Monday, December 03, 2007

Dino-Mummy

Now this is a spectacular find.

Scientists on Monday announced the discovery of what appears to be the world’s most intact dinosaur mummy: a 67-million-year-old plant-eater that contains fossilized bones and skin tissue, and possibly muscle and organs.

Preserved by a natural fluke of time and chemistry, the four-ton mummified hadrosaur, a duck-billed herbivore common to North America, could reshape the understanding of dinosaurs and their habitat, its finders say.

“There is no doubt about it that this dinosaur is a very, very significant find,” said Tyler Lyson, a graduate student in geology at Yale University who discovered the dinosaur in North Dakota.

More here.

Sunday, December 02, 2007

This Kid Has Balls

If more people spoke out against Muslim extremists, maybe we could shut them down more easily. Too many moderate Muslims are afraid to. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more stuff like this if the extremists keep making Muslims look bad. Already he’s inspired others to follow suit.

Meanwhile, the usual suspects keep wringing their hands. Anyone who makes apologies for Islamic Extremeists isn’t a liberal and should never be called anything other than a coward. 

Mr Magoo PSA

[via BoingBoing]

The Wit and Wisdom of Mike Tyson

Compilation Of Funniest Tyson Quotes - Watch more free videos

Read the Comments

The New Republic offers an apology for the Baghdad Diaries, which were a series of fabrications by Scott Beauchamp. They made our military look like psychopathic scum and perhaps inspired some Hollywood people to make movies nobody saw. The apology took them 14 pages of blather to get around to doing, which is a pathetic attempt to bore people into not reading the last paragraph. That’s the only one that mattered.

So skip to the comments. They’re the best part. It should be noted that many of the anti-war arguments have been shot down repeatedly because of the anti-war leaders’ blatant lies. They call Bush a liar, but undermine their own position by constantly trotting out one falsehood after another. Of course, when they’re caught lying, this causes them no shame. They just change the subject and keep it up.

When Fahrenheit 9/11 was revealed to be full of mendacity and deceptions, you didn’t see too many lefties disown it. Many of them may have stopped mentioning it as the “truth” just as many will probably stop citing An Inconvenient Truth as more of its deceptions and falsehoods come to light. But you still see the occasional peace-pimp citing it.

You would think, when caught in so many lies, that some of the left would question their arguments. Many things they claimed would happen if we went into Iraq haven’t. They didn’t start coming over here to blow things up. The quagmire argument seems to be dissipating fast.

Frankly, the Iraq War could be a moot point in a few years. If that long. But don’t expect any more apologies. 

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Fist of the North Star

I forgot to add this to my list of 80s TV shows. It’s very goofy and has limited animation, but I enjoyed watching it at the time. Fist of the North Star is about a Mad Max style future where the earth is a wasteland populated by crazed bikers and starving people looking for food. The twist is, these mutant bikers have super-powered martial arts. And the hero, Ken, who looks like Sylvester Stallone, has the power to make his enemies explode when he touches them. It’s a delayed reaction, so he often touches them then walks away. The bad guys say: “I’m going to kill you!” and Ken says: “You can’t because you’re already dead.” Then they explode. 

Like I said, it’s a silly show, but entertaining none the less. It was very popular. It was based on a manga by someone who went by the name Bronson. 

Irony DuJour

Italian police burst into the room of a suspected Mafia mobster in Sicily and arrested him as he watched a television show about the arrest of a Mafia boss, investigators said Friday.
Italian Carabinieri police accompany Michele Catalano (C) after his arrest in Palermo November 29, 2007. [Agencies]

Police said Michele Catalano was watching the concluding chapter late Thursday of the TV mini-series “The Boss of Bosses,” recounting the arrest in 1993 of real-life Cosa Nostra leader Salvatore “Toto” Riina, when he was detained.

They Catalano, 48, was suspected of being a senior commander serving under the latest “boss of bosses” Salvatore Lo Piccolo, who was arrested this month after nearly 25 years on the run.

Catalano faces charges of drug trafficking and extortion.

China Daily

Losing the War on Drugs

Rolling Stone has an article on “How America Lost the War on Drugs”. While I generally find Rolling Stone articles to be biased politically, this article is pretty dead on target.

We’ve been fighting the war on drugs for over 30 years and drugs remain cheap and plentiful. Drug gangs have only grown in strength. There are more now gangs than ever before.

We’ve spent billions, if not trillions of dollars on the drug war and the problem hasn’t abated much. It’s more socially unacceptable to be a drug user than it was in the 70s, but it’s also socially unacceptable to be an alcoholic or a smoker and that hasn’t stopped them either.

The only way to win the war on drugs is to completely change tactics and make it legal. That would eliminate the business for drug lords and gangs. It would cut off a major source of revenue for terrorists. Because if we grew our drugs and managed it ourselves, that would destroy the business of the drug trade. And by taxing drugs, the government would have insane amounts of capital to pay for things it needs to fix, like Medicare and Social Security.

Instead of sending people to prison for using drugs, addicts should be sentenced to rehab and education, which could be funded by drug taxes.

But that would make too much sense. This is why governments and bureaucracy can never solve problems. They get stuck on a failed ideas and keep it going almost indefinitely. The welfare state ran for 30 years and caused immense harm to families in America, especially in minority communities. The drug war has sent millions of people to jail or prison needlessly and empowered a criminal underclass to wreak massive harm on society.

You would think the lesson of prohibition brought would have clued these politicians to the realities of banning things. When you ban something you create a demand and a black market. Prohibition in the 20s helped Organized Crime to become rich and powerful. It cost serious amounts of money and manpower to take on those gangs, and the Mafia is still with us today. 

I can fully understand why people would not want to legalize drugs. Drugs cause a lot of harm when they are abused. But by criminalizing drugs, you drive drug abusers into secrecy and hiding. Which makes the problem much harder to deal with.

The vast majority of crime in the US is drug related or drug enabled, meaning the people involved were under the influence. If the government really wants to solve this problem they have to take a different tact. They have to consider changing the laws and seeing if an open approach works better. The evidence suggests it would.