REQUIRED READINGLe Monde reports the formal recomendation has been given by the investigators -- the current Prime Minister will be charged. Just two years ago the "genius" who started the 33 day war was politically untouchable, and AIPAC was taking no political prisioners among the "weak on Israel" Dems running in the '06 cycle.
The Torkham highway links Peshawar with Kabul (and northern parts of Afghanistan and Central Asian states), and today 20 heavy trucks, oilers in particular, are sitting at Torkham. In Pakistan, not Afghanistan.
The US has run up the tempo, violence and depth of its ground and missile attacks in North and South Waziristan tribal regions in the past weeks, and now their southern supply line has been administratively interdicted.
Maybe the NeoCons will get the Russians to give them even more access to the northern supply line, for a song.
Dick Cheney's little (and wicked late) dip into the blue water naval toolkit -- a kit he and Donald Rumsfeld tried very hard to short so they could go long on what really matters -- gun boats and gun trucks to decorate the sandbox -- has yeilded a symmetric payoff. Three or more US boats in Georgian ports and four Russian boats in Venezuelan ports.
Symmetry, oh fearful symmetry. That's the Mount Whitney, at Poti.
The reticent woman car camping adjacent was soaked. She asked for towels and a blanket and mentioned she been in a vehicle accident earlier, when the inner rain bands first got here. Her car, with it's Dean sticker, wasn't in sight. A few minutes later Gracie said "she's flooded out", so MB went out into the rain squal to help. She drained and moved the tent, staked it down and came back in. Stomach cancer, up for tests, an accidental camper, now wet, cold and disoriented, her car and clothes somewhere else, and rail thin.
MB scrounged up dry clothes -- a mix of overs and unders, girl's, men's and women's, and took her back to the crash site in the truck. A half hour later MB called -- the bridge -- three feet above the stream when she brought me back from a closed Dulles -- was under fast water. She was going to try the back route ... No joy. Just passable but for the debris -- logs.
Later she called -- dry clothes and food and the woman was feeling better but still not making good choices -- her family at Myrtle Beach not called, no keys, no dry shelter. The rain was torential. We'd water coming in, an electrical fault that took out A/C on one side of the rig, and the water pump failed, and as the eye passed over the wind reversed to resemble a nor'easter and gusted. I took down the VSAT dish and we secured the lashings that had worker loose or failed and reanchored the woman's wandering, now water anchored tent.
The storm is passing, just gusts of wind, and the chorus of sirens from Reston.
I sat down a seat over from the man and his son. There was movement, a small umbrella, less than a foot long, made sumersaults down to the ground, again and again. After a few spins the dad reminded his son to move his arms on his side. I looked across his son and said "it's alright, I've two boys with autism."
He was waiting on a delayed flight from Addis Abba and his son was already at his sit-in-chairs limit. Like me, he's an 11 and an 8, one moderate to profound, one mild to moderate. We shared notes. Alarms, escapes, dangerous "normal adults", worthless police who can't be bothered to help a child, only enforce normative behavior. He'd the additional burden of being black, with an accent, and black boys who are autistic in quick to disaprove non-colored public places, like Dulles.
I showed him Jonah's camera work and he showed me a photo of his more affected 8 year old.
As I left his son asked why I have blue eyes. I said it's just because I have less color in my skin, that's all.
I've never previously met an emigrant from Africa with a child with autism, let alone two, with another sub with allergies but neurologically typical. Parallel lives.
I needed a book I could only find at a tech bookstore and MB wanted to try to get into the Abramoff sentencing, so we drove past the Wall and I remembered a classmate at Berkeley. We both shot pistol for the squad, he could hit the target occasionally, and was wicked gungho. I did significantly better, and was much less gungho. I was satisfied that BuPers sent me on cruise that did convoy and ASW drills. He was impatient to get to 'Nam and resigned to go as an EM. His name is over there somewhere, along with a lot of other kids I was in school with but didn't know or simply don't remember from 1968.
I can see shooting target, with a target weapon, and I can see shooting any number of standard arms for waterfowl and deer. I just don't see the point of even putting a hand on a 16 or pretending that a 5.56 round is useful for harvesting deer. Pretense isn't service, and the service provides ample opportunities to learn the proper use of infantry weapons, even for those who don't seek, or are not yet allowed, a combat arms assignment.
