“If they knew where they were, I certainly would send in U.S. troops to rescue them, in a New York minute I would, without permission of the host country. I wouldn’t be waiting for some kind of permission from some guy named Goodluck Jonathan.”

-U.S. Senator John McCain.

LOVE that man. No: are you kidding me, sending American troops to Nigeria? Ab-so-lute-ly NOT! Period there...Exclamation point. Nigeria poses no threat to U.S. national security. Nigeria only poses a threat to Nigerian national security. Boko Haram...Well, Boko Haram is Islam, Islam everywhere, anywhere, poses a threat to U.S. national security...Nah, this is an issue of Nigerian incompetence, there's no more threat here to the U.S. than Islam in America. McCain would do it on humanitarian grounds, a la Bosnia, etc. I don't like Bosnia as an example. That was the problem with U.S. intervention in Bosnia, it gave amigos like McCain a goddamned precedent. No. HANDS OFF NIGERIA! Leave it to the Nigerians. Goodluck! He-he-he. And Patience! Ha-ha-ha-ha.

The Continent of Incompetence.

His wife's name is Patience! Goodluck's wife's name is Patience!

"Lost Forever? Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan Cowers Amid Terror."-NBC News.

Deep in a dense forest in northern Nigeria, more than 200 young girls, some as young as 12, are beginning a second month in the hands of gangs of armed Islamist fanatics.

U.S. officials believe they have been split up into three groups, one of which their kidnappers captured on video. It is a video anguished parents watched this week, identifying, through their tears, more than 70 of their daughters.

Their plight has touched the hearts of people around the world. But in the country’s capital Abuja, one man appears unmoved. Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan failed to make any comment on the girls’ kidnapping for three weeks.

This week his office announced that on Friday he would finally visit the village from where girls were abducted, Chibok in Borno state. The president would meet the girls’ parents. The stage was set for Jonathan to show he felt their pain and cared for his people, their children.

And then, on the morning he was meant to go, he canceled the trip.

The Nigerian president wouldn’t visit after all. He wouldn’t see the parents. He wouldn’t even see his soldiers, who, we are told, are searching for the girls. His aides suggested he was persuaded not to go by "security advise". He’s going to Paris instead.

Since the day the girls were kidnapped, Jonathan hasn’t set foot in the state where it happened, never mind the boarding school where the girls were woken from their sleep and snatched by Boko Haram militants.

His wife Patience criticized the parents who were protesting the lack of effort in finding them. There are reports she even asked for one of the protest leaders to be arrested.

Meanwhile her husband glibly told global leaders gathered in his capital for the World Economic Forum that the kidnapping had a silver lining; it would mean the end of terrorism in Nigeria.

It is a text book example of how not to respond to a national tragedy.

And this is no ordinary tragedy. This is one that threatens to further tarnish Nigeria’s already terrible reputation for governance and competence.

Africa’s most populous country, boasting the continent’s biggest army and its biggest economy, looks today like a laughingstock; a state that not only fails its citizens but callously fails even to acknowledge that there’s much of a problem.

Nigeria’s army said this week it had launched an operation to find and rescue the girls. It has offered 
no proof whatsoever that it’s doing this. On the same day, its army commander in the region was fired and replaced. His troops nearly mutinied during the week after Boko Haram attackers killed several of their comrades.

The Army, and the government, have been stung by strong criticism both at home and abroad this week.

The Governor of Borno State Kashim Shettima says the federal government has been “deaf, dumb and blind” to the threat posed by Boko Haram for three years.

In Washington, Nigeria’s military was heavily criticized by a senior U.S. Defense official. Alice Friend, the Pentagon’s top Africa official, told a Senate panel the Nigerian army was showing “real fear” in battling Boko Haram and couldn’t match their “brutality and violence,” preferring "to avoid coming into conflict with them.”

In another stinging remark she said “we cannot ignore that Nigeria can be an extremely challenging partner to deal with.”

On Saturday, President Jonathan and his Defense and National Security ministers will sit in Paris with representatives of the United States and EU and leaders of his neighboring countries to try to solve the problem of Islamist terrorism in Central and West Africa. The goal is an action plan to share intelligence and to seal their borders more effectively. Although they are neighbors and scarred by Boko Haram’s violence, there is, for example, “absolutely no dialogue between Cameroon and Nigeria,” according to one French diplomatic source quoted by Reuters.

