Eh. Give them the desert and let them literally pound sand.

Posted by: Ace at 08:38 AM | Add Comment
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Must-read post. Not only does it strongly suggest deep Iranian direct involvement with the 9/11 attacks, it also demonstrates that the CIA routinely discards, dismisses, and denigrates any information that disagrees with its basic narrative of what's going on in the world.

Nor does the Commission bring up another story that Timmerman reveals in his book (pages 7-9). On July 26, 2001, an Iranian intelligence agent walked into the American embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, and asked to see the CIA chief. He finally talks to two CIA functionaries: "Joan", who assesses his story and decides it needs further review, and "George", a CIA case handler who laughs Zakeri out of the embassy. The story?

There's going to be a big attack on America on the twentieth of Shahrivar, Zakeri insisted. That's the date my boss told us to be ready. Six people who have been trained as pilots have just left Iran.

George consulted a calendar that gave the corresponding Western dates. So we're talking about September 10, right? I'll mark my date book, he added sarcastically. He paid Zakeri a few hundred dollars for his time and sent him away.

July 26 came just two weeks after Mohammed Atta met with Ramzi Binalshibh in Madrid to finalize the date for the 9/11 attacks...

The CIA handler misinterpreted 20 Shahrivar; in fact, that date came out to 11 September. None of this gets any mention in the 9/11 Commission report either, despite the testimony from Zakeri being read out in a German court in January 2004. When Timmerman checked out Zakeri's stories against known data, it came up correct. However, when Timmerman contacted the CIA about Zakeri, they reacted uncharacteristically hostile to Zakeri -- but they refused to answer when asked about the July 26, 2001 meeting.

Keep this in mind when you read about the ongoing feud between the CIA and the Bush Administration.

The CIA is arrogant... which would be fine, if it knew what the hell it was doing. But it doesn't. It's both arrogant and incompetent, which is a dangerous mix.

Via QT Monster, a clearing-house blog for stuff about Able Danger and 9/11 Commission.

Posted by: Ace at 08:31 AM | Comments (2)
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Communications technology isn't as sexy as, say, lasers or flyin' cars, but it's certainly having some interesting and important effects on our society.

First of all, it save a great deal of time -- a very precious commodity. In Japan, phones are common with GPS built into them, so if you need to find your way to a bar or restaurant or residence, you can just enter the address, and the phone will actually plot you a map to getting there. From your current address to the door you're looking for.

And it seems that all these cameras are going to put a serious dent into street crime, too. Sure will make prosecutions a hell of a lot easier-- hard to argue with a photograph showing you with your wee-wee out.

Dad? Dad?!?!

Posted by: Ace at 08:10 AM | Comments (10)
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Anathema to many, and I'm sure not a fan of Minetta. But...

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta proposed imaginative fuel efficiency standards for new SUVs, vans and pickups. This scheme would divide light trucks into a half-dozen categories based on size, not weight.

By 2011, the smallest so-called "truck" (a PT Cruiser) would have to attain 28.4 mpg, while the largest could get by with 21.3. Add a few inches, and the standards drop. Fatten up to 8,500 pounds, and there are no rules.

I don't know... given the situation we're in, is it horrible for the government to coerce auto manufacturers into engineering these large vehicles to get slightly better mileage?

It's not impossible, and it's not always necessary to simply lighten the vehicle up and replace life-saving steel with weaker aluminum alloys:

The editorial cites a report "from President Bush's own Environmental Protection Agency" supposedly proving "America's cars and trucks are significantly less efficient, on average, than they were in the late 1980s, and that leaps in technology have been used to make vehicles more powerful but not more fuel efficient."

What did that EPA report show about those demonized SUVs? In 1978, SUVs weighed 4,202 pounds, produced 146 horsepower and got only 12.3 miles per gallon (mpg) in combined city-highway driving. By 1988, they were down to 3,859 pounds, had only 144 horsepower but got 17.4 mpg.

By 2005, by contrast, SUVs were up to 4,649 pounds and had 236 horsepower yet achieved a record 18.1 mpg. That demonstrates a huge fuel efficiency increase -- much more space, safety, comfort and performance with less fuel. Efficiency means getting more for less, not getting less for more. The United States is impressively energy-efficient.

That can be interpreted two different ways. One, we don't need additional government coercion, because manufacturers already have an economic incentive to produce higher-efficiency vehicles.

Or, two, we can engineer cars to get slightly better mileage without reducing weight and safety, and if the government can act as a spur to give engineers additional motivation to do so, perhaps we should.

I don't know. As I've said before, yes, I'm generally against government regulation, but there's a tragedy-of-the-commons sort of effect here that keeps increasing our dependency on oil controlled by terrorist-friendly or terrorist-sponsoring nations.

What if SUV's shed about 400 pounds, bringing them closer to the 1998 average, but kept the 2005 engineering making them more fuel efficient? A two-ton road yacht is still nothing to sneeze at. And perhaps they could get 20 or 21 mpg. Not a huge increase, but not a trivial one either.

Government coercion in technological matters has benefits. (I know it also has drawbacks.) But a forced emphasis on improving a technology will, almost invariably, make that technology more advanced and also cheaper, even if it is simply due to wider utilization (the more people who have it, the cheaper per-unit cost of research and development and manufacturing costs).

