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Saturday, December 13, 2003
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 Chris Floyd writes: The story, by John Roos, deals with the controversy over a new bullet made by a Texas firm, RBCD, and distributed by Le Mas Ltd. of Arkansas. As Roos explains, the new 5.66-mm Le Mas round is "frangible" -- it will "penetrate steel and other hard targets but will not pass through a human torso." Instead, it effectively explodes inside a body, ravaging tissue in all directions, "creating untreatable wounds." The ammo has not been adopted by the U.S. military yet, but it is being used by some of the "private security consultants" hired by the Bush administration to prowl the streets of occupied Iraq. These mercenaries are not always bound by the laws and codes of honor that govern regular military forces, so they're free to do any dirty work that the Bushists want to keep off the books. They are also free to carry out productive "field experiments" of new ammo on human targets, the paper reports. Roos writes of hired gun Ben Thomas, who works for an unnamable company carrying out unspecified tasks in Iraq for the Bush Regime. Thomas cheerfully relates his first kill with Le Mas' fabulous frangible, during what he said was a skirmish with Iraqi gunmen in a rural village near Baghdad. "It entered his butt and completely destroyed everything in the lower left section of his stomach," Thomas said of the single bullet from his M4 carbine. "Everything was torn apart. Nobody [could] believe this guy died from a butt shot." Thomas and his fellow irregulars made sure to examine his handiwork when the fight was over, exploring the dead man's exploded rectum to study the effects of the new round. The verdict? The bullet's a beaut. "There's absolutely no comparison, whatever, none" to the piddling damage caused by lesser 5.56-mm cartridges, Thomas said. And he should know, telling Roos that he has "shot people with various types of ammo" in his shadowy work around the world. He's stocking up on the Le Mas butt-buster, he added, and will be taking plenty to his privatized pals when he returns to Baghdad after a brief chill-out in Florida. (12/13/03)
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 One could say that there are several different kinds of logic, which are differentiated by the number of possibilities one is considering at any one time. You know, of course, two-valued logic. That is black and white thinking. It is when one considers that there are only two options, and one needs to choose between them. You're either for or against. You either support freedom, or you're a terrorist. You're either a christian or a heathen. You're either for or against abortion. A person who uses two-valued logic does merely need to decide whether to pick the 'good' option or the 'bad' option, and the only other thinking involved is to try to match the options with previously known 'good' or 'bad' labels. "Aha, he uses bad words, so what he's saying is of course bad". There can also be three-valued logic. That's when there is Yes, No and Maybe. That is, the answer is either a clear Yes (good), a clear No (bad), or we just don't have enough information to decide yet, which is a Maybe. That can of course be considered a little more advanced than two-valued logic, as everything doesn't just get categorized at first glance. But not much better.More simple than either of those is one-valued logic. That is when there's not even any need for or faculty for evaluating things. Things are just the way they are, usually because The Big Book says so, or The Big Guru, or The Big Government. And if they didn't mention it, it of course doesn't exist. Generally it is if you consider yourself so powerless that you just have to accept whatever comes along, from the only direction you're looking in. Like, if you've latched on to a literal interpretation of some kind of religion, and you believe that the decision making process is entirely out of your hands. Oh, nothing wrong in believing in bigger things, but here we're talking about whether you think or not. (12/13/03)
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10:50:15 PM 
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 San Francisco Gate -- After a week spent reviving a plan left for dead a week ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Friday a fiscal recovery package that will place before voters in March a $15 billion bond measure and new spending restrictions. Schwarzenegger signed the bills in his office shortly after the Senate voted for the bond and spending limit bills Friday afternoon. Their votes followed the Assembly's approval Thursday night and gave the new Republican governor his biggest victory since he took office last month. "Today, I'm a happy governor," Schwarzenegger said during a signing ceremony attended by party leaders from both houses. "The recovery plan that I'm about to sign, I'm very happy about because both parties came together." With his signature, Schwarzenegger capped a week of bipartisan cooperation rare in recent years, as he and legislative Democrats revived the package considered dead last week and then worked throughout the week to reach a compromise. Once that was done, they had to corral reluctant Republicans, who had wanted a tougher spending limit, to agree. "This is a compromise," said Senate Republican Leader Jim Brulte. "What it does is force this state to begin to live within our means. This bill is better than the current situation." Senators voted 35-5 for the spending restrictions and 27-12 -- the minimum needed to get the bill on the March ballot -- for the bonds. All the Senate opposition came from Republicans. On Thursday, the Assembly voted 80-0 for the spending limit and 65-13 for the bonds. The multifaceted package includes a mandate that spending cannot exceed revenues in any year. It prohibits long-term borrowing to pay operating expenses, except for the $15 billion bond. The governor will have the authority to force lawmakers to deal with a fiscal emergency, by calling a special session and stopping all other business until solutions are adopted. Perhaps most important, however, is a requirement the Legislature begin building a reserve fund. Starting in 2006-07, lawmakers will be required to set aside 1 percent of general fund revenues into a "rainy day" fund and increase the set aside each year until the reserve fund reaches $8 billion. (12/13/03)
