Monthly Archives: August 2006

Bush’s war?

Not hardly, according to 73 percent of respondents to a recent British poll in the UK published in the Guardian on Thursday. This is post-airplane plot discovered. Forty-four percent think this war will last more than 20 years. I’d say that’s optomistic. Fifty-five percent favor passenger profiling. Of course, law enforcement already is passenger profiling. They’re just not talking about it, in my view, and calling everybody else and his two-year-old out of the line to cover themselves.

Via Buzzmachine 

Then, just two days later, look what happens aboard a passenger jet returning Brits from holiday.

"British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny – refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed. The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic."

It gets damn claustrophobic in many passenger jets, people all crammed together like cattle. Curiosity, laughter, and surely fear can ripple down the seat files like an exotic bovine infection.

Today’s pretty picture

erikbech1_strip.jpg

Aurora over Yellowknife, Canada, last night, from Spaceweather.com which says the display was not related to today’s geomagnetic storm but just "a place where auroras have a habit of appearing for no particular reason. A little gust of solar wind or a twitch of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) is all it takes to produce bright Northern Lights. Yellowknife’s secret? It’s located near the Arctic Circle in the heart of aurora country."

More first grade

After the first week of class, with the red folder and its homework assignment showing up in Mr. B.’s Superman backpack every afternoon, it’s clear that this is not his father’s elementary school.

For one thing the folder has a behavior page stapled in the front of it with three smilie faces (rather, one smilie and two frownies) for each school day. The yellow smilie is labeled "Super Day, as expected." The blue frownie is tagged "Warning," and the purple frownie’s wording is "Conference needed." So far, five days into the program, Mr. B has had only yellow smilies.

I’m glad they didn’t do this when I was in grade school. I might have been in trouble at home almost every afternoon instead of only at report card time.

Looney Toons at 40,000 feet

I never did like traveling in the aluminum cattle car, so I hope this is not what air travelers have to look forward to, instead of an anti-war movement on the ground, we get one in the air.

"A self-described peace activist responsible for the diversion of a London-to-Washington flight Wednesday acted bizarrely for hours, made references to al Qaeda and hijack training flights, and was restrained by two passengers after she urinated in the aisle." 

Heat perspective

From meteorologist Bob Rose’s eather discussion regarding the ongoing heat wave…

"While this is certainly significant, it isn’t close to the record of 21 consecutive days set between July 21 and August 2, 2001. So far this month, there have been [14] days with temperatures at or above 100 degrees. The record for the most 100-degree days in August is 27, set in 1923. We’re not near record territory yet, but several more days are likely to be added to this month’s list. No significant change in the current pattern is expected for the next few days."

So disregard the yellowing, crunchy grass and look forward to Labor Day when it should all be over for another year.

How to stop Iran…

…without firing a shot…

"Threaten Iran’s gasoline supply. Iran is often said to have an oil weapon pointed at George Bush’s head. Rob Andrews, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey, notes the reverse is closer to the truth: Because Iran lacks refining capacity, it must import 40% of its gasoline. Of that amount, fully 60% is handled by a single company, Rotterdam-based Vitol, which has strategic storage and blending facilities in the UAE. The regime also spends $3 billion a year to subsidize below-market gas prices."

UPDATE The U.S. it seems is moving against Iran in lesser ways, although we only hear it through the usual anonymous sources.

"The United States blocked an Iranian cargo plane’s flight to Syria last month after intelligence analysts concluded it was carrying sophisticated missiles and launchers to resupply Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, two U.S. intelligence officials say.

"Eight days after Hezbollah’s war with Israel began, U.S. diplomats persuaded Turkey and Iraq to deny the plane permission to cross their territory to Damascus, a transfer point for arms to Hezbollah, the officials said."

And the science of crate-ology

Searching grandmas

"What is so infuriating about this is that the ACLU favors policies which discriminate against all sorts of people—old people, women, children and others who, under random searches and other idiotic numerical formulas, are pulled aside for literally no reason at all.

"All of this is happening against a backdrop of a war on terror in which roughly 99 percent of jihadi terrorists are of either Middle Eastern or South Asian descent and 100 percent of them are Muslim."