Sunday, 9 January 2011
Darn scary article on global warming.............
The Washington Post
The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in
some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a
report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulafft, at
Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers
all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto
unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions
report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees
29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf
stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by
moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many
points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.
Very few seals and no white fish are found in the Eastern Arctic,
while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before
ventured so far North, are being encountered in the old seal fishing
grounds. Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt
the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.
See Below:
Oops! Never mind. This report was from November 2, 1922, as
reported by the Associated Press and published in the Washington Post
- 88 years ago!
H/T Shelly
An olde favourite....from Rico
This has long been a favorite joke of mine.
It's old, but I have never 'seen' it framed on a wall like this before now.
The PC-thenthitive will doubtless be 'offended' but they have no sense of humour anyway,
and as long as it was well-received by my old pals in the British Army of the Rhein and the SAS
...well, I could care less what the less-mentally endowed think.
Hey! It's a joke!!
And I still like this olde joke.
- It makes me wax nostalgic for my youger European days...
Jeepin in the Dez.
Truckhaven, north Ocotillo Wells, just west of Salton Sea, in Sunny Southern California
From Airship DC
PACIFIC OCEAN (Jan. 7, 2011) An EA-6B Prowler assigned to Electronic Attack Squadron (VAQ) 134 and an F/A-18E Super Hornet assigned to Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 81 launch simultaneously from the bow and waist catapults on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70). Carl Vinson and Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 17 are on a deployment to the U.S. 7th Fleet area of responsibility. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class James R. Evans)
H/T Marc
The Sunday Best..............
Cry the children in the agony of their deaths an eloquent assertion of their faith in christ ... nicolas sarkozy understands
Politics & the shooting of congresswoman gabrielle giffords ....
Iran has produced 40 kg of 20% enriched uranium
'Wobbling Earth' will turn all your zodiac predictions for 2011 wrong
South Korea says North is boosting special forces
Dambisa Moyo: without change US will almost certainly become a socialist nation
Beach sex scandal after copulating couples filmed
Toy collection could fetch more than $40 million
Clinton seeks stronger ties with Arab allies
Obama Eyeing Internet ID for Americans
Somalia's al-Shabab bans mixed-sex handshakes
Daley, Emanuel, Obama: Chicago on the Potomac
Bloodbath as 14 decapitated bodies of young men are found in Acapulco
Nasa probe DID find organic material on Mars... but it took scientists 34 years to notice
China builds world's longest bridge
Laser canons to defend ships from pirates
A clue to CIA mystery that has defeated the world's codebreakers
Aflockalypse now: on a wing and a prayer
Sudan Referendum: birth of a failed state?
Australian floods: Rockhampton residents are 'whacking' Queensland's venomous snakes to keep themselves safe
Moqtada al-Sadr calls for Iraqis to 'resist occupiers' by peaceful means
Heidi, the Cross-Eyed Opossum, Charms Germany
Uncertainty Reigns as Baghdad Enters New Era
Policeman claims trauma from porn email
Serious Problems ahead for the British Pound
and finally..........
Fun random image dump
Attention Linkwhoring
When you figure in inflation...........by Rico
OK, I know I know I know that 'officially' there is no inflation and hasn't been for several years.
Well, at least according to our Government.
Would THEY cook-the-books and LIE to us to avoid making any cost-of-living [COLA] adjustments to Social Security recipients, et al?
Nawwwwwwwww.
- And, I gotta agree with the USG (which doesn't figure-in energy or food when calculating inflation). As long as I don't need fuel for my vehicle to drive to the grocery store, hey....no problemo! There is NO inflation.
Inflation is a sneaky blighter though.
Look at the last decade of the US Equity market.
- Adjusted for inflation, you could call this chart "how to lose 24% and still have to pay capital gains taxes."
Gee! Uncle Sammy wins again by collecting taxes on money lost!
- Heads he wins, tails you lose.
Whoopee!
Happy days are here again!
Video: Marines Fight Through Enemy Ambush To Build New Patrol Base
1/3/2011 By Cpl. Daniel Blatter, Regimental Combat Team 2
H/T Marc
Saturday, 8 January 2011
Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords Shot by Gunman: Breaking Updates
I'm praying for everyone involved.
See the full report: "Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords Shot by Gunman at Townhall Event in Tucson — Progressives Blame Sarah Palin 'Hit List'."
Updates throughout the evening: "Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords Shot by Gunman at Townhall Event in Tucson — Progressives Blame Sarah Palin 'Hit List'."
Blair Hitch Project
Hitch gave up behind the scene deets with a screensaver money shot:
"...When Tony Blair took office, Slobodan Milošević was cleansing and raping the republics of the former Yugoslavia. Mullah Omar was lending Osama bin Laden the hinterland of a failed and rogue state. Charles Taylor of Liberia was leading a hand-lopping militia of enslaved children across the frontier of Sierra Leone, threatening a blood-diamond version of Rwanda in West Africa. And the wealth and people of Iraq were the abused private property of Saddam Hussein and his crime family.
