Keys Corner

A bomber with 6 cruise missiles having atomic warheads under the wings flies across the USA from North Dakota to Louisiana:

The plane took the cruise missiles from Minot Air Force Base to Barksdale Air Force Base for decommissioning Thursday, the Air Force said.

“This is a major gaffe, and it’s going to cause some heads to roll down the line,” said Don Shepperd, a retired Air Force major general and military analyst for CNN.

The warheads should have been removed from the missiles before they were attached to the B-52 bomber, according to military officials.

Good job they didn’t drop off – imagine the chaos a perceived atomic attack would have set off, when you think what a bag of flour or a flashing circuit board can do…

Behaviour, which elsewhere would hardly raise an eyebrow, can get you arrested in the USA.

IKEA in New Haven (USA) was closed on Thursday last week after a customer reported seeing a woman scattering a white powder outside the store. City and state police, firefighters, the FBI, and the city Health Department were all called in to investigate. The powder turned out later to be flour, which was being used to mark the route of a paper chase.

Police arrested a brother and his sister who had marked the trail for an international running club and charged them with first-degree breach of peace. A police spokesman, asked if a breach of peace, which is a felony, was too severe a charge for someone marking their running trail said, “I think the question we should be asking is: ‘What did their act cost the city of New Haven?’”.

Not quite in the same category as the Boston Mooninites, but almost.

An interesting article in today’s Handelsblatt caught my eye today. It appears that the CIA might have been funding illegal operations by bringing forged $100 bills into circulation. To date, bills worth $50 million have been confiscated.

A little searching on the internet turned up a short article in the English Wikipedia reporting the same story and dating the first report (by a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) to this effect in January 2007. Interestingly, the White House has been claiming that North Korea is the guilty party.

Europeans consistently regard the US as the biggest threat to world stability, a new poll revealed in the Financial Times today:

...Inhabitants of Spain are most concerned about the US, with 46 per cent of respondents naming America as the biggest threat.

European poll respondents – who also come from France, Germany, Italy and the UK – are increasingly concerned about China, which 19 per cent perceive as the biggest threat, up from 12 per cent last July.

Meanwhile, 17 per cent identify Iran as the biggest threat, 11 per cent Iraq and 9 per cent North Korea. Only 5 per cent single out Russia, despite increased tensions between Moscow and the west…

Research In Motion, the manufacturer of BlackBerrys says: no way, but the French government has banned the use of the BlackBerry by civil servants because their mail gets routed through servers in the USA. Actually, the ban came into effect 18 months ago, but a reminder was issued this week.

In fact, the US government has required copies of all telecommunications crossing their national boundaries since before the Second World War, and more recently has passed laws such as the USA Patriot Act and CALEA which require communications to be made available to the US government or law enforcement agencies. We won’t mention ECHELON either, will we? So my guess would be that the French government is justified in assuming their Blackberrys are being monitored.

Ruth told me about a program she heard while drving home yesterday – about how apparently 53% of all Americans believe the world was created around 6000 years ago and that the bible is to be understood literally (about creating the world in 6 days and so on).

I found this web site which is run by a multi-faith group, which has done some analysis on the figures, which seem to be in that ballpark. While all the statistics quoted on the site are interesting, I thought the statistics near the bottom of the page particularly interesting:

Beliefs elsewhere in the world:

Belief in creation science seems to be largely a U.S. phenomenon among countries [in] the West. A British survey of 103 Roman Catholic priests, Anglican bishops and Protestant ministers/pastors showed that:

• 97% do not believe the world was created in six days.
• 80% do not believe in the existence of Adam and Eve.

It seems a US missile defence system similar to that intended for Poland that is upsetting Russia at the moment can only shoot down modern weapons:

The Pentagon was forced to abort a bid to shoot down a long-range missile over the Pacific Friday when it failed to fly high enough to engage the missile defense system, US officials said.