Whether or not an “action plan” materializes, Goodluck Jonathan will likely return to Nigeria next week with little or no progress to report on finding the schoolgirls. Dozens of military advisers and experts from the United States, Britain, France and Canada are now poring over maps and satellite images. Planes, manned and unmanned, are scouring Nigeria’s vast Sambisa forest. The FBI, CIA, Israeli intelligence — even China’s security services — have been drawn in to a manhunt that has gripped the world.

It just doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression on Nigeria's president.

The Continent of Incompetence.

Hey, get this, Boko Haram: Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, and Chad have pledged joint action to deal with you. Cameroon's president said, "We are here [in Paris] to declare war on Boko Haram." And Chad's president did him one better: "There is determination to launch...a war, a total war..."

Shock and awe, baby! Among them these four great nations have 3 1/2 fully operational AK47's.

The Continent of Incompetence.

Africa.

Know why Nigeria didn't stop Islam from kidnapping all those girls? Boko Haram was better armed than the Nigerian military! They had rifles and stuff. Now, Nigerian soldiers are mutinying, firing on their own commanders, not out of sympathy for Islam, because they're afraid to fight! A Continent of Cowardice.

Image: Actual man on actual telephone poll trying to get cell phone reception in actual Lagos, Nigeria.

MH370.

"Who Has Satellite Date That Shaped Search."-CNN

Who has the data investigators used to shape their search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and why hasn't it been released to the public?

The answer to those questions depends on who you ask.

Facing a growing chorus of criticism from scientists and family members who want to see more details about why searchers are combing the southern Indian Ocean for the missing Boeing 777, Malaysia's top transportation official Thursday claimed his country doesn't have the raw data from the satellite's communication with the plane as it flew thousands of miles off course.

The data is crucial because it's what led investigators to the area where they're currently searching for the plane. And in recent days,some scientists outside the investigation have suggested they don't trust investigators' analysis of the data, and questioned whether searchers are even looking in the right place.

"The raw data is with (satellite company) Inmarsat, not with Malaysia, not with Australia, not with Malaysia Airlines, so if there is any request for this raw data to be made available to the public, it must be made to Inmarsat," Acting Minister of Transportation Hishammuddin Hussein said.

Australian officials heading the search in the Southern Indian Ocean tell CNN they don't have the raw data, either.

But Inmarsat, which owns the satellites, insists that the data has already been released to investigators.

"Inmarsat's raw data was provided to the investigation team at an early stage in the search for MH370," Chris McLaughlin, the company's vice president of external relations, told CNN's "Erin Burnett: OutFront."
...

"I don't know who to believe," CNN aviation analyst Miles O'Brien said. "But isn't it awful that it's quite evident somebody is lying here? Somebody is lying. We're talking about something that involves a missing airliner, now 70 days. Lives lost, families shattered. And there (are) people lying about this. This is absolutely reprehensible. I can't even believe...it would be funny if it wasn't so tragic."

Aviation attorney Arthur Rosenberg said he thinks the satellite company is obligated to release the data, whether or not Malaysian authorities have it.

"Unfortunately, you almost get the sense that they're stalling, that there's something in there that they don't want the world to see. And that's the problem," O'Brien said. "That's why there's so little credibility right now about why this search zone has been identified."

May 17:

Russia 28
United States 23
Germany 5
Ukraine 5
China 4
Netherlands 2
Belgium 1
Brazil 1
Spain 1
Ireland 1

"Mr. Gladstone once paid a visit to a Tweedside country, and in the afternoon went out for a walk and came to a gate which gave upon the glen.  It was late in November, a snowstorm was threatening, and the sheep, as is their custom, were drawing out from the burnside to the barer hill where drifts could not lie. An old shepherd was leaning on the gate, and to him Mr. Gladstone spoke in his high manner. 'Are not sheep the most foolish of all animals?  Here is a storm pending, and instead of remaining in shelter they are courting the fury of the blast.  If I were a sheep I should remain in the hollows.'  To which the shepherd replied, 'Sir, if ye were a sheep ye'd have mair sense.'"
-Buchan.

