w o r d s

As of yesterday, days will be getting longer again on this side of the globe. Of course here, in the Old North State that’s not that big a deal, anyway. But I did start paying more attention to sunrise/sunset this fall. When I bike to work and back home, I prefer to avoid the bad light conditions at dawn and at dusk.

Considering that the shortest day of the year is still 9 hours and 42 Minutes long here, I am amazed at the seemingly overpowering desire of our neighbors to string hundreds of lights, and thousands of lights in some cases, all over their houses, trees and shrubs, all over the yards and even on a vehicle (in one case). But it ’s probably not so much deprivation of sunlight around here, as it is the spirit of the holiday season taking possession of their brains and compelling them decorate their yards with, for example, a 10-foot/3-meter illuminated, inflatable nativity. Or maybe it’s just mall-Christmas-muzak and eggnog induced temporary insanity?!

I wonder how popular this Christmas-lights-craze is in places that are much darker this time of year, like Reykjavik, Iceland (4 hours), or Point Lay, Alaska (0 hours)? In Freiburg, Germany (8h 22m) days are shorter than here, but folks are much more restrained when it comes to decorations, at least the electrical flavor (maybe because of their power bills?). And what about, say, Honolulu (10h 50m)? Do the Hawai’ians who celebrate Christmas decorate their houses with lights? I’ll have to ask John next week … when we see him in Charlotte, Michigan (9h 02m).

In Togo I never saw any electrical Christmas lights. Probably because the village has no electricity. And when folks said they were going to “light the tree” they meant it quite literally, and set fire to it. December it the driest time of year in Togo, and so most farmers burn their fields to get them ready for the next growing season. That means there are huge bush fires all over, and on Christmas eve we’d sit on the porch, drink some palmwine and watch the festive glow of the fires all over the mountains around us.

So, Happy Winter Solstice to all, especially those of you who need UV-light treatment this time of year!

… accidentally. In the night from Wednesday to Thursday, 170 armed Swiss troops crossed into the tiny neighboring Principality of Liechtenstein. They got lost in bad weather in the Alps during a training exercise and strayed a mile into the unarmed principalities sovereign territory. Scrambling to prevent any escalation, both countries immediately launched diplomatic efforts and were able to peacefully resolve this incident.

Oh boy - that was a close one! :)

BTW: Liechtenstein is the only country left with direct historical continuity back to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (The First Reich).

Since I received my greencard ten years ago, I had very little interaction with the US immigration services - basically I showed my greencard to the friendly officers at the airport once in a while. So when my greencard was about to expire, I requested a new one. I payed the $270 (!) fee and got a date to go to Charlotte for a “biometrics” appointment. That date was last Thursday, but due to the winter weather we had, I missed the appointment. So I called the toll free number on the form to find out how to reschedule the appointment. Thus began my little CIS odyssey.

For work I do call customer support phone lines quite frequently, and so I think I’ve see the Good, the Bad and the Ugly when it comes to automated phone systems. So I thought. The US CIS automated phone system is in an wholly separate category. It has layers upon layers upon layers of “options”

if we approved your I-129 petition and you need us to notify a different POE, please press 6

It took me 20 Minutes to “find” a live person in that maze of Orwellian bureaucrat-speak. I explained my situation and she said that that’s no problem - I should just go to Charlotte on a Wednesday, when they take walk-ins for greencard renewals. Oki-doki.

So today I drove to Charlotte, which is about a 2.5-hour drive. I got there at 11:00 AM - the place was really busy. I explained my situation to the security person at the front desk, and she looked at me and said “You called the 800-number, eh? They don’t know what they are talking about. We have not done walk-ins here in years.” Say what??!!

She explained that after 9/11 they began doing full background checks during the biometrics appointment. That takes 2 hours, or more, so they can’t do more than a few applications a day, let alone walk-ins. Oh great! She said I could wait until 2:00 and see if they have time today. Or I could come back Saturday, and try it again - Saturdays are sometimes less busy.

So why do the people at the call center tell us bogus information? I wondered … The CIS security person said that “they ” tried to get the call center people to stop telling people about walk-ins - to no avail. Uh-huh … So what is the real secret for getting a new appointment? Could you give me a phone number for someone who can reschedule my appointment? Sorry … she said, we’re not permitted to give out phone numbers. The proper way to reschedule is to check a box on the form that says “check here to reschedule the appointment” and mail a copy of the form to CIS.

