>Expose the Real McCain

>Here is the video of John McCain’s 100 years in Iraq comment.

John McCain wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years, but his lobbyist-ran campaign has and will continue to viciously attack anyone who remind the American people.

We know it — we have it on tape to prove it — and with your help, the American people will know it as well with our latest ad on John McCain and Iraq. – democrats.org

CJr has what is says is the full quote in context:

Here’s McCain’s full quote, in context, from back in January:

Questioner: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years…McCain: Maybe a hundred. Make it one hundred. We’ve been in South Korea, we’ve been in Japan for sixty years. We’ve been in South Korea for fifty years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. Then it’s fine with me. I would hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.

How does McCain propose to have a ground war where Americans are no longer being injured, harmed, wounded or killed? Is there such a plan that we are not using now which would end the killings? If so, we should switch over to that plan today! I don’t think such a thing exists. If we stay in a war in Iraq, Americans will keep getting killed. Isn’t Al Qaeda just an American creation? Isn’t it just one small group that gets exaggerated coverage? The biggest factions are the Kerds, Sunnis,  Shia the way I understand it. There will be no Al Qaeda territory.

Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority, strong Kurdish ethnic minority, secularist Sunni Muslims and others would suppress any real power bid by the fringe Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaida, al-Fayadh said. – ith

So, McCain seems to be out of touch with reality of the situation in Iraq. Or, more likely, he is going with the Neocon plan to use fear of Al Qaeda as the reason the US should have military bases in Iraq.

>Iraq Oil Revenue May Top Outlook

>

A new U.S. government report projects Iraq’s oil revenue will top a record $70 billion this year, adding fuel to a congressional push to force the Iraqi government to assume more responsibility for rebuilding the country.

“A new U.S. government report projects that Iraq’s oil revenues will top $70 billion this year, adding fuel to a growing Congressional push to force Iraq’s central government to assume more responsibility for rebuilding the country.”)

The report from Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen, which will be released Wednesday, highlights the windfall Iraq stands to reap this year because of soaring oil prices. The cost of a barrel of Iraqi oil has increased by 250% since 2003, and Iraq earned more than $18 billion from oil sales in the first quarter of 2008, the report found.

If Iraq is able to maintain its current levels of production and exports for the entire year, its oil revenue will be double what the Iraqi government had anticipated even a few months ago. “Iraq’s oil income, forecasted in 2003 to be the primary pool of capital for post-war reconstruction, now has become the chief funding source,” the report found.

The report comes as lawmakers from both parties push measures designed to force Baghdad to spend more of its oil money on reconstruction. Sens. Susan Collins (R., Maine), Ben Nelson (D., Neb.) and Evan Bayh (D., Ind.) are drafting legislation requiring future U.S. reconstruction aid to Iraq to come in the form of loans, rather than grants.

“The time has come to end this blank-check policy and require the Iraqis to invest in their own future,” the senators wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Rep. Ike Skelton (D., Mo.), who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, said Tuesday he would support efforts to restrict further U.S. aid to Iraq unless Baghdad began spending more of its oil money.

“They could put that money into reconstructing their own country,” he told reporters. “There’s going to have to be some sort of honest to goodness pressure like redeploying our troops and or cutting back our aid.” – wsj

Interesting way to benefit from the oil riches of the country we invaded. I guess this is the punch line to Colin Powell saying a few years ago that Iraq’s oil belonged to the Iraqi people. Well, it belongs to them, but they must spend it on what we say. Naw, this war in Iraqi was never about oil. Suuure.

>Seen a monkey loose in your subdivision?

>

A pack of 15 monkeys have escaped from a wildlife facility in Polk County, sparking a massive search for the animals, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

When Fish and Wildlife spokesman Gary Morse answered his phone today, he immediately knew the topic.

“The monkey business,” he said. “As far as I know, there are several teams out looking for this group of monkeys.”

