Yesterday was a great day to be an American, and an even better day to be an Iraqi. Notwithstanding the best efforts of Osama bin Laden http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110004957 , Barbara Boxer http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110006177 , Jacques Chirac http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110002580#friends , Ted Kennedy http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110006224 , Saddam Hussein http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110002473 and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110006200#islam , millions of Iraqis cast their first free ballots. The scenes of joyous Iraqis embracing freedom were as moving as watching Germans dance on the Berlin Wall 15 years ago--and all the more impressive given that Iraqi voters faced real physical danger from terrorists seeking a return to tyranny. A New York Times anecdote from Baghdad tells the story:
Batool Al Musawi hesitated for a single moment.
The explosions had already begun as she rose from her bed early on Sunday. One after the other, the mortar shells were falling and bursting around the city, rattling the windows and shaking the walls.
For an instant, Ms. Musawi, a 22-year-old physical therapist, thought it might be too dangerous to go to the polls.
"And then, hearing those explosions, it occurred to me--the insurgents are weak, they are afraid of democracy, they are losing," Ms. Musawi said, standing in the Marjayoon Primary School, her polling place. "So I got my husband, and I got my parents and we all came out and voted together."
The Times quotes 80-year-old Rashid Majid: "We have freedom now, we have human rights, we have democracy. We will invite the insurgents to take part in our system. If they do, we will welcome them. If they don't, we will kill them."
Monday, January 31, 2005
Friday, January 28, 2005
Consistantly and Thoroughly
OAKLEY
Are you absolutely sure that's wise, sir? I mean, I don't want to sound pretentious here, but Itchy and Scratchy comprise a dramaturgical dyad.
KRUSTY
Hey, this ain't art, it's business! (to Meyers) Whaddya got in mind? Sexy broad? Gangster octopus?
MEYERS
No, no. The animal chain of command goes mouse, cat, dog. (to the writers) D-O-G.
WEINSTEIN
Uh, a dog? Isn't that a tad predictable?
EXECUTIVE
In your dreams. We're talking the original dog from hell.
OAKLEY
You mean Cerberus?
EXECUTIVE
(pause) We at the network want a dog with attitude. He's edgy, he's "in your face." You've heard the expression "let's get busy"? Well, this is a dog who gets "biz-zay!" Consistently and thoroughly.
KRUSTY
So he's proactive, huh?
EXECUTIVE
Oh, God, yes. We're talking about a totally outrageous paradigm.
MEYER
Excuse me, but "proactive" and "paradigm"? Aren't these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important? Not that I'm accusing you of anything like that. I'm fired, aren't I?
MEYERS
Oh, yes.
Are you absolutely sure that's wise, sir? I mean, I don't want to sound pretentious here, but Itchy and Scratchy comprise a dramaturgical dyad.
KRUSTY
Hey, this ain't art, it's business! (to Meyers) Whaddya got in mind? Sexy broad? Gangster octopus?
MEYERS
No, no. The animal chain of command goes mouse, cat, dog. (to the writers) D-O-G.
WEINSTEIN
Uh, a dog? Isn't that a tad predictable?
EXECUTIVE
In your dreams. We're talking the original dog from hell.
OAKLEY
You mean Cerberus?
EXECUTIVE
(pause) We at the network want a dog with attitude. He's edgy, he's "in your face." You've heard the expression "let's get busy"? Well, this is a dog who gets "biz-zay!" Consistently and thoroughly.
KRUSTY
So he's proactive, huh?
EXECUTIVE
Oh, God, yes. We're talking about a totally outrageous paradigm.
MEYER
Excuse me, but "proactive" and "paradigm"? Aren't these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important? Not that I'm accusing you of anything like that. I'm fired, aren't I?
MEYERS
Oh, yes.
32 years!
Benefits of hybrids slow to arrive at pocketbook
Friday, January 28, 2005
LAURA GUNDERSON
Hybrid owners tick off several benefits of hybrid car ownership -- among them, cutting air pollution, curtailing reliance on fossil fuels and trimming gas expenses.
However, in most cases, it takes years of gas savings for hybrid owners to save money using the cars fueled by gas, electricity or both. The cars, gaining in popularity, still typically cost between $3,000 and $7,000 more than comparable conventional cars.
A typical owner of a 2005 Toyota Prius, which is rated at 60 miles per gallon in the city, would save $545.40 a year on gas and would make up the car's price premium in about five years, according to one calculation.
The owner of a Honda Civic hybrid would save about $205 on gas and would make up the price difference in 32 years. Rated at 46 miles per gallon in the city, the Civic hybrid doesn't offer such a large difference between city gas mileage as its conventional twin.
The calculations are based on the difference in the hybrids' suggested retail purchase price from those of conventional counterparts, the cars' federally rated city mileage, Oregon's current average gas price of $1.80 a gallon for regular unleaded and an assumed 12,000 miles a year in driving.
Friday, January 28, 2005
LAURA GUNDERSON
Hybrid owners tick off several benefits of hybrid car ownership -- among them, cutting air pollution, curtailing reliance on fossil fuels and trimming gas expenses.
However, in most cases, it takes years of gas savings for hybrid owners to save money using the cars fueled by gas, electricity or both. The cars, gaining in popularity, still typically cost between $3,000 and $7,000 more than comparable conventional cars.
A typical owner of a 2005 Toyota Prius, which is rated at 60 miles per gallon in the city, would save $545.40 a year on gas and would make up the car's price premium in about five years, according to one calculation.
The owner of a Honda Civic hybrid would save about $205 on gas and would make up the price difference in 32 years. Rated at 46 miles per gallon in the city, the Civic hybrid doesn't offer such a large difference between city gas mileage as its conventional twin.
The calculations are based on the difference in the hybrids' suggested retail purchase price from those of conventional counterparts, the cars' federally rated city mileage, Oregon's current average gas price of $1.80 a gallon for regular unleaded and an assumed 12,000 miles a year in driving.
Edward Said = Boob
Edward Said: The Palestinian Authority
Palestinian Authority Book Review by James Panero
Humanism and Democratic Criticism, by Edward W. Said. Columbia University Press, 154 pages, $19.95
This review appears in the winter 2004 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.
In November 1993, the New York Times Magazine featured a remarkably unprescient essay by Edward Said titled “The Phony Islamic Threat.” He charged the media, government bureaucrats, and Middle East experts with conjuring an Islamic bogeyman to demonize at home and abroad. Coming only a few months after the first attack on the World Trade Center, the piece dismissed all talk of an Islamist threat as a reflection of American prejudice and insecurity. Then, in the 1997 revised edition of his book Covering Islam, Said ridiculed “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airlines,” as inventions of racist Westerners.
Since the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Said’s theories on the interaction of Islam and the West have become dominant—one might say hegemonic—in the academy. He refashioned postmodernism into something called postcolonialism. Armed with the nebulous “deconstruction” theory of Michel Foucault, he seized a narrow canon of literature and enlisted it in the service of political advocacy; in his case, on the Palestinians’ behalf. For over two decades he identified with this group, championing its cause at every turn, flacking it in every paper, ceaselessly hewing to Yasser Arafat’s line, even serving as a Palestinian governor-in-exile in New York.
Before cancer took his life in September 2003, the University Professor in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University fired some parting shots; Humanism and Democratic Criticism is one of them. For the most part, it is not an enjoyable read. The volume recasts four lectures given at Cambridge University in October and November 2002 (not 2003 as the book says), and an earlier essay on “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.” Yet for a précis of Said’s thought and style, one could do worse. At only 154 pages, it is remarkably dense, packed with the literary criticism, petty self-pity, grandstanding, and the quick-tempered excoriation of enemies that made the “dispossessed” professor a favored guest on “The Charlie Rose Show,” NPR, and media throughout the world. If the results are uneven and repetitive, one must make some allowances—this was a book produced on borrowed time.
Said’s fame and infamy stem from his insistence on transmuting scholarship into political activism. In his foreword, Akeel Bilgrami admits that the literature professor’s “intellectual legacy will be primarily political.... This is inevitable and it is perhaps how it should be.” Said was the willful antithesis of the disinterested scholar, and nowhere is this more apparent than in this book. Humanism and Democratic Criticism is not about Israelis and Palestinians, or Islam and the West, or “the humanities” in any serious sense. It is Said’s blueprint for a new pedagogy, the likes of which could not have been imagined by the Columbia scholars he invokes—Mark van Doren, Jacques Barzun, F.W. Dupee, Meyer Shapiro, and Lionel Trilling. Post-9/11, politics have become total. This is Said’s exhortation from beyond the grave: Develop a form of humanism that amounts to “stubborn, and secular, intellectual resistance.” Read: politicize. The classroom is the battleground, the lectern is the soapbox, and the instructor is a committed agent of social change. This is the responsibility of the engaged intellectual.
There are incredibly tedious moments in this book, which begins with Said’s ritual invocation: “I grew up in a non-Western culture, and, as someone who is amphibious or bicultural, I am especially aware, I think, of perspectives and traditions other than those commonly thought of as uniquely American or ‘Western.’” The implication, of course, is that this qualification furnishes him with unique insight superior to that of the prejudiced Western scholars he made a career of denouncing.
Score-settling was high on Said’s to-do list. Lynne Cheney, Dinesh D’Souza, and Roger Kimball are blasted as “irate traditionalists or callow polemicists.” Allan Bloom suffers from “dyspepsia of tone.” Harold Bloom makes “tiresome vatic trumpetings.” William Bennett employs “thumping oratory.” Samuel Huntington developed a “deplorably vulgar and reductive thesis of the clash of civilizations.” Bernard Lewis is a “discredited old Orientalist.” Saul Bellow is racist, evidenced by a passage from Mr. Sammler’s Planet. The hitlist extends to T.S. Eliot, the Agrarians, The New Critics, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and Matthew Arnold, the progenitor of what Said calls “Arnoldianism.”
Not even his privileged upbringing, fame, television appearances, an endowed professorship at Columbia, and years of accolades and publications succeeded in giving the lie to Said’s own identification as “dispossessed.” Christopher Hitchens, an old friend and co-author of Blaming the Victims (1998), confessed in Slate soon after Said’s death that “Edward had a slight tendency to self-pity, and the same chord was struck even in the best of his literary work, which often expressed a too-highly developed sense of injury and victimhood.”
To many readers, these contradictions only made Said’s public persona more attractive. This book is packed with odd moments, and often Said’s exile-on-Main Street grows downright comical. Here is one example: “True, it is a considerable disadvantage to realize that one is unlikely to get asked on to PBS’s NewsHour or ABC’s Nightline or, if one is in fact asked, only an isolated fugitive minute will be offered.” In another strange moment, Said writes, “In far too many years of appearing on television or being interviewed by journalists, I have never not been asked the question, ‘what do you think the United States should do about such and such an issue?’...It has been a point of principle for me not ever to reply to the question.” This, despite a lifetime of telling the U.S. what to do in op-ed pages, radio programs, and television talk shows.
Some of Said’s detractors on the Left were outraged by his support for the “Great Books” and Columbia’s “core curriculum.” But for Said, the classics need not be avoided, just reinterpreted. This is the secret message of his humanism and “return to philology.” He says flatly: “Humanism is not about withdrawal and exclusion. Quite the reverse: its purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny as the product of human labor, human energies for emancipation and enlightenment, and, just as importantly, human misreadings and misinterpretations of the collective past and present. There was never a misinterpretation that could not be revised, improved, or overturned.”
Said’s concept of a “new humanistic practice” is not original. For over a decade, students have been grappling with the mandarin mores of studying great literature in the academy. He is correct when he writes that “the new generation of humanist scholars is more attuned than any before it to the non-European, genderized, decolonized, and decentered energies and currents of our time.” They have little choice. One reads Jane Austen, for example, to comprehend her legitimization of colonialism—an argument Said put forward in his book Culture and Imperialism. I can imagine an analogous situation fifty years ago in the storerooms of the Hermitage Museum: “What colors. What elegance. What a capitalist trickster, this Matisse!”
Said’s efforts to unify instruction and advo-cacy have borne fruit. In spring 2002, a UC Berkeley instructor inserted in the description of his English class, “The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance,” the following caveat: “Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections.” Far from being an anomaly, this sort of activist intolerance is common practice in classrooms countrywide. The Berkeley instructor’s mistake was simply to make the unsaid explicit, exposing it to the protests of university trustees and the “conservative media.” Both sides were hardened by the exchange.
Said writes that “reading involves the contemporary humanist in two very crucial notions that I shall call reception and resistance.” Undoubtedly, reception and resistance are the codewords for the next round of the culture wars, part and parcel of the legacy of Edward Said.
James Panero is the associate editor of The New Criterion.
Palestinian Authority Book Review by James Panero
Humanism and Democratic Criticism, by Edward W. Said. Columbia University Press, 154 pages, $19.95
This review appears in the winter 2004 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.
In November 1993, the New York Times Magazine featured a remarkably unprescient essay by Edward Said titled “The Phony Islamic Threat.” He charged the media, government bureaucrats, and Middle East experts with conjuring an Islamic bogeyman to demonize at home and abroad. Coming only a few months after the first attack on the World Trade Center, the piece dismissed all talk of an Islamist threat as a reflection of American prejudice and insecurity. Then, in the 1997 revised edition of his book Covering Islam, Said ridiculed “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airlines,” as inventions of racist Westerners.
Since the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Said’s theories on the interaction of Islam and the West have become dominant—one might say hegemonic—in the academy. He refashioned postmodernism into something called postcolonialism. Armed with the nebulous “deconstruction” theory of Michel Foucault, he seized a narrow canon of literature and enlisted it in the service of political advocacy; in his case, on the Palestinians’ behalf. For over two decades he identified with this group, championing its cause at every turn, flacking it in every paper, ceaselessly hewing to Yasser Arafat’s line, even serving as a Palestinian governor-in-exile in New York.
Before cancer took his life in September 2003, the University Professor in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University fired some parting shots; Humanism and Democratic Criticism is one of them. For the most part, it is not an enjoyable read. The volume recasts four lectures given at Cambridge University in October and November 2002 (not 2003 as the book says), and an earlier essay on “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.” Yet for a précis of Said’s thought and style, one could do worse. At only 154 pages, it is remarkably dense, packed with the literary criticism, petty self-pity, grandstanding, and the quick-tempered excoriation of enemies that made the “dispossessed” professor a favored guest on “The Charlie Rose Show,” NPR, and media throughout the world. If the results are uneven and repetitive, one must make some allowances—this was a book produced on borrowed time.
Said’s fame and infamy stem from his insistence on transmuting scholarship into political activism. In his foreword, Akeel Bilgrami admits that the literature professor’s “intellectual legacy will be primarily political.... This is inevitable and it is perhaps how it should be.” Said was the willful antithesis of the disinterested scholar, and nowhere is this more apparent than in this book. Humanism and Democratic Criticism is not about Israelis and Palestinians, or Islam and the West, or “the humanities” in any serious sense. It is Said’s blueprint for a new pedagogy, the likes of which could not have been imagined by the Columbia scholars he invokes—Mark van Doren, Jacques Barzun, F.W. Dupee, Meyer Shapiro, and Lionel Trilling. Post-9/11, politics have become total. This is Said’s exhortation from beyond the grave: Develop a form of humanism that amounts to “stubborn, and secular, intellectual resistance.” Read: politicize. The classroom is the battleground, the lectern is the soapbox, and the instructor is a committed agent of social change. This is the responsibility of the engaged intellectual.
There are incredibly tedious moments in this book, which begins with Said’s ritual invocation: “I grew up in a non-Western culture, and, as someone who is amphibious or bicultural, I am especially aware, I think, of perspectives and traditions other than those commonly thought of as uniquely American or ‘Western.’” The implication, of course, is that this qualification furnishes him with unique insight superior to that of the prejudiced Western scholars he made a career of denouncing.
Score-settling was high on Said’s to-do list. Lynne Cheney, Dinesh D’Souza, and Roger Kimball are blasted as “irate traditionalists or callow polemicists.” Allan Bloom suffers from “dyspepsia of tone.” Harold Bloom makes “tiresome vatic trumpetings.” William Bennett employs “thumping oratory.” Samuel Huntington developed a “deplorably vulgar and reductive thesis of the clash of civilizations.” Bernard Lewis is a “discredited old Orientalist.” Saul Bellow is racist, evidenced by a passage from Mr. Sammler’s Planet. The hitlist extends to T.S. Eliot, the Agrarians, The New Critics, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and Matthew Arnold, the progenitor of what Said calls “Arnoldianism.”
Not even his privileged upbringing, fame, television appearances, an endowed professorship at Columbia, and years of accolades and publications succeeded in giving the lie to Said’s own identification as “dispossessed.” Christopher Hitchens, an old friend and co-author of Blaming the Victims (1998), confessed in Slate soon after Said’s death that “Edward had a slight tendency to self-pity, and the same chord was struck even in the best of his literary work, which often expressed a too-highly developed sense of injury and victimhood.”
