I can't even begin to imagine the talent competition...

The latest Miss Venezuela, the lovely Reina Bella Guerrero, is a Barbie doll. The contest was held in Caracas in early December, and the above doll won the crown and will move on to the Miss Barbie Universe pageant.

The people entering the dolls in the contest, along with designing makeup and clothes for their beauties, also give them names an even invented biographies. The dolls pose in evening gowns, swim suits and also answer questions from the judges. As the post title alludes to... I would die to see the talent competition if they have one. 

Here's a few more pictures. Try not to drool over them.

The Christmas Tradition of the Ex Husband

When Ambi Jr. was but a young sprout he used to love claw crane games. Those are the machines where you maneuver a little crane to grab a toy or stuffed animal.

One year, just before Christmas, he managed to snag 'Ex Husband', the unshaven, beer drinking lout pictured to the right. While I just saw it as a mighty strange prize for a claw grabber game, when my son got home with it he decided it would make a fine Christmas tree ornament and so, with my collusion, on to the tree it went.

Needless to say, Mrs. Sinistral found Ex Husband rather less charming than we did and she promptly moved him to a hidden corner in the back of the tree. 

The war on, the poor guy's bounced from the back of the tree to the front and back again ever since as one of my family's cherished Christmas traditions. Well, at least Junior and I cherish it, I suspect Mrs. Sinistral would chose a different term.

Merry Christmas to you all from Ex Husband and the Ambisinistral family.   

 

Stratfor and Salma Hayek

Continuing my new found sleazy tactic of coupling Strafor articles with hot babe pictures -- I probably should be ashamed of myself for it but I'm not -- this week we have Salma Hayek.

The screen cap above his her first appearance in the movie Desperado. Her entry causes a number of guys to crash their cars as she sashays across the street. I once had a friend who had a minor fender-bender going to work. He jumped the gun at a stop light and rear-ended the car in front of him. When he got out the car to talk to the other diver, that fellow laughed and said, "you were looking at the blond too, eh?" He was, so I guess her entry scene isn't completely unbelievable. 

What is unbelievable is that she runs a combination cafe/bookstore and it is always empty. One would think, since she's the only one who works there, every single guy in the town would be in the place drinking coffee and feigning an interest in literature. 

Regardless, if you haven't seen it, aside from Ms Hayek it features completely over-the-top violence, with one gun fight actually featuring members of a mariachi band firing rockets out of their guitar cases. Quite the guilty pleasure to watch.

The Stratfor article is much more somber, since it deals with the alarming drug gang violence of Mexico. By the way, if you haven't noticed, I've added Borderland Beat, which covers the situation in Mexico extensively, to the sidebar. It's grim reading, but I think it's an important topic.


MEXICO AND THE CARTEL WARS IN 2010

Editor's Note: This week's Security Weekly is a heavily abridged version of STRATFOR's annual report on Mexico's drug cartels. The full report, which includes far more detail and diagrams depicting the leadership of each cartel along with our updated cartel map, will be available to our members on Dec. 20.

By Scott Stewart, December 16, 2010

In our 2010 annual report on Mexico's drug cartels, we assess the most significant developments of the past year and provide an updated description of the dynamics among the country's powerful drug-trafficking organizations, along with an account of the government's effort to combat the cartels and a forecast of the battle in 2011. The annual cartel report is a product of the coverage STRATFOR maintains on a weekly basis through our Mexico Security Memo as well as other analyses we produce throughout the year. In response to customer requests for more and deeper coverage of Mexico, STRATFOR will also introduce a new product in 2011 designed to provide an enhanced level of reporting and analysis.

In 2010, the cartel wars in Mexico have produced unprecedented levels of violence throughout the country. No longer concentrated in just a few states, the violence has spread all across the northern tier of border states and along much of both the east and west coasts of Mexico. This year's drug-related homicides have surpassed 11,000, an increase of more than 4,400 deaths from 2009 and more than double the death toll in 2008.

