Obama's claim that he has to hide this evidence to protect our soldiers is the sort of crass, self-serving exploitation of "The Troops" which was the rancid hallmark of Bush/Cheney rhetoric.
And he quotes Andrew Sullivan:
So Cheney begins to successfully coopt his successor.
They really do treat Cheney as if he has the infernal power of mind control, even out of office. Cenk Uygur in Huffington Post writes:
This is an unbelievable moment. Dick Cheney's PR offensive over the last month actually worked. Barack Obama just crumbled and will follow Cheney's command to not release the new set of detainee abuse pictures.
I have to admit, though, that I was a bit surprised when I went to the Daily Kos thread on this and found there are readers of his defending Obama's decision.
I wonder if Olympic athletes regularly take vitamins?
In other vitamin related news, it seems there are there a lot of researchers in the last year or two saying that people may have gone too far in sun avoidance, as it is leading to a Vitamin D deficiency which can cause all sorts of problems. Have a look at this article, for example, and all of the related stories at the side.
I know I barely get any sun myself now, but after having a couple of (minor) skin cancers cut off a few years ago, that seems the right thing to do. But in reality, maybe getting some early morning or late afternoon sun might be better for me in the long run.
Jonah Goldberg writes well here about the overly reductionist approach by which some people dismiss the affection dogs display to their owners.
As Goldberg indicates, if you take this approach to dogs, it can just as strongly be argued to human love. It is an attitude that devalues what should be most strongly held as true.
George Megalongenis' take on the budget seems right to me: lots of spending to come; very, very little in the way of budget savings for a few years. It's a budget to set large debt in concrete. (The last bit are my words, not his.)
Interesting article here about the big problems caused by people playing with mercury. This bit was news to me:
Some Caribbean religions and folk healers use mercury because they believe its supernatural powers bring good luck and drive away evil spirits. Practitioners apply mercury to the skin, add it to candles or sprinkle it around the home.
About 38 percent of 900 people mostly with Latino or Caribbean backgrounds reported that they used or knew someone who used mercury for religious, spiritual, or health purposes, according to a survey by John Snow, Inc., a Boston health consulting company. The ATSDR report warns that "such use may lead to chronic mercury exposure among those who use it in this manner and for subsequent occupants of the contaminated homes."
"Imagine if you suspected that your apartment might have had a prior occupant that sprinkled mercury on the carpet a decade ago," said Arnold Wendroff, founder of the Mercury Poisoning Project, a website dedicated to the issue. "That's not something you want to live with."
Wendroff has tracked religious mercury use since 1989 after a young boy in a class he was teaching told him his mother sprinkled mercury on the floor of their home to keep away witches. These liquid good luck charms, which can be purchased at medicine shops called botanicas, are often found in 10-gram bottles. Mercury fever thermometers, in comparison, contain only a few grams (.5 to 3.0 g) of mercury.
It seems to have been a long time since there was a shuttle mission with a good run of possible early evening sightings over Brisbane (and fine weather to go with them.) But this one seems to be it. See the NASA link here to find your Australian location sighting times over the next week.
This is especially noteworthy for South East Queensland, with its (usually) clear winter evening skies. (The moon won't be around either.) Here's the schedule for Brisbane:
[Apart from the date and time, the columns are: Duration in minutes, maximum elevation above horizon (in degrees), where it will approach from (in degrees and direction) and where it depart.]
Sun May 17/06:42 PM
3
24
10 above NNW
24 above NNE
Mon May 18/06:40 PM
4
33
10 above NW
33 above NNE
Tue May 19/06:38 PM
4
45
15 above NW
44 above NE
Wed May 20/06:06 PM
5
44
20 above NW
24 above ENE
Wed May 20/07:43 PM
<>
15
11 above W
15 above W
Thu May 21/05:25 PM
2
27
27 above ENE
10 above E
Thu May 21/06:59 PM
2
59
21 above W
59 above WNW
Fri May 22/06:15 PM
4
81
30 above WNW
37 above E
Fri May 22/07:52 PM
<>
11
11 above W
11 above W
Sat May 23/05:30 PM
6
74
38 above WNW
11 above E
Sat May 23/07:08 PM
2
41
16 above W
41 above WSW
Sun May 24/06:24 PM
3
77
26 above W
50 above ESE
Mon May 25/05:39 PM
6
78
32 above W
13 above E
Mon May 25/07:16 PM
2
30
13 above W
30 above W
UPDATE: For a nice video of the launch, and comments of a first time launch viewer, go to this Cosmic Variance post.
