The Australian: Food chemicals send even mild children hyper [May 29, 2004]: "IT'S not just hyperactive kids who go berserk after consuming artifical colourings and preservatives.

Now research has shown that even mild-mannered children can run wild after drinking additive-laden juice.

British research has found that certain additives made three-year-olds more hyperactive, regardless of whether they had been diagnosed with hyperactivity.

So strong was the effect of the additives that the researchers called for the chemicals to be removed from the diets of pre-school children 'in the long-term interest of public health'.

The latest study, published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, is the first to examine the effect of additives on children who are not hyperactive or allergic, as well as those who are.

The study used the preservative sodium benzoate, a preservative commonly found in fruit drinks and carbonated drinks, and the artificial food colourings sunset yellow, tartrazine, carmoisine, and ponceau."

Home Training - The weird and wonderful -: "I think I have a harder training then most schools give. It's in the woods and I made a projectile machine. It shoots wood and your only defense is to smash it apart or block it.

"

Google Search:: "Then you probably shouldn't buy it online. IMO you'd be better off to
go to GC or some other shop and pick the $200 guitar that sounds and
plays best, regardless of make or top material. That would include the
Epiphone AJ-100 and AJ-200, neither of which has a solid top but can
sound surprisingly good if you find 'the one'."

Google Search: cheap samick group:rec.music.makers.guitar.acoustic: "that for mass produced instruments (production
instruments), the headstock and price point is no longer the definitive mark
of quality. I'm saying that both Samick in Asia and Taylor in the USA use
similar machinery to provide increasingly similar quality products and that
the producers of more expensive guitars are going to have to do something to
distinguish themselves more effectively. I do hope this will eventually
translate into more customizable options (different hardware options),
better tonewoods, etc, when it comes to the higher priced
instruments...maybe they will start competing with some of the handmade
boutique guitars that truly define 'high end' but so far, the cheapies are
catching up....used to be you could tell a cheap instrument by the
bracing...Martin made half of its reputation on the X-Bracing...now everyone
does it.."

Google Search:: "For under $200 acoustics, check out the Yamaha 401; a good, no frills,
spruce and mahogany laminate, dreadnought. Good player, good, sound,
construction, above average tuners, and sounds surprisingly full for
that price range."

Music Highlights Mitsubishi TV Ads (washingtonpost.com): "On the other hand, it was a two-year-old song that caught the attention of viewers in 2001.'Start the Commotion,' a 1999 song by the Wiseguys, was featured in two Mitsubishi Eclipse commercials that were launched last year. The song had gone largely unnoticed until Mitsubishi put it on television."

Montreal Gazette - canada.com network: "He was 14 when he fell in love with Mark, a boy two years older, and adopted the guise of a female secret service agent to order his friend to stab him in a suburban alleyway. Mark was meant to end his life with the words: ''I love you, bro.''
Mark carried out the stabbing in Altrincham, Cheshire, shortly before 8 p.m. on June 29 last year. He knifed John in the chest and abdomen. The second blow cut into his kidney, liver and gall bladder, nearly killing him.
Minutes later, Mark reported the attack on his cell phone.
Police launched a manhunt after both boys told them a stranger in black had dragged John into the alleyway and stabbed him."

101 Free Things to Do on Oahu: "101 Free Things to Do on Oahu (or under $10)"

New Scientist: "She says the findings reinforce the message that antibiotics should be used only when absolutely necessary. She also suggests that patients who have just finished antibiotic treatment should also receive 'probiotic' tablets containing 'good' gut bacteria.

Eating foods such as raw fruit and vegetables also helps to restore the natural balance in our guts. 'Once you are done with the antibiotics you are not finished,' adds Huffnagle. 'You need to recover from the treatment itself."

