From Russia via the BBC

Squirrels have bitten to death a stray dog which was barking at them in a Russian park, local media report.

Passers-by were reportedly too late to stop the attack by the black squirrels in a village in the far east, which reportedly lasted about a minute.

They are said to have scampered off at the sight of humans, some carrying pieces of flesh.

A pine cone shortage may have led the squirrels to seek other food sources, although scientists are sceptical.

The attack was reported in parkland in the centre of Lazo, a village in the Maritime Territory, and was witnessed by three local people.

A "big" stray dog was nosing about the trees and barking at squirrels hiding in branches overhead when a number of them suddenly descended and attacked, reports say.

"They literally gutted the dog," local journalist Anastasia Trubitsina told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.

"When they saw the men, they scattered in different directions, taking pieces of their kill away with them."

Mikhail Tiyunov, a scientist in the region, said it was the first he had ever heard of such an attack.

While squirrels without sources of protein might attack birds' nests, he said, the idea of them chewing at a dog to death was "absurd".

"If it really happened, things must be pretty bad in our forests," he added.

Komosmolskaya Pravda notes that in a previous incident this autumn chipmunks terrorised cats in a part of the territory.

A Lazo man who called himself only Mikhalich said there had been "no pine cones at all" in the local forests this year.

"The little beasts are agitated because they have nothing to eat," he said.

Is this so terrible?

Since we are at war and part of that war is to convince some of the people in Iraq to quit killing our soldiers, I am hard pressed to see anything wrong with putting favorable articles in the Iraq newspapers even if you have to pay some "reporter" to write them. Some of our press, like the New York Times, which has been known to simply make up news, is all upset and sadly our government seems to be anxious to find out if this is true. I hope it is true and furthermore, I hope it is working. Here is a portion of the article which you can read here:

"The Sands Are Blowing Toward a Democratic Iraq," an article written this week for publication in the Iraqi press was scornful of outsiders' pessimism about the country's future.

"Western press and frequently those self-styled 'objective' observers of Iraq are often critics of how we, the people of Iraq, are proceeding down the path in determining what is best for our nation," the article began. Quoting the Prophet Muhammad, it pleaded for unity and nonviolence.

But far from being the heartfelt opinion of an Iraqi writer, as its language implied, the article was prepared by the United States military as part of a multimillion-dollar covert campaign to plant paid propaganda in the Iraqi news media and pay friendly Iraqi journalists monthly stipends, military contractors and officials said.

Finally making some sense

The government's decision to allow airline passengers to carry small scissors is part of a broader shift in airport security, focusing more on keeping explosives off planes and less on stopping another Sept. 11-type attack.

Rep. John Mica , R-Fla., chairman of the House Transportation Committee's aviation panel, applauded the decision as a welcome change in the mindset of the Transportation Security Administration.

"They're trying to shift from shaking down little old ladies with scissors and knitting needles to looking at what the real threats are," Mica said. "Explosives are my major concern."

Letter from a soldier in Iraq

I watched Bush speaking on television last night. It was my first day off since arriving in theater one month ago.

Please, America, listen to the man.

The moment anyone puts a timetable on coalition forces leaving, we’ve lost the war. You can’t put a timetable on the good guys unless you can put one on the bad guys too. That’s ridiculous. You can’t put an exact timetable on training up the new Iraqi military and police forces. It would be irresponsible.

No one wants American troops to keep dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know, because I’m one of those troops and I would prefer not to die here. On the other hand, and this is what you won’t hear from most mainstream media, if I do die over here, I’ll do so with few regrets. I wouldn’t be dying for a lie, as so many minstrels of misery and mischief keep spouting.

Americans are dying in Iraq so Americans don’t have to die at home, or so that they can die of self-inflicted things like lung cancer and heart attacks instead of having a building blow up and crush them while they are inside it. Don’t kid yourself that things are otherwise. Keeping the fight in the enemy’s home court is exactly the right thing to do.

It’s sad that so many Iraqis and others are dying over here. However, when you discover you have cancer the treatment is always the same - attack it at the source. You don’t wait for it to spread. And when is the last time you heard a doctor putting a limited timetable on cancer therapy? I can picture it in my mind. “Mr. Smith, we have seen some progress with your tumor. It’s shrinking. But we need to move on now. The timetable for treating you has passed. Good luck.”

That’s what some people are trying to tell Iraq just as hope is looming on the horizon. And that disgusts me.

Iraq Yardstick

How are things going in Iraq? The barometer I use is reports from the troops over there and coming back from there. The way I see it, if there was wide-spread dissatisfaction with how things were going, some sizeable minority of our military would be bitching about things and the liberal media would be focused on it like they were on Abu Gharib. That is not what I hear from the military. All the negatives are from democrat politicians and other Bush haters such as the main stream media.

Gift Cards

More and more shoppers are deciding to just give those little plastic cards implanted with a dollar amount that the recipient can use to select merchandise at the store of origin. There are some advantages for the giver in that shopping is greatly simplified and wrapping is not a hassle. It implies more thoughtfullness than cash since you went to the specific store to get the card. The recipient is usually pleased to get the freedom to go shopping for something desired instead of returning something not wanted. These facts pale in comparison to how happy the store is to sell gift cards. First, most of them are used in the month following Christmas and the season is thereby not only extended, but the purchase is usually for more than the value of the card. So, the retailer wins with two store visits rather than the one. In addition, some 10% of the total amount spent on the cards (about $50 billion this year) is never redeemed. Depending on the state laws, this eventually becomes revenue for the retailer. How sweet is that?

Bush's New Ideas

Bush touted "an innovative approach" that returns Mexican illegals closer to their hometowns so they will be less likely to sneak in again. But the Border Patrol started doing it more than 50 years ago.

"Technology can help an individual agent have broader reach and more effectiveness," the president said, citing the surveillance value of UAVs. What he didn't mention was that the government was shamed into using these drones by ordinary citizens frustrated with federal inaction who, more than two years ago, built their own drones and posted the aerial images on the Internet.

Dick Armey's Take On His Party

The Wall Street Journal has an Op-Ed piece written by Dick Armey who was the House Majority Leader from 1995 to 2003. I don't have a link to the article, but he mainly pointed out many of the things I have complained about in the past months. When the Republicans try to match the Democrats in spending and raising taxes, they are not only mismatched, but doomed to failure. He points to Colorado where the Governor, Bill Owens joined the dems in overturning the limit on state spending previously imposed by their constitution. Armey concludes that this killed any chance for Owens to run for President. It was here that Armey advanced one of his axioms. "make a deal with the devil and you're the junior partner".
Armey, who was one of my heroes along with Newt Gingrich, goes on to point out that these runaway spending binges by Bush and the other Republicans were caused by political considerations. Bush didn't want to run for office being bashed by the dems for starving someone or some program. This lead to Armey's next axiom. "you can't get your finger on the problem if you've got it in the air."
At the end of the piece, Armey points out that we who call ourselves conservative and Republican have to support permanent tax cuts, repeal the death tax, and control spending. It is obvious that for liberals to be elected they have to move toward us. Notice Hillary Clinton? This prompts the question of why Republicans want to act like them? A final Armey axiom. "when we act like us we win. When we act like them, we lose."

Bush Misses Illegal Alien Boat Again

Neal Boortz nailed the Bush speech yesterday on our immigration "policy". He started out building up the patrols on the border and then mentioned sending them home again. Here is some of it. Read it all.

