Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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And octopus. (via)
The rest of Buescher's biology-inspired jewelry and sculpture is here. Speaking of octopodes, PZ's Friday cephalopod is a beaut.
When the flavor is gone, it's time to make art. Via haha.nu, where you should also see this post.
When you think you've heard it all, think again.
County police said they charged three 17-year-old students at Howard High this year in the incident after a teacher alerted a school resource officer. On Jan. 11, the teacher told the officer that she saw a student give a small plastic bag that she believed contained drugs to another student. The police officer contacted the student and seized the bag, which contained two small "candy balls" wrapped in foil containing marijuana, police said. Police charged two students at the school with distribution of drugs on school property and a third with possession of marijuana.
Howard County police turned the gumballs over to Maryland State Police, whose Forensic Sciences Division Laboratory in Pikesville determined each gumball contained approximately one gram of marijuana. The instructions on the foil of the gumballs told users to chew for 30 minutes to one hour "before you would like receive your high" and to "chew for as long as possible, then swallow."
I gotta say, that's pretty clever, though not a particularly efficient way of ingesting it.
While drilling for an underground rail tunnel in Istanbul last fall, Turkish workers discovered the remains of an ancient port. Now, it has turned into Turkey's biggest archeological dig ever.
Archaeologists call it the Port of Theodosius, after the emperor of Rome and Byzantium who died in AD 395. They expect to gain insights into ancient commercial life in the city, once called Constantinople, that was the capital of the eastern Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires. [...] So far, the 17 archaeologists, three architects, and some 350 workers at the site have found what they think might be a church, a gated entrance to the city, and eight sunken ships, which have Pulak particularly excited.
He believes the ships were wiped out in a giant storm. He said the wooden boats, all apparently destroyed around 1000, make up a sort of "missing link" in the history of shipbuilding because of the fusion of old and new techniques in a single boat. [...] The site is huge, about four city blocks long by two to three wide. [...]
Digging for the Marmaray tunnel has also led to archaeological finds in the Uskudar district on the Asian side of Istanbul and Sirkeci and Veznedar on the European side. Giant machines constructing the tunnel are dredging up artifacts from the sea floor in the Bosporus. Most of the tens of thousands of pieces likely to be uncovered will be cataloged and then reburied where they were found, said Metin Gokay, a scientist at the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. Only a small percentage will qualify as museum-quality pieces, while others will be used for research. Modern-day Turkish coins will be left with the reburied items as markers to show the area has been disturbed, just in case archaeologists many centuries later dig the site up again, Gokay said.
How very cool. Officials are planning to build a museum on the site and move the underground station further outside the city. National Geographic had a similar story recently about the seemingly endless discoveries that "urban speleologists" keep making under the streets and sewers of Rome. Unfortunately, only part of the story is available online and the photo gallery leaves out the most impressive shots. Sorta drives home just how young America really is.
The DNC still has to sign off on it, but the tentative opening rounds of the 2008 nominating process look very, very promising for John Edwards.
Iowa (caucus): 1/14
Nevada (caucus): 1/19
NH (primary): 1/22
SC (primary): 1/29
Kos explains why (and remember this).
Cassini's radar has identified a giant continent on Titan, with a wide variety of geologic features across the nearly 3000-mile wide mapped strip. Be sure to catch this Quicktime movie highlighting the features of the landmass astronomers are calling Xanadu.
Also, near Titan's north pole, Cassini has gathered very strong evidence of large methane lakes, making it the only other body in the solar system known to have lakes.
Igbal Asghar reached across the counter at Super Halal Meat market and passed two butchered chickens to the man with the familiar face. Then he ducked into the walk-in freezer to fetch the customer's second order, goat meat.
When the butcher stepped out seconds later, the customer's severed left hand lay on the floor by the meat saw, Asghar said. The customer ran down the Springfield store's center aisle and into the front parking lot, leaving a trail of blood and yelling repeatedly that he was "not a terrorist." Outside, another witness said, the man announced that he had used the meat saw to cut off his hand "for Allah."
Yikes.
A new idea for the exploration of Mars may be less of a scientific leap forward than a hop. Researchers say a swarm of bouncing, spherical bots the size of baseballs could hop across the red planet to search for life. [...] Sheltered from extreme surface radiation and weather, the underground systems of Mars could hold signs of past life or provide shelter for astronauts from Earth, the scientists say. But the unpredictability of cave formations make the systems hard for robots to explore, Boston says. [...]
