Ice Cold German Women

Don't take my word for it; take a look.

Not much blogging going on right now so I'll write this off as sort of a halftime act in the spirit of the upcoming Superbowl. I have to wonder, though, if the American public would find the above linked ice show less offensive than the well known wardrobe malfunction.

Who do you think you are, Mike Fahey?

If you are hoping that Ashland, Nebraska will soon be replaced by water-skiing convenient to Omaha, then as Mr. Hosh says: "I'm amazed at how big some people think their penises are". Hosh's post is a Must Read for locals!

Google's shame

Quoted below is a short note I sent off to the folks at Google. This after Google took their decision to aid and abet the intellectual enslavement of the Chinese people by getting into bed with their murderous, repressive communist regime.

Your decision to throw in with the repressive totalitarian government of the People's Republic of China makes me sick. I'm hoping you took this decision out of greed, rather than sympathy, but the ugly result is the same: the promise of the internet is perverted. I'm writing to Congress to see if you can't be stopped. You are aiding and abetting the intellectual enslavement of millions of human beings. Shame on you!

You won't help our own efforts to stop terrorism, but you will help the largest totalitarian government on earth dupe and deceive it's own people. I am outraged that you should enjoy the benefit of being listed on a US stock exchange. You should issue your stock on the Chinese exchange!

The internet offers the promise of access to the world of information, free from the meddling of local tyrants and petty despots. That promise is undone if the big search engines, which make the information useful by making it 'findable', throw in with the tyrants. How would you feel if Google decided to let George Bush and his pals (or Hillary Clinton and hers) decide what you could or could not find on the internet?
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Google motto: Do no evil. But its OK to help others do evil.

No worries over Japanese banning of U.S. beef imports: Let them eat fish heads

Mad Cow
The Japanese government (whose official policy once was to kill my Dad and all of his friends) has caught US meat exporters trying to slip them some possibly Mad Cow infested spinal cord meat. American meat exporters had agreed to keep the spinal cords out of meat shipped to Japan, but somebody either goofed or cheated. In a knee-jerk response to their discovery of some spinal cord tissue in a shipment of US beef, they have again banned all US beef imports.

Nebraska (formerly known as the Beef State) Department of Agriculture Director Greg Ibach, thinks the Feds will get this straightened out before the Japanese ban's effects trickle down to the Feedlot. Other government and industry folks are also trying to put a lid on concerns about Mad Cow in the US. Nothing to worry about.
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You know spinal cord tissue as that greasy stuff you sometimes find in a small depression at the point where the 'T' is crossed on a T-Bone steak:
Nowadays, butchers pull all the obvious spinal cord stuff off before they sell it. Of course, ALL the bad stuff stays right in the cow's spine, like fugu poison stays in the blowfish's liver; cut it out and the remaining meat is safe! But Mad Cow Disease isn't a disease in the normal sense of the word, but merely a molecule gone bad: the prion. If you eat prions, they might cause your brain to turn into a sponge. Hence the 'sponge-iform' in the name, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE, aka: Mad Cow Disease.

There are numerous taxonomically differentiated forms, largely because the symptomology was observed in various species and locations long before the prion connection was made. When people get it, the docs call it Variant Creutzfeld-Jacob disease. (To distinguish it from the Classic CJD, which isn't related to cow eating, I guess.) The first human form was noted among Pacific island cannibals, where it was called Kuru. In sheep the prion problem is called Scrapie, and in our own native deer it is called Chronic Wasting Disease, (CWD). In all cases, the victim's brain, human or animal, winds up looking like swiss cheese. In humans the victim dies a stumbling, mumbling idiot. As a class, these afflictions are known as Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSE).

If, after reading the links above, you believe science really knows how this nasty condition spreads, you are naive. If you believe that bad prions know to stay only in the infected cow's spinal cord and out of the rest of the nerves you can't see, then you are as dumb as the USDA thinks you are. And if you believe that the whole TSE problem isn't being deliberately obfuscated for political and economic reasons, then I have a footbridge in Nebraska to sell you. No worries?
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Update on CWD in deer: prions found in deer meat (venison), not just in central nervous system.

SUR XIII Pt 2

Pinheada
I recently reported on Storm Lake, Iowa's, one and - hopefully- only representative of MS-13, the violent El Salvadoran gang that's making a home for themselves in these United States. Juaquin Pineda fired random shots on three occasions, presumably with a stolen 9mm pistol, and then he was a wanted man.

Now he's in a North Carolina jail waiting for a ride back to Storm Lake's Buena Vista County Jail. That's the way things are supposed to work and it's probably not a newsworthy event but I think I'll try to keep track of it.

In the interest of good blogging I should add that the SUR XIII tatoo on the back of his neck is the only evidence I have of any association with MS-13. For all I know he could be a packing house worker who got some ink on his neck to scare people.

Laura Bush calls Hillary Clinton ridiculous

Laura Bush 'off the Plantation'

Hillary Clinton said the Congress is just a plantation, (and you know what she means), to suck up to racialist crowd in Harlem on MLK day. Laura Bush, a genuine lady and not one to use harsh language, responded by calling the plantation statement "ridiculous". As you can see from the photo, Laura Bush refuses to pander to the racialists, even going so far as to wear her 'cracker duds' to a Negro dress-up function.
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New Orleans' idiot Mayor Ray 'Schoolbus' Nagin says he regrets claiming that it was "God's will" that NOLA be restored to its former chocolateness, (and you know what he means). I don't doubt that he does; he must be used to regretting his words by now. But Nagin's chocolate statement reminded me of an old joke that I heard when I was working in D.C. at the time of the March on Washington. The joke was considered to be in bad taste even then, but the folks at my job had plenty of bad taste. It goes like this:

Q: Why do they call Washington, D.C. Hershey-town?
A: Because it is 90% chocolate and 10% nuts.

