News: April 2008 Archives

This stuff is child's play for an expert blogger such as myself, but I feel obligated to fan the flames as Barack Obama is hoisted by his own petard. Here's Obama in his "Lincolnesque" speech on race from March 18th, 2008.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.

And here's Obama disowning Jeremiah Wright yesterday, April 29th.

"At a certain point, if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that's enough," Obama said.

"That's a show of disrespect to me. It is also, I think, an insult to what we've been trying to do in this campaign.''

"I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw.''

Perhaps it's fitting to let Jeremiah Wright have the last word:

We both know that, if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected.”

Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever’s doing the polls. Preachers say what they say because they’re pastors. They have a different person to whom they’re accountable.

Here's an uplifting human events story for you: high school student Gregg Fox survives brain cancer, re-learns how to read and talk, and then scores a perfect 36 on the ACT.

Four years ago, after Gregg Fox was treated for a brain tumor, he had to learn to speak and walk again.

He's made remarkable progress, and now the Ladue Horton Watkins High School junior has the test score to prove it: He earned a perfect 36 on the ACT college entrance exam.

Fox, 17, is one of four Missouri students to earn a perfect score out of the almost 20,500 statewide who took the test in December.

"Mentally, I've made a full recovery, I guess," says the humble Fox.

His success is a testament to his tenacity and strength. Congratulations!

Something about this story sounds fishy... John McCain is collecting disability payments based on injuries he sustained when shot down, imprisoned, and tortured during the Vietnam War.

Sen. John McCain has long said he is in robust health and is strong enough to hike the Grand Canyon, but he also is receiving what his staff Monday termed a "disability pension" from the Navy.

When McCain released his tax return for 2007 on Friday, he separately disclosed that he received a pension of $58,358 that was not listed as income on his return.

On Monday, McCain's staff identified the retirement benefit as a "disability pension" and said that McCain "was retired as disabled because of his limited body movements due to injuries as a POW."

McCain campaign strategist Mark Salter said Monday night that McCain was technically disabled. "Tortured for his country -- that is how he acquired his disability," Salter said.

There's no question that McCain served America heroically, but from what I've seen he doesn't appear to be disabled. In fact, he appears to be far more robust than many younger men. Maybe military disability payments don't work according to my intuition, but shouldn't they be used to compensate people who are unable to work because of their injuries? McCain has been drawing a Senatorial salary for decades, which would appear to undermine a claim that his injuries have hindered him professionally.

On the other hand, maybe military disability payments are intended as compensation for injuries, regardless of their effect on a person's productivity. Are they just ongoing payouts for transitory pain, suffering, and disability? Should McCain be getting paid because he is still unable to raise his arms above his shoulders? I don't know the answers to all these questions, but it seems odd to me that a man capable of serving as a US Senator is considered to be so disabled that he requires disability payments to sustain him.

(Note: If someone were to propose it, I could potentially support a system that gives monetary rewards to American troops who act with great heroism, but I don't think disability payments are an appropriate way to accomplish that goal in an unofficial manner.)

Ann Althouse berates those of us who jumped on the "abortion art" bandwagon, calling it an obvious hoax. I'm chagrined, and promise to be more skeptical in the future... maybe I'm overly cynical? Maybe I'm too quick to believe the worst about my ideological enemies. Anyway, Ms. Althouse puts this buffoon in her proper place:

Ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body... So that's what passes as insight at Yale these days? If I was going to get livid and horrified about something it would be that a great university sucks so many young women into the into the intellectual graveyard of Women's Studies. Think what these women could be studying instead of this endlessly recycled drivel. If you care about women's bodies, study science and help us with the limitations of the body. But to imagine you are helping us by restating meager platitudes is just very sad.

The FBI sure seem to have a loose definition of "terrorism":

The car was reported stolen last week. After the theft, the car’s owner was fueling his motorcycle when he spotted his stolen car.

