Haaretz sympathizes with the terrible bad luck that seems to pursue scientists and engineers who provide assistance to Iran’s nuclear program. It’s really a lot like all the deaths which overtook the people who violated that pharoah’s tomb.
The five nuclear experts killed in a plane crash in northern Russia earlier this week had assisted in the design of an Iranian atomic facility, security sources in Russia said on Thursday.
The five Russian experts were among the 44 passengers killed when the Tupolev-134 plane broke up and caught fire on landing outside the northern city of Petrozavodsk on Monday.
The experts – who included lead designers Sergei Rizhov, Gennadi Benyok, Nicolai Tronov and Russia’s top nuclear technological experts, Andrei Tropinov – worked at Bushehr after the contract for the plant’s construction passed from the German Siemens company to Russian hands.
The five were employed at the Hydropress factory, a member of Russia’s state nuclear corporation, and one of the main companies to contract for the Bushehr construction.
The sources said that the death of the scientists is a great blow to the Russian nuclear industry.
The experts were tasked with completing construction of the plant and ensuring that it would be able to survive an earthquake.
According to the sources, although Iranian nuclear scientists have in the past been involved in unexplained accidents and plane crashes, there is no official suspicion of foul play. Investigators are probing human error and technical malfunction as the causes of the crash.
Careful reading between the lines may discover that there is a message of some kind embedded in this news story.
One of Muffy Aldrich’s friends reminisces about (and defends) fraternity life at Cornell in the mid-1970s.
It’s a funny thing about me and my cronies. For us, college was about growing into manhood; sophomoric antics notwithstanding, we aspired to be grown-ups. Our models, sartorial and otherwise, were our fathers and our friends’ fathers, those stout fellows, which sounds hopelessly square but speaks volumes about who we were. “There is the presence of a father…a force of counsel and support that would have carried one, well-equipped, into manhood,” John Cheever wrote in his journal. “One does not invest the image with brilliance or wealth; it is simply a man in a salt and pepper tweed, sometimes loving, sometimes irascible, and sometimes drunk but always responsible to his son.”
Forgive me if I tend to romanticize the past. Like many of my age, I am bewildered by what it means to be an adult in a culture dominated by the values of children. How are children to be shown the way out of childhood by parents who want to be children themselves?
James Delingpole identifies an authentic instance of settled science: US liberals really are the dumbest creatures on the planet.
[W]hy it is that liberal-lefties manage to be so utterly wrong about everything[?]
“Because they’re stupid,” said a libertarian friend of mine.
“Oh come on, not all of them surely? A bit misguided, maybe but…” I protested.
“No really they’re stupid because they’re not interested in facts. They just want to construct their pretty little narrative about the world, regardless of whether or not it has any bearing on reality. And then they want to dump it on us. And ruin our lives. So not just stupid but evil too.”
Abe Sauer, blogging at The Awl, contends that Rolling Stone’s recent hit-piece on Michele Bachmann by Matt Taibbi represents a classic example of leftie journalism taking deliberate aim at an opponent and then shooting itself in the foot.
The backlash against the lashing out against presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has already begun. Following the Palin blueprint, Bachmann plans on fully leveraging the negative publicity with her base: they see leftist attacks as a point of pride and an indication of strength. ...
It’s forgivable that Rolling Stone’s take-down is at best re-reported and at worst poorly sourced. It’s less forgivable that it’s self-detonating. It’s a screed that warns America that Michele Bachmann is to be taken seriously—right before doing exactly the opposite.
The profile is the kind of battle-axing of Bachmann that is going to do great pageviews for the magazine but ultimately play right into her hand. It gives Bachmann legitimate evidence that the fabled leftist mainstream media is attacking her. Consequently, it will make her more popular with a base that looks for which conservative leader is being most reviled in the media, and then assumes that person is their best bet. (It’s not a coincidence that Tim Pawlenty has completely avoided harsh criticism from the MSM while at the same time being unable to gain traction with Tea Party-influenced primary voters.)
Not only is the profile unnecessarily mean, it’s sloppy. ...
On the same day Taibbi’s story hit the web, The Blaze called it a “seemingly slanderous” piece that “attacks Bachmann’s faith.” Elsewhere it was called an “anti-Christian hit piece.” By tomorrow, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Bachmann’s own campaign distributing photocopies of it in Iowa.
But Bremer’s greatest complaint is Rolling Stone “smearing the town of Stillwater as some whites-only, wealthy gated community that propelled Bachmann to the national scene.” And Avidor said that “the smear of Stillwater is what sticks out for me.”
