Isreal's Buffer Zone Inside Gaza

     The logic of the act is that if there are no people in this border, or "buffer", zone, then there won't be anymore Qassem (homemade) rockets fired into Israel.  What's important here?  The entire buffer is on the Palestinian side.  Israel has declared that the Palestinians are 100% at fault.  Not one yard of Israel is suitable for protecting Israel, only Palestinian land.  One of the most densest populated and poorest places on Earth.

     Sorry for being myopic.  The real issue is Russia.  Americans dropped the ball after the fall of the wall.  Even Milton Friedman has admitted, in not these precise words, that building a Republic was our top priority, not selling off the Russian state for scrap.  In fact, the exact same argument can be used in Iraq.  JP Bremer expended effort in the first year not to educate Iraqis about elections and democracy, that rat bastard killer scumbag, but he spent a lot of effort setting up the wholesale selloff of all of Iraqi's assets.  There are decent Republicans, but none of them are in positions of power.

Warmonger Report

     Israeli peices of crap who pose as humans have been busy.  There are some fine Israelis.  I wish them luck.

     In an attempt to shred the road map, again the Israelis have begun the process of increasing the number of settler housing units in the West Bank, by over 220 this time.  The bullshit-propaganda-from-the-getgo "road map to hide the fact Bush has no sane policy in the Middle East" says no new housing in the settlements.  Ariel Sharon says "fuck that."  Bush is usually quiet about such things, and, in any event, the billions of dollars in US civilian and military aid continue unabated.  Meanwhile, Palestine has some of the poorest, most overcrowded people on Earth.  American self-respect demands we send more attack helicopters to Israel.

     The Israeli Air Force has been flying over and bombing "independent" Gaza since its inception.  Today they launched five raids, and hit no people and a few buildings.  This is in response to rocket attacks which hit no people and damaged nothing.  That's what we call a proportionate response, right?  In similarly insane news, the Israelis will flower Gaza with leaflets which will warn the Palestinian police about upcoming rocket attacks (how nice, but wouldn't installing phone lines and remembering the numbers be cheaper?) and putting full blame for any dead Palestinians on the police (for not evacuating everyone whenever Israel says so).

     In more deadly news, for the long term, the scum-Murdoch Jerusalem Post is leading with a story that the IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz says Iran may have a nuclear bomb by 2008, a far cry from the US estimate of 2015.  Halutz says it might be as long as 2015, but why take chances?  The Israeli security establishment wants to pre-emptively bomb Iran's nuclear bomb facilities (which worked perfectly at Iraq Osirik, don't you think?)  Honestly, when I think of Begin and Sadat I think of peace deals.  Here is a report from the Begin-Sadat center describing how Iran must be bombed right away.  It's filled with crap-headed analysis including this quote "the Chief of the IDF Intelligence Department, Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi (Farkash) warned that March 2006 constitutes the 'point of no return'; i.e., after that date, any diplomatic efforts to curtail the Iranian nuclear program will be pointless."

     Would anyone on Earth like to make a bet that, on its current course, Israel is going to come through this OK?  Anyone?

     Remember, the Christian Zionists aren't protecting Israel, they are using it.  And I told many Israelis about that when I was there.  Not enough, and no one important, I admit.  When the rapture comes the Jews will convert or die, right Bush?

Edward O. Wilson

     He wrote a book on Darwin's four books.  He made a point which struck me as terribly amusing, which I (perhaps entirely rewrite) as follows:

     Since no one has shown how God can wave his hand and create an eye or a rotary flagella, the theory of Intelligent Design has problems, and these problems can only be removed by removing God from the process of evolution.

The Age of Yellow Journalism

     Pulitzer had decent politics, Hearst did not, and they both excited the public into wanting the Spanish-American war (oddly, Hearst's papers were among the last to react to the Maine explosion, was he, in some way, responsible?).  So, the question is, when did this age of errors end?  What stopped it?  I've never been able to find out.  But it certainly was over after Hearst and Pulitzer were dead. 

     Kerry Packer, of Australia, is dead.

Jobs Quote from Cornford's Microcosmographica Academica

[Jobs] fall into two classes, My Jobs and Your Jobs.  My Jobs are public-spirited proposals, which happen (much to my regret) to involve the advancement of a personal friend, or (still more to my regret) of myself.  Your Jobs are insidious intrigues for the advancement of yourself and your friends, speciously disguised as public-spirited proposals.