Same old, same old. It is impossible to stand there and say you're going to crack down on illegal immigration while at the same time say that you are going to reward people who broke our immigration laws. The president says it's not amnesty. Ok, now we've finally caught the president in a lie. OF COURSE it's amnesty! When you tell someone who has broken the law that you are not only going to ignore their illegal conduct, but you are actually going to reward them for it, then you have more than plain old garden variety amnesty, you have amnesty with perks!

Bush falls back into Harriet Meirs mode

This is going to help Bush with his base not at all.

President Bush today will call for a crackdown on illegal immigration, a move aimed at further rallying conservatives who recently cheered Mr. Bush's tough talk on Iraq and the Supreme Court. But the president will also renew his call for a program to allow Mexicans who have already entered the U.S. illegally to remain here for up to six years. That initiative has long angered conservatives who equate it with amnesty.

Liberals won't like this.

NEW YORK -- New York City public schools must let religious groups rent space for meetings on the same basis as other organizations, a federal judge ruled. The city's law department said it will appeal.
Bronx Household of Faith, an evangelical congregation, has sought for years to rent space for Sunday worship in Public School 15. In May, the Justice Department's civil rights division filed a brief supporting the church.
Judge Loretta Preska of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York earlier had taken the opposite side in the case.
She based her latest ruling on the 2001 Supreme Court precedent in another New York case, Good News Club v. Milford Central School. There, the high court said schools' denial of rentals for after-class Bible clubs was unconstitutional under free-speech guarantees.

Iraq Elections

The elections in Iraq are coming on the 15th of December and the campaign has heated up. Unfortunately, it appears to be taking on a decidely American flavor. Here is an exerpt from an Iraqii which supports this view. You can read the whole thing here.

"... people in the street think that candidates should focus more on their political platforms rather than on exchanging accusations and allegations.

The other battlefield of electoral campaigns can be seen in the posters war. Tearing posters of other parties has become so common that there are specialized contractors who get paid to do this! And they either tear the posters or paste their client’s poster over them.
One man who works in this field said to me “there are no more walls left in Baghdad and we had to buy a new set of tall ladders in order to reach the highest spots possible…” while a taxi driver felt sorry for the “money being wasted on these posters” and added “if they used this money to offer free clothes to the poor in this winter I’d give them my vote”.

Aside from what parties put on their posters or say in the speeches they make, the people themselves are also using a portion of the walls to write whatever they like with or against this or that list; one funny line I saw yesterday said something that translates like this:

Vote for Allawi and your wife will buy malawi (heavy bracelets of gold) and vote for the I’tilaf (the united alliance) and you’ll go back to the tlath-talaf (3,000 in reference to the old poor salaries that Saddam paid us). "

Sounds good to me

AUSSIE RULES

CANBERRA AUSTRALIA:

Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia law were told on Wednesday to get out of Australia, as the government targeted radicals in a bid to head off potential terror attacks. A day after a group of mainstream Muslim leaders pledged loyalty to Australia at a special meeting with Prime Minister John Howard, he and his ministers made it clear that extremists would face a crackdown.

Treasurer Peter Costello, seen as heir apparent to Howard, hinted that some radical clerics could be asked to leave the country if they did not accept that Australia was a secular state and its laws were made by parliament. "If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you," he said on national television. "I'd be saying to clerics who are teaching that there are two laws governing people in Australia, one the Australian law and another the Islamic law, that is false.

If you can't agree with parliamentary law, independent courts, democracy, and would prefer Sharia law and have the opportunity to go to another country which practices it, perhaps, then, that's a better option," Costello said. Asked whether he meant radical clerics would be forced to leave, he said those with dual citizenship could possibly be asked to move to the other country.

Education Minister Brendan Nelson later told reporters that Muslims who did not want to accept local values should "clear off". "Basically, people who don't want to be Australians, and they don't want to live by Australian values and understand them, well then they can basically clear off," he said.

Separately, Howard angered some Australian Muslims on Wednesday by saying he supported spy agencies monitoring the nation's mosques.

Mideast Protests

Mark Steyn makes the very good point that we are seeing large protests in Jordan against Zarqawi but if the "occupation" is so unpopular in Iraq, where are the mass demonstrations against that? I'm not talking 200,000, or even 100 or 50,000. But, if there were just 1,500 folks shouting "Great Satan, go home!" in Baghdad or Mosul, it would be large enough for the media to do that little trick where they film the demo close up so it looks like the place is packed. Yet no such demonstrations take place.

Hope this is correct

The Elaph Arab media website reported on Sunday that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of the al-Qaida in Iraq terror group, may have been killed in Iraq on Sunday afternoon when eight terrorists blew themselves up in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

The unconfirmed report claimed that the explosions occurred while coalition forces surrounded the house in which al-Zarqawi was hiding. American and Iraqi forces are looking into the report.

Water Boarding

Several times I have read that the liberals are all upset with the nasty Bush administration because they subject terrorists to a form of "torture" known as waterboarding. I didn't know what that was exactly until recently. Here is the description. You can decide if it so cruel that we should never use it to save American lives.

Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess.

Not Again!

Well, it has really started. Yesterday, Congressman Murtha, a Viet Nam veteran from Pennsylvania, called for the U.S. to pull the troops out of Iraq. I thought we learned not to fight wars we didn't intend to win and that our troops can't be defeated but our politicians can be. Iraq citizens watch this stuff and since our disgraceful abandonment of the Kurds and others in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, they are bound to be skittish about committing to fight the insurgents who are certain to be keeping lists of those who collaborate with us now. If they decide to sit back and wait to see if we perservere, it will be harder to reach the stated objective of having Iraq fight their own insurgency. The problem is not so much a lone Congressman but the sad fact that we have an inarticulate President who can't seem to muster the words and tactics to rally the public to his cause. I am depressed by it all.

Happy Birthday to William Buckley

I just read a tribute to William Buckley. He is turning 80 and I just wish we could count on 80 more from this most talented observer of the scene in America. Here is one of my favorite anecdotes, but you can read the others here.

In his speech to a large student crowd, Buckley talked at length about the China trip. I had just read his National Review article about the trip and observed how he artfully incorporated pieces of it into his speech. He fielded student questions following the speech from a microphone placed on the floor below the podium. One of my classmates, visibly drunk, approached the microphone to ask Buckley a killer question.

"Mr. Buckley, Mr. Buckley, Mr. Buckley," he said as he warmed to his theme. "Do you really think the American involvement in Vietnam is right, or do you recognize that it's an imperialistic war where we're pursuing our own interests at the expense of the Vietnam people with no justification except the higher interests of American business and its friends in the Nixon administration..." and so on, at slightly greater length.

"The former," Buckley responded.

Trial Lawyers Again

Several times I have pointed out how the slimy trial lawyers think more about their ability to garner greedy profits than the health of the rest of us. This is particularly apparent now in their opposition to indemnification of vaccine producers who are being asked to produce a vaccine to the avian flu. The bill in the Senate now is being opposed by Democrats at the behest of the slimy ones. You can read it here.

