Which Old Witch?

Original: (Sunday, December 31, 2006)

The Wicked One!

Yes, Saddam Hussein is dead! They hanged him, in the dark, in a dark place.
I reckon some people are happy about it. These men certainly must be! I don't know about al Jaafari, but there's not much George W. Bush likes more than a nice execution. Probably reminds him of better days when, as Governor of Texas he could order lots of executions. Or course, a good old-fashioned hanging beats one of those wussy lethal injection executions hands down. Heck, with a lethal injection you can't even tell when the Grim Reaper has come and gone.
However, this may fall among that class of Things You Should Be Careful You Wish For. It seems to me it's a somewhat ominous precedent. Having a Quisling court of a puppet government execute a former head of state; I mean. A head of state who was, moreover, handed to the court conditionally, premised from the get-go on the certainty of a guilty verdict and a death sentence. Saddam was, of course, a Brutal Thug Dictator - supported in his thuggery, unfortunately, by the United States so long as he followed orders: something he failed to do in 1991.

Be That As It May

The precedent has been established now: Kangaroo Court Yes; World Court No.Who knows if perhaps there will come a time when a United States President, sitting or former will wish that he could appeal to the World Court?
OH:, just as an aside, I think it's really really stupid to create a martyr to give your enemies a rally point, just out of a self-righteous belief in your own personal divine guidance. I know; it's hard to believe that Saddam Hussein could ever be made into a hero, but think about who is telling the story in the Sunni states of the middle east? And how many would-be successors are willing to rewrite the history of Iraq/The Saddam Years to their own personal gain?
Please Stay Tuned

God Said...

Original: (Monday, August 08, 2005)

"Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth...
... and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so." And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. (Gen. 1:29-31)
Sorry; I saw this on a childs sampler in a local church, and I just couldn't resist!
I wonder if God will be unhappy if we disdain HIS/HER gifts?

Maybe It's Too Subtle?

Original: (Tuesday, June 12, 2007)

Last week I went to see Pirates of the Carribbean - At World's End. I expected a fairly mindless but enjoyable comedy-plus-grotesque-creatures movie. Lots of computer graphics. Strange plot. Lots of action. Odd non-sequiturs; like the earlier Pirates. Instead, at the beginning of the movie, I saw the following:

Scene: A line of prisoners, assorted men/women; one child. Dirty and mangy; lined up; being marched to a five-station gibbet (five nooses, no waiting). Just the intro; nothing special. Setting the scene, as it were. But then!

Camera pans. Zooms in on British Soldier (Marine, actually, I think), reading a proclamation. I guess nobody was paying attention yet. I haven't read or heard anything about this. What the proclamation says is:

"To insure the security of the royal colonies the following is proclaimed - 1. The Right To Freely Assemble: Suspended. 2. The Right To Freedom Of Speech: Suspended. 3. The Right Of Habeas Corpus: Suspended. 4. The Right To Trial By A Jury Of Peers: Suspended.

Who knew! George W. Bush was the scriptwriter for Pirates of the Carribbean!
Or, hmmm, maybe somebody just wanted to steal his best lines. See if we're paying attention. Apparently, nobody is.
Along the same line, here's a column by Eugene Robinson, one of the few, the coherent, the knowledgeable, the not shrill(I like that: Fleeting Glory in Albania (Washington Post, Tuesday, June 12)

Yes, George W. Bush, the man who, in a paraphrase of a famous saying from the Vietnam War had to destroy democracy in order to save it! He will, in fact, (direct quote here)...live in infamy.

Blair is "Shocked!...Shocked!"

Original: (Wednesday, July 13, 2005)

Tony "The Poodle" Blair is shocked to find out that there are people in England who act just like people do in the rest of the world.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has expressed his shock that the four men believed to have carried out last week's deadly terrorist attacks on London's transit system were British nationals.

As shocked, I presume, as were Americans when we found out that the "Arab Terrorists" who blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City were named Timothy McVeigh.
Meanwhile, some of the cast-of-thousands of "Terrorism Experts" are happily bloviating about what a large and sophisticated al Quaeda cell it must have taken to have performed such a coordinated attack on the London underground. Piffle! How sophisticated do you have to be to call your friends on your mobile phone when it's time to set off an explosive? How sophisticated do you have to be to look up how to make a bomb, in a book or online? How many disaffected suicidal bipolar adolescents are going to take direction from anybody? Believe it or not, McVeigh did not have an al Quaeda handler teaching him how to blow up a building.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, did not have an al Quaeda handler when they shot the hell out of Columbine HS

Sven Jaschan, did not have an al Quaeda handler when he created the Sasser Virus. Only "experts" who have managed to avoid learning anything about what real people are really capable of can manage to claim a huge complex monolithic doomsday cult is responsible for every explosion that happens in the world. Excepting, of course, the explosions set off by the United States military in the furtherance of peace and democracy. Those explosions are, I suppose, being set off by a huge complex monolithic doomsday cult - a cult that believes it can install its neocolonialist vision of society throughout the world. Or, at least, the oil-bearing part of the world.

