Events

I love the Straight Dope: Q: I have asked flight attendants on airplanes all over the world. No one knows. No one even hazards a wild guess. ... Why doesn't the plastic bag inflate? Since it doesn't, what is it for? First an inside secret: the bag does inflate, but only when you exhale. Here's the deal. Passenger oxygen masks give you a continuous flow of oxygen (as opposed to oxygen on demand, which only flows when you inhale). The oxygen obviously can't flow into your lungs while you're exhaling, so...

Scientists find more evidence that the planet is, on average, its warmest in 400 years: A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that the Earth is heating up and that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century. Overall, the panel agreed that the warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last 1,000 years...

New Scientist is reporting this hour that a man died in Beijing of H5N1 bird flu fully two years before China admitted any human cases: The case suggests that, as has long been suspected, many more people have caught H5N1 flu in China than have been reported, and for a longer time. The more human cases there are, the more chances the virus has to evolve into a human pandemic strain of flu. "It's a very important issue that needs to be clarified urgently," Roy Wadia, a spokesman for the World Health...

More on this later, but just keep in mind that oppressive regimes always attack the press before attacking the people. Keeping a free and open press is an absolute requirement of democracy. On that theme, three stories: The Chicago Tribune's Don Wycliff (reg.req.) says: "If intellectual dishonesty could be said to have a face, I saw it Tuesday evening as I watched Bill O'Reilly's program on Fox News." Craig Neumark (of Craigslist) admirably sums up on NPR today why net neutrality is a good thing...

I refer here to President Roosevelt's approval rating after the Battle of the Bulge. Josh Marshall's people found a beautiful document prepared in the 1940s; Marshall himself explains why this is not simply a poke-in-the-eye for Fox News—er, Press Secretary Tony Snow: There's a serious underlying point here about the administration's basic frivolousness in its conduct of the war. No one thinks you can fight a war or conduct any project of great consequence by following minor oscillations in polls. But...

One of my readers just sent this in: A small town had three shuls: Orthodox, Conservative and Reform. All three had a serious problem with squirrels in their buildings. Each congregation, in its own fashion, had a meeting to deal with the problem. The Orthodox decided that it was predestined that squirrels be in the Shul and that they would just have to live with them. The Conservatives decided they should deal with the squirrels in the movement's style of Community Responsibility & Social Action. They...

According to Federal Aviation Regulation (FAR) 61.56: (c) ...[N]o person may act as pilot in command of an aircraft unless, since the beginning of the 24th calendar month before the month in which that pilot acts as pilot in command, that person has (1) Accomplished a flight review given in an aircraft for which that pilot is rated by an authorized instructor; and (2) A logbook endorsed from an authorized instructor who gave the review certifying that the person has satisfactorily completed the review....

Summer has just begun in the Northern Hemisphere. It started at 12:26 UTC (8:26 EDT, 5:26 PDT), and goes until September 23rd at 04:03 UTC (11:03 pm Sept. 22nd, CDT).

But, then again, maybe not:

Jack Abramoff's right-hand man, David Safavian, was convicted today of lying and obstructing justice: Safavian was charged with lying about his relationship with Abramoff and his knowledge of the lobbyist's interest in acquiring properties from [General Services Administration], the property managing agency for the federal government. He was also charged with obstructing investigators looking into a golf trip he took with Abramoff in 2002. TPM Muckraker has a thorough dossier on this clown.