FlaSoxxJim

That's as good a warning as I might have given, minus the profanity (maybe). Maybe I4E has moved to the Far West Coast?

Crestor is/was poised to give Lipitor a run for its money. The owner, AstraZeneca, is already digging in to defend the product. Unless there is some solid Phase IV clinical data ready to crunch to look at the safety issues, they might get probably another 6 months to a year of market time before they'd have to pull it. I'd assume renal failure takes a while to develop.

Yeah, they are suggesting that this species is from pretty soon after the great ape branch split off from gibbons and siamangs, so it's a very early great ape. It's kind of neat that they suggest an upright posture in this species even though it predates any specializations for brachiation (tree swinging). From that perspective, all the quaint popular notions about man 'coming down from the trees' over the course of evolutionary time are way off base. It appears the arborial great apes had to continue to differentiate in order to get off the grouns and into the trees. Cool stuff.

Vintage Brando. Great film.

This is potentially a seriously big deal. It will be in this week's issue of Science, which has about as rigorous a peer review process as there is, so the evidence presented will be compelling. Ancient fossil could be human-ape ancestor It is important to note two points the news article brings out. First, even though this is very likely an ancestral great ape from a place on the evolutionary trunk before hominids split off, it is not necessarily THE 'missing link.' That is, this species may have predated the actual split by some unknown amount of time. Second, note this simple, inoccuous statement in a mainstream news story: Humans represent one of four extant lines of great apes. No controversy, no scandalous claim. Pretty mainstream – and pretty dang neat, too. It will be good to get this particular gap in the physical fossil record filled. The old, 'Show me the human-ape ancestor in the fossil record' is an old Creationist saw that may finally be put out to pasture.

Bill's gates? :rolly

Wow, there's a thread idea... Although it would have to remain tasteful. (inset bad joke here?) I still think 'cootie mamma' has a certain panache. [i believe this thread is officially hijacked.]

Not really, but she was pretty pricey as far as your average box goes...

Sheesh. You'd think he'd ask one of the tech heads over there how to turn on the spam blocker. On an unrelated note, I was happy to read that they have successfully crossed a Macintosh with my ex-girlfriend.... ... Now they have a computer that never goes down.

I just think we should all stop pissing off the cows so they don't stay mad. End of story. Really I don't see what's the BSE... er, BFD.

Very cool. I like the 'vapor' for 'vanities' restorative translation, and the idea of weeding out nuances that were added in early Christian translations (Alter's example of the "body-soul split of early Christianity [as] something not imagined in the early Hebrew" is a good example) but were not inherent to the spirit or intent of the original Hebrew. I think a side-by-side comparison of this version to one of the more faithful standard versions would be really interesing - almost enough for a comparrative college class.

Hey, I'm the first to admit I appreciate that I probably won't be kidnapped and decapitated today, even by the Christian Coalition!

Damn! How did I forget good old Clayton Waagner in my humble suggestion in another thread that American Christian Extremists are not mythical entities?!? Here's where a lot of the "anthrax" was coming from: Waagner is doing God's work?

Sorry to hear it, Eye. I understand the sentiment though. It is the same feeling I get when I see the power a mobilized and agendized American UberChristian movement has to f*** up the country. Yes, the comparison between our fanatics and theirs is hyperbole. But the truth is that the GOP has been hijacked by religious fanatics, and we are starting to see the fallout from that. When the Christian right is telling moderate GOPers that if they don't like what the GODGOP stands for then maybe they should become Democrats, then it's a good sign that all is not well with the party. It should have scared a lot more of us when Bush 41 basically said back at the start of Gulf War V1.0 (I'm paraphasing), with God's help we're going to be victorious in our battle against 'those religious fanatics.' The call for legal and constitutional prohibitions on gay unions and abortion are, largely, born of religious beliefs that are not shared by all. But they are increasingly being foisted on us all nonetheless. A single-minded religious viewpoint is shaping the American social and political landscape. And you fool yourself to think there are not extremist elements in the Christian Right. Recall the John Birch Society, finding Godless Commies under every bed and passionately asserting that the UN was the active agent in an international communist conspiracy. Their motto: "Less Government, More Responsibility, and – With God’s Help – a Better World." Problem is it's a very one-dimensional God they've tagged to help shape that world. What about the Christian Identity movement's belief that white Anglos are the true Israel, and Jews are really just satanic pretenders as God's chosen people? Yes, these are extremes, but so are the radical Islamists currently beheadding people. Those actions are as vocally and vehemently renounced by mainstream Muslims as they are by the rest of the world. And that 'extremist minority' element regularly bubbles right to the surface of the Christian conservative mainstream. Crap like Fallwell's crusade against the purple Tellytubby because he was so obviously a "gay role model" (for 1-2 year olds no less!), or people like Buchanan that so openly hate anyone who doesn't look, act or think like them, or people who carry a "God Hates Gays" sign at the funeral of a gay man killed in a hate crime (implying God approved of the murder!)... Mainstream extremism? There's a distinctly Calvinist flavor to it all today. God's chosen ones are the ones in power. He speaks through President Chimpy (which suggests God's not much of a thinker either?). But like Ralph Reed said after 2000, it was always pretty much in the bag: "He (God) knew that George Bush had the ability to lead in this compelling way."

See my distinction between your average "Alah Akbar!" fundamentalists and those that take it over the cliff into radical militantism. In the Muslim world, Islamic militant extremist acts are also the exception rather than the rule.

It does not. Mind you, that is why I said fundamentalist Islamics and not militant extremists. But, then again the abortion clinic bombers and doctor murderers are pushing the envelope there too, eh?

You've intimated at one of the great ironies of right wing Christian fundamentalism, Tex. The Religious Righties who think God talks through President Chimpy are cut from the same damn cloth as the Islamic fundamentalists. And, amazingly, they cannot see it.

What I don't get is why the threat of another era of M.A.D. doesn't seem to work on us. As the lone superpower to come out of the other end of the Cold War, we should not have any need to try to get back into the business of escalation by expanding our nuclear arsenal rather than maintaining a status quo or even (*gasp*) a bit of strategic nuclear disarmament.

This is why it's soooo great to have a President that is committed to developing 'tactical nukes' and telling every other country in the world they can't explore nuclear options unless they want a unilateral ass-kicking. Now we have the Russians back in the ICBM business, so things won't be so one-sided and boring. Russia developing new nuclear missile Apparently he doesn't know our proposed missile-defense system is already useless? I mean, according to the actual physicists that understand these things - not the defense policymakers who can't fix a toaster but think sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into a StarWars V2.0 black hole is a swell idea. Good times...

Reast easy and rejoice - the beatific pannini is back up for auction. Virgin Mary Sammich Back Up!

What the f*** is up with that? Some deep-seated voter apathy, man.

As far as the local reporting is saying, no. But the absentees aren't in there either. On top of that, there is an automatic recount triggered if the difference is less than 1%, so it has the pottential to be pretty drawn out here.

More than half of PB County is still out, 1/3 of Miami-Dade, and a little less than 20% of Broward out as well. Even if the trends in the returns there continue as they are tthat will still add a good bit to Kerry's totals.

...less the absentee (Bush) and early polling site (Kerry) votes.

Very little of South Florida has been reported yet. Kerry should have taken some of the I-4 corridor counties and unfortunately he didn't. But the returns frim Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties (If they learned how to cast a friggin' ballot down there) can easily erase the apparent Bush Florida lead. Not that it will go down that way, but the state is far from a done deal. The absentee ballots will break for Bush as they traditionally do, and the early polling place votes will break toward Kerry, so no clear outcome can be projected from there either.