http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2006-08/01/content_654311.htm

Raul is the brother of, and most likely (and just as antiquated) successor to, Fidel. Thus, any type of bureaucratic crisis in the event of Fidel’s demise is unlikely, although Raul is overshadowed by Fidel in personality and is unlikely to gain the public relations status of his brother.

It was also announced at 9 PM EST on Cuban state television.

Meanwhile, Miami (or at least Little Havana) is partying like its 2012, or something like that.

Everyone’s reading as far as possible into the matter, especially Washington, which has long been preparing for Fidel’s death.

But I wonder, though: Fidel may be alot of talk (he’s a gifted orator, btw), but for all the verbal belligerence that has constituted the dialogue between Washington and Havana (which is 90 miles south of the Florida Keys), the guy’s outlasted 9 frickin’ U.S. presidents.

The U.S. has not sent an invasion force to Cuba since the Bay of Pigs (well, those were CIA-sponsored Cuban exiles, not U.S. military personel), and, despite the fall of the USSR, has only used an embargo to starve him out of power.

So it went halfway around the world to fight against threats to Western civilization by the likes of Iraq and (eventually) Iran, but can’t invade a country – one with which it has had bad relations since the 1960’s – that is 90 miles south of the border?

And what if the undying wishes of the Cuban masses are fulfilled? What if, tomorrow, the government throws in the towel and says “fuck it, let’s do elections!”? Cuba, most likely, would become yet another piece of shit Hispano-American nation for the U.S. to fuck deep in the ass for its sugar, tobacco, and other perishable cash crops (with an elite – yes, the elite that resides in Havana – to be used as garden hoes to tend the Cuban soil for U.S. enrichment); or, the U.S. could probably have enough of those already (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, etc.).

So, that’s just what I’m wondering at the moment.

Saw it for the first time last night.

It’s finally here. Yahoo and WindowsLive/MSN are now interoperable on Yahoo Messenger.

So, pretty much, if you usually use YIM, but still have a few contacts on MSN, you can add those to your YIM list and kiss MSN goodbye.

Of course, you’d need Yahoo Messenger 8 to do it; MSN/WindowsLive hasn’t announced anything similar as of yet.

Also, LJTalk, Livejournal’s own Jabber-based instant messaging service, is coming next month. It’ll be federating (interoperable) with other Jabber clients, including Google Talk and Gizmo Project.

So this should be interesting. Hope to try it out.

Oh, and if anyone who reads this uses MSN more than Yahoo, let me know.

I’m reading the Wikipedia article on Eugenics.

Continue reading Long Rant: Immigration and the Culture of Power →

Hope its cheese-flavored.

I guess that 2012 will be the year of something significant and earth-shattering, like the Boxing Day Tsunami or 9/11.

Why?

Because, at least sometime between now and then, somebody – be it John Hagee or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – is going to bring back the Messiah/Mahdi.

Hagee preaches it. Ahmadinejad prepared Tehran’s infrastructure for the arrival while he was mayor of the city. The former is throwing no mere chump change to the Israeli state, and has organizaed the Christians United For Israel (CUFI). The latter saw an aura of light around him when he spoke at the U.N. General Assembly, and has a nuclear lab in his basement.

Meanwhile….
Hamas picks a fight. Again.
Hezbollah joins in. Again.
Israel is in Lebanon. Again.
Fighting Hezbollah. Again.
Carpet-bombing Beirut. Again.

And now a convert from Islam to Baha’i has mentioned some text written over a century ago by one of Baha’i’s granddaddies about how Jesus died on the cross…..then went to India.

And a fringe group makes an annual pilgrimage to the Dome of the Rock with 6-ton stone blocks to rebuild the Temple on the Mount, rebuffed each year by the (Israeli) police; while preacher/farmer Clyde Lott from Canton, Mississippi, tries to send his homegrown unblemished red heifers to Israel (and is rebuffed by the relevant Food and Drug authorities in both the US and Israel).

The Middle East (and anyone, anywhere, who associates with it) is a madhouse. Yet the rest of us in Europe and North America is bitching about illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and Mexico? Hah!

Oh, and for the nostalgic and interested, here’s the late Syd Barrett’s First Acid Trip.

Enjoy.

Gollum, the Wikipedia Browser

Coming Soon!

http://www.cityofmilton-ga.org/default.aspx

Well, if the referendum on the 18 goes OK, the former county of Milton (which, along with Campbell County, was merged into Fulton – Georgia’s largest county – back in the 30’s for obvious financial reasons) will regain its independence (somewhat), but as a municipality.

For more on this, see the Wikipedia article.

More power to Milton. The county system (and its equivalents in other countries) runs counter to urban government, anyway.

Why?

