...quoting Neal Bernard who fronts a PETA shill group passing itself off as the "Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine"

If youÂ’re feeling fat these days, blame Congress.

ThatÂ’s just what the nationÂ’s doctors are doing, saying that federal lawmakers are responsible for the fact that a salad costs so much more than a Big Mac....

...“The real scandal in Washington is the farm bill,” said Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “Senators take millions from corporations that produce bacon, burgers and other fatty foods. Then Congress buys up these unhealthy products and dumps them on our school lunch program. Companies get rich, and kids get fat.”...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 03:33 PM | Comments (12)
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Encapsulated in an article written by a woman trying to convince readers about how awful he would be.

Thanks Ms. Heard! If a Giuliani Administration is only half-as-bad as you suggest it would be, that would make it, what's the word?, oh yeah. AWESOME.

Posted by: Jack M. at 03:10 PM | Comments (46)
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Would you eat it?

A clam that lived on the seabed in the frigid waters off Iceland's north coast has been hailed as the longest-lived animal ever discovered.

The mollusc, which is thought to have lurked beneath the waves until at least the age of 405, would have been a juvenile when Galileo picked up his first telescope, Hamlet was first staged and the gunpowder plot failed to blow up King James I.

The Arctica islandica clam was plucked from 80m-deep water by researchers at Bangor University in Wales, who were dredging the north Iceland shelf for the creatures. By studying their shells, the scientists hope to learn how the marine environment has changed in recent centuries.

The clam was alive when it was brought to the surface, but at that point, the researchers had no idea how old it was. Only after cutting through the shell and counting annual growth rings under a microscope did they date the mollusc to between 405 to 410 years old.

"Its death is an unfortunate aspect of this work, but we hope to derive lots of information from it," said Al Wanamaker, a postdoctoral scientist on the university's Arctica team. "For our work it's a bonus, but it wasn't good for this particular animal."

I'm sure that the Global Warming goofballs are right now wondering if there's any way to claim the widths of the clam's growth rings proves "the science is even more settled" now.

Guys, chill. It's a fucking clam.

Posted by: Ace at 02:53 PM | Comments (40)
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Okay, they arenÂ’t Barbary Pirates but stillÂ…pirates.

A U.S. Navy warship fired on and sank two skiffs used by pirates Sunday to hijack a merchant vessel off the coast of Somalia, U.S. officials said Monday.

The USS Porter responded to a distress call from the merchant vessel carrying benzene, the officials said. Sunday's shooting took place in international waters, they said.

At the request of Somalia's government, a second U.S. warship, the destroyer USS Arleigh Burke, is now shadowing the merchant ship inside Somali waters, the officials said.

Coincidently, the U.S.S. Porter is named after Commodore David Porter, and his son, Admiral David Dixon Porter. Porter the elder served in the Barbary Wars.

Awww...[Ace]: I was just about to put this up. Oh well, here's the previous story, about the pirates seizing a Japanese tanker.

Somali pirates have hijacked a Japanese-owned chemical tanker in the latest such seizure in the Horn of Africa nation's notoriously lawless waters, a regional maritime official and a piracy watchdog said on Monday.

Andrew Mwangura, head of the East African Seafarers' Assistance Programme, said shipping sources in both Somalia and Japan had confirmed the vessel was seized eight nautical miles offshore on Sunday morning.

"We are trying to establish what demands they have, and how many people were on board," Mwangura told Reuters by telephone from the Kenyan port city of Mombasa.

"There are five well-organized pirate groups operating in Somali waters. We know the one which took this boat," he said.

...

"She has been taken into Somali waters, and we haven't heard anything from her since," the official said.

Quoting an IMB official, Japanese news agency Kyodo said the tanker had 23 non-Japanese crew on board, made up of its South Korean captain and South Korean, Filipino and Myanmar nationals.

Posted by: DrewM. at 02:34 PM | Comments (17)
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The fourth most inactive year for circular storms in the past 30 years.

Posted by: Ace at 01:00 PM | Comments (39)
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Jim Geraghty taps into the rumor pipeline and gets a face full of frothy goodness.

"Top men" in the GOP (Who? Top men) are trying to coax Ted Olsen into elective politics.

