Irving Progressive

Fox News now behaves like an Eastern European regime when it comes to publishing images. From a Huffington Post article on their response to criticism from the New York Times:

On the July 2 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade labeled New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg and editor Steven Reddicliffe "attack dogs," claiming that Steinberg's June 28 article on the "ominous trend" in Fox News' ratings was a "hit piece." During the segment, however, Fox News featured photos of Steinberg and Reddicliffe that appeared to have been digitally altered -- the journalists' teeth had been yellowed, their facial features exaggerated, and portions of Reddicliffe's hair moved further back on his head. Fox News gave no indication that the photos had been altered.

This is fucking sinister...a news organization that claims to be "Fair and Balanced" is Photoshopping other journalists' photos as part of a smear job article? Does this network still have the audacity to hide behind the "Fair and Balanced" meme?
Fox News is lower than a joke, lower than the gutter and operating in the worst traditions of Stalinist Eastern Europe. What a bunch of jerks.

...is that a number of smaller electricity providers have gone out of business in recent weeks in Texas. This article notes the latest casualty in North Texas.
We can expect more smaller providers who work on a reseller model to go out of business all over the USA in the next few months, as they discover that they cannot buy wholesale electricity at a lower rate than the rates they are charging their customers.

It seems like some famous people do suffer from an exaggerated sense of self-importance:

1. The President of France, Nicolas Sarkosy, apparently believed that he was shown insufficient deference by an employee of the France 3 TV network...he also seemed to react rather childishly when an elector refused to shake his hand. Whatever next? A new law to force people to bow down to him?

2. The golfer Greg Norman appeared to be able to buy control of an Island in the Bahamas last weekend, including the local police force. This was apparently to prevent unwanted media coverage of his very expensive wedding to former tennis player Chris Evert. Whilst it is all well and good to want a private wedding, some of the reported incidents sound like an abuse of power by the police.

The Louisiana House of Representatives has approved a bill that would facilitate the teaching of creationism in public schools:

On Wednesday, with just two weeks left in the legislative session, the Louisiana House of Representatives approved SB 733, a bill intended to facilitate the teaching of creationism in public schools.

It is good to know that the legislature feels it has enough spare bandwidth to devote to this incredibly important issue. A probable alternative explanation is that the legislature is dominated by fools and knaves who appear to believe that one can legislate against the scientific method in favour of a variation of "God Did It".
It is actions like this that demonstrate that, at a time when the US is wallowing in debt like pigs wallow in shit, too many people here are fixated on legislating to adjust reality. Truly, denial runs deep.
I would, however, be remiss if I failed to note that the Louisiana legislators were elected by the poeple of Louisiana, whose past voting record also includes voting for a convicted felon (Edwin Edwards) and more recently voting in a Governor (Bobby Jindal) who appears to believe that he can advance the cause of humankind by conducting exorcisms.
My tentative conclusion is that the electors in Louisiana would do well to get their brains in better working order and actually start voting for sensible people of a higher level of probity, instead of allowing their legislative processes to be dominated by crooks and moonbats.

And it is also the 100th birthday of my grandmother, born on this day in 1908. I will be in the UK for the birthday party this weekend.
In the meantime, here is a provocative post from Hale "Bonddad" Stewart concerning the chronic debt situation of the USA, and how the US might transition from a debt economy to an equity economy. As he notes. this will not be a painless process...

Satire and ridicule are often powerful weapons against entrenched foolishness and stupidity. This diary at DailyKos seeks to shine a satirical light on the bigoted antipathy that many people seem to hold towards same-sex couples and same-sex marriage.
(WARNING - High levels of snark may be encountered in the Comments section).

The general level of scientific knowledge and understanding of the scientific method in the modern USA continues to amaze and perplex me.
This weekend I found two interesting reports on the relationship between science, religion and commerce. This report from the Pew Group looks at the tension between religion and science, which manifests itself most clearly in several key areas: Evolution and natural selection being one.
This article takes a look at the influence of conservative and business-funded "think tanks" and pressure groups on environmental regulation.

