Posts from — July 2006

Having apparently forgotten on the 10^th, skippy the bush kangaroo is celebrating his fourth blogiversary™ ^{[Talk Left]} today.

Maru, among others, posts on the Faux fascination with a DKos “Flame War”.

Flame War? The server still responds. That’s a “spark spat” not a FLAME WAR!!!

On the news groups an “all out, Godwin-inducing, your Momma, flame war” crashed servers, brought the backbone to a crawl, and had people standing by the router cabinet with a CO₂ fire extinguisher to keep it from melting. You had people adding memory and writing code to try to keep their mailboxes empty. You had university payrolls running late because of the overload on the system. Fuses would blow, circuit breakers would snap, and the discs in electric meters would “Frisbee” away.

What wimps.

If things look a little weird at your favorite TypePad sites it is not your imagination.  They were doing something last night that affected a lot of people and destroyed the best comment I ever made at Musing’s musings.

Ah, well.

Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Sudan, Mexico, Venezuela, Libya, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia – as long as all of these countries are stable and untroubled, the bulk of the world’s supply of oil can be pumped out of the ground and the price stays stable. At the moment, Libya is the least troubled.

Of course, increased tensions anywhere near these countries, or along the sea lanes from these countries to oil refineries can be a problem.

The price of a barrel of crude jumped $20 on threats to Iran, $5 on the North Korea missile tests, $5 on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, not to mention the existing problems in Iraq – none of which has anything to do with supply or demand, merely the perception of possible supply problems if things go bad.

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Valerie Plame has filed suit against Cheney, Libby, and Rove. [CNN MSNBC all breaking news flash only at this time.]

This could be interesting. Too bad the Supremes decided that it was alright to do this sort of thing to serving Presidents.

Update: CNN link.

I was otherwise occupied and didn’t make it to the used book sale this morning.

I’m not sure it would have mattered with prices like this: A rare complete copy of the First Folio of William Shakespeare’s plays has sold for £2.8m [$5.14 million] at a Sotheby’s auction. That’s a bit high for a book with scribbles in the margins that wasn’t signed by the author[s].

CBS is reporting that the Senate has compromised on Gulf drilling. The compromise is to put all of the drilling rigs off the coast on the western end of the Panhandle in Area 181.

It’s okay, the people in the western Panhandle vote Republican, so they won’t mind if their tourism is screwed and the military operations have to move elsewhere, because this is for the good of oil companies.

Florida Senator Mel Martinez, the choice of the “Big Oil” White House, crafted this “compromise” to the coasts of the Eastern Time Zone. John Ellis can’t run again, so he doesn’t care.

That 125-mile zone they keep talking about is 125 miles off the coast of the Peninsula, not the coast of the state. Look at the map in the article.

From BBC: Israel attacks Beirut’s airport.

This is around the bend and will start a major war. Ehud Olmert had better be given a reality check by the other parties, because things have gotten out of hand. There is no justification for this.

Shakespeare’s Sister, among others, is rather nonplussed by the statement of Administration toady attorney, Steven Bradbury, that: “The President is always right.”

Of this is not the same as Papal infallibility which was defined by the First Vatican Council of 1870. Heavens, no, that would be entirely too confining for the President, who has to deal with the important issues of the Global War on Terror. There can be no limits on the power of the President to always be correct.

Only counter-revolutionary forces would mention posters saying: “Der Führer hat immer recht.” There is no need to talk about Khrushchev [Хрущёв] and the speech to the 20^th Party Congress about Stalin’s “cult of personality” [Культ личности Сталина].

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Apparently distracted by Gaza, the Israeli army was surprised by a raid in which two Israeli soldiers were captured. In response Israel launches raids on Lebanon, losing a tank and four crew members almost immediately to a mine, so more raids continue.

Israel claims it was an “act of war”, but the lack of any settlement, other than between Egypt and Israel, since the 1967 Six-Day War makes it more accurately an “act during war.”

The reports call the Hezbollah raid a “cross-border raid”, but that would only be true if you think the Shebaa farms area belongs to Syria, rather than Lebanon, which is still in dispute. What is not in dispute is that it is occupied by Israel and Hezbollah wants them out.

Hezbollah regularly sends rockets into what it considers to be part of Lebanon. The rockets are directed at Israelis occupying the area. These actions are considered “liberation” activities, not terrorist attacks by the Lebanese government. The Shi’ia of Lebanon, as well as the Shi’ia governments of Syria and Iran, consider the actions of Hezbollah reasonable and praiseworthy.