Bridges to nowhere

Back when the appropriations for next years transportation projects were released, there was a lot of noise generated about a bridge in Sitka, Alaska which would cost some $220 million to build and connected an island with 50 inhabitants to the mainland and took the place of a 5 minute ferry ride. Of course, Senator Stevens was the big foot for this boondoggle in Congress with Congressman Young from there helping since he is Chairman of the Transportation Committee in the House. There was a lot of controversy about this, especially after Katrina caused so much damage that we seem obligated to make right at great expense. As I have blogged on before, my favorite Senator, Colburn of Oklahoma, tried to get the earmarked money for this infamous bridge removed and the money sent to Louisiana instead. No go. Senate voted it down flat.
That move was tough to swallow politically since all logic was stood on its head. The guys in Washington are not stupid however. They have now removed the earmark. That is right. There is no more a designation that the money being sent to Alaska to build that bridge. Here is what you may not see in the fine print. The money is still going to Alaska to build that bridge, but it is up to the state to decide whether or not to build it. They could do something else with the money. Now, doesn't that make you feel better?

Budgets Washington Style

Well, here is where we are in Washington. Congress is trying to pass a budget and if you read the papers you would think there is this giant clash between Republicans and Democrats over some heartless cuts the Republicans are trying to impose on the poorest and most helpless of our citizens--those whose very lives are threatened by cuts in entitlements. These are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, food stamps, farm subsidies and other things which go up every year unless slowed legislatively. There are two important aspects to this. First, the Democrats want nothing to do with changes in the growth of such programs. Next the nasty Republicans are proposing nothing meaningful. Over the next 5 years the total Federal budget is expected to $13.855 trillion. The Republican plan would hack it all the way down to $13.800 trillion or 0.25% in 5 years. The new prescription drug plan adds some $300 billion to the budget over this time period. This is 6-times what this so-called deficit reduction plan would save. It is tryly laughable for the Republicans crow about their fiscal efforts and even more laughable for the Democrats to protest so loudly.

Sand Sculpture

This is a sand sculpture made by Chuck Ritchey, Sr. on the beach at Ocean City, Maryland. Since this is public land, the ACLU will surely be in court soon. Even though the tide takes them away every day, he is right back making another one.

Good News

A summit focusing on narrowing the digital divide between the rich and poor residents and countries opened Wednesday with an agreement of sorts on who will maintain ultimate oversight of the Internet and the flow of information, commerce and dissent. . . .

Negotiators from more than 100 countries agreed late Tuesday to leave the United States in charge of the Internet's addressing system, averting a U.S.-EU showdown at this week's U.N. technology summit.

Here we go again

Michael Newdow, the guy who tried to get the Pledge of Allegiance banned, is now filing a suit to remove the phrase "In God We Trust" from our coinage.

The atheist who’s spent years trying to ban recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools says he’ll file a new lawsuit this week.

Michael Newdow says he’ll ask a federal court to order removal of the national motto “In God We Trust” from U-S coins and currency. He says it violates the religious rights of atheists who belong to his “First Amendment Church of True Science.”

We are all getting bored with this idiots lawsuits. We need someone to take great issue with religious symbols on government property like the crosses marking graves of service men and women which are so prevalent in military cemetaries. Surely that offends somebody somewhere. Some of them have the Star of David on them. Draw up the legal papers and file them in the 9th District out there in San Francisco.

Sounds like a good declaration to me.

From Peter Costello, the treasurer of Australia:

If you are somebody who wants to live in an Islamic state governed by sharia law you are not going to be happy in Australia, because Australia is not an Islamic state, will never be an Islamic state and will never be governed by sharia law.

We are a secular state under our constitution, our law is made by parliament elected in democratic elections.

We do not derive our laws from religious instruction.

There are Islamic states around the world that practise sharia law and if that’s your object you may well be much more at home in such a country than trying to turn Australia into one of those countries, because it’s not going to happen.

This is a bad sign

Chinese officials revealed that pigs have tested positive for bird flu in Xiangtan County, Hunan Province, where a bird epidemic is raging and one human death, possibly from bird flu, has already occurred, reported Phoenix TV on November 10. Hunan Province Bureau of Agriculture officials tested samples of pig oral secretions to assess the possibility that bird flu was responsible for the death of a 12-year old girl on October 17th. The girl was cremated the same day that she died, and her ill brother is still in quarantine.

If this is true it shows that the H5N1 strain has jumped to pigs and its lethality in humans is not limited to the very old or the very young. Epidemiologically this greatly increases the likelihood that the virus could establish a reservoir in multiple species and greatly increase its ability to infect humans. China needs to close down that Province.

More of this is needed

President Bush's administration has threatened to sue Southern Illinois University, alleging its fellowship programs for minority and female students violate federal civil rights laws by discriminating against whites, men and others.

Read the article here.

The way I read the siuation, it seems pretty clear to me that discrimination on the basis of skin color and gender is fairly obvious in this situation.

USS Reagan Passing the Arizona Memorial

Capability

• Top speed exceeds 30 knots

Powered by two nuclear reactors that can operate for more than 20 years without refueling

• Expected to operate in the fleet for about 50 years

• Carries over 80 combat aircraft

• Three arresting cables can stop a 28-ton aircraft going 150 miles per hour in less than 400 feet

Size
Towers 20 stories above the waterline

• 1092 feet long; nearly as long as the Empire State Building is tall

• Flight deck covers 4.5 acres

• 4 bronze propellers, each 21 feet across and weighing 66,200 pounds

• 2 rudders, each 29 by 22 feet and weighing 50 tons

• 4 high speed aircraft elevators, each over 4,000 square feet

Dates

• Dec 8, 1994 Contract awarded to Newport News Shipbuilding

• Feb 12, 1998 Keel laid

• Oct 1, 2000 Precommissioning Unit established

• March 4, 2001 Christened by Mrs Nancy Reagan

• May 5, 2003 First underway

• July 12, 2003 Commissioned

• July 23, 2004 Arrived at homeport in San Diego, CA

Capacity

• Home to about 6,000 Navy personnel

• Carries enough food and supplies to operate for 90 days

• 18,150 meals served daily

• Distillation plants provide 400,000 gallons of fresh water from sea water daily, enough for 2000 homes

• Nearly 30,000 light fixtures and 1,325 miles of cable and wiring

• 1,400 telephones, 14,000 pillowcases and 28,000 sheets

• Costs the Navy approximately $250,000 per day for pier side operation

Costs the Navy approximately $2.5 million per day for underway operations (Sailor's salaries included

Mark Steyn nails it again.

I do think that what's pathetic about all Western countries, including the United States, including France, including Canada, and a lot of other countries, is that they make these sort of high school sophist arguments about terrorism, as if it's some sort of theoretical debate. It's not. We're dealing with a very difficult situation here. And if you accord to terrorists all the rights of somebody who gets arrested for holding up a liquor store in Des Moines, you are going to lose to the terrorists, because when you accord them the full rights of somebody who is a criminal, you make it impossible to prosecute this as a war, which is what it is.
Read the whole interview here.

Buchanan appraisal of Bush performance

Pat Buchanan has never really seen things the same way Bush did and now he really doesn't. Pat is an old school conservative and Bush is a so-called newer version of conservativism which largely likes foreign entanglements, war and big government more than many of us. Here is the way Buchanan put it.

Under Bush I, taxes were raised, funding for HUD and Education exploded, and a quota bill was signed under which small businesses, accused of racial discrimination, were made to prove their innocence, or be punished, in true Soviet fashion.

Under Bush II, social spending has exploded to levels LBJ might envy, foreign aid has been doubled, pork-at-every-meal has become the GOP diet of choice, surpluses have vanished, and the deficit is soaring back toward 5% of GDP. Bill Clinton is starting to look like Barry Goldwater.

