Mr. Sandman Sends Bubba A Dream

The New York Post has the story and the video.

During an appearance at the Convent Avenue Baptist Church in Harlem, the former president was caught nodding off.

Clinton was there during a service to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., while his wife was nearby at Abyssinian Baptist Church, where she was endorsed by its minister, Rev. Calvin Butts.

More from Sister Toldjah, Pirate's Cove, Jawa Report, Colossus of Rhodey, Ace, Big Dog, Riehl World View, Don Surber,

May The Force Be…… Something Or Other….

Last year I posted about a couple of Brits who were petitioning the United Nations to recognize their religion. Said religion being that of Jedi. Yes, Jedi. As in the George Lucas Star Wars movies Jedi. Well, a bit more than a year on and two bothers in Britain have opened their very own church of Jedi.

A Jedi "church" has been born in a galaxy far far away – North Wales.

The Holyhead chapter of the self-styled Jedi Church, which claims up to 400,000 members worldwide, has sprung up thanks to brothers Barney and Daniel Jones, both Star Wars obsessives.

The "church" is only one of a handful around the planet, said hairdresser Barney, 26, the Anglesey Order Minister, also known as Master Jonba Hehol.

"Some people think it will be quite interesting but lots of people will ridicule us because it seems quite nerdy but we've had a good reaction so far," he said.

"We think of it as proper lifestyle enhancement and it should be taken seriously – it can't be bad if it makes life better.

"We live normal day-to-day lives.

"We are trying to take away the humour of it all and bring more structure so people take it more seriously."

The "religion" was born as a result of a nationwide joke in the 2001 census when nearly 400,000 claimed their belief system was Jedi.

And now Barney and musician Daniel, 21 – or Master Morda Hehol, self-appointed UK "church" leader – are getting their new "religion" off the ground.

"It's serious," said Barney.

They have organized their religion around the teachings – and I am not making this up – of a movie prop.

"We will have teachings based on Yoda – the 900-year-old grand master – as well as readings, essays submitted, meditation and relaxation, visualisation and discuss healthy eating.

"Quite nerdy" doesn't quite describe it. "Seriously in need of a life" is closer.

Jobs Nobody Want

Reuters reports on a weird phenomenon: jobs for highly skilled machinists are going unfilled because American companies simply cannot find enough trained workers. These are relatively high wage manufacturing jobs that the companies are aggressively trying to fill. But they are having to turn down orders because there simply are not enough hands to do the work.

TRAFFORD, Pennsylvania (Reuters) – Only half the machines are running at precision parts maker Hamill Manufacturing, nestled in the Allegheny Mountains just east of Pittsburgh, once the booming center of the U.S. steel industry.
 
But the factory's overcapacity is the result not of a shortage of business — it has more orders than it can fill, despite a slowing U.S. economy — but because of a shortage of skilled workers.

"I'd hire 10 machinists right now if I could," said John Dalrymple, president of the company, which makes high-end parts for military helicopters and nuclear submarines. "That's eight to 10 percent of our workforce."

While millions of jobs making everything from textiles to steel have moved to new powerhouses like China in recent years, precision manufacturing remains a crucial niche in the United States, one that is overworked and chronically understaffed.

And, in a bad sign for the United States and its declining economic might, that shortage of skilled workers is likely to get worse as Baby Boomers retire — with no younger generation of manufacturing workers to take the baton.

"Our workforce is an aging workforce," said Chief Executive Jeff Kelly, whose father founded Hamill nearly 60 years ago. "There isn't a queue of people lining up to come into the industry."

Some 20 percent of small to medium-sized manufacturers — those with up to 2,000 workers — cited retaining or training employees as their No. 1 concern, according to a survey by the National Association of Manufacturers. The survey was carried out in 2007 but has not been published yet.

A separate study in 2005, the latest available, said 90 percent of manufacturers are suffering a moderate to severe shortage of qualified workers.

