About That Porous Border

ABC News is reporting that we have a wee bit of a problem:

The FBI is investigating an alleged human smuggling operation based in Chaparral, N.M., that agents say is bringing "Iraqis and other Middle Eastern" individuals across the Rio Grande from Mexico.

An FBI intelligence report distributed by the Washington, D.C. Joint Terrorism Task Force, obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com, says the illegal ring has been bringing Iraqis across the border illegally for more than a year.

Border Patrol officials in the area said they were unaware of the specifics of the FBI's report, and federal prosecutors in New Mexico told ABCNews.com they had no current cases involving the illegal smuggling of Iraqis.

The FBI report, issued last week, says the smuggling organization "used to smuggle Mexicans, but decided to smuggle Iraqi or other Middle Eastern individuals because it was more lucrative." Each individual would be charged a fee of $20,000 to $25,000, according to the report.

One would be curious to know the percentages of Iraqis versus "other Middle Eastern" folks involved. One would also like to ask how many people reading this blog have $25 grand in cash on hand? One would further like to know why the Congress and the President can't get off their collective duffs and do something about securing the border? One could, of course, die of old age waiting for an answer to that. If someone sneaking over the border doesn't prompt that event sooner, that is.

Variations

A new variation on the Nigerian letter scam has cropped up, ABC News is reporting. This one sends an email to potential victims claiming to be from a rogue US soldier. The scam is the usual pattern, however. The "soldier" claims he has come into a large sum of ill-gotten loot and asks for the victims help in spiriting out of Iraq. Please send them your banking information, and you get a cut.

Bogus e-mails from purported rogue U.S. military servicemen are being sent as part of a spam e-mail scam, FBI officials told ABC News.

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, known as IC3, issued an alert Tuesday warning of the spam scam in which e-mails are made to appear as though they come from crooked soldiers asking recipients for help in moving war loot out of Iraq.

"In this particular case, they've got what appears to be a rogue GI who is looking to take money looted from Iraq and get it out of Iraq to the United States and try to prey on the greed of American citizens," Shawn Henry, deputy assistant director of the FBI's cyber division, told ABC News.

The e-mails vary in content, but in general, they explain how a purported U.S. serviceman has found tens of millions of dollars in Iraq. Some of the e-mails claim that the funds were taken from terrorists and insurgents who were using the money to buy bombs and ammunition.

One e-mail claimed the sender has survived two suicide bomb attacks and is eager to start a new life.

The e-mails request help in bringing the money to the United States and ask recipients to provide personal information to begin the transaction. The scammers promise participants a cut of the reputed funds, and then try to get bank account information from the recipients to finish the transaction.

The scammers have no shame whatsoever, of course. If you get one of these you should contact the FBI at once. They can be reached at the Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov. Under no circumstances should you open any attachments - they are almost certain to be trojans or malicious software. (Frankly, I have a hard time mustering up a lot of sympathy for folks who fall for this sort of thing. They have larceny in their hearts to even think about cooperating with something like this. But that is another discussion.)

People Pay To Study This

Longtime readers know I am a bit of a history buff. But archaeologists have always fascinated me in particular. These folks pay a lot of money in college tuition then go out and do backbreaking labor in usually nasty conditions. All to gain a better understanding of the past. Of course, some conditions are much nastier than others. Such as digging into a pit full of 130-year old, well aged human excrement.

Marisa Solorzano is nose-deep in 130-year-old fecal matter.

The archaeologist, a member of a team excavating a housing site in what used to be the center of Ventura, was on her knees Monday, burrowing a small hand trawl into the odorous soil of an early women's outhouse.

Glamorous it is not. But the labor-intensive work has paid dividends — a pistol dating to the 1800s, a bowie knife, several small whiskey flasks and a set of false teeth all have been unearthed from either the women's outhouse or a nearby men's.

Then there were the mysterious dog skulls. A large blade from a set of sheep shears was found next to two dog skulls, one with a couple of vertebrae still attached.

"It might be an early crime scene," project archaeologist John Foster said. "It looks like the two dogs were decapitated. Then whoever did it dumped the skulls and the blade, thinking the women probably wouldn't be looking too hard into the bottom of the privy."

Um, no. But 130 years later, a woman is doing just that. Odd, isn't it? There is video at the link as well.

Disinformation

Having spent a good many years in the Nuclear industry, I can say from experience that seismic concerns are addressed in every plant design. For older plants, the required seismic upgrades have been extensive. One plant I worked at had added so many snubbers to piping that it became a major effort to do any work in some areas - clearances were terrible.

So I read the "concerns" being raised by anti-nuclear activists following the problems at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa reactor in Japan after the earthquake yesterday with a huge grain of salt. The press has not carried a lot of real detail, but there appears to have been some very, very small release of water from a spent fuel pit, a transformer fire - which has nothing whatsoever to do with the nuclear side of the plant and some drums knocked over. Consider me underwhelmed as to the seriousness of all that. Not so the helpful "activists". They are kicking things up into high gear.