TheFeature :: An Architect in the City of Bits: "Mitchell: The implications of location-awareness are far from obvious. The technology enables you to reconsider things as fundamental as, say, signage in a city. For example, we traditionally think of a stop sign as part of the fixed infrastructure of the city. But if you have a location-aware automobile, you can shift the stop sign to the dashboard so it pops up when you approach an intersection. If you have whole networks of location aware vehicles, the system becomes more elaborate. Perhaps the stop sign only pops up when there's another car coming from the opposite direction. You could even have elaborate intersection priority schemes.
"

The New York Times > Magazine > Regarding the Torture of Others: "There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At least or especially in America, Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real time -- life isn't edited, why should its record be edited? -- has become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am -- waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects of their lives, store them in computer files and send the files around. Family life goes with the recording of family life -- even when, or especially when, the family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace. Surely the dedicated, incessant home-videoing of one another, in conversation and monologue, over many years was the most astonishing material in ''Capturing the Friedmans,'' the recent documentary by Andrew Jarecki about a Long Island family embroiled in pedophilia charges. "

test

Crosman Airgun Forum (new): "357-8' Barrel
May 20 2004 at 1:48 PMStan (Login slayers1)
from IP address 81.195.22.185

Response to 357 - 8' Barrel

AFAIK
Housing - 357A204-8'
Barrel - 357-203-8'
Barrel support - 357-008 (the same for all models)
Rubber grips will not match old model handle. Anyway, old plastic ones are way better:)"

Newsday.com - National News: "WASHINGTON -- The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.

'Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein,' said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.

The Information Collection Program also 'kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing' by passing classified U.S. documents and other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of dollars from the U.S. government over several years.

An administration official confirmed that 'highly classified information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel.'"

Thom Yorke on learning to play the piano:

"There's something very particular about the chords of your songs. You hold a single tone and skate from one chord to another unexpectedly.
Yeah, that's my only trick. I've got one trick and that's it, and I'm really going to have to learn a new one. Pedals, banging away through everything. I just find it really nice, because things can pull and push against it. I don't know many chords, and what I do know is from guitar playing?to approach playing piano after playing guitar is quite peculiar. I'm not worried about filling up the chord, and I really like the low, fat sound. I don't like the high stuff at all."

WIRED 1.1: "Hyperlearning" by Lewis J. Perelman: "
Hyperlearning
Would you send your kid to a Soviet collective?
By Lewis J. Perelman
Dear Information Industry Executive:
Could your business benefit from a few hundred billion dollars in new sales? Good. Let's talk.
We all know that the world economy is going through what some call a 'second industrial revolution' as knowledge-based businesses replace production-based businesses at the core of economic activity. In the trenches of this revolution a host of companies are scrambling to capture the high ground of the new multimedia, telecomputing mega- industry that is springing up from the digital integration of many diverse enterprises.
But contrary to what you have heard during the recent election, schools are one of the principal barriers to the growth of not only this new industry, but the whole world economy. Replacing the bureaucratic empire of educational institutions with a high-tech commercial industry will pull the cork out of the knowledge-age bottleneck - opening up an annual market worth $450 billion in the US alone.
Recent campaign rhetoric aside, the real threat posed to our economy by education, schools and colleges is not inadequacy, but excess: too much schooling at too high a cost.
The conventional 'technology' of the classroom is a thousand-year-old invention initially adopted to discipline an esoteric cadre of acetic monks. The institution of contemporary, 'public' education is a 19th- century innovation designed as a worker-factory for an industrial economy. Both have as much utility in today's modern economy of advanced information technology as the Conestoga wagon or the blacksmith shop.
America currently has the most schooled workforce in its history: In the last two decades, the number of college graduates abso"

The New York Times > Business > Economic Scene: Does Highway Spending Really Pay Off?: "On average, they write, 'one dollar of annual highway spending reduces the annual congestion costs to road users only 8 cents.' This is not a return on a one-time investment but a continuing expense; we have to keep spending that dollar to get the 8 cents.
Dr. Winston cautions that the specific number may change as the working paper is revised, but that the general point - a very small effect - seems certain."

Scotsman.com News - Latest News - Stolen Stradivarius Nearly Became Cd Holder: "The prospect the prized instrument could have been turned into a CD holder is so abominable. I get sick when I hear it, said Robert Cauer, a Los Angeles-based expert instrument restorer."

Democracy Now! | Rumsfeld Knew: Iraq Prison Abuse Part of Pentagon-Approved Black Ops Program

A new report by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine begins:

“The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, t expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligenc community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror

"According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A."