I have seen this exact thing myself. A shortage of skilled boilermakers, pipefitters and especially of riggers was a real problem recently in planning construction for a new power plant. Fewer and fewer young engineers entering the power industry is also a real problem that utilities have been trying to rectify for years now, so it is happening on the white collar side as well as on the blue collar. All of these are skilled fields requiring highly trained workers – and the jobs are very hard to fill. As the boomers retire, there is going to be a huge knowledge loss and we could see some serious problems fairly soon.

Glaciers And Volcanoes Don’t Mix

Except sometimes they do:

Another factor might be contributing to the thinning of some of the Antarctica's glaciers: volcanoes.

In an article published Sunday on the Web site of the journal Nature Geoscience, Hugh Corr and David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey report the identification of a layer of volcanic ash and glass shards frozen within an ice sheet in western Antarctica.

"This is the first time we have seen a volcano beneath the ice sheet punch a hole through the ice sheet" in Antarctica, Vaughan said.

Volcanic heat could still be melting ice to water and contributing to thinning and speeding up of the Pine Island glacier, which passes nearby, but Vaughan said he doubted that it could be affecting other glaciers in western Antarctica, which have also thinned in recent years. Most glaciologists, including Vaughan, say that warmer ocean water is the primary cause of thinning.

Volcanically, Antarctica is a fairly quiet place. But sometime around 325 B.C., the researchers said, a hidden and still active volcano erupted, puncturing several hundred yards of ice above it. Ash and shards from the volcano carried through the air and settled onto the surrounding landscape. That layer is now out of sight, hidden beneath the snows that fell during the next 2,300 years.

I caught another article on this last night that had a very interesting tidbit:

Corr and Vaughan used ice-penetrating radar to locate the volcano just west of the expansive Pine Island Glacier. Specifically, they detected a New Jersey-sized plot of ash at more than 8,000 square miles (20,700 square kilometers) beneath the ice.

The debris is a hallmark of an ancient eruption.

“The discovery of a ‘subglacial’ volcanic eruption from beneath the Antarctic ice sheet is unique in itself," Corr said. "But our techniques also allow us to put a date on the eruption, determine how powerful it was and map out the area where ash fell."

Scientists like Corr have used radar and other technologies to find other features, such as lakes, tucked beneath the Antarctic ice. Researchers also think that magma-heated rock beneath Greenland's massive ice sheet is accelerating its melting, but whether a volcano or just a pool of magma is responsible is still a matter of debate.

New Jersey sized ash field and volcanic activity in Western Antarctica. Claims that the Western ice sheets are melting. Possible magma related melting in Greenland. Claims that the Greenland ice sheets are melting.

Note a pattern there?

Deep Freeze

Temperatures have plummeted even further today as brutal arctic cold has swooped down into the United States.

PORTLAND, Maine – Temperatures dropped to breathtaking levels, well below zero, in extreme northern sections of Maine early Monday.
 
Thermometers registered 34 degrees Fahrenheit below zero at Van Buren, 27 below at Presque Isle and 26 below at Allagash, the National Weather Service reported.

In the northern Rockies, Butte, Mont., registered 32 below at 8 a.m. — with a wind chill of minus 47, the weather service said.

Washington, DC also got a small taste of how bitterly cold it has been, with temperatures registering more than 20° F below the norm.

Although it was nothing compared with the below-zero temperatures felt by football fans in Green Bay, Wis., the Washington region barely tipped 20 degrees yesterday afternoon. With winds of up to 25 mph, it felt even colder: 8 degrees at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport and 12 degrees at Reagan National Airport.

At Dulles International Airport, one of the colder spots in the Washington region, the windchill factor at midday was 6 degrees.

By 10 p.m., the temperature at National had dipped to 20 degrees, the lowest reading since March 8. The record low for the day at National is 2 below, set in 1985. The normal high for the day is 42, and the record high is 70 (set in 1951).

Accuweather is predicting more cold and quite a lot of lake effect snow. The temperatures will moderate somewhat but still remain dreadfully cold.

British MPs Warn That Biofuels Do More Harm Than Good

Close on the heels of the leak of a report by the European Union's own research organization that concludes that biofuels cause more harm than good, a committee of British parliamentarians has reached the same conclusion. They warn of skyrocketing food costs, rainforest destruction, damage to wildlife and negative impacts on water usage. Gee, you'd think they've been reading Blue Crab Boulevard.

