http://www.omlettesoft.com/newjournal.php3?who=Lord+Omlette&id=1261879266

"Humble & Brilliant" will, barring unforseen disaster, be available on LP & for download on March 10, 2010. Just in time for SXSW!

rljd

A provocative new study published this year in the journal Heart and Circulatory Physiology suggests, however, that there may be a novel way to test at least one element of your heart's health right in your own living room, right in the middle of the holidays. Sit on the floor with your legs stretched straight out in front of you, toes pointing up. Reach forward from the hips. Are you flexible enough to touch your toes? If so, then your cardiac arteries probably are also flexible.

…

What the researchers found was a clear correlation between inflexible bodies and inflexible arteries in subjects older than 40. Adults with poor results on the sit-and-reach test also tended to have relatively high readings of arterial stiffness. In short, the study concluded that "a less flexible body indicates arterial stiffening, especially in middle-aged and older adults." No such correlation was found in those under 40, even when gender and fitness were considered as factors.

…

How it is that stiff muscles in the back and legs are linked to stiff tissues near the heart is an issue that hasn't been fully elucidated, Mr. Yamamoto says, although arterial walls are composed of the same kinds of elastic tissues as muscles elsewhere in the body. So it's likely, he says, that alterations in the composition of muscle tissues in the lower back (including aging-related alterations in the amount of collagen within the muscles) could be occurring in the arterial walls at the same time.

What is surprising are some early indications that increasing your flexibility might somehow loosen up your arteries, too. That was the accidental and, as yet unreplicated finding of a small 2008 study at the University of Texas at Austin. The study was designed to examine whether weight lifting increased arterial stiffness. (It didn't, at least on this occasion.) The control group consisted of people who stretched. They were not expected to show any change in cardiac function, but over the course of 13 weeks they in fact increased the pliability of their arteries by more than 20 percent.

Gretchen Reynolds

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave approval for a $25 million project to restore a 250-acre swath of wetlands along the Hackensack River after adjustments were made to allay fears that the restored wetlands would generate more bird strikes at nearby Teterboro Airport.

…

The ambitious project along the Hackensack in Carlstadt, part of the Richard P. Kane Natural Area, lies just northeast of the new Meadowlands football stadium and the Izod Center. EarthMark will pay the landowner -- the Meadowlands Conservation Trust -- $6 million over five years to lease the site and restore the wetlands. EarthMark expects to make that back and earn a profit by selling mitigation credits, which are used by developers to offset wetlands harmed by construction elsewhere.

In January, EarthMark will begin excavating the tract to improve the Mudabock Creek and add some new channels to allow tidal flows back into the property. Earthen berms will also be constructed along the interior border of the property so that industrial sites to the west and north don't flood. Next July and August, the company will plant up to 1.3 million plugs of spartina grass, as well as other native species, including bulrush, spike rush, swamp aster and water hemp, to attract more migrating birds and provide better habitat for spawning fish. The Meadowlands are a key stopover for birds migrating in spring and fall. More than 80,000 birds from 181 species flew through the area in 2004, according to a New Jersey Audubon Society survey.

James M. O'Neill

If a man yells "YOU LIE" in a room full of politicians, how do you know to whom he's talking?

Phil Greenspun

http://www.omlettesoft.com/newjournal.php3?who=Lord+Omlette&id=1261857940

But the book inspired him to pursue an intense study of nuclear energy over the next few years, during which he became convinced that thorium could solve the nuclear power industry's most intractable problems. After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it's so plentiful in nature, it's virtually inexhaustible. It's also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.

Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the '50s through the early '70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the '60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors -- in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.

Richard Martin

The state attorney general has sued the institute and its president, Harold J. Raveché, accusing him of plundering the endowment and receiving $1.8 million in illegal low-interest loans for vacation homes, with half of them later forgiven.

The institute's trustees tripled Dr. Raveché's salary over a decade, to $1.1 million last year, higher than presidential salaries at Harvard, M.I.T. and Princeton, and, the lawsuit says, Stevens used multiple sets of books to hide its deteriorating financial condition.

"We found extensive misconduct going back years, a pattern of misinformation to the board and misuse of the endowment," the attorney general, Anne Milgram, said in an interview this month. "Stevens Institute needs real reform."