Blair's Dilemma

Until this week, the proposed anti-terror bill in Great Britain included a plan to extend the period for which police can hold terror suspects without charging them, from 14 to 90 days. But on Wednesday, November 9th, in Mr Blair’s first major parliamentary defeat since becoming prime minister in 1997, the House of Commons voted down the measure by 322 to 291. This is part of a struggle facing not only the British, but the U.S., Australia and other countries which treasure their liberties.
Benjamin Franklin wrote that “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” He presaged an argument that is raging almost two and a half centuries later. What precisely are the essential liberties which, when given up, make a liberal society unworthy of the name?
We are faced with struggles over aspects of the Patriot Act where persons deemed particularily dangerous could be held forever and the British are going to settle on a 28 day holding period. There will be cases where any given number doesn't fit the circumstance. For example, with the shorter 28 day period, we may well see things like unsubstantiated charges being leveled which might be avoided if things proceded more deliberately. On the other hand, forever seems like along time to some of us. Terrorism makes rule making tough.

Only in the movies

I ran across 40 things that are only seen in the movies. They are pretty funny and I am sure we could all add to the list if we were clever enough. Here are some I thought especially apt.

All bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red digital displays so you know exactly when they are going to explode.

The ventilation system of any building is the perfect hiding place. Nobody will ever think of looking for you in there and you can travel to any other part of the building undetected.

One man shooting at 20 men has a better chance of killing them all than 20 men firing at once (it's called Stallone's Law).

This pig won't fly

The Washington Post looked at the situation in France and came to the conclusion that what the French need to do was put in some good old affirmative action. So, they have a stagnant economy and 10% unemployment. In the face of this, they should start giving nonexistant jobs preferentially to those burning Paris down. It is hard for me to see what this would do except change the source of the riots from the minority to the majority citizens of that pitiful country. I think they would wind up with what is commonly called civil war.

This could be handy

The US government has unveiled a "non-lethal" laser rifle designed to dazzle enemy personnel without causing them permanent harm. But the device will require close scrutiny to ensure compliance with a United Nations protocol on blinding laser weapons.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) believes the weapon could be used, for example, to temporarily blind suspects who drive through a roadblock. However, the DoD has yet to reveal details of how the laser works.
The PHaSR may attempt to address safety concerns by automatically sensing its distance from a target. The limited information released by the DoD includes mention of an "eye-safe range finder", which may mean the laser's power is adjusted depending on the distance to the target. The system is also said to incorporate a "two wavelength laser system", which may be designed to counter goggles that can filter out certain wavelengths of laser light.

Athletic Role Models

I am not a fan of the Hip-Hop culture which black athletes continue to offer as a model for urban kids to emulate. I realize that I am supposed to accept the nonsense that all cultures are equal and one is not superior to another, but I just can't get there. A recent flap over the dress code for black players in the NBA reinforced my distain for these overpaid and selfish parasites. It would be easy to just condemn them, but I started looking for some athletes who could and should be alternatives to the Iversons in the NBA. Two I came up with were Tiki Barber of the New York Giants and Warrick Dunn of the Atlanta Falcons. These two running backs seem to excel off the playing field as well as on it. Barber dresses appropriately and speaks in complete sentences which suggest an above average intelligence. Warrick devotes a large amount of his time and money to charitable activities instead of bling bling and absurd bopping from one mindless activity to another. There are probably others, but I doubt the youth in the hood will notice them.

Musical Breasts?

Musical breast implants

Computer chips that store music could soon be built into a woman's breast implants.

One boob could hold an MP3 player and the other the person's whole music collection.

BT futurology, who have developed the idea, say it could be available within 15 years.

BT Laboratories' analyst Ian Pearson said flexible plastic electronics would sit inside the breast. A signal would be relayed to headphones, while the device would be controlled by Bluetooth using a panel on the wrist.

According to The Sun he said: "It is now very hard for me to think of breast implants as just decorative. If a woman has something implanted permanently, it might as well do something useful."

The sensors around the body linked through the electrical impulses in the chips may also be able to warn wearers about heart murmurs, blood pressure increases, diabetes and breast cancer.

Amazing church finding in Israel

A mosaic and the remains of a building uncovered recently in excavations on the Megiddo prison grounds may belong to the earliest church in the world, according to a preliminary examination by the Israel Antiquities Authority.

One of the most dramatic finds suggests that, instead of an altar, a simple table stood in the center of the church, at which a sacred meal was held to commemorate the Last Supper.

Photographs of three Greek inscriptions in the mosaic were sent to Hebrew University expert Professor Leah Di Segni, who told Haaretz on Sunday that the use of the term "table" in one of them instead of the word "altar" might lead to a breakthrough in the study of ancient Christianity. It is commonly believed that church rituals based on the Last Supper took place around an altar.

I think we knew this

The U.S. Department of Defense sees urban schools as ones of its biggest recruiting obstacles. Not because leftist teachers in some of those schools try to keep recruiters out, but because so many potential recruits have to be turned down because of the poor education they have received in those schools. While only 21 percent of Americans live in rural areas, 44 percent of the qualified recruits come from these areas. What’s strange about all this is that the rural areas spend much less, per pupil, on education, but get much better results. Part of this can be attributed to differences in cost of living, but a lot of it has to do with simply getting more done with less. Per capita, young people in rural areas are 22 percent more likely to join the army, than those of the same age in urban areas.

Mark Steyn sums up France

The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans? For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have lost that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.

France

It will be interesting to see if anyone in France will fight for the country.

"Somebody was telling me about the French Army rifle that was being advertised on eBay the other day -- the description was, 'Never shot. Dropped once.'" Rep. Roy Blunt (MO)

Bring it on

The more I hear about the coming trial of Scooter Libby, the more I am convinced that certain folks who once thought these were really cool indictments may change their mind. Let's wait until Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson, Judy Miller, Tim Russert, Matt Cooper, and others perhaps some in the CIA have their notes and E-mails subpoenaed and they have to testify under oath about all of these matters. From what I read, Ted Wells, Libby's attorney is tough. Libby is a big favorite to be found not guilty.

Not much sympathy out there

I have been reading a number of comments related to the situation in Paris on the internet web site hosted by Lucianne Goldberg. It is hard to find much in the way of sympathy for the French. As a matter of fact, the most common reaction is let them burn and rot in hell. The truth of the matter is the French had better get this right the first time. If the Muslims send out a cry for help there are a lot of willing supporters in nearby Germany, Holland, etc and the French simply aren't given to serious suppressive or even defensive activity.

Chickens come to roost

Back in the 1990s, the French sneered at America for the Los Angeles riots. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported in 1992: "the consensus of French pundits is that something on the scale of the Los Angeles riots could not happen here, mainly because France is a more humane, less racist place with a much stronger commitment to social welfare programs." President Mitterrand, the Washington Post reported in 1992, blamed the riots on the "conservative society" that Presidents Reagan and Bush had created and said France is different because it "is the country where the level of social protection is the highest in the world."

Read the entire editorial here.

New CBS Poll

There is a new CBS poll out today which shows that the job approval for Bush is at an all time low of 35%. That will be the headline and the basis for subsequent discussion.

Now look at the weighted sample:

Republicans: 223 (23.80%)
Democrats: 326 (34.79%)
Independents: 388 (41.4%)

See how often you hear anything about the internals of polls such as this.

Joe Wilson's Truthfulness??

The following is great ending to a column published by Larry Elder questioning the lying by Joe Wilson which is now obvious as we look back on the Libby indictment for lying to the FBI and giving divergent testimony to a Grand Jury. You can read it here, but here is the end of the essay:

Question: How serious is lying to a federal investigator?

