I like the new blog

I can cheat the title and I like the color but truth be told I like it mostly because I can write without someone looking over my shoulder. Present company excluded of course.

This is where I get to say things like you ought to buy Laura and Jenna Bush’s book. No one is asking you to read it either. I just think that if a cause is just then it ought to be supported. Illiteracy is the mind killer, IMHO.

Update: 11:09 WPMT I think this baby just found a name!

It’s Not Like I Don’t Care

But the issues and framing of those issues are locked in the sixties yet again. The problem with Hillary and McCain is most evident in their word choices which were scarcely uttered by Americans or Soviets in the former longest war, the Cold one,  and their solutions to problems are rooted there as well.

They are not too old in years, but in mindset. Their belligerence toward one and all, near or far, friend or foe is because they cannot see the world in any other way. While they are banging their shoes on desktops and cultural revolutions, the world has turned and belongs to those who must live with the consequences of these would be strong Presidents, those who are not baby boomers.

As a baby boomer, all I can do is help things along.

Republican Obstruction Hits The CQ

Why whatever do they mean?In an article that should have been written last year….

Lou Dobbs World

China probes report of hundreds of children ’sold like cabbages’

China is investigating whether hundreds of children, most between the ages of nine and 16, were sold to factories in the southern province of Guangdong over the past five years to work as virtual slave labourers, state media said Wednesday.

The probe was launched following the publication Monday of an investigative report by Southern Metropolis, a state-run daily in Guangdong. The report said the children were “sold like cabbages” by their parents to gangs who in turn sold them off to employment agencies or directly to factories hundreds of kilometres from their homes.

It’s like the Marianna’s, under reported, under the radar, underwear.

Shades Of Jimmy Carter

Canada reaches out to Taliban

KHENJAKAK, AFGHANISTAN — Canadian troops are reaching out to the Taliban for the first time, military and diplomatic officials say, as Canada softens its ban on speaking with the insurgents.

After years of rejecting any contact with the insurgents, Canadian officials say those involved with the mission are now rethinking the policy in hopes of helping peace efforts led by the Afghan government.

This wouldn’t be news if governments had any f’n sense. In fact this wouldn’t be news if we had a media that pointed out when government officials didn’t have any f’n sense.

Seems to me like the press ought to worry less about its’ access to politicians and let the politicians worry more about having access to them.

We like to blame the elected for the wars, and blood, and the mucussy warmness of it all. But it is actually a coalition of media, religious, and political fairies wishing to be right about something larger than themselves, that what did you do after school stuff that colleges think are important in students who have never been expected to think for themselves, and are not expected to think for themselves afterwards either. What do you do when they are wrong? They are the experts!

Imperial blowback only happens to other empires.

Bright Shining Lies

Blinded by blight

Gates does on occasion what McBush does by default. I’m surprised that McCain’t hasn’t tied these two guys into the suspension of the gasoline tax and a chicken in every pot pie campaign. Must be lacking in creative talent.

Nothing new there, which is why it’s on the news.

All The Gushing Hero, Smilin’ Sidney’s Now Their Man

‘Mission Accomplished’: How the Media Covered the Bush Pronouncement 5 Years Ago — and its Aftermath

Chris Matthews on MSNBC called Bush a “hero” and boomed, “He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics.” PBS’s Gwen Ifill said Bush was “part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan.” On NBC, Brian Williams gushed, “The pictures were beautiful. It was quite something to see the first-ever American president on a — on a carrier landing. This must be very meaningful to the United States military.”

As per the notes on experts below in the previous post, now these same people are gushing over McBush.

Don’t Do This At Home, Trust Us We’re Experts!

Information Flow Charting

Calling All Readers: RFI

So Abu Muqawama got into a semi-public argument with one of the world’s leading al-Qaeda experts today about a subject he wants you guys to weigh in on. Basically, Abu Muqawama advanced what he did not think a controversial proposition: that the internet is used by terror groups and guerrilla groups to spread TTPs — tactics, techniques, and procedures.

This appears to be the either or phase of the discussion, which will be decided by the natives to be either one and the other or both, while the immigrants continue to insist on their expertise and training environments as the only possible vector of conveyance because we have always done it this way.

If it weren’t true then I would, being an immigrant, wish for the disinformation to continue, making the wannabes more obvious and open to action on or upon. Disinformation always works in the authorities favor, and when it is deployed in the Mainstream media as propaganda it can make other “immigrants” to the national security issues debate, easy marks.

Disinformation is, as a commodity, no different than information. Some choose to rely more on the MSM, others on the specialists and experts in the blogosphere. Given differing people’s abilities at learning from one medium over another, an expert and very smart person that cannot learn online will be inclined to conclude that online education and information distribution is a poor substitute for their own preferred method.

As far as this stuff goes, it only takes one or two who can learn and apply that information garnered off the net to make all other points of view moot.

Another problem with assuming too little about the nets ability to distribute information is to foster an attitude of superiority that may not be warranted, and so that particular person becomes a target of personal abuse within the medium they eschew. Self inflicted blog shot wounds.

The internet provides a very fast way of distributing ideas that may or may not survive scrutiny, but it is at least open to scrutiny from both peers and novices willing to spend the time digging into the subject. The stuff the experts deals with has to have a controlled access schema, whether in jargon, or in this case, national security classification. Experts don’t like to see their bailiwick being bandied about in public, especially when that novice analysis contradicts the experts analysis, and even more so when the novice’s analysis is the more correct one as events unfold.

The political blogosphere is used to this now. The inability of any of the three remaining viable candidates to fully use the internet to it’s educational potential is astonishing. One they remain woefully ignorant as individuals about the flow of information, and secondly they ignore those opinions that do not necessarily meet their predefined concept of expertise.

No one at Microsoft ever understood the ping of death until they discovered they had built it into their own systems, which made the novice an expert for a while. The concept merely needed a batch file to inspire the patch file. The expert in AM’s case may discover that what is true for computers is also true of the internet. It’s what you don’t know that can hurt you, and experts don’t know a lot of things about a lot of things. they may even not know a few things about their own field that someone has stumbled across on the net and put together on their own.

Maybe We Should Leave

Deployment of aircraft carrier a US ‘reminder’ to Iran, says Gates

In the past few days senior administration officials have made a series of pointed remarks about the Iranian role in Iraq. Gates himself claimed: “What the Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen and women inside Iraq.”

Really?!

Since they are there under the pretext of lies, but that is an old story, Mission Accomplished!
No one could have foreseen this thing happening to me.

Just when the Pentagon quit sending defense industry insiders to the media with a bag of beans too!

Victims and Viewers II

The media keeps informing us of the news they wish us to hear, and none of what we need to know.

They look at the ratings and decide we are enjoying it.

Victims and Viewers

I am reminded this morning that big shipping can’t slow down their vessels in the areas where right whales traverse as it would cost them money. Same thing they say about raising their taxes.

They never say they pass this expense off to the consumers, with the 1.3 markup.