This Is VERY Bad

The Times of London is reporting that the release of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) from a British laboratory may have been deliberate.

The deliberate release of viral material, possibly in an act of sabotage, may have caused the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, officials said last night.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) said in a report ordered by the Prime Minister that “release by human movement [of the FMD virus] must be considered a real possibility”.

Inspectors all but discounted theories that the virus escaped by air or water from the laboratory complex close to where the outbreak started, although they are continuing to investigate the possibility of equipment failure or a security breach.

The HSE concluded in the report — which was sent to Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, last night — that there was “a strong probability” that the virus came from the research centre three miles from the first outbreak in a herd of cattle in Surrey.

Mr Benn said that sabotage could not be ruled out. “The truth is we do not know. That is why further investigations need to take place.”

The finding strengthens suspicions raised at the weekend when it was discovered that the strain of virus was one found only in laboratories. Investigators were unable, however, to decide whether the foot-and-mouth contamination escaped from the Institute of Animal Health, the government-funded body that first identified the virus, or Merial, a private company that shares the same site at Pirbright.

Further genetic analysis of the virus is being carried out to determine from which of the laboratory units the virus originated.

If it turns out to have been done intentionally, all hell is going to break loose - both in Britain and in America.

The Invasion Has Begun

In 1951 the dean of American science fiction, Robert Anson Heinlein, published a dire warning to the world in the form of a novel named The Puppetmasters. Oh, many critics have tried to say that Heinlein was warning of the threat of communism with his tale of brain-sucking slugs taking over humans for fun and profit. Not so! He was really warning about the dangers of the Animal Uprising™ and we have proof. A man has been detained at New York's LaGuardia airport. Which is not in and of itself remarkable, New York being New York, but the man was being controlled by the monkey in his ponytail!

NEW YORK - A man smuggled a monkey onto an airplane Tuesday, stashing the furry fist-size primate under his hat until passengers spotted it perched on his ponytail, an airline official said.

The monkey escapade began in Lima, Peru, late Monday, when the man boarded a flight to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said Spirit Airlines spokeswoman Alison Russell. After landing Tuesday morning, the man waited several hours before catching a connecting flight to LaGuardia Airport.

During the flight, people around the man noticed that the marmoset, which normally lives in forests and eats fruit and insects, had emerged from underneath his hat, Russell said.

"Other passengers asked the man if he knew he had a monkey on him," she said.

The monkey spent the remainder of the flight in the man's seat and behaved well, said Russell, who didn't know how it skirted customs and security.

Airport police were waiting for the man and his monkey when the plane landed about 3 p.m., and the man was taken away for questioning. It was unclear whether he would face any criminal charges.

It's the Invasion of the Body Snatchers - with monkeys. We here at Blue Crab Boulevard urge our faithful readers to do what we have done - shave your head at once so the monkeys can't get a grip on your hair to suck your brains out. Do the same for all your loved ones. Oh, sure, the dog looks funny but she'll thank you later when she hasn't been enslaved by a simian puppetmaster. And your spouse will forgive you, if he or she really loves you. Right, Honey? Honey?

UPDATE: CBS picks up the story and completely misses the real dangers of mind-conrtrolling marmosets and focuses on "health concerns". Will the media never learn?

Totally Nuts

I spotted this story on Yahoo and just had to find the original story, not the AP version. I think this is it. A Minnesota man was unable to get doctors to remove his testicles so he hired "professionals" to do it instead. He survived, although it sounds like it was a near thing. His former family jewels, however, are missing. Police in the twin cities are have an APB out on the missing - er - parts.

Russell Angus just wanted relief from the pain in his groin.

So the 62-year-old St. Paul man asked doctors to remove his testicles. They refused.

He then hired "professionals" to do the surgery for him.

Now, police are looking for the two to three individuals who removed Angus' testicles at his home July 28. Police say the surgery is potentially illegal; anyone who performs medical procedures in Minnesota must be licensed to practice.

"Based on my knowledge and experience, I know that it is not common or usual for a licensed medical practitioner to perform surgery in the nonsterile environment of a private home," Sgt. Richard Munoz wrote in an affidavit.

Police responded to Angus' home July 28 to assist medics on a report of an injured male.

When officers arrived, they saw that an upper-level room had been converted into a makeshift operating room complete with an operating table, medical equipment and a camera.

