Move the goalpoasts? They're changing stadiums!

Zombietime on the Hitchens-Hedges "Is God Great?" Debate:

The American political landscape experienced an epochal re-alignment on May 24. A subtle yet far-reaching tectonic shift.

You probably didn't notice. But you will, eventually.

Because it was on that date in Berkeley, California that the radical left reversed what had been its immutable rejection of religion and for the first time embraced spirituality...

How did this strange state of affairs come to pass? In one word: Islam.

The left... has always been anti-religion. But now, they've become caught in a philosophical bind: how can they promote multiculturalism -- and by extension all non-Western cultures, such as fundamentalist Islam -- if they condemn religion in general? Neocon pundits have since 9/11 frequently accused the left of being in bed with Muslim extremists, a charge which the left has vehemently denied. But with every denial their position was becoming more and more untenable, as the verbiage and narratives of Islamic radicals and "anti-war" progressives have grown to become virtually indistinguishable.

Someone had to take the lead and resolve the dilemma that the left had created for itself. And so it was Hedges who stepped forward... taking what is for him (and the left) a revolutionary position: that spirituality and religion -- with the noteworthy exception of organized Christianity -- is good.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:17:48 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 226 words, total size 2 kb.

Lileks again

Judging from the output so far over at the bucket, there may soon be a shortage of room in the Pipes.  Wow!
Later:  And he's posting pictures, too.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 05:39:20 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 30 words, total size 1 kb.

Turkish troops in Kurdish Iraq

Howard calls it, May 30th:

Turkey will absolutely invade the Kurdish area of Iraq and kill as many of the Kurds as possible.

Today:

Several thousand Turkish troops crossed into northern Iraq early Wednesday to chase Kurdish guerrillas who attack Turkey from bases there, two Turkish security officials said.

UPDATE 070606 22:40:  Well, maybe not yes.

Fouad Hussein, the head of the office of Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani, said the government had no knowledge of any invasion. -- Reuters 15:40gmt

(The above story is headlined "Iraqi Kurds deny incursion by Turkish troops,"  but "having no knowledge of" isn't the same as "deny," is it?)
Later:  Turkish sources are telling varying stories, but all confirm some kind of incursion.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 17:51:24 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 118 words, total size 1 kb.

Monday politics: June 4, 2007

"As if you didn't need another reason not to vote for him" department: President John McCain would have Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in his cabinet

"...the 70 year old presidential hopeful also said that he would ask Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to serve on his cabinet to deal with technology issues if elected." -- Arlen Parsa's Daily Background

(McCain is also clueless about net neutrality.) [Via Slashdot]

Document thief Sandy Berger gave up his law license, short-circuiting an investigation of his couduct by the D.C. Bar. Ronald Cass wonders what's so damaging that someone would give up his occupation to hide it.  And why no one but bloggers seems to be interested.

Is The Smartest Woman In The World sorry she didn't bother to read the intelligence report? From the CNN transcript:

WOLF: Senator Clinton, do you regret voting [to] authorize the president to use force against Saddam Hussein in Iraq without actually reading the national intelligence estimate, the classified document laying out the best U.S. intelligence at that time?

CLINTON: Wolf, I was thoroughly briefed. I knew all the arguments. I knew all of what the Defense Department, the CIA, the State Department were all saying. And I sought dissenting opinions, as well as talking to people in previous administrations and outside experts...

WOLF: So let me just be precise, because the question was: Do you regret not reading the national intelligence estimate?

CLINTON: I feel like I was totally briefed. I knew all of the arguments that were being made by everyone from all directions. National intelligence estimates have a consensus position and then they have argumentation as to those people who don’t agree with it...

Translation: "No, and the dog ate my homework."
[Via Don Surber, who calls it a "crash and burn" performance, but notes that you'd never know it from the press accounts.]

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 15:10:35 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 284 words, total size 3 kb.

Curiouser and curiouser

My previous post on the Andrew Speaker matter centered around the AP's poorly-written initial story and how the questions it raised almost exceeded the information it conveyed. Two days later, more information is coming out, and it appears there are plenty of screwups to go around. It may take a Congressional investigation (horrors!) to sort things out. Here's a rough guide to the issues:

• What was Speaker told before he left? Speaker says health officials "discouraged" him from making the trip, but when asked point-blank if he was a risk and if they were forbidding his trip they said no. Wayne County (Georgia) health officials say they told Speaker not to make the trip. Speaker says he has a tape of the conversation. ("Steve Katkowsky of the Fulton County Health Department told CNN, 'If such a recording was made it was without the consent and without the knowledge of Fulton County Health Department officials.'"-- CNN Story, June 2, 9:25am) Um-hum, could be a gotcha. Let's see if there's any more mention of the tape.
  
