Bane begins his mayhem.
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07.12.2011
August 2nd, 2008 · 14 Comments
Since an old friend told me about his climbing trips to Thailand it’s been one of my boxes-to-tick. Climbing by the beach and then relaxing in the blue seas sounds too good to be true. I’m about to find out – I’ve decided to do it later this year…
Photo kindly shared by HalonaCoast on Flickr
I’m planning to make the trip in November, which should be good for weather and well clear of the rainy season.
If you’ve been sport climbing in Thailand or know anyone who has, I’d really appreciate your help.
What I need to begin are 2 things:
Recommendations for the best destinationI’m climbing 6b top-roped indoor and leading 5s at the moment, but with plenty of time to train before November I’ll like to get that into 6s. I’ve heard Krabi and Railay are two hotspots. True?
Climbing schools or centresAs I’m heading out solo I’d like to arrange a trip, an event, something to guarantee that when I get out there I can get some kit and to ensure there are belay partners around.
So – look forward to hearing from you, and I’ll keep the blog updated with the plans as they come together.
WASHINGTON ? In a potent political pairing, President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton evoked a more prosperous time in America Friday as they jointly pushed a green jobs program that Obama said harkens back to the Clinton administration when “we were firing on all cylinders.”
“We can be that nation again,” Obama said. “We will be that nation again.”
In the spare setting of a downtown Washington construction site, Obama offered a restrained assessment of the current U.S. economy even in the face of Friday’s sharp drop in unemployment, from 9 percent to 8.6 percent in November.
Noting that the U.S. has seen 21 straight months of private sector job growth, Obama said, “We need to keep that growth going.” And he prodded Congress once again to extend and expand a current Social Security payroll tax cut.
Recalling better economic times, Obama seemed almost nostalgic. Embarking on a re-election campaign, he drew not-so-subtle attention to the successes of the last two-term Democrat to serve in the White House.
“When Bill Clinton was president, we didn’t shortchange investment. We didn’t say we’re going to cut back on the things that we know are going to help us grow in the future,” he said. “We didn’t make decisions that put the burden on the middle class or the poor. We lived within our means. We invested in our future. We asked everyone to pay their fair share.
“And you know what happened? The private sector thrived. Jobs were created. The middle class grew, its income grew. Millions rose out of poverty. We ran a surplus. We were actually on track to be able to pay off all of our debt. We were firing on all cylinders.”
The unusual pairing of Obama and the popular former president was designed to draw outsize attention to a $4 billion administration energy efficiency initiative that Obama and Clinton teamed up to announce. It aims to achieve achieving fuel savings in government and private sector buildings and more employment at no increased cost to taxpayers.
Obama said the program was a cheap way to help create jobs, save money and cut down on pollution.
“It is a trifecta,” he said.
The program’s appeal is that the cost to renovate government and private sector buildings is paid off over time by the energy savings. What’s more, the contractors who perform the work guarantee that lower energy costs will materialize.
“It is the nearest thing we’ve got to a free lunch in a tough economy,” Clinton said.
The announcement is yet another in a string of White House initiatives designed to address the current weak economy without having to seek congressional approval.
But the program itself was overshadowed by the television-ready image of the incumbent president and the last two-term Democrat to serve in the White House appearing together. The appearance was reminiscent of, though not comparable to, Obama’s and Clinton’s joint appearance a year ago when Obama gave the former president the stage to endorse a tax deal between Obama and Congress.
Alluding to ads by a Republican-leaning political group that feature Clinton comments about tax increases, Obama said: “I’ve noticed that some folks on the other side have been quoting President Clinton about it’s a bad idea to raise taxes during tough economic times.
“That’s precisely why I sought to extend the payroll tax this year and next year. It doesn’t mean we lock in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. I don’t think President Clinton has been on board for that for perpetuity.”
To that, Clinton looked on with nodding delight.
Clinton spoke first Friday, praising the energy program and Obama’s leadership. Obama followed. But as they wrapped up and Obama began to guide Clinton and other guests away, a reporter asked what advice Clinton had for Obama.
