack - New paint blocks out cell phone signals

ROCHESTER, N.Y., March 1 (UPI) -- A Rochester, N.Y., company has developed paint that can switch between blocking cell phone signals and allowing them through.

"You could use this in a concert hall, allowing cell phones to work before the concert and during breaks, but shutting them down during the performance," said Michael Riedlinger, president of NaturalNano.

Using nanotechnology, particles of copper are inserted into nanotubes, which are ultra-tiny tubes that occur naturally in halloysite clay mined in Utah. Combined with a radio-filtering device that collects phone signals from outside a shielded space, certain transmissions can proceed while others are blocked, the Chicago Tribune reported.

J.

An IBM T-40. It'll take a while to get everything loaded on. Pls be patient....

J.

Not like most users who read this will care, but there's been some lost packets lately while using Vonage while also surfing. (If you find them, just send them this way - I'll pay the postage due.) I searched around, and apparently Linksys routers (possibly others as well) have a QoS (Quality Of Service) setting that you can fiddle with to give priority to certain ports and devices.

It took about five minutes of fiddling, but I got things set so the Vonage box has the highest priority on the connection bandwidth. Quality of service is now fine, even with two high-speed downloads going on at the same time.

And I look at the above and realize I couldn't have made heads or tails out of that twenty years ago. Must have picked up something along the way, eh?

J.

But judging from what I've seen and what friends have reported - they're not.

Is We Educating Our Children Good? - The New Editor

The last couple of days have seen a number of news reports that don't reflect very highly on the state of our nation's educational system.

However, it's not the case that a few aberrant stories have been reported in the last few days -- they are part of a long-term trend, and should be of major concern.

The fact is, the overwhelming evidence indicates that our nation's various public school systems are not only not delivering, they are in horrible shape.

40 years back, you could get a decent education - but not up to the standards of 60 years back. Now, we've got the little guy in a private school because the state we live in ranks #49th in the nation. And we moved so we'd have a fallback school that wasn't in the bottom third of the state. Now, I've got my own problems with math, but being in a school that ranks in the bottom third of the 49th state just doesn't inspire me with a great deal of confidence in the education the little guy would get there, ya know?

And before you say "Well, you should get involved with the schools and help them improve" - no. We pay our taxes to fund the schools. The school, WITHOUT OUR INPUT, should be putting out students educated to at LEAST a certain level.

That criteria isn't being met.

The teachers' unions have fought tooth and nail to avoid testing of the students, they've successfully fought to avoid competency testing for teachers. They're turning out a substandard product, so to speak, and by all appearances the vast majority of them just plain don't care.

And if they don't care enough about the work they do - I don't see it's my job to force them. Instead, we opt out - at significant expense and trouble.

And in fifty years, we'll have a stratified society. On one level - those who are condemned to malfunctioning public schools. On the other - those who's parents valued education, and went out of their way to make sure their children got the best education possible.

It makes no sense that it should be so - but what is apparent is that it's what the educational establishment in this country will settle for.

J.

I'm pushing this to the top - and I'm sorry I think it's necessary to. (I've also rewritten it some, just to be honest with you. I know - the moving finger, having writ, moves on and doesn't backtrack, all that jazz. Well, sometimes it's just necessary to do a rewrite.)

Let's be honest here - most of us get some inkling of what's going on in the world through broadcast media, whether it be radio or television. We depend on the news readers to give us at least slightly accurate and unbiased information, that's more or less relevant to what's actually going on in the world - but lately it sure seems like we're going more for a 'scandal du jour' type of reporting that I'm not at all happy with. If I want that sort of reporting, I can get it at the supermarket checkout. I mean, I REALLY need to know that it was actually a battle between flying saucers during the height of hurricane Katrina that caused the levees to fail.

So when I start seeing stuff like this:

Associated Press Pop-up Link

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

So - Bush was being briefed on Katrina. And Bush was supposed to... do what?

FEMA had already been alerted, and was creeping into position. Nagin and What'shername were busily ignoring their disaster prep plans.

A top hurricane expert voiced "grave concerns" about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren't enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome.

"I'm concerned about ... their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe," Brown told his bosses the afternoon before Katrina made landfall.

Will this change the outcome? No. Does this have anything that wasn't known months ago? Nope. Will this change the planning for the next disaster? Not too damn likely, IMHO. So why is this suddenly headline news?

Oh, wait. Civil war hasn't broken out in Iraq, and it's starting to become apparent. Looks like the economy's actually doing pretty well. So - let's drag out something on Katrina!

Sigh. They really do think people are stupid and gullible, don't they? That we're going to be uncritical consumers of whatever they want to feed us.

Update: Powerline weighs in, looking at what the AP reported versus what they released that they supposedly have. There wasn't much similarity between the two. The ending is as follows...

Power Line: More Leaks; This Time, Katrina

The AP article is fatally compromised by its factual errors, and adds nothing to our understanding of the issues surrounding Hurricane Katrina. It also raises an important point about the leaks that form the basis for many news stories these days. The AP took what appears to have been a substantial quantity of leaked material, and turned it into a brief against the Bush administration. Whether the documents themselves contain anything noteworthy, and whether, on balance, they support the AP's tendentious interpretation, is impossible to tell. (because THEY aren't releasing their source material - ed.) In view of the fact that no one trusts the AP, the New York Times and other news outlets who make use of leaked documents and other materials to report on them objectively, here is a modest proposal: let us see them. If the AP will release the leaked materials, the rest of us will quickly figure out what significance, if any, they have.

After all - why would the Ministry of Truth lie? That would be doubleplus ungood. Prolefeed is goodthink, no badthink allowed...

Update 2: Captain's Quarters has additional info.

Most news agencies have reported on the AP's tape of a meeting involving President Bush, Michael Brown, and a number of other FEMA officials and local and state politicians during Hurricane Katrina. In the tape, most of the reports claim, Bush specifically heard warnings about levees being breached. However, that's not what the tape shows, at least the portion aired by the AP and NBC on their broadcast last night (available at MS-NBC at the above link). What is does show is an expert saying to the group, "At this point, we don't know whether the levees will be overtopped or not."

As Dafydd ab Hugh at Big Lizards points out, breaching and overtopping are two very different events. Neither are particularly desirable, of course, but overtopping would result in the release of excess water from Lake Pontchatrain, while the breaches released an exponentially larger volume, resulting in far more devastation. No one in this clip mentions the word "breach" at all, and the breathless reporting at the AP winds up being highly misleading. It's used to indict the president, who later said that no one imagined that the levees would be breached -- and if this clip is as good as the media has, then apparently the president is right.

(Psst: A word to all those MSM 'journalists' who think this sort of 'reporting' is enhancing their credibility - Dan Rather tried this sort of stuff with Bush's records - and you might want to consider what that did to his career prospects and what he did to your entire industry. We depend on you reporting TRUTH - not spinning off half-baked conspiracy theory garbage about teh EvIl Shrub. If we want that - there's always the Weekly World News. Keep this up, and you'll be right down there with Bat Boy.)

J.

* - FYI: There's three general levels of security classification. 'Confidential', 'Secret', and 'Top Secret'. Generally, 'Confidential' info is stuff that might be harmful if leaked, 'Secret' is stuff that could be harmful, and 'Top Secret' is stuff that'd be decidedly harmful if leaked.

For example - 'Confidential' would be the info that plans for an armor-plated porta-potty are in the works, 'Secret' would be a deployment schedule with locations, times and dates, and 'Top Secret would be an analysis of the design and flaws thereof, including the info that (until such time as a retrofit task force can be implemented) the external door to the quick-acting toilet-paper replacement dispenser mechanism is actually made of two-ply S-fiberglass and is 1/10th of an inch thick instead of the specified 3/4th inch Chobham armor plate, thus creating a system vulnerability that could be exploited by any enemies. Current recommendations, to be implemented in Fiscal Year '09, in lieu of replacing the door (to be contracted out in Fiscal Year '10, with the first prototypes to be ready in '13 and full deployment in '17), is to paint it the same tan camoflage as the rest of the Armored Porta-potty, instead of leaving it the fluorescent red with a black center as it comes from the factory.

I hope this clears things up.

(And I just noticed that the Armored Porta-potty would have the initials AP. Whoops. Might be a bad example there...)

J.

If you've ever done any D&D, you'll enjoy these.

The Order of the Stick - by Rich Burlew

J.

Splash Back - get all of the globs off the screen by pumping them

Yep, something to fiddle with. Have fun.

J.

CNN - EX-CNN ANCHOR BROWN: "THE NEWS IN THIS COUNTRY IS A BUSINESS"

Former CNN anchor Aaron Brown has suggested that television viewers are responsible for the deterioration of broadcast news as much as the TV networks themselves. "In the perfect democracy that I believe TV news is, it's not enough to say you want serious news, you have to watch it," he told an audience in Medford, OR this week. As reported by the Medford Mail Tribune, Brown, speaking to a First Amendment forum, noted that while CNN was spending a fortune covering the 2004 tsunami, Fox News was channeling its resources into the missing teenager Natalee Holloway. The contest, he noted, was won hands down by Fox. The result, he suggested, was not lost on his former employer, CNN. "The news in this country is a business," he said. "You might not like to think of it that way, but it is." He suggested that television, instead of being diverted by scores of late-breaking trivial stories, ought to focus on the 6-10 "really important stories" that occur each day.

J.

Maybe it's just me - but I don't see the difference between overtopping the levee and breaching the levee as being a 'minor semantic quibble'. But the majority of the folks posting here don't seem to comprehend the difference.

Metafilter -- Bush wasn't lying after all..

Engineering terminology evolved to describe and specify certain conditions. I'm sorry, but if even I can tell the difference between the two words and find the difference very significant, I don't see how these folks are missing it. Unless they prefer to ignore that the two words mean very different things because it fits the ideology they prefer.

Reality doesn't care what your political persuasion is. Neither does engineering terminology. And one point that is very much missed is that 24-48 hours before Katrina hit, there wouldn't have been time to do ANYTHING to remedy decades of neglect and corruption when it came to the levee system.

J.

But is it too late?

Guardian Unlimited | Columnists | Timothy Garton Ash: We must stand up to the creeping tyranny of the group veto

It was a bright cold day in February, and the digital watches were blinking thirteen. Across the street from the concrete skeleton of a large building, a noisy crowd was repetitively chanting "Stop the Oxford animal lab! Stop the Oxford animal lab!" Just around the corner, at least 500 demonstrators, among them many Oxford university students, gave their vocal reply: "Stand up for science! Stand up for research! No more threats, no more fear! Animal research, wanted here!" A student wordsmith had obviously worked hard on the chants, which continued with "Pro-science! Pro-gress! Pro-test!". Then there crackled through an oldfashioned electronic megaphone the voices of Oxford academics, a doctoral student and, most movingly, the mother of a disabled child. They explained howprogress in medicine depends on carefully regulated animal tests and called on us to resist the "animal rights terrorists". A large banner held aloft in the middle of the crowd proclaimed "Vegetarians against the Alf". Alf stands for Animal Liberation Front, the extremist animal rights network which has attempted (sometimes violently, sometimes successfully) to intimidate universities into not doing research on animals.

Standing at the corner of Mansfield Road, I was proud of the demonstrators who were reminding my university what, at best, it is still about: the pursuit of truth and the defence of reason. Protests against student loans or higher rents - these we expect. But here were students turning out on a chilly Saturday morning to stand up for science.

.....

If someone says "the Nazis didn't kill so many Jews and had no plan for their systematic extermination", he is a distorter of history who deserves to be intellectually refuted and morally condemned, but not imprisoned. If, however, someone says "kill the Jews", or "kill the Muslims", or "kill the Americans", or "kill the animal experimenters", and points to particular groups of Jews, Muslims, Americans or animal experimenters, they should be met with the full rigour of the law. That's why, of all the recent high-profile cases where free speech has been at issue, that of the London-based hatepreacher Abu Hamza is the only one where I feel a criminal conviction was justified. Not because he was a Muslim rather than a Christian, a Jew or a secular European. No. Because he was guilty of incitement to murder. This is the line on which we must take our stand. Facing down intimidation, backed by the threat of violence, is the key to resisting the creeping tyranny of the group veto. Here there can be no compromise.

And that, I think, is what those students had instinctively understood when they turned out for a very English little demonstration on a bright, cold morning in Oxford. Orwell would have been proud of them.

Using rights of free speech to deny others theirs... isn't that what so many have warned us about over the years? Yet there's folks who wouldn't hesitate about denying the rights of others to speak freely.

J.

Let's see. There was a big flap about Valerie Plame, who outed her, when she was outed, and what effect her outing had. Then, there were people screaming for the heads of the folks who leaked her name... then it devolved down to a point where it looked like it could be her husband who leaked it and the media hared off in other directions.

But in the meantime, there've been some pretty severe leaks which DO affect the efforts of the WoT. These are legitimate (in that they're verifiable), definite leaks, which are very much illegal (as in against US Code) and require invesitgation.

White House Trains Efforts on Media Leaks

I'm sorry, but it doesn't work both ways here. Leaked info needs to be traced back to whoever leaked it - and that person needs to be prosecuted. You don't insist on one set of rules for cases like Valerie Plame's name being leaked to the press, and one set for things like the NSA intercepts. If leaking Valerie Plame's name was wrong and deserving of prosecution, then so was leaking the NSA info, and thus the prosecution of whoever leaked that is right and proper.

And over at "The Corner on National Review Online#091618"

Keller's own newspaper led the fight for the Valerie Wilson CIA leak investigation, cheering the appointment of a special prosecutor with powers that exceeded even the old independent counsels. And what happened? That special prosecutor went to the White House and got government sources to waive confidentiality restrictions on their talks with journalists. Then he went to journalists and said, "See? I've got these waivers. You can testify or you can go to jail." And then he sent one of them to jail and threatened others. And so far, at least, he hasn't found enough evidence to charge anyone with a national-security crime.

