Japan needs nukes

Or maybe we just want Japan to have them.

CDR Salamander ponders the question.

General Patton had a great phrase,

'I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French division behind me.'

Well, outside the British, I would rather head out over the horizon in the company of the JMSDF than anyone else.

An Attack Submarine?

It's always worth checking out Day by Day.
Unfortunately it's too wide for this blog format, so just follow the link.

The seas will be now safe from killer rabbits.

Gloves or bare hands?

Do you feel better when you go to a restaurant and see gloved food handlers? According to this story in the LA Times, it's really a wash.

The reassuring news: Very few of the samples spawned cultures of the microbes being tested, which included Escherichia coli (some forms of which can make us sick) and Staphylococcus aureus (a germ that's common around the nose, mouth and rectum and that can cause skin infections).

The disconcerting news: There was no statistical difference between glove-handled tortillas and ones that were touched by human flesh. Tortillas handled with gloves gave rise to microbe growth 9.6% of the time; those touched with hands, 4.4% of the time. But the sample size was not large enough to establish that the rates were truly different.

Dean Cliver, a professor of food safety at UC Davis, said he wasn't too surprised by the findings, because studies have shown that dirty hands almost inevitably contaminate the outside of gloves as the user puts them on.

"The main purpose of gloves is they look good to customers and inspectors. The only possible exception is if people have some kind of skin infection," he said. "Hand-washing is still key … gloves are more a matter of keeping up appearances."

Bleg: Female gun-owner

This just in via the Second Amendment Sisters:

From Monica Hill, Fox News Channel:

The Fox News Channel is producing a one-hour program on guns. We are searching for a female gun-owner who used the gun to defend herself and is willing to share her story. Interested individuals should contact me as soon as possible at 212.301.5376 or via email at monica.hill "at" foxnews.com

If you know anybody who qualifies, pass it on.

(For those of you not familiar with what I did with Monica's email address there, you need to put the @ symbol where you think it goes. I didn't put her plain email address on the blog so that spammer robots won't be able to harvest it.)

Willie Loman to the white courtesy phone please

One of my fond High School memories is of convincing the operator at SFO to page Willy Loman to the white courtesy phone. I like targeted jokes that only a few people will get. That's no doubt what made me such a sucker for MST3K years later.

This memory was prompted by Terry Teachout wondering if Arthur Miller will be long remembered after his death.

Election Results

Patrick Ruffini presents the Iraqi Election Results Map.

The two main parties in Iraq, the mainly-Shia United Iraqi Alliance, and the Democratic Patriotic Alliance of Kurdistan are ethnic parties -- but they're the most vanilla ethnic parties you could imagine. The Kurdish alliance is a fusion of two parties who once fought a civil war against each other. With the exception of Allawi's Iraqi List, these coalitions pretty much include everyone of a particular ethnicity. This holds true even for the parties beyond the top three -- for instance, President Al-Yawer's coalition of Sunnis, which finished fourth at 1.78%, the Iraqi Turkmen Front coming in fifth, and the National Rafidain List, representing Assyrian Christians, which turned out a huge vote in U.S. overseas voting.