Month: June 2005

  • 2nd Case of Mad Cow in Texas

    Bovine spongiform encephalopathy in Texas. Act surprised.

  • War Crimes Act of 1996

    Did you know about the War Crimes Act of 1996? I didn’t either: [I]t makes grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions a federal crime… [I]t carries the death penalty. If death results from torture or inhuman treatment, then there is a death penalty, and that means there’s no statute of limitations. That means that if […]

  • Time Turns Over Plame Notes

    To prevent serial shill Judith Miller and Matt Cooper from going to prison, Time magazine is turning over the notes surrounding their research on the Valerie Plame leak investigation. Bob Novak couldn’t be reached for comment from under the bridge where he lives.

  • China's Investors Move in on US Utilities

    Remember the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935? I don’t either. It barred utility holding companies from using profits from their regulated business activities in unregulated businesses. It was a move after the Depression when 53 utility holding companies went bankrupt and 23 had bank loan defaults. Senate just repealed the law and China […]

  • Iraq Is(n't) Vietnam

    Quick bullets from this WaPo article by Robert Cohen: Iraq is not Vietnam No united nationalist movement No charismatic leader Iraq is Vietnam Confusing terrorism as a monolithic force a la communism Reliance on reconstruction stats for rosy picture US not fighting a united insurgency, Sunnis and others share goals but not vision Reliance on […]

  • Mint Tea Musings

    The think about panic attacks in the summer heat is you can’t tell that you’re having one. You aren’t sure if it is because you are walking fast. Or you are impatient to stand in line. Or something else tipped it off. Here at the cafe drinking some mint iced tea. I’m glad they started […]

  • Divorce Among Military Families Rampant

    I know rampant isn’t the right word: (via T) Between 2001 and 2004, divorces among active-duty Army officers and enlisted personnel nearly doubled, from 5,658 to 10,477, even though total troop strength remained stable. In 2002, the divorce rate among married officers was 1.9 percent – 1,060 divorces out of 54,542 marriages; by 2004, the […]

  • NoFo on Lipo

    Jake (with whom I will be guest starring in Scarrie! in 2 weeks) opines on his venture through the land of fat and money: Make sure you have realistic expectations about what lipo will do for you. It won’t make you more popular. It won’t make you necessarily sexier. It won’t get you hotter dates […]

  • Bush's Applause Prompted by Staffers

    Like everything else: It was my observation that that one applause break was actually triggered by members of the president’s advance team. They were just a few feet from me. They started to applaud– applause is contagious, and it then swept through the room.

  • Your Brain is Not a Computer

     From Slashdot: For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes as though they involved passing discrete packets of information… — like a digital computer. More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a […]