"...Today, all of these Caligula figures are at least out of power, and at the best either dead or on trial. How can anybody with a sense of history not grant Blair some portion of credit for this? And how can anybody with a tincture of moral sense go into a paroxysm and yell that it is he who is the war criminal? It is as if all the civilians murdered by al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be charged to his account.
"...This is the chaotic mentality of Julian Assange and his groupies.
Pic - "Bosnia. That's what did it for me, Courtney. I kept seeing the same names on petitions for action I wanted to sign. Oh, look - there's Perle, and here's Wolfowitz - these people wanted to act." with Hail Darling Leader from GrEaT sAtAn"s gIrLfRiEnD
News..........
Cornbread fresh from the oven ...
Did the U.S. Invade Iraq to Contain China?
Israel admits Iran incapable of producing nuclear weapon before 2015
Gates Recommends Cancelling the Procurement of USMC's Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle
Obama's Moment of Truth at the UN
Don't pat me says Nader
Palin Says Obama Is “Hell Bent on Weakening America”…
A "must read" for all who would understand how islamic agitprop works ... pamela geller explains "dawa" at atlas shrugs ...
Women's panties get even more sexy!
How Nazis barked up a mocking dog
Fattest man Paul Mason sues the NHS for allegedly 'letting him grow'
Elderly Swedes bloodied in snow shovel brawl
TSA: Living on Borrowed Time?
Magnetic North Pole Shifts, Forces Runway Closures at Florida Airport
The Fifteen Most Hated American Companies Of 2010
Wind farms don't work in the cold: Why it's no use waiting for turbines to keep us warm as the snow returns
HMS Nightclub: Pride of the Fleet may become a Chinese disco
Eating carrots and plums 'makes you more attractive'
Nicolas Sarkozy says Christians in Middle East are victim of 'religious cleansing'
Empty wine bottles sell for £300 in China
Divers claim to have discovered USS Revenge
Argentine pilots arrested in Spain for smuggling cocaine
and finally..........
The journey that left me with an empty feeling by little Jimmy May
Haiti
Friday, 7 January 2011
Big Government and the Constitution
Listen to this discussion with Keith Olbermann and Yale political scientist Akhil Reed Amar. Progressives despise limited government, a concept that never leaves the lips of either of these men. The full entry is here: "Progressives Want to Read Slavery Back Into Constitution."
Additional commentary at American Power.
Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change
I mentioned previously that one of the extreme gender feminists suggested on Twitter that the #MooreandMe protest was something akin to a new civil rights movement. No doubt there's quite a bit of self-congratulations there. And while the gender feminists did gain a lot of attention, the power of Twitter and other media is to mobilize social change through strengthening civil society. The new media gets people out in the streets, to the ballot box, raising money and distributing information. This is not to minimize the leveling effect we saw with this most recent feminist campaign, but large-scale political effects of social technology will vary across regime development, or at least that's one of the things I'm getting from Clay Shirky's article at Foreign Affairs, "The Political Power of Social Media." While Shirky discusses the new social media as a global phenomenon, the essay focuses on the potential for revolutionary change in authoritarian regimes. The established democracies aren't prone to regime change of this sort, although some of those in the U.S. and Europe are backing the WikiLeaks project with such hope in mind. That said, it's an informative discussion at the article. The key point is the contrast between "instrumental" and "environmental" approaches to Internet freedom. The former relates to U.S. efforts to pressure repressive regimes to open access to online information sources. The latter focuses on the more traditional theme of opening civil society in general, taking the long view to social and political change:
In January 2010, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined how the United States would promote Internet freedom abroad. She emphasized several kinds of freedom, including the freedom to access information (such as the ability to use Wikipedia and Google inside Iran), the freedom of ordinary citizens to produce their own public media (such as the rights of Burmese activists to blog), and the freedom of citizens to converse with one another (such as the Chinese public's capacity to use instant messaging without interference).In any case, Charli Carpenter has more thoughts: "Information Doesn't Want to be Free, People Do."
Most notably, Clinton announced funding for the development of tools designed to reopen access to the Internet in countries that restrict it. This "instrumental" approach to Internet freedom concentrates on preventing states from censoring outside Web sites, such as Google, YouTube, or that of The New York Times. It focuses only secondarily on public speech by citizens and least of all on private or social uses of digital media. According to this vision, Washington can and should deliver rapid, directed responses to censorship by authoritarian regimes.
The instrumental view is politically appealing, action-oriented, and almost certainly wrong. It overestimates the value of broadcast media while underestimating the value of media that allow citizens to communicate privately among themselves. It overestimates the value of access to information, particularly information hosted in the West, while underestimating the value of tools for local coordination. And it overestimates the importance of computers while underestimating the importance of simpler tools, such as cell phones.
