Posts from — January 2009

A couple of days ago CBS reported on a new source of foreign news, GlobalPost.com. I waited to write about it until their site was up, which it now is.

This is a network of stringers who live all over the world who will be sending in stories about the areas they live in. Many are former foreign correspondents for media outlets who have been laid off in the latest round of cost cutting and consolidation.

The emphasis won’t be on the breaking stories, but on the real lives of these areas. It looks a lot like a community blog, but why not?

CNN reports a local story: Authorities: Fake-emergency pilot under securities probe

(CNN) — A man whose financial management business is under investigation faked a life-or-death emergency in his private aircraft before secretly parachuting out and letting his plane crash in the Florida panhandle, authorities said Monday.

The pilot, identified as Marcus Schrenker, 38, later checked into a hotel in Alabama under a fake name and then put on a black cap and fled into woods, authorities in Alabama said, according to the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office in Milton, Florida.

So there’s an idiot with a pilot’s license who has been ripping off his clients and he needs to flee. Given the details in the article, I find it hard to believe that people trusted anyone this incompetent.

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Thinking back to the many discussions in my grandmother’s kitchen among the group that lived through WWI, the Depression, and World War II, I remember that they knew that FDR was not tied to any particular policy.

Some of the relatives had been associated with programs among the “alphabet soup” pouring out of Washington that didn’t work, and they noted with approval that FDR wasn’t a man to stay with something that was failing.  The programs weren’t simply pushed out the door, they were watched for their effectiveness.  If a program didn’t do what they expected, it was shut down and something else was tried.

In a way, the strength of FDR was that he didn’t have a grand strategy that everything was part of, and nothing was ignored because of the side that proposed it.  There was a goal, getting out of the Depression, and if you had an idea that might help, it was tried.  If it worked, it was kept.  If it didn’t work, it was gone.

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Every time people want to do something they know is totally, absolutely wrong, but they still want to do it, they create myths to justify their behavior. This is how they avoid taking moral responsibility for their blatantly immoral actions.

In the United States the myth was generally called Manifest Destiny. You see, when the United States was stealing land from the people who already lived there, it was fulfilling its preordained destiny.

John L. Sullivan wrote an essay supporting this view in 1839, but people may be more comfortable with this middle school version that most encountered in one form or another in a public school, although there was no tone of disapproval when it was taught to me in the 1950s.

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Danger Room reports on an effort by Israeli hackers to enlist assistance in attacking web sites that are considered “pro-Palestinian”. All you have to do is download and run their software and you will be helping the Israeli cause.

Except, their little “Patriot” program gives them control of your computer, and you have no idea what they are really going to be using it for, according to security experts.

Oh, BTW, if you are in the US, you might also want to read the text of 18 U.S.C. 1030 about the consequences of participating in a distributed denial of service [DDoS] attack on other people’s web sites. Free speech means everyone’s speech, not just those you agree with.

Both Jill and Jim DeRosa have noted that Howard Dean wasn’t invited to the “change of command” ceremony for the DNC Chair.

What exactly would lead anyone to expect the Obama organization to have any regard for other people? If you aren’t part of the cult of personality, you don’t exist. People are expected to just fall in line behind his awesomeness, not be thanked for their assistance.

Writer’s Block

You need a softer wrist-rest.

[Editor: This is one of the problems of cats: they have a tendency of injecting themselves into whatever you are doing.

Friday Ark

Update: CNN has more on Zeitoun.

CNN reports on the results of the attacks on the UN: U.N. suspends aid work in Gaza

GAZA CITY, Gaza (CNN) — Israeli forces fired on a U.N. aid convoy Thursday in Gaza, killing two aid workers, during a three-hour truce that Israel set up to allow humanitarian aid to reach civilians, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said.

“Since the conflict began 13 days ago, four UNRWA local staff have been killed,” according to a statement from Ban’s representative referring to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency.

“The U.N. is in close touch with the Israeli authorities about a full investigation of this and other incidents, and about the need for urgent measures to avoid them in the future.”

As a result of Thursday’s fatal attack on its aid convoy, the U.N. relief agency will suspend activities in Gaza until the Israeli military can guarantee the safety of its staff, said the agency’s chief spokesman, Chris Gunness, in Jerusalem.

The humanitarian agency provides food and relief supplies to about 80 percent of Gaza’s 1.5 million people. At least 50 trucks carrying humanitarian goods and diesel fuel crossed into Gaza on Thursday.

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I warned people that Obama was not liberal or progressive, that he was, at best, a moderate Rockefeller Republican, but they bought into the cult of personality.

They voted for him, so now they get to fight him over his attacks on Social Security and the stupid tax cuts. They get to fight him over his wimpy, ineffective stimulus package.

The Obama-Biden team stand barely above Joe LIEberman in their voting records, but people ran around claiming these were the people that were going to undo the damage of conservative policies.

Don’t be surprised if his court appointees don’t exactly add a weight to the left side of the bench.

I didn’t vote for him, so he’s not my problem to solve, because the damage he causes is on the heads of those who did.

Danger Room does some reporting on changed tactics because of Lebanon which confirms for me that they learned nothing other than to suppress the reporting of what they are doing.

Anyone who paid minimal attention to Israeli targeting in the Lebanon attack knows full well that they made almost no effort to avoid civilian casualties, because their definition of a combatant includes almost everyone.

The problem was they just weren’t as good as they had been. They haven’t had a real war in decades, and they still believe they can win with “shock and awe” from the skies.

I’m an Air Force supporter, and I don’t think you can win with air power alone. It didn’t work against Britain, so why assume it will work against anyone else. The record shows that it is most effective after your ground army has proved its ability to take and hold territory. If a country’s army is still able to put up a credible offense, the civilian population will not lose hope.

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Bill Richardson could not have hidden grand jury proceedings that took place in August 2008, so the Obama team would have known about them and went ahead anyway. Suggesting that Richardson is to blame for the problem, is the sort of thing the Shrubbery does.

Leon Panetta doesn’t have direct intel experience, but after the way that the Hedgemony has screwed around with the structure of the intel community, he doesn’t need it. All of the decisions that were once made by DirCIA/DCI and the National Security Advisor have been transferred to the Director of National Intelligence, so DirCIA is a bean counter.

Panetta is a budget and organization pro, so maybe he can straighten that mess out after the years of cronyism at the CIA. If the decision is made to restructure the intel community into something more effective and efficient, then you will need intel credentials for the job, but not now.

The complaints of Feinstein and Rockefeller would have a lot more relevance if they had been doing their jobs for the last 8 years instead of going alone to get along.

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С Рождеством Христовым to my Orthodox friends who are still waiting to see how the calendar reform works out.

Unlike Jill at Cookies in Heaven, Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof, and Keith at Invisible Library, I’m not re-doing the whole place, but I’ve made a couple of recent changes.

Having noticed this nice use of the feed widget by News Writer at Stop The Press!, I’ve added the BBC history feed on the sidebar.

After encountering it at Making Conservatives Cringe I’ve added the Commentluv plugin to comments. If you have a blog it will read your feed and provide a link to your last post. For some reason if you preview first, the link goes away, but what would computers be without “anomalies” [a lot less aggravating, for one thing].

Today marks the Feast of the Epiphany, end of the twelve days of Christmas, and Día de los Reyes in Spanish-speaking countries.

This is the customary day for gift exchanges in many Christian cultures because it is the day that the Magi finally arrived in Bethlehem with their totally inappropriate gifts after putzing around for over a week because they didn’t want to ask for directions.