Posts from — April 2013

She’s the only planet we have, if we blow it, we can’t pack up and move.

Wikipedia as an Earth Day entry, with links to other sites.

Juan Cole suggests that the tragedy in Boston may have been the result of intergenerational conflict that Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev wrote about in his novel, Fathers and Sons. That was certainly part of the problem, but there were other issues.

For those playing at home these are the main members of the family, their relationship to the suspects, and their location: Anzor Tsarnaev & Zubeidat Tsarnaeva [father and mother, Russia], Maret Tsarnaeva [aunt, Canada], Ruslan Tsarni [uncle, US].

The suspects are Tamerlan [26 years-old] and Dzhokhar [19 years-old] and are in the US. [Dzhokar’s name should really be spelled ‘Jokhar’ in English and generally is. It is a common Chechen given name, and the Chechen name for their capital city]

You will note that the mother and aunt have an ‘a’ at the end of their family name. Russian has gender assignments even for last names. The uncle uses the Chechen form of the last name, while the others use the Russian form.

When Chechnya was introduced I was interested, but then it was reported that the father and mother had returned to Russia, so I knew to put it aside. The repression they were apparently fleeing when they entered the US in 2002 was from the Chechen separatists. The aunt made an unclear reference as to what the father did in Chechnya, but it seemed to involve a government security function with the official Russian government.

The Atlantic Wire reports that the family arrived in the US during April of 2002 when the sons were 15 and 8 from Kyrgyzstan. Jokhar was born in Kyrgyzstan, which means that Tamerlan left Chechnya when he was 7 or younger. He wouldn’t have had much of a connection to the area.

In the report it was noted that Jokhar became a US citizen in April of 2012, but Tamerlan was denied citizenship because of a domestic violence arrest. Now, if you were looking for a grievance against the US this would certainly be on my list.

McClatchy reports that:

…

In January 2012, the elder brother returned to Makhachkala from Cambridge, Mass., for six months to update his expired Russian passport …
…

On Friday, a federal law enforcement official said Tamerlan Tsarnaev had in the past been interviewed by the FBI at the request of a foreign government. The official would not name the government, but added that “nothing derogatory . . . came out of that interview.”

A Russian security officer interviewed Saturday said Russia must have been the party that made the inquiry.

So, he wasn’t a ‘person of interest’ to the FBI, he was a ‘person of interest’ for the Russian FSB [Federal Security Service]. He was a Chechen who had come of age, and the FSB would be interested.

There are other reports that Tamerlan considered moving back to Russia, but his father basically vetoed that idea. It didn’t seem like anyone wanted him around except his brother, and may not have seen a way out. The move to Islam was probably a reaction, a search for an anchor point or a purpose.

There is one thing that has bothered me about this case and no one seems to be digging into it – where were these brothers getting their money? Guns, black powder, and pressure cookers cost money, not to mention rent, utilities and food, where did it come from? That is an important piece of the puzzle.

I haven’t seen anything that would convince me that this wasn’t a young man lashing out at the world, and dragging his brother into it.

The BBC has a nice little article on the screw-up that was used to justify austerity/deficit hysteria: Reinhart, Rogoff… and Herndon: The student who caught out the profs.

Read how a grad student at UMass-Amherst [University of Massachusetts at Amherst] discovered the problems quickly but spent a lot of time reviewing what he found because he couldn’t believe that two economics professors at Harvard University could be so sloppy.

But it gets worse. At Next New Deal Arindrajit Dube, a UMass-Amherst economics professor, did some additional work on the R-R data and wrote Reinhart/Rogoff and Growth in a Time Before Debt.

It is a very technical post, but the bottom line is that debt doesn’t seem to cause the lower growth, lower growth appears to raise the debt. Basically, the cause has to precede the effect, and Reinhart/Rogoff’s data shows that the lower grow starts before the rising debt, not after.

That is one of a group of North American B-25 Mitchell bombers that took to local skies in celebration of the 71^st and final reunion of the Doolittle Raiders, the group and mission depicted in the movie, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.

