Monday Morning: Let’s Mambo

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When your Monday begins to drag — and you know it will at some point — put on a little mambo.

Especially Perez Prado‘s Mambo Number 5 and Mambo Number 8. They’ll spice up your day, get it back on track. There are some more recent covers and mashups of Prado’s mambos, but they just aren’t the same as the originals.

Be careful where you play this stuff; it’ll make your mother or grandmother move in ways you may not want to watch.

Let’s cha-cha-cha…

“Damn it Jim, what the hell is the matter with you?”*
FBI-Comey_TakeADeepBreath_21FEB2016
FBI was still trying to dig itself out of a hole on Saturday evening, resorting to damage control mode yesterday. Note, though, Director James Comey’s statement at Lawfare and subsequent coverage at the Los Angeles Times don’t mention at all the screwed up handling of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook’s iPhone. Take that deep breath, then save it to cool your soup, eh?

So I’m following the map that leads to you
Nope, not Maroon 5, but Facebook’s Connectivity Lab, building a map of the network it claims will help it understand how best to reach populations with poor to no internet. A map, to people not on the map? Creepy, like a stalker ex-boyfriend with global reach. Can’t wait for the conditions by which the U.S. government claims it needs access to that.

Radioactive materials gone walkabout in Iraq now found
This is a strange story. Not the part about a testing device containing radioactive Ir-192 used by a Turkish oil pipeline inspection services company that went missing in November but not reported by media until last week, or the part where the device turned up this weekend, dumped by a gas station. Nor even the odd description of the discovery:

“A passer-by found the radioactive device dumped in Zubair and immediately informed security forces,” the chief of security panel in Basra provincial council, Jabbar al-Saidi, said.
“After initial checking I can confirm the device is intact 100 per cent and there is absolutely no concern of radiation.”

What’s strange is the coverage of this story: picked up by mostly conservative outlets, not widely covered in large news outlets. Huh. Weird. Pick out some key words from the story and do a search yourself, compare to coverage on other stories. Heck, it doesn’t even show up on Reuter’s Middle East and Africa site this morning, though they first broke the story.

Not-so-happy anniversary, Q-1 Predator drone
15 years now this death-from-the-sky has been in use. Sadly, it’s become embedded in our culture now.

All right, time to set this aside and put on my dancing shoes. ¡Vamonos! ¡Baile!

* gratuitous Star Trek quote, Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy to Captain James T. Kirk.

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9 replies
    • lefty665 says:

      Les @1 Thanks for the link. The Boston Globe sure gets a lot right, including that Hillary is one of the architects of the current mess, not a savior as she claims. It’s just one more reason a majority of the country is pretty sure she’s untrustworthy and a liar.
      .
      The BG still has a limited understanding of Aleppo. The Syrian Gov’t has retained most of Aleppo, and most of its people, something like 1-1.2m, as opposed to 40-80k in the terrorist held portion. The terrorist held numbers include mostly the terrorists themselves and their families. The recent rush to the Turkish border has been from that group and reportedly includes a surprising number of young men.
      .
      The BG also correctly calls out the amazing US decision to arm and back al nusra, the local al qaeda franchise while our “allies” the Saudis, Qtaris and Turks arm, fund and support ISIL and other terrorists. Bizarre too is the Turks shelling Kurds the US supports and to whom we have attached special forces advisers. What a @#$%^&*( mess.
      .
      Here’s a couple of more links:
      Moon of Alabama He’s a long time left wing blogger, but his aggregation of reporting is pretty good. The comments section is pretty wild, but does cover quite a variety of opinion.
      Sic Semper Tyrannis The old Colonel who runs the blog is reasonably irascible, but he and several of the regular posters have USA and Marine special forces history, and he’s got DIA ME cred too. Since the Russian intervention he’s been right on the money predicting and tracking the course of the war.

  2. martin says:

    Oh man, you’re musical sensibilities run kinda parallel to mine.
    The first time I became aware of latin music as a radio staple, was in Corpus Cristy Texas, circa ’53/’55. Lot’s of latin music, but nothing caught my ear until his top 10 hit came out. I think I was 7 or 8 yrs old.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj64NlRnpDY
    With that tune playing against the background of a sultry Gulf of Mexico night.. sheeezus. No wonder it caught my ear.
    Of course, my mothers favorite TV program had already prepped my ear, as my namesake, “Rickey” Ricardo’s music became a weekly staple.
    Although, at the time, I was more inclined to listen to the emerging “rock & roll” and Texas blues sounds, which forever changed my life, as I picked up a guitar in ’56 and eventually played professionally clear through the early 90’s. Thanks for the memories. Those latin tunes still bring back some of the best in my life.

    Oh, and thanks for the morning “news”. Your selection is right in the pocket.

  3. P J Evans says:

    Sort of OT:
    My response when Webb started making noises about reopening his campaign for president was ‘it’s dead, Jim.’

  5. Clayton Bradt says:

    The story of the lost – and found – radioactive source in Iraq is not at all peculiar. These radiography sources go missing somewhere in the world (including the US) fairly regularly – once or twice a year or so. They usually turn up just like this one did, dumped somewhere when the thieves realized what they had and that they couldn’t do anything with it except hurt themselves. Often it turns out that they just fell off the back of the company truck because it wasn’t secured properly. This iridium-192 source was never a dirty bomb threat, by the way. In the form of a tiny metal pellet or disc, the material is just not very easily dispersible – ever try to blow up a BB? Maybe it could have been dissolved in acid but that would be much more dangerous to the processors than to the intended victims.

  6. orionATL says:

    off topic but maybe interesting:

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160216143512.htm#.VsfnD3j_T9Q.mailto

    the story involves global warming in a past era, – 55.5 mill yrs, an era in which the gulf of mexico had become landlocked. the hypothesis is that the seawater then evaporated in suchbsubstantial quantity as to lower seabed pressure and allow hydrated methane to separate into methane gas. the methane gas then contributed to a very remarkable time of severe global warming called “xy boundary thermal maximum”, or some such.

    the gulf of mexico became unlocked and filled again in a mere 850k years.

    curiously, no mention made made in this short article of the enormous meteor impact in the n. west corner of the gulf 10 mill yrs earlier.

    this story is fascinating in itself, both for the window on the past and for the remarkable science that can make some sense of what happened so very long ago.

    but there is a ghost of this geologist’s hypothesis that may have import for us as mere contemporary mortals.

    deep ocean waters are not the only place where methane (a solar “lens” gas) is stored in quantity. i’ve read that artic permafrost is also a major methane storage repository.

    media presentations of global warming, induced by advanced human societies, have focused on sea rise heights and on other animals’ loss of habitat and subsequent species death.

    however, the frozen methane release problem could turn out to be as important/destructive, or more, for human society than sea water rising.

    the questions for the future might be,

    “just how hot can you stand it if you live in bemidjii, minn?”.

    “what if san francisco had temperatures like baghdad?”

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