Blue Crab Boulevard

Continuing on in my task to visit one member of the fighting 101st each day, today I went to Assorted Babble, a blog which has been kind enough to link me several times. Suzie has the lowdown on one of my least favorite lowlifes, Jimmy Carter, who has been taking money from the bin Laden family.

UPDATE: Captain's Quarters and Powerline both make good points on this. The bin Laden family has not been generally supportive of Osama. Maybe using the same tactic Moore uses is not a good one. It can be argued that Carter knew full well that Moore's technique was false on that basis, however, and Carter should have called Moore on it.

We're rebuilding New Orleans in the same spot and not thinking about moving it? It turns out New Orleans is sinking by as much as one inch per year.

Everyone has known New Orleans is a sinking city. Now new research suggests parts of the city are sinking even faster than many scientists imagined — more than an inch a year.

That may explain some of the levee failures during Hurricane Katrina and it raises more worries about the future.

The research, reported in the journal Nature, is based on new satellite radar data for the three years before Katrina struck in 2005. The data show that some areas are sinking four or five times faster than the rest of the city. And that, experts say, can be deadly.

"My concern is the very low-lying areas," said lead author Tim Dixon, a University of Miami geophysicist. "I think those areas are death traps. I don't think those areas should be rebuilt."

The blame for this phenomenon, called subsidence, includes overdevelopment, drainage and natural seismic shifts.

For years, scientists figured the city on average was sinking about one-fifth of an inch a year based on 100 measurements of the region, Dixon said. The new data from 150,000 measurements taken from space finds that about 10 percent to 20 percent of the region had yearly subsidence in the inch-a-year range, he said.

Guess what? Levees that have subsided by several feet over the years cannot stop the water. This on top of faulty construction over a period of decades are all what contributed to the disaster Katrina caused. The new levee construction is not taking this increased subsidence into consideration.There will be another, worse disaster in the future.

Tell me again why we're rebuilding New Orleans in the same spot and not thinking about moving it?

Damn it, this just keeps getting worse.

WASHINGTON - Personal information on 26.5 million veterans that was stolen from a Veterans Affairs employee this month not only included Social Security numbers and birthdates but in many cases phone numbers and addresses, internal documents show.

Meanwhile, VA Secretary Jim Nicholson said Wednesday that he had named a former Arizona prosecutor as a special adviser for information security, a new three-month post that will pinpoint security problems at the VA and develop recommendations for improvements.

The three pages of memos by the VA, written by privacy officer Mark Whitney and distributed to high-level officials shortly after the May 3 burglary, offer new details on the scope of one of the nation's largest security breaches. The memos were obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.

They show that a file containing 6,744 records pertaining to "mustard gas veterans" — or those who participated in chemical testing programs during World War II — was breached, and that a "short file" with as many as 10 diagnostic codes indicating a veteran's disability also was stolen.

At the same time, however, the memos suggest that the data might be difficult to retrieve by thieves.

"Given the file format used to store the data, the data may not be easily accessible," stated one memo dated May 5 and distributed internally May 8.

Gee, why doesn't that make me feel better? So far the VA has announced the analyst who took the data home will be fired, VA deputy assistant secretary Michael McLendon has announced his resignation and the department placed Dennis Duffy, the acting head of the division in which the data analyst worked, on administrative leave.

I'd say there are some tough questions that need to be answered right now. I still want to know exactly why that data was being taken home.

Gateway Pundit has a phenomenal report that really puts the Iraq war in perspective. This is stuff you will never see in the mainstream media that is controlling (or trying to control) the narrative on the war. Despite the doom and gloom, despite the howls from the left, Iraq is not the disaster people are trying to paint it. Not even close. There is a ton of information over there.

Well, the folks in California are hopping on the bandwagon to try to overturn the constitution, which I have posted on before. Basically this an attempt at an end-run around the constitution and the electoral college without actually following the constitution and trying to amend the constitution. The prohibition against compacts between the states should be enough to stop this insanity, one would hope.

This is tyranny, folks.

Welcome to the party, WaPo. Glad there is some mainstream coverage at last on this. The more light, the better.

