Posts from — June 2006

Because of the spam I’ve started closing comments, pings and trackbacks on posts after 31 days. If you want to comment on an old post, just add an OT: [Off Topic:] to a current post and we can work something out. If you haven’t noticed, I keep changing the date on the World Cup post to bring it forward as the data is updated.

The Florida Plates series will only ever have two plates stored at a time. The graphics are large and I don’t want to waste storage on them. If you go back a month, the link for the “beneficiary” will be unique for every post, but the graphic will only be one of the two most current.

The BBC has the details.

Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.

See All Hat and No Cattle for the context.

That was my original title for part of my “Heartless” post, below. Thesaurus Rex of Shakespeare’s Sister used the term in a post on the same general subject, and August J. Pollak’s latest cartoon is in a similar vein.

The comparison to Kabuki runs deeper than the obvious theatrical elements that we have been seeing lately in Congress, although the stereotypes and caricatures in themselves would be sufficient.

There are three periods in Kabuki and they are illustrative of Congress. Originally it was an all female art form with wit and promise that degenerated when less talented people entered the stage. It became entertainment for men with money and prostitution was rampant.

The first reform replaced women with young men, but the pattern was repeated and so many reforms and restrictions were placed on the form, including using only older male actors and freezing the repertoire. To save the art it was necessary to reduce the influence of men with money.

Maybe we could reduce Congressional prostitution by only electing women, because old men don’t seem to be the answer.

What’s the difference between George Bush and Kim Jong Il?

One’s a short, obnoxious, high-heel wearing moron who can’t speak English, and the other is the leader of North Korea.

You had to know this was going to happen as soon as they offered Iran a deal; Kim would want to know if Ahmadinejad’s deal was better than his. Kim doesn’t want to take the deal behind door number one if the grand prize is behind door number two.

CBS carries the standard story about what the US says is going on and all of the expressions of concern, real concern, and extreme concern various governments and individuals are making over the possible testing of a Taepodong-2 missile by the North Koreans. Well, except the Russians and the Chinese, who haven’t made a statement, which is kind of odd.

Laura Rozen has posted that the South Koreans have some doubts about the accuracy of the US intelligence on the test. The South is wondering if this might not be a test of one of the shorter range missiles designed to annoy the US and bring attention back to North Korea.

Let’s be clear: of all of the people on the planet who should have been eliminated immediately after Osama bin Laden was neutralized with extreme prejudice, Kim Jong Il has to be number one with a bullet. He has allowed his population to slowly starve to death while he plays games.

* Noh is a Japanese theater form.

First you need to understand the meaning of abu, which can be “the father of” [appropriate for Father’s Day] or “the guy with” depending on what follows.

For example, Abu Hamza could mean “Leo’s Dad” or “the guy who has a lion” or “the guy with the virtues of a lion”. Abu Ayyub could mean “Job’s Dad” or “the guy with the patience of Job”.

There might be a lot of kids named Leo, but I suspect that the popularity of Abu Hamza among thugs in the Islamic world is an attempt to paint themselves as tough. In the West we name people “the Lion-Hearted”, “Coeur de Lion”, or “Corleone”

When the US identifies the new leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, they are using kuniyat, nicknames. The guy is either “a lion-hearted migrant” [Abu Hamza al Muhajir] or “a patient Egyptian” [Abu Ayyub al Masri].

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This is supposed to be the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. According to the US briefers his name is Abu Ayyub al-Masri [nom de bomb Abu Hamza al-Muhajir] and a “known associate” of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri, who is definitely the number two in the original al Qaeda.

Okay, why is an Egyptian wearing a thobe and a ghutra with a agal on his head? That says Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States, not Egypt. Most Egyptians who use the keffiyeh [headscarf] wear it as a turban, like al-Zawari, but usually those who wear a hat, just wear a skullcap.

Parts of this guy’s résumé sound stolen from the “work history” of Abu Khabab al-Masri, an al Qaeda bomb maker that Pakistan claims to have killed.

Of course, he’s definitely different than Abu Hamza al-Masri, who lost an eye and both hands fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and now is in a British prison for preaching hate and violence.

