March 14, 2007

"No One Is Suffering More Than The Palestinian People," Continued
— Ace

Suffering children gleefully recount how many Jews their 21-year-old mother killed in a suicide bombing.

Palestinian "journalists" reportedly abetted Steve Centanni's kidnappers.

No one's suffering more than the Palestinian people.

Except, of course, those unfortunate enough to come into contact with them.

Vile?

You be the judge.

Posted by: Ace at 11:15 AM | Comments (54)
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The Glove
— Ace

When Allah says it's the Quote of the Day and then adds "Awesome," I guess I should listen.

This reads like every superhero story you've ever read.

Mark Roth never expected his research to have military applications. He was a biochemist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, studying how chromosomes move during cell replication. Then, about a decade ago, his second daughter, Hannah Grace, died of heart failure at the age of 1. Her death sent him down a much stranger path. “I became interested in immortality,” he says.

Roth knew that some animals hibernate — slowing their metabolisms until environmental conditions improve. He also knew that some cells can enter a kind of dormancy and then spring back to life — essentially, they go into suspended animation. Roth wanted to better understand this “metabolic flexibility.” He started testing various chemicals that slowed metabolism, like heavy water and tetrodotoxin (puffer fish poison, used in Haiti to turn people into zombies). Nothing worked. But then Roth found a loophole in one of nature’s seemingly absolute rules: Animals need oxygen. But some creatures, like nematodes, fruit flies, and zebra fish, don’t die if oxygen levels drop. Instead the critters suspend. Their hearts stop beating for up to 24 hours. They don’t breathe. And they don’t die. Wounds stop bleeding; nearly any injury becomes survivable, and the brain shuts down without damage. “If you were shot, this is exactly what you would want,” Roth says.

ItÂ’s a timing issue: At oxygen concentrations below some critical level, animals kick off. But take the oxygen level even lower than that, fast, and they donÂ’t. The problem was, Roth couldnÂ’t figure out how to pull off his oxygen reduction trick in mammals, let alone humans. What would a battlefield medic do? Tie a plastic bag over a wounded soldierÂ’s head?

A television show gave Roth the clue he needed. In October 2002, he was watching a PBS show about caving in Mexico. The host had to don a breathing mask because the cavern’s air was full of hydrogen sulfide, which binds to mitochondria and impedes the body’s ability to use oxygen. “Oh my gosh,” Roth thought. “We can de-animate people.”

Three weeks later, Roth was at a meeting at the Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado, organized by DSO’s Bielitzki, the ex-NASA veterinarian. The agency was looking for ways to extend the “golden hour,” the period of time within which massive-trauma victims need to get medical care. Bielitzki thought Roth had the best shot, and was prepared to fund further research.

But before the program could start, DSOÂ’s performance-enhancement push ran into trouble in Washington. The PresidentÂ’s Council on Bioethics was publishing reports decrying body hacks. Some in Congress worried about being accused of funding a Frankenstein army.

In response to those critics, the agency already predisposed to clandestine research — decided to go underground. Program names were changed to dull their mad-scientist edge. Metabolic Dominance became Peak Soldier Performance. Augmented Cognition became Improving Warfighter Information Intake Under Stress. Researchers were told to keep their mouths shut; many current and former program managers still won’t talk on the record, requesting anonymity for this story. The Surviving Blood Loss program, meant to fund Roth’s work, was itself put into suspended animation.

That's the part of the research that will save lives. Anoter DARPA Project -- "The Glove" -- will build super-soldiers so fewer lives need to be saved at all:

Grahn and his research partner, biologist Craig Heller, started working on the Glove at Stanford in the late 1990s as part of their research on improving physical performance. Even they were astounded at how well it seemed to work. Vinh Cao, their squat, barrel-chested lab technician, used to do almost 100 pull-ups every time he worked out. Then one day he cooled himself off between sets with an early prototype. The next round of pull-ups — his 11th — was as strong as his first. Within six weeks, Cao was doing 180 pull-ups a session. Six weeks after that, he went from 180 to more than 600. Soon, Stanford’s football trainers asked to borrow a few Gloves to cool down players in the weight room and to fight muscle cramps.

...

