Monkey terrorists:

A top court reprimanded authorities in the Indian capital for failing to stop hundreds of monkeys from terrifying residents, news reports said Thursday.

As forest cover around New Delhi has shrunk, the city has struggled with a growing simian population. Government buildings, temples and many residential neighborhoods are overrun by hundreds of Rhesus macaques. The animals will occasionally snatch food from unsuspecting passers-by and even bite them.

"If you can't control the monkeys, what can you do?" the Delhi High Court acerbically asked...

Indeed. That is the key question, as Charleton Heston asked so many years ago.

How do you deal with out of control monkeys? Why, you import even more aggressive monkeys, of course.

Over the years city authorities have tried various methods to deal with the problem. They've used monkey catchers who use langurs - a larger and fiercer kind of simian - to scare or catch the monkeys.

Why that's an idea so crazy it's got to work!

Dave at Garfield Ridge just had a stroke-inducing orgasm.

On to the sad story-- gorilla ebola.

An outbreak of Ebola virus in northwestern Republic of Congo has killed 5,000 gorillas, helping to push the threatened species even closer to extinction, a study says.

The estimate is made by a team of scientists in Europe and central western AFrica, who say there was a "massive die-off" of gorillas in Congo's Lossi Sanctuary park from 2002 to 2004.

...

The new study suggests that the gorillas were not only infected by some animal reservoir -- last year, three species of African fruit bat were fingered as an Ebola source -- but also by contact between ape groups themselves.

Also under suspicion: Russian businessman Lugovoy.

Posted by: Ace at 06:05 AM | Comments (25)
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It looks like the case is all but solved -- at least as far as the immediate assassin. Who was pulling his strings is still unresolved. Although Putin is still the obvious candidate.

This is strong evidence he was poisoned at the Milennium Bar, and that he either contaminated the sushi bar later due his high exposure or else (if the sushi bar meeting happened first) the poisoner tried to poison him there but failed, again leaving behind traces of the Polonium.

As Alexander Litvinenko was buried yesterday investigators revealed that they now suspect that the former Kremlin spy was poisoned in the bar of a luxury London hotel when he met two Russian businessmen.

All seven bar staff working at the Pine Bar in the Millennium Hotel that night have tested positive for polonium-210, the radioactive isotope that killed Litvinenko. Health authorities are trying urgently to contact the 250 customers using the busy bar on November 1.

...

Health experts said they were surprised to find that the levels of radiation found in the seven bar staff approached that found in Litvinenko’s wife, Marina. Professor Pat Troop, of the Health Protection Agency, said there was no short-term danger to the bar staff but conceded that there was a “very small” long-term risk of cancer.

Michael Clark, of the agencyÂ’s radiation protection division, said last night that it was possible that Litvinenko was poisoned by a contaminated cigarette or drink.

A cigarette-- or multiple cigarettes in the same pack -- might explain why he was leaving traces as he moved about, as I so astutely noted earlier.

A minute quantity of polonium-210 placed in LitvinenkoÂ’s glass would explain how he ingested the radioactive poison that led to his agonising death three weeks later.

So too, presumably, would smoke from a poisoned cigarette.

The vapour that evaporated from the drink would have been inhaled by anyone in the area, with a greater concentration for his Russian companions and staff, who would have been in the bar much longer.

Now we come to where the Polonium was found where Litvinenko did not visit -- pointing to his killer.

Investigators believe the poison cocktail was likely to have been manufactured in a guest room at the hotel, a short walk away from the US Embassy. Significant traces of polonium-210 were found in a fourth-floor room, which was occupied by a visiting Russian.

Police believe that the killer may have stalked Litvinenko in London that day and had first tried to poison the ex-KGB colonel in a sushi bar. That failed but the poisoner left ample traces of the deadly radioactive isotope in the Piccadilly restaurant.

...

Traces of polonium-210 has been found at Parkes Hotel, Mayfair, it was confirmed last night. It means that radiation has been found at all three hotels where Mr Lugovoy had stayed since flying to London on October 16. The Parkes was the first he stayed at.

