Thursday, October 9, 2014

SAR #14281



Life does not have an index and the table of contents is pretty vague.

Re-Runs: India and Pakistan are skirmishing over Kashmir again. This wouldn't be important except both of them have nukes. 
 
The Thirty Year War: Never mind that Joe Biden was right, we're not supposed to notice that the countries we call friends have been and continue to finance both al-Qaeda and now ISIS – just as the Saudis did the 9/11 bunch. And a lot of informed people say that airstrikes won't do the job, that the fight against rabid jihadists will have to be widened from Iraq and its neighbors to include Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Nigeria and others. The US has now moved to using Apache helicopters against ISIS. Eventually it will be the insertion of forward air controllers, then protection on the ground for the FACs, then large unit deployments. 
 
This Just In: Netanyahu replaces Miss Manners on “American Values”. 
 
Daycare For Adults: The five major US airports with direct flights from Ebola-infected regions have begun screening arriving passengers for Ebola. Which will do little or no good due to its long incubation period, but will give TSA a reason to strip search everyone with the sniffles.

Teaching Point: The United States voluntarily ended slavery, according to a member of the Colorado Board of Disinformation Education. 
 
Technical Knockout: All those “important updates” that Adobe keeps sending you seem to be designed not to improve the product but to see what you've been reading lately. It turns out that installing Windows 10 requires your give Microsoft permission to spy on you – as though they didn't before. Canada has demanded that Google and Netflix give the government data on their Canadian customers. And best of all, the DOJ maintains that it is perfectly legal for a federal agency to steal your identity, swipe the photos and personal information off your cell phone and use it to construct a fake Facebook page using your name, photos and info in an attempt to con criminals into revealing themselves. 
 
Self-Inflicted: From now on, any USB stick can quite possibly carry malware in its firmware, impervious to your attempts to make it 'safe' by reformatting.

Democracy Inaction: Turkey's PM said that the government's decision to open fire on people protesting the government's passive approval of ISIS decimation of Syrian Kurds, which killed 19 protesters, was done because any protest against the government was “going against democracy.”

Cops & Robbers: In NC cops acting on a tip from a racist neighbor stormed into the home of white foster parents and pepper sprayed a teen aged foster child who was in the home. He was black, of course. In Indiana the state troopers will pull you over on suspicion of not being saved. In Detroit a cop was found innocent in killing a 7 year-old girl during a police raid because it was determined that he was incompetent, not negligent. Another Detroit cop was arrested after a road-rage incident in which he brandished his Glock at a family in a minivan. In MD a judge has found it unremarkable that two cops beat an unarmed student unconscious as he lay unresisting on the ground. In NYC a cop explained breaking into a woman's home and beating her by saying “Sometimes I'm a bad guy.” He had justgotten an award for his bravery. In SC a cop was charged with a misdemeanor for killing a 68-year old DUI suspect who was sitting in a parked car.

Did Nobody Notice? Macroeconomic models are not very good at predicting how variables such as GDP, employment, interest rates and inflation – y'know, economics - will evolve over time. Why is economic forecasting so hard? Because greed is constantly evolving so many things can go wrong, and do. That's the official explanation. 
 
Don’t Ask: Air Canada says it will to come down hard on crew members caught watching pornography in flight.

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