Too late, the Times and its allies realized that a terrible precedent had been set. Now some of them try to argue that the Wilson leak was an act of retribution, while the NSA and secret prisons leaks were the work of good-government whistleblowers, so one should be vigorously prosecuted while the others are ignored. It won't work. Leaks are leaks, and the NSA and secret prisons leaks were, by any estimation, far more damaging to national security than the Wilson leak. (In that case, the special prosecutor said in court recently that he did not intend to show that any damage occurred from the leak.)

So now there are more investigations going on. The Times and its supporters wanted this kind of thing. Now they've got it.

J.

AWST STORY

Speculation, anyone? (And this is the first I've ever heard of 'chipmunk cheek' C-5s, too.)

J.

Found these tonight - Stargate Sounds - maybe there's something there you'd like. That's sounds of special effects - if you're looking for others, check out the page here.

(My personal favorite quote is this one. I'm thinking of putting it in as a general error sound. And this one for mail.)

J.

We're getting close to the point where we have materials good enough to do something like this.

The Great Space Elevator - Gizmodo

There are startups and then there are startups. Web 2.0 is all fine and dandy and I love AJAX as much as the next person but let’s face it, as amazing as Flickr, del.icio.us and MeasureMap are, they and the rest of the new web apps combined and taken to the tenth power aren’t even half as sexy as the Space Elevator. The what? Business 2.0’s Georgia Flight explains:

In this case - I think so. We need a dream, a frontier of some sort. The promise of open horizons, of room to expand. And short of colonizing Antartica, there's no room left. (Admittedly, Antarctica is a sunny beach compared to the rest of the Solar System. But then again, there's the Hyperdrive supposedly in development...

All things considered - I'd rather see NASA throw money at space elevator ideas than redoing Apollo - and it'd be a real kick if this drive works, but it has to be outside 5 planetary diameters to function.

(Two points to whoever identifies the stories where the '5 planetary diameter' requirement was a continual plot point.) (Cripes. I just googled it. Too easy by far.)

J.

At least, in my humble opinion.

My Way News - S. Dakota Legislation to Ban Most Abortions

PIERRE, S.D. (AP) - Gov. Mike Rounds signed legislation Monday that would ban most abortions in South Dakota, a law he acknowledged would be tied up in court for years while the state challenges the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

If something like this ever comes to a vote in Georgia, I'll be voting against it. This is a matter of personal choice, and should be left to the woman who is pregnant. Such an act may well be the best of a limited number of bad options (or at least, so she might think), and shouldn't be made unavailable to her by legislative fiat.

J.

The spammers have tried a new trick - and it worked for a little while.

The normal syntax for a hyperlink (which MT is configured to block from a lot of spam addresses) is (along with precursor info that I won't display, but if you know HTML, you know what it is) 'href="http://www.wherever.com" with a right arrow, the text you want displayed, then a '/a' appended.

You'll notice the ' 'href="http:' string. That signals that the next thing's a link. And MT flags on that. However, MT won't flag it if the string is ' 'href=http:', and stuffs it into comments without ANY hesitation at all. After all - no link, no foul, right?

I've had 10 of those pop up in the last hour, all missing the " mark in the crucial place. It's easily blocked - you just put the string ' 'href=http:' in as an example of what you want blocked, and that takes care of it. Or should - I'll let you know if it doesn't.

Blasted spammers. They're not legal prey, are they? You could classify them as vermin, I suppose...

J.

But in this case, I think they need to leave the covered dishes at home...

ABC News: EXCLUSIVE: Iraq Weapons -- Made in Iran?

March 6, 2006 — U.S. military and intelligence officials tell ABC News that they have caught shipments of deadly new bombs at the Iran-Iraq border.

They are a very nasty piece of business, capable of penetrating U.S. troops' strongest armor.

J.

Wow. Varga knew how to draw 'em big, didn't he?

(It's real big for a pinup.^*)

(^*Pins, nails, ropes, scaffolding, screws, glue - you name it, they likely needed it to get it up.¹)

(¹Except for Velcro. That hadn't been invented yet.²)

(²Neither had Viagra, but I digress.)

(SFW, BTW. It's historical.)

J.

Out in California there's a valley. In that valley, there's a runway, and a 'lake'. The 'lake' is dry, at least according to Google Earth, and it's called Carricut Lake. It's in the China Lake Naval Weapons Center range - and at the north end of that runway is something I can't quite identify.

36 02'56.83N 117 30'25.10W

Anyone got any guesses?

(Note - it's only visible in Google Earth. I think the Windows Live Local pic of that was taken earlier, judging by areas that haven't been cleared. And it's not there in the Terraserver.microsoft.com image of the same area - seeing that Windows Live Local uses the same database, that's not surprising...)

J.

Looks like this site might have a lot of good tips...

Free Money Finance

Enjoy!

J.

Hmm. Who knew? (PS - it's free.)

God's Debris

Frankly, this is the hardest book in the world to market. When it first came out in hardcover, booksellers couldn’t decide if it was fiction or nonfiction. Was it philosophy or religion? It’s a religion/science book written by a cartoonist, using hypnosis techniques in the writing. It’s a thought experiment. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever read. How do you sell something that can’t be explained?

Nonetheless, the hardcover version of God's Debris was a solid success. I lost count of how many people e-mailed me to say it was the best book they’ve ever read. By way of comparison, I’ve published over thirty Dilbert™ books, two of them number-one New York Times best-sellers, but I’ve never gotten the kind of excited responses that I did from readers of God's Debris.

It's... interesting. Enjoy!

J.

Jokes in English for the ESL/EFL Classroom - Riddles (I-TESL-J)

I'd better not let the little guy see these...

J.

In the small dead animals: Capitalist Piglet - Who's Suckling Whom? thread was an interesting comment. The argument's on capitalism vs socialism - and those who've lived under a socialist government in Saskatchewan don't seem too impressed with the idea. But one post was thought-provoking...

How come we never idealize capitalism. For centuries we have idealized the theory of socialism, and when it failed in practice we blamed falible mankind. But just for mo, fancy capitalism idealized. All children would be educated to the best of their ability, the better to serve the system. Medical treatment would be based on the profit motive but working on the margins that the market would impose. All would recieve treatment, for it is advatageous to the system not to waste human capital. Art would have to appeal to the public and not just an acredited elite. Those who fall through the cracks would recieve effective treatment based on theories that work as opposed to treatment which keeps them where they are, and provides employment for "social scientists". I could go on. The point is why is socialim the only path to a heaven on earth (not that I belive in such a thing)? Why can't we have a fanciful capitalism to counter the equally fanciful socialist ideal?

Just a thought.

Posted by: jason at March 8, 2006 01:02 PM

It's an interesting thought, isn't it? Makes you wonder what might have occured if Marx had been persuasive about Capitalism, instead of going all out for his modified feudal system. (Everything belongs to the Lord of the State, and you'll get what he thinks you need, and you'll give everything to the State or be sent somewhere unpleasant.) (Yes, I know that's not how Socialism/Communism is supposed to work. Sure seems to end up like that, however.)

And there was this towards the end...

I have lived in both provinces. Born and raised in Alberta, I moved to Saskatchewan in my mid twenties and have been in Saskatchewan for almost twenty years. I have seen both sides and Saskatchewan is failing from government interference, competition and controls.

Many people on this thread are very hard on "lefties". Those who feel that Saskatchewan is the right model for the future. Judge for yourself.
I have sent two sons to Alberta for education. One because we don't have the population to hold training for the trade anymore. The other because there were not enough spots avaiable in his area of choice.
The U of S and other institutions that continue to teach the wonders of socialisn are doing a disservice to the best and brightest in this province.

We could be so much more.

I am tired of being someones lab rat!

Posted by: Daniel at March 9, 2006 10:39 AM

J.

Just another step...

Sandia's Z machine exceeds two billion degrees Kelvin

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia’s Z machine has produced plasmas that exceed temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin — hotter than the interiors of stars.

The unexpectedly hot output, if its cause were understood and harnessed, could eventually mean that smaller, less costly nuclear fusion plants would produce the same amount of energy as larger plants.

The phenomena also may explain how astrophysical entities like solar flares maintain their extreme temperatures.

The very high radiation output also creates new experimental environments to help validate computer codes responsible for maintaining a reliable nuclear weapons stockpile safely and securely — the principal mission of the Z facility.

“At first, we were disbelieving,” says Sandia project lead Chris Deeney. “We repeated the experiment many times to make sure we had a true result and not an ‘Ooops’!”

The results, recorded by spectrometers and confirmed by computer models created by John Apruzese and colleagues at Naval Research Laboratory, have held up over 14 months of additional tests.

Basically, at this point we're in a race between the advancement of science and our consumption of easily-produced energy. I'd feel a hell of a lot better if we hadn't turned away from nuclear power twenty, thirty years back.

Think of this as a SimCity/SimEarth sort of simulation. You start out with wood, find coal, then oil - then develop on to nuclear fission, then use the fission to bootstrap yourself to fusion - at which point you've won the game. You can jump a level (from wood, for example, to oil) but it takes a hell of a scientific leap to imagine the next level, then comprehend it, then develop it and implement it. And to get to the next level takes X amount of energy/research - but to jump a level takes X² amount. It's possible to do it from wood to oil, or from coal to nuclear, and even oil to fusion - but it always takes a minimum of X² to get there.

Oh, not that I think we'd run out - there's technologies to use oil shale and oil sands - but that's like six months of emergency cash put into a safe-deposit box. You don't tap into it unless you absolutely have to.

Thankfully, we're not at that point yet. We've got a few decades left of oil before we need fission on line - but it could be we're jumping a level here... or maybe hitting something completely unexpected.

Time will tell.

J.

CHairforce.com
Sit. Push Buttons. Mission complete!

Sounds like my civilian job...

Check out the videos under 'Fun' - especially the 'Falcon Love Song'. "The odds are good but the goods are odd"... that says it all!

J.

Or, why the NHS in Britain isn't living up to the designed function.

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Simon Hoggart's sketch

Every month Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, arrives at the House of Commons and tries to explain that the NHS is not crumbling to bits - it only looks that way.

Every month, MPs - not all from the opposition - tell her about cancelled operations, closed wards, unpaid contractors, inflated administration, huge overspending, the resignation of the chief executive and yesterday, dentists who are paid £80,000 a year but can't get round to seeing NHS patients.

I wouldn't be surprised to see it dismantled. The Brits are pretty patient and long-suffering - but that patience does have limits.

J.

Goodbye, you sorry waste of oxygen.

Milosevic found dead in prison cell - Europe - MSNBC.com

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader who orchestrated the Balkan wars of the 1990s and was on trial for war crimes, was found dead in his prison cell near The Hague, the U.N. tribunal said Saturday.

Milosevic, 64, apparently died of natural causes, a tribunal press officer said. He was found dead in his bed at the U.N. detention center.

The world is a bit brighter today.

J.

Or, study insurgency as Al Quaeda and Zarqawi do it, and do the exact opposite.

By targeting the people who nominally supported their efforts in Iraq when they started questioning what they saw as Al Quaeda trying to take over everything, apparently the Sunnis got on Z-man's shit list, turning them into fair targets.

But instead of this having the desired effect, which was (apparently) to make the Sunnis understand that they should let Al Quaeda control everything because, well, they were Al Quaeda and therefore holier (and more deserving to run things, I guess) it's really pissed off the Iraqi insurgents.

And Al Quaeda's worn out their welcome.

Telegraph | News | Sunni insurgents 'have al-Zarqawi running for cover'

Insurgent groups in one of Iraq's most violent provinces claim that they have purged the region of three quarters of al-Qa'eda's supporters after forming an alliance to force out the foreign fighters.

If true, it would mark a significant victory in the fight against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'eda in Iraq, and could partly explain the considerable drop in suicide bombings in Iraq recently.

Al Quaeda's getting to the point where they badly need the presence of the 'infidel occupier' to justify their existence. Without them, they have no justification for forcing others in Iraq to do their bidding, aside from a shakey theology, and they're finding that Iraqi nationalism is starting to build and become thicker than the Islamic factionalism they've been expoliting.

The claims were partly supported by the defence ministry, which said it had evidence that Zarqawi and his followers were fleeing Anbar to cities and mountains near the Iranian border.

It is this move that is believed to have prompted a statement a fortnight ago from the insurgent groups in the central city of Hawija that they were declaring war on al-Qae'da. It is being interpreted by intelligence experts as a response to an unwanted influx of foreign fighters seeking refuge. Iraq's Sunni Muslim insurgents had originally welcomed al-Qa'eda into the country, seeing it as a powerful ally in its fight against the American occupation.

But relations became strained when insurgents supported calls for Sunnis to vote in last December's election, a move they saw as essential to break the Shia hold on government but which al-Qa'eda viewed as a form of collaboration. It became an outright split when a wave of bombings killed scores of people in Anbar resulting in a spate of tit-for-tat killings.

In reaction, the insurgent groups formed their own anti-al-Qa'eda militia, the Anbar Revolutionaries. The group has a core membership of 100 people, all of whom had relatives killed by al-Qa'eda. It is led by Ahmed Ftaikhan, a former Saddam-era military intelligence officer.

It claims to have killed 20 foreign fighters and 33 Iraqi sympathisers. Many more are said to have fled. The United States has confirmed that six of Zarqawi's deputies were killed in Ramadi.

Osama al-Jadaan, a tribal chief, has claimed that with the support of the Iraqi army his supporters have captured hundreds of foreign fighters, and has sought to prevent jihadis entering the country from Syria.

Sucks to be Al Quaeda these days... but you won't find any sympathy for the bastards here.

Update: Especially after stuff like THIS...

Attacks kill at least 44 in Iraq - Conflict in Iraq - MSNBC.com

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The feared resumption of mass sectarian violence erupted Sunday in a Baghdad Shiite slum when bombers blew apart two markets shortly before sundown, killing at least 44 people and wounding about 200.

The bloody assaults on Sadr City came only minutes after Iraqi political leaders said the new parliament will convene Thursday, three days earlier than planned, as the U.S. ambassador pushed to break a stalemate over naming a unity government.

