Havel est morte. ¡No Pasarán!: Good-Bye, Friend

¡No Pasarán!: Good-Bye, Friend.

Charter 77 and free lands of Europe behind him, something extra good ahead! Vaya con Dios!

Bibi tomahawk slam down on BHO: not gonna happen

Netanyahu slams Obama’s proposal for pre-1967 borders | Hayley Peterson | Beltway Confidential | Washington Examiner.

Good work, Bibi!

How many times does BHO get something rubbed in his face on television, for all the world to see? Not often enough! Usually, it is BHO rubbing it in America’s face on television in Europe somewhere, about how we are sorry for being great or similar claptrap. It makes my day that Israel did so. Bibi slams it down!

Googled: not gonna happen

bin Laden est morte

They got the bastard. Good work, USN.

What is happening in Zahedan today?

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is in southern Afghanistan lately.

U.S. Defense Secretary Gates Visits Afghanistan
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates paid a visit to U.S. troops in Afghanistan, arriving in Kabul on Thursday, as shared in a feature on The Washington Post. His visit, according to the feature, is happening during the time of the arrival of the last U.S. reinforcements in the country. Secretary Gates was met by NATO commander Gen. David Petraeus upon his arrival in Afghanistan.

On Friday, the Secretary travelled to Kandahar province…

Whenever one of these big shots shows up over in that part of the world, I look for something to squeeze up to the surface in Zahedan, like puss oozing out of a zit.

Where is Usama bin Laden, and what is happening in Zahedan today?

Zahedan, Iran, with a few other rumored locations for UBL, Zabol, Iran, Quetta, Pakistan, and the Taliban stronghold Kandahar, Afghanistan. (Click for large version.)

What Creation is it we see?

For Mike Sola and his son, and for Persian Kiwi.

Crowd size at D.C. mall, with new crowd size rating scale

After some debate and consideration at the Pajamas Media website concerning the size of yesterday’s big rally in D.C., I developed a new rating scale for crowd size.

1. Ginormulous = Original MLK I Have a Dream event
   
2. Ginormous = ?
3. Gigantic = ?
4. Enormous = ?
5. Humongotorious = ?
6. Humongous = ?
7. Huge = Aug. 28, 2010 honor rally
   
8. Massive = ?
9. Big = ?
10. Sharpton-like
    
    Image: Preston Rescigno/Getty Images
11. Critical mass
    
    Image: © The Terrence Jennings Photographic Archive
12. Esperanto convention
    
13. Rahm Emanuel Ethics Society
    

It needs some more photographic examples of D.C. crowds for the upper end of the scale, from ginormous down to humongous. You can have a lot of fun with this. Post a comment if you have a good example.

Ground zero demonstrators look kosher.

Two opposite protests running in downtown NYC today, by Ground Zero, near City Hall, a few blocks from the World Trade Centers. In the map below, New Yorkers opposed to the boot-in-the-face mosque were at map icon A, the corner of Park and Broadway. Pro-Sharia mosque demonstrators were at map icon B.

View Larger Map
If you look at the photos in the NY Daily News and NY Post websites, you will see a bunch of New Yorkers with mostly good old regular homemade picketing signs.

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What strikes me as 100% normal and kosher is that there are not many fancy pre-printed signs like one sees at labor rallies and political party events. Most of the signs in these photos are homely looking signs that will go in the scrapbook as "My First Protest."

That is a good thing to see, in my opinion.

It tells me that these are regular civilians speaking their voices, both groups. Hopefully everybody behaved themselves although in NYC, you never know! Eventually, there will be professional protesters, probably for the pro-Sharia group. But for today, this looks like a great demonstration. Free speech activity, 100%. USA!

Tanker Lia to New York, not Bandar Abbas

The Lia, IMO 9417751

Strange report: a tanker loads gasoline in Turkey, then instead of steaming off for Bandar Abbas, it heads for New York with it. Gasoline sanctions are in effect now, but Iran denies anything to do with the gasoline in this vessel, The Lia.

