I is for Impeach

It is time to impeach the President, the Vice-President and the Attorney General for the wholesale destruction of the Constitution.

"It's time to break out the damn powder already. I don't give a damn what Speaker Pelosi says; with all due respect it's always worth it to defend the Constitution, whether or not you can succeed. And if our reps won't defend the Constitution, we're going to replace them with reps who will." here.

and here

"I don't intend to vote for any Congressman who fails to support impeachment by word and deed. It might be third party time."

and the case for impeachment:

"By disobeying Congressional subpoenas, by retaining a perjuring Attorney General, and now by commuting the sentence of convicted perjurer and justice obstructor Lewis Libby, President Bush has clearly announced his intention to issue a get out of jail free pass to anyone convicted of covering up his administration's crimes. These actions strike at the core of the concept of the rule of law, and demonstrate that no other remedy to protect the Constitution still exists save impeachment."

Effortless living

The sheer number of things one has to do e.g., to even maintain a small patch of garden can seem overwhelming. Then add to it all the other things one wants to do. This is a general problem with goal-oriented behavior.

So I'm trying to change my perspective. Just like with breathing - I have no goal, no destination, just have to keep on breathing.

Let's see if it works.

Invading the Sacred

Aditi Banerjee has written a great essay in Outlook India - Invading the Sacred. I recommend reading it through and through (thanks, Rajan!)

The story they have cleverly created about Hinduism goes something like this: Hindus were too occupied with earthy pleasures and pursuits to develop an authentic spiritual and philosophical tradition of their own; therefore, whatever Hindus find valuable in modern day Hinduism has either been imported from elsewhere or conceals something pathological that can only be exposed through Freudian psychoanalysis.

_____

Since it is brought up in the essay, I want to just mention something about the idea that the Bhagavad Gita is a Buddhist work.

The Gita is embedded in the Mahabharata, which today is a stupendous epic of over 100,000 verses - we are told seven times as long as the Bible, ten times as long as the Illiad and Odyssey combined. Its original core was probably of the order of 8000 verses, so you can understand the accretion over the ages.

So it is entirely possible that the Gita is a later interpolation. I think in the opinion of most philologists it is indeed an interpolation.

To this I want to add that it is an interpolation of an extremely interesting kind. One of the themes in the Mahabharata that we have today is the evenhanded treatment Krishna gives his warring cousins, Arjuna and Duryodhana. In the Mahabharata minus the Gita, however, I think only Duryodhana is vouchsafed a Vishvarupa darshan (vision of the cosmic form) of Krishna, this when Krishna is trying to dissuade him from war. Arjuna has his darshan only later, during the exposition of the Gita, when the first battle is about to fought. So the interpolation of the Gita had to be accompanied by a reaching back into the story and making an interpolation there as well - it is inconceivable that in the story before the Gita, only Duryodhana had this privilege and not Arjuna.

So this was not some random appropriation of some work, it was sewn into the story in a seamless way.

Even if it is some later expansion of an earlier tradition that simply said, Krishna had to inspire a dejected Arjuna to fight, i.e., there was a placeholder in the original story, the coordinated addition of vishvarupa darshan had to have taken place to the epic.

_______________

A remark about the quest of philologists for the "original" work and what it meant - in my opinion, this is based on a mental model of the Bible as the original word of God. Firstly, Indian traditions are much more malleable/much less canonical, and second, the reason for preservation of the tradition, handing down from one generation to the next is more likely because of the meaning of the text in the living tradition, and not some "original" meaning that is anyway obscured, and that the traditionalists were blissfully unaware of.

What I'm asserting is that to understand the Indic traditions, one has to take seriously the tradition itself; its (long-forgotten) origins have very little to say.
The philologists want to understand your grandfather purely from his first year of life, but what your grandfather has of interest to tell you comes from his accumulated life experience.

New York curbs on photography

New York City is considering new rules about photography on city property (this includes sidewalks). The NY Times story is here.

It begins:

Some tourists, amateur photographers, even would-be filmmakers hoping to make it big on YouTube could soon be forced to obtain a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance before taking pictures or filming on city property, including sidewalks.

Why the new rules now?

The NYT explains:

In May 2005, Rakesh Sharma, an Indian documentary filmmaker, was using a hand-held video camera in Midtown Manhattan when he was detained for several hours and questioned by police.

During his detention, Mr. Sharma was told he was required to have a permit to film on city property. According to a lawsuit, Mr. Sharma sought information about how permits were granted and who was required to have one but found there were no written guidelines. Nonetheless, the film office told him he was required to have a permit, but when he applied, the office refused to grant him one and would not give him a written explanation of its refusal.

As part of a settlement reached in April, the film office agreed to establish written rules for issuing permits. Mr. Sharma could not be reached for comment yesterday.

What are the new rules like?

New rules being considered by the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting would require any group of two or more people who want to use a camera in a single public location for more than a half hour to get a city permit and insurance.

The same requirements would apply to any group of five or more people who plan to use a tripod in a public location for more than 10 minutes, including the time it takes to set up the equipment.

What is the effect of the rules?

The rules define a “single site” as any area within 100 feet of where filming begins. Under the rules, the two or more people would not actually have to be filming, but could simply be holding an ordinary camera and talking to each other.

i.e., in short, if you're brownskinned and carrying a camera, the NY police can harass you at their own discretion.

Hummingbirds

Take a look if you can, Imagemaster's bathing hummingbirds, on fredmiranda.com.

Petunias

Heh, I carefully rolled back exposure compensation (I thought), but I was actually rolling back the Flash Exposure Compensation of the absent flash. So this came out underexposed.

But I liked the dark colors. Here it is.



PS: I have properly exposed snaps as well.

Exposure variations

Short story: please go to this Picasa album, view the slide show with captions on, and come back here and tell me which exposures with Flash:off and which exposures with some value of Flash Exposure Compensation you liked. Refer to the number, e.g., "I330" at the beginning of each caption.

Longer story:

Y'day, a number of what would have been good photographs I blew because I didn't get the exposure right. The photographic situation is: person in the shadow, bright background. Hence this set of two series.

The constants are:
Canon 5D on tripod
24-105 mm f/4 lens at 105.0 mm
580 EX II flash.

All files are jpgs from the camera, dragged into the Picasa upload tool.

There were some light clouds, occasionally obscuring the sun. The series was taken between 12:10 and 12:30.

____

My conclusions:

If you don't have flash handy, use spot or partial metering to get the face correctly exposed. You will likely sacrifice the background, but you don't have much choice.

Things greatly improve if you have a flash. Use evaluative metering, and (on the 5D) set exposure compensation to -1/3 to -1 - this will preserve highlights in the background. Set flash exposure compensation to -1 or more, otherwise you will overexpose the face.

----

Yes, I know post-camera RAW file processing opens a whole new large parameter space. But for the most part, I don't think I want to spend a lot of time in front of the computer, I want the exposure to require minimum to zero touch up.

----

Criticism, better technique, suggestions for another experiment with other settings, I'd really welcome.

----
Postscript: Remember, this is for unposed photographs of people who are not going to stay still. I don't think I'd have the time to meter on middle gray, exposure lock and then reframe and take the picture.

Mentarch's 8 principles of incompetence

Mentarch proposes these eight principles of incompetence, fully explained on dailykos.com

Zeroth Principle: Incompetence is driven by intellectual sloth.
First Principle: Incompetence surrounds itself with incompetence.
Second Principle: Incompetence is ethics-impaired.
Third Principle: Incompetence abhors transparency and accountability.
Fourth Principle: Incompetence does or says anything to defend itself.
Fifth Principle: Incompetence always supports incompetence.
Sixth Principle: Violence is the last refuge of incompetence.
Seventh Principle: Incompetence is nothing but consistent with itself.

Ring Out Solstice Bells

The song is for the winter solstice, really, but who cares?



( Jethro Tull Rare Promo Vid for Solstice bells 1976 )

Another version.

Garden learnings

Petunias in outdoor pots need **daily** watering, rain or shine.

My few pots are gradually recovering from being some critter's snack bar. If they continue on their current trajectory, I will post photographs. 'course I can't post the lovely delicate scent petunias have en masse.