The monkeys, 11 adults and 4 juveniles, somehow got out of a permitted wildlife facility that belongs to Lex Salisbury, the CEO of Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo.

“They are his personal pets,” Morse said.

Officials urge community members not to panic about the monkeys. The Polk County Sheriff’s Office has sent out a reverse 911 call to alert residents who might have missed all the fuss about the escape.

The monkeys, called Patas monkeys, are harmless to humans. The monkeys natural habitat is in arid climates in Africa. They are social, but ususally docile animals who move quickly and travel in groups, Morse said.

Apparently, the monkeys jumped off their home on an island at the wildlife area and swam across a pond, something they are not supposed to be able to do, Morse said.

“They are absolutely no threat to people,” Morse said.

What to do if you see the missing Patas monkeys?

Don’t approach them. Call the Fish and Wildlife’s hotline: 1-888-404-3922. –tb

>Molten STEEL Flowed Under Ground Zero for Months After 9/11

>

Reports of molten steel in the foundations of the Twin Towers and Building 7 have been noted in the literature of skeptics of the offial account of the building collapses. None of the official government reports have commented on these reports, although FEMA’s Report contained an appendix disclosing evidence of mysterious high temperature corrosion of steel due to a combination of oxidation and sulfidation. – 911rsrch

In response to the numerous reports of molten metal under ground zero, defenders of the official version of 9/11 have tried to argue that it was not steel, but some other kind of metal with a lower melting point.

Well, here are what top experts who eyewitnessed the molten metal say:

• The structural engineer responsible for the design of the WTC, described fires still burning and molten steel still running 21 days after the attacks (page 3)

• A retired professor of physics and atmospheric science said “in mid-October when they would pull out a steel beam, the lower part would be glowing dull red, which indicates a temperature on the order of 500 to 600 °C. And we know that people were turning over pieces of concrete in December that would flash into fire–which requires about 300 °C. So the surface of the pile cooled rather rapidly, but the bulk of the pile stayed hot all the way to December”

• The head of a team of scientists studying the potential health effects of 9/11, reported, “Fires are still actively burning and the smoke is very intense. In some pockets now being uncovered, they are finding molten steel“

• Hazardous materials experts also stated that, six weeks after 9/11, “There are pieces of steel being pulled out [from as far as six stories underground] that are still cherry red” and “the blaze is so ‘far beyond a normal fire’ that it is nearly impossible to draw conclusions about it based on other fires” (pay-per-view)

• An expert stated about World Trade Center building 7, “A combination of an uncontrolled fire and the structural damage might have been able to bring the building down, some engineers said. But that would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been PARTLY EVAPORATED in extraordinarily high temperatures” (pay-per-view). Note that evaporation means conversion from a liquid to a gas; so the steel beams in building 7 were subjected to temperatures high enough to melt and evaporate them

• According to reporter Christopher Bollyn, MarkLoizeaux, president the world’s top demolition company, and Peter Tully, head of a large construction firm, said the following:

Tully told AFP that he had seen pools of “literally molten steel” in the rubble.

Loizeaux confirmed this: “Yes, hot spots of molten steel in the basements,” he said, “at the bottom of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven levels.”

The molten steel was found “three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed,” he said. He confirmed that molten steel was also found at WTC 7, which mysteriously collapsed in the late afternoon.

So, lets say there really was molten steel, what could cause that?

Thermite induced collapses would explain fires burning under water for months, but fires from jet fuel would have been extinguished.

