15 Seconds to Safety.

Murder in Moscow. A human rights lawyer shot in the head after a news conference. He had acted for the family of a woman strangled to death by her interrogator and was protesting the murderer's release from prison. BBC:

In an interview with the BBC's Russian Service a few days ago, Mr Markelov said the decision to release Budanov showed that the Russian system was deeply flawed.

"I understand now that there is no rule of law," he said.

I wonder if Obama will comment. Or even be asked about this.

P.S. Oh, and a journalist, Anastasia Baburova, Novaya Gazeta, died later of her injuries...she was silenced too. How many is that under the Putin regime? Ah yes, Time's Man of the Year, in 2007. The Russian bear begins 2009.

This reply-all snafu at the Department of State must have been hilarious to watch unfold:

"Department staff hitting 'reply to all' on an e-mail with a large distribution list is causing an e-mail storm on the department's OpenNet e-mail system," says the unclassified cable that was sent Thursday by Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy.

He said the result was "effectively a denial of service as e-mail queues, especially between posts, back up while processing the extra volume of e-mails."

The cable orders employees to "take immediate action" to ensure they and their colleagues are "aware of the negative impact of hitting 'reply all'" and to delete e-mails addressed to large numbers of people that they might receive in error.

"Anyone who disregards these instructions will be subject to disciplinary actions," Kennedy wrote in the cable, which begins: "Please ensure widest distribution of this message."

Quite a culture of trust at State. Someone sends an obviously errant message to an oversize State Department email distribution list and thousands insist on letting all their collegues know they caught the error. Then, as if the experience of shutting down the computer system isn't enough to make State employees pause the next time, the department feels compelled to issue a threat of disciplinary action as a preventative measure.

Interestingly, I was able to draw some culture conclusions from another email dustup. When I was in the Air Force, the "I love you" virus made it into our email system. Emails showed up in my in-box with the subject "I love you". If one opened it, the program would replicate itself and send an "I love you" message to everyone in that person's email address list. Fortunately most of us deleted the email as soon as we saw the subject since we doubted the sender really was sending us a love note. Some people did open those messages and I'll note the only "I love you" emails I got were from the computers of my fighter pilot friends.

H/T Bilbo

Mickey Mantel - Gangbanger ---->

Highlanders are rolling in their graves.

Young trainee officers at Strathclyde Police search social networking sites for pictures of people posing with weapons, mainly knives...

...If they were posing in a public place, like on the street or a park, the law has been broken and they'll be arrested.

Even when pictures are taken in private, though, which isn't technically breaking the law, he says the weapons are so dangerous his officers pay a visit to the people involved.

"We show the parents their pictures," he explained, "recover the weapons and make sure they know that behaviour is unacceptable.

"We have large kitchen knives, axes, samurai swords, baseball bats, a huge number and different type of weapons - in simple terms weapons that can kill."

Kitchen knives!?

Remember, when they outlaw baseball bats, only little leagers will be criminals... or something like that.

H/T Phantom, warns of a new Scottish dispora.

There is a credible report that Hamas will agree an 18-month ceasefire. Presumably the promise from Netanyahu to come back to Gaza and finish the job that Barak and Livni left half-done concentrated the terrorists' leaders' minds.

By the way she is Israeli. She'd look good with a rifle, but I'm sorry to say she's an airhead peacenik. Still, braver men and women will kill to keep her safe.

I'll keep this short. Maybe the crescendo of failures by Obama, topped by this very public humiliation by the IOC, calls for a script rewrite if he wants to avoid being a joke figure for the rest of his presidency. The obvious plot twist is to hit Iran. I don't think Obama has the guts to order the the USAF into battle alone, but he'd let Israel take most of the risk and try to claim some glory from a logistical support role for the USA.

The Twin Towers (1368ft) were once the tallest buildings. Islamic terrorists destroyed them early in this decade. Today, near the decade's end, the Burj Dubai (2716ft) is opened. It's height equals the Twin Towers combined. The symbolism of height and global status is obvious, but unremarked in the West.