How the Free Market Really Works

In the typical Econ. 101 class, we are told that price is determined by the balance of supply and demand. Since higher prices give incentives to suppliers to increase the supply and the purchasers to consume less, while lower prices will depress supply and increase demand, the price will stabilize where supply = demand.

But how does this happen in the real world? Take the case of a wedding photographer. He must charge enough so as to remain alive and to pay for equipment and supplies. But how much should he actually charge beyond that?

One might imagine that the photographer adjusts his charges till he gets sufficient work to fill the fixed resource that he has - the number of events that he can go to in an year. If he gets more work than he can fulfill, he can raise his rates, etc. In practice, one would imagine that he has a fixed price list and offers discounts if necessary - it would not be good to be constantly fiddling with his published rates.

In the real world, however, he asks other photographers.

(Most) Terrorists are Criminals not Enemy Combatants

Conceptual Guerilla explains the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling.

Well worth a read. The point is that apart from cases like al Qaeda fighting in Afghanistan alongside its (erstwhile) national government constituted by the Taliban, terrorists are criminals governed by criminal law (innocent till proven guilty, need to be charged with a crime and have their day in court, etc.) and are not enemy combatants (e.g., prisoners of war).

A person suspected of crimes in the context of his association with Al Qaeda must be charged with a crime, and put on trial with a reasonable opportunity to establish his innocence of such crimes. Because remember, just because the government SAYS you are a "terrorist," doesn't mean you are. Our centuries-in-the-making legal system requires the government to prove its case -- as well they should.

C.G. makes the observation

They complain that the rule of law gives certain advantages to insurgents and outlaws. They're actually right about that. The rule of law is what prevents any government -- and the hegemonic forces that support it -- from becoming what we would call "totalitarian." It is what forces any government to confront political opposition by means other than force. It is what promotes and leads to "political solutions" and forces otherwise coercive government to deal with grievances, and build broad based support.

The Xi_b Baryon

Think of it as the elder brother of the protron, made up of a down, a strange and a bottom quark, and six times heavier. Just recently discovered, read about it

here, and
here.

Bizarro Empire

Justin Raimondo, at antiwar.com

The Air Force has to show it is part of the solution in Iraq, whether or not it can actually play a significant positive role on the battlefield, because that is the road to increased pull on the Hill and in the White House, which means more funding. Within the Empire are all these little empires, competing for tax dollars, prestige, and political primacy, and it is this civil war – always being fought, albeit at various levels of intensity – that is the ultimate undoing of the imperial order.

It doesn't matter that air power exacerbates the problem in Iraq, rather than solving it. It doesn't matter that we're alienating ordinary Iraqis, who often are the victims of U.S. air raids; all that matters is that the Air Force's rivalry with the Army (and the Navy) requires air strikes. What determines our "strategy" is a shifting concatenation of competing agencies and political factions that meet on the battlefield of congressional committees and the higher councils of U.S. policymakers. The outcome of this war – the intra-bureaucratic turf war – determines the strategy and conduct of the external war. And that is the road to certain defeat.

and this dire warning:

America, having exhausted itself militarily, economically, and spiritually, will one day be found washed up on some foreign shore, a hapless Gulliver overrun by hordes of angry Lilliputians and bound by a thousand threads to their feuds. When the history of the American Empire is written, any fair and objective author will have to concur that it didn't have to turn out that way: if we choose the prerogatives of Empire over the ascetic ideals of our republican tradition, we go willingly to our doom.

Screened out

Note to self: Need to spend less time in front of screens.

Sicko

A review of Michael Moore's new documentary, Sicko.

Update
California Nurses give Moore, Sicko 8-minute standing ovation.

Local Canidae

Third time I've seen these on my early morning walk. The first pic shows the closest I got today with the 70-200 mm lens. Second and third show crops. I'm annoyed (at myself) that the crops are not sharp.

Not sure what the animals are - foxes or coyotes? I think the pics are merely an existence proof. Will try again.

Since coyotes are supposedly very shy, I tend to think these are not. On the other hand, the county news has been carrying news of coyotes, so that is why my thoughts veer that way.







On this last one, you can see that the camera is really focused on that vegetation at the bottom left of the frame. Grrr.....novice still!

Burke's Commentary on the Bush Administration

Via digby, Scott Horton in Harper's writes out Edmund Burke's condemnation of the Bush Administration. It includes this quote, about Bush's cheerleaders:

The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man. But I cannot conceive any existence under heaven (which in the depths of its wisdom tolerates all sorts of things) that is more truly odious and disgusting than an impotent, helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, without a consciousness of any other qualification for power but his servility to it, bloated with pride and arrogance, calling for battles which he is not to fight, contending for a violent dominion which he can never exercise, and satisfied to be himself mean and miserable, in order to render others contemptible and wretched. - Edmund Burke, "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol", 1777.

Kala Pani

Kala pani - "black water" - among other things, refers to the jail in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands where freedom fighters were imprisoned. "Blackwater" has an equally inauspicious meaning in the US.

Blackwater

Yes, yes, you are POTUS

Via digby

this

But by all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny."

Highlights - thinking aloud....

A little exercise, results shown below, have helped, I hope, solidify something that should have been blindingly obvious from the start. (This is in the nature of a soliloquy, so don't complain!)

On Washington Valley Road, in the vicinity of Gabriel's Fountain, we came across this church. In the pictures below, the sun is setting and is just below the top of the tower. Taken from the car window, so that should explain the artifact on the lower left. BTW, I don't think the streaks in the sky are lens flare, as I recall, the sky did look like that.

In this first, the exposure was governed by the bright sky, and this is how it came out of the camera.



It was possible by a simple manipulation of the luminance curve in Photoshop to render it thus:



A look at the histograms before and after is illuminating. The exposure has enough information retained to make a substantial improvement possible.
Before:

After:


It is a matter of shrinking all the unused range of luminance.

Here's another shot, this time the exposure is governed by the foreground and the sky is blown out.


You'll have to take my word for it, but nothing I tried could restore any detail in the sky. The luminance histogram tells us why - the luminance information has been mostly lost.



The exposure should be such as to maximize the information captured, in this case the camera should expose the brightest area correctly.


(Tools used - Photoshop Elements 2.0 on MacOS X, and Photoshop 3.0.5 in MacOS 9 (Classic)).

Iris

Exposure: 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture: f/5
Focal Length: 105 mm
ISO Speed: 400

Blown Highlights

Next door to Gabriel's Fountain is Martinsville Florist, and though the florist was closed, their wares were on display.

This planter pictured below was in the shade. (I have a picture of the whole store front, showing exactly where it is, but my niece features in it, and my policy is not to post pictures of family members on public forums - chalk it up to something learned from experience.) You can see that the whites are badly overexposed (much worse than my roses below). From the EXIF info:

Aperture: f/4
Focal Length: 92 mm
Shutter speed: 1/80
ISO Speed: 400.

This was a f/4 lens, so it was wide open. Gives you an idea of the light.



I found this from photographer Thomas Pindelski on how to deal with this in bright sunlight. Presumably it will work in this situation as well.

First roses of 2007

These are among the first roses of 2007 in my garden. (I believe my garden has its own micro-climate. Other roses in the area have been blooming for a while.)

Not that I have a lot of roses. A Sunsprite (shown below), four red Knockout bushes. and climbing White Dawn and Don Juan trained on an arbor. The Don Juan actually flowered first, but the flower is 8 feet off the ground, and even standing on a chair, I couldn't get a good photograph. (Was too lazy to get out the step-ladder). All of them are with flower as of this morning.

You can see that the highlights are blown (something I'll return to.)

I'll also say it this once and never again - it sometimes seems faintly blasphemous to me to use the Canon 5D to record everyday life.

An Old Classic

Mad About You. I was kindly reminded of that show today. :)

Why does anyone buy Time magazine?

I certainly don't. But people do, I guess, because I see it on the news-stands. But why? There are better sources for enjoyable fiction.

Times columnist Joe makes up a conversation out of thin air.

This is what Joe Klein says

...Yesterday I spoke with Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-Ca.) just back from Iraq, who voted for the bill--as did a majority of Democrats who are not running for President. "Look, I would love to have cast a vote against Bush on this. We need a new strategy and I hope we can force one in September," she told me. "But I flew into Baghdad on a troop transport with 150 kids, heading into the field. To vote against this bill was to vote against giving them the equipment, the armor they need. I couldn't do that."