Plans to promote "green" petrol and diesel made from crops will do the planet more harm than good and should be scrapped, a committee of MPs have said.

Their report accuses ministers and the EU of being "reckless" in subsidising fuels made from plants in the absence of international agreements to protect the tropical forests.

The Commons environmental audit select committee warns that growing crops such as wheat and sugar beet in Britain to make fuel would cause a rise in the price of food, and make it harder to meet targets on water quality and the conservation of birds, plants and animals.

The MPs say an immediate moratorium should be imposed on "expensive and inefficient" subsidies directed at "green" fuels.

Late to the party, but they finally made it. As the report points out, there are severe problems with the fixation on biofuels. Yet the true believers keep pimping it as salvation. Maybe the politicians are beginning to wake up to the bill of goods they are being sold, however.

British Home Secretary Afraid To Walk The Streets

There is quite a ruckus going on in Britain at the moment after the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, admitted that it is not safe to walk the streets after dark. Her aides then compounded an already bad situation by claiming she'd gone out for a kebab at night. Only it turned out to have happened during the day – and she had a bodyguard with her. Can you say laughingstock?

Jacqui Smith suffered a barrage of criticism yesterday after admitting she would not feel safe walking the streets after dark.

Opposition MPs said the Home Secretary had made an "admission of failure" to the millions of shift-workers who have no option but to brave the threat of violence.

Aides of Miss Smith compounded her gaffe with a desperate attempt to undo the damage by claiming she had recently popped out in the evening to "buy a kebab in Peckham".

In fact, she has round-the-clock police protection.

And the owner of the kebab shop in question told the Daily Mail yesterday that Miss Smith had been accompanied by a burly minder when she dropped in for a £3.90 doner (sic) last Wednesday – at teatime not late at night.

The Home Secretary made her admission in an interview at the end of a week when three teenage thugs were convicted of murdering father-of-three Garry Newlove, kicked to death outside his home.

Asked whether she would feel safe walking the streets of Hackney, one of the most deprived parts of London, she replied: "Well, no, but I don't think I'd have ever have done."

Asked why she would not feel safe on Hackney's streets at night, the Home Secretary replied: "Well, I just don't think that's a thing that people do, is it, really?"

She was also questioned about how she would feel if she was walking through the affluent area of Kensington and Chelsea after dark.

Miss Smith responded: "Well, I wouldn't walk around at midnight and I'm fortunate that I don't have to do that."

"Well, I just don't think that's a thing that people do, is it, really?" Translation: "Elite people like me don't have to walk about at night. That's only for the little people." You know, that comment from Smith perfectly illustrates the ruling elitist mindset that afflicts socialist thinking. They haven't a clue how people actually live.

Honestly, I suspect the Labor party will be shown the door at the next election.

When Bubba Attacks

Fred Barnes points out the extreme disadvantage Barack Obama is laboring under. He simply does not have an attack machine to match the power of Bill Clinton. Barnes calls it the Bubba factor.

When every candidate except Hillary wants to put out unfavorable information about an opponent and be sure to draw heavy press coverage, the candidate himself must handle the task. And there's a downside: the candidate is deplored for "going negative." But if an aide or supporter is assigned the task, the media is likely to yawn and the information the candidate wants to trumpet gets far less coverage.

But not in Bill Clinton's case. He's the one supporter of a candidate whose words are reported to the world under blazing headlines. Thus when he criticizes Obama on Iraq and other issues, as he did in New Hampshire, we hear about it. And when he scolds the press for giving Obama a free ride, we not only hear about it but the press takes the criticism seriously.

In Nevada, after two union endorsements of Obama put Hillary's expected victory in the Democratic caucuses in jeopardy, Bill waded in again. He denounced the way the caucuses were set up as undemocratic and unfair. Later, he repeated charges that Hillary voters were being threatened into voting for Obama. Once more, the coverage of Bill was big-time.

Bill Clinton does another thing for Hillary's campaign–respond to criticism of her. When her experience as a major White House player has been questioned, Bill has stepped in to defend her. He should know, right? He was president.

