Category — Uncategorized

Please drop by Sam and Mexico’s personal photographer a few times daily so he will get the requisite number of hits prior to Flag Day and will stop whining and blegging.

This entry in NPR’s This I Believe series should make you hungry if you eat meat. They should have the audio link up by now, but they have the text available.

You have to pay attention to this commentary, Digging for Hidden Bodies in Michigan , in which “funeral director Thomas Lynch muses about what it means to hide the bodies of mobsters, regular folks and soldiers.” It sounds weird when you read the blurb, but it makes sense. [I’m not saying that he equates the Shrubbery with the mob; that would be wrong…]

This final piece from NPR, Funeral Protest Ban Targets Anti-Gay Church , in which you get to listen to the dulcet tones of that master of the obnoxious and leader among the Religious Reich, Fred Phelps, complain about the actions to ban things like Anti-gay group protests at National Cemetery, which took place at Arlington today. [If I were a nasty person I might say something like: “If his parents had taken Fred to the vet for neutering and a rabies shot we wouldn’t have to put up with his garbage”, but I won’t.]

The CBS report, Deadly Attack On CBS News Crew, doesn’t go beyond the media involvement.

CNN is better with their report, 2 CBS News staff, U.S. soldier killed in Iraq blast:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Four people, including a U.S. soldier and two members of a CBS News crew, were killed Monday when a bomb ripped through the U.S. military convoy in which they were traveling.

CBS said cameraman Paul Douglas, 48, who was based in London, and sound tech James Brolan, 42, were killed in the blast.

The U.S. military said a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi contractor also were killed in the attack on their convoy. (Watch activity around the charred vehicle at the blast site — :46)

Six U.S. soldiers and CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier were wounded in the attack, the military said.

The CBS crew was imbedded with the 4^th Brigade Combat Team of the 4^th Infantry Division. They had stopped and gotten out of their vehicles when an IED planted at the site was detonated.

The 4^th Infantry Division is based in Fort Hood, Texas, and the two CBS employees are British.

Maybe it’s just me, but I have a responsibility for the soldiers sent to Iraq. The CBS people had a choice. If the media would report the deaths of the American military personnel with as much dispatch as they report the death and injury of journalists, something might actually get done about bringing this mess to an end.

Actual headline of the CNN article on King Charles’s the Shrubbery’s attack on Parliament Congress: Rumpus over FBI raid leads to talk of resignations.

The footnote on the bottom of page 73 of the Harper Collins hardcover of The Truth by Terry Pratchett:

“Words resemble fish in that some specialist ones can survive only in a kind of reef, where their curious shapes and usages are protected from the hurly-burly of the open sea. ‘Rumpus’ and ‘fracas’ are found only in certain newspapers (in much the same way that ‘beverages’ are found only in certain menus). They are never used in normal conversation.”

Welcome to Ankhmorpork.

The master of miniscule, skippy the bush kangaroo, let loose with an excellent rant about the wusses on the wrong wing of the discussion regarding the threats the US faces today.

I think he hopped over a few things that were going on during the 1960s and 1970s that didn’t directly involve the CCCP:

The United States was disrupted by multiple riots in the 1960s. The “12^th Street Riot” in Detroit in 1967 was probably the worst, but there were riots in many cities following the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination in 1968 and a police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Today there is Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, but there were many more groups and individuals involved in terrorism world-wide before the fall of the Berlin Wall:

[Read more →]

Lisa English is back writing regularly at Ruminate This after an extended hiatus, and she has an interesting find in Pursuing The Impossible. . . Or A Method To Their Madness?

Over at Counterpunch she found an article, The Politics of Paranoia and Intimidation by Floyd Rudmin, a professor of social and community psychology at the University of Tromsø in Norway.

I don’t assume that Counterpunch always fact checks, and am unfamiliar with Dr. Rudmin, so it was time to do a little searching to see what I could find.

His academic credentials are fine: BA Philosophy from Bowduin College, MA Audiology from SUNY Buffalo, and MA, PhD Psychology from Queen’s University in Canada. He is a pacifist and well-published in his field.

As a social psychologist he crunches a lot of numbers as statistics is possibly the only way you can derive an real answers in his field, so he has a practical background for his claims.

[Read more →]

An update on the on-going campaign to attack Iran by Shrubbery and the Mayberry Machiavellis.

