But about 20 minutes into the mission, the Pentagon’s research arm, known as Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, announced on its Twitter account that: “Range assets have lost telemetry.”

DARPA has a Twitter account, on which it announces the results of tests. This astounds me.

This TV has built in WiFi.

It connects to my Netflix Instant View account.

My Netflix Instant View account has Fawlty Towers.

In HD.

Modern Technology is fantastic. If only it could move my house 3 feet to the left.

London, Feb 6 (IANS) Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan isn’t intimidated by the full body-scan machines that have been recently installed at London’s airports – in fact, he’s been signing off printouts of his X-rays.

Khan, appearing on ‘Friday Night With Jonathan Ross’ – one of British television’s most popular weekend shows – revealed he’s been turning the controversial security machines into a public relations opportunity at London’s Heathrow airport.

‘I’m always stopped by the security, because of the name. And I think its okay: the western world is a little bit worried, paranoid and touchy, I guess – and feely when they’re frisking you,’ Khan told his celebrity chat show host moments after explaining how his new film is about a Muslim named Khan on a mission to tell the US president he is not a terrorist.

‘I was in London recently going through the airport and these new machines have come up, the body scans. You’ve got to see them. It makes you embarrassed – if you’re not well endowed.

‘You walk into the machine and everything – the whole outline of your body – comes out.’

Khan said he did not know that the body-scans – installed in the wake of last year’s abortive Christmas Day bombing of a transatlantic flight over Detroit – showed up every little detail of one’s body.

‘I was a little scared. Something happens [inside the scans], and I came out.

‘Then I saw these girls – they had these printouts. I looked at them. I thought they were some forms you had to fill. I said ‘give them to me’ – and you could see everything inside. So I autographed them for them.’

In a few months, grocery aisle magazines will feature hi-resolution renderings of Jennifer Anniston’s naked body as she returns from a romantic romp in the Firth of Forth with Gerrard Butler (while secretly pining for Brad Pitt).  Not too long after that, we’ll learn about Angelina Jolie’s next pregnancy from airport scans.  All while feeling so much safer.

The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

The world’s other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity’s soaring reproduction rate.

Ironically, China, despite its dirty coal plants, is the world’s leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict.

I swear to god, it’s like these morons read 1984 and A Brave New World and said “Hey, that sounds like a good idea!”

It’s worth reading Bush’s 2001 speech on stem cells again.

At its core, this issue forces us to confront fundamental questions about the beginnings of life and the ends of science. It lives at a difficult moral intersection, juxtaposing the need to protect life in all its phases with the prospect of saving and improving life in all its stages.

As the discoveries of modern science create tremendous hope, they also lay vast ethical mine fields.

As the genius of science extends the horizons of what we can do, we increasingly confront complex questions about what we should do. We have arrived at that brave new world that seemed so distant in 1932 when Aldous Huxley wrote about human beings created in test tubes in what he called a hatchery.

[snip]

Research offers hope that millions of our loved ones may be cured of a disease and rid of their suffering. I have friends whose children suffer from juvenile diabetes. Nancy Reagan has written me about President Reagan’s struggle with Alzheimer’s. My own family has confronted the tragedy of childhood leukemia. And like all Americans, I have great hope for cures.

I also believe human life is a sacred gift from our creator. I worry about a culture that devalues life, and believe as your president I have an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world.

And while we’re all hopeful about the potential of this research, no one can be certain that the science will live up to the hope it has generated.

You got absolutely none of this from the supposedly thoughtful Obama. With him, stem cell research seems completely devoid of ethical dilemmas. I’m glad we finally got a smart guy in the White House who understands all sides of the issues.

The thought of babies being exposed in America – not in a Communist dictatorship, but in America – should be absolutely revolting to any civilized person. Yet there was Obama, approaching this issue skeptically because he was afraid that it might impinge on abortion rights.

if that fetus, or child—however way you want to describe it—is now outside the mothers’ womb and the doctor continues to think that it’s non viable but there’s, let’s say, movement or some indication that, in fact, (the fetus is) not just coming out limp and dead, that, in fact, they would then have to call a second physician to monitor and check off and make sure that this is not a live child that could be saved.

So in Obama’s world view, the rights of newborns – and if it is “outside the mothers’ womb,” it is not a fetus – are so negligible that the possibility that the law might require a second opinion on whether some babies are in fact alive was too high a burden to place on a woman seeking an abortion.

…essentially adding an additional doctor who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physicians to induce labor and perform an abortions. Now if that’s the case… I think it’s important to understand that this issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births.

The bill was specifically about babies who came out alive. Obama couldn’t take his eyes off of his abortion dogma long enough to see that there were babies being exposed, left to die in closets. Faced with evidence that this monstrous practice was occurring in his state, Obama couldn’t bring himself to get worked up about it. Instead, he took the opportunity to rise in defense of abortion rights, and to criticize and kill the bill that tried to save the lives of living, breathing babies.

This sort of abortion uber alles philosophy is monstrous. We ought not expose babies. Those who see a bill written to ensure that living, breathing babies are not intentionally killed, and are primarily concerned with the burden on abortion rights of requiring a second opinion in a few marginal cases have priorities that leave me utterly aghast.