Damn the Iraqis

     Peter Pace, not a General who has impressed me much before, admits the Iraqis want us out.    The GOP leadership wants us to stay.  Fucking Lieberman wants us to stay.  Who cares what those "people" in "Iraq" say, right?  They don't vote.

     I'm listening to Craig Crawford at Congressional Quarterly talk about his book, about politicians who attack the media.  It is kinda nice because one rarely hears a Southern accent on a leftist in the major media.

How Odd

     Marine Captain and classics major Nathaniel Fick is on C-SPAN2's BookTV now.  He participated in both Afghanistan and Iraq.  It's so different.  He honestly talks about killing innocent Iraqis (and the way the command didn't want to lift a finger to help an injured Iraqi kid) and how the situation was _not_only_ starting to turn bad very quickly (by the time they got to Baghdad!) _but_also_ how the potential threats (the 20-40 year old men, as opposed to children and women) were _never_ particularly happy about the invasion, even in the South.  The book he wrote is called "One Bullet Away"

Sometimes I'm A Sap Cards I Made

Sorries

     Been totally wrapped up in my map site.  I added a new winning margins (log scale) map to the election 2000 page over at Wikipedia.  Remember that stupid red/blue map county map?  Well, if I don't do an adjusted log scale of the data for the "winning margins" map, Los Angeles County (won by Gore by about 1,500,000 votes) fades out the rest of the country entirely. 

Abramoff/Delay

     I've only made three posts which reference this issue, hopefully in part because other people have done a good job (including animated web pages explaining the messy business.

     Thanks to anyone who did make sense of this issue to internet audience.  It is snowballing well, and that is a good thing.

Your Job

     Should you choose to accept it, is to put every law-breaking government officer in jail.  Including the ones reading this (or their boss, or their boss's boss, or their boss's boss's boss, whoever would be appropriate).

Prolly, You've Heard

     the histrionic propagand of the mighty wurlitzer spew the hate-filled money-grubbing mantra of Morales and Chavez hating.  NarcoNews has a far more reasoned perspective on matters Latin American (that's a slogan the Economist use[sd])

• Coca: Evo has not said his government will unilaterally decriminalize coca. On the contrary, they have agreed to respect all previous international accords on coca eradication, including those signed with the United States.
• Economic Policy: A recent in-depth report published by the reputable Bolivian NGO Center for Labor and Agrarian Studies (CEDLA in its Spanish subtitles) on the three leading political parties’ governmental plans finds that “the electoral proposals of MAS, Podemos (Tuto’s party) and UN (National Unity Party) maintain a neoliberal economic political orientation that favors the accumulation of transnational capital and the growth of the primary-export sectors, with the state’s role being to guarantee the reproduction of private capital—fundamentally transnational—in Bolivia’s strategic economic sectors.”
• Gas: MAS has stated that it will respect the Hydrocarbons Law signed on May 18, 2005—the controversial bill that sparked the May/June mobilizations of this year (the infamous Second Gas War). As for the MAS’s “nationalization” promises, CEDLA’s investigation finds that all three parties’ proposals "seek to veil their interest in maintaining, with certain differences, the monopoly control by the transnational corporations of the hydrocarbon resources of the country."

     I can't prove they will fulfill their election promises, but school these peices of shit the next time you hear their lies, OK?

Highly Reserved

     Feeling piqued?  Noticed well beyond the normal call?  You aren't the only one.

Blair or Special Branch renegades

     Three years ago the British gov't gave itself the authority to end the authority of the Northern Ireland Assmebly (sorta like the Scottish Parliament) in because three Irish Republican Army members were connected to a spying/leaking case. 

     The "case" was named Stormontgate, after the Irish Parliament building (the quite attractive Stormont).  The case was, in the last week, dropped and all the accused were acquitted.  Now a 20 year British Agent, who had infiltrated Sinn Fein (the political wing of IRA) says the whole Stormontgate affair was a scam.

     Either Prime Minister Tony Blair is using false charges to undermine democracy, or he can't control his own damn spies.

     However, it isn't too hard to imagine that an ex-infiltrator would have something the IRA leadership could pin on him, to force him to talk.  Who knows, either way?

A Joke

     So, some scientists have developed a new test, hopefully more definitive, to determine whether or not a person is sane.  For part of it, the tested person watches film clips, and is asked to say what happens next.  For example, they can watch a man and a woman walk down the street together, and the woman is obviously either about to break up with the man, or is about to tell him she is pregnant, or whatever.  The film stops and the insane person is asked "What were those two people going to do next?"

     He answers "Break for lunch."