…

"You've got allegations involving excessive compensation, but also abuse of the endowment, keeping two sets of books, misleading the board and forgiveness of below-market-rate loans," Mr. Siegel said. "The entire process of oversight looks tainted. You rarely see a case this extreme."

The Internal Revenue Service has its own continuing investigation that "includes issues pertaining to defendant Raveché's compensation," the suit says. It also notes that Stevens paid the I.R.S. $750,000 last year in penalties and unpaid taxes for several of its spinoff technology companies.

…

The turmoil at Stevens can be traced to 2004, when Moody's downgraded its bond ratings to near junk status because of operating deficits and rising debt. A faculty committee, led by Donald N. Merino, a professor of technology and engineering management, had studied the institute's tax returns and other public financial reports, and concluded that administrative salaries were excessive and that Stevens's finances were deteriorating.

Sam Dillon

Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait. The failure was "the inevitable result of rich countries refusing adequately and fairly to shoulder their overwhelming responsibility", said Christian Aid. "Rich countries have bullied developing nations," fumed Friends of the Earth International.

All very predictable, but the complete opposite of the truth.

…

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China's representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. "Why can't we even mention our own targets?" demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil's representative too pointed out the illogicality of China's position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why - because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord's lack of ambition.

China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak "as soon as possible". The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen. I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world.

Mark Lynas

Michele Bachmann has become well known for her anti-government tea-bagger antics, protesting health care reform and every other government "handout" as socialism. What her followers probably don't know is that Rep. Bachmann is, to use that anti-government slur, something of a welfare queen. That's right, the anti-government insurrectionist has taken more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts thanks to corrupt farming subsidies she has been collecting for at least a decade.

…

data compiled from federal records by Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit watchdog that tracks the recipients of agricultural subsidies in the United States, shows that Bachmann has an inner Marxist that is perfectly at ease with profiting from taxpayer largesse. According to the organization's records, Bachmann's family farm received $251,973 in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2006. The farm had been managed by Bachmann's recently deceased father-in-law and took in roughly $20,000 in 2006 and $28,000 in 2005, with the bulk of the subsidies going to dairy and corn. Both dairy and corn are heavily subsidized--or "socialized"--businesses in America (in 2005 alone, Washington spent $4.8 billion propping up corn prices) and are subject to strict government price controls. These subsidies are at the heart of America's bizarre planned agricultural economy and as far away from Michele Bachmann's free-market dream world as Cuba's free medical system. If American farms such as hers were forced to compete in the global free market, they would collapse.

However, Bachmann doesn't think other Americans should benefit from such protection and assistance. She voted against every foreclosure relief bill aimed at helping average homeowners (despite the fact that her district had the highest foreclosure rate in Minnesota), saying that bailing out homeowners would be "rewarding the irresponsible while punishing those who have been playing by the rules." That's right, the subsidy queen wants the rest of us to be responsible.

Yasha Levine

http://www.omlettesoft.com/newjournal.php3?who=Lord+Omlette&id=1261767086

"I think, 'I could do this tomorrow while we're all sitting around, listening to this [Richard] Cook crap we heard today. We always get ice water in those meetings; that's something I could do to save time.' Then I think, 'No, that would be gauche.' But then I think of Luis Alvarez, the physicist. He's a guy I admire for his gutsiness and sense of humor, and I think, if Alvarez was on this commission, he would do it, and that's good enough for me."

At 11:00am on August 9th, 1945, just a minute before the second atomic bomb in the space of three days was dropped on Japan, a B-29 bomber named The Great Artiste quietly dropped three canisters from the sky. Inside each of the canisters, alongside a shockwave gauge designed by American physicist Luis Alvarez, was an unsigned copy of the following letter. The letter, written by Alvarez and two fellow scientists, was addressed to Japanese nuclear physicist Ryokichi Sagane - a man with whom Alvarez had previously worked at Berkeley - and pleaded with him to inform his 'leaders' of the impending 'total annihilation' of their cities. The letter reached Sagane a month later after being found 50km from the centre of devastation: Nagasaki.

Alvarez and Sagane met again 4 years later, at which point the letter was finally signed.

Having largely dispensed with the usual spate of extraterrestrial and paranormal hypotheses -- is everyone on the internet crazy? asked one commentator -- you, dear readers, have gotten down to brass tacks.

