An Observation

A word of advice. Don't schedule a physical examination on your birthday. The doctor may decide to give you the gift of "the works" at the exam. And the nurse may give you another one by looking at your EKG and saying, "Uh oh."

That's always fun.

Pay Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain

It really should not come as a surprise that a lot of "spontaneous" events recently have really be very well-funded and highly choreographed political theater. For people who have been paying attention, it should also not be surprising who the man behind the curtain pulling the levers is, either. Investor's Business Daily has an editorial on George Soros.

Democracy: George Soros is known for funding groups such as MoveOn.org that seek to manipulate public opinion. So why is the billionaire's backing of what he believes in problematic? In a word: transparency.

How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely "NASA whistleblower" standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros' Open Society Institute , which gave him "legal and media advice"?

That's right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros' flagship "philanthropy," by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI's "politicization of science" program.

That may have meant that Hansen had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly "censored" spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda.

Hansen even succeeded, with public pressure from his nightly news performances, in forcing NASA to change its media policies to his advantage. Had Hansen's OSI-funding been known, the public might have viewed the whole production differently. The outcome could have been different.

That's not the only case. Didn't the mainstream media report that 2006's vast immigration rallies across the country began as a spontaneous uprising of 2 million angry Mexican-flag waving illegal immigrants demanding U.S. citizenship in Los Angeles, egged on only by a local Spanish-language radio announcer?

Turns out that wasn't what happened, either. Soros' OSI had money-muscle there, too, through its $17 million Justice Fund. The fund lists 19 projects in 2006. One was vaguely described involvement in the immigration rallies. Another project funded illegal immigrant activist groups for subsequent court cases.

So what looked like a wildfire grassroots movement really was a manipulation from OSI's glassy Manhattan offices. The public had no way of knowing until the release of OSI's 2006 annual report.

There is more - you really need to read it all, it is that important. So how much effect has this all had? The Anchoress has looked at that:

Once upon a time you could say, “who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes,” with a wry smirk and appreciate the irony. It’s not so ironic, anymore. Now we are in the third act of Hamlet, the King - his conscience pricked - is crying out and the castle is in uproar and Hamlet declares, “believe none of this,” which is good advice. Maybe all of history has been a staged production, but I don’t believe that. Sadly in American politics, circa 2007, very little is real, very few are motivated by selfless love of country, and illusionists are everywhere.

Whoever can manipulate the images, whoever can best misdirect your attention, whoever can mesmerize you with their illusions…that is who will win this election, because too many of us buy into everything we see and hear. Unless we stop falling for it all - for the large-scale productions and the small sound bites. How do we do that? I can only hazard a guess, myself:

Remember that half of what you see is an illusion and the rest of what you see is a passing fashion, and you’ll fret a good deal less, no matter what the issue.

Perhaps the other half of that good advice is to watch less news and television, read fewer papers, spend less time on political forums feeding your rage and paranoia and spend some time - every single day - being quiet and contemplative. I think that’s the only way to counter all of this frenetic noise that leaves you neither time nor room to think and which completely cuts you off from your guts and your instincts. Your guts are there for a reason. Don’t stop using them.

Remember, even the internet - particularly the political forums - contribute to the illusions:

Pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Pay attention.

Sticks And Stones

I never particularly cared for Jerry Lewis the comedian. I admit he sometimes made me laugh, but mostly, I really didn't enjoy most of his material. But for 42 years now, the now 81-year old Lewis has held his Labor Day Telethon to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association. He has raised an enormous amount of money for that organization - and dedicated every Labor Day weekend since he was 39-years old to doing so. That, I think, is worthy of respect, regardless of whether I cared for his act or not.

So would it be too much to ask to cut him a little slack?

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Comedian Jerry Lewis apologized on Tuesday for his use of an anti-gay slur during the weekend broadcast of his annual Labor Day Telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

The controversial remark came Monday afternoon in the 18th hour of the live national telecast, when a visibly weary Lewis, 81, was joking on stage, pretending to introduce members of someone's family as he mugged for the camera.

"Oh, your family has come to see you. You remember Bart, your oldest son, Jesse, the illiterate fag …," Lewis said, as he apparently caught himself and ceased the gag in mid-sentence, turning on his heel away from the camera.

A clip of the incident surfaced on a number of Internet sites on Tuesday, including TMZ.com, drawing a condemnation from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).

