0733: The sky is falling . . . again

Why is ‘abbreviated’ such a long word?

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

Via she who Writes Like She Talks…

Just when you think Israel’ homegrown neo-cons can’t dig the hole any deeper, they prove you wrong.

And I asked: “You mean a death then?”
“Yes,” the voice said. “Die
into what the earth requires of you.”
Then I let go all holds, and sank
like a hopeless swimmer into the earth
and at last came fully into the ease
and the joy of that place,
all my lost ones returning.

-from Song In A Year Of Catastrophe, p. 40

Found in my electronic chapbook.

From Farming: A Hand Book by Wendell Berry.

I’m not sure who first coined the phrase: The Century of China, but as we prepare to enter the second decade of the 21st century, the case for China’s dominance continues to grow. Where China goes, nations notice and as always in international relations, we judge governments by the friends they keep.

From The Irrawaddy:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao began an official visit to Burma on Wednesday. The premier’s trip marks the 60th Anniversary of Burma’s diplomatic ties with China. He is the first high-level leader of China to visit Burma after the visit of former President Jiang Zemin in 2001.

The Irrawaddy has compiled a chronology of the two countries’ relations during the past 60 years.

2001-Chinese President Jiang Zemin visits Burma and signs economic and border agreements in December.

1996-Sen-Gen Than Shwe makes his first visit to China since taking over as chairman of SLORC in 1992.

1994-Burma buys two modified Jianghu-class Chinese frigates in August. Chinese Premier Li Peng visits Burma at the invitation of Snr-Gen Than Shwe in December.

1993-Burma opens a consulate in Kunming, China.

1991-Eleven Chinese-made F7 jet fighters are delivered to Burma as part of a US $1 billion arms deal between Beijing and Rangoon which also includes naval patrol boats, tanks, armored personnel carriers, light arms, anti-aircraft guns and missiles, ammunition and other military equipment.

1990-The Chinese ambassador in Rangoon visits the office of the National League for Democracy to honor the landslide victory of the party in the election. The first major shipment of arms and ammunition from China arrives in Rangoon.

1989-Lt-Gen Than Shwe, the vice chairman of State Law and Order Restoration Council, leads a delegation of 24 senior military officials to China.

1988-Border trade is officially opened between the two countries in December.

Get the picture?

Roldo Bartimole writes:

MMPI of Chicago is closing in on $100 million kitty thanks to hard-pressed Cuyahoga County taxpayers. Thanks, Timmy and Jimmy.

The Medical Mart quarter-percent tax passed by Tim Hagan and Jimmy Dimora with acquiescence of Peter Lawson Jones (the guy who can”t take public transportation home but needs a special tax-paid driver) delivered another $2.9 million in May. All for a good cause, right? Wrong.

That brings the total taxes collected for the Medical Mart/Convention Center to $97,359,348.55.

Do you think a newspaper with the resources of the Plain Dealer could tell us just how that money is now being spent? I do. Apparently its editors don”t, however. Because we never get an accounting. Waiting for the FBI, I guess. Twenty years from now.

County taxpayers – really smokers and drinkers – have contributed another $1.6 million in May. That brings the total since August 2005 to $66,233,782.20. A lot of money. But hell we have to help the billionaire Lerner family. Don”t we?

And smokers get hit for another $1.5 million in May for the Arts & Culture tax. It brings the total collected since Feb. 2007 to a cool $62,308,332.51. Think we could get the PD to give us an accounting of how this money has been doled out? Not a chance.

All these taxes by the way are regressive taxes. In other words, they weight most heavily upon those of us with small incomes.

County Commissioners can never think of a luxury tax that would hit the rich for these things they MUST have. Maybe the new reform County government will take a look at how to take from the rich instead of giving to the rich. Nah.

The total for the three regressive taxes, rounded off, is now more than $225 million. You paid it. You should know.

Wonder how many necessary products that would have bought and how many jobs it would have produced if not given mostly to help billionaire sports owners.

Let”s keep LeBron. Doesn”t matter what it costs. We must have him.

Geert Wilder
28 September 2008

Dear friends, Thank you very much for inviting me. Great to be at the Four Seasons. I come from a country that has one season only: a rainy season that starts January 1st and ends December 31st. When we have three sunny days in a row, the government declares a national emergency. So Four Seasons, that’s new to me.

It’s great to be in New York. When I see the skyscrapers and office buildings, I think of what Ayn Rand said: “The sky over New York and the will of man made visible.” Of course. Without the Dutch you would have been nowhere, still figuring out how to buy this island from the Indians. But we are glad we did it for you. And, frankly, you did a far better job than we possibly could have done.

I come to America with a mission. All is not well in the old world. There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe. This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe itself, it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West.

The danger I see looming is the scenario of America as the last Continue Reading »

Steve Coll writes:

Some problems that I half-expected that also turned out to be true: 1) Writing fast about serious subjects because they are in the news, without doing a lot of reporting first, can produce crap. 2) Even the better instances of that sub-genre are still not very satisfying over time to the author. There are a few transcendent deadline essayists born from time to time (Murray Kempton, Michael Kinsley, Rick Hertzberg, half the sports columnists of the last three decades) and many other very good ones, including a number blogging on this site, but the rest of us might not wish to be tempted by blogging freedom to emulate them if we can instead spend our time travelling, reporting, researching in archives, or writing books in our attics. This is just a blog post, however; I am free to revise my thinking in an hour, or whenever I revive Think Tank (as I intend to do), and presumably no one will notice.

