Performance Artist Pyro At It Again

The same "performance artist" who faces charges for one arson has been caught again in San Francisco - this time trying to burn down a cathedral in San Francisco. Paul Addis was caught after setting fire to the effigy that is normally burned at the Burning Man Festival - only he did it several days before it was supposed to be lit. This time he was caught on the steps of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

Paul Addis was taken into custody on the top steps of the cathedral around 11:40 p.m. Sunday with an ammunition belt of small explosives strapped around his waist, said San Francisco police spokesman Sgt. Steve Mannina.

Police were tipped by a caller who said they overheard Addis talking about a plan to set fire to the church, Mannina said.

No fire was set and there was no damage to the Episcopal church, a French Gothic structure that sits atop the city's Nob Hill.

Addis was booked on five felony charges — attempted arson, possession of arson materials, possession of a destructive device, arson of a church, violation of a court order — and a misdemeanor for altering a firearm, according to the sheriff's department.

He remained in jail late Monday in lieu of $488,000 bail. A jail spokeswoman said she did not have any information on whether Addis had a lawyer.

Mannina said Addis is the same person who's facing arson charges in Nevada for allegedly setting fire to the Burning Man effigy in Nevada's Black Rock Desert days ahead of its scheduled burn.

In his booking photo, Addis was still wearing his red and black face paint from the desert event and sporting a wide smile, making the mug shot an instant Internet hit.

This guy has a real problem. This isn't art, it is a mental illness. He's a pyromaniac.

Shuttle Mission Extended One Day

NASA has extended the current shuttle mission by one day to allow additional inspections of the malfunctioning rotary joint on the International Space Station.

The work will delay Discovery's departure from the station to Monday from Sunday, a postponement that NASA said could carve a day out of the already slim six-day launch window for the next mission, when the shuttle Atlantis will fly the long-awaited Columbus laboratory to the station. That mission is targeted for launch on December 6.

For nearly two months, NASA has been aware of a potential problem with one of the station's massive rotary joints that spin the outpost's solar wing panels so they can track the sun and generate power.

But when spacewalker Dan Tani was dispatched on Sunday to investigate the problem during a spacewalk, he found shards of metal scrapings prevalent throughout the joint.

"I was quite sure there was something anomalous with the mechanism," Tani said on Monday during an in-flight interview.

He collected samples to return to Earth for analysis, but space station commander Peggy Whitson, a biochemist, conducted a preliminary experiment on Monday and discovered that the metal bits contained iron.

That was not good news. NASA had hoped the debris was coming from outside the joint, such as from one of the device's aluminum-lined thermal covers. Now engineers will be looking at parts of the rotary joint itself.

Not a good thing. The NASA website elaborates:

After analyzing photos of debris found inside the station’s starboard Solar Alpha Rotary Joint, mission managers decided to devote the mission’s fourth spacewalk Thursday to further inspection of the joint.

As a precursor to the additional rotary joint inspection spacewalk, Tuesday’s spacewalk by Mission Specialists Scott Parazynski and Doug Wheelock will include a short task to inspect the port rotary joint to provide comparison data to station managers who will spend the night developing procedures for the fourth spacewalk. All other tasks for the third spacewalk remain as trained with the focus being on installation of the P6 truss and solar array pair to its permanent location outboard of the port truss.

The crews completed final preparations for the P6 truss installation and continued outfitting and activation of avionics and systems racks inside the Harmony Node. Despite the shutdown of the Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly in the U.S. Destiny laboratory, work continues as normal with no interruption to operations with other means of carbon dioxide scrubbing equipment on board.

Something is grinding in that joint, obviously.

Ah-OOOOOOH! Werewolves Of Cardiff!

Apparently, the neighbors in Cathays, Cardiff over in Britain aren't used to some things. For example, a half-naked man sitting 15 feet up in a tree howling like a wolf at 6:30 in the morning.

A half-naked man sparked a major police operation this morning after climbing a tree and howling like a wolf at the top of his voice.

The man reportedly told angry neighbours "leave me alone, it's my tree'" when they confronted him about the noise at 6.30am.

As tempers frayed and local residents in Cathays, Cardiff shouted for him to be quiet, he retorted "that's a bit inappropriate", and refused to climb down.