The Doolittle Raid was really a psychological warfare operation as it wasn’t able to actually damage much of Japan’s military effort, but it gave a boost to American morale, and pinned down a segment of the Japanese military to defend the home islands against further raids.

The Raid was originally scheduled for April 19^th, 1942, the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, but at to be advanced because the aircraft carrier Hornet that was carrying the aircraft was spotted by a Japanese submarine.

The Reunion was held locally because the training for the Raid took place on Eglin Air Force Base. This is the last year because the few survivors are currently in their 90s.

Rude Awakening

What’s going on?

[Editor: Lutu woke up as I approached to take this picture of her on the pump house.]

Friday Ark

Update: Sad news. Sergeant Mango, Old White Lady’s orange and white tom, has passed.

Most of the people who stop by here will be familiar with the Ray Bradbury novel, Fahrenheit 451, a future in which books are banned and burned if found. The title is a reference to the temperature at which paper ignites.

Ammonium nitrate is widely used by farmers as a fertilizer, but it also has a secondary use as a low-grade explosive. While it is generally safe, you don’t want it anywhere that might reach 410° Fahrenheit because that is its flashpoint when it becomes explosive.

Having a fire at a fertilizer plant is almost guaranteed to result in an explosion like this:

Emergency services are searching for survivors after a blast at a fertiliser plant in the US state of Texas killed between five and 15 people.

More than 160 people were injured and dozens of buildings destroyed in the town of West, near Waco.

You don’t fight fires at fertilizer plants, you evacuate people and wait for the explosion. fertilizer plants should have automated fire suppression systems, foam for preference, because of the risk.

Timothy McVeigh added fuel oil to a load of ammonium nitrate and blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City. The fuel oil increases the power of the explosion, and the mixture is widely used in mining.

Putting a fertilizer plant in a town is just guaranteeing a disaster at some point.

Why does anyone bother with the Democratic Party? With the Presidency and Congress in their hands for two years, they produced nothing that mattered to Democratic voters. The major output of Zero’s first two years in office with a Democratic Congress was a block of excuses.

The ‘Democratic’ President has consistently advocated cutting Social Security and Medicare – the Party’s biggest achievement.

The Senate Democrats refused to reform the rules that would have ended the Republican obstructionism, and so laws supported by 9 out of 10 Americans can’t even get a vote. Why bother having control of the Senate if the Democrats won’t do anything?

If they aren’t going to represent you, why do you vote for them?

UPDATE: The new system seems to be working at 9:45PM CDT – wonders never cease.

I will be installing an update tonight, so this place will disappear for a while, but hopefully be back up for Cat Blogging.

The status reports will be at my other place, Why Now annex, which is bare and dusty at the moment.

Unfortunately this upgrade is one of those that ‘prunes’ the code, so I can’t simply copy over the existing files, I have to delete them first to avoid a lot of useless code being left in the directories.

If things go as planned [yeah, right, like that ever happens] things will only be down for about 15 minutes, but it will probably take longer based on past experience.

I would prefer to do this on the Weekend, but my ISP has a nasty habit of taking their system down for maintenance on the weekend without warning anyone. It isn’t down for long, usually, but it certainly disrupts file transfers.

In a fine rant at Stonekettle Station, Jim Wright invokes Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first Inaugural Address (March 4, 1933):

“… the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

He then uses the analogy of his cats attitude towards fear to attempt to put some spine into people.

In his novel, Dune, Frank Herbert includes:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. – Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear

The poster at the top reflects the attitude of the Hedgemony, the crew that ignored all of the warnings about an imminent attack against the US that is now shorthanded as 9/11.

There was a book written, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Canadian Naomi Klein, that explains why corporations want people in fear, and too many governments cooperate with that desire.

The PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, torture, loss of civil rights are all products of the fear in this country after 9/11. Remember the rainbow of terror alerts that were hauled out every time the Hedgemony wanted people distracted?

