Who Can Name That Helicopter?

Title 1) Don’t Forget Who You Are (I’ve since changed the title)

For anybody wondering about the title, I was at my sisters checking out what channels she got on her new “Dish” TV service. I landed on Lawrence Fishburne in the classic “Deep Cover.” Great movie, at least I thought at the time, I can see the cheesiness now, but it really was a decent flick. Anyway, I haven’t seen it for years.

The line, “Don’t forget who you are,” came at the exact moment I had decided I wanted an actual title and had just started staring off into space in an attempt to think of something.

Christopher Hitchens

Barack to Reality
Obama’s victory didn’t magically eliminate America’s problems and enemies.
Nov. 10, 2008

Serving the Clintonian Interest
The last thing we need is a Clinton in charge of foreign policy.
Nov. 24, 2008

Just to give the most salient examples from the Clinton fundraising scandals of the late 1990s: The House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight published a list of witnesses called before it who had either “fled or pled”—in other words, who had left the country to avoid testifying or invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination. Some Democratic members of the committee said that this was unfair to, say, the Buddhist nuns who raised the unlawful California temple dough for then-Vice President Al Gore, but however fair you want to be, the number of those who found it highly inconvenient to testify fluctuates between 94 and 120. If you recall the names John Huang, James Riady, Johnny Chung, Charlie Trie, and others, you will remember the pattern of acquired amnesia syndrome and stubborn reluctance to testify, followed by sudden willingness on the part of the Democratic National Committee to return quite large sums of money from foreign sources. Much of this cash had been raised at political events held in the public rooms of the White House, the sort of events that featured the adorable Roger Tamraz, for another example.

Our Friends in Bombay
We must stand by our most important ally.
Dec. 1, 2008

I hope I am not alone in finding the statements about Bombay from our politicians to be anemic and insipid, and the media coverage of the disastrous and criminal attack too parochially focused on the fate of visiting or resident Americans. India is emerging in many ways as our most important ally. It is a strong regional counterweight to Russia and China. Not to romanticize it overmuch, it is a huge and officially secular federal democracy that is based, like the United States, on ethnic and confessional pluralism. Its political and economic and literary echelons speak English better than most of us do. Its parliament in New Delhi—the unbelievably diverse and dignified Lok Sabha—was viciously attacked by Islamist gangsters and nearly destroyed in December 2001, a date which ought to have made more Americans pay more attention rather than less. Since then, Bombay has been assaulted multiple times and the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan blown up with the fairly obvious cross-border collusion of the same Pakistani forces who are helping in the rebirth of the Taliban.

It would be good to hear from the president and the president-elect that we regard attacks on the fabric and society of India with very particular seriousness, as assaults on a close friend that was battling al-Qaida long before we were. In response, it should be emphasized, our military and financial and nuclear and counterinsurgency cooperation with New Delhi will not be given a lower profile but a very much higher one. The people of India need to hear this from us, as do the enemies of India, who are our sworn enemies, too.

The inevitable question arises: Did our nominal ally Pakistan have a hand in this atrocity? In one sense, to ask the question is to answer it. Whether we refer to al-Qaida “proper,” or to any of the armed Kashmiri formations that have lately been mentioned, we find some pre-existing connection to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI. Another conceivable suspect, the former Bombay crime lord Dawood Ibrahim, wanted by the Indian authorities on suspicion of blowing up the Bombay stock exchange and killing 300 civilians in 1993, has long been a fugitive from justice living safely in Pakistan’s main port of Karachi. Not a bad place from which to organize an amphibious assault team that acted as if it had been trained by serious military professionals.

My Wife vs. The Desert Eagle .50

Rolling Stone is reporting that gun sales are up 50% since Obama was elected.

… and of course the big story toda in Sports & Firearms:

Plaxico Burress

Illegal possession of a firearm in New York City carries a mandatory three-and-half-year jail sentence. If by “illegal” New York means unpermitted and concealed and by “mandatory” New York means mandatory, Burress might soon find himself longing for the Tom Coughlin practices he has so resolutely avoided.

