Posts from — November 2009

The Orlando Sentinel says that a Web site names Florida strangest state.

Not surprising when the Orlando Sentinel hosts FloriDUH and the St. Petersburg Times hosts Bizarre Florida, both of which feature the odd news from around the Sunshine State.

It warms my civic pride that a plurality of the stories come from my area. I defy you to find another area with drive by spelling corrections to hate signs.

This Friday between 11AM and 5PM CST [1700 – 2300 UTC] the place will be closed for maintenance by my hosting company.

I know it will be tough, but you’ll have to find somewhere else to go during those hours. There will be Cat Blogging and if a hurricane pops up it will be covered at the Why Now annex [Note to self: better empty the trash and sweep out the cobwebs over there].

CNN reports that Army suicides set another yearly record

Washington (CNN) — Suicides among soldiers this year have topped last year’s record-breaking numbers, but Army officials maintain a recent trend downward could mean the service is making headway on its programs designed to reduce the problem, Army officials said Tuesday.

Since January, 140 active-duty soldiers have killed themselves while another 71 Army Reserve and National Guard soldiers killed themselves in the same time period, totaling 211 as of Tuesday, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, U.S. Army vice chief of staff, told reporters at a briefing Tuesday. But he said the monthly numbers are starting to slow down as the year nears its end.

Not only is the trend up overall, but it is up among soldiers who haven’t deployed to a war zone, and December is traditionally a terrible month for suicides. People are overstressed and this is a clear indication of the problem, along with the increasing rates of domestic and substance abuse.

Naturally it’s from The Onion: Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be

ESCONDIDO, CA—Spurred by an administration he believes to be guilty of numerous transgressions, self-described American patriot Kyle Mortensen, 47, is a vehement defender of ideas he seems to think are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and principles that brave men have fought and died for solely in his head.

“Our very way of life is under siege,” said Mortensen, whose understanding of the Constitution derives not from a close reading of the document but from talk-show pundits, books by television personalities, and the limitless expanse of his own colorful imagination. “It’s time for true Americans to stand up and protect the values that make us who we are.”

If you have lived in SoCal, the Escondido dateline isn’t accidental, i.e. this describes a significant portion of the population of the town. It may be caused by the exhaust fumes from I-15.

I just had a visitor searching for “illegal uses of floor wax” – huh?

There is probably a logical reason for that search, but I’m not sure I want to hear it.

You remember that item in the stimulus package that was going to help workers by giving them more money in their paychecks so they would continue spending? Well, it wasn’t very well designed.

CNN/Money reports on the Stimulus surprise: 15 million may owe IRS.

Congress still thinks we live in a “Father Knows Best” world of single income nuclear families living in the suburbs with two kids, a dog, and a DeSoto in the driveway. The simplistic way that the law was written is going to take a tax bite out of a lot of people because Congress apparently didn’t consider the possibility of people with multiple jobs.

This is just one of the manifest reasons to not use the tax system for anything other that raising revenue for the government. When you use the tax system for “social engineering”, there are always unintended consequences. The massive increase in home equity lines of credit is a direct result of screwing around with the tax code.

It wasn’t that many years ago that the Israelis were able to carry off bogus propaganda attacks against their “enemies” [the rest of world] in a convincing fashion, but no more. The days when Israelis spoke unaccented Arabic and could create the documents of any nation in the world have passed.

When it comes to faking Iranian munitions the US has proved its incompetence, and now the Israelis have screwed up in a major way: from Juan Cole, 20-Year-Old Letterhead points to Israeli Forgery in Francop Affair.

Come on, this is what Wikipedia is all about, current information. Intel agencies need to get out more and look at what’s happening in the real world.

Of course, the Israelis will claim that the Iranians did this on purpose to shield them from charges, but I would point out that when governments transfer weaponry and don’t want to have it traced back to them, something the US does a lot, they use cut outs, intermediaries for the operation. The US often used the Israelis for this purpose [Iran Contra ring a bell?].

The Israeli seizure of the Francop was an attempt to create anti-Iranian propaganda. It’s just another area that the Israelis are no longer any good at after years without any credible threats.

No one in China will hear it unless it is approved by the government.

Keith B. Richburg of the Washington Post reports that Access to Obama Remarks Blocked in China.

This visit was big news in the West [not as important as a certain book tour, but big], but it only got a minute on the nation-wide Chinese evening news, near the end of the broadcast. The Chinese aren’t covering the book tour, so that was a plus.

