Struck in tsunami

More ways to raise the flag.

Gene therapy 'hope' on impotence

The gene therapy work is moving from the lab to the clinic
US scientists say they are closer to creating a gene therapy treatment for erectile dysfunction.
Human and animal trials suggest this could offer an alternative to current treatments for some patients, the American Society of Gene Therapy heard.

Researchers say gene therapy could be effective far longer than pills used just before sex, improving spontaneity.

The human trials involved injections into the penis and some experts queried whether men would choose this option.

More here, if you need it.

If I Only Knew then What I Know Now....hmmm

Like all lives, you get one go at it. If you are lucky you enjoy the richness and gifts and endure the hardships and tough times. A good life is where all things considered; the scales wind up tipping in your direction. But as Bobalharb reflected and mused, it would be nice to crank up the old time machine and go back and take care of business like you should have done so the first time. What would you do?

By the way the picture is Brigitte Bardot at eighteen. She still writes me.

Institutional Breakdown - Whitewashing the Problem

Our institutions are failing us and here is one of the more recent examples; The Pew Research Center recently published the results of a poll of 55,000 American Muslims which it and much of the Media have characterized as showing that Muslims in America "are largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world." As was pointed out by Dennis Prager, Pew and much of the media have tried to put "lipstick on a pig." To their credit though, unlike the buried EU study showing rampant Muslim youth hate crimes there, Pew has not tried to lock away the bad news.

Relatively few Muslim Americans believe the U.S.-led war on terror is a sincere effort to reduce terrorism, and many doubt that Arabs were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Just 40% of Muslim Americans say groups of Arabs carried out those attacks.

The poll reveals that Muslims in the United States reject Islamic extremism by larger margins than do Muslim minorities in Western European countries, when compared with results from a 2006 Pew Global Attitudes Project survey. However, there is somewhat more acceptance of Islamic extremism in some segments of the U.S. Muslim public than others. Fewer native-born African American Muslims than others completely condemn al Qaeda. In addition, younger Muslims in the U.S. are more likely than older Muslim Americans to express a strong sense of Muslim identity, and are much more likely to say that suicide bombing in the defense of Islam can be at least sometimes justified.

Very few Muslim Americans – just 1% – say that suicide bombings against civilian targets are often justified to defend Islam; an additional 7% say suicide bombings are sometimes justified in these circumstances.

Views about terrorism are broadly shared by all segments of the Muslim American population, but the polling does find pockets of support for extremism. Overall, just 5% of Muslim Americans express even somewhat favorable opinions of al Qaeda. Yet strong hostility toward al Qaeda varies widely – 63% of foreign-born U.S. Muslims say they have a very unfavorable opinion of al Qaeda, compared with 51% of all native-born Muslims, and just 36% of African American Muslims.

Pew's narrative explanation of the poll tends to highlight the positive results while downplaying the negative. For instance 5% of all American Muslims have a favorable opinion of Al-Qaeda. In addition to that, 27% chose to express no opinion of Al-Qaeda. Based on Pew's estimate of 2.35 million Muslims in America, nearly 120,000 Muslims in America have a favorable view of Al-Qaeda while a whopping 23,500 approve suicide bombings! Does that represent Mainstream America? More than 1 out of 4 American Muslims (or nearly 600,000 people) refuse to express a negative opinion of the world's most virulent cancer yet are presented as "mainstream." Yeah, right! 60% of mainstream America do not believe Arabs carried out the 9/11 attack. Would the Pew people or the media have us believe that 17% of mainstream America believe suicide attacks are justified (8%) or refused to condemn them (9%)? BTW - 12% of foreign born Arabs think that suicide bombings may be justified. Pew says "not to worry", compared to other countries our Mohammedans are wonderful liberal people.

Muslim Americans hold liberal political views on questions about the size and scope of government. At the same time, however, they are socially conservative and supportive of a strong role for government in protecting morality. When asked to choose, 70% express a preference for a larger government providing more services; just 21% prefer a smaller government providing fewer services.

