Posts from — March 2007

Today on the Daily Kitten they are featuring Madeleine, the Maine coon kitten of four legs good at Plush Life.

Maddie has pretty much taken over Plush Life, which is understandable once you see her.

I am not a disinterested party in this matter, and this is a rant about the nullification of the Emancipation Proclamation by high-tech companies with H-1B visas.

CNet reports: Gates calls for ‘infinite’ H-1Bs, better schools.

When asked by Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) how many visas Congress should approve, Gates repeated a suggestion he made years ago: that there should be an “infinite” number. “Even though it might not be realistic,” he said, “I don’t think there should be any limit.”

Gregg said he “agreed 100 percent” that there shouldn’t be a limit on the number of highly skilled people in the country, but he suggested Congress might not be able to do more than double the quota.

Support for bumping up the number of visas is hardly universal. Advocacy groups representing American computer programmers and scientists, such as the Programmers Guild, have fiercely resisted the idea. They argue that companies like Microsoft have not been making a good-faith effort to recruit qualified Americans and that the current structure of the H-1B program allows American companies to hire foreign workers at lower pay rates than American counterparts.

If you are foolish enough to remain loyal to a company long enough you will approach the $100K salary level and feel like you should be able to take a vacation occasionally, and not work more than 50 hours a week. You will be laid off and replaced with a couple of H-1Bs who are nominally working on a different project in a different part of the company. This is only in the case of core business products that are too critical to be outsourced.

There will be no effort to hire American, merely a statement by the company that no one applied for the positions which means they must have the indentured servitude of an H-1B visa holder who can be dumped without risk. While the government keeps saying there are jobs in the IT sector, they never look at the number of under- and unemployed programmers, especially over the age of forty.

Any member of Congress who is tempted to vote for anything based on the testimony of Bill Gates should read a Microsoft warranty¹. After reading that piece of legal prose and having it parsed to explain exactly what it says, the member of Congress should be able to understand how trustworthy Bill Gates isn’t.

1. Microsoft only guarantees the quality of the media [CD-ROM or DVD] that their products are shipped on. They don’t guarantee that anything will be on the media, and if there is something on the media, they don’t guarantee that it will do anything. If the media is defective, they’ll replace it.

The Anchorage Daily News reports on the Stormy fortunes. Ten mushers are out, and some still going are banged up:

Bryan Mills of Merengo, Wisc., did, however, decide to play cowboy after he broke the tibia — the small bone — in his left leg.

“If I lived in Alaska, then I would scratch,” Mills said. “(But) I didn’t come all the way from Wisconsin to scratch.”

“There was a root sticking up and it banged the outside of my leg,” Mills said. “I heard a snap and thought the sled was broken. Then everything went numb in my leg. It was the scariest moment of my life.”

Stan Watkins III, a heart doctor in Anchorage who was here to watch the race, advised the 42-year-old to scratch, but Mills refused.

“This is what the Iditarod’s all about,” he said.

Dr. Cole, in response to the confusion by many pundits as to what the Libby trial was about, provides a short presentation: Libby’s Lies, Cheney’s Lies.

Anticipating the problems some people seem to have with reading comprehension, he provides pictures.

The United States has no real idea what Iran is actually doing because the current White House destroyed our best source of human intelligence on WMD operations in Iran when it exposed Valery Plame and her network. It is highly likely that people were killed or imprisoned when it became known they were working with or for the CIA front company that Ms. Plame managed. The US ability to gather intelligence was seriously degraded by what Libby, Rove, and Cheney [at a minimum] did. The national security of the United States was put at risk to prevent the people of the United States from learning that the White House was distorting intelligence to justify the decision to go to war with Iraq.

Via MSNBC, an Associated Press report on Ivan Safronov’s death: Russia opens inquest into reporter’s death

A journalist who fell to his death from a fifth-story window had received threats while gathering material for a report claiming Russia planned to provide sophisticated weapons to Syria and Iran, his newspaper said Tuesday.

Prosecutors have opened an inquest into the death of Ivan Safronov, a military affairs writer for the daily Kommersant who died Friday in what some media said could have been murder.

Kommersant reported that Safronov told his editors he would write a story about Russian plans to sell weapons to Iran and Syria via Belarus, but they said he had not yet submitted the article.

In the old days the transaction would have gone through Bulgaria, but now they use Belarus because Aleksandr Lukashenko needs to pay his bill for Russian natural gas.

It’s a pretty interesting shopping list: MiG-29 and Su-30 fighters, Iskander [SS-26 Stone] surface-to-surface missiles, S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems, and the Pantsyr-S1 missile/cannon close support anti-aircraft defense systems. The anti-aircraft systems are top shelf and pose a real problem for an attacking air force. The aircraft and Iskander systems are targets and a waste of money against either the US or Israel, unless the intention is to divert resources.

Putin has transferred his belief system from Karl Marx to Gordon Gekko, so he will sell weapons to anyone with cash.

