Posts from — November 2008

This may come as a shock to some, but the Pentagon photoshops pictures. The BBC reports on a recent example: Row over altered US Army photo

The Pentagon has become embroiled in a row after the US Army released a photo of a general to the media which was found to have been digitally altered.

Ann Dunwoody was shown in front of the US flag but it later emerged that this background had been added, and that her uniform details had been changed.

The Associated Press (AP) news agency subsequently suspended the use of US Department of Defence photos.

[Read more →]

Mustang Bobby has a nice piece on the thirtieth anniversary of Jonestown, the first of many major cult suicide/murder pacts in recent history.

The deal was supposed to be that in exchange for putting up with hurricanes six months of the year we didn’t have to put up with ice and snow. Well, thanks to global climate change I will be moving plants inside, putting the tent over my Mother’s water garden, ensuring that the light bulb I use to warm the concrete slab for the feral cats is working, putting a bigger bulb in my Mother’s shed where the paint and some of her plants will be stored, and a dozen other things that are required when we have a FREEZE down here.

I know it helps to kill the fleas and the fireants, but my house is designed for cooling, not heating, and then for a twenty degree variance, not the forty to fifty degrees that will be needed tonight. We have air conditioners, not furnaces. Just a few days ago it was 82°.

Based on the temperature map I think Fallenmonk can forget about fresh picked tomatoes for Thanksgiving.

CNN has its fire summary up for today. It is based on their own reporting.

Both MSNBC and CBS are using an AP story with some original reporting thrown in, usually at the end.

As long as the winds stay down, they can make some progress, but if the winds come back the fires will flare up again. So far there have been no fatalities directly related to the fires, but that could change after the affected areas are inspected more thoroughly.

Just like earthquakes, Californians expect fires when the Santa Anas begin blowing. But just like earthquakes, they expect them to happen to other people.  It is the same attitude that people on the Gulf Coast have about hurricanes.

CNN is now reporting – Authorities: One of California wildfires ‘human caused’

MONTECITO, California (CNN) — One of three major wildfires burning in southern California appears to be “human caused,” a spokesman for the state’s fire agency said Sunday.

Investigators have eliminated “all accidental causes” of the fire that has destroyed 210 homes and injured two people in Santa Barbara County since Thursday, and arson is suspected, spokesman Doug Lannon said.

“We need the public’s help in identifying any activity in or around the afternoon of November 13,” Lannon said.

In my last post I noted the pattern of three fires in three days moving from the North to the South and starting in similar locations. That doesn’t prove anything, but the pattern makes investigators suspicious. There were no barns with damp hay, no grain elevators, no dry lightning storm. They would start looking for a campfire in the woods, a downed power line, a motor vehicle accident… something to explain why the fires started. It is a process of elimination, but if you can’t find anything else, you are left with concluding that the fire was set.

peleToobake of the Netherlands. For your winning comment to a post buried in the archives, you have have been entered into all of the major comment spam databases for WordPress blogs.

Here is the winning entry:

to: Admin – If You want to delete your site from my spam list, please sent url of your domain to my e-mail: stop.spam.today@gmail.com
And I will remove your site from my base within 24 hours
webmastegz

What a maroon!

According to Cal Fire, there are currently three major fires burning in Southern California, the Tea Fire at Montecito [Santa Barbara County], the Sayre Fire at Sylmar [Los Angeles County], and the Triangle Complex that started as the Freeway Fire near Corona [Riverside County] but has spread into Orange County. They started on three nights in a row moving from North to South in unsettled wildness areas upwind from residential communities.

The BBC has a brief overview, and the Los Angeles Times has a longer summary report.

Cat Blogging Ahead

Consult A Search Engine

Note: This is not my work. I discovered these months ago and have no idea where. I think I was looking for standard highway signs, or possibly a Florida panther crossing sign, and discovered them. I rediscovered them while doing some “housekeeping” on my hard drive. They were apparently created by Philipp Lenssen, as this is the earliest reference I could find when I JFGI.

Almost no one is polite anymore. Public discussion has dropped into the gutter and no one seems inclined to climb out. The last 8 years of the reign of the War on Terror™ has turned reasoned debate into wide scale, childish, yelling matches.

The opponents of Proposition 8 have published the names on the donors list of the supporters of the Proposition, and many of the donors are talking of being “blacklisted”. The same article mentioned that the supporters of the Proposition contacted people who gave money to their opponents and threatened to “out” them if an equal donation wasn’t sent to supporters of the proposition [This is called theft by extortion in many jurisdictions].

If you are willing to spend big bucks to support something, why would you worry if your name was published? Political donations are part of the public record that anyone can look at. If you think that your position would be at risk because of being associated with an issue, don’t get involved except by voting.

I can’t believe that people would be so naive as to expect that you could limit the civil rights of a group of people, and that those people wouldn’t react.

[Read more →]

As the Santa Ana winds build into the area they will interfere with the “sundowner” winds [on the coast the wind changes from onshore to offshore around sundown] which have been pushing this fire.

The Los Angeles Times has good coverage of the Montecito Tea Fire with a video segment, and a separate photo gallery.

It is expected that a closer inspection will reveal that the number of homes lost, currently 100, will probably double.

The Santa Ana winds building in and a continuing forecast of dry weather just increases the fire danger in the entire region.

UPDATE: Jill of Cookies in Heaven and skippy the bush kangaroo has been evacuated and is camping out with friends, so her coverage from ground zero is probably limited by bandwidth and power restrictions.

Update 2: The Santa Anas are complicit in the Sayre fire in Sylmar near Los Angeles that erupted last night. It is going to be a bad time in SoCal.

On Wednesday at the end of a post about Paloma, Jeff Masters noted the conditions were right for a Santa Ana in Southern California and a fire today.

The fire started late Thursday night at Montecito in Santa Barbara County with approximately 100 homes already consumed.

With better models to predict these events, soon your insurance company will be able to cancel your policy a week before they would have had to pay out.

KT, Not QT

Your next step, is your last.

[Editor: There have been a half dozen ferals with these markings [this is KT-2], and not one of them has ever been tolerant, much less friendly.

Friday Ark

You just type things in and it goes out and searches for them and tells you that Martin Eisenstadt and the Hoover Harding Institute are bogus, so you don’t embarrass yourself.

WKW has covered this hoax in depth over at Shakesville, so the information is readily available with a minimum of checking.  Apparently anyone can claim to be associated with a political campaign and there is no checking.  This is a problem with anonymous sources used by the media, there is no way to check if they even have access to the information they claim to be revealing.

I won’t be commenting on the election to any extent until what I can already see happening is obvious. There is no delusion like self-delusion, and the fairy tale is already being written.

Still fighting the good fight with three software packages which, when all is finally written provide exactly what I want, but which agree on almost nothing. It is a project that calls for someone with a multiple personality disorder so they can switch among three different people to bring this all together.

It would have been nice if there were some consistency in variables, defaults, typing, delimiters, error messages, or anything else, but this is why programmers, in theory, make the big bucks. I’m beginning to think that working in a cannery would have been more remunerative, when you factor in all of the expenses and the time spent producing a product. For some reason many clients think that programming is the same as typing, and programmers should be paid for by the page of source code, not for the knowledge to produce that page.

Это жизнь в большом городе.