Wow, I am really honored by the kind words from Hugh Hewitt. With that very public statement from him, I guess I'll have to at least look into moving over to Townhall.com. Meantime, please do look around a bit.
And thank you very much for the compliment, Mr. Hewitt.
Blogosphere | Gaius Thursday, 6 July , 2006 | 
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I do not expect this trend will catch on anytime real soon in the US. The eating of worms, scorpions, ants and grasshoppers, that is.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A discerning guest at a Manhattan cocktail party removed a scorpion from its bed of cheese on an endive leaf and popped it in his mouth, determined to savour the taste unadulterated.
"Nutty, sweet," was the verdict of Gourmet magazine food editor Ian Knauer at the recent soiree.
"That's an antenna," he added, pointing to a morsel of cricket left poking through lips of his companion at the Explorers Club in New York, which likes to entertain its well-traveled members with exotic culinary adventures.
Founded in 1904, the exclusive international club has some 3,000 members around the world including Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest, astronaut John Glenn and paleontologist Richard Leakey.
On the menu at a reception for some lesser mortals in June were worms, crickets, scorpions, ants and pigeon pate.
"We're so fast to make fun or make comments about the way someone talks or the way someone walks, and food is like the last bastion," said Gene Rurka, the Explorers Club's exotic foods expert. "But someone today is living off this."
Nutty describes more than the taste. But the ants, worms and maggots must be handled in a special way to prepare them for the table.
Large ants from Texas are served with blackcurrants in a sweet mini-tart, while he likes to serve the maggots stuffed in mushrooms. "They're delicious," Rurka said. "I was going to say like a tasty rice grain, but soft. It's not chewy like that."
He has experimented with worms and decided the best option is to disguise them as a pretzel, tying them in a knot like the salty dough snack, and to serve them with mustard. First they have to be fed on oatmeal for 10 days to cleanse the system, and he does not recommend taking worms from just anywhere.
"You don't want them raised in a dump site, you don't want them raised in manure," he said.
Sounds yummy. Maybe my palate isn't sophisticated enough to appreciate the delicate flavor of insect. Or maybe I just have never been that drunk or crazy. Probably the latter.
The British Bat Conservation Trust is planning a trip to the Palace of Westminster, the home of the British Parliament. The plan on doing a head count of the bats that reside there.
In a first, the Bat Conservation Trust will deploy inside the gothic-style premises in central London next Monday to determine exactly how many bats live beneath its rafters, towers and gargoyles.
"We're hoping the evening will demonstrate that bats and people can and do live in harmony — whether it be in our palaces, our churches, our homes or our barns," said Amy Coyle, the charity's chief executive.
First and foremost, the bats are actually spies from the animal uprising gathering information on the doings of Parliament. The Bats from the Bat Conservation Trust should be clearing the winged rodents, not counting them. But, aside from that we respectfully submit that any count of the little batty creatures would be incomplete without these two:
And George Galloway, of course.
Weird Stuff, World news | Gaius | Comments Off
Hugo Chavez is planning a little jaunt to see a good buddy. No, not Cindy Sheehan. He's jetting over to see his new best friend, Kim Jong Il in North Korea. It is being reported that Chavez is seeking an arms for oil trade deal with the North Korean Government.
During Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il in late July, the two countries are also expected to craft an oil-for-arms deal.
Venezuela's leader is most likely to fly to Pyongyang at the end of July on the occasion of his planned trip to Russia on July 25. Chavez told reporters that he plans to discuss science and technology cooperation with the North.
Analysts in Seoul say Kim and Chavez would mainly discuss forming a "strategic alliance" against the United States.
Ties between the two nations have been warming. Last September, Yang Hyoung-Sup, deputy head of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, traveled to Venezuela, followed by an economic delegation's visit in November led by Trade Minister Rim Kyong-Man.
Venezuela set up its first-ever permanent ambassadorial post in Pyongyang in April, 32 years after bilateral ties were forged in 1974.
Venezuela's Foreign Ministry delegation traveled to the North in May. "North Korea is expected to establish its embassy in Venezuela in the near future," a diplomatic source said.
Chavez, who has promised a socialist revolution to end poverty in his country, is forging alliances with such U.S. foes as Cuba, Iran, North Korea and some African countries.
Since Chavez took office, the leftist government has been working to move away from the U.S. "shadow" and sell its oil in exchange for a military build up. Chavez was first elected president in 1998 and was re-elected in 2000.
This behavior is a direct result of the show of internal disarray in the United States coupled with the suicidal behavior of the ruling elites in Europe. The old evil is on the rise again.
Computer hackers for one, apparently. A former consultant entered guilty pleas to four counts of hacking into FBI computer systems.
A government consultant, using computer programs easily found on the Internet, managed to crack the FBI's classified computer system and gain the passwords of 38,000 employees, including that of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.
The break-ins, which occurred four times in 2004, gave the consultant access to records in the Witness Protection Program and details on counterespionage activity, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Washington. As a direct result, the bureau said it was forced to temporarily shut down its network and commit thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars to ensure no sensitive information was lost or misused.
The government does not allege that the consultant, Joseph Thomas Colon, intended to harm national security. But prosecutors said Colon's "curiosity hacks" nonetheless exposed sensitive information.
Colon, 28, an employee of BAE Systems who was assigned to the FBI field office in Springfield, Ill., said in court filings that he used the passwords and other information to bypass bureaucratic obstacles and better help the FBI install its new computer system. And he said agents in the Springfield office approved his actions.