"...[H]e had a gift, too, of making a situation more clear than God intended it to be..."
-Buchan on Sir John French.

"He had not Sir John French's gift of speaking to the chance-met soldier. Once, I remember, he tried it.  There was a solitary private by the roadside, whom he forced himself to address.  Haig: 'Well, my man, where did you start the war?' Private (pale to the teeth): 'I swear to God, sir, i never started no war.' It was his last attempt."
-John Buchan (Lord Tweedsmuir) on Field Marshal Douglas Haig. "Pilgrim's Way."

"Can it assure them that there is no human being so insignificant as not to be of infinite worth in the eyes of Him who created the Heavens, or so feeble but that his actions may have consequences of infinite moment long after this material system shall have crumbled into nothingness?  Does it offer consolation to those who are in grief, hope to those who are bereaved, strength to the weak, forgiveness to the sinful, rest to those who are weary and heavy laden?  If not, then, whatever be its merits, it is no rival to Christianity."
-Arthur Balfour, "The Religion of Humanity."

May 16:

Russia 59
United States 48
China 10
Germany 10
Slovenia 9
Spain 7
France 7
United Kingdom 5
Malaysia 2
Poland 2

                                                                             Spike.

Blog owners do not like spikes. That spike represents 48 pageviews between 3:04 pm and 3:27 pm Eastern Time, U.S. All of the posts, except one, corresponding to that spike, are from February 20-25, 2012. Blog owners do not like spikes because they do not make sense. Blog owners like things to make sense.

Poot-Poot: Internet a CIA Project.

"That's life. That's how it's organised by Americans. You know all of this started during the dawn of the Internet as a special project of the CIA. And it keeps on developing."

[Information entered on Google] "all goes through servers that are in the States, everything is monitored there".

-Russian President Vladimir Putin, April 24, 2014.

He's right! Russia--and Germany and Brazil--are determining the feasibility of their own Googles, as China has done with Baidu and Weibo.

The Americans committed an enormous breach of trust on the internet. The Bush administration started it and the Obama administration continued it. Russians, Germans, Brazilians, Chinese--and millions of Americans--lost faith in America. There is no going back.

It's Friday. Let's dance.

Oh, and she's pregnant! I didn't see that.

I'm such a hater.

Now, let's not jump to any conclusions! Let's not stereotype! Islam is a religion, a "great religion" as Hilary Clinton said after Benghazi. Islam is JUST LIKE Christianity and Judaism, no better AND NO WORSE! Don't you even think of such a thing. Islam is NOT more violent than Christianity or Judaism. ALL religions are good. Even great. They're ALL ALIKE. In their goodness and greatness.

Does that about cover it? Did I miss anything?

"Sudan to Execute Christian Woman who Refused to Convert to Islam."

NEW YORK – Sudan on Thursday sentenced a 27-year-old mother to hang for apostasy when she refused to renounce her family and the Christian faith in which she was raised. She is also to receive 100 lashes for adultery beforehand.

Meriam Yahya Ibrahim was raised as a Christian by her Ethiopian mother. Her father, a Sudanese Muslim, was reportedly absent from her upbringing, but because she was born in Sudan, she is considered Muslim by the state. Ibrahim married a South Sudanese-American Christian man, Daniel Wani, but because the state religion in Sudan is Islam, the marriage is considered void and Ibrahim is considered to have committed adultery, and to have converted away from Islam, by marrying Wani.

Ibrahim has a 20-month-old son, Martin, who is being held in jail with her, and she is eight months pregnant. It is unclear whether she will be executed immediately after giving birth or if the court will wait two years, as local media has reported.

She has been in jail since February.

According to Amnesty International, she was arrested in August 2013 after a family member reported that she was committing adultery because of her marriage. The charge of apostasy was added the following February, when she said she was Christian.

“We gave you three days to recant but you insist on not returning to Islam. I sentence you to be hanged to death,” the judge said during her sentencing on Thursday, addressing Ibrahim by her Muslim name, Adraf al-Hadi Muhammad Abdullah, AFP reported.

Ibrahim, in court, insisted that she is Christian and never committed apostasy, AFP said. Her husband has also insisted to the media that she was “never Muslim.”