Cartel Dynamics

The high levels of violence seen in 2010 have been caused not only by long-term struggles such as the fight between the Sinaloa Federation and the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Organization (also known as the Juarez cartel) for control of the Juarez smuggling corridor but also from the outbreak of new conflicts among various players in the cartel landscape. For example, simmering tensions between Los Zetas and their former partners in the Gulf cartel finally boiled over and quickly escalated into a bloody turf war along the U.S.-Tamaulipas state border. The conflict has even spread to states like Nuevo Leon, Hidalgo and Tabasco and has given birth to an alliance between the Sinaloa Federation, the Gulf cartel and La Familia Michoacana (LFM) called the New Federation.

RIP Captain Beefheart.

Crank the volume and shed a tear. Captain Beefheart has passed away at the age of 69.

Ohh-ohh, fleas on rats, fleas on rats

Above is a rather odd song about the Black Death. I'll warn you, the "fleas on rats" chorus is liable to get stuck in your head, I know it drove me nuts as I merrily hummed it for a day or two.

It's from a series of educational songs produced to introduce various subjects in high school (at least that's what I gather from the comments). I don't know how well they work, but I imagine they are pretty good for kicking off a lecture on a given topic. People younger then me fondly remember Schoolhouse Rock from Saturday mornings, I suspect the generation now in high school will have fond memories of these.

It is from a YouTube channel called historyteachers (History for Music Lovers). If you go there you can find more of their video efforts.

Along with the Black Death one, I quite liked Copernicus ("Because" by the Beatles).

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

There was to be no press coverage allowed of Obama's meeting with Clinton. No photos, no questions, not even a written statement about what happened.

That changed when Obama and Clinton wrapped up their private meeting in the Oval Office. Clinton wanted to publicly endorse the tax package. Obama is welcoming all the help he can get.

So the two presidents headed straight for the famous briefing room with no warning.

emphasis mine - source

As good as a politician as Clinton is he had to have known how ridiculous that press conference would paint Obama.

From the item quoted above it looks like Clinton may have pushed the idea to appear publically with Obama. Once at the podium he monopolized the microphone and started fielding questions. As entertaining as the part is where Obama says he has to leave, watch the part before that and pay attention to Obama's body language. The further it goes, the less happy he looks.

The screen grab above is from just after Obama said he had to leave and Clinton chuckled, gave a little wave of his hand and joked about it. Contrast their expressions as Obama turns to hurry off the stage and Clinton turns his attention back to the press. One angry, one delighted.

The rest of the press conference was just salt in the wounds. After Obama's two disastrous appearances earlier in the week, Clinton demonstrates how a pro does it. No running off for cookies on his part, instead he delivers a far more effective and gracious defense of the compromise. I wonder if he and Hilary had a good laugh about it afterwards?

I've never seen anything quite like it. Well, we all remember how Obama's campaign treated Bill Clinton. Pay backs a bitch, aint it Barry?

Stratfor and Angelina Jolie

Hah, I never figured one of these Stratfor articles would give me an excuse to post an Angelina Jolie picture. 

It has occurred to me that if I mentioned Angelina Jolie several times in this post, that all of the people searching for Angelina Jolie in Google would get the Angelina Jolie search results page, which might draw traffic to my post that mentions Angelina Jolie if my mentioning Angelina Jolie enough times gives me a high enough ranking in Angelina Jolie searches.

[Knucklehead pointed out in the comments that I spelled her name wrong. I've corrected the error]

Of course I would never stoop that low.

At any rate, my excuse for posting her picture is that it is from the movie Hackers, a silly piece of nonsense that was her first theatrical release. It features roller skating, high school attending, Elite Hackers who use Macs to pull juvenile hacking pranks and yell "hack the world" now and again. However, they're soon battling an Eeevil Hacker Dude, who also roller skates a lot, and has a nefarious plan to to blackmail the world by sinking oil tankers. It's so goofy it is actually entertaining.

The movie came to mind because Stutnex, Wikileaks and the 4chan group Anonymous (the first of whom just got arrested) and their Wikileaks revenge attacks, hacking and other computer-based tomfoolery have been recently all over the news. 

Of course, China has long stood at the nexus of government sponsored hacking, but they all face their own issues with dissidents challenging their network security.  The latest Stratfor article, which discusses China's situation follows.


