Category: Internet

This picture taken in Seattle yesterday says it all about life in the Northwest, earnestly.

Another year, another E-Tech Conference from Bill O’Reilly’s evil twin, and once more technology’s being co-opted to seduce gullible young people into a political movement somewhere to the left of Kucinich. It’s particularly amusing that the Cult of the Sacred Camel had a special “Digital Democracy teach-in” without anybody who actually believes in democracy and understands digital technology, with the exception of Jeff Jarvis, and nobody at all to speak from the center or the right of the political spectrum. They pulled a similar stunt last year with a panel on Warblogging that was devoid of actual warbloggers. I complained to Doc Searls and Dan Gillmor about that panel, but by now it’s obvious what the scam is so no fuss from me — O’Reilly is obviously trying to pick up where L. Ron Hubbard left off when he died. O’Reilly’s pricey conferences are the birthplace of the bubble that ate the Dean campaign, so it’s a natural that flim-flam Joe Trippi was a featured speaker.

Here’s a couple of good takes on David Kay’s actual findings from Iraq. First, see Totten on what Kay actually said to Tom Brokaw:

TB: The president described Iraq as a gathering threat ? a gathering danger. Was that an accurate description?

DK: I think that?s a very accurate description.

TB: But an imminent threat to the United States?

DK: Tom, an imminent threat is a political judgment. It?s not a technical judgment. I think Baghdad was actually becoming more dangerous in the last two years than even we realized. Saddam was not controlling the society any longer. In the marketplace of terrorism and of WMD, Iraq well could have been that supplier if the war had not intervened.

And then see Belmont Club’s take on the intelligence:

The liberal sneering at the American failure to find WMD stockpiles in Iraq is like making fun of a man who, having been tested for diabetes, receives a negative result but is told that what he really has is cancer. The US rightly feared that rogue states were developing weapons of mass destruction but did not have the breadth of imagination to conceive of the extraordinary web of cooperation between Pakistan, North Korea, European arms dealers and the Arabian states, who contributing according to their abilities, solved the problem of the atomic bomb. We went looking for an Iraqi bomb and found an international one.

The sneering class is already claiming that Kay says the WMD threat in Iraq was all hype and lying, but that’s not what he’s saying at all. It’s a fact that he didn’t find WMD stockpiles in Iraq, but it’s also a fact that he found all the ingredients of a weapons program that was in significant violation of th UN sanctions. Given the ineffectiveness of the CIA and the long run-up to the war thanks to French obstructionism, this is about all that what one would expect him to find. So you won’t be hearing me saying “Bush lied, and Kay said so.”

The snow was followed by freezing rain, and now we’re in the middle of an Ice Palace as Day 2 of The Great Ice Storm of 2004 continues in Greater Portland, land of (frozen) hippies. Here’s a shot of a tree in the front yard.

It’s warming up and the ice is starting to melt, thanks to some hot air imported from California.

LATER: Here’s what it looks like when the sun comes out, a rare and wondrous event.

We’re snowed-in today: the schools are closed, the office is closed, it’s been slowly dumping all day long, and nobody’s going anywhere. Weather forecast calls for a quick warming trend, which will most likely bring flooding.

And being a former Californian and all, I still don’t quite get the concept of weather. Can somebody explain what it’s supposed to be good for?

Here’s how it was at 8:30 this morning:

And by 5:30, it was like this:

You’ve no doubt heard about the British Airlines flights delayed or cancelled over the Christmas period because of terrorist threats. Here are the details.

We had another light dusting of snow last night, about 2-3 inches. Here’s how it looked at noon.

This just in: the mad dairy cow came from Canada:

Mr DeHaven said preliminary information he had just received suggested that the infected animal “likely entered the United States as part of a group of 74 dairy cattle that were imported through the border crossing at Eastport, Idaho, originating from a dairy herd in Alberta, Canada in 2001.”

A case of mad cow disease was reported in Alberta last spring.

Happy Fun Steve, himself a Canadian of considerable fame and authority, says the only way to prevent the spread of BSE is for cows to practice attachment parenting, and we here under the moss heartily agree — it’s premature weening that causes all these problems, you know.

Link via Al Hawkins, RN.

Checking the news for information on Mad Cow Disease in general and the suspected case turned up near Yakima, WA, is a pretty fruitless pursuit. You’re likely to find articles like the one in Slate cited by Prof. Bainbridge (via Instapundit) sensationalizing feedlots and urging you to a vegetarian diet, and that would be a mistake. So let’s collect some of the facts, just to be ornery.

In the first place, this Holstein cow isn’t an example of feedlot beef, good or bad. It was a worn-out, 4 1/2 yr. old dairy cow sold to slaughter along with 19 compadres because it wasn’t producing as much milk as the dairy farmer wanted. Your clues to that are the breed — Holstein’s are dairy cattle, not beef cattle — the sex — beef cattle are steers, not cows — the location — beef cattle aren’t raised on dairy farms — and the age — beef cattle are slaughtered at 18 months of age, more or less, and this cow was 4 1/2 yrs. old. It was most likely infected 4 years ago, when it was a calf, and probably by a milk substitute containing tallow it was fed to wean it off the profitable mother’s milk.

Worn-out dairy cows don’t get slaughtered for the steaks you’re going to buy at a restaurant, you can’t buy their meat at Safeway, and you can’t buy hamburgers at McDonald’s or Burgerville made out of them. Their meat goes into processed foods like bologna, sausages, and dog food.

If you want to worry about the contamination of the food supply, consider that this infected cow produced milk for the last four years, and you stand a better chance of catching mad cow from milk than you do from beef, although the evidence is pretty slim in either of these scenarios.

If we’re going to enact major policy changes to prevent further outbreaks of Mad Cow, the places to start would be in stricter standards for milk substitutes, a ban on selling old milk cows for human consumption, and more comprehensive testing. The thing you can do for yourself if you’re worried about tainted beef is to buy grass-fed beef from hippie ranchers, like I do, most recently from a rancher outside Eugene, OR.

Other than that, you might want to limit your milk consumption, but you should do that anyway if you’re over 2.

Remember when the Left was all atwitter over the idea that invading Iraq was a distraction from the War on Terror? One of their prime organs has seen fit to revise its view now that Qaddafi has agreed to dismantle his WMD program and Iran has agreed to surprise inspections of its nuclear plants:

Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair are entitled to claim a large share of the credit for Libya’s surprising announcement. To an extent that cannot be precisely measured, the fate of Saddam Hussein, who was ousted from power by the American military with British backing after endless prevaricating about Iraqi weapons programs, must have been an important consideration in Libya’s decision.

With the surly Brits on the verge of sending Tony Blair packing, we hope that this news and the capture of Saddam slaps some sense into them, at least for a while:

So, far from entering 2004 with trepidation, the prime minister will start the new year with good reason to feel both relieved and optimistic.

The strangeness of British politics must owe something to the proximity of France.