Category Archives: HISTORY

Osama bin Laden’s War Against the U.S.: It was about economic attrition

Rachel Maddow is one of the best “explainers” I’ve ever seen on television, let alone on a news show, and (as I too often remind folks when I make a statement like this) I’m no spring chicken.

After the Japan earthquake and tsunami in March of this year led to radioactive disasters at a half-dozen nuclear power plants, the most lucid, informative and understandable lay explanations of the crisis — the causes, technologies involved, dangers, etc. — were without question done by Rachel Maddow.

She’s also really good at focusing her attention on important stories — or angles on important stories — which might otherwise escape our notice.

Now she has done it again with a unique discussion of Osama bin Laden, and the strategy which was at the root of his style of asymmetrical warfare against the United States. Continue reading →

Doctor Who History 1963-2010 from Joe Siegler on Vimeo.

via Roger Ebert’s Journal

A (relatively) quick snapshot of “Dr. Who” — all of them — from 1963 onward.

If you have been watching BBCAmerica, it’s changed a bit over the years. Like many Americans, Tom Baker’s “Dr. Who” hooked me when it aired on PBS about 30 years ago.

Doctor Who History 1963-2010 from Joe Siegler on Vimeo.

A Soldier Speaks, From Tomfoolery (@OTOOLEFAN)

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Originally posted on TOMFOOLERY (otoolefan.wordpress.com). To see the original post and read viewers’ comments, click on the title link below. – Mike

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A Soldier Speaks

April 30, 2011 OTOOLEFAN Leave a comment Go to comments

The following comment was posted on this site a few weeks ago and it’s eloquence speaks for itself. The only thing I would add to this is we saw a similar scenario played out by the GOP right before Christmas. They were all about 9/11 and it’s heroes, until it came time to come to the aid of sick and dying first responders. – OTOOLEFAN

I am a totally disabled veteran, there are actually very few of us who are totally disabled.

Needless to say. I wish the liberals would take the credit they deserve. Liberals do more to support veterans disabled veterans than the right does. The right actually hates disabled vets.

The real issue is that people equate defense spending and supporting the military with supporting veterans. Veterans do not benefit one dime from defense spending.

We rely on the VA, and the pyramid of federal and state aid programs. IT IS THE LIBERALS WHO SUPPORT ME. And not any of the patriotic charities that raise tons of money under the guise of supporting veterans.

I really don’t get involved in politics. But I live in Delaware and Christine O’Donnell and the 9/12 patriots attacked me, so I did get involved. ( Meet Sen Kerry at a Chris Coons Event ).

So liberals, take your credit, there are alot of disabled vets that understand this so please take your props.

Airborne18

Equally Unhealthy? High Fructose Corn Syrup vs. “Corn Sugar”

As oxymoronic as it sounds, I believe this to be true: If big business has a reputation for lying, obfuscating and being generally deceptive, they come by it honestly.

A case in point is the Corn Refiners Association‘s (CRA) recent petition to the FDA to allow them to change food ingredients labels from “high fructose corn syrup” (HFCS) to “corn sugar”. Continue reading →

The Oceans of Enceladus, and Some Musings on ET Life

3 Replies

April 19, 2011

Business is humming if you’re in the business of extra-solar planets, exobiology or exoenvironmental studies.

Recently, it was announced that scientists had determined that liquid water and hydrocarbons were present on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. They made this determination using Cassini’s plasma spectrometer, which had found specific ions characteristic of water in motion. (It never ceases to amaze me how scientists can tease information out of data using the most obscure scientific facts.)

That makes at least 4 worlds (Earth, Mars, Enceladus, and Europa) in our solar system where liquid water and other ingredients necessary for life have been found to be present now or in the past, or probably so. Continue reading →

Is it time to consider internationally supervised elections in the United States?

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[Update, April 2, 2012: Another embarrassing and inexcusable election scandal in Florida. Palm Beach Elections Overturned After Hand-Count Reveals Op-Scans Mistallied Results. As Brad Friedman’s article further suggests, we MUST ~~have a verifiable paper trail for all election tallies~~ have a physical count of ballots by humans before an election is certified. ]

[Update, June 13, 2011: This piece is made even more relevant by the recount discoveries and legal challenges surrounding the Wisconsin Supreme Court elections – Mike]

In 2000, the United States experienced a very close and heavily contested presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Bush won a minority of popular votes, but after legal challenges were exhausted, he had a majority of the Electoral College, giving him the election. Enough serious questions were left forever unanswered to shake Americans’ confidence in the honesty of the election outcome. The result was Continue reading →

Open Letter to NY Rep. Anthony Weiner: Please Don’t Run For Mayor of New York City!