Earlier this year, Rep. Sally Kern gave an unhinged talk during which she claimed that "the homosexual agenda" was a bigger threat to the USA than terrorism or Al-Quaeda.
I previously blogged about this, and also wrote to the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, telling them that if they did not disavow Rep. Kern's batshit bigotted nonsense, I would not be visiting Oklahoma or spending any money in the state in the future. As far as I can tell, they have not disavowed her ridiculous prattlings, so my refusal to visit or spend money in Oklahoma stands.
Pam's House Blend has the latest on the fallout from Rep. Kern's rantings (see link at the top). Included is news that at least one corporation is having serious second thoughts about relocating to Oklahoma (surprise surprise - corporations, by and large, are smart enough to want the best employees, and many of the best and most creative employees are at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from the likes of Sally Kern). It also seems that Oklahoma has sunk down the list of desirable relocation destinations for corporate relocation consultants. Who'd have thunk it?
Additionally, Kern now has an opponent in the November election, who was jolted into running against her by her verbal bloviations earlier in the year.
I shall watch how this all plays out over the next few months. In the meantime, I will continue to logistically and fiscally avoid all interactions with Oklahoma.

Simple answer: attempt to censor it.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have been heavily criticized in the media and on numerous fan and discussion sites for their decision to resign tight end Jerramy Stevens. Stevens has had a history of encounters with law enforcement, mostly related to being drunk. He is already going to be suspended for the first 2 games of the 2008 season for violating the NFL's substance abuse policy. Stevens was previously dropped by the Seattle Seahawks and signed a one year contract with the Buccaneers for the 2007 season.
The criticism continues, but it seemingly will not be allowed to continue on the club's fan site, as explained here by Mike Florio in Pro Football Talk.. A sternly-worded admonition from the monitors can be perused here.
My working assumption is that the Buccaneers are clamping down on discussion on the club site because of fears that they might be vulnerable to libel action from Stevens if fans start mentioning or discussing allegations made against Stevens in his past lives.
This is the sort of pointless CYA that will merely perpetuate the controversy. This sort of heavy-handed censorship risks undermining the credibility of the fan forum, and does nothing to prevent the discussion in other forums. It is utterly pointless and its very nature draws further attention to the decision to re-sign Stevens, which was always going to be difficult to justify, given his checkered past and the fact that he has not exactly been a great player on the field. He is unlikely to be giving any of the other upper-echelon NFL tight ends any cause to worry in the near future.
The Bucs signed a turd, have re-signed him and now they do not want to hear about their error. No surprise there. However, the means by which they are attempting to shut down debate and comment are pointless, petty and bound to fail.

From commenter Mike Sulzer over at Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon:

The LoRTC (loss of respect time constant) for a President is about six years and one reelection for lying about matters of national security, starting wars, and killing many thousands. It is instantaneous for sexual indiscretions.

Over at his blog, Craig Pirrong has another article dealing with an old canard - that speculators are responsible for driving up the price of commodities (in this case, crude oil). He previously wrote about this back in 2006.
As Paul Krugman has pointed out, the way speculation works is to buy up inventory and store it, thus creating a shortage and causing prices to rise that way. That was the approach taken by the Hunt brothers when they tried to manipulate the world silver market. At the peak of their activity, the Hunts were rumored to own or hold buy options on a third of the world's supplies of silver. The market manipulation attempt failed, as partly documented in this Wikipedia entry.
The problem with the idea of speculation driving up oil prices is that there is no evidence that crude oil inventories are increasing. The current price increase is being caused by the oldest reality of capitalism, too much demand and too little supply.

Another European niche airline ceased operations yesterday. This adds to the considerable tale of woe in the airline industry, as high fuel prices and a spreading economic recession combine to place airlines under enormous financial pressure.
The ominous statement in the Guardian article comes at the very end:

Aviation analyst Wyn Ellis at the stock brokers Numis Securities warned that the industry was fast approaching a crisis point.

"There are likely to be a number of spectacular casualties," he said.

There is also this rather sobering article which pretty much predicts further airline business failures, partly because the airlines, instead of reducing capacity, which would allow them to increase fares, are mainly engaging in a war of attrition against each other.

