Abercrombie99, Saudi flat, Wilkerson livid, Dani downs F-117

Abercrombie99, originally uploaded by Giordano Bruno.

Agave "Century plant" actually two flowered in the 6 years At Abercrombie. Supposedly pollenated only by a Mexican moth, in Sydney Honey bees did it.

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Saudi Arabia's capacity now stands at about 11 million barrels a day. The Saudis pump about 9.5 million barrels, leaving a cushion of about 1.5 million barrels, mostly of heavier grades not very usable in the West. There is virtually no other global spare capacity.

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Some USA pilotical blogs
talkleft
digby justoneminute huffington

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Col. Larry Wilkerson was Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff throughout Bush's first term. A career soldier, he's also served as director of the U. S. Marine Corps War College. In short, he's anything but a fuzzyminded pacifist.
Last week, Wilkerson gave a speech at the New American Foundation in Washington blaming a secretive " cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld," for seizing power from an ignorant, intellectually lazy president. They were aided, he said, by "an extremely weak national security adviser" (Condoleezza Rice ), who told Bush whatever he wanted to hear "to build her intimacy with the president."

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Another Constitutional breakdown, concerning the separation of powers, occurred in June 2004. More than a year after the Supreme Court decided in Rasul v. Bush that the nearly 600 Muslim men and young boys being held incommunicado at Guantánamo Bay were entitled to have their cases heard by U.S. courts, they remain in cold storage--no lawyers, no court dates. The Bush Administration simply ignored the ruling.
"[Bush's] Justice Department," Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate, "sees [the ruling] through the sophisticated legal prism known as the Toddler Worldview: Anything one doesn't wish to accept simply isn't true." Because the Founding Fathers never anticipated the possibility that the nation's chief executive would treat its final judgments with the respect due an out-of-state parking ticket issued to a rental car, the Supreme Court has been rendered as toothless as a gummy bear.

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26 October 2005
..Col. Zoltan Dani was behind one of the most spectacular losses ever suffered by the US Air Force: the 1999 shooting down of a F-117A stealth fighter.
.The 27 March 1999 hit on the radar-evading plane during the 78-day NATO campaign over Serbia, triggered doubts not only about the F-117s..F-117 was detected and shot down during a moonless night..by a Soviet-made SA-3 Goa (SAM).
"We used a little innovation to update our 1960s-vintage SAMs to detect the Nighthawk," Dani said...It involved "electromagnetic waves,"
..James O'Halloran, editor of Jane's Land-Based Air Defense, said the Serbs were probably able to down the fighter precisely because of their radar system's outmoded technology.
"We know he is telling the truth. ... The F-117 was designed to be stealthy against modern radars. Against old long pulse duration radars, its not stealthy," said O'Halloran. "People in the West do not like to say that."
..two allied aircraft shot down.. The other was an F-16 fighter,..also hit by an SA-3..At least one is said to have ditched into the Adriatic..the alliance never succeeded in knocking out Dani's batteries.
The Serb SAMs.. forcing attacking warplanes to altitudes above 15,000 feet, where they were safe from surface-to-air missiles but far less effective in a ground attack role.
.."The Americans entered the war a bit overconfident..
"At times, they acted like amateurs," Dani said, listing some ways the Serbs managed to breach NATO communications security, including eavesdropping on pilots' conversations with AWACS surveillance planes.
"I personally listened to their pilots' conversations, learning about their routes and bombing plans," Dani said.
Dani said that his unit has had annual reunions on every 27 March since 1999 when a cake in the shape of the F-117 is served.

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Delcan NET, a Canadian company, developed the system which triangulates the location of each driver by monitoring the signal sent from the cell phone as it is handed off from one cell tower to the next. Each phone is uniquely identified and the information is compared with a highway map to record on what road each motorist is traveling at any given time. The system also records the speed of each vehicle,