With 20 percent of the world's nuclear reactors in seismically active zones and the remote but real possibility of earthquakes just about everywhere else, nuclear power plants are designed with shaking in mind.

Plants in many countries have survived quakes more powerful than the one that hit Japan on Monday, suggesting that the poor performance of the Kashiwazaki Kariwa reactor is more illustrative of recent safety problems in the country's nuclear industry than any inherent vulnerability of the technology.

"It did what it was supposed to," said William Miller, a University of Missouri at Columbia nuclear engineering professor. "It shut down. It did not release radioactive material into the atmosphere."

Miller said he considers the relatively small amounts of radioactivity that were released when the earthquake knocked over several waste-containing barrels to be "negligible."

But environmentalists and nuclear watchdogs expressed concern that fire and power failure, both of which resulted at Kashiwazaki on Monday, can trigger nuclear meltdown.

Fire and power failure. So what? A transformer fire is actually a fairly frequent, if unwelcome, event in the utility industry. One plant I used to work at had a transformer explode and burn. And that was a coal plant, not a nuke. As to the loss of power - first, the second the plants tripped offline - as they were designed to do and did - there would be offsite power available. If that happened to go away, there are diesel generator sets that start automatically (and are tested all the time to ensure that they will do so). There was no "loss of power", merely a loss of one or more layers of protection. Nukes are very, very redundant in protection. All of those units tripped, I am quite sure, all by themselves before a human even realized that there was an earthquake.

Oh, and the amount of radioactivity in spent fuel pool water is generally extremely low. So Miller is right not to be concerned. Beware of "activists" raising "concerns". It is all too often a way to spread fear and disinformation about what is really going on.

A Dreadful Development

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard regret to inform our readers that man's best friend, strong-armed by the enforcers of the Animal Uprising™, have turned on us. Oh not all of them yet. But enough. Just ask Marcus Burghardt. The German rider in the Tour de France was viciously attacked and thrown from his bike by a dog. Well, the dog wasn't actually vicious, he made it look like an accident. But it was intentional.

Cyclists spend months training for the gruelling mountain climbs and tortuous distances of the Tour de France, aware that the slightest nudge by a competitor could send them crashing out of the race.

But it is unlikely that the course safety manual spends too much time detailing the potential hazards posed by wandering pets.

All of which will be of little consolation to German cyclist Marcus Burghardt whose race plans lay in tatters yesterday lunchtime after he collided with a large labrador.

Footage of the dramatic crash shows the dog ambling across the road straight into the path of Burghardt's speeding carbon fibre bike. The front wheel buckles on impact, sending the rider tumbling over the handlebars on to the confused animal.

The bike then up-ends before crashing on to the dog's back, while the pink-clad cyclist rolled around on the road.

The dog was uninjured, of course. Notice the casual way he saunters away in the video, looking for another victim.

Expect more "accidents" as the race continues. The Animal Uprising™ is insidious.

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Or leaving deposits, as the case may be. Wisconsin is having to deal with a rapidly growing population of giant Canada geese. The feathered fiends are noisy, hostile and, worst of all, extremely messy. A fifteen pound giant goose can produce two pounds of excrement. Each day. Every, single day. These are not birds, they are poop factories.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Service has euthanized 1,400 nuisance geese this summer, more than double the number of a few years ago, said Dan Hirchert, a wildlife biologist who coordinates the goose management program in Wisconsin.

"That is the last solution," he said. "As we are removing birds, people come up and thank us."

The agency also has teamed with the DNR on a new two-page brochure outlining the conflicts and offering solutions that can be used.

Gary Tanko, superintendent at SentryWorld Golf Course in Stevens Point, uses a single word to describe the problem with geese at his 18-hole course — "Terrible."

"It gets worse every year. We have tried everything from the cannons from the DNR to harass them to trying to turn sprinklers on them, whatever we can do. But they keep coming back," he said.

Tanko estimates 50 to 100 geese — "a herd of them" — routinely waddle about the course, including on the greens.

In 1986, the DNR estimated Wisconsin had 11,130 Canada geese at breeding age. That population swelled to 125,200 last spring, Van Horn said.

Given the hatch of new birds, the DNR figures at least 275,000 geese call Wisconsin home this summer, mostly in an area east of a line that stretches from south of Madison to Green Bay — the state's most densely populated region of people.

"They are using up as much habitat as they can find and prospering," Hirchert said.

Wisconsin has two different populations of Canada geese, which are federally protected, Van Horn said. One group nests in northern Ontario, Canada, and migrates to Wisconsin for the fall and winter. The resident giant Canada geese nest and raise young in Wisconsin. They become the nuisance, he said.