Burj Dubai is funded by high oil prices, paid by the West to the Arabs. Oil prices are high because Western governments have prevented domestic exploration and production. So there is less oil, more dependence on our enemies and more pollution in the world. The only practical response has been expansion of bio-fuel production at taxpayer expense; hence food shortages because of misallocated land. It's nice that liberals get to feel virtuous tho. Would that self-approval were an alternative energy source.

Burj Dubai, a finger in the sky.

Mick: I like Mark's imagery, but I thought this might be a good place to add a related, but different observation. The last world-record holder skyscraper built in the U.S. was the Willis (formerly the Sears) Tower, constructed in 1974. Why no further attempts are supertalls? Hundreds of skyscrapers have been built in the U.S. since then, but no one is particularly interested in setting records. The reason is simple--there is no longer an economic justification for such projects. With the advent of the internet, businesses are far more decentralized and it makes much more sense to build in landscaped business parks closer to where people actually live. Effectively, new technologies have rendered the supertall obsolete.

Except in Islamic countries...

The truly rich don't flaunt symbols of their wealth. When Sam Walton of Walmart fame, was asked why he drove an old Ford pickup truck rather than a Rolls Royce, Walton replied that you can't put dogs in the Rolls Royce. Sam Walton was a billionaire because he understood what had value and what didn't.

Look at the picture and note that there is nothing around the Burj Dubai. This is emblematic of the old Texan observation--Big hat, no cattle. When you visit New York City, Chicago or London, you see a sea of skyscrapers--to the extend that they become mundane, an unremarkable part of the landscape where wealth and power are simply taken in stride.

The lonely Burj Dubai is a monument to impotence.

Tony Blair in Israel:

Of note is a story he related about Netanyahu when the two of them were at a dinner party hosted by Netanyahu. It seems the waiter accidentally ladled the soup, matzo ball I presume, onto Netanyahu’s lap. The waiter, rather than gushing over with apologies to his head of state, proceeded to berate him for being in the way while he was trying to do his job. Netanyahu apologized profusely... Blair asked rhetorically, in which other Middle Eastern nation might one witness such an episode with a similar outcome.

Garry Kennard
Director
Art and Mind
www.artandmind.org
www.garrykennard.com

Here's the group from 1984:

Garry, right; Gombu next to Garry; me 2nd left. One of Gombu's classic sayings to describe an excruciating path up a mountain is "undulating up".

The pirates 'have all died:

MOSCOW, Russia — Following high level complaints about "imperfections" in international law, Russia announced Tuesday that captured Somali pirates "have all died." A Russian official claimed that 10 pirates seized by Russian special forces aboard an oil tanker last week were quickly freed but then died on their way back to the Somali coast.

The unidentified high-ranking Defense Ministry official did not elaborate on how the pirates died, deepening a mystery that has prompted speculation the pirates were executed by commandos who had freed a Russian oil tanker seized in waters 500 miles (800 kilometers) east of Somalia's coast.

The official told Russian news agencies the pirates' boat disappeared from Russian radar about an hour after their release.

"They could not reach the coast and, apparently, have all died," the official said

h/t SDA

Sinking someone else's destroyer used to be an act of war. Now it isn't even considered going over the brink. CIA chief Leon Panetta (pronounced "Pansy") assures the talking heads there won't be any accountability for North Korea:

International investigators have concluded that North Korea torpedoed a South Korean warship in March, killing 46 sailors. North Korea has denied the allegation and warned any punishment would trigger war.

Panetta said on ABC television that, for many years, "we've been going through these kinds of provocations and skirmishes with a rogue regime."

In the end, he said, "they always back away from the brink, and I think they'll do that now."

I don't expect a war either - our leaders are probably leaning heavily on South Korea to take the abuse. According to Panetta, that's just what the Norks do, God bless 'em all.

What is right to expect is a North Korean version of the Bermuda Triangle - where their ships just start mysteriously disappearing. But that won't happen either. Instead, North Korea is Exhibit "A" for Iran and every other two bit regime that having nukes means you can get away with murder and the U.S. will go to bat for you to keep the "peace".