Adam Ross:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced today that the United States will set aside billions of dollars to pursue a vaccine for H1N1, commonly referred to as swine flu.

The Obama administration has officially overreacted.

First comment on WaPo site:

Let me guess.

The WaPo editorial writers would rather US tax dollars be spent bombing Iran than defending America, right?

Seriously, are you all brain dead - or were you just dropped on your head as children?

Prince William Becomes an Honorary Barrister

The trainee RAF helicopter pilot is more used to planning sorties and checking weather forecasts than legal argument.

But in the ceremony on Monday at London's Middle Temple the Prince was not only called to the Bar - to be made a honorary barrister - but called to the Bench, the Inn's governing body.

It's important not to understand. It's important not to learn. In the total buggeration into which the world's help for Afghanistan has now descended, it's important not to know too much. Accept that somebody some day may understand, but it isn't going to be you. Somebody some day may grab the Gordian knot and cut it, but it isn't going to be us. Know only that. To know more is to know less.

It so happens that my week as Nato/Isaf's guest here in Afghanistan has coincided with some big stories coming out of the country. There are battles; there are kidnappings; there came sad news of the deaths of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Thorneloe and Trooper Joshua Hammond. There's a presidential election campaign under way. But my argument is that news like this is a distraction from the underlying story. The battle will ebb and flow. But victory is impossible.

Chicago Sun Times: 4 charged with digging up, dumping bodies at Burr Oak Cemetery

...four workers at historic Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip plundered them, smashing open the concrete liners and hauling away the human remains inside to a weedy dump site, Cook County investigators say.
If bones clattered off the dump truck along the way, they were left on the side of the cemetery roads, investigators say.

As many as 300 bodies were unearthed and dumped in a mass grave as part of a scam that netted the workers about $300,000, authorities said Thursday.

The empty graves were resold to unsuspecting families for cash -- off the books, authorities said..

Sheriff Tom Dart said the scam took place over at least four years. The human remains in the mass grave -- in the northwest corner of the cemetery -- are so hard to identify that the sheriff's office has brought in 30 to 40 FBI experts -- some of whom have scoured mass graves in Serbia and other parts of the world.

Dart said the process of trying to identify the bodies will be similar to work done at Ground Zero following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

.... Mahoney said Towns took cash from families who came to the cemetery seeking to bury loved ones. She allegedly drew up paperwork on the new burials, and then destroyed it so there would be no record. Towns then pocketed the cash and paid off the other three defendants, Mahoney said.

Towns would then tell the three workers to exhume human remains from existing graves and put them in the mass grave, Mahoney said. Employees allegedly excavated entire burial sites -- including the concrete vault that surrounds the coffin. The caskets and headstones were often smashed, officials said.

The workers sought out older, unmarked graves that hadn't been visited in a while, Dart spokesman Steve Patterson said. One was that of a baby who died in 1946, Patterson said. The headstone was smashed to pieces.

New bodies were then buried in the old plots, Mahoney said. Authorities also said some old bodies were pounded into the ground, with new bodies "double-stacked'' atop them.

The sheriff's office discovered, in plain sight, a jawbone with teeth along with 29 other bones in the mass grave -- an unkempt grassy area, prosecutors said.

One employee told prosecutors he saw skulls and rib bones strewn around the area.

"There are a lot of remains scattered around," Dart said. "This was not a surgical effort. ... They were dug up with backhoes and discarded."

Introducing SEC data guy. H/she mines the universe of XBRL-formatted filings in order to represent um aggregate claims of financial performance ...

[June] The problem for XBRL advocates is that "transparency" cuts a number of ways. Is XBRL better than the current publicly available data scraped from HTML filings? Sure. But it's hard to research the current problems. XBRL is easy. I can check XBRL data for technical errors in about a minute (download the data, zip it, upload it to a publicly available validation tool, see results).

regardless of a company's characteristics or industry (NIC) assignment...

[July] Below is a graph that shows the total number of distinct entities filing a 10-K or 10-Q over time. It also shows the number of distinct entities expressing "substantial doubt" for the first time in one of those filings (full details on the data below the jump).

so far. Useful, no?

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

"We have information from a captured militant that they are given some kind of tablets, and that after taking them, a person comes to resemble a robot, and is in a daze," Kadyrov said. "They get these tablets from abroad and give them to young people. These are excellently trained workers of Western special services, who are working against the Russian Federation. They are using us, knowing our mentality, knowing that a majority of us are Muslims. They have good supplies and specialists. All of the foreign special services workers are operating against Russia. And the people of Russia accuse us. They think that a war is still going on here, that Chechens are bandits and terrorists. But Chechens are dying while protecting Russia's [territorial] integrity. Hundreds of thousands died here, thousands of people disappeared without a trace, thousands of police died in battle" (www.izvestia.ru, July 7).

Right up there with Zhirinovsky's claim that the Spanish football team beat Russia using mind control technology.

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

I am sure I'll be torn apart for such incorrectness, but the picture in this article, not reproduced here for reasons of mysteriousness, is of two people who I admire, but never expected to see in the same frame.

You can't be me, I'm taken

What did Obama and Burlesconi do to the Government Palace?

The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.

Thank gopod for all the private time i've had with him. Life-long consistancy rules.

Skennah Kowa