FlaSoxxJim

C'mon, Matt Drudge has to earn a living too.

Well, heres a "slightly" different take on things, from CNN ('friggin' liberal kooks) http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp.../0436129648.htm The entire piece is also copied below because it may disappear if it's actually true, as things like this tend to. I have no Idea what the truth is, but tell me how much faith you have in our pre-way satellite surveylance if we didn't catch Russia moving > 750,000 pounds of high explosives out of the country? Wasn't that exactly the kind of mass oppperation we were supposed to be looking for when we thought Saddam might have WMDs and try to move them out? If the Russian version turns out to be true, does it make you feel ANY better about the complete incompetence with which this has been executed?? And Jas, if something close to the CNN-reported version turns out to be the case, then who will you be sending that big f*** YOU to?

That was the day you blinded yourself looking at the sun, right? I also remember one from when I was in 3rd or 4th grade. Being the little science geek I was I made one of them shoebox-pinhole projection dealies so you could view the eclipse, and I remember my teacher letting me out of class to watch the eclipse while the rest of the class had to stay behind.

Yep, it isn't good. I have yet to get down there post-hurricane, but I live and work in the Indian River Lagoon watershed that receives a bunch of diverted water from the Okeechobee basin and it has really causes us big problems. We talked about some of this before here right after the storms, but the frustrating thing is that if te natural systems were functioning the way the are supposed to, they would actually be resilient enoughto bounce back from even this kind of "once in a century" hit. The problem is the amount of water ditching, damming, and diversion, combined with the fact that the big slug of water is very nutrient polluted and not clean. There is also a very altered Okeechobee floodplain (the folks living around it got tired of their houses getting flooded in cases like this, so they "fixed" it). What will prove most frustrating is if all of this derails the already precarious and contentious Everglades restoration plan - the single largest restoration ever attempted by man. Insted of going forward and finally getting at the $8 billion in core federal money to get it going, they will have to reassess all the parts of the system, change the plan accordingly, and the support and money for the project may well go bye bye.

The guy just needeed a better defense (see below). A stand-up comic once (I can't remember who) once said Texas was the only state where you could get off on a murder conviction by using the "he needed killin' " defense: Judge: Son, why did you kill that fella? Man: Well Yer Honer... Aj'm sorry but... Well he NEEDED killin'!! Judge: Hmmm, well, OK you can go. Just don't go killin' anybody that doesn't need killin, y'hear?"

It should be inconceivable that the race should even be tight -- that the guy has to be that incompetent and negligent and abominable for enough people to even consider voting him out. Then again, it is telling that he had the entire country and world behind him after 9-11 and yet he was able to completely piss that away in 3 year's time and leave the country in a far worse standing in the eyes of the world and any Americans paying attention. Here's hoping the Bush knack for being four and out holds true. This time, it's not 'the economy, stupid' - it's the stupidity, stupid.

Damn! I got so caught up between Game 4 and the eclipse I forgot to set the VCR. It looked like it was going to be great (which means it won't last long before they cancel it of course).

Too bad... you'll just have to make due with teh Northern Lights. Those I want to see.

It's very cool 9and we're getting a good viewing here), but it's only once in a lifetime if you plan on buying the farm before 2007.

Tacitus is the one most octen cited. Pliny the Younger and somebody else I forget also write of Jesus and early Christians. The truth - a truth that I sometimes forget due to Catholic indoctrination I have not entirely shed - is that even these writers penned ttheir histories six or more decades after the fact. So, yes, technically there actually are no surviving contemporaneous historical texts documenting a life and death of Jesus - no historical eye-witness accounts and only scriptural accounts.

Why do I have an image of Ralph Cramden in my head?

I think you are right, and I think that would be a motive for an attack of that nature. Everyone that says that Kerry is the "terrorist's choice" has been too lazy to think it through. The "Bring it On" Bush mentality gives the terrororist networks a reason for being and a clearly visible infidel enemy invader to unite against. Four more years of Bush is a guarantee of a gangbuster terrorist/insurgent industry. Just like Israel has never seemed to figure out that every offensive mounted by them creates a new clutch of young Palastinian martyr/recruits, not enough people comprehend (or care) that we are doing the same think. Bush was right when he said you can't actually win the war on terror. But you sure as hell can lose it.

And Johnny and Edgar Winter??