Thermite contains its own supply of oxygen, and does not require any external source such as air. Consequently, it cannot be smothered and may ignite in any environment, given sufficient initial heat. It will burn just as well while underwater, for example, and cannot even be extinguished with water, as water sprayed on a thermite reaction will instantly be boiled into steam. [Answers.com] – via wrh

Here’s what eyewitness firefighters say:

• New York firefighters recalled in a documentary film, “heat so intense they encountered rivers of molten steel“

• A NY firefighter described molten steel flowing at ground zero, and said it was like a “foundry” or like “lava”

• According to a member of New York Air National Guard’s 109th Air Wing, who was at Ground Zero from September 22 to October 6, “One fireman told us that there was still molten steel at the heart of the towers’ remains. Firemen sprayed water to cool the debris down but the heat remained intense enough at the surface to melt their boots”

• As late as five months after the attacks, in February 2002, firefighter Joe O’Toole saw a steel beam being lifted from deep underground at Ground Zero, which, he says, “was dripping from the molten steel“

Here’s what other eyewitnesses say:

• A public health advisor who arrived at Ground Zero on September 12, said that “feeling the heat” and “seeing the molten steel” there reminded him of a volcano

• An employee of New Jersey’s Task Force One Urban Search and Rescue witnessed “Fires burn[ing and molten steel flow[ing] in the pile of ruins still settling beneath her feet”

• A reporter with rare access to the debris at ground zero “descended deep below street level to areas where underground fires still burned and steel flowed in molten streams”

• An Occupational Safety and Health Administration Officer at the Trade Center reported a fire truck 10 feet below the ground that was still burning two weeks after the Tower collapsed, “its metal so hot that it looked like a vat of molten steel“

• A witness said “In the first few weeks, sometimes when a worker would pull a steel beam from the wreckage, the end of the beam would be dripping molten steel”

• A NY Department of Sanitation spokeswoman said “for about two and a half months after the attacks, in addition to its regular duties, NYDS played a major role in debris removal – everything from molten steel beams to human remains…”

The fact that there was molten steel under ground zero for months after 9/11 is very odd, especially since firefighters sprayed millions of gallons of water on the fires and applied high-tech fire retardants.

See also this. – gw

>Human line ‘nearly split in two’

>

Ancient humans started down the path of evolving into two separate species before merging back into a single population, a genetic study suggests.

The genetic split in Africa resulted in distinct populations that lived in isolation for as much as 100,000 years, the scientists say.

This could have been caused by arid conditions driving a wedge between humans in eastern and southern Africa.

Details have been published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

It would be the longest period for which modern human populations have been isolated from one another. But other scientists said it was still too early to reconstruct a meaningful picture of humankind’s early history in Africa. They argue that other scenarios could also account for the data. At the time of the split – some 150,000 years ago – our species, Homo sapiens, was still confined to the African continent.

The results have come from the Genographic Project, a major effort to track human migrations through DNA. The latest conclusions are based on analysis of mitochondrial DNA in present-day African populations. This type of DNA is the genetic material stored in mitochondria – the “powerhouses” of cells. It is passed down from a mother to her offspring, providing a unique record of maternal inheritance.

“We don’t know how long it takes for hominids to fission off into separate species, but clearly they were separated for a very long time,” said Dr Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project. “They came back together again during the Late Stone Age – driven by population expansion.”

Family tree

Although present-day people carry a signature of the ancient split in their DNA, today’s Africans are part of a single population. The researchers compiled a “family tree” of different mitochondrial DNA groupings found in Africa. A major split occurred near the root of the tree as early as 150,000 years ago. On one side of this divide are the mitochondrial lineages now found predominantly in East and West Africa, and all maternal lineages found outside Africa.

On the other side of the divide are lineages predominantly found in the Khoi and San (Khoisan) hunter-gatherer people of southern Africa. Many African populations today harbour a mixture of both. The scientists say the most likely scenario is that two populations went their separate ways early in our evolutionary history.

This gave rise to separate human communities localised to eastern and southern Africa that evolved in isolation for between 50,000 and 100,000 years. This divergence could have been related to climate change: recent studies of ancient climate data suggest that eastern Africa went through a series of massive droughts between 135,000-90,000 years ago.

