Say Anything Blog

I figure this will be a many part series, so let’s start off with some obvious ones.

Osama Bin Laden

Baby Doc

Luis Posada Carriles

Here.

Burlington Telecom, owned by the small city of Burlington, Vermont, (population 39,000), decided to carry Al Jazeera English, sparking debate among residents and leading some groups to ask for its removal from the list of channels.

Aha! Its the conservative, ‘government out of my backyard and into that faggot’s bedroom’, crowd who wish to have it banned. Of course, don’t speak of banning Fox…

Another issue which lays bare the fact that the whole conservative complaint that Dems want you regulated and not them is pure hogwash. That inconsistent position is proudly trumpeted by both parties now.

Forget conservatives versus liberals—the real debate over Al Jazeera in Burlington and elsewhere is increasingly turning into a debate between those who have watched the channel and those who have not. Those who have watched Al Jazeera on air will benefit from its strong global perspective on international news and affairs. On the flipside, most of the sections of society insisting Al Jazeera be dropped have never even watched it.

...one group should not be allowed to impose itself on the other…

Even if you are against the content that some news channel like Al Jazeera is broadcasting, don’t you nonetheless want it available to you if you choose to watch it? I don’t see why anyone would censor any of these news channels… be it Fox or Al Jazeera.

New Jersey is giving governors and mayors across the country — assuming they are paying attention — a chilling lesson on how hard it is for elected officials to pay down a recklessly incurred debt in timely fashion.

No matter how much Trenton slashes spending for hospitals and other essential services, this debt will cost the state’s taxpayers $2.6 billion annually in payments for interest and principal for years to come.

For New York, California and other states staggering under out-of-control debt, New Jersey’s warning may have come too late. But it is not too late for other states and thousands of cities, towns and counties to learn that politicians who have little trouble running up a big tab have a terrible time paying it off when the bill, as it must, finally comes due.

or should that be

politicians who have little trouble running up a big tab have a terrible time [fessing up to what they’ve done]

These are ‘flatlander’ Dems. Meanwhile, in the northern mountains...

VBM: And we’re seeing another budget surplus for this year?

Spaulding: Right. I think we could end up this year with, say, a $40 million surplus. That would be pushing the upper side of it but it could easily be in the upper-30s.

In any case, the bond rating firms appreciate the Capitol Debt Affordability Advisory Committee, because we seem to be able to keep a lid on our debt. Around 1990 we were in the top 10 in the country in debt per capita and debt as percentage of personal income, and now we’re down below medium, and we have a really strong story to tell there.

The agencies also like the fact that we have a joint revenue forecasting process twice a year that really works.

VBM: What is that?

Spaulding: Twice a year the Emergency Board, which is made up of the Governor and the legislative financial leaders, get together with the Governor’s economist and the legislature’s economist and they develop a consensus revenue forecast and bring it to the Emergency Board, where it is adopted. You don’t have a governor saying, ‘Well, I think that this much money is going to come in,” and a legislature saying, “Yeah, but we think only this much money is going to come in.” There is a revenue forecast, and everyone lives by it. It tends to allow you to build your budgets around a realistic revenue forecast.

We have been fairly conservative in that regard, too.

A realistic revenue forecast? Wow.

I don’t think the flatlanders, or even the banks, know what that is anymore. Its just another dirty word - we would all rather have hollow words that lie, coddle, and inspire false confidence.

“The voters won’t like paying back all this money we’ve blown.”

“Don’t tell them.”

Jerusalem Post

The report said that instead of driving its enemies out of power, the US-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007.

David Wurmser, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser a month after the Hamas takeover, said he believed that Hamas had no intention of taking over the Gaza Strip until Fatah forced its hand.

“It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was preempted before it could happen,” he was quoted as saying. Wurmser said that the Bush administration engaged in a “dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] with victory.”

Wurmser said he was especially galled by the Bush administration’s hypocrisy. “There is a stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy,” he said. “It directly contradicts it.”

Neocon critics of the administration told the magazine that the old State Department vice of rushing to anoint a strongman rather than solving problems directly had led to the terrible missteps in the Gaza Strip.

To rely on proxies such as Dahlan, former UN ambassador John Bolton said, was “an institutional failure, a failure of strategy.” Bolton blamed Rice, saying Rice, “like others in the dying days of this administration, is looking for a legacy. Having failed to heed the warning not to hold the elections, they tried to avoid the result through Dayton.” Lieutenant General Keith Dayton was the US security coordinator for the Palestinians, who reached a secret agreement with Dahlan to strengthen Fatah’s forces.

If only we could look our own Middle East policies ‘in the eyes’. But no, we are lied to and Bush/Rice/et al. provide covert support to terrorists.

If I was in high school still, I’d be reassured. “He’s cool.”