Wani has reportedly reached out to the American Embassy in Khartoum, to no avail.

Ibrahim’s trial is the first of its kind in Sudan, Reuters reported, and it would be the first time someone has been executed in Sudan for apostasy. The trial has created an outcry among Christian groups in the West and Sudanese groups.

Amnesty International released a statement on Wednesday calling the ruling “abhorrent.”

“Amnesty International believes that Meriam is a prisoner of conscience, convicted solely because of her religious beliefs and identity, and must be released immediately and unconditionally,” said Manar Idriss, Amnesty International’s Sudan researcher.

Sudan Change Now Movement, a youth group, said in a statement, “The details of this case expose the regime’s blatant interference in the personal life of Sudanese citizens.”

Another rights worker in Sudan, whose name was withheld for security reasons, also told Christian outlet Morning Star News, “We are fighting for Meriam’s life, freedom and fair treatment – according to the law, if she had been a Muslim she should be killed soon after she gives birth to her child.”

“We grieve today at the sentencing to death of a mother, pregnant with her second child, for the expression of her faith and legal marriage to a practicing Christian,” said International Christian Concern regional manager William Stark in a statement. “ICC fears Meriam could be the first of many more Christians to suffer under an increasingly radicalized Sudanese government intent on enforcing Shari’a [Islamic] law throughout the land.”

A representative for the UN secretary-general told Talk Radio News, “the case of Ms. Yahya appears to be a clear violation of freedom of religion.”

Article 18 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights establishes “freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” and the right to change religion.

On Tuesday, the US, UK, Canadian and Dutch embassies in Khartoum released a joint statement in English and Arabic expressing “deep concern.”

“We call upon the government of Sudan to respect the right to freedom of religion,” the statement said, “including one’s right to change one’s faith or beliefs, a right which is enshrined in international human rights law as well as in Sudan’s own 2005 Interim Constitution.”

Under section 126 of the 1991 Sudan Penal Code, apostasy is a crime punishable by death.

Those accused of apostasy are given a chance to repent “within a period decided by the court” – in Ibrahim’s case, three days, and if they do not repent then they are killed.

Reuters contributed to this report.

-Headline and full article from Jerusalem Post.

May 15:

Russia 37
United States 28
Slovenia 6
United Kingdom 5
Turkey 4
Germany 3
India 3
Ukraine 3
Indonesia 2
Canada 1

Stella Elizabeth Williamson.

I emailed a Medical Examiner friend:

Hi Doc,

...You are familiar with the 1980 Gallitzin, Pa. "babies in the attic" case? I just read a paper by a Penn State PhD candidate who wrote that there was in the house "the odor of decomp, still unmistakable in 1980, leaking from the attic." My question to you is, "Is that reasonable?" The mummified remains of five infants, all under one-year of age, murdered between 1923-1933, individually wrapped in newspaper, stuffed in a trunk, kept in the attic of a big old three-story house:  is it reasonable that they'd still be stinking up the house in 1980?

Her response:

 I think that there probably would still be an odor when you’re close to the remains, but I don’t think that it would smell up the whole house.

March* May 14:

United States 44
Russia 42
Turkey 21
Spain 6
Germany 5
Australia 4
Indonesia 2
South Africa 2
China 1
France 1

*I apologize for any inconvenience.

Stella Elizabeth Williamson.

"Could they have ignored the odor of decomposition, still unmistakable in 1980, leaking from the attic?"
-"A Comfortable Evil," Melinda Page Wilkins, PhD thesis, Pennsylvania State University, 2004, pp 131-132.

Very surprised about that. That there would still be an odor of decomposition after 50-60 years. Wilkins is right that it is "unmistakable." Human decomposition also smells differently than other animal decomp. It is a distinctive smell that you are not going to confuse with squirrel or dog or cat. Medical Examiners refer to decomps they have to autopsy as "sweeties." There is a sickly sweet smell to human decomp that is distinctive.

"They" refers to other Williamson household residents. The smell absolutely would have been present in the 1920's, '30's, probably into the '40's to anyone, anywhere in the house. No doubt about that. In 1980? Wilkins obviously got that information from the Coroner or the cops, people in a better position than I to know, to have smelled it themselves. Oh well. I'm the one writing this. No. I don't believe that. Under the circumstances of this case as I understand them, I do not believe the odor of decomposition would be present in the house after half a century. No.

