:: posted by buermann @ 2008-09-04 17:22:28 CST |
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Dude on NPR ventilating about the array of voter registration fraud convictions against ACORN employees. No actual details, but vague allegations that this Barrack Obama fellow undermines the integrity of elections and threatens to corrupt the Republic. Why yes, he is a presidential candidate. What's actually going on?
So ACORN employees have figured out they can game the organization for an easy paycheck by faking the paperwork. I can see how this is a costly problem for ACORN, but some faked registrations easily traced back to the culprits wouldn't seem to poise much of an ominous threat to liberty and gobbledygook. Certainly, it's less of a problem than when the state decides you're dead.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-09-04 12:14:40 CST |
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somalia:
The report, authored by Ken Menkhaus, a Davidson College professor who is regarded as one of the foremost US experts on the Horn of Africa, calls for a thorough reassessment of US policy, including its support for the TFG and the primacy it has given to its "war on terrorism" in Somalia.
"US counterterrorism policies have not only compromised other international agendas in Somalia, they have generated a high level of anti-Americanism and are contributing to radicalization of the population," concluded the report, entitled "Somalia: A Country in Peril, a Foreign Policy Nightmare."
"In what could become a dangerous instance of blowback, defense and intelligence operations intended to make the United States more secure from the threat of terrorism may be increasing the threat of jihadist attacks on American interests," the report stressed.
Probably good news: Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi last week said his country is prepared to withdraw troops from Somalia.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-09-04 10:13:54 CST |
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lies down snarling:
I feel like they just handed the election away, like they didn't even want it. They must figure that when they retreat back to the trenches the base will have that pile of rotting meat and festering hatred to feast on. There was nothing but the usual ploys to lie about a tax policy published months ago, decrepit socialismo bogeymen (but they're the change!) and incoherent non-sequiturs (Mittens: we need "change from a liberal washington, to a conservative washington!", "the party of ideas, not the party of Big Brother!"), and blabberbutt whoppers about the biggest pork project in a decade of headlines.
To her credit the press seemed pleasantly surprised that she could deliver her attack lines. She clearly earned that communications degree. But they were called on the bridge to Nowhere, Alaska before Bush's speechwriter could have even put pen to paper for Palin's coming out party, and it was left at the center of the speech. Being mayor of a small town involves pulling yourself up by your federal handouts, y'all dig?
I've got an election strategy for you: let's make all our own foibles the center of the campaign, but try drawing the targets on the opposition, then blame the press if doesn't work out. In the meantime, their lame slogans are really ours, nya nya nya.
It is but by the grace of their invisible sky god that they only have to deal with the Democratic Party. It's hard to imagine how anybody else could find some way to turn this silver platter into a brown bag of shit sandwich.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-09-03 23:51:59 CST |
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shorter mike huckabee:
If John McCain hadn't been shot down bombing a Vietnamese power plant the commies would have invaded Wisconsin to hunt down the Green Bay Packers and they wouldn't have had a plan for the occupation and looters would have stolen all the timber so there wouldn't be any school desks for our children to earn, or receive as a gift from veterans who looted the timber, or something.
I think?
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-09-03 18:48:24 CST |
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BUSH: If the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain’s resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry left never will.
First, he's not equating the "angry left" to Vietnamese interrogators, he's saying they haven't got the nuts. There's probably not much substance to that, Clinton just outsourced it to Egypt and Jordan, afterall. Second, torture broke John McCain every bit as much as it broke Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: he gave up no useful information and confessed to everything.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-09-03 08:54:10 CST |
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eerily familiar:
I was watching this really rather enjoyable brief history of climate science, a lecture by Naomi Oreskes, Professor of History and Science at the University of California, San Diego:
There's a lot of talk about McCain not vetting her and making an irresponsible decision without forethought, and so forth, but it seems clear that she's just a chewtoy for their coo coo base. McCain's been bending his maverick behind over for the crazies since he lost in 2000, and somehow unlike any other set of organizing frameworks in America these people still harbor enough institutional memory years later - an admirable quality, to say the least - that he felt he had to throw them one more bone to mill down the fault lines. It'd be easy to dismiss it as a loser move, but
they're just making the same Jimmy Carter/Karl Rove play that has worked so well in the past against a Charlie Brown defense. Maybe it's just me, but what I saw last Friday was Obama trying harder to not scare anybody than win an election.