Like many things in this area of the world, a little more attention to detail by the bureaucrats of the foreign ministries in London and Paris after World War I would have clarified these things.

From my 12/03/2004 post Talking to the Opposition:

In every age the common interpretation of the world of things is by some scheme of unchallenged and unsuspected presuppositions; and the mind of every individual, however little he may think himself in sympathy with his contemporaries, is not an insulated compartment, but more like a pool in a continuous medium – the circumambient atmosphere of his time and place.

—
F. M. Cornford Foreword of Thucydides Mythistoricus

This was an amazing insight for me personally when I stumbled across it in research on a paper regarding heroes in literature. This is a truth: if you are a rebel, what you oppose is determined by your time and place.

We are all biased, but if we recognize the existence of the bias we can adjust for it when looking for the truth. Don’t judge history by modern standards; judge it by its own standards.

This concept is vital in the intelligence field. You must see your opponent as he sees himself to understand what he may do. What is insane for you; may be eminently reasonable according to his “circumambient atmosphere”.

It isn’t bad enough that the US government is blundering around blindly making no effort to figure what’s going on and why the world hates us, but the contagion is spreading. Japan is talking about a preemptive strike against North Korea.

If you have never spent any time in Asia, you are totally unaware of the divisions among the various nations and ethnic groups. About the only thing they all, and I do mean all, have in common is Japanese occupation during World War II, and no one is apt to forget about it in any near century. Young Japanese are about the only Asians who don’t know what happened and that is dangerous. If Japanese aircraft attacked North Korea, the response would probably come from South Korea and China, only because they are closer than Australia.

Asians do not want military action of any kind by Japan. Don’t try to tell them it’s a new century.

World Cup official shot himself: Juergen Kiessling, the man who organized the World Cup in Germany, attempts to commit suicide at 65?

Materazzi denies terrorist insult:

The BBC’s Ten O’Clock News also called in experts to study the television footage of the incident and determined the following:

Materazzi’s first word to Zidane was “no” before he then told him to “calm down”.

He then accused him of being a “liar” and wished “an ugly death to you and your family” on the day the Frenchman’s mother had been taken to hospital ill. This was followed by “Go f*** yourself”.

How rife is taunting in football?

Fifa investigates Zidane red card. This is a bit touchy. If Fifa determines that Materazzi used a racial slur of any kind, ownership of the World Cup could come into question as he scored one of the penalty shots and should have been ejected for race baiting.

It’s a game, people. It’s kicking a ball around a yard. It is supposed to be fun. It is supposed to provide exercise and teach teamwork and sportsmanship. It is not supposed to involve autopsies, courts, and lawyers.

Update: new transcript of the exchange discovered.

As CNN reports:

Governor Timothy M. Kaine gave an informal pardon Monday to Grace Sherwood, who 300 years ago became Virginia’s only person convicted as a witch tried by water.

Now some among you may have complained about the absurdity of a well-known representation of a witch trial not realizing that it was based on historic fact, for a given value of based.

The most common reason I have encountered regarding pitching people into the local bayou to see if they were witches was because witches had sold their souls to the devil. Obviously without a soul they would be lighter and would float, whereas good Christian would sink from the weight of their soul. This was sound Aristotelian logic, very advanced scientific thought for the time.

There was no satisfactory explanation, beyond the ever popular: “if they weren’t guilty of anything they wouldn’t have been arrested”, as to why you would present someone with the choice of drowning if they were innocent or being hauled out and hanged if they were guilty. In later ages the guilty were burned after death as they had to dry out first.

In English common law if you were accused of a crime and died when “put to the question” without confessing your guilt, your family inherited your property, otherwise it was generally forfeited to the court.

I have avoided getting into this because I assumed that Ehud Olmert would finally figure out that things don’t add up to good news for Israel.

In one action alone 22 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have died. What does Olmert say to the family of the dead soldier? This was about saving one Israeli soldier, and they have already lost one with more to come.

Since I reported on the Swiss reaction, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has issued a warning on a Gaza ‘disaster’ [a waste of time as the Shrubbery will veto any UN action], the EU warns Israel on Gaza attacks, and the Christian Science Monitor is asking:
Are Israel’s actions in Gaza ‘war crimes’?

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