NFL finally admits the sky is blue.

This is the DUH! story of the day today.  Dare I say it, a no-brainer.

A study commissioned by the National Football League reports that Alzheimer's disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league's former players vastly more often than in the national population — including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49.

So yes, the NFL has finally admitted what the rest of the medical universe has known for dead sure since the invention of the MRI scanner: being hit on the head a lot while playing football can give you brain damage.  Otherwise known as diffuse brain injury.  Otherwise known as what happens to boxers most of the time. They even have a name for it in the boxing world, its called being "punch drunk". Its why you don't see very many jocks living to ripe old ages.  Duh.

Also happens when you head the soccer ball for 20 years, so don't be getting too cocky all you soccer geeks.  Oh, and hockey too.  Life is dangerous, and will eventually kill you no matter what.  So get out the cotton batting and wrap yourself up before its too late!

Next up, the medical community will propose a blanket ban on public, high school and university football and some DemocRat will take up the torch.  And somebody will sue the NFL.

In 3, 2, 1...

Now, interestingly rugby players and Ozzy rules football players have markedly lower rates of diffuse brain injury.  Its because they don't wear pads and helmets.  Helmets actually cause this type of injury, believe it or not.  Also major spinal cord injuries to the neck and upper back as well.  Funny, eh?

That's something else that has been known for a loooong time that the NFL won't admit.  Because they are money grubbing weasels who don't care a damn about sport, their players or anything else, is why.  Same as the Olympics really.

Shut off your TV.  That is what will finally fix it. Nothing else will.

The Phantom

Just how partisan is the media, anyway?

Quite.

Remember the frothing outrage over Bush's continuing the ban on press being present as caskets were received?  You're supposed to forget that now.  Democrat in the White House y'know.

In April of this year, the Obama administration lifted the press ban, which had been in place since the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Media outlets rushed to cover the first arrival of a fallen U.S. serviceman, and many photographers came back for the second arrival, and then the third.

But after that, the impassioned advocates of showing the true human cost of war grew tired of the story. Fewer and fewer photographers showed up. "It's really fallen off," says Lt. Joe Winter, spokesman for the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations Center at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where all war dead are received.

 

"It seems that if the weather is nice, and it's during the day, we get a higher level of media to come down," says Lt. Winter.

Now that a Republican is no longer the president,  nobody except the AP seems willing to shift themselves to cover the honored dead as they come home from the war.  As Byron York says,

With casualties mounting, the debate over U.S. policy in Afghanistan is sharp and heated. The number of arrivals at Dover is increasing. But the journalists who once clamored to show the true human cost of war are nowhere to be found.

Yea, verily.

The Phantom

Another for the "Why regulation is bad" files.

Today's lesson on why regulations are bad: because innocent grandmas get arrested for buying over the counter cold medicine at the pharmacy, is why. 

The larger question, of course, is what idiot arrests an -obviously- innocent woman for an -obviously- legal business transaction.  Answer, Vermillion County Prosecutor Nina Alexander, the usual kind of civil servant idiot one usually finds behind these stories. 

Here's what Nina baby says about it:

"Just as with any law, the public has the responsibility to know what is legal and what is not, and ignorance of the law is no excuse, the prosecutor said. "I'm simply enforcing the law as it was written," Alexander said.

AKA, she's just following orders.  And herein lies the problem.  They are all, always, just following orders.  The fact that no human being could possible know all the myriad regulations, laws, codes, guide lines, strictures and etc. we are supposedly subject to is completely irrelevant. Orders are orders.

This is a common theme these days. There is no reasonableness in bureaucracy.  Reasonable men do not become bureaucrats and officials.  Power tripping, by-the-book, "I was just following orders" willfully heedless cretins are who become bureaucrats.  Its the nature of the job.  Reasonable, intelligent human beings quit in disgust.

Therefore regulations have to be designed so that UNreasonable robot-men can't hurt innocent people with them through malice, boredom or simple stupidity.  Which is pretty near impossible.  No matter how foolproof you make something, the universe will keep delivering greater and greater fools until it breaks.

The answer is to de-fund the bureaucracy.  You can't trust them to make reasonable laws, and you can't expect them to enforce laws reasonably.  All you can do is starve them out.

Tax cut now.  No cut is too big.

News Flash!!!

ABC News notices the NEA scandal. Finally.

Those guys are SO on the ball!

America's future?

One in six patients in the Brit National Health service misdiagnosed.

On the bright side, Britain does have a private care option, which oddly does not seem to have many scandals or outrages associated with it of late.  Barry doesn't like the private care option.

The Phantom

NEA propaganda update!

New audio from Big Hollywood on the government funded NEA search for the next Lenni Reifenstahl.

