Posts from — April 2008

It takes time for the plates to adjust: Another quake shakes southern Illinois

(CNN) — A 4.5-magnitude earthquake shook southern Illinois early Monday, the latest in a string of quakes that have rattled the region since last week, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The quake — the 18th since a magnitude 5.2 hit the area Friday morning — was centered about six miles below ground and about 37 miles (60 km) north-northwest of Evansville, Indiana, or about 131 miles (211 km) east of St. Louis.

It struck at 12:38 a.m. local time (1:38 a.m. ET). There were no immediate reports of damage.

Until the Hedgemony decides no one really cares about such things and abolishes it, you can get more information at the USGS Earthquake Center.

These are probably a series of aftershocks, but occasionally the release of pressure at one location over-stresses another fault and you have a separate quake. The veteran ‘quake people don’t get too excited about these “minor” events, forgetting the first time they realized that the ground wasn’t as solid as they had believed all their lives.

CNN is reporting that the Colorado Party has lost: Former bishop claims Paraguay election

(CNN) — Six decades of single-party rule in Paraguay came to an end on Sunday after Colorado Party candidate Blanca Ovelar conceded a loss to former Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo, who claimed the historic win on his promise to help the poor.

With more than half of the 14,000 precincts reporting, Lugo, backed by the Patriotic Alliance for Change, claimed 41 percent of the votes, according to the preliminary results reported by the government’s election department.

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Also in the paper was a report about the required environmental impact public meeting for the changes at Eglin AFB as a result of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure law. Due to this round of BRAC, Eglin is getting the Joint Strike Fighter Initial Joint Training Site, and the 7^th Special Forces Group (Airborne).

The JSFIJTS means that all of the services will be training in the new F-35 at Eglin, and the base will eventually get over a hundred of the aircraft.

The 7^th SFG move means thousand more Army personnel and large training exercises.

The comments at the meeting were pure Twilight Zone.

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While in a waiting room I scanned my local “libertarian” puppy trainer, and their op ed was like the episode of Star Trek where Kirk causes the evil computer to self-destruct with a logical fallacy. The problem for the editorial board was the conflict between the right to bear arms and the rights of the property owner caused by Florida’s new “Take your howitzer to work” law. After wasting several inches of newsprint in a pong game between the Second and Fourth Amendments, they finally decided that they would side with the Fourth Amendment, because if you can’t violate the Bill of Rights on your own property, what’s it good for?

Listening and reading “military analysts” discussing the Hedgemony’s Excellent Adventure has been making me nervous. I have been concerned that the uniforms had some sort of neurotoxin in their dye that caused you to go delusional.

Fortunately the New York Times article, Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand, shows that is was just an unethical [and illegal] domestic agitprop program of the Rumsfeld Pentagon. It might have been nice if the media had vetted their “experts” and announced all of their conflicts of interest, but audiences aren’t interested in distractions, like the fact that the person doing the talking makes big bucks from the war he is praising. They do tend to avoid “product placements”, like “that nest of America-hating-scum was shipped to hell by the Kill-All model AGM-5009X of the Grace L. Ferguson Missile and Storm Door Corporation.”

[Please note that they say these things with absolutely no shame.]

From CNet: AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010

U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet’s current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.

Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.

“The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today,” he said. “In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.”

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Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.

Someone needs to tell Mr. Krugman that you are not supposed to fact check Obama. He and I both know about the four Presidents and what the economy was like from 1980 until today, but we are not supposed to bring reality into this campaign.

When you go around writing columns like, Clinging to a Stereotype, and include numbers and graphs on your blog [Dying Midwestern city blogging and Midwestern economics] which support what you are saying, you are “harshing their buzz”, and they will attack you.

The attacks are guaranteed when someone like Anglachelg picks up on your writing and files posts like Myth of Bitter White Working Class and Stereotypes – Facts and Ideals. They don’t want to hear that mistakes have been made.

You are not following the media’s narrative, and that just causes confusion. How can the world function when “everybody knows” and “conventional wisdom” are no longer operative?

Of course the worse part, is that at the end of it all, there will be a Republican in the White House, because the Democrats refuse to listen to voters and give them the policies they are asking for, and have been asking for.

