Six prisoners in British jails have applied to have children with their partners following a landmark European court ruling that their human rights would be breached if they are prevented from becoming fathers.
Why not just set them free?
Reply
Monthly Archives: February 2009
Poem of the Week: 2/8/09-2/14/09
The Wild Swans At Coole by William Butler Yeats is this week’s poem of the week.
Rant of the Week: 2/8/09-2/14/09
The clip from showcasing Milton Friedman beating up on Phil Donahue demonstrates the best and the worst of Friedman. The worst is the beginning of the clip where Friedman idolizes the free market. The best is the latter part of the clip where Friedman challenges Donahue’s own idols.
Essay of the Week: 2/8/09-2/14/09
The Roving Cavaliers of Credit by Steve Keen is this week’s essay of the week. It provides a good critique of the ideas underlying the neo-classical ideal. Its failure is that it implicitly falls into the fallacy (made more explicit in Steven Keen’s other writings) that since the emperor has no clothes, the pretender must therefore be well dressed. The one does not follow from the other.
Must Be Iran Reads Congressional Reports
But there is another reason American military and national security officials are so worried: in at least two earlier ballistic missile launches, the Iranians launched in ways that “appear they were designed to optimize an EMP burst,” according to a Pentagon source with detailed knowledge of the Iranian’s efforts and of space technology.
I wonder if Iran read this report and decided that they would get more bang for their buck by setting off the big one in low orbit as opposed to nuking some city. If the hype is in any way correct, the vaporizing of one city would be easier for the US to recover from then one successful EMP attack.
Bad Fires
Marie Jones, who was visiting Kinglake, where about 12 people perished, told Melbourne’s The Age newspaper that a badly-burnt man had arrived at the property where she was staying with his baby daughter, and told her his wife and other child had been killed.
“He was so badly burnt. … his little girl was burnt, but not as badly as her dad, and he just came down and he said `Look, I’ve lost my wife, I’ve lost my other kid, I just need you to save [my daughter]’,” Ms Jones told the newspaper.
A lot of people have died in the current round of brush fires in Australia. You can read all you want to know about them here.
Remember California?
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger can order thousands of state workers to take two unpaid days off a month to cut $1.4 billion from the budget, a judge ruled.
Superior Court Judge Patrick Marlette in Sacramento, California, today ruled in favor of Schwarzenegger in a lawsuit brought by employee unions seeking to block the furloughs. Schwarzenegger said yesterday that he would lay off workers to achieve the savings if he lost in court.
California counties are throwing another wrinkle into the state’s cash crisis as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders try to agree on a way to erase a $42 billion budget deficit.
Several counties are considering some form of tax revolt—either filing lawsuits or delaying tax payments to the state—because the governor has proposed withholding payments to them for as long as seven months in a move to preserve cash.
Local governments already are missing out because the state has imposed a 30-day payment delay to counties. That was part of a move by the state controller to delay refunds to taxpayers, money for college tuition-assistance programs and payments to state vendors.
The Riverside County Board of Supervisors authorized staff to file a lawsuit, while elected officials in Colusa County decided to impose a 30-day delay on sending any taxes and fees it collects to the state.
If this is what amateurs can do, what could professionals accomplish?
This from the Telegraph….
French fighter planes were unable to take off after military computers were infected by a computer virus, an intelligence magazine claims.
Another story from the Telegraph details what another hacker was able to do to US computers without really trying.
These stories are nothing by themselves. But they make you wonder what a bunch of disciplined professionals working with the backing of a national government could accomplish via computer hacking if they put their mind to it.
The nationalist cyber mob that Russia throws at nations that annoy it does not count as professional in my book.
Russian Games
So now it’s official: Kyrgyzstan ain’t bluffing. On Tuesday, Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev caught the Pentagon off guard, saying his country planned to close Manas Air Base, a major logistics hub for supporting U.S. operations in Afghanistan.
A defense official tells the Wall Street Journal: “Frankly, we thought it was a negotiating tactic, and we were ready to call their bluff … But it’s becoming clearer that, no kidding, they want us out.”
Fingers are now pointing at Moscow. The New York Times reports that the State Department and the Pentagon have concluded that Kyrgyzstan was doing the Kremlin’s bidding by kicking out the Americans.
Yet there is this from The Nation…..
Russia granted transit rights to non-lethal U.S. military supplies headed to Afghanistan but only after apparently pressuring a former Soviet state to close an air base leased to the Americans. The signal from Moscow: Russia is willing to help on Afghanistan, but only on the Kremlin’s terms.
The bottom line seems to be that Russia is not trying to force the US out of Afghanistan at the moment. But they want the supply lines to depend entirely on their good pleasure.
By the way, non-lethal supplies is all the US really needs to ship in by truck. Ammunition and the like can easily be flown in by air as those are only a tiny part of the total supply needs. But fuel, concrete, and other such supplies really need to be shipped in by truck. It is just too expensive to fly those things in and in any case the US does not have enough cargo planes to support a large fighting force in the field.
Basic Math
Maybe this is why corporate accounting is so screwed up.