I was struck this week with two remarkable breakthroughs in the use of bacteria. While once the scourge of parents and doctors, the simple bacteria is being enlisted as an ally in new scientific work. Researchers in New York have discovered a way to use radioactive bacteria to kill cancer, using bacteria as a uniquely effective vehicle to find and attack cancer cells. In the meantime, a team from the University of Exeter has discovered a way to use bacteria to make bio-diesel.
Continue reading “In Praise of Bacteria: New Scientific Breakthroughs Find Unexpected Ally”
Month: April 2013
The experienced canine criminal will remain silent even in the face of incriminating forensic paw evidence.
Continue reading “Spot Remained Silent When Accused Of Trashing The Grass Pile . . .”
There is good news and bad news in the latest Gallup poll on atheist politicians. For the second time in less than a year, Gallup reports that a majority of Americans would vote for an atheist for president. However, the 54 percent who would vote for an atheist are offset by 43 percent who said they would not vote for an atheist even if she or he was well-qualified.
Continue reading “Gallup: 54 Percent Of Americans Would Vote For Atheist For President”
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has spent years denouncing the United States as we have continued to pour hundreds of billions into this country (and his corrupt family and government). Now, Karzai has called on China to come in and guarantee security in the country as he continues to call on the United States to get out. Despite these consistent attacks on the U.S. and Americans as “demons”, the Obama Administration continues to put our soldiers in harms way and spend money that is badly needed at home in this country. So, while the Administration is cutting back on FAA towers and slowing air travel, we will continue to spend wildly in a country seeking to replace us with China. Brilliant.
Continue reading “As U.S. Continues To Spend Fortune In Afghanistan, Karzai Turns To China”
Zambia’s justice minister Wynter Kabimba has gone public with his opposition to efforts to protect gays and lesbians in his country. Kabimba, who is also secretary general of the Patriotic Front, unleashed a tirade against gay rights this week and what he views as an international conspiracy to spend “colossal sums of money” to promote homosexuality. He is just the latest African leader to strike out at gays and lesbians.
Continue reading “Wynter of Discontent: Justice Minister Declares “No Room For Gays” In Zambia”
New York State Senator Greg Ball (R) took little time after the Boston bombing to call for the torture of 19-year-old Dzokhar Tsarnaev. Ball went to Twitter to call for the teenager to be tortured in the name of all of the values we hold dear as Americans.
Continue reading “New York Senator Calls For The Torture Of Boston Bombing Subject”
There is an interesting free speech case brewing in West Virginia where Jared Marcum, 14, has been criminally charged for refusing to remove a T-shirt with National Rifle Association’s logo and hunting rifle. The T-shirt was found in violation of Logan Middle School’s dress code. However, regardless of how you feel about gun rights, the T-shirt was the expression of a recognized constitutional right and constitutes political speech.
Continue reading “West Virginia Teen Arrested After Refusing To Remove NRA T-Shirt”
The Palinotologists are back. A Kansas school district is refusing to back down from a plan for mandatory assemblies featuring a creationist group to explain the history of dinosaurs. Despite overwhelming data and testing showing the world is millions of years old, many creationists insist that Earth is only a few thousand years old. Dinosaurs represent a bit of a problem of course. The solution, as famously stated by that American intellectual Sarah Palin, is that men co-existed with dinosaurs. Hugoton Public Schools invited Creation Truth Foundation’s founder Dr. G. Thomas Sharp to teach the “Truth about Dinosaurs” at two assemblies. Hugoton Public Schools superintendent Mark Crawford however insists that students must hear about science from this biblically based group.
Last week, President Bill Clinton accepted GLAAD’s ‘Advocate for Change’ Award in Los Angeles last night but not everyone was buying Clinton’s latest change of heart over gay marriage. GLADD notably left out of the award that Clinton not only signed but helped push through the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). This was not in 1896 but in 1996. Clinton was heckled by some in the crowd as he accepted the award as a leader on gay rights, yelling “you signed it” when he referred to DOMA as if it was some alien or GOP legislation. What is truly annoying is Clinton’s “some of my best friends are now gay” rationalization.
Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Two of my passions are poetry and science. I am especially interested in astronomy. In celebration of National Poetry Month and Hubble’s 23rd anniversary image, I’m posting an ESA/ NASA Hubblecast video of the Horsehead Nebula and a poem by the great Walt Whitman.
Hubble’s 23rd Anniversary Image
Continue reading “The Hubble Telescope, The Horsehead Nebula, and A Little Walt Whitman”
Respectfully submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty (rafflaw)-Guest Blogger
In the past few weeks, I have written about how the FDIC along with the Bank of England had developed a plan to allow the Big banks to grab depositors funds in order to bail out those very same big banks. Since that article was written, I have reviewed just what role the Federal Reserve Bank plays and how can it be improved. You may remember the role the Federal Reserve played in bailing out the Big Banks during the beginning of the Great Recession.
“As a result of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit of the Fed, Senate sponsor Bernie Sanders of Vermont said, “We now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world.” Among the investigation’s key findings was that the Fed unilaterally provided trillions of dollars in financial assistance to foreign banks and corporations from South Korea to Scotland. These decisions were all made without the public, media or elected officials’ knowledge, and they would have remained secret without an audit.” Bernie Sanders Continue reading “Fed Up With the Fed”
Submitted by Charlton Stanley (Otteray Scribe), Guest Blogger
This is not going to be easy to read. It was not easy to write. This story is about Frank Kirby Cowan, and 167 other allied airmen from World War II. Their story is unique in a way that the stories of all the other thousands of fliers from both sides of the conflict are not. Our paths first crossed on August 23, 1946, but that is a story for another day.
Kirby was a young man from Harrison, Arkansas. His father was an engineer for the railroad, and Kirby planned to follow in Joe Cowan’s footsteps. Then a war happened. Like so many thousands of other Americans, Kirby joined the service following the attack at Pearl Harbor. Kirby joined the Army Air Corps, and was assigned to B-17 bombers as a radio operator. He said he had never flown in an airplane until he joined the Air Corps. He remembered his first experience flying in an airplane very well. The Air Corps did not waste time with orientation flights or sightseeing. Kirby’s first experience in an airplane had him standing up in the back seat of an AT-6 Texan, shooting a machine gun at a practice target being towed by another AT-6.
After finishing his training, he was assigned to the 339th Bomb Squadron, 96th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force. Their B-17 was called Horn’s Hornets, because the pilot was named Horn. In those days, losses were high, and Horn’s Hornets ran out of luck in 1944. Their B-17 was cut in half by an anti-aircraft shell. There are no known photos of what happened to their airplane, but this image of similar damage to a B-24 illustrates it. 
Kirby said, “When the engines unloaded they made a sound I had never heard an airplane engine make before. With no load on them, they started screaming. We started tumbling end over end. I was pinned to the inside of the plane by the G forces. I got a glimpse of the tail section falling away. The tail gunner didn’t have a chance. For a second, we stopped tumbling, so I took a Brody out the back where we were cut half in two. There were three of us that got out.” The remaining six crew members either were killed by the flak shell, or could not get out. The pilot, co-pilot, bombardier, and flight engineer were trapped in the nose of the plane.
Kirby went on, “Of the three of us that got out, one guy was shot in his parachute. He didn’t make it to the ground alive.”
Continue reading “Kirby Cowan, the Airmen of Buchenwald, and the KLB Club; A Cautionary Tale”
The man who apparently thinks the Constitution
and our laws are optional.
or “You Might Be An Enemy Combatant If . . .”
by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
UPDATED: You might be an enemy combatant if . . . Sen. Lindsey Graham (R – S.C.) says so.
This sounds like a bad joke, but it isn’t. The potential political misuse of the arbitrary “enemy combatant” status has been discussed here on many threads albeit usually in the form of using Executive abuse to illustrate that danger while Graham’s cavalier “suggestion” is clearly from the Legislative branch. In comments made by phone to the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin on Friday, April 19, Senator Graham said of the Boston bombers:
‘They were radicalized somewhere, somehow.’ Regardless of whether they are international or ‘homegrown,’ he said, ‘This is Exhibit A of why the homeland is the battlefield.’ Recalling Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster, Graham noted that he took to the Senate floor specifically to object to Rand’s notion that ‘America is not the battlefield.’ Graham said to me, ‘It’s a battlefield because the terrorists think it is.’ Referring to Boston, he observed, ‘Here is what we’re up against,’ and added, ‘It sure would be nice to have a drone up there [to track the suspect.]’ He also slammed the president’s policy of ‘leading from behind and criminalizing war.’”