“I can’t believe he ever came here,” Bremer said. Actually, he didn’t: Taibbi confirmed to me that he never set foot in Minnesota for the piece.
Middle Eastern cartoon accusing ISI of assisting Osama
The New York Times reports a story leaked by US intelligence officials which connects the dots between the late Osama bin Laden and Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency.
The cellphone of Osama bin Laden’s trusted courier, which was recovered in the raid that killed both men in Pakistan last month, contained contacts to a militant group that is a longtime asset of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, senior American officials who have been briefed on the findings say.
The discovery indicates that Bin Laden used the group, Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen, as part of his support network inside the country, the officials and others said. But it also raised tantalizing questions about whether the group and others like it helped shelter and support Bin Laden on behalf of Pakistan’s spy agency, given that it had mentored Harakat and allowed it to operate in Pakistan for at least 20 years, the officials and analysts said.
Out-of-date “Heather Has Two Mommies” controversy to be superseded by the hip new “Kate Has Three Mommies” model?
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On a leafy drive in west Los Angeles, at a newly renovated home with cathedral ceilings and a backyard pool, 4-year-old Kate Eisenpresser-Davis’ friends have been known to pose an intriguing question: “Why does Kate have three mommies?”
Lisa Eisenpresser, 44, and her partner, Angela Courtin, 38, share custody of Kate with Eisenpresser’s ex-partner.
When asked to describe their life, Eisenpresser and Courtin respond with the same word: “Normal.” Days are spent searching for the right balance between work and home, and zigzagging through Mar Vista to meetings, school and gymnastics.
Courtin is pregnant. Kate will soon have a sister, Phoebe, conceived from Eisenpresser’s egg and sperm from a donor — the same 6-foot-1 Harvard grad, who scored a 1580 on the SAT, who served as Kate’s donor.
“It’s almost like I’m too busy to be thinking too deeply about being gay and different,” Eisenpresser said.
Maybe she shouldn’t bother. According to a Times analysis of new U.S. Census figures, the Eisenpresser-Courtin-Davises are on the leading edge of change — of a steady evolution in the meaning of “family” and “home” in California.
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J continues:
But what the heck kind of woman not only tells the media that the sperm donor that facilitated her childbearing is a Harvard grad but tells the media his frickin’ SAT scores? (Unfortunately, I can’t evaluate how awestruck I ought to be without more information on whether the reported score was generated before or after the various dumbing-down “renormings” of the scoring system.)
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T responds:
Presumably the singing groups will soon need to update their repertoires to include “Your Daddy Was a Yale Sperm….”*.
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A reference to the old-time Yale a capella singing group song “Your Daddy is a Yale Man,” which not every reader may be familiar with, so here are the 2009 Whiffenpoofs performing same:
Ten years ago, General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, decided to improve the morale of the ordinary soldier by allowing him, too, to don the chic and sporty black beret, previously worn only by elite Ranger units.
But, as Gilbert and Sullivan noted in their Savoy opera of 1889 The Gondoliers: “If everybody’s somebody, then no one’s anybody.”
Apart from all that, berets are pretty silly looking and they don’t keep the sun out of your eyes. They are fussy to put on, needing a lot of adjusting, and they really look goofy with the digital pattern desert camouflage Army Combat Uniform used operationally every day.
These pictures are just lurid images of vultures consuming a human corpse and some Tibetan funerary practices which are actually rather worse. Looking at these will give you nightmares, so do not click on either link.
Who would have imagined that Knife Collecting guru Bernard Levine is a Harvard ‘69 dropout, who became an expert on knives as a way of surviving in the city on the Bay back in the era of the Summer of Love?
In February 1969, Levine headed west, looking to connect with a love interest in San Francisco—who promptly returned east to enroll in college. He knocked about the city for a couple of years, working as a stevedore and in construction. His first job, hanging sheetrock, had five other Harvard students on the site. “I realized that I wasn’t strong enough to do this kind of work,” he says, “and that it wasn’t getting me far enough away from Harvard!”
He tried a small business gathering wild yarrow stalks in the hills near San Francisco, which natural food stores sold in bundles of 50 because dividing piles of yarrow is a classical method of consulting the I Ching. “Then they found a lower-priced source,” Levine says. “That was my first lesson in business.”
In September 1971, a couple at the house Levine lived in invited him to come to a flea market; they were moving and had some items to sell. He went to a Goodwill store to find something he might sell at the flea market, and purchased a box of old knives for $3.00—30 knives, as it turned out, at a dime each. “I knew less than nothing about knives,” he says. “The little I knew was wrong. But I spread my knives out on a cloth and was overwhelmed by people.”