That’s right - even though I was at the office, my only reasonable option was to mail in the form. That is the type of service the US government provides for a $270 fee, at the beginning of the 21st century!! But we are just damn foreigners - so who cares. Since we don’t get to vote, no one cares. I have no congressman to call about nonsense like that. Yet, we do have the privilege to pay taxes.

Taxation without representation is tyranny
James Otis, American Patriot.

Of course, in comparison to what some people have to go through dealing with CIS, my problems are really pretty minor. So minor, I can actually laugh it off and shake my head at the absurdity of this experience. But this experience also reminds me of the abyss of how such gross inefficiencies of an uncaring bureaucracy can completely ruin lives. And they do. Every day.

Oops - apparently the harddrive fried on the server that hosts my website, this blog and my email server. So I was without email (at least non-work email) for two evenings, which was a bit disconcerting. And I was a bit nervous about the provider’s ability to restore all services and files and databases. I would hate to lose the information I gathered in this blog. I do have a local copy of the static website, but I have no backups of the databases. I should probably download a backup - just in case.

After 19 hours downtime, everything was back up and running. Phew! I am just glad I don’t run anything rally critical on this service. But then, you get what you pay for, and they are pretty cheap - $60/year.

Tom Philpott (Grist) questions entomologist and biofuels skeptic extraordinaire David Pimentel (Cornell) about why crop-based energy won’t work. Interesting interview, but Pimentel does need to get out a bit more. And I wish Philpott had been a bit more probing on some of Pimentel’s assertions - like this one:

Pimentel: Conserve! One word. And no one talks about it, including the environmentalists.

Is he just yanking our chains??!! No one else talks about conservation?? He’s joking, right?

This is an interesting exchange:

Philpott: So if we converted 100 percent of a year’s worth of solar energy stored in plant matter to fuel, we’d only supply half of our current energy consumption. What’s that telling us?

Pimentel: It’s telling us we’re using too goddamn much fossil energy! And another thing it tells us is that you’re not going to be self-sufficient, or even produce half of our energy from biomass in the U.S., if we want to eat.

Yeah - thanks, Dr. P - I realize now you do need a PH.D. to figure out we’re using too much fossil fuel!

Interestingly however, Pimentel is very pro-organic:

“Pimentel: I don’t want to say that organic can supply all the food in the world, but it can be much more sustainable than conventional ag and just as productive.”

Biofuels Are an Environmental Dead End, Alternet, By Tom Philpott, Grist Magazine. Posted December 13, 2006.

What annoys me about Pimentel, is his focus on the problems. He finds that the numbers don’t seem to work, so he discounts a solution. He seems to be in favor of solar energy, which is great, but solar won’t help us run the trucks and trains that carry us and our good across the country. That does not mean we should ignore solar energy. It just means we need different solutions for different applications. But Pimentel acts as if alternative fuels advocates suggest that the entire energy input of the US should be covered by soy or corn.

Solving the sustainable-energy puzzle will require many different pieces, and solar, biofuels and conservation are some of the big pieces. Pointing out the lousy energy balances in ethanol is not particularly helpful. How about helping solve the problem? How about putting that Cornell-educated mind to work and help figure out how to make fuels that grow back in a more efficient way?

Mexico’s presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (or AMLO), unlike Gore or Kerry, is not about to give up his fight for democracy and justice in his country. In light of evidence of blatant ballot-stuffing by the ruling party PAN, and considering that nearly one million votes have not been counted, the PRD’s candidate has called for massive protests in Mexico City and across the country to pressure the electoral commission (which is controlled by the ruling PAN) to order a complete re-count.

There does seem to be evidence that the ruling PAN also had help from North-of-the-Border. Greg Palast, who published many reports about the problems with the elections in 2000 and 2004, says he has evidence that the Republican-friendly voter-purgers from ChoicePoint compiled citizen files and voter lists for Mexico and Venezuela, just like they did for Florida, under the cover of a “counter-terrorism” contract with the FBI. The Mexican list was apparently provided to the ruling PAN in order to be used to “scrub” AMLO-supporters from the voter rolls for the presidential election earlier this month.

