Passed

The terrorist surveillance program (officially the "Protect America Act") has passed the House of Representatives 227-183.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 — Under pressure from President Bush, the House on Saturday gave final approval to changes in a terrorist surveillance program despite serious objections from many Democrats about the scope of the executive branch’s new eavesdropping power.

The hyperventilation from the left will reach the threshold of pain momentarily. Get your earplugs.

And A Bit Of Sanity

After posting the last item, in which the Daily Mail luridly asserted that an American company had been the source of the Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreak in Britain, I pulled up the Telegraph. They are not making such a claim and instead are playing the story straight. The American company shares a complex with a British government-run facility that houses a lot of dangerous pathogens. The Telegraph does not assign blame to either facility just yet but notes that the American company has promised full cooperation with any inquiry and that the site manager is flying back from a family holiday immediately to assist.

A biosecurity failure at a research laboratory has been pinpointed as the likeliest source of Britain's foot and mouth outbreak.

An inquiry by scientists is centring on fears that the virus escaped from the Pirbright laboratory site in Surrey, the only centre licensed to work with the foot and mouth virus. It is feared that the virus, carried on the wind, infected cattle grazing in a field three miles away.

A private pharmaceuticals company, Merial Animal Health, which has been developing a foot and mouth vaccine, shares the Pirbright site with the government-funded Institute for Animal Health, which holds 5,000 strains of the virus. Officials have not ruled out the possibility that such a release of the virus was deliberate. Both centres, however, pride themselves on their tight security record.

Last night, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) confirmed that the strain found on the infected farm was not one that would normally infect animals. A spokesman said the strain was similar to a virus known as 01 BFS67, which was isolated in the 1967 foot and mouth outbreak.

The department said the strain was present at the institute and had been used in a vaccines batch made last month by Merial. The company, which is jointly owned by drugs giants Merck and Sanofi-Aventis, had agreed to halt production on a "precautionary basis", Defra said.

The strain is thought to be relatively mild - less virulent than the pan-Asian strain that swept the country in 2001.

The Pirbright Institute - the British government's part of the facility - houses more than 5,000 strains of deadly pathogens.

Other British media: The Guardian plays it straight.  The Times of London does not, they, like the Daily Mail hype the American company and barely mention the British government facility. But there are two telling passages:

Peter Ainsworth, shadow environment secretary, demanded an independent inquiry. “If it turns out to be true that the laboratory is the source, then it’s almost as if the government has infected its own stock. Serious questions must now be asked about how this was allowed to happen,” he said…….

……. The government institute has recently suffered funding cuts, condemned by members of the Commons science and technology select committee, which said it was suffering the “loss of key staff and skills”.

Something to really think about there.

This Is Bad

The Daily Mail is reporting that the latest British Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreak in Britain may have originated from a pharmaceutical laboratory located only three miles - upwind - from the site of the outbreak. The facility is, apparently, partially owned by an American company but also houses British government run operations, despite the initial lurid sentences in the report. The American company has, however, voluntarily shut down all production at the facility - which, ironically, was supposed to be producing vaccines for FMD.

An American pharmaceutical company appeared to be responsible for the foot and mouth outbreak in Britain.

Merial, which makes foot-and-mouth vaccines and has a laboratory three miles from the Surrey farm hit by the disease, dramatically agreed to stop production immediately.

The breakthrough came after Defra experts established that the strain of foot and mouth disease found in cattle at the infected farm at Wanborough is similar to the virus isolated in the 1967 outbreak in Britain.

'It is most similar to strains used in vaccine production, including at the Pirbright site shared by Merial and the Institute of Animal Health,' said a Defra statement, adding that this particular strain was used in a batch of vaccine made by Merial last month.

A Defra spokesman said the focus of an investigation would be that the virus was airborne.

Defra hopes that if the virus was inhaled only by the 64 cows which were culled at the farm, the outbreak may be contained and will not spread beyond a three-kilometre exclusion zone set up around the farm.

After the breakthrough in identifying the virus, Chief Veterinary Officer Debby Reynolds ordered that a new, single ten kilometre protection zone be created encompassing both the infected farm and the Pirbright complex.

