Memnison Journal

HBO production and presently running on that network.  My take on it is that it’s a once-funny;  I have a hard time watching gangster movies because I really don’t get off on people beating and killing each other, especially if the people involved doing the beating are serious scum.   This is SOPRANOS GO BAGHDAD; [...]

He also mooted the possibility that the Russian government would buy some of its metal products to shore up falling demand.
At under $50 a barrel, the Russian government is taking a beating, because their Big Ticket was oil and gas.   The entire economy was not based on industrial production, but in raking in petrodollars.   [...]

Details after the cut.

The interesting part of the last week, of course, was to watch McCain be seriously stupid in the face of Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe. The whole thing started off with McCain double-dast-daring that gormless Obama guy to be a real man and walk down a Baghdad street like he did, [...]

…and besides, unlike the wife, I’ve never gotten through his works.
Regular readers will note that the tags I put on posts are plentiful and sometimes sound goofy; that may be because it’s conceptual shorthand to me. ‘kubler-ross’, ‘renmin’, or ’sep_reality’, for example. The first has to deal with posts on death and [...]

Hydrogen, stupidity and incompetence. I swear to gawd, folks, I sometimes cannot imagine how we ever got this idea that George W. Bush, the first President with a MBA (from Harvard, yet) would run a tight, disciplined and competent organization that would - oh, how did that line go - “restore honor [...]

Ya know we gotta do it, and if the lilly-livered Democrat gets in, we have to think about Doing What Has to Be Done.
“Yes, gentlemen, they are on their way in, and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country, and our way of life, I suggest you get the rest [...]

A map of Chinese languages and dialects.  The ‘YUE’ one in the south is essentailly what we know of as Cantonese.
A map of Old Iranian languages.  Useful for us ancient history sorts.

From a MSNBC interview of Huckabee:
“South Carolina’s a great place for me. I mean, I know how to eat grits and speak the language. We even know how to talk about eating fried squirrel and stuff like that, so we’re on the same wavelength.”
“Mika, I bet you never did this,” Huckabee went on, addressing Mika [...]

Last night, after we were done watching Keith Olbermann (and after catching his excellent Special Comment on Bush’s lies over the NIE issue), we watched a little of Dan Abrams’ follow up show; he had Tony Blankley (formerly Newt Gingrich’s press guy), one of the main editors at SALON, and Pat Buchanan on for commentary [...]

Various sources are now saying that yes, Bush was indeed told point-blank last August that the intelligence services had new information that led them to strongly believe that the Iranian A-bomb project had been DOA for years.  One of those sources is the President’s mouthpiece.
Bush, on Tuesday: In August, I think it was John — [...]

…and say that he really, truly had no idea about the NIE’s stuff about the 2003 stop to the Iranian A-bomb efforts.  There were some creative ways to use that and get somewhere for the bigger picture with Iran.  But, expecting positive use of Bush’s imagination is asking too much.  Sheesh.
It’s also pointed out on [...]

Good stuff, white heat.  From The Huffington Post:

Bush: “Don’t talk like that in front of the children!  Kids, I believe in the Iranian A-bomb, don’t you?  If we’d all just clap our hands…”

Bush apparently knew about the findings of the NIE since last summer, that the Iranians had shelved their A-bomb program four years ago, and kept ratcheting up the rhetoric anyway to go and bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran in any event. In his press conference today, he basically claimed that the NIE supported his hard line, and [...]