Panglossian Notes

More bs from NATO and or just lazy reporting?

I'd like it if this old cold war alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, aka NATO, which, since 1989-90, seems to be endlessly in the state of looking for a purpose to exist, would just stop having meetings. This way, we in the real world, might be less bothered by the now routine dumb press releases and brilliant insightful statements that the organization seems bent on issuing every time 2 or more of its officials get together for a good old hand wringing and whining fest.

But no, they must meet, I guess, so yesterday, after the latest meeting in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, the organization's current pet project, the Afghanistan fiasco, was the subject of the great and brilliant pronouncements which were duly recorded verbatim

""Nation building in Afghanistan will take "a generation, if not generations," NATO's top official said yesterday ..."

1 - What's a generation again?
2 - Is it "all the people living at the same time or just those of approximately the same age"?
3 - So does everyone currently on the earth have to died for one generation to be finished?
4 - When did the NATO generation clock start to tick?
5 - If everyone born yesterday, that's when the NATO statement was made, lives, 80 years, and, say no improvements in life expectancy are made during this current generation's reign, does that mean the Afgan fiasco is expected to last a minimum of 160 years?

""NATO will have to be present in Afghanistan in the military sense for the foreseeable future ..."

1 - Does this mean NATO actually can't find anythings else productive to do?
2 - Is this a good news story?
3 - Is "foreseeable future" from a politician's perspective, an actuarial perspective or is it from the perspective of one of the generations already mentioned?

If you must, you can read for yourself the rest of the interview (sic) by a Canadian reporter of the NATO official, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, after the latest meeting.

However I'll warn you the lines used by the official are getting more than just a little frayed and shop worn and per normal, here, now in Canada, the MSM type was only present to get Scheffer's dictation down.

Technorati Tags: Military, NATO, Sarcasm, Utopia

Doris Lessing clears her mind.

An interesting small piece today in The Guardian's book section. It seems Doris Lessing is cleaning her mind so-to-speak.

She says she hates Tony Blair, thinks George W. Bush is simply a world class calamity, and, oh she also hates the government of Iran which is "cruel and evil".

"Lessing, the author of the Golden Notebook, also revealed her contempt for the former prime minister Tony Blair and the US president, George Bush.

"I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning," she said. "Many of us hated Tony Blair - I think he has been a disaster for Britain and we have suffered him for many years.

"I said it when he was elected: 'This man is a little showman who is going to cause us problems,' and he did.

"As for Bush, he's a world calamity. Everyone is tired of this man. Either he is stupid or he is very clever, although you have to remember he is a member of a social class which has profited from wars."

Doris Lessing on some things
Guardian Unlimited
October 23, 2007

I kind of like her assessment. Blair is just a puffed up showman at best and unfortunately has proved that shit Hermann Wilhelm Göring correct. As Göring professed: by convention, and it seems practice, war criminals are simply brutes and thugs on the losing side or those who have lost power and influence and can't be hidden from long memories. (Göring never referred to himself as a brute or thug, I've used some literary license). The latest Blair warmongering in New York proves that Tony boy'O thinks he'll always miss his date with the war crimes tribunal but just to be on the safe side he'll continue to trot out his insane bile to crazed individuals in the US. The Daily Mail had the best headline on the latest Blair touting I think: Middle East peace envoy Blair launches attack on Iran. Their pictures were great also, eh. The one just to the right here with the wacky cardinal is super. Tony likely telling some rye story about his escapades in fucking over the Palestinians as the "peace guy" and the goofy prince of the church having his first orgasm since being banned, in the great church clean-up, from instructing little boys before their first communion. Sorry, I sometimes do go on just a bit too much.

The one item likely to get most attention across the pond from the Lessing home in London will be her comment on the 9/11 thingy in New York. Gad I hope Jon Stewart doesn't think he has to wade in to prove he isn't Fox and is balanced by lampooning Lessing- screw balanced.

I think Lessing is right. The US over reacted emotionally as well as jingoistically to the plane crashes. I do agree it was traumatic and I've written before about what the bloody day meant to me, not that I matter, but I think of it as a horror for an individual whom I picture, in my nightmares, as having to make a decision, 20 minutes after arriving at work, about jumping to death. The standard bs now on 9/11 is all political theatre and typical MSM crap - those who actually lost someone on that day are exempt from my strange view. You can think, of course, whatever you want.