In theory, the units could spring over small gaps and or kick their way out of cracks and crevices. Boston thinks the bots could also tackle challenging surface terrain on the red planet, including polar ice caps riddled with fissures. [...] The mostly plastic bot features an extendable foot powered by an artificial muscle. Dubowsky has already used the novel "muscle" polymer in other robots. In the case of the hopping Mars microbots, the plastic muscle would propel the units forward three feet (one meter) once every hour.
The key to the concept, as explained in the article, is distributed computing. Using a cellular communications network, the bots could explore a wide area, then if one finds something interesting, call the others over to help examine it. They could either be deployed from a rover or dropped from above for a wider initial distribution, and for the same mass and weight of the Spirit rover, you could deploy a thousand jumping baseballbots. The researchers hope to test them in an Earth cave some time next year.
Cigarettes and alcohol go together like peanut butter and jelly. Oh, what a tasty pairing. I'm pretty sure that, in combination, they form a complete protein or something. However, here's a troubling interaction I didn't expect.
To mimic more closely the effect in human drinkers, Chen and his colleagues studied the effects of binge drinking in adult rats. They injected rats' stomachs with a dose of alcohol roughly equivalent to around four or five drinks in quick succession; enough to make their blood alcohol hit double the United States legal driving limit of 0.08%. The team also gave the animals a range of nicotine doses similar to those in the bodies of light, moderate or heavy smokers.
In 'heavy smoking' animals, the nicotine slashed the rats' peak blood-alcohol level, which came about an hour after injection, in half. Blood alcohol of 'moderate smoking' animals dropped by around 30%, and animals mimicking light smokers were not affected. The results are reported in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
Good news, right? Well, not exactly. That smokers drink more is a widely observed phenomenon. If the same nicotine-alcohol reaction takes place in humans, what it likely means is that smokers are simply drinking more to get the same sensation. And then there's the big catch: cutting the BAC in this fashion doesn't do anything to reduce the additional hangover potential those extra drinks bring.
I don't do it for the money, I do it for the chicks.
To Steven Turnage, it was bad enough to dress up in a chicken suit and stand along a city street in 105-degree heat. Having passers-by shoot bottle rockets at him has him crying foul.
"People don't take this costume seriously," said Turnage, who wears the suit to promote a fast-food restaurant. [...] Turnage said that during the two weeks he has worn the chicken suit people have thrown smokeless tobacco cans at him and tossed frozen drinks. After a bottle rocket attack, he called police.
"It's challenging," Turnage said. "You've got to be very dedicated and have a high tolerance for heat. You almost have to have a calling from the Lord to do this type of work."
If the Lord calls you to stand by the side of the road in a giant chicken suit in the dead of summer, it's time to change religions. I'm a little surprised they didn't just make the foul/fowl pun in the first paragraph explicit, but it probably would have set tongues clucking. Seriously, though, bottle rockets are a bit much. We don't need another one of these.
Urban installations guaranteed to baffle passers-by. (via)
Unintentional porn. Tons of stuff here, so get comfortable before indulging your inner Beavis. (via)
"A 12-year-old girl who last month became Scotland's youngest mother has been arrested after a night out. The girl, from West Lothian, who has not been named, was detained on Sunday 16 July following a drunken incident."
Sounds fair to me: "The city [of Philadelphia] plans to evict a Boy Scouts council from its city-owned headquarters or have the group pay a fair rent price unless it stops discriminating against gays."
The New York Dolls are back! (via)
The Sultan of Brunei flies in style.
"I'm 45 and my scrotum has become extremely droopy. When I make love my testicles bang around way too much. Is there any way to tighten them?"
Join in the fun, clowns.
Update: As of this writing, 350 comments and counting. And let me tell you, there are some mind-bogglingly brilliant entries.
An amazing collection of images, mostly shot through electron microscopes. Big hat tip to Sterling for mailing me the link.
This is a very interesting collection of images. From the "About" page:
Sponsored by Cornell University's Institute for Digital Collections (CIDC) this image-bank provides a visual resource for the study of the Fantastic or of the supernatural in fiction and in art. [...]