The attackers struck with car bombs, including a suicide driver, and mortars at the peak shopping time, destroying dozens of market stalls and vehicles as the explosives ripped through the poor neighborhood as residents were buying food for their evening meals.

J.

For instance, this service....

Ship 'n' Shred : Home Paper Shredder and Office Document Shredding Service

I get between 5 and 15 credit card applications a week, and have been ripping the things up and throwing them away.

We now have a shredder next to the kitchen trash can.

J.

Let's face it. Terrorists, by definition, want to create terror - and thus influence the thinking of a group or country to do what they want, that the country wouldn't particularly care to do if they had a choice. So this is an indication that the expected result didn't exactly materialize after a spate of bombings.

Gateway Pundit: Terrorist Plan Spoiled as Indian Hindus & Muslims Join in Protest

Hindu and Muslim women shout slogans during a rally against Tuesday's string of bomb explosions that killed 20 people at a temple and train station in Varanasi, India, Saturday, March 11, 2006. About 150 Hindu and Muslim residents marched Saturday through the streets of Varanasi, a city fames for its shrines on the banks of the River Ganges, shouting slogans against terrorism and urging Pakistan to foster friendship with India. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)

Terrorist attempts to divide the Varanasi and create communal havoc in the Hindu Holy City and beyond seems to have failed:

Not only did the people foil the nefarious designs of the terrorists but they also snubbed the political leaders who tried to gain political mileage out of the situation.

Leading citizens, intellectuals, businessmen, youth activists, social workers and cultural bodies organised a number of peace marches, meetings and candlelight processions to drive home the message of communal harmony and unity. Mahant Bhawani Nandan, chief of the Haathiyaram Math, has taken the lead in organising prayers for those killed in the blasts.

J.

With the occasional interesting bit...

Tapes reveal WMD plans by Saddam?-?Nation/Politics?-?The Washington Times, America's Newspaper

Audiotapes of Saddam Hussein and his aides underscore the Bush administration's argument that Baghdad was determined to rebuild its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction once the international community had tired of inspections and left the Iraqi dictator alone.

In addition to the captured tapes, U.S. officials are analyzing thousands of pages of newly translated Iraqi documents that tell of Saddam seeking uranium from Africa in the mid-1990s.

Me, I'm still interested in the reports of drums of 'insecticide' being found in armories...

J.

Tom Fox went to protest, and protect - in a pacifist manner - the Iraqi people from the US.

So he gets snatched by the insurgents, tortured, and killed. He exposed himself to his enemies, trusting that his pacifism would protect him. So ends a would-be Ghandi, tortured, shot, and dumped by railroad tracks. I can't say it much better than what follows.

the will to exist - a blog about life

Well, the end result was torture, injury and death, but it was you that got dehumanized by the enemy, Tom. It wasn’t U.S. troops who dehumanized you. It was evil Iraqis with the same mindset that has existed in this part of the world for a millenium, a mindset that isn’t compatible with modern notions about human dignity and the value of an individual human being. The same mindset is responsible for the lack of progress in building infrastructure and bringing Iraqis basic services. The same mindset is what forces U.S. troops to suspect everybody and “dehumanize” Iraqis. This is war, and it continues because of the mindset of fundamentalists who are theologically motivated, not because American soldiers like fighting and killing. Generally speaking, most of us would rather be at home enjoying whatever it is we love about being American.

To the Christian Peacemakers, I would say - you are misguided. Iraq does not produce the kind of enemies Ghandi fought. Ghandi’s non-violence worked because his enemies had a conscience. His enemies believed in human dignity and fairness. The insurgency in Iraq doesn’t give a shit about those things, to be quite frank. These are people who will sell their own mother to the devil if they think it will get them something they covet in return.

Tom lasted as long as he did because he had value to the people who snatched him. When that value was gone - so was Tom.

RIP, man. You didn't do anything to make the situation better, but at least you gave the Jihadis some thrills while they tortured and killed you. And maybe, at the end, you realized that rolling over and baring your throat to the wolf that wants to kill you doesn't earn you respect or safety.

I wonder sometimes if the folks who, as pacifists, go to places like this with a near certainty of being killed aren't indulging in a convoluted deathwish. It's certainly a somewhat suicidal action, no matter how you try to pretty it up.

"We mourn the loss of Tom Fox, who combined a lightness of spirit, a firm opposition to all oppression, and the recognition of God in everyone," Doug Pritchard and Carol Rose, co-directors of Chicago-based Christian Peacemaker Teams, said in a statement.

When they went to Iraq pre-war, it was with the intent to protect 'the Iraqi people'. However, there's no record of them trying to protect the Iraqi people from Saddam or his goons. I guess even they realized that pacifism wouldn't be protection from that regime, and that all they'd be would be entertainment for the torturers.

I can't say I fault their idealism - but again, I think that idealism should have been tempered with the knowledge that the people they're trying to 'protect' would kill them in a heartbeat if they saw an advantage to it... or if simply they got tired of holding one of these people as a hostage.

Sorry - pacifism against a group that will kill you is a sure way to get your numbers reduced to an ineffective level, not that pacifism is very effective against people who kill without hesitation in the first place. All it does is make you an easier target for people who literally want you dead.

J.

Is McDonald's building in Iraq yet?

Michael J. Totten: The Last Village in Iraq

What do you think? I asked him. Should Iraqi Kurdistan declare independence?

“If the West stands with us, we want independence for all the Kurds in the world. We are one people. Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and Iran, are exactly like us.”

I wanted to know: What’s the one best thing the West can do for the Kurds? He told me the same old answer that has been bouncing around in this part of the world for decades:

“We want Kurdistan to be the 51st American state.”

Wouldn't THAT piss off the Islamists... not to mention the mullocracy in Iran and various other groups that don't want to see democracy or freedom in that area.

J.

WorldNetDaily: Clooney uses F-word to thrash Democrats

Taking aim at leading Democrats, Clooney writes, "The fear of been criticized can be paralyzing. Just look at the way so many Democrats caved in the run up to the war. In 2003, a lot of us were saying, where is the link between Saddam and bin Laden? What does Iraq have to do with 9-11? We knew it was bulls---. Which is why it drives me crazy to hear all these Democrats saying, 'We were misled.' It makes me want to shout, 'F--- you'; you weren't misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic."

The actor says Americans need to united and find things on which to agree.

So here we have someone giving his thoughts, someone who creates his living out of the ability to be someone he isn't, who depends on scriptwriters to make him look intelligent, who is surrounded by a culture which has elevated the coddling and cosseting of celebrities to high art while absolving them of any responsibility for their actions and opinions, saying people need to agree on things. (Said 'things', apparently, to include validating his opinions and feelings so he doesn't have to do more than come out with the 'f-word' to express himself.)

And I contrast this 'star' with stars in the past like Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable... People who actually did things (the two actors mentioned were both in the Army Air Corps in WW2) instead of faking their way through life. (Well, I can't exactly criticise faking your way through life - that's what I've done with computers for the last 20+ years. Talked my way into the first computer job, and have been faking it ever since - but I don't just act like I'm fixing the problems, when I get done the problem's solved.)

And I'm not saying he's not intelligent - a quick look at his bio on Wiki shows he's not stupid by any stretch of the imagination.

But when you're immersed in a culture which takes image for substance, which constantly alters what's perceived as reality to make a good story, in which you KNOW that the vast majority of what you're seeing isn't real but an artfully crafted illusion - and you actively participate in the making of those illusions and that culture - it just seems a bit odd that he should be calling for people to 'agree on things'... when it would seem that quite a few of them already HAVE.

Then, there's this bit from OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan

Which gets us to George Clooney, and his work. George Clooney is Hollywood now. He is charming and beautiful and cool, but he is not Orson Welles. I know that's like saying of an artist that he's no Rembrandt, but bear with me because I have a point that I think is worth making.

Orson Welles was an artist. George Clooney is a fellow who read an article and now wants to tell us the truth, if we can handle it.

More important, Orson Welles had a canny respect for the audience while maintaining a difficult relationship with studio executives, whom he approached as if they were his intellectual and artistic inferiors. George Clooney has a canny respect for the Hollywood establishment, for its executives and agents, and treats his audience as if it were composed of his intellectual and artistic inferiors. (He is not alone in this. He is only this year's example.)

And because they are his inferiors, he must teach them. He must teach them about racial tolerance and speaking truth to power, etc. He must teach them to be brave. And so in his acceptance speech for best supporting actor the other night he instructed the audience about Hollywood's courage in making movies about AIDS, and recognizing the work of Hattie McDaniel with an Oscar.

Was his speech wholly without merit? No. It was a response and not an attack, and it appears to have been impromptu. Mr. Clooney presumably didn't know Jon Stewart would tease the audience for being out of touch, and he wanted to argue that out of touch isn't all bad. Fair enough. It is hard to think on your feet in front of 38 million people, and most of his critics will never try it or have to. (This is a problem with modern media: Only the doer understands the degree of difficulty.)

But Mr. Clooney's remarks were also part of the tinniness of the age, and of modern Hollywood. I don't think he was being disingenuous in suggesting he was himself somewhat heroic. He doesn't even know he's not heroic. He thinks making a movie in 2005 that said McCarthyism was bad is heroic. (ed. - McCarthy was right in that there WERE a lot of Communists - but he was also a publicity seeking moron who didn't do the US any good at all. And 50+ years later, with the collapse of the USSR and China modifying THEIR Communist tendencies, something about him really hits the "Eh, so what?" button for pretty much everyone outside of Hollywood... )

How could he think this? Maybe part of the answer is in this: The Clooney generation in Hollywood is not writing and directing movies about life as if they've experienced it, with all its mysteries and complexity and variety. In an odd way they haven't experienced life; they've experienced media. Their films seem more an elaboration and meditation on media than an elaboration and meditation on life. This is how he could take such an unnuanced, unsophisticated, unknowing gloss on the 1950s and the McCarthy era. He just absorbed media about it. And that media itself came from certain assumptions and understandings, and myths.

Most Americans aren't leading media, they're leading lives. It would be nice to see a new respect in Hollywood for the lives they live. It would be nice to see them start to understand that rediscovering the work of, say, C.S. Lewis, and making a Narnia film, is not "giving in" to the audience but serving it. It isn't bad to look for and present good material that is known to have a following. It's a smart thing to do. It's why David O. Selznick bought "Gone With the Wind": People were reading it. It was his decision to make it into a movie from which he would profit that gave Hattie McDaniel her great role. Taboos are broken by markets, not poses.

And judging from the numbers (over at Boxofficemojo) there's enough people who feel the same way that the influence of Hollywood's kind of dropping... and dropping fast. (If you get to $50 mil in the theaters, it's pretty much considered a blockbuster movie. When did the bar get moved so low?)

Hollywood exists because the studios and stars produce entertainment that people want to see, not lectures that they don't. The falling revenues would be enough to convince other business types that they might be going down the wrong path with regards to customer service - but it doesn't seem like it with Hollywood.

J.

Hmmm. Maybe...

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Myths of Iraq

During a recent visit to Baghdad, I saw an enormous failure. On the part of our media. The reality in the streets, day after day, bore little resemblance to the sensational claims of civil war and disaster in the headlines.

No one with first-hand experience of Iraq would claim the country's in rosy condition, but the situation on the ground is considerably more promising than the American public has been led to believe. Lurid exaggerations and instant myths obscure real, if difficult, progress.
I left Baghdad more optimistic than I was before this visit. While cynicism, political bias and the pressure of a 24/7 news cycle accelerate a race to the bottom in reporting, there are good reasons to be soberly hopeful about Iraq's future.

But the foreign media have become a destructive factor, extrapolating daily crises from minor incidents. Part of this is ignorance. Some of it is willful. None of it is helpful.

The dangerous nature of journalism in Iraq has created a new phenomenon, the all-powerful local stringer. Unwilling to stray too far from secure facilities and their bodyguards, reporters rely heavily on Iraqi assistance in gathering news. And Iraqi stringers, some of whom have their own political agendas, long ago figured out that Americans prefer bad news to good news. The Iraqi leg-men earn blood money for unbalanced, often-hysterical claims, while the Journalism 101 rule of seeking confirmation from a second source has been discarded in the pathetic race for headlines.

To enhance their own indispensability, Iraqi stringers exaggerate the danger to Western journalists (which is real enough, but need not paralyze a determined reporter). Dependence on the unverified reports of local hires has become the dirty secret of semi-celebrity journalism in Iraq as Western journalists succumb to a version of Stockholm Syndrome in which they convince themselves that their Iraqi sources and stringers are exceptions to every failing and foible in the Middle East. The mindset resembles the old colonialist conviction that, while other "boys" might lie and steal, our house-boy's a faithful servant.

The result is that we're being told what Iraqi stringers know they can sell and what distant editors crave, not what's actually happening.

That the emphasis on blood doesn't do Iraq any good doesn't matter.

J.

When your regiem is on the ropes, you grab for straws. Any straw.

Foreign Affairs - Saddam's Delusions: The View from the Inside - Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray

When it came to weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Saddam attempted to convince one audience that they were gone while simultaneously convincing another that Iraq still had them. Coming clean about WMD and using full compliance with inspections to escape from sanctions would have been his best course of action for the long run. Saddam, however, found it impossible to abandon the illusion of having WMD, especially since it played so well in the Arab world.

Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of chemical weapons on Kurdish civilians in 1987, was convinced Iraq no longer possessed WMD but claims that many within Iraq's ruling circle never stopped believing that the weapons still existed. Even at the highest echelons of the regime, when it came to WMD there was always some element of doubt about the truth. According to Chemical Ali, Saddam was asked about the weapons during a meeting with members of the Revolutionary Command Council. He replied that Iraq did not have WMD but flatly rejected a suggestion that the regime remove all doubts to the contrary, going on to explain that such a declaration might encourage the Israelis to attack. [See Footnote #1 below]

Ironically, it now appears that some of the actions resulting from Saddam's new policy of cooperation actually helped solidify the coalition's case for war. Over the years, Western intelligence services had obtained many internal Iraqi communications, among them a 1996 memorandum from the director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service directing all subordinates to "insure that there is no equipment, materials, research, studies, or books related to manufacturing of the prohibited weapons (chemical, biological, nuclear, and missiles) in your site." And when UN inspectors went to these research and storage locations, they inevitably discovered lingering evidence of WMD-related programs.