Susan Sontag, sorry she is gone, wrote one of the best responses to the political crap and almost immediately after the events started down the bullshit road. Unfortunately her essay was inflicted on my Southern cousins shortly after 9/11 in the New Yorker and they just couldn't handle it. Her essay isn't still available on the New Yorker's website but here is a link just to refresh everyone's mind about what she wrote. Andrew Suillivan, of course, shit all over her. Hey, maybe a naturalized citizen is something like a typical religious convert - they become more catholic than the pope if you are a convert from something to a roman catholic, that is.

Technorati Tags: Endless shnoring, Shmucks, Shnoring, Shnoring again

Those damned illusive convictions

Let's see now. Why is it that as soon as government must make a case that awful "evil-doers" have been doing "bad" things in front of a jury something goes really really wrong.

"DALLAS, Oct. 22 — A deadlocked federal jury here did not convict any leaders of a Muslim charity who were charged with supporting Middle Eastern terrorists, and the judge today declared a mistrial in what has been widely viewed as the government’s flagship terror-financing case.

The case, involving the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and five of its backers, is the government’s largest and most complex legal effort to shut down what it contends is American financing for terrorist organizations in the Middle East. President Bush announced he was freezing the charity’s assets in 2001, saying that the radical Islamic group Hamas had “obtained much of the money it pays for murder abroad right here in the United States.”

But at the trial, the government did not allege that the foundation, which was based in a Dallas suburb, paid directly for suicide bombings. Instead, the prosecution said, the foundation supported terrorism by sending more than $12 million to charitable groups, known as zakat committees, which build hospitals and feed the poor.

The prosecution said the committees were controlled by Hamas and contributed to terrorism by helping Hamas spread its ideology and recruit supporters. The government relied on Israeli intelligence agents, using pseudonyms, to testify in support of this theory.

But prosecutors appeared to have made little headway in convincing the jury..

The case involved a total of 197 counts, including providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, years of investigation and preparation, almost two months of testimony and more than 1,000 exhibits, including documents, wiretaps, transcripts and videotapes dug up in a backyard in Virginia.

After 19 days of deliberations, the jury acquitted one of the five individual defendants on all but one charge, on which it deadlocked. A majority of the jurors also appeared ready to acquit two other defendants of most charges, and could not reach a verdict on charges against the two principal organizers and the foundation itself, which had been the largest Muslim charity in the United States until the government froze its assets in late 2001.

No Convictions in Trial Against Muslim Charity
Leslie Eaton
October 22, 2007
New York Times

Could it be, gads what a thought, that even some of George W. Bush's fellow Texans might not think that funding charitable groups which provide hospitals and feed the poor are a threat.

Jesus, what's the world coming to!

"The decision today is “a stunning setback for the government, there’s no other way of looking at it,” said Matthew D. Orwig, a partner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal here who was, until recently, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Texas.

“This is a message, a two-by-four in the middle of the forehead,” Mr. Orwig said. “If this doesn’t get their attention, they are just in complete denial,” he said of Justice Department officials, whom he said may not have recognized how difficult such cases are to prosecute.

David D. Cole, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, said the jury’s verdict called into question the government’s tactics in freezing the assets of charities using secret evidence that the charities cannot see, much less rebut. When, at trial, prosecutors “have to put their evidence on the table, they can’t convict anyone of anything,” he said. “It suggests the government is really pushing beyond where the law justifies them going.”

No Convictions in Trial Against Muslim Charity
Leslie Eaton
October 22, 2007
New York Times

Well, I guess in cases like this, involving financing or funding, the ultimate message for thugs in charge of the government idea of justice is: freeze the assets - confiscate them. Then render the individuals charged to Poland (Are their camps still open?) or Egypt or some other friendly brute's place and beat a "true" confession out of the them.

Oh heck, save all that bother and money and just do the beating up someplace in North America. No serious person in any executive or legislative arm of government would complain since it is self-evident that all secret government action is in the national interest.

Heavens, funding hospitals and feeding the poor in the Middle-East.

Subversive terrorism, you can bet on it. Jesus h Christ!

Incidentally, I wonder what he might think of caring for the poor and needy.