The radioactive isotope has also been found at Risc Management, a security firm in Cavendish Place, visited by Litvinenko with Mr Lugovoy and Mr Kovtun on October 17.

Now why was is the Polonium trail following Lugovoy around to every hotel he stayed at, as well as on the airplanes he took to from Moscow to London and back?

Allah links the article I did about the nuke theory, in which it is postulated Litvinenko was part of a plot to refresh the Polonium triggers in missing Russian suitcase nukes and, presumbably, nuke London (or an American city). And then accidentally poisoned himself.

I suppose nothing in this new information disproves that, except... well, even if we assume that Litvinenko was some sort of late-convert Islamic terrorist true believer (and Allah's link notes that his conversion to Islam still isn't fully established), it would be difficult to recruit a Russian agent into the plot.

Sure, money and all that, I suppose. But if that's the case, why hasn't the Kremlin sweated it/beat it out of him yet?

Oh, And... An earlier report stated that the other Russian "businessman" meeting with Litvinenko -- Dmitry Kovtun -- has fell into a coma due to radioactive poisoning, immediately after being questioned by Russian and Scotland Yard investigators.

That report has been denied.

Reports last night that Mr Kovtun had suddenly collapsed in a coma in Moscow with radiation poisoning were denied by his lawyer, hours after the Interfax news agency claimed that Mr Kovtun was in critical condition in a clinic. Mr Kovtun had spent the past two days at the clinic talking to Russian prosecutors and British detectives.

He joked that on the night “the only poison we [he and his business partner Mr Lugovoy] gave Litvinenko was alcohol”.

Correction: I quoted the report about him falling into a coma before coming across the denial.

Posted by: Ace at 05:48 AM | Comments (4)
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It's artificial.

By this I mean there was no seismic change in the circumstance in Iraq. Incrementally most say it has gotten worse, but worse in a specific way: sectarian violence has increased. There has been an increase in US combat deaths, but such rises and declines in combat intensity has been largely cyclical; there may be some reason to fear that it will only get worse from here, but there is also good reason -- the whole history of the war -- to suspect it will abate. And then, later, increase in intensity again.

The sudden determination -- now the Conventional Wisdom, according to the media -- that everything has gone to hell and that we must get out immediately if not sooner is almost entirely a creation of the Democratic victory in November, and the media's consequent emboldment to say clearly and forcefully the things they've been thinking since, oh, before the war began, and since the one-day "quagmire" in the actual invasion when our troops had to stop moving due to sandstorms.

It's not real. There was no genuine "Iraqi Tet," and even to the extent there was something of an Iraqi Tet, we know something about Tet offensives: they're designed not to achieve military victories, but public opinion victories in America.

The Sunnis cannot win this war. They are greatly outnumbered. The best they can hope for is... well, to be slaughtered en masse and ethnically clensed from all Kurdish or Shi'ite strongholds. And make no mistake: That is the inevitable consequence of an American withdrawal. The odd truth of this war is that Sunnis are fighting their greatest protector, the American military, which will not permit slaughter on a mass scale, even against the Sunnis, who pretty much deserve it by this point.

With the American forces departed, the restraints come off the Shi'ites entirely. What, precisely, will all those militias do when they no longer have American patrols to dodge, or American soldiers to snipe at?

Of course the full force and fury of decades of hatred and desire for vengeance will be visited upon Sunni men, women, and children. What we are seeing as far as "sectarian violence" now is nothing compared to what will transpire when the moderating force of American troops is removed from the equation.

If you want to talk to realism -- let's talk realism. Cold-blooded, heartless, amoral utilitarian realism. Rule by men with guns is not a "lawless" situation. It's in fact the oldest, and most primitive, sort of "law" there is -- law by superior numbers and superior military might. The Sunnis cannot win this war; their plan, to the extent they have one, is to make the country so unstable that some outside force such as -- if you can believe this pipe-dream -- America itself will come to see them as the only group capable of ruling the fractured, fratricidal country of Iraq and reinstall them as masters of the country.