To many readers, these contradictions only made Said’s public persona more attractive. This book is packed with odd moments, and often Said’s exile-on-Main Street grows downright comical. Here is one example: “True, it is a considerable disadvantage to realize that one is unlikely to get asked on to PBS’s NewsHour or ABC’s Nightline or, if one is in fact asked, only an isolated fugitive minute will be offered.” In another strange moment, Said writes, “In far too many years of appearing on television or being interviewed by journalists, I have never not been asked the question, ‘what do you think the United States should do about such and such an issue?’...It has been a point of principle for me not ever to reply to the question.” This, despite a lifetime of telling the U.S. what to do in op-ed pages, radio programs, and television talk shows.
Some of Said’s detractors on the Left were outraged by his support for the “Great Books” and Columbia’s “core curriculum.” But for Said, the classics need not be avoided, just reinterpreted. This is the secret message of his humanism and “return to philology.” He says flatly: “Humanism is not about withdrawal and exclusion. Quite the reverse: its purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny as the product of human labor, human energies for emancipation and enlightenment, and, just as importantly, human misreadings and misinterpretations of the collective past and present. There was never a misinterpretation that could not be revised, improved, or overturned.”
Said’s concept of a “new humanistic practice” is not original. For over a decade, students have been grappling with the mandarin mores of studying great literature in the academy. He is correct when he writes that “the new generation of humanist scholars is more attuned than any before it to the non-European, genderized, decolonized, and decentered energies and currents of our time.” They have little choice. One reads Jane Austen, for example, to comprehend her legitimization of colonialism—an argument Said put forward in his book Culture and Imperialism. I can imagine an analogous situation fifty years ago in the storerooms of the Hermitage Museum: “What colors. What elegance. What a capitalist trickster, this Matisse!”
Said’s efforts to unify instruction and advo-cacy have borne fruit. In spring 2002, a UC Berkeley instructor inserted in the description of his English class, “The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance,” the following caveat: “Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections.” Far from being an anomaly, this sort of activist intolerance is common practice in classrooms countrywide. The Berkeley instructor’s mistake was simply to make the unsaid explicit, exposing it to the protests of university trustees and the “conservative media.” Both sides were hardened by the exchange.
Said writes that “reading involves the contemporary humanist in two very crucial notions that I shall call reception and resistance.” Undoubtedly, reception and resistance are the codewords for the next round of the culture wars, part and parcel of the legacy of Edward Said.
James Panero is the associate editor of The New Criterion.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Torture part tre'
AP Still Looking for Another Abu Ghraib
The Associated Press got their paws on a Pentagon document classified “secret,” detailing purported interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay.
And as usual when the mainstream media vampires get hold of such a story, a secret document with the potential to further damage our ability to effectively interrogate terrorists and enrage the Arab street even more than it already is, the AP immediately trumpets it to the world in the most lurid way possible: Guantanamo Soldier Details Sexual Tactics.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man’s face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider’s written account. A draft manuscript obtained by The Associated Press is classified as secret pending a Pentagon review for a planned book that details ways the U.S. military used women as part of tougher physical and psychological interrogation tactics to get terror suspects to talk.
It’s the most revealing account so far of interrogations at the secretive detention camp, where officials say they have halted some controversial techniques.
“I have really struggled with this because the detainees, their families and much of the world will think this is a religious war based on some of the techniques used, even though it is not the case,” the author, former Army Sgt. Erik R. Saar, 29, told AP.
Guess what, Army Sgt. Saar? The detainees and their families already have no doubt whatsoever that this is a religious war. They’re at Gitmo because they’re jihadis, you fool, and they are by their very nature waging a religious war.
Aaarrrgghhh. This kind of thing just makes me want to scream, “Wake up!” All I can hope is that the American public sees through mainstream media’s constant, ongoing attempt to turn our own people into the villains, with these ridiculous, overheated, almost comically exaggerated “torture” stories.
The Associated Press got their paws on a Pentagon document classified “secret,” detailing purported interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay.
And as usual when the mainstream media vampires get hold of such a story, a secret document with the potential to further damage our ability to effectively interrogate terrorists and enrage the Arab street even more than it already is, the AP immediately trumpets it to the world in the most lurid way possible: Guantanamo Soldier Details Sexual Tactics.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man’s face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider’s written account. A draft manuscript obtained by The Associated Press is classified as secret pending a Pentagon review for a planned book that details ways the U.S. military used women as part of tougher physical and psychological interrogation tactics to get terror suspects to talk.
It’s the most revealing account so far of interrogations at the secretive detention camp, where officials say they have halted some controversial techniques.
“I have really struggled with this because the detainees, their families and much of the world will think this is a religious war based on some of the techniques used, even though it is not the case,” the author, former Army Sgt. Erik R. Saar, 29, told AP.
Guess what, Army Sgt. Saar? The detainees and their families already have no doubt whatsoever that this is a religious war. They’re at Gitmo because they’re jihadis, you fool, and they are by their very nature waging a religious war.
Aaarrrgghhh. This kind of thing just makes me want to scream, “Wake up!” All I can hope is that the American public sees through mainstream media’s constant, ongoing attempt to turn our own people into the villains, with these ridiculous, overheated, almost comically exaggerated “torture” stories.
Johnny Carson
From a monologue in the 1970's-
"August 4th: President Carter has recommended that it should not be a criminal offense to be found in possession of an ounce or less of marijuana.
Carson: The trouble is that nobody in our band knows what an ounce or less means.
Doc Severinsen: It means you’re about out."
"August 4th: President Carter has recommended that it should not be a criminal offense to be found in possession of an ounce or less of marijuana.
Carson: The trouble is that nobody in our band knows what an ounce or less means.
Doc Severinsen: It means you’re about out."
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Head Hackers
Mark Steyn: Europe has taken over the Holocaust.
"look at how my colleagues at The Spectator chose to mark the anniversary. They ran a reminiscence by Anthony Lipmann, the Anglican son of an Auschwitz survivor, which contained the following sentence: “When on 27 January I take my mother’s arm - tattoo number A-25466 - I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah.”
Jenin? Would that be the notorious 2002 “Jenin massacre”? There was no such thing, as I pointed out in this space at the time, when Robert Fisk and the rest of Fleet Street’s gullible sob-sisters were going around weepin’ an’ a-wailin’ about Palestinian mass graves and Israeli war crimes. Twenty-three Israelis were killed in fighting at the Jenin camp. Fifty-two Palestinians died, according to the Israelis. According to Arafat’s official investigators, it was 56 Palestinians. Even if one accepts the higher figure, that means every single deceased Palestinian could have his own mass grave and there’d still be room to inter the collected works of Robert Fisk. Yet, despite the fact that the Jenin massacre is an obvious hallucination of Fleet Street’s Palestine groupies, its rise to historical fact is unstoppable. To Lipmann, those 52-56 dead Palestinians weigh in the scales of history as heavy as six million Jews. And what’s Fallujah doing bringing up the rear in his catalogue of horrors? In rounding up a few hundred head-hackers, the Yanks perpetrated another Auschwitz? These comparisons are so absurd as to barely qualify as “moral equivalence”.
As for the notion that this or that people “deserve” a state, that’s a dangerous post-modern concept of nationality and sovereignty. The United States doesn’t exist because the colonists “deserved” a state, but because they went out and fought for one. Were the Palestinians to do that, they might succeed in pushing every last Jew into the sea, or they might win a less total victory, or they might be routed and have to flee to Damascus or Wolverhampton.
But, whatever the outcome, it’s hard to see that they would be any less comprehensively a wrecked people than they are after spending three generations in “refugee” “camps” while their “cause” is managed by a malign if impeccably multilateral coalition of UN bureaucrats, cynical Arab dictators, celebrity terrorists and meddling Europeans whose Palestinian fetishisation seems most explicable as the perverse by-product of the suppression of their traditional anti-Semitism."
"look at how my colleagues at The Spectator chose to mark the anniversary. They ran a reminiscence by Anthony Lipmann, the Anglican son of an Auschwitz survivor, which contained the following sentence: “When on 27 January I take my mother’s arm - tattoo number A-25466 - I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah.”
Jenin? Would that be the notorious 2002 “Jenin massacre”? There was no such thing, as I pointed out in this space at the time, when Robert Fisk and the rest of Fleet Street’s gullible sob-sisters were going around weepin’ an’ a-wailin’ about Palestinian mass graves and Israeli war crimes. Twenty-three Israelis were killed in fighting at the Jenin camp. Fifty-two Palestinians died, according to the Israelis. According to Arafat’s official investigators, it was 56 Palestinians. Even if one accepts the higher figure, that means every single deceased Palestinian could have his own mass grave and there’d still be room to inter the collected works of Robert Fisk. Yet, despite the fact that the Jenin massacre is an obvious hallucination of Fleet Street’s Palestine groupies, its rise to historical fact is unstoppable. To Lipmann, those 52-56 dead Palestinians weigh in the scales of history as heavy as six million Jews. And what’s Fallujah doing bringing up the rear in his catalogue of horrors? In rounding up a few hundred head-hackers, the Yanks perpetrated another Auschwitz? These comparisons are so absurd as to barely qualify as “moral equivalence”.
As for the notion that this or that people “deserve” a state, that’s a dangerous post-modern concept of nationality and sovereignty. The United States doesn’t exist because the colonists “deserved” a state, but because they went out and fought for one. Were the Palestinians to do that, they might succeed in pushing every last Jew into the sea, or they might win a less total victory, or they might be routed and have to flee to Damascus or Wolverhampton.
But, whatever the outcome, it’s hard to see that they would be any less comprehensively a wrecked people than they are after spending three generations in “refugee” “camps” while their “cause” is managed by a malign if impeccably multilateral coalition of UN bureaucrats, cynical Arab dictators, celebrity terrorists and meddling Europeans whose Palestinian fetishisation seems most explicable as the perverse by-product of the suppression of their traditional anti-Semitism."
Super Size
Obesity suit may dog McDonald's
Court reinstates part of suit accusing the company of tricking kids into eating fattening foods.January 25, 2005: 7:07 PM EST
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal appeals court Tuesday revived part of the widely-watched obesity suit against McDonald's Corp. that accuses the world's biggest fast-food company of using misleading advertising to lure children into eating fattening, unhealthy foods.
The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a trial judge wrongfully threw out certain portions of the complaint in September 2003 on grounds that it lacked information linking the plaintiffs injuries with eating McDonald's foods. The panel did, however, uphold other parts of the dismissal.
The appeals court said the proof about injuries could be provided during pre-trial proceedings and did not need to be included in the initial filing. It said it was sending the case back to the trial judge for further proceedings.
The ruling comes on the same day that "Super Size Me," a documentary about a man's month-long diet of McDonald's fast food, was nominated for an Oscar.
McDonald's said they expected the obesity suit will be thrown out again.
Court reinstates part of suit accusing the company of tricking kids into eating fattening foods.January 25, 2005: 7:07 PM EST
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal appeals court Tuesday revived part of the widely-watched obesity suit against McDonald's Corp. that accuses the world's biggest fast-food company of using misleading advertising to lure children into eating fattening, unhealthy foods.
The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a trial judge wrongfully threw out certain portions of the complaint in September 2003 on grounds that it lacked information linking the plaintiffs injuries with eating McDonald's foods. The panel did, however, uphold other parts of the dismissal.
The appeals court said the proof about injuries could be provided during pre-trial proceedings and did not need to be included in the initial filing. It said it was sending the case back to the trial judge for further proceedings.
The ruling comes on the same day that "Super Size Me," a documentary about a man's month-long diet of McDonald's fast food, was nominated for an Oscar.
McDonald's said they expected the obesity suit will be thrown out again.
'Back that Ass Up'
5th Circuit Rules in Rappers' Battle Over Phrase 'Back That Ass Up'
> John Council Texas Lawyer 01-25-2005
>
> As often happens in the hip-hop world, two rappers became embroiled in
> a dispute over who owned the rights to a song that utilized a popular
> phrase. And it took the musical ear of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of
> Appeals to settle the matter.
> Positive Black Talk Inc., et al. v. Cash Money Records, et al. plunged
> the conservative appellate court into the world of booming bass lines
> and popular street slang.
> Chief Judge Carolyn Dineen King, who wrote the opinion, boiled
> the case down to a dispute between Louisiana rappers Juvenile and
> D.J. Jubilee over who owned the rights to a song that included
> the poetic four-word phrase 'back that ass up.'"
> In its Jan. 13 opinion, the 5th Circuit sets out the following facts:
> In 1997, both rappers recorded songs with similar titles -- D.J.
> Jubilee, also known as Jerome Temple, recorded "Back That Ass Up,"
> while Juvenile, also known as Terius Gray, recorded "Back That
> Azz Up."
> Juvenile's song was a hit, sold more than 4 million CDs and grossed
> more than $40 million in sales. However, D.J. Jubilee's song failed to
> elevate either his bank account or his profile. D.J. Jubilee continues
> to work as a special education teacher.
> John Council Texas Lawyer 01-25-2005
>
> As often happens in the hip-hop world, two rappers became embroiled in
> a dispute over who owned the rights to a song that utilized a popular
> phrase. And it took the musical ear of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of
> Appeals to settle the matter.
> Positive Black Talk Inc., et al. v. Cash Money Records, et al. plunged
> the conservative appellate court into the world of booming bass lines
> and popular street slang.
> Chief Judge Carolyn Dineen King, who wrote the opinion, boiled
> the case down to a dispute between Louisiana rappers Juvenile and
> D.J. Jubilee over who owned the rights to a song that included
> the poetic four-word phrase 'back that ass up.'"
> In its Jan. 13 opinion, the 5th Circuit sets out the following facts:
> In 1997, both rappers recorded songs with similar titles -- D.J.
> Jubilee, also known as Jerome Temple, recorded "Back That Ass Up,"
> while Juvenile, also known as Terius Gray, recorded "Back That
> Azz Up."
> Juvenile's song was a hit, sold more than 4 million CDs and grossed
> more than $40 million in sales. However, D.J. Jubilee's song failed to
> elevate either his bank account or his profile. D.J. Jubilee continues
> to work as a special education teacher.
Thomas Maguane fiction- "Ice"
"Drum majors back then were on the verge of being replaced by “majorettes,” and a position that had once been considered honorably athletic had become somehow effete and clouded with unspoken sexual ambiguity—although that ambiguity hadn’t yet managed to taint our own drum major, whose pert and blossoming girlfriends all seemed to wind up losing their reputations. Nevertheless, the crowd hoped for humiliating disaster. I, strangely, hoped for his success. I waited for that high toss to produce, as if by the hand of Praxiteles, the most graceful division of space, a split second of immortality for the drum major, and, for me, a lesson in courage. At the same time, another part of me shared the crowd’s wish to see him on all fours with the baton up his behind. As would become a lifelong habit for most of us, we longed to witness both spectacular achievement and mortifying failure. Neither of these things, we were discreetly certain, would ever come to us; we would instead be granted the frictionless lives of the meek."
How about pulling the fire alarm?
Man Jailed For Faking Heart Attacks To Avoid Paying For Meals
POSTED: 8:17 am EST January 24, 2005
MACHIAS, Maine -- A 54-year-old man who routinely complained of fake chest pains to avoid paying the tab for restaurant meals may have gotten his just desserts.
The sentence followed the recommendation of District Attorney Paul Cavanaugh, who said the Aug. 5 incident at the Townhouse Restaurant marked the 13th time that Elias tried to skip out on the check by pretending he had trouble breathing and was having a heart attack.
"He has 18 convictions just since 2003," the year Elias moved to Maine from California, and has been jailed numerous times, Cavanaugh said.
Authorities said Elias would order dinner and drinks, eat and enjoy, then fake his need for medical assistance when the check arrived. He would be taken to a local hospital but usually left before police arrived.
Elias' court-appointed attorney, Jeffrey Davidson, told the judge that the homeless and unemployed man just wanted to eat a restaurant meal "like anybody else."
"Even if he didn't have dignity, he wanted to feel like he did," Davidson said.
POSTED: 8:17 am EST January 24, 2005
MACHIAS, Maine -- A 54-year-old man who routinely complained of fake chest pains to avoid paying the tab for restaurant meals may have gotten his just desserts.
The sentence followed the recommendation of District Attorney Paul Cavanaugh, who said the Aug. 5 incident at the Townhouse Restaurant marked the 13th time that Elias tried to skip out on the check by pretending he had trouble breathing and was having a heart attack.
"He has 18 convictions just since 2003," the year Elias moved to Maine from California, and has been jailed numerous times, Cavanaugh said.
Authorities said Elias would order dinner and drinks, eat and enjoy, then fake his need for medical assistance when the check arrived. He would be taken to a local hospital but usually left before police arrived.