By our back of the toilet paper calculation, that means that the resident population of dung machines is dropping some 275 tons of goose squeezings each and every day. Yechhh. Wisconsin's days as "The Badger State" are numbered. The goose will bury all the badgers - in goose droppings. The Animal Uprising™ is resorting to biological warfare. 

The Fish And I

Did you know it is illegal in Thailand to possess anything related to The King and I, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical? The weird things you find out. Anyway, a fishing guide in Thailand has landed a carp the size of a politician. No, really. This is one king-sized carp.

The world record for the biggest carp ever caught has been smashed after a fish was landed weighing almost 20 stone - heavier than John Prescott.

The monster was caught on a homemade rod but was too heavy for the angler's scales. They only went up to 100kg - vastly inadequate for the job.

The giant fish's 20 stone weight is a conservative estimate. It took two men to lift the beast above the water for a photograph, whereupon it slapped one of the men with its tail.

It was caught in Thailand by a local fisherman known only as Kik who works as a guide for mainly European sportsmen………

……"The Siamese Giant Carp we estimated at weighing just over 120kg or 265 pounds. She may be a tiny bit bigger but to say 120kg is fine with us.

"It is the biggest carp ever caught on rod and line in the history of sport fishing.

"But it will not qualify as the scales available only went up to 100kg.

They have a picture of the beast - and it is ginormous. We can't say for sure if the picture is genuine, though it appears to be. Then again, so does this one. One never knows in the age of Photoshop.

A Great Legal Step Forward

Well, things might be bad in Germany, demographics-wise, but there is hope on the legal front. Police there are refusing to arrest a man for exercising a fundamental human right. That's right, its completely legal to throw your computer out the window when you get frustrated with it.

Police in the northern city of Hanover said they would not press charges after responding to calls made by residents in an apartment block who were woken by a loud crash in the early hours of Saturday.

Officers found the street and pavement covered in electronic parts and discovered who the culprit was.

Asked what had driven him to the night-time outburst, the 51-year-old man said he had simply got annoyed with his computer.

"Who hasn't felt like doing that?" said a police spokesman.

A landmark legal decision. It is now safe to really hit the "execute" key. In all fairness, they did make him clean up the mess, however. Pedestrians in Germany should now be alert for falling computers, unlike Poland where they have to watch out for the St. Bernards hurtling down.

Rugby Has Cannibals!

I never played the game myself, but a lot of my friends in college were Rugby players. Every, single one of them was certifiable. Completely whacked. Crazy as loons. But man, could they throw a mean party. Anyway, I remember that one of them had a bumper sticker on his car that read "Rugby Players Eat Their Dead." Only sometimes they don't wait for the victim to die.

SYDNEY (AFP) - An Australian rugby player who went to his doctor with severe headaches was amazed to find he'd been living with an opponent's tooth embedded in his forehead for months, it was reported Tuesday.

Ben Czislowski clashed heads with an opponent during a game in the Queensland Cup competition in early April, slicing open his forehead and leaving his opponent with a broken jaw and several missing teeth.

Czislowski told Brisbane's Courier Mail newspaper that his wound was stitched up after the match and since then he had suffered shooting headaches, lethargy and an eye infection.

Czislowski finally went to the doctor when he became concerned that the lethargy might make him have to stop playing rugby (I told you they were crazy.) There, the x-ray revealed that his opponent's tooth was lodged under the skin above his eye socket. Mike Tyson became infamous for biting a chunk of Evander Holyfield's ear off. The unnamed rugby player tried for the whole head, apparently!

Snakes On An SUV!

A man in Pennsylvania recently got a personal introduction to the Animal Uprising™. He stopped at a local convenience store to gas up his SUV. Which is when he was informed that he had a passenger. 

BETHLEHEM, Pa. - A snake slithered out of the engine compartment of a man's SUV when he stopped to get gasoline, causing a bit of commotion at the station. Scott Naylor was at a Wawa convenience store in the city on Friday morning when a woman at the gas pump next to him began yelling, police said.

A boa constrictor more than 5 feet long was emerging from Naylor's engine compartment, police said. It slithered out to the store's parking lot, where police were able to capture it.

"It created quite a traffic jam there, because everybody wanted to see the snake," said police Detective Mark DiLuzio said. "(It's) something you don't see every day in a Wawa parking lot."

And at these prices you won't see any more (Cue rimshot). Obviously, the snake was intending to hijack the SUV but became disoriented - probably from the gas fumes. No we know that the Reptile legions are trying to hijack SUVs. We strongly urge our readers to check under the hood and make sure a snake is not trying to disguise himself as a cable in there. You do that by pulling all the wires out where you can see them clearly. And, on the bright side, the resulting walking to work will be good for your heart!

