Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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An important conversation is beginning to emerge on progressive blogs about the War on Terror and it is based on a notion that will prove controversial. Namely, that there is no War on Terror. You can expect the right to seize on this as evidence of the left's essential unseriousness in the face of an existential threat, and probably to win the rhetorical battle in the short run. However, it's past time for progressives to stop fretting about that. The right wing will say that no matter what position you take on any issue. It's a classic case of projection, and it is what they do best (aside from running up record-breaking deficits).
We are not at war. I'm not speaking here of Congressional war declarations; by that metric, we haven't been at war since 1945, though in practice we obviously have. I'm referring to an actual state of warfare. The war in Afghanistan ended when the Taliban fell. The war in Iraq ended when the Ba'ath were driven from power. What remains in both countries is a policing occupation among various Hobbesian conflicts that truly only concern us inasmuch as they affect our access to natural resources, or as long as we continue to proclaim ourselves the policemen of those countries. Not only is it unclear who we are fighting, it's increasingly unclear why we are fighting.
We are not faced with an existential threat. Even if all the violent Muslim extremist groups were working in concert, we still wouldn't be facing an existential threat. They plainly aren't powerful enough to bring down even the creaky government of Egypt, much less the world's last superpower. We are confronting a law enforcement issue, the same as every other government in the world. This reality is beginning to dawn on more and more Americans, which is why the ridiculous notion that we're in danger of losing the Southwest to Mexico has suddenly gained new traction. The right wing has no currency without an enemy, some scary "other"—hippies, blacks, drug users, Muslims, homosexuals, Mexicans—to hold up as a boogeyman to justify consolidating further power in an already too powerful executive. What is cowardly in this situation is not opposing the adventure in Iraq, it's allowing our own government to whittle away our freedoms because you're frightened some swarthy person might set off a bomb somewhere.
As Digby points out, the concept of a war on terror doesn't even make logical sense. It's a "war" that by design can never be won, that has no identifiable endpoint. And its goal isn't destruction of an ideology, but instead an entrenchment of domestic power.
What we do about Islamic fundamentalism is a topic we must deal with. I suspect that it will take a global effort and a willingness to deal intelligently with the impending global oil crisis. There will be other challenges as well, including potential wars and regional strife and any of the other things that have marked civilization from the beginning. All peoples must deal with such things.
But there is no war on terrorism. The nation is less secure because of this false construct. We are spending money we need not spend, making enemies we need not make and wasting lives we need not waste in the name of something that doesn't exist. That is as politically incorrect a statement as can be made in America today. But it's true. [...]
And I suspect, too, that I will be long in my grave before the "war on terrorism" is a thing of the past. It was a terrible accident of history that September 11th happened when the lunatic neocon cabal was in power. Nothing could have been worse. It was more damaging than the attacks themselves. We'll be dealing with the fall out from that strange happenstance for a generation.
Exactly. Feel free to call me unserious. I'm used to it. But so far, we've burned through nearly 2500 of our own troops, tens of thousands more permanently injured, God only knows how many dead or maimed Iraqis, hundreds of billions of dollars, most of our prestige and good will, and for what? For democracy? For freedom? Give me a break. It's the opening shot in a resource war, and everybody knows it, even if they won't admit it to themselves. And, like it or not, they aren't our resources. We don't have any right to insist the world petroleum market be conducted in dollars. We don't have the right to pick and choose other peoples' governments for them.
There is no war on terror. There never has been. It's time to start saying it aloud.
The Supreme Court ruled today that public servants, when speaking in the capacity of their jobs, are not protected by the first amendment. "When public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties," Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his decision, "the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline."
"Of course a supervisor may take corrective action when such speech is inflammatory or misguided," Justice Stevens writes in a dissenting opinion in the 5-4 decision. "But what if it is just unwelcome speech because it reveals facts that the supervisor would rather not have anyone else discover?"
Recently appointed Chief Justice John Roberts then summarily fired Justices Ginsberg, Souter, Stevens, and Breyer, pointing out that their dissenting opinion was no longer protected speech and they were lucky to get the rest of the month's health insurance coverage.
Some tentative good news from Iraq.
The truth about anal bleaching.
Surprisingly, smoking marijuana apparently carries no increased risk of lung cancer, even in huge amounts.
Now I want to make shiny mud balls.