CHINA AND ITS DOUBLE-EDGED CYBER-SWORD
By Sean Noonan,  December 9, 2010

A recent batch of WikiLeaks cables led Der Spiegel and The New York Times to print front-page stories on China's cyber-espionage capabilities Dec. 4 and 5. While China's offensive capabilities on the Internet are widely recognized, the country is discovering the other edge of the sword.

China is no doubt facing a paradox as it tries to manipulate and confront the growing capabilities of Internet users. Recent arrests of Chinese hackers and People's Liberation Army (PLA) pronouncements suggest that China fears that its own computer experts, nationalist hackers and social media could turn against the government. While the exact cause of Beijing's new focus on network security is unclear, it comes at a time when other countries are developing their own defenses against cyber attacks and hot topics like Stuxnet and WikiLeaks are generating new concerns about Internet security.

One of the U.S. State Department cables released by WikiLeaks focuses on the Chinese-based cyber attack on Google's servers that became public in January 2010. According to a State Department source mentioned in one of the cables, Li Changchun, the fifth highest-ranking member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and head of the Party's Propaganda Department, was concerned about the information he could find on himself through Google's search engine. He also reportedly ordered the attack on Google. This is single-source information, and since the cables WikiLeaks released do not include the U.S. intelligence community's actual analysis of the source, we cannot vouch for its accuracy. What it does appear to verify, however, is that Beijing is regularly debating the opportunities and threats presented by the Internet.

A Shift from Offensive Capabilities

On Nov. 2, the People's Liberation Army Daily, the official paper for the PLA and the primary medium for announcing top-down policy, recommended the PLA better prepare itself for cyber threats, calling for new strategies to reduce Internet threats that are developing "at an unprecedented rate." While the report did not detail any strategies, it quoted a PLA order issued for computer experts to focus on the issue.

Pandas with strange parents

No, the above picture doesn't show that pandas have turned to a life of crime and taken up kidnapping, or cubnapping, or whatever you would call it. 

What's pictured is a Chinese conservationist dressed in a panda costume to tend to a captive-born cub to prepare it for eventual release in the wild. Rather than hand-raising panda cubs, as they have done in the past with mixed success, they decided to shield the cubs from human contact as much as possible. Hence the panda suits.

An article and more pictures at: My mum swears she's a panda, but I'm not sure: Why scientists are dressing up to fool bear cubs.

It's steam! It's punk! It's steampunk!

Yes, it’s a steam powered record player. Playing a punk LP. The Sex Pistols – God save the Queen (Victoria obviously).

You can’t really get more steam, or punk, than that!

And yes, I know it sounds terrible.
....

Now steampunk is an odd thing. It’s not really my cup of tea and I got somewhat annoyed after I posted details of my Google Maps Brass Wristlet Navigator that people called it steampunk. That wasn’t the intention! It just happens to be made from brass. But I thought well, if people want steampunk then let’s do something that’s really steampunk. Hence the steam powered gramophone.

Yea, it sounds terrible, but is still a wonder to behold. More details and pictures at Asciimation, the website of fellow who made the steam powered, punk rock playing turntable (via Retro Thing).

One community organizer to another...

Except for the amount it embarrasses his bumbling administration, I can't imagine Obama really being all that upset by the antics of Julian Assange.  'Course he'll have to throw him under the bus, but it seems to me like the sort of a stunt a community organizer would admire.

From Robert Gibbs:

"It is safe to say that the president was, as an understatement, not pleased this information becoming public,"' Gibbs said. "As you saw during the presidential campaign and as during his time in the White House, open and transparent government is something that the president believes is truly important."

"But the stealing of classified information and its dissemination is a crime."

source

 Oh brother, I wonder how he managed to keep a straight face as he gas-bagged on about the transparency of the Obama administration? If nothing else, at least they seem vaguely aware that espionage is a crime.

Problem solved

While looking for material for a Thanksgiving Day post I got sidetracked when I stumbled upon the Australian Brush Turkey. An interesting thing about them is they can walk up walls, particularly when they are chicks, even if the wall is inclined at a greater than 90 degree angle. Above is a video showing them in action. 

