Happy Holidays…Happy Thanksgiving

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

RUN…run fast!

…We all have so much to be thankful for…
…Enjoy your day…

~Sharon~
~The Baby Boomer Queen~

Detroit ranked #1 for MOST DANGEROUS City…

In another blow to the Motor City’s tarnished image, Detroit pushed past St. Louis to become the nation’s most dangerous city, according to a private research group’s controversial analysis, released Sunday, of annual FBI crime statistics.
The study drew harsh criticism even before it came out. The American Society of Criminology launched a pre~emptive strike Friday, issuing a statement attacking it as “an irresponsible misuse” of crime data.

The 14th annual “City Crime Rankings: Crime in Metropolitan America” was published by CQ Press, a unit of Congressional Quarterly Inc. It is based on the FBI’s Sept. 24 crime statistics report.

The report looked at 378 cities with at least 75,000 people based on per-capita rates for homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and auto theft. Each crime category was considered separately and weighted based on its seriousness, CQ Press said.

Last year’s crime leader, St. Louis, fell to No. 2. Another Michigan city, Flint, ranked third, followed by Oakland Calif.; Camden, N.J.; Birmingham, Ala.; North Charleston, S.C.; Memphis, Tenn.; Richmond, Calif.; and Cleveland.

The study ranked Mission Viejo, Calif., as the safest U.S. city, followed by Clarkstown, N.Y.; Brick Township, N.J.; Amherst, N.Y.; and Sugar Land, Texas.

CQ Press spokesman Ben Krasney said details of the weighting system were proprietary. It was compiled by Kathleen O’Leary Morgan and Scott Morgan, whose Morgan Quitno Press published it until its acquisition by CQ Press.

The study assigns a crime score to each city, with zero representing the national average. Detroit got a score of 407, while St. Louis followed at 406. The score for Mission Viejo, in affluent Orange County, was minus 82.

Detroit was pegged the nation’s murder capital in the 1980s and has lost nearly 1 million people since 1950, according to the Census Bureau. Downtown sports stadiums and corporate headquarters, along with the redevelopment of the riverfront of this city of 919,000, have slowed but not reversed the decline. Officials have said crime reports don’t help.

Detroit Deputy Police Chief James Tate had no immediate comment on the report. But the mayor of 30th ranked Rochester, N.Y.. an ~police chief himself, said the study’s authors should consider the harm that the report causes.

“What I take exception to is the use of these statistics and the damage they inflict on a number of these cities,” said Mayor Robert Duffy, chairman of the Criminal and Social Justice Committee for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

The rankings “do groundless harm to many communities,” said Michael Tonry, president of the American Society of Criminology.

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Thak you AP News
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Oh dear…I have a friend who is an Investigator for the City of Detroit…I truly hate to think of him out there…I hope he retires soon. Be safe, my friend.

~The Baby Boomer Queen~

WAR IS HELL…Walter Reed’s, Ward 53…is full and getting more each day!

At Walter Reed, Care for Soldiers Struggling With War’s Mental Trauma Is Undermined by Doctor Shortages and Unfocused Methods

On the military plane that crossed the ocean at night, the wounded lay in stretchers stacked three high. The drone of engines was broken by the occasional sound of moaning. Sedated and sleeping, Pfc. Joshua Calloway was at the top of one stack last September. Unlike the others around him, Calloway was handcuffed to his stretcher.

When the 20 year old infantry soldier woke up, he was on the locked down psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. A nurse handed him pajamas and a robe, but they reminded him of the flowing clothes worn by Iraqi men. He told the nurse, “I don’t want to look like a freakin’ Haj.” He wanted his uniform. Request denied. Shoelaces and belts were prohibited.

Calloway felt naked without his M-4, his constant companion during his tour south of Baghdad with the 101st Airborne Division. The year-long deployment claimed the lives of 50 soldiers in his brigade. Two committed suicide. Calloway, blue-eyed and lantern-jawed, lasted nine months, until the afternoon he watched his sergeant step on a pressure plate bomb in the road. The young soldier’s knees buckled and he vomited in the reeds before he was ordered to help collect body parts. A few days later he was sent to the combat stress trailers, where he was given antidepressants and rest, but after a week he was still twitching and sleepless. The Army decided that his war was over.

Every month, 20 to 40 soldiers are evacuated from Iraq because of mental problems, according to the Army. Most are sent to Walter Reed along with other war wounded. For amputees, the nation’s top Army hospital offers state of the art prosthetics and physical rehab programs, and soon, a new $10 million amputee center with a rappelling wall and virtual reality center.

Nothing so gleaming exists for soldiers with diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder, who in the Army alone outnumber all of the war’s amputees by 43 to 1. The Army has no PTSD center at Walter Reed, and its psychiatric treatment is weak compared with the best PTSD programs the government offers. Instead of receiving focused attention, soldiers with combat-stress disorders are mixed in with psych patients who have issues ranging from schizophrenia to marital strife.

Even though Walter Reed maintains the largest psychiatric department in the Army, it lacks enough psychiatrists and clinicians to properly treat the growing number of soldiers returning with combat stress. Earlier this year, the head of psychiatry sent out an “SOS” memo desperately seeking more clinical help.
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Thank you The Washington Post, Anne Hull and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
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If you do not believe that this condition exists…go to any VFW Post and talk to anyone there…! You can see it in thier faces, their eyes and in thier stories…WAR IS HELL!

And if you have a story to share about your experience with the military or VA health care systems…here is the contact information:
The Washington Post at (202) 334-4880 or by Email at militarycare@washpost.com.
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Your stories need to be heard, so we can stop this war and bring our men and women home.