Like Henry II of England, he doesn’t have to order people to be eliminated, it just happens. Of course, this might be the result of the people who talked to Safronov in the UAE realizing they should have kept their mouths shut, and removed a potential obstacle to their career advancement.

I’ve seen this around the neighborhood, so I’ll post the link.

From The News Hole, the blog of Countdown – SHOCK: DRUDGE TAKES CLIP OUT OF CONTEXT! DEVELOPING…:

The audio clip Drudge used is out of context. Not included in his version is Hillary’s set up, which leads into her quoting from a well-known hymn by famed gospel composer Reverend James Cleveland.

The congregation immediately recognized the hymn and cheered her.

And she only affected that accent when citing that one refrain from the Cleveland hymn, a Baptist church standard.

The audio clip on Drudge is also somewhat altered – whether deliberately or because it is a dub – from the real-time version we have.

I’m not a fan of Mrs. Clinton, but nobody needs to put up with this kind of crap. There are substantial issues to argue about without dealing with the stupid. They have a longer clip so you can judge for yourself.

DeeDee Jonrowe second to scratch Iditarod 35.

Ms. Jonrowe is a cancer survivor who has been at the front multiple times, including runner-up twice. She took a spill and broke at least one bone in her hand.

The hand injuries are a major problem because it is nearly impossible to change the boots on the dogs with only one good hand.

Why couldn’t NPR have found someone other than Libby Lewis to report on the Lewis Libby trial and conviction?

Hide the dogs and arm the women – for the next 60 days the Florida legislature is in session.

The local public radio stations usually carry Capital Report during the annual two-month spasm of political opera. Willing suspension of disbelief is helpful in listening to the foolishness foisted upon the citizens of the state by its part-time lawmakers.

Four-time winner Doug Swingley is out of the Iditarod with possible broken ribs and dislocated thumb. Swingley would have probably stayed in with just broken ribs, but you can’t really take care of your dogs with only one hand.

While it is cold, there has been a lack of snow this year, which makes the ground icy and bumpy. The snow usually cushions the sled from small irregularities, and softens falls.

During his liar-side chat™ the Shrubbery said he was ‘troubled’ by army scandal. Bovine excrement!

As Mustang Bobby of Bark Bark Woof Woof reports: “It’s Not Just Walter Reed”, and Ellroon of Rants from the Rookery focused on an earlier Washington Post piece, Shortages threaten Guard’s capability.

Facts: the entire military medical system [under the Department of Defense] is in disrepair, the entire veterans medical system [under the Department of Veterans Affairs] is experiencing major problems, FEMA is still not back to the same level of competence it had in 2000, the food system is not as safe as it was in 2000, the deficit is spiking, the housing and stock markets are in the tank.

Have you looked at the privatization scheme at Walter Reed? A five-year contract for $120 million, $24 million a year, and they are supplying 50 people to do the work of 300!? The President is the only one in Federal service who makes $400,000/year, so how is this saving taxpayers money?

The President is the single individual common to all of these problems. The people in charge of all of these areas report to the President. The President appoints these people. The President approves their budgets. The President is responsible for their performance. The “bureaucracy” is a term covering the employees of the execute branch of government – the Presidency. The President is the problem.

The BBC reports on a study by a British think tank: Report warns against Iran attack

The Oxford Research Group report is written by nuclear scientist and arms expert Frank Barnaby.

“If Iran is moving towards a nuclear weapons capacity it is doing so relatively slowly, most estimates put it at least five years away,” he says.

Mr Barnaby adds that an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities “would almost certainly lead to a fast-track programme to develop a small number of nuclear devices as quickly as possible”.

He says it “would be a bit like deciding to build a car from spare parts instead of building the entire car factory”.

The BBC then commits an act of blatant journalism, by assigning Gordon Corera , a security correspondent, to look at the claims in Iran: Can a military strike work?

[Read more →]

Okay, among the early candidates the only one who is worth my support is Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico. The three front runners lost my vote and support on the issue of Iran. They still don’t get it: AIPAC and their enablers are passing out the “brown acid,” and Clinton, Edwards, and Obama still haven’t learned to “avoid the brown acid”¹, the intel and spin that got us the very “bad trip” that is Iraq.

I refuse to vote for anyone who won’t make the effort to really learn about matters of war and peace. I’m not voting for another unnecessary war.

1. You have to be a older to really understand the reference, but someone has probably written about it on the ‘Nets.

In the Republican congressional leadership one finds:

McConnell of Kentucky, Lott of Mississippi, Blunt of Missouri, Cantor of Virginia, Putnam of Florida, and, from Texas, Cornyn, Hutchinson, Granger and Carter.

I think that might explain what Oliver Willis finds puzzling in his post: Conservatives Vs. Lincoln.

The period of the mid-nineteenth century tends to be presented in a “slightly” different fashion in American history classes depending on what region of the country you live in, starting with the name of the best known event in that period.

If you look at the change to Presidents Day, from the celebration of Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays, you might find the same geographic distribution among supporters of the change.