It is perhaps the world's cheapest mobile phone. It is the latest offering from Hugo Chavez's socialist revolution. And its name is derived from a slang word for penis. Behold the Vergatorio.
Venezuela's president launched the handset on his TV show with a Mother's Day call to his mum and predicted it would conquer all rivals.....
Verga is slang for penis and vergatario is a newly minted word which signifies excellent but retains connotations from its root.
Massive alcohol intake usually resolves in a banal headache. We report a case of a patient presenting with acute alcohol intoxication in which the ensuing “hangover” was due to a knife blade deeply retained in the brain parenchyma.
As noted here recently, what exactly is it about sport that gave it a reputation for being "character building"?
Update: A story about Australian cricketing hero Keith Miller, as noted by his biographer in Australian Story a couple of weeks ago:
Bill [Miller's son] I think suffered more than the other three. He arrived in England at age 18 to stay with his father, it was a big moment for him. And here was Keith playing around with girls younger than him. This caused a bit of confusion in him because he was the oldest boy and very close to his mother and that would have on reflection probably have been a bit damaging for Bill.
BILL MILLER, SON: He told me that Peg said, 'whenever you're overseas you can fool around but just don’t do it at home'. And of course, he’s my father, I believed him. And it wasn’t until years later I asked Peg that and she said 'do you really think that I would have said that'. And I said 'no you wouldn’t of'. She said 'exactly right'. So that sort of gutted me a bit, that he’d lied to me about that. But I still loved the guy. I used to have some great times with my father.
Update: I saw some of the Four Corners program about the NRL and sex last night. Was it really necessary to show the picture on the mobile phone instead of just saying "yeah, the guys will email me photos of their erection all the time"? The blond woman talking about this seemed to quite happy to run a free service via which women wanting sex with a footballer could have an arranged meeting.
While I guess it's useful to have football clubs running classes on how it's not right to trick your mate's drunk girlfriend into having sex with you, it's kind of disturbing to think that any young bloke needs telling. (I also wonder whether, if the camera is not there, the sessions are received with such gravity.)
The only sitcom still worth watching in the last few years, the screening of the (likely) last episode of Scrubs has attracted a lot of comment in the States this week.
Slate had an article praising it, not for its comedic value, but for being "the most accurate portrayal of the medical profession on TV." (Bet you didn't see that coming.) Allegedly:
...if you talk to doctors, they'll often sing the praises of one medical show in particular, which they say captures the training process, the profession, and the dynamics of a hospital with remarkable accuracy. No, it's not House, the tale of a misanthrope who happens to be a doctor. It's not Grey's Anatomy, a torrid romance novel disguised as a medical show. It's not even the recently departed ER, which broke television ground with its realistic gore. It's Scrubs.
The article makes out its case reasonably credibly.
But of course, no one watches it for that reason. The show apparently is made by people with sufficient generosity that they allow a huge number of segments to remain posted on Youtube. It seems that with a little effort, you can find nearly any clip from the 8 seasons which you found particularly funny.
In Australia, the show has never has a decent chance to build a following on commercial TV due to the hopeless way (common to nearly every sitcom shown in the last 5 years) that the programmers have chopped and changed the schedule. Currently, I have been watching Season 6 which has had a rare continuous run on Comedy Channel (but even that has a hopeless way of jumbling seasons and episodes, so that still the only way to get a complete story cycle here is to rent the DVDs.)
Anyhoo, I recently saw the popular all-singing episode ("My Musical") from 2007. (It was probably shown here starting at 10.42pm one night of the summer holidays on Channel 7 in 2008.) The highlight was surely "Guy Love", which is good enough to embed:
(A clarification: the women in bed is featured because she has an aneurysm causing her to have musical hallucinations, a storyline evidently based on this true life report.)
I can't help it, I want to embed two other short clips that are particular favourites:
Janitor, the greatest comedic deadpan evil character ever created:
And Dr Kelso has his greatest moment here (although, bizarrely, the person who posted this clip gives away the joke in the heading - don't read it!):
Brilliant. When will there be another sitcom that makes me laugh out loud?
Lots of interesting stuff from this detailed survey:
Despite their desire to belong, only a small number of Muslims questioned in Britain, for example — 10 percent — consider themselves integrated into British society. That compares to 46 percent of Muslims in France and 35 percent in Germany....
Researchers found 38 percent of British Muslims said they had a job, much lower than the figure for the British general public — 62 percent — and lower than Muslims in Germany or France, where 53 percent and 45 percent respectively said they were employed. No figures were compiled for the United States....
...71 percent of Britain's Muslims considered themselves to be struggling to get by, as did 56 percent of Muslims questioned in the United States. Research for the study was conducted in mid-2008, before the full impact of the current financial crisis hit.
