Bill O'Reilly on David Letterman

The hoopla that surround Bill O'Reilly at the Late Show with Dave Letterman. Make sure you see the beginning where David dip his pencil in Bill's cup of water that he drinks from later on.

Millions of Children To Be Fingerprinted

British children, possibly as young as six, will be subjected to compulsory fingerprinting under European Union rules being drawn up in secret. The prints will be stored on a database which could be shared with countries around the world.

The prospect has alarmed civil liberties groups who fear it represents a 'sea change' in the state's relationship with children and one that may lead to juveniles being erroneously accused of crimes. Under laws being drawn up behind closed doors by the European Commission's 'Article Six' committee, which is composed of representatives of the European Union's 25 member states, all children will have to attend a finger-printing centre to obtain an EU passport by June 2009 at the latest.

The use of fingerprints and other biometric data is designed to prevent passport fraud and allow European member states to meet US entry visa requirements, but the decision to fingerprint children has disturbed human rights groups.

The civil liberties group Statewatch last night accused EU governments of taking decisions in which 'people and parliaments have no say'. It said the committee's decisions were simply based on 'technological possibilities - not on the moral and political questions of whether it is right or desirable.'

'This is a sea change,' said Ben Hayes, spokesman for Statewatch. 'We are going from fingerprinting criminals to universal fingerprinting without any real debate. In the long term everyone's fingerprints will be stored on a central database. You have to ask what will be the costs to a person's privacy.'

According to secret documents obtained by Statewatch, the committee will make it compulsory for all children from the age of 12 to be fingerprinted. However, several of the committee's member states are lobbying to bring the compulsory age limit down. Sweden tells the committee it 'could agree with a minimum age of six years for passports'.

The UK, meanwhile, observes that it has collected the fingerprints of five-year-old asylum seekers with no 'significant problems'. Since February the Home Office has been fingerprinting children as young as five at asylum centres in Croydon and Liverpool. It took the decision amid concerns children were being registered by several families in order to claim more benefits.

Refugee support groups, including the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, have described the action as 'intrusive'. The JCWI also expressed concerns that fingerprints kept on file could be held against children if they tried to return to the UK in later life.

Fingerprinting young children is considered difficult because their fingers have yet to fully develop. The European Commission notes: 'Scientific tests have confirmed that the paillary ridges on the fingers are not sufficiently developed to allow biometric capture and analysis until the age of six.'

A commission spokesman said initially only member states would have access to their citizens' fingerprint data. However, after the Madrid bombings the commission signalled its intention for all fingerprints to be stored on one database that could one day be accessed by each EU state. 'Whether access for third countries will be allowed has to be decided by the EC at a later stage,' the spokesman said. 'Nevertheless, full interoperability is ensured, should the EU decide to give access to third countries.'

Such a move opens up the possibility that the fingerprints of British children could one day be accessed by foreign intelligence services. 'Secure passports make a lot more sense than ID cards,' said Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty. 'But only as long as the information that is kept is no more than necessary and is not shared with other countries.'

Greg Brady - High As A Kite

According to Barry Williams' autobiography, in this scene where the station wagon pulls up with the canoe on top, Barry is as high as a kite. This is pure poetry. There are so many little nuances that are unmistakably stoner: The forgetful pause before his first line to Dad, the giggle before the girl's "Wow a boat", his glance at the boat right after as if he'd forgotten it was there, the blissful smile at 2:31, the inappropriate giggle at 2:47, the stare at 2:53... Beautiful!

"Head On" Into Quackery

Not having a TV anymore I missed this - but James Randi caught it!

