Bearded Men Singing from the Heart, Part 4

A. A. Milne didn't wear a beard.

Let's not skate around the issue

Bearded Men Singing from the Heart, Part 3

Beards in harmony.

Bearded Men Singing from the Heart, Part 2

So much beard.  So much heart.

U.N. and NATO as war referee?

I get that the U.N. should prevent war crimes whenever possible. But what exactly are we all doing in Libya? We seem to be enforcing a pretty arbitrary set of rules. 

"You can have your war, but you can't use airplanes. Also, if you are one side of the confict, you might not want to use tanks."

We're not arming or supplying either side, so really, what, what are we doing?

Bearded Men Singing from the Heart, Part 1

more to come...

The Egyptian Revolution and the Gaza Strip

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With the future of the Egyptian government still in question after the resignation of Hosni Mubarek, and with it the future of Israeli-Egyptian relations, an interesting idea has resurfaced: Returning control of the Gaza Strip to Egypt.

Egypt was given control of the Gaza Strip in 1949 at the end of the Arab-Israeli war.  It governed the region either directly or indirectly until 1967 when Israel occupied it after the Six-Day War.  In 1993 The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority to govern the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and in 2005 the Israelis withdrew from the Gaza Strip.

Since then neither Israel or Egypt has wanted anything to do with the Gaza Strip.  Israel has basically fenced in the 1.5 million or so residents and the residents have responded by electing Hamas to a majority of seats on the Palestinian Legislative Council and firing rockets into Israel, prompting the Gaza War in 2008.

Enter the new Egyptian government sometime this year. 

While nobody knows what the new government in Egypt will look like let's assume that it is a civil democratic government which, along with the Egyptian military currently in control of the government, values the long peace with Israel and Egypt's relationship with the US.  If so then it should be of great importance to the new Egyptian government to reach out to both the US and Israel to make that position clear.  The Egyptian military, in particular, would seem to have about $1.3 billion worth of reasons annually to ensure that the new Egyptian government maintains its close ties to the US and the US will naturally have an interest in insuring that the Arab-Israeli peace is maintained.

The Israelis have many reasons for desiring a change in the dynamics of their border with the Gaza Strip and no desire to occupy it again.  The Egyptians, following the conventional wisdom of the Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank, have maintained that a future Palestinian state would include both areas.  Perhaps now is a good time for the conventional wisdom to change.

If the Gaza Strip was annexed by Egypt, policed by Egypt, it's borders with Israel maintained and normalized as the rest of the Egypt-Israeli border, and if real representation in the new Egyptian government was given to the people of the Gaza Strip it could be the tipping point towards lasting peace in the region.  The people of Gaza could enjoy the peace, prosperity and increased freedom that would come with citizenship in a modern democracy, and Israel would gain increased security on its southern border and the marginalization of Hamas as a political force, which could inspire new vigor in negotiating the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank.

Yes, it must be exhausting to be paid handsomely to be wrong

"I've gotten tired of telling investors to buckle up and hang on. Instead, I am urging them to adopt a more cautious strategy than the conventional financial wisdom—or "Dow 36,000"—would dictate."

Dow 36000 Author, James Glassman in the WSJ, via Chait.

smells like burning

"I hear Steven Levitt is writing a book analyzing A.J. Jacobs' quest to spend a year reading everything Malcolm Gladwell ever wrote. The audiobook will be narrated by Robert Krulwich of Radiolab."

via the alt text of today's excellent xkcd, the first two panels of which go like this:

Solidarity

I'm thinking that of all the states in which conserviative governors are gearing up to try to destroy public sector unions, maybe Wisconsin wasn't the right place to start.

Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Firefighters of Wisconsin, who pledged solidarity with his fellow state workers, even though firefighters and police were spared from Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to bust state unions' bargaining power. Among Mitchell's pledges: The state's safety workers would agree to forgo some of their privileges and benefits to preserve collective bargaining for all the state's union workers. "We have a unique job," he said, "but so does the snow-plow driver, so does the janitor, so does a nurse, so does a teacher at UW college.

Honestly I can't tell what's going to happen here. Russ Feingold is going around describing our time as "the Gilded Age on Steroids," and I'm not sure he's wrong. But I also don't see the antidote, so I'm hoping he's wrong and that we bounce back towards something like the mid-90s status quo.

Yeah I know what you mean

I don't have a source or context for that, but I like it.

WTF, Texas

On the one hand, Rick Perry is quick to proclaim that Texas's limited, business-friendly government is responsible for Texas weathering this recession better than other states.

Meanwhile, in reality, Texas school districts are laying off tons of teachers--yes, I weighed them--due to budget shortfall, meaning we will continue to have one of the worst educations systems in these United States.

Also in reality, rolling freakin' brownouts. Clearly our limited government is up to the challenge.