Spotted in a Bangkok Newspaper

Original: (Sunday, October 28, 2007)

...
A poll by ABAC (Assumption University of Thailand, Bangkok) indicating that some 83% of Thai voters think it's perfectly acceptable to accept money in return for their vote in the upcoming election! There has been a lot of shock and awe surrounding this number, in spite of the fact that in Thailand, unlike the food, statistical numbers tend to be rather poorly cooked. Lots of pontificating by farang (foreigners) about the simpleminded rural Thai people not understanding Democracy - as if the citizens of the United States understood it. Which the evidence shows they do not.
In any event, here is a letter (e-mail, really) that appeared in the Bangkok Post a few days ago:

The secret ballot is a truly wondrous thing. You can
sell your vote to whomever you wish, as many times as
you wish. When it comes time to cast your ballot, you
are entirely free to bless the candidate of your
choice. Witness the classic movie "The Great Man
Votes" (John Barrymore, 1938), wherein the hero is
courted, wined and dined; his arrears of rent is paid
up. In the final scene he is driven to the polling
place. He saunters up the steps. He turns to the
camera. He smiles. He winks. The message is clear - he
is voting his choice, NOT the corrupt politicians who
"bought" him. Of course, the audience doesn't get to
know who gets the Great Man's vote; that's not the
point of the movie, is it?
I think it's wonderfully appropriate to accept money
from corrupt candidates. And then vote as you will.
Of course, it all depends on the secrecy of the
ballot. The secret ballot used to be a given in the
USA. That's why vote-buyers were forced to look for
votes in the local graveyards. In some places people
continued to vote for decades after their death!
However, with the wonders of the computer age, that's
being done away with. Now the computer can cast your
vote for you, even decide what choice you will be
making. Progress!
Thank you,
Aj. Frank,
Bangkok

Insanity

Original: (Sunday, January 29, 2006)

Reminded of that trendy definiton of Insanity... "doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results."
Comes a report in Financial Times

FT.com

(and many others) about a new poll, in which 57% of the pollees apparently think that it's a good idea to attack Iran! Fifty-seven percent of my countrymen appear to be insane!
Now, we have one of our body parts stuck in Afghanistan; another stuck in Iraq. Since that hasn't worked, lets put another one in Iran. Sure - that'll work! We'll just keep on attacking other countries until we manage to get it right. Casting back through recent history (well, recent to me anyway), we haven't been very successful at attacking other countries since the 1940's. Since then, ever since General MacArthur tried to start a war with China, which he succeeded in doing at a cost of around a million lives, thousands of them American servicemen, all our military adventuring seems to have gone awry. To put it mildly. I think we are soon going to run out of body parts to invest.

Which leads me to a (somewhat) parallel topic. I have changed my mind! Here's what I said last November:

I Did Not Think I Would Hear This

I regretfully take it back. Sorry Congressman Murtha.

Now it's my opinion that we need to leave all those troops in Iraq. More even, we need to send the entire force of the United States Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force to Iraq. If the troops come home, that will only make them available for Mad George to send to attack yet another country that isn't a "Partner For Peace". I'm guessing here, but it sort of appears that any who aren't Partners For Peace are potential "Partners For War".
And there seem to be a lot of 'em.
No; lets send everyone to Iraq, where we have already had more Americans killed than in the World Trade Center. Keep 'em out of the bloody hands of the President.

A Flash of Hindsight

Original: (Saturday, September 15, 2007)

This has to be the

The Biggest D'OH of The Twenty-First Century.

Or, perhaps, any century. Someone actually measured the actual nutitional value of the latest-and-greatest crops produced by the Green Revolution, and discovered Oh My! that the nutritional value was less per unit weight than those old fashioned plants from the days of yesteryear. Crop Yields Expand, but Nutrition Is Left Behind. Now, I never think of things like this, until somebody else points it out. I'm not very inquisitive, I guess. But, this kind of thing seems so obvious in hindsight, I'm shocked! shocked!, that it never occurred to me that this would be the case.
Question: How do you make something bigger, faster?
Answer: Simplify the process.
Question: How Do You Do That?
Answer: Throw out the complex steps in the process.

