I'm watching the madness in Toledo, Ohio

What started as a Neo-Nazi rally and the response to it is now a scene of mob rule with looters stealing everythig that's not nailed down and setting fire to strangers houses. The situation is completely out of control. Naturally the mayor, Jack Ford, is a Democrat.

Why was I not surprised? And I'm sure that somehow, Democratic spinners are figuring out a way to blame this on President Bush.

The world is a scary place

From Charles Krauthammer:

October 14, 2005
Bird Flu as Biological Weapon?
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- While official Washington has been poring over Harriet Miers' long-ago doings on the Dallas City Council and parsing the Byzantine comings and goings of the Fitzgerald grand jury, relatively unnoticed was perhaps the most momentous event of our lifetime -- what is left of it, as I shall explain. It was announced last week that American scientists have just created a living, killing copy of the 1918 ``Spanish'' flu.

This is big. Very big.

First, it is a scientific achievement of staggering proportions. The Spanish flu has not been seen on this blue planet for 85 years. Its re-creation is a story of enterprise, ingenuity, serendipity, hard work and sheer brilliance. It involves finding deep in the bowels of a military hospital in Washington a couple of tissue samples from the lungs of soldiers who died in 1918 (in an autopsy collection first ordered into existence by Abraham Lincoln), and the disinterment of an Alaskan Eskimo who died of the flu and whose remains had been preserved by the permafrost. Then, using slicing and dicing techniques only Michael Crichton could imagine, they pulled off a microbiological Jurassic Park: the first ever resurrection of an ancient pathogen. And not just any ancient pathogen, explained virologist Eddie Holmes, but ``the agent of the most important disease pandemic in human history.''

Which brings us to the second element of this story: Beyond the brilliance lies the sheer terror. We have quite literally brought back to life an agent of near-biblical destruction. It killed more people in six months than were killed in the four years of the First World War. It killed more humans than any other disease of similar duration in the history of the world, says Alfred W. Crosby, who wrote a history of the 1918 pandemic. And, notes The New Scientist, when the re-created virus was given to mice in heavily quarantined laboratories in Atlanta, it killed the mice more quickly than any other flu virus ever tested.

Now that I have your attention, consider, with appropriate trepidation, the third element of this story: What to do with this knowledge? Not only has the virus been physically re-created. But its entire genome has now been published for the whole world, good people and very bad, to see.

The decision to publish was a very close and terrifying call.

On the one hand, we need the knowledge disseminated. We've learned from this research that the 1918 flu was bird flu, ``the most bird-like of all mammalian flu viruses,'' says Jeffery Taubenberger, lead researcher in unraveling the genome. There is a bird flu epidemic right now in Asia that has infected 117 people and killed 60. It has already developed a few of the genomic changes that permit transmission to humans. Therefore, you want to put out the knowledge of the structure of the 1918 flu, which made the full jump from birds to humans, so that every researcher in the world can immediately start looking for ways to anticipate, monitor, prevent and counteract similar changes in today's bird flu.

We are essentially in a life-and-death race with the bird flu. Can we figure out how to pre-empt it before it figures out how to evolve into a transmittable form with 1918 lethality that will decimate humanity? To run that race we need the genetic sequence universally known -- not just to inform and guide but to galvanize new research.

On the other hand, resurrection of the virus and publication of its structure opens the gates of hell. Anybody, bad guys included, can now create it. Biological knowledge is far easier to acquire for Osama and friends than nuclear knowledge. And if you can't make this stuff yourself, you can simply order up DNA sequences from commercial laboratories around the world that will make it and ship it to you on demand. Taubenberger himself admits that ``the technology is available.''

And if the bad guys can't make the flu themselves, they could try to steal it. That's not easy. But the incentive to do so from a secure facility could not be greater. Nature, which published the full genome sequence, cites Rutgers bacteriologist Richard Ebright as warning that there is a significant risk ``verging on inevitability'' of accidental release into the human population or of theft by a ``disgruntled, disturbed or extremist laboratory employee.''

One batch of 1918 flu has the capacity for mass destruction that no Bond villain could ever dream of. Why try to steal loose nukes in Russia? A nuke can only destroy a city. The flu virus, properly evolved, is potentially a destroyer of civilizations.