(Rant On)
I do get really frustrated when I find myself in a discussion/argument with a person who appears to be unable to tell the difference between the following:

facts vs. opinions
assertions vs. arguments

I am in a frustrating exchange with a work colleague who, presented with a statement that the US National Debt has steadily increased over the last few years, accused me of engaging in interpretation of the facts because the national debt as a percentage of GDP has not increased.
I said nothing about the debt as a percentage of GDP in my original statement. The fact is that the debt has steadily increased and is still increasing. This is not a matter of opinion or interpretation as he suggested. His response is irrelevant and is really a disguised variant of the strawman fallacy. However, he appears to think that he has somehow "won" the argument. The reality is that he hasn't constructed an argument. He has merely provided a list of assertions, most of which are incorrect or fallacious. He appears to be ignoring my reminders to him that an assertion is not an argument, and constantly repeating it does not convert it to any higher level of fidelity or validity.
(rant off)
The sad fact is that this is not the first time I have engaged in these types of frustrating exchanges, and it will almost certainly not be the last. There are a lot of folks out therein many different places in the world who appear to be unable or unwilling to engage in any form of sound discussion based on the use of argument and facts. Most normally they repeat assertions in an increasingly repetitive and shrill manner, and then become angry and dismissive when it is pointed out that those assertions are not arguments. I recall being invited to "go back to my own damn country" not long after 9/11 when I got into a similarly frustrating exchange of views with a co-worker. The irony was that he was married to a woman from Germany, so one would think he would have appreciated more than most people the intellectual bankruptcy of the "go back to your own country" response. However, we were in the period immediately following 9/11, when at least 2 work colleagues of mine stopped speaking to me because I disagreed with them on the appropriate US response to 9/11.

I wrote this letter in Salon in response to Gleen Greenwald's evisceration of early media reaction to some of the criticisms of their performance by Scott McClellan in his upcoming memoir. Unsurprisingly, two media figures interviewed on CBS today by Katie Couric seemed to think that the media had (to use an old British expression) done "a bloody good job". Their astonishing apparent lack of self-awareness boggles the mind, and reminds me of the Onion satirical article where Bill Gates of Microsoft awarded himself high marks for dexterity and charisma. One has to assume that the media members in question would prefer to write their own job performance appraisals...
UPDATE - Greenwald has another article here which reveals the extent of the war cheerleading mindset within media company leadership immediately after 9/11. Covered in this article is the case of Ashleigh Banfield, who was demoted and fired after making comments at a conference critical of the media's war cheerleading, and also covered is the firing of Phil Donahue.

A new corporation named CitizenRe appeared last year in a blaze of publicity, seemingly offering a solar power selling method based on a complex rental/lease model, plus elements of what appears to be Multi-Level Marketing (MLM).
CitizenRe made some fairly expansive claims about its business model, yet appeared to have no financing at the time. This blog posting examines some of the aspects of the CitizenRe business model and asks some questions about the viability of the model.

As in this comment in a discussion on Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon, which touches on the age-old debate of how much the original principles on which the USA was founded (as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, codified in the Constitution and discussed in the Federalist Papers) are still applicable today. Depending on their philosophy, different folks tend to adopt different positions. Chris Sinnard's comment acerbicly questions how the modern USA can be any more complex than the USA at the beginning of its life as a nation. Responding to a statement in an earlier comment that the founders of the USA lived in simpler times, he has this to say:

Simpler compared to what? The intricacies of American Idol and Lost? How much more complicated is the life of Joe Lunchbox, or any other American, compared to Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin? Really. You really think that the issues that the founders dealt with, issues like tyranny, are somehow irrelevant in these "deeply complicated modern times"? You're fooling yourself with such a fallacy if you really believe that to be the case.

A point of view with which I agree. As a transplanted person from Europe reading the Constitution, I am struck by its elegance and pragmatism as it seeks to define a governance system free from the tyrannies and arbitrary injustices from which many of the founders had escaped. I am unimpressed by the tendency of many people to regard the Constitution as a pesky piece of paper that can apparently be ignored by the Executive Branch whenever it feels like it.
Over at The New Republic, a dense pile of comments greeted an essay by Stephen Pinker concering the concept of dignity and how he feels it has been distorted and abused by members of the President's Council on Bioethics. As one might expect, a lot of the comments coalesced on the age-old question of whether a foetus is a human being. As somebody who studied Biology in high school, and has a skeletal knowledge of human reproduction and genetics, I find this debate perplexing, since it often ends up with people talking themselves into fallacious and inaccurate dead-ends without even noticing.
Here is commenter Sullydog eloquently demolishing the whole "foetus as human being" argument (comment #37, I cannot link directly to comments alas):