That was not the end of Graham’s disturbing posturing.
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Sometimes I feel that among our distinguished crew of guest bloggers and the prodigious output of Professor Turley, that I seem to be “The Doom and Gloom” guest blogger. It seems I’m always looking at the worst side of things, without the counterbalance of positive articles that most everyone else here produces. This is actually a dichotomy when compared to my personal life. I happen to be one of the luckiest people you can meet and although I’ve suffered my share of life’s tragedies, my outlook is almost always optimistic. Yet when I turn my attention to the condition of this country and the way it is governed, my pessimism overwhelms me intellectually, even as I am predominantly a fairly happy person in my life and thankful for the blessings chance has bestowed upon me.
This past Wednesday I found myself filled with this pessimism, nay total skepticism, that our Country can redirect its downward spiral towards Corporate Feudalism. The catalyst of course was the vote in the Senate killing the proposed gun legislation, 54 to 46 in favor of the legislation. It is no mystery to the reader that the legislation failed, even with a majority voting in favor of it because we have all become familiar with the Senate rules which now inexplicably require 60 votes to move on any legislation. That this particular piece of legislation was defeated wasn’t that important to me. The compromise bill was so watered down as to be neutral, except as an empty gesture towards gun control, upon which in fact it wouldn’t have had any effect upon. I wasn’t bothered by the fact that those 46 who voted against the bill were predominantly Republican, with 4 Democrats. Since the bill represented nothing more than an empty gesture, their votes indicated merely that they were voting in their political interests, which most legislators today tend to do. What bothered me were both Harry Reid and President Obama for their inability to even try to attempt to break up the logjam in Congress via filibuster reform. Perhaps it is the “gloomy” side of me pondering this, but I think that the refusal to move on filibuster reform by the Democrats indicates a reality far more sinister than mere adherence to what is seen to be tradition. Continue reading “America’s Broken Legislative System”
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Like most of us I have been watching the developments in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon tragedy throughout the week. Because I’m retired I probably logged more hours of viewing it on TV than most people who are younger. The initial bombings on Monday and their aftermath made me terribly sad at the loss of innocent lives and the maiming of so many, which will have future pain and consequences for the entire lives of the victims. As a father and grandfather how could I not feel painful tears for the death of an 8 year old and the lifelong pain of his parents? Yet beyond that sadness, I also felt a sense of anxiety in my chest as I listened to the hour upon hour of cable news coverage and the analysis of “terrorism experts” aligned with prognosticators telling us what it all means.
My anxiety did not stem from fear of terrorism, because that fear is irrational. This is so not because terrorism is a chimera, but because this type of terrorism is an all too real fact of the lives of humanity and indeed while we in America have suffered it, so has the rest of the world to an even greater degree. Great Britain, Spain, Iraq, Israel, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia etc. and so on and so forth. Life itself is always uncertain and unseen death lurks as a constant possibility for even the most protected of us. This has always been the human condition and the truth is that as the eons of human history have passed we are far safer now than our ancestors ever were. Yet it is also a human necessity to maintain the illusion of our own safety and indeed immortality. When horrors like the Boston Marathon bombings occur it tends to shake up our human illusions and engender fear. In the aftermath of these horrors though come the “explainers” whose attempts to soothe us only increase the fears. Following the “explainers” come those who would exploit the aroused fears for their personal gain or predilection. This happened in America from 9/11 and in its wake the false meme “This Changes Everything” was transformed into a reality of war, torture and the shredding of our Constitution. My anxiety was raised because as I watch this all unfold on TV I became fearful of how this new attention arousing horror would be used by those intent upon transforming this country into a Police State under the guise of saving it from terror. Continue reading “SWAT: Is America Coming Under Martial Law, Redux”