What did North Carolina ever do to deserve Vernon Robinson?
Marie Osmond has naughty daughters.
If you're having your mugshot taken, you might as well mug for the camera.
Yeesh, talk about a high burden of proof. In related news, we're now much closer to being able to grow new ones.
Kung Fu Monkey ruminates on the word "chickenhawk."
I'm back from the Outer Banks, which was a simply lovely time. Unfortunately, I am still busy busy busy, so it's hard to say how much posting I'll be doing in the short run. As it stands, my hands would be full even if I was this kid.
Announcements like these, however, are generally followed by a burst of posts so you just never know. Stay tuned.
I described my neighborhood - in the frame of reference for the abundance of piedmont readers - as "Trinity Park with palm trees" a few months back. Well, the biggest palm on the block is at the corner two houses up from mine and its crown is home to a handful of squirrel, a few pigeon, a family of swallow, and (on tell from the neighbor whose house is closest to it) an owl.
Now what an owl would be doing... No. Scratch that...What a squirrel would be doing raising it's young in such close proximity to a raptor like an owl makes me wonder what mammalian traits are ready for elimination. But the squirrel seem fully content in their routine and, yes, a few weeks ago I spied what appeared a Screetch owl perched quietly on a domestic service powerline directly across the street from the wildlife apartment so regularly full of chatter from its less hushed tenants.
My experience living in a (barely) renovated tobacco barn with squirrels residing in its roof made me easily understand these creatures as ignorant, annoying, filthy, and worthy of elimination upon the slightest invasion of civilized space. To have avoided having the rest of the animal kingdom rise up in revolt against them, slaughtering them to a one, is one of ecology's great injustices.
To watch anyone succeed in a life endeavor is - to some extent - to size them up by way of their accomplishment as talented or lucky. The same holds true for failure: incompetence or misfortune.
As I retrieved my son at the end of a visit to the house of the same neighbor who first brought the owl's presence to my attention a couple of nights ago shortly after sunset, a chattering in the palm tree grabbed my ear. Rustle. Shake. Thump.
The long-dead base of a palm frond fell from the bottom of the crown, about 50 feet up, and suspended about half an inch above it was a squirrel, looking stright down, motionless save the rush of air wisping the fur on its erect tail.
Thwack! The frond base - a chunk of dried wood about 5 inches cubed - hit the curb spilling the rodent out into the street. A car passed over it, the driver oblivious or at least uninterested or unable to stop. Somehow tire and squirrel failed to occupy the same space at the same time. The squirrel paused, looked up at me as if to plot revenge, and slowly made his way to the base of the palm tree and begin his ascent. Whether it was relief, disorientation, or a keen sense of humor that kept his upward movements confirmed and retarded I will never know.
But I looked up and that owl watched the whole damn episode from the powerline across the street.
Hey, look. Ted Nugent is gearing up to run for governor of Michigan. We here at apostropher.com wish him all the best, since the Republican Party clearly needs more obviously insane candidates to carry their banner. Tom Coburn can't do it all by himself, people.
There's only one damn reason we have this immigration problem: We never finished what we started in 1848. God damnit, those lazy spics were sitting there on top of almost a million square miles of what would fortunately soon be liberated to this Country just not putting it to good use at all! What, a few missions and a few cattle ranches - 'scuse me, ranchos - and you call that a Country?
No way. It took Good Ol' American Know-How™ to set that part of the US of A in line, but alas we forgot to finish the job. Any self-respecting conquering nation owes its descendants - for the sake of a properly assimilated subjugate population - a renaming of places. So what follows, 158 years overdue but still not too late, are a few froz gobo recommendations for changes to the map.
Americans can name a place like nobody else, and some of our best ones are the westernmost and southernmost ones before Rand-McNally gets all Spickish: Flagstaff, Steamboat Springs, Salt Lake City, Fort! Worth!, for God's sake. You say that and you know exactly where the fuck you are and that you better not be navigating it in some low-riding el camino with fuzzy dice hanging from your mirror.
Yeah, these places need some fresh names to clear out the stuffy, 5-century old air in the place; let's start with a biggie: Los Angeles. Easy enough, call the whole place Hollywood. The sign's already on the hillside. It'll still be a Barbara Streisand-listening, George Clooney-loving, liberal mecca, but let's at least call it something respectable. Next up: San Antonio. No question here, it's Last Stand, Texas! Sam Houston would be proud.
