Reality Check for Anti-American Italians

Captain’s Quarters gets into this bit with the Italian Journalist, Giuliana Sgrena.  Ed, in short, feels that we’re dealing with a lack of communiation.

I concur.  AS Ed describes it:

It appears, so far, that what happened is that the Italians came up to a checkpoint that they hadn’t anticipated on a road that is the most dangerous in Iraq. Not sure of who the people were waving for them to stop — remember, they were still a ways off — they intended to drive straight through it to get to the checkpoint they knew. The Americans tried warning the car and when it failed to stop, shot out the engine with a few rounds from an M-16 or similar weapon. The rounds bounced through to the interior or missed their intended target and went straight into the cab.

Try it this way; You’re on one of the most dangerous highways in the world for Car-bomb suicide attacks.  You’ve got a car speeding toward your checkpoint, refusing to stop when told.

Think fast; what do you do?

And what is this about the Italians caving in to Rransom demands?

UPDATE: Ed’s just on fire with this one today.
He writes that Giuliana Sgrena’s working for Il Manifesto, which as the name sugegsts is an Italian Communist newspaper. Gee, no reason for their wanting to cast Americans in a negative light, eh?

The problem, of course, is that there’s a lot of dogs. There’s also only one mother-in-law. It’s that combination that had me scrambling, over this last week.

OK, perhaps I should back up and explain fully for the benefit of those who hadn’t been following this saga.

My 81- year- old mother in law had a stroke a month ago, which left her unable to care for herself. As often happens, her children were forced to deal with the house and all that was in it. This always unpleasant task was multiplied by the pets left behind. One of which… her dog… was a rather faithful companion… a beagle mix called George. George really is a great dog, and was an ideal companion for Mom.

Her birds (two of these) would have been no problem. My wife and I keep birds, so what’s two more? The dog was another story. We already have a dog, and three cats, neither of which will get along with another dog. Sad, because given the choice, we’d have kept him in the family. We rather like George. But because of our situation, he ended up spending a month being cared for by the vet where Mom had been taking him for the last few years, whilst we spent our spare time looking websites all over the country.

We finally found one in May’s Landing, NJ, called “Penny Angel’s Beagle Rescue“. During our initial conversation with the folks running that operation, we learned that Penny Angles places 300 dogs per year in foster homes. Based on this we made arrangements to drop off George at a PetSmart outside Atlantic City, NJ, where Penny Algels were doing a pet placement thing. PetSmart is to be commended for this, arranging for adoptions is something they do quite a bit of across the country. Apparently Penny Angles is one adoption partner of many.

The problem I had was one of time; I couldn’t pick the dog up form the vet here in Rochester, NY, until 08:30 on Saturday… and I had to be at May’s Landing by no later than 15:30. Mapquest says the trip is do-able in 6 and a half hours. Which left me about a half an hour of playtime. (Oh, joy!) Good thing that Bit’sBox is road ready.

400 miles to find a dog a home may seem like a bit much, but I had already offered to drive this animal anywhere within 600 miles of Rochester. First, as I say, he’s a good dog, but my mother in law was rather attached to him. On both those accounts, I couldn’t simply take him to the “humane society” where he stood about a 90% chance of being gassed in the second week there. even without her feelings being involved in the matter, I would have hated to create a second tragedy in response to the first.

So, we drove on Saturday.

I-90 to Syracuse and then 81 south to Scranton PA, and 476 to 76, through Philly to 676 the Ben Franklin Bridge, the Altantic City Expressway, and there we were, 6 hours later.

A few things things of note, that I jammed into my Palm as we made our trip.

One of the things I’d hoped to do with this whole situation was create an object lesson for my older boy; That being that life is not expendable, and that we have a responsibility both to our families, and the lives they take responsibility for. Spending a Saturday driving, and the ~$120 of fuel costs were, in my view, a small matter in the face of that responsibility.

…made the run without major incident in the desired time. I’ll be posting the report on that trip in a BITSBIT later today.

Jen Martinez writes a great Blog about things Military, called A Collection of Thoughts. She’s been in my blogroll forever. Today she writes a note about an effort to buy a paralyzed soldier a home, over in Wheaton, Illinois.

It’s the kind of story you’ll never see posted by Kos, or Kevin Drum, for example.

Ed at the Captain’s Quarters links Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) who has …..

…written a detailed rebuttal to Robert Byrd’s argument on the Senate floor earlier this week, when (apart from the abhorrent Nazi analogies) the former Klan recruiter took on the mantle of the protector of minority rights. Cornyn demolishes Byrd’s arguments that the GOP’s attempt to change precedent on filibusters has any Hitlerian overtones by pointing out the specifics of when Byrd himself successfully did the same thing.

Good reading.

Fellow Rochester blogger Charles Simmons notes the Tingy list has grown yet further. He suggests he’ll continue doing this list until it reaches a billion USD. Frankly at the rate it’s groiwng, he won’t be long at it.

Can anyone name for me any prominent liberals who have publicly condemned Ward Churchill?

Little Green Footballs notes that the LA TIMES has started shilling for North Korea.

That rumble you hear is Frank Gannett rolling endlessly in his tomb.

Engadget has a picture you need to see.

The Times Online ‘s Gerald Baker has invoked Monty Python in explaining the stupidity of the Anti-American view of the EU and a lot of Leftist Americans, with them.

