Ken's Weblog

People should not fear their governments; governments should fear their people.

Month: August 2008

  • History repeating itself in Afghanistan

    Rockets, guile and the lessons of history: the Taleban besiege Kabul. The lorry drivers who bring the Pepsi and petrol for Nato troops in Kabul have their own way of calculating the Taleban’s progress towards the Afghan capital: they simply count the lorries destroyed on the main roads.

    By that measure, and many others, this looks increasingly like a city under siege as the Taleban start to disrupt supply routes, mimicking tactics used against the British in 1841 and the Soviets two decades ago.

    Abdul Hamid, 35, was ferrying Nato supplies from the Pakistani border last month when Taleban fighters appeared on the rocks above and aimed their rocket-launchers at him, 40miles (65km) east of Kabul. “They just missed me but hit the two trucks behind,” he said. “This road used to be safe, but in the last month they’ve been attacking more and more.” [Times Online]

  • This sounds familiar

    Twins chase the news on L.A.’s dark streets. It was pushing 11 on a Friday night, and Austin Raishbrook wanted to be prowling the streets of Los Angeles looking for murder and mayhem.

    Mired in a pocket of messy downtown traffic, the 32-year-old British transplant clenched the wheel of his Police Interceptor Crown Victoria and cursed out loud. Every few seconds, he turned his attention to the laptop computer glowing beside him, checking for any fresh crash alerts on an internal California Highway Patrol website.

    One of the three radio scanners clipped to the visor above Raishbrook’s head crackled to life. A Los Angeles Police Department dispatcher reported gunshots on 110th Street, near Broadway. A victim was lying in the street.

    […]

    “With shootings, you need to get there quick enough to get the shot of them loading him into the ambulance,” he said, weaving in and out of lanes and blowing past cars that appeared to be standing still. “Unless he’s dead on arrival. If he’s D.O.A., you’ve got all the time in the world.”

    Raishbrook has an identical twin brother, Howard, who also spends most nights in a Crown Vic, monitoring police scanners. The brothers don’t wear badges of any sort. But if it’s late at night in Los Angeles and there is a police pursuit, shootout, terrible car accident or a good-sized fire, chances are they’ll be there. They’ll be the ones with the video cameras. [Los Angeles Times]

    It’s ironic that I came across this article so soon after reading a (badly reproduced) copy of a book by Weegee, a photographer famous for doing much the same thing (with a still camera) 70 years ago in New York.

  • Spam fighting

    When I switched to WordPress I left comments enabled, and in the (roughly) one month since then I’ve already received 21 spam comments–thus reminding me of why I had disabled comments in Movable Type. Rather than disable comments again, I’m trying out reCAPTCHA, a service which displays two annoyingly hard to decipher pictures of words which much be typed in to post a comment.

    Unlike other such services, the words displayed by reCAPTCHA are taken from scans of old books that couldn’t be deciphered by optical character recognition software. This way at least the effort spent trying to figure out what the pictures say will at least benefit people who scan old books.

  • All the comment spam is remind…

    All the comment spam is reminding me of why I disabled comments on my blog in the previous software.

  • No capitalism allowed

    Jackboots Crush Bacon Dogs.

    dog death

    Here at reason, we’ve been on the bacon dog beat for a while now, chronicling the brave men and women who grill bacon dogs on L.A.’s street corners, in defiance of rules and regulations which class bacon as a "hazardous food." The story has everything: class warfare, racism, protection rackets, relish, and mustard.

    This latest development is so not kosher—a veritable bacon dog Kristallnacht:

    At Hollywood and Highland last Friday night, police cracked down on the little ladies with the cars selling those street favorites. All the food and all their equipment were confiscated and trashed.

    An LAist photographer was there, and he caught a series of horrifying images, including the one above, which depicts illegal hot dog carts being fed into the gaping maw of the dumpster truck.

    The Ur-text of bacon doggery, starring Drew Carey:

     


    [Hit and Run]

    Here in the Soviet Union v2.0, capitalism will not be tolerated.

  • Update hassles

    Updating to a newer version is much less painful with WordPress than it was with Movable Type, but it’s still not without its problems. Disappearing themes, for example.

  • Updating weblog software is a …

    Updating weblog software is a pain.

  • Somebody forgot to ask the interviewees what they intended to say

    This probably won’t stay up for very long, as it’s on YouTube, but there’s video clip of an interview with an American citizen who was in South Ossetia when the war started, along with her aunt who escaped back to the US with her. She specifically points out during the interview that it was Georgia that started the war and was bombing civilians, and thanks the Russian troops for protecting her.

    This aired on Fox News, and the reporter interviewing them didn’t look too happy. I’ll bet he got some nasty phone calls from his bosses after the show!

  • What’s really happening in Georgia

    Georgia: the messy truth behind the morality tale. It is remarkable how quickly other people’s bloody tragedies can be transformed into simple morality tales by Western observers sitting in cushioned, air-conditioned offices.

    Almost as soon as the terrible violence broke out in Georgia and South Ossetia, voices in the West were insisting that this was a straightforward tale of a plucky independent republic (Georgia) standing up to a ‘bully wreaking havoc’ (Russia). Georgia is presented as bravely defending its democratic writ by wishing to hold on to South Ossetia, while Russia is accused of ‘dismembering’ a nation state by supporting the South Ossetians’ separatist sensibilities (1). There have been demands for the Western powers, in particular America, to defend Georgia – a rare representative of ‘freedom and civilisation’ in the East (2) – and to chastise the Russians. One commentator says Russia should be ‘denied the prestige that comes with membership of the G8’ (3).

    The problem with this fairytale script that is being cut-and-pasted on to the horrendous massacres of people in South Ossetia and Georgia is that it is almost entirely wrong. Georgia is no free-spirited, democratic republic, but an increasingly authoritarian regime that bans overly critical media outlets and criminalises opposition parties (4). Russia is acting not from an imperialist, expansionist standpoint but out of desperation, behaving recklessly because it feels its sovereign authority challenged by numerous ex-Soviet republics. [Spiked]

    An unusually rational look at the history behind the war in Georgia and who really started it.

  • The answer is obvious

    DAVID T. BEITO: A Query on Two Secessions: Kosovo and South Ossetia.

    Can anybody explain why the U.S. opposed violent anti-secessionism by Serbia in Kosovo but (apparently) now apparently supports violent anti-secessionism by Georgia in South Ossetia?

    [Liberty & Power: Group Blog]

    That’s easy to answer. Georgia is a client state of the Evil Empire; Serbia was not.