“Oh, he gives me advice all the time,” Obama said, eager to leave.
Clinton returned to the microphone, but stayed on message, extolling the green building program.
When a reporter shouted whether a president can win re-election under the current economy, Clinton appeared to hear it and looked ready to respond, but Obama corralled him and ushered him away.
The program outlined Friday is designed to upgrade buildings over the next two years, with a goal of improving energy performance by 20 percent by 2020. The federal government will commit $2 billion to the effort and a coalition of corporations, labor unions, universities and local governments will undertake the other half.
Authority for the program has been in place since the Clinton administration but has been little used. Obama’s announcement is yet another in a string of White House initiatives designed to address the current weak economy without having to seek congressional approval.
Gene Sperling, director of the White House National Economic Council, said private economic analyses indicate that the $4 billion plan could generate about 50,000 jobs over two years.
The program builds on an initiative that Obama launched in February and that Clinton led through his Clinton Foundation to get the private sector to invest in greater energy efficiency.
Joining Obama and Clinton was Thomas Donohue, the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a long-time proponent of the Energy Saving Performance Contracts.
“We have been pushing the ESPC program for more than a decade because this holds tremendous potential,” Donohue said in a statement. “Despite the benefits of ESPCs, the program has been grossly underutilized.”
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Report: Pakistan gave OK to deadly US air strike
Pakistani officials gave the go-ahead to a NATO air strike that killed 24 Pakistani troops, unaware that their own forces were in the area, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday quoting U.S. officials.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/vp/45515810#45515810
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04.12.2011
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria – An army official says that suspected Muslim sect members have shot and killed two people during a wedding ceremony in Nigeria’s restive northeast.
Lt. Col. Hassan Ifijeh Mohammed, a military spokesman based in the area, said Saturday that three others were wounded by stray bullets and are being treated at the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital.
He blamed the attack on the radical Muslim sect known as Boko Haram. He said the gunmen came in unmarked vehicles with Kalashnikov rifles. Among the two dead is a former councilor of the Maiduguri Metropolitan Council of Borno state. Mohammed said no arrests have been made.
Boko Haram has been carrying out a campaign of attacks for more than a year. The group wants the strict implementation of Islamic Shariah law across the country’s north.
Source: http://www.startribune.com/world/134960138.html
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MOSCOW ? The leader of Russia’s only independent election monitor was detained at a Moscow airport for 12 hours, a colleague said Saturday ? the latest government pressure on a watchdog that has documented thousands of election law violations ahead of Sunday’s parliamentary vote.
Golos has compiled some 5,300 complaints from voters during the latest campaign ? most linked to United Russia, the party that dominates the Kremlin and supports Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Roughly a third of the complainants ? mostly government employees and students ? say employers and professors are pressuring them to vote for the party.
Golos leader Lilya Shibanova was held at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport after refusing to give her laptop to security officers late Friday, the group’s deputy director Grigory Melkonyants said. She was released after giving up the computer, he said.
“The detention was politically motivated,” Melkonyants told The Associated Press.
The detention follows a decision Friday by a Moscow district court to fine Golos $1,000 for violating a law forbidding the publication of public opinion research within five days of an election.
The group has come under growing pressure since Sunday, when Putin accused Western governments of trying to influence the election through their funding of unidentified Russian non-governmental organizations. Golos, whose name means “vote,” is supported by grants from the United States and Europe.
The group’s staffers all over Russia “face threats and psychological pressure,” Melkonyants said.
Kremlin-controlled NTV television showed a half-hour program on Friday evening that attacked Golos directly. The program included shots of suitcases full of U.S. dollars and claimed that Golos was openly supporting opposition parties and trying to discredit the elections.
United Russia dominates Russia’s political life and has received overwhelmingly favorable coverage during the campaign, mostly from Kremlin-controlled national television. But the party is increasingly disliked, seen as representing a corrupt bureaucracy and often called “the party of crooks and thieves.”
