“My War”

Military 1 Comment

CBFTW:

I was on page 92, the part where Orwell was frantically chasing down a fascist with a bayonet fixed to the end of his rifle. Read for a bit, then when we got to the area where we thought was the point of orgin for those fired mortars, I stopped reading and bookmarked my place in the book, and we dismounted in this really third world area of Mosul that had this really bad stench of rotten milk lingering in the air. Tons of trash littered all over the place, and a bunch of cows and stray chickens roaming around freely. Lots of little kids also came out of nowhere to stare at us. We talked to some of the locals to see if they saw or seen anything. Then something happened, and well all raced back onto our vehicle and burned rubber outta there. And we were now in hot pursuit of these mad mortar men the same way a cop races to an armed robber call in his police car. I opened up my book and continued to read. That fascist, that Orwell was chasing down with a bayonet fixed rifle, got away from him, and I was now at the part where Orwell injured some guys with a grenade of sorts, and was ready to kick some serious ass, when all the sudden we stopped suddenly, and I had to close the book back up because the back ramp dropped and we were told to dismount.

The rest here.

This Just In:

Political Animal 1 Comment

Canadian Finance Minister Ralph Goodale addressed reporters half way through his ten day tour of the continent to report that Africa is poor.
Toronto Star;

“It’s obviously important to Africa, but it’s also important to the world” to find solutions to long-standing development and poverty issues, he added. “We all have a stake in that. … It’s partly altruism but quite frankly, for the rest of the world, it’s partly also self-interest,” he said. “And those of us who are privileged to live in some of the more comfortable parts of the world need to understand that.”

Of course. It’s all about geography.
Perhaps Goodale can draw on the nearly uninterrupted half century of Liberal success in throwing money at findiing creative solutions to solve the problems of poverty, unemployment, tribal tensions, violence and illiteracy on Canadian Indian reserves.

More On Swift Boats

Roadkill 2 Comments

Re: the continuing/not-so-continuing Kerry – Cambodia contraversy, commentor “Dan” writes (scroll down);

“I was with River Division 514 (PBR’s) in Dec.68. We were patrolling the canals around Rach Soi and Rach Gia area. We came under attack Christmas eve(’68) during the “cease-fire” period , while patrolling a canal. I think we called it “echo” canal. To my knowledge, no Swift boats were in the rivers at that time.They all were coastal patrol units. I think they did start patrolling the rivers some months after I returned home (July’69). Our last station was aboard YRBM-16 in the Chau Doc area patrolling the Vinh Tay canal.I still don’t remember any Swift boats there. This area was on the Cambodia border.
I honestly feel that Mr. Kerry is full of himself or maybe something from the pasture lands.

And this, via Instapundit, who is rubbing the media nose in this mess of their own making;

Heh.

Hubble Bubble

Science No Comments
It was a pretty good guess that the Hubble Space Telescope would enrich our knowledge of the universe.
But who predicted that it would bring us this much beauty?

“In this unusual image, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captures a rare view of the celestial equivalent of a geode � a gas cavity carved by the stellar wind and intense ultraviolet radiation from a hot young star.

