A lot of the blogosphere today has been focused on Hillary Clinton's Meet the Press interview. But they have mostly focused on the growing racial antipathy between Clinton and Barack Obama. Jim Hoft over at Gateway Pundit notices another aspect of Clinton's appearance: her trying to grab credit for the success of the surge in Iraq that she opposed.
Politics, War | Gaius Sunday, 13 January , 2008 | 
Comments (5)
A Pennsylvania man had to shoot a bobcat that was indulging in the sport of bobbing for goats. Or bob-catting for goats, as the case may be. Jesse Stuver was alerted by a neighbor that a bobcat was munching on one of his pet goats, grabbed a pistol and went out to dispatch the predator.
“My neighbor ran inside and yelled that a bobcat is attacking one of my goats,” he said. “I got my pistol and ran outside.”
When he got outside, his neighbor told him the bobcat was in the barn. The bobcat was on the back of his mother goat. The rest of his herd, including one of the mother’s babies, were hiding in the corner of the fence outside the barn.
“The bobcat was standing 6 to 8 feet away, growling,” he said. “The growl sounds like a dog growl, not like a mountain lion.”
When he entered the barn, the female bobcat, which he estimates weighed between 45 to 50 pounds, was biting the goat.
“I shot the bobcat and killed it,” he said.
Bobcats are pretty rare in that part of Pennsylvania. I think I mentioned this once, but I was sitting out on my front step with a cup of coffee a few years ago, enjoying the sunrise, when I saw something moving across my neighbor's yard. After a few moments I realized it was a bobcat. It padded across the yard, looked at me for a moment from across the road, then wandered off, heading south down the road.
Now I wonder if it was scouting for goats.
Animals | Gaius | Comments (3)
As the AFP report puts it, this would make the fictional Dr. Frankenstein quite jealous. American researchers have essentially made a brand new animal heart out of the stripped down remains of a once living heart. And they have made that sucker beat as well.
If extended to humans, the procedure could provide an almost limitless supply of hearts, and possibly other organs, to millions of terminally ill people waiting helplessly for a new lease on life.
Approximately 50,000 patients in the United States alone die every year for lack of a donor heart, and some 22 million people worldwide are living with the threat of heart failure.
"The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells," said lead researcher Doris Taylor, director of the Center or Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota.
While there have been advances in generating living heart tissue in the lab, this is the first time an entire, three-dimension bio-artificial heart has been brought to life.
The core procedure making this possible is called decellularisation.
In this process, all the cells from an organ — in this case the heart of a dead rat — are stripped away using powerful detergents, leaving only a bleached-white scaffolding composed of proteins secreted by the cells.
In the experiments, this matrix was then injected with a mixture of cells taken from newborn rat hearts and placed in a sterile lab setting, where the scientists hoped it would grow.
After only four days, contractions started, and on the eighth day, the hearts were pumping, according to the study, published in the British journal Nature Medicine.
It is a long first step toward truly cloned organs, from the sound of it. If they can get to that point, there would theoretically be no chance of organ rejection. This is only a first step, the new heart only worked at about 2% of the efficiency of a normal rat heart. But it is a step in in interesting direction.
The followers of Ned Ludd are alive and well. And they wear green. Jeremy Clarkson describes the antics of the environmentalists in Britain this week in today's Sunday Times.
A couple of weeks ago, plans for a wonderful new coal-fired power station in Kent were given the green light and I was very pleased.
This will reduce our dependency on Vladimir’s gas and Osama’s oil and, as a bonus, new technology being developed to burn the coal more efficiently will be exported to China and exchanged for plastic novelty items to make our lives a little brighter.
It’s all just too excellent for words, but of course galloping into the limelight came a small army of communists and hippies who were waving their arms around and saying that coal was the fuel of Satan and that when the new power station opened, small people like Richard Hammond would immediately be drowned by a rampaging tidal swell.
They argued with much gusto that if Britain was to stand any chance of meeting Mr Prescott’s Kyoto climate change targets then we must build power stations that produced no carbon emissions at all.
You’d imagine then that last week, when Gordon Brown announced plans for a herd of new nuclear power stations, they’d have been delighted. Quiet power made by witchcraft, and no emissions at all. It’s enough, you might imagine, to make Jonathon Porritt priapic with pleasure.
But no. It turns out the eco-mentalists don’t like nuclear power either for lots of reasons, all of them stupid. They worry about what would happen if a reactor blew up. Which is a bit like worrying about living in a house in case a giant meteorite lands on it. They claim that people who go within five miles of a reactor die of leukaemia instantly. (They don’t.) They wonder where the plants will be built. (Wales?) And they ask what we will do with the waste. Simple. Put it in the Rainbow Warrior.