Jane Harman (D-Ca.) actually cast her vote against the President on this, and issued this statement:

"Today’s vote must be seen as a referendum on this President’s refusal to listen to a majority of Americans and a majority of Congress, who want him to end the combat mission and implement the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations on training, counter-insurgency, and enhanced diplomatic and economic efforts in the region.

"I support our troops and I refuse to be manipulated. My ‘no’ vote on the Iraq Supplemental is a vote to move past the fractured politics on Iraq and restore some sanity and bipartisanship as Congress confronts the serious threats of the 21st century."

Sri Ganesh!

Follow the bread-crumbs to see the EXIF data.

"We told you so"

Darksyde's priceless diary on dailykos.

Need to read

The riveting testimony of Peter Comey if you haven't watched it yet.

What a POTUS!

The NSA surveillance program was so bad that the senior members of the highly loyal Ashcroft Justice Department threatened to resign. And the President's men tried to bully a sick Ashcroft into approving of it. Here.

Watch this.

Here is Josh Marshall's commentary:

There are so many parts of this late night hospital blitz story that it's a bit hard to know where to start. One thing that seems very clear -- even clearer than when I discussed it below -- is that the president sent Gonzales and Card over to the hospital to coax an okay out of the presumably heavily sedated Ashcroft. The first day's reportage really skirted around that issue. Maybe day two will be different. Another point though is to remember just who it is we're dealing with here.

This is John Ashcroft, not by many measures a staunch libertarian and a pretty committed Republican to boot. He was refusing to sign off on this. And according to Comey's testimony he was willing to resign over it, apparently along with most of the senior leadership of the Department of Justice. I think we need to know more about just what was being done with this program that would make Ashcroft put so much on the line.

Another point: if we assume that the president sent Gonzales and Card over to the hospital room (and I think that's the only reasonable interpretation of yesterday's testimony), there must have been a meeting before that call was placed, probably at the White House. Who was in the meeting? And who got the president to authorize this? Gonzales? I doubt it. I think we probably needing to be looking toward the Vice President's office playing a driving role in all this.

And read this.

I think it’s safe to assume that whatever they were fighting over, it was a matter of substance. When John Ashcroft is prepared to resign, and risk bringing down a Republican administration in the process, he’s not doing it for kicks. Similarly, when the President sends his aides to coerce a signature out of a desperately ill man, and only backs down when the senior leadership of a cabinet department threatens to depart en masse, he’s not just being stubborn.

It’s time that the Democrats in Congress blew the lid off of the NSA’s surveillance program. Whatever form it took for those years was blatantly illegal; so egregious that by 2004, not even the administration’s most partisan members could stomach it any longer.

Double Standards

So much for the Global War on Terror!

Luis Posada, a veteran anti-Castro militant and CIA operative under George Bush Sr, was told that he was free to go due to administrative errors in the case against him for entering the US illegally. Posada is wanted in Venezuela and Cuba for allegedly plotting to blow up a Cuban airliner in which 73 people died in 1976.

--

Here is another one:

Short story: Ann Coulter dodges voter fraud charges because her ex-boyfriend at the FBI had the investigation shut down. Meanwhile, democratic voter registration drive volunteers are only now getting out of jail as their cases get reviewed by an incredulous court...

US MSM

This set of three will give the reader a good view of what is wrong with the Main-Stream Media in the US.

CIP tells the tale of an altercation between Newsweek's Jonathan Alter and Radar Online's Jebediah Reed. As CIP writes,

This would be of minor note if it were not for the fact that Alter's tantrum exhibits a lot of the things wrong with the way that he and his colleagues engage in journalistic malpractice.

.

From there to Glenn Greenwald on the contempt that MSM figures have for bloggers.

There is much to learn from the contempt expressed by John Yoo, Joe Klein and Jon Alter towards blogs -- i.e., a collection of hundreds of thousands of politically engaged citizens who are dissatisfied with the prevailing political and media power centers and have created their own instruments for expressing and activating that dissatisfaction.

It is absolutely true that citizens are forced to rely upon large media organizations to collect information and report what the government is doing, and that is precisely why their profound failures are of such concern.

Greenwald points to Digby who makes the case that the MSM are are bunch of Washington insiders who delude themselves that they represent the silent majority.

Of course political reporters should go out and interview Americans and write stories about what those Americans have to say about the issues of the day. But those interviews are not any more representative of what "the people" as a whole think than are the liberal blogs or Sally Quinn's fictitious "small town" or the fans at a NASCAR race. This is especially true when it's filtered through the phony bourgeois posturings of a bunch of highly paid reporters and insiders who have contrived a self-serving little passion play in which they are regular blue collar guys from Buffalo and corn fed farmers from the Midwest (Real Americans!) who just happen to summer on Nantucket and get invitations to white tie state dinners with the Queen of England. Pardon us fringe dwellers for being just a tad skeptical that these forays out into "America" are informing us about anything more the embarrassing neuroses of some very spoiled elites.

General confusion

Charley Reese is not impressed by General Petraeus.

Creationist fun

If you need a quick laugh, this creationist quote should provide it.

A hidden cost of the Iraq War

Context: Greensburg, Kansas, was obliterated by a tornado. 95% of the town of 1500 was destroyed.

"Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius has reminded us that President Bush’s disastrous misadventure in Iraq has purposely left states unprepared and unable to respond adequately to natural disasters that we should expect. "We’re missing about half of our trucks from the National Guard units," Sebelius said. "Clearly trucks to haul this debris away would be enormously helpful. We are missing flatbeds. We are missing Humvees, which are used to get people to safety and security and to haul equipment around. We are missing a number of our well-trained National Guard personnel. The equipment that we continue to harp on that has been sent overseas when our troops are deployed and not restored at the same level could be enormously helpful."

(from dailykos.com)

The Money Quote

"

"You know, if Bush would stop his self-indulgent stubbornness for half a day, he could see plain as day that he has an opportunity to retain American control of the World Bank by easing Wolfie out. If he tries to keep Wolfie in that spot, American control could end.

I really wonder whether his failure to distinguish between necessary toughness and catastrophically shoot-ourselves-(America)-in-our-foot pigheadedness results from biological anomaly. His inability to harvest experience, and so to think and form successful judgments, is just so inexplicable."

(from The Washington Note.)

Adulterated Chinese medicine kills 365 in Panama

Past posts here have dealt with the common Chinese business practice of mixing melamine with grain gluten to make the protein content seem higher. Call it finding a novel use for industrial waste.

We now hear that another common Chinese business practice is to use diethylene glycol (a poisonous sweet tasting substance that is used in car radiator anti-freeze) instead of more expensive regular sweeteners in children's medicines.

Meanwhile the Bush Administration is busy dismantling the Food & Drug Adminstration, which has the primary responsibility of preventing these atrocities from reaching the market.

Read about it in this Daily Kos article.

Race in America - an update

CBS.com has turned off all comments on its website on news stories about leading Democratic contender for the Presidential nomination, Barack Obama.

It is leaving comments on for all other Presidential candidates.

CBS is doing this because of a large volume of racist comments, a volume too large for CBS to moderate. At least, so says this Daily Kos story.

Obama has been given Secret Service protection. I do not know whether this is standard practice for a leading candidate for the nomination. I had thought only the party nominee was given this. Obama's chief rival, Hilary Clinton, gets Secret Service protection as a former first lady. I can only wonder if this is because of racist threats against Obama.

The Obama candidacy will likely bring out America's closet racism, and give lie to the constant Conservative assertion that racism is dead and over with and nothing we need worry our heads about, let alone attempt to remedy. And I can hope that coming out into the sunlight will make it wither away.

US Attorney Scandal

Yes, the US attorneys are political appointments - i.e., they are nominated by the President, and serve at his pleasure. But once appointed, they are supposed to be apolitical, like the high court justices, who are appointed by the President, but are supposed to independent thereafter.

Anyway, for any reader who doesn't get what the fuss is all about, this TPM post is a must-read. The practical consequences of what this administration did should become clear.

Tornado Watch

CIP photographs a tornado (somewhere in New Mexico).

Sen. Lautenberg (D-NJ) - genius!