TOYAKO, Japan — President George W. Bush looked into the eyes of Russia’s new president, Dimitri A. Medvedev, on Monday and saw, he said, “a smart guy.”

The exchange brought to mind Mr. Bush’s first meeting with Mr. Putin, at Brdo Castle in Slovenia in June 2001, when Mr. Bush famously said he had “looked the man in the eye” and “was able to get a sense of his soul.”
...
“You know,” Mr. Bush said, “I’m not going to sit here and psychoanalyze the man, but I will tell you that he’s very comfortable, he’s confident, and that I believe that when he tells me something, he means it.”

Honestly, these two meet and we hear about Bush’s birthday.

“I congratulated George on his birthday, which is also a very important thing, irrespective of summits out there — irrespective of our will, these dates occur in our life.”

Hmmmmm. I wonder if they had a chance to talk about Bout and his precarious legal situation.

Watermelons do the same thing that Viagra does.

Meanwhile, women are desperately trying to get their diseases cured by convincing us that they lead to erectile dysfunction.

The arrest on 6 March of 41-year-old Viktor Anatol’evich Bout in Bangkok continues to shine a most unwelcome (for some) spotlight on the shadowy world of the international arms trade, and will doubtless leave many governments, including the US, scrambling for cover as they attempt to limit the fallout from his arrest.

Bout was taken into custody in a conference room on the 27th floor of Bangkok’s five-star Sofitel hotel after reportedly attempting to sell armaments to Colombia’s FARC guerrillas.

His arrest involved not only the Royal Thai Police and the US Drug Enforcement Agency, but the Romanian Border Police, the Romanian Prosecutor’s Office Attached to the High Court of Cassation and Justice, the Korps Politie Curacao of the Netherlands Antilles and the Danish National Police Security Services.

The following day, Michael Garcia, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Michele Leonhart, the Acting Administrator of the DEA, announced the unsealing of charges against Bout (aka “Boris,” Victor But,” “Viktor Budd,” “Viktor Butt,” “Viktor Bulakin,” “Vadim Markovich Aminov … and so on.

One of Bout’s three lawyers, Yan Dasgupta, claimed that, “Some [US] governmental officials at the moment of his detention tried to actually send him to United States without following proper extradition procedure prescribed by the law. He was doing everything in his power including physical resistance not to fly to the US”

The Russian embassy immediately hired Thai lawyer Lak Nitiwatvichan, who told reporters, “He was a military man. He has done nothing wrong. Thailand is a sovereign country, so since he was arrested in Thailand, he is willing to be prosecuted under Thai law”

Bout’s organizational skills have impressed many western observers. Misha Glenny, author of McMafia, a study of global criminal networks, told ISN Security Watch when asked about Bout, “He’s a spectacular success - my own personal opinion. […] “You generally find behind spectacular success of criminals shady government support.

“That Bout has been arrested is a very positive sign. […] The influence of gangsters in Russia is diminishing,” Glenny concluded.

Bout’s trials promises to be a unique and disturbing peak into the shadowy world of illicit arms trafficking, and the US must be nervously contemplating what he might say in court about his transports flights into Baghdad and Afghanistan as a Pentagon contractor.

Perhaps however, Viktor Bout is merely misunderstood; as his wife Alla recently observed in her first interview with a western newspaper: “He’s a poet, not the lord of war”

Here’s an interesting article about the departure of ‘Fumo the Democrat’ from a 30 year career in state politics.

HARRISBURG - Every man needs a little madness in life, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free.

With those words, culled from the exuberant character in the book-turned-movie Zorba the Greek, an emotional State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo bid farewell to his colleagues in the Senate yesterday, in what was likely his last speech from the floor he has commanded for almost three decades.

The Democratic senator from Philadelphia said he was not resigning early - he will stick by his plan to serve out his term, which ends this year.

But he said he wanted to give his goodbyes because he did not believe he would be back in Harrisburg in the fall, when lawmakers return from summer break.

At that point, he will be fighting a raft of corruption charges awaiting him in federal court in Philadelphia. He is accused of using his position and staff to live lavishly at the expense of taxpayers - and of trying to block an FBI investigation into his conduct. His trial is scheduled to begin in early September.

“I will miss it terribly,” Fumo said of being in the Capitol. “I’ve spent half my life here, and I’ve spent it here with every fiber in my body. I’ve loved it, I’ve hated it, I’ve had great experiences and very sad ones.”

In many ways, it was an unlikely end to a 30-year career in Harrisburg, where Fumo left his mark with an unapologetically aggressive and swashbuckling style that people only half-joked was vintage Philadelphia.

His farewell speech came on a holiday in a near-empty Capitol, where the focus of anyone left working was almost exclusively on completing the state budget in time to catch the July Fourth fireworks.

