The Decider Solves the Middle East Crisis

 
BUSH to Blair: "I think Condi is going to go (to the Middle East) pretty soon."

BLAIR: "Right, that's all that matters, it will take some time to get that together . . . See, if she goes out she's got to succeed as it were, where as I can just go out and talk."

BUSH: "See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over."

BLAIR: "Who, Syria?"

BUSH: "Right . . . What about Kofi? That seems odd. I don't like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything else happens."

BLAIR: "I think the thing that is really difficult is you can't stop this unless you get this international presence agreed." . . .

BUSH: "I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen. We're not blaming Israel. We're not blaming the Lebanese government."

LMAO... OK, Alanis, just tell Hizbollah to stop it. Why didn't we think of that before? 

...full post...

Newt Declares WWIII

 
"I believe if you take all the countries I just listed, that you’ve been covering, put them on a map, look at all the different connectivity, you’d have to say to yourself this is, in fact, World War III." 

...full post...

U.S. judge temporarily bans Navy's use of sonar to protect whales

To protect marine species, a U.S.federal judge temporarily blocked the Navy from using active sonar during an exercise off Hawaii, the Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday.

In a seven-page ruling, the judge said there is "considerable convincing scientific evidence" that the Navy's use of sonar can kill, injure and disturb many species, including marine mammals.. U.S. Navy had planned to use sonar during the Rim of the Pacific exercise, which began last week off Hawaii with 40 surface ships and six submarines scheduled to participate. The sonar portion of the monthlong exercise was to begin Wednesday.

The sonar use in this exercise is meant to test whether quiet, diesel-powered submarines can be detected. Before this exercise, U.S. Department of Defense invoked a six-month national security exemption from the Marine Mammal Protection Act to thwart a lawsuit by an environmentalist group.

The environmentalists filed the lawsuit last week after the National Marine Fisheries Service issued a permit for the Navy to use sonar during the current exercises. Los Angeles-based Judge Florence-Marie Cooper ruled that the exemption did not cover the National Environmental Policy Act cited in the lawsuit.

The judge's order blocks the Navy's use of sonar until a July 18 hearing, when Cooper is to consider making the ban permanent. Cooper gave the two sides until July 12 to meet and discuss a possible settlement.

The Navy said that sonar was the only effective means to quickly detect and target hostile submarines, and that sonar operators needed training at sea "to protect our nation's ships, shores and allies."

Navy scientists denied that sonar hurts whales. But the Fisheries Service concluded that sonar used during a similar exercise in 2004 had likely caused 150 melon-headed whales to gather in a shallow bay.

story: http://english.people.com.cn/200607/05/eng20060705_280265.html

...full post...

Give Rise the Toxic Jungle

Rising CO2 will give rise to poison ivy, noxious vines
New York, May 31 (PTI): Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could give birth to thick forests, but with more toxic forms of poisonous ivy and other noxious vines, researchers say.

Higher carbon dioxide levels expected in the next 50 years could breed ivies that grow twice as fast, and, unexpectedly, manufacture a nastier form of poison, researchers in the United States have shown.

"It'll be more dangerous to go in the forest," team leader Jacqueline Mohan of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts was quoted by Nature magazine as saying. Poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans), which grows as a shrub or tree-climbing vine, is already the scourge of gardeners and hikers in North America for the excruciating skin rash it can trigger. The plant makes a fatty toxin called urushiol in its leaves.

In the study, Nature says Mohan and her co-workers pumped extra carbon dioxide over three large circular plots of North Carolina pine forest. For six years, the plants inside were exposed to an extra 200 parts per million of the gas over today's atmospheric concentration of about 380 parts per million, roughly what we might expect from pollution by the middle of this century.

Other research, the magazine says, has suggested that vines tend to grow particularly fast in response to higher carbon dioxide levels and that vines are increasing in abundance all over the planet.

Unlike trees, which use extra carbon to grow more wood, vines use it to produce more leaves. The extra leaves help the plant to harvest even more carbon dioxide, the cycle continues and the vines flourish.

Mohan's experiment sought to check whether the plants shoot up in the wild, as they do in greenhouse experiments.

"Yes, dramatically," was the answer, Nature says.

The poisonous ivies grew at double the rate of plants grown under regular carbon dioxide levels, whereas woody species on average tend to grow around 31 per cent faster.

The elevated levels also created a nastier version of urushiol poison, the team showed.

By extracting urushiol from the plant's leaves, Nature says the researchers found that poison ivy grown in high carbon dioxide churned out more than 150 per cent more of one nasty, unsaturated form of urushiol and around 60 per cent less of the mild, saturated form.

...full post...

Yay for Censorship

So the Colbert video (see previous post) was well on it's way to becoming the biggest video on youtube ever, the stats were off the charts. Then suddenly views started dropping fast. I went to check out why and got this message:

This video has been removed due to copyright infringement.

Seems that all C-Span videos were removed from youtube. Wikipedia states that C-Span claims intellectual property rights on anything it broadcasts. Interesting timing me thinks... I bet if it was just the two-headed Bushtard routine they'd all still be there...

...full post...

More Corporate Media Non-News

Somehow, Stephen Colbert was invited to be the headlining guest speaker at the Washington Press Corp Dinner, which Bush also attended. Listen to Colbert rip into the Bush Administration and the so-called "Liberal Media". It's painful to watch, but that's Colbert's style, and I love it. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that the President got himself tore a new asshole on live TV, and no major news media outlet even bothered reported it.

...full post...

An Inconvenient Truth

...full post...

Yahoo! Bible Thumpers!

If you haven't visited Yahoo! Answers yet, don't. The stupidity therein is absolutely astounding. Especially entertaining is the religious category, where various believers profess to the world how ignorant they really are in their individual theologies. It will make your brain hurt, don't say I didn't warn you. 

...full post...

The Right to Electricity as Mother Nature (and Disney) Intended

"Anyone who's seen [the Walt Disney animated film] 'The Lion King' knows there's a circle of life," which in the real world includes "access to electricity, disease prevention, clean water and nutrition," said Paul Driessen, senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality.

"But just as there's a circle of life, there's also a circle of death. It connects policies that perpetuate poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death," noted Driessen, who is also the author of the book, "Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death."

The Circle of Life provides access to electricity??? Where do I sign up?

...full post...

Prison Ship Earth

"Jesus entrusted Judas with a secret he did not reveal to any of his other disciples: That this world was not created by the one true God, but by a lesser, evil divinity as a place to entrap divine spirits.

'The idea of this gospel is that humans have a divine spirit trapped within them that needed to escape their bodies and Jesus was just here temporarily and he also needed to escape and Judas provided him the way of doing it.' "

...full post...

Corporation Responsible for 'Big Dig' Fiasco Awarded Los Alamos Labs

Nuclear laboratories are no longer to be intellectual institutions devoted to science but part of a corporate-business model where research, design, and ultimately the weapons themselves will become products to be marketed....continued post...
In December 2005, construction giant Bechtel won a $553 million yearly management contract to run Los Alamos Laboratories, which has an estimated $2.2 billion annual budget.

But a look at Bechtel's record might not inspire others... The California-based construction giant has a long history of big projects, big promises, bigger budgets and even bigger failures.

In Boston, Bechtel was put in charge of the "Big Dig," the reconstruction of Interstate 93 beneath the city. In 1985, the price tag for the project was estimated at about $2.5 billion. Now, it is a whopping $14.6 billion...

Hiroshima and Nagasaki wish this had happened sixty years ago.

...full post...

God Loves The Baptists

A pastor performing a baptism was electrocuted inside his church after grabbing a microphone while partially submerged...

...full post...