In 2002, therefore, when the United States intercepted a message between two Iraqi Republican Guard Corps commanders discussing the removal of the words "nerve agents" from "the wireless instructions," or learned of instructions to "search the area surrounding the headquarters camp and [the unit] for any chemical agents, make sure the area is free of chemical containers, and write a report on it," U.S. analysts viewed this information through the prism of a decade of prior deceit. They had no way of knowing that this time the information reflected the regime's attempt to ensure it was in compliance with UN resolutions.

In the end, he severely screwed up by trying to play both sides. The rest of the article... wow. He gutted his military leadership in a coup-proofing maneuver, the army was undertrained and underequipped - all in all it almost looks like a comic farce.

A close associate once described Saddam as a deep thinker who lay awake at night pondering problems at length before inspiration came to him in dreams. These dreams became dictates the next morning, and invariably all those around Saddam would praise his great intuition. Questioning his dictates brought great personal risk. Often, the dictator would make a show of consulting small groups of family members and longtime advisers, although his record even here is erratic. All of the evidence demonstrates that he made his most fateful decisions in isolation. He decided to invade Iran, for example, without any consultation with his advisers and while he was visiting a vacation resort. He made the equally fateful decision to invade Kuwait after discussing it with only his son-in-law.

In a wide-ranging discussion with his closest advisers in the fall of 1990, Saddam provided an insight into his "unique" abilities:

"America is a complicated country. Understanding it requires a politician's alertness that is beyond the intelligence community. Actually, I forbade the intelligence outfits from deducing from press and political analysis anything about America. I told them that [this] was not their specialty, because these organizations, when they are unable to find hard facts, start deducing from newspapers, which is what I already know. I said I don't want either intelligence organization [the Iraqi Intelligence Service or the General Military Intelligence Directorate] to give me analysis -- that is my specialty. . . . We agree to continue on that basis . . . which is what I used with the Iranians, some of it out of deduction and some of it through invention and connecting the dots, all without having hard evidence".

After 1991, Saddam's confidence in his military commanders steadily eroded, while his confidence in his own abilities as a military genius strengthened. Like a number of other despots in history who dabbled in military affairs, Saddam began to issue a seemingly endless stream of banal instructions. He could not resist giving detailed training guidance.

Dozens of surviving memoranda echo the style and content of a 2002 top-secret document titled "Training Guidance to the Republican Guard." These documents all hint at the kind of guidance military officers received from Saddam on a regular basis. One chapter of the "training guidance" document, called "Notes and Directions Given by Saddam Hussein to His Elite Soldiers to Cover the Tactics of War," charged officers to do the following: "Train in a way that allows you to defeat your enemy; train all units' members in swimming; train your soldiers to climb palm trees so that they may use these places for navigation and sniper shooting; and train on smart weapons."

Little evidence exists that any of the politicized Iraqi generals understood the advantages in maneuverability, speed, command and control, or training that the U.S. forces enjoyed. By the time the military was ready to brief Saddam on the lessons of the Persian Gulf War, however, they did fully understand the danger of presenting him with claims other than those he already believed. Truthful analyses therefore gave way to belittlement of the U.S. victory and denials that the United States had any advantage over Iraq other than in military technology. One comment made by an Iraqi general during a mid-1990s conference was typical: "After the liberation of our land in Kuwait, and despite the fact that more than 30 countries headed by the occupation forces of the U.S. rushed madly upon our Republican Guard, our performance was heroic."

Read the whole thing. It's amazing.

J.

From... the GUARDIAN of all places? Wow.

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | We were right to invade Iraq

The failures of the occupation are legion: delayed elections, inadequate security, eroding infrastructure, complacency over the tortures at Abu Ghraib, and a heavy death toll among Iraqi civilians and our troops. But had we allowed Saddam's regime to persist, in defiance of its obligations under 17 UN security council resolutions, the consequences would have been an unalloyed catastrophe. The Uday-Qusay dynasty would have ensured further extreme oppression, unless and until the regime collapsed in chaos. It is a fine judgment whether a rogue state or a failed state, prey to the barbarities that jihadists are trying to inflict on Iraq now but without hindrance, would have been the worse prospect. The notion that terrorism has been brought to Iraq uniquely by the west's overthrow of Saddam, who bankrolled it and was the most likely conduit for Islamist groups to obtain WMD, is astonishingly ahistorical.
Against those disastrous scenarios, there are clear advances. We no longer have to bear one major risk: a psychopathic despot overcoming a porous sanctions regime, and using oil sales to pay for resumed WMD production. The absence of WMD was a huge intelligence failure; so it is fortunate that we are no longer reliant on Saddam's word. As Professor Graham Pearson, of the Bradford University school of peace studies, has written, focusing on stockpiles is misconceived: "In an aggressor state, there is no requirement to have such stockpiles as the national strategy is not one of having an ability to retaliate in kind but rather ... to use chemical and biological weapons at a time of its choosing." Saddam did possess dual-use facilities that, according to Charles Duelfer of the Iraq Survey Group, could quickly have produced chemical and biological weapons.

J.

Here for years they thought Pluto didn't have any moons.

Then they found Charon.

Now they've found two more.

Pluto’s moons are all in the family - Space.com - MSNBC.com

Pluto’s two recently discovered satellites have essentially the same neutral color as Pluto’s large moon, Charon, scientists said Friday.

Too cold to be popular real estate, though...

J.

Africa's New Ocean: A Continent Splits Apart - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

Normally new rivers, seas and mountains are born in slow motion. The Afar Triangle near the Horn of Africa is another story. A new ocean is forming there with staggering speed -- at least by geological standards. Africa will eventually lose its horn.

Wonder how that'll effect the climate in that part of the world?

J.

LILEKS (James) :: Institute :: Compu-Promo

All on the scrap heap now, pretty much - but at least James Lileks has a use for them...

J.

I'm looking at some of the proposed planks of the Democratic agenda - and they're pretty thin stuff. I'm especially impressed by Nancy Pelosi's line...

According to Pelosi, Democrats are "about the future" and making it "better for the next generation."

Your mileage may vary, of course.

Pelosi Hints at Democrats' 'Unified' Agenda -- 03/15/2006

"I was told that an entry level person at Wal-Mart, who works his or her entire career at Wal-Mart, would make as much as the CEO makes in two weeks. A lifetime of work versus two weeks in the executive suite -- this is not America, this is not fairness, this is not the basis of a strong middle class that is essential for our democracy. We must change that in our country," she said.

I'm not sure if Pelosi's saying that everyone should be paid what the CEO makes, or the CEO should be paid what the janitor makes. Either way, it ignores the value of the work that's being done. And I just don't find much sense in that.

She also wants to support universal, affordable access to broadband within 5 years.

Right. Care to guess who's going to have to pay for that? IF it ever gets implemented, and doesn't disappear like smoke in a high wind after the next election?

And a quick perusal (bearing in mind this is to a CWA group) doesn't have a single thing on defense. Well, 'affordable broadband' ain't on my list of high-priority concerns - and neither is making that folks who want a union in their company can force it if over half the employees vote for the union to come in. (That's more on the lines of a 'um, don't they have that already?' sort of thing.) I can appreciate them trying to focus on domestic issues - but the issues they're focusing on aren't (IMHO) going to be real grabbers in the first place. And as far as broadband or internet access goes, it's pretty much a certainty that any company that really wants/needs it already has access, and home access... well, that's a function of what provider is in your area. Rural Wyoming's not going to have it, unless you go satellite... which is already available. This looks like an expensive solution to a not-very-widespread problem.

But it plays well to communication workers.

Overall? Democrats promising stuff, knowing that nobody would blame them if they never deliver if they got into office, and ignoring things that are vital to the nation. Sorry - I've been fooled by the rhetoric before. I won't buy that horse.

J.

Who Wants To Be A Superhero?

Not I. I'll settle for being an adequate human being. I'm still working on THAT.

J.

Is often held up as the way it should be done in the states.

This is a diary of a NHS doctor in the UK.

Damn.

NHS Blog Doctor: The Crippen Diaries (Week 11)

Go and read this. There's no way any exerpt can do it justice.

If any candidate espouses socialized medicine, no way in hell will they get my vote. Not after seeing this, and contrasting it with the care and attention my father got here in the US when he got his stents and bypasses, paid for by Medicare.

And MSNBC says we've got mediocre health care.

U.S. health care mediocre across the board - Health Care - MSNBC.com

Fine. I'll accept mediocre over lousy or nonexistant any day. My father, mother, and my brother would all likely be dead under NHS rules and (mal)practices. Government controlled medicine on the European model, as far as I'm concerned, just fell off my list of things I'd vote for. Any candidate, as I said, who promotes this sort of horror won't be getting my vote..

But wait - there's just a BIT more.

NHS Blog Doctor: Sue and Dave and "Hospital at Night"

When Dr Crippen was a hospital doctor, some of the jobs he did were called One-in-Twos. You did a full working day from 8.00 a.m. until 6.00 p.m. and then you worked every other night from 6.00 p.m. until 8.00 a.m. the next morning, and also every other weekend from Friday at 6.00 pm until Monday at 6.00 p.m. That came to about a hundred and twenty hours a week.

The hours were ridiculous, and the pay derisory but you learned some medicine. The government has stopped this because EU regulations forced it to. Junior hospital doctors are nowadays not allowed to work more than forty-eight hours a week, after which they must be tucked up in bed with a cup of cocoa.

The economics here are straightforward. If you reduce doctors’ hours by approximately two-thirds, you need three times as many doctors to do the same work. We did not need Wat Tyler for that!**

The government has not increased the number of doctors.

So at nights and weekends, and particularly over long bank holidays like Christmas, the hospitals are denuded of medically trained staff.

There is a crisis. Do not get ill at Christmas. The doctors have gone home.

How did the government cope with this crisis?

First of all, it hushed it up.

Secondly, it rebranded it, so that if any one does hear about it, it is not a crisis, it is an opportunity. An opportunity for team building.

And it has rebranded it with a comforting, plausible, attractive name.

It is not called, “Oh Christ, I’m bleeding and there are no doctors in the hospital”. It is called “Hospital at Night.”

J.

as amazed as the Wright Brothers would have been if they'd seen air transport go from the Wright Flyer to the SR-71 in twenty years.

pr06_typhoon_PSC - Typhoon Personal Super Computer

FREMONT, CA, March 9th, 2006 - Many researchers and developers currently operate their simulations or applications on large-scale computing machines or around the schedule of laboratories which lend or rent out time on systems. Unfortunately, this not only means that research and development is limited to tracts of computing power that may or may not be available on a regular basis. In terms of both convenience and productivity, many find themselves at the mercy of the appointment book or chained to large computers. Enter the Tyan Typhoon PSC: a personal super computer (PSC) which offers high-performance computing power down to the customer desk-side.

Using either AMD Opteron™ 200 series processors (model B2881YDS4T), or Intel? Pentium? 4 or Pentium D processors (model B5160YDS4T), the Typhoon PSC offers a wealth of features to meet the needs of the supercomputing audience. Such features include:

Incredible small-sized supercomputing system (14" x 12.6" x 26.7")
Support for up to four (4) nodes with one or two processors (including Dual Core support)
Low-noise operation… less than 47dB!
Up to 64GB of DDR400/333 Registered memory (AMD Opteron-based system)
Up to 32GB of DDR2-667/533 Unbuffered memory (Intel Pentium D-based system)
Eight (8) Gigabit Ethernet ports integrated for network expansion options
Up to four (4) Serial ATA HDD devices supported
Four (4) built-in EPS12V 350W power supplies with PFC

J.

What? What? Did you say something? Speak up, don't mumble!

Eh? Earbuds may pose risk for hearing loss - More Health News - MSNBC.com

WASHINGTON - More research is needed to determine whether popular portable music players like Apple’s iPod increase the risk of hearing loss, the National Institutes of Health said in response to a lawmaker’s request for a review of the issue.

A recent survey commissioned the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association suggested that U.S. teenagers are listening to iPods and other MP3 players too loud and too long. And more than half of high-school students reported at least one symptom of hearing loss.

Father's pretty close to deaf himself - thanks to years of using power tools without proper hearing protection. I'm hoping to avoid such a problem, but I'm already seeing (well, hearing) noticeable loss in the left ear.

Now I look at folks who have iPods and earbuds (or headphones) with the volumn turned up to where I can hear things CLEARLY five or ten feet away and just shake my head. It's time to invest in hearing aid manufacturers, because there's going to be a large increase in sales soon. (I might even say a 'Boom', lol.)

J.

And not one I'm too eager to see ressurected.

Ice Harvesting in New England

J.

rrrrthats5rs.com - Don’t Shoot the Puppy

Heh. Enjoy!

J.

Could well be...

Quantum dots that produce white light could be the light bulb's successor

Until now quantum dots have been known primarily for their ability to produce a dozen different distinct colors of light simply by varying the size of the individual nanocrystals: a capability particularly suited to fluorescent labeling in biomedical applications. But chemists at Vanderbilt University discovered a way to make quantum dots spontaneously produce broad-spectrum white light. The report of their discovery, which happened by accident, appears in the communication “White-light Emission from Magic-Sized Cadmium Selenide Nanocrystals” published online October 18 by the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

In the last few years, LEDs (short for light emitting diodes) have begun replacing incandescent and fluorescent lights in a number of niche applications. Although these solid-state lights have been used for decades in consumer electronics, recent technological advances have allowed them to spread into areas like architectural lighting, traffic lights, flashlights and reading lights. Although they are considerably more expensive than ordinary lights, they are capable of producing about twice as much light per watt as incandescent bulbs; they last up to 50,000 hours or 50 times as long as a 60-watt bulb; and, they are very tough and hard to break. Because they are made in a fashion similar to computer chips, the cost of LEDs has been dropping steadily. The Department of Energy has estimated that LED lighting could reduce U.S. energy consumption for lighting by 29 percent by 2025, saving the nation’s households about $125 million in the process.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with this. I'd gladly retrofit our bulbs from incandescents to LED based, even at a cost of double or triple current incandescent pricing...

