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Okay, mostly I just wanted an excuse to re-use that headline. The sub-editor deserves a prize.
Story, here.
NEW YORK — Two men wheeled a dead man through the streets in an office chair to a check-cashing store and tried to cash his Social Security check before being arrested on fraud charges, police said.
If this isn’t a WTF, I don’t know what is.
BAYOU LA BATRE, Ala. — A man angered after a dispute with his wife confessed to tossing his four young children off a bridge, authorities said Wednesday as they searched murky waters for the bodies.Lam Luong, 37, who is charged with four counts of capital murder, told authorities Tuesday night that he drove to the Dauphin Island bridge and dropped the children from a span that reaches 80 feet in places, said Detective Scott Rivera.
Luong came to coastal Alabama from Vietnam in 1984 and worked in the commercial fishing industry as a shrimper, Police Chief John Joyner and a relative said. He had argued with his wife, Ngoc Phan, before taking the children, he said.
Authorities were searching a 100-square-mile area and waters as deep as 55 feet. The search included divers and cadaver dogs in small boats, as well as three helicopters, Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran said.
Joyner said he feared the search of the Intracoastal Waterway below the bridge would be hampered by bad weather and choppy waters. The bridge extends from the mainland to Dauphin Island, which lies between the waterway and the Gulf of Mexico.
The couple lived with Phan’s mother at Bayou La Batre, a fishing village with a large Southeast Asian community. Phan’s brother-in-law Kam Phengsisomboun, who is from Thailand, said the couple moved back to the area from Hinesville, Ga., only a couple of weeks ago.
They argued Sunday night and again Monday, he said. Luong left the home with two of the children, then later came back for the other two, he said.
The family initially feared the children had been traded to support a drug habit, Phengsisomboun said. Luong had a crack cocaine habit and had spent an insurance settlement from an automobile accident rapidly, he said, and authorities confirmed Luong had a history of drug offenses.
Inject, Shoot, Hang OR Gas this piece of waste, immediately after the verdict is read and announced
We all know about the two Lancet studies and the controversy invoked by their ‘estimates’ of the Iraqi death toll, especially the supposed 650,000 killed by 2006. Last week, The National Journal published an article by Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon; look no further for the most extensive critique, not only of the studies’ methodology, but also of the political bias of the writers themselves.
Ad hominem attacks, you might say, are irrelevant to any intelligent debate, and you would be right – up to a point. An ad hominem by itself is meaningless, but added to a solid rebuttal of the data helps provide a more complete picture.
Therefore, would it surprise anyone to learn that John Tirman, who commissioned the study, has also written a book called 100 Ways America is Screwing Up the World ? Or that $46,000 of the money he raised came from George Soros’ Open Society Institute? These are people with an agenda, and it would seem two of the study authors, Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham, have similar sympathies:
Soros is not the only person associated with the Lancet studies who had one eye on the data and the other on the U.S. political calendar. In 2004, Roberts conceded that he opposed the Iraq invasion from the outset, and — in a much more troubling admission — said that he had e-mailed the first study to The Lancet on September 30, 2004, “under the condition that it come out before the election.” Burnham admitted that he set the same condition for Lancet II. “We wanted to get the survey out before the election, if at all possible,” he said.
“Les and Gil put themselves in position to be criticized on the basis of their views,” Garfield concedes, before adding, “But you can have an opinion and still do good science.” Perhaps, but the Lancet editor who agreed to rush their study into print, with an expedited peer-review process and without seeing the surveyors’ original data, also makes no secret of his leftist politics. At a September 2006 rally in Manchester, England, Horton declared, “This axis of Anglo-American imperialism extends its influence through war and conflict, gathering power and wealth as it goes, so millions of people are left to die in poverty and disease.” His speech can be viewed on YouTube.
In 2006, Roberts sought Democratic nomination for New York’s 24th Congressional District.
Roberts, who opposed removing Saddam from power, is the most politically outspoken of the authors. He initiated the first Lancet study and repeatedly used its conclusions to criticize Bush. “I consider myself an advocate,” Roberts told an interviewer in early 2007.