Yet, oddly, in another part of the report it says:
The study found that 77 percent of British Muslims feel a strong sense of British identity, compared to 50 percent of the country's non-Muslims. In France, around half of Muslims and non-Muslims say they feel a strong sense of patriotism.
Isn't that inconsistent with the preceding figures?
On Colbert Report last night, there was an interview with Laurie Garrett, a woman who seems to know a fair bit about swine flu. (It was fairly amusing, and you can watch it here.)
One of the things she said, though, I didn't recall hearing before. It was that Indonesia, which has strains of the very worrisome bird flu, does not share information with the WHO because its Health minister believes that there is a US/Western/Jewish conspiracy to find new flus, make vaccines and force poor countries to buy them. (Colbert's response to this was pretty funny.)
This situation is perhaps even worse than that summary, as noted here:
Falling short of elaboration, Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said on Tuesday that the deadly swine flu virus could have been genetically engineered. She had earlier accused Western governments of making and spreading viruses in developing countries to boost pharmaceutical companies' profits.
Since 2006, Indonesia has refused to share all of its bird flu virus samples with WHO researchers, citing fears that the system is being abused by rich countries to produce profitable vaccines, which impoverished nations have to buy.
A more detailed account of the Health Minister's views can be found here. It does not mention Jewish conspiracy as a possible part of her reasoning, as did Colbert's guest, but it does say that "she is a member of the moderate Islamic mass movement Muhammadiyah, but has also reportedly cosied up to radicals such as the Islamist Hizbut Tahrir group, which believes in replacing Indonesia's secular government with a Muslim caliphate."
... the Syrian state-controlled paper al-Tawhra asserted that Israel was responsible for the expanding bird flu phenomenon. It said Israel had spread the virus in the Far East to mislead the world while aiming to attack the Arabs.[2]
Damn those Jews are clever.
But seriously, it would be a disaster if belief in Jewish conspiracy contributes to the death of millions of people (including Muslims) due to delays in getting out a vaccine to combat a future mutated bird flu.
Maybe this needs covert operations: blacked up CIA agents who roam Indonesian farms at night, taking blood from chickens and ducks.
...at Saudi Arabia's only beauty pageant, the judges don't care about a perfect figure or face.
What they're looking for in the quest for "Miss Beautiful Morals" is the contestant who shows the most devotion and respect for her parents. ...
So after the pageant opens Saturday, the nearly 200 contestants will spend the next 10 weeks attending classes and being quizzed on themes on inner strength and leadership.
Pageant hopefuls will also spend a day at a country house with their mothers, where they will be observed by female judges and graded on how they interact with their mothers, Al Mubarak said.
All that work for what? A new car? (Oh, wait a minute, we're talking women in Saudi Arabia.) No, the first prize is a glorious $2,600. Hardly worth sucking up to Mum for the day for that.
But even the Gulf News must recognise that this bit sounds funny:
There are few beauty pageants in the largely conservative Arab world. The most dazzling is in Lebanon, the region's most liberal country, where contestants appear on TV in one-piece swimsuits and glamorous evening gowns and answer questions that test their confidence and general knowledge.
There are no such displays in ultra-strict Saudi Arabia, where until Miss Beautiful Morals was inaugurated last year, the only pageants were for goats, sheep, camels and other animals, aimed at encouraging livestock breeding.
I hope next year they allow contestants from Australia. Kevin Rudd in an abaya would be a shoo-in.
(It's taken a long time for Europe to start objecting to the use of corpses as entertainment, but there finally seem to be people who agree with me who are prepared to take action.)
Bryan Appleyard has a funny grumble here about American breakfasts, but I think his comments could be extended generally to all American food.
It's been many years since I have been there, but one of the lasting impressions of the place is that all of the food seems to have a heightened artificiality to it, and as Bryan notes, it even extends to fruit and supposedly "natural" products. (I remember an Australian I was visiting commenting that she had no idea what they put in their bread, but it just never went mouldy like old Australian bread. Then again, she was slightly mad in some other ways, so I shouldn't take her word I suppose.)
It remains a deep mystery how this fakeness in all food is achieved.
Quite a lengthy explanation here of recent research into what happened in a couple of experiments on iron fertilization, and why it may not be such a great way to sequester carbon. (Still seems worth looking into further though, is my impression.)
Richard Fidler does pretty good interviews, and I caught most of this one on the radio earlier this week. The interviewee is Queensland molecular biologist John Mattick, and the talk is about DNA, "junk DNA", and Mattick's upbringing and views on education.
All very interesting, but you do need a spare hour to listen to it.