Meanwhile, William Safire peers into his cracked, factory-irregular discount crystal ball and makes predictions highly quotable fantasies about possible Veep candidates.

Among those mentioned: McCain for Giuliani, Petraeus for Romney.

Related: Disaffected social cons may want Huckabee as their standard bearer in a third-party bid. Making him a decided front runner for Veep.

Posted by: Ace at 12:57 PM | Comments (16)
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She denies saying 9/11 was an inside job. Then she refuses to answer more questions.

Indeed, I doubt she actually said that as an affirmative proposition. Instead, she simply "raises questions" as to whether the "official story" is true and suggests that pre-planted explosives took down WTC 7.

Pre-planted by whom?

Who knows. She's just "raising questions."

Posted by: Ace at 12:47 PM | Comments (13)
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Instapundit has a lot of links and analysis.

Michael Yon reported on the ground from Afghanistan in 2006, and in a three-part series argued that the opium trade, and consequent empowerment of criminals and the Taliban, could possibly lose the war for us. He republishes that series and notes that his 2006 predictions seem to be coming true.

There are many indicators that the Afghan campaign is at this date a complete failure; how much has anything changed from when The Perfect Evil was published nearly a year ago? At the time of its publication, I intended it as a warning cry that action needed to be taken, and fast, before the momentum of decline reached avalanche velocity.

As with my January 2005 warnings of looming civil war in Iraq, it appears that at least a year or longer is needed before what was initially a solvable problem metastasizes into a Stage 4 disaster. If that experience is a guide, there are 3 phases between First Warning and Hail Mary. In Iraq, it took 6 to 9 months to complete the cycle of “euphemize what can’t be ignored.” The same amount of time was needed to complete the “attack the messenger” phase. Before the “fix it before it kills us” phase can commence, a full and seemingly endless cycle of “blame everyone else” needs to be completed by all the people who could have and should have done something sooner.

The war is finally turning a positive corner here in Iraq. Although some complain that the turn around is behind schedule, if Iraq continues to progress so rapidly, I will leave here in 2008, with plans to go to Afghanistan.

Posted by: Ace at 12:40 PM | Comments (17)
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Hollywood is making a GI Joe movie -- or cartoon, not sure -- and they are of course balking at making him an American soldier. To alienating to world audiences, natch. So they're going to make him a tool of some sort of UN/EU/Bilderberg/Trilateral Commission force.

I thought this was a non-issue. Really, who cares? It's a dumb cartoon character and action figure. What the hell do I care if Hollywood goes the typically insipid/safe-for-foreign-audiences route and strips him of his American identity?

Or so I thought. Until I read this column. Apparently his likeness is based on a real marine, a genuine Medal of Honor hero of Guadalcanal.

As Platoon Sgt. Mitchell Paige and his 33 riflemen set about carefully emplacing their four water-cooled .30-caliber Brownings on that hillside, 65 years ago this week -- manning their section of the thin khaki line that was expected to defend Henderson Field against the assault of the night of Oct. 25, 1942 -- it's unlikely anyone thought they were about to provide the definitive answer to that most desperate of questions: How many able-bodied U.S. Marines does it take to hold a hill against 2,000 armed and motivated attackers?

But by the time the night was over, "The 29th (Japanese) Infantry Regiment has lost 553 killed or missing and 479 wounded among its 2,554 men," historian Lippman reports. "The 16th (Japanese) Regiment's losses are uncounted, but the 164th's burial parties handled 975 Japanese bodies. ... The American estimate of 2,200 Japanese dead is probably too low."

You've already figured out where the Japanese focused their attack, haven't you? Among the 90 American dead and seriously wounded that night were all the men in Mitchell Paige's platoon. Every one. As the night of endless attacks wore on, Paige moved up and down his line, pulling his dead and wounded comrades back into their foxholes and firing a few bursts from each of the four Brownings in turn, convincing the Japanese forces down the hill that the positions were still manned.

...

In the end, Sgt. Paige picked up the last of the 40-pound, belt-fed Brownings and did something for which the weapon was never designed. Sgt. Paige walked down the hill toward the place where he could hear the last Japanese survivors rallying to move around his flank, the belt-fed gun cradled under his arm, firing as he went.

...

