Thursday, August 31, 2006

SawStop

This is very cool; check out this table saw that stops the instant it comes in contact with skin. Be sure to watch the 'hot dog' video for a demo.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Public school tries to 'recruit' homeschool kids

by Brandon Hendrickson
published on Monday, August 28, 2006

Teachers, starved for technology, are bounty hunting homeschooled children.

Such is the case in Mason County, Ky., where The Ledger Independent reports that local public school teachers are being encouraged to make house calls to dropouts and homeschoolers alike, convincing them to return to school.

For each student that rejoins the fold and stays for a year, the teachers receive new technology in their classrooms. more

Monday, August 28, 2006

The reality in Iraq

Bush 'palace' shielded from Iraqi storm

Paul McGeough, Baghdad
August 26, 2006

The plans are a state secret, so just where the Starbucks and Krispy Kreme stores will be is a mystery. But as the concrete hulks of a huge 21-building complex rise from the ashes of Saddam's Baghdad, Washington is sending a clear message to Iraqis: "We're here to stay."

It's being built in the Middle East, but George W's palace, as the locals have dubbed the new US embassy, is designed as a suburb of Washington.

An army of more than 3500 diplomatic and support staff will have their own sports centre, beauty parlour and swimming pool. Each of the six residential blocks will contain more than 600 apartments.

The prime 25-hectare site was a steal — it was a gift from the Iraqi Government. And if the five-metre-thick perimeter walls don't keep the locals at bay, then the built-in surface-to-air missile station should.

Guarded by a dozen gangly cranes, the site in the heart of the Green Zone is floodlit by night and is so removed from Iraqi reality that its entire construction force is foreign.

After almost four years, the Americans still can't turn on the lights for the Iraqis, but that won't be a problem for the embassy staffers. The same with the toilets — they will always flush on command. All services for the biggest embassy in the world will operate independently from the rattletrap utilities of the Iraqi capital.

more

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Former CIA operative on the "War on Terror"

Six Questions for Michael Scheuer on National Security
Posted on Wednesday, August 23, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.

Michael Scheuer served in the CIA for 22 years before resigning in 2004; he served as the chief of the bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999.


I have excerpted two questions of the original seven from the article found here

1. We're coming up on the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Is the country safer or more vulnerable to terrorism?

On balance, more vulnerable. We're safer in terms of aircraft travel. We're safer from being attacked by some dumbhead who tries to come into the country through an official checkpoint; we've spent billions on that. But for the most part our victories have been tactical and not strategic. There have been important successes by the intelligence services and Special Forces in capturing and killing Al Qaeda militants, but in the long run that's just a body count, not progress. We can't capture them one by one and bring them to justice. There are too many of them, and more now than before September 11. In official Western rhetoric these are finite organizations, but every time we interfere in Muslim countries they get more support.

In the long run, we're not safer because we're still operating on the assumption that we're hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we're hated because of our actions in the Islamic world. There's our military presence in Islamic countries, the perception that we control the Muslim world’s oil production, our support for Israel and for countries that oppress Muslims such as China, Russia, and India, and our own support for Arab tyrannies. The deal we made with Qadaffi in Libya looks like hypocrisy: we'll make peace with a brutal dictator if it gets us oil. President Bush is right when he says all people aspire to freedom but he doesn't recognize that people have different definitions of democracy. Publicly promoting democracy while supporting tyranny may be the most damaging thing we do. From the standpoint of democracy, Saudi Arabia looks much worse than Iran. We use the term “Islamofascism”—but we're supporting it in Saudi Arabia, with Mubarak in Egypt, and even Jordan is a police state. We don't have a strategy because we don't have a clue about what motivates our enemies.


7. And finally, an extra question—what needs to be done?

This may be a country bumpkin approach, but the truth is the best place to start. We need to acknowledge that we are at war, not because of who we are, but because of what we do. We are confronting a jihad that is inspired by the tangible and visible impact of our policies. People are willing to die for that, and we're not going to win by killing them off one by one. We have a dozen years of reliable polling in the Middle East, and it shows overwhelming hostility to our policies—and at the same time it shows majorities that admire the way we live, our ability to feed and clothe our children and find work. We need to tell the truth to set the stage for a discussion of our foreign policy.

At the core of the debate is oil. As long as we and our allies are dependent on Gulf oil, we can't do anything about the perception that we support Arab tyranny—the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and other regimes in the region. Without the problem of oil, who cares who rules Saudi Arabia? If we solved the oil problem, we could back away from the contradiction of being democracy promoters and tyranny protectors. We should have started on this back in 1973, at the time of the first Arab oil embargo, but we've never moved away from our dependence. As it stands, we are going to have to fight wars if anything endangers the oil supply in the Middle East.