The fact of the matter is this. The decision to go nuclear has exposed the whole environmental cause for what it is: not a well intentioned drive for clean power but a spiteful, mean-spirited drive for less power. Because less power hits richer countries and richer people the hardest.
That about wraps it up. Without energy, the West will collapse. Which appears to be exactly what the extremists are pushing for. Having worked in the nuclear energy field, I know just how safe and clean those plants really are. One can also point to France where their energy needs are filled primarily by nuclear power plants and where they safely recycle used fuel to create more fuel. As Clarkson points out, the Luddites are only in favor of energy production that doesn't work - and never can, the laws of physics being what they are.
Timothy Noah, a senior writer at Slate, pens an op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times that analyzes a word that has become increasingly popular with politicians while simultaneously losing all real meaning. He says that it is time for a change: politicians should stop using the word 'change.'
In 1960, John F. Kennedy promised change from the Eisenhower years with the slogan "Let's get America moving again," but he didn't use the word itself. In 1976, Jimmy Carter offered the slogan "A leader, for a change." Bland as these slogans were, by today's standards they would be too substantive. In the current environment, a candidate who promised to get the country "moving again" might invite attacks that he favored big government, while a candidate who promised leadership "for a change"( i.e., as opposed to the incumbent) might get tut-tutted by the media for stooping to negative campaigning. Even "Let's make America great again," Ronald Reagan's slogan in 1980, would likely prove insufficiently anodyne today because of its militaristic overtones.
All of these candidates campaigned for change, but none fetishized the word "change." That began to, um, change in 1988, the year Michael Dukakis announced in his race against Vice President George H.W. Bush that "I want to be a force for positive change." "We are the change," answered President Reagan at that year's GOP convention. The counter-slogan proved such a success that Reagan repeated it at the 1992 convention.
That time, though, it didn't work, because Bill Clinton had made himself Mr. Change. Clinton uttered the word 10 times in his nomination speech, which was as many times as he uttered the better-remembered word, "hope" (as in, "I still believe in a place called Hope"). "It's time to change America," Clinton said. "Our people are pleading for change," he elaborated. "We've got to change the way government does business," he continued. "How do I know we can come together and make change happen? Because I have seen it in my own state," he concluded.
A LexisNexis database search tells the story. The phrases "change agent" and "candidate of change" turned up in news sources 50 and 70 times, respectively, in 1988. By 1992, they turned up 483 and 557 times. A cliche was born. A similar search for 2008 shows the phrases turning up 217 and 300 times — and that's only two weeks into the year. On an annualized basis, that's 5,642 and 7,800 times, respectively.
Obsession with the word "change" is at least partly a consequence of the decline in Democratic Party affiliation between 1977, when 48% of Americans self-identified as Democrats, and 1987, when only 38% did. Since then, party affiliation for Democrats and Republicans has hovered between 30% and 40%. As a result, in presidential years the two parties have ended up competing fiercely for the votes of political independents.
Noah rather dryly points out that not all change is particularly good. Pol Pot was an "agent of change." So were a lot of very bad historical figures. But it has become a mystical word of late with virtually every candidate promising to "change" something. It has been flogged into a meaningless, feel-good word that holds out limitless hope with no real content whatsoever.
Noah's quite right, it really is time for something different (let's not call it change). Like maybe it is time for the people running for the highest office in the land to explain what - and how - they plan to make things better.
That would be a change, indeed.
Charming news today. Older computer users are going to remember, not fondly, the old MS-DOS boot sector viruses that used to be fairly common. Newer users may not have even heard of them, as they haven't really been in use for some time now. Guess what? They're baaaack.
The malware, called Trojan.Mebroot by Symantec, installs itself on the first part of the computer's hard drive to be read on startup, then makes changes to the Windows kernel, making it hard for security software to detect it.
Criminals have been installing Trojan.Mebroot, known as a master boot record rootkit, since mid-December, and were able to infect nearly 5,000 users in two separate attacks, staged on Dec. 12 and Dec. 19, according to Verisign's iDefense Intelligence Team. In order to install the software on a victim's computer, attackers first lure them to a compromised Web site, which then launches a variety of attacks against the victim's computer in hopes of finding a way to run the rootkit code on the PC.
Once installed, the malware gives attackers control over the victim's machine.
The group behind this latest rootkit is the same one responsible for the Torpig Trojan, and it is believed to have already installed more than 250,000 Trojan programs, iDefense said in a report on the rootkit published Monday.
The interesting thing about Trojan.Mebroot is that it installs itself on the master boot record (MBR). This is the first sector of the computer's hard drive and it is the place the computer goes to first whenever it wants to boot up the operating system. "Basically, if you can control the MBR, you can control the operating system and therefore the computer it resides on," wrote Symantec researcher Elia Florio in a blog posting on Trojan.Mebroot.
