Glorious News, Comrades!

To: All Russian people

From: Head Fish Kisser

Close on heels of huge success of our one-way submersible submarine glorious Kursk, we are proud to announce our newest super-weapon. Unmatchable super vacuum bomb will strike fear into hearts of West. with unmatched environmental friendliness, said super bomb will hoover our enemies into submission. We are also soon to announce much-feared Nock gun which will strike more fear into our enemies. While super vacuum weapon is already greatly feared by West, our glorious scientifical type people already have plans to improve performances. There is always Roomba for improvement.

That is all, please to go back to procreating.

UPDATE: Who your daddy is?

The Truther Future

With abject apologies to Mary Katherine Ham who actually had to bear the presence of these jackals. My own take on the future of the 9/11 "truth" movement.

Bon Boot Appétit

Well, this should make you hungry. The Rockland County (New York) has hit a Chinese restaurant in Nanuet with two health code violations. It seems that a kitchen worker discovered a novel way of crushing the garlic. Oh, it was very effective, mind you. It just wasn't, you should excuse the term, quite kosher.

He was crushing the garlic by stomping it with his boots.

NANUET, N.Y. - Stomping on garlic with your shoes on is apparently not the correct way to prepare takeout food. The Rockland County health department hit the Great China Buffet restaurant with two violations after a patron took pictures of an employee who was wearing boots while stomping on a huge bowl of garlic in the alley outside.

Health inspectors went to the Chinese restaurant after an employee at a nearby store, Dan Barreto, alerted them to the unsanitary act, which he had recorded on his cell phone.

"I go back there, and the guy's stepping on garlic," said Barreto, who used to eat at the restaurant. "There he was just jumping up and down on it, smashing it up, having a good time."

The health department does not consider a person's shoe or boot a proper instrument to use in food preparation, senior public health sanitarian John Stoughton said Tuesday.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard are appalled that someone would be so unsanitary in the preparation of food. Boots are right out when preparing food around the Crabitat. We would never stoop to that level. We use these exclusively. They produce the perfect texture in the garlic.

Venezuelan Train Wreck

(T)Hugo Chavez is heading Venezuela right into an economic train wreck. Having artificially pegged the exchange rate in 2003, his currency is about to be forced into a massive devaluation. There already is a de facto devaluation of more than 50% on the illegal currency market, in fact.

“The pressures are there for bolivar devaluation,'' the New York-based bank said in a report by economists Tim Kearney and Emy Shayo, who didn't give a timetable for the event.

Under currency exchange restrictions introduced by Chavez, the bolivar was fixed at an official rate of 2,150 per dollar and trading outside the Foreign Exchange Administration Commission is banned.

Chavez plans to cut three zeros off the currency on Jan. 1. The currency in the so-called parallel market, in which companies and individuals obtain dollars illegally, is traded at around 4,820 bolivars per dollar.

Bear Stearns expects the nation's current account surplus to more than halve to $12.3 billion this year from $27.2 billion in 2006, partly because of a surge in capital outflows.

The drop in the currency in the parallel market “represents the overly easy monetary policy and a lack of confidence, which are unlikely to reverse at any point in the foreseeable future,'' both economists wrote.

It will be a fast and nasty collapse when Venezuela's economy hits the wall of reality.

Four-Wheel Independent Snake-spension

This will really help raise awareness about the Animal Uprising™. After all, Americans love their cars. But that could change. Because the reptile legions of the Animal Uprising™ have a new trick. They are disguising snakes as coil springs and putting them under people's cars!

DELAND — Take it from an animal control officer, still stinging on Monday from two bites from a 5-foot boa constrictor he helped remove from under a woman's car:

"Anybody who says they got bit by a snake and it didn't hurt is a liar," DeLand police Animal Control Officer Gary Thomas said in an interview.

Police were called to the parking lot behind the Daytona Pennysaver building on Woodland Boulevard about 10 a.m. Friday to remove the snake, which had entangled itself around the car's coil springs in the wheel well.

"Originally I was called about a diamondback rattler, so I called for police backup," Thomas said. "(Sworn officers) carry guns and Tasers. All I carry is a red leash."

The car's owner told Thomas she wouldn't get in the car until officers showed her the whole snake.

Though snakebites are unusual, two were reported in July in Osteen and Flagler County. Nearly all calls about snakes are the same — 5 feet long and brown with a diamond pattern — said Sgt. Chris Estes, a snake enthusiast who worked for the Central Florida Zoo years ago.

That isn't even the best part of the story, incidentally. The official report describing what happened when one of the two police officers dropped his end of the snake is the funny part:

According to Thomas' written report of the incident, "Officer Petrella proceeded to perform a dramatic ballet dance on his tiptoes as he demanded that Estes secure the front of the snake's body."

