So what did the Shrubbery learn from the failure that was the evacuation of the New Orleans Convention Center?

Apparently nothing: In the USA Today article, Slow U.S. evacuation plans leave thousands stranded, we learn that an American embassy in a country in which there had been evacuations before, had no plan to deal with the problem.

The Detroit News article, Lebanon rescue plan: Cruise ship, informs us that they decided to rely on a cruise ship that could carry 750 to start ferrying people to Cyprus, but they don’t know when that will happen: “Americans have been told to wait for a phone call and that they can’t board the ship unless they’ve signed a contract agreeing to pay the U.S. government back for the price of their evacuation.”

This is dependent on a working telephone system, which is not a given in a country that is being bombed, and the ability to find somewhere safe to wait. It has been my experience that food and fuel have a tendency to become in short supply during daily bombing and it is usually better to stage people prior to evacuations so that things can be dealt with quickly.

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DJHLights as a truly disturbing post up about the what we are doing to the minds of our children.

This is why the haters win so often.

If you want a concrete, real world example of what the stem cell issue is all about Jack knows.

I’m not interested in bad interpretations of ancient works that people are unable or unwilling to read in the original language. If you haven’t read it in the original language, you haven’t read it.

Basing decisions on a willful ignorance of science, is not ethical, it is just ignorant. I heard all of this garbage back in the day about organ donations, and before that it was blood donations and vaccines. Every one of those things was portrayed as anti-religious and unethical, oh, you don’t want to know about what was said in the South about the possibility of “race mixing”. People, who could have been saved, died because of these attitudes, and that is not ethical.

Good thoughts, vibrations, prayers, etc. would be appreciated for Andante of Collective Sigh who is finally having her eye surgery.

She will be off-line for a week or so.

Tropical Depression 2 with the possibility of becoming Tropical Storm Beryl has formed southeast of the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

People on the coast might want to keep an eye on the weather for the next few days.

Update at 4:30CDT: Tropical Storm Beryl: 33.3°N 73.3°W winds of 40 Mph moving North

Via Sideshow the Guardian explains the background of Juan Cole’s remark: “They could have traded 3 Hizbullah members in their custody for the 2 Israeli soldiers.”

From the Guardian article, The framing of Hizbullah:

The prisoners Hizbullah wants released are hostages who were taken on Lebanese soil. In the successful prisoner exchange in 2004, Israel held on to three Lebanese detainees as bargaining chips and to keep the battle front with Hizbullah open. These detentions have become a cause celebre in Lebanon.

Nothing is simple in the Middle East.

The whole point of the Base Realignment and Closure process was to allow local community involvement in the process and to allow for planning as the Pentagon moved major units around.

Locally there were some minor losses and major increases at what everyone thought was the end of the process…except that Rummy doesn’t like playing by the rules any more than the Shrubbery.

When it was announced that the 16^th Special Operation Wing was moving from Hurlburt Field to Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, no one got upset. Hurlburt Field was getting the 1^st SOW to replace the 16^th, and the Special Ops guys needed a desert field for training.

Then the rumors started about the 46^th Test Wing moving from Eglin AFB to Edwards AFB in California. local tv and both the Pensacola News Journal and the Northwest Florida Daily News jumped on the story.

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