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 The Atlanta Journal Constitution -- A 46 percent surge in the price of natural gas since Thanksgiving has been so startling, one analyst has suggested the futures markets should be investigated. Natural gas for January delivery rose surged 60.6 cents, or 9 percent, Friday to $7.221 per 1,000 cubic feet on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It was the highest close since Feb. 28, when prices settled at $8.10, and was $2.30 above the Nov. 26 close. As a result, consumers could see higher energy bills as early as next month, analysts said. Any increase won't be nearly as severe as the recent run-up in futures prices because utilities sign long-term contracts for the bulk of their winter fuel over the summer. ... ``Any of us that are in the business and see the amount of natural gas in storage argues for a much lower price,'' said John Kilduff, senior energy analyst at Fimat USA in New York. Kilduff said, however, that two consecutive weeks of higher-than-anticipated consumption is forcing traders who expected prices to be relatively low this winter to cover their bets. ``It's a brutal free-market economy and I think fears of supply (shortages) going forward are what's being priced into this market,'' Kilduff said. Ed Silliere, a trader at Energy Merchant LLC in New York, said the markets are also factoring in the expectation of higher demand stemming from an improving economy. ``You've got guys holding onto supply who don't want to give it up because they think supplies might be tight later in winter,'' and that's forcing buyers to bid up the price, Silliere said. (12/13/03)
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 BBC Science -- US scientists have decoded and analysed the genome of a bacterium which could help clear up radioactive waste and possibly even generate electricity. The Geobacter species has genes that allow it to convert uranium and other radionuclides dissolved in water to solid compounds that can be extracted. Its ability to manipulate electrons in metals could form the basis of a bio-battery, the US Energy Department says. The genetic research on the bug is reported in the journal Science. The organism, called Geobacter sulfurreducens, was found in a soil sample in Oklahoma that was contaminated by hydrocarbons - the breakdown products of fossil fuel combustion. Researchers at The Institute for Genomic Research (Tigr) and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, tell Science the bacterium has extraordinary capabilities. The Massachusetts workers have previously shown that Geobacter species can precipitate a wide range of radionuclides and metals (including uranium, technetium and chromium) from groundwater, preventing them from migrating to wells or rivers where they may pose a risk to humans and the environment. Now, the genomic research has given some insights into how this is possible. G. sulfurreducens has 100 or more genes that appear to encode for various forms of c-type cytochromes. These are proteins that help move electrons back and forth. They enable G. sulfurreducens to "reduce" metal ions - in essence adding electrons to positively charged metal atoms so that they become insoluble in water and precipitate as part of solid compounds. These compounds are then more easily removed. Small charges of electricity are also created through the reduction process and this has raised the possibility that Geobacter could form part of a bio-battery. (12/12/03)
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 BBC Science -- A mouse-sized fossil found in China may be the oldest ancestor of modern marsupials - the mammal family that includes kangaroos and koalas. The creature, which was unearthed in Liaoning province, extends the ancestry of marsupials by 50 million years. The stunning specimen preserves an imprint of the animal's coat of hair and analysis of its feet suggests it was adapted to climbing in trees. Details of the find are reported in the latest edition of the journal Science. Sinodelphys szalayi, as the new species has been named, lived alongside the dinosaurs in the early Cretaceous Period. The 125-million-year-old creature has close affinities with the family of mammals known as metatherians, which includes the marsupials. The fossil is astonishingly complete and thus provides scientists with a rich insight into the early evolution of mammals. ... In 2002, Luo and colleagues described the earliest fossil placental mammal - Eomaia scansoria - which was discovered in the same quarry in northeastern China as Sinodelphys. "At the earliest evolutionary split between marsupial relatives and placentals, you would expect two fossils like this to be geographically close. What this tells us is that the split occurred no later than 125 million years ago. At this time, we already have definite features that can be assigned to either type," Dr Luo told BBC News Online. Perhaps the best known difference between marsupials and placental mammals is in the way they reproduce. Marsupial young are born relatively underdeveloped. In some but not all marsupial species, the mother develops a special pouch on her body in which to nurse her young. In placental mammals, the young develop in the uterus, nourished by a specialised organ attached to the uterus wall - the placenta. (12/12/03)
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6:49:59 AM
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© TrustMark
2004
Timothy Wilken.
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1/1/2004; 5:50:45 AM.
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