• What was Speaker told by the CDC? In his Good Morning America interview, Speaker said he was told not to take a commercial flight home, and instead to check in to a clinic in Rome. This, he says, left him facing "a very real threat that [he] could have died" in Italy, since he had been told earlier that the only place he could be treated was in Denver.
  
• Did the government offer Speaker any assistance at getting home? Government says yes, Speaker says "that's a lie."

If Speaker's story holds up, it appears that U.S. authorities (that is, the CDC and the Fulton County Health Department) had second thoughts after they had allowed Speaker to leave the country. They contacted him, told him not to take a commercial flight back, but offered no practical assistance for his situation, their only suggestion being (to him) the equivalent of a death sentence. In fact, all they did was put Speaker on the "no fly" list (which had the consequence of exposing more people than if he's just flown directly back to the states), and flagged his passport. The results we all know.

My initial question ("What the hell were they supposed to do? Send him back to Canada?) seems to have been resolved: According to later reports, Speaker was supposed to be "detained and isolated, and public health officials [were to] be contacted" [CNN Report], not blocked from entering the country [gist of the AP report quoted in my post]. So I guess we're fortunate that American citizens still can't be barred from their country simply on the say-so of some bureaucrat.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 03:51:47 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 435 words, total size 3 kb.

Glass houses and food safety

Did the scandal over contaminated pet food encourage you to indulge in some smug superiority about American food safety standards? Think again:

Two companies are recalling livestock and fish feed ingredients because they contain the industrial chemical melamine, U.S. health officials said on Wednesday.

The companies were identified as Ohio-based Tembec BTLSR, a unit of the Canadian wood products company Tembec Inc., and Uniscope Inc. of Colorado.

The melamine was not linked to a recent recall of pet food that was tainted with [melamine added to] raw ingredients from China, said Dr. David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration’s assistant commissioner for food protection.-- Reuters [bolding and bracketed text mine]

So now we have a (Canadian owned) American company doing exactly the same thing the Chinese are accused of-- adding melamine, a potentially dangerous chemical, to animal feed ingredients.

In the Chinese case, it's commonly believed that the melamine was added to wheat gluten in order to inflate its score on protein-content tests. In this new case, (a significantly smaller amount of) melamine was added as a "binding agent" to improve the products' texture and handling qualities. From the (U.S.) Food and Drug Administration's recall notice:

Based on the levels of melamine and related compounds in the initial ingredients, FDA estimated the probable level of melamine and related compounds in livestock feed as less than 50 parts per million (ppm) based on the recommended mix rate of two to four pounds of binding agent per ton of livestock feed. The estimated levels in fish and shrimp feed are less than 233 ppm and 465 ppm, respectively, of melamine and related compounds...

The estimated melamine levels in feed made with these binding agents are similar to the levels discussed in the interim safety/risk assessment of melamine and related compounds made available by FDA earlier this month... [which stated that] the consumption of pork, chicken, domestic fish, and eggs from animals inadvertently fed animal feed contaminated with melamine and its analogues is very unlikely to pose a human health risk.

Today's Wall Street Journal [no link, read in dead-tree version] mentions this in the fifth paragraph of a story headlined China Rebuts Criticism Of Food Exports' Safety [June 1, 2007, central edition page A4].  The Journal quotes a Tembec executive vice president as saying that Tembec had used melamine as a binding agent since 2004, but stopped after the pet food crisis.

Uniscope, Inc. is actually the hero here.  That company discovered the presence of melamine in Tembec's product when it ran tests on materials from its suppliers in response to the pet food scandal.

This is the second instance of melamine getting into the human food chain that we know of.  Earlier some of the Chinese-contaminated gluten made its way into pig food (California) and chicken feed (Indiana) when the Canadian pet food producer sold some of it as surplus product to animal feed producers.

And now the Chinese are saying, effectively, "you do it too."   Guess what.  They're right.

Therese at the PetsitUSA.com weblog has been doing a much better job of following this story than I have.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 14:39:38 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 498 words, total size 4 kb.

Proprietary standards lose again

Audible shutters its proprietary podcast service.

"From the start, Wordcast appeared to be a solution looking for a problem. Podcasting took off at the end of 2004, in large part, because podcasts were based on established standards (MP3s & RSS), they were interoperable and they were free. Wordcast, on the other hand, was proprietary, exclusive and designed to be a platform for paid podcasts...
While Audible managed to generate a tremendous amount of buzz with the Wordcast anouncement, little of the positive buzz came from people involved in blogging or podcasting." -- Podcasting News: Audible Kills Wordcast Service; Podcasting Not Quite Dead Yet

Via Jeff Jarvis, who is indulging in some schadenfreude.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 02:19:49 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 115 words, total size 1 kb.