The scientists studying them call it wing assisted incline running. That's a wonderfully goofy phrase I'll likely try to work into a conversation sometime.

They're not actually turkeys, they're some sort of mound building bird and they can be quite a bit of pest in suburban areas.  The Australian ABC News has an article Man v bird: the brush turkey battle that discusses the problem. From the article:

Professor Jones says once a pesky male brush turkey has decided his mound, his nest which he uses to attract females, is going in your backyard, it's all downhill from there.

"It's just about impossible to get rid of the guy," he said.

"He has decided that's where he's going to put his precious mound, which is the most important thing in his world, and nothing will dissuade him.

"It happens all the time. People say 'I'm sick to death of that bloody bird', so they spend back-breaking hours spreading it all back out again.

"Next morning they wake from their exhausted sleep to find it all back in place.

"It's like the turkey is saying 'look I've made a big decision about where my mound is going and look buddy this is it, I'm staying'."

I have a suggestion for Professor Jones -- declare a national holiday, chop their heads off, jam stuffing into their carcasses and stick them in a pre-heated oven for a few hours. That should thin their flocks some.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving all. Enjoy your family, the meal, pumpkin pie and football on TV.

Important successes will be accomplished

For those that don't know, Turkmenistan is a county rich in natural gas and lunatic leaders. The combination has led to some strange and expensive construction ventures, such as gargantuan spinning statues and the Las Vegas of Central Asia among others.

I confess to having been been remiss in keeping folks abreast of the latest news of grandiose and completely crazy engineering projects moving forward in Turkmenistan. 

For example, I never posted about the opening ceremony for the Golden Age Lake that happened last year. This is a scheme left over from the Turkmenbashi (may he rest in peace). This project involves digging hundreds of miles of canals to channel water to the Karashor Depression. 

The purpose of all this is to create a 750 square mile lake in the middle of the desert. I'm not sure, but it may have something to do with the late Turkmenbashia's rather odd notion to start cultivating rice in the deserts of Turkmenistan.

Meanwhile his successor, Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov, is apparently quite the sports enthusiast. That's him on the horse. He's come up with the idea to blow gobs of money building a gigantic sports complex in Turkmanistan.

The suspicion is that he is building it so he can bid on hosting the Olympics. This in spite of the fact that Turkmenistan has never won an Olympic medal. My favorite bit from the article:

Since coming to power, Berdymukhamedov has earnestly cast himself as a man of action, striking a stark contrast with his epicurean predecessor, President Saparmurat Niyazov (ed - a.k.a. the Turkmenbashi), who died of heart failure in late 2006 at the age of 66. 

Niyazov did sporadically attempt to instill his subjects with an understanding of the benefits of exercise. His most eye-catching practice was to lead his ministers and government workers on an annual 8-kilometer trek up the Walk of Health, a concrete staircase built into the hills overlooking the capital, Ashgabat.

But while officials trudged up the hill, rotund Niyazov reputedly took a helicopter ride to the summit, thereby undermining the entire purpose of the exercise.

A Bleg

While my contributions are nearly insignificant I do try to contribute some small amount of money to be used for the benefit of our troops and veterans. For the past few years I've done that through Wounded Warriors Project and Soldiers' Angels.

Unfortunately these charities are not highly rated by Military Money Matters Veterans Charities Ratings - both received a "D" grade. Charity Navigator rates Wounded Warriors Project at only 48.66 (presumably out of 100) - apparently because nearly 86% of their fundraising is consumed in costs. They rate Soldiers' Angels at 50.85.

Are any of our readers familiar with these charities enough to either defend or condemn them? Do you have any service member and/or veterans charities you KNOW to be top notch?

And you thought red light cameras were bad...

From the EU's Project ASSET (Advanced Safety and Driver Support for Essential Road Transport) web site:

The aim of ASSET is to contribute substantially to the improvement of safety in the field of sustainable road transportation.

ASSET will generate, process and provide important road safety information from essential system components.

Improving driver support, awareness and behaviour is a key issue.