That, of course, will not happen. The Sunnis will never control Iraq again; the best they can hope for is the success of the American plan to create a stable, peaceful, power-sharing and federalist Iraq in which they have, yes, a disproportionate amount of power, but not the total control they once had.

That's their best option. The other option -- the one they may finally have brought to fruition -- is to have no power at all, and to be driven out of the cities into the barren (and oil-free) wastelands of the western deserts, to live out their lives in misery and privation, and to occasionally have these sad lives cut short by Shi'ite gangs raiding villages and killing them by the dozens.

It's time to use that fact to our advantage. It's time to get "realistic." And the realistic way to settle this is to announce -- couched in diplomatic language that makes it seem less vicious than it actually is -- that unless the Sunnis disarm immediately, and before the Shi'ite militas do, the US can no longer justify the cost in lives to protect the Sunnis from Shi'ite militas. Compliant Sunni areas that give up or drive out their Al Qaeda or Ba'athists terrorists will have US/coaltion garrisons to defend them, and vigorous patrolling to protect them from murder.

Areas which do not comply will be left to the tender mercies of the law of superior firepower.

That will remain, hopefully, a threat and a threat only, and we can hold out some optimism the Sunnis will come to their senses and accept the best possible outcome of this war -- a life in which they have some substantial power in the country, a good chunk of the oil revenues, and peace for themselves and their children.

But if they do not accept the terms of their defeat -- then we ought to stop attempting to disarm the Shi'ite militias, and let them do as the please.

Except for those Shi'ite militiamen who attack US forces, of course. Those should be wiped out mercilessly.

The warplan should be the opposite of that suggested by Baker. Baker claims we must stop making fighting Al Qaeda the priority, and instead seek peace. That's quite wrong. We should refocus on killing Al Qaeda and Shi'ite militiamen who attack US troops, and let peace seek itself, through the brutal methods by which peace is usually ultimately had.

The word "pacify" has a nice connotation, suggesting coddling a baby by giving it warm milk to suckle on. In historical reality, populations are "pacified" through extremely brutal, dirty, and nasty means, killed, raped, butchered, and driven out of their homelands until they ultimately lose all hope of military victory and all desire to fight.

So let the Sunnis be pacified. As the Shi'ites and Kurds may wish. The US will change its mission to hunting Al Qaeda and the like, and offer protection only for those populations willing to support it, where US troops can patrol in almost total safety from attacks by the locals.

In any area where the US is not so welcome by the locals, then they have chosen the manner by which their dispute shall be settled, and such disputes are never settled happily. One side is simply killled and brutalized so badly they're no longer capable of fighting at all.

Let that be the victory in Iraq.

That's "realism." And that's the sort of "realism" I would have greeted from the Baker report.

Kill those who attack Americans or the Iraqi government forces. But if Shi'ite militas want some payback against the Sunnis who have been murdering them for decades now -- well, sure, we'd like to see less murder and mayhem, but we're past the point of caring very much about that.

It was perfectly inevitable that the Shi'ites would ultimately start visiting their own rough justice on the Sunnis -- what did the Sunnis imagine would happen after the hundredth bombing and thousandth murder? That's how wars go. Yes, there is a cycle of violence -- until that cycle is broken. Not by treaties or diplomacy; those are incidental, formalities observed after the cycle ends.

The cycle of violence ends when so much violence is inflicted on one oppponent or both that one or both sues for peace. War ends when one or both sides can no longer stomach seeing their children killed.

That's realism.

Instead we have a lot of happy talk about getting Syria and Iran to reverse their clearly-expressed policy goals and overriding national interests in order to "help" us in Iraq.

