Month: March 2009

Silhouette of Birds in Flight

silhouette-of-birds-in-flig

Silhouette of Birds in Flight

I caught a flock of geese flying North to Spring mating grounds yesterday, the focus is slightly off because I was shooting through branches and had to take infinity by focusing the edge of the clouds in the background. So you see the birds as a blured silhouette, but I like this because it looks like a Japanese water color painting if you just glance at it. [as always click on the picture to see the full size ]

Cap and Tax Shell Game Pushed by Geithner

Cap and Tax Shell Game Pushed by Geithner

This is the worst possible time to be pushing cap and trade – increased prices for energy are not the answer for our economic woes, and a low energy future is not the way to combat pollution. If we want to tackle the problem we should be building clean energy, not penalizing all sources we don’t agree with because bankrupting power companies and decreasing energy supply has dire consequences for the world. Make no mistake about this: it’s the middle class tax hike Obama didn’t tell you about in the election, and it could easily be argued that sustained high energy prices for several years led directly to the mortage debacle which pushed us over the hill into recession.

Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard

Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard

The new OS’s are squaring off, here’s some real stimulus to our economy, from The Street:

Investors will be looking to see how both firms boost their sales through state-of-the-art operating systems such as Microsoft’s Windows 7 and the latest version of Apple’s Mac OS X, dubbed Snow Leopard. With Apple said to be unleashing Snow Leopard sometime this year, and Microsoft gearing up for Windows 7, the tech sector is preparing for a clash of the OSes

This gives me a big groan as undoubtably I will upgrade at some point, but I just recently went through the pain of upgrading to Vista 64 and have learned it’s quirks (like it’s wise to right click an install program and run it as administrator when you install if you don’t want problems later, etc.) So maybe I’ll see if I can do the beta, I still have some connects at MS from my days of running a tier 3 support team. With a family reunion coming and other things it’s unlikely I would splurge and pick up a Mac with the expensive tag that comes with it. (Besides that I still have nightmares from setting up a national frame relay apple talk network way way back when…)

The Yellow Peril Revealed

All it takes is one kook to cook a kookspiracy.

The Yellow Peril Revealed

In the last two days there’s been a new story appearing on some of the less than credible conservative blogs, and it’s also making the rounds in email. The story amounts to saying that as part of China buying into our debt that all land in the US was used as collateral, meaning your house, your business, your property.

It’s ridiculous if you think about it anytime at all, but the small nexus of hate that exists in some dark corners of the Conservative blogosphere knows little about sanity. This isn’t going to be a full-fisking of the story because I don’t want to send the nutballs traffic or direct too much attention their way since that’s the point of them posting it.

I will point out the genesis of the latest Kookspiracy theory. There are three pretty well known conservative blogs carrying the “China’s going to take our land through Eminent Domain” story, but tracking the links puts you in a circle between the blogs, until you arrive at an anti-semite neo-nazi site. I won’t name the blogs and I won’t link to them because they live on hysteria and sensationalism, building an audience of frothing crazies to gather notoriety and page hits. In other words the real yellow peril is not the Chinese, but rather the yellow journalism of the kookosphere.

On the 11th Bloomberg ran a story (and this is the only “hard cite” they’ve got,) regarding China needing assurances that their investment wouldn’t go South if they buy our paper from the Stimulus – in other words they need to know that we are serious about fiscal restraint and keeping the dollar secure.

So how did we get from a Bloomberg story on the background of China’s concern about buying our paper (which drove the subsequent Obama announcement and conference on fiscal restraint and reducing the deficit,) to “OMG! China’s Going to Take YOuR HowSE through Eminent DoMaiN!”?

All it takes is one kook.

Hal Turner is a raging anti-semite white supremacist nutball in every sense of the word. He’s prone to making threats and cooking up Kookspiracies. I will not link to his site because the stench of madness flies up the flue at that house, but you can see various historic pages from his site here in the Wayback machine. Note the ads in the sidebars etc., there are also news articles in archives like this one to be found.

For those who don’t believe that Hal Turner is a raging nutball with lots of neo nazi fans, here’s a snip from an article on his blog:

Many visitors to this blog thought I was some sort of nutcase for my story which revealed that upwards of 775,000 American citizens are on lists to be rounded up by our government.

Just from a skim of his current blog content and comments he also appears to be a white supremacist neo-nazi who floats a lot of conspiracy theories. He does a radio show as well, but I’m not sure if that’s just podcast or what.

Harold Charles “Hal” Turner is an American white nationalist and white supremacist from North Bergen, New Jersey. He ran his program, The Hal Turner Show, as a webcast from his home once a week, and depended on donations from his listeners. He quit the show in July 2008. In August his website also closed down, though he retains a blog.

Wikipedia has a long entry on him, with lots of links at the bottom if you require further verification. Some of those links are now gone since his blog was swarmed by Anonymous, but many of the news links are there to confirm, and the Wayback machine is also linked here to confirm.

So what is the point here? Just this: There are legitimate voices on the right that value Conservative principals like honesty deeply, but this story doesn’t come from any of them.

People who run with this are not very credible because it took me all of 20 minutes last night to sift this out. Republican politicians, pundits, and bloggers need to be careful of their associations because this stench doesn’t come out — and you certainly don’t want your picture taken with these kooks.

Where does the truth in the Stimulus paper lie? Well the Chinese will get something strategic or political out of this, but trust me that it won’t be your house.

*note: Some history on the original “Yellow Peril”  please take note of the marked similarities in source and slanders.