Posts from — May 2006

Everyone has probably seen the picture, Watertiger titles “Gidget Goes Gobi”, of the Shrubbery in a Border Patrol Chenowth Exodus sandrail¹ in violation of the Arizona seat belt law.

[Of course they need a custom-made vehicle from a company in Duncan Hunter’s [R-CA-52] district, don’t be silly]

He apparently has nothing better to do for his $400K/year.

1. A sandrail has a manufactured tubular frame, while a dune buggy uses a modified Volkswagen Beetle body. Get with it, Dude. [What some people think is important is a “puzzlement”.]

Katy vs. Car

I’m not afraid of that car, she always stops.

[Editor: Katy is one of the kittens from the ladder. She has an attitude. She won’t get out of the way when my Mother drives in. She moves for everyone else, but apparently knows that my Mother will drive around her.

Friday Ark

CNN has an overview of the hearings, which is painful for anyone with a memory to read.

NTodd focuses on the most egregious lie about the effectiveness of Hayden pet project, and Larry Beinart expands on the point.

This is my take:

Get real, you sniveling little twit. You were a three-star flag officer and a staff weenie, which makes you a busboy at the Pentagon. No matter what you had, no one in this administration was listening. Rumsfeld barely acknowledges the existence of four-star flag officers, and then, only if they agree with him and his magic plans to “reform the military”. You wouldn’t even have been able to get a memo past a receptionist at the Pentagon.

[Read more →]

Kevin Hayden at The American Street has been busy lately. He just finished changing servers and revamping the line up on the “Street” and now he has launched an Oregon-centered site: Wagontongues.

He was also kind enough to consider me someone who is fighting against the repression and criminal acts.

When you first read the article, U.S. Offers Anti-Proliferation Treaty, it seems reasonable, but the devil is in the details.

This treaty will take affect when the five permanent members of the UN Security Council [US, Russia, China, Britain, France] approve it. There is no provision for verification in the treaty. It is designed to produce an automatic Security Council resolution. It doesn’t address current stockpiles of weapons-grade material.

My guess is that the US has figured out that Russia and China are not going to go along with the US plan to get UN cover for an attack on Iran, so they are trying an end around to generate an automatic UN excuse.

The way this turkey is worded, the US claim of Iranian production of weapons-grade material is all that will be needed to get an automatic resolution.

The US might have more standing on this issue if the Shrubbery hadn’t violated the old Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by cutting a deal with India to supply nuclear material.

Oriskany, New York is the site of one of the bloodiest and most significant battles of the Revolutionary War. A group of primarily Dutch and German colonists stopped a force of British troops, Tories, and their Native American allies, blocking the Mohawk River valley. The casualties were so great that there weren’t enough men left in the valley to bury the dead.

As a result, when the Lexington-class of carriers were being built, ships that carried the names of important battles, one of them was designated the USS Oriskany.

Oriskany is my Mother’s hometown and where I happened to graduate from high school, [military brats see a lot of schools].

The Pensacola Beach Blogger reported the Oriskany was sunk off the coast of Pensacola yesterday to become an artificial reef. He also has links to the museum in the village and to pictures of the sinking.

In the BBC article on the Oriskany there is a link to video of the sinking.

Like many who saw service on the “O” in Korea and Vietnam, she was buried at sea, now she will be reborn as a habitat for fish.

Lance Mannion is subbing over at Michael Bérubé’s blog and he has a great comparison between the current US government and the government of Ankh-Morpork in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel: Guards! Guards!.

I’m a fan of Pratchett and have read all of the Discworld novels. This one has a 1989 copyright and is a great fit to our current situation. It’s hard to accept that there’s little difference between the US and a pizza-shaped world of witches, wizards, and dragons.

With these people in charge, you can forget political science research and turn to the fantasy writers to understand what’s going on.

CNet reports: Labels sue XM over music-storing ‘mothership’

XM said the Inno, which is manufactured by Pioneer, is a legal device that enables consumers to listen to and record radio, just as the law has allowed for decades.

While the labels are asserting that the device has transformed radio broadcasts into a download service, XM said the device does not allow consumers to transfer recorded content. XM also said content recorded from radio broadcasts like XM’s is not on demand, in contrast to the content people buy from online music stores like Apple’s popular iTunes service.