You have to read pretty far down to find details about the British government activity at the facility. But there is a history of problems dating back to the 1950s there. Aside from the pointing fingers in the article, the troublesome bit about the whole report is that the virus might be airborne. That would be very bad news, indeed. (But I would not be too quick to rule out rodents, either.) Information on the Pirbright Institute can be found here.

Ride ‘Em, Cowboy

My daughter helped out a friend of hers when the local 4-H group could not get enough kids to participate in a horse-grooming contest. While at the fair, she saw an exhibition of Cowboy Mounted Shooting and came home raving about wanting to try it. As it turns out, one of her classmates is a competitor and is reportedly rather good at it. The sport combines barrel racing with shooting (blanks, only). I saw this feature and was reminded of all that.

NEW ORLEANS - His trusty six-shooters loaded, the cowboy gallops off, reins in one hand, pistol in the other. As his horse twists and slews, he shoots. Pow! Pow! Pow!Pow!Pow! Now it's a straight run: PowPowPowPowPow! Nine of the 10 balloons are dead, dead, really dead.

Part barrel-riding, part marksmanship, part costuming and several parts noise, it's cowboy mounted shooting — a sport that started with three guys at a Phoenix shooting range in 1992 and now has about 7,000 members in 42 states and Sweden.

The Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association's calendar lists 436 events from Florida to Alaska — at least 10 a month, with December off.

Louisiana's state championship is Saturday evening in Amite, about an hour's drive north of New Orleans. It's among nine events just this weekend and 57 this month.

Chuck Duncan, president of Louisiana Territory Guys, Gals & Guns and an assistant professor of kinesiology and education at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, expects 20 to 25 competitors. "We're still trying to establish the sport here," he said. Spectators get in free.

The sport is a spin-off from cowboy action shooting, in which costumed contestants run through full-size sets and shoot bullets at full-sized targets. Cowboy action shooting devotees not only span the United States, but include clubs in Canada, Australia and Europe, including Switzerland and Scandinavia.

The official Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association website (motto: Raw Horsepower - Hard Ridin' - Straight Shootin') has primers on how to get started in the sport. Only approved firearms can be used (single action .45 caliber guns of specific make and model) and there is a rather strict dress code. The blank cartridges must be from an approved vendor and are loaded and unloaded by an official at the competitions.

Cats, Bats, Rabies And The Carolinas

Take it from someone who reads a lot of news on a daily basis, stories like this do not usually happen very frequently or as relatively close together geographically. So it is something to be a bit wary of. A couple from McCormick, South Carolina are being treated for exposure to rabies after picking up a stray cat.

A man and woman who picked up a stray cat in McCormick recently are undergoing treatment to prevent rabies, state health officials said Friday.

The woman was holding the cat when she was bitten and scratched, while the man was exposed through saliva in existing cuts as he petted the cat, said Clair Boatwright, spokeswoman for the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.

The cat died Aug. 1, and DHEC confirmed it was rabid Friday, she said.

Meanwhile, another item, this time from Cornelius, North Carolina, says that a cat and its human owner are being treated for exposure to rabies after the cat picked up a stray bat.

A Cornelius teenager thought he was doing the right thing, but now he needs rabies shots.

His cat brought home a dead bat and dropped it on the patio. The teen picked it up by its wing, carried through the house and put it in a garbage bag so health officials could test it for rabies.

The Centers for Disease Control normally runs such tests whenever bats pop up where they aren’t supposed to be.

The two towns are not real close together, approximately 140 miles as the rabid bat flies. But having two stories this close together could indicate that there is a bit of a rabies problem in that region. Something to be aware of if you happen to live down that way. So do not touch any dead animals and you really might want to curb your enthusiasm for rescuing strays as well.

Elegy For The Not-Famous

A very interesting piece by Charles Moore in today's Telegraph is really worth taking the time to read. It is about the unnoticed and the unsung, the average, common people without an ax to grind or a message to howl. The good and decent and mostly silent majority.

A friend who had just opened her house for a day in aid of the village church wrote to me this week. The opening had been a success, she said, despite the rain. The crowd were "the best people in the world, unsung and unnoticed by politicians and press simply because they are so nice".