Prions: A New Twist On A Folded Protein

Genetics No Comments

Prions act as stepping stones in evolution

When a protein misfolds, the results can be disastrous. An incorrect change in the molecule’s shape can lead to diseases including Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s. But scientists have discovered that misfolded proteins can have a positive side in yeast, helping cells navigate the dicey current of natural selection by expressing a variety of hidden genetic traits.
[…]
Previously, True and Whitehead Institute Director Susan Lindquist reported that a particular yeast protein called Sup35 somehow altered the metabolic properties–or phenotype–of the cell when it “misfolded” into a prion state. Sup35 helps guide the process by which cells manufacture protein molecules. However, when Sup35 misfolds into its prion state, it forms amyloid fibers similar to those found in Alzheimer’s patients and causes the cell’s protein-producing machinery to go drastically awry.
More often than not, this is deleterious to the cell. In about 20% of the cases tested, however, the Whitehead team discovered that these new phenotypes afford the yeast cell a survival advantage.
[…]
In order for Sup35 to ensure that the cell properly reads the protein recipes contained in genes, it focuses on what are called “stop codons”– sections of DNA that indicate exactly where in the gene a particular protein recipe ends. Sup35 ensures that the cell only translates material prior to these designated codons.
But when it misfolds into a prion conformation, Sup35 gets sloppy, and the cell reads beyond the stop codons, translating genetic information that previously had been dormant. As a result, the cell’s phenotype changes.
And here’s where evolution comes in.
On those rare occasions when, due to a particular environment, the altered properties of the cell provide it with a survival advantage, the cell passes that trait on to its progeny. But when the daughter cells are mated and genetic reassortment takes place, they can subsequently pass along this same trait without the prion–that is, the trait becomes fixed in the cell’s lineage and no longer depends on the prion state. “We don’t know yet exactly how the daughter cells do this,” says Lindquist, who also is a professor of biology at MIT, “but they do it quickly, often after a single mating.”

Cool.

Religion Of Peace Death

Terrorism 2 Comments

Exerpted from a sermon delivered at Finsbury Park Mosque in London, by Sheikh Abu Hamza Al-Masri.

[O]ne should not pray for the souls of members of the security forces in our countries, if they are killed while fighting Islamists. One should under no circumstances pray for their souls because they fight for the taghut. [3] They are fighting for the legitimization of interest and for forcing it on people, for the legitimization of fornication and other forbidden things, and for the presence of Jews and Christians in the Arabian Peninsula. They are fighting for the throne of Genghis Khan, for the throne of [King] Fahd, for Mubarak, and not for Allah.
“‘The Believers fight for Allah, whereas the infidels fight for the taghut. Fight the allies of Satan. Indeed, Satan’s cunning is weak’ [Koran, 4:76]. To pray for such people in mosques makes a mockery of the religion of Allah, because it misleads people and makes them believe that these are fighters for Allah, whereas [in fact] they kill Muslim men and women unjustly.
[…]
“That is because the true believer sees the world-to-come as though through a sheer fabric, as though he hears the voices of paradise, and he longs for it and yearns for it. He weighs things with both the scales of this world and the next, not only the scales of this world. He overcomes desires and stiffens his resolve not to be entangled in dubious matters, and then he triumphs and dies a good death. This is what the infidels and the hypocrites do not understand. They do not understand those who love death because it is the gate through which they meet the Lord. The believer knows that he is married to both this world and the next. This world and the next are [like] two wives [married to the same man]; if he makes one of them happy, it is at the expense of the other. If a man gives charity from his wealth, it is for the hereafter and it affects him [adversely] in this world. If he goes to fight in Jihad, it is likely that his business will be damaged and he may be separated from his family, but it is done for the sake of the world-to-come. But if he does nothing about the world-to- come, and engages himself completely in this world, this is at the expense of the world-to-come, and the world-to-come will be angry with him because of it.”
“The infidel Americans who ruined their palaces [in paradise] with their own hands must pluck these ideas out of the heads and hearts of young men and women of the believers, of the people of our nation, so we would surrender to them as the red Indians had, so that our rights would be forfeited and we would lose both this world and the world-to-come, and so that we shall be their slavish followers in both this world and the world-to-come, in this world – to humiliation, and in the world-to-come – to the fires of hell, God forbid.”
“That is why they want to change the curricula, the curricula that edify believers, the curricula that educate people to persevere. They will never achieve it. They can win the sympathy of the hypocrites and those who apostatized and those whose hearts are sick, but they have no power over the believers, because Allah protects them and gives them his blessed protection. This is Allah’s rule: Do not be deceived by this world, do not be deceived by temptations: ‘Let not the fortunes of the disbelievers in the land deceive you. Their prosperity is brief, and then hell shall be their abode. What an evil resting place!’ [Koran, 3:197-8]. This is the rule of Allah.

Arested a month after this sermon, the Americans have been trying to extradite him for his alleged attempts to create a jihad camp in Oregon.

