Posts from — April 2010

For reasons known only to them, according to Digby the Republican Governors Conference has decided to adopt Guy Fawkes, a religious fanatic who attempted to blow up a government building, as their symbol. I guess it was too soon for them to use Der Reichstagsbrand [Reichstag fire].

Would anyone care to compare and contrast Guy Fawkes and Osama bin Laden?

So, on November 2^nd when you enter the voting booth, do you want to elect those who are apparently OK with blowing up the US Capitol?

Here’s Wikipedia on the 2010 UK General Election being held on May 6^th. All 650 seats in the British Parliament are up for grabs and it is a three-way race. I’m using Wikipedia because it has a neutral tone and has every conceivable link to coverage at the end of the article.

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It is ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand, which is similar to the American Veterans Day, in that it began as a remembrance of World War I, and has become more generalized over the years.

“Anzac Day commemorates the involvement of Australian and New Zealand troops in a World War I campaign on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey.”

The Gallipoli Campaign began as a Winston Churchill [then First Lord of the Admiralty] plan that spun out of control and got a lot of people killed on both sides with nothing much changing, but then, that was quite common in World War I.

Peter Weir’s made a movie, Gallipoli, which, if nothing else, proves that Sergeant Alvin York, and T.E. Lawrence weren’t the only people who fought in World War I.

After initially reporting that there was no leak from the Gulf drilling rig disaster, CNN now reports Oil leaking from site of sunken rig, Coast Guard says.

About 1,000 barrels a day is pouring into the Gulf from the broken pipe, and the stormy weather is preventing effective measures to contain it. The 11 missing workers are now presumed dead, as the majority, if not all of them, were at or near the top of the well casing when the explosion occurred.

If the wind and waves take the oil ashore before BP can stop it, it will be an even worse ecological disaster.

I would note that the pipe may have broken when the damaged rig sank, and there may not have been a leak until that occurred.

From CNN: Mississippi tornado leaves at least 10 dead.

It was one of the large, long-distance tornadoes that was on the ground in Louisiana and then crossed all of Mississippi, before finally collapsing in Alabama. It scoured a half-mile path of death and destruction across the state, with the death toll is expected to climb after the damaged buildings are searched.

We got rain, wind, and lightning on the Gulf Coast as the front sucked up moisture to fuel the destruction.

Saint George is the patron saint of England, Georgia [the country], Bulgaria, Portugal, Catalonia, and the city of Moscow. Orthodox countries tend to celebrate George on November 23^rd.

PETA condemns George for his senseless slaughter of dragons. The YWCA condemns the condemnation and wants to know when PETA is going to volunteer to be DragonChow™

International Day of the Book UNESCO

It is also the birth and death day of Billy the Bard, who was a great writer in desperate need of a spelling checker.

Master Shakespeare gave all of the best lines to villains supplying low humor to those who have read the Folio, e.g. Arlen Specter quoting Iago, reputedly in support of Clarence Thomas.

That’s apparently what McAfee’s programmers thought Windows XP with Service Pack 3 was, according to the BBC report: Security update hits Windows PCs

Thousands of PCs around the world have been paralysed by a security update that wrongly labelled part of Windows as a virus.

The update was sent out by security firm McAfee and made affected PCs endlessly restart.
…

McAfee’s 5958 update wrongly identified the Windows svchost.exe file as the wecorl.a virus. This worm tries to replace an existing svchost file with its own version to help it take over a machine.

The update wrongly labelled svchost as the virus and then quarantined it. This caused many PCs to crash as Windows uses many copies of the file to keep the operating system going.

Computers inside businesses running Windows XP with service pack 3 applied were the hardest hit according to reports…

Given some of the things that Service Pack 3 gets up to, I’m not surprised that anti-virus software would think it was malignant. Much of the snooping that SP3 does to “protect” M$ from “pirates” is exactly the same as many virus programs, including the bit about reporting home.

Inspection Tour

Get a haircut!

[Editor: Molly is out and about in the pleasant weather we’ve had making sure that no cat has forgotten how to cringe. It’s tough being the Alpha Prime.]

Friday Ark

The BBC says that the IATA is still kvetching and looking for a government hand-out: Ash cloud chaos: Recriminations over Europe flight ban

There have been bitter recriminations over the almost week-long closure of large parts of European airspace because of volcanic ash from Iceland.

Airlines are seeking compensation from governments over the unprecedented shutdown, which they say cost them $1.7bn (£1.1bn).

