Posts from — August 2014

This Tuesday, the 26^th is the primary election in Florida. The polls are open from 7AM to 7PM and you really need to vote, even if you don’t belong to a political party.

Under Florida law if an election will be decided in the primary because other parties aren’t contesting it, everyone gets to vote in that primary, which means there are a lot of Republican primary races that I get to vote in 👿

The other thing that happens in primaries is that governments try to sneak referendums passed the voters by putting them on the primary ballot. My county government is attempting to do this to get approval for another tax giveaway to businesses. You need to let them know you are watching them.

Position: 22.3N 72.6W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: Northwest [320°] near 9 mph [15 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 35 mph [ 55 kph].
Wind Gusts: 50 mph [ 85 kph].
Minimum central pressure: 1005 mb.

Currently about 90 miles [ 145 km] North-Northeast of Great Inagua Island.

A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for the Southeastern Bahamas including the Acklins, Crooked Island, Long Cay, the Inaguas, Mayaguana, and the Ragged Islands; the Central Bahamas including Cat Island, the Exumas, Long Island, Rum Cay, and San Salvador; and the Turks & Caicos Islands.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

… But local officials have lost their minds.

The BBC had this, Boy held for ‘killing pet dinosaur’, in their weird news section.

It takes place in South Carolina where a 16-year-old high school student was given an assignment to write something in the ‘Facebook status update style’. [I was unable to locate this ‘style’ in the Modern Language Association style guide, and cannot conceive of an actual need to be familiar with it.]

Giving the assignment all of the seriousness it deserved, he wrote about his plan to kill his neighbor’s ‘pet dinosaur’, and the school went bananas. Then the local police went bananas when he was ‘difficult’ in questioning and arrested him on a charge of ‘disturbing the school’.

I can certainly agree that both the school and the police are seriously disturbed based on their reaction, and I think the boy’s desire to be home-schooled is definitely the best course, because the diploma from a school that assigns papers written in the ‘Facebook status update style’ and doesn’t recognize a joke is hardly likely to be taken seriously.

The New Kits

But I’m not tired, Mom!

[Editor: Ms Underhouse showed up with two brown mackerel tabbies and a grey that look like about 6 weeks and ready for weaning.

Friday Ark

Real life shouldn’t interfere with blogging, but it does.

So, the Missouri governor figured out that he doesn’t need the National Guard in Ferguson because things have quieted. They have quieted because officials started talking to community leaders, and the community leaders asked people to lower the temperature. Officials should have done that days ago, but they apparently didn’t know who the community leaders were.

The police have made 163 arrests, but 128 have been for ‘failure to disperse’, i.e. exercising your rights under the First Amendment to the US Constitution to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances is illegal if the police say so.

ISIS was apparently asking for over $100 million in ransom for the journalist they murdered. The organization he was working for doesn’t have that kind of money available, and certainly couldn’t have raised it or paid it without US government assistance because the transfer would have been illegal.

I’m keeping an eye on Invest 96 which is west of the Antilles and headed for the Caribbean. It might be a tropical depression tomorrow.

Questions are being raised as to why all of this aid and assistance is flowing into the Kurdish north of Iraq, while the south isn’t seeing the same level of help.

The reason is simple – Kurds are fighting to protect their areas and to regain areas they have been pushed out of of by ISIS. When the US attacks ISIS heavy weapons, the Kurds follow up on the ground. Refugees are flowing into the Kurdish area to escape ISIS, and they are a burden on the local government.

People, like the UN, have access to the Kurdish areas and can deliver supplies to refugees, which is not true in much of southern Iraq. The Iraqi army still isn’t capable of a competent offensive campaign.

The world helps those who are willing to help themselves.

Jay Nixon, the Governor of Missouri, has reacted to the failure of his curfew to do anything except anger the people of Ferguson by sending in the National Guard.

What a brilliant move – the trouble really started when the police showed up in their military costumes, so now he’s sending in the real military to further anger people on the same day an independent autopsy showed that Michael Brown was shot 6 times, not the ‘few times, maybe more than two but not many more’ that the Ferguson police chief has publicly claimed after looking at the ‘official autopsy’.

The US Attorney General is on his way to Ferguson, but I don’t think he is going to be able to do much because the Feds cannot simply take over the case of a homicide, the way they can take over other types of crimes.

The only way things can be calmed down is by telling people the truth about the incident, and that doesn’t seem to be on the agenda.

Maliki finally got an offer he couldn’t refuse, probably from Iran, and stepped aside making a viable Iraqi government possible. It isn’t a certainty, but nothing would have changed if Maliki refused to leave.

