Tunes For Nuclear Workers

As someone who has spent a large part of his career in the nuclear energy field, I can assure you that this video is brilliant. The industry has been trying, for years now, to keep radiation dose to workers to an absolute minimum. It's known by the acronym ALARA or As Low As Reasonably Achievable. The training for this, however, has been less than scintillating. Oh, it is absolutely factual, perfectly correct and transmits all the information a worker needs - but you can't dance to it. Well now, rad workers can:

Okay, I know most people won't know what the heck they are talking about, but to an insider, it's spot on accurate. (An RWP is a Radiation Work Permit, by the way). We tend to be overly acronymic in the nuclear power field.

Howard Dean Defines “Opportunist”

For your edification, "Screaming" Howard Dean has provided a handy definition of the word 'opportunist':

While we honor McCain's military service, the fact is Americans want a real leader who offers real solutions, not a blatant opportunist who doesn't understand the economy and is promising to keep our troops in Iraq for 100 years."

From Wikipedia:

John McCain's capture and imprisonment began on October 26, 1967. He was flying his twenty-third bombing mission over North Vietnam, when his A-4E Skyhawk was shot down by a Soviet-made SA-2 anti-aircraft missile over Hanoi.[34][35][36][37] McCain fractured both arms and a leg,[38] and then nearly drowned when he parachuted into Truc Bach Lake in Hanoi.[34] After he regained consciousness, a mob gathered around, spat on him, kicked him, and stripped him of his clothes.[39] Others crushed his shoulder with the butt of a rifle and bayoneted him in his left foot and abdominal area; he was then transported to Hanoi's main Hoa Loa Prison, nicknamed the "Hanoi Hilton" by American POWs.[39][40]

Although McCain was badly wounded, his captors refused to give him medical care unless he gave them military information, beating and interrogating him.[39] Only when the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a top admiral did they give him medical care[39] and announced his capture. His status as a POW made the front pages of The New York Times[41] and The Washington Post.[42]

McCain spent six weeks in the Hoa Loa hospital, receiving marginal care.[34] Now having lost 50 pounds, in a chest cast, and with his hair turned white,[34] McCain was sent to a different camp on the outskirts of Hanoi[43] in December 1967, into a cell with two other Americans who did not expect him to live a week; they nursed McCain and kept him alive.[44] In March 1968, McCain was put into solitary confinement, where he would remain for two years.[39]

In July 1968, McCain's father was named commander of all U.S. forces in the Vietnam theater.[2] McCain was immediately offered a chance to return home early:[34] The North Vietnamese wanted a worldwide propaganda coup by appearing merciful, and also wanted to show other POWs that elites like McCain were willing to be treated preferentially.[39] McCain turned down the offer of repatriation; he would only accept the offer if every man taken in before him was released as well.[45] McCain's refusal to be released was even remarked upon by North Vietnamese senior negotiator Le Duc Tho to U.S. envoy Averell Harriman during the ongoing Paris Peace Talks.[46]

In August of 1968, a program of severe torture methods began on McCain, using rope bindings into painful positions, and beatings every two hours, at the same time as he was suffering from dysentery.[39][34] McCain made an anti-American propaganda "confession" that said he was a "black criminal" and an "air pirate".[34] He has always felt that his statement was dishonorable,[48] but as he would later write, "I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine."[39] His injuries left him permanently incapable of raising his arms above his head.[49] He subsequently received two to three beatings per week because of his continued refusal to sign additional statements.[50] Other American POWs were similarly tortured and maltreated in order to extract "confessions",[39] with many enduring even worse treatment than McCain.[51]

And, of course, what McCain actually said about 100 years in Iraq:

McCain never actually went so far as to call for a century-long occupation. Rather, in response to a New Hampshire town hall questioner who asked about President Bush’s statement that U.S. troops could be in Iraq for 50 years, McCain interrupted and said, “Make it 100.”

“We've been in South Korea … we’ve been in Japan for 60 years,” he continued. “We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that’s fine with me. I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training, recruiting and equipping and motivating people every single day."

Indeed, Screamin' Howie did define the word opportunist quite well. In fact, Howie's picture should appear right next to that word in dictionaries everywhere.

You Know You’ve Had Too Much To Drink

When you reach up to brush something off your shoulder and realize it's the floor. You really, really know you've had too much when you wake up in a garbage truck.

William M. Bowen, 27, awoke about 6:30 a.m. Thursday to find that he was inside a commercial trash-collection truck filled with waste.