A few more:
San Francisco: Quakeville, CA
El Paso: Hot Rocks, TX
San Diego: Balmy Bay, CA
Laredo: um... West Brownsville, TX
Santa Fe: Fe? Who the fuck is Fe? Iron? Ironville, NM!
Wait, New Mexico? Try Was Mexico. Ironville, Was Mexico, 87505. I like the ring of it.
Amarillo: Dear God, what self respecting people would name a town 'Yellow' for chrissake? How 'bout Panhandle Junction, TX
Las Vegas: What is a Vega, people? Neonland,.. Slotsville,.. Jackpot!, Nevada! With the exclamation point and everything. That'll be good for business.
The Rio Grande: C'mon, people. How on Earth do you expect them to see it as a barrier if it's called "Great River" in their language. "Come on in, Muchachos, the water's great!" No. River Styx. Except spell it with 2 x's. River Styxx looks like you mean business.
And finallly, my hometown, Sacramento. Hmm. Sacramentown sounds kinda stupid, as does Sacredville. Well, it's flat and we grow a lot of artichokes... Apostrophiles, I present you the newly renamed capital of the golden state: Artichoke Flats, California.
Hmm.... New Orleans....
In the grander scheme of things, and not knowing all the details, I'm really not surprised that an eight-term congressman from Louisiana had $90K in his freezer. Some things really startle me and others really don't. For lack of anything substantive about this investigation to contribute (anybody else notice that the story is no longer about his bribery investigation but about the fuss over the search of his office?) I'll just offer up my aknowledgement that if he was a Republican I'd pile it on any way I could.
So in all fairness, I'll just pile it on it the spirit of bipartisanship.
Amid the chaos and confusion that engulfed New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck, a congressman (Jefferson) used National Guard troops to check on his property and rescue his personal belongings — even while New Orleans residents were trying to get rescued from rooftops, ABC News has learned... (items included) a laptop computer, three suitcases, and a box about the size of a small refrigerator,
Y'see the power was out and all my money ice cream was gonna melt! Look, if Democrats want "Culture of Corruption" to work as a national election theme they might want to, I dunno, stamp out corruption when they see it? Hmm. Radical idea. Shit can this guy. Let Dennis Hastert defend him.
Speaking of Dennis Hastert, let me pile it on a bit... It did surprise me that Mr. Hastert so quickly rushed to the defense of an, ahem, allegedly corrupt Democratic congressman. I had no idea the separation of powers was quite so important to him. Glad to know he's sending a strong signal of his displeasure with executive branch searches of congressional offices. I wonder why he would do that? It's not like he's a "subject" or "target" of any investigation.
Meantime, the Justice Department twice denied ABC News reports that Hastert was under FBI investigation to determine his role in a public corruption probe centered around convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Hastert said he has not received any notice from the department that he was being investigated [...]
"With regard to reports suggesting that the Speaker of the House is under investigation or 'in the mix,' as stated by ABC News, I reconfirm, as stated by the Department earlier this evening, that these reports are untrue," Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty said in a statement issued shortly after midnight Thursday.
But what doesn't connect is the last paragraph of the very same article:
The Associated Press reported last November that Hastert for two years did not disclose his use of Abramoff's restaurant for a fundraiser just two weeks before he asked the Interior Department in a letter to reject a Louisiana Indian tribe's application for a casino license. At the time, Abramoff was representing another tribe that opposed the casino. Hastert, who collected a total of $100,000 from Abramoff's and his tribal clients, blamed a paperwork oversight, filed the required disclosure and paid for the use of the restaurant.
Read that and again, and then somebody please explain to me why the hell he isn't a target of this investigation.
Leave it to the Dutch to contribute another adaptation to rising sea levels.
Animation (383Kb .wmv)
The biology of giant tubeworms is stranger than anybody suspected. (via)
Look out below. (NSFW ads in the sidebar)
And with that, the hiatus begins for real. Hatteras Island, here I come.
The Nicetown man said he had been sleeping peacefully in the couple's bed Tuesday night when his wife pounced on him without warning, grabbed his groin, dug her manicured fingernails in and flayed him, leaving his gore-slicked gonads dangling much lower than normal.