That said, on the sole basis of her vast experience in reforming the PTA, Palin will clearly make a very maverickyish sub-overlord. We need more local schmoes stumbling around in higher office: it's less corruption for more Jerry Springer. Joe Biden can stand before a pastel modern art piece at the end of every recall election and tell us about loving one another, for all our faults.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-09-02 23:19:46 CST |
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somebody in the conventions finally mentions US detainee policy:
Isolation ... incredible heat beating on a tin roof. A light bulb in his cell burning 24 hours a day. Boarded-up cell windows blocking any breath of fresh air.
Oh, nevermind, it's just Fred Thompson, talking about John McCain's rarely discussed experience as a POW.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-09-02 19:27:27 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2008-09-02 11:09:39 CST |
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bright idea:
PANAMA CITY (Reuters) - Panama plans to hand out 6 million energy-saving light bulbs, nearly two per citizen, to ease soaring demand for electricity and prevent future blackouts, President Martin Torrijos said on Monday.
I left the State Capitol before the marchers did, alternately shadowing riot police and the roving protesters. For hours the game was the same: mostly black-clad protesters would round a corner chanting and dancing. The black-clad riot police would form columns. There would be a tense standoff and then, as quickly as they came, the protesters would disappear around another corner. It went on and on like this.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-28 10:42:30 CST |
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most days I miss Perl:
If Rails produces a 502 Proxy Error:
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
It might just be that /tmp is not writable, so mongrel can't create the 4 separate tempfiles it apparently needs to generate for every uploading request larger than 114k, though what you'll see in the logs is an error about not being able to create said files in mongrel's working directory, rather than a write error to /tmp.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-26 14:18:38 CST |
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Laos, 35 years later...:
the most secret location in this clandestine war was the former CIA air base of Long Chen, in central Laos, a place that remain off limits even today.
Oh. Well that should make for an interesting documentary:
What? No 60s jingles providing a poppy soundtrack for the B52 bombers as they raze the countryside? What the hell kind of documentary is this?
update: The Al Jazeera report that stirred up said documentary, when Tony Birtley became the first Western journalist to visit said Hmong in 30 odd years, is on youtube. Reading some more general background on the silly bickering over what to do with the people we armed and trained to fight our colonial enterprises for us might be advisable.
My inclination is, being as some in the Laotian government are still understandably irate with all our fantastic enterprises leveling their country and the Hmong's services rendered in that disaster, to just send the rest of our drug running terrorists to Sheboygan, with their compatriots.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-25 13:42:23 CST |
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coulda woulda shoulda:
the National Security Archives gets more cool stuff:
A 400-page Sandia National Laboratories report on bin Ladin, compiled in 1999, includes a warning about political damage for the U.S. from bombing two impoverished states without regard for international agreement, since such action "mirror imag[ed] aspects of al-Qaeda's own attacks" [see pp. 18-22]. A State Department cable argues that although the August missile strikes were designed to provide the Taliban with overwhelming reason to surrender bin Laden, the military action may have sharpened Afghan animosity towards Washington and even strengthened the Taliban-al-Qaeda alliance.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-20 21:23:16 CST |
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my imagination is turning into my father:
The more I delve into the intertubes' enormous DIY community, the more I feel like I'm living in the world described in Player Piano, and understand the bare necessity of owning a garage and a woodshop, nevermind a kiln and a specialmatic. Bumbling suburban apes the world over are building absurd, rudementary contraptions that just barely work, and like any other monkey I can't help but want to imitate them.
Now, you can take your pick - whether you believe Clinton and Putin were intent on preventing genocide, like they claim, or whether their intentions reflected some more stately interest - but the objective reader might note a similar interest in "diverting oil around Russia" in the Balkans.
Bass looks to the history of humanitarian intervention, and unsurprisingly finds it everywhere. He decides to land upon the British role in the Battle of Navarino as a "spectacular" instance of a nation intervening against its own interests for humanitarian purposes:
When Greek nationalists rose up against Ottoman rule in 1821, much of the British public rallied to their cause, galvanized by press reports of Ottoman atrocities. This was supremely inconvenient for the British government, which had a clear imperial interest in supporting the Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Russian expansion. But the London Greek Committee lobbied the government, sent money and weapons to the Greeks and dispatched men, including Lord Byron, then probably the most famous poet in Europe, to Greece to fight. Byron died of fever there. (Imagine Bono fighting in Darfur today.) Finally, in 1827, the British Navy, alongside French and Russian ships, sank much of the Ottoman Navy in Greece helping to secure the creation of todays independent Greece.
An intriguing example! I note that the British Navy had been ordered to avoid hostilities - Britain only agreed to go in, after five years of successful stalling, on a bid to restrain the new Russian Tzar's unilateralist tendencies - and that sinking the Ottoman Navy, and thus winning Greece its independence, was rather an accident. The Admiral, as a reward for this humanitarian gesture of either disobeying orders or defending his fleet, was summarily relieved of his command and recalled to London for a solid dressing down, while the Foreign Office went about patching things up with the Ottomans and installing some Bavarian Prince into the otherwise empty throne of the Greek republic, and so, terminating the independence all those 19th century British Bonos had died fighting for.