A Rumpke garbage truck driver had emptied a bin behind the Muncie Eye Center into his truck and was about to activate its trash compressor when he heard someone screaming.

"He looked up and this gentleman was standing out the top of our truck," said Larry Green, market safety supervisor for Rumpke.

Generally speaking, it is a bad idea to go pearl diving when you've been drinking. Apparently, there is a stage between falling-down drunk and dead-drunk: dumpster-drunk.

Who’s Running The Asylum?

Why, the Johnson county (Iowa) board of supervisors, of course. The board voted to allow self-proclaimed ghost hunters access to a former insane asylum located in that county. Mind you, there have never been any ghosts reported there.

Brandon Cochran, museum operations assistant for the historical society, said there have never been reports of ghosts or bizarre happenings at the building and that bringing in a paranormal team is "kind of taking the pre-emptive approach.

He wants an Iowa-based paranormal investigative team to come in for one night. Cochran said he hopes they don't find any paranormal activity and the investigation can put to rest any speculation.

A four-person Carroll Area Paranormal Team will use thermal imaging equipment and voice recording systems, Cochran said.

The mind boggles. In other odd news, a Farmer in Australia is wondering who threw the suspected bits of spacecraft onto his property:

CANBERRA (Reuters) - A cattle farmer in Australia's remote northern outback on Friday said he had found a giant ball of twisted metal, which he believes is space junk from a rocket used to launch communications satellites.
 
Farmer James Stirton found the odd-shaped ball last year on his 40,000 hectare property, about 800 kilometres (500 miles) west of the northern Queensland state capital of Brisbane.

Rumor has it that the Johnson county board of supervisors is sending a team of UFO investigators. Meanwhile, signs of giant sharks have been found in the St. Clair River in Michigan:

"It's a shark tooth," Craig Wentz said. "It's petrified. It's rock."

Michigan State University paleontologist Michael Gottfried said the 3-inch long tooth comes from an extinct species called Carcharodon megalodon, or the "megatooth" shark. The megalodon, which went extinct 2 million years ago, reached lengths of more than 60 feet.

By comparison, Great White sharks generally are about 20 feet long.

Rumors that the Johnson county board of supervisors is sending shark hunters to investigate are not true. They are actually sending the ghost hunters to locate Chief Brody and Quint so they can ask them to look into the matter.

Feel Safe?

The folks who believe their Apple computers are much safer than computers running Microsoft operating systems might want to take note of this item. At the latest CanSecWest security conference it took someone exactly two minutes to break through Apple's much vaunted security and take control of the computer.

Nobody was able to hack into the systems on the first day of the contest when contestants were only allowed to attack the computers over the network, but on Thursday the rules were relaxed so that attackers could direct contest organizers using the computers to do things like visit Web sites or open e-mail messages.

(Charlie) Miller, best known as one of the researchers who first hacked Apple's iPhone last year, didn't take much time. Within 2 minutes, he directed the contest's organizers to visit a Web site that contained his exploit code, which then allowed him to seize control of the computer, as about 20 onlookers cheered him on.

He was the first contestant to attempt an attack on any of the systems.

Miller was quickly given a nondisclosure agreement to sign and he's not allowed to discuss particulars of his bug until the contest's sponsor, TippingPoint, can notify the vendor.

Interesting that they did not try to offer to give prizes for hacking a Linux system. I'd be interested if they did. But this does show that there is a real crisis coming in computing whether people realize it or not. It is coming very quickly, too.

Sockpuppet Politics

I rather like much of what Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal writes. But in some ways, I think he missed an important point in his column today. He agonizes a bit over the way the internet is changing political campaigns, recognizing the good parts but also fearing some of what is happening. He starts out by noting the high body count of campaign workers who have been cut free after making particularly nasty, damaging or harsh points about other candidates. Then he philosophizes a bit.

A clue to what's going on was in The Wall Street Journal's account this week of the instant dismissal of a fundraiser for the Clinton campaign named Mehmet Celebi. Mr. Celebi is a Chicago businessman whose heretofore obscure name had been bumping about the Internet as the producer and backer of a movie that is both anti-American and anti-Semitic. There is more to this story, including a defense of Mr. Celebi's personal sentiments. You can look it up, but we'll cut to the summary execution, as described to the Journal by Hillary Clinton's campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson: "[W]e made the decision that he would no longer be fund-raising for us."