"She didn't use no weapon - this was just sheer brute strength and fingernails. She grabbed me by my [scrotum] and ripped it apart with her bare hands," Randolph said yesterday from his hospital bed at Albert Einstein Medical Center, where he was in stable condition with stitched and bandaged genitals.
Wait, it gets worse.
Howard Randolph said his wife tore "everything out of the sac and all the skin away." Just the thought triggers most men to hunch over and wince, but Randolph said he felt "fine" yesterday thanks to the morphine that doctors administered. [...]
"She'll probably blame her mental illness," he said. "She's bipolar, and she doesn't take her meds." But he says this is the third time she's physically assaulted him, and he's had enough. In 2003, she threw a metal chair at him while he was recovering from heart surgery, he said.
Yeah, sounds like it's time to call it quits, Howard. (via)
A few weeks ago I noted how silly Republicans look dealing with $3.00 per gallon gas. Well, now they look even sillier:
But Republicans from coastal states, worriedabout their reelectionthat the provision could hurt tourism and pave the way for oil drilling in the future, voted with most Democrats late Thursday to strip the drilling measure from the bill. The vote was 217-203.
"We're talking about 3 miles" off the coast, said Florida Rep. Clay Shaw, a Republican from Fort Lauderdale. "The line of sight is over 7 miles. This bill just goes way too far in really imposing mass destruction (fg: Oh, please...) on our beaches..."
To be honest, I should temper the partisan cheap shots and congratulate Republicans who seem to understand there's more to the quality of life than bigger cars. Maybe even wish them electoral success.
Nah.
The Wall Street Journal calls the Competitive Enterprise Institute "the best environmental think tank in the country," which should be enough to tell you that "environmental" and "think" are being used ironically. If you need more evidence, Kevin Drum notes their recent ads on environmental carbon dioxide.
The ads, "airing in 14 U.S. cities from May 18 to May 28, 2006," don't merely say that global warming isn't a big deal — though they say that too — they seriously say that carbon dioxide is great stuff. "We breathe it out, plants breathe it in."
Well, there's no arguing with that, especially when it's accompanied by pictures of old growth forests and sweet little girls using their CO2-enhanced breath to blow on dandelions.
Stay tuned for their next ad campaign: "Stop complaining, New Orleans. We couldn't live without water."
Pat Robertson says God told him He's sending more hurricanes, and possibly a tsunami, to America.
It's beginning to appear that the killings of civilians in Haditha I mentioned in March are even worse than it first seemed, and even military officials are admitting a war crime occurred.
Ugly? That doesn't even begin to cover it. Dick Cheney is ugly. The Pentagon is ugly. An Abrams tank is ugly. Executing helpless women and children while they're huddled on the floor, praying to their God, is a war crime committed by terrorists. It's Lidice and Rwanda and Srebrenica and, of course, My Lai. The men who committed this crime aren't really human any more -- they shed their humanity like a snake sheds its skin when they walked into those houses and started shooting. All that's left of them is a dark pit at the center of their reptilian brain stems, a place that knows no pity or remorse or even self-awareness. They're lost souls -- lost to the world and to themselves.
I don't know if it's better or worse that this atrocity seems to have been committed by a military unit completely out of control, instead of one that was following orders, as was clearly the case at Abu Ghraib. One one hand, you can argue that it's simply a reminder that Americans are as capable of being beasts as anyone else: Germans, Japanese, Russians, Serbs, Arabs, Afghans, Israelis, Somalians, Afrikaaners, Salvadorans -- the list goes on and on. There's nothing exceptional about us, even in our war crimes.
From time to time, you'll hear somebody say that a particular atrocity—Rwanda, Sudan, take your pick from hundreds of others—is "incomprehensible" or "inhuman." Would that it were so. If anything is clear from our history (and by "our," I mean human beings), it's that any people are capable of committing atrocities, given the right circumstances. And those circumstances are far more common than we'd like to believe. War can turn otherwise normal, decent people into monsters. It doesn't happen to every person who goes to war, but every war does it to certain people. And eventually, some of those people are going to come home and have to try to sublimate that same sociopathic rage while in our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces.