I'm back to using my VSAT, so I haven't bothered to download the chrome binary (that's what visits to wifi hot spots are for, along with the designer coffee), but others have and there is a significant difference (as in "very bad") between the Google Corporation's chrome and the Mozilla Foundation's firefox browsers.
Two machines with flushed caches loaded the default page for www.berkeley.edu. The chrome machine immediately queried for the hostnames for *all* of the links on that page, even though that browser had not yet visited any of them.
Another test was run once with Firefox (with all the various extensions turned off) and then again with Chrome (after flushing the windows DNS cache). The sample of websites is CNN, BBC, Washington Post, a few web comics, a weather site, slashdot, the register.
Firefox generated 194 DNS packets (queries and responses)
Chrome generated 638 DNS packets (queries and responses)
Chrome was 3.289x the query load of Firefox.
Because both use the publicsuffix.org, see ttps://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:Effective_TLD_List, a really silly idea in so many ways, the .co registry is going to get really hammered. I've no idea if Google is picking up the load at the Universidad de Los Andes, which runs the NIC for Columbia.
There's a blog by one of my peers, Gene Spafford, that I just came across. He wrote up a report after the then-presumptive nominee came to Purdue last July which I recommend highly -- Barack Obama, National Security, and Me
The zone file for the Czech Republic's namespace is digitally signed (DNSSEC) effective September 1st, and the OMB recently published the requirement that .gov zone file also be made secure using DNSSEC.
Something to read: link.
I'm mildly amused that Cara Cowan Watts, my least favorite member of the CNO Council, and one two hundred and fifty sixth Cherokee, has an opinion on Indian Identity.
We would like to make impersonation of a tribe, or a tribal citizen, a felony.Of course, this is really in the context of the disenfranchisement of Cherokees by the current CNO executive and council majority, so it should simply be understood to mean that Cara would like to toss some of her darker skinned political critics in jail. Actually, since she used the word "felony", she means she'd like to have the United States toss some of her darker skinned political critics in a United States jail.
Source: The Tahlequah Daily Press
MB got email asking about Steve Silver and Jack Abramoff this morning, so here's what she wrote on February 14th, 2006 ... More questions than answers.
Many people are not all that familiar with the Office of Public Records Lobby Filing Disclosure Program. Essentially, anyone who wants to lobby any US government agency or office, including Congress or the Executive, has to register and then file semi-annual reports. For the recovering archaeologist like me, it is a treasure trove of information on some of the sleaziest creatures on earth: Lobbyists.
The database is a fairly powerful tool, once you get used to it. You can sort by registrant, client, lobbyist, issue code, lobbied agency, date, etc. In the past, I've generally used the one of the first three, but today, I branched out, sorting the data by issue code, IND, for Indian Affairs. It's important to note that there is in fact a separate issue code for gaming (GAM), which includes tribal gaming.
The vast majority of clients under this code for any given year are Indian tribes. But as I scanned the entries for 2002, I came across one that stood out: The "registrant" was Robertson Monagle and Eastaugh; the client, Greenberg Traurig (actually, misspelled "Trauig".) Robertson Monagle's headquarters were located in Anchorage, though the lobbyist named on the account, Steven Silver's offices were in Arlington, Virgina. A new sort brought up all the filings for Greenberg Traurig by Silver, just a handful, beginning with a registration in May, 2002. A quick check by client indicated that Greenberg had only hired their own lobbyists six times in the past eight years (when records became available online) all, with the exception of Silver, for tribal gaming issues.
The reason this registration (Page 1, Page 2) was so intriguing was information provided on the second page, under "Lobbying Issues". Silver indicated by the codes, "ENG", "IND", "NAT" and "ENV", that his lobbying issues were Energy, Indian Affairs, Natural Resources and Environment. In fact, on the next line indicating current and anticipated specific lobbying issues, Silver elaborated, "All issues relating to Indian Policy" and "Exploration for Oil and Gas".