Why does the US government want to influence the elections in Mexico? Could it be because Mexico sell more crude oil to the US than Saudi Arabia:

US Crude Oil Imports (Thousand Barrels per Day)

Country 	YTD 2006
CANADA 		1,757
MEXICO 		1,668
SAUDI ARABIA 	1,422
VENEZUELA 	1,186
NIGERIA 	1,134
IRAQ 		666

source: US EIA

This may be a simplistic POV, but the US government is aggressively meddling with the internal affairs of just about each of these countries (not sure about Canada, though I would not be surprised), especially where the powers-that-be start talking about regulation and public ownership of natural resources (Venezuela, Saddam in Iraq). If the US government spent half the effort on energy conservation, fuel efficiency and alternative energy sources, as it spends on meddling with the internal affairs of these countries - let alone occupying them - this country would be a healthier place in many ways, and the world would be a much more peaceful place.

Philips is working very hard these days to piss off consumers, as acknowledged by one one of their recent patent applications. Odd thing, you think, for a consumer electronics company to create technology to disenfranchise and piss off consumers? Seems disingenuous? Yet, this seems to represent a new industry trend. Consider the recent whooping Sony received over its bungled attempts to impose its will on consumers. Now Philips is handing consumer-rights lawyers this little gem:

If a new idea from Philips catches on, the company may not be very popular with TV viewers. The company’s labs in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, has been cooking up a way to stop people changing channels to avoid adverts or fast forwarding through ads they have recorded along with their target programme.
-snip-
Philips suggests adding flags to commercial breaks to stop a viewer from changing channels until the adverts are over. The flags could also be recognised by digital video recorders, which would then disable the fast forward control while the ads are playing.
Invention: The TV-advert enforcer, Barry Fox, NewScientist.com news service, 18 April 2006
(via Slashdot)

Now that’s what I call a challenge to the marketing department. Can’t wait to see Philips spin this technology to consumers. Maybe they’ll collaborate with La-Z-Boy and create a recliner chair that will strap you in and force your eyelids open while ads are on during the Superbowl. Thank god I don’t have cable TV.

… at least not when it’s time fo my triple bypass, because you’d increase my chance of experiencing complications during recovery by seven percentage points, according to a recent study:

Percentage of Patients Having Complications After Surgery:
52% - Patients who were receiving prayers and did not know this.
52% - Patients receiving no prayers and not being told anything about prayers taking place anywhere for anyone.
59% - Patients knowing they were receiving prayers

Does this mean that knowing people are praying for you is bad for your health? Some say that the stress of thinking ‘I must be really ill if people are praying for my health’ may have contributed towards the health complications.
Praying Doesn’t Help The Sick Get Better, Christian Nordqvist, Medical News Today, April 1, 2006.

No, this is not an April fools joke - they really did this study, and the results are about to be published in the April 4 issue of the American Heart Journal. The John Templeton Foundation shelled out $2.4 million (!) for this study, where Harvard Medical School researchers divided 1,802 bypass patients at six hospitals into three groups. Two groups were uncertain whether they would be the subject of prayers. The third was told they would be prayed for. Too bad for them, because they had the highest rate of complications.

OK, so if you must pray for me, do me a favor and keep it to yourself.

Last night I watched “Team America” and laughed my butt off. They make fun of Osama BinLaden, Kim Il Sung, Hollywood and America. They depict Michael Moore as a suicide bomber who blows up Team America’s headquarters. They don’t depict, or poke fun at, the Prophet Mohammad (pbuh). Maybe that’s because Islam’s holy prophet is not very funny. Especially not as funny as Michael Moore. Or North Korea’s weird, pathetic, scary leader. Or America’s obsession with bombing the Middle East into freedom. The movie is done entirely with marionettes and it features elaborate backgrounds and really awful music. It’s quite artful and has great production value. But the movie is offensive in many ways: it’s violent, crude, tasteless, oh-so-politically-incorrect. But it’s very, very funny.