"Institutional breakdown" is how I describe the media's ideological whitewash of critical issues facing this country. More and more, it seems that the truth is subverted in order to advance a left wing secular, anti-Christian agenda. Think I'm crazy? Substitute the word Christian for the word Muslim and imagine the media's enraged reaction. What is this country coming to?

Jim Cramer on Mitt Romney

I love it when motor mouth, spitball wizard, Chris Matthews gets out-flanked. Cramer cold-cocked Matthews who is in the tank for Obama.

Humane theories of counterinsurgency warfare that have failed us for 60 years.

..."What's the postmodern equivalent of air power, the new revolutionary development? It's the proliferation of the 24/7 media in all its formats. And the terrorists realize it."

OUT-THOUGHT BY THE ENEMY
OUR STRATEGY VS. THEIRS, IN IRAQ & BEYOND
Ralph Peters, New York Post

June 1, 2007 -- OUR current military tactics in Baghdad are the most promising we've tried: deploying units amid the population to provide security around the clock. But we may not have enough troops or enough time left to turn neighborhood successes into a strategic win.

We may have waited too long to operate on the cancer killing Iraq. (Washington's still arguing about the diagnosis.)

Since Saddam's statue fell, we've tried one grunt-level technique after another, hoping tactics would produce a strategy. That's backward. First, you establish your strategy. Then you select the tactics that can achieve it.

Oh, we had nebulous goals regarding democracy and peace in the Middle East. But goals aren't a strategy. And neither the Bush administration nor the Pentagon ever laid down a coherent and comprehensive strategic plan to get us from A through B to C. Even if the current troop surge works, it gets us only to B - with C still undefined after more than four years.

The terrorists have done a better job. We sent them reeling in Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq stunned them, but when we reached Baghdad we turned out to be the dog that caught the fire truck. Civilian ideologues insisted our troops wouldn't be needed long, if at all, and forbade our military from running a no-nonsense occupation with sufficient resources to impose and maintain order.

We gave the terrorists and insurgents time to regain their balance. And they did.
Oh, they went through trial-and-error phases, including ill-judged mass confrontations with U.S. firepower. But they ultimately proved more adaptable than we've been: We restrict ourselves to supposedly humane theories of counterinsurgency warfare that have failed us for 60 years; our enemies simply do whatever works.

Since 2004, al Qaeda and its clones have developed a strategic framework for action that's proven so effective that terrorists outside of Iraq have adopted it. While our tactics often seemed disconnected from any clear strategic purpose (precisely what do we hope to achieve in Iraq even now?), the new terrorist doctrine for fighting Western militaries is so perfectly integrated that any honest staff officer has to admire it.

The terrorists' immediate goal is to get us out of Iraq. Their actions against us at every level of warfare contribute to that purpose:

• At the tactical level, they concentrate on killing and wounding our soldiers and on restricting our movements. Their weapons, such as roadside bombs, contribute to both objectives, while suicide bombings against civilians make the streets we can't drive ungovernable.
• At the operational level - the hinge between tactics and strategy - they exploit the media's appetite for sensational images and anti-Americanism to get out a message that amplifies their power. Their tactics directly support this operational effort.
• At the strategic level, they leap over our forces to influence our population and, through them, our government. The operational-level focus on the media directly supports the strategy.

The terrorists know where they want to go and they have a plan to get there. We don't. No one in Washington offers a detailed, persuasive answer to the Iraq question.

Bring the troops home! OK, then what? No one will tell you. Give the surge time! All for it. But what is the specific end-state we hope to reach, and are our means sufficient?

We're stuck in a terrible marriage in Iraq - and if we leave, mom's going to kill the kids. So we crack open another bottle of sound bites to comfort ourselves.
The military brass also has to shoulder its share of the blame for fighting the kinder, gentler war its pedants want to fight, rather than fighting to win. Officers poisoned by too much time on civilian campuses behave like professors, defending the fanciful theories in their dissertations to the last Infantryman. (They unanimously insist that religion isn't a major factor in the Middle East, since Harvard taught them that faith is irrelevant.)

