Blue Crab Boulevard

Wow, this is fabulous news from (and to) Ed Morrisey of Captain's Quarters. He is now (or will be in a very short time) a full time employee of the "New Media." A transition from hobby to career.

Today, with the support of family and friends, I made the transition from hobbyist to full-time worker in the New Media. I have accepted a position as Political Director of Blog Talk Radio, an exciting new venture known to the CQ community but one which I hope to help expand exponentially. It's a chance to work full time in the field which I have grown to love, and an opportunity to help others literally discover their voices.

Why Blog Talk Radio? After weeks of interaction with the owners and the staff, I have come to believe in the product and see it as the next frontier in the democratization of media. In a way, it has even more accessibility and enterprise than blogs did when they first began. For no cost, anyone with a decent broadband connection and a phone can host their own live "radio" show, streamed on the Internet, and accept callers and conduct discussions. When we start adding advertisements, hosts will earn money for their work in a revenue-sharing arrangement with Blog Talk Radio. To top it off, the show automatically podcasts itself and the replay stream is available within minutes of the end of the broadcast.

My most sincere good wishes to Ed in his newest venture. He deserves this. Congratulations, Captain Ed.

Or fever blogging. At the moment, I am running a fever. Nothing really serious, probably flu and or a bad cold. So if it gets incoherent around here, blame the cold medicine. But I am rather short on patience at the moment, just to let folks know. I hate being sick.

That's what the FBI says about the bulletin they have just put out to law enforcement agencies all across the country. Nothing to worry about, those people with ties to terror groups who are signing up to drive school buses are no problem.

They are kidding, right?

WASHINGTON (AP) - Suspected members of extremist groups have signed up as school bus drivers in the United States, counterterror officials said Friday, in a cautionary bulletin to police. An FBI spokesman said, "Parents and children have nothing to fear."
Asked about the alert notice, the FBI's Rich Kolko said, "There are no threats, no plots and no history leading us to believe there is any reason for concern," although law enforcement agencies around the country were asked to watch out for kids' safety.

The bulletin, parts of which were read to The Associated Press, did not say how often foreign extremists have sought to acquire licenses to drive school buses, or where. It was sent Friday as part of what officials said was a routine FBI and Homeland Security Department advisory to local law enforcement.

It noted "recent suspicious activity" by foreigners who either drive school buses or are licensed to drive them, according to a counterterror official.

Foreigners under recent investigation include "some with ties to extremist groups" who have been able to "purchase buses and acquire licenses," the bulletin says.

But Homeland Security and the FBI "have no information indicating these individuals are involved in a terrorist plot against the homeland," it says. The memo also notes: "Most attempts by foreign nationals in the United States to acquire school bus licenses to drive them are legitimate.

Let's just put this in perspective for a moment. An attack in this country on children by extremists would be a complete and utter disaster. For the extremists. Because the American left wing would not stand a snowball's chance of stifling the fury of this nation at such an act. Period.

Sandia National Laboratory has produced some ice that you probably would not want in your martini. Unless you enjoy really hot martinis, that is. Because the ice they produced is actually hotter than boiling water.

Scientists have turned water into ice in nanoseconds, which means really, really fast. That's not the most interesting part, though. The ice is hotter than boiling water.

The experiment was done at the Sandia National Laboratories' huge Z machine, which generates temperatures hotter than the sun (setting a record here on Earth) and where researchers test what we know about those plain vanilla "phases" in textbooks: solid, liquid and gas.

"The three phases of water as we know them—cold ice, room temperature liquid, and hot vapor—are actually only a small part of water’s repertory of states," said Sandia researcher Daniel Dolan. "Compressing water customarily heats it. But under extreme compression, it is easier for dense water to enter its solid phase [ice] than maintain the more energetic liquid phase [water]."

They only had to subject the water to a mere 70,000 atmospheres of pressure to do it. So you probably won't see hot ice at your local watering hole anytime soon. There are still more states of water that Sandia is examining, at least 11. You know, these folks just sit around thinking these things up all day long……

Once again, a coordinated series of suicide attacks on electric substations has been launched by the ravening rodents of the Animal Uprising™. This time they hit in Eau Claire, Wisconsin and in Pendleton, Oregon.

An Xcel energy representative says around one o'clock a squirrel caused equipment problems at their substation in Hallie, triggering a power loss on the North side of Eau Claire that stretched from Melby to 40th avenue.

"We were doing our regular business and all of a sudden about one o'clock all the lights went off and everything went off," JimBob's Pizza shift manager Dawn Lium said. (Ed. Note: This is generally what happens when the electricity goes out, so we aren't real sure what value this added to the story. Other than a plug for JimBob's, of course.)

"We got a call from Xcel energy they have a substation shortage or outage so it's pretty much the North part of 53," Jerry Tomesh of the Department of Transportation said.

…

PENDLETON, Ore. - A squirrel got into a PacifiCorp substation in Pendleton, cutting power Monday night to nearly 3,400 customers.

Initially, 1,571 customers were affected, but to repair the damage, crews had to disconnect additional users.

The outage took place at 5:43 p.m. The utility said many customers were restored by 8:15 p.m. and all were back up by midnight. (Ed. Note: No mention of whether JimBob was affected.)

The problem with squirrels, of course, is that they are fine conductors of electricity. One of our informants tells us that utilities are investigating the possibility of manufacturing cable out of squirrels, in fact. He is one of our less coherent informants, however, so we aren't sure how accurate that information is. However, if you notice an attractive pelt on the wires running through your neighborhood, remember that you heard it here first!