In Europe and America the right to say whatever the fuck is on your mind is widely cherished, if under appreciated. Freedom of speech means the government cannot tell you to shut up just because it does not like what you say. I can say about our so-called president whatever the hell I want. But I cannot go around falsely accusing ANYONE of anything. And, of course, I have the RIGHT to wear a “Harleys suck” T-shirt to that biker bar down the road. But some of those upstanding, flag-wearing patrons there are going to see it as their patriotic duty to shove my first amendment rights up my … constipation avenue.

So, should a Danish newspaper have the RIGHT to piss off roughly a Billion Muslims? Sure. Should they act surprised when the Muslims protest? Hell, no! Should the Danes be surprised that radical Arab nationalists exploit this incident and incite major turmoil? Well, not really. Do the Arab radicals care that they look like fools to the Danes when they burn Danish embassies over a cartoon? Does the First Amendment guarantee my right to endlessly ask stupid questions only to answer them myself? Oh, whatever …

All I am saying is this: if you exercise your Freedom of Speech to sow hatred, hatred and violence you’ll reap. The well-camouflaged point of this rant is that the whole brouhaha over the Mohammad cartoons is NOT about freedom versus religion. It’s really about the culture war between the reasonable, liberal people on this planet and the few idiots, in Denmark, Pakistan or wherever, who think they can force their way-of-life down other people’s throats. Freedom is not the right to bite your thumb at anyone who crosses your path. Freedom is an ideal that requires great care and respect, especially for your brother who has a different point of view than you do. That does not mean you cannot criticize Islam or poke fun at religion. But it means you have to be very conscious of the social context of what you say and understand the potential consequences.

Humor is an important part of free speech, because a good joke can be so much more powerful than a sermon or a lecture. But you better know what your talking about, or that punchline is going to blow up in your face. In Europe, jokes about Muslims generally are about as funny as a baseball bat bearing down on a dark-skinned face. So, those who chose to use their freedom to make racist jokes and poke fun at things they don’t understand, or care about, are squandering a precious privilege. These fools don’t see that the freedom to speak also sometimes requires the wisdom to shut up. Freedom is wasted on the hypocrites. And they are not funny, either.

I am really torn when I ponder the pre-holiday sellout by Germany’s ex-chancellor Schröder to Putin’s little racket Gazprom. Which is the bigger scandal? His cynical, middle-finger-in-your-face exit from the public arena? Or is it even worse that it is apparently perfectly legal to conduct foreign policy for the German people for seven years while netwoking your way into a lucrative job with an international company controlled by the Russian government? And I also want to know what Fischer knew about Schröder’s plans.

Clearly, politicians who retire from the public arena will often sell their experience and contacts to the highest bidder. That’s the reality, and we can probably live with that, as long as we can see clearly that official business is not too blatantly influenced by private economic interests. But the Gazprom job puts Schröder on the same level with Dick Cheney, who lets the U.S. energy industry write its own regulatory framework, and who is clearly in the pocket of companies that profit from the mess in Iraq. And his new job might put Schröder into the same executive suite with Putin, who is exploiting his elected office for his personal enrichment like a banana-republic potentate.

So the $50.000-question is this: when the interests of his employer are in conflict with the national economic interests, or maybe even security interests, of Germany, where will Schröder’s loyalties lie? Will the former chancellor of Germany condone, or even support corporate decisions against German interests? Or will he lobby for German interests at Gazprom? What will it be Herr Bundeskanzler a.D.? Krimsekt und Kaviar oder Riesling und Nordseekrabben?

The cold fact that Governor Schwarzenegger refused to grant clemency to Stanley Tookie Williams was predictable and consistent with the cruel spirit of the death penalty. The practice in this country to terminate the lives of convicted murderers is irrespective of any subsequent redemption or repentance. It is thus quite remarkable that the Governator’s decision (pdf) was based on the lack of an apology from Williams:

Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption. In this case, the one thing that would be the clearest indication of complete remorse and full redemption is the one thing Williams will not do.
Statement of Decision (pdf)

So had Tookie said “sorry,” and admitted guilt, Schwarzenegger would have let him live? Hardly.

In the death penalty the state executes its patriarchal control over its subjects. In other societies where the state has the right to take a citizen’s life, like China, Swaziland, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Libya, Iran, or Bangladesh, the power of the state to control a citizen’s life is much less questioned than in the U.S. While most Americans prefer the state to stay out of their lifes, most also agree that the state has the right to end the life of those among them who commit capital crimes.