Levine learned that there were knife collectors, and the brand names that were collectible. “It was a revelation,” he admits. He continued selling knives at flea markets on weekends. “It turned out to be much longer hours than any job,” he says. “I’d spend all week scrounging up knives and on Friday bring them to a cutlery shop in North Beach where they’d restore them for me. The grandfather there—born in Romania in 1885—taught me a lot about the European cutlery business in the early twentieth century.
“My great love in school had been history,” he says. “Old knives are a good window into history, and a window that looks out in every direction.” From the very first day, Levine recorded every knife he sold, including brand markings and a description, eventually logging 13,000 entries.
One of the correspondents on a Fox Hunters’ email list commented today:
“When I saw the headline in my email ‘Huntsman announces run for president,’ my first thought was ‘Why would a huntsman want to run for president? He will never get to hunt with all the security details!’”
Three Bassets Bleu de Gascogne from the Ashland Bassets of Warrenton, Virginia: Vitamine, Veloce, Verdict (photo: Karen L. Myers)
Karen’s photo essay (771 photos!) of the Second Day of the Bryn Mawr Hound Show was uploaded yesterday. Day 2, Saturday, is the show itself, the hound classes and the pack trials.
Science quotes, from a lecture given at the 7th World Congress on Mummy Studies, the latest findings concerning Europe’s oldest natural human mummy, found in September 1991 in the Ötztal Alps, near Hauslabjoch on the border between Austria and Italy and usually referred to as Ötzi or the Iceman.
Less than 2 hours before he hiked his last steps in the Tyrolean Alps 5000 years ago, Ötzi the Iceman fueled up on a last meal of ibex meat. That was the conclusion of a talk here last week at the 7th World Congress on Mummy Studies, during which researchers—armed with Ötzi’s newly sequenced genome and a detailed dental analysis—also concluded that the Iceman had brown eyes and probably wasn’t much of a tooth brusher.
The Iceman, discovered in the Italian Alps in 1991 some 5200 years after his death, has been a gold mine of information about Neolithic life, as researchers have extensively studied his gear—copper ax, hide and leather clothing, and accessories—and his body. Previous research on the Iceman’s meals focused on fecal material removed from his bowels. The contents showed that he dined on red deer meat and possibly cereal some 4 hours before his death.
But a team led by microbiologist Frank Maixner of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, recently reexamined computed tomography scans taken in 2005 and spotted, for the first time, the Iceman’s stomach. As the researchers reported at the meeting, the organ had moved upward to an unusual position, and it looked full. When they took a sample of the stomach contents and sequenced the DNA of the animal fibers they found, they discovered that Ötzi, just 30 to 120 minutes before his death, had dined on the meat of an Alpine ibex, an animal that frequents high elevations and whose body parts were once thought to possess medicinal qualities.
The new findings are “cutting edge” says Niels Lynnerup, a specialist in forensic medicine at the University of Copenhagen. “We are now inching our way to the last minutes of the Iceman.”
In a separate presentation, dentist Roger Seiler and anatomist Frank Rühli of the Centre for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zürich, examined the dental health of the Iceman, who probably died between the age of 35 and 40. Previously, researchers examining radiological images of his teeth discerned no trace of cavities or other dental problems. But the Swiss team created new three-dimensional images of the ancient traveler’s dentition. These showed that the Iceman suffered a blunt force trauma to two teeth—possibly a blow to the mouth—at least several days before his death and was plagued by both periodontal disease and cavities. The cavities, Seiler said in his talk, confirm that the Iceman ate a diet abounding in carbohydrates, such as bread or cereal, and reveal that he possessed a “heavy bacterial dose on these teeth.”
Local man admires visiting Emperor Penguin on Peka Peka Beach on the North(!) Island of New Zealand
For the first time in 44 years, an estimated-to-be 10-months-old Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) waddled ashore on Peka Peka Beach near the bottom of the North Island of New Zealand yesterday, approximately 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) from its native Antarctic waters.
The immature Penguin is roughly 31” tall. Emperor Penguins are the largest Penguin species and can reach 48”.
News reports are indulging in the usual kinds of empty speculation. Reports of the Penguin’s possible thirst (it has been observed to be eating wet sand) are probably not well-founded. Penguins can drink salt water.
The only other confirmed sighting of a wild Emperor in New Zealand was in 1967 at the southern Oreti Beach.
is a key reference in any collector’s library and Bernard Levine’s earlier 
is a classic book on a very special subject.