The problem for the campaigns, and this is new to our politics, is that these incidents — no matter how petty (Samantha Power), or how large (Jeremiah Wright) — will never go away. Once they enter the bitstreams of the Internet, they circulate without end — on blogs, on political talk shows, in print.

One can argue that the campaigns shouldn't be so pusillanimous, that they ought to show more fiber in the face of intimidation from the left or the right. Keep in mind, though, that the ratio of response from the campaigns and output from the media storm is about 1-to-infinity. An apology is just a peep. Reprimands are too private. The Screaming won't end until the campaign silences the source of the problem. Damage control for dummies: Terminate them.

One result is that political speech will be self-censored, from the candidate on down. However high the stakes, speech by the candidates themselves has become increasingly bland. The primary debates for the most part were artificially civil. When a Romney, Clinton or McCain said something with bite, they got hammered. Why be real? It's too dangerous.

With the campaigns intimidated into verbal mush, they are offshoring what they really think into the mouths of surrogates who can't be fired. Everyone in the game knows that under the new rules, Ferraro-like remarks on the unique status of the Obama candidacy are a firing offense. So when Bill Richardson, whom Bill Clinton made both U.N. ambassador and secretary of energy, endorsed Barack Obama last week, super surrogate James Carville called him "Judas." Sounded to me like the perfect metaphor, an expression of what virtually every living Clintonite still onboard must have been thinking. But had the Clinton campaign's strategist Mark Penn said it, the blog-driven media Scream would have roared til he was tossed from the train.

Henninger fears for the future of political discourse in the unforgetting eye of the internet age. What he misses, I think, is that any new technology tends to be self-correcting. A balance will come about eventually. Yes, the unforgetting internet will change things, making candidates think hard about what they are saying. In time, the use of sockpuppets to make surrogate attacks will also become unattractive, because that unforgetting eye will not allow a candidate to avoid responsibility. In a way, Henninger sees that by invoking the old television show The Prisoner. But he sees that as a threat. It could also be an opportunity. Maybe the same old politics won't work anymore in the internet age. Maybe we'll start seeing more genuine politicians in the future.

One can hope.

Whining In The Big Apple

It seems that unions are behind the latest whining campaign - especially in New York City - over biometric scanning being used to clock employees in and out of their workplace. A new system is supposed to begin tracking city employees and the unions are unhappy.

NEW YORK - Some workers are doing it at Dunkin' Donuts, Hilton hotels, even at Marine Corps bases. Employees at a growing number of businesses around the nation are starting and ending their days by pressing a hand or finger to a scanner that logs the precise time of their arrival and departure — information that is automatically reflected in payroll records…..

….."They don't even have to hire someone to harass you anymore. The machine can do it for them," said Ed Ott, executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO. "The palm print thing really grabs people as a step too far."

The International Biometric Group, a consulting firm, estimated that $635 million worth of these high-tech devices were sold last year.

Protests over using palm scanners to log employee time have been especially loud in New York City, where officials are spending $410 million to install an automated attendance tracking system that may eventually be used by 160,000 city workers.

Scores of civil servants who are members of Local 375 of the Civil Service Technical Guild rallied Tuesday against a plan to add the city medical examiner's office to the list of 17 city agencies which already have the scanners in place.

The scanners have rankled draftsmen, planners and architects in the city's Parks Department, which began using them last year.

Heaven forbid that a person drawing a government salary might actually have to be at work to get paid. In the nuclear industry, biometric scanners have been in use for more than a decade. I have to use an identity card and insert my hand into a reader every time I go on site and every time I leave. Those scans keep track of who is on site at any one time in case there is ever a need to evacuate, of course. But they can be used to check attendance as well. Those particular rules were enacted by the Federal government, incidentally. It seems more than a bit ridiculous for government employees, even those at the state or city level, to balk at the same rules that have been imposed on part of the civilian sector applying to them.

If the systems streamline payroll and ensure that workers are actually at their jobsite what is the whining really about?

Buddy Can You Spare A Dime?

You might want to ask that question, should you ever need to, in a red state, not a blue one. George Will notes something that I have posted about before: left-leaning people tend to be parsimonious when it comes to charity.

Sixteen months ago, Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, published "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism." The surprise is that liberals are markedly less charitable than conservatives.

If many conservatives are liberals who have been mugged by reality, Brooks, a registered independent, is, as a reviewer of his book said, a social scientist who has been mugged by data. They include these findings:

Although liberal families' incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).

Conservatives also donate more time and give more blood.