"Jerry Lewis' on-air use of this kind of anti-gay slur is simply unacceptable," GLAAD President Neil Giuliano said in a statement, adding that the comic's remark "feeds a climate of hatred and intolerance" that could incite anti-gay violence.

GLAAD urged Lewis to apologize for the comment and asked the entertainer to meet with members of the group "to help him understand why these words are so hurtful."

Lewis issued a statement later in the day through organizers of the telethon saying he was sorry "to anyone who was offended."

"I obviously made a bad choice of words. Everyone who knows me understands that I hold no prejudices in this regard," he said. "The success of the (telethon) and all the good that will come from it shouldn't be lost because of one unfortunate word. I accept responsibility for what I said. There are no excuses. I am sorry."

GLAAD might want to consider that Lewis realized almost as soon as he said it that he had made a mistake and that he has issued a real, heartfelt apology. It would be a better move for them to accept that and let the matter drop than to continue to flog away at an 81-year old man who has done so much to help others. They would look better by doing so than by continuing to beat up verbally on Lewis.

Drop it. Please.  

(Joe Gandelman has thought on this as well, as well as some tribute video.)

UPDATE: Apparently GLAAD has issued a statement acknowledging the apology and is dropping the matter. There may yet be some hope for civility.

A Plague Of Squirrels

Actually, it's worse than that. It is actually squirrels with plague. A dead squirrel found in downtown Denver, Colorado died from bubonic plague.

DENVER — A dead tree squirrel found near City Park east of downtown Denver tested positive for bubonic plague, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health.

A person near the park noticed several dead squirrels in the neighborhood and reported the die off to Denver Animal Control..

In a release, John Pape, an epidemiologist who specializes in animal-related diseases for the department's Disease Control and Environmental Epidemiology Division, said, "Plague is a disease seen every year among rodent populations in rural areas of Colorado, including the Front Range. It is unusual to find plague in the center of an urban area although it has happened before." In Colorado, plague-infected animals are most likely found in the foothills and mountains, he added.

The risk to humans is small, but it is there. Authorities are warning residents of Denver not to touch dead rodents or rabbits and to keep their pets away from them. If you must pick up a dead animal, wear gloves and put the carcass in a plastic bag. Call the CO-HELP (Colorado Health Education Line for the Public) at 877-462-2911 to report a dead animal. (Obviously, it is also a very good idea to seek medical treatment at once if bitten or scratched, but that is a pretty rare occurrence. Keep an eye on your pets, though.) Pass the word to anyone you know in Denver.

Greetings From The Easter Batty

Authorities in Memphis, Tennessee would very much like to talk to anyone who attended an Easter egg hunt at the Mount Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church. It seems one of the Easter eggs some children found had wings. And fur.

And rabies.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. Health officials in Memphis are contacting everyone who attended a church's Easter egg hunt.

That's because a rabid bat was found on its back near a playground at the church during the hunt.

It was taken inside the Mount Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church where several children touched it. Between 150 and 400 people attended the event.

Health officials believe a very small number of people might have been exposed to the bat.

I have no idea how many people in the Memphis area read this blog, but if you know or know of someone who may have attended the event, get word to them to check in with the local health department. Rabies is nothing to mess around with. It is also a good idea to make sure that your kids know that a bat should be left alone if found laying about. If they are on the ground, they are sick, usually with rabies.

Klepto-Rodent

A Maine man is engaged in a battle of wits with a mouse. So far, the mouse is well ahead on points. After the man captured the mouse - on three separate occasions, mind you - the mouse was able to escape unharmed. After the last daring breakout, the mouse also took along a souvenir.

The man's dentures.

(Bill) Exner, 68, said he and his wife Shirley scoured his bedroom after the dentures disappeared from his night stand.

"We moved the bed, moved the dressers and the night stand and tore the closet apart," he said. "I said, 'I knew that little stinker stole my teeth' — I just knew it."

They found a small opening in a wall where they suspected the mouse was coming and going, and their daughter's fiance, Eric Holt, stepped in to help.

"He brought a crowbar and hammer and he sawed off a section of wood and pulled up the molding and everything," Exner said. "It was quite a job."

They retrieved the dentures, and Holt suggested his future father-in-law boil them in peroxide and whatever else he could find for to disinfect it.

So, to retrieve the teeth, they had to demolish part of their home. Offhand, it appears to be time to take a completely different approach to the problem. We'd suggest that the couple try adopting the ravaging rodent before it ransacks again. Just start feeding it pet food.