Now the next time you change a tire, you're going to be nervous, aren't you? That hissing may not be air leaking. Personally, we here at the Crabitat are looking into getting a flamethrower, just in case.

That isn't even the best part of the story, incidentally. The official report describing what happened when one of the two police officers dropped his end of the snake is the funny part:

According to Thomas' written report of the incident, "Officer Petrella proceeded to perform a dramatic ballet dance on his tiptoes as he demanded that Estes secure the front of the snake's body."

Now the next time you change a tire, you're going to be nervous, aren't you? That hissing may not be air leaking. Personally, we here at the Crabitat are looking into getting a flamethrower, just in case.

Stunted Souls

A few days back, I posted about the truly unhinged reaction a number of people in the Seattle area had when Seattle Seahawks quarterback Matt Hasselbeck had a picture taken with George W. Bush. Many of the reactions were, at best, deranged, at worst, hateful. So much for that liberal tolerance, eh?

One guy told him: "I hate you, I'll never wear your jersey, I'll never like the Seahawks again."

"Huh?" Hasselbeck thought. "Seriously?"

"Politics can be very mean and dirty," he said. "The things politicians say about each other, and what activists say, I had a brief glimpse of that for a couple of days.

"If I ever had any questions about whether I wanted to run for office, I now know the answer — I don't."

Best-selling author JA Jance happens to have a very personal story about Matt Hasselbeck that she posted over at her blog. It is, I think, very relevant.

At this time last year, things were pretty tough around here.  Our son-in-law, Jon, was in the University of Washington Hospital fighting through the last few months of his nine year battle with melanoma.  Jon was in the Coast Guard at the time he was first diagnosed and continued to work in and for the Coast Guard until he was no longer able to do so.

 Sometime during that long difficult time, a person whose name I don't know–a person with connections to both the Coasties and to the Seattle Seahawks–made arrangements for Seahawk quarterback, Matt Hasselbeck, to come visit Jon in his hospital room.  It was supposed to be a half-hour photo op type visit.  He stayed for two hours.  He brought along an autographed football and a pair of shoes–cleats–for Jon's son Colt to "grow into."  There were pictures.  Pictures of Matt with Jon, with Colt, with our daughter, Jeanne T., and with hospital nurses and doctors as well.  And there was talking–guy to guy talking about sports, about life, and also about faith.  Even from the waiting room across the hall, it was a very moving thing to witness.  Once Matt left, Jon was on a high that had nothing to do with his pain meds.  In a very dark time, that visit was a vivid splash of light. 

Go read the whole thing, because the story does not end there. Matt Hasselbeck has more grace, class and humanity than any - no, make that all - of the stunted souls who screeched and wailed about a photograph. Every last one of you who did so should be ashamed of yourselves.

The Sea May Burn

Well I started out down a dirty road
Started out all alone
And the sun went down as I crossed the hill
The town lit up the world got still

Im learning to fly but I ain't got wings
Comin down is the hardest thing

Well the good old days may not return
And the rocks might melt, and the sea may burn

Im learning to fly but I ain't got wings
Comin down is the hardest thing
(Tom Petty, Learning to Fly)

A Pennsylvania man has done something nobody has ever seen before. He has made seawater burn. And it burns hot enough to melt a few rocks, too.

For obvious reasons, scientists long have thought that salt water couldn't be burned.

So when an Erie man announced he'd ignited salt water with the radio-frequency generator he'd invented, some thought it a was a hoax.

John Kanzius, a Washington County native, tried to desalinate seawater with a generator he developed to treat cancer, and it caused a flash in the test tube.

Within days, he had the salt water in the test tube burning like a candle, as long as it was exposed to radio frequencies.

His discovery has spawned scientific interest in using the world's most abundant substance as clean fuel, among other uses.

Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist, held a demonstration last week at the university's Materials Research Laboratory in State College, to confirm what he'd witnessed weeks before in an Erie lab.

"It's true, it works," Dr. Roy said. "Everyone told me, 'Rustum, don't be fooled. He put electrodes in there.' "

But there are no electrodes and no gimmicks, he said.

Dr. Roy said the salt water isn't burning per se, despite appearances. The radio frequency actually weakens bonds holding together the constituents of salt water — sodium chloride, hydrogen and oxygen — and releases the hydrogen, which, once ignited, burns continuously when exposed to the RF energy field. Mr. Kanzius said an independent source measured the flame's temperature, which exceeds 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, reflecting an enormous energy output.

