In a classic cross-over of our love of horses and politics, we learn that a horse at the San Franciso zoo has been named “Coulter”. This has prompted the question of whether the horse was named for controversial political pundit Ann Coulter. Given the proclivities and leanings of the San Francisco population, it certainly seems likely. Of course, there is the rich Coulter family, patrons of the zoo.
An 11 year old horse has died as a result of competition in an endurance event. The horse was euthanized after becoming ill at the start of the race. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon event and should cause us to re-consider the value of endurance races.
I am not fond of such events for I believe the horse is by birth more of a sprinter than a distance runner. It’s thus asking the horse to perform outside of its normal range of activities, merely for the sport and entertainment of humans. Despite being popularized (and maybe mythologized) by the movie “Hidalgo”, it is a brutal sport for both human and horse.
A new case of West Nile Virus was confirmed today in Kentucky. Of the 5 cases, 4 of the animals either died or were put down.
Please consider vaccination, and also practice mosquito control.
I know we have grown accustomed to bias in the MSM, both small and large, but that doesn’t mean we should just ignore it. In fact, we should call it out whenever it occurs.
One example is today, in which a WRAL-TV news article about the George Allen “macaca” controversy includes a headline (Bush Helping Lawmaker Who Used Racist Term) and a single paragraph stinging Bush for raising money for Allen.
It’s a story that is really about the Allen controversy, but which has been prepended with a single paragraph designed to imply the by continuing support for Allen, Bush is equally culpable. This reporting is based upon an equally flawed Associated Press article.
It’s not that Allen didn’t make a stupid remark, he did. It’s not that he didn’t understand it as a racist statement or that it would be interpreted that way, he probably did.
It IS that the MSM uses nearly every opportunity to implicate Bush in every evil thing.
UPDATE: Video shows news crew alive, and asking for release.
American reporter Steve Centanni, 60, of the San Francisco area, and Olaf Wiig, 36, of New Zealand were grabbed from their TV van not far from the Palestinian security services headquarters in Gaza City on Aug. 14.
In the video, the men sat on the floor in sweatsuits and appeared to be in good health. No armed men were seen.
Centanni said, “Our captors are treating us well.” He said they get showers, food, water and access to bathroom facilities.
“I’m here and alive and give my love to my family and friends and ask that you do anything you can to try to help us get out of here,” Centanni.
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Fox News Channel reporter and New Zealand based freelance photographer Olaf Wiig are still missing in the Middle East.
There’s been precious little reporting of this story in the MSM, probably because there appears to have been little progress in the story.
But both Michelle Malkin and Captain Ed note that “no news is news” in this case. While the situation does not look good, we can hope and pray for their eventual release.
And yes, to the Captain’s point, we do consider the kidnapping of journalists a more serious threat to liberty than the travails of the JonBenet Ramsey case and many of the other stories now occupying center stage.
In a study to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, NASA-backed scientists today revealed the first direct proof of the so-called “dark matter” in the universe. Dark matter is a consequence of the observations of the universe and its rate of expansion. “Normal” matter, that makes us the visible universe only accounts for a small portion of the mass of the universe based on observation of the distribution normal matter and the rate of expansion of the universe.
At the root of the hypothesis, the universe would fly apart without an additional source of gravity to hold together galaxies and galactic clusters.
An alternative theory is that gravity has different strengths depending on the scale of the effect. That is, perhaps gravity is stronger on an intergalactic scale.
Both theories are considered by scientists to be so crazy as to unbelieveable without definitive proof.
However, today’s announcement is a setback for the “variable gravity” theory, as the data, if reproducible, offer fairly definitive proof of the existence of dark matter.
Scientists at the University of Arizona and elsewhere analyzed data coming from the titanic collision of two galaxies — the largest and most cataclysmic event in the universe after the Big Bang. The matter — both normal and dark — which was emitted from this collision separated, owing to drag on the normal matter. However, the dark matter, which does not interact with normal matter according to theory was not slowed. Pictures of the gravitational lensing of the light from the collision provide the most convincing evidence of the dark matter.