Poisoning Pets On The Patio

Look, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard have labored long and hard to warn people about the Animal Uprising™. That does not, however, mean that we are in favor of poisoning the family pet, most of whom have not joined the animal overlord's attempt to take over the planet. So we are warning all our readers about the recall of many, many, many brands of cat and dog foods. Because there are numerous reports of pets being poisoned by the food. The manufacturer has issued a very large recall of the foods. The entire lists of dog and cat foods can be found here on the manufacturer's website.

</joking off> This is serious, folks. If you have purchased any of the listed brands of pet food, stop feeding them to your pet at once and go get something else for them. What this inadvertently shows, however, is the fact that all of these brands of pet food are essentially the same. So, have you been buying "premium" pet food for your animals instead of that store brand? Is your regular brand on the list? Feel like you've maybe been scammed a bit by clever advertising?

Just asking. Go buy something else for Fido or Fluffy right now.

Microsoft Vista May Kill Your iPod

Apple is warning that the new Vista operating system Microsoft just released appears to cause some real problems with iPods. Some legally purchased songs won't play and some users have had their iPods corrupted when trying to eject the device from the computer.

IPods could be damaged by Microsoft’s new computer operating system, the company behind the popular digital music players has warned.

Apple, the long-standing rival of Bill Gates’s Microsoft, is urging users not to upgrade their PCs to the Vista system until it comes up with a compatible version of the software that runs iPods.

Microsoft launched its long-awaited Vista operating system in a blaze of publicity last week and claimed that more than 5,000 hardware and software products would work with it.

But Apple, which has sold 90 million iPods since 2001, says many users of the iconic portable music players have had problems when connecting them to PCs using Vista.

It claims some have found that songs bought on its iTunes Store will not play on the new system, and that other Vista users have even seen their iPods corrupted when they try to unplug them. The contacts and calendar functions on iPods are also said to be affected.

A statement on Apple’s website reads: “iTunes Store purchases may not play when upgrading to Windows Vista from Windows 2000 or XP.

“Ejecting an iPod from the Windows System Tray using the Safely Remove Hardware feature may corrupt your iPod.”

Microsoft has dedicated a team to issue patches to fix the problems, but the war of words is going strong. Apple is strongly recommending that customers not switch operating systems until new iPod software is released in a few weeks. Vista is off and running.

Another Must Have Product

Close on the heels of the exciting exploding laptop computer and the must have geek-cessory, the flaming zip drive, comes a new technological wonder! A real consumer must-have: the combustible massage chair!

TOKYO, Jan 31 (Reuters Life!) - Japan's Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. said on Wednesday it would recall thousands of massage chairs for free tests and repairs, saying the chairs could catch fire.

The maker of Panasonic-brand goods said fires destroyed two massage chairs in December and January when power cords inside the chairs' motors emitted sparks.

Such fires would only occur in rare cases, said the maker of the chairs, Matsushita Electric Works, which is 51 percent-owned by Matsushita Electric.

The two incidents occurred in demo chairs after repeated use by customers, Matsushita Electric Works spokesman Yukio Kinashi said.

I wonder if there's video. If you have one of these babies, you might want to unplug it until it gets fixed.

A Warning Repeated

Peter Brown, who is the assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, has a bit of cautionary advice for the politicians in Washington playing politics with the troops in Iraq. He repeats something that Bill Clinton said in 2002 and warns that it is still pertinent.

Yet, Democrats marshaling opposition to Bush's plan might do well to consider the words of the former president, who is their smartest political strategist.

After the 2002 election, Clinton had an explanation for those who did not understand why Bush and the Republicans had picked up congressional seats. The GOP victories that year, in which national security was a big issue, were the exception to the historical record of the president's party usually losing seats in mid-term elections.

"When people are insecure, they'd rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right," Clinton said.

Simply put, Clinton was suggesting that just because voters think a Republican president has messed up this war, doesn't necessarily mean that they will vote for the other party to make sure that it doesn't happen again.

That is because the number one criterion Americans have in picking a president is that he (and it is not coincidental that until now it has been a he) be a "strong" leader.

Clinton's wife is the front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. It is also not coincidental that until recently, Sen. Hillary Clinton had been less critical of the Bush policy than many of her Democratic colleagues in an effort to strengthen her national security bona fides.

But given the building pressure within her party, and the need to avoid alienating the activists who hold great sway in the nomination process, she too has been stepping up her criticism of the Bush policy.