Elias' court-appointed attorney, Jeffrey Davidson, told the judge that the homeless and unemployed man just wanted to eat a restaurant meal "like anybody else."
"Even if he didn't have dignity, he wanted to feel like he did," Davidson said.
Company fires all smokers. Get ready for it.
Michigan Firm Won't Allow Smoking, Even On Employee's Own Time
UPDATED: 8:19 AM EST January 25, 2005
LANSING, Mich. -- A Michigan health care company has fired four of its employees for refusing to take a test to determine whether they smoke cigarettes. The company enacted a new policy this month, allowing workers to be fired if they smoke, even if the smoking takes place after-hours, or at home. The founder of Weyco Inc. said the company doesn't want to pay the higher health care costs associated with smoking. An official of the company -- which administers health benefits -- estimated that 18 to 20 of its 200 employees were smokers when the policy was first announced in 2003. As many as 14 of them quit smoking before the policy went into effect. On the company's Web site, it states:
Weyco Inc. is a non-smoking company that strongly supports its employees in living healthy lifestyles.
UPDATED: 8:19 AM EST January 25, 2005
LANSING, Mich. -- A Michigan health care company has fired four of its employees for refusing to take a test to determine whether they smoke cigarettes. The company enacted a new policy this month, allowing workers to be fired if they smoke, even if the smoking takes place after-hours, or at home. The founder of Weyco Inc. said the company doesn't want to pay the higher health care costs associated with smoking. An official of the company -- which administers health benefits -- estimated that 18 to 20 of its 200 employees were smokers when the policy was first announced in 2003. As many as 14 of them quit smoking before the policy went into effect. On the company's Web site, it states:
Weyco Inc. is a non-smoking company that strongly supports its employees in living healthy lifestyles.
Monday, January 24, 2005
Catch up on Ketchup
There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Umami is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother's milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato. "Umami adds body," Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, says. "If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it's thicker--it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food." When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids, he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the concentration of sugar--so now ketchup was also sweet--and all along ketchup had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues. Give a baby soup, and then soup with MSG (an amino-acid salt that is pure umami), and the baby will go back for the MSG soup every time, the same way a baby will always prefer water with sugar to water alone. Salt and sugar and umami are primal signals about the food we are eating--about how dense it is in calories, for example, or, in the case of umami, about the presence of proteins and amino acids. What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz's ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?
A number of years ago, the H. J. Heinz Company did an extensive market-research project in which researchers went into people's homes and watched the way they used ketchup. "I remember sitting in one of those households," Casey Keller, who was until recently the chief growth officer for Heinz, says. "There was a three-year-old and a six-year-old, and what happened was that the kids asked for ketchup and Mom brought it out. It was a forty-ounce bottle. And the three-year-old went to grab it himself, and Mom intercepted the bottle and said, 'No, you're not going to do that.' She physically took the bottle away and doled out a little dollop. You could see that the whole thing was a bummer." For Heinz, Keller says, that moment was an epiphany. A typical five-year-old consumes about sixty per cent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control. "If you are four--and I have a four-year-old--he doesn't get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases," Keller says. "But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It's the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize." As a result, Heinz came out with the so-called EZ Squirt bottle, made out of soft plastic with a conical nozzle. In homes where the EZ Squirt is used, ketchup consumption has grown by as much as twelve per cent.
There is another lesson in that household scene, though. Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived. There the three-year-old was, confronted with something strange on his plate--tuna fish, perhaps, or Brussels sprouts--and he wanted to alter his food in some way that made the unfamiliar familiar. He wanted to subdue the contents of his plate. And so he turned to ketchup, because, alone among the condiments on the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and sour and salty and bitter and umami, all at once.
A number of years ago, the H. J. Heinz Company did an extensive market-research project in which researchers went into people's homes and watched the way they used ketchup. "I remember sitting in one of those households," Casey Keller, who was until recently the chief growth officer for Heinz, says. "There was a three-year-old and a six-year-old, and what happened was that the kids asked for ketchup and Mom brought it out. It was a forty-ounce bottle. And the three-year-old went to grab it himself, and Mom intercepted the bottle and said, 'No, you're not going to do that.' She physically took the bottle away and doled out a little dollop. You could see that the whole thing was a bummer." For Heinz, Keller says, that moment was an epiphany. A typical five-year-old consumes about sixty per cent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control. "If you are four--and I have a four-year-old--he doesn't get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases," Keller says. "But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It's the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize." As a result, Heinz came out with the so-called EZ Squirt bottle, made out of soft plastic with a conical nozzle. In homes where the EZ Squirt is used, ketchup consumption has grown by as much as twelve per cent.
There is another lesson in that household scene, though. Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived. There the three-year-old was, confronted with something strange on his plate--tuna fish, perhaps, or Brussels sprouts--and he wanted to alter his food in some way that made the unfamiliar familiar. He wanted to subdue the contents of his plate. And so he turned to ketchup, because, alone among the condiments on the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and sour and salty and bitter and umami, all at once.
Most depressing day...
MSNBC
Updated: 1:51 a.m. ET Jan. 24, 2005
LONDON - Is the midwinter weather wearing you down? Are you sinking in debt after the holidays? Angry with yourself for already breaking your New Year's resolutions? Wish you could crawl back under the covers and not have to face another day of rain, sleet, snow and paperwork? Probably. After all, it's Jan. 24, the “most depressing day of the year,” according to a U.K. psychologist.
Dr. Cliff Arnall's calculations show that misery peaks Monday.
Arnall, who specializes in seasonal disorders at the University of Cardiff, Wales, created a formula that takes into account numerous feelings to devise peoples' lowest point.
The model is: [W + (D-d)] x TQM x NA
The equation is broken down into seven variables: (W) weather, (D) debt, (d) monthly salary, (T) time since Christmas, (Q) time since failed quit attempt, (M) low motivational levels and (NA) the need to take action.
Updated: 1:51 a.m. ET Jan. 24, 2005
LONDON - Is the midwinter weather wearing you down? Are you sinking in debt after the holidays? Angry with yourself for already breaking your New Year's resolutions? Wish you could crawl back under the covers and not have to face another day of rain, sleet, snow and paperwork? Probably. After all, it's Jan. 24, the “most depressing day of the year,” according to a U.K. psychologist.
Dr. Cliff Arnall's calculations show that misery peaks Monday.
Arnall, who specializes in seasonal disorders at the University of Cardiff, Wales, created a formula that takes into account numerous feelings to devise peoples' lowest point.
The model is: [W + (D-d)] x TQM x NA
The equation is broken down into seven variables: (W) weather, (D) debt, (d) monthly salary, (T) time since Christmas, (Q) time since failed quit attempt, (M) low motivational levels and (NA) the need to take action.
The Beard does rounds
Klamath Falls, Or.
As part of my training I have been assigned friday night rounds at the local medical center. During this time I shadow a respiratory therapist. I have done 3 so far. Week 2 I got to participate in 3 births. In KF it is the respiratory therapists are responsible to maintain the airway in newborns. This can often get harry. Two of the births I saw were C-sections. One was a repeat, for legal reasons most hospitals adhere to a policy that if you forgo vaginal delivery at anytime, that avenue is then closed to you forever. There is a small uproar with women over this policy, and I expect it to fluctuate in my career. The second one was an emergency section, for fetal distress. This was a "mec" baby. Meconium is baby shit. Mec babies shit in the sac and often then make a lunch and a lung full of it. Usually in deliveries you "bulb" suction, "bulbs" are the snot turkey basters we all had under the bathroom sink growing up, and then go for a vigorous cry. You get babies to cry by roughing them up with a towel, this also cleans them, you can also tap their feet. In "mec" babies you have to clear the airway in a hurry, this involves using actual suctioning and bulb suctioning. The last thing you want in a mec baby is a vigorous cry prior to thourough suctioning because this embeds the crap deeper in their lungs.
I had expected baby poo to be unfecal in appearence, I thought I had once read it was white. This was a lie, this baby was covered in crap very similiar to my own after 4 pitchers of Black Butte and a Bacon Cheese Burger. We suctioned the somach and removed most of it, about 3 ozs.
The "old fashion" delivery was uneventful, the mother had an epidural and seemed to barely notice she was passing a life through her loins. All three babies were healthy and scored well on the apgar., which is a test that evaluates new borns.
Having no children yet, this was the first I had seen a birth, much rather participated in one. I have to say it is very emotional. While I was terrrifed the whole time I was in there, I was also jubilant. I would highly recommend this experience, I think it may be why we are here. I can not put it into words. It is life changing.
This week was pretty boring, the only thing I got todo was sit in on a bronchoscopy. This is a procedure were they put a fiber optic tube down into your lungs. We did it to a lady to access her for "bronchiectasis" which are nasty ulcers in your airways. She was negative thankfully, but we did suction a ton of mucus out. I was surprised by the size of the anatomy. Your trachea is about the size of a quarter and you R and L mainstems a dime. I put a link to a site with some pictures.
As part of my training I have been assigned friday night rounds at the local medical center. During this time I shadow a respiratory therapist. I have done 3 so far. Week 2 I got to participate in 3 births. In KF it is the respiratory therapists are responsible to maintain the airway in newborns. This can often get harry. Two of the births I saw were C-sections. One was a repeat, for legal reasons most hospitals adhere to a policy that if you forgo vaginal delivery at anytime, that avenue is then closed to you forever. There is a small uproar with women over this policy, and I expect it to fluctuate in my career. The second one was an emergency section, for fetal distress. This was a "mec" baby. Meconium is baby shit. Mec babies shit in the sac and often then make a lunch and a lung full of it. Usually in deliveries you "bulb" suction, "bulbs" are the snot turkey basters we all had under the bathroom sink growing up, and then go for a vigorous cry. You get babies to cry by roughing them up with a towel, this also cleans them, you can also tap their feet. In "mec" babies you have to clear the airway in a hurry, this involves using actual suctioning and bulb suctioning. The last thing you want in a mec baby is a vigorous cry prior to thourough suctioning because this embeds the crap deeper in their lungs.
I had expected baby poo to be unfecal in appearence, I thought I had once read it was white. This was a lie, this baby was covered in crap very similiar to my own after 4 pitchers of Black Butte and a Bacon Cheese Burger. We suctioned the somach and removed most of it, about 3 ozs.
The "old fashion" delivery was uneventful, the mother had an epidural and seemed to barely notice she was passing a life through her loins. All three babies were healthy and scored well on the apgar., which is a test that evaluates new borns.
Having no children yet, this was the first I had seen a birth, much rather participated in one. I have to say it is very emotional. While I was terrrifed the whole time I was in there, I was also jubilant. I would highly recommend this experience, I think it may be why we are here. I can not put it into words. It is life changing.
This week was pretty boring, the only thing I got todo was sit in on a bronchoscopy. This is a procedure were they put a fiber optic tube down into your lungs. We did it to a lady to access her for "bronchiectasis" which are nasty ulcers in your airways. She was negative thankfully, but we did suction a ton of mucus out. I was surprised by the size of the anatomy. Your trachea is about the size of a quarter and you R and L mainstems a dime. I put a link to a site with some pictures.
Friday, January 21, 2005
Right on Brother
MANCHESTER, Conn. — Coming soon to a theater near you: movie listings that print the start time for the main feature. Frustrated with lengthy advertisements and previews that delay movies and chew up viewing time, a state lawmaker wants theaters to be honest about when a movie actually starts. State Rep. Andrew Fleischmann is proposing legislation to force movie listings to print the time the previews start, and when the movies start.
"We're being robbed of our freedom of choice because we're not told when the actual movie will begin," said Fleischmann, a Democrat.
"We're being robbed of our freedom of choice because we're not told when the actual movie will begin," said Fleischmann, a Democrat.
18 yrs of work-
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) - David Atkinson spent 18 years designing an experiment for the unmanned space mission to Saturn. Now some pieces of it are lost in space. Someone forgot to turn on the instrument Atkinson needed to measure the winds on Saturn's largest moon. "The story is actually fairly gruesome," the University of Idaho scientist said in an e-mail from Germany, the headquarters of the European Space Agency. "It was human error - the command to turn the instrument on was forgotten."
The mission to study Saturn and its moons was launched in 1997 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., a joint effort by NASA, the European agency and the Italian space agency. Last Friday, Huygens, the European space probe sent to the surface of Saturn's moon Titan, transmitted the first detailed pictures of the frozen surface.
Atkinson and his team were at European space headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany, waiting for their wind measurements to arrive.
The probe was to transmit data on two channels, A and B, Atkinson said. His Doppler wind experiment was to use Channel A, a very stable frequency.
But the order to activate the receiver, or oscillator, for Channel A was never sent, so the entire mission operated through Channel B, which is less stable, Atkinson said.
"I (and the rest of my team) waited and waited and waited," he wrote, as the probe descended. "We watched the probe enter and start transmitting data, but our instrument never turned on."
The mission to study Saturn and its moons was launched in 1997 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., a joint effort by NASA, the European agency and the Italian space agency. Last Friday, Huygens, the European space probe sent to the surface of Saturn's moon Titan, transmitted the first detailed pictures of the frozen surface.
Atkinson and his team were at European space headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany, waiting for their wind measurements to arrive.
The probe was to transmit data on two channels, A and B, Atkinson said. His Doppler wind experiment was to use Channel A, a very stable frequency.
But the order to activate the receiver, or oscillator, for Channel A was never sent, so the entire mission operated through Channel B, which is less stable, Atkinson said.
"I (and the rest of my team) waited and waited and waited," he wrote, as the probe descended. "We watched the probe enter and start transmitting data, but our instrument never turned on."
Want to know why drugs cost so much?
This whole article is great. Gladwell is sharp...
"The problem with the way we think about prescription drugs begins with a basic misunderstanding about drug prices. The editorial board of the Times has pronounced them much too high; Marcia Angell calls them “intolerable.” The perception that the drug industry is profiteering at the expense of the American consumer has given pharmaceutical firms a reputation on a par with that of cigarette manufacturers.
In fact, the complaint is only half true. The “intolerable” prices that Angell writes about are confined to the brand-name sector of the American drug marketplace. As the economists Patricia Danzon and Michael Furukawa recently pointed out in the journal Health Affairs, drugs still under patent protection are anywhere from twenty-five to forty per cent more expensive in the United States than in places like England, France, and Canada. Generic drugs are another story. Because there are so many companies in the United States that step in to make drugs once their patents expire, and because the price competition among those firms is so fierce, generic drugs here are among the cheapest in the world. And, according to Danzon and Furukawa’s analysis, when prescription drugs are converted to over-the-counter status no other country even comes close to having prices as low as the United States.
It is not accurate to say, then, that the United States has higher prescription-drug prices than other countries. It is accurate to say only that the United States has a different pricing system from that of other countries. Americans pay more for drugs when they first come out and less as the drugs get older, while the rest of the world pays less in the beginning and more later. Whose pricing system is cheaper? It depends. If you are taking Mevacor for your cholesterol, the 20-mg. pill is two-twenty-five in America and less than two dollars if you buy it in Canada. But generic Mevacor (lovastatin) is about a dollar a pill in Canada and as low as sixty-five cents a pill in the United States. Of course, not every drug comes in a generic version. But so many important drugs have gone off-patent recently that the rate of increase in drug spending in the United States has fallen sharply for the past four years. And so many other drugs are going to go off-patent in the next few years—including the top-selling drug in this country, the anti-cholesterol medication Lipitor—that many Americans who now pay more for their drugs than their counterparts in other Western countries could soon be paying less."
"The problem with the way we think about prescription drugs begins with a basic misunderstanding about drug prices. The editorial board of the Times has pronounced them much too high; Marcia Angell calls them “intolerable.” The perception that the drug industry is profiteering at the expense of the American consumer has given pharmaceutical firms a reputation on a par with that of cigarette manufacturers.
In fact, the complaint is only half true. The “intolerable” prices that Angell writes about are confined to the brand-name sector of the American drug marketplace. As the economists Patricia Danzon and Michael Furukawa recently pointed out in the journal Health Affairs, drugs still under patent protection are anywhere from twenty-five to forty per cent more expensive in the United States than in places like England, France, and Canada. Generic drugs are another story. Because there are so many companies in the United States that step in to make drugs once their patents expire, and because the price competition among those firms is so fierce, generic drugs here are among the cheapest in the world. And, according to Danzon and Furukawa’s analysis, when prescription drugs are converted to over-the-counter status no other country even comes close to having prices as low as the United States.
It is not accurate to say, then, that the United States has higher prescription-drug prices than other countries. It is accurate to say only that the United States has a different pricing system from that of other countries. Americans pay more for drugs when they first come out and less as the drugs get older, while the rest of the world pays less in the beginning and more later. Whose pricing system is cheaper? It depends. If you are taking Mevacor for your cholesterol, the 20-mg. pill is two-twenty-five in America and less than two dollars if you buy it in Canada. But generic Mevacor (lovastatin) is about a dollar a pill in Canada and as low as sixty-five cents a pill in the United States. Of course, not every drug comes in a generic version. But so many important drugs have gone off-patent recently that the rate of increase in drug spending in the United States has fallen sharply for the past four years. And so many other drugs are going to go off-patent in the next few years—including the top-selling drug in this country, the anti-cholesterol medication Lipitor—that many Americans who now pay more for their drugs than their counterparts in other Western countries could soon be paying less."
