PJ Media » The Three Great Scams of Our Time

Quote of the day:

I have been following the ascent of Barack Obama from early in the Democratic primaries—when he surfed on a wave of clichés, bromides, plagiarisms, gaffes, promises, and outright fabrications to the nomination—up to the present moment when he began to be exposed as arguably the most disingenuous and destructive president in the history of the United States. I found it hard to believe that he had succeeded in conning the majority of his countrymen (and much of the West). True, he enjoyed the material assistance of the consensus media in what was both a massive cover-up of his dubious formative and intellectual influences and an equally massive promotional campaign. Nonetheless, how a largely unvetted nonentity with a winning manner could so effectively beguile even a dumbed-down electorate is nothing short of grotesque.

Redshirting: Holding kids back from kindergarten - CBS News

"60 Minutes" did a piece on Kindergarten redshirting. In it, they clearly illustrated the big elephant in the corner, but never overtly mentioned it: every single example they cited was of a boy being held back--not one girl.

It's very dry here in Madison:

Seriously dry conditions have developed over southern Wisconsin during June. Several stations in the south central sections of the state reported the driest June on record. Madison received only 0.31 inches of rain, breaking a 117-year record. This amount was only 7 percent of normal June rainfall. Beaver Dam (0.33 in), Ft. Atkinson (0.42 in) and Watertown (0.50 in) also experienced their lowest June rainfall totals.

I don't remember seeing anything like it. Our lawn is yellow and it crunches when I walk on it. There are tall ugly weeds popping up in the middle of lawns all over town. Our garden is doing ok. We have to water twice a day, but on the plus side the garden weeds have been easy to keep down. I hope it will end soon.

I find this story "Swiss institute finds polonium in Arafat's effects" highly unlikely:

Traces of the poisonous element polonium have been found in the belongings of late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, a Swiss institute said on Wednesday, and a television report said his widow had demanded his body be exhumed for further tests.

Arafat died at a hospital in France in 2004, after a sudden illness which baffled doctors. Many Palestinians have long suspected he was poisoned.

Darcy Christen, spokesman for the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, told Reuters on Tuesday it had found "surprisingly" high levels of polonium-210 in Arafat's belongings.

The half life of Polonium-110 is 138.4 days.  Which means that between the day he died (Arafat died on 11/11/04) and January 1, 2012, there would have been 18.5 half-lives. Which means that for every million atoms of Polonium that might have been on Arafat's belongings when he died, only 2.5 particles would have still existed at the start of the year. I don't know the lag-time between the tests and the announcement, but if they tested it after the first of June, that would have dropped to 1.2 particles per million.

Needle, meet haystack.