But I believe for the average American this issue is not one of the state executing control over their life, but one of the state projecting the image of the strict (but just) father figure. Many in the American middle class want the state to wield this power to punish the “bad children” with the wrath of the God of Abraham and Moses. This is why to the fundamentalist Christian Americans anti-abortion and pro-death-penalty positions are NOT inconsistent. It’s all about submitting to the authority of the “Father.” This fundamentalist Christian absolutism is a moral framework that is popular across American mainstream society.

As popular as this moral absolutism is, most Americans are really pragmatists and the steadily eroding support for the death penalty shows this. Key is to show that using the death penalty the state projects strength at our expense. The death penalty is a social and moral burden to this country. It has no value as a deterrent, provides no “closure” or “comfort” to the victims, it is prohibitively expensive and it drags this country down morally. The death penalty bestows an absolute power over life and death onto the government and the judiciary that these all-to-human and error-prone institutions should not have. It is the beginning of a slippery slope of the government using more and more force to enforce its laws and impress upon its citizens its determination to do so. And in the end, no matter how rigorous the judicial process, the state will end up killing someone innocent. And in America, we are the state.

Old Europe is in a tizzy over finding out more and more details of how the CIA used European airspace and airports to shuttle abducted terrorism suspects to and fro for “innovative interrogation” in what some call a “gulag-like” system of “black sites” - secret prisons. Well, the GULAG it ain’t, but a scandal it sure is.

Now it looks like the CIA had an interesting collaborator in Germany: former Minister of the Interior Otto Schily, as the Washington Post reports:

In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country’s interior minister. (…)

[Ambassador Daniel R.] Coats informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.
Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake - Washington Post, December 4, 2005; Page A01

Otto Schily is an interesting figure in German politics. As a co-founder of the Green Party, he is a key figure of the German left. He later “defected” to the Social Democrats, and built a reputation as the one-man law-and-order wing of the German left.

The issue of the CIA planes transporting abducted suspects, many of whom were innocent, could be a huge problem for Germany and other European countries, because they may violate the European Convention on Human Rights. If the German government was aware of these flights and human rights violations were perpetrated on these planes in German airspace or on the ground, than Germany is also implicated in these violations. and unlike the U.S. government, the German government does not assume it can violate human rights with impunity by waving the “9-11 wand.”

Worried yet about the bird flu? At least the Feds are on the job, now, right? There are competent public-health experts hammering out plans for a response to a flu pandemic, right?

Meet Stewart Simonson. He’s the official charged by Bush with “the protection of the civilian population from acts of bioterrorism and other public health emergencies”–a well-connected, ideological, ambitious Republican with zero public health management or medical expertise, whose previous job was as a corporate lawyer for Amtrak. When Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, recently speculated, “If something comes along that is truly serious…like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence,” many of those professionally concerned with such scenarios couldn’t help thinking of Simonson. They recalled his own unsettling words at a recent Homeland Security subcommittee hearing on government response to a chemical or biological attack: “We’re learning as we go.”
Germ Boys and Yes Men - The Nation - November 28, 2005 issue

A lawyer? A former Amtrak lawyer? And he is learning as he goes???

I dread the day the president announces that “Simonson, you’re doing a heckuva job!”

The Council on Foreign Relations held a conference on Nov. 16 in New York where a number of high-powered panelists discussed the threat of a flu pandemic and the status of avian flu preparedness in the U.S. and around the world. The intensity and complexity of the problem, as laid out in the discussions, is truly mind-boggling. The experts seem to mostly agree that we don’t know when the pandemic is going to begin, and we don’t know how bad it’s going to be. Most also agree that we are pretty sure it’s going to be bad, but just how bad is a matter of debate.

“Hope for the best and prepare for the worst” is the operating mode for folks involved in crisis preparation and contingency planning. Some of the scenarios kicked around in the discussions talk about a massive pandemic, a horror scenario where millions die, 1 in 2 are sick, critical infrastructure breaks down, hospitals are totally overwhelmed. Hundreds of millions have no power, no fuel, no medicines, little food or water. I have not seen any predictions as to the real probability of this worst-case scenario, but it is clearly out there as a possibility. The factors that will determine the scale of the pandemic are either unknown or variable. What we don’t know is how soon the H5N1 virus will be able to start jumping easily from human to human and the pathogenicity of that virus. And one of the changing variables we control is our level of preparedness.