Perhaps these facts help us understand why the two Lancet studies estimate an Iraqi mortality rate more than 10 time’s that of the Iraqi Body Count figures. They certainly enlighten us as to why both studies underwent accelerated peer-review in order to be published before their respective US elections. The authors have denied access to their raw data, citing fears for the safety of those interviewed but I’m clearly not alone here in believing there are enough questions surrounding the studies to warrant further inquiry. As current editor of the Lancet himself says:
“Anything [the authors] can do to strengthen the credibility of the Lancet paper,” Horton told NJ, “would be very welcome.” If clear evidence of misconduct is presented to The Lancet, “we would be happy to go ask the authors and the institution for an official inquiry, and we would then abide by the conclusion of that inquiry.”
…who seems to have gotten a nice new car stereo system for Christmas.
xkcd.com: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
spot_the_dog
Polish man finds his wife… working in a whorehouse.
They’re now divorcing. I think this is a mistake. He likes to visit whorehouses/she likes to work in whorehouses: They’re a match made in… wherever.
Way I see it, America needs a president who’s gonna somehow un-royally screw up the Middle East, do some serious cleaning up after you dropped your pants and took a steaming dump all over the fucking environment, and—boom!—restore dignity, honor, and all that shit to these United States.
See, I got solutions to all your problems—I got ’em right here in my big, hairy ballsack.
HAVANA (Reuters) – Philip Agee, a former CIA spy who exposed its undercover operations in Latin America in a 1975 book, died in Havana, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma said on Wednesday.
Agee, 72, died on Monday night, the newspaper said, calling him a “loyal friend of Cuba and staunch defender of the people’s struggle for a better world.”
Actually, I’d call the guy a traitor, who should have died at a much earlier age….Like from hanging, gas or electrocution.
where you go to sleep on the couch because you don’t own a bed, and when you wake up, you’re in a waterbed. A leaky one at that. Doomed to repeat the day over and over.
Well, it isn’t exactly like that, but I see the residents have rearranged all the furniture. I think I like it. More homey-like.
It appears that rearranging the furniture is all the rage today. Plus, our favorite hawk from Iowa liveblogged the Iowa caucuses, which, while it’s old news, is about the only interesting thing there is to read about the campaign so far.
Last weekend on this site Tizona called attention to a video showing a quadriplegic man whose handicapped-accessible van, which he needs for transporting his motorised scooter, was heartlessly stolen. It brought to mind an article I had recently read about a doctor and former documentary maker in America who, for the past 10 years, has been equipping people in wheelchairs with video cameras and asking them to document their daily lives.
In a recent New England Journal of Medicine article, Dr. Gretchen Berland provides an overview of what she found. Dr. Berland has also turned the footage from three participants; one who used a wheelchair as a result of a cervical spinal cord injury, one due to multiple sclerosis, and one because of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease); into a film called Rolling.
As someone who has had about 10 years’ worth of experience with Australia’s healthcare system in the past 6 months, I found Dr. Berland’s calls for special attention to be paid to creating a more patient-centered health care system in America very interesting. Some of the participants’ stories also make me think more about news items I’ve fairly well just skimmed over in the past couple of years, such as two separate incidents here in Perth where people in motorised wheelchairs were hit and killed on the train tracks.
There are some excerpts from her film Rolling available on the NEJM web site. I really, really urge people to set aside a little time and have a look. Dr. Berland says, “The three participants in this project taught me to see the world in ways I had never imagined.”
And the more ways in which we can try to see the world, the better.
____________________________________________
The View from the Other Side — Patients, Doctors, and the Power of a Camera (Gretchen Berland, M.D., New England Journal of Medicine)
Excerpts from Rolling featuring Galen Buckwalter, Ernie Wallengren, and Vicki Elman
(cross-posted here)
spot_the_dog
Do not, I repeat, do not, run down wooden stairs with nylon stockings on your feet.
Warning: The rest of this post is quite alarming, so only click for more if you think you’re prepared for it.
We’re messing with the template again.
Spreading the chairs out, restocking the bar, stuff like that.
Nothing to worry about.
The Tizona Group 