The FBI has spent huge amounts of money on enhancing their computer systems. The contractor was able to gain access using common hacking tools available for free on the internet.
The FBI's struggle to modernize its computer system has been a recurring headache for Mueller and has generated considerable criticism from lawmakers.
Better computer technology might have enabled agents to more closely link men who later turned out to be involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to intelligence reviews conducted after the terrorist strikes.
The FBI's Trilogy program cost more than $535 million but failed to produce a usable case-management system for agents because of cost overruns and technical problems, according to the Government Accountability Office.
While Trilogy led to successful hardware upgrades and thousands of new PCs for bureau workers and agents, the final phase — a software system called the Virtual Case File — was abandoned last year. The FBI announced in March that it would spend an additional $425 million in an attempt to finish the job. The new system would be called "Sentinel."
Why am I not feeling reassured?
Crime | Gaius | Comments (4)
The Mexican presidential election "recount" continues to seesaw back and forth with Calderon now a bit ahead according to the Washington Post.
MEXICO CITY, July 5 — The tightest presidential race in Mexican history continued to see-saw back and forth overnight, with populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador edging ahead slightly in a ballot recount early Thursday before slipping back behind ruling-party candidate Felipe Calderón.
With nearly 98 percent of the vote tallies recounted, Calderón had 35.62 percent of the vote, while López Obrador had 35.57 percent, the Associated Press reported just after 5:30 a.m.
The recount at this point (according to Mark In Mexico) is really a recount of the tallies from each polling place, not a physical hand-over-hand through each and every ballot. I rather suspect that this will continue to be very messy for a while.
Each campaign accused the other of trying to manipulate the vote counts to favor their candidate, while electoral officials implored them to refrain from declaring victory until the full count was complete, the Associated Press reported.
Luis Carlos Ugalde, head of the Federal Electoral Institute, which is tabulating the results, said Wednesday that he was unsure how long the count would take. The process is complicated by a law that allows for the contents of the vote packets to be opened only if the tally sheets, or the packages, appear to have been tampered with or damaged. Such packets are then sliced open and a vote-by-vote count is conducted.
This has enraged López Obrador and his supporters, who have alleged that 51,900 polling places had "grave inconsistencies" and that 18,600 ended up with more votes than the number of ballots given to the polling place. They want a vote-by-vote count of every packet. But Ugalde said Wednesday that opening all the packets would amount to a violation of law that would annul the results of not only the presidential race but also thousands of other races, including contests for the legislature and a host of governorships.
Stay tuned.
UPDATE: Mark In Mexico has his latest update posted and it does show Calderon in the lead by less than 1/2 of one percent. He has a detailed writeup of the process that is going on. It is not a recount.
UPDATE: Uh oh. López Obrador has called his supporters to gather in Mexico City to protest this weekend.
Yale has refused admission to a degree program for the former Taliban official, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi. The New York Times reports:
The student, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, apparently can continue to take courses at the university as an untraditional student in a non-degree program, as he did during the past academic year, said Tatiana Maxwell, the president of the International Education Foundation, which was created to raise money to send Mr. Hashemi to Yale.
It was uncertain yesterday whether Mr. Hashemi, who is 27, will do so; he is in Pakistan visiting his family and could not be reached for comment.
Mr. Hashemi became the focus of a contentious political and cultural debate this spring, after an article about his experience at Yale appeared in The New York Times Magazine on Feb. 26.
Yale was sharply criticized by conservatives in opinion articles in The Wall Street Journal and in other newspapers and magazines, as well as on cable news shows and blogs, for opening its classrooms to a former representative of the Taliban, who harbored Al Qaeda and are trying to destabilize the government of Afghanistan.
At the same time, a number of Yale students and professors supported Mr. Hashemi's presence at the university. They argued that he would benefit from a Yale education and from the culture of tolerance and open inquiry that prevails at a university in the West; they also said they would benefit from having him at Yale.
Yale officials declined to comment yesterday on the decision on Mr. Hashemi's application.
They indicated in a prepared statement, however, that admission into the degree-granting program for untraditional students had been made much more rigorous this year, more closely mirroring the difficulty of gaining regular admission into Yale's undergraduate college.
Mr. Hashemi was admitted a year ago to the nondegree program, which allows nontraditional students to take courses at the university part time.
Ms. Maxwell said Mr. Hashemi had informed her in the last few days that he had been denied admission into the degree track, which is known as the Eli Whitney Program.
"Rahmatullah found out that he was not accepted," Mrs. Maxwell said, "but we believe that he is still allowed to continue in the nondegree program."
Mrs. Maxwell said she did not know whether Mr. Hashemi wanted to remain at Yale after the outcry over his presence there last spring and after being rejected for the Eli Whitney Program.
Clint Taylor, one of the founders of the Nail Yale blog was interviewed for the story.
But some critics of Mr. Hashemi's presence at Yale applauded the decision. Clint Taylor is one of four alumni who created a blog, Nail Yale, that questioned why someone who was part of a regime they described as a "terrorist-abetting tyranny" was allowed to attend one of the nation's most selective universities.
"They involved themselves in politics when they admitted Hashemi, and now they are trying to find their way out of it," Mr. Taylor said, adding, "I can't say I'm very surprised."
He said he was aware that the Yale administration had spoken of tightening up the admissions regulations for the Eli Whitney Program. "I don't think anyone thought it was unconnected to the controversy over Hashemi," he said.
Actually this is probably completely typical of the way a university gets out of a situation they caused themselves.
H/T Allah.
Yale Follies | Gaius | Comments Off
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