The effects of the next flu pandemic are difficult to predict, because these major variables are unknown or changing. Preparedness is a major factor, and there is now momentum on a global scale to get ready. However, preparations are only in the beginning stages, and we need a lot more time to be able to cope with a major pandemic.

In a discussion with David Nabarro, UN system senior coordinator for avian and human influenza, and David Fedson of Aventis-Pasteur, Michael Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at University of Minnesota lays out this picture in Session 2 of the CFR conference:

OSTERHOLM: (…) I mean, when you think about the fact that this if a pandemic were to occur today, there’s a very high likelihood we would begin to shut borders around the world. We live in a global, just-in-time economy today where this country, in particular, absolutely lives on the goods and services of much of the rest of the world. Many of our critical medical supplies, our pharmaceutical products, our food supply everything you can name that would come to a screeching and crashing halt if, in fact, pandemic began today.

(more…)

Kanzlerin Pestbeule is ready to lead Germany … in circles probably. On the surface a national consensus government may seem like a good idea to accomplish needed but painful social reforms in the next four years. That would be the case if this was 1) a government with a mandate, and 2) a government with real leadership.

1) despite fact that this “coalition” occupies 448 of 614 seats in parliament, it does not represent the will of 70 percent of the population. In fact, a poll last week shows that 75 percent of German voters see the arrangement as a “Notlösung” - a solution of last resort. Better than - uh - no government. A the same time, 54 percent are optimistic about the coalition. That’s not much of a mandate for such an arrangement.

2) Both SPD and CDU have serious leadership problems. The CSU (the Bavarian flavor and Siamese twin of the CDU) has no leadership problems. They have no leadeship. The Social Democrats have just dealt with their leadership problems and put a new generation of leadership in charge. We’ll see how that plays out.

This weird coalition represents quite well the state of mind of the German electorate. They want things to change - but not really. The fact is that Germany has been governed by a hidden “grand coalition” for a while. None of the reforms and changes Schröder’s government did, would have been possible without help from the opposition. These deals were hammered out in bi-and tri-partisan committees. If the Merkel gang had any complaint, it was that the entitlement reforms did not go far enough. The German electorate became frustrated with increasing cost of health care and disappearing entitlements, and voted for a conservative government - but not really.

Germany is entering an interesting transition phase. Several things can happen:

• Nothing much
• New leadership emerges and takes charge
• This “coalition” becomes gridlocked and no one is in charge - which will likely lead to
• New elections

Or any combination of the above.

I doubt that any of this will bring about the much-needed smart reforms of the social network and the entitlement programs.

It is the year 2005 A.D. and a border dispute is brewing between Canada and Denmark over a 1.3 km² rock in the arctic. Both countries are members of NATO, but they had competing flag-raisings, flyovers by jets and even officials visiting Hans Island, an arctic island claimed by both countries. Hans Island is a barren rock in the center of the Kennedy Channel of Nares Strait, which is the strait that separates Ellesmere Island from northern Greenland and connects Baffin Bay with the Lincoln Sea. No one lives there, not even penguins.

Yet, this dispute is becoming a matter of national pride, and tempers flare:

For many years, the Canadian military has repeatedly invaded Danish territory, without any respect for international treaties or laws. Therefore, Canada must be excluded from NATO and the UN, and must be forced to give war reperations [sic] for the damages they have inflicted. Furthermore, the Canadian ministry of defence should be disbanded, and all Canadian military equipment should be handed over to Denmark.
Free Hans Island

Yeah, and check out Radio free Hans Island - they even post the “National Anthem” of an independent Hans Island.

The BBC carefully negotiates both points o view:

In 1984, a Danish minister, Tom Hoeyem, caused a stir when he visited the island and raised the Danish flag.

Mr Hoeyem also buried a bottle of brandy at the base of the flagpole and left a note saying welcome to Denmark.

The UPI news agency reported that Canadian troops landed on the island a week before Mr Graham’s visit, planted a Canadian flag and built an Inuit stone marker.