A police van and ambulance were called and the surrounding road was closed off as trained negotiators attempted to talk him down.

But he remained seated - caked in mud and shoeless - on his branch 15 feet above the ground for nearly two hours.

Gee, like that's unusual or something. They ought to be around here when Uncle Guido gets into the moonshine.

Cute And Cuddly - With A Taste For Penguin Flesh

Photographer Paul Nicklen has managed to capture a series of images showing that all is not well in the ranks of the Animal Uprising™. It seems that the leopard seals have turned on the penguins. Oh, and they eat humans, too.

Between November and March, leopard seals wait in shallow water off major penguin breeding colonies.

Their aim is to capture newly fledged penguin birds who are going to sea for the first time.

The seals' teeth are fearsome weapons: front canines and incisors designed to capture and shred their prey's flesh - and back molars with sharp edges for grasping and cutting.

The creature's reputation took a dark turn in July 2003 when Kirsty Brown, a 28-year-old British marine biologist snorkelling off the Antarctic Peninsula, was grabbed by a leopard seal and pulled down into the icy waters.

She drowned despite her colleagues working for over an hour to revive her.

One presumes that a wetsuit-clad human looks an awful lot like a jumbo penguin to a leopard seal. (The last picture in the series is begging for a new caption.)

The Green Waldo

Well, I see he still is having a hissy fit. Today Greenwald is going off on the right wing blogosphere after Dread Pundit Bluto highlighted what got left out of Greenwald's original rant.

In fact, I'd say that Greenwald exceeds mere exaggeration and mischaracterization and flirts with outright lies in that section of his post. Colonel Boylan has not confirmed the authenticity of the letter, and the possibility remains that Greenwald, who has been alleged to use sock puppets in the past, might have faked it.

I hope the Colonel did write it, and, if he did, that he gets a commendation for it.

So what the hey, I'll just pile on, too.

Dog Shoots Man!

Forget that man bites dog stuff. This is serious. An Iowa man has been shot, point blank, by a pack of dogs. No, really, he was.

CHICAGO (AFP) - A pack of hunting dogs shot an Iowa man as he went to retrieve a fallen pheasant, authorities said.

James Harris, 37, was shot in the leg while hunting with some friends on Saturday afternoon.

The group shot a bird which landed on the other side of a fence, the Iowa Department of Natural Resource said in a press release.

"Harris reportedly went to retrieve the bird, placed his gun on the ground and crossed the fence near the muzzle end," the press release said.

"When he crossed the fence, hunting dogs stepped on the gun, which discharged and struck Harris in the left calf at a distance of roughly three feet."

The dogs have crossed over to the dark side. They are now joining the Animal Uprising™. Man's best friend becomes man's worst nightmare.

World’s Oldest Clam Discovered

A clam found in Icelandic waters has caused great excitement at the Bangor University's School of Ocean Sciences. Scientists are convinced that the clam was about 400 years old when it was found.

Can you imagine living for four centuries?  A team of scientists from Bangor University's School of Ocean Sciences believe they have found an animal which did just that, a quahog clam, Arctica islandica, which was living and growing on the seabed in the cold waters off the north coast of Iceland for around 400 years. 

When this animal was a juvenile, King James I replaced Queen Elizabeth I as English monarch, Shakespeare was writing his greatest plays Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth and Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for espousing the view that the Sun rather than the Earth was the centre of the universe. 

According to the Guinness Book of Records, the existing record for the longest-lived animal belongs to a 220 year old Arctica clam collected in 1982 from American waters.  Unofficially, the record belongs to a 374 year old Icelandic clam which was found in a museum.  Both these records appear to have been eclipsed by the latest specimen, whose age, between 405 and 410 years, has been assessed by counting the annual growth lines in the shell. 

The elderly mollusk (upper right) was universally declared to be delicious when steamed with white wine.

(Photo by _e.t)

Taking Bambi For A Ride

A woman from New Jersey was lucky enough to walk away from a collision with a deer that landed a six-point buck squarely in the front seat of her minivan.

MONROE — A township woman escaped injury after a large deer smashed through the front windshield of her minivan on North Radix Road near Mink Lane, township police said today.

The six-point buck was killed in the collision, which was reported at 8:59 a.m. Friday. The deer's carcass rested entirely on the front, passenger seat after the accident.