La La La La I Can’t Hear You La La …

Media 1 Comment

Dean Esmay on the perplexing media refusal to cover any of the growing and glaring discrepencies in the Kerry self-promoted Vietnam record;

The media blackout on Kerry’s Vietnam record is really quite stunning. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. We know for a fact that 80-90% of working reporters and editors vote Democratic in every election, but this is simply unreal. As John Rosenberg notes, even so respectably mainstream-left a paper as the Washington Post, on its front page no less, is continuing to gush about Kerry’s fantastic Vietnam record and the support of his fellow veterans, while saying not one word about any of the Swifties’ allegations or the recently uncovered evidence of Kerry’s possibly false claims about Cambodia. Or about a man who served on his boat saying he’s a liar and a sleaze.
The Post didn’t put the gushy praise-sans-criticism in an editorial either. It was there as front page news.
I would have to ask why a single 20 year old drunk driving charge made screaming national headlines four years ago, but none of this is making it into the mainstream press, except on the editorial pages of a few small newspapers.

Dean’s post is rich with links to the various contraversies. Go check it out. Right now, the blogosphere is the only real source for this story – which seems to be growing despite the best efforts of the mainstream media to ignore it, and the Democrats to sue the Swift Boat Vets into silence.
update – talk radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt spots the first crack in the dam.

Trust In Media

Blogging 1 Comment

With the continuing silence on the Kerry/Cambodia story in the major media – despite an acknowledgement, retraction and revision by his campaign – is there little wonder that “a survey of 10,000 blog readers earlier this year conducted by Blogads found that 61 percent of respondents found blogs to be “more honest” than other media outlets.”

Hodder gives four reasons for trusting bloggers over general- assignment reporters:
Niche expertise. Newspapers try to cover the whole world, while bloggers can be experts with a deep knowledge about a topic like open-source software or micro-biology.
Transparency in motives. Bloggers are upfront about their biases and subjective approach, and they have greater freedom to speak from the heart and use a personal voice. Most journalists are constrained by an institutional objectivity. “I often read a reporter’s story and wonder, what’s their experience? Where are they coming from? What’s the context? What do they really think?” Hodder says.
Transparency in process. Bloggers link to documents, sources and supporting evidence to buttress their own authority. “The top-down press articles I see are written as if they’re not connected to anything, as if they just came out of a vacuum,” she says.
Forthrightness about mistakes. When bloggers err, the credible ones publish a mea culpa and take responsibility, with the corrected information alongside their original posting. Not so with newspapers, whose front-page mistakes are corrected in an inside page, or broadcast news, where mistakes are almost never acknowledged.

Good article.

John Kerry’s Orthodox Christmas

Insufferable Twits 2 Comments

Searing memory, updated;

kerry.jpg

“Mr. President, I remember Christmas of 1968, eating kutia, varenyky and pampushky on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared–seared–in me. And this pysanky my Baba sent me.”

Oriana Fallaci Interviews Oriana Fallaci

Radioactive No Comments

Italian journalist and former war correspondant Oriana Fallaci’s new book Oriana Fallaci Interviews Oriana Fallaci which warns of an Arab invasion of Europe and criticises authorities for allowing it to become ‘a colony of Islam’, has sold 500,000 copies of in a single day. They have begun reprinting a second edition.
The Belmont Club notices the kneejerk reaction that the work is evidence of racism.

Instead of meeting these serious accusations head on, the Left declares the
entire argument malformed, haram, taboo, inappropriate and therefore inadmissible. Fallaci’s propositions are never allowed to evaluate to a definite value; they must remain, on pain of breaking the world, forever null. Like the old jailhouse story of prisoners being forced to drink out an unflushed toilet unless they confessed, where one prisoner complains that his rights are being violated because there’s a fly in it, these newspaper responses miss the point by such a margin that one suspects they are on another planet; in a universe where Islam can never, like Christianity before it, consist of humans struggling to reform their faith. That would grant unacceptable equality to those who are fated to play the role of victims. In that twilight, blinkered world, Darfur, Kashmir, Ambon, Mindanao, Nigeria, Madrid and 9/11 disappear entirely while mock horror at racism fills every available space. And the toilet is fine but for the fly.

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