Answer: Ask Martha Stewart.

Question: How serious is perjury?

Answer: Ask former President Bill Clinton.

Question: Why don't some in the mainstream news media raise stronger questions about Wilson's credibility?

Answer: Ask someone else.

Larry Elder is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and publishes a monthly newsletter entitled "The Elder Statement."

Washington still leaky!

There is an article in the Washington Post this morning which is entitled

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons

If you go read the article it doesn't take much sleuthing to figure out that the entire article is directly sourced by material from the CIA itself and there is not likely to be a special prosecutor to investigate the specific source of the material. I am saddened by the fact that someone is providing this information for publication, but I am sure glad the prisons are out there somewhere and we have some terrorists locked up there.

Energy Facts

Here in Georgia gasoline prices are coming down rather nicely. We are seeing regular at about $2.20/gallon and it is a little cheaper across the river in South Carolina. Most of this is attributed to imports from Asia and Europe. Such is not the case with natural gas. You can tell it is going to be rough when folks in the north and northeast start having to pay $600/month to heat their houses. The way you can tell is the politicians--even the Republicans like Senator Frist--are complaining about the greedy energy companies. The fact, however, is the politicians got us in this situation long ago. There was an oil spill off the coast of California near Santa Barbara in 1969 which precipitated a move to anti-business, pro-environment policies which lead to our current deficit being a "crisis" in the eye of those affected. First there was a ban on drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico (think Florida beaches) that deprived us of 58 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Our annual consumption in the U.S. is about 5 trillion. The Rocky Mountain Front was declared out of bounds for drilling and there went access to 11 trillion cubic feet. Clinton took 5.6 million acres of federal land out of play and there went another trillion feet. Given the fact that gas wells do not produce oil spills which spoil beaches, the price for these political realities is going to be high.

Something for Northeastern Senators to Think About

The National Italian American Foundation (NIAF) applauds President George W. Bush on his nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr., a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, to the position of associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.Judge Alito, whose father immigrated to the United States from Italy, is highly respected in the judicial community for his constitutional knowledge and his impeccable character.President Bush has chosen an individual whose intellect and qualifications are above reproach. We are proud and fortunate that he shares our Italian heritage. Washington, D.C. Oct. 31, 2005.

The large Italian-American population in New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Rhode Island, etc. will be very interested in the vote of one of their senators against Sam Alito.

I am not sure about this.

A paper due for publication this week in the journal Nature found that a combination of three drugs applied topically in monkeys prevented infection with a virus similar to the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. The results are among the most promising to date in tests of this approach and point toward a prevention strategy that could save many lives.

This sounds good, but I wonder how practical it will be. If you are the type of woman who would willingly have sex with someone who may have AIDS and you are not sure, you might not have enough sense to use the product. If you are willingly having sex with someone you know has AIDS, will you trust the gel? If you are a woman in Africa, for example, who is unable to convince a man to use a condom, will you be able to delay sex long enough to use a vaginal gel? Maybe it will have some marginal benefit and I guess that makes it worthwhile to some extent.

Enforcement??

You don't need a law for everything. Mary Flowers is an idiot.

Many kids grow up learning they cannot come to the dinner table until they've washed their hands. But in the rush of a school day, not only is hand-washing not mandated, it often is not even possible. A bill introduced this month by Democratic Illinois state Rep. Mary Flowers would change that. Her legislation, to be voted on next session, would mandate that every student washes or otherwise sanitizes their hands before eating lunch at school. “When you think about all the things your hands touch — before you even enter a room you touch a doorknob that's been touched by hundreds of thousands of people before and who knows when it's been washed,” said Flowers, who represents the southwest side of Chicago. “Students are playing volleyball, football and basketball between classes without washing their hands. They're touching money that came from who knows where, different states or countries.”

Star Anise

Star anise is a green 8-pointed star shaped fruit grown in Southern China. Until recently, star anise was used as a cooking spice although it has been used for thousands of years as a Chinese cold medicine. More recently, the value of star anise has increased remarkably. The reason for the financial windfall Chinese farmers are experiencing is related to the fact that the star anise berries are chock full of an organic compound called shikimic acid. At one time I knew a little organic chemistry and shikimic acid is somewhat familiar in that it was on the pathway to an amino acid I used to have to learn about. Now it has become more glamorous since Roche needs large quantities of shikimic acid to make Tamiflu which is able to treat avian flu and thus is being hoarded by governments all over the world. There is a fermentation process which can be used to produce shikimic but extraction from star anise is much more efficient and there are a lot of happy farmers in China as a result. The irony is the area where shikimic acid is produced in China is the same where the disease originated.

Libby Indictment

After cogitating on it over the weekend in between successfully rooting for Georgia Tech to win and the University of Georgia to lose, I have decided the indictment of Libby is pretty thin gruel. It looks to me the matter comes down to Libby saying he learned Valerie Plame's occupation from reporters and the prosecutor saying he learned it from Cheney or some other place and therefore was lying to the FBI and to the Grand Jury. Since nobody was indicted for outing her, and she apparently wasn't outed, it escapes me what difference it makes. Until someone shows me Libby had some dark ulterior motive to lie and mislead the investigators, no crime was committed in my view.

Excess Profits

There is talk now in Congress, even among Republicans, about how the oil companies are making too much money and we should somehow make them give some of it back in the form of excess profits taxes. I don't like paying over $0.69/gallon, but maybe we should get all the facts before jumping on the "give us our money back" bandwagon. Consider this fact from the Tax Foundation.

Federal and state taxes on gasoline production and imports have been climbing steadily since the late 1970s and now total roughly $58.4 billion. Due in part to substantial hikes in the federal gasoline excise tax in 1983, 1990, and 1993, annual tax revenues have continued to grow. Since 1977, governments collected more than $1.34 trillion, after adjusting for inflation, in gasoline tax revenues—more than twice the amount of domestic profits earned by major U.S. oil companies during the same period:

Read about it here.

An interesting interview

Bill Roggio who blogs at The Fourth Rail had an interesting interview with a Col. Davis in Iraq. Here is an exerpt:

Bill: What is the greatest threat to U.S. Marines and soldiers patrolling in the region?

Col Davis: The greatest threat by far is the IEDs (improvised explosive devices), VBIEDs (vehicle borne IEDs), SVBIED (suicide VBIEDs). This is the insurgent's most deadly weapon. It has been rewarding to watch the proficiency develop in the Marines, sailors, soldiers and airmen serving out here to detect and disable these weapons. During Operation River gate, we encountered an average of four dozen IEDS a day during the course of a ten day period and 90-95% of these weapons were disabled or destroyed before they could be detonated.

Read the whole thing.

Bush's Failing??

I saw a run-down today of Bush's problems, and they are many, but one I am having a hard time with. I can see the immigration failure, the spending excesses, the idiotic nomination of Harriet Meirs, the imposition of the Davis-Bacon act in reconstruction of the hurricane damage, and others, but I am really not sure he deserves credit or blame for the out-of-wedlock births which are being laid at the feet of the Bush administration. Example of the problem is given below.

A record number of babies — nearly 1.5 million — were born to unmarried women in the U.S. last year. And those moms were more likely to be 20-somethings than teenagers, according to new federal data released Friday.

"This is not a teenage issue," says Stephanie Ventura,. a demographer with the National Center for Health Statistics. "Women in their 20s are accounting for a huge percentage of these births."