This, coming at the same time as a MySpace hack has been exposed, isn't really great news.
Using a hacked MySpace profile, online criminals are trying to trick victims into downloading a malicious Trojan Horse program by disguising it as a Microsoft update, according to researchers at security vendor McAfee.
The attack is certainly not widespread– McAfee has seen it used on only one MySpace profile– but it does show how sites such as MySpace can be abused by criminals.
Web surfers are presented with what appears to be a popup window advising them to download the latest version of Microsoft's Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, which was just released this Tuesday. This software is distributed by Microsoft to help Windows users rid their systems of malware.
In reality, the popup window is just part of a larger image that takes up most of the computer screen. If the user clicks anywhere on this image, his computer will then begin to download the Trojan program.
Wonderful. If you're not keeping your security and operating system updates current, you're likely to be - or soon become - part of the problem. Do yourself and everyone else a favor and make sure you are up-to-date on all the software you are using. If you can't be bothered to run updates for Windows, turn on the automatic feature. Please. My AV software howls like a banshee if it is only a day or so out of date on updates (I use Kaspersky).
Fluffy now has a permanent home in Columbus, Ohio. She'll be dining on a couple of rabbits each week and entertaining visitors to the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium on a permanent basis - up until now she was merely visiting. Fluffy is billed as the largest python in captivity, by the way.
The zoo paid $35,000 to the snake's breeder in Oklahoma to keep the reticulated python on permanent display. While on loan last year, the python helped draw 1.53 million visitors, just under the zoo's attendance record of 1.56 million set in 2006, said Pete Fingerhut, the zoo's associate director.
Fluffy is about as long as a moving van and thick as a telephone pole.
Bob Clark, the breeder from Oklahoma City who raised the python from a hatchling, initially resisted the zoo's purchase offer but said he's happy with the outcome.
"I really love that snake; I think it's a special animal," he said. "It's so big and tame and wonderful. But I have to deal with the realities of life like everyone else. I like to have the money, and I know she's got a great place to live there."
The Columbus Zoo doesn't buy animals very often, said Executive Director Jerry Borin. Its animals generally come as exchanges from other zoos or through breeding loans or donations, he said.
We strongly encourage the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium to keep a very careful count of zookeepers and visitors. And make sure that the snakes doesn't suddenly develop an overly large bulge in her physique. They should also be aware that snakes named Fluffy have a history of jailbreaks.
Animals | Gaius | Comments (1)
Argentina's main airport in Buenos Aires was the scene of a riot after the national airline canceled international flights for the second day in a row. The would-be passengers tore the place up pretty badly and hurled objects at airline staff. (The report does not mention any injuries.) The reason for the flight cancellations is a walkout by baggage handlers and ticket agents over wages.
Television images showed damaged ticket counters and broken glass in the main hall of the Aerolineas Argentinas terminal, where passengers angry at delays caused by a baggage handlers strike and a walkout by ticket counter workers shouted down an Aerolineas Argentinas employee and threw objects at him.
The strike for higher wages had sparked delays at the airport in a Buenos Aires suburb since Friday. Several thousand passengers were stranded when Aerolineas Argentinas canceled its flights abroad, according to local media. Phone calls to the airline and airport company went unanswered on Saturday.
The angry mob expresses outrage that airline officials won't show their faces at the airport. Given the flying objects, it really isn't hard to understand why the officials are choosing not to.
This is an ugly story. The New York Times generates a blatantly slanted story attempting to paint war veterans as damaged, defective murderers just waiting to be unleashed on an unwitting America. They cherry pick the stories of some 121 "killings" committed by "combat veterans" - although they really do not explain the criteria they used for making those choices. They then spin this into a tale of damaged, traumatized people rampaging across the country. There is no context at all, just the stark telling of 121 killings - all blamed on military service. Armed Liberal tries to give some of the context that the Times is unable to manage.
And we're presented with a litany of tragedy.
But as usual, I keep asking the simple question - well, what does it mean? How do these 121 murderers compare with the base rate of murderers in the population?
And the answer appears to be damn well.
The only reference I could find for the number of troops who have served in combat areas was at GlobalSecurity.com, citing a Salon article:
Three and a half years have passed since U.S. bombs started falling in Afghanistan, and ever since then, the U.S. military has been engaged in combat overseas. What most Americans are probably unaware of, however, is just how many American soldiers have been deployed. Well over 1 million U.S. troops have fought in the wars since Sept. 11, 2001, according to Pentagon data released to Salon. As of Jan. 31, 2005, the exact figure was 1,048,884, approximately one-third the number of troops ever stationed in or around Vietnam during 15 years of that conflict.