Angus told police that he had hired two to three people to remove his testicles in his home and that he was not conscious during the surgery.

He said that when he woke up, his testicles and the "professionals" were gone and he was bleeding profusely from his groin. He called his daughter, Jessica Zemek, 26,who came over and called for help.

Our considered opinion of all this is that Angus is certifiable. Totally nuts - and you can take that any way you'd like. But the mysterious "professionals", who the police would really, really like to talk to got us thinking. The story reminded us of  these guys.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Three men accused of running a sadomasochistic "dungeon" in rural Haywood County were in custody Friday, charged with performing illegal castrations.

Investigators from the office of Sheriff Tom Alexander said the men admitted performing at least eight surgeries on six consenting clients over the past year, including castrations and testicle replacements.

None of the men — identified as Richard Sciara, 61, Danny Reeves, 49, and Michael Mendez, 60 — is licensed to practice medicine, officials said.

That bizarre case was disposed of by the courts a while back:

In plea bargains, Sciara, 62, was sentenced to a year in prison, though he has served all but two weeks of that time. Reeves, 50, was sentenced to eight months in prison, and Mendez, 61, received four months. Reeves and Mendez have already served their sentences and will enter four and two months of house arrest, respectively, and three years of supervised probation.

We are not saying the men were involved in any way, of course. But there are some very, very odd people running around, aren't there?

Crocodile Paratroops Invade Russia!

Oh, sure, you think we're making this up, don't you? Hah! The Russian nuclear research town of Sarov isn't laughing. When it starts raining crocodiles on a busy street, there's not much to laugh about!

The one-metre (3.3-feet) caiman crocodile landed on a pavement after leaning too far out of the window of the apartment where it had lived for the last 15 years, the RIA Novosti news agency quoted an official with the local branch of the ministry as saying.

Frightened passers-by called the emergency services and rescuers managed to lasso the stunned animal and take it to a shelter for stray pets.

It was soon returned to its owner, unharmed apart from damage to one of its teeth, the official said.

It fell 12 stories and chipped a tooth? You know what this means, don't you? It was leading with its fangs. Well, that and that crocodiles are immune to the ill effects of the sudden stop at the end of a fall. We thought Poland had it bad with falling saint Bernards.

They Don’t Teach The Aeneid In Dutch Schools, Apparently

Laocoon, follow'd by a num'rous crowd,
Ran from the fort, and cried, from far, aloud:
‘O wretched countrymen! What fury reigns?
What more than madness has possess'd your brains?
Think you the Grecians from your coasts are gone?
And are Ulysses' arts no better known?
This hollow fabric either must inclose,
Within its blind recess, our secret foes;
Or 't is an engine rais'd above the town,
T' o'erlook the walls, and then to batter down.
Somewhat is sure design'd, by fraud or force:
Trust not their presents, nor admit the horse.’
(Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), Aeneid, Book 2)

One must presume that Dutch schools do not teach the story of the fall of Troy any longer. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Workers at a seaside drink stand saw something bobbing in the surf, so they fished it out of the water. Then, they brought it right to the drink stand. They never even questioned where it had come from. They just figured they had found a giant Lego man.

Workers at a drinks stall rescued the 2.5-metre (8-foot) tall model with a yellow head and blue torso.

"We saw something bobbing about in the sea and we decided to take it out of the water," said a stall worker. "It was a life-sized Lego toy."

A woman nearby added: "I saw the Lego toy floating towards the beach from the direction of England."

It is, of course, a Trojan Lego man. When darkness falls, the penguins will let themselves out and take over the town.

Pig-Biting Mad

Well, the Weekly World News is folding and the Washington Post is carrying it as straight news. Interesting times, indeed.

The Weekly World News was not one of those sleazy tabloids that cover tawdry celebrity scandals. It was a sleazy tabloid that covered events that seemed to occur in a parallel universe, a fevered dream world where pop culture mixed with urban legends, conspiracy theories and hallucinations. Maybe WWN played fast and loose with the facts, but somehow it captured the spirit of the age — and did it in headlines as perfect as haiku:

"DEAD ROCK STARS RETURN ON GHOST PLANE!"

"BLIND MAN REGAINS SIGHT AND DUMPS UGLY WIFE!"

