Month: May 2007

Peanut allergies overstated

ScienceDaily[*1] :

Despite hundreds of families being told their children have peanut allergies every year, many of the children may be able to eat peanuts safely, a study by researchers at UNSW and the Sydney Children’s Hospital has found.

Peanut allergies occur in one in 200 infants, according to the Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy.

“This is a really important finding,” said Dr Brynn Wainstein, a Sydney Children’s Hospital immunologist and MD candidate at UNSW.

“Because peanut allergies are potentially serious, requiring all sorts of restrictions, families can become very anxious when in fact, some of these families may be worrying unnecessarily,” Dr Wainstein said.

Unnecessary Worry Syndrome is the real under-reported pandemic, at least in areas covered by 24-hour TV news channels.

Don’t boil your broccoli!

ScienceDaily[*1] :

The researchers, Prof Paul Thornalley from Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick and Dr Lijiang Song from the University of Warwick’s Department of Chemistry bought Brassica vegetables, (broccoli, Brussel sprouts, cauliflower and green cabbage) from a local store and transported them to the laboratory within 30 minutes of purchasing. The effect of cooking on the glucosinolate content of vegetables was then studied by investigating the effects of cooking by boiling, steaming, microwave cooking and stir-fry.

Boiling appeared to have a serious impact on the retention of those important glucosinolate within the vegetables. The loss of total glucosinolate content after boiling for 30 minutes was: broccoli 77%, Brussel sprouts 58%, cauliflower 75% and green cabbage 65%.

The effects of other cooking methods were investigated: steaming for 0–20 min, microwave cooking for 0–3 min and stir-fry cooking for 0–5 min. All three methods gave no significant loss of total glucosinolate analyte contents over these cooking periods.

Keep those cruciferous veggies out of the boiling pan!

Lileks visits Disney World

This should be good[*1] .  It begins:

If you have any doubts about anything in the world – the purposes of money, the transience of joy, the point of it all, frankly – it is swept away the second you watch your daughter running barefoot through the grass in the dusk to see the fireworks burst over the lagoon.

Chimp-girls gone wild!

ScienceDaily–Female-led infanticide in wild chimpanzees[*1] ;

As the result of new field work involving the Sonso chimpanzee community in Budongo Forest in Uganda, the St. Andrews researchers now report instances of three female-led infanticidal attacks. Alerted to the killings by sounds of chimpanzee screams, the researchers directly observed one infanticide, and found strong circumstantial evidence for two others. Evidence suggested that in two of the cases, the killings were perpetrated by groups of resident females against “stranger” females from outside the resident group. Infants were taken from the mothers, who were injured in at least two of the attacks; in at least one case, adult males in the area exhibited displaying behavior, with one old male unsuccessfully attempting to separate the females.

CSI-Uganda:  The Great Ape Unit . . .

If Iraq’s a civil war, so is Los Angeles

These guys ain’t the Union and the Confederacy.  They’re the Crips and the Bloods (that is, if the Crips were getting IEDs from Iran and the Bloods AK-47s from the Mafia).

J.D. Johannes writes at Outside the Wire[*1] :

The JAM (Shiite Mahdi Army–ed) and AQIZ (Al Queda in Iraq–ed) equally despised your average Dora, Rasheed or Abu Bashir resident and almost seem to work in collusion to profit from  their shake down schemes.  Without AQIZ, there is no need for JAM.  Without JAM there is no need for AQIZ protection from JAM.

I got to meet some of the JAM mid-level management and was not impressed. When confronted with a few soldiers he looked like a deer in the headlights and then started crying.

One minute he was the big tough JAM Boss full of the wasta getting ready to EJK (Extra-Judicial Killing–ed) a guy but when team of soldiers showed up he turned into, well, jelly.

The Baghdad Security Plan is working and can achieve an endstate.  It took the Brits 12 years in Maylaya.  We are following their plan.

The biggest enemy we have is an over active media and spineless Host Nation government which is intimidated by the JAM and has the JAM as key constituent group.

[*1] http://www.outsidethewire.com/blog/outside-the-wire/looking-for-that-civil-war-we-are-bogged-down-in.html

What in the world happened?

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[*1] , 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[*2] 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[*3] ;

Carbon-credit trading is apparently the scam[*4] we all really, down deep, thought it was;

Reviews of Indoctrinate U.[*5] (see a previous Medary post . . . );

The “last word” (oh, Lord, one could wish that it were so) about George Tenet’s book[*6] ;

“We win, they lose.”[*7]

Apparently, linking to stories without commenting on them is a bloggie no-no[*8] .  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[*9] .

The “lost” province of Anbar in Iraq[*10] , it seems, has been “un-lost.”

Tornado video[*11] .

A right-center Hungarian immigrant is elected President of France[*12] .

James Lilieks gets demoted[*13] at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Star-Tribune.  Silly newspaper.

The Most Ethical Congress Ever.[*14]

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

From the enemy’s mouth

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[*1] ) 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

You got a Hummer.  You think you’re hot stuff.  Heh.  That’s NUTHIN’.  Get yourself an MRAP–a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle[*1] .  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