Of for crying out loud, not those guys again...

Yes back for the Holidays! Its the worst of all worlds. Take an Alien and cross it with a Predator and you get this slimy bastard. I thought Hollywood couldn't think up any more wholesome Christmas stories. Well I am glad to be proved wrong. I will pre-review this film since I have seen a cut of it and here goes...

Yuck!

Can't these insipid beasts bother some other planet? Why is Earth the Mecca for all the shitty evil creatures in the Universe? In Alien vs Predator the Earth was just a nice backwater to allow the Predator Aliens to kill the Alien Aliens. Now they are back and the humans just get in the way again. I'd like to see something other than the same old BS that I have seen a million times before from both these creatures. If they can't do that then the movie makers should stop wasting time on them.
Here is the link to AVP-R for what it is worth

Fort Rock and Molokini

Fort Rock is a semi-circular ring of stone in the middle of the Oregon desert. Molokini is in the tropic of Cancer off the coast of Maui, Hawaii. They actually have a lot in common. They are both extinct volcanoes and both were sculpted by water. Fort Rock, like Molokini, was once and island in the middle of a large Pleistocene lake. Unlike Molokini, Fort Rock was inhabited. The oldest shoes in North America were discovered there, laying in a cave. They are 9000 years old.

Scott McClellan blames Bush and Rove!

Scott McClellan - Former White House Press Secretary:

"I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby," McClellan, 39, wrote. "There was one problem. It was not true."

McClellan wrote that he "unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff, and the president himself."

- This first appeared 1 hour ago on the Bloomberg News Service

Oregon on the cutting edge again

The big medical story this week is of the cloned monkey cells done a the Oregon Primate Center. This is not the story I will be talking about...

The neat looking graphic above is a CGI image of Adenovirus-14. According to the CDC there are lots of adenovirus types out there and most are pretty harmless unless you are really young or really old or have a problem with your immune system like you have HIV or something.

What makes Adenovirus-14 interesting is that this strain attacks healthy adults and puts them in the hospital with pneumonia. It is basically a cold bug and is transmitted the same way, by touch or in by inhaling an infected persons cough. You catch a cold and instead of sneezing and taking a day off work to watch Perry Mason you may end up in the ICU or even the morgue.

Why should Oregonians worry about Adenovirus-14? Below is an excerpt from a Medpage Article from today.

"ATLANTA, Nov. 16 -- Clinicians should keep their eyes peeled for a mutated form of adenovirus 14 that has caused at least 10 deaths, most of them among adults, the CDC warned."

"The new strain of adenovirus 14 differs in that most of its victims have been otherwise healthy adults, CDC officials said.

"What really got people's attention is these are healthy young adults landing in the hospital and, in some cases, the ICU," said John Su, M.D., Ph.D., of the CDC. "

"The deadliest outbreak, identified retrospectively, occurred in Oregon, after a local clinician reported multiple patients admitted to a single hospital for pneumonia over a five-week period in March and April.

Of the 17 specimens obtained, 15 were positive for adenovirus 14, the CDC said, leading Oregon public health authorities to review records from virology labs and find 68 people who tested positive between Nov. 1, 2006, and April 30, 2007. "


This is a Bar of Soap. USE IT!!

WW IV

WW IV smoldered to life in the mid 1980's during WW III (the cold war). Like a forest fire that lingers under the pine needles and sod, it was invisible. It flared up from time to time but did not seem to pose too much of a threat.

Since September 11th we are all much more alarmed. Our stupid reactions and completely inadequate responses to this conflagration have only allowed it to spread. With no containment strategy it is crackling out from hot spots and is much more of a threat now.

To a large extent Bush and his failed policies has been responsible for the severity of WW IV. The situation in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran, in Darfur and now Turkey, is totally going the wrong way. Make no mistake, this is a HOT war. The lives of hundreds of millions hang in the balance. And I fear that we have stumbled so badly in its beginning that by the time it is over many of the millions of lives will be lost. Each great war starts differently.

We need brilliance in positions of leadership. I see NONE in the current crop of Presidential candidates. They fail to appreciate the magnitude of the war the world is in. The war we helped get going by decades of stupid decisions. Bush is bad since his solutions are simplistic and not based on reality. Yet the next President will be in the same situation as Bush. He or she will be faced with a massive problem, Iraq being only one part, that they cannot ignore. There is no negotiating with this enemy. No councils or ceasefires.

I have no clue how this war will end. I do think that keeping canned food in the car and having an exit strategy on how to get out of town is not a bad idea. WW IV is hotter than the cold WW III. Yet we still have all the nukes. Nobody should be so naive as to think the use of nuclear weapons, by the US or other nations, or entities, is beyond consideration.

I have read the Candidates positions, such as they are, and none of them, Democrat of Republican really seems to have a clue as to what to do about anything. They are so busy beating up on each other, trying to appease one core constituency or another that they seem stuck in sloganeering and broad generalities so milky, and opaque as to be useless. How can American voters know who to vote for? Judging by the candidates, their misinformation, lies, and insane positions, I would have to say put all the names in a hat and pick one. Then vote for that person.

Having said all this I would argue that a Democratic President, based on what is coming out of the mouths of all candidates, will be slightly less pathetic than a Republican President. It is not that the Republican candidates are really bad, it is just that the groups that they have to appease are basically just this side of the mentally ill (no offense meant to those who are mentally ill.)

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Federalist and Democrat talking on Church and State

I know the current crop of Christian fanatics would like us all to think that the founders of our Great Republic were bible wielding hyper-Christians but...

John Adams (The Federalist) "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it."

Thomas Jefferson (The Democrat) "The authors of the gospels were unlettered and ignorant men and the teachings of Jesus have come to us mutilated, misstated and unintelligible."

John Adams "I had forgotten the custom of putting Prophets in the Stocks....It may be thought impiety by many, but I could not help wishing that the ancient practice had been continued down to more modern times and that all the Prophets at least from Peter the Hermit, to Nimrod Hews inclusively, had been confined in the Stocks and prevented from spreading so many delusions and shedding so much blood."

Thomas Jefferson "If the freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by law in theory, can ever rise in practice under the overbearing inquisition of public opinion, then and only then will truth, prevail over fanaticism."

John Adams "We have now, it seems a National Bible Society, to propagate King James's Bible, through all Nations. Would it not be better, to apply these pious Subscriptions, to purify Christendom from the Corruptions of Christianity; than to propagate those Corruptions in Europe Asia, Africa and America!"

Our loyal Allies!

“The days of looking the other way while despotic regimes trample human rights, rob their nations' wealth, and then excuse their failings by feeding their people a steady diet of anti-Western hatred are over.” -Dick Cheney

Of course, that is, unless you are a buddy of the VP then go ahead, suspend you nations constitution, beat up protestors, and jail and torture your political rivals. As long as it is all for a good cause.

If you get into the toilet do not be surprised if you end up covered in shit. With Pakistan we have not only armed a man as tyrannical as Saddam, but also stood by and done nothing while he tramples his own people. The policy of back military strong men always leads to the same future. Mainly revolution, civil war, and mass death. Saddam was armed and helped when he suited our purposes, just like Musharref is today. There is really no difference. These men foment radicalism as a response to their tyrany. They use the existance of radicals on the edges, whether is in the mountains of Pakistan or the northern regions of Iraq, as a tool to continue to practice their thuggery.

In some ways Bush uses the same concept. He uses the existance of radicals on the edges to excuse his thuggery here.