On The Pennsylvanian through Lancaster County. The passenger behind is going to a ceremony at an Episcopal church - she is telling her neighbor the history of each member of her family after freedom from slavery. Two young people in old-fashioned clothes board our car. He wears a wide-brimmed hat, she has a bonnet, and a backpack. Do the Amish ride Amtrak? A cluster of nuclear cooling towers on the left by the Susquehanna - is this Three Mile Island? Would be able to check, if Amtrak had Wifi on board. A train trip through technological time, all the way to not-quite-the 21st-century. Macintosh country is behind - maybe people here use PCs and not Apple, sort of the way they drive Mercurys and Buicks, not VWs and Hondas like everybody. A burnt DC3 at the Harrisburg airport.
News roundup: The bright spot in the economy is the iPhone (good engineering pays). The start-and-stop war in Afghanistan seems to have pushed the Taliban close to taking Islamabad (in the same way as taking antibiotics just until you feel better opens the way to a bad infection). The think tank proposals for the Cabinet were visibly weaker and more timid than Obama's (from reading past issues of Foreign Affairs). I made a bug report for a piece of shareware and got a reply before thinking about it a second time (can you expect this kind of service from a big software company?). Tony Tether, another of Rumsfeld's disastrous innovations, was fired unceremoniously of Feb 20 (the incompetent Darpa head was expected to stay until a successor was found, but they let him go before he could do more harm). Dick Cheney needs to go potty (are there any grown-ups left in the Republican party?).
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"Taliban close to taking Islamabad"
Pelo menos, agora estão percebendo o resultado da lambança. Quero ver o conserto!
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Falando em trens, li que os EUA estariam tomando um pouco de vergonha e pensando numa melhor infraestrutura ferroviária. Confere?
Pensando.... pensando.... do pensamento ao trem de ferro, falta malhar bastante aço.
churches, slavery, amish, nukes, wifi, buicks, hondas and a burnt dc3.
this seems to be america on track. five centuries in a few lines.
but i am not sure the antibiotics metaphor is a good one. alternatively, to err is human to persist is of the devil.
after all: who is selling guns to the talibans?
follow the money!
abs
sgold
Who sells them? Or more important, where do they get the money? Extortion? Maybe from the Arabians? Or from middle class European heroin users? Crime, oil, drugs, same combination everywhere.
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