Look at Warner Robins. It is the largest city in Houston County, and has annexed a bit of neighboring Peach County (as of 1997, actually). But expansion of the city’s borders are systematically opposed by residents who live in the county and outside of Warner Robins proper, due to taxes.

Taxes?

Yes. Living outside of the city, you’d have to pay only 3 tiers: federal, state, and county. Living inside the city, however, you’d have to pay 4 tiers: federal, state, county, and city.

But wait. Isn’t the city part of the county?

Nope. City has its own police, county has its own police. They only govern in their separate jurisdictions, and not anymore than that.

This is why, in many larger municipalities in the U.S. (and Canada), there has been a growing movement for municipalization of counties which are encompassed by an entire city, for the above tax reasons as well as making sure that governance in within the border is handled as easily as possible (rather than having to go through the rather obsolete county in between the city and the state). San Francisco has already done it (the “City and County of San Francisco” are one and the same government), as has Honolulu (which encompasses the entirety of the island of O’ahu, even though Hawai’i doesn’t have any municipal-level governments), and it has been debated for Atlanta-Fulton (even though it runs aground with the fact that [1] Atlanta also has a bit of DeKalb and [2] Atlanta would have to forego the rest of Fulton county, such as the aforementioned Milton and Campbell, since both of those, while part of Fulton, are not part of Atlanta).

If municipalization were taken even further, New York City could essentially be its own state, considering that its famed Five Boroughs (Queens, Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island) are also 5 of the 62 counties of New York State. So…..is it Albany or is it the City that is governing those boroughs/counties?

So its obvious that both the state and county systems are gradually, but surely, becoming obsolete as city and borough areas increase in both size and influence. More power to the future City of Milton from the folks in Houston County.

Its all explained on the profile. Opinions (with backing arguments) are needed.

What could sub-Saharan African lit look like a century from now?

In English? Nope.

In any Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic language? Heh, no.

Even in Roman or Arabic script? Probably not, if the developers of N’Ko and Mandombe have something to write about it.

N’Ko, first launched in 1949, is a writing system created by Solomana Kante of Guinea for the Mande languages (although initially for his own Maninka). With its spread and promotion in Mande-speaking regions (it has spread into neighboring Mali and Cote d’Ivoire’s own Mande-speaking areas, even though they are to be found throughout West Africa), it has gained increasing recognition and attention within academic circles, and has received sponsorship from the ISO to UNESCO’s Initiative B@bel; it was approved this year for Unicode 5.0. However, it faces a challenge at home from the French (and other Indo-European) language and Roman alphabet, which are the rule of the day in West Africa (even though you have Arabic script as an alternative), and dominate the communications of West Africa with the world.

Further southeast of N’Ko’s home, you have Mandombe, a syllabary invented by Wabeladio Payi of Bas-Congo province (now Kongo central as of July 30, when the new constitution is officially supposed to kick in), Democratic Republic of the Congo (fmr. Zaire), in 1978. It’s being promoted by the demographically-influential Kimbanguist Church (its also being taught in the primary-to-post-secondary schools owned by the church) and by the 500-or-so professors at the Center for Negro-African Script (CENA) in Kinshasa. Currently, it has been transcribed to the 4 national languages of the DRC – KiSwahili, Lingala, Tshiluba, and KiKongo – and an ongoing effort is underway to transcribe it to other (most likely Bantu) languages. There are no calls for Unicode approval at the moment, and remarks by linguists (particularly software linguists) on the script have so far been negative concerning the structure of the script.

Anyone remember Stan Lee’s “The 7th Portal”? It was that Shockwave-animated action series that was done by Stan Lee Media back around the turn of the century, but then seemingly disappeared from sight and mind when the dot-com bust took out STM.

Short synop: 3 guys and 3 girls (all gamers), one each from Brazil, North America, Germany, India, Japan, and South Africa all turn into cyber-superheroes in order to stop an interdimensional villain from taking over our own. The big joke about it is that both the webisodes and the internet connections in the webisodes are all dial-up, LOL.

I was just wondering because I just updated the Wikipedia page with direct links to StanLeeReturns.org’s archive of 7th Portal episodes if anyone cares to watch…..or cares at all, LOL.

Anyway, the surprising thing is that I only knew about this series when I went to Wild Adventures in Valdosta some three years back; there, they had this one ride, a virtual reality ride (complete with those red and blue glasses) known as the 7th Portal. I think I rode it three times before we had left the park, such was the impression that it made on me.

I tried searching for it a year or two ago, but only now have I turned up the episodes. Now all the Wikipedia page needs is a descriptive picture.

And for anyone who’s interested, the StanLeeReturns.org site has – of all things – swimsuit pics of the characters from the series (I guess you’d expect that sort of thing