Bass continues:
Humanitarian intervention, in other words, is not the property of the United States or the generation of liberal hawks who championed Balkan interventions in the 1990s. For better or worse, it is best understood as an idea thats common to the big democracies on both sides of the Atlantic.
And, he might have added, common to other notable products of Western civilization. If only Neville Chamberlain had established a stricter system of international intellectual property rights, so much mid-century calamity could have been avoided.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-17 02:17:02 CST |
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mental bulimia:
A conservative acquaintance suggested to me this morning that Bush's actions regarding Georgia may some day lead us to see that "bush is a modern day churchill". The thought was fairly unfathomable, figuring the proposed truce pushed onto Georgia's village idiot by our village idiot seems to give Russia exactly what it wanted, de facto if not entirely de jure. The first hit I got on google news for "bush churchill", in the hopes of discovering what must be the extraordinarily idiotic logic behind such fantasies, was the Wall Street Journal:
President Bush finally condemned Russia's actions on Monday after a weekend of Olympics tourism in Beijing while Georgia burned. Meanwhile, the State Department dispatched a mid-level official to Tbilisi, and unnamed Administration officials carped to the press that Washington had warned Georgia not to provoke Moscow. That's hardly a show of solidarity with a Eurasian democracy that has supported the U.S. in Iraq with 2,000 troops.
Compared to this August U.S. lethargy, the French look like Winston Churchill.
Well, either way you puke it up it's still pretty stupid. The conservative's mental equivalent of chronic acid reflux is that anytime a serious crisis is encountered World War II will be painfully regurgitated. All French President Sarkozy did was host the bridge game, and now the WSJ is comparing him to some archaic thug, to whom, if we're to be serious, was a good deal more like Putin - note the efficient imperial savings to be had by occupying secessionist territories that want to be annexed - than any of these other jokers, pulling off some goofy stunts at the terminal end of a once mighty empire.
On the bright side, if the simple minded foaming at the mouth for the past week for a "new Cold War" is any indication, none of these people will be running the world for much longer.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-16 15:46:54 CST |
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MCCAIN: As the president has said, there are significant challenges that remain in the region, from getting control of the country of Afghanistan to this very serious crisis that exists between Pakistan and India. So there's challenges in the region, but overall the success so far has been very impressive.
October 10th, 2000:
MCCAIN: I think we're seeing, perhaps, our worst fears being realized there in that part of the world. I believe that unless something turns around rather quickly, we could see further escalation and open welfare, whether it be in Ramallah, the West Bank, Gaza or Lebanon, Syria. I support the administration's efforts strongly to bring this -- to defuse this crisis that's looming that could be the greatest since the '73 war, '67 war. And it's very, very serious. It has very serious consequences and it is clearly in the United States national security interest to see this situation defused.
I do not think it's appropriate for me or any other politician right now to criticize the administration while this very serious crisis is going on.
A feather hasn't flown off the back of a chickenfoot without being declared a serious crisis by Launchpad McCain.
THE NATIONAL INTEREST: polls (including Time and Rasmussen surveys released this week) have consistently demonstrated McCain’s advantage over Obama on terrorism and national-security issues. If a serious crisis unfolds, voters may regard McCain as the more experienced and tougher candidate, prepared to deal with foreign chaos.
I don't think I'd hire him to run the company risk assessments.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-15 22:05:46 CST |
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abolishing the cia:
Jimmy Carter one asked why his daily brief from the CIA just told him what he'd already read in the morning paper. The statistical outlier Reagan was of course too busy writing the news himself to have any use for some petty civil servant telling him what he'd been up to. The last three Presidents of the United States all famously watched the progress of their wars on CNN or, latterly, FOX. But times change, and technology advances. The POTUS of the future will just read wikipedia.
As you can see, the market has provided centralized intelligence products that the consumer routinely prefers over more bureaucratic alternatives, demonstrating once again the inefficiency and waste of government and the superior innovation of the private sector. It is inevitable that the CIA will be phased out of existence, like so many other archaic federal redundancies before it.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-11 23:37:59 CST |
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I rung her before we sailed away, we're bound for South Ossetia:
I understand a border territory caught between the spheres of influence of two major world powers is experiencing some hostilities. The Bush administration's behavior, I'm sure, is awful and shocking in some way. Rather than follow the story, however, I've decided to save some time and watch it in movie form. The only hard part is figuring out which tinpot leader gets to be allegorically represented by this sublime Ernest Borgnine performance.
update: An old Human Rights Watch report, back when it was still watching Helsinki, on the 1991 Georgia-South Ossetian conflict is rather more informative than anything I'm seeing anywhere else.