The Bush administration has been more than happy to arbitrarily take away our liberties, eviscerating even habeas corpus. But they still pay homage to the gun lobby.

If you are on a government list of terrorists or potential terrorists, for instance, you will find it very difficult to fly. But if you want to buy a gun, being on that list doesn't disqualify you.

Quoting from the link below:

"

Under the federal Brady Act, a licensed firearms dealer must request a background check through the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) before an unlicensed individual may purchase a weapon. However, even if a NICS check reveals that the prospective purchaser is a known or suspected terrorist, nothing in current law prevents that person from purchasing a gun unless he or she meets one of the other disqualifying factors, including felony or domestic abuse convictions.

In January 2005, the GAO produced a report to Sens. Lautenberg and Biden (D-DE) that found that from February 3 to June 30, 2004, a total of 44 firearm purchase attempts were made by individuals designated as known or suspected terrorists by the federal government. In 35 cases, the FBI authorized the transactions to proceed because FBI field agents were unable to find any disqualifying information (such as felony convictions or illegal immigrant status) within the federally prescribed three business days. (emphasis added) "

Well, Senator Lautenberg has introduced a bill, titled "Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2007". that would close this loophole, and it puts into collision the Administration's desire for executive power and its genuflections to the gun lobby.

Read about it in this dailykos story.

Must-see bird photography!

(via Rajan Parrikar) : Romy Ocon's Philippine Wild Birds Gallery

Scope of melamine contamination grows

Grain gluten from China is apparently routinely spiked with melamine to make it seem to contain more protein (nitrogen) than it actually does.

This, in the US, has contaminated pet food, hog feed, and now chicken feed. This dailykos.com story has the scoop:
FDA drops the other shoe: Millions ate contaminated chicken

So now many people have eaten melamine-laced chicken. It is still not clear if the contamination has hit food directly consumed by humans.

Mid-air bird wrestling

The other day I saw a small bird harassing a larger one, climbing above it and then diving down. Against the bright blue sky I could not identify the birds. Was wondering how one would photograph it. Well, Jody Melanson has posted an awesome photograph on fredmiranda.com.
I think you should be able to see it without registering.

They sold out the world for an F-16 sale

Via Rajan Parrikar, The Raw Story : "They sold out the world for an F-16 sale".

N+1 Syndrome

An Iraqi timeline, in Friedman Units

More on Vitamin D

http://www.westonaprice.org/basicnutrition/vitamindmiracle.html

The previous article on Vitamin D was via a libertarian site (lewrockwell.com). For some reason, the writers there like to thumb their noses at big medicine/pharma; and a Vitamin D as a miracle preventer of cancer that would cost pennies a day makes them feel happy. However, as the article above mentions, Vitamin D as a dietary supplement comes with risks, and one would still need a doctor to manage those risks.

Vitamin D as a cancer preventer?

Vitamin D casts cancer prevention in new light
(Globe & Mail)

"But perhaps the biggest bombshell about vitamin D's effects is about to go off. In June, U.S. researchers will announce the first direct link between cancer prevention and the sunshine vitamin. Their results are nothing short of astounding.

A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error."

(via lewrockwell.com )

China: melamine routinely added to feed

NYT: Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China

A long standing business practice in China of mixing melamine in feed to make it register as high protein is discussed.

Birds!

Y'day I was feeling rather annoyed. You see, Friday, the bird food had run out. So, Saturday, I went to the pet store, got the standard wild bird food, supplemented it with black sunflower seed (2:1 ratio), took down the bird feeders, gave them a thorough wash, did chores outside waiting for feeders to dry out, and then filled them up. All the while, the various finches, titmice, chickadees, doves, blackbirds, and so on were reproaching me in no uncertain terms, while perched on the roof and various trees and bushes.

Then I fill the feeders, put them back in the normal places, and go in to make lunch. And watch the birds from the kitchen window.

What birds? They'd all gone away!

But then the birds redeemed themselves, when after lunch, a hummingbird visited, the first in my memory. That made my day! Of course, it didn't visit my hummingbird feeder, but who cares.

My next task is to follow as much of the NJ Audubon Society planting advice as possible. And of course, plot on getting a nice long birding lens :).

Why I need a long lens :)

The 70-200 mm is simply not long enough :)

Gray Goose

It's getting better all the time!

Confused Spring

More daffodils (scanned from film, film for some reason developed very grainy. Time to go digital!)

McCain on The Daily Show with John Stewart

The Third Path links to the video and has the transcript.

The fake news anchor and comedian talks about the Iraq war and talks to a senior and powerful politician in exactly the way the Main Stream Media folks are supposed to, but never do.

581 c

Astronomers have found a roughly-Earth-class planet orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581. The planet is estimated to be five times as massive as the earth, and has a temperature between 32 and 104 (no units provided, I hope they mean F, a salubrious planet it would be!).

The significance of this is that it is the first detection of this class of planet outside the solar system, and that it might the first of many, many such discoveries.

Turtle Island Quartet

This note is not because of the Quartet's music (about which I do not know much). Rather, I heard the interview of David Balakrishnan and Mark Summer by NPR's Robert Siegel, and wonder of wonders, Robert Seigel pronounced "Balakrishnan" exactly as you might hear it in Kerala!

The Innocence Project

"Today, the Innocence Project launches "200 Exonerated, Too Many Wrongfully Convicted," a month-long national campaign to create state Innocence Commissions and enact other reforms that can address and prevent wrongful convictions."

On the 200th DNA Exoneration in the U.S.

"These 200 people are a remarkably diverse group - they include a rich man's son in Oklahoma, homeless people, school teachers, day laborers, athletes and military veterans. But mostly they are African-American men without money to hire good lawyers (or, sometimes, any lawyers).

Combined, these 200 people have served about 2,500 years in prison - that's roughly a million nights in prison."

....

"The 200 DNA exonerations nationwide give us irrefutable scientific proof of the flaws in the criminal justice system. We look at every exoneration to determine what caused the wrongful conviction in the first place, and we see clear patterns. More than 75% of the wrongful convictions involved eyewitness misidentification (often cross-racial misidentification, and often from more than one witness); nearly two-thirds involve forensic science errors (from simple mistakes to outright fraud); 25% were based on false confessions (as the result of coercive interrogations or defendants' limited mental capabilities)."

Human food contaminated?

It is possible that along with pet food wheat, rice, corn gluten, human food is also contaminated. However the Chinese government is not cooperating with the US Food & Drug Administration investigation.

I think the US Government should impose a blanket ban on Chinese agricultural products until the Chinese overcome their recalcitrance.

Impeach Cheney! Who is Cheney????

Here's something from the NYT that I had meant to previously mention, but couldn't find - it is the results of a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center of 1502 American adults.

"Americans may have more news outlets today than two decades ago, but they still don’t know much more about current events than they did then, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

But here’s one big difference: the survey respondents who seemed to know the most about what’s going on — who were able to identify major public figures, for example — were likely to be viewers of fake news programs like Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”; those who knew the least watched network morning news programs, Fox News or local television news.

Only 69 percent of people in the latest survey could come up with Dick Cheney when asked to name the vice president; in 1989, 74 percent could name Dan Quayle . Fewer could name the governor of their state (66 percent now compared with 74 percent in 1989) and fewer could name the president of Russia (36 percent now compared with 47 percent before).

In 1989, fully 81 percent of people knew that the United States had a trade deficit; today, only 68 percent knew.

The survey found that education was the best predictor of who would do well on the questions. “However,” it said, “despite the fact that education levels have risen dramatically over the past 20 years, public knowledge has not increased accordingly.” About 27 percent of Americans are college graduates. "

Corn gluten contaminated too!

Corn gluten from China, used in pet food, is also found to be contaminated with melamine.
(via dkos).

So far we know that this was fed to pets and to hogs (people eat hogs).
The big question is, has contaminated (wheat,rice,corn) gluten entered directly into the human food supply?

VA Tech Prof

My Virginia Tech Professor, RIP

"I remember on the first day of class Professor Loganathan had a photographer come to the class to take a picture of the class from the front of the room. He then had us fill our names into a seating chart. Professor Loganathan must have studied the photograph and seating chart quite a bit because within a short period of time, he called on us by name without any hesitation to think of the name. No other professor that I had cared that much about learning our names. "

Twisting in the breeze

Senator Coleman (Republican, Minnesota) can't decide just how much he supports US Attorney Rachel Paulose (via talkingpointsmemo.com).