As such, Dr. Roy, a founding member of the Materials Research Laboratory and expert in water structure, said Mr. Kanzius' discovery represents "the most remarkable in water science in 100 years."

Dr. Roy cautions that this is still very early in the game, so to speak. The energy equations have yet to be worked out. (It is not known if it takes more energy to produce the reaction than is actually generated.) Much more research is needed before anything other than a really amazing parlor trick comes from this. But Mr. Kanzius has come up with something here that is worth looking into. Oddly, this is just a side note to his real purpose - cancer treatments using the radio frequency device he invented - which is apparently ongoing with papers being written about experiments.

The Perfect Alibi

In a bizarre case of real life imitating the internet, a new company will give French adulterers a perfect alibi to cover up their indiscretions. The company, headquartered in Belgium, is run by a former detective. She already has clients.

"You need to justify your absence to your entourage, to your relatives, for whatever reason. You are stifling in you family set-up and want to have a breather without creating discord. You want to experience a brief encounter without endangering your family life or your marriage," says the home page of alibila.com.

"We have a range of services," it goes on.

For 19 euros, the company will provide phone confirmation for a fictitious meeting.

Other schemes include providing false wedding invitations, postcards, seminar brochures or restaurant bills.

Geraldine, a driving instructor from south-west France, was desperate to get away for a night of passion with a former lover arriving from America after 10 years absence.

However, her husband is a "very strict man".

"I couldn't admit to him this sudden desire to see for one last time, this man who had made my heart beat so hard," she told Le Parisien.

So she contacted Alibilia and received a call from a fake student in desperate need of a driving lesson while watching television with her husband.

Most of the company's clientele are men.

We thought cheating offsets were a joke. We do, however, have one teensy question: an emergency driving lesson? You call that an alibi? Heck, for half that price we could come up with a better alibi than that involving a penguin, two space aliens, a badly disorganized sock drawer and a midget with a camera. Your significant other would be so confused, they'd never catch on.

Ebola Outbreak In Congo

The Congolese government has declared a quarantine around an area in southeastern Congo after reports that at least 167 people have died in an outbreak of Ebola. There is some confusion going on at the moment because it appears that other diseases are also hitting at the same time. This is complicating the response to the outbreak.

The United States' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a lab in Gabon confirmed the disease as a hemorrhagic fever, and specifically as Ebola, Health Minister Makwenge Kaput said on national television Monday. He did not provide further details.

According to WHO, five samples have tested positive for Ebola. About 40 more samples are pending.

At least 167 people have died in the affected region over about four months and nearly 400 have fallen ill, said Jean-Constatin Kanow, chief medical inspector for Congo's Kasai Oriental Province. Kinshasa, the capital, is 430 miles northwest of the area.

Some of the patients have improved after being given antibiotics, which would have no impact on Ebola, WHO experts said. The experts said that led them to suspect that shigella, a diarrhea-like disease, or typhoid has broken out in the same area. Symptoms for the three diseases are similar in early stages.

In the Congolese hospital where patients were being treated — a mud hut with a corrugated roof — patients are not being isolated. That means that patients who have shigella, which is not usually a fatal disease, might be mixed with Ebola patients, putting them at risk at catching the highly fatal fever.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on Ebola. Here is the official CDC page on the disease. This is one nasty virus.

“Destined To Be Rapid And Total”

Those are the words used to describe a new mathematical analysis of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers six years ago today. Dr Keith Seffen of Cambridge University performed the calculations to take a look at how a collapse could have been so rapid and so complete. Once the collapse began, there was no stopping it - and calculations show that it would only take nine seconds - about the same as a free fall from the top of the towers.

The study by a Cambridge University engineer demonstrates that once the collapse of the twin towers began, it was destined to be rapid and total.

One of many conspiracy theories proposes that the buildings came down in a manner consistent with a "controlled demolition".

The new data shows this is not needed to explain the way the towers fell.

Over 2,800 people were killed in the devastating attacks on New York.

After reviewing television footage of the Trade Center's destruction, engineers had proposed the idea of "progressive collapse" to explain the way the twin towers disintegrated on 11 September 2001.

This mode of structural failure describes the way the building fell straight down rather than toppling, with each successive floor crushing the one beneath (an effect called "pancaking").

Dr Keith Seffen set out to test mathematically whether this chain reaction really could explain what happened in Lower Manhattan six years ago. The findings are published in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics.

Previous studies have tended to focus on the initial stages of collapse, showing that there was an initial, localised failure around the aircraft impact zones, and that this probably led to the progressive collapse of both structures.