The 'nuts' in the joke were analogous to the white folks who ran the government, and, of course, you know what 'chocolate' stands for. I bet you won't hear any pols telling that one. But then, who would have guessed Ray Nagin would have said his 'chocolate' piece. It just gets worse and worse.

Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson bows to constituent wishes

Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska has again shown that he isn't fit to be a Democrat. He has repeatedly ignored his Democrat party's leadership, preferring instead to acquiesce in his constituents' wishes. On Tuesday, Nelson said that having already "supported more than 215 of President Bush's nominations to the federal bench, including Chief Justice John Roberts", he will now cast his vote to confirm Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Senator Ben Nelson, my kind of Democrat. The kind the party wishes they could kick out.

Argument for culling teenagers

These youngsters who beat homeless folks should not be allowed to breed. There is something fundamentally wrong with these cats. As they say in the Navy, these kids can't be repaired with materials on board. They should be culled. Sent back to the factory. And, for goodness sake, it should be done expeditiously. Stop bad genes before they spread.
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Shades of the old ultra-violence. I wonder if these bad seeds and their lawyers will blame their behavior on drinking "milk with knives"? Tony Burgess was spot-on in his ugly view of the future; the only thing he failed to get right was the outcome of the cold war.

Winter Count

Lone Dog's Winter Count

It comes as no surprise to me that the red indians of the Great Plains kept track of their years by counting winters. In these parts, only if a person survives another winter may that person truly claim to be another year older. The old feeder has been wondering if he will get to put another icon on his hide when the last snow of the current winter ends. It has been one tough winter. Wah wah wah.

I'm forcing myself to start blogging today. I'm doing it to keep my mind from dwelling on this afternoon's visit to the gastroenterologist. Cirrhosis never gets better, it seems, so I'm just going in to see how much worse mine has gotten.

How far behind. blogwise, has my winter of many maladies gotten me? Lets see, first I need to finish up the mountain lion poll results. I have done some of the basic analysis already. Like the polling pros, I have my analysis pre-jiggered-up to support my own conclusions before the voting even starts. By the time I get done with it, Omaha will have gotten used to mountain lions chasing the kids and nobody will care.

It seems I promised TimeTogether that I would comment on an article they suggested. Well, I started to work on that one by loading the article and my notes into my ancient Palm V pda so I could work on it without dragging my rotting carcass up to the console. The Palm V promptly died, so I bought a new Tungsten. The Tungsten wanted me to forego the clumsy synchronizing cradle for the new, hassle-free, wireless way: the Bluetooth hot synch. Attempts to set up the Bluetooth 'network' somehow caused my router's configuration to go south., isolating the entire Feedlot from the internet. It is fixed now, but it didn't fix itself. Just another pain in the ass; nothing money couldn't fix. My comment for TimeTogether is also nearly finished, but I'm leery of using the Bluetooth to zap my work back into this computer.

More later.

SUR XIII

I've been digging thru the news to see what I could find to complement my previous blog and I was reminded of a shooter who the police are looking for in Storm Lake, a town about 30 miles from me. He fired random shots on at least three different occaisions this past week, but my interest is the tatoo on the back of his neck which reads SUR XIII.

According to Wikipedia this is a symbol associated with Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, the extremely violent gang from El Salvador which has been migrating to the U.S. in recent years. To be in MS-13 is to be a member for life. Runaways automatically earn a death sentence. The police mentioned that the man, Juaquin Pineda, is possibly suicidal.

This raises a few questions in my Friday the 13th influenced reasoning. For instance there are lots of Hispanics in Storm Lake so he could have been a recruiter, but this 'cholo' attracted a shitload of small town attention so I'm hoping that if he wasn't a deserter from MS-13 that he is now and is a long ways down the road.

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Apparently Juaquin's ex-wife lives in Storm Lake.

Friday the 13th

Will it be unlucky? Obviously it will be for some, but any day can be unlucky for anybody so why have we a myth about a Friday that happens to fall on the thirteenth day of the month?

Urban Legends has more than a few good stories about the forboding #1 3, plus some surprising bad news about Friday. If you're a rational and sensible sort of person it probably won't even interest you, much less scare you. If you're already superstitious, though, then it might give you some good reasons to stay home.

Such nonsense doesn't begin to faze an old dog like me. Sure, I'll probably be home tomorrow but only because I haven't got anything better to do. And what's wrong with sleeping under the bed now and then? TGIF? We'll see....

Proud to be

The tragic deaths of twelve coal miners and the ensuing blame game perhaps overshadows the debt of gratitude I, for one, feel towards the 74,000 coal miners in this country. Much has been said about innumerable forms of alternative energy that we could or should be developing. I'm not the one to evaluate that, but I do know that we have people who are quite willing to go down into the dark, dirty and dangerous earth and bring back up those precious lumps of coal that we haven't figured out how to live without.

Coal miners, oil field workers, refinery workers. These are the men and women who are making energy happen right now. It's sad when they lose their lives doing their jobs, but the twenty-two mining deaths in 2005 pales in comparison to the five thousand miners who lose their lives every year in China.

Another reason for being grateful for living in the U.S. even if, as Loretta Lynn, you happen to be a coal miner's daughter.