Sinatra song updated.

link

Independent:

Scientists have discovered a dramatic variation in the genetic make-up of humans that could lead to a fundamental reappraisal of what causes incurable diseases and could provide a greater understanding of mankind.

The discovery has astonished scientists studying the human genome – the genetic recipe of man. Until now it was believed the variation between people was due largely to differences in the sequences of the individual ” letters” of the genome.

It now appears much of the variation is explained instead by people having multiple copies of some key genes that make up the human genome.

Until now it was assumed that the human genome, or “book of life”, is largely the same for everyone, save for a few spelling differences in some of the words. Instead, the findings suggest that the book contains entire sentences, paragraphs or even whole pages that are repeated any number of times.

The findings mean that instead of humanity being 99.9 per cent identical, as previously believed, we are at least 10 times more different between one another than once thought – which could explain why some people are prone to serious diseases.

The studies published today have found that instead of having just two copies of each gene – one from each parent – people can carry many copies, but just how many can vary between one person and the next.

The studies suggest variations in the number of copies of genes is normal and healthy. But the scientists also believe many diseases may be triggered by an abnormal loss or gain in the copies of some key genes.

Another implication of the finding is that we are more different to our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, than previously assumed from earlier studies. Instead of being 99 per cent similar, we are more likely to be about 96 per cent similar.

An Open Letter to Drug Czar William Bennett from the late Milton Friedman.

92 Year Old Lady Shot By Police

Landing on Plymouth Rock

Last year, Mike Franc, at Human Events, identified the real reason for America’s annual Thanksgiving celebration.

Writing in his diary of the dire economic straits and self-destructive behavior that consumed his fellow Puritans shortly after their arrival, Governor William Bradford painted a picture of destitute settlers selling their clothes and bed coverings for food while others “became servants to the Indians,” cutting wood and fetching water in exchange for “a capful of corn.” The most desperate among them starved, with Bradford recounting how one settler, in gathering shellfish along the shore, “was so weak … he stuck fast in the mud and was found dead in the place.”

The colony’s leaders identified the source of their problem as a particularly vile form of what Bradford called “communism.” Property in Plymouth Colony, he observed, was communally owned and cultivated. This system (“taking away of property and bringing [it] into a commonwealth”) bred “confusion and discontent” and “retarded much employment that would have been to [the settlers’] benefit and comfort.”

Just how did the Pilgrims solve the problem of famine? In addition to receiving help from the local Indians in farming, they decided allow the private ownership of individual plots of land.

On the brink of extermination, the Colony’s leaders changed course and allotted a parcel of land to each settler, hoping the private ownership of farmland would encourage self-sufficiency and lead to the cultivation of more corn and other foodstuffs.

As Adam Smith would have predicted, this new system worked famously. “This had very good success,” Bradford reported, “for it made all hands very industrious.” In fact, “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been” and productivity increased. “Women,” for example, “went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn.”

The famine that nearly wiped out the Pilgrims in 1623 gave way to a period of agricultural abundance that enabled the Massachusetts settlers to set down permanent roots in the New World, prosper, and play an indispensable role in the ultimate success of the American experiment.

A profoundly religious man, Bradford saw the hand of God in the Pilgrims’ economic recovery. Their success, he observed, “may well evince the vanity of that conceit…that the taking away of property… would make [men] happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.” Bradford surmised, “God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them.”

The real story of Thanksgiving is the triumph of capitalism and individualism over collectivism and socialism, which is the summation of the story of America.

The First Thanksgiving

Another atrocity produced by our absurd drug laws. It sounds like the lady died bravely defending her home.

Houston Chronicle:

ATLANTA — Police who shot and killed a 92-year-old woman after she wounded three officers were looking for a man who sold drugs to undercover agents at her home earlier that day, authorities said Wednesday.

The agents got a search warrant after buying drugs Tuesday afternoon from a man in Kathryn Johnston’s home, Assistant Police Chief Alan Dreher said.

Johnston’s niece, Sarah Dozier, said her aunt likely had reason to shoot the three plainclothes investigators as they stormed her house.

“My aunt was in good health. I’m sure she panicked when they kicked that door down,” Dozier told WAGA-TV, adding that there were no drugs in the house. “There was no reason they had to go in there and shoot her down like a dog.”

Police insisted the officers did everything right before entering the home, despite suggestions from the woman’s neighbors and relatives that it was a case of mistaken identity.

Johnston was the only resident in the house at the time and had lived there for about 17 years, Dreher said. The officers “knocked and announced” before they forced open the door and were justified in shooting once fired upon, he said.

Rev. Markel Hutchins, a civil rights activist and spokesman for the family, said he could understand why Johnston would have a gun because she lived in a high-crime area. “She was afraid,” Hutchins said. “This is a horrifying situation in a neighborhood where crime happens often. This incident is a result of a mix-up.”