But scientists have said regulators had few options beyond flight bans.
…

Virgin Group chairman Sir Richard Branson meanwhile told the BBC that he believed governments would be unlikely to impose a blanket ban again.

“I think if they’d sent up planes immediately to see whether the ash was actually too dangerous to fly through or to look for corridors where it wasn’t very thick, I think that we would have been back flying a lot sooner,” he said.

The bans were imposed because volcanic ash – a mixture of glass, sand and rock particles – can seriously damage jet engines.
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She’s the only planet we have, if we blow it, we can’t pack up and move.

Wikipedia as a brief Earth Day entry, but links to other sites.

The Defense Department thinks we need to develop renewable energy sources and is funding programs to work on the problems.

McClatchy reports that the Pentagon is taking the lead on cutting back on fossil fuels and Danger Room ran a story on the effort in my area: Air Force Debuts Biofuel-Guzzling Warthog.

In addition to the biofuels, the military is using solar-powered water purification systems, and wants to use renewable methods of generating power for its bases. The military sees this as a national security problem – it costs the military hundreds of dollars per gallon to deliver fuel to the forces in Afghanistan to power generators and other equipment.

For almost a decade unit leaders have been requesting solar systems to generate power for small units in remote locations. Even if the systems do nothing other than charge the batteries for equipment, they are valuable. If the military understands the problem, consider how far behind the curve Congress is.

The BBC reports on the Oil rig blaze off Louisiana leaves at least 11 missing

US coast guards are searching the Gulf of Mexico for at least 11 oil workers missing after an explosion and fire on a drilling platform.

The rig was still burning hours after the blast on Tuesday night, 52 miles (84km) south-east of the Louisiana port of Venice.
…

Deepwater Horizon, built in 2001 by South Korea’s Hyundai, is 396ft (120m) long and 256ft (78m) wide, according to the company’s website.

It was working on a part of the block known as the Macondo prospect, in 5,000ft (1.5km) of water.

On its website, Transocean describes itself as the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor, with more than 50 years’ experience “with the highest specification rigs” and 18,000 employees.

This was a drilling rig and they were capping the well off after finding oil when something went terribly wrong. In addition to looking for the 11 missing workers, a company is using a remote controlled submersible to attempt to cap the well head and stop the flow of oil that is fueling the huge fire. There will be a spill that the Coast Guard hopes to contain after the fire is finally out.

Such accidents are rare, but they obviously happen, even when the people involved are experienced and have relatively new equipment. This is one of the reasons people along the Florida coast don’t want drilling operations off their snow-white beaches.

Local people are waiting for the list of names because some of the off-shore workers are from this area.

It’s that time of year again, Spring, when the bull alligators thoughts… uh, actually, when bull ‘gators stop thinking with their brains and control is passed to the other end of their spines. MSNBC reports that a ‘gator came to the door of a Volusia County home.

If they pick up the scent of a female, they will head directly for it, no matter what is in their way. They will go through screens and end up in people’s houses when they would normally avoid people whenever possible. You learn to just stay out of their way and don’t expect anything that is even a reasonable facsimile of rational thought from ‘gators at this time of year.

They have a lot in common with college students on Spring Break.

For a given value of good.

McClatchy reports that the Feds have taken Charlie Crist up on his suggestion: FBI, IRS launch probe of Florida GOP’s credit card expenses

The U.S. attorney’s office in Tallahassee, the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service are all involved in the probe, which grew out of the state investigation into former House Speaker Ray Sansom. He was indicted on criminal charges that he stashed $6 million in the state budget for an airplane hangar for a friend and campaign donor.

In the federal case, Sansom and others could be charged with making false statements on their tax returns and tax evasion.

If someone gave you a lot of grief during an arrest or booking, and they had a lot of cash on them [pimps, dealers, etc.], you always had the option of dropping a dime to the IRS. You had to really not like the prep to do this, because the IRS would assume that the wad of green was the individual’s weekly income, check to see what they had paid in taxes [normally nothing], and then put a tax lien on the individual’s life. It was a brutal thing to do to anyone.

The IRS is going to look at the records and if they determine that the charges were for personal, rather than professional expenses, that will be classified as unreported income. A rock hard rule of taxes: never, ever, under-report your income. You can get fined for over estimating your expenses, but you can go to prison for under reporting income.

IRS proceedings are “administrative”, not “judicial”, as in “Rights? You don’t get no stinking rights!” These proceedings are to determine how guilty you are.