What you want with foreign policy is options. Right now we don't have options because our economy and our allies' economies are dependent on Middle East oil. What benefit do we get by letting China commit genocide-by-inundation by moving thousands and thousands of Han Chinese to overcome the dominance of Muslim Uighurs? What do we get out of supporting Putin in Chechnya? He may need to do it to maintain his country, but we don't need to support what looks like a rape, pillage, and kill campaign against Muslims. The other area is Israel and Palestine. We're not going to abandon the Israelis but we need to reestablish the relationship so it looks like we're the great power and they're our ally, and not the other way around. We need to create a situation where moderate Muslims can express support for the United States without being laughed off the block.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Liquid Explosives on Airplanes

I had to copy this segment from this Register piece: The minor 'chemistry details' we never heard about:

"Binary liquid explosives are a sexy staple of Hollywood thrillers. It would be tedious to enumerate the movie terrorists who've employed relatively harmless liquids that, when mixed, immediately rain destruction upon an innocent populace, like the seven angels of God's wrath pouring out their bowls full of pestilence and pain.

The funny thing about these movies is, we never learn just which two chemicals can be handled safely when separate, yet instantly blow us all to kingdom come when combined. Nevertheless, we maintain a great eagerness to believe in these substances, chiefly because action movies wouldn't be as much fun if we didn't.

Now we have news of the recent, supposedly real-world, terrorist plot to destroy commercial airplanes by smuggling onboard the benign precursors to a deadly explosive, and mixing up a batch of liquid death in the lavatories. So, The Register has got to ask, were these guys for real, or have they, and the counterterrorist officials supposedly protecting us, been watching too many action movies?

We're told that the suspects were planning to use TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, a high explosive that supposedly can be made from common household chemicals unlikely to be caught by airport screeners. A little hair dye, drain cleaner, and paint thinner - all easily concealed in drinks bottles - and the forces of evil have effectively smuggled a deadly bomb onboard your plane.

Or at least that's what we're hearing, and loudly, through the mainstream media and its legions of so-called "terrorism experts." But what do these experts know about chemistry? Less than they know about lobbying for Homeland Security pork, which is what most of them do for a living. But they've seen the same movies that you and I have seen, and so the myth of binary liquid explosives dies hard.

Better killing through chemistry
Making a quantity of TATP sufficient to bring down an airplane is not quite as simple as ducking into the toilet and mixing two harmless liquids together.

First, you've got to get adequately concentrated hydrogen peroxide. This is hard to come by, so a large quantity of the three per cent solution sold in pharmacies might have to be concentrated by boiling off the water. Only this is risky, and can lead to mission failure by means of burning down your makeshift lab before a single infidel has been harmed.

But let's assume that you can obtain it in the required concentration, or cook it from a dilute solution without ruining your operation. Fine. The remaining ingredients, acetone and sulfuric acid, are far easier to obtain, and we can assume that you've got them on hand.

Now for the fun part. Take your hydrogen peroxide, acetone, and sulfuric acid, measure them very carefully, and put them into drinks bottles for convenient smuggling onto a plane. It's all right to mix the peroxide and acetone in one container, so long as it remains cool. Don't forget to bring several frozen gel-packs (preferably in a Styrofoam chiller deceptively marked "perishable foods"), a thermometer, a large beaker, a stirring rod, and a medicine dropper. You're going to need them.

It's best to fly first class and order Champagne. The bucket full of ice water, which the airline ought to supply, might possibly be adequate - especially if you have those cold gel-packs handy to supplement the ice, and the Styrofoam chiller handy for insulation - to get you through the cookery without starting a fire in the lavvie.

Easy does it
Once the plane is over the ocean, very discreetly bring all of your gear into the toilet. You might need to make several trips to avoid drawing attention. Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide / acetone mixture into the ice water bath (Champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you'll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you'll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.

After a few hours - assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven't overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities - you'll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two.

The genius of this scheme is that TATP is relatively easy to detonate. But you must make enough of it to crash the plane, and you must make it with care to assure potency. One needs quality stuff to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale," as Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson put it. While it's true that a slapdash concoction will explode, it's unlikely to do more than blow out a few windows. At best, an infidel or two might be killed by the blast, and one or two others by flying debris as the cabin suddenly depressurizes, but that's about all you're likely to manage under the most favorable conditions possible."