The Enemy Withi, by Gore Vidal, 10/27/02: "Meanwhile, our more and more unaccountable government is pursuing all sorts of games around the world that we the spear carriers (formerly the people) will never learn of. Even so, we have been getting some answers to the question: why weren't we warned in advance of 9/11? Apparently, we were, repeatedly; for the better part of a year, we were told there would be unfriendly visitors to our skies some time in September 2001, but the government neither informed nor protected us despite Mayday warnings from Presidents Putin and Mubarak, from Mossad and even from elements of our own FBI. A joint panel of congressional intelligence committees reported (19 September 2002, New York Times) that as early as 1996, Pakistani terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad confessed to federal agents that he was `learning to fly in order to crash a plane into CIA HQ'. "

The Observer | Review | Gore Vidal claims 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11: "America's most controversial writer Gore Vidal has launched the most scathing attack to date on George W Bush's Presidency, calling for an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda's plans.
Vidal's highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled 'The Enemy Within' - published in the print edition of The Observer today - argues that what he calls a 'Bush junta' used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home.
Vidal writes: 'We still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.'"

Huge penalty in drug fraud / Pfizer settles felony case in Neurontin off-label promotion: "Prosecutors said Warner-Lambert turned Neurontin into a blockbuster drug with tactics like paying doctors to listen to pitches for unapproved uses and treating them to luxury trips to Hawaii, Florida or the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. One doctor received almost $308,000 to tout Neurontin at conferences.
'This illegal and fraudulent promotion scheme corrupted the information process relied on by doctors in their medical decision making, thereby putting patients at risk,'' said U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan, chief prosecutor for the federal district based in Boston. "

Huge penalty in drug fraud / Pfizer settles felony case in Neurontin off-label promotion: "A division of Pfizer Inc., the world's largest drugmaker, has agreed to plead guilty to two felonies and pay $430 million in penalties to settle charges that it fraudulently promoted the drug Neurontin for a string of unapproved uses.
In an agreement announced by government prosecutors Thursday, Pfizer unit Warner-Lambert admitted that it aggressively marketed the epilepsy drug by illicit means for unrelated conditions including bipolar disorder, pain, migraine headaches, and drug and alcohol withdrawal.
A company whistle-blower, whose 1996 civil suit spurred government investigations of Neurontin's marketing campaign, will receive about $26.6 million through the settlement under legal provisions that reward citizens for helping to recover government money obtained by fraud. "

This should be a movie with Julia Roberts. I want to be a whistle-blower.

CNN.com - Hundreds of?Abu Ghraib prisoners freed - May 14, 2004: "BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- U.S. authorities released 293 prisoners from Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison Friday, the first mass prisoner release since images of abuse at the hands of the U.S. military surfaced several weeks ago.
Earlier, officials had said 315 prisoners were freed but Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said the release of 22 prisoners was delayed.
Kimmitt told reporters Friday that the next prisoner release will be next Friday.
'We anticipate 475 prisoners to be released. Twenty-two prisoners delayed today are expected to be released on May 21st,' he said."

Interesting.

International News Article | Reuters.com: "NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) - Aides to militant Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr blamed U.S. tank fire on Friday for three small holes that appeared in the vast gilded dome of Shi'ite Islam's holiest shrine, the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf.
Qais al-Khazali, Sadr's chief spokesman, showed the damage to journalists after six hours of heavy fighting in which U.S. armor advanced for the first time onto sacred ground in its confrontation with Sadr's Mehdi Army militia.
The holes, high above the ground, were on the side of the dome facing Najaf's vast cemetery, where U.S. tanks stormed in to attack guerrilla positions hidden among the tombs."

Is this justified or not?

International News Article | Reuters.com: "NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) - Aides to militant Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr blamed U.S. tank fire on Friday for three small holes that appeared in the vast gilded dome of Shi'ite Islam's holiest shrine, the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf.
Qais al-Khazali, Sadr's chief spokesman, showed the damage to journalists after six hours of heavy fighting in which U.S. armor advanced for the first time onto sacred ground in its confrontation with Sadr's Mehdi Army militia.
The holes, high above the ground, were on the side of the dome facing Najaf's vast cemetery, where U.S. tanks stormed in to attack guerrilla positions hidden among the tombs."

