On Monday, I visited one of the schools transformed into refugee housing in the center of Tbilisi and spoke to four women–Lia, Nana, Diana, and Maya–who had fled with their children from a cluster of small villages just outside the city of Gori. “We left the cattle,” Lia said. “We left the house. We left everything and came on foot because to stay there was impossible.” Diana’s account: “They are burning the houses. From most of the houses they are taking everything. They are stealing everything, even such things as toothbrushes and toilets. They are taking the toilets. Imagine. They are taking broken refrigerators.” And Nana: “We are so heartbroken. I don’t know what to say or even think. Our whole lives we were working to save something, and one day we lost everything. Now I have to start everything from the very beginning.”
Maybe they exist, but I haven’t seen any eyewitness accounts of the supposed atrocities by the Georgians that Russia claims started this.
And be sure to hit his tip jar. It’s how he affords to do this reporting.
I’d won a free 6″ sub. This was timely, since I was planning to buy one for my wife. We finished our meal; I went back to the place where the Sandwich Artists labor in various degrees of surly disinterest, and presented the coupon. The Artist began to craft the meal out the chopped and processed carbclay arrayed before him – and that’s when the manager walked over.
“For future reference,” she said, “those are for the next visit.”
I pointed to the small print on the back of the ticket. “Actually, it says for your next order.”
“Well, it means visit. It’s how we keep track of them in the back.” She jerked a thumb towards the back of the store, where the Something wet and spiny sat in a crate, swallowing souls and dreams and crapping out rules and procedure.
If there are two things I don’t like, it’s someone who tells me that fine print doesn’t mean what it says, and alludes to some company process that makes things simpler not for me, or for the employees, but some theoretical person on whose behalf the system was set in place years ago by a team of consultants who have already moved on to rejiggering something else that worked perfectly fine. On the other hand, after years of dealing with restaurant employees who couldn’t give a fig about the job, it’s difficult to carp when you find someone who does – unless, of course, that person has decided to make a point about a free sandwich for future reference.
If he did, I’d actually vote for him, as opposed to against Obama.
Fred Thompson. He’d mop up the floor with almost anyone in a debate (particularly Obama’s rumored finalists) and he’d only have to campaign for two months. And in the unfortunate circumstance that something happened to McCain, we’d have him for a president.
Florida is apparently a haven for ambulance chasers, because there are always a lot of ads on television by lawyers trolling for victims (though now that I think about it, this may have been a national one, because it was on Fox News, which I get via satellite). I just heard one for some kind of medication that said, “If you or your loved one died after taking this stuff, call us right now.”
OK, so if I died, what am I, supposed to channel John Edwards?
Some folks have been criticizing the recent Orion parachute test failure as just one more screwup at NASA that they’ve been covering up, and made a bigger deal of it than it is, but Henry Spencer has a more nuanced, and correct view:
Foul-ups in testing are not uncommon, especially when the test setup is being tried for the first time. One of the headaches of high-tech test programmes is having to debug the test arrangements before you can start debugging the things you’re trying to test.
Sometimes a malfunctioning test setup actually gives the tested system a chance to show what it can do in an unrehearsed emergency. During a test of an Apollo escape-system in the 1960s, the escape system successfully got the capsule clear of a malfunctioning test rocket.
But sometimes the test conditions are so unrealistically severe that there’s no hope of correct functioning. Unpleasant though the result often looks, this isn’t properly considered a failure of the tested system. That seems to have been what happened here.
As I’ve noted before, requirements verification is where the real cost of a development program comes from, particularly when the only useful verification method is test.
Lieberman may switch parties at the Republican convention. If he caucuses with Republicans, that would make it tied in the Senate, which means that Dick Cheney would be the tie breaker, and the Republicans would take over, at least until January. Bye, bye, Majority (non)Leader Reid…
Victor Davis Hanson previews what’s sure to burst forth among many in Denver next week:
Democrats wanted a bison and got Obambi, whose new ‘take no prisoners’ rhetoric in front of the VFW sounds like the Italian army in North Africa not the Desert Rats. Just imagine had Obama written “Dreams From My Grandmother” about a working-class white woman who moved to Hawaii sacrificing her all, stressing integration, conciliation, character, and hard work (all true), rather than future career-in-mind idealization and myth-making about a polygamist, alcoholic and absentee Marxist father? Had he done the former, he would have gotten a small advance, few sales–and now bankable proof of his character, rather than money, sales–and an embarrassing revelation of his PC credentials. Harvard Law Review is as essential to wowing a tiny irrelevant Eastern elite as it is meaningless to proving to mid-America that you can easily size up a thug like Putin, see through Euro-trash nonsense, or get some energy leverage back from the mullahs and House of Saud.
The Democrats expected an in-the-tank liberal press to publish charts and graphs of how the “progressive” FDR Obama was better for the blue-collar-worker than the Tom Dewey Republican. Instead they got the last gasp of the 1960s spoiled-brat loudmouths, ranting and frothing how an Obama could at last reify their own narcissistic, guilt-ridden pretensions. The amen-stable at Newsweek, for example, would not have been hired there as copy-editors in the 1960s. If Chris Matthews thinks his tingle up the leg giddiness helps Obama, or Sen. Obama’s race speech is the new Gettysburg Address, he doesn’t know Bakersfield or Dayton. A Keith Olbermann rant is a veritable McCain campaign ad.
Wow. They’re getting a real dumping in Brevard County. We got off lucky down here. This has to be hitting KSC workers and contractors pretty hard.
I’m surprised that Lake Okeechobee is still two feet below normal today. I would have thought that an almost-hurricane sitting over the watershed for a couple days would have gotten it up a lot higher.
[Update a few minutes later]
If this thing follows the current models, and heads off across the panhandle, it will probably set a record for the percentage of a large state affected by a single storm. Literally everyone in Florida will have been hit by it to one degree or another.