Silflay Hraka

It’s required of us, you know. Miss one day and the powers that be send over little guys in jackboots to trash the house. Ngnat calls them the Media Elves.

Commenters at the previous TOTSP have been trading charge and countercharge over which party, Terri’s husband or her parents, is likely to be benefiting financially from their position on whether she should live or die.

But the answer to the question “Which party is in it just for the money?” needn’t be one or the other. It could well be both. As long as they stay in the fight to the bitter end, both Michael Schiavo and Terri’s parents will be able to look forward to what will amount to a lifetime stream of funds generated by the case; book contracts, lecture fees, TV appearances, various media rights. Their behavior upon being faced with the possibility of such magnificent remuneration will be what finally puts the “Who’s in it for the money?” question to rest.

Two new hosts have volunteered for Carnival of the Vanities hosting duties this week;

New World Man, who wants us to decentralize the Supreme Court

Circuit splits would also occur less frequently, for two reasons. One is that splits are not a favorable situation, and there would be pressure that doesn’t exist today, when the Supreme Court is likely to step in and take care of it, to consider comity and ecumenism in circuit decisions. Two is that the Chief Justices, caucusing with their fellows on the Supreme Court, would bring back to their circuits a sense of the Court’s likely disposition. To the extent circuit splits occur less frequently, of course, the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court will be that much less necessary to exercise.

and fellow Triangle blogger Pratie Place, our regional expert on the history of giant cheeses.

On July 20 1801 the “Ladies of Cheshire,” dressed to the nines, assembled at a big cheese bee with pails of curds from “900 cows at one milking.” These had all, by the way, been Republican cows – the milk of Federalist cows was “scrupulously excluded.” During a day of hymn singing the curds were packed into a giant cider press.

The finished cheese was ungainly: more than four feet in diameter, thirteen feet in circumference, weighing 1,235 pounds, it would have sunk into muddy spring roads. Therefore it was decided to make delivery in winter, by sled and boat.

Truly, this a world of glory in which we live.

The Marburg virus has spread to another Angolan province, Cabinda, where 14 people have been put under quarantine, and possibly to Portugal as well.

Bad enough news as it is, but there’s worse, in that the disease appears to be spreading in Angola’s capital, Luanda. All previous cases had some connection to the province of Uige, where the outbreak was first reported.

Luanda provincial health director Vita Mvemba said in the capital: “One Portuguese citizen who has visited Uige was admitted on Sunday at the military hospital and one girl, about 12 years old, has been transferred from the Cacuaco Health Centre to the Americo Boa Vida Hospital.”

“The girl is from Luanda. She has been admitted with a fever for the last two days at the Cacuaco centre. Today, she started bleeding. That’s why we urgently had to transfer her to the Americo Boa Vida Hospital,” Mvemba said.

Here’s a map of the provinces reporting cases of Marburg thus far. I’ll update it as more cases appear, which hopefully they won’t. Provinces where Marburg cases have been documented are in red. Provinces considered at high risk for infection are in pink.

Background: Marburg in Angola, Hunting The Elusive Marburg, Mapping Ebola

8.2 earthquake in Indonesia. At the moment it appears to be in almost the exact same spot as the December 2004 quake.

The USGS advised officials in the area to move people inland, and Thai officials were among the first to issue a tsunami warning for the Andaman Sea.

No reports of injury or damage had been received from the region. The Dec. 26 quake that launched the massive tsunami was a 9.0, the USGS said.

Update: In, fact, it’s just to the south of the December quake, a geology.com produced map of which is over to the left. I’ve added the southernmost star to show the location of the new quake.

Geology.com also has a tsunami wave height map from the December quake.

The December quake was initially reported as a 6.8 on the Richter scale, and laster revised upwards, as many earthquakes are. The fact that this one is initially being reported as an 8.2 strikes me as a bad sign. The depth reported for the quake, 30 km, is the same as that of the December quake.

Update: An American Expat in SouthEast Asia is reporting that either a Tsunami is expected to strike Malaysia within an hour or that there’s not going to be one at all–though he’s unable to reach some areas.

It’s required of us, you know. Miss one day and the powers that be send over little guys in jackboots to trash the house. Ngnat calls them the Media Elves.

