by cameron | Jun 22, 2011 | Brisbane, Uncategorized
Jason ordered a couple of iPad2s for us several weeks ago which haven’t arrived yet. Here’s the shipping notification we just received from Apple.
- May 26th – Picked up from Shenzhen
- May 27th – Arrived Singapore
- May 29th – Arrived Frankfurt
- June 3rd – Delivered in Good condition, Istanbul
- June 9th – Picked up from Istanbul
- June 18th – Arriived Shenzhen
- June 20th – Arrived Hong Kong
- June 21st – Awaiting departure to Brisbane
- 21 Jun 2011 06:22:35 Hong Kong Shipment Received At Transit Point.
- 21 Jun 2011 09:11:33 Hong Kong Shipment In Transit.
- 21 Jun 2011 11:21:48 Hong Kong Shipment Received At Transit Point.
- 21 Jun 2011 17:03:56 Hong Kong Shipment In Transit.
- 21 Jun 2011 21:00:00 Hong Kong Shipment Lost. Recovery Action Underway.
Looks like Apple’s shipping system needs some work.
by cameron | Jun 21, 2011 | Uncategorized
- Could Obama Be Impeached for Waging War in Libya Without Approval of Congress? Glenn Greenwald asks in Democracy Now. Apparently he decided to ignore the views of top White House lawyers when he decided to invade LIbya. My take on this is that while he probably COULD be impeached, he won’t. The elite don’t do that to each other except under EXTREME circumstances. Oh sure, they will huff and puff about blowing his house down, but it’s all political theatre designed to keep the people distracted, sell newspapers and bump up viewership to cable news and news sites. Meanwhile Goldman Sachs will continue to rape the U.S. blind.
- The Liberty Scam – Stephen Metcalf in SLATE has written a terrific and timely article on why libertarianism fails as a political ideology. I have come to the same conclusions over the last ten years. None of us is an island, to paraphrase John Donne. If you live in a country such as Australia, you are taking advantage of the opportunities that our society offers. That doesn’t only include benefits such as public education and healthcare. It also includes people who build roads. People who collect your garbage. The people who grow your food and the people who sell it to you. It’s one big system and, because you are part of it, you are benefiting from it. If you’ve been successful and made a few bucks, you have to ask yourself the question – “Could I have done this if I had to carve my own roads, manage my own healthcare, grow and harvest my own food, dispose of my own garbage, protect yourself against burglary or enemy invaders?” Chances are you owe, in no small part, your success to the fact that many, many other people are doing the things you don’t HAVE to do, which has allowed you to focus on education or hard work. So you didn’t get to where you are all by yourself. That’s a fiction. You owe a large part of your success to the system you live in.
by cameron | Jun 20, 2011 | Iraq, Uncategorized
- Iraq hunting $17 billion missing after U.S. invasion – “The missing money was shipped to Iraq from the United States to help with reconstruction after the ouster of Saddam Hussein….. All indications are that the institutions of the United States of America committed financial corruption by stealing the money of the Iraqi people, which was allocated to develop Iraq, (and) that it was about $17 billion,” said the letter sent to the U.N. with a 50-page report.” That’s what these wars are about, folks – theft. Plain and simple. Theft of money from the U.S. taxpayers and theft of the natural resources of the Iraqi and Afghani people. Everything else they throw at you – Saddam, Bin Laden, the Taliban, etc – is just smoke and mirrors. It’s all about the rich stealing from the poor and the gullible. It’s the oldest trick in the book, a magnificent sleight of hand even Hypnotist Kenny would be proud of.
- Another day another pedophile Catholic priest & cover-up by the Church – remembering, of course, that the key message here isn’t about the pedophiles themselves, it’s about the Catholic Church’s systematic and deliberate cover-up of the crimes to protect their cash. (See my earlier posts on the topic – GDay World 382 – Dr Wayne Chamley on Catholic Sexual Abuse in Australia, G’Day World Video – Peter Kennedy, Rebel Priest, part one, The Irish “Child Abuse Commission”).
- WSJ has a brain aneurism when it learns the The Dalai Lama is a Marxist – “Earlier this month, the Dalai Lama told a group of Chinese students at the University of Minnesota, “I consider myself a Marxist . . . but not a Leninist.”” The author, philosopher Carlin Romano, then goes on to say “It’s an old, familiar position in Western secular intellectual life: Marxism wasn’t a God that failed, and the Soviet Union and Mao’s China don’t count against it, because Marxism was never tried—Communism perverted it.” That’s actually not the argument at all, Carlin. The argument is that the Bolshevik’s perverted socialism. Had the Menshevik’s managed to wrest control of the Communist Party, we might have seen a very different 20th century Russia.
by cameron | Jun 17, 2011 | Uncategorized
- “every pencil David Rees sharpens is shipped with a signed and dated certificate authenticating that it is now a dangerous object.”
- Chrissy and I had a great time catching up with @lelaissezfaire last night. If you don’t follow him on Twitter, you should start now. Read his blog, too.
- Yeah Weiner had to resign. But, as Taibbi says, it’s NOT about sexting. It’s about lying his ass off about it for a week. When you have a job like that, you have to know that if you get caught lying about shit, it’s going to mean people don’t trust you and that’s kind of a bad thing for a politician. So don’t feel sorry for him. He knew the rules when he took the job.
- As @danmc reminds me, “its also about politicians not putting themselves somewhere they can be blackmailed”. Rule #1 when you take office should be “don’t get caught doing stupid shit while you’re in office”.
- How awesome is this TARDIS prop? It’s the opening shot from the 1964 Hartnell-era episode “The Aztecs”.
by cameron | Jun 16, 2011 | Cuba, geopolitics, Podcast, Wikileaks
In the news today…
- WikiLeaks Haiti: The Earthquake Cables – The Nation has some background (via Wikileaks) on what was happening in Haiti after the earthquake. Remember all those troops that the USA sent in with the excuse of “security”? Well it turns out the US troops weren’t there at the request of President Préval or the Haitian government. They might have been sent to protect the assets of US manufacturers with operations in Haiti. Or, just as likely, they were there to prevent a revolution against the US-backed puppet government of President Préval. As I discussed in NIP05, the US has a long history of over-throwing Haitian Presidents who don’t tow the US line, such as democratically-elected Jean-Baptiste Aristide who was ousted in a US-backed coup in 2004. Interesting quote: “But other countries carried out rescue and medical relief efforts without the presence of military troops. For example, in the six months after the quake, the Henry Reeve Medical Brigade, a 1,500 member contingent of doctors who graduated from Cuba’s medical school, treated 70,300 patients, and performed more 2,500 operations, all without deploying soldiers or bringing in weapons, according to a Henry Reeve Brigade report in June 2010.”
- Bitcoin – A Scam? Or Brilliant? – An interesting analysis from various people (some pro-, some con-) about Bitcoin. Worth reading if confusing. Still trying to get my head around Bitcoin. Had to stop running the app yesterday as it was totally taking over my CPU. (HT @willozap)