War is hell #17
Tag: us
View from a Rhino House: cashing-in
In spite of the US government going for a nap this week a man who pieced together the remnants of five $100 bills eaten last winter by his one-eyed dog, has received a $500 cheque from the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Wayne Klinkel, a graphic designer from Helena, Montana, who works for a local newspaper, said he found Sundance (presumably the dog) had eaten the notes, left in his car while he & his wife were away having lunch, leaving one intact dollar bill & a small piece of a single $100 note.
For the next few days Klinkel followed the dog around in the snow, collecting his droppings in a plastic bag, keeping it frozen in the cold outside his house, & after a couple of weeks he thawed the dog shit in a bucket of soapy water (everyone needs a hobby).
He separated the $100 bill pieces then washed & began to assemble the tiny paper fragments.
He took the taped-together bills to a local bank & the Federal Reserve in Helena where he was directed to the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Mutilated Currency Division, where he mailed the digested bills with a notarized letter on 15th April.
The Treasury Department offers reimbursement in some proven cases of damaged currency, & a standard claim takes up to 2 years to be resolved, according to the department’s (currently furloughed) website.
“When mutilated currency is submitted, a letter should be included stating the estimated value of the currency & an explanation of how the currency became mutilated,” the website says.
On Monday he received a $500 cheque in the post from the Mutilated Currency Division to replace Sundance’s dinner.
A telephone operator with the U.S. Department of Treasury on Thursday said department representatives were furloughed & unavailable for comment on Klinkel’s reimbursement.
It’s a dog’s life (if you’re lucky).
View from a Rhino House: have safe, be fun
It was reported on Sunday that a man in Ohio found over 120 kilos of marijuana hidden inside a Mexican-made gun-safe that he bought over the internet.
The man had ordered the large, steel gun-safe from the Champion Safe Co. It was made in Nogales, Mexico, & trucked from Mexico to Champion’s warehouse local County Sheriff John Lenhart said.
The safe was delivered in June to the customer by an independent driver contracted by Champion, Lenhart added.
The marijuana, tightly wrapped in 10 packages, has a street value of $420,000, according to the sheriff. He said the truck’s shipment contained 30 safes, but that all the others were without the extras.
The US driver who delivered the safe to the customer has been cleared of any involvement, but the driver who delivered the shipment from Mexico to Ohio has gone missing, according to Lenhart. (If they haven’t paid him a visit yet, I bet his “friends” are making strenuous efforts to find him, too.)
He said the DEA normally would not be interested in what is considered to be a relatively small amount of marijuana. But the DEA is interested in learning more about the delivery method & size of such an operation.
“It’s a pretty decent way of smuggling,” Lenhart said. “My guess is that it’s not the first time it’s happened.”
A conflation of the war-against-drugs & guns, who could have seen that one coming?
View from a Rhino House: vicious attack on US banks
In San Diego a protester is standing trial on criminal vandalism charges (with a possible sentence of up to 13 years if convicted) for a scribbling a series of anti-bank slogans in chalk on a city sidewalk.
Mayor Bob Filner has denounced the prosecution of Jeff Olson as a waste of taxpayer money & an abuse of power that infringes on the First Amendment.
The city attorney, Jan Goldsmith, defended his pursuit of the case in remarks published yesterday on a San Diego news website, saying: “We prosecute vandalism & theft cases regardless of who the perpetrator or victim might be.”
“We don’t decide, for example, based upon whether we like or dislike banks,” Goldsmith added. “That would be wrong under the law….”
To add to the air of farce a Superior Court Judge yesterday issued a gagging order in the case, forbidding all parties from discussing the trial further. He previously ruled that Olson would not be permitted to invoke freedom of expression as a defense in the case.
Olson is charged with 13 misdemeanor counts of vandalism, each carrying a maximum penalty of one year in jail plus a $1,000 fine.
He is accused of writing a series of protest slogans between February & August 2012 on sidewalks in front of various Bank of America branches.
Olson has admitted to the graffiti protests, but said nothing he wrote was profane or vulgar & suggested his prosecution was politically motivated.
“I wrote, ‘No thanks big banks.’ I wrote, ‘Shame on Bank of America,'” he said, adding: “If I had drawn a little girl’s hopscotch squares on the street, we wouldn’t be here today.”
The mayor’s office would not rule out the possibility that the mayor might appear as a witness for Olson.
The mayor & city attorney have previously clashed over the mayor’s recent successful effort to cut $500,000 from the city attorney’s budget.
So much for the land of the free. In France he would by now be a national hero with a promising career in politics (a younger M. Bové).
View from a Rhino House: hissed off….
Now that the “War Against Drugs” & the “War Against Terror” have been successfully concluded, & before the “War Against Iran” gets going, the US has declared war against the inhabitants of Guam (a US territory in the Pacific). Well OK, it’s only actually declared war on the island’s brown tree snakes, but we’ve all seen what collateral damage looks like after the airforce has dropped in for a visit. Anyway, US wildlife officials plan, during the next few months, to bomb the island with dead baby mice stuffed with a common analgesic that is poisonous to the slithering, tree-huggers.