"In that sense, being a human being is a biological status." Who says so? You? It is rather difficult for me to afford a fertilized egg (a zygote) with the status of a human being. It has no brain. It has no spinal cord. It has no nerves. It has no eyes. It does obtain its own nourishment. It is incapable of independent movement. It has no autonomy. It is incapable of reproduction. Now, IF it were implanted and allowed to come to term, it MIGHT become a human being. But that is not the same as saying it IS a human being. Potentiality is not actuality.

There is a lot more, including his pointing out that if a blueprint is not a building, why some people regard a fertilized egg as a human makes no sense. His conclusion is that the viewpoint is bound up with the idea that a human has a soul, and I think he is correct. Since the soul is regarded as beyond the realm of the physical, it should not be necessary to posit a foetus as a human, but that is what seems to occur somewhere along the line.

Here is a sample of the proposals in the letter:

For each member of Congress, I propose we set up a collective internet site. This site will allow interested members of the public to, in realtime, monitor your every activity to assure ourselves that none of you are committing illegal or terrorist-enabling acts at any given moment of the day.

The primary feature will be the ability to listen in to any conversation you may be having, whether it be on your work phone, your home phone, your cell phone, text messages, email -- whatever. These conversations will be streamed to the internet, so that they may be monitored by responsible members of the public. The contact information of whoever it is you are talking to at that moment at time will also be displayed and tracked -- whether it be your wife or husband, child, doctor, secret mistress, whoever -- so that we can monitor them as well. You know, just to be safe.

You can trust us, as members of the public, to be discreet. We will only listen and watch, and will not abuse the information. After all, what could any of you possibly have to hide? Only someone intent on criminal acts objects to being monitored proactively. On the contrary, you should be grateful to us: by listening to your every phone call and reading your every communication, we can only help you to prove that you have nothing to hide. I am unfamiliar with the vagaries of American law these days, but my understanding is that this ongoing surveillance will make you even more innocent than you were before. Perhaps you will even be twice as innocent as before, or four times as innocent -- what patriot could resist?

There is also a final sting in the tail:

There is another matter that needs addressing, which is that it may be necessary at some point to torture one or two of you, just to make very, very certain that you do not know something about terrorists that you perhaps might be hiding. No need to worry about that now; we can address that in separate legislation.

I laughed so much when I read this, that I was originally going to categorize it here under Comedy. Then I realized that we are in an era where (as The Onion has proved) it is becoming very difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in the governance of modern America.
Sadly, this is another one of the "sad, unbelieveable but stupid" governance events. I hope that the letter was sent to Messrs. Hoyer and Rockefeller...

UPDATE - Some of the comments are priceless. Examples:

I've already got a name picked out:

Governmental Oversight Delegation

And then we can send them text messages from time to time, just as a courtesy reminder, that says:

G.O.D. is watching you.

I have here in my hands a list of 535 - a list of names that were made known to the general public as being members of the United States Congress and who nevertheless are still working and subverting the Constitution of the American government.

Have they no shame? We shall see.

Some constructive criticism here...
This is quite good, Hunter, but I think that maybe you should go back to writing satire.

The ex-BBC sports commentator David Coleman found his name (not 100% fairly) appropriated in the 1970's to describe an example of nonsense speech by commentators. They were dubbed "Colemanballs". Example follows:

For those of you with the black-and-white sets, Liverpool are the team in the all-red strip

This site lists a whole bunch of other examples of malapropism, garbled, and in some cases nonsensical speech from the world of British soccer.
Here is another collection of similar stuff.
There will be overlaps.