Add this to the mix and your head will really spin. A study published in 2003 gives compelling evidence that modern chimps should actually be on the Hominid branch of the primate evolutionary tree, and not on the branch that contains the other extant great apes. That would put Chimpanzee not in our genus, but it would put it in our family (Hominidae). So, for all the "I didn't come from no damn monkey!" anti-evolutionists... well, they're right, actually we came WITH them.

Exactly right. Current thinking is that we co-existed with Neanderthals and were not descended from them. Our Cro-Magnon/Homo sapiens line was around in vvery small numbers for a while, and then for unkknown reasons we multiplied like gangbusters arounnd 40,000 years ago. This coincides with the time in which the Neanhderthal line vanished - presumably due to competition and/or extirpation by Homo sapiens. Just thinking about how relatively recent that was (40k years is nothing on an evolutionary scale), and thinking that this proposed new Flores species was around as recently as 12K years ago (and possibly not even of genus Homo according to some) is wild. A book that came out last year (I think it was called "Dead Humans") reviews the state of the field and suggests there were as many as 15 different Hominid species over the past 3 million years. As many as 10 of these lines existed on earth at the same time, although we're all that's left now. And like the speculation surrounding the demise of Neanderthal, there is at least some support for the idea that modern man helped its congeners along to extinction as well.

I could not agree more. There need to be limits to free trade - oxymoron though that is. When we don't like fishing/farming/social/whatever practices of a country, we should be free to express our dissatisfaction with our decisions to trade with thm or not. Now under WTO, we may have legitimate reasons for not wanting to do bisiness with a country for those reasons, but under WTO it onnly comes down to us restricting free trade and we are sanctioned.

We missed the chance at ratifying it and having any input on implementation - at best we will be signatories after the fact to keep WTO off our backs when they deem that we're responsible for 33% of some coastal nation's lost trade revenue when sea level rise destroys their economy in onne way or another, and we are the only ones not being proactive about addressing the problem. Such global litigation may seem far fetched, but when we joined WTO we agreed to be held to their decisions. That cost us as much as $1 million a day (levied, I don't know if we paid), when we were judged to be unfairly excluding crtain shrimp imports because those member nations were using unrestricted fishing practices we don't agree with. I agreed with the US position on that ban, but joining WTO really tied our hands and any member nation that accuses us of hurting their commerce or trading unfairly is listened to. So imagine when global climate change destroys certain economic sectors of various at-risk nations. And, unlike the cigarrette company arguments of 'prove it was our crap that caused your cancer,' environmental monitors are getting good at tracing the origins of pollutants having global-scale impacts. It will become a huge, crushing economic burden on us. And it will serve us right. We had a chance to lead the world by example but the Administration was short-sighted and in the pockets of industry and we f***ed it up. The clean technology existed, but industry said it would hurt them too much economically to install it. The original 12% reduction was too little, and the 5% reduction of Kyoto 2 is a near-joke. But we decided to not even do that.

There is also no doubt as to the historical existence of Jesus the man. His existence and his mortal demise are corobborated in non-Biblical historical writings. It is the divine attributes (and the long hair and blue eyes) of the man that will remain in question.

Seriously, while I will always love the classical Renaisance and Byzantine depictions of "EuroChrist," it has always been hard to swallow that image as being anything close to the historical reality.

Insanely cool! That's the stuff that made me want to become a scientist. [stupid decision in retrospect... as back I go to writing about the bioactivity of extracts isolated from ground up sponges... yippee!] If they can find some good evidence corroborating the Homo erectus to Flores Man connection that would be pretty amazing. The traditional (and largely suspect of late) view is we are the living end of a straight line of descent from Homo habilis --> H. erectus --> H. neandertalis --> H.sapiens. Anthropologists have long suspected that this is a huge oversimplification, and that the real evolutionary pattern consists of a lot of branches and dead ends, like we see for just about everything else on the planet. Ultimately the discovery of contemporary fossils of several of these species demonstrated that they did in fact exist at the same time. But to go from --> H. erectus that existed nearly a million years ago to a new species (maybe) that was around as recently as 12,000 years ago... that would be phenomenal.

Look out KW!!! Here comes Steff, pedal to the metal!

I smell SoxTalk Pedestrian Derby!

Also in the old Drudge today... and I promise it wasn't me!!... Katherine Harris's Car Trouble - Cops: Florida man tried to run down controversial Republican

I know that one. Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.

That's why Russia is backing the treaty. Vodka is a much better cold weather drink, and they'd have to switch to mai tais or something if global warming got hold of the place.