The driver, April Ruelan, 36, was able to stop her 1999 Ford Windstar without incident after the animal barreled through her window, police said.

Another attempted carjacking by the Animal Uprising™. Fortunately, the deer are even less bright than usual at this time of year. Football season does that to them.

Pack Up Your Troubles

Or, if not your troubles, how about your friends? A 19-year old woman in Germany has escaped a detention center, packed up inside another inmate's suitcase.

HANOVER, Germany (AFP) - A 19-year-old woman appears to have escaped from a juvenile detention centre in northwest Germany by hiding in the suitcase of a fellow inmate who was released, police said on Monday.

Guards at the facility in Neustadt remarked that the suitcase of the 18-year-old who walked free on Friday was particularly heavy but failed to search it, the police said.

Apparently, there is no IQ test for the position of guard at a German detention center. Authorities have been unable to locate either one of the women. Which means they're probably living next door to the center.

Things That Go Bump In Your Wallet

Benjamin Radford, LiveScience's very own bad science columnist, examines a new, relatively lucrative phenomenon: ghost tourism. He is, shall we say, less than complimentary.

Ghost tourism has boomed over the past decade, propelled by the public's interest in the mysterious and supernatural. There are hundreds of ghost tours offered across the country, from Hollywood ("Come see Haunted Hollywood and ghosts of the stars!") to New England ("Visit Boston's infamous haunted locales!").

Some places have more historical lore to draw upon than others. Salem, Massachusetts, for example, exploits its infamous witch trials of the 1690s, while tourists, goths, wannabe vampires, and Anne Rice fans flock to New Orleans, Louisiana, with its reputation for mysticism and voodoo.

Many tours tout their guides as "Certified Ghost Hunters" or "Certified Paranormal Investigators," though that's like claiming to be a "Certified Kitten Petter." For better or worse (usually worse), anyone can call himself or herself a ghost hunter; there is no accrediting institution, and "certifications" can be bought from online diploma mills for about $50.

Ghost tours can be a very lucrative business: It is a service with little overhead and start-up costs.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard know a worthwhile scam business opportunity when we see one! Therefore, we are accepting candidates for accreditation as certified paranormal investigators from the Professor Gaius Paranormality Research Academy and Coffee Shop®! That's right, for a mere $49.95 (bargain price!) we will certify you as a paranormal-type person with a minor in tour guiding. It's a license to mint money. Cash only, small bills with non-sequential serial numbers.

Fighting Fire With Fire

The Washington Post looks at the fires in southern California, what caused them and what helped mitigate them in places. Frankly, they blame the history of fighting fires as one of the prime causes of the extensive damage that fires are causing these days.

As much as they blame Santa Ana "devil winds" and record dryness, ecologists, climate researchers and firefighters say that the towering, uncontrollable conflagrations of the past week gorged themselves on huge stocks of natural fuel that were the result of a decades-old policy of fighting every blaze in sight, including small blazes that, left alone, would have burned themselves out.

Bill Patzert, a climatologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, acknowledged the paradox of the consensus he was about to state: "We fight too many fires."

But the drama of the past week also produced evidence of a man-made solution. Some houses that strictly adhered to fire-preventive building and landscaping rules survived the inferno, while nearby structures that paid less attention to those regulations went up in flames.

In northern San Diego County, residents of five newly built subdivisions expected to return to find heaps of ashes where their homes once stood. Maps and video showed that the Witch fire, the most destructive of all, had passed right through their neighborhoods.

"We were kind of in mourning," said Margi Schmidt, a resident.

Yet not one house burned. And the reason turned out to be less heroic then prosaic.

"I went and thanked a firefighter on my way back in here," Schmidt said, "and he said, 'It really wasn't that much work because you guys did the right things with your landscaping.' "

The terrain and vegetation in southern California should be the same as it is in northern Mexico: grass and chaparral should be pretty much all there is. But the insistence on fighting every fire has allowed decades of tinder dry vegetation to accumulate. Coupled with introduced trees like palms that literally explode in fires, the results are becoming more catastrophic with each event. New developments that adhere rigidly to fire control standards are proving that humans can find ways to cope with the arid environment. But it is going to take quite a bit of time - and money - to unravel the mess that years of firefighting has made.

