Posts from — October 2007

Because of on-going problems with the hosting service, my dumka dot com e-mail address is moving to a different server. This means that any e-mails sent may, or may not reach me. Actually, that is the current situation and the reason for the change.

Just to make things interesting, my ISP has decided to save money by setting up its own servers, rather than outsourcing to Earthlink, so that e-mail address will be changing. They were rather crestfallen when they contacted me for a customer survey on the wonderful new features they are making available, and found out I didn’t have the slightest interest in any of them.

Hopefully, one will get stabilized before the other gets changed.

Newsweek says U.S. unintentionally empowering warlords. Gee, you think? I mean, how could anyone have guessed that giving Sunni sheiks big money and weapons would empower them?

I’m not making this up: Senator Craig To Join Idaho Hall Of Fame. I’m also not going to wonder if it should be “Stall of Fame.”

From the junta’s very own newspapers in Burma: Junta: Weapons Seized From Monasteries. A minor question – if they had all of these weapons why weren’t they used? Shouldn’t there be some reports or footage of the monks gunning down the police, instead of pictures of them being brutally stomped, beaten, and shot?

Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.

The Washington Post has a report about how we did things, when we did them right: Fort Hunt’s Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII

For six decades, they held their silence.

The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.

When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.

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The New York Times reports: War-Crimes Prosecutor Quits in Pentagon Clash

In the latest disruption of the Bush administration’s plan to try detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for war crimes, the chief military prosecutor on the project stepped down yesterday after a dispute with a Pentagon official.
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The prosecutor, Col. Morris D. Davis of the Air Force, was to leave his position immediately, a Defense Department spokeswoman said.
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Colonel Davis, a career military lawyer, had been in a bitter dispute with Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, who was appointed this summer to a top post in the Pentagon Office of Military Commissions, which supervises the war crimes trial system.

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McClatchy Newspapers has a report on the new line of generals in the Pentagon assembled by Secretary Gates and you know it isn’t good for the Hedgemony when the headline is: New military leaders question Iraq mission.
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Via Candide’s Notebooks, Andrew J. Bacevich [Colonel, US Army retired], professor of history and international relations at Boston University, has written the title article about General Petraeus for Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative magazine [October 8, 2007 issue]: Sycophant Savior. Interesting review of “political generals” and very telling main point – if the surge were working wouldn’t the recommendation be for more troops?

[Before he retired from the Army he would have said “ass-kissing chickenshit,” but as a university professor he chose “sycophant.”]

Yesterday was the fifth blogiversary™ for the funny farmer at American Street and the third blogiversary™ for Melissa et al. at Shakesville.

E. coli strikes again: Sam’s Club recalls beef patties.

They are called “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties,” were produced by Cargill, and had an expiration date of February 12, 2008. They are coded UPC 0002874907056 Item 700141.  The first problems were reported on September 10, 2007.

This Cargill plant has to be a legacy operation, because they have moved into a lot of other other areas. Given the level of genetic manipulation they do, I wouldn’t knowingly eat anything they were involved with.

Dr. Cole has a story up at Informed Comment on a current controversy, Tutu Excluded, and links to the Minneapolis Star Tribune article, St. Thomas won’t host Tutu

A plan to invite Desmond Tutu to speak at the University of St. Thomas next year was scuttled by university officials who did not want to offend the Jewish community over the Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, university officials confirmed Wednesday.

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Zipster

Hurry UP!

[Editor: Zipster looks like Income’s younger brother, but he is feral. When I go out to feed the “pride” Zipster dashes around my feet at full speed. He may leap up a tree and then jump down and take off, full tilt, in another direction.]

Friday Ark

In Memoriam

Last weekend Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway had to say good bye to her good friend, Eddie Purrington Mattson, after an extended illness.

The BBC reports that the ‘Gay bomb’ scoops Ig Nobel award:

Pioneering research into a “gay bomb” that makes enemy troops “sexually irresistible” to each other has scooped one of this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes.

Other winners included work on treating hamster jetlag with impotency drugs, extracting vanilla from cow dung, and the side-effects of sword swallowing.

Complete list below the fold.
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Since the Congress of the United States has decided to throw around opinions about this and that, people with an interest in the proper administration of government might want to take the opportunity to ask a few questions.

For example, given the rather clear language in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

How can Congress pass resolutions condemning a newspaper advertisement? Surely such an act is designed to suppress both speech and the press. This isn’t individual members of Congress expressing their views, this is the institution attacking the opinions of a group and the newspaper for printing those views. Isn’t the net effect an abridgment of free speech by the Congress?

Today there is a call for bloggers to respond to the situation in Burma in an organized fashion and I believe that pressure should be kept up on the junta. I doubt that the actions of organizations like Amnesty International will have any immediate effect, but it will serve to remind them that they are being watched.

On October 4, 1957 people all over the world tuned in to hear the beeping from the first man-made object to orbit the planet, Простейший Спутник-1 [Elementary Satellite 1].

NASA has a WAV file of the sound at their site on Sputnik.

The BBC has a Q&A: Sputnik and check out the Russian Space Web [in English, if you insist].

The Space Race was on, and we referred to the competition as a race, not the War on Space.