We might have just given it to our enemies.

Have a nice day.

Al Gore as Kurtz

Every time Al Gore (D-Mars) opens his mouth, I am convinced that he lost his mind during the aftermath of the 2000 election that was "stolen" from him. Savor this bit from a talk he gave in Sweden:

When asked how the United States would have been different if he had become president, though, he had harsh criticism for Bush's policies.

"We would not have invaded a country that didn't attack us," he said, referring to Iraq. "We would not have taken money from the working families and given it to the most wealthy families."

Where's the signs of madness? There is ample evidence that Saddam Hussein was actively supporting terrorism and that he was horrendous thug that murdered his own people by the hundreds of thousands. Is Mr. Gore saying that if he were in charge, Saddam would still be in running Iraq and still murdering his fellow countrymen? That taking out Saddam and installing a nominally functional democracy was not in our national interest? That the people of Iraq don't deserve the ability to pick and choose their leaders the same as we do? That somehow, the people of Iraq should be held in perpetual bondage because hand-wringer like Mr. Gore don't want to feel guilt about anything? And as for taxes, the poorest people taxes did not go up. Everybody's taxes went down. These are not views of the political positions, these are established facts. And he can't see them. He has lost his mind.

I'd be willing to collaborate on any rewrite of the "The Heart of Darkness" with Al Gore in the Kurtz role.

dpny

Greetings to those from various media outlets

To those who are here for the first time, I say welcome. I like to quote liberally from the National Review (I know, bad choice of words) and from any number of News Corp outlets. I also like Andrew, although he was mostly wrong about Hurricane Katrina and who dropped the ball.

Have a look around and feel free to email me.

dpny

So it was tin-foil hat time

The guy police have in custody for stealing that Cessna Citation from St Augustine and flying it to Georgia doesn't appear to be a jihadi crackpot. I thought it was a bit of a reach. Still, of your garden variety miscreant can take a plane like that, then someone with genuine malicious intent can as well. Couple that with all the bombs being found on college campuses and...

Maybe I should put the hat back on.

dpny

Does this piss off anybody else other than me?

During the Katrina disaster (a mostly man-made disaster I might add), I repeatedly heard trained journalists talking about how New Orleans had been decimated by the storm. I heard the same nonsense during Hurricane Rita. And every time there is some sort of nasty terrorist attack in Iraq (or anywhere for that matter), talking heads everywhere say that such and so was "decimated".

I'm sorry, but I can't live with this anymore. Decimate means to kill 10 percent of a given population. When Roman legion captures a particularly nasty bunch of non-Roman, they would decimate the prisoner, i.e. kill one out of every ten.

Will somebody please tell these alledgedly educated, so-called journalists to pick another, more accurate term, other than decimate?

Greetings

Musement Park and Andrew Sullivan readers. My space here is mostly economic with a little culture thrown in around the edges. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to link. I'll reciprocate.

dpny

By request

The code replaced Andrew's web site this morning:

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<p align="center"><img border="0" src="http://www.geocities.com/perizh_007/images/bd21313_1.gif" width="492" height="19">p>

<p align="center"><span style="background-color: #000000">&nbsp;<img src=http://www.geocities.com/perizh_007/images/skull-2.jpg width="320" height="256">span>p>

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<p align="center" style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="background-color: #000000"><font color="#FF0000" size="5"><b>HackeD

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<p align="center" style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="background-color: #000000"><font color="#FF0000" size="5"><b>#carderx

on DALNETb>font>span>p>

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<p align="right" style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="background-color: #000000"><b><font color="#FFFFFF" size="5">thank's

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<p align="right" style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="background-color: #000000"><b><font size="3" color="#808080">^adinda^,

PHP-injection, y4kuz4font>b>span>p>

<p align="right" style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="background-color: #000000"><b><font size="3" color="#808080">anak2

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I've just had an enormous spike in traffic to this site

More than 100 people in the last few hours -- up from a couple of dozen. Feel free to reply to anything I post. I gotta' fugure out why this is happening.

dpny

Bet that Oil falls further

The US Weather Service is reporting that they think this will be a milder the normal winter. After dealing with the freaking frozen tundra that is Upstate New York in the winter, I'll take a temperate North Carolina winter any time. That fact that it will be even milder is great.