""Most definitely a crucifying issue. "

JHC
33 AD
Jerusalem

Technorati Tags: Government oh, yeah?, Hot Air, Justice?, Politicians, Puzzles, Terrorism?

The warmest Oct. 21 on record!

So today's TO Star is saying this may have been the hottest (sic sorry warmest) October 21st. ever? Gads I was wondering why I was wearing my bathing costume all day.

Technorati Tags: great stuff, Hot Air, Politicians

A" private life"?

I'd forgotten to link specifically to Arthur Goldhammer's petit note on private lives. I've always known they, politicians or other public characters should remain none of my business, and I also do not want to know anything about my neighbours. Strange, eh but I can likely rent some tape version of whatever you may be trying to hid from the world from the "land of the free and the brave" aka the USA. What a marketing possibility, jesus H, eh.

But just in case some may have missed the Parisian thingy this last week, below a head shot of the lovely Cécilia. And I do mean lovely, none of my usual sarcasm, she is lovely gads. But Arthur's brief comments please, eh:

The principle that the private life of public men has no business in the newspapers has evidently been "rendered inoperative," to borrow a phrase from the Nixon era. Le Monde, which had maintained a discreet silence as the Sarkozy marriage drew to a close, today offers a detailed account, not only of Cécilia's affair with M. Attias but of Nicolas's simultaneous affair with "a journalist from Le Figaro." Cécilia is said to have more in common "with Mme Bovary than with Mme de Maintenon." The piece, which reads like the report of a private detective ("She tells her husband she is leaving him and heads for the airport. He follows in an official automobile, siren screaming, in vain. She joins Richard Attias in Petra, Jordan ..."), is signed by Raphaëlle Bacqué and Philippe Ridet. The former has been busy in this genre, since she was involved in digging up the dirt on the Hollande-Royal couple as well. Who needs Choc and Closer when we have Le Monde pipolisé?

Technorati Tags: Curiosity, France, eh?, Lovely faces, Politicians

What to think on a warm Sunday morning?

What to think about on a warm Sunday morning at latitude 45°23′54″ N?

It is early yet, but will it be an unseasonably warm Sunday in October?

Yes, at least according to Environment Canada.

The forecast high for this Sunday is 22°C. The records back to 1939 indicate that the regional normal for October 21ths is 11°C but for today in recent history the record high was 24°C, in 1979.

Already this morning, it seems to me to be unseasonably warm, and it is. I have all the windows open in the condo and a nice warm breeze is blowing through from south to north.

According to Environment Canada, my sense of what an appropriate temperature should be, in this part of North America this time in October, is correct. It should be cooler and it usually would only be me, still dreaming of the Arctic, who has my windows open, but a quick check tells me that my Southern neighbours also are enjoying the breeze. Windows are open up and down the street.

The day, however, likely won't be a new record high for warmth.

Although I'm still stuck on my sense of what is normal, I know the Environment Canada records will start to show a creep upwards in the usual high for this day. The 22°C, likely to be recorded today, will just add its small weight in the move up.

The perception, I and maybe some others have, about colourful brisk Northern autumn days, will fade as we adjust.

For some strange reason on this about to be quite lovely day, I'm not feeling very optimistic about my adjusting to what maybe coming.

Just to provide an indication of the part of the world I'm thinking about, a snap shot of a segment of the great circle running through where I live (75°40′25″ W), westward, to approximately the beginning of the Pacific Ocean, and just a little WSW (123°55′32″ W) of Portland Oregon.

Great Circle graphic courtesy of Great Circle Mileage Calculator and Display

Technorati Tags: blogging, Climate Change, Global Warming, Hot Air

Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize: Yawn, Cheer, get Grim? Only 1 of the above!

Free associating on Al Gore's good fortune.

The winners of the Nobel Peace Prize have been announced. They are Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

So, by my count, there is only one Nobel prize left to be doled out this year, the one for economics.

Oops, the economics prize isn't really a Nobel Prize is it? Isn't it really just the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel or, to translate, an allotment from Sweden's central bank. But a royal does the presenting of the medals and stuff for it at the same time as the others get theirs for Peace, Literature, Chemistry, Medicine, and Physics.

Stop quibbling! I know, and I am, or was, a professional economist. Now I don't get paid for brilliant current economic analysis. I guess that makes me an amateur, at least according to the really old Olympic rules for who can participate and thus, turning those rules on their head, likely not eligible to engage in commenting on this specific subject - Nobel & economics.