The instrumental approach can also be dangerous. Consider the debacle around the proposed censorship-circumvention software known as Haystack, which, according to its developer, was meant to be a "one-to-one match for how the [Iranian] regime implements censorship." The tool was widely praised in Washington; the U.S. government even granted it an export license. But the program was never carefully vetted, and when security experts examined it, it turned out that it not only failed at its goal of hiding messages from governments but also made it, in the words of one analyst, "possible for an adversary to specifically pinpoint individual users." In contrast, one of the most successful anti-censorship software programs, Freegate, has received little support from the United States, partly because of ordinary bureaucratic delays and partly because the U.S. government is wary of damaging U.S.-Chinese relations: the tool was originally created by Falun Gong, the spiritual movement that the Chinese government has called "an evil cult." The challenges of Freegate and Haystack demonstrate how difficult it is to weaponize social media to pursue country-specific and near-term policy goals.
New media conducive to fostering participation can indeed increase the freedoms Clinton outlined, just as the printing press, the postal service, the telegraph, and the telephone did before. One complaint about the idea of new media as a political force is that most people simply use these tools for commerce, social life, or self-distraction, but this is common to all forms of media. Far more people in the 1500s were reading erotic novels than Martin Luther's "Ninety-five Theses," and far more people before the American Revolution were reading Poor Richard's Almanack than the work of the Committees of Correspondence. But those political works still had an enormous political effect.
Just as Luther adopted the newly practical printing press to protest against the Catholic Church, and the American revolutionaries synchronized their beliefs using the postal service that Benjamin Franklin had designed, today's dissident movements will use any means possible to frame their views and coordinate their actions; it would be impossible to describe the Moldovan Communist Party's loss of Parliament after the 2009 elections without discussing the use of cell phones and online tools by its opponents to mobilize. Authoritarian governments stifle communication among their citizens because they fear, correctly, that a better-coordinated populace would constrain their ability to act without oversight.
Despite this basic truth -- that communicative freedom is good for political freedom -- the instrumental mode of Internet statecraft is still problematic. It is difficult for outsiders to understand the local conditions of dissent. External support runs the risk of tainting even peaceful opposition as being directed by foreign elements. Dissidents can be exposed by the unintended effects of novel tools. A government's demands for Internet freedom abroad can vary from country to country, depending on the importance of the relationship, leading to cynicism about its motives.
The more promising way to think about social media is as long-term tools that can strengthen civil society and the public sphere. In contrast to the instrumental view of Internet freedom, this can be called the "environmental" view. According to this conception, positive changes in the life of a country, including pro-democratic regime change, follow, rather than precede, the development of a strong public sphere. This is not to say that popular movements will not successfully use these tools to discipline or even oust their governments, but rather that U.S. attempts to direct such uses are likely to do more harm than good. Considered in this light, Internet freedom is a long game, to be conceived of and supported not as a separate agenda but merely as an important input to the more fundamental political freedoms.
RELATED: Evgeny Morozov, "Why Washington's support for online democracy is the worst thing ever to happen to the Internet."
Cross-posted from American Power.
Pentagon Faces the Knife
At WSJ, "Savings Ordered Up, Spurring First Troop Cuts in Decades; Salvo in Budget War":
In an early salvo in Washington's battle over the deficit, the White House ordered the Pentagon to rein in its budget, a move that will force a sizable cut in overall troop numbers for the first time in two decades.RTWT.
The surprise decision, which is designed to cut a total of $78 billion from the military budget in the next five years, shows how even the military isn't immune from the political heat brought on by worsening U.S. fiscal woes. It also represents a setback for Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who had fought to stave off such an outcome.
We are having to tighten our belts," Mr. Gates said Thursday.
The projected five-year budget outlined by Mr. Gates doesn't include an actual decrease in the military budget. But it will stop growing by 2015. With salaries, health-care and fuel costs climbing every year, the Pentagon needs a 2% to 3% annual budget increase to avoid making cuts in programs.
Under Mr. Gates's proposal, the Army and Marine Corps will shrink by up to 47,000 people, a reduction that comes on top of a 22,000 decrease already planned for the Army. Currently, the two services have about 772,000 members, with the last cuts to the Army and Marines coming after the 1991 Gulf War.
No new head-count cuts are planned for the Navy or Air Force, which recently underwent reductions.
By seeking long-term cuts in the Pentagon budget, the White House is taking on a Republican bastion and hoping to put the GOP on the defensive, especially tea-party-backed lawmakers who campaigned on slashing government spending.
Plus, Secretary Gates' interview is excellent, especially at 5:00 minutes, the discussion of the defense budget in perspective (as a percent of total federal spending and of GDP); and also the later discussion on the Chinese challenge and DADT repeal.
RELATED: Gordon Adams and Matthew Leatherman, at Foreign Affairs, "A Leaner and Meaner Defense: How to Cut the Pentagon's Budget While Improving Its Performance."
Cross-posted from American Power.
Both Elvis Presley and Tom Jones Loathed John Lennon
At London's Daily Mail, "Girls, Guns and Why Tom Jones and Elvis BOTH Wanted to Beat Up John Lennon." (Via Dana Loesch.)
Read it all. Elvis couldn't stand Lennon's antiwar pacifism, and Jones was tempted to kick Lennon's but himself.
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