(Of course, I'm a gadget junkie.)

J.

WOAI: San Antonio News - Flying Cow Leaves Two Police Cars in Flames

Sadly, it goes downhill from there.

J.

It's easy to discount progress, simply because it's nowhere as visible as the problems are. (Remember the MSM's mantra - if it bleeds it leads...) But people ARE noticing.

Power Line: JPod: "Iraq's Overlooked Triumph"

John Podhoretz credits Iraq's "political class" with a little-appreciated victory in resisting calls for civil war over the past two weeks, and instead continuing to work out their inevitable conflicts through the political process. Podhoretz makes a fundamental point that some seem to forget:

[T]he members of Iraq's political class have chosen hope - chosen to fight their battles at the bargaining table rather than in the streets. By doing so, they are, in fact, offering an example of what democratic institutions are intended to do. They are supposed to replace armed conflict with political negotiation conducted by those who might otherwise take up weapons to get their way.

Podhoretz's conclusion is, I think, exactly right...

And of course there's going to be people who would gladly force everyone else back into that slavery if THEY can be at the top of the heap, power-wise. (You know, I always used to wonder how movie supervillians (or regular ones) got their evil henchmen. The promise of power can corrupt the soul.)

When all this started after 9/11, I figured that I'd never know the end of it. We're looking at a process of change in the ME that will literally take decades to complete, and it can be slowed and even rolled back some by the folks who would gladly destroy all Western thought in favor of hardcore Islamic theology. (Does it ever strike you as odd that a lot of the left-leaning folk in the West look at Christianity and any expression of it and shudder, screaming that it's obvious that the Southern Baptists want to take over the world, while essentially ignoring what the hardcore Islamist factions say they want and actually try to do? It kind of puzzles me, unless it's a manifestation of the old 'Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend' thing - though the treatment within Islam of gays and women is hardly friendly...)

Aaron might see the end of it - or maybe his kids. But I'll see progress along the way - and have to be satisifed with that...

In truth, we likely won't know whether the Iraq war was a success or a failure, a good idea or a bad idea, for another twenty or thirty years, when the consequences of the effort not only in Iraq, but throughout the region, become clear. For now, we can only guess. But my guess is that our effort in Iraq will succeed, and that that conflict will eventually come to be seen as an important step in the vital process of bringing reform to the Arab world, and thereby defusing the threat of Islamic terrorism.

Even if it takes decades.

J.

London to give low-income residents free high-speed Internet line | ajc.com

London — Imagine an Internet system so fast it would allow users to download all 32,640 pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica in less than 7 seconds.

That's exactly how speedy the broadband connection will be for thousands of low-income residents in East London in a pilot program.

New set-top boxes that combine the functions of a television and computer will be installed in 1,000 households next week, with an additional 20,000 homes coming online by year's end.

It's part of what's been called the Digital Bridge project and is paid for by the British government, the European Commission and local officials.

Organizers say users will be able to surf the Internet and download material at speeds up to 2,000 times faster than common broadband.

Typical Britain broadband lines offer speeds of up to 2 megabits per second. The pilot system will offer speeds of up to 2 gigabits per second. A gigabit is 1,024 megabits.

But I have to wonder at the expense, and the expected return. This looks like a 'we're doing it because we can' sort of thing, not a 'we're doing it because it's needed' sort of project. Not that there's anything wrong with that - but is it just me, or does the provision of high-speed internet to poor families seem a bit, um, overabundant? Oversupplying? Overzealous? Expensive as all hell? (At $20 mil for 20,000 subscribers, it's $1k each - but considering the country and bureaucracy, I'd say they're looking at $3 to $5k per unit, by the time it's all said and done.)

Well, they must have some idea that the return will be worth the investment. Especially considering they're having trouble finding doctors and staffing hospitals - you've got to wonder about the funding priorities.

NHS Blog Doctor

Meanwhile back at the coal face, Dr Crippen is struggling to get information from his hospital colleagues.

Ten weeks ago, he referred an elderly lady with a malignant feeling liver and deranged biochemistry to the gastroenterologists under the TWR. She has now been seen three times at the hospital and had a battery of doubtless appropriate investigations. She came in today to discuss her progress.

All that was in the notes was a letter relating to the original assessment done nine weeks ago. This was little more than a recital of the referral letter I wrote and a list of the proposed investigations. It has taken six weeks for the letter to get through. Why?

Because it has been typed in New Delhi.

There is still a dog turd under Dr Crippen’s desk, as described here. I put it there two years ago when the cleaning services were “outsourced.” Now the typing has been outsourced as well.

The relationship between family doctors and hospital doctors used to be dynamic and interactive. Letters went backwards and forwards in the internal post within forty eight hours. Hospital secretaries were not well paid, but they did a good job. As any good secretary should, they understood the foibles of their bosses, and they corrected their grammatical howlers. That no longer happens. Dr Crippen cannot fault the presentation of the Indian letters. But understandably the consultants’ howlers remain, and there are one of two more of distinctly Indian origin. Words, phrases and punctuation do not always survive the return trip to New Delhi.

This system is causing misunderstanding and delay. There are confidentiality issues. It is putting a group of valuable English employees out of work which, as described here, is upsetting the unions and it is putting an unnecessary communication barrier between doctors.

It has hard to believe the savings are great. The downside, however, is enormous and is measured in patient suffering.

Seems a bit strange, is all...

J.

The designers did one heck of a job...

It’s ‘drive or die’ time for Mars rover - Space.com - MSNBC.com

HOUSTON - NASA’s Spirit Mars rover has wrapped up exploration of a baffling feature called "Home Plate" but now faces the onset of Martian winter while dealing with dropping power levels and fighting a balky right front wheel.

"Our current focus is to drive like hell … and try to get [Spirit] to safe winter havens before the power situation gets really bad," said Steve Squyres, lead Mars Rover Exploration scientist at Cornell University.

J.

To try to take over a guided missle cruiser or a destroyer with a fishing boat and some RPGs?

ARTICLE: Pirates attack 2 Navy warships from Norfolk in the Indian Ocean (The Virginian-Pilot - HamptonRoads.com/PilotOnline.com)

A dozen suspected pirates on a small fishing boat became prisoners Saturday after they opened fire on two Norfolk-based Navy warships in the Indian Ocean.

Five of those captured off the coast of Somalia were wounded and a 13th man was killed, the Navy said.

No one on the Gonzalez, a guided missile destroyer, or the Cape St. George, a guided missile cruiser, was hurt.

J.

But, but... I was told it WAS!

the will to exist - a blog about life - All quiet in the heart of Baghdad

The last few days have been eerily quiet here in the Green Zone. An injection of American troops coupled with Operation Swarmer to our north seem to have changed the routines quite drastically. Things are happening behind the scenes too, as negotiations continue on shaping the government. It has been slightly more than three months since the elections in which Iraqis voted in much higher number than we do back home in the U.S. The media continues to try and give the impresssion that Iraq is embroiled in a full scale civil war, doing Iraqis and the coalition a great disservice.

There is nothing like the American Civil War happening in Iraq. Instead, what is happening is that a centuries old conflict between two different brands of Islam, Shia and Sunni, is being reawakened by external and internal agitators. These agitators are people who would not benefit from a stable and prosperous Iraq. Iraqis are not a stupid people though - they can see through the violence and they have things like this to say:

Finally I would like to say to all our friends in the West and America in particular, this: have no fear; the battle is far from being lost. The land of Sumeria, Akad, Babylon, Ur, Nimrod and Ashur will never die. The land where the Old Testament was written and the Aramaic of Jesus Christ was spoken cannot become extinct. The Capital of Harun Al-Rashid and the Arabian nights cannot die. Land of Abraham and the prophets, Mesopotamia is indestructible. Seven thousand years of turbulent history attest to this. Only this land will remain tortured and cannot rest or calm down until it achieves greatness again. This is a germ that has been genetic in this mystic land from the beginning of history. This same history will credit the U.S.A. in years to come to have been the one to arouse this long dormant genie.

On Sunday, Iraqi police were increasing security around the Shiite city of Karbala to preempt any more attacks from taking place there. Already, one mortar round exploded in a crowd there on Sunday, but did not cause casualties.

The city is the site of a major religious holiday on Monday and is expected to welcome 2 million pilgrims to the city. The Imam Hussein shrine, where one of the festivals is taking place, is one of the four holiest Shiite sites in Iraq, rivaling the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which was destroyed last month, sparking much of the recent sectarian violence.

In addition, last week, the U.S. military launched its largest operation since a month after the war began in March 2003. Operation Swarmer has resulted in the discovery of 11 caches of weapons and the detention of 80 suspected insurgents, the U.S. military press center reported Sunday.

Casey acknowledged that the situation on the ground is fragile in Iraq, and will remain so until a new national unity government is formed. But citing training of Iraqi security forces and elections over the past year, Casey added that good progress was being made politically and militarily in Iraq.

"What the long-term nature of our presence here might be is a subject for a discussion with the new government of Iraq," he said.

But when the media, in their effort to maintain interest and viewer eyeballs, runs 'if it bleeds it leads' stories about how it's all going to hell, and Democrats pontificate about how we should pull all our troops out NOW, then remember that what's seen in the news may not be what's actually happening. Not that they're lying, as such, they're just making it sound more in line with their script...

J.

It's always easy (and very tempting) to do nothing when faced with a terrible challenge with an uncertain outcome. Security Watchtower examines what might have occured if we hadn't gone to war with Iraq. The results aren't pretty.

The Third Anniversary of the Day the U.S. backed down

Three years into Operation Iraqi Freedom, more than 2,200 brave American soldiers have been killed on the battlefield and another 17,000 wounded. The cost has been tangible, both in human terms and financial, as U.S. and Iraqi forces continue to fight against a terrorist insurgency intent on pulling Iraq back to the third century. Today the mainstream media, alternative media and blogosphere will be full of analysis on the war in Iraq after three years, and there is probably little we could add to the discussion.

Instead we've considered the alternative to going to war in March 2003 and look at the day of 19 March 2006, as the third anniversary of the day the United States backed down against Saddam Hussein, which would've been the result of a policy that many even today still advocate on behalf of.

The Containment Policy
In order to adequately assess where Iraq would've been today under Saddam Hussein, it is necessary to confront one myth; that there was some policy to return to in absence of taking military action. There in fact was no containment policy to return to and the idea that Saddam Hussein was "in a box" in March 2003 is a falsehood. In the past Senator McCain has confronted this myth.

In the end, you're faced with a choice on how you spend your dough. Sometimes, when faced with one more expensive repair on a car that's paid for you just decide enough's enough and take on the expense of a new car. ('78 Toyota Corolla, with 14 years and 165k miles on it, after two water pumps, one battery, one alternator, and a full set of U-joints... then starting to make expensive sounds from the clutch and transmission. Sometimes, you just can't keep a system running.)

In many ways that's what we've been faced with the dictatorships in the ME. Yes, they're noisy and require a lot of expensive maintenance. But the problems weren't bad enough to call for the costly option of war to clean out the whole mess.

Then 9/11 hit, and the 'Pay me now or pay me later' realization hit that it WAS later, and going the way we were would be much more costly than we would be willing to pay. (Not that there's some who wouldn't care what the price was, as long as the status quo didn't change.)

Saddam Hussein counted on a lack of will from the United States to act in March 2003, in the face of opposition they had built in the security council through France, Russia and China. An emboldened Hussein would've been unable to be contained any longer and would today have at the minimum chemical weapons and the delivery systems (ie. missiles and operatives) to launch attacks at a time and place of his choosing. With the blood of a million people on his hands through his open acts of war, support of terrorism, manipulation of sanctions and a campaign of terror he waged on the Iraqi people, there is little reason to believe that another 100,000 wouldn't have perished at his hands between 2003 and 2006 and we'd be faced with a far graver threat then the one that existed in March 2003. As with any war there have been miscalculations and mistakes made, but that doesn't diminish the fact this administration should be praised for acting against a known threat before it was allowed to fully crystalize.

J.

Damn - how unfair!

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Socialism Makes People Worse

Throughout much of last week, hundreds of thousands of students in France were angrily protesting.

They have been joined by the major French labor unions, which are threatening a general strike.

And what is this all about?

It is all about a new law in France that allows a company to fire a person under the age of 26, without cause, within two years of being hired.

As it happens, the whole point of the law was to encourage companies to hire young people. The unemployment rate among young people in France is 23 percent. And in many suburbs, it is double that. Meanwhile, French companies are understandably loath to hire 22-year-olds when they cannot fire them except "for cause," which under union rules means something like committing mass murder in the workplace.

What these massive demonstrations reveal is the narcissism, laziness and irresponsibility inculcated by socialist societies.

Enough generations of socialist policies have now passed for us to judge their effects. They are bleak. Socialism undermines the character of a nation and of its citizens. In simpler words, socialism makes people worse.

So... they're rioting because they don't have a job - and the guaranteed jobs they could get are few and far between - and they don't want the company owners to have the ability to fire them for cause.... so there's no real chance they'll have a job anyway.

Well. That sure makes sense.

J.

Well, looks like Ben Stein's got the answer.

Who's to Blame for High Oil and Gas Prices?: How Not to Ruin Your Life - Ben Stein/Yahoo! Finance

Executives of the big oil companies have been hauled before the U.S. Senate recently to defend their industry's recent mergers and record profits as American consumers face high oil and gasoline prices. I'm going to defend the big energy companies in this case, since I think they're not the reason for high prices.

Before you write me angry e-mails, dear reader, let me first lay down some street credibility. Yes, I'm a gray-haired guy now. But I've spent a lot of time in my life as an antipoverty lawyer in New Haven, Conn., and in Washington, D.C., helping very poor people with their legal woes. I also spent years as a lawyer working on prosecuting false and deceptive advertising.

