Welcome to Medary.com Wednesday, October 09 2024 @ 10:16 PM CST

Current Affairs

Eating fruit could damage your DNA?

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Well, probably not, although everything else you can eat is bad for you, so why not "an apple a day?"

ScienceDaily:
In an advance toward understanding the contradictory health effects of bioflavonoids, scientists in Tennessee are reporting that these natural components of fruits and vegetables poison a key human enzyme critical for the normal function of DNA.
. . .
In their laboratory study, the researchers showed that bioflavonoids poison topoisomerase II in cultured human cells. This enzyme plays important roles in many critical DNA processes and removes knots and tangles from the genome. The enzyme acts by making a double-stranded cut in DNA, passing another segment of the double helix through the break, and reconnecting the broken strands.

What in the world happened?

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I've been on a really big boat going to somewhere named the Panama Canal among other exotic locations.  The full tale of that journey will be told here in the fullness of time, but until then, let's look through the Not-So-Wayback Machine (i.e. the tireless Glenn Reynolds aka Instapundit, the one-man web techno-lego-politico-geek content aggregator) at what happened since I boarded the big boat in Ft. Lauderdale on April 27th:

Let's see . . .

Reaction to the charging of Atlanta cops in the bungled no-knock invasion and killing (murder? manslaughter?) of 90-year old woman's house;

Some silly little blowup about the mercury in compact fluorescent lightbulbs;

Carbon-credit trading is apparently the scam we all really, down deep, thought it was;

Reviews of Indoctrinate U. (see a previous Medary post . . . );

The "last word" (oh, Lord, one could wish that it were so) about George Tenet's book;

"We win, they lose."

Apparently, linking to stories without commenting on them is a bloggie no-no.  Who knew?

It seems that MSNBC ran a program while we were at sea, where their flaming leftist anchors and hosts asked a bunch of Republicans Presidential hopefuls lots and lots and lots of questions about abortion

The "lost" province of Anbar in Iraq, it seems, has been "un-lost."

Tornado video.

A right-center Hungarian immigrant is elected President of France.

James Lilieks gets demoted at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Star-Tribune.  Silly newspaper.

The Most Ethical Congress Ever.


There's more, of course.  Read the whole thing.  (Heh.)

From the enemy's mouth

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Or, why the MRAP is necessary:
we have not forgotten about Palestine, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Andalusia [Spain], the Philippines, and all the other countries… The Islamic State of Iraq is seeking to export the jihad to neighboring countries... The jihad that began in Muslim Afghanistan and then spread to Iraq shall not stop there and will limited by any border. (emphasis mine).

This is not the rantings of a right-wing wacko.  It is a quote (via Counterterrorism Blog) from an interview with a member of Al-Queda in Iraq.

The Democratic Party and their allies in the media are working hard every day to make sure that this guy wins.  To the Democrats:  is your blind hatred of George W. Bush so deep that you can't see that you have sided foursquare with the jihad?

Enter the MRAP

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You got a Hummer.  You think you're hot stuff.  Heh.  That's NUTHIN'.  Get yourself an MRAP--a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle.  Hooah! (Or Oorah! Your mileage may vary. But whatever the mileage is, it won't be very good, heh heh heh.)

The MRAP--photo credit: Lance Cpl. Charles Howard, USMC

 

Indoctrinate U.

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At the core of our intellectual culture, the university, a very peculiar form of myopic intolerance has taken firm root.  This intolerance is aggressively, reflexively, unthinkingly "tolerant" of a dizzying range of "progressive" issues, but becomes even more aggressively intolerant when it identifies a brave (or naive) person on the "wrong" side of those issues.

Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters talks to a Hamline University student who was suspended for merely suggesting, in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech incident, that the university take another look at the universitty's gun-free zone policy.

This is not tolerance.  This is tyranny.

I haven't yet seen the movie Indoctrinate U. but I intend to.  From initial reviews, all those who truly, REALLY believe in tolerance should probably do so as well.

That's no ape, that's a "person!"

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Lawyers want an Austrian court to declare a chimpanzee a "person."

"If we can get Hiasl declared a person, he would have the right to own property. Then, if people wanted to donate something to him, he'd have the right to receive it," said Theuer, who has vowed to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.

Austria isn't the only country where primate rights are being debated. Spain's parliament is considering a bill that would endorse the Great Ape Project, a Seattle-based international initiative to extend "fundamental moral and legal protections" to apes.

Maybe I'm just being a Neanderthal, but I think this is just silly.

Recreating Vietnam

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Last time the Democrats took us down this stop-funding-the-war road, it ended with Cambodian killing fields and 444 Americans in an occupied embassy in Tehran.

It also gave us disco.

God help us all.