This will be achieved through an advanced sensor/processing network providing assistance and information for drivers, traffic control agencies and infrastructure operators.

Wondering what the heck gibberish like "sustainable road transportation" is about you may delve further into the website for more information. If so, you will discover that it is "a practical holistic approach generating an overall safety theory to manage the complex interactions" which involves "a competent team of experienced and multidisciplinary experts (Kybernetikwerkstatt)" which examine "chains of interdependencies and processes will be analysed to identify critical parameters influencing road safety".

Eh, what?

The website Engadget has a post that clarifies the gobbledygook:

Each of the £50,000 (about $80,000) cameras can naturally tell just how fast you're going and, if you're speeding, take a picture of you and your license plate number. That's just the beginning. It can also look up the status of your insurance, tell if you're wearing a seatbelt, and ding you for tailgating, all while sitting alone on the side of the road, relying on a wireless data connection and an internal generator to be totally self-sufficient. 

Speeding? Seatbelts? Tailgating? So, all the happy talk at the Project ASSET website is just a smoke screen for yet another means of city hall, under the guise of "sustainable road transportation" and other such claptrap, to vacuum money out of your wallet via traffic fines. 

Wonderful. Just wonderful. 

Gunfight in Matamoros

I've recently began following a blog called Borderland Beat. It is covering the escalating violence in northern Mexico. It is depressing reading (and be forewarned if you follow the link -- it sometimes has rather graphic pictures). 


Today the Zetas (one of the criminal cartels fighting to control the drug trade) and the Mexican federal police backed by soldiers engaged in a large scale gun battle. So far 47 people have been reported killed, including Tony Tormento who was one of the cartel's leaders. The astonishing video above is gives a feel for the volume of gunfire. I don't speak Spanish so I don't know what the camera men and the people on the streets are saying to each other. Brave man, the fellow who filmed that.


Most sobering to a U.S. citizen is that Matamoros is just across the border from Brownsville Texas and the gunfight was so intense that the University of Texas at Brownsville and Southernmost Texas College had to cancel or move some events. With violence increasing in northern Mexico it seems only a matter of time before a serious and deadly border incident happens.

Sorry suckers, but the race goes to the swift

I'm in Atlanta this week. To the left is the TV news I can watch here. The local coverage is about Georgia races I know little about. It doesn't matter, I voted in Florida last week before I took my trip.

As for my vote, after observing Al Gore's life style I decided that if I aligned my self as a member of the Elite Class I could, with a clear conscience, have a huge house filled with many flat screened TVs, incandescent light bulbs, SUVs parked in the drive and what-not,  so I voted a straight Green ticket. 

'Course, there's a rather different fate in store for you. I'll now be exhorting you to live in a hovel, eat nothing but locally grown gruel, and in general keep your carbon footprint as small as possible. Sorry for tossing you all under the bus, but -- what can I say -- a weasels gotta do what a weasels gotta do.  Go Green and Hoo-rah!!!

Anyways, here's to a happy election day and bear in mind, whatever else may happen, at least we won't have to watch any of those damn campaign commercials for a while.

Oh darn, he's caught on to me.

John Kerry, speaking in the Boston Globe (emphasis mine): "We're in a period of know-nothingism in the country, where truth and science and facts don't weigh in. It's all short-order, lowest common denominator, cheap-seat politics."


All I've got to say in reply is, "lighten up pal -- the bleachers are all I can afford. Not all of us can manage to land a prickly Ketchup Heiress who will buy us box seats."

Where the Luddites are...

I've noticed there has been a huge uptick in articles about biodiversity in the last few weeks. Much of this is driven by that fact that the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Biodiversity (COP10) is being held in Nagoya Japan. 


Biodiversity is a problem, particularly in the area of over fishing controversy and the difficulty in setting fishing polices between nations. Larger exotic mammals are also threatened, and of course there is the frightening problem of the resurgence of  wheat stem rust. All serious topics for conservationists.


Unfortunately, the biodiversity issue is also a powerful Luddite magnet In fact for a brief time, after the Great Hole in the Ozone Crisis and before the rise of AGW, it was the Luddite issue of choice. I suspect with Climate Change losing steam it will return to the front burner with that group.

