Posts from — April 2007

The Associated Press reports: Woman Beaten On Video Sues Cop, Chicago. This is the case of an off-duty Chicago police officer beating up a female bartender half his size while unaware that everything was being captured by a security camera.

Outgoing Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline has said [Anthony] Abbate had “tarnished our image worse than anybody else in the history of the department,” and vowed to speed up the process of getting officers accused of misconduct off the street. Soon after the incident, Cline announced he was retiring.

I would suggest in retirement Mr. Cline you look up the Haymarket Riots, and the 1968 Democratic National Convention. I assure you, as egregious as this conduct was, it is definitely not the worse thing your department has ever done. I think we both know that without the video tape nothing would have happened to Abbate. Everyone in Chicago knows it too.

It’s Hexennacht and the moon is just past full, but there is no Blocksberg available for dancing down here and local fire officials frown on bonfires.

Of course the Church grabbed this holiday too and called it Walpurgisnacht in honor of one of their Anglo-Saxon saints, rather than good German witches [Hexen].

Melamine is great for counter tops and lab tables, but it just isn’t good for your kidneys. LitBrit at Shakesville has been keeping tabs on this and has two recent posts [one – two] on the use of melamine by the Chinese food industry to cheat on the protein content of their products.

When the pet food story first broke I was amazed at how relatively quickly the manufacturer tagged the Chinese wheat gluten as the problem. Then I sort of wondered why they used a “food grade” gluten, instead of “feed grade” in their products. They made pet food for Wal-Mart, which is only interested in price, and the food grade should be more expensive. I’m beginning to suspect that they knew there was melamine in the feed grade gluten because of associated pet deaths in the past.

This is a good time to return to the policies of an earlier Republican President, Theodore Roosevelt, and start to really kick some corporate butt, because the slimy SOBs just don’t care about anything but short-term profits. The Food and Drug Administration was created because of the foul practices of the food industry, and if they aren’t under constant scrutiny, they return to their old poisonous practices.

Update: LitBrit brings out number three in her series.

Update 2: From the Yellow Doggerel Democrat:

Rhyme for the occasion:

First, melamine fed to our cats and our dogs,
Then into our food chain, by way of our hogs,
Now chickens, consuming their melamine feed…
So what have YOU eaten? (Oh crap… we’re all screed.)

– SB the YDD

Jack at Grumpy Forester has been explaining to his kids that It Is As It Was. He makes us all look really stupid for going down the same path that led to Watergate and Vietnam.

Melanie finds that Thomas E. Ricks of the Washington Post talks to people who think Iraq is Riskier Than Vietnam.

More corrupt than Nixon and a bigger military and diplomatic disaster than Vietnam, I don’t think the Shrubbery has to worry about having a “legacy.”

Note: I feel stupid for not being able to figure out a way of stopping this.  I saw it happening again and I couldn’t convince people of the danger.

More information on America’s Own Terrorists.

The Associate Press reports on the arrest of a suspect:

Paul Ross Evans has been charged with use of weapons of mass destruction, manufacture of explosive material and violating freedom of access to clinic entrances, according to a statement issued by the Austin Police Department.

[snip]

The bomb was found in a bag in the parking lot of the Austin Women’s Health Center. After an employee found the package, a bomb squad detonated the device.

It contained an explosive powder and two pounds of nails, said David Carter, assistant police chief.

Had the bomb detonated, it could have injured people 100 feet away, police said.

Yes, two pounds of nails, a device designed to kill and maim people, not clinics, including people just walking by, or pregnant women planning for the birth of the their child, or children in strollers. Bombs don’t care.

This is the “culture of life.”

[Editor at 10:10PM: Do not feed the troll.  There is a reason that comment has not been removed.  Ignore it.]

Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.

know that you have way too much time on your hands.

The Associated Press reports: New Noah’s Ark ready to sail

SCHAGEN, Netherlands (AP) — The massive central door in the side of Noah’s Ark was thrown open Saturday — you could say it was the first time in 4,000 years — drawing a crowd of curious pilgrims and townsfolk to behold the wonder.

Of course, it’s only a replica of the biblical Ark, built by Dutch creationist Johan Huibers as a testament to his faith in the literal truth of the Bible.

Reckoning by the old biblical measurements, Johan’s fully functional ark is 150 cubits long, 30 cubits high and 20 cubits wide. That’s two-thirds the length of a football field and as high as a three-story house.

Well it is “literally” one-fifth the size of the “original” and it took him two years with modern tools to build it. No word on whether Mr. Huibers considered the possibility that the description of the Ark in the Bible might be a little “exaggerated.”

