Category — Uncategorized

I try not to get involved with economics because I hated the subject instinctively, mainly because what I was hearing in class wasn’t logical and couldn’t be applied in the real world.

Max of Maxspeak was one of the few economists who made a point of connecting what was going on with the real world and now he has announced: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. A new position precludes blogging.

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Two years ago Katrina had already made landfall in South Florida and was on its way to the Gulf where it would become a monster.

In the aftermath I have noticed a lot of people who are complaining about actions of the state and local governments without understanding anything about disaster funding. There is one point I’d like to address because it is often used to disparage governments and is totally unfair.

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Michael of Musing’s musings is checking on the price of gopher wood and pondering the real question: “How long can you tread water?” as the rain continues to fall and the rivers continue to rise in his area of the Midwest.

But Fallenmonk reports that although the state is experiencing drought and a record number of days above 100°, a majority Repub committee of the Georgia House reports “No Worries” as Global Warming is not real.

Well, I know how much credence I put in a GOP judgment on reality…well, actually we don’t yet have an instrument to measure levels that small, but better electron microscopes are being built every year.

Update: If you never seen or heard the routine, here’s Noah on Youtube.

Bovine excrement increases greenhouse gases and exacerbates global climate change, so I really wish these people would stop.

DNI “Mike” McConnell spent a quarter century in military intelligence and served as DirNSA [Director of the National Security Agency] so he took the same course I did on the Fourth Amendment do’s and don’t’s. I couldn’t believe what I read in the earlier article, so I found the original piece.

In the El Paso Times article, Transcript: Debate on the foreign intelligence surveillance act, he makes the following response:

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Avedon Carol at The Sideshow cuts to the chase on Vietnam, and by implication Iraq, and asks the real question:

It would be nice if we could somehow force them into a real debate in which we get to ask them just what exactly it is they think we lost in ‘Nam, and what we would have won if we’d stayed. What prize would have been worth thousands more names added to that wall?

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When I saw the report about the Shrubbery’s VFW speech I knew I had to comment. I hopped over irony, skipped passed parody, jumped beyond satire, sidestepped sarcasm and went directly into Number 7 mode. This was so wrong I knew I had to go with it. I figured that some would perceive this as a stainless steel colander™ moment and a hyperbolic exercise in hate of the Hedgemony. So be it, it was too good to miss and I got to haul out some terrifically bad moves by the very annoying people who thought they knew what was best for “the people¹.”

Imagine my dismay when this morning I stopped by Dr. Cole’s place and read: Military Coup Planned for Iraq?

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It is possible that the Shrubbery thought that Alden Pyle was Gomer Pyle’s brother, and he had probably missed the episode about Alden in Saigon after getting on the wrong airplane in Atlanta while headed to Mayberry for a visit.

I worry about hurricanes because I have to make decisions for a number of people based on what these storms do, and I want to get things done ahead of time. I’ve been dealing with these suckers for decades, so I don’t relax until they are truly dissipated, not just headed in a different direction.

While I’ve been watching the Caribbean, almost two dozen Americans had died as a result of the flooding in the Midwest. Michael at Musing’s musings is on the verge of cabin fever, and Mustang Bobby of Bark Bark Woof Woof got to his parents’ house in Ohio in time to watch their sump pump prove to be inadequate to the job of keeping the basement dry.

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Barely able to survive on the pittance the government pays [$168K/year], Tony Snow is resigning as the Presidential Press Secretary to return to his old job as Presidential Press Secretary at Faux News.

A while back the military went paranoid on use of the Internet by the troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The story was they were a danger to operational security posing details of operations in their e-mails and on their blogs, so everything had to be screened and sites had to be blocked.

Unfortunately for this line of reasoning they started monitoring everything and as Noah of Danger Room writes: Army Audits: Official Sites, Not Blogs, Breach Security.

It would appear that in the official efforts to the catapult the propaganda the military PR people are too often violating operational security. When they report “successes,” they are providing too much background. I have to assume that this is being done by contractors, because the actual members of the military who work in the information field are very careful about this.

I’m forced to conclude that it wasn’t a concern for OpSec, but a concern that unspun truth would get out that prompted the clamp down.

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog notes:

MEXICO CITY — Authorities are sounding the alarm about an influx of assault rifles, armor-piercing pistols and fragmentation grenades from the United States, weapons that they say are increasingly being used to kill police and soldiers fighting drug cartels.

It sounds like the US is proving weapons to narco-terrorists who are attacking Mexican law enforcement. Maybe the Mexican government should classify the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms a terrorist organization?

Update: Local officials in Nineveh province now put the death toll at 500. There are only an estimated 100,000 Yazidi in Iraq.

Juan Cole notes that the series of car bombs that killed 200 in northern Iraq was a continuation of the attempts to eliminate minority populations. This time the Yazidi, a Kurdish religious sect, were the targets. In July it was Shi’ia Turkmen.

The Sunni Arabs want to force all other groups out of the area. The “noise” about al Qaeda in Iraq is is the official military agitprop. This is more probably part of the civil war than of the resistance to occupation. This would have happened with or without the US presence or foreign fighters.

Outside of the regular military of Iran is the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, AKA the Revolutionary Guards or Pasdaran. The Special Forces unit of the AGIR is the Quds Force which has an interesting history:

The Quds Force was created during the Iran-Iraq war as a special unit from the broader Pasdaran forces. After the war, Quds Force continued to support the Kurds fighting Saddam Hussein, during the war it had helped the Kurds fight the Iraqi military. The Quds also expanded their operations into other areas, most notably aiding Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance against the Soviets during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and then helping Massoud after the war against Taliban forces. There were also reports of the Quds forces lending support to Muslim Bosnians fighting the Serbs during the Yugoslav wars.

The US supported the Kurds. The US supported the Northern Alliance against the Soviets and the Taliban.

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Yeah, right, just your average middle-class Americans, the Bushies.

Cécilia Sarkozy is not apt to drop in at a neighbor’s for hotdogs when she avoided most of her husband’s victory celebration. The Times may write Cécilia, you’re breaking all the rules, but it is extremely doubtful that she cares. Her husband is the politician and has obligations, she didn’t agree to anything.

[the first link is to Youtube, if you’re on dial-up]