I will be suspending this blog, and its newest sibling (Aries, Mork, or Tahoe) until August 2013.

This action is being taken because our family’s upcoming move to the capital city of the Land of Smiles.

Preparations for this move will take up a vast amount of time as the logistics (not to mention the bureaucracy) of a move halfway around the world are quite daunting.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you in August.

Richard Nixon had Watergate.

Ronald Reagan had the Iran-Contra Affair.

Bill Clinton had an affair.

George W Bush had the Valerie Plame Affair.

And now, the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has Benghazi, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, and the Department of Justice’s snooping on the Associated Press all on his scandal-plate.

Maybe Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush are happy with the fact they were one-term presidents.

For example, if a person sides with Group A over Group B in a given situation based on a principle, then that same person should also side with Group B if the roles were reversed because the principle remains the same.

In an earlier post, I showed how a member of the Supreme Court of the United States switched principles depending on who was making the argument. Let me now expand on this idea to the world at large.

As a Jew, I take the situation regarding the existence of Israel rather personally.

In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted to implement a partition plan that would have created two states: one Palestinian and one Jewish.

When the British Mandate over Palestine ended on May 14, 1948, David ben Gurion declared Israel to be an independent state. The following day, neighboring Arab states invaded the Jewish State in what is now known as the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Shockingly, and against all the odds, Israel won.

Almost two decades later, in 1967, war broke out again. As Egyptian forces crossed UN lines and massed on Israel’s southern borders, the Israeli Air Force launched a surprise attack against Egypt starting the Six-Day War. At the end of that conflict, Israel had taken over the Sinai Peninsula (from Egypt), the West Bank (Jordan), the Gaza Strip (Egypt), and the Golan Heights (Syria).

In 1979, as part of the Camp David Accords, Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt. In 1993, as part of the Oslo Accords, some portions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip were placed under the control of the newly created Palestinian Authority. In 2005, Israeli forces left the Gaza Strip. However, to this day, the Jewish State has maintained control over portions of the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

This Israeli control over these lands once held by Arabs has not sat well with the Arab world and with the international community. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC), with its Resolution 497, calls on Israel to rescind its annexation of the Golan Heights. Reactions from the Arab street are negative when Israel builds settlements in the West Bank

So what would be the mood of the “Arab Street” (whatever that phrase means) if an Arab country annexed land belonging to a neighbor. If the Arab states were adhering to the principle that annexation, in any form, was bad, then it would be obvious that leaders from Libya to Egypt to Syria would demand that their Arab brothers return said land.

But why imagine when I can bring you a real-world case study.

Allow me to introduce you to the African area of land known as Western Sahara.

A colony of Spain in the late 19th century, the Western Sahara is bordered by Morocco to its north, Algeria on its extreme northeast, Mauritania to its east and south, and its western border is the Atlantic Ocean.

Morocco had claimed the land bound by the Western Sahara as its own since 1957. In 1975, Spain relinquished control of its colony to a joint administration run by Morocco and Mauritania. Mauritania withdrew from the joint administration in 1979 and Morocco took full control of the territory.

However, the people who originally lived in Western Sahara were not too pleased to be under anyone’s rule and the Sahrawi national liberation movement (also known as the Polisario Front) was created and it proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in the area known as Western Sahara.

So here you have a portion of land once run by a European party which walks away and a neighboring country takes de facto control of the land and its people. To make the comparison even more obvious, the annexing country builds a wall to contain the original inhabitants.

(For comparison, the Moroccan Wall in Western Sahara is 2,700 kilometers in length where as the Israeli West Bank wall is 700 km in length.)

So what has been the international response to this annexation by an Arab country? Has there been a UNSC resolution asking Morocco to immediately give up its claim?

Of course not.

Among the UNSC resolutions that have been adopted, there has been a resolution asking for a cease-fire to the conflict between Moroccan forces and the Polisario Front (UNSC Resolution 690) and there has been one asking for a referendum so that the people could decide (UNSC Resolution 995).

I’d like to link to any negative commentary from an Arabic news service about the annexation by Morocco of the Western Sahara, but I can’t seem to find any. If you come across any, please let me know.

So while the international news community files story after story after story after story about today being the Palestinian commemoration of Nakba (The Day of Catastrophe…otherwise known as the day Israel declared its independence in 1948), don’t expect a similar rush to criticize the conquering power when the anniversary of the annexation of the Western Sahara by Morocco comes around.