The most creative newspaper in American history, the Weekly World News broke the story that Elvis faked his death and was living in Kalamazoo, Mich. It also broke the story that the lost continent of Atlantis was found near Buffalo. And the story that Hillary Clinton was having a love affair with P'lod, an alien with a foot-long tongue. And countless other incredible scoops.

None of these stories was, in a strictly technical sense, true, which explains why the Weekly World News never won a Pulitzer Prize. But in its glorious heyday in the late 1980s, the supermarket tabloid amazed and amused a million readers a week.

But that was then. Now, with circulation plunging below 90,000, American Media, which owns WWN, has pulled the plug. The Aug. 27 issue will be the last. After that, the Weekly World News will be as dead as Elvis, maybe deader.

But the Weekly World News also had headlines that may not have been made up:

"12 U.S. SENATORS ARE SPACE ALIENS!"

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have long suspected that to be the case. It's a rather long and quite amusing article. But, sadly, the WWN was no longer competitive in today's media world. The New Republic has a snazzier layout.

Waste Of Money

Venice is famous for many things. Such as floods, guys paddling people around in odd looking boats while singing, stinky canals, floods, interesting architecture and of course, floods. To try and prevent the floods the government has spent gazillions of dollars in flood control schemes. (This does nothing to help with the gondolier infestations, but you can't win them all.) But, sadly, it has all been for nothing. Sure, they can stop most of the flooding. But it won't matter. The pigeons are eating Venice.

Venice's architecture is under attack again from the city's pigeons, except this time their beaks are as much a problem as their droppings.

The birds are chipping away at the marble facades of St Mark's Cathedral in the celebrated main square of the lagoon city.

The pigeons peck at small gaps in city's statues and facades in order to reach scraps of bird seed and other food that have been blown inside, and as they do, the gaps increase in size, cracking the marble.

The damage caused from bird droppings was already well-known and has led to calls for the bird seed sellers of St Marks to be removed, though this caused outcry among the Italians and they have remained.

To keep the numbers down, contraceptive laced food is being left for the pigeons and gulls - but this is having little effect.

Ettore Vio, the architect responsible for the upkeep of buildings in Venice, said: "The problem came to light when we examined photographs of the statues and facades of buildings during restoration.

Once the pigeons finish devouring Venice, they'll take on Rome for dessert.

When The Circus Comes To Town….

….There are always klowns. Dennis Byrne reports on the lefty bloggers reactions to Hillary Clinton at the Koz Kidz Konfab.

When Clinton spoke the truth at the forum about lobbying practices in Washington, the crowd roundly booed her. Asked about taking campaign money from lobbyists, she pointed out that lobbyists "represent real Americans. They actually do. They represent nurses, they represent, you know, social workers. They represent–yes they represent corporations that employ a lot of people."

See, right there she stepped in it, not just on the lobbying thing, but acknowledging what the lefties don't want to hear: Corporations, for all their faults, do something good; they give people jobs.

Amid the boos, she might have added–if she could had been heard–that people make their livings representing them too. There are abortion industry lobbyists, twisting arms for "a woman's right to choose." Other lobbyists are prowling the halls of Congress on behalf 12 million illegal aliens yearning (we're told) for citizenship, universal health care, global (un)warming, family farmers, teachers–I could go on forever listing lobbyists who are excused or ignored by the left because they are doing it for "good causes."

John Edwards, one of the blogapalooza's favorites, thought he issued a stunning rebuke to Clinton by asking a rhetorical question of the crowd: "How many people in this room have a Washington lobbyist working for you?" If there were any seniors there, they could have responded: "AARP!" which is one of Washington's most powerful lobbies.

Yes, and how could I forget organized labor–from unions representing government workers who lobby for even bigger government and more jobs, to teachers, who have shackled public education with their job protections and lush retirement benefits, and don't forget the auto workers whose benefits have so weakened the American auto industry that, for the first time, more foreign cars are being sold in America than domestic ones. Organized labor's lobbyists are funded by workers who are forced to join unions to have a job and who automatically have money taken from their dues for political causes.

Clinton discovered what conservatives long have known: talking to lefties is like trying to talk to children. Rational argument and facts don't impress.

Byrne is rather sarcastic about the whole thing. But the fact is that Edwards and Obama, the heroes of the left, have taken money from lobbyists. There is more money in play in this election than ever before in American history. It is coming from somewhere, isn't it? And as much as the Koz Kidz like to preen about themselves, what campaign funds they are raising are only a drop in the bucket. There is big, big money involved here. It is being spent at an unbelievable rate, too.