Lashed by lawyers, timid generals are better suited to fight for funding on Capitol Hill than to defeat our nation's enemies in the field. They're show-dogs that don't hunt. Despite all the shimmering technology we've bought, our military leaders remain trapped in 20th-century thinking - while the terrorists, for all their invocations of the past, are clear-eyed about what it takes to win in the 21st century.

Those who follow military matters have heard plenty of mumbo-jumbo about a "revolution in military affairs" in the last few decades. Most of the rhetoric was a scam to enrich defense contractors, but there was a true revolution in military affairs in the last century. It involved mechanization and wireless communications and even the atomic bomb, but its apotheosis was air power.

The advent of military aircraft changed warfare, expanding the battlefield into a third dimension while dramatically deepening the area that could be attacked. Air power alone was rarely decisive (despite the claims of its advocates), but control of the skies became vital.

What's the postmodern equivalent of air power, the new revolutionary development? It's the proliferation of the 24/7 media in all its formats. And the terrorists realize it. They learned to trump air power and all the detritus of the last revolution by refusing to mass together and by submerging themselves in urban seas. Then they went one better by grasping the power of irresistible weapons that came free of charge: the media.

Yes, the media were able to influence a war's outcome back in the Vietnam days. But the Cronkite-era media were the equivalent of World War I biplanes. Today's media are a sky full of B-52s, cruise missiles and stealth fighters - with unlimited ordnance.

The terrorists know they can't beat our forces on the battlefield. Their purpose in engaging our troops is to generate a body count, graphic images and alarmist headlines. They've created a new paradigm of warfare that's cheap, effective and defiantly hard to defeat.

Meanwhile, our own military isn't even allowed to slip stories to the bribe-driven Arab press. And the global media credit every perfunctory claim by the terrorists that the target we just hit was another wedding party.

It may prove impossible to win by today's rules. We, too, need a new warfare paradigm. The bad news is that there isn't any sign of one.
Meanwhile, it's disheartening to see a sound tactical approach to security in Baghdad at last and Sunni tribes turning against al Qaeda in Anbar province - but an enduring strategic vacuum in Washington.

Some Pr*cks are Bigger than Others.

I will probably regret this post.

Men obsess over penis size, women don't

Published: June 1, 2007 at 4:26 PM

SHEFFIELD, England, June 1 (UPI) -- Women are more interested in a man's personality and looks than the size of his penis, but men often experience penis anxiety, found a British review.
The review, published in the British Journal Urology International, found that while men often have a better body image, a better genital image and more sexual confidence if they have a large penis, women don't necessarily feel that bigger is better.

Dr. Kevan Wylie, of the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, in Sheffield, and Ian Eardley, of St. James' Hospital in Leeds, examined more than 50 international research projects on penile size and small penis syndrome completed since 1942.

The results of 12 studies that measured the penises of 11,531 men found that on average, erect penises ranged from 5.5 to 6.2 inches in length and 4.7 to 5.1 inches in girth.

A survey of over 50,000 heterosexual men and women found that 66 percent of men said their penis was average-sized, 22 percent said large and 12 percent said small. Eighty-five percent of women were satisfied with their partner's penile size, but only 55 percent of men were satisfied with their penile size.

"It is helpful to normalize the situation and provide as much accurate information as possible, as many men either lack any information or have been misinformed," Wylie said in a statement.

No, You Listen to me Stupid.

How is that again? You think I'm angry? You can't construct a simple sentence and now you are going to articulate the future of America based on your vision, your wisdom, your insight, your instincts, your honesty, your courage, your respect for law, your economic theories, your political and diplomatic accomplishments, your idiotic jammer?

Not this time stupid. You have exposed yourself to be the weak, dishonest neo-liberal fool that you have always been and we were too naive to notice. We are a naive people. No more.

You Mr. Bush are not fit to lead anything let alone a great country and a once great political party. If the Republican party stands for anything it better stand for the courage to do the right thing at a tough time. Republicans need to do what Democrats never could do and that is reject a president that is Republican in name only. We need to apologize to the American people for not having said so earlier but should say it now.

George W, Bush, it is well past your time to leave. Go, please just go.

Laura Ingraham says it much better. hattip: Doug