As far as I can tell, there are basically three non-insane explanations floating around, none of which are (strictly speaking) mutually exclusive:

1. Something went terribly, terribly wrong.
2. It was an energy management maneuver.
3. It is a countermeasure designed to defeat future boost phase missile defenses.

…

Which brings us to the second reason that solid-fueled missiles make pretty spirals -- so-called "generalized energy management" manuevers or GEMS. You can't just shut-off a solid-fueled missile in mid-burn (at least not easily), so you need to let it do a little dance to burn off some energy.

Here is a nice video of a US THAAD interceptor getting funky before getting down to business.

The Bulava was most likely aimed at the test ground in Kamchatka, so it would have needed to perform an energy management maneuver to reduce the missiles range from 8,000 km to about 3,000-4,000 km. The fact that a bunch of drunken Norwegians think that a StarGate has opened up is just a bonus, as far as the Russians are concerned.

Jeffrey Lewis

A self-styled Nevada codebreaker convinced the CIA he could decode secret terrorist targeting information sent through Al Jazeera broadcasts, prompting the Bush White House to raise the terror alert level to Orange (high) in December 2003, with Tom Ridge warning of "near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experience on September 11," according to a new report in Playboy.

The report deals another blow to the credibility of the Department of Homeland Security's color-coded terror alert system, and comes after Ridge's claim that the system was used as a political tool when he was DHS secretary.

The man who prompted the December 2003 Orange alert was Dennis Montgomery, who has since been embroiled in various lawsuits, including one for allegedly bouncing $1 million in checks during a Caesars Palace spree. His former lawyer calls him a "habitual liar engaged in fraud."

Justin Elliott

Policy wonks and deficit hawks weren't the only ones paying attention when President Obama signed the Fiscal Year 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act last week. HIV activists, public health experts and communities of drug users celebrated--not for what's in the appropriations bill, but for what's not in it: a ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs, which has appeared in the federal budget every year since 1988.

After two decades, this change is a historic achievement. Obama had already missed one opportunity to lift the ban, neglecting to pull it out of his budget in May. Still, that same month former Seattle chief of police Gil Kerlikowske was sworn in as the director of national drug control policy, calling for a new common-sense approach to drug addiction. When the drug czar calls for an end to the war on drugs, it's clearly the start of a new era.

Beth Schwartzapfel

Royal Dutch Shell PLC is seeking buyers for 10 of its Nigerian onshore oil-production assets following years of militant attacks on its facilities that have squeezed the company's profit, people familiar with the matter said Sunday.

The oil fields have a market value of $4 billion to $5 billion and represent proven oil reserves of about 100 million barrels, one of the people said. The Anglo-Dutch company, for decades Nigeria's biggest foreign oil operator by production, is looking to dispose of the blocks in the first and second quarters.

The move marks a capitulation of sorts for Shell.

Spencer Swartz

In his speech about added troops for Afghanistan earlier this month, President Obama made a brief reference to Yemen, saying, "Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold -- whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere -- they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships."

Until tonight, American officials had hedged about any U.S. role in the strikes against Yemen and news reports from Yemen attributed the attacks to the Yemen Air Force.

President Obama placed a call after the strikes to "congratulate" the President of Yemen, Ali Abdallah Salih, on his efforts against al Qaeda, according to White House officials.

Brian Ross, et al

http://www.omlettesoft.com/newjournal.php3?who=Lord+Omlette&id=1261619598

Increasingly, infrastructure investment and mass transportation are framed by the liberal-conservative divide, turning relatively straightforward municipal issues into cultural and ideological battles. With our transportation infrastructure literally falling apart -- the American Society of Civil Engineers puts the repair bill at $2.2 trillion -- the United States faces an interesting dilemma.

A thriving economy is desperately needed to increase wealth, decrease unemployment and wean people off federal entitlement programs fiscal conservatives hate. A dependable and indirect method of stimulating the economy is driving down the cost and energy required to move goods and services by investing in our roads, railways, bridges and other infrastructure. That by definition requires massive amounts of public money.

…

Tea Partiers aside, growing dissatisfaction with President Obama and the fact the opposition party typically does well in midterm elections mean we'll see less political support for anything beyond a cursory overhaul of existing infrastructure. Don't expect much progress on expensive new fronts like high-speed rail. That Obertsar's bill has gotten this far relatively uncontested is almost certainly due to conservatives' laser-like focus on healthcare reform. And liberals may be willing to sacrifice ambitious goals in favor of more salient issues that spread benefits more widely -- high-speed rail may have support in those areas slated to get it, but every legislator loves bringing home money for roads.