So the Seven-Elevens of the mid-Atlantic states prefer Turkish gasoline now? That seems unusual.

Latest position of The Lia

http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/shipdetails.aspx?mmsi=636013794

Andrea Bocelli is here. My little brother James is here.

When people talk about the missing children who perish in abortions around the world, I think about my little brother, James.

What would my life be without him? Brother fighting with brother, brother joshing brother, brother suffering with brother at the death of parents, brother consoling brother, little brother breathing, there.

How could it be if my mom had miscarried and James had never seen the light of day? My world would be without the sun, and joy would disappear in the static noise of a channel without a source.

And perhaps Andrea Bocelli is like that to someone. If his mother had aborted as the doctors recommended, where would this planet be? How could his mother be consoled?

But Andrea Bocelli is here. My little brother, James, is here.

In the spring of 1945, Viktor Frankl walked out of Dachau concentration camp, free, a few days after liberation by the Americans. He walked for miles in the spring air. He stopped and saw some larks and listened to their joyful singing, and in that moment he prayed and knew his new life was beginning.

I think about Viktor Frankl and those larks often. My little brother, James, is here.

More unusual activity in Zahedan: vest bombers

From Planet-Iran.com, more news of violence.
UPDATE 3 >> Bombing in the Baluch city of Zahedan claims 30; Jundallah claims responsibility (vidoes)

More people die in Iran. This time it is Zahedan. It’s bad.

But I thought the Sunni would be using truck bombs, not vest bombers. The suicide vest is more like Hamas.

I still wonder where Osama bin Laden in hiding out: somewhere up in Khorasan, the recent guess? Perhaps in the country between Zahedan and Kandahar as I have been speculating this last year or so? Over in Pakistan?

Zahedan, Iran, with a few other rumored locations for UBL, Zabol, Iran, Quetta, Pakistan, and the Taliban stronghold Kandahar, Afghanistan. (Click for large version.)

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UPDATE: July 26. This post has a live link to Planet-Iran, matching up with its copyright and reproduction charter.

Stop Iran NOW!

Stanley Baldwin or Neville Chamberlain, the appeasement of the Oval Office has got to stop.

The bastards shot the girl.

Republished one year later, "You bastards shot the girl."

You bastards shot the girl.

YouTube shows censors lethal force being used in Iran.

Sorry. That video lived a very short time.

Try this update page which is not part of YouTube.

They shot the girl

OK, the YouTube version is back on the air, but let’s keep both versions here.

Iran will be free.

Obama golfs while the shrimpers die.

It is hard to attain this level of multi-dimensional, coordinated hypocrisy. It takes real talent.

1. BHO: "Republicans are devils."
   

   Obama says GOP making life harder for the jobless
   Jun 19, 6:07 PM (ET)
   WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama on Saturday pinned blame on Republicans for making life harder for the unemployed and for those who could lose their jobs without new federal intervention.

2. BHO: "British Petroleum chief is a devil."
   

   White House chief: Yacht trip another gaffe by BP
   Jun 19, 2:26 PM (ET)
   WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama’s chief of staff says BP chief executive Tony Hayward has committed yet another in a “long line of PR gaffes” but attending a yacht race in England while the Gulf oil spill disaster continues.

   Hayward faced a fresh avalanche of criticism as news circulated Saturday that he was at a yacht competition around the Isle of Wight.

   White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is mocking Hayward’s infamous statement that he wishes the crisis were over so could have his life back.

3. BHO: "Five hours of golf. Nice."
   

   Obama hits golf course with Biden on another hot, humid weekend – The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room.
   By Bridget Johnson – 06/19/10 03:37 PM ET
   President Barack Obama hit the golf course Saturday with Vice President Joe Biden.

   The White House pool report noted that Obama left at about 1 p.m. for the course at Andrews Air Force base, and his golfing parters included White House Trip Director Marvin Nicholson and David Katz, the energy efficiency campaign manager at the Department of Energy.

   Obama left the course shortly before 6 p.m.

