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Who is more in tune with using Blogger: Schrödinger or Heisenberg?

Most days I think that Heisenberg has the edge, but when you are informed that you have posted an article but can’t access your blog to see if it’s there, I tend towards Schrödinger.

Oops, point to Heisenberg, we’re Bloggered Again.

But this time they have the Blogger Status site hosted by Google to say that they are down.

They say 7-8PM PST, which is 9-10PM my time. We’ll see how it goes.

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The Federal deficit is widely reported as $390.1 billion, but that doesn’t include $235.3 billion “borrowed” from the Social Security tax surplus.

The real deficit is $625.4 billion dollars, more than half, $350+ billion, went to interest on the national debt.

Borrow and spend, and in an election year with the Republicans in trouble you know the pork is going to be packed into every bill.

We’re spending tens of billions on Iraq and Afghanistan, but they don’t put that in the budget. This is how they run businesses, so they are running the government the same way, quarter to quarter, hiding the real bottom line.

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The BBC World Service went to Denmark for some background on the cartoon controversy and talked to people on the street.

If they hadn’t done that I would never have been aware that the current government of Denmark is a coalition that has a rightwing party involved. I also learned there are neo-nazis in Denmark, there are about 200,000 Muslim immigrants in the country, and there is a fundamentalist imam in Copenhagen.

Some people say that the newspaper at the heart of problem is a supporter of the rightwing party, but I can’t verify that claim, because I can’t read Danish well enough and I’m not in the mood to crawl through a newspaper with a Dansk Ordbog.

There are people calling for immigration reform [Minut Mennesker?], to prevent a flood of “swarthy foreigners” from displacing native-born Danes, or some such foolishness.

All politics are local. This started as a collision between the Danish right and this troublemaking imam. I know the imam is a troublemaker not only because a member of the Danish parliament who is a Muslim told the imam to shut-up or get out, but because the guy delivers his rants in English. If you are the leader of a congregation of immigrants in Denmark, why would you assume that congregation speaks English? If you are speaking to the world media and not the congregation, English is very useful.

This pattern is being reflected all over Europe, the rightwingers and fundamentalist Muslims start fights to play to their base. This time the problem got out of hand and the hardliners in the Muslim world are running with this “gift”. Thanks to the re-printing of the cartoons in newspapers across Europe as the whole thing was dying down, it has gotten worse.

The part about the rightwing component of the Danish government goes a long way towards explaining why the Danish foreign minister has refused to meet with the ambassadors for Muslim countries. He has lost a couple of embassies since he made that decision, and should probably call all Danes home before they get kidnapped and/or killed in the current frenzy.

If it hadn’t been the cartoons, it would have been something else. This is a continuation of what happened in France. Europeans invited in all kinds people to do the grunt work during the good times, and many European groups are trying to solve their problems by ejecting the children and grandchildren of those immigrants.

This thing has provided cover for every religious extremist in the Muslim world and set back the moderate voices a decade. The cartoons, with the exception of the one about running out of virgins, weren’t even amusing.

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