Everyone except the Iraqi government and ISIS is ready to arm the Kurds, and the US is occasionally hitting some actual military targets in their air campaign. The attacks seems to be concentrated on heavy weapons and vehicles, which are major advantages that ISIS has over the Kurds.

The Neocon losers are all claiming that Zero could have prevented the rise of ISIS if he had been more involved in Iraq. This ignores the reality that the Iraqi government that the Neocons created wanted the US out and wasn’t interested in US concerns.

They are also claiming that ISIS could have been stopped if we had armed the ‘good’ insurgents in Syria. This ignores the fact that the people who started the movement against Assad wanted non-violent change, not weapons, and the later groups that took up guns had their weapons caches taken by ISIS. ISIS is and was the most unified and largest armed insurgent group in Syria. The only armed group that could reasonably be expected to win against them is the Syrian Army.

… And they eat the covers and put the pages in the privy.

The Missouri State Troopers reduced the heat in Ferguson and had the situation under control and now the police chief and governor are turning up the heat on the situation.

The police chief held a news conference and identified the officer involved in the shooting for the first time. He then showed a surveillance video that showed a man who might have been Michael Brown committing a strong-arm robbery. Afterwards he admitted that the officer involved in the shooting stopped Mr Brown for ‘jaywalking’, walking in traffic, not for suspicion in the robbery. The video served no purpose other than an attempt to show the victim wasn’t a good person.

Then the Governor Nixon of Missouri imposed a curfew on the town of Ferguson, criminalizing normal behavior ‘in support of public order’, and alienating the citizens.

It’s one step forward and two steps back for this blight.

Double Teamed

Dinner, we want dinner!

[Editor: Ms Underhouse joins Froggy in an attempt to trip me.

Friday Ark

According to the CBC the Missouri governor has ordered the Missouri State Troopers to take over security in Ferguson under command of a Black Captain who grew up in the town.

He dealt with the protest in his standard uniform by walking with the protestors and will be talking to them to get their side of the story.

Meanwhile, the Ferguson police chief says his response wasn’t military, it was SWAT police tactics. Yo, chief – if it has feathers, web feet, and quacks – it’s a duck. If it’s wearing camo BDUs, desert combat boots, ballistic helmets, and pointing assault rifles at people = it’s military.

After spending yesterday upgrading WordPerfect, today was the monthly PMS Day [Patch MicroSoft – what did you think?] on two machines, and then I checked Linux and the new LTS [Long Term Support] version of Ubuntu was available on the Software Update page. I backed-up and pressed the ‘upgrade’ button.

After downloading well in excess of 800MB of compressed data that contained 1963 files I sat around a couple of hours as it went through the process.

There was only one problem – I should have removed some of the old versions of the Linux image from the boot partition to free up space.

There were a couple of errors on re-boot, but the only thing that doesn’t seem to want to work is a game that I use to distract myself when I hit a coding block [writer’s block for programmers].

Things went amazingly well given the potential for problems, and I didn’t have to do it by hand, which was a plus.

I have to update the site software as this site was being used in denial of service attacks on other sites, a problem just corrected by WordPress.

Hopefully I will be back up tonight.

Update: Cheated disaster again, but it will be a couple of days before I hack the file that gives people the ability to include images and such in comments as that is a hack done by hand.

Update: Hack complete. The publicly visible site is back to normal, but the back end is messed up again. If you have a WordPress site you really need to update to version 3.92 because the problem it fixes cost me some money yesterday before my host blocked it.

At least people are dropping food and water to the Yazidis who don’t make trouble and stay in their own communities. They have an interesting religion that doesn’t cause any trouble. It seems to be a mixture of Islam, Christianity, Zoroaster, and Hindu beliefs. They don’t have converts – you have to be born a Yazidi. Obviously they must be hated and feared if you are fundamentalist anything. I hope they can be saved from the ethnic cleansing that ISIS intends.

To make the Republican war-mongers happy, Zero is engaged in air strikes against ISIS in Northern Iraq in support of the Kurds. The Kurds are at least willing to put up a fight, but they are going to need the heavy weapons that Maliki refused to provide and then surrendered to ISIS.

The US owes the Kurds for the way George HW Bush left them hanging after the first Gulf War. He encouraged them to revolt and then refused to help them when they were attacked by Saddam.

Meanwhile Maliki is refusing to give up power in Baghdad despite the calls from everyone of importance in Iraq that he leave. Now he is attacking the decision of the President of Iraq not to ask him to form a government, and has sent forces loyal to him into the streets of Baghdad as an implied threat.

We have no problem winning wars, and no success at handling the peace afterward. Given that reality, why do we do it?