Is this justified or not?

Honolulu Weekly - Restaurants: Honolulu Restaurant Reviews, Oahu Restaurant Listings: "The Bistro
Century Center, 1750 Kal?kaua Ave, third floor (943-6500). Mon 11am?2pm; Tue?Fri 11am?2pm, 6?10pm; Sat, Sun 6?10pm. Late supper menu at the bar 10pm?1:30am. Appetizers: $10?$20. Entr?es: $24?$52. AmEx, Disc, MC, V.
Knowingly retro, purposely classic, the Bistro is an unabashedly dress-up, leave-the-kids-at-home kind of place. And the food merits all the hoo-ha. Sweet scallops sit in a luscious citrus beurre blanc, rack of lamb comes with its pomegranate-spiked jus. The late-night menu is a swank deal?take a seat at the bar and have some steak tartare (best in town); it?ll set you back only $12."

Aloha Stadium Swap Meet: "Hours of Operation: Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays from 6:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Swap Meet will close at 1:00 p.m. when UH football games are scheduled.

Buyer fee: Age 12 and above - fifty cents per person. Age 11 and below - free.

The Aloha Stadium Swap Meet is easily accessible by public transportation or by your own vehicle.

Public Transportation: Take 320 Airport/Pearlridge or #47 Waipahu. To return, take #20 or #47 Waikiki Beach and hotels or #49, #51, #52 or #62 marked Honolulu/Ala Moana Center and transfer to Ala Moana #8, #19 or #20 Waikiki Beach and Hotels."

Aloha Stadium Swap Meet: "Hours of Operation: Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays from 6:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Swap Meet will close at 1:00 p.m. when UH football games are scheduled.

Buyer fee: Age 12 and above - fifty cents per person. Age 11 and below - free.

The Aloha Stadium Swap Meet is easily accessible by public transportation or by your own vehicle.

Public Transportation: Take 320 Airport/Pearlridge or #47 Waipahu. To return, take #20 or #47 Waikiki Beach and hotels or #49, #51, #52 or #62 marked Honolulu/Ala Moana Center and transfer to Ala Moana #8, #19 or #20 Waikiki Beach and Hotels."

hawaii-nei.com: Five Fun Things for Under $10 on Oahu: "Five Fun Things to Do on Oahu for $15 or less"

Daily Herald Suburban Living Section: "So that's it, right? All this freaking out over fatness, as I had suspected, was some fashion-industry conspiracy to make larger people feel bad because they aren't lucky enough to have thin genes and a magic metabolism like me.

I was lovin' it once again.

Then the blood work came in.

My cholesterol shot up from a 'normal' 181 to a 'borderline high' 201. And my 'bad' cholesterol shot up from 102 to 116. At 130, doctors start thinking about 'treatment.'

Keep in mind, this happened during a period where I was burning more calories than I was eating.

'It's pretty startling to see the rapidity with which your cholesterol increased,' the doc said. 'It just goes to show you that McDonald's is so high in saturated fats, within two weeks, you overwhelmed those mechanisms that your body uses to keep cholesterol in check.'"

Illuminating blacked-out words | CNET News.com: "In January, the State Department required that its documents use a more modern font, Times New Roman, instead of Courier, Naccache said. Because Courier is a monospace font, in which all letters are of the same width, it is harder to decipher with the computer technique. There is no indication that the State Department knew that."

Daily Kos || Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.: "'Our lives begin to end when we become silent about things that matter.' - Martin Luther King, Jr. "

MSNBC - The Price of Arrogance:

'I take full responsibility,' said Donald Rumsfeld in his congressional testimony last week. But what does this mean? Secretary Rumsfeld hastened to add that he did not plan to resign and was not going to ask anyone else who might have been 'responsible' to resign. As far as I can tell, taking responsibility these days means nothing more than saying the magic words 'I take responsibility.'"