On biodiversity we're already seeing things like the following:

Prentice argues that biodiversity protection is not just up to national governments.

"Municipalities have to share that responsibility," he said. "And, frankly, all of us as citizens have to be interested in protecting the biodiversity of the planet."

Heather Hamilton, executive co-ordinator of the Canadian Biodiversity Institute, agrees that most biodiversity issues are local issues.

She cited the plight of the Blanding's turtle in the South March Highlands of the Ottawa suburb of Kanata. The turtle is an threatened species and shares the Highlands with 18 other threatened species. That didn't stop the City of Ottawa from splitting its habitat in half with a road extension.

Back to the Biodiversity Drawing Board

and this:

The strategy says biodiversity should be ''mainstreamed'' - that all Australians must take responsibility for improving wildlife protection if threatened ecosystems are to have the best chance of surviving climate change.
It calls for a 25 per cent boost in the number of Australians and organisations taking part in biodiversity conservation.

''If we continue to live unsustainably, we risk the degeneration of the ecological systems that support our life and our nation's productivity,'' says the report, endorsed by state and federal environment ministers. The Natural Resource Management Ministerial Council strategy is likely to receive a mixed response from green groups, which have called for more ambitious targets to protect threatened species.

Biodiversity plan to lock up land 

and of course what Luddite could ignore genetic engineering in an issue like this:

The 12-day Convention on Biological Diversity summit in Nagoya is intended to head off the rapid loss of plant and animal species that is happening around the world. The belief is that a more diversified global ecosystem has a better chance of protecting life. 

To facilitate this, summit participants are looking at things like hard targets to prevent deforestation and implementing new rules and regulations that would see victims of biodiversity loss compensated. They are also examining potential rules on sharing genetic material to ensure corporations don't get a stranglehold over biodiversity.

But Canada has already been blamed for being obstructionist in several aspects of the biodiversity meetings. Chief among these is the fact that Canada objects to a reference to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in a protocol over sharing the proceeds from the sale of genetic material with sovereign populations.

For that, Canada has already won a "Dodo Award"—similar to the Fossil Awards handed out during climate change summits—by a network of NGOs following the bio-diversity summit. 

Government opposes biodiversity protocols

Let's see... turtles, check; sustainability, check; UN Declaration, check. Been there and done that, and  I'm also sure there is a shake down of money in there somewhere that I've missed.

The shame of it is that this is a serious issue. Conservation, like pollution reduction, is a worthy goal. However, already I'm seeing the usual buzzwords, wild 'goals' being demanded and tisk-tisking over humans daring to cast their shadow on the Earth.

14 Years later

The album which morphed into the Buena Vista Social Club was originally intended to be a collaboration between musicians from Cuba and Mali. Problems with passports, visa or scheduling caused the Malian musicians to miss the original recording date so the producer cobbled together the group that eventually recorded the well received album.

As Will Hodgkinson in his article AfroCubism: Buena Vista take two relates, ""The conversations I  had with the Malian musicians after Buena Vista came out consisted of two subjects. They were: 'Oh shit', and 'When can we try doing it again?'" says Gold, who has finally made his planned Afro-Cuban collaboration happen, 14 years after the event."  

Above is a clip of the musicians finally playing together. 

Such a collaboration isn't at all surprising. West African music moved across the Atlantic with the slave trade and through the Caribbean where it split north to the States and south to Brazil. Since then the Caribbean, American and Brazilian have reflected their influences back to West African.  

Below is a clip featuring Toumani Diabate, from the AfroCubism clip above, playing with Ali Farke Toure who's music I linked to in my previous post Father & Son. In that earlier clip the blues influences were obvious, in this clip one can hear the subtle Latin influences.

Throwing cameras into the air

Ceth Studio has a post about Kinetic Photography. Above, and after the fold, are some examples of pictures taken using the technique. It is something a number of people are experimenting with. There are flikr streams with more examples of it and, if you want to risk your camera tossing it into the air to try it yourself, there is information on how to at  Camera Toss (The Blog).