Is a $20 cell phone on the horizon? (August 8, 2005) -

http://news.com.com/Is+a+20+cell+phone+on+the+horizon/2100-1039_3

-5823239.html

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India is among the fastest-growing cell phone markets in the world. The country expects to add more than 100 million new subscribers in the next two years, from the present base of 58 million. Industry leaders assert that although call charges in India are the cheapest in the world, high regulatory fees and the lack of cheaper entry-level phones are key factors affecting growth.

Engibous said the bulk of the designing, development and testing for the new chipset took place at Texas Instruments' Bangalore development center, which has 1,200 engineers. The facility, one of the oldest foreign development centers in India, marked its 20th anniversary this month.

The semiconductor maker also announced what it said are the first cell phones built in India--from concept to design to production--featuring Texas Instruments' TCS chipset family and a single-chip Bluetooth module. These phones have been developed by Indian companies BPL and Quasar. While BPL will target the local market, Quasar has developed the phone for Primus. The phones are expected to be available by year-end.

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What if there isn't any appreciable "collective wisdom of the workforce?"

How long before the complaints will be about stupid American phone support?

How long before the phone support jobs are beyond the collective wisdom of the workforce?

"Collective wisdom" is a renewable resource, but only if that wisdom is passed on by the prior generation.

I don't begrudge India or any nation its right to achievement. I am angry about this nation's extraction and depletion of the current and future value of its most valuable resource. Its collective wisdom.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I just saw a news item linked to from Salon.com. It was the second one I saw today that seemed to express a desperation that's been glossed over and covered up for years now in America. I'll spare you any more liberal commentary, at least in this post. Maybe I'll add a bit of conservative commentary.

'Thank God guns are so easily available in America!'

How bad is Iraq?

From the Associated Press:

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A young Marine who feared returning to Iraq persuaded his cousin to shoot him in the leg, then told police he was hit by random gang gunfire, authorities said.

The shooting early Saturday on Chicago's Northwest Side was meant to keep 19-year-old Moises Hernandez from going back to Iraq, prosecutors said.

...

The young man's father, Ray Hernandez, said his son was troubled by nightmares when he got home.

"Whatever he experienced changed him totally," the senior Hernandez said. His son had joined the Marines to get away from gang violence, the father said.
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Man shoots postman to get jailed

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A US man shot his postman so that he would get sent to prison for life and escape his crippling medical debts, investigators say.
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If some Al Capone like character calls a reporter to say that a "hit" may happen on "X" person at "Y" time and place and the reporter then calls half a dozen "capos" to inform them of said "hit" to confirm and verify that it may happen, is that a journalist doing a good job worthy of Bill of Rights protection or is that a co-conspirator?

Much has been made of the fact that Miller didn't write a story on Plame, but what if that was never her intention or role? Just as she and some in the current Bush group have been made out to be dupes of Chalabi, maybe she and they were duped in the same way some were duped by the yellowcake documents. Remember, these people, no matter how much they blunder, never seem to be punished for their blunders. It's not a whistleblower that's being protected here by journalist Miller. It a hitman doing a hit. Miller's 1st may be most perps 5th.

It took some time to be certain that terror was the basis since the initial reports stated that explosions in the London Underground were caused by power surges. But at this point, with multiple Underground explosions and bus explosions there can no longer be any doubt that this is a well synchronized terror strike against London.  Beyond that, little is apparent.

Personally, if I had to ride a bus or train in a major metropolitan city in the U.S. this morning I'd be very wary. Let's hope there isn't a strike here.  I don't remember which general said it but I don't think there'd be much of a Constitution left if there is terror strike here.

Initially I saw the report on BBC News.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/default.stm

I then tried to follow the updates via News Now, but that seems to be down at this point.
http://www.newsnow.co.uk/newsfeed/?name=Current+Affairs

Surprisingly on News Now there was a link to a blog that had some "street" info.
http://europhobia.blogspot.com/2005/07/london-tube-explosions.htm
l#comments

Other UK sites I've been following -
http://www.sky.com/skynews/uknews
http://u.tv/newsroom/

A couple of homages have been posted recently to two of the greats of journalism past.

Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin.

Don't Be a Blogger Manqué, Norman Mailer [June 28, 2005] -

Gone from the papers, Breslin still packs a punch [June 28, 2005] -

[Linked via http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=84509]

I thought they were good reads, with and without Jay Rosen "currency" links.