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“Want a Smart Network or Dumb Pipe?”

That’s the new scam by the telcos and cable companies. From them you want a “dumb pipe”, because that’s their function in the Internet, already a very smart network.

The Internet is all about open standards; it doesn’t care if you have a Mac, a Wintel box, some flavor of Linux, whatever; it works. Everything is sliced into packets with “to” and “from” addresses and a sequence number. The packets flow to their destination by any path available and are reassembled at the other end. A simple, but elegant, solution that doesn’t get hung up when a hurricane rips up part of the network.

What the telcos and cable companies want to do is reserve part of the Internet and make it into a toll road. If you pay the toll you get preferential treatment.

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The result of the Republican reorganization of government: U.S. not ready for disasters.

Most American cities and states remain unprepared for catastrophes, a government analysis concludes, calling the shortcomings in emergency planning a cause “for significant national concern.”

Their contractors rip the country off: Documents Expose Sept. 11 Fraud.

The lead investigators for the FBI and the Federal Emergency Management Agency told AP that the plan to prosecute KEI for those thefts stopped as soon as it became clear in late summer 2002 that an FBI agent in Minnesota had stolen a crystal globe from ground zero.

That prompted a broader review that ultimately found 16 government employees, including a top FBI executive and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, had such artifacts from New York or the Pentagon.

They are looters and should be shot.

They don’t care if someone dies in service, dead soldiers are just “numbers”:

Question: Tony, American deaths in Iraq have reached 2,500. Is there any response or reaction from the President on that?

MR. SNOW: It’s a number, and every time there’s one of these 500 benchmarks people want something…

That’s right, Mr. Snow, they want to know when it’s going to end.

Apparently supporting the troops doesn’t include money for Fort Sam Houston to pay its utility bills.

The Republicans in Congress hold meaningless press events on our dime at the Capitol to pretend they care. Stupid worthless votes are taken to provide campaign ad footage with public funds.

A plague on both the Houses!

Please go over and extend your condolences to NTodd on the untimely and unexpected passing of his Mother.

In Memoriam

Festus

[Editor: She survived a raccoon as a kitten and a getting hit by a car as a yearling. She was too skittish to take to the vet so the only help I could ever offer was antibiotics in food near her “hiding place”. She was approximately 9 years old, born after Opal but she survived multiple hurricanes. The car accident damaged her pelvis so she was never a mother but she was a babysitter for the younger cats. She disappeared for a couple of days and I found her in her “hiding place”. She will be missed.

Friday Ark

Mustang Bobby highlights a Miami Herald article about a GAO study of the FEMA aid distributed after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

What may not be obvious from the reporting is that the GAO is talking about “worst case” when it says that up to 16% or $1.4 billion of the money may have been wasted through fraud and/or misuse. Scout of First Draft, your source for all things Katrina, notes that Facing South‘s Chris Kromm has dug deeper and notes that the estimate is based on a finding of 1,500 potential fraud cases with a total value of $16.8 million.

To put this in context on July 5, 2005 I wrote: “FEMA wants Floridians to return $27 million in aid ‘overpayments’ based on a review of the money that they handed out before the 2004 election. This does not include the money that FEMA handed out in Miami-Dade county; that Florida Senator Nelson pointed out was not actually struck by a hurricane.”

Given the devastation of Katrina and Rita, it looks like FEMA tightened up since the year before, but they are still not handling money very well.

For more context, Maru notes that Congress is going to get a cost of living pay raise of $3,300, a $1,765,500 budget increase, not counting the Judiciary increases that are tied to Congressional salaries.

John, by the grace of God, king of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and count of Anjou in the meadow which is called Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines, on the fifteenth day of June, 1215, signed the Great Charter in the presence of assorted heavily armed peers of the realm, who assured him it was the right thing to do.

The British Library has pictures of the Magna Carta available, and Wikipedia has a nice discussion of the document.

The Magna Carta of 1297 is permanently residing in the US National Archives.

The Avalon Project’s translation of the 1215 version with an index and definitions.

John abided by the charter for several months, before he returned to business as normal, but the principle was established – no one is above the law.