Zach Rosenberg

A senior administration official explains to TPM: The White House was concerned about the original language, which would have prohibited the DoD from using companies whose employment contracts contained an "arbitration clause," which would keep employees from taking the company to court for Title VII offenses, which include rape, sexual assault, harassment and false imprisonment. That language, the official said, may have forced the government to reneg on multi-billion-dollar contracts. Because of a clause in many of those contracts, the government would still have to pay the contractors, even though the work wouldn't be performed.

Another concern: The Pentagon deals with a massive number of contracts and would never be able to make sure the arbitration clauses were stripped in all those contracts.

…

Of course, there is a national security waiver. The secretary of defense can waive the restriction if, say, a contractor is the only one who can provide a certain service or product. But the secretary would have to explain, in detail, why no one else could fulfill the contract. And, according to the official, that explanation would be posted online, in public view. (The idea here being that another company who makes the same product could step forward.)

Rachel Slajda

http://www.omlettesoft.com/newjournal.php3?who=Lord+Omlette&id=1261447569

http://www.omlettesoft.com/newjournal.php3?who=Lord+Omlette&id=1261444527

e.e: i wonder if we can pull someone we know from stevens
e.e: it usually works out better than total strangers
e.e: as much as we hated stevens, it's slightly above the general average population
JLP: I'm fine w/ that, but who?
e.e: i don't have much friends
e.e: but you know lots of ppl
e.e: don't you know any frustrated php developers in basement?
JLP: all gainfully employed or nott willing to relocate to east coast
e.e: keep your eyes open when you go drinking next time i guess
JLP: I will either wind up w/ a g/f or a co-worker
e.e: or both
e.e: don't even think about it
JLP: haha
e.e: make your candidates write SQL when you're looking for g/f

If you thought I was grumpy before, just imagine how I am after waking up this morning to have a Helloscan tell me it wants money to let me moderate my own comment threads right now on my blog and will be charging to use them at all next year. Grrrrr.

Avedon

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echo "No one is talking about this post.\n";
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The railroad tracks from Boston to Washington - the busiest rail artery in the nation, and one that also carries America's only high-speed train, the Acela - have been virtually shut out of $8 billion worth of federal stimulus money set aside for high-speed rail projects because of a strict environmental review required by the Obama administration.

Because such a review would take years, states along the Northeast rail corridor are not able to pursue stimulus money for a variety of crucial upgrades.

The projects, aimed at increasing speeds, range from bridge replacements in Connecticut to new overhead wires in New Jersey. They would cut the Acela's travel time from Boston to New York by almost 30 minutes, and from Boston to Washington by a full hour.

When the first grants are announced in January, most of the money - and accompanying jobs - is expected to go to railroad projects in California and the Midwest, which currently have no high-speed trains but are trying to establish service for the first time.

Alan Wirzbicki

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights. Still, the intercepts could give America's enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under U.S. surveillance.

Siobhan Gorman, Yochi J. Dreazen and August Cole

Due the difficulty of adding encryption to a large number of deployed systems, each with high bandwidth video flows (particularly the "Gorgon's Stare" with 10 separate feeds), a quick fix is very unlikely.

John Robb

John seems to be burned out from all craziness, so I'm going to continue with my rant against those who say that if Democrats were Republicans they would have rammed their health care bill through, the same way that legendary Senate leader Bill Frist rammed immigration reform, Social Security privatization, and drilling in ANWR through.

DougJ

Sen. Klobuchar just made a great point on MSNBC- using the logic of those wanting to kill the bill because it isn't good enough, we would never have passed the Civil Rights Act of 1960 because it didn't have the reforms of 1964, 68, and 91 included.

John Cole

http://www.omlettesoft.com/newjournal.php3?who=Lord+Omlette&id=1261340242

The Wiimote can track just about anything: All that's needed is an LED light. Hydrologist Willem Luxemburg of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands demonstrated a hacked water-level sensor made from a Wiimote and a plastic boat at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union here Monday.