Brown tree snakes were introduced to Guam during the closing stages of WWII by visiting U.S. military vessels & have become major pests, blamed for wiping out large chunks of native bird populations on the island.
Officials have worried for years that Agriculture Department had been about the only US government department that wasn’t “at war” with somebody or something & selected the snakes (which have no natural predators on Guam) as “low-hanging” fruit; arguing that pre-emptive military action now could save other, friendly Pacific islands. It appears they were referring especially to Hawaii, over 7,500 kilometres (well beyond “slither range” under normal circumstances) to the east, where numerous US voters & purveyors of presidential memorabilia live.
“Guam is a very unique situation,” said William Pitt, a wildlife biologist (who has never understood the meaning of the word pleonasm) at the U.S. Agriculture Department’s National Wildlife Research Center in Hawaii. “There is no other place in the world that has a moslem insurgent snake issue like Guam.”
The project is set to begin with dead newborn mice being dropped by helicopter over heavily forested areas where the snakes are most concentrated.
Stuffed into the mouth of each murdered, infant mouse will be acetaminophen, the active ingredient in several over-the-counter pain-relief compounds, which is toxic to snakes “but not a lot of other animals,” Pitt said. (NB. Small children & the elderly or those suffering from a range of medical conditions may not fall into this “not a lot” category.)
In an attempt to keep the baited dead, infant mice off the ground, each tiny rodent will be attached to a strand of ribbon between pieces of cardboard designed to drop in a loop & catch in the canopy of trees, he said, pointing out that this was significantly cheaper than parachuting-in live mice or SEALs.
The goal of the aerial assault, which will eventually involve the slaughter of around 2,000 mice in all, is not to eradicate but to reduce & control the brown tree snake population on the island, Pitt said.
“Shock & awe” do not begin to cover it….
View from a Rhino House: “… the right of the people to keep & bear arms shall not be infringed.”
An online petition on the American government’s ePetition site demanding the government “Secure resources & funding, & begin construction of a Death Star by 2016” was created last month by a John D (no unkind suggestions as to what the “D” stands for, please) of Longmont, Colorado, & has gathered over 5.000 signatures during the 3 weeks it has been online. It’s still just over 19.000 short of its goal to reach 25.000 signatures by 14th December.
Building a moon-sized space-station cum doomsday-weapon capable of destroying the Earth with one blast from its planet-buster, as seen in Star Wars, would be “a good way to create American jobs,” John claims.
John argues: “By focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform & weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, & strengthen our national defense.”
I’m not completely sure how destroying the planet would strengthen US defenses, but I confess I am not an expert in these matters. Perhaps when John gets the backing of the Tea Party for his candidacy as next Secretary of Defence he will release a few more details, possibly including how private ownership of one of these technical masterpieces is covered by the Second Amendment (see title). In the meantime, if you can, please go & sign the petition – make the world a safer place for us all!
View from a Rhino House: worlds & words apart
If you’re a language teacher now is the time to consider a move to a new career, maybe pig farming or becoming a trappist monk; anything where talking to people is not necessary – avoiding all those unpleasant memories & broken dreams. Almost-real-time speech conversion from one language to another has arrived. Microsoft Research demonstrated not only how to convert spoken English into Mandarin with just a few seconds’ delay, but also how to output that Mandarin speech with the rhythms & intonations of the original speaker. The technology was demonstrated by Microsoft’s research chief Rick Rashid in Tjianjin, China on 25th October (as part of the ill-starred Windows 8 & “Surface tablet” launches) but the news initially got lost in the bear-fight about responsibility for the general “Asian Launches Cock-up”.
Rashid said a few English sentences into the MR’s new speech-recognition, translation & generation system & reports suggest that the Mandarin output stunned a crowd of 2000 academics.
The system’s “whizz-bang” capability stems from a series of improvements throughout the speech-to-speech process. Software like Dragon has after many years of effort, at last begun to make inroads, & create opportunities, for speech recognition in offices & the next generation of tools based on it, like Apple’s Siri, recognizes spoken questions & search for answers on the web. Microsoft’s Kinect has also recently had a speech interface added.
While such systems fail in handling words at an average rate of around 20% MR’s trick is to use a neural-networking heuristics system that reduces word-recognition errors to around 12%. That means the translation engine (Bing Translate) has a far better chance of creating intelligible Mandarin input to feed into the speaking engine.
But the “goddam!!” factor is the generation of Mandarin speech in a voice recognizably like that of the speaker’s: if you can preserve the speaker’s vocal rhythms & intonations in the translation, their meaning (it is claimed) will be more apparent & the conversation will be more effective. This was achieved for the Tjianjin presentation by having Rashid work with a machine-learning algorithm for an hour, rather than the more usual recitation of a standard text that software like Dragon asks for.
Just think of how many wars will start once we can all understand exactly what each politician really said!
ThursdayAgain 
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