Fits right in next to the newspaper bailout, eh? Gotta have some shiny Obama content to print in your Obama propaganda machine.

Best thing that could happen here? The US government gets out of the art business. And shames the Canadian government into getting out of it as well.

New DemocRat Majority Protection Bill gets The One's approval.

Yes friends, the man who gave you the Bank Bailout, the Car Bailout, the Porkulus Bailout and is trying hard to jam a big ol' Health Care "Bailout" down your resisting throats has said he'd be delighted to see a Newspaper Bailout on his desk.  Yes he would.

"I haven't seen detailed proposals yet, but I'll be happy to look at them," Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview."

Probably because as he said all over the place, nearly wall to wall on Sunday night, the MSM is behaving "rudely".  Despite the two miles of column space the New York Times has given him and the record TV face time he's been getting, there's still all this rude commentary going on.  Darn that Rush Limbaugh anyway.

So, Barry and the Dems (sounds like a band, doesn't it?) would like for the MSM to go "not for profit" (I'm not making that up, they said that) and get a big ol' "cash infusion" from Uncle Sam so they don't have to keep printing mean divisive stuff about The One just to make a buck and keep the presses rolling.

Translation, Barry is getting his ass handed to him by the Internet and would like to have his very own media machine that he calls -all- the shots on to win the next election.  With you paying for it, of course.

This is a bigger deal than healthcare.  Watch this one move along under the radar.

The Phantom

Finally, you can buy Buckeytubes by the square yard.

Press release by Nanocomp Technologies indicates they have succeeded in making carbon nanotube yarn and cloth as strong as kevlar.

In April, Lashmore had a mechanical multicaliber gun shoot bullets at different versions of his sheet, each less than a fifth of an inch thick, at a speed of 1,400 feet per second. Four sheets were breached, but three showed no damage. Lashmore and his 35 employees were ecstatic.

"We didn't expect it to work at all," he admits.

Cruising the web site, they say they have delivered 10,000 meters of yarn to one customer, so it looks like this is finally the real deal.  Commercial quantities of nanotube cloth, on demand.  Expensive sure, but you can get some if you need it. 

The US Air Force want to use it for wiring in their aircraft because its as conductive as copper (or possibly more so) and weighs a fraction of what an insulated copper wire does.  Its also tremendously stronger than copper, making it pretty awesome for damage reduction in combat aircraft.  You can cast it in directly as part of composite sheets too, making it possible to eliminate wiring altogether for some applications.

I've been stoked about this stuff since Buckyballs were discovered 'way back in the late 1980's.  Diamonds by the square yard, how cool is that?!

The Phantom

Overflight report!

Reporting overflight by Westland Lysander. I've got PICTURES baby! Yeah!



Ok, so its a crappy picture. It was far away by the time I scrambled to get the camera.

Here's what it looked like a couple weeks ago at the Warplane Heritage museum.



It looks like a sweet flying machine in the air. I love Cayuga!

The Phantom

The One's Glorious speech.

The One spoke in his patented mellifluous tones this evening to the US lawmakers. He was received thus:

South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson shouted "You lie!" after Obama had talked about illegal immigrants.

Well, Barry did lie, he said that illegal immigrants wouldn't be covered under his health care bill. Which ain't true. They will be.

Joe Wilson is my hero.

Laws are for the Little People

The Obama White House steams onward at full speed into new, uncharted waters in search of more/better/different sources of propaganda. This time its the NEA in a conference call. As the author says, the silence of the mainstream media is deafening.

Another conference call has materialized, revealing a concerted effort by government to use the arts to address political issues.

Lee Rosenbaum, a blogger for Artsjournal.com, posted her experience with a meeting that occurred on August 27th and confessed that she also felt “uneasy” about the government’s arts effort. The meeting invitation (viewable here) went out to all “member local, state, and regional arts agencies, community-based arts organizations, and national partners of Americans for Arts.” Americans for Arts is a non-profit arts organization that has received substantial grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

But there is more fun!

Even more disturbing than learning that the White House and NEA are using the arts to address specific issues, is to learn what was discussed on this new conference call. Rosenbaum mentions that there was much talk of “leveraging federal dollars” to get artists and cultural organizations involved in social-service projects.

Yes friends, you can use your National Endowment for the Arts grant to make propaganda for The One. Which will no doubt ensure that you get another, bigger grant for your next crucifix-in-pee display.

From the comments, the best comment of the day:

"If I put a Hope and Change sticker in a glass of urine - will they pay me?"

I love it when Lefties say what's really on their minds!!!

What's on the Obama administration's mind?  "Republicans are assholes!"  No kidding, the guy said it on video.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/09/02/obamas_green_jobs_czar_van_jones_republicans_are_aholes.html

'Nuff said!

The Phantom