From the October 1, 2001 start of the Afghanistan war, that's about 26,000 troops/month. To date (Jan 2008) that would give about 1.99 million.
That means that the NY Times 121 murders represent about a 7.08/100,000 rate.
Now the numbers on deployed troops are probably high - fewer troops from 2001 - 2003; I'd love a better number if someone has it.
But for initial purposes, let's call the rate 10/100,000, about 40% higher than the calculated one.
Now, how does that compare with the population as a whole?
Turning to the DoJ statistics, we see that the US offender rate for homicide in the 18 - 24 yo range is 26.5/100,000.For 25 - 34, it's 13.5/100,000.
I'll point out that there are some 1.4 million active duty military personnel and about 1.3 million more in the reserves and National Guard. There are also some 26.4 million veterans of the US armed forces in this country. Bruce Kesler, who has had to deal with the smearing media since Vietnam says this:
Yet, the New York Times could not find words to put the 121 cases of physical violence by vets in full perspective. For example, these 121 are a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of the hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. This post does some quick calculations to come up with a smaller rate of homicides than among the civilian population.
The NYT’s does offer this: “The Times used the same methods to research homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans for the six years before and after the present wartime period began with the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.
This showed an 89 percent increase during the present wartime period, to 349 cases from 184, about three-quarters of which involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. The increase occurred even though there have been fewer troops stationed in the United States in the last six years and the American homicide rate has been, on average, lower.”To which the Pentagon offers this:” Colonel Melnyk questioned the validity of comparing prewar and wartime numbers based on news media reports, saying that the current increase might be explained by “an increase in awareness of military service by reporters since 9/11.” He also questioned the value of “lumping together different crimes such as involuntary manslaughter with first-degree homicide.” I'm sure the Pentagon had more to say, much of it unpublishable for polite company.
In short, the NYT’s has no serious methodology but a serious agenda.
Amen. This is trying to tag returning veterans with a "defective" label, just as they did to returning Vietnam veterans. Yes, the killings are tragic, but it is just wrong to try and forward an agenda by exploiting those killings this way. And it is criminal to try to smear all service members and veterans in this way. (Oh, the NYT hatchet job is here, by the way.)
Media | Gaius | Comments (14)
There is something supremely ironic about Hillary Clinton bemoaning the "disenfranchisement" of people in Nevada due to the cumbersome caucus system in public while her surrogates are working desperately to disenfranchise members of a union that endorsed Obama. Yet that is precisely what is going on in Nevada right at this moment. (I posted about this last night.) Today, the Washington Post explains exactly why the effort is being made. The article also, as I predicted, points out that the union membership is largely made up of Hispanic voters. And the union leadership expects every member to follow the leadership's advice on who to choose in the caucuses.
Clinton raised questions about the caucus process when she campaigned here Thursday. Repeating an argument she made after she lost the Iowa caucuses, she said caucuses provide only a "limited period of time" for participation, as opposed to day-long primaries. "People who work during that [caucus] time, they're disenfranchised," she told reporters.
State party officials counter that the sites in the casinos are specifically designed to meet the objections raised by Clinton and to allow more people to participate in the notoriously cumbersome caucus process.
The casino caucuses are open to any shift worker, including cab drivers and employees at nonunion casinos, who is on duty midday Saturday within a 2 1/2 mile radius of the nine sites. They must present identification showing that they work on or near Las Vegas Boulevard, the Strip's official name. However, the logistical reality of Las Vegas — where mega-casinos can be half a mile long and the Strip is clogged with cabs hustling gamblers around town — is that it will be very difficult for workers in nonunion casinos to take the time to walk or drive to the caucus sites.
Culinary officials have been prepping their union's members on caucus rules — the doors close promptly at noon, and no late attendance, for example — at meetings for months. Although their endorsement of Obama came late, they predict a near-united front for him, adhering to the labor movement's notion that division weakens a union's hand, whether in contract bargaining or politics.
"We believe that everyone has the ability to choose on their own, but normally we all try to stick together," said Jennifer Grote, 44, who works in food service at the Paris hotel-casino and will serve as a caucus captain on Election Day.
"You cannot divide union workers," added Leain Vashon, a bell captain at the Paris.
Oh, and the people who are now suing on Clinton's behalf? They made no objection to the process they are now suing over when the rules were put in place. In fact, they were right there at the meeting where the rules were set. But at that point, Hillary was supposed to be the inevitable candidate, of course.
Minutes from the meeting last March when the state Democratic committee approved the caucus process show that several of the parties to the suit were there and approved of the process.
Time to update Benjamin Disraeli's famous saying. There are hypocrites, damned hypocrites and then there are Clintonistas.
Our Founder