The latest major medical swindle being offered the American public is a raucously-cracked-up product we’ve now been introduced to through a massive TV advertising campaign. It’s named, “Head On,” a small waxy stick that one rubs directly on the forehead to relieve headaches. It sells for $8. Looking into it, I found it was – great surprise! – a homeopathic “remedy.” Each .2-ounce (<6 grams!) stick contains a “12X” concentration (?) of White Bryony – a type of vine – as one of the two active ingredients. That means that the whole damn stick contains 1 part of ingredient in 1,000,000,000,000 parts of wax, or a stick contains .000,000,000,005,67 grams of "ingredient!" Since there are some 100 applications in a stick, divide that quantity by 100… An additional ingredient is potassium dichromate (K2Cr2O7) at a dilution of one part to a million parts of wax. Though this chemical is intensely red-orange in color, and is used as a disinfectant and as a stain for furniture, the 1:1,000,000 dilution makes the Head On product quite colorless – as well as without ingredients.

See how silly it gets?

When I heard that NBC-TV Nightly News was going to discuss this product, I was encouraged. Any hope I had quickly faded when I viewed the piece. They were only dealing with the inane, repetitious, TV commercial. The consensus was that the commercial – simply because it was irritating – would sell the product; not a word was said about whether the wax stick would really work, except that maybe if it didn’t work, people would stop buying it. Yes, they will, but only after they’ve been swindled and the makers have made millions in profits. For those of you in the USA and Canada who have heard the promo, but not for others, my version will be significant:

Head On: it’s a scam for the deluded.
Head On: it’s a scam for the deluded.
Head On: it’s a scam for the deluded.

What insanity. This product is proudly featured by Walgreen’s Pharmacies. Note in the photo that this fake – and another piece of quackery seen at the right side of the photo – “The Power of Magnets” for migraine relief! – are placed among legitimate products that actually do work. This is called, association by reputation. Prince Charles would, I’m sure, rush to purchase “Head On” – as do millions of Americans, every day. And George Bush would call it a “faith-based” decision…

How Legalizing Drugs Will End the Violence

Norm Stamper is former chief of the Seattle Police Department and an advisory board member of NORML and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP):

Back in the early 1960s, I often sneaked into Mexico at the San Diego-Tijuana border. Too young to cross legally, I'd coil up in the trunk of Charlie Romero's '54 Merc. My buddies and I would head straight for the notorious Blue Fox to guzzle Carta Blancas, shoot Cuervo Gold and take in the "adult entertainment" acts. It wasn't something I'd necessarily want my kid doing, but there was a certain innocence to it: tasting freedom, partaking of forbidden adult pleasures. The frontera of Mexico was a fun, safe place to visit.

All that has changed.

From Tijuana to Matamoros, drug gang violence along the U.S.-Mexico border has taken the lives of thousands -- cops, soldiers, drug dealers, often their families, other innocent citizens from both sides of the border. Even a cardinal of the Catholic Church. Many others have gone missing and are presumed dead.

In the mid-'90s, the Arellano brothers' drug cartel ruled Tijuana, perched atop the hierarchy of Mexico's multibillion dollar illegal drug trafficking industry. Using cars, planes and trucks -- and an intimate knowledge of NAFTA -- the Arellanos transported hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine into American cities.

They enlisted U.S. drug gangs. In 1993, in my last days as San Diego's assistant police chief, the local gang Calle Treinte was implicated in the Arellano-inspired killing of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo. The Arellanos bribed officials on both sides of the border, spending over $75 million annually on the Mexican side alone, to grease their illicit trafficking.

And they enforced their rule not just with murder but with torture. If Steven Soderbergh's gritty 2000 film "Traffic" caused you to squirm in your seat, the real-life story of Mexican drug dealing is even more disquieting. The brothers once kidnapped a rival's wife and children. With videotape running, they tossed two of the kids off a bridge, then sent their competitor a copy of the tape, along with the severed head of his wife. Another double-crosser had his skull crushed in a compression vice. And who can forget the carne asada BBQs, where the Arellanos would roast entire families over flaming tires?