PARAMETERS, US Army War College Quarterly - Summer 1997: "'Police officers responded to a domestic dispute, accompanied by marines. They had just gone up to the door when two shotgun birdshot rounds were fired through the door, hitting the officers. One yelled `cover me!' to the marines, who then laid down a heavy base of fire. . . . The police officer had not meant `shoot' when he yelled `cover me' to the marines. [He] meant . . . point your weapons and be prepared to respond if necessary. However, the marines responded instantly in the precise way they had been trained, where `cover me' means provide me with cover using firepower. . . . over two hundred bullets [were] fired into that house.'[1] "

deseretnews.com | Lab creates babies for donor tissue

"CHICAGO — In a growing practice that troubles some ethicists, a Chicago laboratory helped create five healthy babies so that they could serve as stem-cell donors for their ailing brothers and sisters.
The made-to-order infants were screened and selected when they were still embryos to make sure they would be compatible donors. Their siblings suffered from leukemia or a rare and potentially lethal anemia.
The Chicago doctors said the healthy embryos that were not matches were frozen for potential future use. But some ethicists said such perfectly healthy embryos could end up being discarded.
"This was a search-and-destroy mission," said Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The chosen embryos "were allowed to be born so they could donate tissue to benefit someone else."
Valparaiso University professor Gilbert Meilaender, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, called the practice "morally troubling."

KenKinder.com - Plone Review: "User Interface

Plone's front end is sharp and clean. Its backend, however, is an abomination before computers and indeed humanity itself. There's no excuse for Plone's backend: it is an atrocity that will give alien intelligence a reason to wipe out Earth, and its creators are the world's true criminals.

Customizing your site's look and feel is pure guesswork and is done on a veriety of undocumented levels."

Charlie's Diary: "Complaints that the modern world is unnatural or artificial in some way miss the point; the world we live in is anthropogenic, we made it. We didn't have any collective choice in the matter, either: short of discarding tools, clothes, and ultimately language there's no way back to the Garden of Eden from here. (And indeed, the existence of a mythical state of perfection at some time in the historic past is just that -- a myth, a consolatory story to explain the imperfections of the present. Just like the bastardized utopia myth of a perfect future if we'll just agree to work together.)"

Prologue - The Diamond Invention: "My interest in the diamond invention was sparked originally by a chance meeting that I had with an English diamond broker in St. Tropez in the summer of 1977. The .broker was Benjamin Bonas, and he represented De Beers' Diamond Trading Company. He was visiting some friends of mine for the weekend, and during the course of a leisurely lunch the subject of diamonds was broached. Bonas explained that despite revolutions, hostile governments and general turmoil in Africa, De Beers still firmly controlled the production of diamonds. He pointed out that this arrangement had proved so successful that even the Soviet Union sold the diamonds from its Siberian mines to De Beers. He did not elaborate at this point on the actual mechanisms used De Beers to lock up the flow of diamonds from diverse quarters of the world. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the idea that a South African company, aided and abetted Black African and Communist nations who were pledged a total embargo of South African business, had succeeded putting together a truly global alliance to protect the value and illusion of diamonds. As the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique got their full independence, the pressures throughout Africa, and most of the world, to isolate South Africa would drastically escalate. How would the diamond cartel survive?

In Washington, later that year, I filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for all the investigations of the Justice Department concerning the diamond Cartel. The resulting archive of documents provided a fragmentary picture of De Beers' conflicts and near collision with antitrust laws of the United States, the clues all pointed to mining companies in South Africa and the distribution arm London. I therefore began my inquiry into the nature and future of the diamond invention in Johannesburg."

GODZILLA RETURNS: "We tend to think of 'Godzilla' as a cheesy monster movie, thanks largely to heavy re-editing in the Burr version that dispensed with nearly 40 minutes of director Ishiro Honda's original vision, two dozen or so sequels that got goofier and goofier, and rivals like 'Mothra' and 'Rodan.' But seeing the original version -- produced by a culture with still-fresh memories of atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a feeling of being caught in the middle of Cold War paranoia between the United States and the Soviet Union -- it's clear that it's time for a major reappraisal. 'Godzilla' is one of the great anti-nuclear films, made by a onetime prisoner of war and documentary filmmaker, with an original vision as well-imagined and chilling as 'Dr. Strangelove.'

Seriously."

sprawl suburbs | Metafilter: "A veritable army of 'suburban sprawl critics' has emerged over the years including Jane Jacobs and James Howard Knunstler plus many others including some who are predicting the immenent demise of suburbs because of oil depletion"