Earlier coverage here.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard wish to alert people to the following safety advisory: do not get in the path of any man suffering from hair loss when he reads of this study just released in the May issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. Just stand clear, trust me.

Many forms of hair loss have been linked to an iron deficiency.

Okay, assuming the stampede to the drugstore to buy iron supplements has subsided:

Could iron deficiency be key to baldness?

The answer is yes, according to researchers at the Cleveland Clinic, who reviewed scientific literature on the connection published over the past 40 years.

"If doctors can understand fully the relationship between iron deficiency and hair loss, then they can help people regrow hair more effectively," study leader Dr. Wilma Bergfeld, head of clinical research in the department of dermatology, said in a prepared statement. "We believe that iron deficiency may be related to many forms of hair loss and that people may need higher levels of iron stores than previously thought to regrow hair."

And here you thought Popeye was eating spinach for his muscles. Hah!

Frank and Anita Milford of England have just celebrated their 78th wedding anniversary.

The pair met as teenagers at a dance in Plymouth, southern England, in 1926 and married two years later.

Asked for the secret of their enduring union, Frank Milford, 98, a retired dock worker, was quoted in The Daily Telegraph as saying: "We don't always see eye to eye and we do have a small argument every day.

"But that comes and goes. We are always here for each other."

His 97-year-old wife added: "The key is give and take and lots of laughter."

With their relationship as strong as ever, the couple hope to beat the record for Britain's longest-ever marriage of 80 years, set by Percy and Florence Arrowsmith. Percy Arrowsmith died last year.

"There's every chance we could break that record," Anita Milford said.

"These days marriages don't last long. A lot of people get married with the idea that if it doesn't work out there's no worry, but we can't understand that."

They are very devoted to one another says the staff at the nursing home they moved into last year.

To prove you're a complete lunatic. The city of Deadwood, South Dakota has given up it's plans to stage an event similar to the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. They were planning to use American bison rather than bulls, too. Which likely would have left them with an absolutely astonishing cleanup on aisle three, so to speak.

She said local businessmen had supported the idea of turning American bison loose on the one street running through the gulch into which the Black Hills town is squeezed.

People would have been allowed to take their chances with the big, lumbering animals in the same way that men and bulls race through the streets of Pamplona, Spain.

Since 1910, 15 people have died in the event made famous by Ernest Hemingway's 1920s novel "The Sun also Rises." The majority were gored.

"They were mostly worried about liability insurance," Nelson said of the city commissioners who voted 4-1 against the proposal on Tuesday. She said Deadwood's own insurer had declined to provide coverage.

Oh, well, there's always Pamplona. Unless the insurance people shut that down, too.

Lance Armstrong has been cleared of the accusations the he was illegally doping during the 1999 Tour de France. When this story first broke, I suspected it was completely fabricated. Turns out I was right.

Dutch investigators cleared Lance Armstrong of doping in the 1999 Tour de France on Wednesday, and blamed anti-doping authorities for misconduct in dealing with the American cyclist.

A 132-page report recommended convening a tribunal to discuss possible legal and ethical violations by the World Anti-Doping Agency and to consider "appropriate sanctions to remedy the violations."

The French sports daily L'Equipe reported in August that six of Armstrong's urine samples from 1999, when he won the first of his record seven-straight Tour titles, came back positive for the endurance-boosting hormone EPO when they were retested in 2004.

Armstrong has repeatedly denied using banned substances.

The International Cycling Union appointed Dutch lawyer Emile Vrijman last October to investigate the handling of urine tests from the 1999 Tour by the French national anti-doping laboratory, known by its French acronym LNDD.

Vrijman said Wednesday his report "exonerates Lance Armstrong completely with respect to alleged use of doping in the 1999 Tour de France."

I think it would be a good idea to convene a special panel on this as soon as possible. Whoever planned and executed this smear should be banned from sports. This is an object lesson to people who decide all press reports are always accurate, by the way. They are not, and sometimes they are actually smear jobs.

I think it would be a good idea to convene a special panel on this as soon as possible. Whoever planned and executed this smear should be banned from sports. This is an object lesson to people who decide all press reports are always accurate, by the way. They are not, and sometimes they are actually smear jobs.