How the White House plays politics

"Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Madam President, I have to declare myself absolutely a series of things: furious, double-crossed, misled, minimized--in terms of my role as a Senator and as chairman of the Intelligence Committee--shocked by the arrogance of the technique that was used
between the White House and the minority leader to say to Republicans, after weeks in which Vice Chairman Bond and I worked out a compromise on a managers' amendment on which we worked in good faith--I dropped things he did not like, he dropped things I did not like--but it was a genuine effort.

Vice Chairman Bond, whom I respect greatly, stood here praising the managers' amendment. Then the word came down from the White House--not from Vice Chairman Bond but from the White House--through the minority leader, that this vote was to be a test of Republican Party loyalty and that therefore all Republicans were instructed to vote against it. In all of my years in the Senate, and certainly all of my years on the Intelligence Committee, I have never seen something so repugnant, putting politics over national security. That is the bottom line.
Politics was put over national security."

Read the whole story here.

Pet food recall expands to rice gluten

Human-grade rice gluten is implicated in the growing pet food recall.

I think that the safest thing to do is to not eat processed foods at all.

---
BTW, my dog in India was a vegetarian daal-roti (and mangoes) dog, and I was amused to find that that was true of a desi colleague's pet as well.

Is he goofy?

From Russel T. Johnson's The Arkansas Roadside Travelogue

"THE VIRGINIA TECH SHOOTING

I've written on this subject before, but here it goes again. Every time I point this out, people roll their eyes and act like I'm goofy, but....

These shootings always occur right after a public health crisis, in this case a big pet food recall. The last school shooting, the one at the Amish school, came right after the big ecoli/green onion scare."

------
Today's NYT has a list of such "notable rampages":

May 18, 1927 Bath, Mich. - a school board official kills his wife and then blows up the school killing 40, including himself.

Aug 1, 1966 Austin, Texas - A gunman kills 16 and injures 31 shooting from the Univ. of Texas tower.

Dec 1, 1997 W. Paducah, Ky. - A 14 year old shoots three classmates and wounds five at a school prayer meeting.

Mar 24, 1998 Jonesboro, Ark. - A 13- and a 11- year old kill four girls and a teacher and injure 11, when they open fire outside a middle school.

May 21, 1998 Springsfield, Ore. - Boy shoots to kill four and wounds dozens.

April 20, 1999, Littleton, Col. - the Columbine massacre - two boys kill 13 and wound dozens and then themselves.

Mar 21, 2005, Red Lake, Minn. - Boy kills grandfather and a companion, five students, a teacher and security guide before killing himself.

Oct 2, 2006, Nickel Mines, Pa. - Man shoots and kills four girls and wounds seven at an Amish school.

---

I can't find a good way to figure out public health crises.

Did you know?

NYT: Japanese, at Times English, Rules the Blogs

"What is the Internet’s most blogged in language? It depends on the month. English and Japanese have leapfrogged each other in the last couple of years.

In November 2005, it was Japanese by six percentage points; in April 2006, English. And over the last quarter of 2006, Japanese accounted for 37 percent of all postings, compared with 36 percent in English, according to a report by the blog tracking firm Technorati. (The data omitted password-protected blogs and are known to undercount French and Korean for technical reasons.)"

---
There were other interesting facts in Monday's NYT, but I've misplaced the section. Somehow, finding them in the online NYT is not exactly easy.

More on Rachel Paulose

More on the young Malayali-descent US Attorney Rachel Paulose.

Please note that I'm not entirely convinced that the prayer for "standing in the gap" is legit. Nevertheless, makes for interesting reading. Note that the prayer is about as fundamentalist and you can get. It is not - "God, give our leaders wisdom, etc...", it is "God, our focus on politics to solve our problems is wrong".

Me, I'll continue looking to Parliament, and not to Jehovah for practical solutions to practical problems.

Garden pics

A snapshot of Daily Kos recommended diaries

BREAKING: Gonzales caught in perjury by new e-mail
Email has been found which seems to contradict US Attorney General's prepared written testimony submitted to Congress.

Now Do You Understand?
The Virginia Tech shooting in which more than 30 were killed, which has shocked the nation, is, in scale, a daily occurrence in Iraq.

I Live In Blacksburg, And Instapundit Is Pissing Me Off -UPDATED
A Blacksburg, VA resident (where VA Tech is) is incensed that a conservative commentator is trying to score NRA points over the VA Tech shooting tragedy.

Former Republican Presidential Candidate Turns Blue
A long-time Republican gives up on the GOP and joins the Democrats.

Famous 82-year-old ex-CEO sh*ts a brick over Bushco
Lee Iacocca's blistering criticism of the Bush Administration.

UPDATED: France told CIA about hijacking plans pre-9/11
In the months before September 2001, French intelligence had informed the CIA about al Qaeda plans to hijack an airplane.

A British Mark of Respect and Sorrow
Condolences for the VA Tech shooting.

Shooting at Virginia Tech
News about the VA Tech shooting.

Frank Rich errs

About Don Imus:

"Of course I was aware of many of his obnoxious comments about minority groups, including my own, Jews. Sometimes he aimed invective at me personally. I wasn’t seriously bothered by much of it, even when it was unfunny or made me wince, because I saw him as equally offensive to everyone. The show’s crudest interludes struck me as burlesque. "

Frank Rich falls back on the tired old excuse that since someone is offensive to all, he is not an offender.

It is one thing to tolerate and even defend offensive speech because one believes in the freedom of speech; but it is quite another thing to support it, e.g., by repeatedly appearing on the show. I think Frank Rich is tone-deaf in that regard.

David Kamp (via James Wolcott) puts it well:

"But I’ve always winced at anyone who bills himself (or has his representatives bill him) as an “equal-opportunity offender”–which is the tack that the defenders of Don Imus have taken. Any true aficionado of comedy and comedians knows that “equal-opportunity offender” is apologist code for “hack entertainer trading in dated ethnographic material.” Jackie Mason comes to mind (he actually has a DVD out called Equal Opportunity Offender ), as does Carlos Mencia. A corollary to this, which I learned from my old Spy boss Kurt Andersen , is that anyone who uses a construction along the lines of “I treat people all the same; I don’t care if they’re black, white, purple, or green”–who uses colors that no human being can actually be –is inherently a racist bastard.* "

Wolcott quotes a standup comic to the same effect:

"People say,'Black, white, purple, polka-dot, makes no difference to me, I don't believe in discrimination.' They're so proud of themselves. Like some nice polka-dot family is going to move in next door, come over to borrow things. Hell, anybody can be tolerant of imaginary beings ."

Weekend Greetings!

Wolfowitz

While waiting for Wolfowitz to step down from the World Bank, you may like to read these:

Wolfiegate
Col. Lang writes at turcopolier

IMO, he is a war criminal. Men were hanged after WW2 for "planning and waging aggressive war." What did he (PW) do? IMO, he was at the heart of the conspiracy to persuade GWB to invade Iraq (for whatever set of reasons that you prefer), depose its ruler, destroy its government and substitute another more to our liking. Is this not "planning and waging aggressive war?"

Paul Wolfowitz's "Hours" May be Numbered at World Bank
Steve Clemons, at The Washington Note

"Paul Wolfowitz has now admitted to helping his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, get positions outside the Bank, including "seconding" her to the US State Department that have helped up her salary to levels that clearly violate World Bank rules (i.e. nearly double her salary ). This is the kind of personnel nepotism and corruption that Wolfowitz has stated he is trying to wipe out at the Bank and in the client governments of the Bank."

Steve Clemons also provides information on how to convey your opinion to the decision makers.

Imus Nation

The Rutgers women's basketball team makes the news by reaching the NCAA finals (and not for any of the scandalous reasons so common with sports teams these days); Don Imus makes a seriously derogatory remark about them, and triggers public protest.
Who gets the hatemail?

The Rutgers team! (from Don Imus's fans).Don Imus's wife had to appeal to fans not to send hate mail to the team.

This poisonous audience is sitting out there, and the corporate and political types will find another vehicle to cater to their low tastes.