Lead author Doron Behar, from the Rambam Medical Center in Israel commented: “It is possible the harsh environment and changing climate made populations migrate to other places in order to have a better chance of survival. “Some of them found places where they could and – perhaps – some didn’t. More than that we cannot say.”

Back together

Dr Wells told BBC News: “Once this population reached southern Africa, it was cut off from the eastern African population by these drought events which were on the route between them.” Modern humans are often presumed to have originated in East Africa and then spread out to populate other areas. But the data could equally support an origin in southern Africa followed by a migration to East and West Africa.

The genetic data show that populations came back together as a single, pan-African population about 40,000 years ago. This renewed contact appears to coincide with the development of more advanced stone tool technology and may have been helped by more favourable environmental conditions.

“[The mixing] was two-way to a certain extent, but the majority of mitochondrial lineages seem to have come from north-eastern Africa down to the south,” said Spencer Wells.

But other scientists said different scenarios could explain the data. Dr Sarah Tishkoff, an expert on African population genetics from the University of Pennsylvania, said the Khoisan might once have carried many more of the presumed “East African” lineages but that these could have been lost over time.

“Although there is very deep divergence in the mitochondrial lineages, that can be different from inferring when the populations diverged from one another and there can be many demographic scenarios to account for it,” she told BBC News. She added: “As a general rule of thumb, when mitochondrial genetic lineages split, it will usually precede the population split. It can often be difficult to infer from one to the other.”

The University of Pennsylvania researcher stressed it was not possible to pinpoint where in Africa the populations had once lived – complicating the process of reconstructing scenarios from genetic data. The Genographic Project’s findings are also consistent with the idea – held for some years now – that modern humans had a close brush with extinction in the evolutionary past. The number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the Late Stone Age. – bbc

>The geekiest pants… ever?

>

Designer Erik De Nijs, has stitched together this eye catching pair of “Beauty and the Geek” jeans. These “modern shaped trousers which are often worn by youngsters..” are the perfect solution for Googling quick exits while running from the fashion police. Built into the knees are a pair of crotch rocking speakers, around the back you have the added convenience of a back pocket for your “mouse”, and for you gamers, there is a joystick controller located just behind the front zipper.

vouspens

>Mystery Of Ancient Supercontinent’s Demise Revealed

>

In a paper published in Geophysical Journal International, Dr Graeme Eagles from the Earth Sciences Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, reveals how one of the largest continents ever to exist met its demise.

Gondwana was a ‘supercontinent’ that existed between 500 and 180 million years ago. For the past four decades, geologists have debated how Gondwana eventually broke up, developing a multitude of scenarios which can be loosely grouped into two schools of thought – one theory claiming the continent separated into many small plates, and a second theory claiming it broke into just a few large pieces. Dr Eagles, working with Dr Matthais König from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, has devised a new computer model showing that the supercontinent cracked into two pieces, too heavy to hold itself together.

Gondwana comprised of most of the landmasses in today’s Southern Hemisphere, including Antarctica, South America, Africa, Madagascar, Australia-New Guinea, and New Zealand, as well as Arabia and the Indian subcontinent of the Northern Hemisphere. Between around 250 and 180 million years ago, it formed part of the single supercontinent ‘Pangea’.

Evidence suggests that Gondwana began to break up at around 183 million years ago. Analysing magnetic and gravity anomaly data from some of Gondwana’s first cracking points – fracture zones in the Mozambique Basin and the Riiser-Larsen Sea off Antarctica – Dr Eagles and Dr König reconstructed the paths that each part of Gondwana took as it broke apart. The computer model reveals that the supercontinent divided into just two large, eastern and western plates. Approximately 30 million years later, these two plates started to split to form the familiar continents of today’s Southern Hemisphere.