Just this week, the bodies of four men, three of them cops, were found wrapped in blankets in Rosarito Beach. Their heads showed up in Tijuana. Corruption of public officials, useful to sustain and grow illicit drug trafficking everywhere, has always run deep in Mexico. But with the country now having supplanted Colombia as the biggest supplier of illegal drugs to the United States, and with annual profits topping $65 billion a year, the numbers of federal, state and local cops on the take has never been greater.

Drug criminals have an unlimited supply of high-powered weapons at their disposal. Kingpins pay mules, usually impoverished, always expendable, to travel to the states to pick up a firearm or two at a gun show. Using the Brady Bill "loophole" (and congressional and presidential failure to extend the ban on assault rifles), all it takes is a phony stateside driver's license and a handful of cash to walk out with semi-automatic Uzis, AR-15s and AK-47s.

Last June in Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas, Alejandro Dominguez was sworn in as the city's police chief. That same day, three dark Chevy Suburbans with tinted windows pulled up to his office. Moments later, Dominguez, a reluctant top cop who only took the job at the pleading of a terrified citizenry, was dead. Police recovered 35 to 40 casings from an AR-15 assault rifle.

Mexico's drug dealers, including the Zetas (elite military commandos assigned to fight drugs but who've gone over to the other side), are among the most organized, proficient and prolific killers in history.

The violence does not end with the capture or the killing of major players like the Arellano brothers. (Ramon was shot and killed by the federales in February of 2002; Benjamín was captured a month later. Francisco has been in prison for years.) As with the illicit drug scene in the United States, thousands of low-level drug-dealing wannabes are marking time -- waiting for today's kingpin to fall so they can move up.

And the violence grows, and grows.

Virtually every analysis of the Mexican "drug problem" points to the themes raised here: the inducements of big money and wide fame; the crushing poverty of those exploited by drug dealers; the entrepreneurial frenzy of expanding and protecting one's markets; the large, unquenchable American demand for drugs; and the complicity of many in law enforcement.

But something's missing from the analysis: the role of prohibition.

Illegal drugs are expensive precisely because they are illegal. The products themselves are worthless weeds -- cannabis (marijuana), poppies (heroin), coca (cocaine) -- or dirt-cheap pharmaceuticals and "precursors" used, for example, in the manufacture of methamphetamine. Yet today, marijuana is worth as much as gold, heroin more than uranium, cocaine somewhere in between. It is the U.S.'s prohibition of these drugs that has spawned an ever-expanding international industry of torture, murder and corruption. In other words, we are the source of Mexico's "drug problem."

The remedy is as obvious as it is urgent: legalization.

Regulated legalization of all drugs -- with stiffened penalties for driving impaired or furnishing to kids -- would bring an immediate halt to the violence. How? By (1) dramatically reducing the cost of these drugs, (2) shifting massive enforcement resources to prevention and treatment and (3) driving drug dealers out of business: no product, no profit, no incentive. In an ideal world, Mexico and the United States would move to repeal prohibition simultaneously (along with Canada). But even if we moved unilaterally, sweeping and lasting improvements to public safety (and public health) would be felt on both sides of the border. (Tragically and predictably, just as Mexico's parliament was about to reform its U.S.-modeled drug laws, the Bush administration stepped in, pressuring President Vicente Fox to abandon the enlightened position he'd championed for two years.)

With drugs stringently controlled and regulated by our own government, Mexico would once again become a safe, inviting place for American tourists -- and for its own citizens, who pay the steepest price of all for our insistence on waging an immoral, unwinnable war on drugs.

What Frequencies Can You Still Hear?

You are a thirtysomething

You're a little frustrated that you can't hear all the tones that the young 'uns can but will be more than happy if it means you don't have to listen to their damn ringtones on the bus anymore. The highest pitched ultrasonic mosquito ringtone that I can hear is 14.9kHz

Find out which ringtones you can hear!

More Americans Too Fat for X-Rays, Scans

More and more obese people are unable to get full medical care because they are either too big to fit into scanners, or their fat is too dense for X-rays or sound waves to penetrate, radiologists reported on Tuesday.