Meanwhile, read this, with a 1995 criticism of the Imus show:

Late 'Daily News' Columnist Foretold Don Imus Conflict -- In 1995

"If you have never heard the Imus show, listen in. It is a cross between an endless infomercial and a bunch of 8-year-olds telling doo-doo jokes into a tape recorder. It is rescued only by increasingly rare moments of inspired, hilarious brilliance.

Tune in any morning and you'll hear Imus or one of his sidekicks joking about having "lipstick on the dipstick" and much worse. This is nationwide morning radio.

Lieberman worries, on the Senate floor, that the increasing vulgarity of network TV "is lowering the standards of what we accept on television, particularly in what used to be family programing hours."

But he's talking out of both sides of his mouth. This week's moments of supposed humor on Imus, broadcast at an hour when children are rising for school, included a reference to Attorney General Janet Reno in crotchless pantyhose, an interview with Screw Magazine's Al Goldstein and a drunken woman saying "s---" over the air. Teehee."

Human trafficking of Indian guest workers

Human trafficking of Indian guest workers

The Raw Story investigative piece by Linda Beyerstein and Lara Alexandrovna, about the trafficking of Indian guest workers to the Gulf Coast under the H-2B visa program.

On the shredding of sovereignty

Scott Ritter:

....

"As an American, I said, I appreciated each nation’s embrace of the United States as a friend and ally. However, as a strong believer in the rule of law, I deplored the trend among America’s so-called friends to facilitate a needless confrontation which would severely harm the U.S. in the long run. These nations were hesitant to stand up to the United States even though they knew the course of action planned for Iraq was wrong."

......

"[In the face of American imperial power] If a nation was incapable of defending its sovereign values and interests, then it should simply acknowledge its status as a colony of the United States, pull down its disgraced national flag and raise the Stars and Stripes."

.......

"This new Democratic leadership has failed egregiously. Not only has the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, been unable to orchestrate any meaningful legislation to bring the war in Iraq to an end, but in mid-March she carelessly greased the tracks for a whole new conflict. By excising language from a defense appropriations bill which would have required President Bush to seek the approval of Congress prior to initiating any military attack on Iran, Pelosi terminated any hope of slowing down the Bush administration’s mad rush to war."

........

"So if we are to continue to permit AIPAC to operate as an undeclared agent of a foreign nation, and to influence American foreign and national security policymaking at the expense of our Constitution, then we should acknowledge our true status as nothing more than a colony of Israel, pull down the Stars and Stripes and raise the Star of David over our nation’s capitol. While representing the final act of submission, it would also be the first truly honest act that occurred in Washington, D.C., in many years."

Fired!

Just a couple of months ago, Senator Christopher Dodd (Democrat from Connecticut) saw it fit to announce his run for the Presidency on the "Imus in the Morning" radio program. Today, CBS fired Don Imus, the host of that program. Imus had said something very nasty - derogatory to women in particular - about the Rutgers women's basketball team on his program, and eventually corporate sponsors started pulling advertising from the show, not wanting to be tarred with Imus's remarks.

The Rutgers team was in the news for the only reason a sports team should be in the news - the team came from nowhere and reached the NCAA finals - the pinnacle of college sports. (They did not win.) This was an inexperienced team consisting of many freshmen. And in what is uncommon in college sports, these young ladies were also, from all accounts, academically sound.

So, why the nasty remarks? It was just Imus being his normal self. The man has a long history of inflammatory statements.

So what is my reaction? Indifference, mostly. The culture hasn't changed. The same corporate honchos who helped elevated Imus are now burying him. The audience that made Imus so influential is still out there. In a decent world, an Imus would at best have a niche market, and everyone could safely ignore his rantings. Dogs bark at street corners, who pays attention? The problem is with the culture that turned Imus into a celebrity in the first place - and that culture is not going away.

Two pieces by Balu

The first two parts of a continuing series:

Translations or Travesty of Traditions?

"In one sense, the title of the piece captures the nature of the tasks facing the contemporary generation, whether in India or in the Diaspora. This generation, unlike many from mine, is confident and self-assured; perhaps, it is proud too about the strength of its culture and traditions. Rightly so. However, personal convictions about the value of our traditions and culture do not automatically guarantee the truth of such convictions. Not only that. It is also the case that the history of India, and that of the entire humankind, requires of us that we are able to say and show what is valuable and what is not in our traditions. This history is the history of colonialism, subservience, and is further weighed down by the scientific, technological, economic and the military weight of the western culture. Today, we need more than a mere practice and a further continuation of our traditions; we need also to examine them honestly and critically in order that we may transmit what we found valuable in them."

...To Follow Our Forefathers - the nature of tradition

While reading this contribution and all the others I hope to write, we need to keep the context in mind. The context is this: many intellectuals, both in India and among the NRIs elsewhere, appear bent on transforming our multiple traditions into a single ‘religion’ called ‘Hinduism’. The problem does not lie in the transformation of variety and diversity into a unity. Rather, it lies in trying to fit our traditions into the straightjacket of ‘religion’. While calling ourselves ‘Hindus’ might be a convenient way of talking, the danger lies in going further and trying to develop ‘doctrines’, ‘theologies’, ‘catechisms’ and ‘Ten Commandments’ so that those around us in the West could recognize us as followers of a religion called ‘Hinduism’. (These reflections are also applicable to ‘Buddhism’, ‘Jainism’, ‘Saivism’ and all such entities.) In the course of my future contributions, I will look at some of the compulsions that force us to manufacture ‘Hinduism as a religion’. In this piece, I want to focus on the nature of traditions. What is a tradition? What differentiates religions from traditions? The second question will remain implicit until the end. By that time, we should have a better understanding of what it means to speak of a tradition.

If the links take forever to load, try going to india-forum.com.

Radio shock jocks

That we know the names of people like Imus, Limbaugh, Coulter, Stern, Savage, etc. - that they are mainstream instead of niche - speaks to an utter lack of taste in the general culture, and of the awesome ability of the free market to find and cater to such.

Gwen Ifill has a thoughtful piece on the latest Imus nastiness.

"...I’m a big girl. I have a platform. I have a voice. I’ve been working in journalism long enough that there is little danger that a radio D.J.’s juvenile slap will define or scar me. Yesterday, he began telling people he never actually called me a cleaning lady. Whatever. This is not about me.

It is about the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. That game had to be the biggest moment of their lives, and the outcome the biggest disappointment. They are not old enough, or established enough, to have built up the sort of carapace many women I know — black women in particular — develop to guard themselves against casual insult.

Why do my journalistic colleagues appear on Mr. Imus’s program? That’s for them to defend, and others to argue about..."

---
Why do people listen to the Imus show? Self-indulgence?

For-profit healthcare?

Gina Kolata, in the NYT writing about heart disease, wrote (emphasis added by me) -

"Studies reveal, for example, that people have only about an hour to get their arteries open during a heart attack if they are to avoid permanent heart damage. Yet, recent surveys find, fewer than 10 percent get to a hospital that fast, sometimes because they are reluctant to acknowledge what is happening. And most who reach the hospital quickly do not receive the optimal treatment — many American hospitals are not fully equipped to provide it but are reluctant to give up heart patients because they are so profitable."

Free markets and the profit motive are all very well and good, but the problem is that a person (and his or her family) who is in the midst of a medical emergency cannot be an effective free-market player - e.g., is not in a position to make a fully informed decision. The care provider must have sufficient incentive to take care of the patient's best interest, even if it spoils the bottom line.

Childhood misbehavior is criminal

Bob Herbert, in the NYT tells us (you can also read it here)

"Last spring a number of civil rights organizations collaborated on a study of disciplinary practices in Florida schools and concluded that many of them, “like many districts in other states, have turned away from traditional education-based disciplinary methods — such as counseling, after-school detention, or extra homework assignments — and are looking to the legal system to handle even the most minor transgressions.”"

What does that mean? Bob Herbert tells us that too.

A six-year old girl threw a tantrum at her elementary school. When teachers could not quiet her down, they removed her from the class. The little girl kicked and pulled a teacher's hair. When the girl did not calm down, the teachers called the police. The police arrested the girl, handcuffed her (around her biceps, because the handcuffs would slip off her wrists), drove her to the county jail, took a mug shot and fingerprints, and charged her with felonious battery and two misdemeanors - disruption of school and resisting a law officer. (On seeing the police, the little girl had hidden under a table, and resisted being pulled out).