You don't have to be more than marginally awake to have noticed that some of the biggest war cheerleaders in politics are people who have never been anywhere near a battlefield. It is also interesting to note that most of those people are also unwilling to see any of their descendents participate in war activities either.
People regarded as cheerleaders without any record of participation were dubbed "chickenhawks" a while back, and the term has now entered the US lexicon as short-hand for a person whose views lack credibility because their life philosophy seems to be based largely on "do as I say".
Dalton Trumbo, who was one of the "Hollywood Ten", writers blacklisted because of their refusal to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, wrote a screenplay for the movie "Johnny Got His Gun" in 1971 that pretty much nails the whole war cheerleader ethos to the wall. Here is the quote:

You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That's their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead.
Hmmmm.
But what do the dead say?
Nobody but the dead know whether all the things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can't talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn't know what death is.

The last few weeks have been brutal for the airline industry in the US. On top of Aloha and Skybus going bankrupt, and the merger (long planned) between Delta and NorthWest, I just read that Frontier Airlines has filed for Chapter 11 protection after a creditor started yanking its chain.
The fuel price escalation, plus the general recession, is going to cause yet more grief in the US airline sector before the end of this year.

Over the past few months we have seen rapid rises in food prices (and the prices of other commodities) worldwide. Not only that, but we are now seeing food shortages, with some countries restricting or eliminating exports of foodstuffs.
A large number of column inches has been devoted to discussion of the root causes of the price escalation. A lot of fingers have been pointed at the US corn ethanol marketplace as a driver of food price increases, on the grounds that this is an artificial market created in an attempt to reduce US dependence on oil imports.
I have been looking for blogs that engage in substantive discussion of these issues from an informed perspective. Here is one such blog.

By now, football fans have probably heard of the publication of a bunch of photos of Matt Leinart, a quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals, cavorting with a bunch of young women in a "party situation".
The photos in question originally generated controversy because of allegations that some of the women might be under legal drinking age (21 in the United States). How on earth the photos could prove that one way or another is a mystery to me.
The fact that a young NFL quaterback regularly parties with young women should be a shock to nobody. However, Matt Leinart might want to read up on the history of other young quarterbacks and their behaviour when they entered the NFL. While Joe Montana and John Elway were keeping a low social profile and letting their throwing and game management skills do the talking on the field, Cade McNown, a first round draft pick a few seasons ago, apparently spent a significant amount of time hanging out with the bunnies at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago. Last time I looked, he was out of football after being dumped out of the NFL, his brief career judged to have been a bust.
What is more bizarre is that a lawyer representing Leinart is now threatening websites who published the photos with legal action under the DMCA. He sent a threatening letter to ProFootball Talk, whose owner Mike Florio happens to be a lawyer by trade. Florio was unimpressed by the threat, and he explains the background, the threat letter itself and a conversation with the lawyer here.
Apart from the fact that ProFootball Talk did not actually publish the photos (it merely linked to them), the threat to the website smells of a try-on. For a start, copyright to the pictures initially resides with the photographer, not the subject. Unless Leinart has purchased the copyright from the photographer, he and his lawyer have no legal basis for any DMCA demand. Since the letter to Profootball Talk did not specify that copyright is claimed by Leinart, that reinforces my belief that the letter is a try-on.
However, the bigger picture here is that either Leinart has a fool for a lawyer, or the lawyer has a fool for a client. If you have been photographed cavorting with young women and the pictures are in the public domain, trying to have them suppressed is a pointless exercise, since the genie is out of the bottle. Not only that, but the attempt to suppress them ensures that the story will continue to gain traction and attention. Absent any legal action, the media would lose interest and most readers would probably move on with the rationalization that "boys will be boys".
Threatening legal action on dubious grounds against an NFL news site run by a lawyer is really, really dumb, since it ensures continual airplay for the story, and will allow more people to continue to ask the question of whether Matt Leinart, to use an old phrase, has a million-dollar contract married to a ten-cent head. At the time when he should be keeping a low profile and winning the job of quarterback, he appears to be also carelessly whooping it up with people of dubious merit, and the resulting publicity is threatening to become the main story about him. For at least one party, he appears to have done the equivalent of inviting a guy with a telephoto lens to a nudist colony, and only now, when the resulting pictures are all over the internet, is his lawyer sending try-on threat letters to the media. Dumb, dumb, and dumber.

