Far South of I-10

The NYtimes has a story about a report that says how poorly afghanistan is doing: ANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Feb. 21 - Three years after the United States drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan and vowed to rebuild, the war-shattered country ranked 173rd of 178 countries in the United Nations 2004 Human Development Index, according to a new report from the United Nations. I'm sure it's terrible there in Afghanistan, but the story seems to be a not so subtle dig at the US using a story that doesn't make the numbers it is based on transparent. Of course this is pretty normal for the news today, so my more practiced google skills quickly bring out a few links: Calculation of the HDI (I can't paste it, it won't let me do a copy paste out of acrobat) It's a combination of three indexes, life expectancy index, GDP index and educational attainment index. These things are indexed using the formula (max-actual)/(max-min) then combined. Of course in a country like afganistan, t

Mary Madigan is posting over at Micheal Totten's weblog about a report from the Freedom House that exposes Saudi funded religious extremism in mosques here in the U.S. One excerpt: The Saudi literature is bent on instilling in its followers the conviction that whenever they are not in Saudi Arabia or other Islamic countries, they are in enemy territory and accordingly should struggle to establish Islam, or else return to the Islamic world. A Saudi-government text [Document No. 32] for tenth-grade students entitled Science of Tawheed, copies of which were obtained at the Al-Farouq Mosque in Houston, Texas, teaches the impropriety of mixing with, or imitating, the unbelievers. “Residing among the unbelievers continuously is also forbidden because it is dangerous for the belief of the Muslim. That is why Allah made it obligatory to emigrate from the land of disbelief to the land of Islam.” [Document No. 32] The message is that the peaceful coexistence of Muslim and non-Muslim in a m

Wretchard at the Belmont club is discussing why the left sees the current US government or maybe the west as the enemy. The "Left's inability to see" -- is the product of their unshakeable belief in the immutability of their world whose safety is guaranteed by the very system they hate the most. In that make-believe garden, academic tenure, human-rights lawyers, newspaper articles and political correctness will always protect them. They are dimly aware of, but do not really believe in the existence an outside world governed by what Tom Friedman called Hama Rules , of which the explosive laden ambulance is a part. Hama Rules is Friedman's shorthand for how Syrians dealt with rebels in the city of Hama. They leveled it. Literally. I've never understood how there can be people here in this country who can wish for US failure in Iraq, who could possibly say 'the enemy of my enemy (bush) is my friend (Iraqi insurgents, islamofacists, etc). I r

Popular Mechanics has a fantastic article debunking many of the myths of 9/11, including the questions of why the Air Force didn't shoot down the airliners. Whenever I've tried to explain to people that an air force base might have 70 planes sitting on the ramp, but only 2 planes sitting on alert armed and ready to fly; and only some bases even have planes on alert, most don't. I don't know how many arguments I've had with people who said it's obvious that Bush knew beforehand about the 9/11 attacks, who would then cite all the issues debunked in this article. Yeah MSM!

They say that when it comes to breakfast, a chicken that supplies the eggs is dedicated, while the pig that supplies the bacon is committed. Since I'm still a chicken I added some links to some renewable energy sites on the sidebar. Just a couple of links to some training sites; solarpower.org is where I attended a one week pv installation class that was very good. I'm still not a big enough pig to spend actual money to install any RE technology on my house, or start a long dreamed of, never done solar power business. Oh well. I also added the first of many links on climate change. These first two sites are like me skeptical. To say that 'consensus' has been reached among scientists is disingenuous, since both of these sites include articles from scientists that don't agree with either the direction or magnitude of climate change, Or are arguing that the 'proof' of the hockey stick graph was conjured out of statistics. By definition, if someone is argu

I just spent the day at my Aunt Alma's funeral. The really saddening thing about the funeral was that she always seemed to be the person in charge of all the previous funerals, either for my grandmother or my aunts and uncles who went before her, or any other event for that matter. For some reason I expected to see her there at the funeral home, saying something like "here comes My Joe" as I walked in. Until we arrived at the funeral home and she wasn't there, her death hadn't really sunk in. She was always funny, with a sarcastic wit that could zap the skin off of the unwary. And she was always kind, she invited all of us, brothers, sisters and cousins over to her house every year at July 4th and labor day to go swimming. Apparently we weren't the richest family in the world, since swimming in Aunt Alma's swimming pool provided the heights of several summers that I can remember. Anyway, it turns out that Gin and gatorade mix pretty well. wh