Bob Herbert protested to the police chief:

"“But she was 6,” I said.

The chief’s reply came faster than a speeding bullet: “Do you think this is the first 6-year-old we’ve arrested?”"

----------

Only in this God-And-Common-Sense-Forsaken US of A!!!!!!

Rice vs Cheney

My previous post had Rumsfeld and Bremer contradicting each other.

Now, via talkingpointsmemo.com we have the following:

"Last year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked [Prime Minister of Israel] Olmert into a 48-hour cease-fire during the war with Hezbollah to allow humanitarian relief, but within hours Israeli planes were bombing again, to Rice's surprise and anger. Olmert had received a call, apparently from Cheney's office, telling him to ignore Rice."

-------

Nice crowd we have in the Bush Administration. I also wonder what kind of insult it will take to have Rice resign in protest? Maybe where there is no honor, there is no insult that cannot be swallowed?

Iraqi police as per Bremer

On October 2, 2003, Lt. General Sanchez gave a congressional delegation headed by Kentucky (R) Senator Mitch McConnell a briefing, where he said that the Coalition had almost 54,000 Iraqi police on duty.

Bremer writes

"After that ... session, I asked Doug Brand, our lanky Yorkshire police officer who was now acting Senior Adviser to the Interior Ministry, to come in with Clay to discuss police training.

"Let's review the situation, Doug. At the end of August, Bernie Kerik said that many of the 35,000 police then on the rolls would have be dropped for incompetence, corruption or previous human rights abuses. Now Sanchez reports that we've got 54,000 police officers on patrol a month later. How the hell could that happen?"

"Apparently General Sanchez is operating under an order from General Abizaid to recruit 30,000 police officers in thirty days," Doug said. "The Army is sweeping up half-educated men off the streets, running them through a three-week training course, arming them, and then calling them 'police'. It's a scandal, pure and simple."

"You know the military, Clay. Can you find me the order they're using to do this hiring?"

"I can get it," Clay said simply.

The military seemed to be proceeding with its plans to replace American combat units with ill-trained Iraqi police. But before I could raise this problem during that afternoon's secure call to Rumsfeld, he asked me to find some positive, newsworthy "interim steps" that we could take to "migrate" political authority to the Iraqis. "We've got to show some forward motion on the political front, Jerry."

That's Feith's Defense policy shop-talking.

.....

"Mr. Secretary, I have to be frank," I said. "You're seeing inflated numbers on police rosters. We shouldn't kid ourselves thinking that the Iraqis are better prepared than they are. We needed a professional police force here, one that's trained to a high standard. That's the whole point of the program in Jordan."

Rumsfeld did not seem convinced. He said that it was better to get the "process started quickly" by having our Army bring in these extra police.

I disagreed. I told him of Doug Brand's description of the Army pulling guys off the street and running them through a short "training" course.

At the end of the call, Rumsfeld seemed to understand, saying he would "push back" on the police in the total-force projection numbers when his office announced them the next week.

-------

We can actually check that:


Department of Defense Briefing, October 16, 2003

Q In the wake of the bombing of the Baghdad Hotel in Iraq, U.S. officials both here and in Baghdad touted the effectiveness of the Iraqi facility's protection force trained by the United States. But subsequent to that our -- CNN's people in Baghdad tell me that, in fact, the people guarding the hotel were contractors from the DynCorp company. Is that the case? And are any of these Iraqi protection forces actually up and protecting anything at this point?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Sure.

GEN. MYERS: Yes.

SEC. RUMSFELD: There are site protection Iraqi forces. There are border patrol Iraqi forces. There are some starting in the Army. There are any number of Iraqis in police forces. The total number keeps going up. About a week ago it was 56,000 with another 14 (thousand) in training, up to 70,000 -- 16 in training, 17 in training. And now it's something in excess of that. They have a variety of responsibilities. I would guess that in addition there are contractors hiring Iraqis with -- for the -- to work for the contractor, which would be a different -- still different category.

DeBaathification of Iraq

CIP wants to know who was behind Paul Bremer's (America's Proconsul in Iraq) decisions to fire anyone who was a "senior" Baathist, to abolish the Iraqi Army, and to abolish the Iraqi police force. These decisions led to the complete unravelling of Iraqi society, and the current disastrous situation.

CIP doesn't want to purchase the book and put any dollars into Bremer's piggy bank. Nice fellow that I am, I got the book from the public library. I can't post my answer there, 'cause Haloscan is down (Why anyone chooses to use that abomination of a comment system is another question, it is a Bremer-like decision, IMO.)

Here are some quotes from the book obtained by looking at the index for "Baath Party, elimination of".

"On May 9 [2003], my last day of preparation at the Pentagon, Don Rumsfeld had given me my marching orders in a memo. Among all my other instructions, Rumsfeld's memo emphasized: "The Coalition will actively oppose Saddam Hussein's old enforcers - the Baath Party, the Fedayeen Saddam (the irregular fighters that had harassed our forces on the march to Baghdad), etc. We will make clear that the Coalition will eliminate the remnants of Saddam's regime."

That morning, Under Secretary Douglas Feith had shown me a draft order for the "De-Baathification of Iraqi Society." He had underscored the political importance of the decree. "We've got to show all the Iraqis that we're serious about building a New Iraq. And that means that Saddam's instruments of repression have no role in that new nation." Although there was no mention in the draft of the regular army, I know that Walt Slocombe, the Coalition's senior adviser for Defense and Security Affairs, had begun discussing the army's future with Feith now that it was clear the force had broken ranks and disappeared.

I had scanned the decree. General Franks had already outlawed the Baath Party in his "Freedom Message" of April 16. This more sweeping order was to rid the Iraqi government of the small group of true believers at the top of the party and those who had committed crimes in its name, and to wipe the country clean of the Baath Party's ideology.

"We're thinking of having Jay [Garner] issue the order today," Feith had said.

"Hold on a minute," I said. "I agree it's a very important step, so important that I think it should wait 'til I get there."

Feith agreed to hold off but encouraged me to issue the order as soon as possible after my arrival in Baghdad. He underscored another point in Rumsfeld's memo stating that the decree was to be carried out "...even if implementing it causes administrative inconvenience."

....

Our concern was only the top four levels of the party membership, which the order officially excluded from public life. These were the Baathist loyalists who, by virtue of their positions of power in the regime, had been active instruments of Saddam's repression. Our intelligence community estimated that they amounted to only about 1 percent of all party members or approximately 20,000 people, overwhelmingly Sunni Arabs.

But I realized that the "administrative inconvenience" Rumsfeld mentioned could prove a lot more than inconvenient. Senior Baathists had formed the leadership of every Iraqi ministry and military organization. By banning them from public employment, we would certainly make running the government more difficult. On the other hand, I was somewhat comforted by the knowledge that apolitical technocrats were usually the people who made organizations work."

-----------

"On May 9, 2003, the day before our departure, I sent a memo to Secretary Rumsfeld, copied to Wolfowitz, DOD's policy office and the General Counsel, summarizing these discussions [with Walt Slocombe and Paul Wolfowitz and other "top Pentagon officials"on the Iraqi army] and the tentative conclusion that we should formally dissolve Saddam's army as well as the security and intelligence services as a prelude to establishing Iraq's new security services. I attached to the memo a draft order doing that but told the secretary, "I will show the draft order to CENTCOM this weekend and send back any suggested changes."

------------

"To launch this delicate process, we had first formally to abolish the old regime's intelligence and security services. Doing so would not send home a single soldier or disband a single unit. All that had happened weeks before. But it would formally dismantle the old power structure and signal that the fall of Saddam and the Baathists was permanent.

We carefully coordinated this critical process with the Pentagon. On May 19, I sent a memo to Secretary Rumsfeld detailing our recommendations for the dissolution of the Iraqi Defense Ministry and its "related entities", including Saddam's intelligence, security and propaganda services as well as the army, other military units, and paramilitary forces. The action, I said, would be "a critical step in our effort to destroy the underpinnings of the Saddam regime, to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that we have done so and that neither Saddam nor his gang is coming back."