Astronauts who reach the planet Mars someday will be able to make martinis, scientists have revealed. There is an enormous amount of water ice at the Martian South pole. There is so much ice that if it were to melt, the entire planet would be covered with 36 feet of water.

The scientists used a joint NASA-Italian Space Agency radar instrument on the European Space Agency Mars Express spacecraft to gauge the thickness and volume of ice deposits at the Martian south pole covering an area larger than Texas.

The deposits, up to 2.3 miles thick, are under a polar cap of white frozen carbon dioxide and water, and appear to be composed of at least 90 percent frozen water, with dust mixed in, according to findings published in the journal Science.

Scientists have known that water exists in frozen form at the Martian poles, but this research produced the most accurate measurements of just how much there is.

They are eager to learn about the history of water on Mars because water is fundamental to the question of whether the planet has ever harbored microbial or some other life. Liquid water is a necessity for life as we know it.

Characteristics like channels on the Martian surface strongly suggest the planet once was very wet, a contrast to its present arid, dusty condition.

Joking aside, that is really good news. Water will make a trip to Mars feasible. Astronauts will be able to make oxygen and hydrogen for fuel for a return trip.

Charles Krauthammer takes a look at an article in the newly re-launched New Republic. He identifies an entirely new syndrome - Bush Derangement Syndrome - Cheney Variant.

"What is wrong with Dick Cheney?" asks Michelle Cottle in the inaugural issue of the newly relaunched New Republic. She then spends the next 1,900 words marshaling evidence suggesting that his cardiac disease has left him demented and mentally disordered.

The charming part of this not-to-be-missed article (titled "Heart of Darkness," no less) is that it is framed as an exercise in compassion. Since Cottle knows that the only way for her New Republic readers to understand Cheney is that he is evil — "next time you see Cheney behaving oddly, don't automatically assume that he's a bad man," she advises — surely the generous thing for a liberal to do is write him off as simply nuts. In the wonderland of liberalism, Cottle is trying to make the case for Cheney by offering the insanity defense……

……I was at first inclined to pass off Cottle's piece as a weird put-on — when people become particularly deranged about this administration, it's hard to tell — but her earnest and lengthy piling on of medical research about dementia and cardiovascular disease suggests that she is quite serious.

And supremely silly. Such silliness has a pedigree, mind you. It is in the great tradition of the 1964 poll of psychiatrists that found Barry Goldwater clinically paranoid. Goldwater having become over the years the liberals' favorite conservative (because of his libertarianism), nary a word is heard today about him being mentally ill or about that shameful election-year misuse of medical authority by the psychiatrists who responded to the poll. The disease they saw in Goldwater was, in fact, deviation from liberalism, which remains today so incomprehensible to some that it must be explained by resort to arterial plaques and cardiac ejection fractions.

Worse yet, I think, is that the former Soviet Union did things like this. Labeling of people who disagreed with the system as mentally unstable and placing them into psychiatric wards. That is very dangerous territory, indeed. I have not read Cottle's piece directly (the last thing I tried to read at TNR required a lengthy and intrusive registration - a game I will not play) so I have no idea what, if any, credentials Cottle has to make such a diagnosis. My guess is almost none based on her stated resume.

Michelle Cottle has been a senior editor at The New Republic since February 1999. She is a 1992 magna cum laude graduate of Vanderbilt University with a B.A. in English and a minor in European Studies.  

At the risk of sounding snarky here, a BA in English does not give one the ability to make medical or psychiatric diagnoses. Just because you can use the words doesn't mean you actually understand them. To those inclined to believe Cottle's take on Cheney ask yourself: would you let her diagnose a pain in your side? I have a BS in Mathematics and Psychology (dual major) and graduated summa cum laude (I am not kidding). That makes me more qualified than Cottle! 

The cornerstone of propaganda is the "big lie". (A number of sources, including Wikipedia, attribute this technique to Adolph Hitler. Which is odd, because it was actually in use well before Hitler. The Soviet Union used it repeatedly. Maybe Hitler was the first one to give it that particular name.) Well, a Danish scientist has just gone on the record exposing "global warming" as a complete myth. If he's correct, global warming may be the single biggest lie in the history of the big lie.

It is generally assumed the Earth's atmosphere and oceans have grown warmer during the recent 50 years because of an upward trend in the so-called global temperature, which is the result of complex calculations and averaging of air temperature measurements taken around the world.

"It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of Earth," said Andresen, an expert on thermodynamics. "A temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system. Furthermore, the climate is not governed by a single temperature. Rather, differences of temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate".

And this should give you cause to really think about this. "…Temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system."  Moving on to a related item posted by Melanie Phillips, one of the biggest proponents of global warming, Mike Hulme, has made a stunning admission. Global warming cannot be proven by science at all. Only by applying ideologically driven "post-normal" pseudoscience (that would be the big lie, again) can the subject be addressed.

Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking, although science will gain some insights into the question if it recognises the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science. But to proffer such insights, scientists - and politicians - must trade (normal) truth for influence. If scientists want to remain listened to, to bear influence on policy, they must recognise the social limits of their truth seeking and reveal fully the values and beliefs they bring to their scientific activity.

What an admission! Let’s read that one again. Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking. Of course not. The facts don’t support it. It’s not true. So, says Hulme, let’s abolish the need to establish the facts and the truth and impose the theory on the basis of — what’s that again — ‘values and beliefs’. In other words, climate change science has got to be anti-science. It’s got to be anti-truth. It’s got to be nothing more than an ideology.

Take these two items and think about them. I imagine the screeching will become very, very loud indeed from the true believers in the First Church of the Presumptuous Assumption of Global Warming®.