In order to take maximum advantage of the materials in the Cornell collections, it seemed best not to adhere to a strict definition of either the Fantastic or its predecessor, the Marvelous, as these have emerged in literary criticism and theory. It will be useful, nevertheless, to note some general markers which have informed the choices implicit in these pages. In the context of western literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Fantastic involves dread, fear and anxiety in the face of phenomena that escape rational explanation, or that reveal the notion of reality to be no more than a construct. A fantastic experience can therefore be likened to the breaking or shattering of a frame. While the literary fantastic is limited to the last 200 years, the Fantastic in art can be construed more broadly. This elasticity allowed us to choose images from works spanning a period from medieval manuscripts and printed incunabulae, to the early twentieth century.
Images were selected for their intrinsic relationship to the topic, because they illuminated an important dynamic, or quite simply because they were unusually striking. Though, inevitably, some familiar pieces will be found in these pages, we have attempted to favor rare or unusual works that, to our knowledge, have not been reproduced before. Hence the concomitant emphasis on book illustration, and on a wealth of images that have remained more or less invisible in canonical art histories. Always, the goal has been to bring to light a body of material scholars were unlikely to have had the opportunity to study. [...]
Cornell's library holdings in several areas provide a deep well from which to draw for a project such as this one. The incomparable Witchcraft collection, the History of Science collection, a recent grouping of Russian Fables and Fairy Tales now on deposit in Kroch library and the serendipitous discoveries that seem so readily to occur once the search gets under way, have resulted in a data-base of nearly 300 images, distributed among several general rubriques or thematic clusters, with search and cross-referencing capabilities.
Widely varied and worth exploring, if you're into that sort of thing.
A 16-year-old girl has survived a direct lightning strike. [...] The lightning struck Marina in the temple, went down through the body and left it near the navel. The gold cross and chain she had been wearing, a Christian symbol, melted and evaporated, leaving deep burns on her neck and chest. [...] Marina came to her senses an hour later. Doctors say her survival is a miracle. At first she could not feel her legs, but the doctors said it was just stress, and indeed the next day Marina was already on her feet. She is still in the hospital, because the deep burns on her neck need constant attendance. The marks will remain on Marina's neck forever.
Pictures at the link. I had to raise an eyebrow at this, though:
"Marina is fine, even her heart is working perfectly well, though usually when a person is struck by lightning, the heart stops immediately. It's a really unique case. There are only a few people who survived a lightning strike, and most of them develop telepathic or psychic abilities," says her doctor.
Um, what?
I plugged the Kircher Society's Lesser Known Museum Week earlier in the week when they kicked it off, and it has only gotten more interesting since. Here's the list so far, and I'll update if they add more:
Museum of the Souls in Purgatory
The Museum of the Hunt and Nature
The Museum of the Past for the Fuure
The Museum of Medical Meteorology
World's Largest Collection of World's Smallest Versions of World's Largest Things
Of course I love the Frog Museum.
Check them all out. It's a fascinating wander.
The center of our galaxy looks an awful lot like one of Jean Dubuffet's dust paintings from the '50s.
Tom Tomorrow's moniker is more appropriate than we knew, as he apparently can see into the future.
Updating this post, the Bristol City Council decided to keep it.
A piece of graffiti by Bristol artist Banksy has been allowed to stay after what the city council described as "overwhelming support" from the public. The stencilled image shows a woman in her underwear standing behind a suited man leaning out of a window, and a naked man hanging onto the ledge. The public was invited to decide whether it should stay on the side of a building on Park Street or be removed.
An internet discussion forum showed 97% of submitters supported the work. Many people who logged on highlighted the fact that Banksy is a Bristolian, and that his work "brightened up" the urban environment. However, the council warned the support of the Banksy piece is not support of graffiti in general, and an extra council team has recently been created to tackle graffiti. [...] Only six people on the AskBristol forum wanted to see Banksy's latest contribution removed.
Excellent.
On the one hand, quite tragic. On the other hand, quintessentially North Carolinian.
A legally blind man fatally shot his wife while trying to balance a plate of fried chicken and a pistol, authorities said. Kelly Honeycutt of Morganton was holding a .38-caliber pistol he found in a box while he and his wife were moving into a new home Monday night, said Burke County Sheriff's Sgt. Robert Beall said. He accidentally shot his wife Norita in the head after she handed her wheelchair-bound husband a plate of chicken [...] Beall said the husband was more than 50 percent blind, had limited movement and was in advanced stages of multiple sclerosis.
