Dannatt, Chavez, Iraq, Hopkins, HIV

aljazeera
Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt .. in an interview with the Daily Mail Friday that Britain's Iraq venture was aggravating the security threat elsewhere in the world.

..troops should "get ... out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems".
"The original intention was that we put in place a liberal democracy that was an exemplar for the region, was pro-West and might have a beneficial effect on the balance within the Middle East. That was the hope, whether that was a sensible or naive hope history will judge. I don't think we are going to do that. I think we should aim for a lower ambition."

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swedemeat
Why did Chavez buy those useless jets?

[should have bought] antitank weapons (a Russian specialty since 1941) and antitank mines, some of them undetectable by most mineclearing systems. The point is, Chavez didn't buy any of these things.

What he did buy with his $3 billion was 24 Sukhoi Su-30 fighters and 53 helicopters. Against a US invasion, all that hardware would be an instant writeoff. If you want to beat the US armed forces, you don't buy fighter jets, because they'll just get shot down
....
and that brings us to the real reason Chavez is spending all those petrodollars on useless Russian fighters: he's scared of a coup, not an invasion. So he's trying to create a new wing of the air force, trained on non-American hardware and loyal to him. It's the oldest trick in the book, creating a parallel military force to protect yourself from the established armed forces.

[wingnuts do techspeak better]

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more from swedemeat:

if however a sufficient objective for the Administration and the interests they champion is to incapacitate the nations of the region by bringing them into a state of chaotic equilibrium that prevents them from furthering any domestic or pan-regional agendas for growth not in lockstep with U.S. interests then a disastrous attack, as defined by a discrepancy between what is promised in selling the war to the public and what is actually achieved, must reasonably be allowed to be considered a significant success.

From this adjusted perspective, Iraq is a success and that success can easily be replicated in Iran.

[you have to consider this seriously: chaos in Palestine , chaos in Iraq, is this the intended outcome?]

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et cum spiritu tuo
prophecyheadlines
Pope Benedict XVI is understood to have signed a universal indult ..for priests to celebrate ..the Tridentine Mass
..The Cornell Society blog says that Father Martin Edwards, a London priest, was told by Cardinal Joseph Zen, of Hong Kong, that the indult had been signed.

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blogs:
iowahawk funny, despite link from lgf

belgraviadispatch lefty
thedigitaldiplomat lefty

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Libyan laptops
aljazeera
The $250 million deal, reached on Tuesday, would provide the nation with 1.2 million computers, a server in each school, a team of technical advisers, satellite internet service and other infrastructure.

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Hopkins Iraq study: the pdf:
thelancet
By Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, Les Roberts
A careful Johns Hopkins study has estimated that between 420,000 and 790,000 Iraqis have died as a result of war and political violence since the beginning of the US invasion in March, 2003.
........................
palestinianpundit
"Add to this the 1.5 million killed as a result of the United Nations imposed (at the behest of the United States and Britain) sanctions—more than 500,000 of them children—and you have a total working its way toward the 3,500,000 killed in Southeast Asia from 1960 to 1973 (see Matthew White’s well referenced Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century).

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virusmyth
If HIV caused sickness, then non-seropositives should have a normal death rate.
But non- sero-positive people have a lower than normal death rate.
So sickness causes HIV infection, HIV infection does not cause sickness.
- an interesting argument.

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11 October 2006
The population of the United States will pass 300 million today, or tomorrow.

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isis (care: pdf)
Tactical nuclear weapons: Europe’s redundant weapons of mass destruction

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Australian lack of broadband puts it at a disadvantage in OECD
Asians visiting here are shocked at the pathetic ADSL speeds & prices
engadgetmobile kalimna
Canadians pay $54 per month for unlimited downloads and speeds of 5 megabits per second while Australians pay $99-95 to Telstra for a download limit of 10 gigabytes at 1/4 the speed.
Punishing metering restrictions discourages online music, video, games and interactive services. It also limits broadband use in education, science and trade. It also imposes more basic costs of just communicating. High costs of broadband access lead to low levels of market penetration and low effective network externalities - Australian per capita incomes are 75% of those in the US but levels of broadband use in households is 33% compared to the US's

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Dannatt Chavez Iraq Hopkins HIV