Ed Morrisey found this item and has this to say about it:

Will this convince the Truthers? Of course not. People who think that Galileo's great contribution to science was postulating the world was round have no real affinity for science or research, but instead for imaginary cabals, innuendo, and paranoia. The truth is out there — at Popular Mechanics, the Journal of Engineering Mechanics, and NIST. It's not in Alex Jones' world.

My own opinions on the "truthers" should be pretty well known by regular readers. There are people in that group who know full well that they are distorting facts, there are others who are easily led and there are the outright stupid. (And yes, that was fully intended to be as insulting as possible.) Collectively, the entire group wouldn't recognize the truth if it walked up and introduced itself.

As I pointed out to one of the drive-by truthers that visit every now and again, the "movement" is very proud of the 200 or so architects and engineers they list as believers. But those 200 or so out of a total employed workforce of 2,430,250 architects and engineers (according to these folks) isn't exactly a bragging point. (I only glanced through their lists but they seemed to have an awful lot of unemployed people on it.)

But, no. This analysis won't penetrate their little fantasy world where they are the brave and fearless heroes. The unscrupulous, mendacious ones will continue to make a living off the gullible ones. And they'll trumpet their echoes back and forth to one another endlessly, jostling for a place on the melted steely knoll with Rosie.

A Pint Will Remain A Pint

A while back, I posted about the "Metric Martyrs" group in Britain that had scored a victory against the imposition of the metric system in Britain. Had they not continued to force the issue, it would have become illegal to use the old imperial measures like the pint and the pound by 2008. Well, today they are back in the news with a complete victory. The EU will be passing a measure to leave the imperial units in place "until Kingdom come".

Brussels will today give up the fight to make Britain drop pints, pounds and miles.

The right of Britons to use imperial weights and measures will be enshrined in EU law under plans being announced by the European Commission.

Traditional measures will remain legal "until Kingdom come", the Commissioner responsible for the move told the Daily Mail last night.

The decision was hailed as a victory for the "metric martyrs" and campaigners who have refused to accept successive governments' attempts to abolish measurements dating back to the Middle Ages.

But the European Commission said it had acted merely to "get the Government out of a hole" and claimed it never targeted Britain's well-loved imperial system.

A directive published today will be put to the Council of Ministers to be approved by EU member states within the next few months.

It will confirm the UK's right to carry on using non-metric measures such as the pint, the mile, and pounds and ounces.

But shops and traders will have to stick to current rules which require those using Imperial weights and measures to show their equivalents in metric as well.

Good for them.

Gotta Love The British Press

The British Press is, if anything, even more infatuated with celebrities than their American counterparts. I regularly check out a number of British news sources and am always amazed at the front page play they give to a lot of people. If you want the latest celebrity dirt, that's usually a good place to start. One person the British media is utterly fascinated with is Posh Spice, aka Victoria Beckham. She's not only one of the Spice Girls, she's married to David Beckham, that guy who makes gobs of money kicking a little white ball around. Today, they have photos of Posh looking less than posh without her signature giant sunglasses.

Victoria Beckham once said her sunglasses 'hide a multitude of sins' — and now we can see why.

An immaculate-looking Posh swept through Los Angeles airport in her trademark giant shades and glossy pout, but looked somewhat put out when forced to remove them at passport control.

Posh removed the sunglasses to reveal her puffy, make-up-free eyes. Guess all that translantic travelling is taking a toll on the celebrity reknowned for her high-maintenance look.

The Daily Mail missed the really big news about that story, though. The bags under her eyes are by Gucci.

Lowering The Standards

The Opinion Journal takes a hard look at the new, lower standards the Democrats have for political discourse and find them lacking. MoveOn's McCarthy moment is only one manifestation of those new, abysmal standards. Instead of disagreements, debates, arguments or discussions over how to address issues the new standard is to call anyone opposing you a liar and halt all discourse.

In an editorial on Sunday, the New York Times, after saying that President Bush "isn't looking for the truth, only for ways to confound the public," asserted that "General Petraeus has his own credibility problems." We read this as an elision from George Bush, the oft-accused liar on WMD and all the rest, to David Petraeus, also a liar merely for serving in the chain of command. With this editorial, the Times establishes that the party line is no longer just "Bush lied," but anyone who says anything good about Iraq or our effort there is also lying. As such, the Times enables and ratifies MoveOn.org's rhetoric as common usage for Democrats.

Late last week, for instance, we heard it said of General Petraeus that, "He's made a number of statements over the years that have not proven to be factual." This was from Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate……..

…….Can this really be the new standard of political rhetoric across the Democratic Party? There was a time when the party's institutional elites, such as the Times, would have pulled it back from reducing politics to all or nothing. They would have blown the whistle on such accusations. Now they are leading the charge.

