Medary.com

80's rock group Blondie gets into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Via Winds of Change, a story from Newsweek/MSNBC: On Call in Hell.

Navy doctor Lt. Commander Richard Jadick volunteers to go to Iraq:

The night before the assault, Jadick hopped into a command Humvee taking a reconnaissance mission from the headquarters base outside the city. He wanted to see what he was up against. In treating traumatic injuries, there is something known as the golden hour. A badly injured person who gets to the hospital within an hour is much more likely to be saved. But Jadick knew that in combat the "golden hour" doesn't exist. Left unaided, said Jadick, the wounded "could die in 15 minutes, and there are some things that could kill them in six minutes. If they had an arterial bleed, it could be three minutes."

Worth clicking through to the MSNBC site to read the entire article.

The People's Cube, an anti-Marxist site, appears to have been banned by Google:

Dear comrades at Google:

At some point, quite recently, our popular site "The People's Cube" (ThePeoplesCube.com) was purged from Google search results. MSN , Yahoo and other search engines still have it - but Google has erased/blocked any link to the site in its database. One can still find links to us from other sites - but not even one from Google to ThePeoplesCube.com. We tried American, French, German, British, Australian, and Russian versions of Google - they used to give us traffic only a few days ago - but all we got was the same line in various languages: Sorry, no information is available for the URL thepeoplescube.com. And if we clicked on Find web pages from the site thepeoplescube.com we got Your search - site:thepeoplescube.com - did not match any documents.

Any anti-Marxist site is a friend of Medary.com.

Why are Army National Guard recruiters being so successful in recruiting? Well, maybe in part because it's not as bad in Iraq as the Old Media wants you to believe:

A driving force in this year's early success, Guard leaders say, is that thousands of Guard members have now returned from Iraq and are reaching out to friends, old classmates and co-workers -- widening the face-to-face contacts that officials say are critical to recruiting. Guard members "are staying with us and want to fill up units with their neighbors and friends," Blum said in an interview. "Now that they're back -- watch out."

The Citizen Soldiers are back, and they're not happy with Old Media.

Hat tip: American Spectator.

Israel's Defense Minister:

Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz was asked whether Israel was ready to use military action if the Security Council proved unable to act against what Israel and the West believe is a covert Iranian nuclear weapons programme.

"My answer to this question is that the state of Israel has the right give all the security that is needed to the people in Israel. We have to defend ourselves," Mofaz told Reuters after a meeting with his German counterpart Franz Josef Jung.

Everybody say "uh-oh!"

Space.com has another article on scientists taking seriously warp drive for space travel.

So you're looking for the latest in faster-than-light interstellar travel via traversable wormholes? That's one theme among many discussed at Space Technology & Applications International Forum (STAIF), a meeting held here Feb. 12-16 that brought together more than 600 experts to thrash out a range of space exploration issues.

Along with the run-of-the-mill space debates of the day, STAIF has also become a respected venue for researchers that dabble in the exotic, the thought-provoking novel, or the downright weird anomaly.

STAIF's web site is here.

A random sampling, from Yahoo! News Top Stories:

Fastow says Lay lied about Enron's problems

Stone Offers Kisses for Mideast Peace

Paisley Leads ACM Nominations With Six

Hatcher Discloses She Was Sexually Abused

Study Warns Women About Spring Break

NYSE goes public, shares surge

From the Guantánamo papers

Blair to raise 'more ambitious' trade plan with Brazilian leader

Bush returns to New Orleans

DeLay Wins Texas Republican Primary

Dana Reeve Dies of Lung Cancer at 44

I know that this pretty much guarantees that FNCNNMSNBCABCCBSNBC will spend months obsessing on all of these stories. I used to think I was interested in just about everything, but that's just not true.

The Opinionated Bastard Blames the Media

I want to be able to read the New York Times or watch CNN, or listen to NPR and be able to trust what they're telling me. Since I can't do that, since the media is no longer fulfilling their basic function, I have to blog, and I have to read blogs. It pisses me off, because I had better things to do this decade than be my own news service. I don't like having to read transcripts of press conferences because I can't trust the media to even write down what was said correctly. I don't like having to spend hours finding real experts on the web to analyze how this or that media expert has distorted the facts. I don't like having to pore through the blogs of journalists, soldiers and Iraqi citizens so I can get some inkling of how things are really going, without the hype. Even though I do it, I don't even like having to download the Brookings report once/month in order to see what the numbers say about how the war is going.

But I have to do all that, because its the only way I can truly be an informed citizen.

Damn, I wish I'd written that. Well Done, O.B

Hat tip: Instapundit, of course.

Via Yahoo News: Self wondering why Big 12 had a trophy for Texas but not Kansas

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) -- When Texas beat Oklahoma 72-48 Sunday afternoon to clinch a tie with Kansas for the Big 12 championship, the Longhorns were handed a handsome trophy to hoist in a midcourt celebration. The day before, when Kansas beat Kansas State 66-52 to clinch at least a tie with Texas, nobody from the Big 12 office was even at the game to congratulate them. The co-champions from Austin were pictured in newspapers and on television proudly displaying their Big 12 trophy. The co-champions from Lawrence merely got back on their bus and went home without so much as a handshake from anybody from the conference office.

A prediction: Kansas will beat Texas should the two teams meet again in the Big 12 or NCAA tournaments.

]This brings up the question of "what do we have now that replaces this thing?"

AviationNow reports Two-Stage-to-Orbit 'Blackstar' System Shelved at Groom Lake?.

A large "mothership," closely resembling the U.S. Air Force's historic XB-70 supersonic bomber, carries the orbital component conformally under its fuselage, accelerating to supersonic speeds at high altitude before dropping the spaceplane. The orbiter's engines fire and boost the vehicle into space. If mission requirements dictate, the spaceplane can either reach low Earth orbit or remain suborbital.

The manned orbiter's primary military advantage would be surprise overflight. There would be no forewarning of its presence, prior to the first orbit, allowing ground targets to be imaged before they could be hidden. In contrast, satellite orbits are predictable enough that activities having intelligence value can be scheduled to avoid overflights.

Photo credit: www.aviationnow.com/Aviation Week & Space Technology