Only seven Kremlin-approved parties have been allowed to field candidates for parliament this year, while the most vocal opposition groups have been denied registration and barred from campaigning.
The Kremlin is determined to see United Russia maintain its majority in parliament. President Dmitry Medvedev and Putin both made final appeals for the party on Friday, warning that a parliament made up of diverse political camps would be incapable of making decisions.
Putin needs the party to do well in the parliamentary election to pave the way for his return to the presidency in a vote now three months away.
Independent pollster Levada Center said last week that United Russia will receive 53 percent of the vote, down from the 64 percent it got in the 2007 vote. This would deprive the pro-Kremlin behemoth of the two-thirds majority that has allowed it to amend the constitution.
Another poll by Levada released in late November shows that 51 percent of Russians believe the election only “imitates competition.”
The Helsinki Commission, a federal board that advises on U.S. policy about security, human rights and other issues involving Europe, criticized the court ruling to fine Golos in a statement released late Friday.
“The campaign against Golos provides additional reason for doubt about the legitimacy of the parliamentary election that will take place in Russia on Sunday and the broader state of democracy there,” it said.
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BAGHDAD, ? A string of explosions hit a Baghdad market and the capital’s western outskirts on Saturday, killing at least 15 people and exposing the challenges still facing Iraqi security forces just over a month before all American troops leave the country.
The bombings mark the second major attack against Iraqi civilians this week and come as American forces are packing up to leave and handing over their remaining security responsibilities to Iraqi forces. Many Iraqis are concerned that insurgents may use the transition period to launch more attacks in a bid to regain their former prominence and destabilize the country.
Iraqi security officials maintain that they are fully prepared for the American withdrawal, which is required under a 2008 security pact between the U.S. and Iraq. About 15,000 U.S. troops remain in the country, down from a one-time high of about 170,000.
Earlier this week, the top U.S. general in Iraq, Lloyd Austin, said that there would likely be some “turbulence” after American troops leave. But he did not think there would be a wholesale descent into violence.
The first blasts Saturday struck an area where people looking for work were gathered in the mostly Sunni village of al-Zaidan, west of Baghdad. Seven people were killed and 11 others were wounded, police officials said.
Hours later, three bombs exploded near kiosks in a market in downtown Baghdad where vendors were selling CDs and military uniforms, killing eight people and wounding 19 others.
“I went outside my shop and saw people running in all directions trying to leave the market area. I saw several bodies and wounded people on the ground,” said Mohammed Youssef, who owns a clothing shop in the area.
Iraqi military commanders later ordered all the vendors selling products in the area to close up their kiosks and move, in an attempt to clear out the area and make it harder for insurgents to hide bombs.
Health officials at Abu Ghraib’s general hospital and at three hospitals in Baghdad confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.
The market had until recently been protected by blast walls, but the military spokesman for Baghdad, Qassim al-Moussawi, said they were removed because the security situation in the city has been improving.
The bombers “try to prove their presence and hinder our efforts to remove all the concrete walls, but we will continue removing them and keeping control,” he said.
Baghdad is crisscrossed with concrete blast walls that both reassure and frustrate residents. The walls helped reduce violence and protect areas such as markets or major buildings. But they also create huge traffic jams and hurt the economy.
The Iraqi security forces have been slowly removing the blast walls, but some people in the market area Saturday said they wanted them back.
“We have been expecting something bad in the market after the security forces removed the blast barriers a few days ago,” said Youssef.
Violence has ebbed across Iraq since the height of the fighting, but deadly bombings and shootings still occur almost daily as U.S. troops prepare to leave. On Thursday evening, 19 people died in the southern city of Basra after three bombs went off in quick succession.
As the U.S. has drawn down the number of American troops in Iraq over the last year, the U.S. military has played more of an advising role to Iraqi security forces, leaving the more high-profile jobs such as patrolling and manning checkpoints to Iraqi security forces.
But U.S. troops have played a key role in helping Iraqi forces gather intelligence on suspected insurgents, something that will be lost when the American military departs.