0940: O”Brien on Israel, ODOT on Twitter

0715: Mr. Weissmuller has a birthday

In the nuclear world, the most important capability is not to deliver a first strike; the most important capability is to deliver a second strike in retaliation for any nuclear attack on your nation. The acronym most commonly used is MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD was the balance of power and the rule of international relations for decades following WW II.

Several years ago I had the honor of hosting a number of Israeli Defense Force sailors in my Sunday morning class. In preparation for the class I did a bit of research and that was when I first learned of the purchase of the three submarines from Germany and their capability to launch cruise missiles from their over-sized torpedo tubes.

The moment I read the description of the submarines I understood why Israel felt the need to have a silent service.

Today, years later, my prediction has come true.

No other nation or extra-nation force in the Middle East has second-strike capability.

Why don’t you ever see the headline “Psychic Wins Lottery?”

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn
and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

-from A Standing Ground, p. 37

Found in my electronic chapbook.

From Farming: A Hand Book by Wendell Berry.

A great deal is written about the human trafficking in women and girls for the sex trade, in part, because it is a dastardly business, but more so in the mainstream media because it titillates. The human trafficking for purposes of more mundane slavery — domestic workers, farm, industrial and commercial workers — gets much less attention.

Which is why the United Nations” Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking is so important. From the Integrated Regional Information Networks:

Ko Hla (not his real name) paid an agent US$800 and then started work on a Taiwanese fishing ship, thinking it was good money at $260 a month. He toiled 18 hours a day.

“We weren”t allowed to complain, we weren”t allowed to contact our [families]. Often we were beaten and intimidated,” the 30-year-old said. “It wasn”t what we expected.”

He quit 16 months later and returned home to find that the agent, who was supposed to send his salary to his family, had run away without making a single payment.

Due to limited job opportunities and low incomes, tens of thousands of Burmese seek work abroad, hoping to earn a better living, but many like Ko Hla and his friends fall prey to human traffickers.

Although there is no reliable data on human trafficking in Myanmar, experts believe several thousands are trafficked annually.

In our own country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deals with human traffickers along our southern border. Until the employers are shut down, the traffickers will continue to work.

There recently was a death of a 98 year old lady named Irena During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist.

She had an ulterior motive, she KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews, (being German).

Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of her tool box she carried, and she carried in the back of her truck a Burlap sack, (for larger kids).

She also had a dog in the back, that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in, and out of the ghetto.

The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog, and the barking covered the kid/infant noises.

During her time and course of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2,500 kids/infants.

She was caught, and the Nazi’s Continue Reading »

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap. On The Writing On The Wal — the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar — Jonathan Rees and I continue our work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

NO SODA/POP/COKE FOR YOU THIS WEEKEND… Ah, the rule of unintended consequences (although in this case I doubt that Walmart gives a feck). Walmart is deeply discounting carbonated sugar water in advance of the Memorial Day kick off of summer and hoarders are going nuts. Keep reading…

SHORE-TO-SHORE WALMARTS…? Initially the comparison of the square footage of all the Walmarts in the United States to the island of Manhattan seems a bit silly, but doctoral student Jesse LeCavalier goes on assemble one of the best overviews and primers on Walmart that I”ve yet read. Keep reading…

AN IPHONE FOR $97…? MAYBE NOT… The evidence here is purely anecdotal. On the Internet it”s way too easy to fake this kind of story (read the comments), specially when you read it and say to yourself, this makes so much good sense. How many 16 GB Apple iPhone 3GS phones are out there? Keep reading…

WE STILL HAVE JOBS… WE STILL HAVE…! Bob kindly offered either Jonathan or I his guest ticket to the annual Walmart meeting in Bentonville next week. I”m in finals and couldn”t accept the offer. But thousands of workers will make the trip and chanting will be part of the festivities at some point. Keep reading…

WHEN DOES BOLD BECOME PANICKED…? One of the basic rules of ecology is that everything is connected to everything. You can”t nudge one factor without creating ripples that will always, in ways great and small, alter every other factor in the system. And when you”re the brontosaurus in the swamp… Keep reading…

WALMART: HELP, MR. OBAMA…! There”s nothing illegal or even mildly offensive about Walmart spending $11 million of its stockholders” money in a coordinated attack on the sovereignty of India in order to crack open the 1.2 billion shopper market for cheap plastic crap. Keep reading…

WALMART…! SAVE US FROM GOVERNMENT…! On my home blog I”ve been writing a series of posts under the flag: How To Birth A Teabagger… What I”m doing is copying emails sent to me that I believe foster and support the Teabagger attitude. Surprise, surprise, one came in that calls upon Walmart. Keep reading…

UNDER PROMISE, OVER DELIVER… Those sage words might be blazoned on the family arms of Montgomery Scott and what will work in the 23rd century will work wonders in the 21st. The folks organizing a rally against the New York City Walmart forgot that page in the protest play book. Keep reading…

THOSE WHO CAN CHOOSE, NIX WALMART… No surprises here, of course. We”ve written again and again about how people don”t choose to shop at Walmart as much as they do so out of economic necessity driven, in part, by Walmart”s own race to the low-wage/low-cost bottom. Keep reading…

Why can’t women put on mascara with their mouth closed?

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.