There's a lesson in all of this that really shouldn't ever have to be taught in the first place.
The site works, the site doesn't work, the site works, the site doesn't work. Hopefully things are settling down.
Ready for more good news about Iraq? How's this for ominous?
Turkish officials signaled Tuesday they are prepared to send the army into northern Iraq if U.S. and Iraqi forces do not take steps to combat Turkish Kurdish guerrillas there - a move that could put Turkey on a collision course with the United States. Turkey is facing increasing domestic pressure to act after 15 soldiers, police and guards were killed fighting the guerrillas in southeastern Turkey in the past week. [...] Diplomats and experts cautioned the increasingly aggressive Turkish statements were likely aimed at calming public anger and pressing the U.S. and Iraq to act against the Turkish Kurdish guerrillas. But they also said Turkish politicians and military officers could act if nothing is done.
Remember, this is in the part of Iraq we keep touting as a success. As John Aravosis comments, "if Turkey forces us to revise our entire Iraq strategy and redeploy forces to the north to quell whatever Kurdish uprising is taking place, that will de facto hurt whatever efforts we are currently making in the rest of Iraq to quell the situation there. It's not like we have men to spare in the rest of the country."
In the meantime, William Kristol is now officially out of his goddamn mind.
Gaijin Biker, in the comments to a post below, linked to a really excellent Flash presentation on imagining the ten dimensions. Go check it out.
Well, that was irritating. Apologies for sometimes-here-sometimes-not nature of this joint over the past couple of days. My hosting company was having some hardware issues that they say are now resolved. We'll see.
The pictures. The video. Some discussion.
Little by little, he's steadily turning into Silvio Berlusconi.
George Will, of all people, delivers a double-barrelled blast of withering criticism at the "voice of a spectacularly misnamed radicalism, 'neoconservatism'." Specifically, the Weekly Standard and William Kristol's insane cheerleading for more and more war. Good on Mr. Will.
See Steve Clemons for more.
The particles have been theorized to exist for about 40 years now, but scientists at the DoE's Berkeley National Lab have, for the first time, directly observed electrons breaking down into spinons and holons.
Just as the body and wheels of a car are thought to be intrinsic parts of a whole, incapable of separate and independent actions, i.e., the body goes right while the wheels go left, so, too, are electrical charge and spin intrinsic components of an electron. Except, according to theory, in one-dimensional solids, where the collective excitation of a system of electrons can lead to the emergence of two new particles called "spinons" and "holons." A spinon carries information about an electron's spin and a holon carries information about its charge, and they do so as separate and independent entities. [...]
The idea behind spin-charge separation is that electrons behave differently when their range of motion is restricted to a single dimension, as opposed to three or even two dimensions. When moving through one dimension, for example, the electrons are lined up head-to-tail, making the repulsive force between their negative electrical charges overridingly dominant. The restricted movement of electrons through one-dimensional material was expected to give rise to collective effects that would be strong enough to break the information flow of spin and charge from a single electron. [...]
Another area in which spinons and holons could play an important role is in the development of nanowires, one-dimensional hollow tubes through which the movement of electrons is so constrained that quantum effects dominate. Nanowires are expected to be key components in future nanotechnologies, including optoelectronics, biochemical sensing, and thermoelectrics. [...] The creation of spinons and holons in one-dimensional systems is also expected to have an impact on the future of spintronics, a technology in which the storage and movement of data will be based on the spin of electrons, rather than just on charge, as with our current electronic technology. Spin-based electronic devices promise to be smaller, faster and far more versatile than today’s devices.
Ugh. Tomorrow's high here in Durham is 100°, with humidity pushing the heat index toward 110°.
The always fascinating blog of the Athanasius Kircher Society has declared this Lesser Known Museums Week, and first out of the gates is Paris' Fragonard Museum, housed in a veterinary school, and full of the sort of taxidermy oddities that I love so. But the late 18th century pieces produced by anatomist Honoré Fragonard are somewhat more unsettling than the dead kittens playing croquet stuff.