Probably the lion's share of my adult life was spent writing about financial fraud for financial publication Barron's, and I helped put a number of fraudulent entities out of business. I also testified against a number of fraudulent managements in lawsuits, both state and federal, and I still often write about injustice in the boardroom.

That being said, I also know how a lynch mob operates.

J.

Well, may as well get it from the source. You don't need to have it interpreted, rephrased, or taken out of context.

President Discusses War on Terror and Operation Iraqi Freedom

Fact Sheet: Strategy for Victory: Clear, Hold, and Build

Looks like a plan to me. Will it work? I'll go out on a limb here and suggest it'll likely work better than anything the Democrats have...

Push back the terrorists. Limit their operational abilities. Give the Iraqi people the chance to make the country THEY would like through creating their own government. When they have a stake in it, they won't let folks destroy it.

J.

(And yes, I did pull out a duplicate post that had the second link in it. Just trying to avoid clutter, you know?)

Or so the impression is.

Yet tax revenues are up.

Overseas tax revenues are up. TaxProf Blog: ASA Releases Repatriated Earnings Explode After Tax Cut

Tax revenues in the US are up. TaxProf Blog: Growth in Federal Tax Revenues Since 2003 Tax Act (This could well be because of domestic debt-fueled spending.) Take a look at the chart here. That's a lot of spending going on.

Here's where the revenues are going. deviantART: Death and Taxes: ... by ~mibi I leave it to you to find your pet peeve.

Of course, not everyone's going to be happy with tax cuts. TaxProf Blog: CBPP Releases 50-State Ranking of Revenue Losers if President Bush's Tax Cuts Are Enacted

And some folks just don't care about their taxes. TaxProf Blog: WSJ: 39% Don't Take Steps To Minimize Taxes

But the IRS is looking to make a bit of money, on the EBay model... IRS Auction - Main Menu so you might want to poke around a bit. Nothing in Georgia, unfortunately. And the rest of the Treasury Department's got auctions of their own... U.S. Treasury - Seized Property Auctions including, of all things, an Army Reserve post.

But what about jobs? Well, it's odd. More jobs, jobless in February - The Olympian has a lot of folks applying for jobs, but low unemployment in the area. Unemployment rose last month as more sought work in Washington state - but that's not bad news since there were more jobs created. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we're at 4.8%.

That's not quite as low as in the middle of the tech bubble, but it's not bad at all. In fact, if you go here you can put in the start and end years you want, and see what the unemployment rate was like. If I'd known the unemployment rate was over 8% when I got out of the active duty AF, I might have been worried. Looks like it peaked at 10.8% in '82 - and if you go for the full range (from 1948 to 2006) it looks kind of on the choppy side.

Okay, job creation? Hmm. Here's another section of the same site - Bureau of Labor Statistics Data - and if you put in the same time frame (from 1948 to 2006, there was one hell of a spike in '83...

But for a more comprehensive summary of jobs, look here.

I may be wrong - but I'm not seeing an excessive amount of suckitude in the economy. Maybe things aren't as bad as projected? You don't get job creation in a depressed economy, neither do you get a rise in tax revenues.

J.

But then, this isn't 'man bites dog' news, and there's not a whole lot of blood being spilled by the appropriate people. So... why cover it?

Possibly because it's, I don't know, maybe RELEVANT?

Bill Crawford on Iraq on National Review Online

After I recently wrote a piece for NRO reporting on some good news from Iraq, I got a fair number of e-mails criticizing me for trying to distort the actual situation. I never meant to give a comprehensive account of how things are going in Iraq. I’m not, as my grandmother used to say, “trying to put lipstick on a pig.” There is a lot of bad news to reports, and I understand that. But the bad news is already being covered in the mainstream media just fine. What’s not being covered adequately is the good news. It is impossible to form an accurate opinion of the situation in Iraq unless both the progress and the failures are taken into account. My aim is only to tell the rest of the story — the part most people are not so well acquainted with. And that’s what I’ll continue here.

'Cause there's a million stories in Iraq - and very few of them involve IEDs or explosives.

J.

You know you're a parent when your child asks you to make a slug for 'performance reading'.

And you figure out that a rolled-up brown calf-high nylon sock looks just like a real slug, but a bit larger.

And that you can use a bent-out and reshaped staple for the antennae.

Of course, it's hard to come up with eyes to put on it (even to scale) so you fake things and put in a face with a Sharpie.

And then you sew up the bottom of the thing with brown thread - otherwise it looks like something a gynecologist would be VERY familar with.

So. After about 15 minutes of work (most of the time spent threading the blasted needle) we have "Some Smug Slug". About two and a half inches long, he smiled nicely for the camera.

Applause not neccessary - just throw money...

J.

On the bias the media's showing.

Radio Blogger

HH: Christopher Hitchens, does that reflect the mindset that you're talking about?

CH: In part it does, because it's very passive. In other words, you read all the time, people say, you could look at any of your today's newspapers and notice it, and say well, there's a civil war atmosphere, as if that was a criticism of the Bush administration, instead of the people like Zarqawi, who have been announcing for two years now that it's their plan to create a sectarian civil war by destroying the other side's Mosques in an unbelievable piece of facistic blasphemy. People look at you when they read about atrocities is if it's your fault for wanting to get rid of Saddam Hussein. This is simply illogical. It's a non sequitur. And you'll note the slight tone of hysteria and the nervousness, I think, in the over-assertive way that your man was just talking now.

HH: Yes, I did notice that.

CH: By the way, since he mentions Mr. Zarqawi, about whom I know a lot, Mr. Zarqawi was a very senior member of the bin Laden family. He probably had, and in my opinion, probably always did have the ambition to outdo Mr. bin Laden, and to become himself the great sheikh and a great leader. But he was a very important member of that gang in Afghanistan already, long before. And of course, if we hadn't gone to Afghanistan, if we'd left it in the hands of the Taliban and al Qaeda, he'd still be there. He wouldn't be in Iraq, so of course your man is correct again in saying we've made him worse. But what...has he thought of the logic of what he's saying? Of course Zarqawi would still be in Afghanistan if we left him alone.

HH: The logic of...

CH: I mean the whole thing is based on this unbelievably masochistic passivity, and which leads to people making elementary logical mistakes they wouldn't otherwise make, because they wouldn't otherwise be blinded by their predjudice.

HH: Last week, when we talked about Yugoslavia and the descent into genocide that Milosevic led, it was because Yugoslavia descended into civil war, and the slaughter became too high, that we had to go in. In Rwanda, the great shame is that in that civil war, the West did not intervene. Now it strikes me as exceedingly odd that on the left, there are voices who wish us to withdraw from Iraq because of the threat of civil war. Does that add up?

CH: Of course, if we had gone into Rwanda when we could have done, when we were warned, and when the United Nations commanders there were begging just for a slight increase in force that would have held off, or at least blunted the original genocidal attack, of course there would have had to be a moment where American soldiers fired on the people trying to commit genocide. It would have happened, and we would have been accused of starting a civil war in Rwanda if that had happened. And you know by who, as well.

HH: Right.

CH: Or we're just really glad...or even though we keep complaining and say oh, we're so sorry we did nothing, secretly we're relieved we didn't ever have to expose ourselves to the messy responsibility.

Is that what's preferable? That the US, instead of trying to be a force for good (however that might be defined) instead be reduced to cowering in a corner, whimpering and a target for any bullies of the world and turning away from where we might help and do good?

Like I said - thought provoking.

And in case you're wondering who Christopher Hitchens is -

Christopher Hitchens - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Christopher Eric Hitchens (born April 13, 1949) is among the best known and most controversial figures in contemporary media. He is a prolific author, journalist, literary critic, and public intellectual who is often described as a "contrarian".

Born in England, Hitchens was educated at The Leys School Cambridge and Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a third in PPE. He now lives in Washington, D.C.

Hitchens has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Nation, Slate, and an occasional contributor to many other publications.

Hitchens is known for his iconoclasm, anti-clericalism and atheism, anti-fascism and anti-monarchism. He is also noted for his acidic wit and his noisy departure from the Anglo-American political left. He was formerly a socialist and a fixture in the leftist publications of Britain and America. But a series of disagreements beginning in the early 1990s led to his resignation from The Nation shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

He is a vociferous critic of what he describes as "fascism with an Islamic face," and is now sometimes described as a "neoconservative" or a "Liberal Hawk," though his idiosyncratic ideas and positions preclude easy classification.

Hitchens no longer considers himself a socialist, but maintains that his political views have not changed significantly.

Update: There's also an interview with Michael Yon on how the mainstream media covers Iraq. Ah, the internets. So chock-full of interesting crunchy stuff.

J.

Comments closed due to spam.

Could be...

by_photo: день второй

Good luck, guys!

J.

Because the AP says he's innocent.

Power Line: Saddam: Pure As the Driven Snow!

The upshot - with millions of documents and thousands of hours of tape to go through (Saddam had an almost Nixonian obsession with making sure his words got saved for posterity) the AP's picked a couple of lines from one transcript and are trying to spin them into Saddam being innocent on WMDs. However, there's other stuff that would seem to contradict that....

Male 2: True Sir, but the information that came to the Special Committee didn’t all come at the same time. They get some information, then a little more, and so on and so forth. So it looks like they got the information in the fall of last year. ... Right now Sir, this is a meeting of the highest leadership in our country, we did actually produce biological weapons. It’s not a lie to say that we worked in this field. And the materials that came here came for this purpose, not for the medical use like we told the Special Committee. So when there’s proof, you are a man of law, when there’s a case in a court, and there’s proof, it leads to the conclusion.

So the conclusion that the Special Committee came to is correct, it’s not a lie. The conclusion said that you imported a large quantity of materials that are used for medical purposes, and at the same time they are raw materials to produce biological weapons. You said it’s for medical purposes, using it for medical purposes only requires kilograms not tons. Meaning that the Ministry of Health can use 200 kilograms the entire year for examinations, but it doesn’t use 37 tons.

We tried to tell them about mistakes that could happen, and how Health Ministers... They see two issues sir, they see some very efficient and accurate actions from us, and they see some mistakes. But when we exaggerate the mistake, they’ll say: you guys are efficient and accurate, know exactly how to work a machine, you were able to establish this big military program with little resources, nobody helped you, but you want us to believe that buying 37 tons was by mistake? So the biological issue...

37 tons is a bit over 33565 kg. At the rate of 200 kg/year (which isn't clear from the transcript) that's about 168 years' worth. Seems a bit odd they'd buy that sort of bulk, don't you think?

Maybe I'm wierd, but here's what I want from the reporting on a story. I want facts. I want the 'who, what, where, when, why, and how' on a story. I want as complete an overview of the story as it's possible to get. I want to be sure that the reporter is covering all angles of the story, not just angles that will show the story as he thinks it should be shown. Do the reporting, show all the relevant facts, and don't jump to conclusions about what I should think about the issue, okay?

J.

Not hardly. Seems there was a rescue in Iraq - three hostages from the same group that sponsored Tom Fox, the poor fool. Who rescued them?

The bad guys.

Associated Press Pop-up Link

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- U.S. and British troops Thursday freed three Christian peace activists in rural Iraq without firing a shot, ending a four-month hostage drama in which an American among the group was shot to death and dumped on a Baghdad street.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. military spokesman, said the hostages were being held by a "kidnapping cell," and the operation to free the captives was based on information from a man captured by U.S. forces only three hours earlier.

No kidnappers were present when the troops broke into a house in western Baghdad. The captives' hands were tied, Lynch said.

"They were bound, they were together, there were no kidnappers in the areas," Lynch told a news briefing.

Wrong.

Pulse24 - Toronto's News has the press release by the CPT folks. You can also find it here. There's no mention of how they were rescued - but they were 'safely released'. Undoubtedly due to the goodness and purity of their hearts and cause, right?

I suppose I can understand it - their entire philosophy is based on non-violence, and that they had to be rescued by violent means and men had to gall them considerably. But, as Hitchens described in his interview there's a certain "unbelievably masochistic passivity" going around, and in this case it might almost be inferred that these people missed their chance at a glorious sacrifice for their beliefs, and because of that they're not going to mention or publicly thank the folks who saved them. Because, after all, what's the point in putting yourself in danger to follow your ideals of nonviolence and passive resistance against the US military if the someone who gets you out of that danger IS the US and Iraqi military?

They were much more useful to the peace movement as hostages. Being rescued dropped their credibility considerably as well as embarrasing them.

J.

Why is it the first response to any opposition or dissent is met with suggestions that explosives be used?

Gateway Pundit: Danish Imams Threaten to Blow Up Moderate Muslim Politician

(Sadly, I'm thinking that there's a whole lot more that's not visible that would really disabuse me of the notion of the RoP being a worthwhile religion.)

J.

I'm getting a used laptop for the little guy's birthday. Hey, he's 8, it's an IBM T-22, and I'm getting it real cheap. However, real cheap means no OS. I can put Linux on it with no problems. I've already slapped Linspire (which is pretty, but you've got to go through their 'store' for downloads) and I've put on Debian - which is command-line and pretty opaque.

So - in your opinions what would be the best Linux distribution for a kid? I'm thinking ease of use is vital, and network connectivity isn't vital.

Thanks for offering your opinions!

J.

As you've probably gathered, I'm kind of proud of the little guy. Well, today something's going on that I never got to do in grade school (or high school, for that matter). He's in a spelling bee, with 7 other schools.

And according to She who is present at school functions - it's been a number of rounds and he's not out yet. (Seeing I haven't heard from her since 10:50, and there'd been 4 rounds, I'd say he's up to round 7.)

We've gone over his words, and he's pretty good - so we'll see where it ends up. I'll post again later when I've got news.

J.

So far so good - it's 11:35 and he's not come out yet.

I'm glad I'm not there - I'd be chewing my fingernails.

J.

I've been informed by She Who Is There that the 2nd Graders have had a quick bathroom break. Well, what goes in must come out, right?