It's the Mad Man Muntz industrial method. For those (many I imagine) who don't remember, Earl Muntz (Motto: "I WOULD GIVE 'EM AWAY, BUT MY WIFE WON'T LET ME--SHE'S CRAZY!") Mad Man Muntz Bio. Muntz was a marketeer who created his own products. Like Ron Popeil, on steroids. If you can imagine such a thing. Among other Muntz'iana was the Muntz TV. It was the original cheap TeeVee. How did he do it? Simple. He threw out all those unnecessary circuits, like the V.Hold and the H.Hold (If you don't remember those controls, you're on your own now. Let me recommend Wikipedia to you). Simple. Inexpensive. Easy to make. Everything was fine. Until...
Until a Pigeon pooped on the antenna. Or flew past it. Or, well, pretty much any kiind of unhappy meteorological event occurred. Then the teevee became unwatchable. Didn't have enough vitamins in it's circuitry, so to speak.

Now, I kind of wonder; are these missing trace compounds perhaps an explanation (or partial explanation) of the highly publicized Obesity Epidemic? It's pretty well understood that there's a kind of mental trigger that is supposed to kick in when you've eaten enough food that says: HEY! ENOUGH! Could it be that the trigger isn't reset by volume, or weight, or calories, but by some trace compound(s)? If so, then, in addition to my earlier prescription for preventing obesity: Walk, Don't Drive; there's another way to avoid excess weight. Eat Good Food. If you can find it, that is.
Coming soon:

Energy: Part 3

- which may (or may not) include yet a third way to avoid obesity. Probably Energy: Part 3 will come after Energy: Part 2; but nothing is certain in these uncertain times.

Upstairs - but no Downstairs...

Original: (Friday, March 25, 2005)

Back in the 1970's, when the rest of us were watching "Upstairs, Downstairs"...

it appears that George W. Bush was only watching "Upstairs,"...

Now George is travelling the country, touting his "ownership society". After a few years of investing in high-class stocks and bonds, he says, we will all be part of the ownership society. We'll have a nest-egg to leave to our children, who will be even richer!
To date, none dare call it what it is - the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. When we sell off our nest-egg for money to buy our food, pay our rent, and, most of all, pay our medicare premiums(!), who is going to redeem our bonds, buy our stocks? Why, our children! How much will they pay for these things? The more you make from your "personal account", the more they will pay to buy from you. Except for the brokers who skim their take from all this activity, who is going to make anything from the whole transaction?

When all is said and done, wealth is still created by work. Work in the classic physical science sense of expenditure of energy over distance, and also in the economic sense of making (or growing, or raising, or providing) something that has value for another. In short - someone has to do the work!
Thus, if there is no ",Downstairs" to perform work for "Upstairs," there won't be any wealth for anyone...

Try telling that to George...
This is in line with the misperception that I see voiced (see ... voiced...? Oh, well...) by some in the news. You know, when they insist that "our schools should teach everyone computer science." Donno about you, but I don't want a computer scientist to repair my car. Or my roof. Or grow my food. And I am a computer scientist!

We all need an Eskimo sometimes

Original: (Friday, June 03, 2005)

Back in '96 (that's 1996, not 18.. or 17.. or..) I was having a tough time. I was working as a fisherman that year, not exactly getting rich. I'd headed offshore to go for Albacore, on my nice new (1960 vintage) boat, Seabreeze

Somewhere (well, I can look up the exact co-ordinates; I wasn't 'lost at sea', really) about 800 miles west of Eureka I caught an old floating hawser in my prop, blew out my engine. Not much I could do out there, except spend a lot of time checking my bilge pumps, putting out distress calls, the usual thing for anyone floating around the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
After what seemed forever, but was actually just four days, I caught a lucky bounce off the ionosphere, and got hold of US Coast Guard Station Brookings. It took a few more days, but a Coast Guard ship finally got to me, about the time the weather was getting really iffy. They took me in tow, and in a few more days I wound up tied to an abandoned fishbuyers dock in Eureka California. Having had little-to-no sleep for weeks, I pretty much collapsed. Spent about 15 hours dead out.
But time has a way of moving along no matter my state of consciousness, so next morning I had no choice but to wake up and try to get things set to rights.
I was standing in the wheelhouse, surveying the chaos, when a cheerful little woman with sensible walking shoes and a slouch hat, looking perhaps a little like Miss Marple, came striding by along the beatup old dock. She waved and gave me a cheerful "Good Morning!". I growled at her. She said "What a beautiful boat you have!" (she had a remarked tendency to speak in exclamation points). I said it was a piece of junk (well, something a bit stronger than 'junk') with a blown engine, unusable, a disaster, etc. She persisted in engaging me in cheerful chatter until, finally, in exasperation at her impenetrable cheeriness, I said: Look, I wouldn't even have a way to get around, except a friend is letting me use his truck.
She said, without even a pause "Oh, you have a friend!"
I must have blinked, or blacked out, or something, because when I looked next, she had disappeared. I wanted to say thank you, or something, but, having delivered her message, she could then depart. That was my eskimo, back in July of 1996.