Barnes points out that Obama has no choice but to go head to head with Bill Clinton – something that has already begun.

ATLANTA – Illinois Sen. Barack Obama launched Sunday what his top aides described as a more aggressive bid to challenge “unbelievable falsehoods” pressed last week in Nevada by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Bill Clinton.

With Obama’s new strategy, the Democratic nomination fight took on a new contour: It’s Obama versus two Clintons, not just one. And the line of attack emerging from his second consecutive primary loss appears to be this: The Clintons are a couple whose words cannot always be trusted.

“You know the former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling,” Obama told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview taped Sunday and set to air Monday. “He continues to make statements that are not supported by the facts — whether it's about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq or our approach to organizing in Las Vegas. This has become a habit, and one of the things that we're gonna have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he's making statements that are not factually accurate.”

The very real danger is that the increasingly vicious Clinton attacks will fracture the Democrats. Obama, however, is caught here. He cannot continue to allow Bill Clinton a free pass on attacks but he risks damaging himself in the process of responding. Some heavyweight Democrats are trying to get Clinton to back off, as I pointed out in an earlier post. But it is unlikely that the Clintons will change the ruthless tactics that they are so familiar with.

Sex And The…. Airplane?

Some flight attendants in Thailand are upset with a television show that they say paints them in a bad light. The show, War of Angels, depicts the romantic hijinks of fictional flight attendants and pilots.

BANGKOK (AFP) – Thai flight attendants on Monday lodged a formal complaint against a TV company for airing a salacious soap opera portraying female cabin crew fighting for the affections of a pilot.
 
Krishnaratn Puranarasamriddhi, vice president of the Thai Airways labour union, said "War of Angels", which aired earlier this month on Channel Five, ignored all the important safety and customer service work carried out by flight attendants.

"It is exaggerated," he told AFP. "It portrays bad images of our crew and it violates the crew's dignity."

Well, we can see how they could be upset by all this negative publicity. After all, the flight attendants aren't Australian.

CANBERRA (Reuters) – Two in three Australian travellers are either members of the notorious Mile High Club or would like to be a member, a survey showed on Monday.
 
Asked if they would consider a mid-air sexual encounter, almost half of 1,110 people surveyed wanted an adventure, while 12 percent already had mile-high membership wings.

"People are obviously looking for more stimulating entertainment than a movie or a CD when travelling by plane," Totaltravel.com global marketing manager Paul Fisher said.

A flight attendant for Australia's flag carrier Qantas was sacked last year after claiming to have had a tryst with actor Ralph Fiennes in a business class lavatory during a flight from Darwin to Mumbai.

Singapore Airlines last November asked passengers on its new super jumbo Airbus A380 aircraft, which had its maiden commercial flight from Singapore to Sydney, not to seek Mile High Club membership in first class cabins, which boast a double bed.

Does Boeing offer an optional condom dispenser for their aircraft?

Udder Stupidity

(T)Hugo Chavez is threatening to send in the army to seize farms at gunpoint unless farmers sell all their milk to the government. He calls farmers who sell their milk outside Venezuela or to cheese producers "traitors."

With the country recently facing milk shortages, Chavez said "it's treason" if farmers deny milk to Venezuelans while selling it across the border in Colombia or for gourmet cheeses.

"In that case the farm must be expropriated," Chavez said, adding that the government could also take over milk plants and properties of beef producers.

"I'm putting you on alert," Chavez said. "If there's a producer that refuses to sell the product … and sells it at a higher price abroad … ministers, find me the proof so it can be expropriated."

Addressing his Cabinet, he said: "If the army must be brought in, you bring in the army."

Chavez issued the warning on his weekly broadcast program "Hello President" after announcing a hike in milk prices, a measure intended to counter recent shortages.

Of course, there is one small problem with Chavez's logic. The price controls set by his government are the real culprit in the food shortages. This has actually been going on for a while with many staple foods in short supply. Chavez has been blaming hoarders and profiteers for all this. The fact is that people do not produce a product then sell it for less than it cost to make just because the government says it must. Another lesson in why socialism simply does not work.