Did the cops ask the people who would have been in the house in the '20's, '30's and '40's--up to 1980--if they noticed that "unmistakable" odor? I don't know.

Good night.

On November 22, 1922 Elizabeth Hadley Richardson Hemingway boarded a train at the Gare de Lyon in Paris to join her husband Ernest, then a correspondent for the Toronto Star, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Hadley put her bags up and then left the train for just the time it took her to buy a bottle of water for the trip. When she returned one of her luggage was gone.

Hadley had thought to take Ernest's fictional writing with her so that he could continue on his earliest stories. He was unpublished yet. She had packed the manuscripts in a small valise. She had packed all the copies, including the carbons. It was the valise that was stolen.

She met Hemingway overwrought. He comforted her before she could get out what had happened. When she got it out, when she told him, Hadley's worst nightmare was realized before her eyes. Hemingway did not comfort her. He got on the next train back to Paris to search their flat, unable to believe that it all was gone (including the carbons).

Hemingway wrote of this holocaust in A Moveable Feast. Decades later, living out retirement in Florida, Hadley Richardson Mowrer was interviewed on her life with Hemingway for The Hemingway Project. Hadley was chipper, chatty, witty, upbeat in the interview. Then the interviewer asked about the stolen valise at the Gare de Lyon. Decades later, you can hear the pain come back in Hadley's voice. Her manner of speaking changes completely.
http://www.thehemingwayproject.com/hadley-talks-about-the-lost-manuscripts/

Image: Hadley, Ernest, Chamby Switzerland, Winter 1922. JFKlibrary.

That's Earth in one take, an image stitched together by NASA in 2012.

It is the end of the day for Google Stats. The top ten countries of pageviewers for May 13:

Russia 53
United States 48
South Korea 9
Spain 6
Australia 5
China 4
Germany 4
France 3
Indonesia 2
Malaysia 2

Stella Elizabeth Williamson.

 

Look at this:

I left you a rose only because You was a very unhappy lady as you was growing up.May your spirit rest knowing what you did to those poor babies. - annie  Added: Sep. 4, 2010

There's somebody who knows something! An as recently as 2010. Leaves her a rose: that is disgusting. If I ever get to the Richland Cemetery, I swear, I'll leave something for Williamson, too. I'll piss on her grave. And headstone. I'll piss all over the grass in front. I'll piss on the right and piss on the left just in case she's buried there. I'll piss on the grass near the headstone and six feet back in case they put her in backwards. I'll store up a lot of piss. Drink lots of water. I'll bring a 12-pack of water in the car. Go back a second time if I have to.

Stella Elizabeth Williamson.

All five murdered babies were live births. Two lived 3-6 months. One lived nine months to one year. Nine months to a year!

"The child had probably begun to sit up, possibly had begun to walk." 
                                        -Dr. Sidney Goldblatt.

I'm nauseous.

The nine month old "appeared to be a chubby infant."

Manner of death:
"...choked with a cloth that was tied in a noose and tightly pulled. The ends were rolled into a ball and stuffed into the child's mouth."

Cause of death: "This could only be the result of homicide." 

The above is from an Associated Press report in the Titusville (Pennsylvania) Herald, October 11, 1980.

Nobody in Gallitzin, Pennsylvania noticed anything. Nobody ever saw Williamson pregnant. Nobody knew of a birth, of five births. Nobody ever saw any diapers, any toys. Nobody in Gallitzin Pennsylvania ever saw Williamson's "chubby infant." Nobody saw him* sit up. Nobody saw her attempt her first steps. Nobody saw him smile, nobody heard her cry.

That is impossible.

*They couldn't determine gender. 

Caution: Incoming intentional pun. MH370 has just fallen off everyone's radar, hasn't it?  24/7 on CNN for weeks, right? There is one article today (CNN). Some Aussie official says it is the most difficult search in human history. Tragi-comic. Cherchez les Malays.

Hey: a house exploded in New Hampshire. No exaggeration. Nice house too. Have a nice day.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/hampshire-house-explodes-police-respond-shooting/story?id=23688435