And he's hanging in there! Man, the suspense is getting to me...

J.

Pretty darn good! He was number 15 in a field of 38. That's pretty darn good, I think, stacked up against the best 2nd grade spellers of 7 other schools. (And a girl in his class he likes placed at #10.)

Tonight, it's party time! Dinner out - and he wants... SUSHI!

All righty then! He's earned it!

J.

SPACE.com -- SpaceX Reports First Falcon 1 Rocket Lost

Well, I'm sure they learned a lot from this - better luck next time!

J.

Okay, I know the Dems have to be the opposition party - but there comes a time when simply being contrary is stupid.

Camp Saddam

REPRESENTATIVE John Murtha, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, appeared on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, March 19, to evaluate the war in Iraq on its third anniversary. Murtha, a decorated veteran and longtime hawk, has become a leading spokesman for his party on the war. And on the show, he spoke of what "probably worries me the most" about the U.S. effort in Iraq. The war, said Murtha, is a diversion from the global war on terror.

"There was no terrorism in Iraq before we went there," said Murtha. "None. There was no connection with al Qaeda, there was no connection with, with terrorism in Iraq itself." This is now the conventional wisdom on Iraq and terrorism. It is wrong.

A new study from the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, paints quite a different picture. According to captured documents cited in the study and first reported in THE WEEKLY STANDARD in January, the former Iraqi regime was training non-Iraqi Arabs in terrorist techniques.

But we already know he was sponsoring terrorism, paying Palestinian suicide bomber familes $25k each. (Thus proving his benevolence, I guess - but he sure couldn't be bothered to spend that dough on his OWN people...) And apparently there was some sponsorship of Phillipines groups too. Terrorism isn't exactly something that spreads without some pretty diligent work on someone's part - and it looks like he was trying to establish Iraq as a terrorist clearing house.

The publication of the Joint Forces Command study, called the "Iraqi Perspectives Project," coincides with the release by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence of several hundred documents captured in postwar Iraq. There are many more to come. Some of the documents used to complete the study have been made public as part of the ODNI effort; others have not.

It is early, but the emerging picture suggests that the U.S. intelligence community underestimated Saddam Hussein's interest in terrorism. One U.S. intelligence official, identified only as an "IC analyst" in the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on Iraq, summarized the intelligence community's view on Iraq and terrorism with disarming candor: "I don't think we were really focused on the CT [counterterrorism] side, because we weren't concerned about the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] going out and proactively conducting terrorist attacks. It wasn't until we realized that there was the possibility of going to war that we had to get a handle on that."

J.

Well, maybe just a little...

Gateway Pundit: Ouch! Photos Show Iraqi & Russian Defense Reps Days Before War!

Yet this... Two Russian generals were photographed receiving awards from Saddam Hussein's government for helping Iraqi military forces less than 10 days before the U.S.-led invasion. is probably going to be spun as Saddam thanking Russia for humanitarian efforts...

Well, it'll be interesting to see the spin.

J.

Attack targets al-Sadr home - Conflict in Iraq - MSNBC.com

Shortly after the attack, the cleric issued a statement calling for calm.
“I call upon all brothers to stay calm, and I call upon Iraqi army to protect the pilgrims as the Nawasib (militants) are aiming to attack Shiites everyday,” he said ahead of Wednesday’s commemoration marking the death of the Prophet Muhammad.

However, he's really stuck between a rock and a hard place. His influence seems to be significantly diminished from its peak - and it's only going to get worse. And I believe he knows he's screwed no matter which way he goes.

Well, he tried for the whole ball of wax and failed. Time to retire, I'd think.

J.

This is a very interesting series of essays by someone who knows a whole lot more about France than I ever will, and I find his conclusions very disturbing and worrisome. Essentially, France has got some major problems - and the people are both denying the problems and fighting any attempts to come up with even the least solution to any of the problems or their precursor situations.

France is paralysed, and may well be dying. I urge you to read the essays - especially the last one if no others, the first two are a bit academic, but the last four are the meat - and I hope like hell that the writer is wrong in his conclusions. But I think he's a lot more right than I'd like to see. We may win the ME - but lose Europe.

Augean Stables ? Essays on France

And yet, over the last five years, a stunning transformation has taken place in Europe, made all the more rapid by the radical denial that has marked mainstream European attitudes until this day. If civic Europe survives — which I passionately hope it does — these opening years of the 21st century will be remembered as a period, much like the 3os, when well intentioned people made consistently foolish choices, deepening their danger.

The essays included here mark my own awakening to the problem which, despite my sense of foreboding in the 1990s, I could not have imagined.

Is something we've become used to in the media. Although it's a bad thing even when trivial, as Daffyd over at Big Lizards points out it's getting a lot worse.

It's difficult for me to take what I see regarding Iraq at face value if it comes from AP or UPI (I'm marginally more trusting of UPI than AP - but it's perhaps 1 or 2%) because I'm pretty convinced that the whole story is going to be discarded or twisted out of recognition for the big three reasons- blood, pain, and making the US look bad. Blood and pain is understandable - after all, good news doesn't get viewer eyeballs back the way blood and angst does, and since you've got to get the eyeballs to get the ratings, and you've got to get good ratings so you can charge more for your commercial time - good news just doesn't make it. (Aside from an occasional bit of human interest, something fluffy and meaningless that can be inserted in a 20 second slot to remind the viewer/listener that not all is doom and horror.) And when you've got a mindset that the US is certainly wrong in the first place, then no matter what occurs it can be spun to fit your script.

But the handling of the events in Iraq this weekend... well, it's pretty interesting the spin they've put on things. And to make it worse, the numbers they quote don't even add up to the total. So why pay attention to what they're reporting, if they won't try to do a decent job?

Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “AP's Mainscream Media Bias”

It's time for the American people to really come to grips with the terrible information crisis we have: our major source of understanding virtually everything is an industry that no longer cares about getting it right -- if they ever did.

UIpdate - and it's not just on Iraq or the economy, either.

Good news gets lost in space station shuffle - Space News - MSNBC.com

HOUSTON - Two veteran spacemen are completing their six-month expedition aboard the international space station, and to report on their achievements, NASA conducted a news conference this week with top program officials and scientists.

NASA astronaut Bill McArthur and Russian cosmonaut Valery Tokarev have performed spacewalks, space redockings, experiments and observations substantially above the planned program, and a suite of hardware repairs that had hitherto not been considered feasible.

But from most of the post-conference news coverage, you’d think they had lost their spacesuits and broken the station’s driveway.

The headlines sounded pretty scary: “Spacewalks halted” ... “Spacewalks temporarily suspended” ... “Spacewalks put on hold.” But the truth is that no extravehicular activity has been delayed, by as much as a minute. The next outing on the schedule isn't until July. And even if an earlier spacewalk suddenly becomes necessary, the preparations would proceed at the normal pace.

Maybe that'll change if they're called on it - but I don't think it likely.

J.

glumbert.com | media | Master Juggler

Wow.

J.

UW Madison was host to the International Conference on Islam. It got no MSM coverage, for reasons which will probably be pretty clear.

madison.com | Moderate Muslims Sighted

I managed to see some of the session on Muslim Integration & the EU and also Islam & Dialogue. I also got to sit down with the chair of the organizing committee, UW grad student Mustafa Gokcek. I hereby declare my search for moderate Muslims to be over, Mr. Gokcek and the folks at this conference offer a stark contrast to the Islamists, and ought to be getting our attention and assistance.

We discussed a number of the issues weighing on the minds of many including, primacy of Sharia law v. Civil law, Turkey as a Muslim democracy (Mr. Gokcek is Turkish and I have spent time there), The assimilation (or lack of) by Muslims in Europe among other issues. Mr. Gokcek was an informed and articulate spokesman for the majority of Muslims who rarely get the press the jihadis do. I have spent plenty of time opposing the extremists and calling for moderate voices to oppose the hateful messages that get so much attention. Well this conference went off with very little coverage from the MSM, something Mr. Gokcek noted during our talk. I think we need to focus more of our time helping these folks get the message of tolerance and co-existence out, even though it is easy to focus on the hate from the extremists.

That's progress, and it's good to see.

J.

(At least, as far as I'm concerned - your mileage may vary.)

Apparently Farscape's gone for (relative) good, because one of the main Characters is now over on Stargate SG-1. This isn't terribly suprising - I've seen Claudia Black in the SG character listings, though I haven't seen any of her episodes yet. Looks like she didn't get in until the 2005 episodes, and I'm still on season 5. But, she's not alone. Looks like Ben Browder is there also.

Well, eventually Netflix will get them. And I'll enjoy them when it does.

J.

Chris Bliss did it with 3.

This guy does it with 5.

I wish I was that coordinated.

J.

Take government out of the equation - pay everyone $10k/year, mandate $3k into health insurance, $2k into an indexed based stock fund. And drop a lot of the other things that government does, like medicare and social security.

Workable? Or not? Take a look at this and tell me what you think...

OpinionJournal - Featured Article

The Plan confers responsibility for dealing with human needs on all of us, whether we want it or not. Some will see this as a step backward, thinking that it is better to pay one's taxes, give responsibility to the government and be done with it. I think an alternative outlook is wiser: The Plan does not require us all to become part-time social workers. The nation can afford lots of free riders. But Aristotle was right. Virtue is a habit. Virtue does not flourish in the next generation because we tell our children to be honest, compassionate and generous in the abstract. It flourishes because our children practice honesty, compassion and generosity in the same way that they practice a musical instrument or a sport. That happens best when children grow up in a society in which human needs are not consigned to bureaucracies downtown but are part of life around us, met by people around us.

Simply put, the Plan gives us back the action. Institutions and individuals alike thrive to the extent that they have important jobs to do and know that the responsibility to do them is on their heads. For decades, the welfare state has said to us, "We'll take care of that." As a result, we have watched some of our sources of life's most important satisfactions lose vitality. At the same time, we have learned how incompetent--how helpless--government is when "taking care of that" means dealing with complex human needs. The solution is not to tinker with the welfare state. The solution is to put responsibility for our lives back in our hands--ours as individuals, ours as families, and ours as communities.

I don't think this'll fly, however - there's too many entrenched bureaucracies that would fight this tooth and nail. And if something as rational as the FairTax won't even make it on the table for discussion, I don't see this even getting into the building, much less the room.

J.

Dub Wheels - Custom Wheels and Performance Tires at Customwheel.com

I'm... amazed. But not speechless. That was reserved for Spinner Teeth - a product at one time sold by TripleXgoldteeth. They seem to have stopped making them. Civilization is saved.

J.

Nixonian in his hubris, Saddam had pretty much everything recorded.

Bad move, that.

Power Line: More From Saddam's Archives

A reader calls our attention to another of the audio tape recordings from Saddam Hussein's office. This one is ISGQ-2003-M0004667, and appears to have been recorded around 1996. Like most of the audiotapes, it is rambling, confusing and often incoherent. The ambiguity of most of what Saddam and his henchmen say is maddening. However, there are some interesting nuggets. This one suggests that the Russians have been paid off:

We have succeeded in a few of the U.N. paragraphs, we have won Russia, ahhh ... we have convinced Russia by way of generous accounts [payoffs], in which, you remember how and why it happened...

Iraq's lies to the U.N. inspectors are again acknowledged, although the actual state of Iraq's weapons programs at the time can't be deduced from the tape:

They have a bigger problem with the Chemical progam than the Biological program, a lot bigger...

It is not the weapons, the size of the imported material, the size of [UNINTELLIGIBLE] that we presented to them or the size of the stockpile. They knew that not all of this was true. We have not told them about the size or kind of Chemical weapons that we produced, and we have not told them the truth about the imported material. Therefore, sir, if they want to raise an issue, I mean, they will see that our argument is the issue of the Biological program.

It is clearly stated that nuclear materials were moved out of Iraq, and it seems, although less clearly, that Iraqi "teams" were still working on nuclear weapons:

Sir, where was the Nuclear material transported to? A number of them were transported outside of Iraq. *** Sir, about the Nuclear program, we say that we have uncovered everything. In addition, we have an unannounced problem with the Nuclear program, and I think they know about it. I mean, there is working teams that are working and some of these teams are not known to anyone.

As we've said before, each of these documents is a very small piece of a very large mosaic, and it would be a mistake to try to draw conclusions prematurely. But some of these comments are certainly suggestive.

J.

'Hillary Clinton is too sexy to be president' - Newindpress.com

LONDON: Sharon Stone says former first lady Hillary Clinton should wait before running for president because she is too sexy for the post.

According to contactmusic.com, Stone says the New York senator should take her place in the White House but only after she has lost some of her sexual power.

Check below the fold for the phrases.

There is something seriously wierd and wrong in Hollywood when the likes of Hillary Clinton is considered 'sexy'. Maybe by a certain gender with proclivities towards their own sex, and as we all know for some folks power is exceedingly sexy and erotic - but..

Hillary? Damn. No. Nope. Ain't hardly. No way, no how. And that Sharon Stone would suggest it...

Man. Talk about a revolting development.

J.

Picture of the Week

That's going to be trouble. Hope they're landing on a grass strip...

J.

Our public school system is a mess, and it won't be getting better soon.

Mike-o-Matic - the thoughts of Michael Andreyakovich - Home schooling and other nasty business.

Perhaps I should not have children. Better for all concerned. I have not the patience either to teach or to deal with the stupidity of the American educational system. I have no intention of bringing a child into a world that will pick him up, put him through twelve years of shit, and leave him functionally retarded.

Not that it can't be done, of course - I've got friends with kids in public school who are getting good educations, but they hold the teachers' feet to the fire and make sure they do their jobs, and the stories I've heard from them and from friends who are teachers are simply incredible. As I said, it's a wonder that kids graduate with any sort of education at all.

So go take a look at Mike-O-Matic's blog. He's a good guy, I think. And I'm adding him to the list on the right.

J.

Don't tell the California EPA.

Follow the link for a story about a bureaucracy run totally amuck, and find out how it could be a problem that'll destroy aviation museums nationwide.

