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1000 posts in just over two years
This is the 1,000th. Not too shabby I suppose. Traffic is finally starting to reach “trickle” status.
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Two good reads
- From Col. Lang (on partial withdrawal)
Iraq, (Mesopotamia) has always been held together (in various eras) by force and coercion. The enmity among the “Iraqis” is not a matter of misunderstanding, or a failure to communicate among themselves.
- From Michael Scheur (on George Tenet’s book)
But Tenet’s resignation would have destroyed the neocons’ Iraq house of cards by discrediting the only glue holding it together: the intelligence that “proved” Saddam Hussein guilty of pursuing nuclear weapons and working with al-Qaeda.
- From Col. Lang (on partial withdrawal)
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My take on the private intelligence topic
John Robb has a good representation of the current “news” going around my corner of the Blogsphere about private intelligence services. It would seem that they’re being created by Walmart and Blackwater. One thing that came to my mind when I read the post is what a great recruiting ploy it is. “Spend all your time reading foreign newspapers, talking to people you can barely understand, and writing reports!” seems unappealing, but “Join a private intelligence company” has a pleasant air of mystery to it.
What sort of work besides analysis is it possible, or feasible to do in our over-lawyered environment? It remains to be seen what they can do as a private entity that isn’t being done by non-private spy groups like the Rand Corporation and the Associated Press.
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My fabulous new logo
The company will be unveiled soon. -
The funniest thing I read today
It comes from the blog of Anderson Cooper, which graces us with
Cameras followed the governor as he shopped for groceries. All he had was $21.00 to spend on food for an entire week. That’s the average amount of money allotted to a food stamp recipient. He had to say “no” to organic bananas and Swiss cheese.
Does anyone expect food stamps to be more than just barely adequate (if that)? Is there anyone laboring under the idea that life on food stamps is an excess of luxury, filled with store bought organic foods?
One of the more annoying human tendencies is that everyone would think like we do if only they had access to the same collection of facts. Thomas Sowell put it best with
Facts do not ‘speak for themselves.’ They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
If you don’t convince someone of the flaw in the theory, all of the “awareness” in the world probably one reinforces one’s original worldview.
And on the awareness stunts, nothing beats death row inmates going on a hunger strike to protest conditions. How can anyone top that?
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Saturday rapid fire
- Thought crime in High School writing class –
Allen Lee, 18, faces two disorderly conduct charges over the creative-writing assignment, which he was given on Monday in English class at the northern Illinois school.
Students were told to “write whatever comes to your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing,” according to a copy of the assignment. This is the first salvo in the education establishments overreaction I suppose.
I wonder how far it will spread. It’s bad enough that 99% of corporate writing is so measured and passive it might as well be written in Latin, now it’s going to start even earlier.
- An interesting profile of international arms dealers. This one is worthy of a James Bond villain status.
- An Israeli newspaper ranks the US presidential candidates in terms of their willingness to defend Israel. Curiously lacking is the American counterpart to their prime ministers.
- Thought crime in High School writing class –
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Lou Dobbs continues his fight against the brown peril…
This time with verbal jousting against America’s other adulterous, Catholic mayor Gavin Newsom. It produced this little gem
Dobbs, an outspoken critic of illegal immigration who hosts an opinionated evening news hour, criticized San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on Monday, saying he and immigrant protection advocates “might as well work for Hermann Goering. I mean, they’re running so much propaganda, trying to confuse the debate, the national dialogue, by talking about immigrants rather than illegal aliens and legal immigrants. It’s mindless beyond belief.
Never mind that Goebbels was the propaganda minister, (Goering commanded the Luftwaffe), and never mind that the source of the gripe is that Newsom is refusing to allow local police to enforce immigration law. Never mind that the appropriate German/Nazi comparison to draw (if one must be drawn, Godwin’s law must be obeyed) is to Admiral Canaris (who helped hundreds of Jews escape the Nazis while he headed the Abwehr).
But don’t think of that, just think of the huge social advances if we brought back dueling. Huge swathes of hacks, apparachiks and fashionable non-conformists would be removed from the gene pool at no cost to the taxpayer. Still others, when forced to put up or shut up, would shut up (or at least try).
We could finally resolve all the pointless debates; is illegal immigration a huge problem that we’re not going to do anything about, or is it a charitable endeavor that we’re not going to do anything about. We would finally know!
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Interesting developments on carbon emissions
It would seem that there has been some progress in developing an actually useful way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Essentially it’s a giant vacuum that sucks the CO2 out of the air. It gets around several problems, most notably geography (the devices can be anywhere). While there is energy expended in the proccess, the main guy has the interesting observation
The real issue, says Lackner, is not the energy consumed but the CO2 emitted. He estimates that for every ton of CO2 he captures, he’ll generate another 0.4 ton. But because this process will take place at a plant, where emissions are concentrated relative to air, it will be easily captured.
Pair it up with nuclear power and you’ve got an even bigger net decrease.
One item not mentioned in the article is that it is possible to start this on a small scale without any public/government consensus on the topic. Any meaningful consensus, particularly an international one would most likely be ineffective, slow, corrupt in implementation and captured by special interests from the start.
The above remedy is able to be done by quite a few people with little public input and delay. The Sierra Club, Richard Branson, Wal-Mart, whoever, could just set them up as much as they wanted. It doesn’t get around the free-rider problem, but it does allow private virtue to be accomplished.
For the record, I’m still a skeptic on global warming, but the technology is fascinating.
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The Great Siberian Ice March
Somehow I wound up on this page on WikiPedia and found it fascinating. During the Russian Civil War in the late teen and early 20s, the Red Army was chasing the White Army across Siberia, specifically Lake Baikal had to escape across the frozen lake in sub-zero temperatures.
the Arctic winds that blow unobstructed across the lake froze many in the army and their families to death. The bodies remained frozen on the lake in a kind of tableau throughout the winter of 1919 until the arrival of summer, when the frozen figures and all their possessions disappeared in 8,000 feet of water.
Does anyone know of a good history of the Russian Civil War? I don’t know of any notable works on the topic.
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The weird far right makes an appearance
We haven’t seen these people since the last administration
Six arrested in ‘militia’ weapons raids; nearby school shut
Federal and state agents arrested six men and seized an arsenal of homemade hand grenades and firearms in raids Thursday, including one that forced the shutdown of a school.The men, members of the self-styled “Alabama Free Militia,” had no apparent plans to use the weapons, but the leader was described as a federal fugitive, federal authorities said.