Residents of the states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 gave smaller percentages of their incomes to charity than did residents of states that voted for George Bush.

Bush carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable giving was above average.

In the 10 reddest states, in which Bush got more than 60 percent majorities, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was 3.5. Residents of the bluest states, which gave Bush less than 40 percent, donated just 1.9 percent.

People who reject the idea that "government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality" give an average of four times more than people who accept that proposition.

That last point is the real driver of course. If the left thinks government must take care of those less well off, they feel no obligation to help out themselves. Never mind that if the government is involved, huge amount of money will be wasted and bureaucratic bloat will set in, using more and more of the money to pay for people to administer the programs - cutting the amount really available for the various programs.

Damage

Regardless of the confident assurances from the supporters of Barack Obama that the controversy over Reverend Jeremiah Wright is nothing to worry about, the candidate himself today signaled that he is very worried, indeed. He has thrown Wright under the wheels of his campaign bus, hoping to gain a bit of traction. Obama today called Wright's remarks "stupid."

Obama gave a sweeping speech on race last week in which he condemned incendiary remarks by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but the words of the former pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago continue to dog the candidate. Reflecting the campaign's concern about the fallout, Obama used a question about religion at a town hall forum as an opportunity to address the issue.

"This is somebody that was preaching three sermons at least a week for 30 years and it got boiled down … into a half-minute sound clip and just played it over and over and over again, partly because it spoke to some of the racial divisions we have in this country," Obama told an audience in this central North Carolina city.

"There are misunderstandings on both sides," the Illinois senator said. "We cannot solve the problems of America if every time somebody somewhere does something stupid, that everybody gets up in arms and forgets about the war in Iraq and we forget about the economy."

Short translation: "If I can't get the media off this and onto my chosen campaign themes, I have a lot of trouble." Wright now joins Obama's grandmother under the bus as the candidate lurches through the crisis. The bad news? The report also restates Wright's anti-America rhetoric. Obama has a real problem.

Gimme Some More Of That Snake Oil, Pardner

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission has taken a rather dim view of the entrepreneurial adventure of a Texas rattlesnake rancher. It seems his "ancient Asian elixir" - a rattlesnake in a bottle of cheap vodka - has drawn their attention - and the rancher's arrest.

SANTO, Texas - A rattlesnake rancher who calls himself Bayou Bob found a new way to make money: Stick a rattler inside a bottle of vodka and market the concoction as an "ancient Asian elixir." But Bayou Bob Popplewell's bright idea appears to have landed him on the wrong side of the law, because he has no liquor license.
 
Popplewell, who has raised rattlesnakes and turtles at Bayou Bob's Brazos River Rattlesnake Ranch for more than two decades, surrendered to authorities Monday. He spent about 10 minutes in jail after the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission obtained arrest warrants on misdemeanor charges of selling alcohol without a license and possessing alcohol with intent to sell.

Personally, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard prefer our vodka be snake-free. However, our enterprising side also sees a business opportunity. After all, the natural remedy market - formerly known as 'voodooism' - is growing rapidly. So we have begun researching several all-natural products that we might be willing to invest in. We've rejected Baby Seal Oil and Snail Darter Syrup, however. We are very interested in the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Tonic, though.

Endeavour Coming Home

Space shuttle Endeavour has fired its main engines and is inbound for a landing at the Kennedy Space Center at 8:39 PM EDT.

Space shuttle Endeavour has fired its engines, slowing it enough to drop out of orbit. Commander Dominic Gorie and Pilot Gregory H. Johnson are guiding the shuttle on its descent to Kennedy Space Center, Fla., where it is scheduled to land at 8:39 p.m. EDT.

STS-123 arrived at the station March 12, delivering the Japanese Logistics Module - Pressurized Section, the first pressurized component of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Kibo laboratory, to the station. The crew of Endeavour also delivered the final element of the station’s Mobile Servicing System, the Canadian-built Dextre, also known as the Special Purpose Dextrous Manipulator.

Safe landing, Endeavour. Well done.

And It Really Hasn’t Gotten Ugly Yet

As down and dirty as the Democratic nomination race has gotten to date, it still has not reached epic proportions. One candidate or the other is going to have the party step in and take away their chance before this is over. (Harry Reid hinted just the other day that something would be done along those lines - in answer to a question about Hillary Clinton.) That's when real bitterness sets in. But even in today's atmosphere, there is distressing news for the Democrats from a Gallup poll. Some 19% of Obama's backers would vote for McCain if Hillary gets the nod. Worse yet, if Obama is anointed, 28% of Clinton's backers would jump ship. Can you say 'disaster'? I knew that you could.