The nerve of those Iraqi citizens

Iraqis Are Ingrates
by Jacob G. Hornberger, August 21, 2006

Poor President Bush. According to the New York Times, the president is frustrated by the lack of public support ... in Iraq. Apparently he’s lamenting that thousands of Iraqis were recently demonstrating in the streets in favor of Hezbollah and chanting, “Death to Israel! Death to America!” Those darned ungrateful Iraqis. Don’t they know that the brutal sanctions that U.S. officials employed against them for more than a decade was for their benefit? So what if they lost hundreds of thousands of their children? Can’t they see that those deaths were “worth it” because U.S. officials were trying to oust their brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, from office?
More

Monday, August 21, 2006

Someone Had to Say it...Terror or Politics?

We should be sceptical about this alleged plot, and wary of politicians who seek to benefit

Craig Murray
Friday August 18, 2006
The Guardian

Nine days on, nobody has been charged with any crime. For there to be no clear evidence yet on something that was "imminent" and would bring "mass murder on an unbelievable scale" is, to say the least, peculiar. A 24th person, arrested amid much fanfare on Tuesday, was quietly released without charge the following day.More

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Awesome Speed Test

I know, this is not a techie blog but this new speed test is very cool. It shows your location and you pick a location to test your internet speed to/from....Check out my results from ATL to Chicago here and then test your own here.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Looking for your confiscated knife? Try ebay

Got this from a friend's blog

This is classic; the government is selling the crap they take from citizens on ebay....read here You would think with the effort it takes to manage this they could create a system where you get your stuff back on your return to whatever airport it was taken from....

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Since we don't give China enough money by shopping at Wal-Mart, our benevelont government simply gives them some of our tax money. Congratulations America, your tax dollars are helping to build the Chinese Empire. Don't worry about it though, keep voting the way you always have, things are sure to change soon...maybe sooner than you think.

Ron Paul writes: Each year the people of the United States write a check to subsidize China, one of the most brutal, anti-American regimes in the world. More

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Middle East Update by Steven LaTulippe

Steve LaTulippe writes: Over the past several months, while working on other projects and taking a quick vacation or two, I’ve been receiving a steady stream of emails from friends and readers concerning America’s deteriorating situation abroad. Mostly, they’ve inquired about my opinion of our various wars and of the future direction of the Middle East.

Simply put, in my opinion, things have taken an ominous turn for the worse. More

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Fiasco - New Book by Thomas Ricks

Ricks' book 'Making the Corps' is one of the finest accounts of Marine Corps boot camp I've ever read. I would strongly recommend it to anyone thinking of joining.

His latest book, 'Fiasco' looks great as well. Ricks' is no liberal war critic but a seasoned field reporter on the front lines who pulls no punches. It's on my list to read, but then again, so are many other books...Here's an amazon editorial review:

Amazon.com
Fiasco is a more strongly worded title than you might expect a seasoned military reporter such as Thomas E. Ricks to use, accustomed as he is to the even-handed style of daily newspaper journalism. But Ricks, the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and the author of the acclaimed account of Marine Corps boot camp, Making the Corps, has written a thorough and devastating history of the war in Iraq from the planning stages through the continued insurgency in early 2006, and he does not shy away from naming those he finds responsible. His tragic story is divided in two. The first part--the runup to the war and the invasion in 2003--is familiar from books like Cobra II and Plan of Attack, although Ricks uses his many military sources to portray an officer class that was far more skeptical of the war beforehand than generally reported. But the heart of his book is the second half, beginning in August 2003, when, as he writes, the war really began, with the bombing of the Jordanian embassy and the emergence of the insurgency. His strongest critique is that the U.S. military failed to anticipate--and then failed to recognize--the insurgency, and tried to fight it with conventional methods that only fanned its flames. What makes his portrait particularly damning are the dozens of military sources--most of them on record--who join in his critique, and the thousands of pages of internal documents he uses to make his case for a war poorly planned and bravely but blindly fought. --Tom Nissley

Reminder: Americans are still dying in Iraq

While we have been distracted of late by deaths elsewhere in the middle east, american troops are still dying. At the end of this article is a list of names; take time to read them.
Aids HIV Bayer

This is unreal, Bayer basically poisoned people with tainted medicine and the FDA knew all about it.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

The Daily Show -- The Miami Seven

Jon Stewart comments on The Miami Seven, the latest 'terror' threat thrwarted by our government protectors. Boy, don't you feel safer?

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Fat Vaccine?

This is just sad; the development of a 'fat' vaccine. Eat what you want and don't exercise, you're vaccinated from obesity...more