Posts from — August 2007

The only real change is that the tax payers of the US are no longer paying for the salary and benefits of one partisan political hack and his access to classified information should cease.  Karl Rove will no longer have a White House office, but anyone who thinks he is no longer in the center of the corruption is fooling themselves.

Karl is looking for the big bucks before his influence and value is at rock bottom.

At 10AM CDT Invest 90L was upgraded to Tropical Depression Four and seems likely to become Hurricane Dean at some point. It is currently on track to cross the Lesser Antilles as a Cat 1 hurricane at the end of the week.

Invest 91L is currently located between the Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba and is projected to become Tropical Storm Erin before coming ashore around the mouth of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo.

In the Pacific, Hurricane Flossie is maintaining Cat 4 status, but appears to be on track to pass south of Hawaii and provide a lot of much needed rain. Thanks to the climate change, Hawaii has been experiencing drought conditions and needs all the rain it can get. The pineapple is going to be tough.

It’s August and time for the tropics to get active.

The short version is that we didn’t learn a thing from the rather disastrous blow-back from the CIA financed insurgency against the Soviet occupation, assuming that you agree that 9/11 was a disaster.

Steve Coll’s book, Ghost Wars, is an open source for the story behind what we did and didn’t do that resulted in al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Pakistan security forces ties to both, the rise of fundamentalism in Pakistan, and the madrassas that use US financed and printed books to teach children to hate the US.

I’m sure everyone is thrilled that our tax dollars built the training sites that were used to attack us, which is why we were able to strike them so accurately, but not quite soon enough.

I know I was happy that the Stinger missiles that we supplied to the insurgents in Afghanistan did in fact prove to be too old to use against our aircraft.

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If you have a clear sky and no light pollution from the local area, tonight at about 10PM will be the start of the best viewing of the annual Perseid meteor shower.

With a new moon, the action will start in the northeastern sky and progress to the east as it gets later.

Susan Landau, a senior engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, lays it out in a Washington Post op-ed: A Gateway for Hackers.

You have to weaken the security of the system to allow it to be tapped. The systems and the people designing them are concentrating on making them secure. One of the reason for using fiber optics is that unlike copper, you can’t listen in without breaking the connection. You can put an inductive sensor on a copper cable and capture the contents with no indication that you have done it.

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In adoring tribute to old style political corruption like Tammany Hall, you have straw polls that are won by the person paying the largest bribes to the largest number of people. The fact that Romney easily wins GOP straw poll in Iowa proves nothing more than he spent more money in Iowa than anyone else to get a media headline. He didn’t win a single delegate to the nominating convention with all of his money. The actual caucuses aren’t for months, and they are just as money oriented.

This is no way to select the leader of anything.

Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.

This is just wrong. This should never happen. This is just entirely too easily and cheaply avoided.

From the Associated Press you get the very badly worded headline: Computer glitch causes 5-hour delays at LAX

LOS ANGELES – About 2,500 international passengers were stranded for as long as five hours Saturday on planes and in terminals at Los Angeles International Airport because a computer shutdown prevented them from passing through customs, authorities said.

The passengers were stranded in four airport terminals and on runways starting at about 1:30 p.m. because of a breakdown in a computer system that contains names of arriving passengers and law enforcement data about them including arrest warrants, said Mike Fleming, a Customs and Border Protection spokesman.
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Both Culture Ghost and Paradox have opinions on the fact that Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have been convinced to leave a residual force in Iraq after withdrawing the majority of the troops.

The three offered up all kinds of reasons for this that simply demonstrate that neither they nor their advisors really understand the military realities of the situation. I offer them a hint: if we cannot provide reasonable control of the current situation with 150,000 troops, why would you believe that a much smaller force has any reasonable expectation of success?

There is a technical term for the small residual force that they advocate leaving behind – hostages.

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Gephyrophobia: An abnormal and persistent fear of crossing bridges.

What do you do when a phobia becomes common sense?

This the Associated Press version: Iraq war czar: Consider a draft

WASHINGTON (AP) — Frequent tours for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have stressed the all-volunteer force and made it worth considering a return to a military draft, President Bush’s new war adviser said Friday.

“I think it makes sense to certainly consider it,” Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

“And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation’s security by one means or another,” said Lute, who is sometimes referred to as the “Iraq war czar.” It was his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate in June.

You can read or listen to the actual NPR interview here.

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When I switched to my own site there were a lot of problems with Blogger, but another problem was someone didn’t like something I wrote and “flagged” my site as spam. I had to go through a hassle to get it back up. So when I was looking for a host, in addition to cheap [you have to make more money than I do to say inexpensive] I wanted a host who didn’t tuck tail when there were complaints. I assumed that who ever complained to Blogger would be back.

Well, Blogger is still at it, only this time Google disables own blog as spam. Yep, they labeled one of their own blogs as spam because it fit their “profile.” Aren’t software filters wonderful?

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Actually the feeling is a lot stronger than that, but you get the drift.

Badtux refers to it as As usual, screw the little guy, and Steve Soto says Bush Finally Enforces Immigration Laws.

This is about the Hedgemony exacting penalties for people who employ undocumented aliens, as well as the workers themselves. The laws involved were passed from ten to twenty years ago, but they have been ignored for the last seven years. Now they decide to enforce them, apparently in annoyance with the Congress for not passing new laws.

Every time someone suggest that a new law is needed and I check, there are already laws on the books that might solve the problem, but the old laws aren’t being enforced. What is the point of killing more trees to print new laws when there is apparently no ability and/or willingness to enforce existing laws?

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In his role as a military penguin, Badtux posted War is Hell to start a discussion about William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union Civil War general who Basil Liddell Hart was the first modern general. Much of “Uncle Billy” Sherman’s success was based on his clear understanding of the importance of logistics. If you can’t supply an army, it ceases to exist.

His march through Georgia was predicated on the ability of the route he planned to supply what his army needed and the skills of that army to overcome physical obstacles. His army built roads and bridges as they moved. There was an apocryphal exchange in which someone said that a tunnel had been destroyed and that would stop Sherman. The reply was that Sherman probably carried a tunnel with him.

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