Everybody's Getting Fat Except...

Original: (Sunday, March 05, 2006)

Obesity seems to have become *ahem* a large item in the news;

How We Get Fat

yet again. It has become a wonderfully complex, hence controversial, topic. People debate both the cause and the cure. While many insist that weight gain is caused by excess caloric intake, many more interesting theories abound. Some say it's MacDonald's, some say television. Some say it's school cafeterias, some say it's advertising.
Just as the cause is debated, so too is the cure. A cartoon character was informed by her (cartoon) physicain that she should lose some poundage; he recommended "moderate diet and exercise." The cartoon lady responded with "don't you think that's a bit extreme?" For those who agree with Blanche, there is a plethora (really, don't you think that should be "are a plethora"?) of obesity cures, most of them reconizeable by claims that weight will "melt away effortlessly". Such is human frailty that we buy into such claims no matter how unlikely we believe the claim to be. So, from Fat Dissolving Soap to Vibrating Belts (which at least sound sort of fun, in a kinky way), we rush from this brand of snake oil to the next, filled with hope, again and again. Surely, one of these magical cures must work!
Now, out of years of personal experience, I announce to you Franks Own Fat-Loss Method!
My new method comes from my observation that:
When I drive a car - I weigh about 215 lbs.
When I walk - I weigh about 175 lbs.
In other words, my CAR is responsible for about 40 lbs of (mostly) fat, or a difference in body mass of over 22%!
Ever the diligent researcher, I looked here

National Transportation Statistics

and discovered that in the United States today there are someting over 260,000,000 cars. As an aside, yes, just as in those old predictions, there are now more cars than there are drivers for the cars.
Now let's look at the math:
260 million cars @ 40 lb/car. That's 10.4 billion lbs of excess avoirdupois, just in the USA!
Continuing, fat is 9 Cal./gram, there are 455 g/lb; so, 9 x 455 x 10,400,000,000 = ummm, lessee...
42,588,000,000,000 (~42.5 Trillion) Calories adhering to the American waistline!
The energy shortage is now over - all that remains is to "tap in" to this National Fat Reserve (NFR); enough reserve energy to see the nation through its next "driving season" (doesn't that phrase seem really tragically odd to you?)
Now, my own experience suggests this energy can best be recovered by people walking from place to place; but that might be a bit extreme.
Seeking the solution in technology; perhaps a National Liposuction Program, with the results transformed into bio-diesel, is a more palatable proposal.
Seeking the solution in the new national paradigm (I truly hate that word!) of victimhood, which is today always the most likely way of responding - I think we will just continue to blame anybody-but-me and keep patronizing the snake-oil-salesman-of-the-moment, seeking the zipless weight-loss, with six-pack abs thrown in for the more unrealistic of us (among whom I count myself, sometimes anyway).
And continue to add to the NFR.
Meantime, my feet hurt.

Which One Is In Denial?

Original: (Monday, September 26, 2005)

Denial is one of the stranger human traits, but it is one I believe we all share, at least from time to time. Sometimes, Like with Scarlet, it's better just to "think about it tomorrow". However, sometimes denial becomes a usual part of one's thinking. This can be bad.
Here's a test for you: Which one of these is an example of denial at work?

a.)



A smoker (like former Marlboro Man Wayne McLaren, shown here) who says "I can quit anytime I want."

b.)


A gambler (like former star quarterback Art Schlichter, shown here) who says "I'll quit just as soon as I make one more big score."

c.)


A President (like ... George W. Bush, shown here) who says "... we see a situation in Iraq in which the Iraqi people at every opportunity have chosen to pull together in the political process," (quote from State Department spokesman Sean McCormack).


... Give up?

The answer is: All Of The Above!
Now, you might be thinking my main idea here is to point out the incredibly destructive kind of thinking denial can bring about. You are correct. The destructiveness is of course much greater if the person happens to be the Most Powerful Man In The World (and determined to prove it). It's not like people didn't try to tell George W. Bush about Iraq. Millions of people marched against his war. I tried to tell him here ( Don't Gaff That Shark!). To no avail. I really just wrote that post as a sort of memory-lane piece anyway. I understand that the President pays no attention to any information that doesn't conform to his own personal (that is to say, wierd) worldview. Heck, he doesn't even pay attention to his own father, who understood back when he invaded Iraq that the only options there were a secular brutal thug dictatorship (Saddam Hussein) or a group of ungovernable brutal thug theocracies (what we are about to see now). He (G.H.W. Bush) opted for a Hussein-without-fangs, as the best of a bad situation. Ahh; it's enough to make one yearn for the Good Old Days. If Only We Had Known!