Crews to take giant box to help with Gulf oil leak

The best short-term solution to bottling up a disastrous oil spill threatening sealife and livelihoods along the Gulf Coast should be headed out to sea Wednesday in the form of a specially built giant concrete-and-steel box designed to siphon the oil away.

At about midday, a barge will haul the 100-ton contraption 50 miles offshore to a spot where a mile-deep gusher from a blown-out undersea well has been spewing at least 210,000 gallons of crude a day into the Gulf for two weeks. BP spokesman John Curry said it would be deployed on the seabed by Thursday.

Read the whole thing….

UPDATE: BP caps one of three leaks at deepwater well….

Woman fined for flossing while driving

NEWPORT, Wales, March 1 (UPI) — A 36-year-old woman was caught flossing her teeth while driving 70 mph on a motorway in Wales, police spokesman said. More….

Couple’s romance ends with lawsuit

NEW YORK, March 1 (UPI) — A man alleges in a lawsuit filed in New York that his former fiancee should be required to return a $58,000 engagement ring
since their relationship is over.

Roger Adler, 42, alleges in the Manhattan Supreme Court suit his former fiancee, Rena Hope Friedman, accepts marriage proposals from men and then ends the relationships so she can keep the valuable engagement rings, the New York Post said. More….

Rat found on aircraft prompts deplaning

OTTAWA, March 1 (UPI) — An Air Canada spokeswoman said an airplane was taken out of service and 205 passengers left the aircraft at the gate after a rat was found on board. More….

Flight passenger eats winning scratch card

CASTLE DONINGTON, England, March 1 (UPI) — A spokesman for an Irish airline said a passenger who won nearly $13,620 on a scratch card ate the instant lottery ticket when told he could not cash it in. More….

The great thing about multiculturalism is that it can be cut down, trimmed, reshaped and refurbished and made to fit anything. Here it has been reworked to serve as the cover for the murder of thirteen servicemen and the maiming of thirty-odd others. And we’re supposed to sit back and nod and say, “Obama knows best. If anything’s wrong, Obama will tell us.”

Read the whole thing….

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NPR:

In White House Vs. Fox News War Of Words, Who Gets Your Vote?

[...]

It seems like time for a survey: [As of Nov 1 @ 3:05 pm ET, Total Votes: 1,018,425]

Cast YOUR vote at NPR

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Mark Steyn @ NRO:

Why, only the other day, very conversationally, the administration floated the trial balloon that it could live with the Taliban returning to government in Afghanistan.

More Steyn

This is — how to put this delicately? — something of a recalibration of Obama’s previous position. From about a year after the fall of Baghdad, Democrats adopted the line that Bush’s war in Iraq was an unnecessary distraction from the real war, the good war, the one in Afghanistan that everyone — Dems, Europeans, all the nice people — were right behind, 100 percent. No one butched up for the Khyber Pass more enthusiastically than Barack Obama: “As president, I will make the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority.” (July 15, 2008)

But that was then and this is now. As the historian Robert Dallek told Obama recently, “War kills off great reform movements.” As the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne reminded the president, his supporters voted for him not to win a war but to win a victory on health care and other domestic issues. Obama’s priorities lie not in the Hindu Kush but in America: Why squander your presidency on trying to turn an economically moribund feudal backwater into a functioning nation state when you can turn a functioning nation state into an economically moribund feudal backwater?

Read the whole thing….

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This morning I had a problem accessing CSJ and my other websites. It didn’t take long to see that the problem was caused by Google’s ad script. By that I mean Google ad servers were not responding to script request. That caused the pages to start loading but then hang when Google ad script tried to execute. I went looking around the Net to see what else was wrong.

I found live blogging at Internet Storm Center. That assured me that it was not a local problem. Also “Update 4″ at the ISC was assigning the blame to AT&T. I was skeptical of that because there are so many ways that AT&T can reroute traffic. I was also perplexed because ISC was posting — and I was able to verify most of it — that the outages involved Google Ad Servers, Gmail, Youtube, Docs, Reader, News, Apps and more. In fact it seemed to involve the whole Google enchilada. But how can that be? Surely Google’s worldwide enterprise has distributed servers. How could one event cripple the whole outfit?

Well, here’s what Google says happened:

The Official Google Blog

This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern…

5/14/2009 12:15:00 PM
Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and “always on,” so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.

Posted by Urs Hoelzle, SVP, Operations

Heh! Now I don’t feel so bad about an event in 1972. One of my programmers screwed up and shut down Citibank’s Commercial Banking System for three days.

By 1980 I was truly amazed at how we (IT) had progressed with backups, redundancy, restores and recoveries. Our goal was to get “always on” at least to service levels of electric, gas and phone companies. By the time I retired ten years ago, IT services in most industries were equal to the service levels of most utility companies.

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The Washington Times:

Jack Kemp, the ex-quarterback, congressman, one-time vice-presidential nominee and self-described “bleeding-heart conservative,” died Saturday. He was 73.

Kemp died after a lengthy illness, according to spokeswoman Bona Park and Edwin J. Feulner, a longtime friend and former campaign adviser. Park said Kemp died at his home in Bethesda, Md., in the Washington suburbs.

Kemp’s office announced in January that he had been diagnosed with an unspecified type of cancer. By then, however, the cancer was in an advanced stage and had spread to several organs, Feulner said. He did not know the origin of the cancer.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called Kemp “one of the nation’s most distinguished public servants. Jack was a powerful voice in American politics for more than four decades.”

Continued….

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From over the transom:

» Larger image «

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While the MSM wastes our time with Obamalies and his agitprop, meaningful stories, like the passing of a real hero, go unreported.

And he drops it in, and sits there in the machine gun fire, as they load 2 or 3 of you on board. Then he flies you up and out through the gunfire, to the Doctors and Nurses.

And, he kept coming back….13 more times….And took about 30 of you and your buddies out, who would never have gotten out.

Medal of Honor Recipient, Ed Freeman, died last Wednesday August 20, 2008, at the age of 80, in Boise, ID….May God rest his soul….

Read the full story….

Note: This has been circulating on the Internet with the wrong date-of-death on it.

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Dr. Lewis answers, if you count one-thousand one, one thousand two, one-thousand three, etc., it would take 30,000 years to reach one trillion.

April 15, 2009

Esse quam videri — “to be, rather than to seem” — is a guide not only to understanding what has been, but also to what we are, and should be. – - – - – John David Lewis, Ph.D.
Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science, Duke University

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