The data show that 35.7% of all births were to unmarried women. Births last year to both married and unwed mothers totalled more than 4 million.

By age group, almost 55% of the births for mothers ages 20-24 were to unmarried women. For those between 25-29, almost 28% of the births were to single women.

Global Warming Shrinking Arctic Ice??

The New York Times appeared to try a new tactic in its campaign to convince the public that global warming is real. But don’t let the Times’ Oct. 10 report on the economic upside of Arctic melting confuse you -- there still isn’t any evidence that human activity is melting the polar regions.

This is the lead-in to an analysis of a recent article in the Times which seems to suggest that global warming is so awful that it is increasing the possibility that it could open up our ability to reach precious oil and energy reservoirs in that region. It seems hard to believe the Times is advocating global warming is good in any manner, but a look at the science suggests that global warming has nothing to do with any good fortune presenting itself. Read the article here.

Brain Imbalance

I am listening to the press conference where the liberal press such as Terry Moran of ABC tries to get Fitzgerald to say something which would allow them to run off and slime Rove or Cheney. He is so much smarter than they are, it is just comical. It reminds me of the Senators asking John Roberts constitutional questions during his confirmation. And these people think they have a chance to reach their liberal objective.

Coburn strikes again

I just read in instapundit about an exchange between Senator Coburn and Senator Specter about funding for CDC. Coburn is a physician and submitted an amendment to a bill which would take $60 million from an authorization bill and spend it on AIDS drugs instead of a Japanese garden for the CDC facility. This would have been enough money to buy drugs for everyone in the U.S. now waiting on funds to treat their disease. You must use the past tense since the amendment was rejected by the senate on a vote of 85 to 15. Specter tried to deny there were funds in the bill for a garden, but his aids had to admit that there were funds for this purpose. Read the whole thing here. I bet they just hate Coburn in the Senate and from what I understand, Coburn couldn't possibly care less which must also drive the business as usual politicians crazy.

Musings

It is early in the day and the big news regarding the Fitzgerald decision regarding Rove and Libby has not come out and Bush has not announced how he will handle his mulligan on the idiotic Meirs nomination. My thoughts are leaning toward Rove escaping and Bush's relief leading to a more principled choice such as Mike McConnell. Since I was so prescient in predicting the Meirs withdrawal, I am going to let my hubris loose to see how long it takes for me to foreswear such predictions.

Where is the outrage at these statements?

WASHINGTON – A radical animal rights activist shocked members of the U.S. Senate this week by advocating the murder of those conducting medical research.

Jerry Vlasak, spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front, told the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works that killing medical researchers was "morally justified" to save laboratory animals.

Vlasak compared the life of lab animals to African American slaves and the Jewish victims of Nazi concentration camps.

He made his comments while defending a similar statement, made to the news media last year: "I don't think you'd have to kill – assassinate – too many vivisectors before you would see a marked decrease in the amount of vivisection going on. And I think for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million non-human lives."

Meirs Hearings Not Necessary

Ann Coulter says we don't need any hearings by the Judiciary Committee for Harriet Meirs. Here is the way she put it:

"In fact, the only two people who will derive any benefit from the hearings are Joe Biden, who will finally look like a constitutional scholar, and Harriet Miers, who might learn something about the Constitution from him."

Tony Blankley advise to Bush

Conservatives are about ready to leave the reservation in droves and Newt's former right-hand man offers some very good advice to GWB and I sure hope he takes it to heart (assuming someone shows it to him). You can read the whole thing here.

Pretty accurate description of the left

One of the more appealing aspects about being on the Left is that you do not necessarily have to engage your opponents in debates over the truth or falsehood of their positions. You can simply dismiss your opponent as "anti."

Anti-worker: It all began with Marxism. If you opposed communism or socialism, you were not merely anti-communist or anti-socialist, you were anti-worker. This way of dismissing opponents of leftist ideas is now the norm. Anyone, including a Democrat, who raises objections to union control of state and local politics is labeled anti-worker: "anti-teacher," "anti-firefighter," "anti-nurse," etc. This is how the unions are fighting California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempts to rein in unauthorized union spending of members' dues to advance leftist political goals. He is depicted as an enemy of all these groups.

Anti-education: Those who object to the monopoly that teachers' unions have on public education and to their politicization of the school curricula are labeled "anti-education." Of course, the irony is that if you love education, you must oppose the teachers' unions.

Read it all here. Written by Dennis Prager.

English Language Problems

A sign posted in Germany's Black Forest: It is strictly forbidden on
our black forest camping site that people of different sex, for
instance, men and women, live together in one tent unless they are
married with each other for that purpose.

In a Zurich hotel: Because of the impropriety of entertaining guests
of the opposite sex in the bedroom, it is suggested that the lobby be
used for this purpose.

In a Norwegian cocktail lounge: Ladies are requested not to have
children in the bar.

On the menu of a Polish hotel: Salad a firm's own make; limpid red
beet soup with cheesy dumplings in the form of a finger; roasted duck
let loose; beef rashers beaten up in the country people's fashion.

Follow-up on the Coburn Amendment

Last week my favorite Senator, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, introduced an amendment which would have moved some highway money ($220 million) from a go-nowhere town to a virtually uninhabited island in Alaska. The money would go instead to Louisiana where a bridge on I-10 was destroyed by hurricane Katrina. As expected, the amendment was defeated by a vote of 85 to 15 and the honorable senators and lone congressman from that fair state went bonkers. Here is follow-up from the Washington Post.

My favorite part is the response from Don Young, Alaska's Congressman. The residents of Alaska were writing the paper in support of giving up their bridge to help Louisiana. When asked by a reporter what he thought of his constituents reaction, he said "They can kiss my ear! That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard."

Look for this story in the New York Times

Assem Jihad, spokesman for the Iraqi oil ministry, confirmed that Iraqi oil revenues reached a record of 2.6 billion dollars in September. He noted, "This [amount] is the highest in the history of Iraq, since it started exporting oil during the first half of last century."

Lipograms

Matt Duffy introduced me today to the fact that there is such a thing as a lipogram. The most famous is Gadsby, "A Story of Over 50,000 Words", written by Ernest Vincent Wright, which, except for the introduction and a note at the end, did not use the letter e. Every word was properly spelled and all narration was grammatically correct. However, the stress of writing such a novel was apparently too much for Wright, who died at the age of 66 on the day Gadsby was published.

In order to avoid Wright's fate, I plan to limit my lipogram constructs to ones which avoid the use of the letter Z or X or maybe even a Q. However, this blog is a lipogram of some note since I avoided the use of my middle initial.

Lipograms

Matt Duffy introduced me today to the fact that there is such a thing as a lipogram. The most famous is Gadsby, "A Story of Over 50,000 Words", written by Ernest Vincent Wright, which, except for the introduction and a note at the end, did not use the letter e. Every word was properly spelled and all narration was grammatically correct. However, the stress of writing such a novel was apparently too much for Wright, who died at the age of 66 on the day Gadsby was published.

In order to avoid Wright's fate, I plan to limit my lipogram constructs to ones which avoid the use of the letter Z or X or maybe even a Q. However, this blog is a lipogram of some note since I avoided the use of my middle initial.

5 year old establishes a religion

Some times you just can't believe how pernicious our courts and schools have become, but this story goes a long way to illustrate the problem. In 1999 a 5 year old kindergarten student submitted an environmental poster with a kneeling semblance of Jesus incorporated. The school objected and folded his poster so Jesus could not be displayed since it violated the separation of church and state. When the matter reached the courts, the case went all over the lot.