Now if only Gore Vidal would comment. :)

Exit Strategy

I've seen many threads on how to get out of Iraq. 'We can't just leave.' 'That would lead to civil war.' 'It's the Democrats job to come up with a way to get out of this horrific murderous mess created by Republicans and the longer the killing goes on, the more it's the fault of Democrats.' Well, something along those lines, give or take a bit of bullshit.

Ya know what? It's easy to get out of Iraq and look good.  The problem is that the "easy" way isn't the way that we really want to follow. Certainly the Republicans don't want to follow it, though they claim to.  How's that?  Give 'em freedom and democracy. The problem is that "we" don't want that. What we want is another Afghanistan. A puppet regime with a pretense of democracy but one that knows who keeps them alive and who they should obey.

So first I'll try to describe the solution, since that's the "Democrats" job. Enable the Iraqis ability to defend themselves against anti-democratic insurgents.  Again, how's that?  Train them. Arm them.  But aren't we doing that? No we're not.  We're trying to create a police force to combat a very motivated, very well armed, funded and trained paramilitary force. No police force can be effective against that. Don't think so?  I saw the streets of Manhattan during the recent Republican National Convention. Thousands and thousands of police doing extensive "crowd control" (a euphemism for illegal arrests and detentions in many cases).  Thousands of police against a small group of protesters. (The large pre-convention Sunday protest parade was completely peaceful and had nothing to do with any protests after the convention began.)  Armed, organized, billy clubbed cops against kids on bikes. But what if those kids had AK-47s and rocket launchers and mortars?  All those thousands of cops wouldn't have been able to stop thousands from being killed including many many of the conventioneers.  Maybe the core Republicans would have been safe with military level protection, but everyone else would have been in danger. Even with all those cops. A police force cannot match a large paramilitary force.  

Enough of this example. Look at what's happening in Iraq. Are we supplying the Iraqis with armored vehicles? Tanks? Helicopters? Command and control for this level of combat?  I'm guessing but the impression I've gotten is that we definitely aren't.  The large scale operations that involved Iraqi government forces seem to be supported by American military command and control and American manned military level hardware.

Simply, we don't want the Iraqis to have a fighting force that can actually fight the insurgency. We want to limit them to a police force and keep them ultimately, especially at the level of government officials, dependent on American military forces for survival.  The Iraqis are to be cannon fodder on the ground and the American forces are to be there to enforce American will, subtly but inexorably. That's why I "say" that "we" don't really want what we claim, freedom and democracy for Iraq.  Freedom would mean the right to tell us to leave. Training them on a military level would enable them to make us leave, or at the least make our stay there even more tenuous than it currently is.

That's my solution. Arm and train Iraqis to the point where they can defend their choice for a future.

OK. I'm sure there are those that will say I've not only ignored the civil war problem but made it more likely and more deadly.  But we've already got a civil war and only one side is armed. The side that doesn't want a democratic nation.  Oh, the Kurds are armed and have for the most part achieved a stable condition, but they're tertiary to the situation, though they represent a problem regarding a stable single nation, primarily because of oil and Turkey. I'll leave out the Kurds for this argument. Frankly I don't know much about the factions. I'm basing this post on the glaring "elephant in the room" inconsistencies that always seem to be ignored in proposed exit strategies.  So back to the point of this paragraph, civil war. There already is a civil war there and the nation killers are the most heavily armed. So arm the nation builders.  That's what we'd do if we really wanted to spread freedom and democracy.  Let the freedom fighters win.  

Again, the problem in that logic is that "our" being there, in heavy military terms, represents a contradiction to anyone's idea of freedom.  Maybe it's a bit fuzzy from our view, but think about what we'd think and feel if heavily armed Iraqis roamed all over America, shooting us at whim and will, saying it's all to help us. Add to that taking our natural resources and building military bases all over the country.  Would anyone here think that's freedom?  Bring back the red coats then.

Fundamentally the Iraqis would have to believe that our intentions aren't self-serving and there's no way the current American regime could project that impression.  Maybe we could get foreign support, including Arab and Muslim nations, if we truly were going to leave.  That international presence might help ease the civil war problem.