The accompanying poll on the story has 69% of 75,000+ responses saying he won’t serve any jail time.

Things You Don’t Hope For

Good moroning gang, and good luck keeping your sanity during today’s second iteration of the opening day of the mad holiday shopping season. Hi to all who participated in the liveblog thingie :) and apologies for the way the connections kept dropping. This is what I get for using “municipal wifi”, err, borrowing bandwidth from whatever neighbor forgot to secure it that day.

By now you will have probably heard about the Wal*Mart temp worker who was trampled to death in a Long Island store, on Black Friday, as he attempted to secure the doors.

As expected, there’s no dearth of internet commentary about this event.

The comment that felt the most poignant to me was one from the Housing Bubble Blog, and it went something like this:

“If this is what folks do for $300 laptops, and in full view of the security cameras, what does it say about how they’ll behave when they’re broke and unable to buy food?”

Even worse, this was on Long Island, where people pay big money to live so that they supposedly don’t have to deal with the face-to-face brutality and crime of living in Brooklyn or one of the boroughs. Did any of the first 200 people through the door ride there on public transit? Did any of them not have single-family homes, mortgages, and personal automobiles?

Mumbai Terrorist Attacks or (India vs. Pakistan)

“Maybe India will avenge. Send in a few badass Gurkhas. One Gurkha is like a hundred of anybody else.” – Saint Bif

It’s hard to determine who’s crazier or more radical — the Pakistanis or the Indians. Don’t forget these two groups had a big pissing contest ten years ago with “nucular” bombs.

The Truth About India And Pakistan’s Nuclear Testing
The reason why the the major governments of the world did not stop India and Pakistan from conducting nuclear testing, ( they all knew well before hand that they were going to do it, despite what you are being told that our intelligence sources did not know – Israeli intelligence notified many countries of this a month before it happened ). The truth is this. India and Pakistan are providing the bulk of computer programmers to solve the world year Y2 problem, when it rolls from 1999 to 2000. Most world governments, including our own, and corporations around the world, including banking financial concerns waited too long to fix the problem. The U.S. government alone has contracted out over 90% of these needed program fixes to fix government programs to programmers in India and Pakistan. There was a worldwide shortage of computer programmers to fix the Y2 problem when governments and corporations around the world realized the severity of it. However, both governments of India and Pakistan started government programs 5-7 years ago to train thousands of their college graduates in computer programming, offering them special incentives to do so. It is estimated that India and Pakistan programmers are providing over 93% of the needed world programming changes to fix the year Y2 problem. Do I need to explain anything further as to why governments worldwide have sat idle and let India and Pakistan explode nuclear weapons that have done nothing but pollute our environment!

~ David Lawrence Dewey ~

http://www.dldewey.com/columns/indonesf.htm

Zulu Finance November

Wall Street Lays Another Egg
by Niall Ferguson
Vanity Fair

Not so long ago, the dollar stood for a sum of gold, and bankers knew the people they lent to. The author charts the emergence of an abstract, even absurd world—call it Planet Finance—where mathematical models ignored both history and human nature, and value had no meaning.

I’ve only finished about half of this article, but it is quite good history. I’ve never actually read a book by Ferguson, but I know he wrote a decent one about World War I which I will read one of these days. He just wrote it and I’ve already read all the others and keep planning to write my own. He’ll just have to wait.

Books by Niall Ferguson:

- The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (2000)
- The War of the World  (2007)
- The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Nov 13th, 2008)

(you can obviously see from the titles why I like Ferguson, without ever having read one of his books. I’ll leave it up to you whether he might be getting somewhat opportunistic. I will say this. Pity of War was widely criticized as over-emphasizing global financial issues regarding World War I. I haven’t read it, I wouldn’t know.)