First it was stated the school acted correctly to censor the poster. A second court affirmed that. Now an Appeals Court ruled that the student's constitutional rights may have been violated and asked the lower court to reconsider. The matter should eventually wind up in the Supreme Court and I can't wait to learn whether a 5 year old kid can establish a religion with a protect- the - environment poster which includes a picture of Jesus.

Read more about it here.

Mahmoud Abbas

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting editorial on the Abbas situation in capsule form. Here is a sample:

Talk to Palestinians, and you will often hear it said, like a mantra, that Palestinian dignity requires Palestinian statehood. This is either a conceit or a lie. Should a Palestinian state ever come into existence in Gaza and the West Bank, it will be a small place, mostly poor, culturally marginal, most of it desert, rock, slums and dust. One can well understand why Arafat, a man of terrible vices but impressive vanities, spurned the offer of it--and why his people cheered wildly when he did. Their dignity has always rested upon their violence, their struggle, their "prisoners of freedom."

For Mr. Abbas, the problem is that statehood and dignity are not a package. They are a choice. And if history is any guide, the choice he must make is not one he is likely to survive.

Read the whole thing.

The Washington Blade

I had never heard of this paper before, but I have seen several blogs tonight referring to an article which evidently is calling for Anderson Cooper, Jodie Foster, and Shepherd Smith of Fox News to come out of the closet. I guess this is more important to some than it is to me.

Makes sense to me

Scott Ott reports that Harriet Meirs has told Senators with whom she has met that she will not answer questions about Roe vs. Wade since it would breech her right to privacy.

Harriet Meirs solution

GOP senators have to go to the White House. It is understandable that Republican senators want to be loyal to an embattled administration. But what the president needs most right now is friends, friends who will do him the service of telling him the truth, even when it’s inconvenient. Bush's stubbornness and willingness to stick by associates can be valuable qualities, but not when they prevent him from realizing a mistake or seeing what an awful position he has put his loyal White House counsel in.

Mark Steyn nails abortion

...when you set aside moral objections to abortion, the utilitarian approach is a question of balance. Abortion doesn’t fall on all fetuses equally. In China and other Asian cultures, it lowers the pool of girl babies, resulting in very disproportionately male societies. Thus, “a woman’s right to choose” leaves you with a lot fewer women to choose from. Even in America, not all women exercise their right to choose equally: The abortion rate for black women is four times higher than that for white women. “A woman’s right to choose” has become, like so many other “progressive” causes, an issue in which one’s enthusiasm for it is inversely proportional to one’s engagement with it. For middle-class female Democrats, “a woman’s right to choose” is like “Free Tibet”: a bumper sticker that appropriates some other crowd’s problem for the purposes of advertising your moral superiority.

Senator Coburn's amendment

This should a lot of fun. Senator Coburn of Oklahoma, birthstate of this humble blogger, is a delightful gadfly and that is why he was opposed by his own Republican party when he ran for the office. Now he has won and will be there for 6 years. Here is his latest ploy. The highway bill recently signed into law has thousands of pork projects includes a particularly egregious Alaska bridge which goes "nowhere". Coburn has proposed that we take that money and repair a bridge destroyed by hurricane Katrina down in Louisiana. As one might expect, the Senators do not want to vote on this because a NO vote would be very difficult to explain if you aren't from Alaska. Here is the Club for Growth's message to its members urging them to support Coburn and making the point that we could buy each person on one end of the bridge his or her own jet plane for the same money as the cost of the bridge.

October 19, 2005

The Club for Growth, with its 32,000 members, plans to score a “YES” vote as a pro-economic growth vote in its annual rating of Congress on Coburn Amendment #2085 to the Senate’s Treasury, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill (HR 3058).

This amendment will transfer funding from the wasteful pork project, the “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska, to the repair and reconstruction of the “Twin Spans” bridge in Louisiana. According to published reports, the Alaskan pork project costs $220 million for a 5.9-mile bridge connecting Gravina Island (population 50) to the Alaskan mainland. The cost of the bridge alone would be enough to buy every island resident his own personal Lear jet.

Today's Powerball Lottery

I went out and bought tickets to the Powerball lottery this morning. As someone smarter than me once said, the lottery is a tax on stupidity. That is the case when the prize is much less than the odds against winning it. The Powerball today is not in that category. The payoff on the lottery is much greater than the the odds against you. The odds against you is 1 in 146 million and the payoff is $340 million. This is called a positive Expected Value (EV). So even after you pay 1/2 in taxes, you have a 179 to 146 positive EV. So, my lottery ticket purchase was stupid, but not as stupid as it would ordinarily be.

Another left wing judge strikes

From Neal Boortz.

Anew law in Georgia that requires Georgia voters to show a government-issued picture ID when they show up to vote. U.S. District Judge Harold Murphy has temporarily blocked enforcement of the law. He says the law is an unconstitutional poll tax. He also says it will not combat voter fraud. For voters without driver's licenses, the state was going to issue free picture IDs. Free .. that means no cost. Still, the judge calls it a poll tax. You don't pay any money, but it's a tax.

Look. This is all very simple. Why did Democrats oppose the law in the first place? Because Democrats want people who are not legally entitled to cast votes to go to the polls on election day. Democrats know full well that illegal aliens, felons, non-citizens and others not qualified to vote are far more likely to vote for Democrats than for Republicans. In several states there are proposals to allow non-citizens, and in some cases illegal aliens, to vote in local elections, and in every case those proposals are being put forward by Democrats. Democrats believe that their political survival might well depend on their ability to generate illegal votes on election day. They have a huge ally in Judge Harold Murphy.

Personal Hygiene

There are articles in the paper lately which address concerns by some of my fellow Microbiologists that the wide-spread use of soaps which contain antibacterial agents may lose their effectiveness over time. For decades now I have warned in lectures and various publications about the overuse of antibiotics and these warnings have been shown to be valid in that resistance to nearly all antibiotics is showing up in various infections. My concern with soaps is not great. For one reason, most people get most of the handwashing benefit from the physical action of the soap itself and don't wash long enough to get much added benefit from whatever is included in the soap which mainly enhances its sales. Resistance is not a big factor when we don't rely on the agent to any great extent in the first place.

A more interesting article you see now and then is one in which someone posts themselves in a public restroom and keeps tabs on how many of each sex washes after using the facilities. I have a brother-in-law who not only washes, but uses a paper towel to open the door to minimize touching an inanimate object which might have fecal contamination left by others who did not wash. That is all fairly harmless, I guess. What I would like to see is a documentation of what the hands contact after using the bathroom facilities and before one reaches the hand washing facilities. If more people like my brother-in-law thought about that, it would be fun to watch them make it to the wash basin with their pants around their ankles.

Now I get it.

It is amazing what you can run across on the internet. Below is a summary of a charge by some loony group that Jews who practice a strange ritual whereby a chicken is waved 7 times over the head of a person in preparation for Yom Kippur are responsible for bird flu and other catastrophies.

A representative of a shadowy group calling itself the Chicken Liberation Organization has accused orthodox Jews of responsibility for the aviary flu, which experts believe may become a global pandemic threatening the lives of millions.