I can grow fresh basil year 'round. Yahoo.

But crude oil, prices, which have been manipulated upward since shortly before the election last year, are at unsustainable levels. Demand is down across the US and, if the weather geeks are right and we do get a mild winter, it will fall further.

Oh, you greedheads at $70. You deserve to lose your shirt. Six month target: high $40s to low $50s or about a 25% to 35% pull back from the highs. Don't sell that Hummer H2 yet.

The bombing in Norman is staring to get noticed

This power graf from Mark Davis in the Dallas Morning News on why the MSM seem to be ignoring the story:

Is it political, because acknowledging a terror threat on our soil might bolster President Bush's war logic? Is it economic, out of fear of scaring people away from football games? Is it geographic snobbery because it didn't happen on either coast? Or is it a PC fear of seeming to lunge toward a jihadist angle?

Read it all here. I tend to think that it's a combination of all of the above, with heavy emphasis on the geographic snobbery angle. One has to remember that the MSM is headquarter on an island off the coast of the United States.

Andrew got hacked

By person or person's unknown. Very ugly.

sorry i hacked you

 

 

 

HackeD
bY revie_perizh

#carderx
on DALNET

 

 

 

thank's
to :

^adinda^,
PHP-injection, y4kuz4

anak2
#carderx. #cirebonhack, #solpot

I almost think I should be wearing a tin-foil hat

Michelle Malkin is absolutely on top of rash of bombs / bombings at college campuses. Her recent attempt to draw a link between the stolen Cessna Citation jet and collegiate jihadi bomber wannabes may be a bit tenuous. Still, the idea that somebody can just steal a business jet and drive it where ever they want is very disconcerting. Ms. Malkin reports that the plan was stolen from St. Augustine, Florida and was then piloted by person or person's unknown to the Gwinett County airport in Georgia. This, Maklin reports, is the same airfield where two of the 9/11 hijackers trained for their mission.

My guess is that somebody will try something between now and the end of the year; some sort of coordinated attack at a number of college campuses with maybe a wild arial surprise thrown in if they can steal more than one plane at a time. The bad guys want to take the fight to the enemy. It would be a great way to rally the troop in Iraq.

Maybe CBS is waking up

It appears that CBS News (of all people) may be picking up the Oklahoma suicide bombing story. While I'm sure they'll link it to President Bush somehow, this bit is encouraging. Will they connect the dots as I and other's have? I dunno. One can only hope. But if they would do some real digging about an issue that really important -- as opposed to the George Bush Air Force Reserve memos -- then maybe, just maybe, they'll regain some of their lost credibility. Still, I can't help but think that they figure out a way to blame this on President Bush.

Oil drops further...

On reduced demand. Now it's under $62.00 a barrel. Sorry if you bought at $70, but you deserve what you get.

Pigs get slaughtered.

This just in...

Bombs found near UCLA on Friday. This is starting to be a big deal.

Alright, remember where you heard this first

The next set of Al-Qaida-esque bombing will take place on college campuses and not necessarily in a major metropolitan areas. With bombs found at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and the suicide bombing in Norman, Oklahoma, it appear that a trend is starting to manifest itself. And if this is the case, why?

It comes down to one very simple truth: the only place in America that you can be rabidly anti-American and still remain fashionable is the college campus, where smug intellectual "superiority" is the rule of the day. This is the kind of place where hatred of all things American -- a rebellion against mommy and daddy where they are no where to be found -- is in itself a fashion statement. This is a unreality where trust-afarians -- the sons and daughter of the most affluent Americans -- can renouce their pasts and become Che Guevera t-shirt wearing socialists. And, rather that seem stupid, they seem principled. They are, for lack of a better expression, cool.

So, why would Al-Qaida choose to recruit on American college campuses? Simple, they can find just enough disaffected losers who are not poseurs but really want to make a statement, and have them self-detonate to the greater glory of La Causa. Indeed, if the reports are true that the Norman, Oklahoma bomber did attend mosque and did try to purchase a large amount of ammonium nitrate and have Pakistani roommates that have subsequently disappeared, then maybe, just maybe this is the beginning a larger trend.