…

Luxemburg's team aimed the Wiimote at a problem that can be very tricky for hydrologists: measuring evaporation on a body of water. The easiest way to measure evaporation is to place pans of water near the lake, or whatever water is being studied, and put pressure sensors in them. The sensors record the drop in pressure as more and more water disappears. But this equipment can run $500 or more, and still the measurements aren't accurate because the water in the pan gets warmer on land than it would in the lake. Alternatively, measuring the level of water in a pan that is floating in a lake is also tricky because the pan will inevitably be moving.

The Wiimote could overcome the evaporation-measurement problems. It has a tri-axial accelerometer and a high-resolution, high-speed infrared camera, which can sense movement with better than 1 millimeter accuracy.

Luxemburg's team tested it in a floating evaporation pan, using a float with an LED. With a Wiimote aimed at the float, and some hacking and programming of the Wiimote's output, they were able to get highly accurate, real-time data on water level wirelessly sent to a laptop.

The IR camera can track up to four LED lights at once, so scientists can use several floats to calculate the water's plane. To be as accurate with pressure sensors, you'd need more and costlier units.

Luxemburg and Hut's goal was to show other scientists at the meeting that the videogame controller can be a legitimate piece of scientific equipment that they should consider deploying in all types of field experiments.

Betsy Mason

The deadline was Dec. 31 for the states to create what would be the largest identification database of its kind under the auspices of the Real ID program. The law also mandates uniform anti-counterfeiting standards for state driver's licenses.

None of the states are in full compliance with the law, first adopted in 2005, requiring state motor vehicle bureaus to obtain and internally scan and store personal information like Social Security cards and birth certificates for a national database, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. About half the states oppose the mandate, or have said they would never comply.

David Kravets

http://www.omlettesoft.com/newjournal.php3?who=Lord+Omlette&id=1261268303

White House computer technicians have found 22 million e-mails that were believed to have been lost during President George W. Bush's administration, according to the Associated Press.

The discovery was announced Monday by the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, which filed lawsuits against the Executive Office of the President, or EOP, over the e-mails in 2007.

The two groups had initially filed a Freedom of Information Act request for e-mails in the wake of a scandal involving the Justice Department, which had fired U.S. attorneys around the country in an apparent political bid to rid the department of prosecutors who didn't adhere to the White House's conservative agenda. The missing e-mails were also potentially crucial to the investigation into the Valerie Plame-CIA leak scandal.

…

The e-mails will eventually be made available to the public, after they are archived through the National Archives and Records Administration.

Kim Zetter

Most Americans fail to appreciate that the Civil Rights movement was about the overthrow of an entrenched political order in each of the Southern states, that the segregationists who controlled this order did not hesitate to employ violence (law enforcement, paramilitary, mob) to preserve it, and that for nearly a century the federal government tacitly or overtly supported the segregationist state governments. That the Civil Rights movement employed nonviolent tactics should fool us no more than it did the segregationists, who correctly saw themselves as being at war. Significant change was never going to occur within the political system: it had to be forced. The aim of the segregationists was to keep the federal government on the sidelines. The aim of the Civil Rights movement was to "capture" the federal government -- to get it to apply its weight against the Southern states. As to why it matters: a major reason we were slow to grasp the emergence and extent of the insurgency in Iraq is that it didn't -and doesn't -- look like a classic insurgency. In fact, the official Department of Defense definition of insurgency still reflects a Vietnam era understanding of the term. Looking at the Civil Rights movement as an insurgency is useful because it assists in thinking more comprehensively about the phenomenon of insurgency and assists in a more complete -and therefore more useful -- definition of the term.

Mark Grimsley

Drug traffickers employing high-tech drills, miles of rubber hose and a fleet of stolen tanker trucks have siphoned more than $1 billion worth of oil from Mexico's pipelines over the past two years, in a vast and audacious conspiracy that is bleeding the national treasury, according to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials and the state-run oil company.

Using sophisticated smuggling networks, the traffickers have transported a portion of the pilfered petroleum across the border to sell to U.S. companies, some of which knew that it was stolen, according to court documents and interviews with American officials involved in an expanding investigation of oil services firms in Texas.

The widespread theft of Mexico's most vital national resource by criminal organizations represents a costly new front in President Felipe Calderón's war against the drug cartels, and it shows how the traffickers are rapidly evolving from traditional narcotics smuggling to activities as diverse as oil theft, transport and sales.