Dear Representative Weiner,

I keep hearing that you have ambitions to run for Mayor of the City of New York. As a huge fan of yours, I have an urgent request.

DON’T! Continue reading →

An Interesting Theory On How Newly Discovered Places Get Their Names

“…So here we are in Yucatan. A strange sort of name for a place, that is! What do you think it means, Titus?”

“‘I don’t understand you.'”

“Pardon me? I thought I was speaking very clearly, Titus. I said, ‘What do you think it means?’ I was referring to Yucatan.”

Drusus chuckled. “I heard you. And I answered you. You asked a question, and ‘I don’t understand you’ is what I replied. All around the world for centuries now we’ve been going up to the natives of one far-off place or another and asking them in nice grammatical Latin what that place is called. And since they don’t know any Latin, they reply ‘I don’t understand you’ in their own language, and we put that down as the name of the place. … And so, when Haraldus or one of his friends asked the natives the name of their kingdom, they answered “Yucatan’, which I’m almost certain is not the name of the place at all, but merely means …”

“Yes,”, said Marcus Junianus, “I think I grasp the point.”

— From the book “Roma Eterna”, by Robert Silverberg (2003) in Chapter “The Second Wave, A.U.C. 1861”

“The Investigator” (1954): An Audio Satire of Senator Joe McCarthy

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“The Investigator” is a scathing satire of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) and his eponymously named ‘witch hunts’ for commies behind every bush and tree.

In the late 1950s, when I was in my late ‘ones’, my friend from across the street played this record for me. I didn’t understand it at the time, but we listened to it several more times over the years, and little by little its significance became apparent to me.

Because this work is so little known and I think the history surrounding it matters even more than the piece itself, I’m posting the article on my site Continue reading →

President Kennedy’s “U.S. Steel Jawboning” Speech & News Conference – April 11, 1962

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TWEET by @OTOOLEFAN (Don Millard ): “JFK vs US Steel: Back when Presidents would stand up to Big Business: http://youtu.be/WWKImfw3nLE”

Don raises an excellent point, and it again reminds us how important it is to learn and remember history, not least so we can recognize when it’s being distorted. Continue reading →

Movie Observation, Life Imitating Art: “Crack in the World” (1965)

I was referred to this article (“Scientists plan to drill all the way down to the Earth’s mantle“) by a tweet from @ebertchicago (Roger Ebert): Drilling five miles down into the earth’s mantle. What could possibly go wrong? http://bit.ly/g9qGVr

Learn more about this movie at the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com).

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Crack in the World (1965)

Summary: A scientist tries to find a limitless, non-polluting energy source by drilling really, really deep into the earth. This can’t end ‘well’.

I first saw this film when I was about 14. Continue reading →

Great Article, Worth Reading: “An Open Letter to the Left on Libya”, by Juan Cole

“Allowing the Neoconservatives to brand humanitarian intervention as always their sort of project does a grave disservice to international law and institutions, and gives them credit that they do not deserve, for things in which they do not actually believe.” – Juan Cole

An Open Letter to the Left on Libya

Posted on 03/27/2011 by Juan Cole

Continue reading →

Fox Distorts, You Decide : What Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) Really Said About Obamacare

Fox, always impartial reporters of the news, totally and intentionally mis-reported the context and intent of Weiner’s remarks.

A “Will” Vs. a “Testament” (From www.centrro.com)

1 Reply

This is the answer to one of those “I wonder why they call it that” questions. You can go to the original web article here.

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What does “Last Will & Testament” mean, anyway?

A “Will” Vs. a “Testament”

Posted by joslyn – March 24, 2011

We can thank old British laws for handing down this phrase. A will, traditionally, dictated how “real property” would be allocated (in other words, land and things of physical value). A testament dealt with personal property — things of sentimental or family value.

These days, there can be a less concrete line drawn between what is “real” and what is “personal,” so we just use the phrase “last will & testament” to cover all our bases.

Incidentally, when it comes to your last will & testament, you are the testator in question.

Oh, and a holographic will is an informal will made under extenuating circumstances, and without the usual legal witnesses and signatures. Even with a holographic will, however, the testator’s signature is required.

The 50 Greatest Sci-Fi Films of All Time

You may not have heard of them all, and many will be before your time (though not necessarily before mine :)

Just for fun, run through the list and see how you agree with, how many you’ve seen, or how many you ought to see.

http://movies.msn.com/paralleluniverse/50-greatest-sci-fi-films/photo-gallery/feature/

One of my favorites not on the list: “The Forbin Project” (1970), with Eric Braedon, just after he was Hans Gudegast in “The Rat Patrol”, but before he was Victor Newman on “The Young and the Restless”. A great little film with a haunting score, and arguably a precursor to “The Terminator”’s Skynet, with inspiration from HAL9000.