Raisin Pooper
Linguist Christopher J. Moore has made a career of searching out some of the world's most "untranslatable" expressions -- words from around the globe that defy an easy translation into English. Moore shares a few of his linguistic favorites from his new book In Other Words: A Language Lover's Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World with Renee Montagne.
African Languages
ilunga (Tshiluba) [ee-Iun-ga] (noun)
This word from the Tshiluba language of the Republic of Congo has topped a list drawn up with the help of one thousand translators as the most untranslatable word in the world. It describes a person who is ready to forgive any transgression a first time and then to tolerate it for a second time, but never for a third time.
Arabic
taarradhin [tah-rah-deen] (noun)
Arabic has no word for "compromise" in the sense of reaching an arrangement via struggle and disagreement. But a much happier concept, taarradhin, exists in Arabic. It implies a happy solution for everyone, an "I win, you win." It's a way of resolving a problem without anyone losing face.
Chinese
guanxi (Mandarin) [gwan-shee] (noun)
This is one of the essential ways of getting things done in traditional Chinese society. To build up good guanxi, you do things for people such as give them gifts, take them to dinner, or grant favors. Conversely, you can also "use up" your guanxi with someone by calling in favors owed. Once a favor is done, an unspoken obligation exists. Maybe because of this, people often try to refuse gifts, because, sooner or later, they may have to repay the debt. However the bond of guanxi is rarely acquitted, because once the relationship exists, it sets up an endless process that can last a lifetime.
Czech
litost [lee-tosht] (noun)
This is an untranslatable emotion that only a Czech person would suffer from, defined by Milan Kundera as "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery." Devices for coping with extreme stress, suffering, and change are often special and unique to cultures and born out of the meeting of despair with a keen sense of survival.
French
esprit de I'escalier [es-pree de less-ka/-iay] (idiom)
A witty remark that occurs to you too late, literally on the way down the stairs. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations defines esprit de l'escalier as, "An untranslatable phrase, the meaning of which is that one only thinks on one's way downstairs of the smart retort one might have made in the drawing room."
German
korinthenkacker [core-in-ten-cuck-er] (noun)
A "raisin pooper" -- that is, someone so taken up with life's trivial detail that they spend all day crapping raisins. You can spot these types a mile off -- it's that irritating pen pusher or filing fanatic whose favorite job is tidying up the stationery cupboard.
Greek
meraki [may-rah-kee] (adjective)
This is a word that modern Greeks often use to describe doing something with soul, creativity, or love -- when you put "something of yourself" into what you're doing, whatever it may be. Meraki is often used to describe cooking or preparing a meal, but it can also mean arranging a room, choosing decorations, or setting an elegant table.
Japanese
tatemae [tah-tay-mye] (noun)
A term often translated as "form," but it also has the specific cultural meaning of "the reality that everyone professes to be true, even though they may not privately believe it." For privately held views, the Japanese have a different term, honne, meaning, "the reality that you hold inwardly to be true, even though you would never admit it publicly." The British civil servant muttering the reproach "bad form, old boy" over a drink in the club, may be expressing something very close to the quality of tatamae.
yoko meshi [yoh-koh mesh-ee] (noun)
"As an untranslatable, this one ranks high on my list of favorites. I could not improve on the background given by commentator Boye Lafayette de Mente about this beautiful word, yoko meshi. Taken literally, meshi means 'boiled rice' and yoko means 'horizontal,' so combined you get 'a meal eaten sideways.'This is how the Japanese define the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language: yoko is a humorous reference to the fact that Japanese is normally written vertically, whereas most foreign languages are written horizontally. How do English-speakers describe the headache of communicating in an alien tongue? I don't think we can, at least not with as much ease."
Spanish
duende [dwen-day] (adjective)
This wonderful word captures an entire world of passion, energy, and artistic excellence and describes a climactic show of spirit in a performance or work of art. Duende originally meant "imp" or "goblin" and came to mean anything magical. It now has a depth and complexity of meaning that crosses artistic borders, from flamenco dancing to bullfighting. The Spanish poet Garcia Lorca wrote an eloquent essay on duende that explores the complex and inspirational flavor of its sense, and I know no better introduction.
African Languages
ilunga (Tshiluba) [ee-Iun-ga] (noun)
This word from the Tshiluba language of the Republic of Congo has topped a list drawn up with the help of one thousand translators as the most untranslatable word in the world. It describes a person who is ready to forgive any transgression a first time and then to tolerate it for a second time, but never for a third time.
Arabic
taarradhin [tah-rah-deen] (noun)
Arabic has no word for "compromise" in the sense of reaching an arrangement via struggle and disagreement. But a much happier concept, taarradhin, exists in Arabic. It implies a happy solution for everyone, an "I win, you win." It's a way of resolving a problem without anyone losing face.
Chinese
guanxi (Mandarin) [gwan-shee] (noun)
This is one of the essential ways of getting things done in traditional Chinese society. To build up good guanxi, you do things for people such as give them gifts, take them to dinner, or grant favors. Conversely, you can also "use up" your guanxi with someone by calling in favors owed. Once a favor is done, an unspoken obligation exists. Maybe because of this, people often try to refuse gifts, because, sooner or later, they may have to repay the debt. However the bond of guanxi is rarely acquitted, because once the relationship exists, it sets up an endless process that can last a lifetime.
Czech
litost [lee-tosht] (noun)
This is an untranslatable emotion that only a Czech person would suffer from, defined by Milan Kundera as "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery." Devices for coping with extreme stress, suffering, and change are often special and unique to cultures and born out of the meeting of despair with a keen sense of survival.
French
esprit de I'escalier [es-pree de less-ka/-iay] (idiom)
A witty remark that occurs to you too late, literally on the way down the stairs. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations defines esprit de l'escalier as, "An untranslatable phrase, the meaning of which is that one only thinks on one's way downstairs of the smart retort one might have made in the drawing room."
German
korinthenkacker [core-in-ten-cuck-er] (noun)
A "raisin pooper" -- that is, someone so taken up with life's trivial detail that they spend all day crapping raisins. You can spot these types a mile off -- it's that irritating pen pusher or filing fanatic whose favorite job is tidying up the stationery cupboard.
Greek
meraki [may-rah-kee] (adjective)
This is a word that modern Greeks often use to describe doing something with soul, creativity, or love -- when you put "something of yourself" into what you're doing, whatever it may be. Meraki is often used to describe cooking or preparing a meal, but it can also mean arranging a room, choosing decorations, or setting an elegant table.
Japanese
tatemae [tah-tay-mye] (noun)
A term often translated as "form," but it also has the specific cultural meaning of "the reality that everyone professes to be true, even though they may not privately believe it." For privately held views, the Japanese have a different term, honne, meaning, "the reality that you hold inwardly to be true, even though you would never admit it publicly." The British civil servant muttering the reproach "bad form, old boy" over a drink in the club, may be expressing something very close to the quality of tatamae.
yoko meshi [yoh-koh mesh-ee] (noun)
"As an untranslatable, this one ranks high on my list of favorites. I could not improve on the background given by commentator Boye Lafayette de Mente about this beautiful word, yoko meshi. Taken literally, meshi means 'boiled rice' and yoko means 'horizontal,' so combined you get 'a meal eaten sideways.'This is how the Japanese define the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language: yoko is a humorous reference to the fact that Japanese is normally written vertically, whereas most foreign languages are written horizontally. How do English-speakers describe the headache of communicating in an alien tongue? I don't think we can, at least not with as much ease."
Spanish
duende [dwen-day] (adjective)
This wonderful word captures an entire world of passion, energy, and artistic excellence and describes a climactic show of spirit in a performance or work of art. Duende originally meant "imp" or "goblin" and came to mean anything magical. It now has a depth and complexity of meaning that crosses artistic borders, from flamenco dancing to bullfighting. The Spanish poet Garcia Lorca wrote an eloquent essay on duende that explores the complex and inspirational flavor of its sense, and I know no better introduction.
Iran
Cheney Says Israel Might 'Act First' on Iran
By DAVID E. SANGER Published: January 21, 2005
WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 - Just hours before being sworn in for a second term, Vice President Dick Cheney publicly raised the possibility on Thursday that Israel "might well decide to act first" to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
In an interview on the MSNBC program "Imus in the Morning," a highly unusual forum for Mr. Cheney, he appeared to use the danger of Israeli military action as one more reason that the Iranians should reach a diplomatic agreement to disarm, noting dryly that any such strike would leave "a diplomatic mess afterwards" and should be avoided.
By DAVID E. SANGER Published: January 21, 2005
WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 - Just hours before being sworn in for a second term, Vice President Dick Cheney publicly raised the possibility on Thursday that Israel "might well decide to act first" to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
In an interview on the MSNBC program "Imus in the Morning," a highly unusual forum for Mr. Cheney, he appeared to use the danger of Israeli military action as one more reason that the Iranians should reach a diplomatic agreement to disarm, noting dryly that any such strike would leave "a diplomatic mess afterwards" and should be avoided.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Straight Cash Homey
This has to be one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. I know it's old, but it's classic.
Randy Moss responding to the $10k he was fined by the NFL. Watch the Video - High speed - Low speed Transcript: Reporter: “Write the check yet, Randy?” Moss: “When you’re rich you don’t write checks.” Reporter: “If you don’t write checks, how do you pay these guys?” Moss: “Straight cash, homey.” Reporter: “Randy, are you upset about the fine?” Moss: “No, cause it ain’t [expletive]. Ain’t nothing but 10 grand. What’s 10 grand to me? Ain’t [expletive] … Next time I might shake my [expletive].” Almost every Viking they interviewed after these statements said this was just “Randy being Randy.”
Randy Moss responding to the $10k he was fined by the NFL. Watch the Video - High speed - Low speed Transcript: Reporter: “Write the check yet, Randy?” Moss: “When you’re rich you don’t write checks.” Reporter: “If you don’t write checks, how do you pay these guys?” Moss: “Straight cash, homey.” Reporter: “Randy, are you upset about the fine?” Moss: “No, cause it ain’t [expletive]. Ain’t nothing but 10 grand. What’s 10 grand to me? Ain’t [expletive] … Next time I might shake my [expletive].” Almost every Viking they interviewed after these statements said this was just “Randy being Randy.”
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Seig Heil!
Mark Steyn devotes his Telegraph column to the bizarre furor over Prince Harry's Nazi costume: "Harry a Nazi? You're having a laugh." Steyn finds elements of fakery and opportunism in the uproar:
"Worrying about a minor Royal schoolboy's alleged Nazi bent seems something of an indulgence at a time when the neo-Nazis get as many votes in Saxony's elections as Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party; when from Marseilles to Paris, Jews are being attacked and their homes, schools, kosher butchers, synagogues and cemeteries burnt and desecrated in a low-level intifada that's been going on so long the political establishment now accepts it as a normal feature of French life; and when the Berlin police advise Jews not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith. It's not just Nazi insignia you don't see in Germany these days; Nazi wise, the uniforms are the least of it."
"Worrying about a minor Royal schoolboy's alleged Nazi bent seems something of an indulgence at a time when the neo-Nazis get as many votes in Saxony's elections as Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party; when from Marseilles to Paris, Jews are being attacked and their homes, schools, kosher butchers, synagogues and cemeteries burnt and desecrated in a low-level intifada that's been going on so long the political establishment now accepts it as a normal feature of French life; and when the Berlin police advise Jews not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith. It's not just Nazi insignia you don't see in Germany these days; Nazi wise, the uniforms are the least of it."
Capone Mob Murder, World War II Hero
Their tickets and their luggage tags read ORD. They come by the thousands, hour after hour, day after day, flying into the concrete and steel and glass monster that's never quite finished, that's always under construction, always expanding, always overflowing. Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, even in the midst of a major recession, remains The World's Busiest, as O'Hare boosters never tire of telling us. And it is pretty busy. Ask the people who get lost there. Ask the homeowners in Des Plaines or Bensenville who live beneath the glide paths. Ask the cabbies who scratch out a living hauling warm bodies and their luggage to and from. Back in the days when Super Mobster Alphonse Capone was losing control of his sprawling criminal empire and was preparing for his trip to Alcatraz on an income tax evasion conviction, a much smaller version of the airport, then known as Orchard Depot, was just beginning to spread its wings. In those days, most travelers took the train, and international travelers went by ship. And anyway, Chicago's big airport was Municipal, out on the South Side - now known as Midway.Then as now, you had to really love flying to want to fly into or out of ORD.In 1949, six years after he went down near Tarawa Island in the South Pacific, Orchard Depot was renamed O'Hare International Airport, in memory of Navy Lt. Cmdr. Edward Henry (Butch) O'Hare.Butch O'Hare, born in St. Louis and raised on Chicago's South Side, was the affable, charming, pleasant-faced son of Edward J. O'Hare, wheeler-dealer millionaire lawyer, federal informant and partner-in-crime of Scarface Al Capone. CONT...
Next-
In a confession shown on Iraqi TV, the leader of Saddam Hussein’s “Army of Muhammad” admits that Syria and Iran are supplying the Iraqi holy warriors with money and weapons: We Received Money and Arms from Syria and Iran.
’Aid Came from the Neighboring Countries - We Got Aid Primarily from Iran’
Interrogator: “Did you get support from the countries of the region?”
Muayed Al-Nasseri: “Yes, sir... Many factions of the resistance are receiving aid from the neighboring countries. We in the Army of Muhammad - the fighting has been going on for almost two years now, and there must be aid, and this aid came from the neighboring countries. We got aid primarily from Iran. The truth is that Iran has played a significant role in supporting the Army of Muhammad and many factions of the resistance. I have some units, especially in southern Iraq, which receive Iranian aid in the form of arms and equipment.”
Interrogator: “You’re referring to units of the Army of Muhammad?”
Muayed Al-Nasseri: “Yes. They received money and weapons.”
’[Fighters] Met Personally with Iranian Leader Khamenei... They Even Got Car Bombs’
Muayed Al-Nasseri: “As for other factions of the resistance, I have reliable information regarding the National Islamic resistance, which is one of the factions of resistance, led by Colonel ‘Asi Al Hadithi. He sent a delegation to Iran from among the people of the faction, including General Halaf and General Khdayyer. They were sent to Iran in April or May and met with Iranian intelligence and with a number of Iranian leaders and even with Khamenei.”
Interrogator: “You mean they personally met with Khamenei?”
Muayed Al-Nasseri: “According to my information, they met with him personally, and they were given one million dollars and two cars full of weapons. They still have a very close relationship with Iran. They receive money, cars, weapons, and many things. According to my information, they even got car bombs.”
’Aid Came from the Neighboring Countries - We Got Aid Primarily from Iran’
Interrogator: “Did you get support from the countries of the region?”
Muayed Al-Nasseri: “Yes, sir... Many factions of the resistance are receiving aid from the neighboring countries. We in the Army of Muhammad - the fighting has been going on for almost two years now, and there must be aid, and this aid came from the neighboring countries. We got aid primarily from Iran. The truth is that Iran has played a significant role in supporting the Army of Muhammad and many factions of the resistance. I have some units, especially in southern Iraq, which receive Iranian aid in the form of arms and equipment.”
Interrogator: “You’re referring to units of the Army of Muhammad?”
Muayed Al-Nasseri: “Yes. They received money and weapons.”
’[Fighters] Met Personally with Iranian Leader Khamenei... They Even Got Car Bombs’
Muayed Al-Nasseri: “As for other factions of the resistance, I have reliable information regarding the National Islamic resistance, which is one of the factions of resistance, led by Colonel ‘Asi Al Hadithi. He sent a delegation to Iran from among the people of the faction, including General Halaf and General Khdayyer. They were sent to Iran in April or May and met with Iranian intelligence and with a number of Iranian leaders and even with Khamenei.”
Interrogator: “You mean they personally met with Khamenei?”
Muayed Al-Nasseri: “According to my information, they met with him personally, and they were given one million dollars and two cars full of weapons. They still have a very close relationship with Iran. They receive money, cars, weapons, and many things. According to my information, they even got car bombs.”
The future of PD?
Josh, Ricky, and Jakob had been living together for a year in San Diego (while Zach was completing his senior year), and they had discovered that, although the California sun and beach were pleasant enough, San Diego was the kind of place where, as Josh liked to put it, if you were motivated you bartended four nights a week.