Iraq, like Vietnam, will go down as a dark stain on our national history, another episode where we lost our moral bearing and came to resemble that which we set out to defeat. While the foundering Bush administration revs up the war drums against Iran (and make no mistake, this is the only reason Iran is being presented as a crisis that must be dealt with immediately), we should take a step back and give some thought to what our current war is doing to our psyche as a nation. Especially given the fact that we'd be facing a regime that already doesn't shy away from brutality, even against its own (please, click that last link and do what you can).
Going double or nothing on ill-advised Middle East wars is insane. What is it going to take for us to realize that our ship of state has been commandeered by Captain Queeg?
Dig these paintings by Jacquelyn McBain. Be sure to click for the larger photos. (via linkfilter)
The Road to Guantanamo is "a documentary with some reenacted scenes, that follows the fate of three British men imprisoned at Guantanamo for more than two years before being released with no charges ever filed against them." The Motion Picture Association of America refused to allow the distributors to market the film with the poster on left and instead made them use the one on the right.
The reason given was that the hood depicted violence and therefore was unacceptable for public theaters. Because yeah, you wouldn't want that.
Where did the flowers come from?
A new University of Colorado at Boulder study involving a "living fossil plant" that has survived on Earth for 130 million years suggests its novel reproductive structure may be a "missing link" between flowering plants and their ancestors...
The origin and evolution of flowering plants has long confounded scientists, he said. Nearly 130 years ago, Charles Darwin, known for developing the theory of natural selection, called the appearance of flowering plants "an abominable mystery."
The surprising new finding suggests flowering plants may have arisen on Earth during a time when plant evolution was "particularly flexible," Friedman said.
Yeah, yeah... Speaking of being "particularly flexible"
Astrocytes are about ten times as plentiful as neurons in the brain. Because they don't communicate electrically, astrocytes have been thought to be support cells for neurons, nourishing them and disposing of their wastes. But it turns out they just talk differently.
Nedergaard devised a new way to "listen" for astrocyte activity, developing a sophisticated laser system to look at their activity by measuring the amount of calcium inside the cells. By listening in the right way, her team has made a series of discoveries that have brought the once-obscure astrocyte and its signaling capability into prominence.
In the latest work, graduate student Xiaohai Wang, M.D., led a team that focused the laser system on the brain cells of mice as their whiskers were gently pushed about with gentle puffs of air. Whiskers make up one of the most important information-gathering mechanisms that many animals have, used in much the same way that people rely on their hands and eyes to learn about their environment. A large part of a mouse's brain is devoted to processing the information their whiskers send its way -- a change in air current might indicate a nearby predator, for instance, or a certain texture might indicate a yummy bite of cheese nearby. Scientists have found that the way an animal's brain learns information from its whiskers mirrors the way people learn from their senses.
Wang and Nedergaard found that with a puff of air on a whisker, astrocytes become activated -- pumped with calcium -- in the section of the brain that processes sensory input. The chemical step is a sign that the cell has been triggered in some way and is ready to send out a signal itself. While it's been shown before that astrocytes can become activated under extreme conditions in the laboratory, Nedergaard said this is the first time that such activity has been seen in an organism during everyday circumstances.
"This opens the door to whether these cells are part of everyday higher cognitive functioning that defines who we are as humans," she said. [...] "Our take on this is that astrocytes really are part of higher brain function," said Nedergaard, noting that astrocytes are much more complex in people than in rodents, while neurons aren't that much different -- just longer.
In other mouse brain news, scientists have figured out the steps Prozac takes to trigger new neuron growth by engineering mice in which new neurons glow green.
Because I work in the clinical trials industry, I've heard a lot of discussion of the horrific effects of the TGN1412 trial in England. But here's an angle I hadn't heard.
In March, six men entered a London hospital to receive an experimental drug. The men were volunteers, and the drug--a potential treatment for arthritis and leukemia--appeared from animal tests to be safe. But within minutes of the first round of doses, there was trouble. The men complained of headaches, of intolerable heat and cold. The drug made one man's limbs turned blue, while another's head swelled like a balloon [three times its normal size! -'r]. Doctors gave them steroids to counteract the side-effect, and managed to save their lives. But several ended up on life support for a time, and they all may suffer lifelong disruptions to their immune systems.
How could such a devastating disaster come from a trial that followed all the rules, including tests on both mice and monkeys? According to a paper published today, the drug developers might have thought twice if they had known more about our evolutionary history.
If the volunteers had been monkeys, there would have been no problem. We may share 98% of our genetic code with chimpanzees, but that last two percent matters. And speaking of angles, this is unsettling.
