Thousands of people have perished in a massive earthquake on the Indonesian Island of Java.
The quake, measuring 6.2, flattened buildings in a densely-populated area south of the city of Yogyakarta, near the southern coast of Java.
Witnesses said people fled as their homes collapsed around them, after the quake struck early in the morning.
This is a very bad one, folks. AP coverage here. No reports of tsunamis, but there may or may not be reason to be concerned about an eruption of Mount Merapi, the volcano that has been threatening eruption in recent weeks. Experts are divided on the possibility.
And we have proof! Officials from the Sutton and East Surrey Water Utility have threatened a circus with heavy fines if their clowns throw buckets of water on one another. The ban also applies to squirting lapel flowers.
Entertainers from Zippo's Circus were told they risked heavy fines if they continued to throw up to 20 buckets of the increasingly precious resource over each other in their slapstick "slosh" shows, Saturday's papers said.
With a hosepipe ban also in place, the funnymen and women will not be able to squirt each other with water from plastic flowers in their buttonholes, either.
The circus' spokesman, one Zippo the Clown, said, "The water board has had a complete sense of humour failure."
The utility spokesman said, "No one else is allowed to fill buckets from a hose in their back garden and throw them over each other, so why should the clowns?"
I'll leave it up to the reader to judge which one is really the clown here.
Even the cost of a human life. Sir Edmund Hillary doesn't think much of climbers who value a trip to the summit of Mount Everest more than they do a human life. Worst of all is the number of people who think that their reaching the summit is more important.
Mount Everest pioneer Sir Edmund Hillary said Wednesday he was shocked that dozens of climbers left a British mountaineer to die during their own attempts on the world's tallest peak. David Sharp, 34, died while descending from the summit during a solo climb last week, apparently of oxygen deficiency.
More than 40 climbers are thought to have seen him as he lay dying, and almost all continued to the summit without offering assistance.
One hopes there is a very special place in Hell for such selfishness.
Well, this is one that ticks me off to no end. A man in Livingston, Louisiana filled his gas tank, then discovered he did not have money to pay for it. An argument ensued with the store owner. The man tried to drive away.
So the store owner shot two tires out on the vehicle.
Both the driver and the store owner were arrested. Good. Throw the book at the store owner. This is one of those things that gets cited by anti-gun folks as proof that guns (and gun owners) are dangerous. No, stupid people are dangerous. And firing a gun over less than $40 worth of gasoline is bone stupid.
One has to ask what Detroit is thinking these days. The auto industry is struggling with the outlook for GM quite grim at the moment. Still, I think offering certain option packages can help increase sales a bit. But I draw the line at this. Pythons are not a good choice.
The next time Dan McBride rents a car, he may want to inspect it not just for dings and dents but also for snakes.
The assistant athletic director at Eastern Kentucky University found a two-foot-long ball python in his rental car this week as he left the Ohio Valley Conference baseball tournament in Paducah.
Apparently, McBride thought it was a gag and put the car into gear. Whereupon the snake looked at him. McBride really, really wanted to leave the car, but the snake had draped itself over the gearshift.
No, I'll say this, McBride is made of sterner stuff than Mrs. Gaius. Had this happened to her, the rental car would have a brand new sunroof. And she wouldn't have cared where the car drove itself off too, either! I had to go chase away a teeny little grass snake for her just the other day. A two foot python would have ended in hysterics. And modifications to the roof.
Victor Davis Hanson has an article out that helps provide some vital perspective on what we have accomplished in Iraq. It's a fitting read for a Memorial Day weekend.
There may be a lot to regret about the past policy of the United States in the Middle East, but the removal of Saddam Hussein and the effort to birth democracy in his place is surely not one of them. And we should remember that this Memorial Day.
Whatever our righteous anger at Khomeinist Iran, it was wrong, well aside from the arms-for-hostages scandal, to provide even a modicum of aid to Saddam Hussein, the great butcher of his own, during the Iran-Iraq war.
Inviting the fascist Baathist government of Syria into the allied coalition of the first Gulf War meant that we more or less legitimized the Assad regime’s take-over of Lebanon, with disastrous results for its people.
It may have been strategically in error not to have taken out Saddam in 1991, but it was morally wrong to have then encouraged Shiites and Kurds to rise up — while watching idly as Saddam’s reprieved planes and helicopters slaughtered them in the thousands.
A decade of appeasement of Islamic terrorism, with retaliations after the serial attacks — from the first World Trade Center bombing to Khobar Towers and the USS Cole — never exceeding the occasional cruise missile or stern televised lecture, made September 11 inevitable.
A decade was wasted in subsidizing Yasser Arafat on the pretense that he was something other than a mendacious thug.
By reminding us of our past policy failures, Hanson helps put what we have accomplished into context. Most of what we have done actually rectifies years of bad moves we have made in the Middle East. There is no government on the face of this earth who has done more to save the lives of Muslims than the United States. Please go read it.
UPDATE: Many thanks to Alexandra at All Things Beautiful for linking. High prasie indeed if she thinks my words worth quoting.
The New York Times is reporting that there are internal debates within the administration over whether to open talks with Iran or not. Many of the senior officials are against doing so, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Sources for the story were granted anonymity, so it is difficult to decide what level people are debating it at this point. It would seem to be some high level Europeans that are in favor of it and possibly some mid to mid-upper Americans (that's a guess from the way the article phrases a few things).
But since the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the crisis over the seizure of American hostages in November that year, the United States has avoided direct talks with Iran. There were sporadic contacts during the war in Afghanistan, in the early stages of the Iraq war and in the days after the earthquake in Bam, Iran, at the end of 2003.
European officials say Ms. Rice has begun discussing the issue with top aides at the State Department. Her belief, they say, is that ultimately the matter will have to be addressed by the administration's national security officials, whether talks with Iran remain at an impasse or even if there is some progress.
But others who know her well say she is resisting on the ground that signaling a willingness to talk would show weakness and disrupt the delicate negotiations with Europe. Ms. Rice is also said to fear that the administration might end up making too many concessions to Iran.
Rice's position is spot on in this matter. If the US talks to Tehran, they will interpret it as weakness. Period. There is only one way in which we could do so and not appear weak, as Charles Krauthammer said yesterday. If European powers endorsed talks as a last resort and promised military support if the talks fail, then we would not be seen as weak. Ultimately that unified threat of force would make it less likely that force would need to be used.
Showing weakness would increase the probability of war to a near certainty.
Civilization, World news | Gaius Saturday, 27 May , 2006 | 
Comments (1) 
