Posts from — January 2015

The BBC reports that the Paris Mayor to sue Fox News over Muslim claims

The mayor of Paris has said she will sue Fox News for its inaccurate reporting about the city following the attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The US network claimed there were “no-go areas” in the French capital where police and non-Muslims refused to go.

Anne Hidalgo said the people of Paris had been “insulted” and the city’s image had been “damaged”.

The network has since apologised for making “regrettable errors” on air regarding the Muslim population.
…

Fox has also apologised for comments by terror expert Steven Emerson, who claimed Birmingham was “totally Muslim” and ruled by Sharia law.

Fox News host Jeanine Pirro subsequently said Emerson had “made a serious factual error that we wrongly let stand unchallenged and uncorrected”.

Mr Emerson said he had made an “inexcusable error”.

Prime Minister David Cameron responded by calling him “a complete idiot”.

Someone needs to explain to Faux News that the slander and libel laws vary from country to country. Maybe Rupert should tell them about what happened to his former tabloid in the UK for playing fast and loose with the laws. Because the Republican Party gives them cover in the US, they assume that they can get away with maligning countries with impunity.

The ABC has the latest on AirAsia QZ8501: Plane climbed at ‘beyond normal’ speed then stalled, Indonesian transport minister says

“In the final minutes, the plane climbed at a speed which was beyond normal,” transport minister Ignasius Jonan told reporters, citing radar data.

“The plane suddenly went up at a speed above the normal limit that it was able to climb to. Then it stalled.”

Earlier at a parliamentary hearing, he said radar data showed the Airbus A320-200 appeared at one point to be climbing at a rate of 6,000 feet [1,800 metres] a minute before the crash.

“I think it is rare even for a fighter jet to be able to climb 6,000 feet per minute,” Mr Jonan said.

“For a commercial flight, climbing around 1,000 to 2,000 [feet] is maybe already considered extraordinary, because it is not meant to climb that fast.”

This is entirely consistent with encountering a supercell in bad weather – an extreme updraft and then an extreme downdraft. This condition will often damage an aircraft as it exceeds the design specifications of most airframes. These are the conditions faced by the Hurricane Hunter aircraft.

How could this possibly have happened? </sarcasm>

The CBC reports: Drinking water trucked into Montana city after oil spill

Officials said Monday that they were bringing truckloads of drinking water to the eastern Montana city of Glendive after traces of nearly 190,000 litres of oil that spilled into the Yellowstone River were found in the city’s water supply.

State and federal officials said preliminary tests Monday indicated that at least some oil entered the supply for the city of 5,300 people. They stressed they are shipping drinking water as a precaution and do not know yet whether there is any public health threat to residents. They will perform further tests to determine that.

The pipeline is buried below the riverbed of the Yellowstone River and most of the river is frozen over.

This is just the latest reason not to build the Keystone XL pipeline.

I have located the tunnel. No light yet, but I’m confident that it is just around the next bend.

Someone else is dealing with the ‘door from hell’ so my frustration is with plumbing now. I’m hopeful that my next trip to the hardware store will be my last.

I actually got home at 9PM today, so that is definite progress compared with yesterday.

I wasn’t close to the computer today, and probably won’t be tomorrow because a ‘little adjustment to a door’ is becoming a major project.

[Old houses are so annoying.]

Sunday update: It’s almost midnight and I just got on-line for a few minutes. Maybe tomorrow.

Cat Blogging is delayed until tomorrow because I haven’t seen a cat outside all day. We had rain on Thursday and then it got colder, so the cats are in hiding. It should warm up tomorrow.

The BBC version” 2014 warmest year on record, say US researchers

2014 was the warmest year on record, with global temperatures 0.68C (1.24F) above the long-term average, US government scientists have said.

The results mean that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred since the turn of the century.

The analysis was published on Friday by Nasa and Noaa researchers.

Last month, the World Meteorological Organization released provisional figures that predicted the past 12 months were set to be record breakers.

The warming wasn’t uniform, for example the Eastern US was below the average temperature. Overall however the oceans and polar regions are warmer.

Don’t expect the news to change the mind of people whose paychecks are contingent on denying the reality to please their masters in the fossil fuel industries.