When the Hasbro Toy Co. called some years back, asking permission to put the retired colonel's face on some kid's doll, Mitchell Paige thought they must be joking.

But they weren't. That's his mug, on the little Marine they call "G.I. Joe." At least, it has been up till now.

Mitchell Paige's only condition? That G.I. Joe must always remain a United States Marine.

I hope his estate is litigious. Maybe they can appoint Fred Goldman as their family advisor.

Posted by: Ace at 11:31 AM | Comments (42)
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Couple of Halloween links. Cracked explores five reasons a Zombie apocalypse may be possible (my favorite parasite clocks in at number 5); and an archeologist recalls the execution/exorcism of a Transylvanian "strigoi" (more or less a vampire) in 2004:

Petre Toma died just before Christmas 2003. Often there are reasons to believe that a man, and less often a woman, is in danger of becoming a strigoi. As a child, they may have cut their upper teeth before the lower ones; or a cat may have leapt over, or a bat flown over the newly dead corpse as it was left out, under vigil, in the family kitchen. In Toma's case there were no prior signs, though neighbours' and family accounts of his life vary: a good family man, but also (hardly unusual in the rural depths) a heavy drinker with a temper. After his death, his niece suffered nightmares and appeared seriously ill. She claimed that her uncle was visiting her at night and feeding from her heart; that he was a strigoi. Toma's brother determined to act. The sequence of events was normal for Marotinu de Sus [the village where this happned] but, through a constellation of circumstances to do with urbanisation and Romania's imminent acceptance into the EU, became rapidly notorious.

...

I asked [my guide] why many of the graves had little hearths in front of them, with the remains of cooked food and sometimes a wine glass. "Well," he replied, "this is where the village women light fires on the three nights from Maundy Thursday – it's to give the dead some light. The dead are cold and afraid of the dark, and they are often hungry and thirsty." The dead of this cemetery are diligently cared for during the first seven years. After that, the skeleton is washed in wine and returned to become increasingly disarticulated; the soul is presumed to be in heaven, nourished by prayer.

Even more critical than the first seven years are the first 40 days. During this period, a corpse may be an unquiet strigoi, moving in its grave and travelling at night in a not quite re-embodied form, to feed off the blood of the living. After 40 days it will morph into moroi – the actual, incarnate, walking dead, able to appear during the day and mount vicious attacks.

...

After the niece became ill, he said, Petre's brother had had to wait, because he could not act within the 12 days of Christmas. On 8 January, the corpse was checked and deemed to be a strigoi. At midnight the next day, six men disinterred it and cut open the chest. I asked Niculae what they used for this and he looked at me as if I was mad, before brandishing his scythe again. Apparently, the chest was cut crosswise with a scythe tip, and the heart removed through the ribcage. Again, I asked what tools had been used. This time we needed help to interpret the words and gestures. It was with a growing image of James Whale's 1931 classic Frankenstein that I understood Fifor to say, as neutrally as possible, "He says it was with a pitchfork. Yes." The subsequent description failed utterly to dispel my horror-film image. The men took the heart, spiked aloft, to the crossroads outside the village. There they roasted it over a brazier and, as far as I could understand, stuffed glowing coals into the ventricles. Held up in the night sky, the heart shed charred flakes that were caught in a tea towel. These were taken to the niece's house, ground up and mixed in a glass of water. "The niece drank it," Fifor confirmed, "and in the morning she said she felt better... in this way she was cured."

So there you go.

Thanks to sidhe and Entropy.

And For Mad Scientists... this old post on Ways To Destroy The Earth.

Swallowed up as the Sun enters red giant stage

You will need: patience

Method: Simply wait for roughly 5,000,000,000 years. During its natural progress along the Main Sequence, the Sun will exhaust its initial reserves of hydrogen fuel and expand into a red giant star - swallowing up Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in the process.

Earth's final resting place: Boiling red iron in the heart of the Sun.

Feasibility rating: 8/10. The problem here is that current scientific theories predict the Earth will probably survive. The increasing solar wind combined with the Sun's decreasing mass will result in the Earth gradually moving out to a wider, cooler, safer orbit.

Thanks to kratatoa for the last one.

Posted by: Ace at 11:05 AM | Comments (12)
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