Posts from — May 2008

It’s beginning to look like the ruling junta of Burma want people to die. The BBC has an extended report on the situation: Fears Burma storm toll could soar

Five days after a devastating cyclone struck, the UN has urged Burma to open its doors to foreign aid and staff.

More than 22,000 people are confirmed dead, but now the top US diplomat in the country has warned that without speedy action that could top 100,000.

Amid the “increasingly horrendous” situation, there is a “real risk” of disease outbreak, said the head of the US embassy in Burma, Shari Villarosa.

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Lower Manhattanite at Group News Blog has some fun in Television For Dummies riffing off of a mistake made at Fox News.

The graphic above is a stamp issued by the “Republik of Abkhazia” celebrating the fall of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately Georgia and Russia are not in agreement over the status of Abkhazia, to the point of deploying troops.

Update: If you are interested, Elayne actually has some of these stamps.

The Palm Beach Post reports that all of the smoke along the “Treasure Coast” is due to Lake Okeechobee burning. The level of the lake is down and two fires of suspicious origin have merged into a single large fire involving approximately 3500 acres of lake bottom. The fire is being limited by the dykes that would keep water in, if there were any water.

What the area really needs is something like a tropical storm to refill the lake and reduce stress on the watershed, but hoping for a tropical storm is not a universally acceptable solution.

Jeff Masters has a Cyclone Nargis update that indicates the death toll could well be above 20,000 as an estimated 10,000 died in one city.

The Irrawaddy River acted much like the MR-GO did in Katrina and increased the damage of the storm surge by acting like a nozzle. The majority of the deaths will likely be from drowning.

Down the road famine is very possible in the entire region as the winter rice crop was being harvested when the storm hit, and Burma is a major regional rice exporter.

If you look around at pictures of the devastation you will notice people clearing debris using hatchets. Trying to cut up a hardwood tree with a hatchet, is a very slow and difficult process at best. Having had to cut up a fair number of softwood pines with a chainsaw, I have a feel for how long it will be for major recovery operations to take hold. Until you clear away the fallen trees on the roadways, you are limited to supplying people by helicopter, and there aren’t that many helicopters available.

I’m sending you this time-sensitive survey because our Party cannot defeat John McCain and claim victories up and down the ballot unless all Democrats who care about America’s future make their voices heard.

That’s the second paragraph from my latest missive from Howard Dean. I doubt Howard wrote it, even though it’s his faux signature on the bottom. It’s probably a clever plot by Mike Gravel to steal the nomination, or something.

Howard, the thing is, you have already made it extremely plain that you don’t want to hear from any of the four million or so Democrats from the state of Florida. You told us that we don’t count and won’t be counted. You dislike Democrats in Florida so much, that, instead of reducing our representation at the convention by half, as stated in the rules of the Party, you eliminated all representation. You told us to shut up, and we will. We will also shut our wallets.

By the way, Howard, I’m no longer a Democrat. Thanks to you and your DNC, I took the hint and left. Update your list.

At 9:59 AM today my DSL disappeared. This is annoying.

I call the number, and, of course, while working through the menus and entering my complete telephone number multiple times [Hint to service center: get caller ID, your network supports it and it would tell you my number. You give it to NSA; why not use it yourself?] a chirpy voice keeps telling me about the wonderful and easy trouble shooting tools available on-line at their web site. [Hint to service center: if I could bloody get on-line, I wouldn’t be calling the DSL service line.]

Well, it turns out they have a major problem that they weren’t aware of because no one is assigned to look at the network on a regular basis, and no one heard the plaintive call of the dying module in a main control box within a thousand or so feet of my house.

That may or may not fix my problem, but until that is dealt with they won’t be able to find out if anything else is wrong. The tech was good and is sending a new modem because I have one of their original batch of DSL modems, so it is possible that the modem is also failing. As he put it, even if the modem is still good, almost no one is still around who knows how to deal with them and the trouble shooting database is not going to help much.

The tech said that the control box should be fixed in a couple of hours, but the official guarantee is within 48 hours – oh, joy.

The techs are good, but the system sucks.

Amie Parnes and Ben Smith ask in The Politico – Is Florida In Play For Dems?

Their question is based on the shift in the Hispanic population from majority Republican to majority Democratic registration.

A news flash – Gore won Florida in 2000. Without the confusion on the Palm Beach ballot it would have been by the thousands who accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan. With Ralph Nader no longer relevant it could have been even larger in this cycle without the shift among Hispanics.

Now, the question is if a Democratic candidate will even be on the ballot, and if they are, will they come in second or third.

The DNC has made a lot of enemies in Florida, and I don’t see them turning that around. The real effects of the Republican’s Amendment One will be obvious by November, and there is no reason to forgive the DNC for making it possible.

It was bad enough when a Florida site noticed, but it was echoed in Indiana, the Pacific Northwest, and Minnesota.

Yes, a Florida school district fired a substitute teacher for “wizardry” when a parent apparently complained about the teacher doing “magic” in class.

