Good reporter

Something
The Putin Doctrine: the defense of Russia is my highest constitutional duty

Secretary of the Treasury

Robert Shiller of Yale.
He is concerned about ranges of income per person,
or John Edwards's "Two Americas".

Who decides if an education is equal

Who decides what constitutes an equal school? We compel a child to go to school for 12 years; what is the compelling interest in making him go to a particular school?
----
The case in Seattle has to do a system where students choose their school. When too many parents want to send their child to one school, can the school board use race as a factor making school assignments?

As if this were the big stumbling block.
How about: Let blacks go where ever they want for the next 200 years.

The next big thing

Pink Slips
at Wal*Mart

Secretary of Defense

Making soap in Kandahar.
Sarah Chayes's Arghand.

Her story of the life, and death, of Muhammad Akrem Khakrezwal is The Punishment of Virtue.

The Collapse of Iraq

is hundreds of times worse than the collapse of the towers.
600k dead vs 3k dead, plus years of danger and chaos.

What I expect from government

1. No secrets
2. The right to bear cameras
3. Checks and balances
4. Stable curency
5. Law enforcement
6. Protect the commons

National Goals

1. Defense
    a. export oil
    b. no national debt
    c. regional farming
2. Public health

Ensure the CIA interrogators have the tools they need to keep our country safe

[Bush's statement]
Let the marines conduct the interrogations.
They seem willing to abide by the Geneva convention.

AWOL - how does he do it

Connections. Plus charm?

The Torture President

The Geneva convention prohibits outrages upon personal dignity.

Bush says every CIA interrogation may violate this restriction. Unless the Congress clarifies what this restriction means, he will be forced to shut the program down completely.

more from the New Yorker, on the push-back against torture.

more from the Voice, that Bush is protecting himself from Hamdan.

War against terra-firma

"Bush's job was to hunt down and kill the architect of the Twin Towers/Pentagon/PA bombings."

So what we are doing in Iraq?

The end of so-called Iraq

Terrorist training camp discovered Six murdered

The six Jesuits were murdered on Nov. 16, 1989 in El Salvador.
The murderers were trained at The School of the Americas,
at Fort Benning, Georgia.
----
Other Lands have Dreams. Kathy Kelly

Return of the Ghost Dance

It may be time for us to place our hopes in the Ghost Dance.

Rumsfeld orders "No post-war planning"

from the Buffalo News
But in 1989, 2,000 U.S. reinforcements were flown in to help establish order, in Panama. Maintaining order was part of the plan in Panama.

Shock without awe

I am shocked, but not in awe.

Rice, Bush, and Cheney are incompetent.
They ignored clear warnings before 9-11.
No law prevented Rice from talking to both the FBI and to the CIA.
Or from talking to Richard Clark. Clinton warned Bush in person.

Andrea Mitchell, reporting on NBC from outside the Pentagon on 9-11 at 10am, said that Osama was a prime suspect, based on similarity to the east African embassy bombings.

You are either with us or against us

Against.

A bad president

A bad president may be what we need.
I hope so.

Seymour Hersh and Iran

Reporter for the New Yorker.
Seen on Democracy Now! talking about our plans for Iran

Coming to a city near you

The DOE is playing with the idea of a reprocessing plant.

Kindness

The only thing that makes any sense.

The opposite of love

Indifference.

The Big Bang

Not even nothing is forever.

Brown v Board

Brown overturned Plessy in part, and affirmed it in part.
It overturned "separate"; it affirmed "equal".

Stop the War

James Kunstler and Y2K

James Kunstler, otherwise wonderful, feels that the Y2K problem was averted by busy programmers[July 10th]. He must think that there were no Y2K problems in China, Borneo, Mexico, and France because all the clever programmers in those countries found and fixed all those bugs. Clearly this is a false belief, but, well, no one is perfect.

Another false belief: The Y2K bug had a "deadline" of the night of Dec 31st 1999, presumably as the second hand, the minute hand, and the hour hand all crept or swept by the "12". Not so, as all you cognoscenti are aware. The "mess" caused by the ambiguity in deciding whether one date is before or after another date when the century is not specified was already half over at that point. The first half of the bugs, the forward looking comparisions, had all just begun to start working properly again(!) at that point, and the second set, the backward looking comparisons, had just started to malfunction.

A factor that helped enormously: modern databases have a special "date" data type, that does store the century. Applications using databases (Oracle, DB2, Informix, Access, ...) had limited exposure to the bug.

A picture is worth a thousand lies

Free-range grass-fed Bison?
Not hardly.
CAFO.

Polyface

Sustainable farming.
See The Omnivore's Dilema, a wonderful, subversive, eye-opeing book about farming.

Etymology of tut-tut

tut-tut, British.
Means "not tat tall" and is possibly derived, by elision, from it.
The british pronounce their t's as t's, not d's. Explosively.

What did Terri want?

She wanted a divorce.

The Great Wall

What would it cost to have Mexicans
build us a wall like this?

Were FDR's PWA and WPA insults?

Not to the people they employed.

The Eleven Commandments

John 13:34 (NIV)
A new command I give you: Love one another.
As I have loved you, so you must love one another.

Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society

Charming, Controlling, Violent

Whose wives were leaving them.
Gossip in Buffalo: OJ was into cocaine.

