War Commentary

Where’s The ACLU (Part Two)?

…and what are they going to do about these phone tappers?

The Sunday Telegraph newspaper quoted a document sent to soldiers of the Territorial Army’s (TA) London Regiment, which has soldiers fighting in Iraq.

The document warned that insurgents in southern Iraq had managed to obtain the home telephone numbers of British soldiers using electronic intercept devices.

It said there had been many instances in the last weeks of relatives and friends of personnel serving abroad on operations getting nuisance phone calls”.

War Commentary

Where’s The ACLU (Part Two)?

…and what are they going to do about these phone tappers?

The Sunday Telegraph newspaper quoted a document sent to soldiers of the Territorial Army’s (TA) London Regiment, which has soldiers fighting in Iraq.

The document warned that insurgents in southern Iraq had managed to obtain the home telephone numbers of British soldiers using electronic intercept devices.

It said there had been many instances in the last weeks of relatives and friends of personnel serving abroad on operations getting nuisance phone calls”.

War Commentary

Where’s The ACLU (Part Two)?

…and what are they going to do about these phone tappers?

The Sunday Telegraph newspaper quoted a document sent to soldiers of the Territorial Army’s (TA) London Regiment, which has soldiers fighting in Iraq.

The document warned that insurgents in southern Iraq had managed to obtain the home telephone numbers of British soldiers using electronic intercept devices.

It said there had been many instances in the last weeks of relatives and friends of personnel serving abroad on operations getting nuisance phone calls”.

Technology and Society

Supply Chain Mismanagement

We bought a new telly back in February at Brandsmart USA (I never know whether the name is Brand Smart, or Brands Mart, or if the name is meant to be deliberately ambiguous that way)–our first leap into the HDTV water. It was a Samsung thirty-inch CRT.

When I first turned it on, a loud buzz emitted from it, lasting about a second. It was annoying, but once the picture came up, everything was fine. I should have taken this to be a warning.

A month or so ago, we lost stabilization on the horizontal sweep, resulting in wavy sides. Fortunately, this was one of those rare occasions on which we actually bought an extended warranty (it was past the ninety days from the manufacturer). After several days, we got a service call (about a week and a half ago, before I went to California). The serviceman took one look, and said that it was a bad power supply. He also told me that the noise at startup wasn’t normal, and was also a bad supply, or perhaps a flyback transformer. If we’d reported it initially, we would have just gotten a new teevee.

But since it was past the ninety days, he was going to have to repair it. He told me that he’d have to order a new power supply from Samsung.

I called this morning (Monday), and they still didn’t have it in, and wouldn’t be able to even tell me when they would, unless I call them again on Wednesday (with the usual waits on hold through two different departments), and which time they could tell me.

How is it, in this day and age, that a major Korean electronics manufacturer can not only not have a part delivered to a major metropolitan area within a couple days, but not even know, after a week and a half, when they will?

Popular Culture

It’s Always 1932

Iowahawk has a brief history of the hot rod:

Even back then Deuces were highly collectible. Car guys started hoarding them, heeding Mark Twain’s famous advice to “buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” Strangely, though, they did start making Deuces anymore: high demand spawned an entire industry devoted to replica and restoration parts. Body repair panels and replica fiberglass Deuce bodies began appearing in the late 1960s, and are now available from dozens of suppliers, as are reproduction 1932 Ford frames. Recently several companies – such as Brookville Roadster and Dearborn Deuce – have introduced complete steel reproduction bodies. With a big enough budget, today you can make a pretty faithful steel recreation of a real 1932 Ford out of nothing but brand new parts. The paradoxical result is that 1932 Fords are more plentiful today than they were new. A scant 275,000 Fords rolled off the assembly line in 1932; today a greater number of “1932 Fords” are currently registered just in the state of California.