International Space Station: Animated Assembly Graphic

http://i.usatoday.net/tech/graphics/iss_timeline/flash.htm

International Space Station Animated Assembly Graphic

FOXNews isn’t … wrong? “Old Wounds Make It Hard for Some Chinese to Find Sympathy for Japanese Victims”

Having a Chinese wife, in-laws (who experienced Japanese wartime occupation and brutality personally) and friends, I have heard from several sources that the Chinese (citizens and ethnic) have donated less to the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/reactor disaster than they did to Haiti’s terrible earthquake tragedy. Far less. Both disasters were horrible human catastrophes, but ethnic Chinese have a much harder time working up sympathy for Japan.

Why? Continue reading →

Japan, Photo and Video Links: Photos, Stories, Radiation Forecast

This is what a clean sweep really is: RT @nytimes “Satellite photos of devastation in #Japan, before and after”: http://nyti.ms/hYQF9W (Also from Australian Broadcasting (ABC): http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/japan-quake-2011/beforeafter.htm)

Radiation weather forecast from The Weather Channel – “High-tech look at where radiation may go” http://wxch.nl/i7MD2y

Survivor of Oregon State tsunami. (Yes, there was one!): @wxchannel video – Dramatic rescue in #tsunami http://wxch.nl/gWtGMT

Nuclear Power and Catastrophe: Lucid Explanations

[UPDATE, 2011-APRIL 22: I have improved the links in this story. I’m sorry it took so long to do so. – Mike]

Contemporary journalism often frustrates me greatly.Good questions don’t get asked, spin is reported as news, and explanations necessary for the understanding of important events are often thin at best and non-existent or flat wrong at worst.

The reporting on the technical aspects of the Japanese nuclear crisis is an excellent case in point. If you want to know how high the tsunami was, the depths of the human tragedy, how much the main Japanese island of Honshu moved or the changes in the length of a day or the tilt of the earth’s axis as a result of the great quake, you’re in luck. There’s lots of that information to find.

If you want to understand what’s going on at the Japanese nuclear plants Continue reading →

Barack Obama: Easy Answers to 2 Softball Questions

Here are the easy questions:

1. Is Barack Obama Constitutionally a citizen of the Unites States, and thus legally entitled to be president of the United States?

2. Is Barack Obama a Christian or is he a secret Muslim?

Continue reading →

White Men Speak With Forked Tongues. How?

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Republican Oklahoma Senators Coburn and Inhofe object to a native American appointed to the federal bench by Barack Obama. Apparently, a Native American who on paper looks highly qualified.

Why? They won’t say. He’s simply “unacceptable for the position.” In what way is he unacceptable? Continue reading →

Japan, China still at odds over Rape of Nanking – Boston.com

A key difference between post-War Germany and post-War Japan: Germany has accepted its guilt — embraced it even — and tried to atone. Japan still disputes its crimes.(As an aside, in 20 years, which will we be? The country that admits to torture and war crimes and atones, or Japan: in denial, defending a national pride that history despoils?)In this article, the war continues.

Having visited China twice, I can tell you that where I went, the Japanese are widely disliked; even hated.

Japan, China still at odds over Rape of Nanking – Boston.com

Evolution: The Mighty Morphing Batmobile!

From Roger Ebert’s Journal

The evolution of the Batmobile

The source of this extraordinary graphic can be found at the bottom. Continue reading →

The “N” word. (No, not that one.)

Maverick Economist Alfred Kahn has a penchant for candor that is both refreshing and dangerous in Washington. When he said that there is the possibility of a “deep, deep depression” if inflation continues to soar, the President was furious. Kahn responded by purging the word depression from his vocabulary and instead using “banana.” So he now says: “We’re in danger of having the worst banana in 45 years.”

– Business: Yes, We Have No Bananas (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,919922,00.html)

Words have power. That’s why an ad slogan is so persuasive. It’s why people polish speeches. It’s why society sometimes considers words taboo.

Sometimes, words are taboo for politically expedient reasons. Economist Alfred Kahn learned this when he felt forced to substitute the word “banana” for the word “depression”. Continue reading →

Conservatives Still Prefer To ‘Massage’ Inconvenient Intelligence Rather Than Be Guided By It

One would think that after Bush dismissed the “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States” intelligence memo in August of 2001, Republicans might have learned that ideologically inconvenient intelligence should not be ignored just because it’s, well, ideologically inconvenient.

And you’d be wrong. Continue reading →