In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Gen. Austin said that Iraqis are very good at human intelligence ? gathering information from a local population that they know well. But they lack the American technology and ability to analyze intelligence gathered from multiple sources and then use that information to combat terror networks such as al-Qaida.
“What we’ve learned about al-Qaida is they have a very sophisticated network and the ability to kind of see themselves across the country, and synchronize activities,” he said. “In order to counter that I think you need the ability to put pressure on the network.”
___
Associated Press staff in Baghdad, Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Hadi Mizban, contributed to this report.
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28.11.2011
The “two goldfish in a tank”-joke doesn’t have a loser.
Well, let’s see.
Do you mean this joke:
?
Q: Two goldfish are in a tank.
A: One says, “Do you know how to drive this thing?”
That definitely has a loser: The person being told the joke is made to think “fish tank” by the context presented by the teller of the joke, and then is ambushed by the teller of the joke specifically by being made to know they were thinking incorrectly — it’s a military tank. The laughter comes from the listener when they realize they were wrong; from the teller at the realization of the listener they’ve been had. Dominance and submission, both.
Or did you have another “two goldfish” joke?
I’d be really interested in a list of animals where humor has been observed
I just gave you one (abbreviated, but pretty obvious.)
and how that manifests (or can be detected)
Ever see a cat hide from another cat or dog, smack it on the head when it wanders by, and then “run away”, but using very high leaps that aren’t effective at distancing instead of the ground covering-speed they are actually capable of? That’s an ambush, with a victim, delivered as social one-uppance, but clearly below the threshold of actual violence. Dominance. That’s humor, straight up. The laughter *is* the “run.”
Dolphins not only ambush and prank, they laugh at the victim’s discomfort, too. Ask any dolphin handler. It can be pretty rough humor, too. Like, broken-bone rough. That’s more of a reflection of just how powerful an animal they are as compared to humans, I think — the same jokes on other dolphins wouldn’t result in that kind of damage. They’ll pull you under when you’re swimming, spit water in your face, all kinds of dominating pranks.
Parrots… those are considerably harder to explain, as the behavior is, in fact, linked with their use of language, and that varies enormously by the individual parrot. I’m going to punt and say you need to live with one. They’re bloody hilarious, though, believe me.
Dogs… they exhibit a wide range of intelligent behaviors (as do cats, for that matter), but as far as humor goes, just play “throw the stick” with one that hasn’t been trained to fetch, and see how easy it isn’t to get the stick back, and how the dog will tease in the manner of “I have the stick, here, it’s almost in your reach, whoops, you’re too slow, aren’t you?” Straight up dominance, you’re the victim, sub-violent. If you enjoy being teased, then we have submission as well (though note how quickly being teased gets old… submission is a hard place to maintain cheerfully.) It’s humor.
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/CFErrpgLO0A/the-science-of-humor
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MOSCOW (Reuters) ? Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s ruling party is likely to get a far smaller majority in parliament at the December 4 election, the country’s biggest independent pollster predicted on Friday.
Based on its last major opinion poll before the election, Levada-Center said Putin’s United Russia party would win about 252-253 places in the 450-seat lower house of parliament, down from 315 it has now.
Levada-Center director Lev Gudkov said Russian voters perceived United Russia, which is being led into the election by President Dmitry Medvedev, as dominant but devoid of policy.
“United Russia is conducting quite a weak electoral campaign,” Gudkov told reporters in Moscow. “It doesn’t really have much of a program.”
Putin, who is almost certain to win a March presidential election, has hinted a poor showing by United Russia could affect his plan to appoint Medvedev as prime minister in a job swap.
“Putin will easily win in the first round because the political field is managed and opponents have been sidelined,” Gudkov said of the presidential election, which the upper house of parliament said on Friday would take place on March 4.
The Levada pollster predicted the Communist Party would come second in the parliamentary election with about 94 seats, followed by the nationalist LDPR party winning 59 seats and the Just Russia party with 44 seats.
(Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova, Alexei Kalmykov and Guy Faulconbridge; editing by Steve Gutterman)
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