Under these new terms, public policy is no longer subject to debate, discussion and disagreement over competing views and interpretations. Instead, the opposition is reduced to the status of liar. Now the opposition is not merely wrong, but lacks legitimacy and political standing. The goal here is not to debate, but to destroy.

It isn't really a new strategy. But it certainly appears to be the new gold standard for the Democrats, led by the increasingly vicious hard left authoritarians (calling them 'liberal' is to mangle the language even further than it already is). One hopes that the American public sends the message that they are sick of this increasingly juvenile standard of politics.

A Sunny Day In September

I wrote this post last year to mark the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

On September 9th, 2001, I arrived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to attend a seminar at Lehigh University. The subject was improving coal power plant efficiency. I was there with two of the engineers who worked for me at the time. It seemed like the subject matter would be useful to us since we were always under pressure to make the plant run better. We got a rental car at the airport and drove into town, making a side trip up to the Lehigh campus, just to scope out where we would be going the next day.

I've always hated business travel, particularly trips that lasted a week, as this one would. I sleep badly in hotels for whatever reason. I wasn't really looking forward to the stay in Bethlehem even though I was looking forward to the seminar, if you understand what I'm saying. But it was a nice enough hotel, not the most expensive, but also not the cheapest. It did have a restaurant and a bar in it, always a plus when you really don't want to drive around a strange city.

On Monday, we attended the first day's session. Basically it ran 8 am to 4 pm every day except Friday when we'd end at noon. There was an enormous amount of material to go over, but the Lehigh professor who was teaching was actually quite good. The sessions were in a bright, airy room, with its own separate greeting area where a snack buffet was set up. The facility also had its own rest rooms, so it was a self-contained area. Like a little world of our own.

Tuesday was a bright, sunny fall day. The temperature was a little bit crisp in the morning, warming up to shirtsleeve temperature as the day passed. The leaves were just beginning to turn, showing the slight tinge that would shortly become the bright riot of color that marks autumn. We were in the seminar by 8 am, cocooned in our bright, airy and yet isolated area. So we never heard any of the news from 80 miles away for quite some time. We never left that little world of ours until after 11am. We didn't know the rest of the world had changed forever that morning.

Sometime after 11 am, we took a break and a few of us decided to walk around a bit. We went outside to enjoy the sunny, beautiful late morning. A young man ran past us and shouted that the World Trade Center had just collapsed, but he just kept running and we couldn't ask him anything. Another dazed looking young man walked by and we asked what was going on. He told us that airplanes had hit both towers and that both had collapsed a short time ago. We went in search of a television. And saw the endlessly repeating images one after another.

And the world changed. Just like that.

They closed the University for the afternoon (they did reopen it the next day). We couldn't leave Bethlehem, of course. There were no flights. So I called my boss, he said just stay and see what happened. We continued to attend the seminar for the rest of the week, but I honestly think that nobody actually learned anything. I can't remember a single thing from the rest of the sessions. By the end of the week, the airport still wasn't open. So we simply cut the last session of the seminar and drove the rental car all the way back to the Midwest with all the other heavy traffic on the interstates. We drove in shifts and went straight through.

MoveOn Does McCarthy

Gee, I wasn't the only one who saw the distinct resemblance in MoveOn's vicious smear attack on General David Petraeus and the downfall of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Boston Globe runs an op-ed today from Peter Feaver using the title "MoveOn's McCarthy Moment." Hugh Hewitt mentioned it yesterday in the LA Times, Dean Barnett saw the resemblance - but also points to a wider problem. Feaver hits MoveOn pretty hard today:

The MoveOn.org ad is vicious, and would garner comment even if it were merely one more primal scream in the coarse blogosphere debate over Iraq. But it is not an angry e-mail or blog entry. It is a deliberate attack on the senior Army commander, in a major daily newspaper, with the intention of destroying as much of his credibility as possible so that his military advice could be more easily rejected by antiwar members of Congress.

The attack was part of an elaborate effort to undermine public support for the Iraq war, and was foreshadowed by an unnamed Democratic senator who told a reporter, "No one wants to call [Petraeus] a liar on national TV . . . The expectation is that the outside groups will do this for us." The effort is funded by powerful special interests, and has all the trappings of a major political campaign.

Precisely because it is so vicious, so public, and so deliberate, the attack on Petraeus cannot be ignored by either side in the Iraq debate. Supporters of the war are duty-bound, like Joseph Welch, to rise and ask of war opponents, "Have you left no sense of decency?" Antiwar members of Congress, like Senator McCarthy's allies, are obliged to answer.

And we did - and the media took notice, too. The Democratic politicians know there is a real problem here, too. That's why they are bailing.