None of Greenberg Traurig's tribal clients at the time had extensive holdings in oil and gas; they were gaming tribes, mostly from the Deep South or West Coast. Even more intriguing was that most of Silver's other clients (outside of a few municipalities in Alaska) had significant timber, oil & gas and/or mining interests, including Louisiana Pacific and BP America. Ironically, the primary lobbyist for BP America in 2002 was National Environmental Strategies, Steve Griles' former firm. In fact, BP was such a loyal client for Griles, it was one of his first he signed up when he left the Interior Department and formed Lundquist, Nethercutt and Griles in early 2004.
Silver only remained Greenberg Traurig's lobbyist for a few months. In Silver's only filing with actual lobbying activity, he claimed this lobbying on Indian Policy and oil and gas exploration was before the House and Senate solely on "ENG" (energy) issues (Page 1, Page 2.) Indian Trust Land leases would fall under "ENG"; tribal gaming would not.
Thereafter, Silver claimed no lobbying activities for Greenberg, and filed a "termination with no activity" in mid-year 2003. In May, 2004, Silver filed "registrant amendment', switching lobbying issue codes a simple GAM (gaming), and claiming work on a internet gaming bill. Greenberg terminated the contract in 2005, after the bill died in the Senate Banking Committee.
An unleashing of the Googling Monkeys brought up very little in regards to Steven Silver. A search on Opensecrets.org indicated a significant Republican donor, with $28,000 handed out since 2000. Robertson Monagle doesn't even have a website in either Anchorage or Arlington.
So why in mid-2002 did Greenberg Traurig, now firmly under the control of Jack Abramoff, hire a no-name natural resources lawyer-lobbyist to work on Indian policy and oil and gas exploration before Congress?
Update: I've been following up on some hunches, and I'm fairly sure one in particular will pan out: The connection between Greenberg Traurig and Steven Silver? Former Don Young (R-AK) staffer and lead counsel on the House Resources' committee (not to mention Team Abramoff heavy hitter) Duane Gibson.
Update2: : Another Alaska connection? Steven Griles former and present partner, Alaska native (no, not Native) Andrew Lundquist. As mentioned previously, Lundquist served as Executive Director of Cheney's Energy Task Force from Feb. 1, 2001, to Sept. 30, 2001, then remained as Cheney's Director of Energy Policy from Oct. 1, 2001, until the end of March, 2002.
They get a guy who hunts with an air gun, and we get a gal who thinks global warming isn't man (and woman) made.
They get a guy who has tender hands when caring for the business end of a tiger, and we get a gal who is rude to bears.
And I'm underwhelmed by Sarah Palin. Bored even.
One of the striking things about working in the ICANN market is the presence of government and business, and the absence of labor. There was a .union proposal in the 2000 round, but nothing since, and I can't recall meeting anyone from a union at ICANN, tracking the issues or simply filling a chair.
In theory, the identification of public policy with private interest is called something that starts with the letter "F". In practice its all a palette of nice buzz words, none of which sound like "wage" or "collective bargaining" or "working conditions".
So labor's stake in the technical coordination of the Internet, or Internet Governance (your choice of terms) is ... zero.
Happy Zero Day.
Tribes are not. The language of the Victims Rights Act is clear:
‘‘(e) DEFINITIONS.—For the purposes of this chapter, the term ‘crime victim’ means a person directly and proximately harmed as a result of the commission of a Federal offense."Thus, the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe and the Louisiana Coushatta Tribe, victims to the tune of half a mill and eleven mill, respectively, have to get permission to testify at Jack's sentencing hearing. Here's the notice letter to U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle link
Someone suggested that I "really ought to read the whole FCC thing. everybody else is sorta pulling out the parts that they want to highlight. but the story in the full FCC order is astounding."
The thing is here.
And Comcast just announced a monthly b/w cap. Of course, if you don't like it, in a free market, you can always switch cable providers, neh?
Harriet Miers wrote this:
In addition to my practice of law, my experience includes running and holding public office, As an at-large city councilmember, I dealt with city issues from supporting the police and firemen to paving issues.And John Glover Roberts, Jr. is Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
As entertaining as Governor Palin is, she's not the nominee, yet, and anything could happen.
between the kitchen and the fuel area, and developing into a complete parallel (to the wrecked towers / flooded conduits wireline) regional infrastructure, is that the application must be made 30 days prior.
Our FEMA chit, applied for August 31st, granted September 23rd, and received September 27th, is the thumbnail.