The CBC's morning news, in part of its commentary on the Nobel announcement, said that Sheila Watt-Cloutier - an Inuit environmentalist rumored to also have been being consider for the Peace Prize -was gracious in her defeat to Gore. She is quoted as saying: "the earth has won". The use of the word defeated struck me as peculiar in the characterization of Sheila's reaction.

It isn't really a competition is it? Can I get into it? Where's the entry form, eh?

The strange, to naive old me, characterization of the Nobel Peace Prize as, maybe, a real competition with all the trappings of, say, a modern play for money sports event has me picturing grizzled old peace activists "defeated" in 1973, by that champion warmonger Henry Kissinger, still seething from the Nobel Committee's slight.

And maybe plotting something non-peaceful? Or just getting grimmer and grimmer and grimmer?

Maybe my speculation about plotting and getting grim could be correct you know. According to Peter Doherty a Nobel Prize for Medicine winner in 1996, who, in a recent interview with Robyn Williams of the ABC, touches on the fall-out for some non-Nobel Prize winners. [The important paragraph is the last one in the excerpt below but the few others, preceding it, provide the context]

"Robyn Williams: Good evening, Robyn Williams with In Conversation, which will feature lots and lots of hot air. What difference, you ask - well, it's the title of Peter Doherty's new book, A Light History of Hot Air, a collection of delightful essays, personal reflections, loosely united by the stuff we breathe.

Let's start though, if we may Professor Doherty, with your Nobel Prize; it is, after all, Nobel Prize week, when most of the scientific ones are announced from Stockholm. The medical prize came on Monday, the chemistry and physics just a few hours ago. Do you know it's coming? Do you wait by the phone, just in case?

Peter Doherty: We kind of knew we were in the frame for it but I wasn't really even aware when the prize was announced. I knew it was sometime around October, when we got the call though it was not totally unexpected.

Robyn Williams: I see, and what time of the night did you get the call - or was it during the day?

Peter Doherty: We were in the US at that stage, we were living in Memphis, Tennessee. We got the call about 4.30 in the morning because they concluded their deliberations in Stockholm about 11.30 or so I think it is, and once they've made the decision they call you and give you a couple of minutes to get your act together and then say we are going to announce it to the media. Then you have the media on your back because it's a big media event.

Robyn Williams: Yes. And it's not being cruel phoning you at 1 in the morning? They're simply saying it's going to happen - stand by.

Peter Doherty: I don't think anyone feels badly about getting the call that tells them they've won a Nobel Prize.

Robyn Williams: And are there any people who wait, and wait, and wait and the years go by and get more and more grim?

Peter Doherty: Oh yes, and some of them get very upset. Many of them are able to move on; the most difficult ones are the unresolved ones. I mean sometimes there're three or four people or five people who might get the Nobel Prize and it only ever goes to three, so a couple of people miss out. And at least they know if they've missed out they've missed out for good - that's it. But the hard ones are the ones that think that they should win it but it never happens, and that happens, especially with the medicine prize, because there are so many enormous advances in medical research over the last 20 or 30 years that people who really do seem quite worthy don't get it

In Conversation
ABC
October 11, 2007

Technorati Tags: Climate Change, Economics, Global Warming Policy, Hot Air

Mr. Fish, I'm glad he's drawn these.

Technorati Tags: Mr. Fish, Politicians, Real , War criminals???

Are you left or right oriented?

An interesting little animated optical illusion via John Quiggan.

After a little practice I've found I can make statuette spin either clock-wise or counter clock-wise.

However, no matter when I first look at the image, the figure is spinning counter clock-wise and I must force it to spin the other way.

Technorati Tags: Australia, Curiosity, Illusions, Puzzles

Why Democracy?

The puzzle will start to be solved tonight for me here in the North part of North America.

From the previews I've seen the series should be very interesting.

Here in the real North of North America the series is hosted by Avi Lewis, that's Naomi Klein's husband (significant other, eh). I, of course, know Avi as the grandson of David Lewis and the son of Stephan Lewis.

Ah, I love it that we still seem to have a strong articulate alternate voice just North of the 49th.

For now anyways!

Technorati Tags: Canada, Canadian, CBC