Reports say Canadian troops leave whiskey at the flagpole on their incursions.
Canada island visit angers Danes, BBC News, 25 July, 2005

Newsflash: the Danes now also claim the North Pole. They probably want to charge Santa Claus rent …

Europeans appear to take the bird-flu threat seriously: Germany now mandates that chicken be kept only inside. But although Bush said he read “The Great Influenza” his administration still slashes funding for public health preparedness by $129 million in next year’s budget.

“Critical funding is shrinking just as public health agencies are being required to expand their work in pandemic influenza preparation and response,” said Dr. Rex Archer, health director of Kansas City, Mo., and president of the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO).
The Bush administration, in its proposed 2006 HHS budget, slashed funding for public health preparedness by $129 million — from $926 million in 2005 to $797 million. The House version of the 2006 HHS bill appropriates $853 million while the Senate bill sticks with the$797 million requested by the administration.
Health directors say HHS flu cuts are for the birds Government Health IT, Oct. 18, 2005

All the while, more and more bird-flu reports across Asia.

The Discovery Institute does not like all this fuss?! What are they worried about? Isn’t god on their side?

A twist in the case is that a leading proponent of intelligent design, the Discovery Institute, based in Seattle, removed one of its staff members from the Dover school board’s witness list and opposed the board’s action from the start.

“We thought it was a bad idea because we oppose any effort to require students to learn about intelligent design because we feel that it politicizes what should be a scientific debate,” said John G. West, a senior fellow at the institute. However, Professor Behe, a fellow at the institute, is expected to be the board’s star witness.
In Evolution Suit, a Web of Faith, Law and Science - New York Times

Or maybe they are worried that they haven’t got their science story quite worked out. If Stephen Meyer’s paper on “Intelligent Design” is supposed to be their science story, ID is toast.

With creationism and “intelligent design” in the offensive across America, the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial has the potential of becoming another Scopes Monkey Trial - the famous 1925 trial that allowed the state of Tennessee to keep anti-Darwinism statutes on the books. Only this time the roles are reversed. In Kitzmiller v. Dover parents and students, with the help of the ACLU, are fighting to keep creationism out of the science curriculum in Dover, PA.

Aided by the American Civil Liberties Union, 11 parents of Dover, Pa., schoolchildren have filed a federal lawsuit against that town’s school board, accusing it of violating the principle of separation of church and state. The school board requires that at the beginning of the 9th grade unit on evolution, teachers are supposed to read a statement to a biology class: “Because Darwin’s theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact…Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.”

Science teachers balked and many Dover parents were angered as well. The plaintiffs are asking the court to void the intelligent-design policy in the class.
WSJ.com - Scopes, 2005: ‘Design’ Theory Faces Legal Test

Why not mention ID in biology? Because if creationism gets a foothold in the public schools, the religious right is going to demand that the astronomy teacher has to talk about how Galileo might be wrong and the pope might be right, after all, that the earth is the center of the universe. Then they are going to require that geography teachers teach the “scientific theory” that the earth is flat.

The middle ages never happened in America. The religious right is determined to change that.

Thursday morning I got an email with a hyperlink to a CNN story about a German scientist making biodiesel from dead cats. Turns out that the clever reporters from Reuters picked up the story from the German tabloid Bild (picture a merger of the Weekly World News and USA-Today) about the company Alpha-Kat, and how they supposedly turn cat-carcasses into fuel. CNN then posted the story.

The fact is that the Alpha-Kat guys actually work on a pressure-less, catalytic process for thermal depolymerization (TDP) to produce biodiesel from ANY kind of garbage. The US company Changing World Technologies operates a TCP plant that turns dead turkeys into biodiesel (using a different TCP process).

And the KAT in Alpha-Kat’s company name refers to the KATalyst they are using for their process - not the kitties … but don’t try to explain that to a Reuters reporter who is reading BILD!

However, you can certainly use dead cats for this process, as well as dead turkeys, rats, skunks, reporters, dogs, care bears, cane toads, teletubbies, TV-anchors, slugs, leeches, etc.

Anyway, I just saw that CNN/Reuters pulled the original story and re-posted a modified version in an attempt to get the facts straight. Now they actually bothered to talk to the guy … instead of just regurgitating the Bild story.

Another great example of quality journalism.