And since we're talking about Baker's destroy-Iraq-get-Israel-free fire-sale -- we should note the incredible forebearance Israel has shown in not simply attacking the Palestinians according to the same rules of war the Palestinians show them, i.e., none. Reduce three or four large Palestinian cities to the ground, killing thousands and dispacing a hundred thousand, and you'd find "peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict" could be reached in fairly short order.

If there is a civil war, then let there be a civil war, with the US only stepping in to fight terrorists of global reach and those who specifically target Americans. If there must be a bloodbath, then let there be a bloodbath, and let the US take a more active role in rebuilding the country when enough people have been killed that those who survive are actually interested in rebuilding, and peace.

But enough of this media-confabulated rush to the exits. The American people voted the Republicans out in November, but they are not clearly in favor of losing this war. Republicans lost because they were perceived as not winning the war. If the country wanted defeat and surrender that badly, it could just as easily kept the old Republican guard in place. They were doing a fair job at it.

Posted by: Ace at 02:00 PM | Comments (169)
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Andrew ("Pretty In Pink") McCarthy writes a good summary of the report. A useful place to start.

NY Post Editorial Board:

After nine laborious months, the Iraq Study Group yesterday recom mended that there be peace in the Middle East.

Well, of course.

But how to achieve it?

One word: Surrender.

Surrender in Iraq - and, in due time but inevitably, beyond.

Not in so many words, of course.

The 10-member group, headed by Republican Jim Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton, wants to pull out U.S. combat troops within 16 months.

It wants Washington to ask those fomenting violence in Iraq - Iran and Syria - to be good fellows and stop it.

And it wants Israel to begin another "dialogue" in pursuit of peace. (Translation: It wants Israel to surrender, too.)

...

The report decidedly avoids using the word "victory." Rather, it sees only the possibility of somehow improving the odds of "success."

But that's just putting lipstick on this pig of a report.

The fact is, the study group offers 79 recommendations adding up to a cowardly exit from Iraq - and the abandonment of tens of thousands of Iraqis who took America's promises at face value.

I continue to be dumbfounded at the Baker Three-For-One Bonus Plan: "You succesfully consigned Iraq to misery and civil war and Iranian domination for decades. In recognition for that, we'd like to give you Lebanon and Israel too."

Isn't losing one country at a time enough?

A lot more after the jump. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:00 PM | Comments (32)
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Dave in Texas sardonically notes that this seems to disprove that our troops are dumb. Adapting cheap, easily-available toys for important, life-saving work and all.

But John Kerry just faxed me to say he's all wet. "Morons love silly-string, toys, and small shiny objects," he writes. "Back when I was a decorated combat veteran in Vietnam, in which I served in Vietnam fighting the Vietnam War as a member of the Vietnam-deployed armed services, some of the drooling mouth-breathers I had to smell all day used to send the rev-up Evel Knevil Stunt-Cycle rolling out into minefields.

"But were these slack-jawed subcretins actually doing so this in an effort to detonate some mines and give us a clear pathway through? Hardly. They were trying to settle a bet over whether a graven image of Lord Evel Knevil was immortal and incorruptible as He Himself was. They were continually disappointed to find that their Evel Knevill Fetish Dolls did not have the divine powers of their crocodile-jumping deity.

"Before Audie Murphy died, I asked him about his famous defeat of a dozen heavily-armed Nazis in a bunker, largely using only his service pistol. I asked him if he thought he was a hero for killing so many Nazis single handedly. He confided to me he didn't know they were Nazis at all, but mistook them for large bipedal squirrels wearing black jackboots. 'I was jess tryin' to make myself a spot of squirrl soup,' he told me. 'Shee-it, if'n they're givin' medals for squirrel soup, my cousin Bessy ought to have won the Silver Star ever Thanksgivin'."

Posted by: Ace at 12:10 PM | Comments (34)
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Well, she finally did it. Under an order to stop stalking/telephone harassing Jeff Goldstein, she violated it, then blew off a required contempt hearing. So a judge issued an arrest warrant.

