Posts from — October 2007

The price of diesel has gone above £1.00 per liter in Britain, that would be $7.78 per gallon. Too bad we don’t have anyone in control who has friends in the oil industry…oh, wait.

Strange how that worked out – almost everything the Hedgemony does cause the price of oil to rise, and then take a dip at election time.

Dr. James Watson has stepped in it, and the Nobel prize can’t shield him. Dr. Watson is one of the people credited with the discovery that DNA is a double helix, and he has gone on to other important work, but he is having one of the worse book tours that any author can imagine, and it may have resulted in his loss of his job.

The BBC has the gory details: Lab suspends DNA pioneer Watson

In his Sunday Times interview, Dr Watson was quoted as saying he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”.

He was further quoted as saying that his hope was that everyone was equal but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true”.

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Rebecca Morelle has a nice article for the BBC, Creating life in the laboratory, that rounds up all of the major research efforts currently taking place around the world.

While I’m sure that this makes a number of people decidedly unhappy, there really is a purpose that doesn’t involve lab assistants named Igor or lightning bolts. Much of the research is aimed at creating microorganisms to help clean up the mess we have made of the planet – bio-Roombas on a very small scale to deal with oil spills, greenhouse gases, and other problems.

CBS is promoting a 60 Minutes segment: Valerie Plame: Bush Didn’t Keep Word

No one was ostensibly punished directly because of the leak, though Karl Rove, President Bush’s close adviser who was involved, resigned some months later. One high administration official, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, then chief of staff for Vice President Richard Cheney, received a jail sentence for lying to investigators probing the leak.

This irks Plame Wilson. “I don’t know about (President Bush knowing about the leak beforehand). But I, like most other Americans, saw President Bush say on TV that he would fire anyone from his administration found to be involved in leaking my name,” she says. “It turns out the president is not a man of his word.”

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The Associated Press reports Comcast blocks some Internet traffic

NEW YORK – Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

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National Weather Service Mobile

… Northern Gulf Coast deluge of October 18th and 19th 2007…

The National Weather Service in Mobile has collected the following rainfall totals since Thursday morning Oct 18, 2007… ending at 7 am CDT Friday Oct 19, 2007. Rainfall continues to move through the western Florida Panhandle and portions of southwest Alabama. Thus… the final storm total amounts will be higher still. In addition… Doppler radar estimates and other data sources indicate that much higher rainfall totals occurred in some locations. Additional rainfall reports will be added as they are received.

Navy Pensacola, FL (npa) 14.88 inches
West Pensacola, FL (cocorahs) 14.72 inches
6.2 W Mary Esther,FL (cocorahs) 12.90 inches
Pensacola Regional Airport, FL (pns) 11.89 inches
Mary Esther, FL (hrt) 11.74 inches
Destin, FL (dts) 10.38 inches
6.4 W Crestview, FL (cocorahs) 10.30 inches
Valparaiso, FL (vps) 10.02 inches
Niceville, FL (coop) 9.94 inches
ft Walton Beach, FL (cocorahs) 9.58 inches
2.3 se Niceville, FL (cocorahs) 9.44 inches

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The Boys

And then there was the time…

[Editor: Income, Sox, and Excise looking out the front door while Sox lies about his life as a feral cat.]

Friday Ark

This is a start: Air Force To Fire Officers For Nuke Gaffe

(CBS/AP) Four Air Force officers are being relieved of duty after losing track of six nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which were flown on a B-52 bomber across the United States without anyone knowing it, reports CBS News national security correspondent David Martin.

In addition, more than 60 Air Force personnel have had their nuclear security clearances lifted, adds Martin.
…

Two Defense Department officials said earlier Thursday that the Air Force investigation found long-established procedures for handling the munitions were not followed and one official said it recommends that five or more officers be relieved of their duties.
…

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By now you know that enough Repubs, including my own idiot Congresscritter, supported the Hedgemony rather than children and the effort to override the Shrubbery’s veto failed.

I’ve been saying, and people are generally taken back when I do, that SCHIP was important because children are plague carriers. They gather in groups and exchange germs. For example: Bacteria that killed Virginia teen found in other schools

NEW YORK (CNN) — Students at a high school in Virginia prepared Thursday for the funeral of a popular classmate, the victim of a deadly drug-resistant strain of bacteria that has turned up in schools across the country recently.

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Juan Cole has a translation of an ITAR-TASS [Информационное Телеграфное Агентство России – Телеграфное Агентство Советского Союза / Information Telegraphic Agency of Russia – Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union / the state press office] piece: Putin & Ahmadinejad Pledge Cooperation.

These things are pure “boilerplate” – the same paragraphs with a few names swapped to reflect different leaders and different countries that I read in Pravda and Izvestia during the Cold War. They still reference TASS, because they are still filling in the blanks in standard Soviet era stories. You would think they would have hired some new writers or changed the script in the last forty years.

Y’all recall Exodus 7:14 when the Nile turned to blood, well around here its called the red tide, an algal bloom that turns the emerald green waters the color of dried blood.

The October 16 update reports:

Water samples were collected early this week from Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa and Walton counties in northwest Florida. High concentrations of Karenia brevis, the Florida red tide organism, were detected near Pensacola Beach (Escambia County), Henderson Beach (Okaloosa County) and Dune Allen Beach (Walton County). Medium to low concentrations of K. brevis were also detected along portions of Santa Rosa, Okaloosa and Walton counties. Reports of fish kills and respiratory irritation have been received from Escambia, Okaloosa and Bay counties.

Karenia brevis produces a wonderful little cocktail of neurotoxins that kill the fish and anything that eats them. It is also aggravates any respiratory problems, beyond the stench of the dead fish and birds.

Hopefully the heavy rain with break up the bloom and flush the bayou and bay.

The weather has been noisy this morning with thunderstorms coming ashore. The front generated a tornado in Pensacola that caused some damage, but the worst hit structure, a preschool had been evacuated before the tornado hit.

The guys at Weather Underground have added a new feature, a tornado map, to show where tornadoes have hit. It is an overlay on a Google map, so it should be intuitive if you use the Google map site.

It looks like this front is at least going to provide some rain to South Georgia, but probably not much to the areas that need it most.

Tristero at Hullabaloo got upset over the weekend about “the national discourse” because, with everything going on in the US right now, the first article in the New York Times weekly review was a piece by John F. Burns about feral cats in Iraq.

Burns was the Baghdad bureau chief, and has taken over the Times’ European desk in Britain.

On one level the piece, What Cats Know About War, is just as story about “a reporter’s cats”, an extended Cat Blogging entry, but it works at another level describing life in Baghdad in terms that many people can understand.

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CNN announces what most of us knew was coming: Turkey approves Iraq incursion

(CNN) — The Turkish parliament has voted to allow its military to make an incursion into Iraq and chase down Kurdish rebels staging cross-border attacks.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government had asked parliament in Ankara on Monday to authorize a military incursion, and the lawmakers responded with overwhelming approval, 507 to 19.

Parliamentary approval, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said before the debate, would not necessarily trigger immediate military action and many analysts doubt a full-scale invasion will be launched.

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