The friends finally arrived in New York last summer, and took up residence in a newly renovated, forty-two-hundred-square-foot, five-bedroom loft in Tribeca, which rents for ten thousand dollars a month—a move that bears about as much relation to the typical postcollegiate experience as “Sex and the City” does to the demographic it purports to represent. The friends have avoided the hardships endured by some of their peers, such as being obliged to live in the outer boroughs, owing to the business they run out of their fifth bedroom, a Web site called CollegeHumor.com. The site features articles written by students or recent graduates on subjects such as “Everything I Learned About Life I Learned in First Semester” and “The Guide to a Great IM Profile,” but the mainstay of its content is visual: digital photographs and video snippets of dorm-room fun submitted by the online readership, and updated daily. It is visited by nearly eight million unique users a month.
http://www.collegehumor.com/
The friends finally arrived in New York last summer, and took up residence in a newly renovated, forty-two-hundred-square-foot, five-bedroom loft in Tribeca, which rents for ten thousand dollars a month—a move that bears about as much relation to the typical postcollegiate experience as “Sex and the City” does to the demographic it purports to represent. The friends have avoided the hardships endured by some of their peers, such as being obliged to live in the outer boroughs, owing to the business they run out of their fifth bedroom, a Web site called CollegeHumor.com. The site features articles written by students or recent graduates on subjects such as “Everything I Learned About Life I Learned in First Semester” and “The Guide to a Great IM Profile,” but the mainstay of its content is visual: digital photographs and video snippets of dorm-room fun submitted by the online readership, and updated daily. It is visited by nearly eight million unique users a month.
http://www.collegehumor.com/
I am hungry
100-Pound Woman Downs Six-Pound Burger
CLEARFIELD, Pa. (AP) - A 100-pound female college student is the first to meet the Denny's Beer Barrel Pub challenge: down the restaurant's six-pound hamburger - and five pounds of fixins' - within three hours. Kate Stelnick, 19, of Princeton, N.J., made the five-hour drive with two friends from The College of New Jersey on Wednesday, after they saw pictures of the monster burger, dubbed the Ye Old 96er, on the Internet and on TV's Food Network. ``I just saw it on TV and I really thought I could do it,'' Stelnick said, after downing the burger in two hours, 54 minutes. Stelnick didn't eat for two days to prepare for the challenge. ``I felt very full, but I was too excited that I actually ate it to notice,'' Stelnick said.
Denny Leigey Jr., the owner of the bar 35 miles northwest of State College, had offered a two-pound burger for years and conceived of the six-pounder after his daughter went to college and phoned him about a bar that sold a four-pounder.
But nobody had finished the big burger in the three-hour time limit since it was introduced on Super Bowl Sunday 1998 - not even competitive eater Eric ``Badlands'' Booker. The 420-pound Booker - who has eaten such things as 49 glazed doughnuts in eight minutes and two pounds of chocolate bars in six minutes - tried three times to eat the burger and finally did on his third effort. But it took Booker 7 1/2 hours.
The burger takes 45 minutes to cook, and those who try to meet the three-hour limit must use no utensils and eat all of these fixins: one large onion, two whole tomatoes, one half head of lettuce, 1 1/4 pounds of cheese, top and bottom buns, and a cup each of mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, relish, banana peppers and some pickles.
Leigey said he was pretty sure somebody would meet his burger challenge, though he didn't have a petite woman in mind.
``I wouldn't have made it if I didn't think it was possible,'' Leigey said.
For her trouble, Stelnick got a special certificate, a T-shirt and other prizes and - as advertised - Leigey picked up the $23.95 tab for the burger.
CLEARFIELD, Pa. (AP) - A 100-pound female college student is the first to meet the Denny's Beer Barrel Pub challenge: down the restaurant's six-pound hamburger - and five pounds of fixins' - within three hours. Kate Stelnick, 19, of Princeton, N.J., made the five-hour drive with two friends from The College of New Jersey on Wednesday, after they saw pictures of the monster burger, dubbed the Ye Old 96er, on the Internet and on TV's Food Network. ``I just saw it on TV and I really thought I could do it,'' Stelnick said, after downing the burger in two hours, 54 minutes. Stelnick didn't eat for two days to prepare for the challenge. ``I felt very full, but I was too excited that I actually ate it to notice,'' Stelnick said.
Denny Leigey Jr., the owner of the bar 35 miles northwest of State College, had offered a two-pound burger for years and conceived of the six-pounder after his daughter went to college and phoned him about a bar that sold a four-pounder.
But nobody had finished the big burger in the three-hour time limit since it was introduced on Super Bowl Sunday 1998 - not even competitive eater Eric ``Badlands'' Booker. The 420-pound Booker - who has eaten such things as 49 glazed doughnuts in eight minutes and two pounds of chocolate bars in six minutes - tried three times to eat the burger and finally did on his third effort. But it took Booker 7 1/2 hours.
The burger takes 45 minutes to cook, and those who try to meet the three-hour limit must use no utensils and eat all of these fixins: one large onion, two whole tomatoes, one half head of lettuce, 1 1/4 pounds of cheese, top and bottom buns, and a cup each of mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, relish, banana peppers and some pickles.
Leigey said he was pretty sure somebody would meet his burger challenge, though he didn't have a petite woman in mind.
``I wouldn't have made it if I didn't think it was possible,'' Leigey said.
For her trouble, Stelnick got a special certificate, a T-shirt and other prizes and - as advertised - Leigey picked up the $23.95 tab for the burger.
Monday, January 17, 2005
I love Borat
'Ali G' Comedian Risks Riot at U.S. Rodeo
LONDON (Reuters) - British comedian Sasha Baron Cohen escaped a near-riot at an American rodeo while filming his satirical "Da Ali G Show."
According to a report in the Roanoke (Virginia) Times, a man who was introduced as Boraq Sagdiyev from Kazakhstan -- in reality a Cohen character named Borat -- appeared at the rodeo over the weekend after organizers agreed to have him sing the national anthem.
After telling the crowd he supported America's war on terrorism, he said, "I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq, down to the lizards ... And may George W. Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq." He then sang a garbled version of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
The Roanoke Times reported that the crowd turned "downright nasty." One observer said "If he had been out there a minute longer, I think somebody would have shot him."
Cohen and his film crew were escorted out of the Salem Civic Center and told to leave the premises.
"Had we not gotten them out of there, there would have been a riot," rodeo producer Bobby Rowe told the paper. "They loaded up the van and they screeched out of there."
It is not the first time Cohen has wooed controversy with his show, which airs on Channel 4 in the UK and on HBO in the United States. In one episode last year, Borat sang an anti-Semitic song called "Throw the Jew Down the Well" at a U.S. country music bar, prompting protests from the U.S-based Anti-Defamation League.
Producers of the Ali G show, Talkback Thames, were unavailable for comment.
LONDON (Reuters) - British comedian Sasha Baron Cohen escaped a near-riot at an American rodeo while filming his satirical "Da Ali G Show."
According to a report in the Roanoke (Virginia) Times, a man who was introduced as Boraq Sagdiyev from Kazakhstan -- in reality a Cohen character named Borat -- appeared at the rodeo over the weekend after organizers agreed to have him sing the national anthem.
After telling the crowd he supported America's war on terrorism, he said, "I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq, down to the lizards ... And may George W. Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq." He then sang a garbled version of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
The Roanoke Times reported that the crowd turned "downright nasty." One observer said "If he had been out there a minute longer, I think somebody would have shot him."
Cohen and his film crew were escorted out of the Salem Civic Center and told to leave the premises.
"Had we not gotten them out of there, there would have been a riot," rodeo producer Bobby Rowe told the paper. "They loaded up the van and they screeched out of there."
It is not the first time Cohen has wooed controversy with his show, which airs on Channel 4 in the UK and on HBO in the United States. In one episode last year, Borat sang an anti-Semitic song called "Throw the Jew Down the Well" at a U.S. country music bar, prompting protests from the U.S-based Anti-Defamation League.
Producers of the Ali G show, Talkback Thames, were unavailable for comment.
Headline revised
Police: Marine who killed cop was gang member
Monday, January 17, 2005 CERES, Calif. (AP) - The Marine who shot and killed one Ceres police officer and wounded another one was a gang member who was high on cocaine at the time of the shootings, police said.
Investigators now are discounting the theory that Lance Cpl. Andres Raya, 19, may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress and instigated a "suicide by cop" - provoking officers to shoot him - because he did not want to return to Iraq.
"During our investigation, we found he wasn't due to go back to Iraq, never faced combat situations and never even fired his gun," Stanislaus County Sheriff's Deputy Jason Woodman said Saturday.
Monday, January 17, 2005 CERES, Calif. (AP) - The Marine who shot and killed one Ceres police officer and wounded another one was a gang member who was high on cocaine at the time of the shootings, police said.
Investigators now are discounting the theory that Lance Cpl. Andres Raya, 19, may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress and instigated a "suicide by cop" - provoking officers to shoot him - because he did not want to return to Iraq.
"During our investigation, we found he wasn't due to go back to Iraq, never faced combat situations and never even fired his gun," Stanislaus County Sheriff's Deputy Jason Woodman said Saturday.
Friday, January 14, 2005
Dangerous Hair!
CAIR has succeeded in intimidating a Tennessee public high school into changing their dress code to allow the Muslim headscarf.
CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee (AP) — A public high school changed its dress code to allow religious headscarves after a national civil rights group for Muslims complained to the principal on behalf of a student. A spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations said Emily Smith, 18, a senior at Chattanooga’s East Ridge High School, wore her headscarf, or hijab, on campus for the first time Thursday. Smith said that although friends and a few teachers offered congratulations, “I wanted to keep it as low-key as possible.”
Khadija Athman, civil rights manager for the Washington, D.C.-based council, said the group sent the school principal a letter January 6, three days after the student e-mailed the council asking about her rights. The letter said that as a Muslim, the student is “required to cover her hair in public. Ms. Smith stated that despite numerous efforts to explain to you the importance of the headscarf in her faith, you always found an excuse to hinder her.” The letter said religious headscarves are protected by the Constitution and laws against discrimination in a public school. Rick Smith, an assistant superintendent for Hamilton County schools, said the school had banned all head wear, but the principal agreed to allow Emily Smith’s hijab after attorneys were consulted. “This particular item was a little different because it is a religious garment,” Rick Smith said. But as Amir Taheri makes quite clear in this article from 2003, the hijab is not a religious garment at all. It’s a political statement. And that, of course, is why CAIR is so active in pushing for its legitimization. All these and other cases are based on the claim that the controversial headgear is an essential part of the Muslim faith and that attempts at banning it constitute an attack on Islam. That claim is totally false. The headgear in question has nothing to do with Islam as a religion. It is not sanctioned anywhere in the Koran, the fundamental text of Islam, or the hadith (traditions) attributed to the Prophet.
This headgear was invented in the early 1970s by Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the leadership of the Lebanese Shiite community. Sadr’s idea was that, by wearing the headgear, Shiite women would be clearly marked out, and thus spared sexual harassment, and rape, by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian gunmen who at the time controlled southern Lebanon.
Sadr’s neo-hijab made its first appearance in Iran in 1977 as a symbol of Islamist-Marxist opposition to the Shah’s regime. When the mullahs seized power in Tehran in 1979, the number of women wearing the hijab exploded into tens of thousands.
In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that “scientific research had shown that women’s hair emitted rays that drove men insane” (sic). To protect the public, the new Islamist regime passed a law in 1982 making the hijab mandatory for females aged above six, regardless of religious faith. Violating the hijab code was made punishable by 100 lashes of the cane and six months imprisonment.
CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee (AP) — A public high school changed its dress code to allow religious headscarves after a national civil rights group for Muslims complained to the principal on behalf of a student. A spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations said Emily Smith, 18, a senior at Chattanooga’s East Ridge High School, wore her headscarf, or hijab, on campus for the first time Thursday. Smith said that although friends and a few teachers offered congratulations, “I wanted to keep it as low-key as possible.”
Khadija Athman, civil rights manager for the Washington, D.C.-based council, said the group sent the school principal a letter January 6, three days after the student e-mailed the council asking about her rights. The letter said that as a Muslim, the student is “required to cover her hair in public. Ms. Smith stated that despite numerous efforts to explain to you the importance of the headscarf in her faith, you always found an excuse to hinder her.” The letter said religious headscarves are protected by the Constitution and laws against discrimination in a public school. Rick Smith, an assistant superintendent for Hamilton County schools, said the school had banned all head wear, but the principal agreed to allow Emily Smith’s hijab after attorneys were consulted. “This particular item was a little different because it is a religious garment,” Rick Smith said. But as Amir Taheri makes quite clear in this article from 2003, the hijab is not a religious garment at all. It’s a political statement. And that, of course, is why CAIR is so active in pushing for its legitimization. All these and other cases are based on the claim that the controversial headgear is an essential part of the Muslim faith and that attempts at banning it constitute an attack on Islam. That claim is totally false. The headgear in question has nothing to do with Islam as a religion. It is not sanctioned anywhere in the Koran, the fundamental text of Islam, or the hadith (traditions) attributed to the Prophet.
This headgear was invented in the early 1970s by Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the leadership of the Lebanese Shiite community. Sadr’s idea was that, by wearing the headgear, Shiite women would be clearly marked out, and thus spared sexual harassment, and rape, by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian gunmen who at the time controlled southern Lebanon.
Sadr’s neo-hijab made its first appearance in Iran in 1977 as a symbol of Islamist-Marxist opposition to the Shah’s regime. When the mullahs seized power in Tehran in 1979, the number of women wearing the hijab exploded into tens of thousands.
In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that “scientific research had shown that women’s hair emitted rays that drove men insane” (sic). To protect the public, the new Islamist regime passed a law in 1982 making the hijab mandatory for females aged above six, regardless of religious faith. Violating the hijab code was made punishable by 100 lashes of the cane and six months imprisonment.
Cards as Weapons
Master of the lethal scaling system, Ricky Jay has been seen slicing into watermelons, snapping pencils, and tossing numerous cards at once with powerful force. Ricky Jay was once a card magician until he caught the fever for pure card scaling. So after about 8 reported years of research and studying, he wrote a book, Cards as Weapons. This book is a coveted tome of knowledge which may range from 200-1000 dollars in sale value since it's out of print. However, excerpts can be found in many places on the web.
The following text and images have been quoted from Ricky Jay's book entitled "Cards as Weapons" (Copyright 1988, Warner Bros.) Regrettably, this excellent book has been out-of-print for quite some time.
Illustrations for the Jay throwing technique
The Jay Grip
First, we must assume that the card can express four directions. The four corners of the card will now be designated as Northeast, Southeast, Northwest and Southwest.
Place the Northeast corner of the card into the fleshy part of the right index finger tip.
The right second finger is placed under the card about one inch down from the index finger along the Eastern edge of the card. The right thumb is placed over the card in exactly the same position. The thumb and second finger has the card pinched between them. If the cards were not present the position of these fingers would be identical to that used in passing the tiniest piece of cigarette to a close friend.
The third and fourth fingers are kept out of the way: this is most easily done by curling them inward to touch the palm. The Eastern edge of the card makes contact with the hand only where it is grasped by the first two fingers and thumb: the card does not touch the palm of the hand at this time. This is very important. Later, when the wrist is turned inward, the Southeast corner of the card will hit the base of the palm, but it does not do so yet. You are now ready to learn the Jay throwing technique.
The Jay throwing technique
The basic spinning motion will be discussed first; the arm action for longer throws will be described later.
Sit comfortably in a chair (not an armchair). Your left hand, which holds the deck, rests in your lap.
Grasp a card in your right hand in the Jay grip. The right arm rests loosely against the right side of the body.
Bend the arm at the elbow so that the hand is now about six inches above your knee and parallel to the floor.
Bend your wrist towards your body until the Southeast corner of the card touches your hand at the base of the palm.
The wrist now straightens, returning to the original position, as the fingers release the card. The card glides out over the second finger, spins forward for a few inches (or feet), and falls to the floor. The motion of the wrist is the same as that employed in dismissing an incompetent valet.
After you get the feel of this motion, you are ready to add arm action; this will provide greater stability and distance.
The Jay throwing technique with complete arm action
The entire throwing action is similar to that of scaling a Frisbee or saucer and the motion of the arm bending back at the elbow is like the swing of a pendulum. This back-and-forth action may be repeated a few times before the release of the card as a sort of warm-up exercise; this is similar to practice-stroking before the shot in a game of billiards.
Resume the relaxed position in the chair. The chair will be familiar with you by this time and it too will be relaxed.
Hold the card in the Jay grip and straighten out the arm, keeping it parallel to the floor.
Keeping the arm in the same plane, bend the arm in at the elbow, back toward your body, at an angle of 90°.
The wrist continues to move back but the arm remains stationary until the card touches the base of the palm exactly as in the spinning exercise.
The wrist and arm swing forward to the original straight position and at this point the card is released.
The follow-through: as the card is released the wrist goes further to the right of the extended straight arm and the fingers open slightly in a flicking motion.