His ruling was brief but to the point. "Although this country is founded upon the principle of lively and often-acrimonious political speech, there comes a point at which one must say eph u to the dirty ephers who are phuquing up life for the rest of us homiez."

Then he began reading some infantile poetry of his own patterned after Dr. Seuss but with words like "Irak" in them.

Correction: I wrote that this was unrelated to Jeff Goldstein, mistakenly; I read too quickly. This matter is related to Goldstein. However, she has been charged since the start of this whole insanity with stalking/harrassing someone else in her home state of Oregon.

Posted by: Ace at 11:07 AM | Comments (41)
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"sally anne" emotes for us:

Dear Fellow Humans?

Why do you choose to hate Islam/Mozlems? We are simply scared of its growth. We NOW know Jesus was not born on 25th December nor was he crucified on a Western Spring day celebrating harvest!! We know we are following pagan traditions and we seem to be doing everything against the preachings of Jesus!!

Bigotry has been our forte for centuries.

Just a bit of statistics:

If you analyse every war over the past 100 years, how many people were murdered by Mozlems? We good Christians did almost all the killings.
Now stop being paranoid and ignorant and be a good human being.

The stuff she's parroting sounds like it comes from college lefties.

But she's subliterate.

I think we're the first society in the world to send the stupid to college. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Actually... I guess college lefty crap is now all over the blogosphere. So she could just be a moron with a modem.

Ah, the Internet... where everyone is a beautiful, rich, Einstein-level genius.

Posted by: Ace at 10:49 AM | Comments (62)
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For what it's worth.

Posted by: Ace at 10:36 AM | Comments (18)
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Update: Apparently some people find this so perplexing and, well, insane that they think I parodized a Lohan email.

Nope. This is the genuine deal. The quotes are real quotes. Everything's from a Page Six item.

She's just this stupid and borderline insane.

She spells "adequate" as "adequite" again, too.

I've bolded some of the better parts, but you know what? It's all good. I should just bold the whole thing.

LINDSAY Lohan is preparing to clean up her image and go to war with the media with the help of a high-powered friend - former Vice President Al Gore.

"Al Gore will help me. He came up to me last night and said he would be very happy to have a conversation with me," Lohan wrote last week in a rambling, semi-literate e-mail to her friends and lawyers.

In the bizarre message read by Page Six, Lohan burbled, "If he is willing to help me, let's find out. Hilary [sic] Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Evan Metroplis [sic], and John Daur who works with them would be willing, if we just ask. If we just ASK."

Lohan was apparently inspired to send out the e-mail by a Page Six item on her "mean girls diva fit" at a GQ magazine party in L.A. Referring to a supermarket tabloid report claiming she had overdosed on drugs, she wrote, "Let's sue the tabloids for saying the things they say. Defamation of character."

Invoking what she puzzlingly calls the "way of the future-Howard Hughes," her desire is to "release a politically/morally correct, fully adequite [sic] letter to the press."

Lohan says she wants to state her opinions on "how our society should be educated for the better of our country. Our people . . . because I have such an impact on our younger generations, as well as generations older than me. Which we all know and can obviously see."

I think we have our new Chris Klein.

I have a good put-down for women like her. You're just not good-looking enough to get away with this personality.

Thanks to yls.

Bonus! Paris Hilton Wants Kids, Soon! “I look after animals, so I’d have a lot to give my kids.”

Well, with all that money, she certainly could start her kids off with very well funded medical trust funds for breas augmentation and Herpes-treatment.

Posted by: Ace at 10:32 AM | Comments (45)
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Green onions seem to be the culprit in the Taco Bell E. Coli epidemic. They gave forty people hepatitis, and killed four, back in 2003, resulting in Chi-Chi's going bankrupt.

I just came across that because I'm writing a Rich "Psycho" Gambini article and I wanted some Chi-Chi's menu items. Took me a little while to figure out why there were no restraurants to be found on the web.

I think Taco Bell's too big to fail, as they say. But who knows.

Posted by: Ace at 10:22 AM | Comments (100)
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