Fred Clark at the Slacktivist [via Scorpio] is right to yearn for The good old days, like January, 2008.

I like Facing South and respect the work of Chris Kromm, but he goes round the bend when the subject is Clinton. In his post, NC Primary Watch: How is Hillary honoring Passover?, he claims that when Clinton wanted the North Carolina debate date changed from today, she was “suggesting it would be offensive to Jewish families who will begin celebrating Passover at sundown today.” And then goes on to suggest that she should be doing something today associated with Passover.

Chris, she isn’t Jewish. This is a Jewish holy week, as in a Jewish religious observance. What was reported at the link you included: Clinton Agrees to N.C. Debate, was this statement: “But Clinton didn’t agree to the date, noting that night is the beginning of the Passover observance among Jewish people.”

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…It does. The BBC reports Iraqi cleric threatens ‘open war’

Radical Iraqi Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr has threatened to wage “open war” on the Baghdad government if it does not halt operations against his supporters.

Moqtada Sadr said he was giving the government a “last warning”, and urged it to take “the path of peace”.

His statement came as Iraqi troops, with US and UK support, clashed with his forces in Baghdad and the south.

He is comparing the Maliki government to Saddam, so this is pretty serious stuff. He has thousands of followers in Baghdad, and there is no way the US and Iraqi forces can stop them if all out war is declared. This could turn very nasty, as in Dien Bien Phu nasty, very quickly.

It would be extremely embarrassing if Iran had to invade to save the US and Iraqi armies.

Obama gets a little negative press, so the obvious answer is to find something to attack Clinton with, because that’s how this “game” is played.

Jeff Fecke at Shakesville makes a mild post about purported Clinton statements, Someone Says Something Sorta Silly, and the trolls come out of the woodwork to attack everyone and anyone who doesn’t forswear Clinton and bow down to Obama.

Since this involves MoveOn, you need to know my feelings about them, as stated in MOVE-ing ON. They are part of the Obama campaign, for all intents and purposes, so it will be difficult for Obama to distance himself from then as Kerry was forced to do in 2004. They ceased to be an independent agent on February 1^st with their rushed move to endorse a candidate.

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At sundown today the Jewish commemoration of the flight out of Egypt begins. Pesach, the festival of freedom, is the story of the Book of Exodus, and fictionally presented in the film, The Ten Commandments, which will probably be on television this week.

This is a time of Matzah [unleavened bread], Marror [bitter herbs], wine and the retelling of the story of founding of Israel.

Lambert at Corrente tells us that the World’s greatest deliberative body calls in the cops, regarding $10 million dollars that magically appeared in a transportation bill after it had been passed without the earmark.

This turkey was way over ripe, because as I noted back in January, it was Too Much Even For South Florida. The local transportation authority in Lee County told the Feds they didn’t want the money, because they didn’t want to build the interchange the money was suppose to finance.

It turns out the only person who wanted the interchange was a developer who owned property in the area, and, from the generosity of his heart, dropped thousands of dollars into the re-election campaign of an Alaskan Congresscritter [OK, not a big puzzle, Don Young is Alaska’s only Congresscritter].

It is really depressing when being elected to public office in Alaska is almost in and of itself proof that you are corrupt. Almost as depressing as my belief that it would save time if anyone who runs for office in Florida as a family values Republican would be required to register as a sex offender.

Jerome Doolittle at Bad Attitudes finds some good news of a sort in his piece, …and Privatization Scores Again!

The money quote: “Despite aggressive collection tactics, the contractors have brought in only $49 million in revenue, little more than half of what it has cost the IRS to implement the program.”

Paul Krugman wrote about this practice a while back and correctly identified it as tax farming, one of the many practices that led to the French Revolution.

I’ve been on the planet more than six decades, and I’m still waiting to see a successful privatization of government services. I’ve seen dozens of attempts all over the country, and they all end up more expensive than when the service was provided by public employees. The government ends up spending more money for less service than they had before privatization. It’s like tax cuts, no matter how often the concept is proven to be a failure, Republicans just have to try it again.