Mon Dieu! We can't be outdone by France!

U.S. increases tsunami aid to $350 million
This excerpt of the above story may be the most telling:

France has promised $57 million, Britain has pledged $95 million, Sweden is sending $75.5 million and Spain is offering $68 million, although that pledge is partly in loans.

We were being out-donated by our friends in Britain, those socialists in Sweden and, that favorite foil of the right, France!
Whether they were shamed into it or not doesn't matter so much right now. The US is finally stepping up to be the superpower she is: $350 million.
Now that's more like it!

The United States of Harkonnen

David Lynch's Dune is playing on AMC (BTW, I recommend the TV miniseries made in 2000 over Lynch's arty and stylistic freakfest) and it sparked a brief email communiqué betwixt my wife and myself (I'm at work, you see, and on my lunch break as I write this) which I tried to convince her that not only is Frank Herbert's Dune an unequivocable masterpiece of fiction, science or otherwise, it reads today with a rather uneasy prescience.

The spice has long been seen as an allegory for oil, especially since it is only available from a desolate desert, the planet Arrakis (aka "Dune"). I had always seen Arrakis as Saudi Arabia but what if we were to substitute that for the entirity of the Islamic OPEC nations? Could not Saddam Hussein sub-in for the Beast Rabban? Sadly, that puts the US in the role of the House Harkonnen (technically, that casting would put W as the Baron but, really, isn't Dick Cheney playing that part already?), the villains of the story. And who will rise up as Muad'Dib? The muslim world is primed for a messianic figure to rise up and rally around.

If only this adminstration read literature beyond The Very Hungry Catepillar and My Pet Goat. Perhaps, after Condi "no one could have imagined it" Rice finishes the last few chapters of Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor (first published in 1994) which ends with an airliner intentionally crashing into the Capitol building during a joint session of Congress, she and Wolfy and the gang might take a gander at Dune.

Stingy Americans?

Absent so long from the blog and then the utter enomity of the earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia and across the Indian Ocean coast is just overwhelming. So much so that when the I heard the US initially pledged just $15 million in aid I thought, "Huh? That can't be right. Jerry Lewis raises about four times that amount every Labor Day Weekend for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. We're spending about 15 times that amount every f-ing day for the war in Iraq. It just didn't sound like the America I knew and grew up in.
And I was right. It wasn't long before that number was more than doubled to $35 million and that was deemed just a begining. That's still a paltry amount given the enormity of this catastrophe, but that's all that was in the coffers of the US Agency for International Development's emergency relief fund. That's it for our "ready cash". Perhaps more aid will be forthcoming but it may take congressional action.
Then again maybe Jan Egeland, UN emergency relief coordinator, was looking at the percentage of each nation's GDP when he refered to "many Western countries" as "stingy". (You'll note that he did not single out the US but that is how the right-wingers are taking it; methinks the laddies doth protest too much.) The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's figures on aid report that none of the world's richest countries donated even 1 percent of its gross national product. Norway was highest, at 0.92 percent; the United States was last, at 0.14 percent.
To be fair, we should also notet that last year the US spent $15.8 billion, the most of any nation for "official development assistance" and nearly double that of Japan, the next closest. But as a proportion of what we as a nation earn, it's still seems "stingy".

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article ref: CNN.com - Stingy Americans? U.N. official's comment hits nerve - Dec 28, 2004

e-Vote Manipulation Programmer Comes Forward

Still fending off voracious, time-eating monsters that kept me from commenting on our troops giving Rummy some much-needed sass and Bush's philandering, mob-connected nominee for the Department of Homeland Security but I just had to pop in a note to divert your attention to Florida.

Bubbling up through the blogosphere is a story that every e-voting Luddite warned us about. Clinton Curtis, a programmer for Yang Enterprises, signed an affadavit alleging that he was instructed by Republican state representative Tom Feeney to develop a program that could alter vote tabluation without detection. The program needed to be touch-screen capable and remain hidden even if the source code was inspected. Curtis developed and delivered a prototype supposedly believing Feeney wanted to know to detect if Democrats tried something. He later learned from his employer that his software might be used to control the vote in Florida.

The linked article on the Blue Lemur has a few more links which includes a PDF of the affadavit.

So still keep one eye on Ohio as that plays out but point your other one down to Florida.