Mark's Views, Perhaps — from behind my eyeballs
Before any other September 17 notes, a very short trip backward through time, noting September 17 in Polish history:
2009 — The United States announces it is scrapping its missile shield for Poland and Czech Republic.
1993 — The last Russian troops leave Poland.
1980 — The independent trade union Solidarity is established in Gdansk.
1939 — The Soviet Union joins Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland.
1924 — The Border Defense Corps is established in the Second Polish Republic for the defense against local bandits as well as armed Soviet raids.
OK, so much for that brief introduction to Polish history. I’ll conclude this post with a few highlights from regular world history.
1630 — Puritans led by John Winthrop establish a settlement on the Shawmut Peninsula in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The settlement is later named Boston.
1787 — The United States Constitution is signed in Philadelphia.
1796 — President George Washington gives his Farewell Address. He declines to run for a third term as President and warns against foreign entanglements.
1814 -– Francis Scott Key finishes writing The Star-Spangled Banner.
1859 -– Joshua A. Norton declares himself “Emperor Norton I” of the United States.
1976 -– NASA unveils its space shuttle, Enterprise.
1978 -– The Camp David Accords are signed by Israel and Egypt and the United States.
2003 — Ohio re-ratifies the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Need something constructive for your mind?
Try this:
a reminder of how we play the game here at Ain’t Complicated:
Item 5 means do not use online sources to generate words. This rule applies only for the first two days of the game.
Remember, please: Five words per player per day.
Thanks!
Oh, this is one of the “rolls of the dice” Ruby and Andrew and I played a night or three ago.
A pickle isn’t just something to eat. A pickle is also something to try to get out of. A problem, in other words. A dilemma.
And of course you know Iran is ancient Persia.
So here you go, straight from the folks at Stratfor:
Misreading the Iranian Situation
After the last round of meetings between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama, the Israelis announced that the United States had agreed that in the event of a failure in negotiations, the United States would demand — and get — crippling sanctions against Iran, code for a gasoline cutoff. In return, the Israelis indicated that any plans for a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be put off. The Israelis specifically said that the Americans had agreed on the September U.N. talks as the hard deadline for a decision on — and implementation of — sanctions.
[…]
Obama’s assurances notwithstanding, there accordingly is no evidence of any force or process that would cause the Iranians to change their minds about their nuclear program. With that, the advantage to Israel of delaying a military strike evaporates.
Here are a few more isolated statements from the above article:
Then, at the end (where you would expect to find it), the closing paragraph:
The current situation is not as dangerous as the Cuban Missile Crisis was, but it has this in common: Everyone thinks we are on a known roadmap, when in reality, one of the players — Israel — has the ability and interest to redraw the roadmap. Netanyahu has been signaling in many ways that he intends to do just this. Everyone seems to believe he won’t. We aren’t so sure.
I wonder what Joel C. Rosenberg has to say about this whole mess. OK, I just peeked. There’s this and this and this.
I thought of that title when this photo greeted me at Drudge a few minutes ago:
What’s with that?!
This?
The Bush administration had said that the shield was intended to protect Eastern Europe from the threat of a nuclear Iran, but Russia bristled at the idea of U.S. interceptor rockets being set up near its border.
Maybe. But probably not.
But to whom is the Russian Premier or President or Prime Minister winking?
Just so you know: Israel’s Iran choices narrow.
The orchestrated roar of air force exercises designed to signal Israel’s readiness to attack Iranian nuclear facilities are belied, perhaps, by a far quieter project deep beneath the western Jerusalem hills.
Dubbed “Nation’s Tunnel” by the media and screened from view by government guards, it is a bunker network that would shelter Israeli leaders in an atomic war — earth-bound repudiation of the Jewish state’s vow to deny its foes the bomb at all costs.
Lash out or dig in? The quandary Israelis call existential seems close to decision-point. Iran’s uranium enrichment has already produced enough raw fuel for one nuclear weapon, U.N. inspectors say, though Tehran denies having military designs. Next month’s international good-faith talks offer no clear relief to Israel, which wants world powers to be prepared to penalise Iran’s vulnerable energy imports but sees Russia and China blocking any such resolution at the U.N. Security Council.
That the Obama administration signed on to negotiating without preconditions — a potential disavowal of the United States’s past demand for an enrichment halt — may only crank up Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ticking clock.
[…]
“There are three clocks at work here: technical, in terms of Iran’s advances; operational, in terms of our capabilities and their precautions; and diplomatic,” Eiland said.
“The questions is when and how these clocks might become synchronised for a ‘window’ in which Israel would act.”
Sleep well.
I assume such a thing exists, but I don’t know.
So I used plain old Google for a Spanish dictionary earlier this morning. You see, I saw on a news site a Spanish word I didn’t recognize. Its context didn’t help me determine the meaning.
After I Googled the term and while I waited for the results to arrive on my very slow dial-up connection, I Alt-Tabbed around to other projects I was multi-tasking.
When I came back to Google, I was stunned at the images that were included in the Image Search portion of the search results.
😯
I quickly scanned the other results and discovered the meaning of the word.
Not a bad word at all.
But obviously a very useful one for promoting PornoImagery.
Lesson learned, I hope: Don’t use Google Search as a dictionary.
And, no, I won’t tell you what the perfectly innocuous word is.