It strikes me that the controversy over Terri erupted and continues, not because of a concern in the mind of the public over a “culture of life,” nor because some large number of people believe that Terri is still resident somewhere inside her crippled body. They may well even believe that she is indeed in a completely non-functional, vegetative state. What they do not accept is that her husband can be trusted to make decisions about her care.

I suspect that had Michael recused himself from the decision some years ago, her parents would have come to accept that their daughter was gone, acceded to the decision to remove the feeding tube, and Terri would have been long dead by now.

The Marburg outbreak in Angola has spread to the capital of the country, Luanda.

A 15-year-old boy and an Italian pediatrician, Maria Bonino, who had both been in the northern Uige province to which the virus had previously been confined, died from the Marburg virus in Luanda, local health officials said.

Angolan health officials are battling to contain the outbreak detected in October in Uige that has claimed the lives of scores of children.

They’re losing. A disease with a 21 day incubation period has reached a city of 1.5 million souls, and the most basic preventative measures are not yet in place.

Angolan health officials assisted by WHO experts and teams from Medecins Sans Frontieres and the US Centres for Disease Control were in Uige to try to shore-up measures to control the outbreak.

“The situation is bad, very bad,” said health ministry spokesman Carlos Alberto. “There is no isolation room. We are setting it up.”

The article does not say whether or not the three other Marburg cases in the capital are from indidviduals who recently traveled from Uige, but that is two more cases than was mentioned earlier in the day, when an association with Uige was being stressed by authorities.

The two fatal cases of Marburg haemorrhagic fever reported from Luanda, the
capital city of Angola, appear to be individuals who had recently visited or
worked in Uige province and were being treated in separate hospitals in
Luanda. So far there has been no confirmation of spread of infection to the
local inhabitants of Luanda, although at least one suspected case is under
surveillance.

At this point, while I would not assume that Marburg has begun to be passed from person to person in Luanda, neither would such an event surprise me, given the lack of an “all these people were recently in Uige” assurance.

Here’s a provincial map of Angola. Provinces where Marburg cases have been documented are in red. Provinces previously considered at high risk for infection are in pink. It’s a big swath of country, and it does not include possibly affected areas in the former Zaire. Based on the cases reported thus far, it’s no stretch to think that fully half the country is at risk of being infected.

Map via ReliefWeb

Note: I’ll update the above as more cases are reported.

Update: 6 cases in Luanda, but all connected to Uige.

Filomeno Fortes, the department head for disease control at the health ministry told Reuters, ‘Of the six cases we’ve had in Luanda, we’ve had two deaths until now. All six came from Uige. None of these represents a primary case from Luanda,’ Fortes said. ‘Our fear is that if we don’t control cases coming from Uige, there is a risk that they could infect people in Luanda,’ he added.

Fran of Northwest Notes wrote in response to our Greylag Goose entry in this series; What a beautiful bird. I really like all of your Birds of Iraq posts.

So obviously I thought of her the moment I opened up the latest email from LTC Bob and saw the bird above. It’s our third wader, a Black-Winged Stilt. It is, as the guide says, “Unmistakable,” which is always a help when it comes to identifying a species.

“Exceptionally long, red legs and rather slim black and white body; walks with high graceful carriage.”

Sounds more like the description of a pied Cate Blanchett than a bird to me, but admittedly, I’m kind of odd. God only knows what’s bubbling away down in the depths of my subconscious. That whatever it is evidently involves a parti-colored Galadriel shouldn’t surprise anyone in the least.

The gods of nomenclature have declared that Stilts, along with the Avocets, form the Recurvirostridae bird family, though controversy erupts once one gets down to the classifying the species.

While there is comparatively little debate about the taxonomy of the world’s four avocets, there is little agreement about species-level taxonomy in the stilts. Leaving aside the unique Banded Stilt Cladorhynchus leucocephalus of Australia, some would lump all other stilts into a single species Himantopus himantopus, the name first in priority and which I prefer to restrict to the Black-winged Stilt of the Old World.

Fortunately for the self-esteem of LTC Bob’s stilt, the nomenclaturists all classify it as Himantopus himantopus no matter what. The question is whether or not to lump the other variants in with it, or to separate them out. Thus, depending upon whom one asks this bird is either another Black-Winged Stilt, or a Hawaiian Stilt, and this one is either a Black-Winged or a Black-Necked. It may seem silly, but the intricacies of avispecies classification can have a surprisingly large effect on the real world.