Chris Kromm at Facing South reports that: “In five weeks, the 5^th Squadron, 73^rd Cavalry of the 82^nd Airborne, based at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, has lost 18 soldiers in Iraq.”

That is 6% of the unit killed in just over a month. They are in Anbar province and the fighting has never let up. Chris highlights some those killed and there are too many Sergeants and Staff Sergeants dying for the unit to hang together. It takes years to replace a mid-level NCO and this is a reconnaissance unit in an airborne division which is even more training. Half of these guys died in a car bombing of their base.

If we can’t protect our troops at their bases, how can’t we expect to protect the Iraqis?

The BBC reports on the continuing problems in the Estonian capital: Tallinn tense after deadly riots.

You have to look at history to understand this, even the Wikipedia entry has the salient details.

The Estonian government is removing a monument put up in Tallinn by the Soviets to mark the “liberation of Estonia from the Nazis by the Red Army.”

What most people don’t realize is that a lot of Estonians viewed the invasion of the Wehrmacht during Operation Barbarossa as liberation from the Soviets. When the Soviets re-took the area they faced Waffen SS units manned by Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians.

When you are dealing with a situation that began with an agreement between Hitler and Stalin that resulted in the occupation of your country by Stalin, the fact that Hitler pushed Stalin out, is not necessarily bad, and the return of Stalin is not necessarily good.

The Estonians don’t like Russians. The Soviet occupation was brutal, and the Estonians are in no mood to forgive and forget. It is absurd of the Russians to think they would.

The BBC reports: Mouse brain simulated on computer

Actually is was about half of the brain on the BlueGeneL supercomputer using 4096 processors and a Terabyte of memory [256MB/processor]. It ran at 10% of the speed of a mouse brain and they could only sustain it for 10 seconds, but it’s a start.

They should have started with something less complex, like the Shrubbery, who based on press conference footage, can’t pass the Turing Test.

Rook wants to know: How many #2 men are there in al-Qaida?

If you capture someone who is possibly a Muslim and isn’t named Osama bin Laden, he’s a #2. The current US government view of the al Qaeda organizational chart is Osama and then everyone else.

Pierre Tristam thinks it’s odd that a man who entered the US illegally and is being extradited by another country for blowing up civilian airliners is released on bail.

Really, Pierre, he’s an anti-Castro Cuban, so, of course he was released.

Xan wonders why none of the MSM is interested in the seizure of a massive arsenal of explosives, weapons, and ammunition.

Come on, Xan, they are white Christian NASCAR fans, not real terrorists. They were just a little over zealous in embracing their rights under the Second Amendment.

Remember: the only people who can protect you from another 9/11 are the guys who were in charge on 9/11. [There’s something wrong there, but don’t analyze it.] They probably won’t screw up that badly again. [Nobody got fired and most of them are still in charge of something vital.]

Update: I left this off by accident.

Ellroon thinks that Sen. Frank Lautenberg [D-NJ] is correct in believing that people on terrorist watch lists shouldn’t be able to buy guns.

Not buy guns? Wait a minute, I don’t think we want to get carried away with this security business. Maybe the GOP is right to have blocked this when they controlled Congress.

I have been listening to recordings of him playing the Duport Stradivarius cello all day.

Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich [Мстислав Леопольдович Ростропович] was a student of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, a cellist, composer, conductor, and political activist. He was born in the oil town of Baku on the Caspian Sea in what is now Azerbaijan and became a musical phenomenon.

The BBC has his obituary.

He taught his cello to sing.

Suck it up you sniveling wuss. You made your bed with the hyenas, so don’t complain about getting bitten by them or their fleas.

George Tenet is out hustling his book with complaints that the Shrubbery doesn’t play fair.

George, your complaint about your reputation is garbage:

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’t is something, nothing;
’T was mine, ’t is his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.

Iago speaking to Othello in Act III, Scene III of Othello

You are just as big a creep as Iago. You were free to resign; you didn’t have to accept the Medal of Freedom; you didn’t have to wait until you were selling a book to speak out. You made no real effort to combat the misinformation campaign, so don’t come around sucking up to the people who were right. You were the Director of Central Intelligence. If you had cried foul, you would have been listened to. You couldn’t make the effort to stop the insanity, so live with your guilt for what your silence has wrought.

Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling has an article in Armed Forces Journal, A failure in generalship, that looks at the performance of general officers in the preparation for and execution of the war in Iraq. The Colonel is, for the moment, still on active duty, and is a veteran of the Iraq war. You need to read this to understand how unhappy he is with the lack of leadership and honesty from the flag officers in the United States military.

My personal favorite sentence among many good points: “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

Swopa, Kevin Hayden, Laura Rozen, Juan Cole, and the Washington Post‘s Tom Ricks all think you should read it.