I received this letter shortly after listening to an item on the Today programme. It was a joint interview with Will Rigby, whose twin brother, John, was recently killed serving in Iraq, and the twins' father, Doug.

Like John, Will Rigby was also a soldier in Iraq. When John was fatally wounded in a bomb attack in Basra, Will was able to be with him at his bedside, reminiscing, "telling a few jokes", holding his hand, until he died. It was their 24th birthday.

Will Rigby did not sound like a poetic type, but there was something of the beautiful Prayer Book funeral service in him when he said that he found it "a great comfort" to think that he and John had "come into the world on the same day" and that on that very day "he left us".

Corporal Rigby is still a serving soldier, and he may therefore be going back to Iraq. He was asked what he thought about that. He said that the Army was doing good work there. "I have a job to do," he said. "Where they say, I go."

What did his father think of the risk to his surviving son? "We have steeled ourselves to the possibility," said Doug Rigby. "We will support him."

The Rigby family came originally from the Sussex village in which I live, and they still live and work in the area. But I do not think I am indulging in sentimental local patriotism by suggesting that they represent those "unsung and unnoticed" people whom my correspondent praised.

Luckily, for the past 60 years at least, the great majority of such people have not been asked to defend their values with their lives. But let John Rigby, who did so - and his suffering family - stand for them all.

It is true that press and politicians find it difficult to notice such people. We are both, in our different ways, schooled to look for trouble, grievance, noise. The MP pays more attention to the constituent who moans than the one who gets on with his life. The reporter is more interested in the very small number of people who commit murder than the very large number of people who don't. That is inevitable…..

…..Popular history, as it was taught until the last 30 years, worked successfully on the "famous men" theory. It furnished a narrative of heroism (and villainy) from which people could understand the achievements of their country and culture and derive examples to follow or avoid.

Now such history is disapproved of, partly because it allegedly ignores the achievements of the common man and woman. This is a misunderstanding. Those of us who live everyday, apparently unremarkable lives are not insulted by examples of greatness, but inspired by them.

What is true, though, is that we are also inspired by others not known to fame. This theme has run through the letters on the page opposite in recent days about epitaphs. There is great eloquence and power in the message that can be sent by the death of someone unknown, or even nameless.

That is why Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard remains one of the greatest poems in our language (recently celebrated as such, I notice, by Gordon Brown). It is entirely about people who never did anything that the world heard about; it gives them dignity by setting them beside those who did. For similar reasons, the story of young John Rigby touches us.

It is fashionable these days to tear down heroes almost as soon as they are minted. The media lives by the motto, "If it bleeds, it leads." Reporters and politicians pay attention to whoever is able to howl the loudest. And the decent, quiet, good people are forgotten. Overlooked as if they did not exist. Moore mentions a poem I had quite forgotten reading years ago. One wonders if it is still taught at all these days when the curriculums at schools are increasingly laden with pop theory nonsense. Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard captures the lives of the unsung, unnoticed people. If you haven't read it, now is a good time. If you have read it, but forgotten it, as I did, now is a good time to reacquaint yourself with it.

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melacholy marked him for her own.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wish'd) a friend.

Foot And Mouth Disease Back In Britain

Foot and Mouth disease has been detected in animals at a farm in Britain, setting the stage for a repeat of the national disaster that engulfed Britain in 2001. In the last outbreak, more than six million animals were slaughtered and the total cost to the nation reached some £8 billion. Prime minister Gordon Brown has reacted quickly and banned all movement of animals in Britain. The EU has already acted to ban all British meat imports to the continent.

The nightmare of foot and mouth is back in the British countryside.

Cattle from a farm near Guildford, Surrey, tested positive for the disease, which cost the country £8billion when it last hit in 2001.

The EU has now banned livestock imports from Britain and Gordon Brown has broken off from the first night of his summer holiday in Dorset to chair a meeting of the Government's emergency planning committee, Cobra.

Environment Secretary Hilary Benn, on holiday in Italy, has also returned to deal with the crisis.

Protection and surveillance zones have been established and all movement of cattle and pigs in the UK has been banned.

All animals on the affected farm will be slaughtered.

The outbreak presents Mr Brown with another major challenge. He has already had to deal with attempted terrorist attacks and devastating flooding since becoming Prime Minister.