Today is Saint John's birthday. I recall when he and W split a tart. Katrina was making landfall on NOLA.
Senators Obama and Biden will be in Dublin tomorrow, a town we've spent the past six weeks, MB doing work for a DCCC targeted Congessional in a district that, due to creative gerrymandering, includes neither the predominantly minority districts of urban Columbus, nor the predominantly better-off suburb of Dublin. One of our favorite songs is Alanis Morrissette's "Isn't it ironic?", and when we learned that there is a powow, here of all places, this weekend, starting the day after we leave Dublin and Columbus, that's what we said to each other. Yesterday's routing announcement for the nominees was just ... more ironic.
We could still lose this thing. Dave Axelrod's sororcidal choice to exploit misogyny and fratricidal choice to exploit race, and Dave Plouffe's choice to exploit the caucuses in Iowa, Nevada, and Texas, not the candidates qualifications and their policy records and promises, have won the nomination and could still keep the Executive Branch in the hands of the Republican Party leadership.
Ohio can be won, it can also be lost. It's competitive, like Pennsylvania, between urban and rural poles, but not by message and candidates alone. It would be prudent, with 66 days left, to set up alternative field campaign plans for the Congressional districts that are competitive, and there are several, that the DNC must win to get, as we say in Maine, "balance of state".
While MB worked on getting the trailer packed I took the kids to Wendy's for a celebratory lunch, as Dublin is where Wendy's started, and where the company's HQ remains to this day.
We also returned our books to the Dublin Public Library, which interestingly enough (well, positively infuriatingly) has a service model for data network access that (a) authentication with a library card is required, presumably because a user might take out some network access and not return it, and the homeless and travelers don't need network access, and (b) network access means web -- not telnet/rlogin/ssh, not pop/imap, not ftp, not ... Recall, this is paid for in part, this discriminatory set of policies, economically discriminatory, and service discriminatory, by E-Rate money, by Federal money. If you want to know what "tiered network service" will look like if the residential loop broadband operators control Congress, just visit a public library. The film is already playing.
As a technical exercise, a "bakeoff for teh tech political bloggers", try taking two laptops, setting them next to each other, pick up a dhcp provisioned addresses for each via the public library wifi, and transfer data from one to the other. Do not use a third node, in Maine or anywhere "outside" the local cloud, http, a dongle, or a wire the length and breadth of a shoestring.
Did I mention that bandwidth is capped at about 60kB/s, inside a cloud that should support 100Mb/s?
As a policy exercise, justify the results.
In "Clues for Call-Time" for the campaign MB helped, so far as three not very skilled guys suffering from advanced misogyny and booze can be helped, I wrote (for the candidate)
...
We do know that Dublin dumped money into fiber and that data-driven tech is more present in Dublin than anywhere else in the OH-15/OH-12 /OH-07. In a nutshell, Dublin will be richer than its surroundings forever because of some exotic glass and a backhoe. Public intervention does work, we just need to pick what we want. Dublin wanted Dublin, the United States may want to fiber-up Appalachia, and the Navajo Nation.
...
2:09. We're going to try and spot the Mainers later today. We're in a spot with less bandwidth than ... India after the triple cable snag last winter.
The Airspace Data Interchange Network Outage made the WaPo today. When Chellie Pingree last ran for the Senate, six years ago, hot on the heels of 9-11 and all the social capital the incumbent party held, because in times of war, partisanship stops at the water's edge, unless of course the incumbent is off chasing moonbats, as we had just a few months after that election, I wrote material. How to run on defense, against an incumbent on Homeland Security, how to run against the "thin eggshell", known to its promoters as "forward defense". Spend on deep defense, stuff like redundant capacity, cause, infrastructure here is better than armor there, shit happens, and armor isn't going to stop Atta gang copy-cat operations.
It wasn't OBL, and it wasn't "dark skies", but yesterday was one failure away from "its raining airplanes", and that's where sending trillions of dollars to West Asia shows up, along with things like Interstate Bridges falling into rivers, and other "deferred spending".
If Dave Axelrod gang has sense, they'll get failing air traffic management, and Ronald Reagan's mass firing of all Federal ATC workers worked into the speech, so that all those fight-capable demographic bottoms in all those TSA-managed-queues and price-hiked luggage-and-meals-now-charged-seats will have something to think about. Like landing.
