Category: Networks

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.

Johann Hari has a very thoughtful and balanced column on complicity with the Saddam regime. The trial should be an opportunity for those governments who supported him to come clean:

The process of confessing our governments’ involvement in Iraq, although uncomfortable, could actually be a liberating experience for us too, because it would help us to remoralise our foreign policy. The images of the gassed Kurds at Halabja will damn the Reagan and Thatcher governments long after any strategic benefit they might have gained from supporting him is forgotten. Today, for similar strategic purposes, we offer support and weapons to butchers in Uzbekistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia, to name just a few. A process of confessing crimes against Iraq will help to identify our backing of criminals elsewhere – and make it politically harder to back fresh tyrants. This is, alas, one reason why an international investigation along these lines is extremely unlikely.

and also an opportunity for the “peace” movement to deal with its lack of moral clarity:

Speaking before the war, [Scott Ritter] told Time magazine: “The prison in question was inspected by my team in January 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children – toddlers up to pre-adolescents – whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually, I’m not going to describe what I saw there, because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I’m waging peace.”

That perfectly captures the moral obtuseness of the anti-war movement. At its heart was the grotesque idea that there could be “peace” for the Iraqi people with Saddam in charge. None of the opponents of the war were actually supporters of Saddam, save for a tiny Gallowayite fringe. But they all prioritised something else over the Iraqi people’s desire to be rid of him, whether it was their own reading of international law, their abhorrence of war, or their distaste for the foul right-wing administration in the White House.

As the anti-war protesters say, “no justice, no peace”, so let’s remove tyrants like Saddam one by one, and vow never to allow our governments to support such heinous fiends ever again.

Fat chance.

Omar’s on a roll over at IRAQ THE MODEL:

Thank you American, British, Spanish, Italian, Australian, Ukrainian, Japanese and all the coalition people and all the good people on earth.
God bless the 1st brigade.
God bless the 4th infantry division.
God bless Iraq.
God bless America.
God bless the coalition people and soldiers.
God bless all the freedom loving people on earth.
I wish I could hug you all.

Any time, little Bubba, we’re all in this fight together.

Via Zeyad.

Tim Blair has a nice collection of Democratic Underground reaction to the capture of Saddam; summary: “Oh shit, we’re in trouble now.” Gloat, gloat, gloat.