Seven Hundred Billion - My Ass!

"Yesterday, President Bush announced his $700 billion plan to buy out troubled financial institutions. Demanding enormous faith in his administration’s stewardship, the plan “would place no restrictions on the administration other than requiring semiannual reports to Congress, granting the Treasury secretary unprecedented power to buy and resell mortgage debt,” and to hire outside firms “to help manage its purchases.” Further, the proposal provides no oversight mechanism:

Sec. 8. Review: Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Bush is demanding unprecedented control over billions of dollars — with no oversight."

See what else Think Progress has to say about the shrub ‘Demanding’ 700 Billion.

See what Matt Stoler has to say about the 700 Billion.

Nearly 12,900 Chinese children sick from milk

China said Sunday the number of children sickened by baby formula tainted with the banned industrial chemical melamine has doubled to nearly 12,900 as the government confronts a scandal over widespread contamination of the milk supply.

More than 80 percent of the 12,892 children hospitalized in recent weeks were 2 years old or younger, the Health Ministry said in a statement posted on its Web site late Sunday. Four children have died.

The ministry said most of the children sickened consumed infant formula from one company, the Shijiazhuang Sanlu Group Co.

Update: The number of children in China sickened by dairy products tainted with the banned industrial chemical melamine has jumped to nearly 53,000, the government said.

Damn, one was too many. But 53,000!

The Army’s Totally Serious Mind-Control Project

Soldiers barking orders at each other is so 20th Century. That’s why the U.S. Army has just awarded a $4 million contract to begin developing “thought helmets” that would harness silent brain waves for secure communication among troops. Ultimately, the Army hopes the project will “lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone.”

If this sounds insane, it would have been as recently as a few years ago. But improvements in computing power and a better understanding of how the brain works have scientists busy hunting for the distinctive neural fingerprints that flash through a brain when a person is talking to himself. The Army’s initial goal is to capture those brain waves with incredibly sophisticated software that then translates the waves into audible radio messages for other troops in the field. “It’d be radio without a microphone, ” says Dr. Elmar Schmeisser, the Army neuroscientist overseeing the program. “Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.”

Full Story: Time Magazine

India becomes first country to use brain scanning in courts

The new technology is, to its critics, Orwellian. Others view it as a silver bullet against terrorism that could render waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods obsolete. Some scientists predict the end of lying as we know it.

Now, well before any consensus on the technology’s readiness, India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine: a brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question.

Full Story: New York Times

Anxiety-detecting machines could spot terrorists

“A scene from the airport of the future: A man’s pulse races as he walks through a checkpoint. His quickened heart rate and heavier breathing set off an alarm. A machine senses his skin temperature jumping. Screeners move in to question him.Signs of a terrorist? Or simply a passenger nervous about a cross-country flight?

It may seem straight out of an Orwellian nightmare, but on Thursday, the Homeland Security Department showed off an early version of physiological screeners that could spot terrorists. The department’s research division is years from using the machines in an airport or an office building — if they even work at all. But officials believe the idea could transform security by doing a bio scan to spot dangerous people.

Critics doubt such a system can work. The idea, they say, subjects innocent travelers to the intrusion of a medical exam. The futuristic machinery works on the same theory as a polygraph, looking for sharp swings in body temperature, pulse and breathing that signal the kind of anxiety exuded by a would-be terrorist or criminal. Unlike a lie-detector test that wires subjects to sensors as they answer questions, the “Future Attribute Screening Technology” (FAST) scans people as they walk by a set of cameras.”

Read the story in USA Today

New way to spot breast cancer shows promise

A radioactive tracer that "lights up" cancer hiding inside dense breasts showed promise in its first big test against mammograms, revealing more tumors and giving fewer false alarms, doctors reported Wednesday.

The experimental method - molecular breast imaging, or MBI - would not replace mammograms for women at average risk of the disease.

But it might become an additional tool for higher risk women with a lot of dense tissue that makes tumors hard to spot on mammograms, and it could be done at less cost than an MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging.

About one-fourth of women 40 and older have dense breasts.

"MBI is a promising technology" that is already in advanced testing, said Carrie Hruska, a biomedical engineer at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., which has been working on it for six years.

She gave results in a telephone news briefing Wednesday and will present them later this week at an American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Washington, D.C.

Mammograms - a type of X-ray - are the chief way now to check for breast cancer.

MBI uses radiation, too, but in a different way.

Women are given an intravenous dose of a short-acting tracer that is absorbed more by abnormal cells than healthy ones.

Special cameras collect the "glow" these cells give off, and doctors look at the picture to spot tumors.

Researchers tried both methods, on 940 women who had dense breasts and a high risk of cancer because of family history, bad genes or other reasons.