The Pilot's Lounge #96: Bureaucrats Or Radium Dials -- Which Poses A Greater Danger?

J.

That means it was legal.

FISA judges say Bush within law?-?Nation/Politics?-?The Washington Times, America's Newspaper

A panel of former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges yesterday told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that President Bush did not act illegally when he created by executive order a wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).

The five judges testifying before the committee said they could not speak specifically to the NSA listening program without being briefed on it, but that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not override the president's constitutional authority to spy on suspected international agents under executive order.

"If a court refuses a FISA application and there is not sufficient time for the president to go to the court of review, the president can under executive order act unilaterally, which he is doing now," said Judge Allan Kornblum, magistrate judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida and an author of the 1978 FISA Act. "I think that the president would be remiss exercising his constitutional authority by giving all of that power over to a statute."

The judges, however, said Mr. Bush's choice to ignore established law regarding foreign intelligence gathering was made "at his own peril," because ultimately he will have to answer to Congress and the Supreme Court if the surveillance was found not to be in the best interests of national security.

The panel of judges unanimously agreed that the law should have been changed before now to deal with new threats from terrorists and new communications technologies, a point made by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat.

"It is confusing that if you take something off of a satellite it is legal, but if you take it off of a wiretap it's not," she said. "We need to include new technology."

(I mean, if even FEINSTEIN can recognize that, you'd think it'd be clear to everyone.)

J.

4.5 years after 9/11, the Democrats finally have a policy statement.

Democrats Pledge to 'Eliminate' Osama - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON - Congressional Democrats promise to "eliminate" Osama bin Laden and ensure a "responsible redeployment of U.S. forces" from Iraq in 2006 in an election-year national security policy statement.

In the position paper to be announced Wednesday, Democrats say they will double the number of special forces and add more spies, which they suggest will increase the chances of finding al-Qaida's elusive leader. They do not set a deadline for when all of the 132,000 American troops now in Iraq should be withdrawn.

Yeah. Sure. Especially after Cynthia McKinney showed how tough she is (and by extension, the superpowers of ALL Democrats) by slugging a cop. At a security checkpoint. In the Capitol. (Man, that woman CANNOT look good for a camera. I'm sorry to be a lookist, but every picture I've seen of her makes me think she's looking for the guys with the white coats to come drag her back to the hospital.)

But anyway - I'm supposed to trust Democrats who have consistently shown they're out of relevant ideas, actively fighting damn near anything proposed by Republicans as far as the economy and the WoT goes, and willing to cut and run in Iraq and (if they get into power and do their usual) Afghanistan if they think it'd get them a few votes?

I'll look at what they've got - but they have to have something BETTER than what's going on now, and something more than a half-assed policy statement. They'll have to have WORKABLE ideas instead of half-baked, half-formed concepts that have the block "Then A Miracle Occurs" right before their expected results in their flowchart.

And I just don't think they've got it in them. They've been substituting meaningful-sounding words for actual actions and actual results for the last 30 years. That won't cut it.

J.

You know, I would never have thought twenty years back that I'd even THINK about a laptop computer for a child. Laptops, if available, were hideously expensive (like the GriD Compass) or pretty limited (like the TRS-80 models 100 and 200) and not something you'd hand over to an 8 year old.

And then fast-forward 20 years. I bought an off-lease laptop for less than a tenth of its price new. I've put the Knoppix distribution of Linux on it (and a big thank you to Daniel K. for the suggestion on that particular flavor of Linux...) and I'll be getting it ready for the little guy's 8th birthday with a whole lot of games and educational stuff. It's probably a bit early, and certainly an extravagant gift, but I'm wanting him to see the technology that's part of his life as something that's background, not something special.

I look at that last sentence, and think how wierd that would seem just twenty years back. Not see computers as something pretty darn amazing? My father, a SF buff and a radar technician in WW2, who worked on the early ballistic calculators with ferrite core memory can't seem to wrap himself around how to use one of these. (To give him his due, he's 87.) It's not that he doesn't have the desire, it's just that there's other things to do and it's got a low priority. At least right now.

But in the future? He wants to learn. He sees the transformational power of the internet, but he doesn't grasp just how far it extends. I want the little guy to see it as background - to use it as casually as I use a cell phone. To have it be a part of his background, of his environment.

I must be nuts.

J.

Squid

Well, who knew baby squid could be so cute? Must be the big eyes...

Whoops. It ain't a baby squid, it's a Euprymna scolopes. Third cousin, twice removed to cthulu...

J.

If someone came up with a petition for Borders and B&N to not sell a book because they found it offensive - the management would laugh and order more copies.

But if the possibility of offending a Muslim is brought into the equation, they'll self-censor in a heartbeat.

The American Thinker

The liberals were right: our civil liberties are slowly disappearing now that George Bush is president. Of course most of the liberals not only seem to approve of these infringements on our freedoms they initiate them-all in the name of the highest ideals of liberalism. Political correctness and sensitivity and all that. And all in the name of religion. But only one religion-Islam.

Yep, its those cartoons again. Mustn’t see them because they are oh so disrespectful, so hurtful. And of course they cause riots. Recently the lack of freedom to view these cartoons occurred in the in one of the main centers of American liberalism—New York. And now a major bookstore chain got religion.

Borders and Waldenbooks have refused to display and sell the April-May issue of the magazine Free Inquiry because of those dreaded cartoons.

That's just plain sad. It's pretty bad when booksellers who have railed against prohibitions on various pieces of literature cave. They'd fight if someone was trying to force them to ban that magazine, I'm thinking - but here they're just laying down and asking for the boot.

J.

Doc Sanity's suffering a bit of burnout. Can't say I really blame her - she's getting a LOT of hate mail. It's starting to get not-fun for her, which is a real shame because I greatly enjoy her take on current events.

But one of the guys in the comments on that, Shoprat by name (who is, as far as I'm aware, no relation to YelpRat from the old Myriad days...) wondered how people can manage to post something on a daily basis. I replied to that with what I thought about the process, and later on realized that there might be quite a few folks who were interested in blogging but weren't sure how to go about it all.

So here's my bit on the Who, What, Where, When, Why,and How of Blogging...

Who? You - if you want. It's not at all hard. You can start off with a Blogger account and get your feet wet, and if it's for you then you can go on to the more complex stuff like Moveable Type and get your own domain and hosting.

Firstoff - figure out who you are. (Admittedly, this will take longer for some folks than others.) You know what your interests are, your likes and dislikes. Come up with a fairly unique title, and go from there.

Now - WHAT do you blog about? Anything and everything. I've blogged myself on everything from the abiotic oil controversy (admittedly just a little bit) to to odd things found in Google Earth to Minuteman Launch Command Center hardware to military affairs to the little guy's Spelling Bee experience to Bush's reserve attendance to baby squid. (The oil and Minuteman stuff got lost in blog meltdowns.) (And at the risk of reigniting old controversies, here's a bit more about Bush's attendance from Mudville Gazette and Baldilocks posted her thoughts here, here, here and here. You won't find a Personnel Specialist who says he was AWOL or missing or whatever, so It's a non-issue, okay? Besides, he's not running in 2008.)

Blog about what you know. Blog about what you think. Blog about what interests you. Blog about things you've done, things you've planned to do, blog about what you're doing. If you're a current events junkie, check Drudgereport daily, check MSNBC and Foxnews, check blogs that lean toward your political viewpoints. Post your take on what's going on inside the Beltway or in Iraq or Thule, Greenland or Coober Pedy in Australia. The point is to take what's interesting to YOU and blog about it.

What else could you blog about? It's limitless! Space exploration or aviation float your boat? There's plenty of sites regarding that, and you're free to opine about anything you want. The face on Mars intrigue you? Investigate your suppositions and write about it! As well as boating, babies, blogs, bastard swords, costuming, sci-fi fandom, the SCA, sex, biology, psychology, medicine, ships, cars, planes, trains, Pixar, Disney, books, movies, manga, medicine, architechture, alternate energy sources and whathaveyou. Follow your interests wherever they might lead - the internet is the greatest research tool ever invented, and the sheer mass of information out there is incredible. You might even learn something!

So - WHERE do you blog? There's two 'wheres' involved here. You can blog wherever you've got a computer that'll let you get to your blog software. Simple, isn't it?

As to where you blog - if you're referring to the location on the web you blog AT, then you've got two main choices.

First, you can use Blogger or Movable Type. There are other blogging software packages out there, but I'm using these because I'm familiar with them. Feel free to try out other solutions. I'm using these as generic examples, and your mileage may vary.

Blogger is a good starting point. You can familiarize yourself with blogging, and with the HTML coding that goes with it if you like. Lots of folks never get beyond blogger, and I probably woudn't have myself if 1and1 Hosting hadn't offered a damn good deal on a 3-year test drive of their packages. At the end of the second year I started using one of their paid-for hosting packages - and though you can find slightly cheaper I don't think you can find any better. Their FAQs will walk you through setting up FTP accounts and domains, and the instructions which come with the MT package will get you through the site setup - and from then on in you can do pretty much anything you want.

Now - just WHEN do you blog? Whenever you want. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, lunchtime, at work when it's slack if you've got a desk job and internet access, whenever you've got five minutes to string a few sentences together about an idea and post it or a couple of hours to put together a really long screed about something which offends you - you choose the time. As far as discipline goes - If you want to blog daily just make sure that no matter what you put up something daily - even if it's only a very short "Well, isn't THIS neat" post about a tiny squid. And if you don't - then don't!

Now the big one - WHY do you blog?

I'd say there's as many reasons to blog as there are bloggers. Some do it to practice their language and editing skills. Some do it because they want to post pictures, or stories, or just for fun. Some do it to explore ideas, putting them up and seeing what others have to say. Some do it because it's the only way their ideas or thoughts will ever get any publication - because on the internet you can say pretty much whatever you want. Some do it for the hits, for the recognition. Some do it for money, though there's precious little money to be made unless you get a lot of hits. And I mean a LOT of hits. (I average 30 a day on a good week. If I were to cube that number, then triple it, I might be able to get enough ad revenue to quit my day job and blog full-time. Guess how likely I think THAT'S going to be...) So the chances are REALLY good that you're not going to get into the group that can support themselves ont heir blogging. (Don't give up your day job, in other words.)

Blog because you want to. Justification beyond that isn't necessary.

Now the final bit - HOW do you blog?

You type. A lot. You get an idea, go "Hmmm, I think I'll blog about that" - and then proceed to do so. Then you post it up, and wait for the comments to roll in. But try to observe some simple rules about what you post.

1. Write complete sentences, and form them into cohesive paragraphs. Breaking up a long post into paragraphs makes it a LOT easier to read. Proper sentence structure helps with that also. You might feel there's no reason to pay any attention to such things as punctuation and capitalization and your muse may impel you to write in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS or teeny tiny type with no punctuation or ways to tell where anything starts and that's okay! You can do that! But don't be surprised if you don't get many people coming back to your site again. Make it easy on the eye, you'll be doing yourself a favor.

2. Put up links to the stuff you find interesting. MT makes it easy, so does Blogger. That way, people can go see for themselves what you've found interesting. And this goes along with...

3. Don't cut and paste whole articles, unless they're really short. And remember to include a link to the original location and attribute the info to the orginal source - which goes along with...

4. Don't post shit as yours that you didn't create. It's called "plagiarism' and it's not polite. It can, in extreme cases, lead to lawsuits. Lawsuits tend to disrupt blogs, so you need to avoid them as much as possible.

5. Post opinion as opinion, not as fact. You can post fact as opinion and not have a problem - but opinion as fact is something else again. I've seen blogs that tout the health benefits of drinking your own urine. That's an opinion, not a fact, and it takes recycling one step too far if you ask me. But someone might see this, think it's a good idea (based on the 'if it's in print it's got to be true' theory of relevance) suck down some of their leftovers and get ill - which could lead to lawsuits. Lawsuits disrupt blogs - you need to avoid them as much as possible.

6. Above all, keep your sense of humor. You're going to make mistakes. If you use Blogger, it can be a real pain. If you roll your own with a hosting service and either MT or WordPad, you'll have the chance to learn PLENTY of new things, all the while practicing language that would make your mother blush. But there's a feeling of satisfaction when you get everything looking just right, and then fill it with what YOU want to blather about.

7. Back up your site regularly. Or not - it's your content, your site, so your decision.

And finally...

8. Have FUN with this. I've been blogging daily (minus family vacations, parental emergencies, surgery and a site meltdown or two) for a bit over four years now. I've had times when I couldn't get to a computer for a couple of weeks - you just pick up where you left off. Set yourself a daily schedule, or not. The important thing is to enjoy it - and if it's not enjoyable just put up one final post saying 'Well, it's been real but I'm outta here'... and go on to the next thing.

So - Have fun!

J.

Here ya go...

Orbox B

J.

I look at these pictures... and read the captions...

Gran Marcha, Los Angeles. March 25, 2006

What should I be thinking when I see this? "Poor, downtrodden Mexicans?" "Damn, what a bunch of idiots?" "Man, that looks like a real problem?"

I'm thinking the third.

It's going to be trouble. They push this, and it's going to get really ugly really fast.

J.

Who knew?

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog

Below are a couple of the requirements for King Richard when out travelling and visiting his subjects...

I. CHAMBRE

ITEM. the kynges chambre shal be adorned wyth tapestries depictinge the supremacye of kynge over subjectes by meanes of subtyl and lernede allegorie

ITEM. the kynges chambre shal be warmede wyth fiere-herthes vntil a mannes brethe turne not vnto myste

...

II. THE HALLE/FEESTES

ITEM. yn the hal shall be sette the biggeste damne throne that yow kan fynde. in no wys shal eny chayre yn the halle even compare to how bigge the throne ys. none shal sitte upon or touche the throne except oure lorde the kynge.

ITEM. feestes shal be held in hal at a goodlie tyme. if the kyng wish not to come to hall forto eten, yow shal not bugge hym aboute yt

Enjoy! (And check out the Brokeback Mountain parody, too!)

J.