Oil theft has been a persistent problem for the state-run Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, but the robbery increased sharply after Calderón launched his war against the cartels shortly after taking office in December 2006. The drug war has claimed more than 16,000 lives and has led the cartels, which rely on drug trafficking for most of their revenue, to branch out into other illegal activities.

Steve Fainaru and William Booth

A common explanation for the US Presence in Afghanistan is Washington's interest in Central Asian fuel sources-- natural gas in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and petroleum in Kazakhstan. The idea of Zalmay Khalilzad and others was to bring a gas pipeline down through Afghanistan and Pakistan to energy-hungry India. Turkmenistan became independent of Moscow in 1991, making the project plausible. For this reason some on the political Right in the US actually supported the Taliban as a force for law and order.

If that was the plan, it has failed. Instead, China has landed the big bid to develop a major gas field in Turkmenistan, along with a pipeline to Beijing. Turkmenistan had strongly considered piping the gas to Moscow instead, but developed conflicts with Gazprom.

So the US is bogged down in an Afghanistan quagmire, and China is running off with the big regional prize.

Juan Cole

http://www.omlettesoft.com/newjournal.php3?who=Lord+Omlette&id=1261203676

We wanted to take a moment to inform you all as to the purpose of the most recent Warcraft III patches in case there was any confusion. Our focus was to reinforce the security for our player base from potential malicious maps that could compromise their systems. Additionally, we enhanced the toolset for our map makers to allow them to improve upon and create new maps for all of you to enjoy.

As a result of the most recent Warcraft III patch, 1.24c, replays from previous patch versions are no longer viewable. This includes replays from patches 1.24a and 1.24b, which will not be grayed out when viewed from the replay list.

Cydra

Turn to page 621 of the Senate version, the section entitled "Transforming the Health Care Delivery System," and start reading. Does the bill end medicine's destructive piecemeal payment system? Does it replace paying for quantity with paying for quality? Does it institute nationwide structural changes that curb costs and raise quality? It does not. Instead, what it offers is . . . pilot prgrams.

This has provided a soft target for critics. "Two thousand seventy-four pages and trillions of dollars later," Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, said recently, "this bill doesn't even meet the basic goal that the American people had in mind and what they thought this debate was all about: to lower costs." According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill makes no significant long-term cost reductions. Even Democrats have become nervous. For many, the hope of reform was to re-form the health-care system. If nothing is done, the United States is on track to spend an unimaginable ten trillion dollars more on health care in the next decade than it currently spends, hobbling government, growth, and employment. Where we crave sweeping transformation, however, all the current bill offers is those pilot programs, a battery of small-scale experiments. The strategy seems hopelessly inadequate to solve a problem of this magnitude. And yet--here's the interesting thing--history suggests otherwise.

t the start of the twentieth century, another indispensable but unmanageably costly sector was strangling the country: agriculture. In 1900, more than forty per cent of a family's income went to paying for food. At the same time, farming was hugely labor-intensive, tying up almost half the American workforce. We were, partly as a result, still a poor nation. Only by improving the productivity of farming could we raise our standard of living and emerge as an industrial power. We had to reduce food costs, so that families could spend money on other goods, and resources could flow to other economic sectors. And we had to make farming less labor-dependent, so that more of the population could enter non-farming occupations and support economic growth and development.

…

You might think that the invisible hand of market competition would have solved these problems, that the prospect of higher income from improved practices would have encouraged change. But laissez-faire had not worked. Farmers relied so much on human muscle because it was cheap and didn't require the long-term investment that animal power and machinery did. The fact that land, too, was cheap encouraged extensive, almost careless cultivation. When the soil became exhausted, farmers simply moved; most tracts of farmland were occupied for five years or less. Those who didn't move tended to be tenant farmers, who paid rent to their landlords in either cash or crops, which also discouraged long-term investment. And there was a deep-seated fear of risk and the uncertainties of change; many farmers dismissed new ideas as "book farming."

…

The United States did not seek a grand solution. Private farms remained, along with the considerable advantages of individual initiative. Still, government was enlisted to help millions of farmers change the way they worked. The approach succeeded almost shockingly well. The resulting abundance of goods in our grocery stores and the leaps in our standard of living became the greatest argument for America around the world. And, as the agricultural historian Roy V. Scott recounted, four decades ago, in his remarkable study "The Reluctant Farmer," it all started with a pilot program.