With 64 percent of the U.S. population either overweight or obese, the problem is worsening, but it represents a business opportunity for equipment makers and hospitals, said Dr. Raul Uppot, a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

"We noticed over the past couple of years that obesity was playing a role in our ability to see these images clearly," Uppot said in a telephone interview.

Radiologists have their own term for it when writing up reports: "These images are limited due to body habitus."

Uppot's team looked for this phrase in radiology reports from 1989 to 2003. These included standard X-rays, computer assisted X-rays known as CT scans, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET).

These scans are used to look for tumors, blood clots, broken limbs and other injuries and diseased organs.

"Overall, 7,778 or 0.15 percent of 5,253,014 reports were habitus limited," they wrote in the August issue of the journal Radiology.

"It essentially doubled over the last 15 years," Uppot said.

The researchers looked more closely at the records of 200 of the patients, who weighed, on average, 239 pounds (108 kg).

"It is a major issue because ... the patient may still have a tumor, the patient may have appendicitis, the patient may have other inflammatory processes," Uppot said.

"This is affecting radiologists all over the country."

NOTHING BUT STATIC

Ultrasounds are most affected, Uppot said.

"In an obese person because the ultrasound beam does not get to the organs or get to them adequately enough we cannot get a picture. It looks like a snowstorm -- I don't know if you have seen those televisions where it is just whiteout? It looks like that."

An MRI can get a good picture if the patient can fit into the tube or get onto the table, Uppot said. Some manufacturers have started to make MRI machines with larger bore holes, but with the cost in the millions of dollars per machine, only large groups or institutions can afford them.

Siemens Medical Solutions of Siemens AG has seen the market potential. "Increase Your Physician Referral Base with 1.5 Tesla MRI for Obese and Claustrophobic Patients" the company says on its Internet website http://www.medical.siemens.com.

"It is a market out there. People who are taking advantage of it are making money," Uppot said. "We are in the process of buying and installing three of these machines."

One problem is with gastric bypass surgery, where the patients are by definition obese, Uppot said.

"If there is some complication -- abdominal pain or and infection or fever -- they are invariably at higher risk of not being able to be imaged with a CT or MRI," Uppot said.

"For the surgeon, he doesn't want to take the patient back to surgery to explore to see what the problem is," he added.

"For the patient, not knowing what is going on is a big issue. If you tell a patient 'I am sorry -- we just can't sit you on our CAT scanner', that is devastating to hear."

Scientists Say They’ve Found a Code Beyond Genetics in DNA

Researchers believe they have found a second code in DNA in addition to the genetic code.

The genetic code specifies all the proteins that a cell makes. The second code, superimposed on the first, sets the placement of the nucleosomes, miniature protein spools around which the DNA is looped. The spools both protect and control access to the DNA itself.

The discovery, if confirmed, could open new insights into the higher order control of the genes, like the critical but still mysterious process by which each type of human cell is allowed to activate the genes it needs but cannot access the genes used by other types of cell. Full story at the NY Times

American Bar Association Vs. King George W. Bush

President Bush's penchant for writing exceptions to laws he has just signed violates the Constitution, an American Bar Association task force says in a report highly critical of the practice.

The ABA group, which includes a one-time FBI director and former federal appeals court judge, said the president has overstepped his authority in attaching challenges to hundreds of new laws.

The attachments, known as bill-signing statements, say Bush reserves a right to revise, interpret or disregard measures on national security and constitutional grounds.

"This report raises serious concerns crucial to the survival of our democracy," said the ABA's president, Michael Greco. "If left unchecked, the president's practice does grave harm to the separation of powers doctrine, and the system of checks and balances that have sustained our democracy for more than two centuries."

Some congressional leaders had questioned the practice. The task force's recommendations, being released Monday in Washington, will be presented to the 410,000-member group next month at its annual meeting in Hawaii.