As the officers approached the house around 7 p.m., a woman inside started shooting, striking each of them, said Officer Joe Cobb, a police spokesman.

One was hit in the arm, another in a the leg and the third in the leg, face and chest, with the chest shot striking a bullet-resistant vest. The officers were taken to a hospital for treatment, and all three were expected to recover, police said.

Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard said his office is conducting its own independent investigation into the shooting, but said a preliminary review shows the officers had a legal right to search the home.

Hutchins said he would try to meet with Police Chief Richard Pennington and would meet with lawyers.

When it came to incinerating gunowners;

or, when it came to repatriating children to live under Communism;

Janet Reno did not have a lot of qualms.

But, suddenly, here’s Janet Reno questioning the right of the Bush Administration to deny illegal combatants, captured overseas bearing arms aganst the military forces of the United States, the identical Constitutional Rights possessed by United States citizens in times of peace.

Bloomberg

In Triple Cross, the third volume of his investigative trilogy on federal mishandling of the World Trade Center bombing investigation, Peter Lance identifies none other than Plame Game prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as the FBI official most responsible for allowing a senior Al Qaeda operative closely tied to Bin Laden himself to remain operational and at-large under the protection of the US Government.

Toronto Sun:

In the al-Qaida camps, he was known as Abu Mohamed al Amriki — “Father Mohamed the American.” And, until he was finally arrested and convicted in 2000 — after two decades of high profile terrorism, including helping to plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa — Ali Mohamed roamed free and even protected.

He was so untouchable, he was taken from quick-thinking Canadian officials, who suspected he may have been a threat.

In the most intimate and thorough way possible, Triple Cross chronicles one of the most vicious spies of our time.

Mohamed was a U.S. Army sergeant, FBI operative and possible CIA asset, who, on the side, was a friend to Osama bin Laden, trained the leader’s bodyguards, was instrumental in killing Americans and was the middle-man in an historic and vile union between bin Laden’s forces and the Lebanese Hezbollah. His fingerprints can be traced to those who assassinated Jewish militant Meir Kahane and blew up the first truck bomb to hit the World Trade Centre.

He made no real secret about being a die-hard jihadi. But the U.S. refused to accept him for what he really was.

“In the annals of espionage, few men have moved in and out of the deep black world between the hunters and the hunted with as much audacity as Ali Mohamed,” Lance, a former ABC News producer, writes in his book.

Mohamed worked his triple-cross as U.S. authorities were — Lance argues — distracted with inner-politics, their own lives, the mob and even a horiffic murder. But more than he does with anyone else, Lance points an accusing finger at celebrated U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who directed the FBI’s elite bin Laden squad, which, Lance argues, allowed Mohamed to remain an active al-Qaida agent.

Lance writes Fitzgerald and other top officials ignored important al-Qaida-related evidence, including proof in 1996 of a liquid-based airliner bomb — a precursor to last August’s plot revealed by British intelligence.

Lance pinpoints how, in 1991, the FBI, knowing of a New Jersey mail box store with direct links to al-Qaida, failed to keep it under watch. Just six years later, two of the 9/11 hijackers got their fake IDs at the same location.

Mohamed himself had come to the FBI’s attention in 1989, when the agency’s Special Operations Group photographed a cell of his trainees firing AK-47s at a Long Island shooting range. The bureau would drop that investigation — as it would in many other cases involving the terror spy.

Peter Dale Scott at Global Research:

It is now generally admitted that Ali Mohamed (known in the al Qaeda camps as Abu Mohamed al Amriki — “Father Mohamed the American”) worked for the FBI, the CIA, and U.S. Special Forces. As he later confessed in court, he also aided the terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, a co-founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and by then an aide to bin Laden, when he visited America to raise money.

The 9/11 Report mentioned him, and said that the plotters against the U.S. Embassy in Kenya were “led” (their word) by Ali Mohamed. That’s the Report’s only reference to him, though it’s not all they heard.

Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney who negotiated a plea bargain and confession from Ali Mohamed, said this in testimony to the Commission

Ali Mohamed. …. trained most of al Qaeda’s top leadership — including Bin Laden and Zawahiri — and most of al Qaeda’s top trainers. He gave some training to persons who would later carry out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing…. From 1994 until his arrest in 1998, he lived as an American citizen in California, applying for jobs as an FBI translator.

Patrick Fitzgerald knew Ali Mohamed well. In 1994 he had named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in the New York landmarks case, yet allowed him to remain free. This was because, as Fitzgerald knew, Ali Mohamed was an FBI informant, from at least 1993 and maybe 1989. Thus, from 1994 “until his arrest in 1998 [by which time the 9/11 plot was well under way], Mohamed shuttled between California, Afghanistan, Kenya, Somalia and at least a dozen other countries.” Shortly after 9/11, Larry C. Johnson, a former State Department and CIA official, faulted the FBI publicly for using Mohamed as an informant, when it should have recognized that the man was a high-ranking terrorist plotting against the United States.