Here’s what Shorebirds : An Identification Guide to the Waders of the World says on the subject of stilt races.

“Try not to fall over.”

Hold on a sec, that’s a different book. Here’s what Shorebirds, which I have chosen as the ultimate word on the subject because it contains some pretty pictures, really says;

RACES Five: nominate himantopus (S Eurasia, India, Sri Lanka, Africa), leucocephalus – ‘Pied or White-Headed Stilt’ (SE Indonesia, Australasia), knudseni – ‘Hawaiian Stilt’ (rare and endangered, Hawaii), mexicanus – ‘Black-Necked Stilt’ (USA to Peru and N. Brazil, Galapagos Islands), and melanurus (Peru and N. Brazil to central Chile and Argentina)

Shorebirds goes on to classify New Zealand’s Black Stilt and Australia’s Banded Stilt as separate species, leaving us with three stilt species overall, one of which has five sub-species. Let us hope birders the world over adopt this scheme as gospel, and bring to a close an argument that, in its way, has been every bit as deadly and bitter as the one between 50 Cent and The Game.

Can’t we all just get along?

Previously: The Eurasian Collared Dove

Next: The Pied Kingfisher

Update: All six of LTC Bob’s Black-Winged Stilt photos have been added to his page at the photo blog.

I’m sure these pictures are giving Putin fits, but given their location, I’m wondering if they’re not making the Chinese autocrats even more uneasy. (lvi)

Nicholas Kristof and the New York Times, yesterday;

The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970′s.

Mr. Dube acknowledged that the white regime of Ian Smith was awful. But now he worries that his 3-year-old son will die of starvation, and he would rather put up with any indignity than witness that.

Silflay Hraka, August 2002;

That makes Ian Smith a bastard, and we know Robert Mugabe is a bastard, right? But which is worse? Can a comparison be made? The last available data for Rhodesia comes from 1974. I’ve posted it with comparative Zimbabwean data from the last two years.

Umm. They’re not free now.

I will now commence holding my breath until Kristof and the Times acknowledge our groundbreaking journalistic leadership on this important story.

…………………………………………….Clunk.

Okay, that may.have been a bit of a high expectation.

I think the the lesson to be learned from the West’s experience in Zimbabwe, as well as much of the rest of Africa, is this; If you want your colonies to succeed as nations, don’t give up them up in a time of war. The West did so during the Cold War, and without fail formerly prosperous countries became embroiled in it as proxies for one side or another, not only in Africa, but Asia as well. “When elephants battle, it is the grass that is trampled, ” goes the saying, and the former colonies of Africa underwent a minimum of twenty years of trampling after they were cast off by their former masters.

The notable exception to that rule; South Africa, which began handing over rule to the black majority in 1990, after the Cold War was won. The result?

Nine years after the fall of apartheid, South Africa has developed into a country with many world-class features that make it the most advanced economy on the African continent. It boasts a sophisticated financial infrastructure with one of the top 10 stock exchanges in the world, an abundant supply of resources and well-developed communications, energy and transportation sectors.

Maybe it’s time to re-colonize Africa, if only to make up for the sins and abandonment her people suffered at the hands of the West previously.

Yes. I’m aware of how popular that suggestion will prove to be in some quarters. But it’s better than leaving Africa to the tender mercies of the United Nations, or Zimbabwe in the blood-covered hands of Mugabe.

When a white racist government was oppressing Zimbabwe, the international community united to demand change. These days, a black racist government is harming the people of Zimbabwe more than ever, and the international community is letting Mr. Mugabe get away with it. Our hypocrisy is costing hundreds of Zimbabwean lives every day.

It’s required of us, you know. Miss one day and the powers that be send over little guys in jackboots to trash the house. Ngnat calls them the Media Elves.

Given that the court decisions seem to be stacking up against those attempting to keep Terri Schiavo alive; How long before someone attempts to kill Michael Schiavo, on the theory that once he’s dead, Terri’s parents would become her legal guardians, and could then ask that her feeding tube be re-attached?