I will repeat something I have said on several occasions. The electoral victory in November was not a mandate for the Democrats to lose a war. Brown's warning echoes that message. It would be a good idea for the politicians to think about that in the coming days.

Deadly Deer’s Dangerous Drool

There is a variant of mad cow disease (Properly named Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE)) that effects affects deer and elk. Known as Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). It is just as scary as the one that strikes cattle or the human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease. Up until now scientists have not understood the way this terrible disease is spread. But with a little creativity, researchers have figured it out with a high degree of certainty.

It spreads by spit.

… CWD is unusual because, unlike its very hard-to-spread relatives, it seems to spread fairly easily from animal to animal.

Scientists were not sure how, primarily because studying large wild animals is a logistical nightmare. The sheer stress of researchers handling a deer caught in the wild could kill it.

Likewise, animals deliberately exposed to infections must be kept indoors so as not to spread disease, another stress for deer used to roaming.

So Colorado State University researcher Edward Hoover turned to fawns hand-raised indoors in Georgia, which has not experienced chronic wasting disease.

"This allows you to do this safely so the deer aren't freaking out," explained Hoover, who reported the first evidence of saliva's long-suspected role in Friday's edition of the journal Science. "These deer are calm and approachable."

Hoover took saliva from wild Colorado deer found dying of CWD, and squirted it into the mouths of three of the healthy tame deer — about 3 tablespoons worth.

Additional tame deer were exposed to blood, urine and feces from CWD-infected deer.

He housed the newly exposed deer in a specialized lab for up to 18 months, periodically checking tonsil tissue for signs of infection and eventually autopsying their brains.

All of the saliva-exposed deer got sick.

So did deer given a single transfusion of blood from a CWD-infected deer — not a surprise, as blood is known to transmit this disease's cousins. But it does reinforce existing warnings to hunters in states where CWD has been found to take precautions in handling their kills.

So with deer season close upon us and the surge of activity in the animal uprising, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard thought we'd pass along a warning. Hunters, if you see a deer or elk rearing back to hawk a loogie at you, run like hell.

A Warning From Drug Manufacturers

A very important reminder from German drug manufacturer Schering. Please pay attention here:

Do not use hemorrhoid ointment on your face.

The warning came after a male stylist said on Norwegian television that many photo models used the cream in the morning to get rid of puffy eyes, which the drug company said seemed to have boosted demand for such products at pharmacies.

"This is a pharmaceutical and not a cosmetic," the group's Norwegian subsidiary Schering Norge AS said in a statement, warning especially to keep haemorrhoid cream out of the eyes.

This has been a public service announcement from your friends at Blue Crab Boulevard. That is all.*

* (Although, truthfully, we do know a few people who would benefit from whole body immersion).

How Not To Treat A Snakebite

You know all those movie Westerns where someone gets bitten by a rattlesnake? The hero always puts on a tourniquet, then slices ope the wound and sucks the venom out. All heroic and all, right? The best way to save someone's life, right?

More like the best way to kill the victim. Or cause an amputation.

Mike Edwards, 46, was bitten by a timber rattlesnake Saturday while working on his Rockvale farm. The bite was so severe that Edwards was kept at Vanderbilt University Medical Center until Monday.

The standard snakebite scene in many movies shows the victim applying a tourniquet to the limb and then cutting the wound and sucking out the venom.

As Edwards and his wife, Andrea, waited for the ambulance to arrive, a good Samaritan tried to help using advice gleaned from Hollywood.

"She put a tourniquet on his arm," Andrea Edwards said. "We were on the phone with the EMT who was on his way to us, and he said to take it off."

As the Edwards learned when they arrived at Vanderbilt, the tourniquet could have cost him his hand or arm.

"The toxicologist at Vanderbilt said the tourniquet just kept all of the venom in one place, and it swelled, which made it harder for the antivenin to get to it," Mike Edwards said.

Edwards' condition was critical by the time they arrived at the hospital and his blood pressure was dangerously low, his wife said. Mike said he lost vision at one point and was convulsively twitching.

"They told me another 10 minutes, and we could have lost him," she said.

Middle Tennessee Medical Center's Dr. Kevin Beier, who specializes in emergency treatment, said venom is used by snakes to break down the tissue of prey to make them easier to digest.

"When you trap the venom, it causes tissue damage and necrosis (tissue death)," Beier said.