Look For The Leftist Label

Jonah Goldberg takes on the subject of labels. He points out that the left is running away from the term 'liberal' and embracing 'progressive'. Both terms mean nothing of the sort, however.

Now, when the presumptive standard bearer of the Democratic Party and the political (and matrimonial) heir to the only Democratic president to be elected to two terms since Franklin Roosevelt says she's not a liberal, it's actually quite a big deal.

But first, do note how crafty Clinton is being. She makes it sound as though she's lamenting the unfair transformation of the word "liberal" from lover of individual freedom to champion of big government.

How, exactly, does Clinton think liberal came to mean "big government?" Could it have had something to do with her attempt to nationalize one-seventh of the U.S. economy under her health care plan, or maybe with her book, It Takes a Village, which suggests that the government intrude itself into every nook and cranny of our lives?

Clinton's answer taps into the common complaint on the left that the word "liberal" has fallen into disrepute not because of the policies of liberals, but thanks to the villainously cynical distortions of conservatives. "The greatest triumph that conservatives ever achieved," liberal columnist Clarence Page recently complained, "is to make liberals embarrassed to call themselves 'liberal.' "

Right. The failures of the Great Society, bussing, racial quotas, high taxes, the Vietnam War (both its beginning and end), Jimmy Carter's "malaise," the nuclear freeze movement, lax law enforcement, speech codes, abortion on demand, bilingual education and, of course, Michael Dukakis: We're expected to believe none of these things can be weighed against liberalism. Liberalism, after all, is never wrong. It must be those mustache-twirling henchmen Lee Atwater and Karl Rove who are to blame.

One might also ask, if Clinton laments how liberalism has become identified with big government, why it is she wants to revive the progressive label. After all, if liberal is a misnomer for statists, progressive represents a long-overdue return to truth in labeling. In Europe, after all, liberals are the free-market, small-government types. But in America, the same people came to be called conservatives in no small part because they were trying to conserve liberal ideas of limited government amid the riot of social engineering during the Progressive Era that Clinton is so nostalgic for.

As Goldberg points out, 'progressive' at one time came to mean 'Stalinist'. But it has been out of mainstream use for quite a while until the latest revival. But liberal or progressive, it is leftism.

Running The KGB Playbook

This is a stinging indictment of the tactics of the left. It comes from Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking foreign intelligence officer ever to defect to the West from the old Soviet bloc. He charges that the left in America today is running the old playbook of the KGB - discredit the American president at all costs. Which is what the Soviets paid leftists in the West to do during the Cold War.

Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels. For communists, only the leader counted, no matter the country, friend or foe. At home, they deified their own ruler–as to a certain extent still holds true in Russia. Abroad, they asserted that a fish starts smelling from the head, and they did everything in their power to make the head of the Free World stink.

The communist effort to generate hatred for the American president began soon after President Truman set up NATO and propelled the three Western occupation forces to unite their zones to form a new West German nation. We were tasked to take advantage of the reawakened patriotic feelings stirring in the European countries that had been subjugated by the Nazis, in order to shift their hatred for Hitler over into hatred for Truman–the leader of the new "occupation power." Western Europe was still grateful to the U.S. for having restored its freedom, but it had strong leftist movements that we secretly financed. They were like putty in our hands.

The European leftists, like any totalitarians, needed a tangible enemy, and we gave them one. In no time they began beating their drums decrying President Truman as the "butcher of Hiroshima." We went on to spend many years and many billions of dollars disparaging subsequent presidents: Eisenhower as a war-mongering "shark" run by the military-industrial complex, Johnson as a mafia boss who had bumped off his predecessor, Nixon as a petty tyrant, Ford as a dimwitted football player and Jimmy Carter as a bumbling peanut farmer. In 1978, when I left Romania for good, the bloc intelligence community had already collected 700 million signatures on a "Yankees-Go-Home" petition, at the same time launching the slogan "Europe for the Europeans."

This is harsh stuff. Pacepa is extremely grateful to the United States for giving him asylum and saving his life, but that does not lessen the impact of his words. He helped spread the propaganda, he helped funnel money to the left to do so. Read the whole thing. There are some truly frightening insights coming from this man.

UPDATE: Ouch. And a real video ouch.