I also advised Rumsfeld that we proposed to offer severance payments to hundreds of thousands of former soldiers, excluding only the most senior Baathists and intelligence and internal security types, many of whom had in any case fled the country. This meant that we would be paying people who had only weeks before been killing young Americans, but that was a cost that had to be borne. Before sending this message to the Pentagon, Slocombe and I discussed the plans with the appropriate Coalition military commanders and civilians, including McKiernan in Baghdad and CENTCOME forward headquarters in Qatar.

At the Pentagon on May 22, Feith carefully reviewed our draft order, which would formally abolish Saddam's security and intelligence services. He asked us to clarify some of the wording, which we did to his full satisfaction. My press spokesman, Dan Senor, stayed up the entire night coordinating the text of the announcement and press plans with Rumsfeld's chief of staff, Larry Di Rita. Later that day, when Rumsfeld authorized me to proceed, I informed the president of the plan in a video teleconference."

-------------

More from the zoo

Re: the performance of the camera - notice the moire effect in the background.

TPM on Rachel Paulose

The case of the US Attorney for Minnesota, Rachel Paulose, becomes more and more interesting. TalkingPointsMemo.com provides the best summary of the news and the issues involved:

1. Link 1
2. Link 2
3. Link 3
4. Link 4

A summary of the summary is that career attorneys find working under Paulose impossible and so are resigning/moving to lesser positions. The Bush Admin. is then attacking these with their usual smear tactics.

Update on Rachel Paulose

Despite US Attorney Rachel Paulose being on the opposite political side from yours truly, I had hoped, as a fellow desi, that she would justify her appointment as the youngest US Attorney ever, etc., by doing a good job.

Unfortunately, apparently not!.

From Father's Garden

Some pics from the zoo

Thiruvananthapuram is going through a hot, dry spell, and the only green grass at the zoo is where it is irrigated. It has rained only once in the two weeks I've been here. The animals and the human visitors were all panting in the heat.

On the positive side, the Sony DSC-HDX (where X=2,5,7,etc.), a point-and-shoot camera with an image stabilized optical zoom varying from 12x to 15x, seems to perform about as well as a p&s can. Here are some pics from the zoo. As you might imagine, in all cases, the animals were quite far away from the camera ( a DSC-H2).

More on the contaminated wheat

This story in dailykos provides further information on the contaminated wheat gluten. The US Food & Drug Administration [FDA] has issued an import alert notice:
Import Alert.

The author of the story says (and I agree):

"I believe they [the FDA] may know more about the wheat gluten's whereabouts than they are currently admitting to publically. And now let me speculate that indeed this gluten MIGHT be in the human food chain, and the FDA does not want to set off a stampede of paniced consumers."

_________________________________________________________________________________

This dailykos story should also be read.

“There was a sizable amount of melamine. You could see crystals in the wheat gluten,” said the FDA’s top vet. Amazingly, no one noticed. Not at Menu Foods, not at Hills, not at Purina, not at Del Monte — all companies who are busy touting their high quality."

and

"Under the President’s proposed 2007 budget for FDA, the funding gap between responsibilities and capacity will grow again, to 56%. This harsh budget reality is a real threat to FDA’s ability to effectively oversee nanotechnology. It means among other things that FDA lacks the resources it needs to build its own expertise, to develop the safety-testing protocols and detection methods needed to evaluate new nanotechnology products, to conduct its own risk research, to gather the necessary premarket data required to get ahead of commercialization and to oversee products after they have entered the market."

Say No to McCain!

Senator and Presidential Candidate John McCain is not worthy of anyone's respect. He forfeited my respect permanently when he embraced George Bush even after the smear campaign in the 2000 Presidential campaign, described below, four years later.

McCain cannot be said to stand for anything except raw ambition. As subsequent events 2000-2007 have shown, McCain's "straight talk" is about as straight as a Sierpinski gasket.

Richard H. Davis, The Boston Globe, March 21, 2004

"Having run Senator John McCain's campaign for president, I can recount a textbook example of a smear made against McCain in South Carolina during the 2000 presidential primary. We had just swept into the state from New Hampshire, where we had racked up a shocking, 19-point win over the heavily favored George W. Bush. What followed was a primary campaign that would make history for its negativity.

In South Carolina, Bush Republicans were facing an opponent who was popular for his straight talk and Vietnam war record. They knew that if McCain won in South Carolina, he would likely win the nomination. With few substantive differences between Bush and McCain, the campaign was bound to turn personal. The situation was ripe for a smear.

It didn't take much research to turn up a seemingly innocuous fact about the McCains: John and his wife, Cindy, have an adopted daughter named Bridget. Cindy found Bridget at Mother Theresa's orphanage in Bangladesh, brought her to the United States for medical treatment, and the family ultimately adopted her. Bridget has dark skin.

Anonymous opponents used "push polling" to suggest that McCain's Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the "pollster" determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements designed to create doubt about the senator.

Thus, the "pollsters" asked McCain supporters if they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative, race-conscious South, that's not a minor charge. We had no idea who made the phone calls, who paid for them, or how many calls were made. Effective and anonymous: the perfect smear campaign.

Some aspects of this smear were hardly so subtle. Bob Jones University professor Richard Hand sent an e-mail to "fellow South Carolinians" stating that McCain had "chosen to sire children without marriage." It didn't take long for mainstream media to carry the charge. CNN interviewed Hand and put him on the spot: "Professor, you say that this man had children out of wedlock. He did not have children out of wedlock." Hand replied, "Wait a minute, that's a universal negative. Can you prove that there aren't any?"

____________________________________________________________________________________

The story of this smear was told during the 2000 primary season itself, and yet the nation let G.W. Bush be elected/selected President. All I can say is - serves the nation right!

Not just pets!

In North America, more than 60 million cans of pet food of over 70 brands have been recalled by the manufacturers, because they contain contaminated wheat gluten. The contaminant can cause kidney failure and death in cats and dogs.

Now it turns out it is not just the "feed grade" wheat that is contaminated. "Food grade" wheat is also contaminated.

E.g., read this.

"Del Monte Foods has confirmed that the melamine-tainted wheat gluten used in several of its recalled pet food products was supplied as a "food grade" additive, raising the likelihood that contaminated wheat gluten might have entered the human food supply."
.....
"The FDA announced today that it has traced the contaminated wheat gluten to a single processor, Xuzhou Anying Biological Technology of Peixian, China, but has not released the name of the U.S. distributor who supplied the product to Del Monte, Menu Foods, Nestle Purina, and Hills Nutritional. In all, more than 70 brands and over 60 million cans and pouches of dog and cat food are now part of this massive recall, as well as at least one brand of dry cat food."
.....
"Public statements have indicated that the contaminated gluten was distributed by a single U.S. company, but since the FDA refuses to name the supplier, it is not yet known if this company also supplies human food manufacturers. It is also not yet known if Xuzhou Anying sells direct to food manufacturers in the U.S. or abroad."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Among other mysteries is why is the US buying food-grade wheat from China?

Needless to say, the absence of any security in the quality of the food supply is alarming. I can only hope that all the companies that sold the contaminated product suffer such heavy financial losses that testing of food and detection of problems before the fact becomes the market solution.

Enlightenment!

Via A.M. :

This Aspen Has Turned, by Nancy Greggs

It begins thusly:


This is my farewell post on DU. I have finally seen the light, and have no choice but to throw my lot in with the RepubliCons. And I do mean no choice; it literally just happened on its own.

It started when I heard President Bush’s Saturday radio address, and finally realized what an articulate statesman he is. Suddenly putting food on my family started to make sense, along with the War on Terror, the need for wire-tapping US citizens, and the necessity of doing away with quaint concepts like freedom in the pursuit of spreading democracy.

My transformation into a BushBot escalated quickly – a kind of surge, if you will. Once I started speaking in talking points, I knew there was no turning back. I realized that facts were the enemy, and I had to fight ‘em over there as well as over here. So I bought a gas-guzzler, slapped a W sticker on the bumper, burned my copy of An Inconvenient Truth, and set out to claim my rightful place in the world as an ill-informed idiot. It was time to adapt to win."

_________________________________________________________________________________

Enlightenment is possible in this life itself! By doing away with the necessity of thought, life becomes infinitely simpler, too. Pure bliss!