“While he was refueling his motorcycle, low and behold, the vehicle that he had reported stolen that belongs to him happened to pull into the gas station area also,” said Los Lunas Police Captain Charles Nuanes.

The car’s owner pulled the keys out of the ignition of his stolen car and the people in the car fled.

When police arrived, they found the explosive device and less than $1,000 worth of Iraqi cash.

“We don’t know what their intentions were,” said Nuanes. “We don’t know what they were planning on doing with any of this.” ...

FBI agents say that they have ruled out terrorism.

Uh... I can't imagine how the FBI managed to rule out terrorism. Explosives... Iraqi money... stolen vehicle... there's nowhere to go from there except terrorism. Maybe the FBI and/or the reporter meant that there's no indication of terrorism, or that there's no indication of a connection to al Qaeda, but a claim to have ruled terrorism completely out begs credulity.

Furthermore, does anyone want to hazard a guess about how the Iraqi cash and explosives got to Los Lunas, New Mexico? Maybe over our porous southern border?

(HT: GatewayPundit.)

4:40am:

There was just an earthquake! It felt pretty mild, but it was strong enough and long enough to wake me up. Must be the New Madrid fault acting up.

4:48am:

Looks like a five-pointer about 200 miles east of here near the border of Illinois and Indiana.

4:56am:

Officially event 851141: 19 miles SSE of Olney, Illinois, Mag: 5.4. Nice.

And nothing on the local news yet... I'm pretty sure I broke the story... insofar as a natural disaster story can be "broken".

6:01am

Maps and more data.

7:30am:

Downgraded to 5.2. Yes, everyone will be talking about it here for a month. "Where were you during the earthquake?" Sleeping. "Yeah, me too!"

Here are some factoids I didn't know:

Earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S., although less frequent than in the western U.S., are typically felt over a much broader region. East of the Rockies, an earthquake can be felt over an area as much as ten times larger than a similar magnitude earthquake on the west coast. A magnitude 4.0 eastern U.S. earthquake typically can be felt at many places as far as 100 km (60 mi) from where it occurred, and it infrequently causes damage near its source. A magnitude 5.5 eastern U.S. earthquake usually can be felt as far as 500 km (300 mi) from where it occurred, and sometimes causes damage as far away as 40 km (25 mi). ...

At well-studied plate boundaries like the San Andreas fault system in California, often scientists can determine the name of the specific fault that is responsible for an earthquake. In contrast, east of the Rocky Mountains this is rarely the case. The Illinois basin - Ozark dome region is far from the nearest plate boundaries, which are in the center of the Atlantic Ocean, in the Caribbean Sea, and in the Gulf of California. The region is laced with known faults but numerous smaller or deeply buried faults remain undetected. Even the known faults are poorly located at earthquake depths. Accordingly, few earthquakes in the region can be linked to named faults. It is difficult to determine if a known fault is still active and could slip and cause an earthquake. As in most other areas east of the Rockies, the best guide to earthquake hazards in the Illinois basin – Ozark dome region is the earthquakes themselves.

When my wife and I woke up and ran downstairs, we went straight to the internet. It never even crossed our minds to turn on the television.

8:52am:

There are probably 50 news crews at the collapsed porch.

10:16am:

An aftershock, preliminarily rated magnitude 4.5.

It's hard for me to imagine anything more grotesque than Yale student Aliza Shvarts' abortion-based art project. (Backup URL.) It's like something out of a horror movie. The sheer barbarity and cavalier display of evil leaves me almost speechless.

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself ?as often as possible? while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts? project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock ? saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion.

But Shvarts insists her concept was not designed for ?shock value.?

?I hope it inspires some sort of discourse,? Shvarts said. ?Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it?s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone.?

There's no "discourse" I'd want to have with this subhuman vermin. What she's done isn't illegal, but should be a capital crime. So yes, I'd be pleased to see the justice system put Aliza Shvarts to death. Since that's not likely, she should be cast out of society, shunned, ostracized, and abandoned.