These conclusions are based on an analysis of Democratic voters' responses to separate voting questions in March 7-22 Gallup Poll Daily election tracking. In each day's survey, respondents are asked for their general election preferences in McCain-Clinton and McCain-Obama pairings. Democratic voters are then asked whom they support for their party's nomination.

The accompanying graph displays the results of the relationship between support for the Democratic Party's nomination and the general election vote between Obama and McCain.

That would be enough to destroy either candidate in the general election. And it really has not gotten ugly yet. What happens when the party rips the nomination away from one or the other in a rather public spectacle and the candidate's supporters take it very, very personally? Gallup's numbers could well be low. And that doesn't even count the voters who might be discouraged and just stay home on election day.

Sounds Eerily Familiar Somehow

Two teenage Bulgarian sisters have been rescued by Italian police from a circus in which one of them is said to have been forced to swim with piranhas.

Police say that while the 19-year-old sister had to swim in a transparent tank, the 16-year-old had snakes draped across her body and suffered bites.

Four members of the family have been freed from what has been described as a "circus of horrors" south of Naples.

Three men have been arrested and charged with holding them in slavery.

The women were paid 100 euros (£78) a week, forbidden to leave the camp and forced to work 15- and 20-hour shifts, according to police.

I'd say this reminds me of my days working in grad school as a T.A., only we weren't payed nearly so well.

Closing In On Cooper?

Children playing in southwest Washington state found what appears to be a parachute buried in the ground in an area that the FBI once considered a likely area for hijacker "Dan Cooper" to have jumped near. The FBI has recovered the parachute and is asking the public for help in determining whether it is of the same type as Cooper is known to have been using when he jumped from the hijacked aircraft.

SEATTLE - The FBI is analyzing a torn, tangled parachute found buried by children in southwest Washington to determine whether it might have been used by famed plane hijacker D.B. Cooper, the agency said.
 
Children playing outside their home near Amboy found the chute's fabric sticking up from the ground in an area where their father had been grading a road, agent Larry Carr said Tuesday. They pulled it out as far as they could, then cut the parachute's ropes with scissors.

The children had seen recent media coverage of the case — the FBI launched a publicity campaign last fall, hoping to generate tips to solve the 36-year-old mystery — and they urged their dad to call the agency.

"When we went to the public, the whole idea was that the public is going to bring the answers to us," Carr said. "This is exactly what we were hoping for."

It seemed a bit odd when the FBI reopened the old case, dating from 1971, but this is an unusual find. One cannot think of too many reasons why a parachute would be buried for legitimate reasons. This may be important or just another dead end. But something has turned up after all these years. Interesting.

Poor, Poor, Pitiful Michelle

So, Barack Obama has released the tax returns of the Obamas from 200 through 2006. Byron York takes a rather jaundiced look at the figures and wonders exactly what Michelle Obama was on about when she was whimpering about how hard the Obama's have had it making ends meet.

Something else that strikes me about the returns is their relation to Michelle Obama's tales of her and her husband's struggle. When I saw Mrs. Obama at an appearance in Zanesville, Ohio last month, she was telling a group of low-income women — the median household income in the county in which Zanesville is located was $37,192 in 2004, well below the state and national medians — about how hard it can be to keep things together. Her talk often touched on money. "I know we're spending — I added it up for the first time — we spend between the two kids, on extracurriculars outside the classroom, we're spending about $10,000 a year on piano and dance and sports supplements and so on and so forth," she told the women of her own household expenses. "And summer programs. That's the other huge cost. Barack is saying, 'Whyyyyyy are we spending that?' And I'm saying, 'Do you know what summer camp costs?'"

The women nodded in agreement, although the Obamas were spending what amounted to nearly a third of a Zanesville resident's annual income on piano and dance lessons. Nevertheless, Michelle Obama portrayed herself and her husband as going through a lot of the same struggles as the women and their families. She conceded that she was doing fine financially, but only after Barack Obama hit it big with his books.

In the seven year period, Barack and Michelle Obama cleared $3,857,564 in adjusted gross income. They gave away $148,392 in charitable contributions in that same period. Somewhat less than 4% of their substantial income. Yet Michelle Obama sang the money blues to people in Ohio who, on average, clear less in salary than one quarter of the Obama's worst year in their best year.

Carriage trade liberal pandering at its worst.