March Of The Sockpuppets

The New York Times notices the ruckus created by the exposure of John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, as a sockpuppet. It is pretty hard on Mackey.

For executives like Mr. Mackey, sock-puppeting is probably more gratifying than effective in swaying opinion or stock prices — until they get caught. Then it is embarrassing, and for chief executives, at least, potentially illegal. Laws carefully prescribe what executives of public companies can say. The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site Friday night that the Securities and Exchange Commission had begun a formal inquiry into whether Mr. Mackey violated security laws with the posts. (Ed Note: The NYT has corrected that last bit. The SEC inquiry is informal.)

Whole Foods maintains that Mr. Mackey did not break the law because he did not disclose any confidential company information.

But the consequences could be damaging to the company, if not to Mr. Mackey. Securities lawyers say the Federal Trade Commission might use the comments to scuttle Whole Foods’ proposed acquisition of a competitor, Wild Oats, a company Mr. Mackey derided in his posts. Wild Oats may also use the comments as the basis of a lawsuit against Whole Foods.

The most interesting ting in the article comes at the very end, however. At least one industry insider is convinced that Mackey is only the tip of the iceberg.

Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist in San Diego and author of the blog Infectious Greed, said he thinks that business people are increasingly resorting to sock-puppetry. “I’m convinced it’s broader than anybody knows,” he said, “I’m convinced this is the tip of the iceberg.”

Mr. Kedrosky said that one chief executive recently told him that he almost had to “chew off my right arm to keep from participating” in an online forum. He declined to name the company but said, “It’s a hard temptation to walk away from.”

Oh, well. It could be open season on sockpuppets soon. We were lucky enough to get a candid picture of Mackey so folks will know what he looks like.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey strikes an impromptu Pose

Deal Reached On Dow Jones

A tentative deal has been reached for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp to buy Dow Jones. The deal will be put to a vote with the board of Dow Jones later today (according to the WSJ website. The AP has different information.) The Bancroft family is apparently still divided over the deal, however.

Negotiators from the two companies on Monday reached an agreement in principle for the original $5 billion that Murdoch had offered, and it will go to Dow Jones' board Tuesday for its approval, the Journal said, citing unnamed people familiar with the situation.

The deal would still need approval from Dow Jones' controlling shareholders, the Bancroft family, which has been divided on a sale to News Corp. because of concerns over whether the Journal would maintain its editorial independence.

Christopher Bancroft, a Dow Jones director, recently has been approaching major stockholders in an attempt to buy enough shares of Dow Jones to block a sale.

Michael B. Elefante, the Bancroft family's lead trustee, has scheduled a meeting for Thursday to present the agreement to the family and is expected to give the family members several days to make a decision, the Journal reported.

Wouldn't you like to be able to attend that meeting. It will be messy, I'm sure.

Finally, Some Government Democrats Want To Cut

The good news: the Dems found something to cut. The bad news: it is the only office that provides some oversight, however limited, for unions. They are attempting to gut the budget for the Office of Labor Management Standards which has nailed some 775 corrupt union officials and forced the restitution of $70 million in dues money to the unions. Its the only bit of government the Dems don't embrace.

Although Congress has long insisted on copious reporting by corporations, including the burdens of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, lawmakers have been relatively nonchalant about union reporting. Unlike the quarterly filings of corporations, unions must only file once a year with the Labor Department using a free software program. They don't have to get an independent certified audit, are only rarely audited by the government, and don't have to follow standard accounting methods.

OLMS, the Labor office that watches over union disclosure forms, says that last year 93% of unions met its reporting requirements. But the other 7% deserve scrutiny. Union members deserve to know how their dues are spent. They might want to know that in 2005, the National Education Association gave more than $65 million to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and dozens of other liberal advocacy groups that have nothing to do with the interests of teachers. In 2006, 49 individuals employed at the national AFL-CIO headquarters were paid more than $130,000. "Union members are also discovering the extent to which their dues money is funding lavish trips for union officials to luxury resorts and other expensive perks unrelated to collective bargaining," says Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.

The OLMS reporting requirements date back to the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, the last major revision of federal labor law. The American Law Encyclopedia notes that then-Sen. John F. Kennedy "was instrumental in inserting title I of the act, which has been dubbed the union bill of rights." It mandated that union votes be by secret ballot, that unions file reports on large payments and loans to union officers, and that all members have access to union financial records and the right to recover misappropriated union assets. Its provisions led directly led to the creation of the Labor Department office that Democrats now consider the lone example of bloated government.

First it was an attempt to take away the secret ballot, now this. It is, of course, political payback for union support in the last election. It is also, like the earlier effort, an attempt to take away protections for the rank and file. Without the OLMS, corrupt union officials will be able to act on their criminal intention with greater impunity. Not exactly a shining bit of leadership, is it?