Gaza,DU, hip grooves, nuclear ice,

Reports this am 18/07/2006 10:46AM AEST that Palestinians have ambushed ZE troops in Gaza, offing one.
Cant confirm this right now.

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An old Nir Rosen column from Feb 2004:

BAGHDAD - Rubaei Street in Baghdad's Zayuna district is one of the city's lesser-known oasis of normality. Far away from the more famous Kindi Street of Harthiya or 14 Ramadan Street of Mansour in the center of the city. On either side of the wide and brightly lit boulevard good restaurants are open well into the night, the sidewalks are crowded with families, and even young couples. Expensive cars slowly cruise the street, and people gaze at the crowds of girls in tight clothes.

I was sitting outside last night (staring at them too) with my Iraqi friend Rana in a fresh fruit juice and ice cream restaurant called Sandra. Owned by a Christian family, this restaurant is a secret I hesitate to reveal to the rest of the world. Sitting outside at dusk, I was sipping my strawberry smoothie while Rana ate imported ice cream, explaining that she did not eat the local ice cream for fear of nuclear contamination in the milk. She noted that the scene before us reminded her of the days before the war, when she would go out at night with her sisters, unafraid of the dangers that keep women sequestered in their homes today.

As she was waxing nostalgically about the good old days under Saddam Hussein, a refrain I am by now accustomed to hear, even from many Shi'ites, and I was trying not to roll my eyes, two sharp gun shots cut her words short and returned her to reality...

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aliveinbaghdad

This "war" isn't meant to be fought using a lot of machinery. But depleted uranium, that kills the next generation. It's impossible (or at least impractical) to kill 30 million people with bullets. Spray depleted uranium around, and there won't be a next generation. A much more permanent way to fight a decisive long war. The troops are a diversion, they hold guard, Du does the real trick. After all the crop making fields are shot up with DU, there won't be any crops. Large scale starvation will follow, and at the same time only babies with 2 heads are born, if any. Then after like 50 years, there are no iraqis. So, the only reason the troops are there is to watch that the iraqis don't interfere with their fields beeing messed with.That's why there isnt a big investment on troop security, they're there on a low importance job (watchdog). All the IDE's an al-qaeda action get the news but the real story is completely elsewhere.

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Dick Cheney:

So we've never made the case, or argued the case that somehow Osama bin Laden [sic] was directly involved in 9/11. (3-29-06)

(apparently he meant Saddam here; maybe he just had them backwards all along by mistake?)

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By 2030, hip replacements in the USA to increase 174%, to 572,000 a year,.. Artificial-knee implants are expected to increase 673%, to 3.48 million..
Conversation eventually turned back to the groove theory, specifically to whether this groove might actually exist. Chao, a brisk and cheerful surgeon who trained at Harvard and Northwestern, smiled knowingly and reached for Landis’s X-ray. As we leaned in, Chao pointed to a cloudy, half-moon-shaped blur on the rim of the femoral head, just beneath the pelvis. It was 1.5 centimeters long and a centimeter deep; it looked like a tiny pearlescent goblet.

“There’s your groove,” Chao said, tapping the film with a pen. “It’s soft, and the pelvis is pushing down on it. It’s a dent.” Landis looked at the X-ray intently, faintly pleased at this revelation but distinctly unsurprised.

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nytimesNuclear delusions: "When Vogtle..was being built in the 1970’s and 80’s .. An entire concrete factory, now defunct, was built here during that time; so was a factory to manufacture ice, a necessary ingredient in making the superdense nuclear-grade concrete required for the reactor-containment buildings ..
.. The plant took almost 15 years to move from blueprints to being operational. And by the time it began producing electricity in the late 1980’s, its total cost, $8.87 billion, was so far overbudget that Vogtle became yet another notorious example of the evils of nuclear energy...
“The fact that the T.V.A. is spending $1.8 billion to fix up an old plant, rather than just spend it on a new plant, suggests that a new one costs well over $2 billion,” David Lochbaum, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, told me in Washington.
[Thats in a country which has, or had, a history of big steel & reactors. Foe Aus to buy one off-the-shelf, expect Westinghouse to hold the place in hock forever]

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100,000 West African black rhinos in 1960. That figure dropped to an estimated 14,000 by 1980 and the animals may now be extinct.
- 1960 was when I topped my 1y school ('grade 7') and received for a prize "Serengeti Shall Not Die" by Bernhard Grzimek, seems I have left it rather late to see Rhinos

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technologyreview nanotube filtration: The new membranes,..Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), could reduce the cost of desalination by 75%, compared to reverse osmosis..
The carbon nanotubes ..only seven water molecules can fit across their diameter.
..water flow rates up to 10,000 times faster than would be predicted by classical equations,..
.... a silicon wafer.. coated with a metal nanoparticle catalyst for growing carbon nanotubes. .. to grow "like blades of grass -- vertically aligned and closely packed."..

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bigelowaerospace Genesis I, launched by an old CCCP ICBM, right out of the silo!
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Gaza DU grooves ice