Monthly Archives: April 2009

The Trials and Tribulations Of a Catholic School Boy

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Or, “Botany … can’t live with it, can’t live without it ….”

… I was out there on the nature trail, both high on life and high on a rolled up and smoked version of Mother Nature. I started talking to Jeff and the other classmates who had gathered around the growing pile of deadwood. Everybody agreed that life was pretty good and were especially happy for me that I had a date for Homecoming.

… For some strange reason, which I can’t for the life of me explain right now, I picked up a leaf from the ground and …


No, no! Don’t do it! Don’t do it!

Continue reading ….

Space Blog

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An Astronaut is blogging from space:

I am going to try to paint a picture in words of what I saw. Close your eyes and imagine yourself here on ISS with me looking out of the docking compartment window. You are positioned so the Earth is passing by below and you can see the horizon as well with the night sky behind it. Here is what you see:

It is completely night. There are thunderstorms across Africa and lightening is everywhere; bright flashes are going cloud to cloud illuminating the clouds as it arcs from one to the other. It is a private fireworks show.

Here.

Minnesota Recount Update

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The three judge panel convened for the purpose of addressing the Coleman challenge of the Minnesota Senate Election won by Al Franken (after a detailed recount) will meet today to examine ballots they had asked brought to the court. The panel had asked for four hundred ballots, but a small number of these (just over a dozen) had already been included in the recount and thus will not be examined.

The panel will examine the 387 or so ballots today, and decide which should be counted. Tomorrow, in a two step process the ballots will be opened by the judged (step one) and counted by court officials (step two).

It seems to be presumed that this is the final act of this panel, and that the panel will adjust the current vote count (from the recount) based by adding this new set of numbers. It is further presumed that candidate Al Franken will maintain his lead after his adjustment. That is a reasonable assumption given that it is statistically almost impossible for Coleman to erase and surpass Franken’s lead with this small number of ballots being considered. The presumption, then, is that this panel will conclude its business right after this adjustment, some time tomorrow.

I keep using the word “presumption” because I don’t believe the court has actually indicated that it is finished with this process. I’m expecting the court to take a few more days to produce a ruling, and possibly even allow additional arguments. The Coleman campaign, sensing defeat, has vowed to take this contest to the next level … the Minnesota Supreme Court. I’m certain that the election contest panel intends to send that court a decision that is as un-reversible as possible, and that is exactly what they should be doing. A little extra adjudicating around now may save a great deal of trouble later.

Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapsing Again

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An ice bridge holding a vast Antarctic ice shelf in place has shattered and may herald a wider collapse caused by global warming, a scientist said Saturday.

“It’s amazing how the ice has ruptured,” said David Vaughan, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey. “Two days ago it was intact,” he said, referring to a satellite image of the Wilkins ice shelf.

The satellite picture, by the European Space Agency, showed that a strip of ice about 25 miles long that is believed to pin the ice shelf in place had snapped.

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Six Shot To Death in Washington

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Once again, cheap, only barely regulated and readily available firearms take a number of lives in yet another mass shooting. In Graham Washington, a man killed his children and himself.

He had a reason, though it was a demented reason. And he had the inclination, though it was a misguided one. And he had a gun. Had he had the first two and not the third, there is a pretty good chance this would not have happened.

The man who fatally shot his five children and killed himself had just discovered his wife was leaving him for another man, authorities said Sunday.

The bodies of James Harrison’s children, ages 7 to 16, were found with multiple gunshot wounds Saturday in the family’s mobile home, most of them in their beds. Harrison’s body had been found earlier in the day with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, behind the wheel of his idling car.

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The perp was a gun nut.

Shall we continue the arguments about gun control here on this post or on the previous post about a different mass slaying that was made so easy by the corrupt policies bought by the NRA in Washington DC?

Jaguars now extinct in US?

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The federal government has opened a criminal investigation into the capture and death of the last known jaguar in the United States, amid accusations that a biologist working for the state illegally baited a trap to attract the cat.

The 118-pound male jaguar, known as Macho B, was captured on Feb. 18 in a leg-hold snare placed by the Arizona Game and Fish Department in a rugged mountainous area southwest of Tucson. The animal, which was described in field reports as healthy and robust, was tranquilized, equipped with a radio-tracking collar and released from the trap.

The jaguar, which was estimated to be 16 years old, was recaptured with tranquilizing darts on March 2 after wildlife personnel feared that it might be in poor health. It was flown by helicopter to the Phoenix Zoo, where a veterinarian said it had irreversible kidney failure. It was euthanized the same day.

Details

Gun Nut Kills Three Cops in Pittsburgh

Violence and Guns

You have probably heard about the shooting in Pittsburgh. The details are still sketchy, but word on the street is that the shooter, who killed three cops, was upset about a law placing some restrictions on gun ownership. He was also upset about secret government activities that “they are not telling us about.”

Do what extent does Gun Nut = Paranoid Maniac who should not be trusted near firearms?

UPDATE:

Police chief Nate Harper says the motive for Saturday’s shooting isn’t clear. Friends say the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and that he feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.

Neighbors said the shooting began at about 7 a.m. and that two officers were shot almost immediately.

“When I looked down I saw two police officers laying in the street,” said Don Sand, who lives across the street and was awoken by the sound of gunfire.

A short time later, more officers, SWAT teams and other law enforcement arrived and a third officer was shot, Sand said.

“They couldn’t get the scene secure enough to get to them. They were just lying there bleeding,” Sand said. “By the time they secured the scene enough to get to them it was way too late.”

Gail Moschetti, who lives diagonally across the street from the Poplawski house, said she heard hundreds of shots as she and her husband took refuge in their basement. Tom Moffitt, 51, a city firefighter who lives two blocks away, said he came to the scene and heard “hundreds, just hundreds of shots.”

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How many more out of control shooting events do we need before we simply place severe restrictions on gun ownership?

For a long time I was willing to take the rights of gun owners seriously. But most gun owners seem to want not even the most sensible and basic restrictions, and continue to argue that they should be left entirely unregulated, as events such as this one continue to happen, and possibly increase in frequency. Obviously, these NRA-symps cannot be trusted to make the kind of important decisions that need to be made.

Gun nuts: If you don’t start getting real, your worst fears may well be realized as we sane people come to take your guns away forever. Start making sense or get out of the way as the rest of us march forward towards a more civilized world.

Did Conflicker Flop? Yes. Why? Nobody knows.

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Contrary to what some have suggested, the worm did, in fact, do what it was expected to do — it activated, giving the worm-masters full administrator-level control over some five million infected PCs, and making itself much more difficult to detect and fight. The worm generates URLs by which the master computer communicates with infected machines, constantly staying ahead of the efforts of security experts to shut them down. Beginning yesterday, the botnet began communicating over 50,000 domain names in 116 countries — a dramatic increase over the 250 URLs used by previous versions of the the worm.

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Experts expect that the worm is going to re-awaken at some time in the future and possibly actually do something. In the mean time, you ma want to get rid of it if is on your system.

If you run Windows, the best way to get rid of the computer is to get a Mac or a Linux computer. There are probably other ways to do this but I don’t really care. If you are running Linux, this worm can’t directly affect you. But if you have a network with some windows computers on it, from the Linux perspective, you can do this to deal with the worm on your network.