Here's the FDA advice for treating snakebite and first aid. Basically, a band above the wound can be used but should be loose enough to slip a finger over. Commercial snakebite kits include suction devices, but no cuts should be made if you attempt to use them.

Health Warning

The FDA is advising people not to eat bagged raw spinach. They have traced an outbreak of E. coli infections to the product but are unable to determine what brands it was sold under or exactly where it was distributed. One person has died so far, but the number of cases reported continues to grow.

The death occurred in Wisconsin, where 20 people were reported ill, 11 of them in Milwaukee. The outbreak has sickened others — eight of them seriously — in Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah. In California, state health officials said they were investigating a possible case there.

The outbreak has affected a mix of ages, but most of the cases have involved women, Acheson said. Further information on the person who died wasn't available.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Wisconsin health officials alerted the FDA about the outbreak at midweek. Preliminary analysis suggested the same bug is responsible for the outbreak in all eight states.

The warning applied to consumers nationwide because of uncertainty over the origin of the tainted spinach and how widely it was distributed. Health officials did not know of any link to a specific growing region, grower, brand or supplier, Acheson said.

Amy Philpott, a spokeswoman for the United Fresh Produce Association, said that it's possible the cause of the outbreak won't be known for some time, even after its source is determined.

"Our industry is very concerned," she said. "We're taking this very seriously."

Reports of infections have been growing by the day, Acheson said. "We may be at the peak, we may not be," he said."

E. coli causes diarrhea, often with bloody stools. Most healthy adults can recover completely within a week, although some people — including the very young and old — can develop a form of kidney failure that often leads to death.

Anyone who has gotten sick after eating raw packaged spinach should contact a doctor, officials said.

If you have any of this product, you should not eat it.

Madness

MSNBC helps provide more fuel to the 9/11 conspiracy fires by writing about a number of the people who are part of this particular mass psychosis. There is a form of madness sweeping this country that is fueled, I suspect, by a number of different factors. The unrelenting attacks by the left on the administration. An inability to believe that there really are vicious killers who want us dead, no matter what we do or do not do. An internal inability to accept that we are not in control of all events. Pick one or all as driving these delusions.

It was a year before David Ray Griffin, an eminent liberal theologian and philosopher, began his stroll down the path of disbelief. He wondered why Bush listened to a child's story while the nation was attacked and how Osama bin Laden, America's Public Enemy No. 1, escaped in the mountains of Tora Bora.

He wondered why 110-story towers crashed and military jets failed to intercept even one airliner. He read the 9/11 Commission report with a swell of anger. Contradictions were ignored and no military or civilian official was reprimanded, much less cashiered.

"To me, the report read as a cartoon." White-haired and courtly, Griffin sits on a couch in a hotel lobby in Manhattan, unspooling words in that reasonable Presbyterian minister's voice. "It's a much greater stretch to accept the official conspiracy story than to consider the alternatives."

Such as?

"There was massive complicity in this attack by U.S. government operatives."

Forget talking rationally to these people. This is a for of mass psychosis. There simply is no way to get past the defenses they have set up.

The loose agglomeration known as the "9/11 Truth Movement" has stopped looking for truth from the government. As cacophonous and free-range a bunch of conspiracists anywhere this side of Guy Fawkes, they produce hip-hop inflected documentaries and scholarly conferences. The Web is their mother lode. Every citizen is a researcher. There's nothing like a triple, Google-fed epiphany lighting up the laptop at 2:44 a.m.

A government that has proved time and time again that it cannot keep secrets is elevated to omnipotent stature. Intelligence agencies that collectively are hard put to find their collective butts with both hands become godlike creatures with limitless reach and abilities.

Let's put aside the could-anyone-do-something-that-spectacularly-twisted? question and touch on practicalities. Isn't the problem with big ugly conspiracies — from the Gulf of Tonkin to My Lai to the 1961 Pentagon plan to provoke a war by attacking Americans and blaming it on Castro — that they are too big and ugly to keep secret?

Griffin shrugs. History is littered with government black-bag jobs. "How do you know they can't keep big secrets? Can you be sure you know what you don't know?"

And there, of course is the final keep in their multiple layers of defenses. The absence of proof is itself proof. There is no way to cure these people. They will have to wake themselves out of this self-induced trance world they occupy. All the rational people can do is keep trying to repeat the facts that they keep denying. We might at least stop some from joining the fever parade.

Start here. Oh and Loose Change, Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,Loose Change,