‘You could say that the process is ongoing as Africa is currently splitting in two along the East African Rift,’ says Dr Eagles. ‘The previously held view of Gondwana initially breaking up into many different pieces was unnecessarily complicated. It gave fuel to the theory that a plume of hot mantle, about 2,000 to 3,000 kilometres wide, began the splitting process. A straight forward split takes the spotlight off plumes as active agents in the supercontinent’s breakup, because the small number of plates involved resembles the pattern of plate tectonics in the rest of Earth’s history during which plumes have played bit parts.’

According to Dr Eagles and Dr König’s study, because supercontinents like Gondwana are gravitationally unstable to begin with, and have very thick crusts in comparison to oceans, they eventually start to collapse under their own weight.  – sd

>Molecular Analysis Confirms Tyrannosaurus Rex’s Evolutionary Link To Birds

>

Putting more meat on the theory that dinosaurs’ closest living relatives are modern-day birds, molecular analysis of a shred of 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex protein — along with that of 21 modern species — confirms that dinosaurs share common ancestry with chickens, ostriches, and to a lesser extent, alligators.

The work, published in the journal Science, represents the first use of molecular data to place a non-avian dinosaur in a phylogenetic tree that traces the evolution of species. The scientists also report that similar analysis of 160,000- to 600,000-year-old collagen protein sequences derived from mastodon bone establishes a close phylogenetic relationship between that extinct species and modern elephants.

“These results match predictions made from skeletal anatomy, providing the first molecular evidence for the evolutionary relationships of a non-avian dinosaur,” says co-author Chris Organ, a postdoctoral researcher in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University. “Even though we only had six peptides — just 89 amino acids — from T. rex, we were able to establish these relationships with a relatively high degree of support. With more data, we’d likely see the T. rex branch on the phylogenetic tree between alligators and chickens and ostriches, though we can’t resolve this position with currently available data.”

Interesting. A chicken is more like a T. rex than an alligator is.

The current paper builds on work reported in Science last year. In that paper, a team headed by John M. Asara and Lewis C. Cantley, both of Beth Israel Deaconess Medi-cal Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS), first captured and sequenced tiny pieces of collagen protein from T. rex. For the current work, Organ and Asara and their colleagues used sophisticated algorithms to compare collagen protein from several dozen species. The goal: placing T. rex on the animal kingdom’s family tree using molecu-lar evidence.

“Most of the collagen sequence was obtained from protein and genome databases but we also needed to sequence some critical organisms, including modern alligator and modern ostrich, by mass spectrometry,” says Asara, director of the mass spectrometry core facility at BIDMC and instructor in pathology at HMS. “We determined that T. rex, in fact, grouped with birds — ostrich and chicken — better than any other organism that we studied. We also show that it groups better with birds than modern reptiles, such as alliga-tors and green anole lizards.”

While scientists have long suspected that birds, and not more basal reptiles, are di-nosaurs’ closest living relatives, for years that hypothesis rested largely on morphological similarities in bird and dinosaur skeletons.

The scraps of dinosaur protein were wrested from a fossil femur discovered in 2003 by John Horner of the Museum of the Rockies in a barren fossil-rich stretch of land that spans Wyoming and Montana. Mary H. Schweitzer of North Carolina State Univer-sity (NCSU) and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences discovered soft-tissue preservation in the T. rex bone in 2005; Asara became involved in analysis of the colla-gen protein because of his expertise in mass spectrometry techniques capable of se-quencing minute amounts of protein from human tumors. While it appears impossible to salvage DNA from the bone, Asara was able to extract precious slivers of protein.

The current work by Organ and Asara suggests that the extracted protein from the fossilized dinosaur tissue is authentic, rather than contamination from a living spe-cies.

“These results support the endogenous origin of the preserved collagen mole-cules,” the researchers write. – sd

>Humans May Lose Battle With Bacteria, Medicinal Chemist’s Research Shows

>

It may not be an ideal topic for polite conversation, but human beings are swarming with bacteria: Even the average healthy adult plays host to about 100 trillion microscopic organisms. Infection takes place when the bacteria get out of hand.

