Here’s a cool video from NASA of the current hurricane season. It’s streamed satellite imagery of cloud patterns with hurrican paths marked. I was surprised to discover that some hurricanes form almost all the way over near Africa before coming across the Atlantic.
U.S. warplanes backed Sunni Arab tribal fighters on Tuesday in what tribal leaders called an unprecedented Sunni-led offensive to drive out Abu Musab Zarqawi’s forces.
Three days of ongoing fighting in towns near the Syrian border killed at least 61 people, at least 56 of them Tuesday, said Dr. Ali Rawi, emergency-room director at the hospital in the largest city near the fighting, Qaim, about 200 miles northwest of Baghdad.
Forty-two of them wore the black training-suits and athletic shoes favored by Zarqawi’s fighters, Rawi said.
Others appeared to be fighters of a rival tribe or civilians, he said.
[…]
The clashes came after insurgents kidnapped and killed 31 men belonging to the Albu Mahal tribe because they had joined the Iraqi security forces, said Sheikh Muhammed Mahallawi, one of the tribe’s leaders.
“We decided, either we force them out of the city or kill them,” with the support of U.S. bombardment, Mahallawi said.
What’s the opposite of building grass root support? Building Round-Up support?
This so-called “kinship care” is the largely unseen fallout from a confluence of social problems — parental drug addiction, incarceration, mental illness and, more recently, military service — that have left about 2.3 million children in the United States raised by their relatives, mainly grandparents. [empha,sis added]
0f course, since most progressives view military service as caused by mental illness.
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Most of the kids come from poor families, but the rural school’s test scores are high. Success, based on discipline and hard work, comes at a price, says this Teacher Magazine story. And the price is … Well, the featured teacher spends no time trying to “engage” students; the school holds few assemblies to motivate students. Yet the kids can be seen reading and studying during recess and they say they enjoy school. The writer thinks they live in such a small isolated town they know no better.
Here is the contribution of the educational establishment to the decline of public education in a nutshell. It is ignorance that causes these children to study hard and succeed at school. Hard work is a terrible price to pay for success. Besides, the kids are doomed anyway. It’s hard to believe that anyone could write this kind of thing other than as a parody, but there it is.
Germany’s Chancellor Minister Gerhard Schroeder has launched his re-election campaign with the expected primary theme of “America is Evil and to blame for everything wrong in Germany”. This is expected to play well to the German citizenry, since nothing is worse for them than being reminded of external reality. Schroeder is clearly playing the people who want to just make the rest of the world go away. Medienkritik has a post on this well worth reading.
Inspired by the documentary “Super Size Me,” Merab Morgan decided to give a fast-food-only diet a try. The construction worker and mother of two ate only at McDonald’s for 90 days — and dropped 37 pounds in the process.
It was a vastly different outcome than what happened in the documentary to filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, who put on 30 pounds and saw his health deteriorate after 5,000 calories a day of nothing but McDonald’s food.
FIVE THOUSAND calories per day and it’s McDonald’s to blame for the weight gain? Does any of the content these “journalists” spew ever make it in to their forebrains for basic reality checking?
Mr. Weldon has accused the [9/11 investigation] commission of ignoring information that would have forced a rewriting of the history of the Sept. 11 attacks. He has asserted that the Able Danger unit, whose work relied on computer-driven data-mining techniques, sought to call their superiors’ attention to Mr. Atta and three other future hijackers in the summer of 2000. Their work, he says, had identified the men as likely members of a Qaeda cell already in the United States.
In a letter sent Wednesday to members of the commission, Mr. Weldon criticized the panel in scathing terms, saying that its “refusal to investigate Able Danger after being notified of its existence, and its recent efforts to feign ignorance of the project while blaming others for supposedly withholding information on it, brings shame on the commissioners, and is evocative of the worst tendencies in the federal government that the commission worked to expose.”
Al Felzenberg, who served as the commission’s chief spokesman, said earlier this week that staff members who were briefed about Able Danger at a first meeting, in October 2003, did not remember hearing anything about Mr. Atta or an American terrorist cell. On Wednesday, however, Mr. Felzenberg said the uniformed officer who briefed two staff members in July 2004 had indeed mentioned Mr. Atta.
[source] Yet commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton still claims
“The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell,” said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. “Had we learned of it obviously it would’ve been a major focus of our investigation.”
Maybe they just didn’t recognize the name.
