During a visit to Albuquerque N.M by President Bush, one of the local officers participating in the motorcade dies when his motorcycle hits a large, and presumably very heavy, stationary object at a high rate of speed.
Guess the headline at the Time/CCN site (answer below the fold)
In the most recent issue of Backwoods Home magazine (which I highly recommend, BTW) a reader’s letter caught my eye. Headlined “Bleach ineffective as disinfectant above 100 [degrees],” the letter from Tim Sheehan of Rosharon, Texas points out that “[T]he disinfecting properties of bleach are nil at temperatures above 100 degrees.”
Anybody know if this is true? And is he talking Fahrenheit or Celsius? I’m relying on bleach as the primary ingredient for our post-SHTF water-purification needs, but frankly about a third of our days here in Northern California can be over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
From the Reagan Diaries:
Tuesday, June 16 [1981]
Today was Press Conference. I don’t think I was very scintillating. […]
It’s lonely. Nancy is in N.Y. for the Royal Ballet. I don’t like it here by myself.
We have just learned that Israel & the previous Admin. did communicate about Iraq & the nuclear threat & the U.S. agreed it was a threat. There was never a mention of this to us by the outgoing Admin. Amb. Lewis cabled word to us after the Israeli attack on Iraq & now we find that there was a stack of cables & memos tucked away in St. Dept. files.
–Ronald Reagan
This shows at least two points: One, that even Jimmy Carter’s Administration considered Saddam Hussein a threat and a potential nuclear power. Two, that Carter’s people were, at best, sloppy in providing vital intelligence to the incoming Reagan people. At worst… well, I imagine some precursor of today’s frothy barking moonbats among Carter’s appointees deliberately burying the files while savoring the prospect of Reagan, the Left’s supposed “nuclear cowboy,” having to deal with a Middle East nuclear war in his first year in office. Had Hussein actually developed nukes by that point, a nuclear conflagration would have resulted — and considering the fabled “Samson Option,” potentially a subsequent U.S. – Soviet nuclear exchange.
Thirdly, I suppose, this shows the State Dept. is neither efficient nor trustworthy.
I attempted to get some video of the lunar eclipse last night, since I was already awake for it anyway.
Unfortunately, the moon is farther away than my videocamera’s autofocus mechanism can judge and from what I was able to see via the viewfinder, the footage isn’t very good. I’ll be downloading it here in a bit, and if I can get 30 seconds or more of good video, I’ll post it up sooner rather than later.
Wish me luck.
Yeah, I can tell you’re all so shocked.
I’ve posted in the past about how the Seattle School District has a blacks-only curriculum and school campus, with even an all black staff, called “The African American Academy”. I lived within a mile of the site they built the new facility on in 2000 on when I was living within Seattle’s city limits. It is a very, very nice place. I took a tour of it shortly before it opened and was impressed.
If you follow the above link you’ll find that as of the last year we have stats for, less than 8% of the students attending the school were not of African origin, so you could damn near call it a “Segregated Education Facility”, which is what I thought the district was trying to get away from using forced busing and racial quotas.
I guess I was wrong.
But nevermind all that old news that the media ignores, there is actually a new indictment against the program: The children still isn’t learning.
Seattle’s African American Academy was supposed to be a model for educating black children.
After almost two decades, it has come to represent the district’s continuing failure to raise black students’ academic achievement.
Seventh-grade math test scores at the K-8 school are the lowest in the district. Enrollment has declined, from a peak of 508 students six years ago to 339 today. When the district chose someone from outside Seattle to take over as principal this fall, the school’s backers protested the decision, a controversy that threatens to drain more students from the school’s half-full building on South Beacon Hill.
Taking the black students out of white patriarchal and “racist” learning environments has only led to a school that suck so bad that they can’t even fill their quota of kids from “African American Backgrounds”.
The only parents who want to send their kid there are those who want their child segregated from whitey and chinky. You know, racists. The rest of the kids didn’t make the cut to get into Roosevelt High School.
And this is how the district runs families out of Seattle or right into the classrooms of private schools.
Oh, and one last thing; Now that there are only 3/5 the number of kids per teacher in the classroom at “The Academy” as there are in a regular school, just how are they going to explain that smaller class sizes mean better learning?
The AFL-CIO is out campaigning for support of the Levin-Rangel Bill (H.R. 2834), which would raise the taxes on all Capital Gains profits.
I know that anytime I see either Levin’s or Rangel’s name on anything that it can’t be good. So I know that then they team up, that it must truly be an abomination.
Here is the AFL-CIO add:
Close the Multi-Millionaire Loophole
At present, the tax law permits partners of leveraged buyout firms and hedge funds to pretend that their fees are investment income that deserves capital gains tax treatment instead of compensation, which would be taxed at the much higher ordinary income rate.
Capital gains are taxed at 15 percent, By some estimates, the U.S. Treasury loses as much as $12.6 billion a year in these taxes. That’s money that could go to fully funding the five-year cost of expanding the public health-insurance program for low-income children, securing the Medicare and Social Security programs or restoring funding for public schools.
James Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies and the highest-paid hedge fund partner last year, earned $1.7 billion, equal to the entire federal spending on maintaining the national park system. There is absolutely no justification for billionaires not paying their fair share of income taxes like the rest of us.
So let’s do the math that the unions are hoping we’re too stupid to be able to figure out.
15% of $1,700,000,000 is $255,000,000.
$255 Million dollars just in taxes, just on his Capital Gains. And there are hundreds of other people paying this rate on amounts not too far below that.
As much as I would love to only pay a 15% income tax, I’m thinking that this guy and others like him are paying their fair share.
Since 2000, emissions of CO2 have been growing more rapidly in Europe, with all its capping and yapping, than in the U.S., where there has been minimal government intervention so far. As of 2005, we’re talking about a 3.8% rise in the EU-15 versus a 2.5% increase in the U.S., according to statistics from the United Nations.
What’s more, preliminary data indicate that America’s CO2 output fell by 1.3% from 2005 to 2006. If these numbers hold up, it would mean U.S. emissions growth is nearly flat so far this decade. Europe hasn’t yet released figures for last year, but it did report in June that emissions from the participants in its carbon-trading scheme, which account for almost half of Europe’s CO2 production, rose slightly in 2006.
The news gets worse for Europe when you consider that during this decade, the U.S. population has grown at roughly double the rate of the EU-15 while the American economy has been expanding about 40% faster. It seems Europe is becoming less efficient in its carbon production while U.S. efficiency is improving.
When will they learn that using the government to over-regulate the manufacturing sector doesn’t work and that industry, when shown the financial incentive of greener-than-thou business policies will self-regulate?
I won’t be holding my breath.
I guess I’ll just have to learn to lower my expectations even further.
We are about to learn the meaning of “ethics†in the United Nations administration of Ban Ki-moon. Eight months after Secretary-General Ban took office, promising to “restore trust,†he has been presented with a simple test, via the case of a former employee of the U.N. Development Program, Artjon Shkurtaj.
So far, amid a welter of U.N. delays, denials, evasions, and broken promises, it looks like Ban is about to flunk.
Who is Artjon Shkurtaj? Thirty-six years old, Albanian born, but fluent in English, he goes by “ Tony.†He is a U.N. whistleblower caught up in the scandal over the U.N. Development Program — flagship agency of the U.N. — funneling hard cash to the regime of Kim Jong Il in North Korea. Shkurtaj worked for years for the UNDP, and from 2004-2006 served as the UNDP’s chief of operations and security in North Korea. From there, witnessing one UNDP outrage after another, he tried to do his part to restore trust, by prodding his bosses at the UNDP to behave with integrity and follow their own rules. They told him not to make trouble.
Shkurtaj finally blew the whistle outside the UNDP, one of a number of voices calling attention earlier this year to such UNDP abuses as the funneling of hard cash to the rogue regime of Kim Jong Il. He also called attention to the UNDP’s curious habit of keeping $3,500 in unreported counterfeit U.S. banknotes for years inside its office safe in Pyongyang. This March, the UNDP fired him.
Shkurtaj protested that he had been sacked in retaliation for his whistle-blowing. UNDP officials denied this, saying Shkurtaj was on a short-term contract that had simply expired.
Oh well, flush and repeat.
Liberal Party Attorney General for Ontario, Michael Bryant, is running a website called “No Gun No Funeral” which hopes to gather signatures it can use to try and pressure Canuck PM Stephen Harper into confiscating all the handguns in Canada.
The kicker is that unless you actually investigate who is running this site, as Steve janke did here, you’d never know that Bryant is behind it.
I’m not remembering all of the AdScam details, but wasn’t it crap such as this that got the Liberal Party booted from Parlimentary majority?
Not that it is all that different from what goes on here in the US. It seems that the Brady Bunch have tired of the propaganda on their own site being swiftly whittled away by non-gun bigots and have taken to posting up at the echo chamber of the Huffington Post.
From the Reagan Diaries:
Thursday, June 11 [1981]
I feel like I’ve spent the day in the U.N. The morning was pretty well taken with a labor leader meeting…. Then it was the Ec. Advisory Council. Art Laffer dropped a grenade on his colleagues when he said we weren’t going to solve the fiscal program until we returned to convertibility of money for gold. I would like to have heard the discussion among those economists after I left.
Then after lunch the U.N. phase started: 5 Arab St. Ambassadors, followed by the Israeli Amb. The 5 of course protested we hadn’t been hard enough on Israel. The Israeli deplored the harsh action we’d taken.
…The truth is the Arab indignation on behalf of Iraq is a waste. Saddam Hussein is a “no good nut” and I think he was trying to build a nuclear weapon. He has called for the destruction of Israel & he wants to be the leader of the Arab world — that’s why he invaded Iran.
–Ronald Reagan