Advanced Techniques
After you master the basic Jay grip, you may want to check out other throwing methods.
The following text and images have been quoted from Ricky Jay's book entitled "Cards as Weapons" (Copyright 1988, Warner Bros.) Regrettably, this excellent book has been out-of-print for quite some time.
Illustrations for the Jay throwing technique
The Jay Grip
First, we must assume that the card can express four directions. The four corners of the card will now be designated as Northeast, Southeast, Northwest and Southwest.
Place the Northeast corner of the card into the fleshy part of the right index finger tip.
The right second finger is placed under the card about one inch down from the index finger along the Eastern edge of the card. The right thumb is placed over the card in exactly the same position. The thumb and second finger has the card pinched between them. If the cards were not present the position of these fingers would be identical to that used in passing the tiniest piece of cigarette to a close friend.
The third and fourth fingers are kept out of the way: this is most easily done by curling them inward to touch the palm. The Eastern edge of the card makes contact with the hand only where it is grasped by the first two fingers and thumb: the card does not touch the palm of the hand at this time. This is very important. Later, when the wrist is turned inward, the Southeast corner of the card will hit the base of the palm, but it does not do so yet. You are now ready to learn the Jay throwing technique.
The Jay throwing technique
The basic spinning motion will be discussed first; the arm action for longer throws will be described later.
Sit comfortably in a chair (not an armchair). Your left hand, which holds the deck, rests in your lap.
Grasp a card in your right hand in the Jay grip. The right arm rests loosely against the right side of the body.
Bend the arm at the elbow so that the hand is now about six inches above your knee and parallel to the floor.
Bend your wrist towards your body until the Southeast corner of the card touches your hand at the base of the palm.
The wrist now straightens, returning to the original position, as the fingers release the card. The card glides out over the second finger, spins forward for a few inches (or feet), and falls to the floor. The motion of the wrist is the same as that employed in dismissing an incompetent valet.
After you get the feel of this motion, you are ready to add arm action; this will provide greater stability and distance.
The Jay throwing technique with complete arm action
The entire throwing action is similar to that of scaling a Frisbee or saucer and the motion of the arm bending back at the elbow is like the swing of a pendulum. This back-and-forth action may be repeated a few times before the release of the card as a sort of warm-up exercise; this is similar to practice-stroking before the shot in a game of billiards.
Resume the relaxed position in the chair. The chair will be familiar with you by this time and it too will be relaxed.
Hold the card in the Jay grip and straighten out the arm, keeping it parallel to the floor.
Keeping the arm in the same plane, bend the arm in at the elbow, back toward your body, at an angle of 90°.
The wrist continues to move back but the arm remains stationary until the card touches the base of the palm exactly as in the spinning exercise.
The wrist and arm swing forward to the original straight position and at this point the card is released.
The follow-through: as the card is released the wrist goes further to the right of the extended straight arm and the fingers open slightly in a flicking motion.
Advanced Techniques
After you master the basic Jay grip, you may want to check out other throwing methods.
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Xanax Baby
Business - USATODAY.com
By Gary Stoller, USA TODAY
Starting next Thursday, airliners and other planes flying high over the Americas will pass much closer to one another than is now allowed - as close as 1,000 feet above or below.
With the change, which is being made mainly to save airlines billions in fuel costs, U.S. safety officials offer passengers some advice: Relax. The 1,000-foot standard has been in place elsewhere in the world for years without incident. In addition, safety equipment aboard planes has been upgraded. "For the flying public, this change will be largely invisible," says Federal Aviation Administration (news - web sites) spokesman William Shumann.
Nonetheless, the notion of planes routinely passing within half the vertical distance that air traffic controllers now allow rattles some high-mileage travelers and an air safety advocate.
John Foor, an engineer from Houston who flew about 125 times last year, says it increases the risk of a midair collision. "It cuts into the safety margin, regardless of the history of no incidents." Though the FAA (news - web sites) says the change probably won't be noticeable, air traffic controller Steve Entis says passengers looking out the windows of a jet flying at cruise altitude might see more planes than in the past, or at least see them closer.
By Gary Stoller, USA TODAY
Starting next Thursday, airliners and other planes flying high over the Americas will pass much closer to one another than is now allowed - as close as 1,000 feet above or below.
With the change, which is being made mainly to save airlines billions in fuel costs, U.S. safety officials offer passengers some advice: Relax. The 1,000-foot standard has been in place elsewhere in the world for years without incident. In addition, safety equipment aboard planes has been upgraded. "For the flying public, this change will be largely invisible," says Federal Aviation Administration (news - web sites) spokesman William Shumann.
Nonetheless, the notion of planes routinely passing within half the vertical distance that air traffic controllers now allow rattles some high-mileage travelers and an air safety advocate.
John Foor, an engineer from Houston who flew about 125 times last year, says it increases the risk of a midair collision. "It cuts into the safety margin, regardless of the history of no incidents." Though the FAA (news - web sites) says the change probably won't be noticeable, air traffic controller Steve Entis says passengers looking out the windows of a jet flying at cruise altitude might see more planes than in the past, or at least see them closer.
Torture part duex
A great article in the City Journal about torture and it's use in Afghanistan and Iraq-
"the Kandahar prisoners were not playing by the army rule book. They divulged nothing. “Prisoners overcame the [traditional] model almost effortlessly,” writes Chris Mackey in The Interrogators, his gripping account of his interrogation service in Afghanistan. The prisoners confounded their captors “not with clever cover stories but with simple refusal to cooperate. They offered lame stories, pretended not to remember even the most basic of details, and then waited for consequences that never really came.”
Some of the al-Qaida fighters had received resistance training, which taught that Americans were strictly limited in how they could question prisoners. Failure to cooperate, the al-Qaida manuals revealed, carried no penalties and certainly no risk of torture—a sign, gloated the manuals, of American weakness.
Even if a prisoner had not previously studied American detention policies before arriving at Kandahar, he soon figured them out. “It became very clear very early on to the detainees that the Americans were just going to have them sit there,” recalls interrogator Joe Martin (a pseudonym). “They realized: ‘The Americans will give us our Holy Book, they’ll draw lines on the floor showing us where to pray, we’ll get three meals a day with fresh fruit, do Jazzercise with the guards, . . . we can wait them out.'""
"the Kandahar prisoners were not playing by the army rule book. They divulged nothing. “Prisoners overcame the [traditional] model almost effortlessly,” writes Chris Mackey in The Interrogators, his gripping account of his interrogation service in Afghanistan. The prisoners confounded their captors “not with clever cover stories but with simple refusal to cooperate. They offered lame stories, pretended not to remember even the most basic of details, and then waited for consequences that never really came.”
Some of the al-Qaida fighters had received resistance training, which taught that Americans were strictly limited in how they could question prisoners. Failure to cooperate, the al-Qaida manuals revealed, carried no penalties and certainly no risk of torture—a sign, gloated the manuals, of American weakness.
Even if a prisoner had not previously studied American detention policies before arriving at Kandahar, he soon figured them out. “It became very clear very early on to the detainees that the Americans were just going to have them sit there,” recalls interrogator Joe Martin (a pseudonym). “They realized: ‘The Americans will give us our Holy Book, they’ll draw lines on the floor showing us where to pray, we’ll get three meals a day with fresh fruit, do Jazzercise with the guards, . . . we can wait them out.'""
Media Bias
The Liberated Newsman
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6814496/
A hilarious take on the subject of media bias comes from Hugh Downs, formerly of ABC's "20/20," in an exchange on the CBS scandal with host Joe Scarborough of MSNBC's "Scarborough Country":
Scarborough: Is there a liberal bias in the media or is the bias towards getting the story first and getting the highest ratings, therefore, making the most money?
Downs: Well, I think the latter, by far. And, of course, when the word liberal came to be a pejorative word, you began to wonder, you have to say that the press doesn't want to be thought of as merely liberal.
But people tend to be more liberated in their thought when they are closer to events and know a little more about what the background of what's happening. So, I suppose, in that respect, there is a liberal, if you want to call it a bias. The press is a little more in touch with what's happening.
So you see, it's not that journalists are biased, it's just that they know more than everyone else and thus are "more liberated in their thought"! Don't you feel silly for thinking they were arrogant elitists?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6814496/
A hilarious take on the subject of media bias comes from Hugh Downs, formerly of ABC's "20/20," in an exchange on the CBS scandal with host Joe Scarborough of MSNBC's "Scarborough Country":
Scarborough: Is there a liberal bias in the media or is the bias towards getting the story first and getting the highest ratings, therefore, making the most money?
Downs: Well, I think the latter, by far. And, of course, when the word liberal came to be a pejorative word, you began to wonder, you have to say that the press doesn't want to be thought of as merely liberal.
But people tend to be more liberated in their thought when they are closer to events and know a little more about what the background of what's happening. So, I suppose, in that respect, there is a liberal, if you want to call it a bias. The press is a little more in touch with what's happening.
So you see, it's not that journalists are biased, it's just that they know more than everyone else and thus are "more liberated in their thought"! Don't you feel silly for thinking they were arrogant elitists?
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Hammer Time
Vince Neil's New Girl Girl Girl
F-bomb dropping and law-affronting rocker Vince Neil showed his softer side when he wed girlfriend Lia Gerardini in an emotional Las Vegas ceremony on Sunday.
The Mötley Crüe frontman's Surreal Life castmate M.C. Hammer officiated over the ceremony, proclaiming, "It's Hammer Time!" as he escorted Neil down the aisle, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It was the fourth marriage for Neil, the second for Gerardini, per the couple's marriage license. Guests including Neil's bandmates Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee, Dennis Rodman and Playboy playmate and Surreal Life castmate Brande Roderick looked on as the twosome swapped vows.
Unfortunately, producer Randy Kubota, who was to have served as Neil's best man, was involved in a mysterious accident before the wedding and was hospitalized with serious injuries. He was discovered in a drainage ditch near the Las Vegas Beltway, having apparently been pushed from a car after leaving a party at Neil's house Friday.
"We don't know what happened," Neil told the Review-Journal.
His manager, Burt Stein, stood in as best man.
Neil's nuptials are just the latest in a series of self-improvement ventures that also included undergoing massive plastic surgery, working out with a trainer and redefining his personal style as part of VH1 reality series Remaking: Vince Neil. The newlyweds, who live in Las Vegas, better honeymoon while they can--Neil and the newly reunited Crüe will embark on a massive world tour next month, touching down in five continents. The band's new two-disc greatest hits album, Red, White & Crüe, is due out Feb. 1 and includes Mötley fan favorites such as "Girls, Girls, Girls," "Dr. Feelgood" and "Smokin' in the Boy's Room."
F-bomb dropping and law-affronting rocker Vince Neil showed his softer side when he wed girlfriend Lia Gerardini in an emotional Las Vegas ceremony on Sunday.
The Mötley Crüe frontman's Surreal Life castmate M.C. Hammer officiated over the ceremony, proclaiming, "It's Hammer Time!" as he escorted Neil down the aisle, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It was the fourth marriage for Neil, the second for Gerardini, per the couple's marriage license. Guests including Neil's bandmates Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee, Dennis Rodman and Playboy playmate and Surreal Life castmate Brande Roderick looked on as the twosome swapped vows.
Unfortunately, producer Randy Kubota, who was to have served as Neil's best man, was involved in a mysterious accident before the wedding and was hospitalized with serious injuries. He was discovered in a drainage ditch near the Las Vegas Beltway, having apparently been pushed from a car after leaving a party at Neil's house Friday.
"We don't know what happened," Neil told the Review-Journal.
His manager, Burt Stein, stood in as best man.
Neil's nuptials are just the latest in a series of self-improvement ventures that also included undergoing massive plastic surgery, working out with a trainer and redefining his personal style as part of VH1 reality series Remaking: Vince Neil. The newlyweds, who live in Las Vegas, better honeymoon while they can--Neil and the newly reunited Crüe will embark on a massive world tour next month, touching down in five continents. The band's new two-disc greatest hits album, Red, White & Crüe, is due out Feb. 1 and includes Mötley fan favorites such as "Girls, Girls, Girls," "Dr. Feelgood" and "Smokin' in the Boy's Room."
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Lost in a Supermarket
Fresh from his re-election victory, Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin "went looking for a warm place to golf" and ended up in an exotic land called Alabama. In case you haven't heard of Alabama, it is one of those "red states" that President Bush carried (by a margin of better than 25%). In an op-ed for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Feingold discusses what he found there.
Well, sort of. Feingold's report from Alabama consists entirely of generalities. It seems Alabamans are really poor: The senator "heard repeatedly of the difficult struggles that so many working families are enduring in both urban and rural areas." And in considering why the state votes the way it does, Feingold detects what the Ayn Rand Institute calls "the ugly hand of altruism":
I can only be humbled by their sacrifice. But because I am a lawmaker and a student of history, I also know who has been asking them to give so much. And I can only wonder how many more generations of central Alabamians will say "yes" when the increasingly powerful Republican Party asks them to be concerned about homosexuality but not about the security of their own health, about abortion but not about the economic futures of their own children. As my wife and I drove through Greenville that night, I thought how fundamentally unfair this all is in order to support an increasingly radical conservative movement.
Of course it is a familiar Democratic trope that red-state voters are impoverished, bigoted bumpkins who vote against their own economic interests because the GOP fools them into caring about trivial matters like homosexuality and abortion. A best-selling book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?," laid out the case last year. In truth, the argument is so full of holes that a Green Bay Packers fan could wear it on his head. For one thing, there is at the very least a tension between the stereotype of the GOP as a party of impoverished dupes and the other Democratic stereotype of the GOP as the party of the rich. It appears that the latter stereotype is closer to the truth. The 2004 exit polls found that John Kerry outpolled President Bush by 63% to 36% among voters making less than $15,000 a year and 57% to 42% among those making $15,000 to $30,000. Among those in the $30,000 to $50,000 range the two candidates ran nearly even (Kerry 50%, Bush 49%), and Bush led 56% to 43% among those making $50,000 a year or more. So the Democrats actually are the party of the poor. The problem is that there aren't that many poor people in America, or if there are, they tend not to vote. Only 8% of the exit-poll participants were in the under $15,000 group, and only 45% made less than $50,000. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that the economic portion of Feingold's analysis is correct--that lots of poor people vote against their own economic interests when they cast ballots for Republicans--or at least that he actually believes it. If Democrats care so much about the "downtrodden," and if the GOP is playing on their false consciousness by emphasizing things that don't matter like abortion and homosexuality, why don't the Democrats simply adopt pro-life and antigay positions, so that they can win office on their superior economic programs and actually do something for these fortuneless folks? The question answers itself, doesn't it? Russ Feingold would never endorse, say, the Human Life Amendment or the Federal Marriage Amendment, because they are against his principles. Indeed, we're guessing he has enough integrity that he'd rather lose an election than change these positions. In other words, when Feingold writes disparagingly of Alabama voters' concern about homosexuality and abortion, it isn't because he regards these as trivial matters. Rather, it is because he does not respect the views of those who disagree.
The Journal Sentinel http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/jan05/291641.asp speculates that Feingold's Alabama trip may presage a 2008 presidential run. Given his condescending attitude toward red-state voters, Republicans can only hope so.
Well, sort of. Feingold's report from Alabama consists entirely of generalities. It seems Alabamans are really poor: The senator "heard repeatedly of the difficult struggles that so many working families are enduring in both urban and rural areas." And in considering why the state votes the way it does, Feingold detects what the Ayn Rand Institute calls "the ugly hand of altruism":
I can only be humbled by their sacrifice. But because I am a lawmaker and a student of history, I also know who has been asking them to give so much. And I can only wonder how many more generations of central Alabamians will say "yes" when the increasingly powerful Republican Party asks them to be concerned about homosexuality but not about the security of their own health, about abortion but not about the economic futures of their own children. As my wife and I drove through Greenville that night, I thought how fundamentally unfair this all is in order to support an increasingly radical conservative movement.
Of course it is a familiar Democratic trope that red-state voters are impoverished, bigoted bumpkins who vote against their own economic interests because the GOP fools them into caring about trivial matters like homosexuality and abortion. A best-selling book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?," laid out the case last year. In truth, the argument is so full of holes that a Green Bay Packers fan could wear it on his head. For one thing, there is at the very least a tension between the stereotype of the GOP as a party of impoverished dupes and the other Democratic stereotype of the GOP as the party of the rich. It appears that the latter stereotype is closer to the truth. The 2004 exit polls found that John Kerry outpolled President Bush by 63% to 36% among voters making less than $15,000 a year and 57% to 42% among those making $15,000 to $30,000. Among those in the $30,000 to $50,000 range the two candidates ran nearly even (Kerry 50%, Bush 49%), and Bush led 56% to 43% among those making $50,000 a year or more. So the Democrats actually are the party of the poor. The problem is that there aren't that many poor people in America, or if there are, they tend not to vote. Only 8% of the exit-poll participants were in the under $15,000 group, and only 45% made less than $50,000. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that the economic portion of Feingold's analysis is correct--that lots of poor people vote against their own economic interests when they cast ballots for Republicans--or at least that he actually believes it. If Democrats care so much about the "downtrodden," and if the GOP is playing on their false consciousness by emphasizing things that don't matter like abortion and homosexuality, why don't the Democrats simply adopt pro-life and antigay positions, so that they can win office on their superior economic programs and actually do something for these fortuneless folks? The question answers itself, doesn't it? Russ Feingold would never endorse, say, the Human Life Amendment or the Federal Marriage Amendment, because they are against his principles. Indeed, we're guessing he has enough integrity that he'd rather lose an election than change these positions. In other words, when Feingold writes disparagingly of Alabama voters' concern about homosexuality and abortion, it isn't because he regards these as trivial matters. Rather, it is because he does not respect the views of those who disagree.