...the campaign website of Sen. Joseph Lieberman went offline during his re-election campaign for the Senate. At the time, his campaign accused the campaign of Ned Lamont (who ran as the official Democratic Party candidate, having won the primary election) of orchestrating a Denial Of Service attack to crash the website.
Tech-savvy folks everywhere pointed out that (a) Lieberman's campaign was using a hosting company costing $15 a month, which is not indicative of a high-volume high-reliability hosting deal, (b) all of the other sites managed by the hosting company were also offline. The obvious conclusion was that the Lieberman campaign had selected an ISP that could not cope with the level of traffic that was hitting the site.
At the time, the FBI announced an investigation into the allegations of a DoS attack. No detail ever emerged of the findings of the investigation, although it was reported at the end of 2006 that the FBI had failed to find any evidence of tampering by outsiders. More recently, however, via a Freedom Of Information Act request, it has been confirmed that the FBI investigation was terminated with the conclusion that there was no DoS attack of any kind on the web site. The Lieberman campaign allegations were falsehoods, and any tech-savvy internet geek would have concluded that within, ooh, about 30 minutes.
The unanswered question; why did the FBI not determine that the Lieberman campaign should be charged with wasting the time of law enforcement, and when is the Lieberman campaign going to apologize for the false accusations.
I know, I am not holding my breath...

I am a regular user of Yahoo IM (my ID is nostall160). Chatting online is a fascinating process, since one sees all sorts of behaviours online, ranging from the open, friendly and interesting, through to the dour, monosyllabic, rude and duplicitous.
One duplicitous behaviour that I see all-to-frequently is the habit that many people have of apparently logging off of Yahoo immediately after you have sent them a message. I say "apparently" because in all probability, they simply went Invisible because they didn't want to talk to me. I have seen this behaviour persistently from some Yahoo users. It is rather amusing, because it gives away their attitude and intentions immediately. If they wanted to not speak to me, they could set their profile to be Invisible to me, or they could set it to be Invisible to Everybody.
I have become somewhat tired of being given the brush-off and being subjected to duplicitous behaviours like the one outlined above. So, commencing immediately, I am not going to initiate any Yahoo conversations. My Yahoo will show my true status (I will not hide), but I will only respond to conversation initiations. I will not initiate any conversations. I want to see how much effort other folks are prepared to invest in communications with me. I feel that I have been investing too much effort for too little reward. Time for other folks to pick up the slack.
UPDATE - I logged onto Yahoo just now and one person appeared to logoff within seconds...classic case of somebody ducking a conversation, when I had not even tried to initiate one. This person has been doing this persistently for weeks, so I guess that they will have to talk to me in the future...

...are available here.

...we pause for a moment to salute The Guardian newspaper, which in 1977 unleashed one of the great April Fool's Day hoaxes - the fictional island archipelago of San Serriffe. This spawned many April 1st imitators. I remember buying the University Of San Serriffe t-shirt at the time. The university's (Latin) motto: In Perpetuam Floreat Nihil (nothing ever flourishes here). I also bought a t-shirt featuring the likeness of the island's military dictator, General Pica.

Gordon Murray, the former Technical Director at Brabham F1, and lead designer for several McLaren road cars, has formed a company to design an innovative new city car.

...into the procurement process that led to a contract for up to $300m in value being awarded to a corporation apparently fronted by a 20-something operating out of Miami with no apparent track record in any type of business. The goods being purchased under the contract were ammunition for US and friendly forces in Afghanistan.
Aside from the seemingly negligible qualifications of the company's front man, a lot of the professed amazement centres around revelations that much of the ammunition supplied under the contract came from Eastern European countries, and that much of the ammunition was old (some of it over 40 years old).
Not surprisingly, politicians have snapped into action over this contract, and are convening hearings to question all of the parties involved. Whilst that may be entertaining, it may not reveal very much, since the international arms trade is murky on a good day, and frighteningly obscure and scary on a bad day.
The New York Times is supposedly investigating this contract; however, this blog posting as already turned up some interesting information.
One of the sources of indignation, that the ammunition is old, may not be an issue. If properly stored and handled, much ammunition and explosive material is stable and lasts a long time. When the US Navy re-commissioned the 4 Iowa-class battleships in the 1980's as part of the Reagan-era spending bonanza known as the 600 ship navy, the ammunition and propellants used in the 16 inch main guns of the ships dated from the 1930's, and was used in live firing exercises and some battle action without issues.
This story will run and run. We can look forward to politicians on television asking questions of varying degrees of acuity and usefulness, and we might see some useful output from the NYT investigation, assuming that it is properly executed (but I'm not holding my breath).