In trying to figure out why the Glove worked so well, its inventors ended up challenging conventional scientific wisdom on fatigue. Muscles don’t wear out because they use up stored sugars, the researchers said. Instead, muscles tire because they get too hot, and sweating is just a backup cooling system for the lattices of blood vessels in the hands and feet. The Glove, in other words, overclocks the heat exchange system. “It’s like giving a Honda the radiator of a Mack truck,” Heller says. After four months of using it himself, Heller did 1,000 push-ups on his 60th birthday in April 2003. Soon after, troops from Special Operations Command were trying out the Glove, too.

So one guy is researching how to put you into suspended animation like Captain America, and another guys is working on giving you his strength and endurance, too.

Definitely worth reading. Damn, that Noah Schactman reports on some cool shit.

Of course, I already had this idea like ten years ago. I called it "The Cock-Bottle," but it was the same basic principle.


Correction: I was confused by the ice-bath thing. MBurris tells me the Glove and the de-animation research are two separate lines of research, completely unconnected.

I thought the Glove was being used as part of the de-animation. I may be wrong. I've emailed Noah Schactman to get an answer.

Answer From Noah: Unconnected, though he's nice enough to say they're "connected" in the sense they're both part of the same human-potential research.


The glove / ice bath and Roth's zombie rodents *are* connected, but they're not part of the same experiment. They're both part of much, much larger push by Darpa's Defense Sciences Office into augmented human performance. Dozens and dozens of university, industry, and military researchers have been funded under this family of programs.

You can check out a rundown of those efforts here;
Roth is under "Surviving Blood Loss"; the glove is under "Peak Soldier
Performance."

I've got a ton more on these projects here.


And coming tomorrow, I'll have a story on some of the neurotech works
that's being done at DSO, too.

I've re-written the post to correct my error, but I've kept the correction part so as to not hide the fact I made it.

Posted by: Ace at 10:31 AM | Comments (26)
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Not Just Iraqi Civilians: US Soldiers' Deaths Down Dramatically Since Surge
— Ace

The source is interesting. Let's put that aside for now.

The rate of killings of US troops in Iraq has been on the decline, down by 60 percent, since the launch of the new security measures in Baghdad, according to statistics revealed by the Multi-National Force -Iraq Combined Press Information Centre.

Only 17 members of the US military in Iraq have been killed since February 14 till March 13, compared to 42 from January 13 to February 13; the rate was on the decline during the first month of the security crackdown, compared to a month before.

Two of the 17 soldiers died at US Baghdad camps of non-combat causes.

The remarkable decrease in killings among the US troops came at a time when more of these troops were deployed in the Iraqi capital, especially in districts previously regarded as extremely hazardous for them such as Al-Sadr City, Al-Azamiyah, and Al-Doura.

Meanwhile, US attacks on insurgent strongholds north of Baghdad curbed attacks against helicopters. Before the new security plan, many such craft were downed leaving 20 soldiers dead.

The US army in Iraq had earlier said that sectarian fighting and violence in Baghdad had dropped sharply, by about 80 percent, since the launch of the plan.

Now as to that source. It's the Kuwaiti News Agency. Why is it that Drudge had to find this on a foreign outlet rather than on any American news source?

The information comes from the DoD. It was fed to the media. Why is it only a Kuwaiti outfit publishes it?

Posted by: Ace at 10:01 AM | Comments (57)
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Another Iranian Officer Missing?
— Ace

This time it's a colonel:

The weeks ago the Iranian armed forces command in Teheran lost contact with a senior officer who had been serving in Iraq with the al-Quds unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, according to a senior Iranian official cited in the Wednesday edition of the London-based Arabic daily al-Sharq al-Awsat.


The Iranian source said that it is still unclear why contact with the officer, Colonel Amir Muhammad Shirazi, was lost. "It is possible that the American forces in Iraq arrested him along with a group of 13 Iranian military and intelligence officials," he said, adding that this is just one of the scenarios being investigated by Tehran.

Are our spies fleeing their country?

And if so, why?

Posted by: Ace at 09:40 AM | Comments (27)
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Mahdi Army Thugs In Negotiations To Lay Down Arms
— Ace

Yes, payoffs are involved.

Apparently with Mook flown the coop they're having trouble getting their weekly thug-checks from Iran. And the need money. And they're sure not going to work or anything.

That would not be in keeping with their proud "warrior" traditions.