Meanwhile the shrimpers down in the Gulf of Mexico see their livelihood vanish, but it’s no concern of the Oval Office on its golf outing.

Mort Zuckerman quotes Xcontra, of course.

Mort Zuckerman: World Sees Obama as Incompetent and Amateur – US News and World Report.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy openly criticized Obama for months, including a direct attack on his policies at the United Nations. Sarkozy cited the need to recognize the real world, not the virtual world, a clear reference to Obama’s speech on nuclear weapons.

When the French president is seen as tougher than the American president, you have to know that something is awry.

True, it’s a paraphrase. But it’s obvious he is indebted to my comment from last June,

When the president of France can call out the US president on foreign policy, you know it is a bad day.

in "Presidential Test Pattern," one of my most popular articles

Unsinn! The Hezbollah are assassins, mullahs are death making slaveholders.

From Michael Ledeen: Don’t You Just Love Hezbollah? It’s So Interesting…Like Freddie Kruger

White House terror "expert" John Brennan – and his boss, President Obama – seem to think that we should be cultivating the “moderate” elements in Hezbollah [viz.]

The Obama administration is looking for ways to build up “moderate elements” within the Lebanese Hezbollah guerrilla movement and to diminish the influence of hard-liners, a top White House official said on Tuesday.

John Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, met with Lebanese leaders during a recent visit.

"Hezbollah is a very interesting organization," Brennan told a Washington conference…

All the president’s "friends" in Hezbollah… Quatsch! (For readers in Rio Linda: quatsch is German lingo for nonsense.)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but can there be anything more imbecilic than the president ascribing civilization to the assassin beheaders of Iran’s Hezbollah?

Good old PersianKiwi was right. It is no accident that the people of Iran want freedom from these death-making slaveholder mullahs.

“Goin’ to Chicago”… for the Climate Conference

More about Climategate: a conference in Chicago. I wonder if Harry Read Me is going to make an appearance as a speaker?

“Goin’ to Chicago”… for the Climate Conference.

Change in the weather

The British meteorological establishment is now advocating for open and transparent temperature data record keeping. In the May 13 issue of Nature, two names in the Climategate emails, Peter Stott and Peter Thorne, displayed unusual humility whilst planning a new temperature data set.

Their opinion column is subscription-only, but this excerpt gets to the heart of the Climategate mess:

The climate community needs to gather temperature records from around the world — including measurements that are not currently freely available — into one, open database. Those data will then need to be corrected and adjusted in a transparent way, to ensure that the resulting data sets are sound, and to allay any public concerns that scientists could have skewed or ‘spun’ the data.

They make this plea for transparency in a new temperature data set, designed to be on a smaller mesh, more weather stations closer together, a few kilometers’ spacing, with data taken more than once per day.

You ask, "Smaller than which mesh?" Their unmentionable answer: the corrupted Hadley CRU TS data sets, for which the grid size was hundreds of kilometers and the temporal scale was a month. I take their call for transparency as a form of partial repentance, "Mea semi culpa," in the tangled HARRY_READ_ME.TXT mess they made of their data, which forced Phil Jones et al. into the foolish tampering with peer review and so forth.

Mea semi culpa for the bungled handling of urban heat islands:

And while it is desirable to correct for the impact of urban development on local temperatures when assessing global climate change, it might be better to maintain those temperature increases in local-scale databases — they do, after all, represent a real local effect.

Concerning "full audit trail," a mea semi culpa on the HARRY_READ_ME.TXT issue — the rabbit warren data sets:

The Met Office’s proposed solution is to invite anyone, from individuals to professional bodies, to create their own rules and algorithms for correcting the databank, using independently gathered funds. Analyses would be sanctioned by the WMO-backed project if a paper had been published in a peer-reviewed journal and the analysts could provide a full audit trail of their processing. By creating such a suite of independent data sets, it will become possible to assess the sensitivity of the data to different sorts of corrections.

If only Phil Jones et al. had applied these transparency and assurance principles to the global temperature data their country entrusted to them.