Obama’s town hall with students in Shanghai was almost as tightly controlled as one the Shrubbery’s events, but the handpicked audience was given the official responses to everything that was said within hours of the end of the event so they would know what to say if they were questioned later.

If a tree falls in China it only makes a sound if the Party approves.

The CBC has a piece on a musical that made it from the Toronto Fringe Festival to a major theater in town. I read it because of the title, so I won’t spoil the surprise.

Somehow I don’t think they’ll be staging this at any of the local colleges or theaters in the area, even though they tend to lean towards the production of musicals.

It must be nice to live in a country like Canada, where you don’t have to worry about the wingnuts coming out of the woodwork if you do anything new or unusual. No one seems to understand that book burnings and such don’t exactly recommend a place to businesses looking to expand, and I can tell you that the guns in the workplace law really makes companies nervous about Florida.

The hysteria from the wingnuts is almost unbelievable, if you hadn’t noticed how totally out of touch with reality they have been for years.

The most important thing everyone needs to remember about the various and sundry “terror” trials, and the movement of people from Guantanamo to prisons in the US, is the identity of those who have been telling you that these people are “the worst of the worst”: the same people who said that there was no doubt that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

I played a role in putting some people into Block D at the New York State prison at Attica, who should never be allowed out for any reason. There is one person in particular that could take out everyone at Guantanamo, if he thought it was amusing. I feel certain that every state prison has at least one of these types of sociopaths, and feel certain that large states have several.

The Federal prison system, especially the Super-max prisons, are designed for these types of people, and they don’t escape. They contain the heads of drug cartels that are responsible for hundreds of murders, but no one tried to put them on the US version of Devil’s Island.

The Federal courts in New York City tried and convicted those involved in the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center, so they can certainly handle Khalid Sheik Mohammed, since he is apparently hellbent on being a martyr.

If we don’t follow our own laws, the terrorists have won.

The ABC reports on something that is definitely not a problem for the local holiday season: Adelaide pageant crowd feels the heat

Adelaide’s 77th Christmas Pageant has drawn a crowd of around 224,000 people, almost 100,000 less than last year.

Organisers have blamed the extreme heat for keeping numbers down.

When it is in the upper 90s I would have a hard time working up the old Christmas spirit. Heat stroke is not something that is associated with the season in North America. The thought of dressing up as Old St. Nick at temperatures like that would involve a good deal of alcohol, over ice, in a cooler.

I can see why they started so early, before it got really hot.

Update: Apparently this is unusual: Adelaide’s record heatwave continues

Never before has Adelaide experienced a heatwave in November – and the weather bureau’s Brett Gage says it will have lasted eight consecutive days.

“It’s a real standout event for November, so I would expect it to stand,” he said.

Zoos have been closed, outdoor markets cancelled and charity events postponed.

This is not good news for the bushfire season, as the high temperatures will be drying out the grass and brush.

Note: This is a long rant, so start reading at your own risk. If anything offends you, it is your problem.

I entered the military during the era of the draft, so there was a diverse crowd in my basic training flight of 65 intentionally bewildered souls. [Come on, you didn’t really think that it was an accident that transportation to basic training sites was timed so you would arrived at night, be taken to eat an absurdly large meal, and set to bed, only to be awakened after a couple of hours by a fire drill?]

While the majority were probably Protestants, we had a Sikh, a Nigerian Muslim with tribal scars, a nominally Catholic Mayan, a Sephardic Jew from Morocco, no few “none of the above”, among the subgroup that bunked around me. It’s not like you had any privacy in the barracks, so you learned this in passing, because you didn’t openly discuss religion or politics in the military. You were warned about this in classes on rules and regulations. The foreign guys were building a profile for immigration as their student visas were running out.

When I watch what has been going on in the military under the Hedgemony, it is totally foreign to my experience as a “military brat”, and during my own time. The rules haven’t changed, they are simply selectively enforced. A primary example of this is Lieutenant General William G. Boykin:

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Yes, it’s Friday the 13^th again. The 13^th falls on a Friday more than any other day of the week, so get over it. It’s only valid in in English and Portuguese speaking countries, so go visit a Spanish-speaking neighborhood for the day.

If you want to blame someone, it’s the calendar of Pope Gregory XIII that created this imbalance. [He obviously didn’t have a problem with the number on any day.]

Chilly Reception

Who me?

[Editor: This is Tip’s brother on a rare foray into the family area. He is almost never outside, as he adopted a neighbor. He actually has a tiny white tip on his tail, but at the time of the picture he was a bit concerned about the attention the other cats were beginning to show towards him.

Friday Ark