Thirteen tumors were found in 12 women - eight by MBI alone, one by mammography alone, two by both methods and two by neither. (The two missed cancers were found on subsequent annual mammograms, physical exams or other imaging tests.)

Looked at another way, MBI found 10 out of 13 tumors, missing three; mammograms detected three out of 13 tumors and missed 10.

Using both methods, 11 out of 13 tumors would have been detected.

"These images are quite striking. You can see how the cancers would be hidden on the mammograms," Hruska said.

Mammograms gave false alarms - led doctors to conclude that cancer was present when it was not - in about 9 percent of patients, compared to only 7 percent for MBI.

The MBI tests led to more biopsies than mammograms did, but they more often revealed cancer.

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation and Bristol-Myers Squibb, which makes the imaging agent used in the study, paid for the work.

The next test will be to see how MBI stacks up against MRI.

The federal government is paying for a new study Mayo is leading that compares the two in 120 high-risk women with dense breasts.

MRI is often used now for women with dense breasts, but it gives many false alarms that lead to unnecessary biopsies.

Doctors hope MBI will prove more accurate and cost less - under $500 versus more than $1,000 for an MRI.

"We all know that mammography is, in and of itself, an imperfect tool, and we clearly need to do better in the future," said Dr. Eric Winer of the Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston, a spokesman for the oncology group. "It is fair to say that MRI will not solve all problems either."

One drawback of MBI: It uses about 8 to 10 times the radiation of mammograms, a dose that engineers like Hruska are trying to lower with newer technology.

Other medical centers also are testing MBI.

"We're just beginning to see what this technology can do," she said.

Life imitates ‘art'

All right so television isn’t art but it works for this …

Sopranos' actor's murder trial set for October

"Sopranos" actor Lillo Brancato Jr. is set to go to trial next month in the death of an off-duty New York police officer.

A judge ruled Friday that Brancato and co-defendant Steven Armento would be tried separately.

Prosecutors wanted them tried together.

Authorities say they broke into an apartment to look for prescription drugs in 2005.

Officer Daniel Enchautegui confronted them and was killed in a shootout.

Armento is accused of firing the fatal shot.

Brancato, who played an aspiring mobster on HBO's "The Sopranos," says he didn't know Armento had a gun.

Brancato's murder trial is set for Oct. 28.

Armento goes on trial Sept. 29.

Zor and Zam

As of Sunday, Sept. 21, 2008, 4,168 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq.

The British military has reported 176 deaths; Italy, 33; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 21; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Denmark, 7; El Salvador, 5; Slovakia, 4; Latvia and Georgia, 3 each; Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand and Romania, 2 each; and Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan and South Korea, 1 death each.

"... Two little kings playing a game. They gave a war and nobody came ..."

Would that it be so ...

Cyber Attackers Beware

Just in case you were concerned ... the wing-nut cyber attacks on Carolina Naturally over the past few days have been throughly defeated and those that attempted the attacks are now dealing with the aftereffects of those foolish attempts.

To wit: Computers that won't boot up, automatic uploads and downloads of all kinds of 'interesting' stuff and ultimately their computers will simply implode and cease to function all together.

It's not nice to fool with us 'old school' computer people - we know the operating machine languages and the C++ crowd hasn't a clue!

Just have to tell their machines to perform a function that has no end ... Sorta like telling the kids you threw 100 pennies in the back yard and they aren't allowed to come in the house until they find all 100 pennies but you only threw out 99 pennies.

The poison your brew today

Has everyone else noticed the Haters are beating themselves up for being haters and telling us they want to throw themselves out of office?

It is really too funny - as many have said the repugicans are running against themselves as if they think they have fooled us by going out the back door, circling around front and yelling at the empty house for the neighbors to see and hear them calling for the bums to leave.

It is pretty pathetic actually - but we cannot help laughing.

I think the line goes something like this 'the poison you brew today, will kill you tomorrow' - or something like that - and by dang, tomorrow has come.

And I Quote

Life begins at rape...ask mayor Palin

~ Shannyn Moore

Shannyn Moore is a blogger in Alaska and knows all about Palin and her hatred of women
Check out her blog and the Mudflats for all things Alaska.

Manhunt on for suspect in slaying of NC deputy

Authorities in rural North Carolina are searching for an Iraq veteran they suspect in the fatal shooting of a sheriff's deputy. Another sheriff's officer was shot but suffered minor injuries.

Officials with the Caldwell County Sheriff's Department said Saturday night they were searching for 32-year-old Skip Brinkley, an Army veteran who served in Iraq from 2004 to 2006. They say he also has some law enforcement training.

Officials say Deputy Adam Klutz was responding to a 911 call at a home earlier Saturday when he was shot in a spot not protected by his bulletproof vest. The other officer was hit three times in his vest.

More than 200 officers were searching the surrounding area in Lenoir, about 75 northwest of Charlotte.