The Journal Sentinel http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/jan05/291641.asp speculates that Feingold's Alabama trip may presage a 2008 presidential run. Given his condescending attitude toward red-state voters, Republicans can only hope so.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Wyden visits OIT Thursday
I will be seeing Senator Wyden on Thursday. I have never met him and only have seen him speak once before. If anyone has anything of interest or concern they would like relayed to the Senator, please post it in the comment section. It is not guaranteed that I will get to ask a question. However most of those in attendance will be angry native Americans. I may get to ask since I am not seeking reparitions (again).
Zerzan Continues Suspicious Rise
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
January 10, 2005 3:17 p.m.
WASHINGTON -- U.S. Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Institutions Policy Greg Zerzan will become acting assistant Treasury secretary for financial institutions once Wayne Abernathy leaves, Treasury said Monday.
Abernathy earlier Monday told President George W. Bush that he planned to resign after Jan. 31 and work in the private sector. Starting Feb. 1, Abernathy will start working for the American Bankers Association in the newly created position of executive director for financial institutions policy and regulatory affairs.
Zerzan has been in his current post since March 3, 2003 and is responsible for policy matters related to financial services issues. He manages Treasury policy regarding government-sponsored enterprises and oversees Treasury's terrorism risk insurance program. Before joining Treasury, Zerzan worked on the House Financial Services Committee, where he was the senior counsel for legislation.
January 10, 2005 3:17 p.m.
WASHINGTON -- U.S. Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Institutions Policy Greg Zerzan will become acting assistant Treasury secretary for financial institutions once Wayne Abernathy leaves, Treasury said Monday.
Abernathy earlier Monday told President George W. Bush that he planned to resign after Jan. 31 and work in the private sector. Starting Feb. 1, Abernathy will start working for the American Bankers Association in the newly created position of executive director for financial institutions policy and regulatory affairs.
Zerzan has been in his current post since March 3, 2003 and is responsible for policy matters related to financial services issues. He manages Treasury policy regarding government-sponsored enterprises and oversees Treasury's terrorism risk insurance program. Before joining Treasury, Zerzan worked on the House Financial Services Committee, where he was the senior counsel for legislation.
Dry Frats
Ban of Brothers
By BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS Published: January 9, 2005
Gillian Laub for The New York Times
With alcohol off-limits at the chapter house, Phi Delts resort to off-campus housing for their parties. Even these gatherings are subject to raids by the local police.
Gillian Laub for The New York TimesGreg Bok, a sophomore brother at the Phi Delt house. The ban on alchohol, Northwestern Phi Delts agree, has had no effect on housekeeping.
y modern fraternity standards, Phi Delta Theta's tailgate party was a real rager. For one thing, there were kegs. I couldn't see them just then, but proof of their existence was everywhere. Packed into a backyard near the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., were some 100 drunken college students, beer spilling from plastic cups, industrial-size ketchup bottles overturned on the grass near the grill and gaggles of hard-drinking sorority girls (including one self-described Phi Delt groupie) keeping pace with the boys.
Amid the revelry, I spotted a lanky, easygoing Phi Delt sophomore from Texas who goes by the nickname Two-Shot, because two shots is about all it takes to get him acting silly. ''Two-Shot!'' I said loudly as he meandered through the crowd in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, a beer in one hand and a cheap plastic bottle of vodka in the other. ''Where's the keg?''
He pointed toward a far corner. ''Hey, homey,'' he said. ''The beer's over there.''
''You going to the game?'' I asked.
''Man, that's a good question,'' he said. ''I got great intentions, you know. But stuff happens. Sometimes I don't make it.''
I wished him luck (''Keep it real!'' he replied) and made my way toward the keg, where I bumped into Theo Michels, Phi Delt's likable chapter president, and Greg Bok, a big, sarcastic, deceptively smart sophomore. (Bok looks like a meathead but says he scored a 1,550 out of 1,600 on the SAT.) Both Michels and Bok were marveling at the success of the day's tailgate.
''Six kegs and no cops,'' Michels said. ''This has to be some sort of record. Last year, we had an off-campus party that started at 10:30, and by 11 the police came with a paddy wagon. A paddy wagon. We're college students trying to have a party off campus, because we can't have one in our own fraternity house, because we're not allowed to drink there. So we try to have one off campus, and it gets broken up. Basically, we can't have a party anywhere.''
Peter Micali, a square-jawed Phi Delt sophomore who had wandered within earshot, chimed in, ''Yeah, it was easier to party in high school.''
Bok shook his head sadly. ''The good old-fashioned fraternity experience is dead,'' he said, pausing for dramatic effect. ''So long, 'Animal House.' ''
t's doom and gloom time for many fraternity boys at Northwestern and at colleges across the country. University administrators, alarmed by the extent of binge drinking on their campuses, are cracking down on the excesses of Greek life, saying it's high time for fraternity boys to shape up and sober up. While all kinds of college students binge drink, the 2001 College Alcohol Study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that fraternity house residents are twice as likely to do so as other students.
Eleven national and international fraternities, including Phi Delta Theta, now require most of their chapter houses to be alcohol-free, no matter what their university's policy is. (Sororities have long banned drinking in their chapter houses.) Take away the booze, the new alcohol-free theory goes, and fraternities will be safer, on more solid economic footing (fewer lawsuits, cheaper liability insurance) and more conducive to the creation of real bonds of brotherhood. Friendships will be forged out of genuine respect, not the shared misery of hazing or the shared fog of drink. ''We just didn't see a way to dramatically change the fraternity culture without removing alcohol,'' said Bob Biggs, executive vice president of Phi Delta Theta, when we met last fall in his office at the fraternity's spotless, museumlike international headquarters in Oxford, Ohio.
But what, exactly, would a dry fraternity look like? And would anyone want to join? You'd have a better chance, I thought, of getting James Carville and Bob Novak to open ''Crossfire'' with five minutes of meditation. As I listened to the brothers in that backyard go on about life at one of Northwestern's ''alcohol free'' fraternities, I couldn't help feeling a little sorry for them. I was a Phi Delt at Northwestern in the mid-90's -- not that long ago, to be sure, but seemingly a different time entirely. While we considered ourselves tamer than fraternities at many state schools (where Greek affiliation can often take precedence over just about everything), my brothers and I still saw drunken debauchery in the chapter house as our fraternal mandate. We threw rowdy keg parties. We got drunk in our rooms and then broke into other fraternities, stealing their sacred robes and toaster ovens. Some of us smoked marijuana, which we grew and harvested in an off-campus apartment. And many of us eagerly participated in drunken hazing, which most of the hazers and hazed saw as a kind of comic relief integral to fraternal bonding. To my brothers and me, a dry fraternity would have been inconceivable.
By BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS Published: January 9, 2005
Gillian Laub for The New York Times
With alcohol off-limits at the chapter house, Phi Delts resort to off-campus housing for their parties. Even these gatherings are subject to raids by the local police.
Gillian Laub for The New York TimesGreg Bok, a sophomore brother at the Phi Delt house. The ban on alchohol, Northwestern Phi Delts agree, has had no effect on housekeeping.
y modern fraternity standards, Phi Delta Theta's tailgate party was a real rager. For one thing, there were kegs. I couldn't see them just then, but proof of their existence was everywhere. Packed into a backyard near the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., were some 100 drunken college students, beer spilling from plastic cups, industrial-size ketchup bottles overturned on the grass near the grill and gaggles of hard-drinking sorority girls (including one self-described Phi Delt groupie) keeping pace with the boys.
Amid the revelry, I spotted a lanky, easygoing Phi Delt sophomore from Texas who goes by the nickname Two-Shot, because two shots is about all it takes to get him acting silly. ''Two-Shot!'' I said loudly as he meandered through the crowd in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, a beer in one hand and a cheap plastic bottle of vodka in the other. ''Where's the keg?''
He pointed toward a far corner. ''Hey, homey,'' he said. ''The beer's over there.''
''You going to the game?'' I asked.
''Man, that's a good question,'' he said. ''I got great intentions, you know. But stuff happens. Sometimes I don't make it.''
I wished him luck (''Keep it real!'' he replied) and made my way toward the keg, where I bumped into Theo Michels, Phi Delt's likable chapter president, and Greg Bok, a big, sarcastic, deceptively smart sophomore. (Bok looks like a meathead but says he scored a 1,550 out of 1,600 on the SAT.) Both Michels and Bok were marveling at the success of the day's tailgate.
''Six kegs and no cops,'' Michels said. ''This has to be some sort of record. Last year, we had an off-campus party that started at 10:30, and by 11 the police came with a paddy wagon. A paddy wagon. We're college students trying to have a party off campus, because we can't have one in our own fraternity house, because we're not allowed to drink there. So we try to have one off campus, and it gets broken up. Basically, we can't have a party anywhere.''
Peter Micali, a square-jawed Phi Delt sophomore who had wandered within earshot, chimed in, ''Yeah, it was easier to party in high school.''
Bok shook his head sadly. ''The good old-fashioned fraternity experience is dead,'' he said, pausing for dramatic effect. ''So long, 'Animal House.' ''
t's doom and gloom time for many fraternity boys at Northwestern and at colleges across the country. University administrators, alarmed by the extent of binge drinking on their campuses, are cracking down on the excesses of Greek life, saying it's high time for fraternity boys to shape up and sober up. While all kinds of college students binge drink, the 2001 College Alcohol Study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that fraternity house residents are twice as likely to do so as other students.
Eleven national and international fraternities, including Phi Delta Theta, now require most of their chapter houses to be alcohol-free, no matter what their university's policy is. (Sororities have long banned drinking in their chapter houses.) Take away the booze, the new alcohol-free theory goes, and fraternities will be safer, on more solid economic footing (fewer lawsuits, cheaper liability insurance) and more conducive to the creation of real bonds of brotherhood. Friendships will be forged out of genuine respect, not the shared misery of hazing or the shared fog of drink. ''We just didn't see a way to dramatically change the fraternity culture without removing alcohol,'' said Bob Biggs, executive vice president of Phi Delta Theta, when we met last fall in his office at the fraternity's spotless, museumlike international headquarters in Oxford, Ohio.
But what, exactly, would a dry fraternity look like? And would anyone want to join? You'd have a better chance, I thought, of getting James Carville and Bob Novak to open ''Crossfire'' with five minutes of meditation. As I listened to the brothers in that backyard go on about life at one of Northwestern's ''alcohol free'' fraternities, I couldn't help feeling a little sorry for them. I was a Phi Delt at Northwestern in the mid-90's -- not that long ago, to be sure, but seemingly a different time entirely. While we considered ourselves tamer than fraternities at many state schools (where Greek affiliation can often take precedence over just about everything), my brothers and I still saw drunken debauchery in the chapter house as our fraternal mandate. We threw rowdy keg parties. We got drunk in our rooms and then broke into other fraternities, stealing their sacred robes and toaster ovens. Some of us smoked marijuana, which we grew and harvested in an off-campus apartment. And many of us eagerly participated in drunken hazing, which most of the hazers and hazed saw as a kind of comic relief integral to fraternal bonding. To my brothers and me, a dry fraternity would have been inconceivable.
Friday, January 07, 2005
Lewis Grizzard
My Mama's pain over; I still hurt
By Lewis Grizzard The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 10/06/1989
Moreland, Ga. - We buried Mama on her birthday, Oct. 3. She would have been 77.
We were blessed with a beautiful autumn day. One of my mother's sisters remarked, "What if it had happened last week when we were having all that rain?"
We took Mama down to the little Moreland cemetery and put her next to her own mother. In the last year or so, Mama often would become confused and would ask relatives where her mother lived.
"She's dead, Christine," somebody would answer her.
And that would make Mama sad.
She was Christine Causby Word Grizzard Atkinson, and she died from a disease called scleroderma. I don't know much about the disease except that doctors told us they had no way to cure it, and it killed my mother slowly. It tortured her.
The family was trying to remember when Mama first got sick.
"It's been at least 20 years," was one thought.
But I knew to the day, almost. She was hospitalized for the first time on the day John Kennedy was buried. That was nearly 26 years ago. I watched the funeral on the television in my mother's hospital room. In the last years she spent all of her time in one of two places - either in a hospital bed in a hospital or in a hospital bed in the living room of her house.
I can't recall the last time I saw my mother standing.
She was a tiny thing in the end. I doubt she weighed 100 pounds. And the painkillers never seemed to put her at ease for very long. A preacher said to the family, "She's better off." He said it twice.
The mother who raised me had been gone for a long time already. That happens so often. The parent becomes the child and the child, the parent.
And, yes, her suffering, as far as we know, is over.
But it still hurts when I think I will never see her again. Will never hear her speak. Will never get to lean over her in that bed and stroke her hair and kiss her and say, "Mama, I love you," and hear her strained reply, "And I love you, too, Sugar."
What she had to go through in her life. I wrote a eulogy that was read at her funeral and I said, "It seemed that every time something good happened to my mother, something bad inevitably followed."
She fell in love with my father and a child was born. But she had to send her husband off to war, twice. And war destroyed him and took him away from her.
After a time she did find another man's love. They were married 35 years, but for 25 of those years, she was so ill she could not enjoy the good parts about being a wife.
Her legacy, though, is she never went quietly. After my father was gone, she was faced with finding a way to provide for herself and her child. She was already in her 40s at a time women had no easy access to financial security of their own.
But she worked by day, and went to school at night, and if there were a hall of fame for first-grade teachers, she would be in it.
And the illness. Her doctor said, "I've never seen a patient fight for her life as hard as she has."
Ten years ago the doctors were telling us to prepare for the end. Ten years ago.
My mother loved me. She protected me. She praised me. She consoled me. She gave me knowledge and values. She inspired me. And when there was no man available, she went outside and tossed a baseball with me.
I should have called her more often.
By Lewis Grizzard The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 10/06/1989
Moreland, Ga. - We buried Mama on her birthday, Oct. 3. She would have been 77.
We were blessed with a beautiful autumn day. One of my mother's sisters remarked, "What if it had happened last week when we were having all that rain?"
We took Mama down to the little Moreland cemetery and put her next to her own mother. In the last year or so, Mama often would become confused and would ask relatives where her mother lived.
"She's dead, Christine," somebody would answer her.
And that would make Mama sad.
She was Christine Causby Word Grizzard Atkinson, and she died from a disease called scleroderma. I don't know much about the disease except that doctors told us they had no way to cure it, and it killed my mother slowly. It tortured her.
The family was trying to remember when Mama first got sick.
"It's been at least 20 years," was one thought.
But I knew to the day, almost. She was hospitalized for the first time on the day John Kennedy was buried. That was nearly 26 years ago. I watched the funeral on the television in my mother's hospital room. In the last years she spent all of her time in one of two places - either in a hospital bed in a hospital or in a hospital bed in the living room of her house.
I can't recall the last time I saw my mother standing.
She was a tiny thing in the end. I doubt she weighed 100 pounds. And the painkillers never seemed to put her at ease for very long. A preacher said to the family, "She's better off." He said it twice.
The mother who raised me had been gone for a long time already. That happens so often. The parent becomes the child and the child, the parent.
And, yes, her suffering, as far as we know, is over.
But it still hurts when I think I will never see her again. Will never hear her speak. Will never get to lean over her in that bed and stroke her hair and kiss her and say, "Mama, I love you," and hear her strained reply, "And I love you, too, Sugar."
What she had to go through in her life. I wrote a eulogy that was read at her funeral and I said, "It seemed that every time something good happened to my mother, something bad inevitably followed."
She fell in love with my father and a child was born. But she had to send her husband off to war, twice. And war destroyed him and took him away from her.
After a time she did find another man's love. They were married 35 years, but for 25 of those years, she was so ill she could not enjoy the good parts about being a wife.
Her legacy, though, is she never went quietly. After my father was gone, she was faced with finding a way to provide for herself and her child. She was already in her 40s at a time women had no easy access to financial security of their own.
But she worked by day, and went to school at night, and if there were a hall of fame for first-grade teachers, she would be in it.