Atul Gawande

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. "In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor," he said.

Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.

Rajeev Syal

The big news out of Iraq over the weekend was the awarding of a handful of new oil development contracts to companies such as Royal Dutch Shell and Russia's Lukoil. These bids follow earlier awards of fields for development to China. The American oil majors failed to conclude any new deals, though Exxon Mobil won a bid for West Qurna 1 in November.

Juan Cole

http://www.omlettesoft.com/newjournal.php3?who=Lord+Omlette&id=1261106449

Hello
Duck butter
Unabrow man
I think you are sexy
Because your delicate features are very elegant
And I don't feel this about most people
And so you should feel very honored by my affections
The ebay gifts of pieces of my heart and soul
I want to make love i
To you till wee hours of the morning
And kiss you and tell you how glad I am that you came into my life
Duck
Turn me on

You've probably seen the stories about the five American Muslim men who were arrested in Pakistan this week after traveling to the country to join up with the jihad. But according to this article in the Wall Street Journal it was all pretty sad sack affair. The five tried to hook up with several Pakistani terrorist groups with at least loose ties to al Qaeda but were consistently rebuffed for either being too lame, too inept or simply for having poor terrorism references.

…

Even the FBI won't give them any respect. In an email to Congress, a Bureau representative wrote: "We currently have no information linking them to terrorist organizations and the FBI was looking for them solely because their families were concerned for their safety and sought our assistance" after the five went missing after Thanksgiving.

Josh Marshall

http://www.omlettesoft.com/newjournal.php3?who=Lord+Omlette&id=1261016568

xjube: wow.. just watched yours and toasts.. game.. fuck.. you guys are assholes

Two months ago, we pointed out in our story on flu in The Atlantic that the antiviral drug Tamiflu might not be as effective or safe as many patients, doctors, and governments think. The drug has been widely prescribed since the first cases of H1N1 flu surfaced last spring, and the U.S. government has spent more than $1.5 billion stockpiling it since 2005 as part of the nation's pandemic preparedness plan.

Now it looks as if our concerns were correct, and the nation may have put more than a billion dollars into the medical equivalent of a mirage. This week, the British medical journal BMJ published a multi-part investigation that confirms that the scientific evidence just isn't there to show that Tamiflu prevents serious complications, hospitalization, or death in people that have the flu. The BMJ goes further to suggest that Roche, the Swiss company that manufactures and markets Tamiflu, may have misled governments and physicians.

Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer

The U.S. first began stockpiling Tamiflu and Relenza back in 2005, in the wake of concern that an outbreak in Southeast Asia of bird flu, a far more deadly form of the disease, might go global. On November 1, 2005, President George W.Bush pronounced pandemic flu a "danger to our homeland," and he asked Congress to approve legislation that included $1billion for the production and stockpiling of antivirals. This was after Congress had already approved $1.8 billion to stockpile Tamiflu for the military, a decision that was made during the tenure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. (Before joining the Bush Cabinet, Rumsfeld was chairman for four years of Gilead Sciences, the company that holds the patent on Tamiflu, and he held millions of dollars' worth of stock in the company. According to Roll Call, an online newspaper covering events on Capitol Hill, Rumsfeld says he recused himself from all government decisions involving Tamiflu. Gilead's stock price rose more than 50 percent in 2005, when the government's plan was announced.)

Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer

The bottom-line problem seems to be that law-abiding people don't have much experience with being treated like criminals.

In a high-pressure situation they sometimes fall back on their quaint expectations of rights and basic human respect. I would wager that someone who had spent serious time in prison would do much better in these situations.

The guy probably had a long day. I bet he just wanted nothing more than to get home and go to sleep. He obviously didn't understand what all the fuss was about, and he ended up stepping on someone's hair trigger. It seems terribly unlikely he did something that you or I would consider physically threatening. After being pepper-sprayed and man-handled, and likely not in the soundest state of mind, maybe he even flailed a bit -- guaranteeing an assault charge (and possible conviction).