The 2001 foot and mouth outbreak led to the slaughter of more than six million animals amid furious criticism that emergency plans were woefully inadequate and ministers and officials missed chances to contain the crisis.

Farmers went out of business and tourism was devastated as huge areas of the countryside were closed off.

More about Foot and Mouth disease (FMD) here  (I always heard it called Hoof and Mouth disease years back). It is not clear at this point how this outbreak spread to the farm animals, but I imagine that there will be a lot of effort spent on trying to figure that out. FMD can spread in deer, rats and even hedgehogs, so it may be difficult to pin down. But I have certainly posted a lot about the rat population explosion in Britain in the past few months. I wouldn't be surprised to find there is some connection.

Phoenix Rises

The NASA Phoenix Mars lander was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida early this morning. The $420 million mission will attempt to land Phoenix at the Martian North Pole to sample ice and soil.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A robotic dirt and ice digger rocketed toward Mars on Saturday, beginning a 422 million-mile journey that NASA hopes will culminate next spring in the first ever landing within the red planet's Arctic Circle.

The Phoenix Mars Lander blasted off before dawn, precisely on time, hurtling through the clear moonlit sky aboard an unmanned Delta rocket. The rocket was easily visible for five minutes, a bright orange speck in a spray of stars.

Tension was high, with much hand-wringing in launch control, as engineers awaited contact with the craft.

"Everything appears normal, but it was a little bit of anxious moments there," said launch director Chuck Dovale. "It seemed like an eternity but it was about 20 minutes or so where we weren't sure. We were hoping Phoenix would phone home and she did."

If all goes as planned _ a big if considering only five of the world's 15 attempts to land on Mars have succeeded _ the spacecraft will set down on the Martian Arctic plains on May 25, 2008, and spend three months scooping up soil and ice, and analyzing the samples in minuscule ovens and mixing bowls.

The Phoenix Mars Lander won't be looking for evidence of life on Mars but rather traces of organic compounds in the baked and moistened samples, which would be a possible indicator of conditions favorable for life, either now or once upon a time.

Video and digital images can be found at the NASA website. As the article points out, only five of fifteen attempts to land a craft on Mars have been successful. Of course, all five that made it have been American.

Lies, Damned Lies And TNR

In descending order. Bob Owens has hung on like a bulldog through the Scott Beauchamp ferfluffle and has received official word from the Public Affairs Officer for General David Petraeus. Col. Steven Boylan says, conclusively, that none of the soldiers in Beauchamp's platoon or company have corroborated any detail of the stories published by The New Republic. The Army is officially calling the stories Beauchamp told false. Not unproven, mind you, false. That's pretty strongly worded and, as Bob points out, leaves very little wiggle room for TNR.

Col. Steven Boylan, Public Affairs Officer for U.S. Army Commanding General in Iraq David Petraeus, just emailed me the following in response to my request to confirm an earlier report that the U.S. Army's investigation into the claims made by PV-2 Scott Thomas Beauchamp made in The New Republic had been completed.

He states:

To your question: Were there any truth to what was being said by Thomas?
Answer: An investigation of the allegations were conducted by the
command and found to be false. In fact, members of Thomas' platoon and
company were all interviewed and no one could substantiate his claims.

As to what will happen to him?

Answer: As there is no evidence of criminal conduct, he is subject to
Administrative punishment as determined by his chain of command. Under
the various rules and regulations, administrative actions are not
releasable to the public by the military on what does or does not
happen.

I saw yesterday that Howard Kurtz, who is usually a bit better than that, fell for the TNR statement that they had verified their stories even though the "disfigured woman" story was - by their own admission - false in a very important detail and false to the entire premise of the article. Beauchamp admitted that the incident (if it happened at all) happened in Kuwait, before Beauchamp had even experienced the war. I was a bit surprised that Kurtz never even questioned the "verification" of a story using completely anonymous sources. That isn't exactly journalism.

Will Beauchamp remain a darling of the truthiness believers? Well sure. Is TNR guilty of perpetrating a fraud on their readers. Well, the Army says so. Given that TNR already has a history of publishing frauds, it is their responsibility to now either produce real proof or to retract the stories, apologize to their readers and take their lumps.