The students and administrators of Yale should be ashamed of what their institution has become. This sort of evil has no place in our culture, contributes nothing to public discourse, and ultimately degrades our society when left unpunished. I hope the Yale alumni find some way to respond to the cruelty done in their name and supported by their money.

For the rest of us, take a long hard look at what our modern amorality has spawned: Aliza Shvarts is a vile creature who conceives human babies only to slaughter them for her amusement, and our society is left with no legal recourse thanks to the decades-long ascent of secular humanism. We should be ashamed of what we've become.

I'm ashamed, as an American, that such evil could be perpetrated in our midst and that I'm powerless to stop it. Pray for our country.

Update:

Maybe it's a hoax?

Color me dubious about the Yale art project story. In talking to a few knowledgeable docs this morning, the facts don’t add up very well. Self-insemination of the sort she seems to be claiming is no easy feat, and “herbal” abortifacients are extremely dangerous and not at all reliably effective. It’s highly unlikely that these two improbable elements would both be carried off successfully multiple times, and with no side effects. It’s more likely that her senior art project is to see how many people she can upset with a hoax.

If it’s a hoax, it’s an abhorrent and disgusting one. If it turns out to be true, it’s of course all the more so and far worse. Either way, where are the adults at Yale?

I don't agree with the permanently-protesting liberal hippies on many things, but I'm proud to see the Chinese Olympic torch relay disrupted in the name of freedom.

Good for you, San Francisco! Glad to see the BUSHITLERIBURTON signs put away for a while to protest against real tyranny.

The Bakken Formation in North Dakota has been making news as oil prices have lingered at record-highs.

America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.

In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951. The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed because of the higher cost of horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated at $20-$40 a barrel.

That's a lot of oil, but we may not have the technology to recover the majority of it... yet.

New curiosity developed in 2007 when EOG Resources out of Houston, Texas reported that a single well it had drilled into an oil-rich layer of shale below Parshall, North Dakota is anticipated to produce 700,000 barrels (111,000 m³) of oil. Estimates for ultimate oil contained in the entire Bakken play range from 271 billion to 503 billion barrels (40–80 km³), with a mean of 413 billion barrels (65 km³) of technically recoverable and irrecoverable oil.[6]

This massive estimate appears to dwarf the estimated 50–70 billion barrels (8–11 km³) of technically recoverable and irrecoverable oil in Alaska's North Slope. A conservative estimate of Bakken's technically recoverable oil would be 1% to 3%, or between 4.1 and 12.4 billion barrels (0.6–2 km³) of oil, due to the fact that Bakken's shale is so tight. However, other estimates range from 10% to as high as 50% technically recoverable reserves.[7] By comparison, recoverable oil estimates in the Alaska formation are 30% to 50%, or a mean of 26 billion barrels (4 km³).

The key phrase is "technically recoverable". As technology improves (and oil prices rise) the amount of "technically recoverable" also increases. (Another illustration of why oil depletion is a myth.)

Researchers in France have discovered what they believe to be the oldest surviving recording of the human voice. (The audio is here, but the clip spends more time on blabbering researchers than on the actual recording.)

An "ethereal" 10 second clip of a woman singing a French folk song has been played for the first time in 150 years.

The recording of "Au Clair de la Lune", recorded in 1860, is thought to be the oldest known recorded human voice.

A phonograph of Thomas Edison singing a children's song in 1877 was previously thought to be the oldest record.

The new "phonautograph", created by etching soot-covered paper, has now been played by US scientists using a "virtual stylus" to read the lines. ...

The short song was captured on April 9, 1860 by a phonautograph, a device created by a Parisian inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville.

The device etched representations of sound waves into paper covered in soot from a burning oil lamp.

Lines were scratched into the soot by a needle moved by a diaphragm that responded to sound. The recordings were never intended to be played.

This is one of the coolest things I've encountered in a long time. Despite the existence of thousands of photographs from the same era, there's something hauntingly immediate about actually hearing a little French girl's voice across so many years.