Why?

Because of الازدواجية …which is “double standard” in Arabic.

On this date, twenty-five years ago (there’s your number for the day), I lost my virginity.

On May 13, 1988, I had sex for the first time. My partner in this inaugural nocturnal endeavour was my girlfriend at the time who has since gone on to become my lovely wife.

And who says guys can’t remember an anniversary?

Most recently with the news out of Cleveland of the three rescued kidnapped girls, the dreaded metaphor is making itself known.

It raised its head after the bombings at the Boston Marathon with the likes of CNN and Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC) to Linda Chavez all using the same cliché.

This disdainful trope fully came into its own when folks gathered around their keyboards to discuss the failures of the intelligence communities in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. (Un)Fine examples can be seen here and here and here.

I speak, of course, of the “connect-the-dots” metaphor.

The problem with the knee-jerk criticism of “Why couldn’t XYZ connect the dots?” is that the critic has the advantage of hindsight. After the fact (e.g., attack, crime, malfeasance, etc.), it is always easy to see the clues hiding in plain sight.

Before the event, it is nearly impossible to connect the dots. The reason for this is due to the number of dots. In a true connect-the-dots picture, the dots are clearly labelled in an easy sequential order and there are no extraneous dots. As with the example below, it is child’s play to even guess the mystery image before the pencil even hits Dot#1.

Find the farm equipment

However, law enforcement and intelligence officials – those most often criticized for failing to connect the dots – do not have the luxury of numbers dots with no extra material. What those people have to deal with is more analagous to the nighttime sky.

The better metaphor that you should have in your mind the next time you read some pundit cry and wail about some police force not connecting the dots is that of the constellations. Instead of the simple kiddie connect-the-dots above, what is below is a more accurate (albeit simplified) picture.

Now find the tractor

Look at all those dots in the simplified starchart above and multiply those dots by 100. Now try to find the picture of the tractor.

That’s what the police and people who work in agencies with three-letter acronyms have to contend with. Given that situation, the surprise is not that the legal system misses events, but that it actually does manage to find the signal in the noise.

…politics (examples here and here);

…economic theory (examples here and here);

…climate change (examples here and here);

…child rearing (examples here and here);

…etc. etc. etc. for dozens of other topics, my follow-up questions is this…

Why is it not acceptable to criticize or even mock the spiritual beliefs of another?

Really.

One life lesson that that former employment taught me was to always test something before releasing it into the wild – or at least before the customer gets a hold of it.

When I tested software, I always strove to ensure that I would find all of the bugs so that the end user would not. In addition to uncovering all the glitches, our verification department also made sure that the program under test satisfied the requirements of the user. In other words, not only did we test to see what was wrong with the software, we also verified what was right with the application.

This was a lesson not fully embraced by a certain company and said business had its hands slapped publicly (or at least on the World Wide Web) by the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

In yet another of my treks around the Internet (such as here and here), I found this news release from HHS stating that the department had revoked the certifications of two software programs designed to be part of the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs. This was done because the programs did not meet the required functionality.

That’s why you test. So your programs don’t wind up in news releases from the government.

The “paltry” and “disappointing” figure of 88,000 jobs created last month was revised by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to 138,000. I will be curious to see if news outlets revise their stories to reflect the fact that 50,000 more jobs were created in March than announced…or it will simply be ignored.

What cannot be ignored is that when I wrote today’s ceditra entry two years ago, the unemployment rate stood at 9.0%. While it is good news that the rate has dropped a percentage point and a half and that 4,000,000 jobs have been created since April 2011, it’s not all that much of a boon if you are still one of the unemployed.

The depression that can overcome someone who is not working was definitely on my mind as my random process for discovering topics to write about (which can never be described as “discouraged”) brought me to page 612 of my local dictionary.

>>>>>>>>>
poor-house, n
1. a house of correction for petty offenders
2. a public institution in which the destitute of a parish received board and lodging in return for work

The original theme of this ceditra entry was going to be a discussion of my fear of being poor. Granted, in the 21st Century America, debtors are not placed by the government in a workhouse to do labor to pay off their debts. Now, those who are poor face other challenges – like living in unsafe neighborhoods, attending low-performing schools, and generally existing in a cycle of poverty. From the days of the 1980 Reagan-Era recession when my father’s and grandfather’s business went under, our family – for the first time – had to cut back on luxuries. From that time, I have always been in fear of not having enough money.