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The New York Times? has an article on a remarkable archeological find in the City of David, alongside the Old City of Jerusalem. The kicker:
The find will also be used in the broad political battle over Jerusalem - whether the Jews have their origins here and thus have some special hold on the place, or whether, as many Palestinians have said, including the late Yasir Arafat, the idea of a Jewish origin in Jerusalem is a myth used to justify conquest and occupation. […] The archaeological debate is also partly a debate over the roots of Zionism and the effort to find Jewish origins deep in the land. [emphasis added]
The NY Times now considers the idea that Jews and Judaism originated in the Levant several thousand years ago in dispute?
The flap about unsealing the Roberts adoption records may bring down the next NYT editor. Methinks they aren’t telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help them G*d.
Here’s a reply I received from the NYT’s Bill Keller, Pulitzer Prize Winner, to an emailed inquiry I made.
As is often the case, the original “source” of this “story,” the Drudge Report is wrong, overwrought and a gross misrepresentation of what has happened. Fox, of course, jumped on the “story,” putting their own spin on it.
Like all major news organizations, we report extensively on the life and career of any nominee or candidate for high public office. Most of the inquiries we make do not report in published articles at all; we would simply be remiss if we did not ask the questions.
In the case of Judge Roberts’s family, our reporters made initial inquiries about the adoptions, as they did about many other aspects of his background. They did so with great care, understanding the sensitivity of the issue. We did not order up an investigation of the adoptions.
Our reporter called a number of lawyers who handle adoptions to learn about adoption issues in general and to inquire whether adoption papers are publicly available. He did not try to get them unsealed, nor did he try to obtain copies in any other way. He did not try to hire anyone to help him.
Our editors have made it clear that they will not stand for any gratuitous reporting about the Roberts children. Many of our staff are adoptive parents - including our executive editor - and we are particularly sensitive to the subject.
And this explanation is supposed to make it look better? If this claim is correct, then the NY Times has never before seen the need to investigate the general state of adoption laws and it is only with the nomination of Roberts that this was important enough to make inquiries. Doesn’t that imply effectively the same thing about the NY Times as the original story?
ONE soldier fought off scores of elite Iraqi troops in a fierce defense of his outnumbered Army unit, saving dozens of American lives before he himself was killed. Another soldier helped lead a team that killed 27 insurgents who had ambushed her convoy. And then there was the marine who, after being shot, managed to tuck an enemy grenade under his stomach to save the men in his unit, dying in the process.
Their names are Sgt. First Class Paul R. Smith, Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester and Sgt. Rafael Peralta. If you have never heard of them, even in a week when more than 20 marines were killed in Iraq by insurgents, that might be because the military, the White House and the culture at large have not publicized their actions with the zeal that was lavished on the heroes of World War I and World War II.
Yes, gosh, what Sort of organizations could publicize these sort of heroic tales? It’s as if it were right there in front of us.
It never fails to amaze how thoroughly the NYT can pretend it doesn’t exist in its own reporting.
MUSLIMS who resent the British way of life should leave the UK, regardless of whether they are citizens or not, a senior Conservative said last night in comments that have heightened already tense community relations.
Gerald Howarth, the shadow defence minister, last night told The Scotsman that extremist Muslims who see the Iraq war as a conflict against Islam should be considered as treacherous as Soviet sympathisers during the Cold War. His remarkable claim shatters the tri-party consensus which Michael Howard, the Tory leader, sought to make with Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and the Liberal Democrats.
Are critics really saying that people who hate the British way of life should stay?
Yes. In addition, the national way of life should be changed to accomodate the people who hate it.
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Glenn Reynolds links to Matt Drudge’s latest update on Helen Thomas’s meltdown after being caught saying that “I’ll kill myself” if Dick Cheney announced he’d be running for the presidency. Drudge reports that “White House press doyenne Helen Thomas is plenty peeved at her longtime friend Albert Eisele, editor of THE HILL newspaper in Washington, D.C.”:
Thomas said yesterday at the White House that her comments to Eisele were for his ears only. “I’ll never talk to a reporter again!” Thomas was overheard saying.
“We were just talking — I was ranting — and he wrote about it. That isn’t right. We all say stuff we don’t want printed,” Thomas said.
Why, yes we do, Ms. Thomas. But that’s never stopped you. But thanks for providing a justification for never talking to a reporter.
This story illustrates for me the precise reason why I, and apparently so many others, despise journalists and their “craft”. It shows that claims of “objectivity”, “transparency”, “informing the public” are not principles but only rhetorical tricks, to be discarded whenever they create inconvenience for journalists. The lesson here is that no one should agree to be interviewed by Old Media with the right to video tape the interview and publish the tape later on.