Crazed Killer Cows KO Copper

An off-duty British police inspector took his dog for a walk on a footpath. A calm way to spend a bit of quality time with his pet turned into something completely different in a flash. A herd of cows decided they didn't like the inspector or his dog and attacked - with intent.

A police inspector walking his dog through a field suffered life-threatening injuries after he was trampled by a herd of cows.

Chris Poole, 50, had to be airlifted to hospital with broken ribs and a collapsed lung following the attack by the usually-docile animals.

"I worked on a farm when I was a youngster and always told people not to worry about cows and said they never attacked," he said yesterday. "Little did I know."

Mr Poole, who is married with a 16-year-old daughter, said he was with his golden retriever Zak on a designated footpath near his home in Brighton when the cattle became agitated.

"I had Zak on a lead but I think they were still bothered by his presence. Suddenly, one cow started mooing and then others began running towards me. There were about 50 of them.

Some were cows with calves but all were fully grown.

"We were surrounded but I wasn't scared at that point. I waved and shooed them away as they came close.

"They were focused on Zak and became more agitated as they got nearer and nearer.

"Then I felt this cow butt me hard in the back. I fell to the ground and let go of Zak's lead.

The cows very nearly killed Poole. Besides being badly injured during the incident, a few days later, while still in the hospital, a sliver of bone worked its way to an artery. Poole very nearly bled to death.

We really are not sure what it is with British animals and police officers. There appears to be a good deal of bad blood between them.

Its not just bad bacon, anymore. Now it's crazed cows.

Traveling For Treatment

The Daily Mail reports that record numbers of Britons are traveling abroad for medical treatment. This despite the fact that those people pay taxes - and quite a lot of them - for "free" health care.

Record numbers of Britons are travelling abroad for medical treatment to escape the NHS - with 70,000 patients expected to fly out this year.

And by the end of the decade 200,000 "health tourists" will fly as far as Malaysa and South Africa for major surgery to avoid long waiting lists and the rising threat of superbugs, according to a new report.

The first survey of Britons opting for treatment overseas shows that fears of hospital infections and frustration of often waiting months for operations are fuelling the increasing trend.

Patients needing major heart surgery, hip operations and cataracts are using the internet to book operations to be carried out thousands of miles away.

India is the most popular destination for surgery, followed by Hungary, Turkey, Germany, Malaysia, Poland and Spain. But dozens more countries are attracting health tourists.

Research by the Treatment Abroad website shows that Britons have travelled to 112 foreign hospitals, based in 48 countries, to find safe, affordable treatment.

Almost all of those who had received treatment abroad said they would do the same again, with patients pointing out that some hospitals in India had screening policies for the superbug MRSA that have yet to be introduced in this country.

Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, said the figures were a "terrible indictment" of government policies that were undermining the efforts of NHS staff to provide quality services.

What's interesting here is that people are avoiding the "free" health care if they can afford it. That speaks volumes about the socialized medical system in Briton - none of it good. I have pointed out many of the failings of the British NHS in earlier posts, regular readers know how bad the situation can get over there. Meanwhile, the left in this country continues to push for socialized medicine. So-called medical tourism also exists in the US, incidentally. In rather large numbers, according to AARP. But the drivers are completely different:

Cherkas is among an estimated 500,000 Americans treated abroad in 2006. As U.S. health care and insurance costs soar, more people are opting for medical and dental care in unfamiliar surroundings and thousands of miles from their families and doctors. "Medical tourism" has morphed in recent years from an obscure phenomenon into a global industry, fueled by the Internet, ease of travel, shorter wait times for appointments and greater international sharing of medical "best practices," says Karen H. Timmons, CEO of the Joint Commission International (JCI), the overseas arm of the nonprofit Joint Commission, which accredits U.S. health facilities.

Some U.S. companies and insurers, anxious to lower care costs, are driving the trend by urging employees to be treated in one of a growing number of countries that cater to foreign patients, among them India, Singapore, Hungary, South Africa, Dubai, Costa Rica and Brazil. Thailand remains a top destination, with Bumrungrad hospital alone treating 64,000 Americans last year—up 11 percent from 2005. Patients checked in for everything from hip repair and prostate operations to root canals and eye surgery.