Just sayin'.

Posted by: Ace at 07:54 AM | Comments (10)
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Always a touchy subject. But obviously there are differences between men and women, including in how our brains work; men and women are essentially alien species to one another, linked only by the fact that our genitals seem to to fit together. If it weren't for genitals and pheremones, we'd be like the white-black and black-white aliens on Star Trek.

Evolutionary biologists have some theories that feed into an explanation for the disparity. In primitive societies, men did the hunting, which often took them far from home. Males with the ability to recognize landscapes from different orientations and thereby find their way back had a survival advantage. Men who could process trajectories in three dimensions—the trajectory, say, of a spear thrown at an edible mammal—also had a survival advantage.8 Women did the gathering. Those who could distinguish among complex arrays of vegetation, remembering which were the poisonous plants and which the nourishing ones, also had a survival advantage. Thus the logic for explaining why men should have developed elevated three-dimensional visuospatial skills and women an elevated ability to remember objects and their relative locations—differences that show up in specialized tests today.

But this doesn't explain why a woman, flicking through channels on TV, always seems to find two women talking in a kitchen -- a repeated scenario constituting 90% of all female-friendly Movies of the Week -- endlessly fascinating and the subject for further investigation. You can try blocking out the We and Oxygen and Lifetime channels, but they have evolved the ability and drive to unblock these channels.

I guess I know the answer-- women are more interested in and adept at detecting social clues about relationships and power-positions between women, and find two women talking in a kitchen an interesting little puzzle for exploration into alpha and beta, dominant and submissive behaviors.

Men, meanwhile, just see two women talking in a kitchen and comprehend that, whatever fascinating dominance-displays are behing exhibited, neither sandwiches nor brownies are being made. It's all, therefore, a horrible waste of time and resources.

Men, meantime, have evolved the drive to watch documentaries about the history of airplanes, because we have some deep-seeded biological imperative to hear things about the Spruce Goose we've already heard six thousand times before.

If Murray really wants to do the world a service, he can research the reasons women ask their favorite question -- "Are you mad at me?" -- even when you're plainly not mad, just admiring the planking on the Spruce Goose; and why women, even when plainly, demostratively angry (and making sure you know that) keep saying "No, nothing's wrong" when you ask them, but then get even angrier when you stop asking and go back to watching Shark Week on TBS.

Posted by: Ace at 07:29 AM | Comments (37)
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Investigating whether or not a Democratic Representative, William Jefferson, authorized payments to Nigerian officials to ease the entry of a Kentucky broadband internet firm into Africa.

Hmmmm... I guess I need to offer an opinion. I think the Federal Corrupt Business Practices Act makes bribes to foreign officials or businessmen illegal. I never really understood that law. I don't want bribes coming in; I'm not sure if I care if they're going out. I care about good clean government at home; I care a hell of a lot less about good clean government overseas; most countries are about 50 or 100 years away from developing even the regrettably-low standards of governmental and business clealiness we have now.

Yes, it's a shady practice and yadda yadda yadda, but this is how business is done in most of the world, and I've gotta think that businesses (and, I guess, politicians) are typically forced into the difficult situation of either breaking the law or putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

And I think most of the time they'll opt to not put themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

It's an idealistic law, and thus, very stupid. Sure, it's a bit embarassing that we might have politicians involved in this, but it's also sort of unhelpful to raid the US residence of a high foreign dignitary.

I don't think diplomatic immunity is a concern; based on a quickie reading, only the residence of the head of the consulate or mission is considered invioable under the Vienna Conentions.

Posted by: Ace at 07:12 AM | Comments (3)
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We already knew that this minor league degenerate was a loser by the way he treated Michelle Malkin.

Now this fifth columnist is comparing Cindy Sheehan to Walter Cronkite throwing in the towel on Vietnam!

Posted by: Tanker at 06:49 AM | Comments (4)
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Third time's a charm. Confirms there was a chart with Atta's name and picture on it.

And some interesting news about why Able Danger was ended -- because back in 2000, while she was still Provost at Stanford, their data-mining techinques pinpointed Condoleeza Rice as a potential spy for the Chinese government.

Okay-- sure, that's surely a miss, and that would make the Clinton Administration less likely to trust other AD findings. But data-mining has never promised a perfect accuracy rate -- it's a tool, and largely a mathematical one, and it always has to be checked against common sense and human understanding.

Still, the claim is that AD was disbanded because the Rice incident convinced officials at the time that what they were doing was close to "spying" on Americans. They weren't-- they were analyzing publicly-available information, and they should not have been disbanded.

Posted by: Ace at 08:11 AM | Comments (11)
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I'm sure they'll figure a way to blame it on America:

Brigitte Bardot, the 1950s and 1960s film star turned animal rights campaigner, has called on the French government to halt the reported use by fishermen on the island of Réunion of live puppies and kittens as shark bait.

Posted by: Tanker at 07:36 AM | Comments (22)
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Am I right or am I right?

Anyway, the Nazis are joining Saint Cindy and her Code Pink peace-whores in Crawford.

Smells like a romantic comedy in the making.

Posted by: Ace at 09:03 PM | Comments (14)
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