Perhaps that's how it went down. It'll probably turn out that the border guards "followed procedure." But that's exactly the problem that makes the story frightening to us:

The path from "long day + non-violent temporary failure of judgement" to "being physically assaulted and facing a life-altering felony charge" seems terribly short.

tc

Noah Shachtman: Well there's certainly very different rules that apply from Afghanistan to Pakistan. You know in Afghanistan the air strikes have got to be very tightly constrained. You know you really can't drop a bomb in Afghanistan without layers and layers and layers of approval. And you have to be very careful about civilian casualties. In Pakistan if the media reports are at all correct you know you're having two, three, four dozen people get killed at a time in these drone attacks and let me tell you they are not all terrorists or militants. There's got to be some civilians involved when you're getting that many people killed at once. So there's a very different feel to the air war in Pakistan. And they don't seem to be taking the kind of care that they do in Afghanistan.

The World

I'm just not sure that killing a few people in leadership is worth radicalizing the entire Pakistani public, which is what I suspect is happening when you are killing dozens of civilians at a time. We have near riots in the US when we try to discuss providing health care coverage for everyone in the country. Can you imagine the reaction if every couple of days we lost twenty people to a foreign air strike?

John Cole

Luis Gutierrez is one of the livelier members of the House of Representatives and the Democrat from Illinois was in true form on the House floor Wednesday defending the financial regulatory reform package against persistent Republican critiques.

The GOP claims that the House bill will create a "bailout fund" for systemically important financial institutions. Gutierrez, a member of House leadership, pointed out that the bill does not, in fact, contain such a fund.

…

What the bill does do, he explained, is create a fund that major firms must pay into. If banks get into trouble, the fund is used to take them over, break them up and sell off the parts. If such a fund was socialist, Gutierrez said, then so is Geico. But unlike Geico, he said, drivers who crash the economy don't get their bank repaired and returned to them under the Democratic plan.

"What they won't tell you is unlike everybody in this room who has to go and take out an insurance policy to drive a car, they want Wall Street and Goldman Sachs to be able to drive our economy into the ground without paying a cent of insurance in case they act recklessly. And all we're saying as Democrats is: 'It's simple. If you wanna do business in America and you threaten the economic stability of our country, then you gotta pay into an insurance fund.' But lemme tell you. It's not the kind of insurance fund where you get into an accident and they take your car and they fix it and they kind of give it back to you new. No no. In our insurance fund, you know what happens? We chop up your car into pieces and sell it and then we pay back the fund with the pieces. That's our fund. Read the bill. It's a funeral fund. You guys love to talk about the death and death and death when it came to health care. Why don't you talk about our death panels now?"

Ryan Grim

http://www.omlettesoft.com/newjournal.php3?who=Lord+Omlette&id=1261012134

The giant, glowing white spiral was reportedly visible all over northern Norway between about 0645 and 0700 GMT. "It consisted initially of a green beam of light similar in colour to the aurora with a mysterious rotating spiral at one end," eye witness Nick Banbury of Harstad said, according to Spaceweather.com. "This spiral then got bigger and bigger until it turned into a huge halo in the sky with the green beam extending down to Earth."

Speculation that it was a bright meteor was quickly dismissed - in part because the apparition lasted for too long to be an incoming space rock. Suspicion then turned to an out-of-control missile.

That is exactly what it was, says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and author of Jonathan's Space Report, a fortnightly email newsletter about space launches. "It's definitely a missile launch failure," he told New Scientist.

Maggie McKee

1. canned tomatoes
2. corn-fed beef
3. microwave popcorn
4. nonorganic potatoes
5. farmed salmon
6. milk produced w/ artificial hormones
7. conventional apples

Liz Vaccariello

1. Get out of Iraq on schedule.
2. Resist calls for Iran to be bombed.
3. Stop allowing the CIA to operate drones with which to assassinate people.
4. Get the Palestinians a state by the end of 2011, even if by unilateral recognition.
5. Stick to the plan of beginning a US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in summer 2011.

Juan Cole

A longtime anonymous donor to the American Civil Liberties Union has withdrawn his annual gift of more than $20 million, punching a 25 percent hole in its annual operating budget and forcing cutbacks in operations.

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U., acknowledged in a written statement that a "family" had told the organization in September that it could not make its annual gifts, at least for next year.

"This family, that has sought to protect its privacy by arranging its gifts anonymously, notified us last month that due to market conditions it will be unable to make its expected sizable donations of over $20 million," Mr. Romero said.

Stephanie Strom