I first saw this at Mustang Bobby’s place and found a slightly different version at the BBC: Pope Francis says freedom of speech has limits

Pope Francis has defended freedom of expression following last week’s attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo – but also stressed its limits.

The pontiff said religions had to be treated with respect, so that people’s faiths were not insulted or ridiculed.
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“You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others. There is a limit.”

Sorry, but respect is earned not ‘deserved’ and if any institution acts in an outrageous fashion, they should be held up to ridicule.

When a religion discriminates against entire groups of people based on their inherent traits, be it sex, skin color, sexual orientation or any other facet that they were collectively born with, no one is under any obligation to respect them. Religion is a choice, not something humans are born with. Choices don’t deserve any special respect.

Show me a human who has never made a bad choice, and then we can start talking about miracles and holiness.

About the only thing of note was from the ABC: Singapore navy finds fuselage of crashed AirAsia jet. They got pictures of the center section of the aircraft with printing on them that identifies it as an AirAsia aircraft. They will be sending down divers to attempt to recover any bodies.

They have already started to download the information on the flight data recorder which should provide answers to many of the questions about the cause of the disaster.

I got an e-mail this morning supposedly summoning me to a ‘pre-trial hearing’ on a software copyright suit. The court papers were in an attachment.

OK, where to begin? As a programmer who has been dealing with software copyright issues on my own behalf for years the entire body of the e-mail was bogus. The court was wrong, the titles for court officials were wrong, everything was just wrong. There wasn’t a chance in hell of my opening the attachment.

These e-mails are part of the ‘social engineering’ used by spammers and hackers to suck people in and ignore common sense. I knew it was a scam just looking at the e-mail address of the sender, but I opened it to see how bad it was.

They might catch some people who don’t take minimum precautions, but anyone paying attention will just delete it. I’m not aware of any jurisdiction that permits service of a summons by e-mail.

In the early hours of January 13th, 1969 I was forced to accept something that I had known for a while, but had pushed to the back of my mind: I was mortal and was going to die.

This was the first of several incidents when my chance of survival was a good deal less than 1 in 2. This wasn’t the scariest, but it was the first, and following on the heels of the terrible events of 1968, it had the biggest impact.

In the end the only “death” was an airplane, Rivet Ball, the Air Force’s only RC-135S. The military version of the Boeing 707, the fuselage broke in half, like an eggshell, on impact. A very talented pilot, John Achor, the aircraft commander, was responsible for that miracle.

I provide more detail on my other site.

I’ve been saying nasty things about the mindless droids who have been attacking Islam lately, so to be ‘fair and balanced’ I should include this gem from the ABC: Snowmen condemned in Saudi Arabia amid concern they ‘promote lustiness and eroticism’

A prominent Saudi Arabian cleric has whipped up controversy by issuing a religious ruling forbidding the building of snowmen, describing them as anti-Islamic.

Most important thing to keep in mind – there are certain parts of your body that you absolutely do not want to expose to the remotest possibility of frost bite. That creates one of the biggest problems of camping in an Arctic winter. [Think about the basic biological functions.]

Anyone who seriously thinks there is any possibility of ‘lustiness and eroticism’ needs a major adjustments to their medications, because the current mix is just not connecting them to reality.

This fatwa is so absurd I have to wonder if this isn’t a salute to Charlie Hebdo … Nah, he really thought he was dealing with a serious issue. 😈

The ABC is reporting that divers have retrieved the voice and data recorders [Black Boxes] from the AirAsia jet that crashed off Borneo.

Earlier they raised the tail section of the jet from the ocean floor, and are still trying to locate a section of the passenger compartment.

Australopithecus rupertus™ has grunted again according to this ABC article:

Murdoch tweeted on Saturday, to his more than 500,000 followers: “Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible”.

In the same article they note:

Australian comedian Adam Hills joined the chorus of scathing criticism with “Oh good, Rupert Murdoch has waded into the Charlie Hebdo debate. I was wondering what an outdated, bigoted, sociopath might make of it all”.

Since the vast majority of the victims of these whackos are Muslims, I have to believe that they really would like these murderers to go away, be put away, or just killed, which is why governments in Muslim countries are at war with them.

More bad news for the French right wing whackos according to a CBC report. The raid on the Kosher supermarket was made much easier when a Muslim employee of the store sneaked out after hiding a group of shoppers to bring the police a key to the store’s security shutters.