From the museum's website:
The three-room museum is organised by themes. The first room is devoted to normal anatomy and to teratology - the study of malformations and monstrosities. The cabinets are filled with models of every organ from a large number of species. The second room contains the skeletons of domestic and wild animals. The jaws (from ruminants and horses) also on display used to allow an age diagnosis, based on the wear of the teeth. Finally, the pathological exhibit is shown in the last room : severe bone lesions, glanders and tuberculosis lesions, parasitic lesions, as well as zoological collections and the famous écorchés by Fragonard.
Excellent first date destination. Hit their site for more, including some rotatable QTVR pictures. I especially recommend the wax-injected human head and the human foetuses dancing a jig.
A striking gallery of paintings by Chinese-born Canadian artist Lui Liu.
Hot water is the world's biggest lie.
Suggestions for more useful wars.
Fishing with your one-armed son (and that's not a euphemism).
Glenn Greenwald: "That is because the political spectrum itself has shifted radically, and the movement which now most loudly describes itself as 'conservative' bears little resemblance to the political movement of which Dean, for his entire life, considered himself a part. As its leading bloggers vividly illustrate, pro-Bush 'conservatism' is a highly authoritarian movement which seeks to vest unlimited and unrestrained power in their Leader, views garden-variety political dissent as blasphemy and treason, and glorifies violence as a justifiable tool to achieve their glorious political ends."
Remember the one in a million blue lobster from last summer? Say hello to the one in a hundred million lobster.
An eastern Maine lobsterman caught a lobster this week that looks like it's half-cooked. The lobster caught by Alan Robinson in Dyer's Bay that is a typical mottled green on one side; the other side is a shade of orange that looks cooked. Robinson, of Steuben, donated the lobster to the Mount Desert Oceanarium. Staff members say the odds or finding a half-and-half lobster are 1 in 50 million to 100 million. By comparison, the odds of finding a blue lobster are about 1 in a million. [...]
Bette Spurling, who works at the oceanarium, said lobster shells are usually a blend of the three primary colors: red, yellow and blue. Those colors mix to form the greenish-brown color of most lobsters. This lobster, though, has no blue in half of its shell, she said. [...] The oceanarium has received only three two-toned lobsters in its 35 years of existence, staff members said.
You can click the picture for a larger version.
I've been accused in the past of being anti-religion which, despite the recent spate of messiah-mockery 'round here, I maintain is not actually true.
People absolutely have the right to believe whatever crazy-ass thing they'd like, so long as they don't scare the horses. However, I can't name one single instance of religious zealots seizing the reins of political power where the outcome wasn't tragic. It's a civic duty to keep those people out of power. I'm not hostile to their religion, I'm hostile to it getting anywhere near the seat of government, in the same way I'm hostile to drunks flying planes.
Watch the events unfolding the Middle East right now for a prime example. Want one closer to home? Check out this discussion board thread populated mostly by folks right here in the US, where the prospect of a regional war in the Middle East has everybody so excited they can barely contain themselves because, hey, this could be the beginning of the Rapture! Hooray! You and him kill each other some more! Bring on the end times! Just a closer walk with thee! Happy days are here again!
I'm not totally convinced these people should have the right to use pointy forks, much less get their hands on any tiny bit of government. (via)
Update: Hmm, now that thread has disappeared. Maybe the Rapture happened after all.
I'm sure it was incredibly exciting...
An eight-year-old US boy hit two holes-in-one with the same golf ball within 20 minutes. Harrison Vonderau and his dad Dave were playing in a father and son tournament at a course in Cleveland, Ohio. They both started screaming and jumping up and down when Harrison hit his first hole-in-one with his pitching wedge. [...] But they could not believe their eyes when he repeated the feat with his nine iron 20 minutes later.
...but I fear the rest of his life is just going to be one giant anti-climax.
In keeping with the recent Christ theme, I give you MonkeyJesus! (via)
Also Monkey Jesus, Monkey Jesus, Monkey Jesus, Monkey Jesus, and Jesus Monkey Pants in Space.
You're welcome.
I try not to duplicate my Unfogged posts over here, but please do follow the two three links in this post. I can't tell you how much it pains me to have reached the point where, with my own government, it seems more likely than not.
Update: See also Billmon, who thinks this round of violence has a circular logic of its own that's going to make it damn near impossible for anybody involved to stop the ride and get off.
"Sophisticated graffiti artists have left their mark near downtown Houston. Someone covered up a billboard on La Branch at Winbern with a poster featuring a picture of Jesus Christ holding a Budweiser can. The company that leases the billboard believes vandals made the poster at home and then pasted it on top of the ad that's supposed to be there."