Then back to hiatus. Here's a lovely picture from Cassini of Epimetheus and Titan dropping behind Saturn's rings and a great false-color shot of Mars' Low Ridge, snapped by the Spirit rover.
We leave for a week at the Outer Banks on Saturday and in the meantime I'm frantically trying to get several projects at work wrapped up before we go. Those efforts gained added franticness thanks to me having to take a sick day yesterday, and being at work today operating at decidedly less than full speed. So, no blogging for a bit.
I'll be back in a couple of weeks.
Live from New York, it's the man who should be our next nominee. Funny stuff. Gore looks more comfortable and at home in his own skin than he ever has before. If anybody is the Hillary-stopper, it's him.
You might not have noticed (if, say, you can't read and only come here to look at the pictures), but I do enjoy the snide, juvenile humor. A lot. And I thought I'd just pass along this paragraph from wwtdd.com, ruminating on the news that Britney Spears announced she'd like to do more movies and, moreover, is willing to appear nude.
I can't help think that Wonder Woman is in development right now, and Britney would be the perfect choice. Except, Wonder Woman is now a blond. And 200 pounds. With stretch marks. And chocolate on her face. And can only run about ten steps before struggling to breathe. And replace her golden lasso with a rope belt. And bullet proof bracelets with brown jugs with 'XXX' on the side. And instead of an invisible plane she has a donkey. Sexiest Wonder Woman ever? Sexiest Wonder Woman ever.
A donkey. Heh. Heh. Heh.
A rare and bizarre disease is slowly spreading and, from what I read, you don't want any part of it.
Morgellons disease is not yet known to kill, but if you were to get it, you might wish you were dead, as the symptoms are horrible.
"These people will have like beads of sweat but it's black, black and tarry," said Ginger Savely, a nurse practioner in Austin who treats a majority of these patients. Patients get lesions that never heal.
"Sometimes little black specks that come out of the lesions and sometimes little fibers," said Stephanie Bailey, Morgellons patient. Patients say that's the worst symptom — strange fibers that pop out of your skin in different colors.
"He'd have attacks and fibers would come out of his hands and fingers, white, black and sometimes red. Very, very painful," said Lisa Wilson, whose son Travis had Morgellon's disease.
While all of this is going on, it feels like bugs are crawling under your skin. So far more than 100 cases of Morgellons disease have been reported in South Texas. [...]
Harriett Bishop has battled Morgellons for 12 years. After a year on antibiotics, her hands have nearly cleared up. On the day, we visited her she only had one lesion and she extracted this fiber from it.
"You want to get these things out to relieve the pain, and that's why you pull and then you can see the fibers there, and the tentacles are there, and there are millions of them," Bishop said. So far, pathologists have failed to find any infection in the fibers pulled from lesions.
Nobody really knows how to treat it, since it doesn't seem to fit neatly into a fungal, bacterial, or parasitic infection category. The small silver lining: it doesn't appear to be contagious. If you really want to feel your skin crawl, you can visit the Morgellons Foundation website, where they report some serious central nervous system symptoms.
Nearly all people with this illness report extreme difficulty with mental concentration and short term memory. Mood disorders, such as depression and Bipolar Disorder, are extremely common in this group of patients, affecting well over half of all individuals reporting symptoms of Morgellons Disease. Parents of children with Morgellons disease report that the majority of these children have ADHD, ODD, mood disorders, or autism. It is estimated that 65% of these children have some form of psychiatric illness, and 10% have an autism spectrum disorder.
Also, more than half of Morgellons patients also have Lyme disease. While cases have been reported in all 50 states, most are in Texas, California, and Florida. I'm increasingly convinced that nature simply doesn't want me to step outside ever. (via MeFi)
I wrote last month about the eighty or so Nukak Maku tribespeople who walked out of the Colombian jungle, half-naked with pet monkeys in tow, with no concept of money, private property, government, or even Colombia. They are assumed to have been driven out of the jungle by Marxist rebels fighting the government. As you can imagine, nobody quite what knows how to handle the situation. The New York Times ran another story today, but was a bit more agnostic as to who exactly pushed them out.
The newly arrived Nukak do not provide much detail about why they left. They just say that "the Green Nukak," a possible reference to Marxist guerrillas, who wear camouflage, told them to leave.