And the illness. Her doctor said, "I've never seen a patient fight for her life as hard as she has."
Ten years ago the doctors were telling us to prepare for the end. Ten years ago.
My mother loved me. She protected me. She praised me. She consoled me. She gave me knowledge and values. She inspired me. And when there was no man available, she went outside and tossed a baseball with me.
I should have called her more often.
A Bridge to Far
From Sen. Ted Kennedy's questioning of Attorney General-designate Alberto Gonzales yesterday:
Well, just as an attorney, as a human being, I would have thought that if there were recommendations that were so blatantly and flagrantly over the line in terms of torture, that you might have recognized them. I mean, it certainly appears to me that water boarding, with all its descriptions about drowning someone to that kind of a point, would come awfully close to getting over the border, and that you'd be able to at least say today, "There were some that were recommended or suggested on that, but I certainly wouldn't have had a part of that, as a human being."
A Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday described the interrogation technique of "water boarding": "It involves strapping a detainee down, wrapping his face in a wet towel and dripping water on it to produce the sensation of drowning." Apparently it is frightening but harmless. It might be worthwhile for the Senate to call a witness who has experience with actual drowning to comment on the difference. Where's Mary Jo Kopechne when you need her?
Well, just as an attorney, as a human being, I would have thought that if there were recommendations that were so blatantly and flagrantly over the line in terms of torture, that you might have recognized them. I mean, it certainly appears to me that water boarding, with all its descriptions about drowning someone to that kind of a point, would come awfully close to getting over the border, and that you'd be able to at least say today, "There were some that were recommended or suggested on that, but I certainly wouldn't have had a part of that, as a human being."
A Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday described the interrogation technique of "water boarding": "It involves strapping a detainee down, wrapping his face in a wet towel and dripping water on it to produce the sensation of drowning." Apparently it is frightening but harmless. It might be worthwhile for the Senate to call a witness who has experience with actual drowning to comment on the difference. Where's Mary Jo Kopechne when you need her?
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Crips and Bloods
Salvadoran Gang Linked to Al Qaeda
East Boston street gang linked to al-Qaeda.
A burgeoning East Boston-based street gang made up of alleged rapists and machete-wielding robbers has been linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist network, prompting Boston police to “turn up the heat” on its members, the Herald has learned.
MS-13, which stands for La Mara Salvatrucha, is an extremely violent organization with roots in El Salvador, and boasts more than 100 “hardcore members” in East Boston who are suspected of brutal machete attacks, rapes and home invasions. There are hundreds more MS-13 gangsters in towns along the North Shore, said Boston police Sgt. Detective Joseph Fiandaca, who has investigated the gang since it began tagging buildings in Maverick Square in 1995.
In recent months, intelligence officials in Washington have warned national law enforcement agencies that al-Qaeda terrorists have been spotted with members of MS-13 in El Salvador, prompting concerns the gang may be smuggling Islamic fundamentalist terrorists into the country. Law enforcement officials have long believed that MS-13 controls alien smuggling routes along Mexico.
The warning is being taken seriously in East Boston, where Raed Hijazi, an al-Qaeda operative charged with training the suicide bombers in the attack on the USS Cole, lived and worked, prosecutors have charged. Also, the commercial jets that hurtled into the World Trade Center towers in New York City were hijacked from Logan International Airport.
“The terrorist aspect, especially when you think in terms of 9/11 and how intent these terrorists are, will turn the heat up on our efforts with MS-13,” Fiandaca said.
MS-13 members congregate near the Maverick Square train station sporting white and blue bandannas, their skin inked with spider webs and “laugh now, cry later” clown faces.
“MS-13 is the most dangerous gang in the area,” Fiandaca said. “They are big. They are mobile. Now they have a terrorist connection.”
The theory that Salvadoran criminals manage to smuggle people over the border was bolstered this month when two Boston men described as MS-13 leaders were spotted on the North Shore days before Christmas - a year after they were deported by Boston Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators for gang-related crimes.
East Boston street gang linked to al-Qaeda.
A burgeoning East Boston-based street gang made up of alleged rapists and machete-wielding robbers has been linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist network, prompting Boston police to “turn up the heat” on its members, the Herald has learned.
MS-13, which stands for La Mara Salvatrucha, is an extremely violent organization with roots in El Salvador, and boasts more than 100 “hardcore members” in East Boston who are suspected of brutal machete attacks, rapes and home invasions. There are hundreds more MS-13 gangsters in towns along the North Shore, said Boston police Sgt. Detective Joseph Fiandaca, who has investigated the gang since it began tagging buildings in Maverick Square in 1995.
In recent months, intelligence officials in Washington have warned national law enforcement agencies that al-Qaeda terrorists have been spotted with members of MS-13 in El Salvador, prompting concerns the gang may be smuggling Islamic fundamentalist terrorists into the country. Law enforcement officials have long believed that MS-13 controls alien smuggling routes along Mexico.
The warning is being taken seriously in East Boston, where Raed Hijazi, an al-Qaeda operative charged with training the suicide bombers in the attack on the USS Cole, lived and worked, prosecutors have charged. Also, the commercial jets that hurtled into the World Trade Center towers in New York City were hijacked from Logan International Airport.
“The terrorist aspect, especially when you think in terms of 9/11 and how intent these terrorists are, will turn the heat up on our efforts with MS-13,” Fiandaca said.
MS-13 members congregate near the Maverick Square train station sporting white and blue bandannas, their skin inked with spider webs and “laugh now, cry later” clown faces.
“MS-13 is the most dangerous gang in the area,” Fiandaca said. “They are big. They are mobile. Now they have a terrorist connection.”
The theory that Salvadoran criminals manage to smuggle people over the border was bolstered this month when two Boston men described as MS-13 leaders were spotted on the North Shore days before Christmas - a year after they were deported by Boston Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators for gang-related crimes.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Safe Area Gorazde 1992-95
I picked up an interesting graphic novel by Joe Sacco that details his experiences in Bosnia. This snippet was included in an interview with him and it seemed to summarize the situation as good as anything-
Yugoslavia -- or The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as it was initially called -- was the artificial byproduct of World War I and it was here that the Croats' and Serbs' troubles began. The First World War left the Serbs in a dominant position, which they took advantage of when they set up the government to the discomfort of the Croats.
Relations between the two were exacerbated in World War II when Hitler, who was not prepared to occupy Yugoslavia, employed the Ustasas, the party that had most recently come to power, to govern Croatia. Unfortunately, the Ustasas proved to be insane and genocidal and proceeded to treat the Serb population as the Germans treated the Jews, with a cycle of massacres and concentration camps. The brutality was fierce and unrelenting. After World War II, Yugoslavia was eventually split into states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia Montenegro and Kosovo. Josep Broz Tito, a professional revolutionary and committed communist, who fought against the Germans, ruled Yugoslavia from 1945 to his death in 1980 and, through the adroit use of carrots and sticks -- "brotherhood and unity" was the ubiquitous slogan -- maintained the ethnicities in relative -- but fragile -- harmony.
On April 27, 1986, in the village of Kosovo Polje, a party hack by the name of Slobodan Milosevic (who had achieved the Presidency of the Central Committee of the Serbian League of Communists) essentially installed himself at the head of the Serbian government by giving a rabble-rousing speech, exploiting the aberrant policies of the Croatian Ustasas 40 years earlier, preaching hatred and violence toward Croats to an audience of eager Serbs. This is, effectively, where the war began.
Yugoslavia -- or The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as it was initially called -- was the artificial byproduct of World War I and it was here that the Croats' and Serbs' troubles began. The First World War left the Serbs in a dominant position, which they took advantage of when they set up the government to the discomfort of the Croats.
Relations between the two were exacerbated in World War II when Hitler, who was not prepared to occupy Yugoslavia, employed the Ustasas, the party that had most recently come to power, to govern Croatia. Unfortunately, the Ustasas proved to be insane and genocidal and proceeded to treat the Serb population as the Germans treated the Jews, with a cycle of massacres and concentration camps. The brutality was fierce and unrelenting. After World War II, Yugoslavia was eventually split into states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia Montenegro and Kosovo. Josep Broz Tito, a professional revolutionary and committed communist, who fought against the Germans, ruled Yugoslavia from 1945 to his death in 1980 and, through the adroit use of carrots and sticks -- "brotherhood and unity" was the ubiquitous slogan -- maintained the ethnicities in relative -- but fragile -- harmony.
On April 27, 1986, in the village of Kosovo Polje, a party hack by the name of Slobodan Milosevic (who had achieved the Presidency of the Central Committee of the Serbian League of Communists) essentially installed himself at the head of the Serbian government by giving a rabble-rousing speech, exploiting the aberrant policies of the Croatian Ustasas 40 years earlier, preaching hatred and violence toward Croats to an audience of eager Serbs. This is, effectively, where the war began.
Interstate Ate
North Interstate Avenue & Skidmore Street
Screw Hooters. Last week North Portland's Interstate MAX line became home to Fire on the Mountain Buffalo Wings, the city's only bistro devoted to the best bit of the bird. Owners Jordan Busch and Sara Sawicki were horrified by P-town's dearth of chicken smeared with bleu cheese dressing and Frank's RedHot when they moved here from Denver in 2003. Now they've opened their own spicy joint, which will also offer its own special sauces and assorted artery-cloggers: Fresh-cut fries, fried pickles, fried mushrooms and, good lord, fried Twinkies.
Screw Hooters. Last week North Portland's Interstate MAX line became home to Fire on the Mountain Buffalo Wings, the city's only bistro devoted to the best bit of the bird. Owners Jordan Busch and Sara Sawicki were horrified by P-town's dearth of chicken smeared with bleu cheese dressing and Frank's RedHot when they moved here from Denver in 2003. Now they've opened their own spicy joint, which will also offer its own special sauces and assorted artery-cloggers: Fresh-cut fries, fried pickles, fried mushrooms and, good lord, fried Twinkies.
$1 Million Paranormal Challenge
The James Randi Educational Foundation is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1996. Its aim is to promote critical thinking by reaching out to the public and media with reliable information about paranormal and supernatural ideas so widespread in our society today.
The Foundation's goals include:
Creating a new generation of critical thinkers through lively classroom demonstrations and by reaching out to the next generation in the form of scholarships and awards.
Demonstrating to the public and the media, through educational seminars, the consequences of accepting paranormal and supernatural claims without questioning.
Supporting and conducting research into paranormal claims through well-designed experiments utilizing "the scientific method" and by publishing the findings in the JREF official newsletter, Swift, and other periodicals. Also providing reliable information on paranormal and pseudoscientific claims by maintaining a comprehensive library of books, videos, journals, and archival resources open to the public.
Assisting those who are being attacked as a result of their investigations and criticism of people who make paranormal claims, by maintaining a legal defense fund available to assist these individuals.
To raise public awareness of these issues, the Foundation offers a $1,000,000 prize to any person or persons who can demonstrate any psychic, supernatural or paranormal ability of any kind under mutually agreed upon scientific conditions. This prize money is held in a special account which cannot be accessed for any purpose other than the awarding of the prize.
The Foundation's goals include:
Creating a new generation of critical thinkers through lively classroom demonstrations and by reaching out to the next generation in the form of scholarships and awards.
Demonstrating to the public and the media, through educational seminars, the consequences of accepting paranormal and supernatural claims without questioning.
Supporting and conducting research into paranormal claims through well-designed experiments utilizing "the scientific method" and by publishing the findings in the JREF official newsletter, Swift, and other periodicals. Also providing reliable information on paranormal and pseudoscientific claims by maintaining a comprehensive library of books, videos, journals, and archival resources open to the public.
Assisting those who are being attacked as a result of their investigations and criticism of people who make paranormal claims, by maintaining a legal defense fund available to assist these individuals.
To raise public awareness of these issues, the Foundation offers a $1,000,000 prize to any person or persons who can demonstrate any psychic, supernatural or paranormal ability of any kind under mutually agreed upon scientific conditions. This prize money is held in a special account which cannot be accessed for any purpose other than the awarding of the prize.
KISS
ISRAELI-born Kiss bassist Gene Simmons (above) has caused an uproar among Muslims by attacking Islamic culture. During an interview with an Australian radio station, the lizard-tongued rock god described Islam as a "vile culture" that treated women worse than dogs. "Your dog, however, can walk by your side," Simmons said. "Your dog is allowed to have its own dog house. You can send your dog to school to learn tricks, sit, beg, do all that stuff . . . None of the women have that advantage." We're guessing Kiss won't be invited to play for the Saudi royal family anytime soon.
-Page Six
-Page Six
Boooooooooooooooooooo
The worst beating at the Orange Bowl wasn't the 55 point USC hung on Oklahoma, but the boos that rained on Ashlee Simpson and the halftime show. I don't know who their target audience was, but is the Orange Bowl Committee and ABC so out of it that a Kelly Clarkson, Trace Adkins and Ashlee Simpson medley sound like a good idea? Especially to an audience of drunk, male football fans?
>>
Ashlee Simpson's Halftime Performance Falls Flat
Boo Birds Descend On Pop Act's Live Performance
Andrew Pulskamp, Staff Writer
SEE IT, HEAR IT
Ashlee Simpson's Orange Bowl halftime performance ended with the screeching line, "You make me want to scream," but all the crowd wanted to do was boo.
Watch Our Slideshow Of What Happened
Simpson's performance topped off a halftime act that featured American Idol Kelly Clarkson, country star Trace Atkins and a host of technical problems.
Simpson, the act's finale, fell flat in front of the 72,000-plus Orange Bowl crowd. The camera zoomed in on Simpson's face just as the boos started raining down then quickly cut away.
>>
Ashlee Simpson's Halftime Performance Falls Flat
Boo Birds Descend On Pop Act's Live Performance
Andrew Pulskamp, Staff Writer
SEE IT, HEAR IT
Ashlee Simpson's Orange Bowl halftime performance ended with the screeching line, "You make me want to scream," but all the crowd wanted to do was boo.
Watch Our Slideshow Of What Happened
Simpson's performance topped off a halftime act that featured American Idol Kelly Clarkson, country star Trace Atkins and a host of technical problems.
Simpson, the act's finale, fell flat in front of the 72,000-plus Orange Bowl crowd. The camera zoomed in on Simpson's face just as the boos started raining down then quickly cut away.
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Torture
Rumors have been flying today that the U.S. has captured Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraq's top al Qaeda terrorist. The Drudge Report says U.S. military and intelligence sources are denying the report, but we sure hope they're true--not just for the obvious reason, but also because confirmation hearings are about to begin for Attorney General-designate Alberto Gonzales.
Bizarre as it may sound, the Democrats apparently intend to accuse Gonzales of being insufficiently kind to America's terrorist enemies--presumably including Zarqawi, if he's captured alive. In a column today, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45936-2005Jan3.html likens the interrogation of terrorists, which he dubs "torture," to the tactics of the totalitarian state in George Orwell's "1984." Lost on Cohen is the distinction between trying to control the thoughts of innocent citizens and trying to prevent mass murder by extracting information from terrorists.
Obviously gratuitous abuses like those at Abu Ghraib are intolerable, and the perpetrators should be prosecuted (as they are being). But Cohen's and the Democrats' obsession with treating terrorists nicely bespeaks a dangerous moral vanity. They seem to think it is worth increasing the risk of another 9/11--or worse--in order for America to avoid the taint of being accused by the likes of the Red Cross of acts "tantamount to torture," whatever that means.
Bizarre as it may sound, the Democrats apparently intend to accuse Gonzales of being insufficiently kind to America's terrorist enemies--presumably including Zarqawi, if he's captured alive. In a column today, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45936-2005Jan3.html likens the interrogation of terrorists, which he dubs "torture," to the tactics of the totalitarian state in George Orwell's "1984." Lost on Cohen is the distinction between trying to control the thoughts of innocent citizens and trying to prevent mass murder by extracting information from terrorists.
Obviously gratuitous abuses like those at Abu Ghraib are intolerable, and the perpetrators should be prosecuted (as they are being). But Cohen's and the Democrats' obsession with treating terrorists nicely bespeaks a dangerous moral vanity. They seem to think it is worth increasing the risk of another 9/11--or worse--in order for America to avoid the taint of being accused by the likes of the Red Cross of acts "tantamount to torture," whatever that means.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
On Francisco Franco
On Francisco Franco written by Charles Few Americans know much about Francisco Franco, leader of the winning side in the Spanish C...
-
Starálfur Blá Nótt Yfir HimininnBlá Nótt Yfir MérHorf-Inn Út Um GluggannMinn Með HendurFaldar Undir KinnHugsum Daginn MinnÍ Dag Og Í GærBlá ...
-
"From our perspective this is an issue between Colombia and Ecuador," he said. "I'm not sure what this has to do with Ven...
-
OK, Grandma ... put your hands in the air ... slowly ... step away from the bingo machine ... put down the knitting needles...