My bills are all due and the baby needs shoes and I'm busted
Cotton is down to a quarter a pound, but I'm busted
I got a cow that went dry and a hen that won't lay
A big stack of bills that gets bigger each day
The county's gonna haul my belongings away cause I'm busted.
Ray Charles
Economic optimism is in the air — at least in rarified air of the twin palaces of Versailles On the Potomac and Versailles On the Hudson. And if you believe the newspapers, there are growing signs that the economy is turning around, and America has dodged the depression bullet.
Phi Beta Iota Editorial Comment: Yesterday we pointed out the idiocy of Virginia police chiefs attacking a lone blogger for using her God-given powers of observation and her First Amendment rights of articulation to expose shoddy police work and Gestapo police reactions.
Today we find an article that is focused on the importance of such blogging as a new form of social communication. Attacking one blogger, whether by abuse of local authority as has been the case in Virginia, or by a massive denial of service attack as is more common out of Russia and other part where brilliant young people have too few opportunities for challenging employment, is an attack on society at larger.
Tip of the hat to AP and the other news services for continuing to be relevant to our lives.
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Original Story Online
By BARBARA ORTUTAY, AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay, Ap Technology Writer – Sun Aug 9, 2:27 am ET
NEW YORK – The outage that knocked Twitter offline for hours was traced to an attack on a lone blogger in the former Soviet republic of Georgia — but the collateral damage that left millions around the world tweetless showed just how much havoc an isolated cyberdispute can cause.
“It told us how quickly many people really took Twitter into their hearts,” Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, said Friday.
Tens of millions of people have come to rely on social media to express their innermost thoughts and to keep up with world news and celebrity gossip.
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer Ali Akbar Dareini, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 42 mins ago
TEHRAN, Iran – A young French academic and local employees of the British and French embassies appeared before an Iranian judge Saturday along with dozens of opposition figures accused of involvement in the country's postelection unrest.
The extraordinary mass trial in Tehran's Revolutionary Court demonstrates the government's resolve to discredit Iran‘s pro-reform movement as a tool of foreign countries — particularly Britain and the United States — trying to spark a revolution to topple Iran's Islamic system.
Reuters – French language teaching assistant Clotilde Reiss (R) sits next to an Iranian policewoman and other defendants …
Click on logo or photo for the rest of the story at the original source.
Associated Press reports that the Senate Ethics Committee has cleared Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticutt (the state where many of the AIG and other Wall Street executives live) for his uniquely personal role in secretly assuring that bonuses for all these morally hazardous individuals would be protected in the two-party bail-out deal. His below market mortgage personally arranged by the leadership of Countrywide is “unrelated.”
Click on the photo to read the story on his admission that he personally added the bonus provision to the “stimulus” package.
We've seen quite a few stupid, abusive policemen–generally in Third World countries, struggling to make a living, treating corruption as a form of life insurance. What we have not seen ourselves in Virginia, is stupid, abusive police chiefs and ignorant abusive “undercover” officers who go after citizens whose only crime is being “alert” and sharing information with others about operations so badly managed they are too obvious to laugh about….kind of like CIA running operations out of official installations with kids throwing money around and no real ability to do anything other than take scraps off the foreign liaison table. Or truly naked, really drunken police sliding down banisters greased with beer in a Washington, D.C. hotel, where local police refused to enforce the law against their visiting brethren.
Editor“JZ” Jason Liszkiewicz surfaced this story and Editor Robert Steele decided to go with it. Both are law abiding citizens and the latter has given at least 5 of his 9 lives for his country.
We have always held the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), and its prime mover Steve Aftergood, in the highest esteem. As we have been building this new site for the public, we have noticed others stealing from FAS and relabeling materials downloaded from FAS as their own. This is unethical and disqualifies any site so doing from being considered a public service.
Our policy is to always link to persistent URLs offered by others. We only create safety copies when there is a high probability the existing URL will not be persistent. Below is a Valentine from Frog to FAS (and to CRS, which may one day grow up to be a public service, not just a shallow pond for Members to dip their toes into diluted substance). Frog links to the FAS CRS master page.
Graphic: East View Cartographic Help for UN Forces Eastern Congo
East View Cartographic, the single most extraordinary geospatial support service in the commercial sector, created the attached without color; the G-2 of United Nations Forces Eastern Congo prioritized their needs (the West still does not have 1:50,000 combat chart with contour line coverage for most of the Third World, i.e. the bulk of the ungovernable unstable zones). It was this single graphic that got the Dutch government to approve a US$3 million expenditure to meet the needs of UN forces in the Eastern Congo.
NOTE: Not a single map existed. Green above represents the least urgent, yellow and red the more urgent.