Life vs. The pursuit of happiness

These people worship me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.

There will be no axis of symmetry

Vegetables are off the table.
Sean McCormack, above, chastised Venezuela today for attempting to intimidate Ambassador Brownfield in Caracas. McCormick previously cautioned that our response to provocation is "going to be serious, strong and asymmetric."

"We will not be intimidated by fruits and vegetables" U.S. Embassy spokesman, Brian Penn, said.

The Tupamaros, fingered by Brownfield, denied throwing fruit.

WMD reported uncovered in Iraq

Reports circulate today that WMD have been located in Iraq. The Judge in the Moussaoui trial in the Eastern District of Virginia instructed the jury March 30th that planes can be considered weapons of mass desctruction when used as missles and flown into buildings.

Uncovered were uncontroverted evidence of weaponized planes in Iraq capable of being flown into buildings. It is widely held within the administration that other planes remain undiscoverd.

Suppression of pictures #5

The US Military today "was outraged" today by the posting of a video claiming to show Iraqi insurgents dragging the burning body of a U.S. pilot on the ground after the crash of an Apache helicopter.
They did not protest the shooting down of the helicopter, the setting the pilot on fire, or the dragging of the burning body.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

The Moussaoui jurors were instructed [Reuters] that a plane qualifies as a weapon of mass destruction when used as a missle.

This means that a missle is a weapon of mass destruction,
and that a plane is dual use technology.

The impact of this line of reasoning on the size of the threat from weapons of mass destruction has not yet been outlined. Presumably, any country with box cutters could be considered to have a program to acquire weapons of mass destruction, if, in addition to the box cutters, we have reason to believe that they are bad people.

April 1st, in history (1389-1400)

Canterbury Tales: The Nun's Priest Tale
3190 Syn March [was gon], thritty dayes and two,
Since March had gone, thirty days and two,
3191 Bifel that Chauntecleer in al his pryde,
Befell that Chauntecleer in all his pride,

Why did Ananias and Sapphira do that?

Acts 5
1Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. 2With his wife's full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself,
----
Clearly, they sold the piece of land with the intention of giving the proceeds to the church. They could have sold a smaller piece if they had intended to give less. I think that when they had the pile of cash in front of them, they looked at each other and said --- this is - too much.

The new world

Speak three languages: tri-lingual
Speak two languages: bi-lingual
Speak one language: handicapped

Exit Strategy

George's strategy is
to not exit.

Moussaoui Death Penalty in Jeopardy

The prosecution needs to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that FBI higher-ups would believe, and act on,
the testimony of a man sworn to destroy America

while, at the same time, they would not believe, and act on,
the impassioned warnings of faithful freedom-loving career agents who reported suspicions of the terrorist plots.

The "would believe Moussaoui and not agents" part is easy to accept;
the "would act on" part is the hard-sell.

UN establishes Human Rights Commission

USA votes against.

Feingold set to condemn White House

Senator Russ Feingold (D. Wis) has initiated an Eminent Domain process against the White House, characterizing it as a "blighted" area. Congress has administrative control over the District of Columbia. Feingold says that the site will be redeveloped as a medium security prison for the current administration.

New Homeless Shelter in DC

The new Washington National Homeless Shelter, the subject of political wrangling on the city council and tough negotiations with NGO Homes Not Jails, is scheduled for completion in April 2008.

"We felt D.C. deserved to distinguish itself. Another red brick homless shelter was not what we wanted," said project architect Joseph Spear. "We wanted something of this time and of this place" he added, "with a feeling of hopefulness. This design seems to say 'Maybe next year'."

Condos to cross Atlantic

Filipino Baptist Fellowship in Long Beach may be overrun by condos.
The city has invoked Manifest Destiny against the church.
Many lots on the west side of Atlantic have already been cleared.
Are two more condos critical?

click for larger picture
click for church's web site

Indicted for authorizing torture

The former president of Chile was indicted for authorizing torture, points out the witty Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

1493 - the 2nd trip

Columbus returns to Haiti and Santo Domingo in 1493 for more.
Haiti and Santo Domingo were popular slave embarkation points.

Population Density

China and India are winning at present.
Note that Rwanda, in central east Africa, is a purple dot.

FLASH: Aruba eyes Lake Maricaibo

We have just learned that Aruba may be interested in annexing the Lake Maricaibo region of Venezuela. "This would be a significant addition to our total Carribean waterfront kilometrage" says Queen Beatrix of Netherlands, the titular head of Aruba, our translator reports.

Donald Rumsfeld, asked to comment on whether this initiative was part of a "behind closed doors" effort to expand democracy in the other Americas, replied that the Netherlands's hegemony in Aruba is part of a repressive colonialist imperialist monarchy, whereas Venezuela has had a remarkable recent history of independent popular democracy, so that this eventuality might be considered as a net loss of democracy by some, although he declined to characterize the development as undesirable or disadvantageous.

General spots terror plot

The Surgeon General reports on a plot that may "dwarf" 9-11.

New Horizons spacecraft to Pluto

Launched Jan/06.
ETA 2015.
[Where] is it now?

David Choe

Anti-social spray painter
[website]

Progress in LA

The Community Garden is to be paved in South Central.