“The target did not reach sufficient altitude to be deemed a threat and so the Ballistic Missile Defense System did not engage it, as designed,” said Air Force Lieutenant General Henry Obering…

...But Obering said there was “always a risk of this occurrence since we are flying old intercontinental ballistic missile motors in our targets.

“We have initiated a target modernization program within our existing budget, which should mitigate these risks for the future,” he said, adding the agency would try to repeat the test later this summer.

Given that Russia probably has a lot of older missiles lying around, it obviously shouldn’t be a problem for them if they want to pop off a missile or two. On the other hand why any EU country would want to install such a system is a bit of a puzzle. A defence system which consists of a grand total of ten missiles only capable of shooting down high-powered hardware seems a bit pointless, don’t you think?

(Yes, I know the US claims the defence is against Iran – I hope they know what state the Iranian rocket motors are in, they didn’t get it right on WMD in Iraq, did they?)

The lengths the US government goes to, to try and convince its subjects that they are under threat from dark forces is truly incredible:

My father, a Palestinian professor named Sami Al-Arian, was arrested over four years ago on trumped-up terrorism charges and submitted to a prosecution over the course of six months that bordered on the farcical. Though he was ultimately acquitted by a jury of the most serious charges against him, the Bush administration has prolonged his imprisonment indefinitely. My father now languishes in a Virginia jail, another victim of the demagogic politics of the so-called war on terror.

Many have wondered why my father would be targeted so vigorously, especially after the government lost a case that cost $50 million…

...When my father’s trial finally began in June 2005, the government presented 71 witnesses, including nearly two dozen from Israel, paraded before the jury for sheer emotional effect. Four hundred phone calls out of half a million the government recorded during a decade of relentless, indiscriminate surveillance of my family were also presented. The prosecutors acted out the phone calls on the 13th floor of a courtroom in downtown Tampa, giving new meaning to the phrase political theater…

I spent some time in the 1980’s regreting that I hasn’t tried to get a job in the USA - I worked on a project which involved regular trips to different parts of the country – including both US coasts, and several cities in the middle of the country, and was very impressed with both the spectacular landscapes and the friendly American people. We know several Brits who did move to the USA and took American citizenship, but now I am really glad we never got our act together. As Naomi Wolf pointed out in the Guardian a couple of days ago, they are already well down the road to having a fascist government.

Gill gave us a G.W. Bush calendar last Christmas, which has been a source of much amusement so far – each day’s sheet has a quotation from the US President. However, if you don’t have the calendar, it’s OK - the White House web site is also a good source for his quotes. Like this one, for example, taken from a speech made a couple of days ago in Ohio:

My job is a job to make decisions. I’m a decision—if the job description were, what do you do—it’s decision-maker. And I make a lot of big ones, and I make a lot of little ones.

Interestingly enough, the first decision I made happened right before I got sworn in as President. I was at the Blair House, which is across the street from the White House, getting ready to give my inaugural address. And the phone rang, and the head usher at the White House said, “President-elect Bush.” I said, “Yes.” He said, “What color rug do you want in the Oval Office?” (Laughter.) I said, this is going to be a decision-making experience. (Laughter.)

If you have any plans to visit the spectacular Grand Canyon Skywalk, you will probably be interested to read this article first – here’s the salient point:

We walked in to get the tickets and met a very long line of people waiting to do the same. After 10 minutes of waiting, a “Question Answerer” came by and made it clear why it was taking so long: the sales people had to explain the “packages” and pricing to each and every person in the line. This was not because the package was that complex, but because each person in the line thought they were going to be paying $25 per person. In reality, the tribe was charging another $50 on top of the $25 for each person. You read that right, 75 bucks a pop. The “Question Answerer” explained it to us:

“The investor wants to get his, that’s the $25. But it’s our land, and we don’t get any of that $25, so we have to get ours too, you know?”

On top of the $75 you need to add tax, making $83 per person. For that price, by the way, you are not allowed to take your camera onto the Skywalk.