These two men, Peter A. Stott and Peter W. Thorne, were involved in the Climategate manipulations. So although they make only an oblique reference to their cherished global temperature mashup, the CRU TS "data" set, it is obvious that they made this new plea for transparency because of their own errors. I will take that as a mea culpa.

About your FOIA request for raw temperature data...

Obama knew.

It has been interesting the past year, trying to figure out what the heck is going on in Iran vis-a-vis Osama bin Laden and al Quaeda. The Iran election crisis a year ago brought the attention of many eyes to Iran in a new way, so it might be that the walk to freedom in Iran will also work out eventually to the capture of a major criminal terrorist.

Read more: Obama’s Known of Al-Qaeda Ties with Iran for a Year, but Still No Action

purple V for victory sign

Mullah Omar protecting bin Laden in Helmand?

Kandahar is looking down the barrel of a combined forces counter-insurgency move. Like Fallujah.

Newspaper stories from London speculate about Taliban’s Mullah Omar and his comrades in Quetta, Pakistan being interested in talking peace, viz.

Taliban’s supreme leader signals willingness to talk peace
Stephen Grey in Kandahar
The Sunday Times, April 18, 2010

The supreme leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammed Omar, has indicated that he and his followers may be willing to hold peace talks with western politicians.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, two of the movement’s senior Islamic scholars have relayed a message from the Quetta shura, the Taliban’s ruling council, that Mullah Omar no longer aims to rule Afghanistan. They said he was prepared to engage in “sincere and honest” talks…

What does it mean?

1. The reports are true, and the Taliban are ready to become normal political participants.
2. The reports are false, and the Taliban are using the jaw jaw method to stall for time.
3. Maybe there is another interpretation.

Perhaps the Taliban are worried about purple fingertips. The intractable Fallujah/Anbar situation resolved into normal political participation. A 2008 review from Fox News:

Last One Turn Out the Lights: Marines Quietly Begin Leaving Bases in Iraqi Cities
Jennifer Griffin
Fox News, Friday, October 17, 2008

But perhaps the biggest sign that the situation has changed for the better for Sunnis living in Anbar: With the help of the Marines and the Iraqi police, nearly 100 percent of the eligible voting population were registered a month ago to vote in upcoming provincial elections.

“They seem to add another political party every day,” Kelly said. “We didn’t have a single security violation of any kind. They’re at least going to give the electoral process a shot … at least going to give democracy a chance.”

The Sunnis, who fueled a large part of Iraq’s insurgency, boycotted the last election for Parliament with only 3 percent of Sunnis participating. Now they feel they have a stake in the government.

In any case, the Taliban talking with powers that be has a protecting effect on Osama bin Laden if he really is in the south of Afghanistan, somewhere between Zahedan, Iran and Quetta, Pakistan, between Kandahar, Afghanistan and Zabol, Iran.

My opinion is (b), since the president has shown ineptitude with Iran’s time-buying nuclear tactics: Jaw jaw with an Oval Office fool until you can nuke Israel, then who cares? Similarly, because the US recently displayed hostility to Hamid Karzai, the Taliban can jaw jaw with the Oval Office fool until they can get a long knife into Karzai’s neck.

View Larger Map
Map showing south Afghanistan, including Lashkar Gah and Kandahar, plus outlying cities Zabol and Zahedan, Iran and Quetta, Pakistan.

Obama as Undergrad

Michael Ledeen is on the mark with this analysis. The president is not a psycho to be analyzed by psychoanalysis, but a spoiled Ivy League brat.

Obama as Undergrad.

I don’t think that just putting Obama on the couch is the best way to understand him.

Put him in the classroom instead. Because he’s the stereotypical American undergrad at a stereotypical Ivy League college in the age of political correctness.

I would add that that now, with power and control but no one to fire him, he is like a pinhead professor, whose vicious faculty politics is a road to the nether world paved with naive, foolish Nuclear Posture Reviews and Molotov-like retail events selling Poland down the river to the Sovs.