The CLO representative, C. Little, has warned that any outbreak of the disease will be the direct result of what he called Jewish responsibility for "atmospheric lowering," a little-understood phenomenon by which the sky appears to be falling, causing migratory birds to descend precipitously and collide with stationary objects, greatly increasing the risk of a 9/11 style crash into skyscrapers and resulting infection of the people inside.

An allied group representing oppressed turkeys, T. Lurkey, supported Little's claims, and said that the Jewish role in the celestial descent was unquestionable. "For years, these people have been spinning chickens around their heads in some reactionary ritual, in the vain hope that doing so would somehow expiate their sins. But in so doing they have created a far greater sin."

Roosting Chickens

The furor over the Meirs nomination represents a reaction by conservatives to 5 years of Bush deviations from first principals. Here they are in no particular order:

• Throwing in with Ted Kennedy to create an education bill which was not only expensive but it did not achieve meaningful reform and broadened the feds deeper reach into what should be local activity.
• Imposition of steel tariffs which never have worked and had to be rescinded--all to curry favor with the labor unions which will never support Republicans.
• Campaigned against the McCain-Feingold finance bill as unconstitutional and then signed it.
• Has no interest in protecting our borders against illegal immigrants.
• Pushed an expansion of Medicare to provide a drug benefit which will eventually have to be cut and will also cause taxes to rise.
  
• Bush has also allowed the congressional authorization of spending to rise faster than the democrats ever would.
  
• Most conservatives were highly energized by Bush's response to 9/11 and backed him enthusiastically when he advance his doctrine that any country which supported terrorists would be treated as if they were terrorists themselves. Our response to Saudia Arabia, Iran, and Syria suggest that was all so much hot air.

Harriet Meirs is the last straw for the conservatives and when Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol, and even your humble blogger turn on him, he is in deep trouble with his base.

I Agree with this

As a medical researcher, I want to make a gentle but sincere plea to the blogosphere to calm down this flu hysteria just a bit. The main way that flu kills is by predisposing its victims to "superinfection" by bacterial illnesses - in 1918, we had no antibiotics for these superimposed infections, but now we have plenty. Such superinfections, and the transmittal of flu itself, were aided tremendously by the crowded conditions and poor sanitation of the early 20th century - these are currently vastly improved as well. Flu hits the elderly the hardest, but the "elderly" today are healthier, stronger, and better nourished than ever before. Our medical infrastructure is vastly better off, ranging from simple things like oxygen and sterile i.v. fluids, not readily available in 1918, to complex technologies such as respirators and dialysis. Should we be concerned? Sure, better safe than sorry, and concerns about publishing the sequence are worth discussing. Should we panic? No - my apologies to the fearmongers, but we will never see another 1918.

Patrick Cunningham M.D.
Assistant Professor of Medicine
Section of Nephrology
University of Chicago

I might add that some panic by the politicians is worthwhile if it leads to laws which diminish the ability of trial lawyers to thwart the development and use of vaccines for infectious disease like influenza. Dr. Cunningham is also misusing the term "superinfection". He is referring to what are more correctly called "secondary infections".

Bush still falling short

In an effort to boost his mediocre SCOTUS nominee this morning, Bush brought in some old men who were once on the Texas Supreme Court to vouch for Harriet Meirs. "She's a thinking person" one former Texas supreme-court justice declared.
Is that related to damning with faint praise? This is going to be awful.

This will help Hillary

Sen. Edward Kennedy said Wednesday that Sen. John Kerry has his backing for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 -- even if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton also runs.

Gore doesn't love us anymore

Al Gore went to Sweden and delivered the speech reported here. This is the latest of anti-American screeds from this supposedly mainstream Democrat. Let's all listen carefully to see which of the dems rejects this pitiful nonsense.

Not again! More bad science.

In August, Bill Lockyer, the Attorney General of California, filed suit against McDonald’s, Burger King, Frito-Lay and six other food companies, saying they should be forced to put warning labels on all fries and chips sold in California that say something like: “This product contains a chemical known by the state of California to cause cancer.”
The state “knows” no such thing. Lockyer’s position is based on the stuff-the-mouse-till-it-explodes school of science. The labeling of acrylamide as a “probable human carcinogen,” according to Joseph Levitt, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, is based on studies where rats were fed a daily dose of 500 micrograms per kilogram of body weight over their life span.
In human terms, the average adult, who weighs more than 75 kilograms, would have to consume 195 pounds of French fries, 142 pounds of graham crackers or 5,350 one-ounce servings (333 pounds) of Cheerios every day for his or her entire life to approach the lowest level of risk observed in laboratory rats.
While acrylamide increases with high temperature cooking and canning, it also forms in uncooked foods and even at room temperature during storage. It’s not something put there by greedy corporations. The FDA’s Total Diet Study survey has found acrylamide in 40% of the food we eat.
The highest concentrations found are in black olives, graham crackers, smoked almonds, cocoa powder, coffee, onion soup, chips, whole-grain cereals and breads, stone-ground sesame and rye crackers, sweet potatoes, peanut butter, baked goods, mixed vegetables, chile, sunflower seeds and even prune juice. Lockyer needs a healthy dose of the latter to cure what seems to ail him.

The Delphi Dilemma

I am following the recent decision of Delphi to declare bankrupcy with interest because it has ramifications for all of us. This company was spun off by GM about 9 years ago and many of the employees were originally with GM and as a result made United Auto Workers wages. This would have been fine if the auto industry had kept going well for GM which used Delphi to supply its auto parts, but Japan cars were there to prevent that. Delphi retirees were the beneficiaries of previous union negotiations which GM capitulated on and provided defined benefits which said that the company would pay the retired workers an amount based on their years of service for life with cost of living increases. Defined benefit retirement is great if the source of the retirement check is growing and financially stable. This does not describe either GM or Delphi right now. So, Delphi has now declared bankrupcy and given the union a choice. They can capitulate and accept massive layoffs of the current work-force along with 60% wage cuts for those remaining or a renege on the retirement package of the retirees. Delphi workers now average $25/hour which is really $65 when benefits are factored in. That is way above the prevailing rate worldwide. So, what we will be seeing is a prelude to the choice the government faces when it finally decides to face up to the generational conflict which will arise when it addresses the Social Security and Medicare demographic problems. We will either make the old folks take less or the young workers pay a lot more--or more likely, both. If you are a Delphi worker or retiree, you are in serious doo-doo right now and the rest of us are following along rather quickly.

As far as retirement plans go, most companies have now moved to what is known as defined contribution plans where the workers pay into an account and when they retire, they get the money and are responsible for providing for their own retirement. This places more of an onus on the worker, but it has a really great advantage in that nobody can take it away later.

Surely the Republicans aren't this lucky!!

From the U.S. News and World Report:

They See Al Gore by a Nose in 2008
Is Al Gore coming back? If allies we talked to have their way, the former veep will be the next president. "It's Gore Time," says a political strategist and fundraiser who is opening a bid to get Gore into the race. Gore friends see his recent political and business moves as proof he's preparing to run. Allies say that in speeches, Gore has found his voice to address domestic and world issues. And in raising money for his Current TV network, which targets the critical youth market, Big Al has built an issue base and donor network that's competitive with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton 's. Our source--a top aide in the previous Bush administration--is planning meetings with Gore's team to push an early entry while Clinton runs for re-election in New York. It doesn't end there: The Gorebots want him to pick Sen. Barack Obama, the youthful Illinois African-American, as his No. 2.

A stealth name change

Teresa has reverted to her more comfortable name. She is once again Teresa Heinz. Who can blame her?