Lots of arrests recently, busting up dastardly terrorist plots, yes? Most of them, however, seem to bear the unmistakeable signature of the Wile E. Coyote School of Terrorism. I mean, sure, probably best to go ahead and charge folks who have bad intentions, because even idiots can make things go boom occasionally, but it's still kinda hard to get excited about the monthly announcement that Larry, Curly, and Moe are safely in custody. So I very nearly skipped past this article entitled "Joliet man admits part in terror plot".
Then I noticed the sub-headline: "Pleads guilty: Says man hired him to help kidnap and scare ex-wife." Waaait a minute. I think we're using two different definitions of terror now, aren't we?
Armed with a BB gun and a mask, a Joliet man helped a former Jerling Junior High School teacher terrorize his estranged wife for $3,000, he admitted Friday in preparation for flipping on the accused kidnapping mastermind at trial. Terrell Hill, 32, of Joliet pleaded guilty Friday, striking a deal with prosecutors to testify against co-defendant Joseph Lyon. Lyon, 48, will face trial in a few weeks on charges he had his ex-wife kidnapped to extort money from her and make her have sex with him. [...] The men set out Aug. 29, 2002, to purchase supplies: a mask and new clothes for Hill, a BB gun, chains and a lock, handcuffs and fake blood for Lyon, Hill said. Lyon even had Hill pretend to beat him up in front of his youngest son and his ex-wife, using fake blood to feign injury, Hill said.
Hill said he was told to "gently" tie up the child and both parents, first in the basement of the house in the 17200 block of Dooneen Drive and then upstairs in their bedrooms. Hill also was to order the Lyons to perform numerous sex acts on each other, photographing one of the episodes after they moved Aug. 30 to the Vista Motel in Orland Park. Hill said he used a Polaroid camera Lyon gave him to take the 11 photos now in evidence. Lyon left the motel room other times to buy beer and get more money, Hill said.
"I guess he missed her," Hill said, explaining the sex.
While I'm sure it was a terrifying experience for his ex-wife and teenaged son, and kidnapping and rape ain't minor crimes by any measure, calling this guy a "mastermind" seems like quite the undeserved compliment.
Back from the beach and the main lesson I took from the vacation is don't ever volunteer to take anybody else's child along with you on vacation, no matter how bored that may leave your own children. On that I'll say nothing else, except that if I ever thought I might want to have additional children, I think it no longer. Anyhow, it turned out to be a pretty busy week while I was away, didn't it? While I have enough catching up at work to keep posting light for a few days, I thought I'd get these week-in-review thoughts down.
The World Cup! And some French guy headbutted some Italian guy in the chest and-- oh, who am I kidding? I really couldn't be any less interested. No, wait. That's not true. Baseball season is still going on, right? And pretty soon, a bunch of chemically-enhanced freaks are going to be riding bicycles around France for a month. Okay, I could be less interested, but only by the tiniest of margins. God, but I hate the summer. Dear lord, please let football season start soon.
What else? Oh yeah, Gaza. I've really never had strong feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian troubles. Don't feel like I have a dog in the fight, don't see any way to cut the Gordian knot, and don't see either side as holding the moral high ground. However, the increasingly likely outcome of the current Israeli siege of Gaza could bear more than a passing resemblance to, let's be frank, genocide. Think I'm being hyperbolic? I'm not.
But the story that you need to read is Seymour Hersh's latest on Bush's obsession with attacking Iran. Really, if you haven't read it, do it now. Then Arthur Silber here and here. Understand what is at stake here: large swaths of the world already consider us an out-of-control, rogue nation. If you think Iraq has spiralled into an uncontrollable bloodbath (and it has), just wait for what an attack on Iran could bring. We've been lucky to have the Iraq mess stay within its borders so far. Bush is playing with a region-wide war here. If we attack Iran for enriching uranium (which, by the way, they are explicitly allowed to do under the NPT), the last paper-thin slip of plausible deniability will dissolve. We will be an outlaw nation ruled by war criminals that ought to be tried and hanged.
And on that cheery note, back to work.
I'm off for a long week of doing as little as possible down on Hilton Head Island. Won't have my computer with me, so no chance of anything from me here until a week from Sunday at the very earliest.
Have a good 4th, everybody.