Confronted with this awkward turn of events, Reg’s angry successors are asking their cohorts: “What have the Americans ever done for us?” “Well, they did get rid of the Taleban in Afghanistan. ‘Orrible bunch, they were.”

“All right, the Taleban, I grant you.”

“Then there was Iraq. Knocked off one of the nastiest dictators who ever lived and gave the whole nation a chance to pick its own rulers.”

“Yeah, all right. Fair enough. I didn’t like Saddam.”

Those who know me well, will know i’m a Python type of guy, so this stuff is just super.  And it makes the point so well…

Neal Boortz makes the point today… and I’ve made it many times, here….  that it’s time to start drilling… past it, rather. It’s also time to build refineries. And it’s time to tell the EPA to stuff itself on this ‘seasonal blends’ nonsense. One blend of fuel, nationwide.  Stop demaning 50 kinds of gasoline.

It’s the only way prices are going to go down, gang… it’s overdue.

Just an offhand comment….

Given the wall to wall carpet bombing of Martha- Stewart- getting- out- of- jail coverage, there must be no negative stories to put up about President Bush. Certainly, the news out of the Middle East is far too good to report to us. Might make the President look good.

Similalry, the economic numbers came up unepectedly strong, yesterday. But you didn’t hear much about that either did you?

Nope. Every channel you tune up, has Martha Stewart being treated to a hero’s welcome after getting out of jail.

Did I mention Mathra Stewart is a significant money source for the Democrats in the last few elections?

Hmmmmmm.

Techdirt this morning has a note up that suggests the record labels are going great guns trying to block the file sharing business model.

Ya know, gang, I’m getting really ticked about this. As I’ve indicated before I have a rather large music collection… On the order of 20,000 LP’s, over 100,000 singles… and a fair amount of CD’s to go with it. The upshot is I have an MP3 collection that requires a server of it’s own, along with a 7 CD tower… all of them loaded with MP3’s as well.

But I’ve not bought much recently. I may have purchased 25 or 30 disks in the last year. The reason for the sudden slowdown in buying of music has nothing to do with my ability to download gigabytes of music off the ‘net, legally or otherwise… it has nothing to do with the technology I employ.  It has nothing to do with a business model at all.

Let’s take a short trip back in time, to the middle 70’s through the 90’s and to today. Remember when the RIAA loudest scream was that Magnetic tape recorders in the home were going to be the death of the music business?

Funny thing; That Chicken Little act didn’t win them any converts, and about everyone had at least one cassette recorder in the house. (Personally, I have a few of them, and a good reel-to-reel unit, as well, even today) But, lo, and behold, despite the simplicity of making a recoding of whatever music source you wanted by simply loading a tape and punching a few buttons, the Music industry didn’t die.

But now suddenly, the technology changes, and we’re supposed to have pity on their calls of the sky falling. again?  Sorry, I don’t buy it. The number of people making supposedly illegal copies of recordings hasn’t gone up at all. Everybody already HAD that ability… we’ve had it since the 50’s and 60’s.

The problem… what’s killing the profits of the music business these days, is what’s being turned out these days. The product they’re turning out makes sewage look desirable. Nobody wants it. 

Until they address THAT issue, the music industry will never recover it’s old glories. And they’re certainly not making any friends with the ‘blame the consumer’ nonsense.

Boing Boing points up something called “Synaesthesia”, which Dictionary.com defines as being:

I suppose one could say that the Chinese technique of Accupuncture, depends on this.
But the key here is he first definition. The article speaks of Elizabeth Sulston, a recorder player who can actually taste tone intervals in the music she plays:

As she began to learn music more formally, she found that when hearing particular tone intervals she experienced a characteristic taste on her tongue. For example, a minor third tasted salty to her, whereas a minor sixth tasted like cream. She started to use the tastes to help her recognize different chords.

Interesting. In my radio years, I worked heavily in audio processing for broadcast, and studied psycho-acoustics, and touched on this topic of Synaesthesia at the time. But, so much of it was undefined the teachers didn’t …couldn’t …spend a great deal of time teaching it.

I suspect that our bodies give us connection with a lot of what could best be termed as subliminal information… stuff way down in the noise level that our consious mind can’t pick up, usually.  I wonder if this isn’t part of what makes the concert going experience so interesting, as an example.iding in a car, in a train. Riding a horse. Sittng in your office, using your computer.  Your MP3 player. All these things, (and of course more) have a ‘feel’ about them that is more than the tactile senses are telling us… things we can’t identify, and therefore can’t logically state exists.

Makes one wonder what else the ‘logical’ world is missing.

Update: Fixed broken link.

democracy guy says Howard Dean should quit.

Barely a month since Dean has been DNC chair, already he has put every single Democrat in the country, whether or not they ever liked the man, on his defensive.  We have to defend why suddenly he doesn’t want to talk about Iraq anymore.  We have to defend why he draws crowds with idiots who threw a shoe at his debate foe.  And it’s just beginning.  All this for a position, DNC chair, that has never, ever, been such a source of distraction.

As I told him in response:

It’s an open question, of which damages the Democrats more….

* That they think Dean is the best represetitive of Democrats today….

…. or…..

* Dean actually IS the best represetitive of Democrats today.

Either way doesn’t look promising.