Byron York wonders (along with the rest of us) if Nancy Pelosi will turn over oversight of US Intelligence to the man she voted to remove for corruption from the federal bench.

Not very surprising, is it? considering the fact that 18-term representative Charles Bernard Rangel is the happy proprietor of his own welfare plantation. We all know that if it’s statist, collectivist, and coercive, Charlie Rangel is for it.

Apparently, Mr. Graham, the third Senator from New York, is experiencing a certain amount of temptation to sign on board as well.

Scrappleface leaks the real Pentagon document:

(2006-11-20) — According to a newly pre-released secret Pentagon document, the U.S. military is considering three options for dealing with the situation in Iraq, dubbed ‘Go Public, Go Home and Go Mecca.’

The unnamed Pentagon official in charge of leaking national security secrets to the Washington Post said it’s possible that the U.S. could adopt some combination of the three.

He summarized the strategy options as follows:

1. Go Public: Consistently leak top-secret Pentagon strategy deliberations to the news media as a way of neutralizing the unfair “element of surprise”, and of building trust by being more transparent with the enemy.

2. Go Home: Remove the only reason for terrorism by bringing all U.S. troops back home, and also allowing all U.S.-trained Iraqi troops to emigrate to the U.S.

3. Go Mecca: Deal “head on” with the heart of the conflict, by amending the U.S. Constitution to bring it into compliance with Islamic Sharia law.

But she finds what the democrats will do with the opportunity presented by their recent electoral success is unclear.

As for Democrats, they have a unique opportunity, one they haven’t had in 14 years, to redefine for the public what their party is. It is their chance to change their public label. Now, with the cameras of the country trained on Capitol Hill, they can throw off the old baggage of the 1960s and ’70s and erase the cartoon version of their party, which is culturally radical, weak in its defense of America, profligate, McGovernite, bitterly devoted to the demands of its groups as opposed to the needs of America.

In 1992 the young Southern moderate Bill Clinton got a chance to erase the cartoon, and he did, for a while. But he quickly slid back, undone by his own confusion as to the purpose of his power, and reinforced the public’s worst assumptions about his party with everything from the health-care fiasco to using the Lincoln bedroom as a comp room for big rollers to horrifying fund-raising and personal scandals. What he did prove — and the area in which he did break away from the cartoon version of Democrats — was that he didn’t dislike money or its makers. He did nothing to harm Wall Street, little to slow the economy, displayed a personal tropism toward the rich. Beyond that he didn’t change his party’s rep.

Can Nancy Pelosi? She looked radiant when she was elected by the Democratic conference Thursday, and she was careful to speak — everyone was careful to speak — of children and grandchildren. No one held up a sign saying “We’re Normal,” but the message was sent.

Can the Democrats spend the next two years showing a moderate, centrist, mature face to the country? Republicans say — this is the big phrase — “It’s not in their DNA.” But betting on the other guy’s inability to change is not, really, a plan. And these Democrats, or many of them, seem a rising generation of pragmatists. They seem to know what’s at stake. If they scare America, they give Republicans a ready campaign theme for 2008: If you liked the crazy Democratic Congress, you’ll love a crazy Democratic White House.

Can they go down the center, or will radicalism of various sorts erupt and gain sway? No one knows. The Democrats don’t know. The answer is going to help shape America’s future political history. And it will help shape George Bush’s. If the Democrats are radical, he will look more reasonable, not only in the eyes of the public but of history. If the Democrats are moderate, I think he will do something surprising, and yet much in line with his personality and nature.

She predicts, on the other hand, that George W. Bush will outdo both the Paleocons and the Neocons in dumping the Republicans.

Old affection and regard for the White House and the president have dissipated. But fear remains. They have two more years, they have the power to nominate, they have money. And so a party that might begin the process of refinding itself by thoughtfully detaching from the White House will, likely, not.

But I see a surprise coming.

What is the first thing men do when they’re drowning? They save themselves. With the waters rising on every side the president will attempt to re-enact his first and most personally satisfying political success when, as governor of Texas, he won plaudits and popularity for working hand in glove with Democrats. He accepted many Democratic assumptions — he shared them, it wasn’t hard.

The White House’s reaction to the recent election was, essentially, Now we can get our immigration bill through with the Democrats. That was a clue. I suspect the president will over the next two years do to Republicans what he did to Donald Rumsfeld: over the side, under the bus and off the sled.

He doesn’t need them. They’re not popular. They’re not where the action is. He’ll work closely with Democrats, gain in time new and admiring press — “Bush has grown,” etc.

This is the path he will take to build his popularity and create a new legacy. If the Democrats let him. It would be in their interests, so I think maybe they will.

Michael Fumento has photos from his most recent trip to Iraq.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.