For this most remarkable but extremely difficult story, there has been considerable worldwide attention.
U.S. (space.com)
Australia (The Australian)
Ireland (Irish Examiner)
Nature magazine
Washington Post via The Boston Globe
Another outrageous propaganda trick by Iranian backed Hezbollah is exposed by Andrew Bolt of the Herald-Sun in Australia. Hezbollah publishes a photo, claiming to be the destruction of an Israeli warship by rocket attack. However, as Mr. Bolt demonstrates, it is actually a photo of the Australian navy deliberately destroying one of their decommissioned ships.
In this particular case, the photograph does not even appear to be Photoshopped, but rather merely stolen, cropped, and re-purposed for propaganda purposes.
[H/T: LGF]
A Pacific Blue flight bound to Sydney received a threat and was escorted into Sydney airport, where it landed safely. However, the passengers on the plane were forced to wait while the plane was held away from the terminal and searched for an alleged bomb, or other device.
All passengers were released and, apparently, no device was found. The news reports coming out of Sydney currently are not clear if there was a bomb or not.
About 100 passengers were evacuated from a plane at Australia’s largest airport tonight after an anonymous caller warned there was a suspicious package on board.
NSW Bomb Squad officers scoured the Pacific Blue 737, which landed at Sydney airport from Fiji, but found nothing and the search was called off at 7.45pm (AEST).
Tensions are running very high since the incident in Britain.
The UN brokered ceasefire is becoming increasingly irrelevant, or perhaps it always was a joke. There is now to be NO understanding that the UN will disarm Hezbollah in Lebanon (or anywhere else).
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was quoted in an American newspaper Thursday as saying that the UN force expected to deploy in south Lebanon will not be tasked with forcibly disarming Hezbollah.
“I don’t think there is an expectation that this [UN] force is going to physically disarm Hezbollah,” Rice told USA Today. “I think it’s a little bit of a misreading about how you disarm a militia. You have to have a plan, first of all, for the disarmament of the militia, and then the hope is that some people lay down their arms voluntarily.
“ If Hezbollah resists international demands to disarm, Rice said, “one would have to assume that there will be others who are willing to call Hezbollah what we are willing to call it, which is a terrorist organization.”
Of course, Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. And it is unrealistic to expect any terrorist organization to “lay down their arms voluntarily”. For terrorists, that is akin to saying that they no longer have any reason to exist. Hezbollah is not a state, and does not represent or defend civilians. They exist only to destroy the Israeli state, and to kill all Jews.
The ceasefire is even further encumbered by the news that our friends the French will contribute only token troops to the effort.
France is considering providing only a symbolic force for the United Nations contingent in Lebanon, and not the thousands of troops UN officials had hoped, Le Monde
newspaper said on Thursday.If true, such a move could seriously delay the UN mission, seen as vital to securing peace between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas, or even scupper the whole operation.
Quoting UN and diplomatic sources, Le Monde said France might send just a dozen officers and around 200 personnel from an engineering division for the beefed-up UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
“scupper the whole operation”…. indeed… that’s exactly what’s happening. The question is: is that what France and the UN intended from the beginning?
Everyone who’s ever worked with horses knows that they can “think” in some ways, and even seem intuitive. Research in this area suggests that this is true, but only at a simple level of thinking.
Still, everything that has been done scientifically in the horse so far addresses tasks, learning, and conceptualization at a fairly simple cognitive level, at least by human standards of thinking. Almost everyone who knows and works with horses would likely have plenty of anecdotal evidence “demonstrating” that horses readily do these simple mental tasks and perhaps much more. The challenge for scientists is to set up experiments to demonstrate the abilities in a manner that can stand up to scientific scrutiny. And that’s where we are at the moment with horse thinking.
Most every person who loves and works with horses will tell you that they can indeed “think”.
