What are you supposed to do? At least I know where my bloody kids are, even if they are in jail

A friend of mine was an intern at Bellvue Hospital in New York. A 28-year old man from Aruba said he was going to die, because he had been cursed. He was admitted for psychiatric evaluation and found to be normal, but his health steadily declined. My friend was able to rehydrate him, balance his electrolytes, and give him nutrients, but nevertheless the man worsened, insisting that he was cursed and there was nothing that could prevent his death. My friend realized that the patient would, in fact, soon die. The situation was desperate. Finally he told the patient that he, the doctor, was going to invoke his own powerful medicine to undo the curse, and his medicine was more powerful than any other. He got together with the house staff, bought some headdresses and rattles, and danced around the patient in the middle of the night, chanting what they hoped would be effective-sounding phrases. The patient showed no reaction, but next day he began to improve. The man went home a few days later. My friend literally saved his life.

as David Brinkley once said, “The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.”

Would Citibank have spent the money to fix its Y2K problem without government urging? Of course, because not to do so would have put them out of business. The same is true of other banks and businesses around the world. Yet government takes the credit.

According to Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller Institute, industrialized nations have been decarbonizing their energy sources for 150 years, meaning we are moving away from carbon toward hydrogen. In other words, the ratio of carbon to hydrogen decreases as you go from wood and hay (1:1) to coal to oil to gas (1:4). Here is an illustration from one of his articles:

It'll be all right on the night
Political correctness has crippled the left's sense of humour.

As a curious example of ijtihad, Manji questions the concept of literal truth by looking at a passage that has had plenty of buzz of late in some (mostly Western) intellectual circles. Islamic martyrs, at least according to their cheerleaders, can look forward to an afterlife of ease and plenty including 70 willing virgins. It seems this passage may be a terrible case of mistranslation. The 70 dark-eyed virgins might actually have been, originally, white raisins, apparently a highly prized delicacy in days past.

It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.

UP to 200 employees of a government department are being tested for lead poisoning after the discovery that drinking water had been contaminated with lead, zinc and copper.

The embarrassing discovery of the contaminated recycled water system in the Department of Environment's Greenhouse Office in Canberra prompted a Christmas shutdown of the water supply and emergency investigations by health officials.

Ian Plimer: Global warming a damp squib

Date: 25/06/2005 - 31/12/2007
Days: Daily subject to availability.
Please contact the booking office on 13 11 02
Session Times: 2.00 pm
Bookings: Required
Phone: 13 11 02