In Chevy Chase, for example, where speeding tickets brought in about $8,000 monthly before cop cams, “We are routinely bringing in approximately a quarter-million dollars per month,” Geoffrey Biddle, Chevy Chase’s village manager, told his Board of Managers in February.
For a community of 2,000 with an annual budget of $4.6 million, that’s a bonanza. What’s more, because locals know enough to evade the cop cams, the village’s new revenue mostly comes from outsiders, rather like a commuter tax.
Recent news stories are all about how jogging can prevent aging. But I wonder how much of that can be attributed to exercise and how much of that can be attributed to being outdoors. From Eurekalert
Researchers at Johns Hopkins are reporting what is believed to be the most conclusive evidence to date that inadequate levels of vitamin D, obtained from milk, fortified cereals and exposure to sunlight, lead to substantially increased risk of death.
In a study set to appear in the Archives of Internal Medicine online Aug. 11, the Johns Hopkins team analyzed a diverse sample of 13,000 initially healthy men and women participating in an ongoing national health survey and compared the risk of death between those with the lowest blood levels of vitamin D to those with higher amounts. An unhealthy deficiency, experts say, is considered blood levels of 17.8 nanograms per milliliter or lower.
Of the 1,800 study participants known to have died by Dec. 31, 2000, nearly 700 died from some form of heart disease, with 400 of these being deficient in vitamin D. This translates overall to an estimated 26 percent increased risk of any death, though the number of deaths from heart disease alone was not large enough to meet scientific criteria to resolve that it was due to low vitamin D levels.
Yet, researchers say it does highlight a trend, with other studies linking shortages of vitamin D to increased rates of breast cancer and depression in the elderly. And earlier published findings by the team, from the same national study, have established a possible tie-in, showing an 80 percent increased risk of peripheral artery disease from vitamin D deficits.
In view of the above, it is ironic that this article views all the sunshine that joggers get as the one negative aspect of jogging.
But the charlatans are only half the story. Courts have also missed plenty of mistakes from well-intentioned, conscientious scientists, too. In fact, these may be even more common—and harder to catch. Studies show that crime lab fiber, paint, and body fluid analyses, for example, may consistently have error rates of 10 percent or higher. The error rate in fingerprint analysis is possibly between 1 percent and 4 percent. And bite mark evidence is notoriously unreliable though still widely used.
To much was made of the few Russian planes that Georgia manged to down. From McClatchy Newspapers…..
At first, news of Russia’s aerial attacks came in fragments. An airfield was hit, a radar station demolished. But by Monday, as bombs fell among the withdrawing Georgian forces, it was only too clear what the Russians had been up to.
The early strikes had made it impossible for Georgians, who in the war’s first day had shot down four Russian aircraft, to mount an effective response. Now Russian jets could dominate the skies.
Col. Gen. Anatoly Nagovitsin, the deputy head of the Russian military’s general staff, put it bluntly: “I can report on Russian supremacy in the airspace. Georgian aircraft stopped flying.”
Outside Tskhinvali, Georgian soldiers huddled beneath trees and bridges, trying to stay out of the line of sight of passing Russian jets. In addition to military trucks, troops were being moved around in civilian buses and vans. In Gori, soldiers worked out of a university building.
They had to hide; there was no answer to the Su-25 fighter jets, TU-22 bombers and others streaking nearby, looking for prey.
If you read the full article, you will get a lot of direct quotes from Georgian soldiers.
This week’s poem of the week is the song Delarey. It was brought to mind by the problems that Georgia is experiencing. The Boers lost their war against the English but they prevailed in the end. When the English withdrew from South Africa they left the Boers in charge. But even still the Boers still cling to memory of their lost war as a badge of honor and so will the Georgians after the Russians have beaten them.
The difference between the Georgians and the Boers is that when the Russians inevitably get draw away by other problems the Georgians will have the demographic majority in their own country. Then it will be a bad time to be a member of the ethnic minorities who sided with the Russians. One only has to think of what happened to the Africans after the English left South Africa even though the Africans outnumbered the Boers. The ethnic minorities that are siding with Russia will not even have that advantage
What can we say? We have a weakness for anyone who delivers a good dose of French bashing.
We were trying to get the Ape Man to write something on Solzhenitsyn in honor of his death. But apparently that is not going to work out for this week. So we had to make do with this essay from Cecil E. Bohanon. The essay is theoretically about Solzhenitsyn’s economic views, but it is a good overall overview of Solzhenitsyn’s outlook on life for those who are not already familiar with him.
Now that strategy is in ruins. As things stand, Georgia will be fighting not to regain South Ossetia or even to deter aggression, but to survive. It is hard to see any good outcome. Georgia has failed to win a quick victory: crucially, it failed to block the Roki tunnel under the Caucasus mountains, normally used as a smugglers’ highway, but now the route for Russian heavy weapons that Georgia cannot counter for long. Worse, the authorities in Abkhazia, Georgia’s other breakaway region, may mount an attack, either on its own or with Russian help.
It seems clear that Georgia has failed to block the tunnel for long even if they did strike at as the Belmont Club suggested. Apparently there are TV clips showing Russian troops pouring out of those tunnels, though I have not seen one to link to yet.
It is hard to believe but the Belmont Club is suggesting that Georgia may be giving the Russians a really hard time. Make sure you read the comments.