Yes, I am fully aware in hindsight that my family’s “privations” were insignificant compared to the what other families went through, but I didn’t see it that way at the time because I was twelve.

My parents still managed to keep our house (and still have it), keep us fed, AND send all of us off to college. So part of me realizes that my fear is somewhat misplaced.

However, like all irrational fears, it is still there.

It is there when M. and I met with our financial advisor and he suggested that we place X amount of money in some account that would have left us with an amount in our checking account that was below the amount I felt comfortable with. This unnerved me because I believe (and this belief only exists to quiet my fear) that I am safer when I have more liquid assets available in the checking account. However, I also realize that that belief completely defeats the purpose of investing.

Crap! Being an adult is hard.
>>>>>>>>>>

I am currently part-time employed. I will soon be out of a job in a pair of months. I will be looking again when we make the jump to the other side of the world.

I keep the fear in check.

My apologies to The Bard but I have no idea what the best answer to his query is.

What I do have at my disposal is a ceditra entry from two years ago. My random process for selecting subjects to write about (which still smells as sweet as a rose despite whatever it is called) landed me on page 203 of the book Boyd’s Curiosity Shop which states…

>>>>>>>>>>>

“Hells Canyon” originally was “Hellers Canyon” – in memory of an early Idaho miner.

First question…Was the canyon named for the miner Heller because this eponymous gentleman dies in said geographical feature?

Second question…Was this chap Heller related in any way to the only other famous Heller I can think of – the author of Catch-22, Joseph Heller?

Third question…How did the name morph from its original designation to the appellation we have today?

Why do names change?

Throughout history, people have altered what places have been called for one reason or another.

I’m not even going to dive into the “euphemism” phenomenon expertly articulated by George Carlin where the horrors of certain conditions are softened via linguistic obfuscation (i.e., “shell shock” become “post-traumatic stress disorder”).

One obvious reason why names change is for political reasons, also known as “winner’s prerogative”. After the Russian Revolution, St. Petersburg was renamed Leningrad. After the Soviet Union broke up (but continues to remain good friends despite the fact that Tajikistan still has Russia’s albums and Ayn Rand books), the name was changed back.

Another reason is for cultural sensitivity. Aboriginal names are starting to make a comeback and replace the names imposed upon them by Western explorers. Ayers Rock in Australia is being known again as Uluru. Alaska’s Mount McKinley becomes Denali and India is now referring to Bombay as Mumbai.

>>>>>>>>>>

Of course Constantinople is now called Istanbul. Why? It’s nobody’s business but the Turks.

Lawbreakers Lawbreaking?

I have written before about my desire for journalists to delete the anonymous source from their reporting.

This article from the Los Angeles Times has following three paragraphs:

The CIA shared all the information provided by the foreign government including two possible dates of birth, his name and a possible name variant as well, an official said

FBI and Russian security services have been conducting interviews separately in the Dagestan area since the Tsarnaev brothers became suspects in the bombings last week, according to a federal law enforcement official.

The officials asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation.

Read those paragraphs again and you will learn that these unnamed officials are providing information to outside sources when they have not been authorized to disseminate such data.

What other federal officials have provided information to outsiders when they weren’t authorized to do it?

Bradley Manning who currently sits in jail…
John Kiriakou who was sentenced to thirty months…
Thomas Drake who had charges against him dropped…

Notice that the above troika were all charged with crimes.

Why is it that none of the unnamed officials in the Times story have to worry about being hauled in front of a judicial proceedings? Why is it okay for an anonymous federal official to blab to Times staff about what the CIA, FBI, and Russian security services knows but it was not okay for PFC Manning to give his material to WikiLeaks?

Is Dick Van Dyke His Role Model?

On a lighter note…

This article from The New York Times has this sentence (on page 2 of the online article)…

Mike Doucette, 27, a chimney sweep who lives on the street, described seeing one brother shot and fall to the ground.

What the Dickens?!? In the second decade of the 21st Century, there are still chimney sweeps? Not only that, but there are  chimney sweeps in the United States of America?

Who knew?

And does Mr. Doucette sing “Chim Chim Chir-ee“?