Popular Culture

It’s Always 1932

Iowahawk has a brief history of the hot rod:

Even back then Deuces were highly collectible. Car guys started hoarding them, heeding Mark Twain’s famous advice to “buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” Strangely, though, they did start making Deuces anymore: high demand spawned an entire industry devoted to replica and restoration parts. Body repair panels and replica fiberglass Deuce bodies began appearing in the late 1960s, and are now available from dozens of suppliers, as are reproduction 1932 Ford frames. Recently several companies – such as Brookville Roadster and Dearborn Deuce – have introduced complete steel reproduction bodies. With a big enough budget, today you can make a pretty faithful steel recreation of a real 1932 Ford out of nothing but brand new parts. The paradoxical result is that 1932 Fords are more plentiful today than they were new. A scant 275,000 Fords rolled off the assembly line in 1932; today a greater number of “1932 Fords” are currently registered just in the state of California.

Popular Culture

It’s Always 1932

Iowahawk has a brief history of the hot rod:

Even back then Deuces were highly collectible. Car guys started hoarding them, heeding Mark Twain’s famous advice to “buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” Strangely, though, they did start making Deuces anymore: high demand spawned an entire industry devoted to replica and restoration parts. Body repair panels and replica fiberglass Deuce bodies began appearing in the late 1960s, and are now available from dozens of suppliers, as are reproduction 1932 Ford frames. Recently several companies – such as Brookville Roadster and Dearborn Deuce – have introduced complete steel reproduction bodies. With a big enough budget, today you can make a pretty faithful steel recreation of a real 1932 Ford out of nothing but brand new parts. The paradoxical result is that 1932 Fords are more plentiful today than they were new. A scant 275,000 Fords rolled off the assembly line in 1932; today a greater number of “1932 Fords” are currently registered just in the state of California.

Political Commentary

Dispatch From Fantasy Land

Kos:

“It was a time that was very stifling for liberal voices in the American landscape,” he remembers. “No one could criticize the president because it was considered treasonous to criticize the president in time of war.” But as an Army veteran who served in artillery logistics in the first gulf war, he felt he could question the rush to combat with impunity. “I vowed my life for the right to criticize our leaders. Nobody was going to tell me I could or could not criticize anybody.”

Yes, I recall well the night all the dissenters were rounded up and sent to the work camps, with just the scraps of clothes on their backs–the wails of anguish, the cries for missing loved ones. Just a few brave souls, veterans like Markos Zuniga, were willing to stand up to the man, and speak truth to power, in defiance of the storm troopers.

—

It’s funny, he probably said this with a straight face, and the Newsweek reporter sees no need to align it with reality. Other than Ann Coulter, I recall very few people being accused of “treason” for “criticizing the president” (and even in her case, I think that the charge was a little more involved than that). Hell, I criticized the president–I still do. What he means is that he (and many others) weren’t allowed to spout inanities and insanities issued from the depths of their dementia and Bush derangement without being criticized for it.

Sorry, Kos, but the rest of us have free speech rights, too.

War Commentary

Perspective

Whenever you hear someone talk about 2500 deaths in Iraq over three years, recall (or learn about), almost ninety years ago, the Battle of the Somme:

The first day of the battle, codenamed Z-Day, was generally accepted to be the worst of them all, with some battalions suffering losses of more than 90 per cent.

The Battle of the Somme was supposed to be won by the Allies on that first day of July. It was partly thanks to this overconfidence that the generals allowed Malins access to the trenches. Instead, the battle lasted until November – long after the finished film had been screened at home. By the end of the offensive, there were more than one million casualties from both sides. After five months of bitter fighting, the Allies had advanced just five miles.

As horrific as the battle was for the British troops who suffered and died there, it cost hundreds of thousands of French and German lives as well. One German officer famously described the Somme as “the muddy grave of the German field army”.

Among those to experience the horrors of the battle from within the trenches were a young JRR Tolkien, later to write the epic Lord of the Rings, the poets Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, future British Prime Minister Anthony Eden – and an Austrian corporal named Adolf Hitler.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!