Excepting, now that I get around to looking, Cobban and co., of course.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-09 22:08:56 CST |
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It turns out John Edwards is less the fag and more the manslut. I don't see the shame in either: it's not like he served his wife with the divorce papers while she was recuperating in the hospital from a tragic accident, or some dick move like that. But whatever it is, it's good news for John McCain!
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-09 19:20:40 CST |
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fred l. smith jr. doesn't make a lot of sense to me:
Our ability to do anything about CO2 increases for the next half-century is now obviously nonexistent. And the tensions we could create by pushing the world into some form of energy rationing, I think, are underestimated. Recall that in World War II, one of the incidents that pushed the war party into power in Japan was an energy boycott on that Asian nation. We are going to do that again with China. It doesnt make a lot of sense to me.
Obviously, it's not obvious, nor is energy coupled to greenhouse emissions, so there's no energy rationing implied, obviously, to some sort of rationing of said emissions by some sort of implied price mechanism, let alone some sort of energy boycott against China nobody seems to have suggested - for this reason, anyway, though they have for every other. Obviously, if the PRC is predicting a 10% loss of output in their 300 billion dollar ag sector, nevermind the annual 7% glacier loss reducing the supply of hydroelectric power and fresh water and irrigation resources, they've got their asses pretty far into the fire already. But China isn't the problem, even after years of record growth, with fewer past emissions to account for, the carbon footprint of the average Chinese citizen is less than a fifth of that of an American. An energy boycott against us would seem more likely.
We must do something. Perhaps. But why must that something be the expansion of state power over our lives?
That, from a classic example of a barnacle that feeds off the bounties that got us into this mess, is classic. Fred Smith pays himself his very comfortable salary with tax incentivized donations from large fossil energy firms, which, to quote Dick Cheney, "government involvement makes ... a unique commodity ... both the overwhelming control of oil resources by national oil companies and governments as well as in the consuming nations where oil products are heavily taxed and regulated", nevermind subsidized and supported as a way of life from the federal level to the local. From naval protection to production tax credits to the occasional trillion dollar occupation, to the state supported highway system at the expense of cheaper, more efficient mass transit that in turn was "deregulated" to shift liability to the public for private profit, to regulatory disincentives for end-use efficiency, to the zoning laws that restrict population density and spawn long commutes over sprawling heat islands, the simple amount of poor design of essential public goods that have benefitted Fred Smith's donor base since the invention of the automobile - and at the expense of alternatives we're now turning back to - is simply incalculable. And he wants to talk about costs.
Fred Smith isn't afraid of a carbon tax increasing state power over our lives, he's afraid of state power ceasing its support of his.
So I take it back. Fred Smith Jr. makes perfect sense, afterall. Inviting him to this debate is like asking the pig at the trough to address portion sizes in the kitchen.
On the up side, I still find Ronald Bailey's argument for a carbon tax over cap-and-trade fairly convincing, and have to admit to some concern that the proposed carbon markets will be a massive swindle. This comment from Northwestern economics prof Lynne Kiesling may be apropos:
Kiesling: In this case of Chicago Climate Exchange, the biggest participants are Ford Motor and American Electric Power—the largest coal-fired generation owners in the country. So for them, it’s a strategic action. They’re hoping to forestall regulation but also it’s a P.R. and reputation capital building exercise.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-09 15:48:50 CST |
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don't confuse us with the facts:
The New York Times reports about how awesome shit is down in Brazil, by way of idly kicking around Bolivia and Venezuela:
Brazil, South Americas largest economy, is finally poised to realize its long-anticipated potential as a global player, economists say, as the country rides its biggest economic expansion in three decades.
That growth is being felt in nearly all parts of the economy, creating a new class of super rich even as people like Ms. Sousa lift themselves into an expanding middle class.
Despite investor fears about the leftist bent of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva when he was elected to lead Brazil in 2002, he has demonstrated a light touch when it comes to economic stewardship, avoiding the populist impulses of leaders in Venezuela and Bolivia.
Instead, he has fueled Brazils growth through a deft combination of respect for financial markets and targeted social programs, which are lifting millions out of poverty, said David Fleischer, a political analyst and emeritus professor at the University of Brasilia.
That's why Brazil's average GDP growth over the past 6 years has been dramatically greater than its impulsive populist neighbors, by avoiding populist impulses!:
