Medary.com

Wisconsin guy falls into chocolate vat at a factory, is rescued after over two hours:

"It was in my hair, in my ears, my mouth, everywhere," said (Darmin) Garcia, who has worked at the company for two years. "I felt like I weighed 900 pounds. I couldn't move."
. . .
After more than two hours in the chocolate, does he still have a taste for it?

"Not so much anymore," Garcia said.

And a picture, courtesy the Kenosha, WI Fire Department (via AP):

This news story is just about at the JonBenet level of significance, but it allows me to make a cheap joke with the title of this entry, so:

Candidate Studebaker quits race after arrest (Cleveland Plain Dealer article):

Dayton -- Democratic candidate Stephanie Studebaker notified Montgomery County officials Tuesday that she was quitting her bid for Ohio's 3rd Congressional District, which covers the Dayton area.

Studebaker, 45, had shut down her campaign after she and her husband were arrested for domestic violence over the weekend at their home in a suburban township.

A veterinarian and political newcomer, she was challenging Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, a former Dayton mayor.

Turner rolled up 60 percent of the vote when he ran for re-election in 2004 in nominally Democratic Montgomery County.

Montgomery County authorities got a 9-1-1 call Sunday from a man who said he was the father of Studebaker's husband, Sam. The man said she was beating her spouse.

Not having seen a picture of the former candidate, it's hard to say whether or not this constitutes a "dog bites man" story.

Yeah, I know I'm bad. I'll go sit in the Naughty Spot for a while.

Well, the "war on terror" is officially over.

There's been an arrest in the JonBenet Ramsay murder case.  For some inexplicable reason, this is the lead story on all of the news channels and front-page news in all the newspapers.

Thank God, we can all go back now to the Nihilistic Nineties.  Somebody get Bill Clinton on the line, we're gonna party like it's 1999!

Strategypage (via Instapundit):

Hizbollah suffered a defeat. Their rocket attacks on Israel, while appearing spectacular (nearly 4,000 rockets launched), were unimpressive (39 Israelis killed, half of them Arabs). On the ground, Hizbollah lost nearly 600 of its own personnel, and billions of dollars worth of assets and weapons. Israeli losses were far less.

While Hizbollah can declare this a victory, because it fought Israel without being destroyed, this is no more a victory than that of any other Arab force that has faced Israeli troops and failed. Arabs have been trying to destroy Israel for over half a century, and Hizbollah is the latest to fail. But Hizbollah did more than fail, it scared most Moslems in the Middle East, because it demonstrated the power and violence of the Shia Arab minority. Sunni Arabs, and most Arabs are Sunnis, are very much afraid of Shia Moslems, mainly because most Iranians are Shia, not Arab, and intent on dominating the region, like Iran has done so many times in the past. Hizbollah's recent outburst made it clear that Iran, which subsidizes and arms Hizbollah, has armed power that reaches the Mediterranean. This scares Sunni Arabs because a Shia minority also continues to rule Syria (where most of the people are Sunni). The Shia majority in Iraq, which have not dominated Iraq for over three centuries, is now back in control.

Early in the morning, I really need some help getting started.

Help spelled c-o-f-f-e-e.

The New York Times (via the South Dakota Politics blog) confirms the black goodness which is coffee:

Coffee is not usually thought of as health food, but a number of recent studies suggest that it can be a highly beneficial drink. Researchers have found strong evidence that coffee reduces the risk of several serious ailments, including diabetes, heart disease and cirrhosis of the liver.

Among them is a systematic review of studies published last year in The Journal of the American Medical Association, which concluded that habitual coffee consumption was consistently associated with a lower risk of Type 2 diabetes. Exactly why is not known, but the authors offered several explanations.

Coffee contains antioxidants that help control the cell damage that can contribute to the development of the disease. It is also a source of chlorogenic acid, which has been shown in animal experiments to reduce glucose concentrations.

Caffeine, perhaps coffee’s most famous component, seems to have little to do with it; studies that looked at decaffeinated coffee alone found the same degree of risk reduction.

Larger quantities of coffee seem to be especially helpful in diabetes prevention. In a report that combined statistical data from many studies, researchers found that people who drank four to six cups of coffee a day had a 28 percent reduced risk compared with people who drank two or fewer. Those who drank more than six had a 35 percent risk reduction.

From Yahoo News:

Opponents of Pluto, which was named a planet in 1930, still might spoil for a fight. Earth's moon is larger; so is 2003 UB313 (Xena), about 70 miles wider.

But the IAU said Pluto meets its proposed new definition of a planet: any round object larger than 800 kilometers (nearly 500 miles) in diameter that orbits the sun and has a mass roughly one-12,000th that of Earth. Moons and asteroids will make the grade if they meet those basic tests.

Roundness is key, experts said, because it indicates an object has enough self-gravity to pull itself into a spherical shape. Yet Earth's moon wouldn't qualify because the two bodies' common center of gravity lies below the surface of the Earth.

"People were probably wondering: If they take away Pluto, is Rhode Island next?" Binzel quipped. "There are as many opinions about Pluto as there are astronomers. But Pluto has gravity on its side. By the physics of our proposed definition, Pluto makes it by a long shot."

U.S. Satellite Protection Scheme Could Affect Global Communications

The remediation system aims to protect hundreds of low earth-orbiting satellites from having their onboard electronics ruined by charged particles in unusually intense Van Allen radiation belts "pumped up" by high-altitude nuclear explosions or powerful solar storms.

The approach, which is being pursued by the US Air Force and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, involves the generation of very low frequency radio waves to flush particles from the radiation belts and dump them into the upper atmosphere over one or several days.
. . .
Dr Mark Clilverd from British Antarctic Survey says, "Some planes and ships that rely on HF communications could lose radio contact, and some remote communities that also depend on HF could be isolated for as long as six to seven days, depending on the system's design and how it was operated. GPS signals between ground users and satellites would also be disrupted as they pass through the disturbed ionosphere."

The article implies that this system would, in part, suppress the effects of an electromagnetic pulse attack.  Wild, weird, amazing stuff, if it works.

Much of what passes for news reporting, in all areas, is of the nature of "X happened, causing Y."  The cause-and-effect relationship is simply assumed, asserted, taken for granted.  A typical example is this story:

Mideast cease-fire boosts Wall Street

NEW YORK - Wall Street welcomed a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon Monday, sending stocks higher as oil prices also dropped sharply.

With no economic data and little corporate news of note, investors saw the cease-fire as a buying opportunity after last week's losses. Crude futures fell as traders saw less risk of a supply disruption in the Middle East after the United Nations-mandated cease-fire took effect. A barrel of light crude was quoted at $72.80, down $1.55, on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
. . .
"We're up now on the cease-fire and oil prices, but it's hard to be an optimist right now, at least in the short term, because of the uncertainty over the economy and rates and the Fed," said Jay Suskind, head trader at Ryan Beck & Co. "As the week wears on, everybody's going to be focusing on the economic numbers and the debate over inflation will come back again."

Early on in any academic course in statistics, you learn the phrase "correlation is not causality."  This means that just because we notice that two things seem to happen at the same time, it is not necessarily true that one causes the other.   There may be another, unidentified factor at work.  Or, it might just be a coincidence.  Or, it could just be that someone's trying to yank your chain.

There is a natural human desire to assign easily-understood causes to observed effects.  Many of these asserted causes have little or no actual basis in reality.  This effect is often seen in business reports which purport to explain why the stock market is up one day, and down the next.  When reading these reports, it's very useful to remember another common phrase:

"It ain't necessarily so."

Reuters headline:  No evidence Iran active in Iraq: US general

But look!  Inside the story itself:

(U.S. Military spokesman, Major General William) Caldwell said recently-manufactured Iranian weapons and munitions had been found in Iraq.

"We do believe that some Shi'ite elements have been in Iran receiving training. But the degree to which this is known and endorsed by the government of Iran is uncertain," he said.

Several powerful Shi'ite militias, including the Badr Organization and the Mehdi Army, supporters of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al Sadr, have long-standing ties with Tehran.

Caldwell said the contacts were via "third elements associated with Iran."

"We do know that weapons have been provided and IED (improvised explosive device) technology has been made available to these extremist elements," he said.

So, once again, it depends on what the definition of "is" is . . . or more specifically, what the definition of "active" is.  Providing support, training and arms to illegal Iraqi militias is, according to Reuters, not "active."

I can think of two reasons why, seemingly, most Westerners (Europeans, Americans) don't take the threat of radical fascist Islamism seriously.  (We can't even call it what it is, but instead cloak it within the feckless phrase "war on terror.")

The first possible reason is that the challenge of the radical Islamists to western liberalism is, after all, a completely justified reaction to western imperialism.   Who are we to impose our values of freedom, liberty, fairness, equal rights, and religious tolerance on people who so manifestly refuse and reject all of them?  Western-style liberal freedom and democracy is, after all, simply not compatible with the Islamic mind.  Because of our cultural imperialism and obscene lust for oil, the Islamists have ample justification to strike out against we, the imperialist West.  We've brought it upon ourselves.

The other possible reason is that the Islamic fascists aren't really a threat to us, anyway.  We're so secure, so powerful, so confident in our culture that all of their demonstrations and bombings and beheadings and airliner plots and little wars against the Zionist Entity are as the buzzing of a mosquito in our ears, to be shooed away at our leisure as we sip our martinis and contemplate our next idle desire.  We follow the threats and the wars much like we follow a sports league, keeping scores and stats about how many people were killed on each side, debating calls of the referees and identifying our favorite teams and players.  It's just a game.

The question I have is:  which view is the most arrogant?