"The Green Nukak said we could not keep walking in the jungle, or else there would be problems," explained Va-di, another Nukak man, whose words were translated from Nukak by Belisario. "The Green Nukak told us to go where it is safe."
Colombian officials wonder if farmers growing coca, the crop used to make cocaine, may also have displaced the Nukak, who are peaceloving and unlikely to fight. Another theory is that another Nukak clan pushed this one out.
The article also looks at another group that emerged from the jungle in 2003, and now are starting their fourth year in a refugee camp. Their reaction to being a ward of the state seems to be, "Dude, this so totally beats scavenging in the jungle." Bonus points awarded for including the picture of a kid eating barbecued monkey head.
U.S. President George W. Bush's job approval rating has fallen to 29 percent in a new Harris Interactive poll. It is the lowest job approval rating of Bush's presidency, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. [...] The Harris poll results came on the same day that The Washington Post reported on a Gallup poll that showed Republican support for the Bush administration has fallen by 13 percent in the past two weeks based on spending policies.
While we're on presidential politics, this examination thereof by Lance Mannion is highly recommended.
And speaking of ham, I came upon a thing of wonder and majesty while wandering through that site. I don't have any idea who Michael Angelo is, and AllMusic doesn't seem to know much more, but apparently he's a guy who plays guitar really fast and sells instructional videos so you can learn to play guitar really fast the Michael Angelo way. He's got chops enough, but the video clips linked here and here made me laugh hard enough to disturb the wife. Especially the second one, with the double guitar. Oh yes.
A new species of monkey was discovered in Tanzania a couple of years ago, which was big news since new primate species are quite the rare find. Researchers had only been able to study the monkey, which sports a mohawk-style ridge of hair, through photographs. They finally found a dead specimen, and it turns out that it isn't just a new species but an entirely new genus—the first new primate genus discovered in over 80 years. Genetic analysis indicates that rungwecebus kipunji is the closest known relative to the baboon, though it has a completely different skull and, unlike the hefty, ground-dwelling baboon, is a slender, reclusive tree-dweller.
The BBC link there has video of the monkey, but honestly I had trouble telling what I was seeing. In other monkey news, rhesus macaques booze it up much the same way humans do, especially after a long day of being tested in the lab. Also, monkey popsicle zen.
John Kyl today: This is nuts.
This is nuts. We are in war. And we’ve got to collect intelligence on the enemy. And you can’t tell the enemy in advance how you’re going to do it. And discussing all of this stuff in public leads to that.
Look, I'm a social liberal, and social liberals share a disdain for Islamic fanaticism that rightwing blowhards couldn't muster in their wildest fantasies. But no. This is not nuts. This is living in a democratic society (or at least fighting to). No matter war or no war, you do not let your government compile vast databases on citizens' phone records about who is calling who, what they might be saying, unchecked, unaccountable, and flipping the finger at any effort to inquire what they're doing. Under such circumstances, it is imperative that the discussion become public, loudly public, widely public, screaming-what-the-fuck-is-going-on-at-the-top-of-your-lungs-and-why-and-who's-compiling-what-information-about-whom-in-secrecy public and any self-styled 'conservative' with half the wits of Barry Goldwater's rotting left pinky fingernail ought to join me in singin' so from the top of the highest mountaintop in America.
A man who pleaded guilty to lobbing a homemade bomb at his girlfriend said he was actually aiming for a beaver dam. In the end, he was the only person injured, and he now faces 10 months in prison as well. Otis Cecil Wilkins, 45, pleaded guilty Wednesday to assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to 300 days in jail. He had been charged with attempted first-degree murder.
According to sheriff's deputies, Wilkins had threatened the ex-girlfriend, then threw the bottle bomb at her car as she drove into her yard in Rougemont, North Carolina, about 30 miles north of Raleigh, North Carolina. Witnesses said the bomb exploded in "a large fireball," and then rolled back toward Wilkins, igniting his shorts.
Public Defender Lawrence Campbell said Wilkins' target was a beaver dam that blocked a waterway, and that the bomb was ignited by ash from his cigarette that fell onto the fuse.
Sweet. Except Rougemont isn't really north of Raleigh, but northwest. It is, however, about 15 miles directly north of Durham, and was in my high school's district.
Neptune may have stolen Triton away from its original partner.