But this all depends on an honest America looking to spread democracy rather than take control of oil in its final decades of significance.

I know. I'm a dreamer, delusional maybe.

From the Washington Post story -

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/10/A

R2005061001911.html

 "New NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin has decided to replace about 20 senior space agency officials by mid-August in the first stage of a broad agency shake-up. The departures include the two leaders of the human spaceflight program, which is making final preparations to fly the space shuttle for the first time in more than two years.

"Senior NASA officials and congressional and aerospace industry sources said yesterday that Griffin wants to clear away entrenched bureaucracy, and build a less political and more scientifically oriented team to implement President Bush's plan to return humans to the moon by 2020 and eventually send them to Mars."


.
.

"He's going to want people that are on his wavelength, and his wavelength is that he's an engineer and a scientist."
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OK. Not much here excepting that Griffin is going to replace people that have made a career dedicated to "human spaceflight" for a project "to return humans to the moon by 2020 and eventually send them to Mars." Yeah, that makes sense. (NOT! If you don't get the sarcasm.)

So, being an average net junkie without Lexis-Nexis, or even a Lexus, I did a quick Google search on Griffin.  Nothing much. Glowing reviews. Geez there's even a 'pray for him little Christian Republican children' page.

http://pptkids.org/index-20050325.php

Let's all pray for the engineer and scientist.

Then I saw this comment on Griffin -

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http://www.shadowsofmedusa.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=21&

In terms of policy, he has always favored minimizing investment into the space station and evolving the space shuttle stack into a heavy-lift vehicle (capable of sending serious payloads to the Moon or Mars).
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Now I've never believed in this "to the moon Alice!" Bush project for 5 bil when papa Bush had a Mars project 15 years before that was supposed to cost 500 bil in those dollars.  My take has always been that NASA wasn't in full stride with the military industrial complex and the Mars mission at some vague decades away date was just a "bring democracy to Mars" sort of cover for shifting NASA into a pork project.

With that preface on my attitude, 'note in the quote' (sounds like a sportscaster type home run phrase) "heavy-lift vehicle."  My memory is fuzzy on the subject but I think the shuttle was originally designed to be smaller and have less load capability. I think it was the military that wanted the heavier load spec.  

Now all this is just vague speculation but I'm not that concerned about a NASA purge as a singleton. Purges have become almost as commonplace with the Bush regime as with communist regimes.  Everything has been politicized and politicized to a radical degree. Every fking thing.  The courts are the most obvious in long term importance, but there's the intelligence community with Cheney and Bolton, et. al. The FBI with the porter doing the sweeping. Look at the generals that say they have enough troops in Iraq.  Those are the people whose job it is to protect and defend America. Another significant Republican purging has been with lobbyists, where if you lean Dem you lean over the cliff and get a quick shove.

If Democrats or any alternative group ever get into power, these entrenched in the woodwork people will require even more extensive purging in order to get government back on the tack of working for America and Americans rather than military-industrialists and multi-nationalists.

Think of all this and remember the uproar over some government travel agency.

Pray for us little children, we need it.

Now I have no illusions about the real inequality in criminalizing "fetal murder." It's all about taking control of sexuality away from women and by extension, people in general. You know. Like the "sanctity of marriage" but only as it applies to gays, not divorce and horror of horrors - let's get real, covenant marriage. This is about criminalizing sexual behavior, not simply taking control of women's bodies. But the gross inequality of the law seems clearly obvious and unconstitutional.  It's very similar to the joke about the guy who kills his parents and then pleads to the court for mercy on the grounds that he's an orphan. The definition of kutzpah. Insane.

Well maybe not insane considering the alternative, or rather the alternative if one believes in "fetal murder." The pregnant children (the woman in this case was seventeen years old) would be executed by the state for aborting their fetuses.  The state would be killing children and young women. I don't think that alone would be a big deal to these people, after all this isn't "innocent life." But the number of people that would face murder charges and execution would be staggering. And if you "plot" and commit "fetal murder" in another country when that fetus was fertilized American, that would seem also to be "fetal murder." That criminalizes the wealthy that always had a way around abortion laws. No coat hangers or stomach standing needed there.

In one of the linked articles there's a quote, "most of the family is very pleased with the verdict." Would they be as pleased if their daughter, or close relative was going to be executed or jailed for 40 years minium? I don't think so.