As Juan Cole points out, since 2003 Iran has been trying to arrange direct talks with the United States over various items of mutual interest.

While Dr. Cole notes that the “Iran as the banker of terrorism” was discredited some time ago, early this morning on the BBC World Service Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns was repeating the meme once again.

CNN reported today that Iran wants the US to stop the bluster, and let’s talk. The Christian Science Monitor points to the reality that the biggest sticking point on the Iranian side is the lack of a US security guarantee for Iran.

[Read more →]

How do you say My Lai in Arabic?

Haditha.

Via the Invisible Librarian we “discover” Dracorex hogwartsia: the Dragon King of Hogwarts, while DARPA hopes to create Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak without having to breed a Demiguise.

I’m still waiting for my flying car.

You supported giving them all of these “extraordinary powers” so they could enable the “extraordinary committee” to “protect the people” and now you have discovered that you are not safe from the “committee’s” intrusion:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
There was no one left to speak out.

Pastor Martin Niemöller

The Pastor was an early supporter of the Nazi Party because “something had to be done about the unrest.”

Do you idiots in Congress not understand that your telephones are being logged. Your e-mail is being read. You are subjected to all of the restrictions when flying. You are subjected to the same indignities as the rest of us.

Did you think you would be immune? Did you think they would treat you differently?

You have the power and the responsibility to stop this. You are supposed to represent the citizens of this country.

This is wrong, but predictable: ‘Da Vinci Code’ success sparks ‘Angels & Demons’ plans.

Dan Brown wrote a boring book named Angels & Demons that no one read before he wrote the slightly less bad book that everyone read. Since the film from the less bad book is making money, they decided to “follow the formula”.

Canadian Broadcasting has a story about the media relations of their new Prime Minister: Harper says he’s finished with Ottawa press corps

Since becoming prime minister in January, Harper has had a testy relationship with the national media in Ottawa. His staff has tried to manage news conferences by saying they will decide which reporters get to ask questions.

The press gallery has refused to play by those rules. “We can’t accept that the Prime Minister’s Office would decide who gets to ask questions,” Yves Malo, a TVA reporter and president of the press gallery, told CP on Tuesday. “Does that mean that when there’s a crisis they’ll only call upon journalists they expect softball questions from?”

On Tuesday about two dozen Ottawa reporters walked out on a Harper event when he refused to take their questions.

That led Harper to say that from now on he will speak only to local media.

Ah, yes: “avoiding the filter to speak directly to the people” was how the Shrubbery put it.

This CBS story, Olmert: Israel Won’t Wait Forever, is just an attempt to shift responsibility:

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday that Israel would be a “willing partner in peace” with the Palestinians, but would draw its own borders in the West Bank should it conclude it has no negotiating partner.

“We cannot wait for the Palestinians forever,” Olmert told members of the House of Representatives and Senate gathered in the House chamber.

“Our deepest wish is to build a better future for our region, hand in hand with a Palestinian partner, but if not, we will move forward, but not alone,” he said, alluding to promised U.S. support.

When you refuse to talk to the other side, you are the problem. There are existing UN Security Council resolutions that clearly delineate the borders, so Israel has the burden to get the Palestinians to agree to any changes. Blaming the Palestinians for who they elect isn’t going to cut it.

Both Australia Broadcasting with their article, Chocolate may boost brain power, and CNN with this Reuters report, tell people to take that Cadbury Fruit & Nut bar and eat it before the test.

Note to the purists: milk chocolate. I’m sorry, but milk chocolate works best.

Apparently the National Post has decided to acknowledge the obvious and admit they didn’t use due diligence: Newspaper apologizes for anti-Iran report.

The National Post ran the piece on its front page Friday along with a large photo from 1944 that showed a Hungarian couple wearing the yellow stars that the Nazis forced Jews to sew to their clothing.

The story, which included tough anti-Iran comments, was picked up widely by Web sites and by other media.

“Is Iran turning into the new Nazi Germany? Share your opinion online,” the paper asked readers Friday.

But the National Post, a longtime supporter of Israel and critic of Tehran, admitted Wednesday it had not checked the piece thoroughly enough before running it.

“It is now clear the story is not true,” Douglas Kelly, the National Post’s editor in chief, wrote in a long editorial on Page 2. “We apologize for the mistake and for the consternation it has caused not just National Post readers, but the broader public who read the story.”

Another planted story to confuse the situation and drum up anger against Iran.

[Read more →]