[Read more →]

Most of the people around here are familiar with the Revelation of the Cocktail Napkin of Laffer™ – the perverse idea that leads one to conclude that as tax rates approach zero, tax revenues approach infinity. That is holy writ for the Supply-Siders.

The Austerians in many areas have an equivalent in the Reinhart-Rogoff research paper on the effect of public debt. At the Next New Deal Mike Konczal writes that Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems.

Reinhart and Rogoff didn’t release their data set with their paper, so it has taken a while to replicate what they did to show negative economic growth when governments have a debt at 90% or above of the GDP.

Essentially what the researchers found is that the only way of reproducing the results of the Reinhart-Rogoff paper is with a range error in an Excel spreadsheet formula. Here’s the thing that gets me – it isn’t a large range, and you should have been able to estimate the answer if you had any decent math skills. Given that the answer that Reinhart-Rogoff got on their spreadsheet was near zero, it should have been obvious that something was wrong, but they published anyway.

People talk about universities as ‘ivory towers.’ If you have ever been a faculty member, especially at a research university, you know they are made of a collection of thick defensive keeps to protect the current ‘lord’. and frequent attacks on the keeps of other faculty members to wrest away their resources. The only thing that will unite a group in the same field is an attack on another ‘kingdom’ for research grants.

Reinhart and Rogoff should have known better, but there will be punishments meted out. As a group, academics do not forgive or forget, and they publish to ensure that no one else does.

Charlie Pierce lives and works in Boston, so it was natural for him to begin early to report on the bombing. In his first post he told people not to jump to conclusions because ‘nobody knows anything yet.’

Apparently his caution was too much for some people and a Blight attack has occurred.

Now he did mention Timothy McVeigh as an example of someone other than their “preferred Muslim terrorists” as a type of person who would do something like this, so that possibly set off the rabid horde.

A safer path would have been to use al Qaeda of Cambridge, Friends of Hamas, the Newer Black Panthers, or ACORN, rather than a convicted terrorist bomber. [Please note that ACORN, which no longer exists, is the only real group in that list. The others are made up. It’s called sarcasm, OK?]

Fortunately officials have stepped in to save Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi from becoming the Richard Jewell of this event. Which reminds me that Eric Rudolph would have been a closer match for the Boston Marathon than McVeigh.

The BBC is reporting that there is an ongoing botnet attack on WordPress sites targeting those who have never bothered to change the administrator’s name from the original ‘admin’.

They use ‘admin’ and then run through possible passwords.

People should have changed out ‘admin’ just after installing the system. It isn’t a simple edit. You have to create a new user, give the user administrator privileges, and then delete the ‘admin’ user. Since no two users can have the same e-mail address, you have to do some messing around, but you really should change it and use a strong password. If you are paying your own hosting fees, you don’t want to get stuck with big usage fees from this type of annoyance.

Which means my cats are all a year older: Sox is 15, Ringo 8, and Excise and Property are 6. Their vet sent them a birthday card.

While they were celebrating, a lot of other people were dealing with the final call for their tax returns. This is not a day to have your computer or ‘Net connection die if you were planning on e-filing. The reality is that most people who wait owe money, and are putting off sending the check until the last minute.

I think I’ve convinced the cats that this song is really “Happy Birthday”.

The Boston Marathon is run every year on Patriots Day, a Massachusetts holiday commemorating the battles of Lexington and Concord in the state that mark the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

Today there were at least two explosions near the finish line of the race, and a fire at the JFK Library within a limited period of time.

At least three people, including a child, are confirmed dead, and over 140 people are reportedly injured.

Those are the facts that are known. We don’t know what caused the explosions or the fire. A lot of people including CNN are calling this a terrorist attack, but we don’t have enough information yet to state that these events were the result of intentional acts by people. Until evidence is gathered and analyzed we simply don’t know.

Because it did occur near the finish line, there has to be a lot of video of the events, and video of possible suspects if these turn out to be actual bombs, intentionally planted.

Wait until we know what happened before drawing conclusions.