Read this story and then determine if there is any way that it is not highly amusing...

...of the USS Iowa moored in the sunset, covered with Christmas lights at NAS Norfolk, VA, in December 1984.

As a victim of bullying in high school, partly because I laboured under the clearly-naive delusion that school was a place where you went to acquire an education and learn stuff, the deja vu flooded over me when I read this article in the NYT about a high schooler being bullied in Fayetville AR. One of the more sinister developments is this one (which could not have happened in my high school period):

In ninth grade, a couple of the same boys started a Facebook page called “Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe.” It featured a photograph of Billy’s face superimposed over a likeness of Peter Pan, and provided this description of its purpose: “There is no reason anyone should like billy he’s a little bitch. And a homosexual that NO ONE LIKES.”

Delightful stuff.
Billy's parents are currently suing the school district, among others, over the treatment that their son has received. As is depressingly normal in these situations, the real scandal is not the bullying itself (there are always dysfunctional jerks in school, as in life), but the meek, incurious inaction by the school management, who seem (as ever) to live in a quaint world where bullying is a rite of passage, to be passively tolerated. This is professional negligence, and the school management and their leaders deserve to have their asses legally and fiscally kicked up the air. The only thing that is likely to cause a modification of behaviour is s righteous public slamming.

My sister is a co-owner of a restaurant in Polperro, Cornwall - The Pol Mary Restaurant. This is primarily a tourist restaurant. Needless to say, they get all types of customers, from the extremely nice and polite to the rude, demanding and obnoxious. However, this Yahoo exchange from yesterday with Cath revealed a new type of customer. For reference, "Peter" is one of the co-owners of the restaurant.
I was dying laughing reading this:

Cath: we had a dog eat part of a table last night
Cath: I guess he got bored
Cath: so next time you get a bit bored in a restaurant, eat a bit of the table
Cath: it’s obviously the done thing in the right circles
Graham: did you bill the customer for the bit of the table?
Cath: nope, we didn't notice until after he'd left the premises!
Cath: and found the heap of a zillion teak coloured bits
Cath: and realised the dowel had gone from the side of the table
Graham: name and shame!
Cath: didn't ask him name, but he was a nice black lab
Cath: Splodge was on table 1, but it wasn't him
Cath: or the little dogs on table 6
Cath: it was that black lab who had camped out under that table, table 7
Graham: hmm
Cath: you'd have thought his owners might have heard him munching the table
Cath: we gave him bikkits, he shouldn't have been hungry
Cath: maybe they thunk he'd brung a stick in with him
Cath: but the fact it was teak coloured might have been a pointer
Graham: this is bizarre...but also bizarrely funny
Cath: I guess he was fed up with waiting all night
Cath: so made his own arrangements re: inhouse entertainment
Cath: I guess he found the dowel on the floor and one thing led to another, and before he knew it, he'd munched it into a zillion bits
Cath: even duct tape no good for this
Cath: or furniture glue
Cath: Peter most disturbed
Cath: he got to make another one
Cath: before the table falls down
Cath: so we must only seat light people there
Cath: until it is reinforced
Cath: so we told Peter not to sit people there for lunch
Cath: just in case
Graham: what did they think that munching noise was then?
Cath: exactly
Cath: I can't believe they didn't hear it
Cath: we thought he must have eaten a stick, until we spotted it was once teak-coloured
Cath: and then noticed the piece of table missing
Cath: Peter looked at the bits and cried “That's a piece of my bloody table! The bastard has eaten my table!”
Cath: whoops
Cath: the first time we have had any dog damage
Cath: had people and kid damage before, but not doggy damage
Cath: normally it is busted glasses, forks gouged into table tops etc or stolen gear, not eaten tables
Cath: nobody ever ate a piece of table before
Cath: that's a new one
Cath: maybe he got worms
Cath: probably got woodworm now
Cath: tonight another black Lab wandered into the kitchen
Cath: and Peter screamed “Get out or we'll cook you!”

It gets better...this is a further story:

Cath: there was also the case of the picnic table being thrown across the terrace ....
Cat