The Inno allows you to record the song that is playing on XM satellite radio and to play it later. It is stored on the device and royalties are paid when the songs are played over the radio.

Greed, plain and simple. They view their customers as criminals.

A married couple of some renown is separating, but that is no reason to either report on it or to pollute the world with bad puns of Beatle song titles.

It might shock the media to find out, but they are correspondents in many of these failed marriages.

Via TBogg we are reminded of the burgeoning sentience of machines: Heroic Computer Dies To Save World From Master’s Thesis.

Laura Rozen has discovered that Congress only plans to work 97 days this year.

I guess that’s why they can’t do any oversight, it would interfere with their four day weekend when they are in session. I think it’s time to look at their compensation package, including health care and retirement.

I don’t go to theaters anymore because the “megaplex” has become more of a large living room with a big screen television than a real theater, and the popcorn isn’t real. I long for the days of my youth when the theater was huge and the ingredients in the popcorn bucket were butter, popcorn, butter, and salt with extra butter available on request.

When listening to the BBC coverage of the Cannes Film Festival last night I was intrigued by the coverage of Opie Taylor’s new film, The DaVinci Code. While unable to go into detail because of a non-disclosure agreement, Vincent Dowd felt the film “verges on the mediocre”, but didn’t quite make it.

Obviously our own entertainment reporter, Mustang Bobby, scanned the initial reviews in The DaVinci Hose and finds that the movie is panning out, not a good thing.

Caroline Briggs in her formal BBC review essentially says it has all of the vices and none of the virtues of the novel.

The consensus seems to be that the villains are the best part of the movie.

Just in case you don’t read Michael, PZ Myers, Maru, Misty, Digby, Rook, or Steve, I would like to mention that being a member of Mensa¹ is no guarantee of common sense or even logical thought processes.

It would take one of the Solons of UseNet to decide if Godwin’s Law was violated, as the violator himself invokes the comparison about his own views on a matter.

What makes this obscene suggestion that the US invoke The Final Solution to deal with immigration problems even worse, is that the commission that oversees the official records of the concentration camps has just announced a change to make them more widely available.

The BBC reports on the Punctilious Nazi archive of death:

Archivist Udo Jost showed us the book from the Matthausen camp, which showed that hundreds of Russians termed “political prisoners” by the Nazis had died on 20 April, 1942.

The cause of death was filed as “shrapnel from bombing”. But the fact that the men died precisely every second minute, on Adolf Hitler’s birthday, suggests they were really killed on the commandant’s orders.

The archive contains records on 17 million people, men, women, and children, who were swept up throughout Europe. These people were “guilty” of being Jewish, Rom, disabled, homosexual, or dissenting.

Update: Steve Gilliard has Vox Day’s attempt to respond using the standard “reading comprehension” ploy, i.e. “you are too stupid to understand what I wrote.”

Poor Vox is in full “cat on a tile floor” mode, and I would note that the Matthausen camp is in Austria, so the Russian prisoners were imported, not deported. This was part of the Nazi “guest worker” program.

1. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a recovering Mensan. I left because they redesigned the Mensa Bulletin to make it more “modern”. This was accomplished by decimating the letters section to make room for worthless graphics and the use of a sans serif font that I found uncomfortable to read. The other members were good, bad, and indifferent. About the only difference from the common run of people was an insistence on citing sources for any claim made, just like blogs.

This is certainly a waste of time and paper: US bans arms sales to Venezuela.

Chavez doesn’t buy arms from the US. His last big deal was with Spain, and I think he buys AK-47s for his army.

The claim about Venezuela supporting Colombian guerrillas is a bit of smoke of mirrors. The Colombian military chased a guerrilla band into Venezuela, and the Venezuelan government got bent out of shape over the presence of Colombian troops on Venezuelan soil.

It’s not like the US would deploy thousands of troops to the US-Mexican border to prevent incursions… Oh, never mind.

Update: Via Michael in comments, Chavez is talking about selling Venezuela’s 21 F-16s to Iran or Cuba, since they can’t buy parts from the US.