Now, a University of Kansas researcher has penned a history of the struggle between man and bacteria — and warns that humankind someday may lose its advantage.

In the March 28 issue of the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Natural Products, Lester A. Mitscher, a University Distinguished Professor of Medicinal Chemistry, calls for the development of more potent antibiotics necessary for humanity to manage drug-resistant breeds of microbes.

“Antibiotics are essentially selective poisons that kill bacteria and that do not kill us,” Mitscher said.

In his article, “Coevolution: Mankind and Microbes,” Mitscher chronicles the advent of antibiotics in the 20th century. Sulfonamides, the first anti-infectives, were introduced the mid-1930s. Penicillin — “the first true antibiotic” — was employed widely during World War II. In the decades since, dozens of important antibiotics have been developed and marketed around the world.

“These were called ‘miracle drugs,’ ” said Mitscher. “Unfortunately, that had a downside. They were so relatively safe and so effective that we became careless in their use and in our personal habits. That has caused much of the resistance phenomenon we have today.”

Microbial resistance to these drugs has been an ever-increasing problem because of the speedy reproduction and evolution of microorganisms.

“Bacteria that survive the initial onslaught of antibiotics then are increasingly resistant to them,” said Mitscher. “The sensitive proportion of the bacterial population dies, but then the survivors multiply quickly — and they are less sensitive to antibiotics. The sensitivity goes all the way from requiring a longer course of therapy or a higher dose, to being totally unaffected by the antibiotic.”

Humans have overused antibiotics in areas such as agriculture, worsening the dilemma of highly resistant bacteria.

“People are surprised to learn that almost half of all the antibiotics produced in the world are used in animal husbandry,” said Mitscher. “I’m not referring to using antibiotics for curing infections of animals — what I mean is use of antibiotics in relatively small doses as an animal-feed supplement. Animals then grow quicker to a marketable size, and this is seen as a universal good. The difficulty is that use of antibiotics in that setting is an invitation towards resistance. Unfortunately, humans get infected with resistant strains that were generated in animals in this manner.”

These days, with so-called “super-bugs” like Methacillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) making news, resistance is becoming a major public health problem.

“Resistance that started in a hospital setting quickly spread into the community, and now resistance is essentially all around us,” Mitscher said. “That does not mean to say we’re all going to die in agony in the immediate future. But this is an important phenomenon that needs to be addressed more carefully than we have in the past.”

Part of the solution is to use antibiotics sparingly for industrial, agricultural and medical purposes. When an antibiotic is called for to treat an infection the best one should be used with appropriate intensity.

Mitscher said that drug corporations must develop antibiotics with the potential not only to kill microbes but also to inhibit their ability to mutate. These new drugs would be made more effective still if they enlisted the body’s own immune system to battle infections.

Alas, because of the economics of the drug industry, Mitscher said such “triple treat” antibiotics might be a long time coming.

“The pace of antibiotic discovery has fallen off, partly because the intensive research on them has lead to increasingly diminishing returns,” said Mitscher. “Pharmaceutical firms have, for a variety of commercial reasons, de-emphasized antibiotic research in recent decades.” – sd

>Colossal squid comes out of ice

>

Technicians in New Zealand have begun to thaw a rare colossal squid specimen.

The operation to defrost the 10-metre (34 feet) long, half-tonne squid began on Monday afternoon in Wellington following a postponement of 24 hours.

The animal is now sitting in a bath of salt water. Once it is thawed, scientists will begin to dissect it.

Very little is known about colossal squid, which appear to live largely in the cold Antarctic waters and can grow up to 15 metres (50 feet) long.

“They’re incredibly rare – this is probably one of maybe six specimens ever brought up,” said Carol Diebel, director of natural environment at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa centre.

“It’s certainly the one that we’re being really careful about, completely intact and in really fantastic condition.”

The Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni specimen was caught in February 2007 in the Ross Sea. – bbc