Copy Cat: Cloning 101

So there's this cat that was cloned. Now if my calculation and understanding on DNA and cloning are correct (and I have no reason why they wouldn't be), we have a problem. If the owner that dished out 50 grand to pay for a cloned cat used the DNA from her old cat when it was mature and/or aging, the cloned cat is going to age really quickly.

Because DNA taken from young life has these long tail thingies on the end of the DNA strands. As the animal ages, the tail thingies get short and the DNA starts to get all fudged up and then you get old and stuff. So if you use this old DNA, you'd be starting off with fudged up DNA and pet would seem old before it actually was old. Get it? Supposedly that's what happened to Dolly. I haven't seen anyone address this. What's the deal?

Merry Christmas!

I've been saying that a lot lately, and whenever I do it makes me happy. Maybe it's because it's the most wonderful time of the year. Or maybe it's because anyone that does is labled a culturally insensitive yahoo by a handful of agenda-controlling journalists out there.

Whatever the reason, Christmas totally rocks and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it from rocking.

Players Unions in Pro Sports

This rant is in response to the NHL which is very likely to strike this year:

I have no doubt that the most egregious abuses caused by workers unions (and believe me, they're definitely out there) are professional athletes. Workers unions were a necessary counter to over-demanding, under-paying, and dangerous work environments imposed by "the man". There's a slough of incompetent and overly-selfserving "mans" out there and the ability to strike is just about the only way most blue collar workers can "stick it to him".

Enter professional sports. Home of the most cushy and high paying jobs on the planet. The revenues professional sports generate are enormous so obviously the players have salaries to match. But that's not enough, and as Dr. Evil once said, why make billions when you can make millions (er, or something to that effect). Professional athletes got together and figured let's "stick it to the FAN" and demand more money by threatening to strike for a season or two.

It makes me sick to think that professional athletes can threaten to strike if "management" does not raise the league "minimum wage" of a six-digit salary the exact same way that a blue collar worker would threaten to strike if he wanted to raise his pay by a few cents per hour. The power that worker's unions give pro-athletes is the most abusive and insulting implementation of union laws in the country (and that's saying a lot). When will fans wake up and demand that this blatant loophole be closed?!

There is absolutely no valid reason that professional athletes, namely in the NHL, NFL, MLB, and the NBA should be given the right to strike. PERIOD

Kyoto Protocol

Stuff that divides the world is often dumb, real dumb. Take the Kyoto Protocol for example. Even advocates for it agree that it will prevent global warming by .15 degrees Celsius over the next 96 years! That's .0015625 degrees per year!

How many jobs is that worth sacrificing? How much hardship is that worth imposing on the economy? How much higher are we willing to see gas prices go?

Advocates for it say it's a good "first step." Er, not really. We barely have enough fossil fuels to make it thru the first half of this century. Sounds an awful lot like a "last step" if you ask me.

Meanwhile this is a real hot button issue in the world. The biggest impact it will ever have is in making the United States look bad just because they won't bow to a completely worthless agreement.

And how does that make you feel, Mr Saddam?

"As a result, I have asked the International Red Cross to send urgently Western medical experts to file an independent report on the current situation and to see if Mr. Saddam is on a hunger strike or not — and what the motives are," Ludot said.

here

Since when did a rational person give a care what Saddam's motives were? Who cares?! And why am I not surprised this Ludot guy is French?

Hey Ludot, no one cares. If Saddam wants to die in his cell by his own hand, I don't care. I'd prefer that over another B.S. Milosevic trial.

Putin weighs in on the Ukraine

A few days ago I said that Powell's excessive support for Viktor Yushchenko would invite ire from the international community. Thanks to Putin, we can now put a face on that angst. According to him, the United States is a dictatorship.

"Even if dictatorship is packaged in beautiful pseudo-democratic phraseology, it will not be able to solve systemic problems," Putin said. "It may even make them worse."

I guess there's several points I'd like to make. 1) See, I told you so. 2) Putin, don't be lecturing the U.S. on making the world safe. Last time I checked, it was your country that was having serious problems with preventing terrorism in the past 3 years -NOT OURS. 3) I can't even remember the last time Bush took a cheap shot at Schroeder or Chirac who perpetually spew anti-American garbage from all their bodily orifices. How is it that Putin can get away with such strong words directed at the United States? Conclusion: Many of the anti-American sentiment going around isn't fair, but still, it has to be considered in U.S. foreign poilicy.

Oil for food program

So I decided to try to educate myself over what happened with the oil for food scandal by reading wikipedia's account of it. That's here. It's long and somewhat boring, but I have kind of changed my feelings of the program. I used to think the problem with it was unaccountable elites that ran the U.N. I think the core problem with the oil for food program is that after the first Golf War, unrealistic sanctions were placed on Iraq. The amount of oil the country is sitting on is second only to Saudi Arabia I believe and oil for food program was more like a breeding ground for kickbacks, bribes, and corruption. I hate to say it, but it actually reminds me of post WWI Germany and the unrealistic sanctions that were put on the country led to a revolt by Hitler which climaxed with WW2. Or it's kind of like the "proverb" in Baseketball, "What a terrible thing to happen on dozen egg night."

Oil for food was doomed from it's conception. If I had a lot of time on my hands, I'm confident I could come up with a very strong argument that the "rebuilding" process after the first Golf War was actually more damaging than the one we've got going on now. If the sanctions we imposed after the first war didn't fester so much corruption, I find it very likely that Saddam's perceived threat to the United States would not have provoked us to go to war.