Just because I need to vent, let me introduce Apologist for the Incompetent Regime, Bradley Griffin:

While it might relieve some tension to complaining via news outlets, on Facebook, and / or calling the electricity retailer (Reliant, TXU, Ambit, or others) we should all be thankful, not complaining.

Controlled outages are good.

When energy reserves have been depleted, rolling blackouts provide a "last resort" answer.

Controlled outages allow your power to come back on! When energy consumption is high, ERCOT implements rolling blackouts to prevent circuit breakers from tripping and generators from overloading. If the controlled blackouts were not executed, there would be a total blackout...for everyone!

...

When another round of rolling blackouts hits our area, be happy in anticipation that your power will come back on.

Says $2 Bill:

Hitler also had a few good ideas

Genghis Khan has been branded the greenest invader in history – after his murderous conquests killed so many people that huge swathes of cultivated land returned to forest.

The Mongol leader, who established a vast empire between the 13th and 14th centuries, helped remove nearly 700million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, claims a new study.

The deaths of 40million people meant that large areas of cultivated land grew thick once again with trees, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

And, although his methods may be difficult for environmentalists to accept, ecologists believe it may be the first ever case of successful manmade global cooling.

via

Metaphor's a hell of a drug

According to NPR's Morning Edition, the reason Michelle Bachman looked so crazy last night on CNN is that she was facing the right (as in to the right) camera instead of the left (as in correct for TV) camera.

The right camera was the webcam broadcasting to Tea Party nation over our beloved tubes. So to the Tea Party, she was eye to eye. To the rest of us, she was looking a little to her right.

Life, she is so sweet to offer us such as this to blog about.

Casual Violence

I don't know what the motive for the shooting in Arizona was.  Anyone that tells you that they do is either a liar or the shooter.  And I wont accept the easy scapegoats like Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck either.

But not knowing the specifics of that particular event won't change the grim reality that we have a problem with violence in this country.  A problem with casual violence.  Violence seen as a reasonable response to any of life's unpredictable twists and turns.   Casual violence permeates our language to the extent that I recently heard a man declare that he would 'kill for a cigarette.'  Not to take nicotine addiction lightly (I was a nicotine addict for 20+ years), but the fact that the individual in question wasn't actually killing at the time that he made that declaration was little comfort.

The common vernacular of sports holds that great players are 'warriors' even at a time when many of our young people have experienced the un-glamorous and terrifying truth that 'warrior' is something that no sane person would aspire to.  War, among all human endeavors, should be condemned out of hand.  War should be the bane of all sane and thinking people. The idea that the vocabulary of war is casually invoked in metaphor to describe something like a football game should be repugnant to anyone.

Likewise political speech should not require martial metaphors to be effective.  War is about killing people to achieve political ends.  War fighting, therefor, should be the last resort of civilized people to resolve any difference.  Casually evoking the language of warfare in political discourse must be rejected.  Those who use it must be held to account by all reasonable people.

Wikileaks saves the internet

While some of the companies that targeted Wikileaks were subject to direct political pressure from American politicians, others seem to have volunteered—a decision that must have been easy to make given all the Wikileaks-bashing in Congress. Wikileaks survived these betrayals; but the myth that today’s Internet is the best of all possible worlds didn’t.

That the Internet is heavily dominated by for-profit companies, and therefore subject to influence from governments, is not a ground-breaking discovery.... Until Cablegate, this situation, while theoretically problematic, was something that most geeks accepted as some kind of necessary evil inherent to capitalism. It seemed unlikely that Amazon or PayPal would bow down to pressure from the governments of Vietnam, Azerbaijan, or Tunisia...  Likewise, it seemed unlikely that democratic governments would want to bully the intermediaries rather than pursue their grievances via the legal system.

What Wikileaks has revealed is that that it doesn’t take all that much pressure (or even controversy) to force Internet intermediaries to drop clients that are not on Hillary Clinton’s Christmas card mailing list. Thus, one way to ensure that the next Wikileaks is not mistreated by its business partners is to minimize the power of intermediaries and, preferably, make them immune to political and financial pressure. This objective, as much as the desire to boost transparency and reduce government secrecy, is what presently unites many of Assange’s technology-savvy supporters. And such geeky efforts to remake the Internet are likely to pay off in the long run even if Wikileaks’s transparency drive falters.

mojo

Weather control is not just for Reichians and warlocks any more

Last June Metro Systems built five ionising sites each with 20 emitters which can send trillions of cloud-forming ions into the atmosphere.

Over four summer months the emitters were switched on when the required atmospheric level of humidity reached 30 per cent or more.

While the country's weather experts predicted no clouds or rain in the Al Ain region, rain fell on FIFTY-TWO occasions.

The project was monitored by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the world's major centres for atmospheric physics.

Professor Hartmut Grassl, a former institute director, said: There are many applications. One is getting water into a dry area.

'Maybe this is a most important point for mankind.' 

I wonder if this causes droughts downwind. BEGUN THIS WEATHER WAR HAS!

via img