Why I had to recognise Georgia’s breakaway regions
Can you imagine what it was like for the Abkhaz people to have their university in Sukhumi closed down by the Tbilisi government on the grounds that they allegedly had no proper language or history or culture and so did not need a university?Well, yes, just about any Indian can.
The piece concludes: The writer is president of the Russian Federation.
That was a well written speach. The delivery was wicked good too. Orange, and Seneca Falls, is the new Black.
It is a pity that Marc Penn got shotgun on that ride. She got better the further away she got from him.
The piece that rue89 ran on the convention has comments. Lots of them. The meme that anyone who is less than chock full o'koolaid is a racist looks to have 100% of the mindshare "over there".
Its the Francophone equivalent to Freedom Fries, and they are trying to work themselves past the awkward bits of having a pretty face take over the SP, and then lose to Sarko.
Watching Sarko do the "honor the fallen" thing with the sound turned off was disturbing. He's grinning while talking about 10 guys getting toe tags and another 21 picking up entry and exit wounds, which seems deranged, almost Bushian.
An outage has occurred at FAA facility in Hampton, Ga. This facility processes flight plans.
Update #1
ATLANTA -- The Federal Aviation Administration said a communication failure Tuesday at a Georgia facility that processes flight plans for the eastern half of the U.S. was causing flight delays around the country.
An FAA Web site that posts airport status information showed delays at some three dozen major airports coast-to-coast, advising passengers to "check your departure airport to see if your flight may be affected."
FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen in Atlanta said there are no safety issues and officials are still able to speak to pilots on planes on the ground and in the air.
She said she doesn't know how many flights are being affected.
Bergen said the problem that occurred Tuesday afternoon involves an FAA facility in Hampton, Ga., south of Atlanta, that processes flight plans. She said there was a failure in a communication link that transmits the data to a similar facility in Salt Lake City.
As a result, the Salt Lake City facility was having to process those flight plans, causing delays in planes taking off. She said there were no problems with planes landing.
"There will be flight delays," Bergen said. "It could be any location because one facility is now processing flight data for everybody."
A spokesman for Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the world's busiest airport, did not immediately return a call seeking comment on the impact there. Bergen said officials at the Atlanta airport were entering flight data manually to try to speed things up.
The communication failure was causing delays for departures and arrivals at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, according to airport spokeswoman Cheryl Stewart. However, she did not have a number on delays.
The FAA has asked that no new flight plans be filed, Stewart said. If an airline has not filed a flight plan yet, that flight can't leave. However, some flights had already filed their plans and those planes were being allowed to depart, Stewart said.
Brenda Geoghagan, a spokeswoman for Tampa International Airport in Florida, said "it may just be too soon" to determine the impact there. Christine Osborn, another spokeswoman at the Tampa airport, said there have been no delays due to the flight plan communication failure. But she said she anticipates problems in the coming hours.
"There's definitely going to be some impact," she said.
At Miami International Airport, there were no delays or cancelations due to the communication failure, said spokesman Marc Henderson.
"There are cancelations due to weather from the hurricane, but not due to this," he said.
The National Airspace Data Interchange Network is a data communications system for air traffic controllers. It's used to distribute flight plans and allows controllers to know when planes are leaving, where they're going and other details.
Allen Kenitzer, a western regional spokesman for the FAA, said the Utah system could handle the extra load while workers tried to get the Atlanta system back online, but it was expected to slow down air traffic.
"We're not going to let an unsafe condition exist. It's just going to be slower," Kenitzer said.
That's a view of the DNC's tech. Obviously, no one who's ever previously done a build-out was involved. Wired's photo guy apparently didn't guess his photo would take only hours to land in the operator's rogue gallery of spaghetti westerns.
I'm looking forward to more pasta when the RNC techies step up to the plate.
Here's a puzzle: On August 7th Asif Zardari (PPP) and Nawaz Sharif (PML-N) signed a 7 page agreement drafted by themselves and the others members of their teams one week ago. The agreement has two clauses of interest today, the clauses which have not been implemented by the signers.
First, the clause that that the deposed jud