Two of Fumo’s friends and colleagues - Minority Leader Robert J. Mellow (D., Lackawanna) and Gib Armstrong (R., Lancaster) - talked about his career and told a few stories about him. And there was a resolution honoring his Senate service.

But his exit was low-key and in many ways did not seem to fit the fiery brand of politics and the love of winning at all costs that he came to be known for.

“It’s sad,” Gov. Rendell said. “This is not the way he would have wanted to go, or the way people who admired him would have liked him to go. He’s done a lot of good here.”

Fumo was one of the most powerful Democrats in the Capitol and in Philadelphia. Over time, he expanded his political sphere to exert control over the election of city judges, City Council members, Democratic City Committee members, and ward leaders.

Fumo would use that power relentlessly for things he wanted, large or small.

Well, ‘Fumo the Democrat’…

good fucking riddance buddy. I guess your ‘funtime’ is over. Thanks though, the city tax in Philly is fucking crippling, douche. Now at least we know what you did with it after admonishing everyone to spend it. “Its needed.” If hell were real, two-faced Janus’s like you’d be the fuel.

I hope the FBI cracks their knuckles and keeps right on at it. We need about 80% of our ‘big party’ politicians sent upstate. On both sides of the isle.

Oh, and someone give Governor Rendell a hanky. He’s teary over the whole ordeal. “It’s sad.” Yep, a 139 charge indictment. I’m just not as upset as the governor.

Here.

He is the 18th teenager to be shot or stabbed to death in London this year.
...
Shakilus was attacked four days after 16-year-old Ben Kinsella was knifed to death in Islington, north London. Three teenagers were appearing in court on Friday charged with his murder.

Later the same day, the bodies of French students Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez, both 23, were found riddled with knife wounds after a flat fire in New Cross, south east London.

Tunisian national Hamouda Bessaad, 34, was stabbed to death on Old Kent Road, south-east London, on Monday, while Dee Willis, 28, died after a knife attack in Peckham a day later.

Here.

One employee told investigators he simply liked looking up the records of professional basketball players.
...
The 192 million passport files maintained by the State Department contain individuals’ passport applications, which include data such as Social Security numbers, physical descriptions, and names and places of birth of the applicants’ parents. Otherwise, the files provide limited information; they do not contain records of overseas travel or visa stamps from previous passports.
...
To test the extent of the snooping, investigators assembled a list of 150 famous Americans and checked how many times their files were accessed over a 5 1/2 -year period. Investigators found that the records of 127, or 85 percent, had been searched a total of more than 4,100 times.

The report said that “although an 85 percent hit rate appears to be excessive, the Department currently lacks criteria to determine whether this is actually an inordinately high rate.”

But one official said there would be little reason to look at the files unless a passport was being renewed or information was being updated. “It should be zero or one time over five years for the normal average American,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

“The United States, which has been driving much of the world’s drug research and drug policy agenda, stands out with higher levels of use of alcohol, cocaine, and cannabis, despite punitive illegal drug policies, as well as (in many U.S. states), a higher minimum legal alcohol drinking age than many comparable developed countries,” the authors wrote in the study, which was published in the July 1 issue of the journal PLoS Medicine.

“The Netherlands, with a less criminally punitive approach to cannabis use than the U.S., has experienced lower levels of use, particularly among younger adults,” they added.

A little response to Rob’s post. After Ahmadinejad saw this clip of Assad and his lady, he thought… “No, hell no.”

My first post on this theme received so much attention that it would just be foolish not to reprise it.

“Okay ladies, now its time to do it all by yourself.”

A short while ago I had the pleasure of attending a lecture titled “The Evolution of Irrationality, Insights from Non-Human Primates” by Dr. Santos from the Comparative Cognition Lab at Yale. She discussed three different studies that she has been working on including this one. Here’s the abstract:

Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. Do these biases extend across contexts, cultures, or even species?
We investigate this question by introducing fiat currency and trade to a colony of capuchin monkeys, and recovering their preferences over a range of goods and gambles. We show that capuchins react rationally to both price and wealth shocks, but display several hallmark biases when faced with gambles, including reference-dependence and
loss-aversion. Given our capuchins’ inexperience with trade and gambles, these results suggest that loss-aversion extends beyond humans, and may be innate rather than learned.

They taught Capuchins to trade, then they compared the risk-taking tendencies of humans to those of the Capuchins and found that, low and behold, they display the same asymmetrical biases we do. Amazing. The implications are that we, as a species, acquired that bias at some point in our evolutionary history roughly 35 million years ago. Soon denying evolution is going to have some serious economic disadvantages. I recommend y’all get in at the ground floor. This is cool stuff. You should have seen the footage of these guys making buys. They trained them will little wallets full of mock currency. Again, amazing. Also, notice that one of the authors of this paper is from the School of Management. Cool stuff.