Posted by: Ace at 09:30 AM | Comments (9)
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Science
— Ace



The Hole - video powered by Metacafe

Thanks to MikeL.

55% Of Democrats Believe The World Will End If We Do Not Protect The Sasquatch's Ecosystem:

Via the guest blogging crew at Instapundit.

Posted by: Ace at 09:11 AM | Comments (23)
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An Equal Opportunity Hump Day
— LauraW.

Sometimes, a piece of news is so retarded, so delightfully jam-packed with half-assed drooling moronitude, that I can hardly hear myself type over my own squeals of idiotic joy.
I have to share this with someone.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York City has never hired a female bridge painter even though qualified women have applied for the job, the U.S. Attorney's office said in a discrimination lawsuit filed in federal court on Monday.

Since 1997, 56 people, including three qualified women, have applied for 13 jobs as bridge painters, according to the complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney's office, adding that all 13 jobs were awarded to men.

A travesty. A TRAVESTY. A clear-cut example of gender discrimination, or I'm not a microcephalic twit.

Here are some more jobs that women have been unfairly barred from:

-Bull Elephant 'Milker'
-Pesticide taste tester
-Roofer
-Roadkill recovery & disposal
-Cowboy
-Lumberjack
-Forward for the Chicago Bulls

(I'd like to formally apologize to all the lovely women out there who have aggressively pursued careers that have been traditionally occupied by men named 'Booger.'
Way to smash that glass ceiling! You're doing a great job. Please don't hurt me.)

Posted by: LauraW. at 06:01 AM | Comments (59)
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March 13, 2007

Sorry About The Huge Picture And Blown Out Screen Size
— Ace

I screwed up the width-limiting tag on that pic. I wrote "width=460" instead of width="460".

I didn't notice there was a problem because, at least in Firefox, the picture displayed the way I wanted it -- at the size of the center column. Firefox fixed my glitch for me, so I never saw it.

It wasn't until tonight when I checked the site in IE I realized what the problem was.

Posted by: Ace at 09:35 PM | Comments (27)
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Obama: "Nobody Is Suffering More Than The Palestinian People"
— Ace

Nobody? Not non-Muslims being systematically raped and murdered in Darfur?

The Palestinians are suffering, to be sure. But their suffering is due, at least partly, to their own choices and actions. They have made the conscious choice to suffer in order to pursue the revanchist dream of extirpating Israel from the globe, to suffer in misery, poverty, squalor and backwardness to achieve this.

And they consciously choose to suffer casualties, both terrorist and civilian, through their never-ending terrorism against Israeli civilians. Oh, occasionally they kill some soldiers, which, as much as I don't like it, is a permittable choice of target in a guerilla war; but most often they find such targets to be too difficult to reach, and not providing a sufficient horror factor, and so choose to blow up schools, pizza shops, discotheques and the like.

Land can be compensated for; walls can be moved; boundaries can be redrawn. But the dead cannot be brought back to life.

The left euphemizes the Palestinians' self-defeating choices by saying "The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." By which they mean the Palestinians never forgo an opportunity to kill Jewish children, nor actually choose peace over war, nor to accept reasonable, if not generous by their lights, proposals to cede back most of their lost land. All in favor of killing, and killing, and killing some more.

My own reservoir of pity for the Palestinians ended on September 11th when I saw that grotesque witch handing out cake in celebration of the American dead. They've chosen their path, and that path is misery and murder.

They are suffering. They chose to make others suffer, and to suffer themselves in return. Let their be no tears over their embrace of murder and masochism.

Democratic Jews are demanding to know exactly what Obama meant by the remark. Democratic Jews are, I've decided, idiots. Let me explain what he meant: He meant precisely what you think he meant, and he further meant all the implications that flow from that.

Grow up. Your party has collectively decided that no Muslim outrage cannot be mitigated or explained away by pointing to supposed sins of the west compelling them to behave as monsters.

I wonder how these "New York money men" got so rich while being so foolish.


Posted by: Ace at 05:57 PM | Comments (102)
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Winston Churchill, Not An Anti-Semite
— Ace

Powerline partially debunks the previous Drudge-linked claim of an unpublished article by Winston Churchill suggesting the Jews were partly responsible for anti-semitism.

A Churchill expert doubts the article was Churchill's at all.

Posted by: Ace at 04:41 PM | Comments (33)
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