Come on, they didn’t burn him at the stake or stone him.

It’s not like they will be able to pay substitute teachers next year, so it just happened a little earlier. The cuts in K-12 are even worse than what is happening in the university system.

The BBC has a general overview, Burmese storm toll ‘tops 10,000’, of the storm.

Dr. Jeff Masters has a more technical look at the storm, Cyclone Nargis:

A disaster of horrific proportions has befallen Myanmar, where the death toll is now over 4,000, with thousands more missing, in the wake of Cyclone Nargis. Nargis–a popular woman’s name in India–is the deadliest and most destructive tropical cyclone ever to hit Myanmar (Burma). The storm hit the coast of Myanmar Friday night as borderline Category 3/Category 4 cyclone, with winds of 130-135 mph. After passing over the low-lying and densely populated Irrawaddy River delta region, Nargis made a direct hit on the capital city of Rangoon.

Because of the secretive nature of the Burmese military government, it has taken days for the facts to start coming out about this disaster. Assistance will be complicated by the lack of relations to other nations that the military dictatorship has caused over the years.

Wikipedia usually has to “lock” its Cinco de Mayo page. I suspect it may be related to the sudden appearance of sites opposing the celebration of this semi-holiday and others who have a hissy fit about any Mexican holiday being celebrated in the US.

In Mexico Cinco de Mayo or Batalla de Puebla, is only a really big celebration in the state of Puebla, where the battle took place.

The Mexican army won the Batalla de Puebla on May the 5^th, 1862, but the French went on to Mexico City in 1863 after receiving reinforcements and installed Emperor Maximilian.

It has the status of St. Patrick’s Day in the US, an excuse to eat different food, and drink different booze, and be obnoxious show an interest in other cultures.

Margaritas, tacos, and the destruction of piñatas, that’s what it is really about, although some people have other interpretations.

Your stainless steel colander™ is going to be needed for other purposes.

Reality check: From January 1981 until today there was only one Democratic administration, that of William Jefferson Clinton. If you are one of the Democratic Party’s “heavy hitters” it is very probable that you were connected to the Clinton administration in one way or another. Can we all accept that?

Despite shared employment in the Clinton administration, not every member of that group is working for, or even endorses Hillary Rodham Clinton in the campaign for President, and some are even working for Barack Obama. Is everyone on board with that concept?

Not every woman in the United States is a supporter of Mrs. Clinton in the Democratic primary. Are there any problems with that statement?

Not every African American is a supporter of Mr. Obama in the Democratic primary. Can we agree on that?

If you can’t agree with those statements, find something else to read, because you won’t understand the rest of this post.

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Let’s see, it’s a caucus in a place that has no value to winning the November election, so Obama Wins Guam.

This post from Group News Blog includes this quote:

Obama finished with 2,264 votes to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s 2,257 votes – a 7-point difference. Obama never trailed from the first vote count on.

Obama won 14 of 21 districts. Most districts that were won by Clinton were by small margins.

There’s no link, so I can’t verify it, but the difference is 7 votes or .15 of a point. A “7-point difference” would be about 316 votes.

Based on the numbers it looks like Clinton won 7 districts by one vote [small margin] and Obama won the other 14 by a single vote to give him his 7 vote margin.

In comments there is discussion of a recount, which is certainly justified.

While the people of Guam are US citizens, they have no electoral college votes and can’t vote for President. Washington DC is the only non-state with electoral college votes.

CNN is reporting more problems in my former hometown: FBI looks into San Diego courthouse explosion

(CNN) — The FBI’s counter-terrorism unit is trying to determine who detonated a small explosive device early Sunday at the federal courthouse in San Diego, California.

The bomb, which damaged windows but caused no injuries, went off about 1:40 a.m. (4:40 a.m. ET), just outside the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Courthouse, the FBI said.

The blast shattered a glass door to the courthouse and broke a window in a building across the street, the bureau reported.

The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force took over the investigation from local authorities after investigators determined the blast was the result of an explosive device.

As this is likely the work of one of the white whackos in the county, and there are a lot of them, it won’t be classified as terrorism, but as an “anti-government protest”, like Eric Rudolph. The only white people who are terrorist are members of animal rights or ecology movements. Christianists with more weapons than most countries are, for some reason, never terrorists.

E. Coli was getting boring, so there’s a new “wee beastie” in this Associated Press report, Gourmet Boutique recalls 143 tons of meat

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York food company is recalling more than 286,000 pounds of meat and poultry because it might be contaminated with the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes.

The voluntary recall includes several different brands of fresh and frozen products made by Gourmet Boutique, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Saturday.

Included are some types of chicken salad and sandwiches sold under the name Gourmet Boutique, and several frozen wraps and burritos sold under the names “Jan’s” and “Archer Farms.”

Listeria contamination is a hell of a lot more dangerous than the report indicates. It can act to make a lot of existing problems worse, and is difficult to diagnose unless someone is looking for it. It is almost always found in processed food, like pre-package lunch meat, and it is the result of unsanitary manufacturing facilities.