Neptune's giant moon Triton has long been considered one of the solar system's most peculiar objects. Not only is it unusally large (40 percent more massive than Pluto), but it orbits Neptune backward, the only large moon to orbit in the opposite direction of its host planet's spin.
Now scientists say they may have solved the mystery of Triton—the giant moon was once part of a pair of planetoids that orbited in the farthest reaches of the solar system, the researchers say. [...] When Triton and its unknown companion passed close to Neptune, the researchers say, the result was a gravitational tug-of-war. Triton's companion lost this struggle and was flung into space, while Triton fell into orbit around the planet.
If you were waiting to snag one of those sexxxy .xxx domains, you can stop waiting. They ain't gonna happen.
Paul Twomey, ICANN’S chief executive, said the decision largely came down to whether by creating the ".xxx" domain ICANN might be put in a position of having to enforce all of the world's laws governing pornography.
That would be time-consuming, indeed.
A mesmerising video of time lapse radar tracking of FedEx flights coming into the Memphis delivery hub around a thunderstorm.
"Communism was a humour-producing machine."
Cell phones are fomenting civil war.
The world's highest resolution virtual reality room is at Iowa State, and it's getting a major upgrade. The website is here.
Ever classy, Silvio Berlusconi says that since he lost the election, he just won't pay his taxes and nyah nyah nyah.
What the world would look like if the polar ice caps melted. (via)
Update: As several smarter-than-apostropher commenters note, this map is for entertainment purposes only. Objects in mirror may be drier than they appear. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.
Everybody pitch in and direct any spare good mojo you have laying about to Ogged for a speedy and uncomplicated recovery.
Josh Marshall picks up on a North County Times article about Duke Cunningham and Hookergate that includes the following from the regional head of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service:
"In my opinion, he has not been cooperative and I have not gotten any information from him to further develop other targets. I was hoping that from a jail cell, he might become more cooperative, but we just don't have the cooperation that I think we should have. [...] This is much bigger and wider than just Randy 'Duke' Cunningham. All that has just not come out yet, but it won't be much longer and then you will know just how widespread this is."
One post later, Marshall poses the question that immediately popped into my head.
Do you know what the threshold is for a government criminal investigator, the regional head of DOD's in-house investigative service, to go public and say on the record that someone isn't cooperating and that the scandal is much bigger than anyone thinks?
Also, consider Duke Cunningham. What would it take to get him to clam up? Duke is 64 years old. He's had cancer. He was just sentenced to 8+ years in prison. That might well be a death sentence. Who's he protecting? And what would make him think he's better off keeping quiet than telling investigators what they want to know?
Well, now I am very curious. I'd keep my eye on TPMMuckraker today.
The right man at this critical time. Why would anybody doubt The Decider's judgement on this? Oh, right.
Hey, you know what would be really sweet? Hit me with your car again. But this time, fast.
A teenage driver who told police he ran over his buddy because his buddy is an adrenaline junkie and "gets off on this kind of thing" was arrested after the stunt went awry and sent his friend to the hospital with [...] a broken leg, a broken arm and road rash. Morris confirmed Monday that he had his friend strike him. He also said he's learned a lesson.
"I won't do this no more," Morris told The Times.
The incident occurred at 10:17 p.m. Saturday outside the Schoop's Hamburgers location on Indian Boundary Road in Chesterton. Domonkos told police he was warming up his car in the Schoop's lot after work when Morris saw him and told him to run into him, but a little faster than usual. Domonkos told police he thought it would end harmlessly like all the other times they have done this.
Domonkos told police he drove around the back of the store so he could approach from the Quizno's Subs side of the plaza and have more room to pick up speed. He told police that as he got closer to Morris, he "punched it," getting his Acura Legend up to about 25 mph. Domonkos told police he aimed right at Morris, and the next thing he knew, he heard a thump and Morris hit and broke the windshield. Domonkos braked and his friend rolled onto the ground and began screaming in agony, police said.
Domonkos told police some glass came into his car, but he was not injured. Police said he didn't think what occurred was a serious matter since they had done it countless times "for fun."
It's a thin line between Jackass and dumbass. (via Obscure Store)
A USAToday/Gallup poll taken over the past weekend puts Bush's approval rating at 31%, disapproval at 65%, both records for that poll. His approval ratings