Cost appears to be the main driver here. Some of the people profiled in the article have dropped health insurance and are opting to go overseas for medical procedures.

The Role Of Norman Bates Will Be Played By Charlie Rangel

Kevin Hassett, writing for Bloomberg, invokes the Hitchcock classic Psycho to describe Charles Rangel's 'mother of all tax hikes'.

For those of you wondering what the details of taxing the rich to pay for Democratic spending proposals might look like, Rangel, a close ally of Hillary Clinton, has provided a tour of the abyss. If the “mother of all reforms,'' as he calls his tax plan, had a name, it would be Mrs. Bates. But, unlike Norman's mother in the Alfred Hitchcock classic “Psycho,'' this lady is very much alive.

In terms of revenue, Rangel's reform would be the biggest tax increase in history. Compared to a baseline where President George W. Bush's tax cuts are extended and the dreaded alternative minimum tax isn't allowed to swallow millions of taxpayers whole, the bill raises taxes by a whopping $3.5 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the office of Representative Jim McCrery of Louisiana, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee.

To put that in perspective, that's about $2 trillion more than the 10-year cost of the Bush tax cuts enacted back in 2001.

But the revenue grab isn't the scariest part. That honor belongs to the increase in marginal tax rates, which is almost unfathomable in its scale. Rangel's main objective is to repeal the alternative minimum tax, which was originally designed to capture taxes from wealthy individuals but over the years has taken in more and more middle-income families.

If Rangel's monster becomes law and the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire, the tax rates for "the rich" will reach confiscatory levels. And the term "rich" is used very loosely. How high would the tax rates be? Really high:

To put that tax rate in perspective, after adjusting for state and local income taxes, it would be about 13 percentage points higher than the average of U.S. trading partners in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And it would give the U.S. the fourth-highest combined top marginal tax rate in the OECD, behind only Denmark, Sweden and France.

Hillary Clinton has already signaled that she will support these crippling tax laws. Remember the last time a Clinton was in office the largest tax hike in American history - and the first ever to be retroactive - was enacted. It looks like Hillary wants to claim the record for herself.

The Foulness Doctrine

John Fund profiles an effort by Indiana's Representative Mike Pence to permanently ban the "fairness doctrine". The left is pushing to have that assault on free speech reinstated, Pence is trying to drive a stake through its black heart once and for all.

It wasn't that hard for Indiana's Rep. Mike Pence to build media and congressional support for his Free Flow of Information Act, which would protect the confidentiality of contacts between reporters and sources. It passed the House this month by an overwhelming vote of 398-21. His next battle will be a lot harder–to permanently ban the Fairness Doctrine, the regulation many liberals are now actively trying to revive in an effort to silence their critics.

Until the FCC scrapped the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, it required broadcasters to provide equal time to all sides of "controversial" issues. In practice, this led to what Bill Monroe, a former host of NBC's "Meet the Press," called "timid, don't-rock-the-boat coverage." On radio, Newsweek's Howard Fineman notes, it "effectively kept partisan shows off the airwaves," so that in 1980 there were a mere 75 talk radio stations. Today there are 1,800.

But the Fairness Doctrine has always had fans in the corridors of power because it gave incumbents a way of muzzling their opponents. The Kennedy administration used it as a political weapon. Bill Ruder, Kennedy's assistant secretary of commerce, explained: "Our strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue." The Nixon administration similarly used the doctrine to torment left-wing broadcasters.

Democrats who have become "Fairness" mongers insist they simply want to restore civility and balance to the airwaves. Al Gore, in a typically overheated speech last year bemoaned "the destruction of [the] marketplace of ideas" which he blamed in part on the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, after which "Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves."

Pence easily got a one year ban through the House in June but the Democrat's leadership is telling its members that they must not sign on to Pence's permanent ban bill. The left's answer to talk radio is the perennially failing Air America. It has never managed to attract enough listeners to be successful. In straight competition in the marketplace of ideas the left cannot compete - hence their need for a tool to silence the opposition. Pence needs 18 Democrats to back his bill in order to bring it to the floor for a vote. If he cannot get those votes, it should be obvious what will be coming in 2009 if the Democrats win in 2008.