For those of you who don’t know Ernie Pyle was my Uncle, he died geting the soliders stories back to the states.

Those of you who want to read more about Pfc. Joshua Calloway, here is a link for you to do so:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/17/AR2007061701351.html

The Twisted Sister is ANTI~WAR but PRO~Troops.

DON’T forget “Hire our returning VETS!” They need our support for the support they have given this counry.

~The Baby Boomer Queen~

The secret to why male organisms evolve faster than their female counterparts…

The secret to why male organisms evolve faster than their female counterparts comes down to this: Males are simple creatures.

In nearly all species, males seem to ramp up glitzier garbs, more graceful dance moves and more melodic warbles in a never ending vie to woo the best mates. Called sexual selection, the result is typically a showy male and a plain Jane female.

Evolution speeds along in the males compared to females.

The idea that males evolve more quickly than females has been around since 19th century biologist Charles Darwin observed the majesty of a peacock’s tail feather in comparison with those of the drab peahen.

How and why males exist in evolutionary overdrive despite carrying essentially the same genes as females has long puzzled scientists.

New research on fruit flies, detailed online last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds males have fewer genetic obstacles to prevent them from responding quickly to selection pressures in their environments.

“It’s because males are simpler,” said lead author Marta Wayne, a zoologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “The mode of inheritance in males involves simpler genetic architecture that does not include as many interactions between genes as could be involved in female inheritance.”

The finding could also shed light on why diseases show up differently in men and women.

Complicated chromosomes

Wayne and her colleagues examined more than 8,500 genes shared by both sexes of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Of those genes, about 7,600 have different expressions [alleles] that do different jobs in males and females.

The flies were identical genetically, except for their sex chromosomes.

In flies and humans, thousands of genes made up of DNA are packaged into tiny units called chromosomes. Each parent contributes one set of 23 chromosomes to offspring, resulting in little ones with 23 father given chromosomes and 23 mother chromosomes 46 total. One pair of these is called the sex chromosome. In this case, the females have two X chromosomes [XX] and males, XY.

Many genes are found on the X chromosome, whereas few are associated with the Y chromosome. For female fruit flies, the X~chromosome genes can come in two flavors called alleles that not only interact with each other but also with other genes.

For instance, if one allele is dominant over the other, that allele would get “expressed” while the recessive allele would stay hidden. Though under cover, the recessive allele kind of hitches a ride on the X chromosome and can be passed on to future generations.

Genetic simpletons

That’s not the case with males.
“We find direct evidence that the expression of the genes on the X has this covering behavior in females whereas in males they’re out in the open,” said study team member Lauren McIntyre, also of UF.
Males only have one X chromosome, so what you see is what you get. If that particular gene gives the male a boost in terms of sexual selection, say a gene responsible for fluffier feathers, the gene would be selected for in the game of natural selection over successive generations. But if the gene is no good for males, it would get selected against over time.

“Having one X means your genes are more open to selection in males,” UF researcher Marina Telonis~Scott said in a telephone interview. “So in a female if you have a recessive allele that confers a sickness, it can be concealed within the two X’s but if you’ve only got one, such as the male, you’re more open to selection.”
And the reason males are gevetic simpletons, it turns out, is sex. The researchers suggest this uncomplicated [compared with females] genetic pathway allows males to respond at the drop of a hat to the pressures of sexual selection. That way they can win females, produce more offspring and start the cycle over again.

While not as prominent a trend, they also found a similar pattern in so~called autosomal genes, which are those found on any chromosome save the sex chromosomes. Many of the fruit-fly autosomal genes, however, did work in concert with genes located on the X chromosome.

Human implications

The “elephant lurking in these results,” of course, is how they would apply to men and women.
The researchers caution the results don’t directly translate to humans. “The X function is thought to be quite different in flies than humans,” McIntyre told LiveScience. In humans, one of the X chromosomes gets inactivated in females, though research is finding this inactivation isn’t always absolute.

However, the results could help explain differences in symptoms and responses to diseases in men and women, the authors say. Sexual selection does occur in humans, they note. In addition, fruit flies and humans share an evolutionary history, the authors point out, which is the reason why we share more than 65 percent of our genes with the tiny insects.
“If we see a mechanism in flies it may also be true in everything that shares that evolutionary history,” McIntyre said.

On a basic level, the genetic machinery works in a similar manner in flies and us.
“There’s a health aspect in figuring out differences in gene expression between the sexes,” Wayne said. “To make a male or a female, even in a fly, it’s all about turning things on either in different places or different amounts or at different times, because we all basically have the same starting set of genes.”
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Thank you LiveScience.com and Jeanna Bryner
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That breaks it down pretty simple…when we are compared to a fruit fly…doesn’t it…all creatures. large or small…

~The Baby Boomer Queen~

Mr. Whipple. Dick Wilson dies…entertainment…

LOS ANGELES, California, Dick Wilson, the character actor and pitchman who for 21 years played an uptight grocer begging customers “Please, don’t squeeze the Charmin,” died Monday. He was 91.

Dick Wilson played Mr. Whipple in more than 500 commercials for Charmin toilet paper.

The man famous as TV’s “Mr. Whipple” died of natural causes at the Motion Picture & Television Fund Hospital in Woodland Hills, said his daughter Melanie Wilson, who is known for her role as a flight attendant on the ABC sitcom “Perfect Strangers.”

Wilson made more than 500 commercials as Mr. George Whipple, a man consumed with keeping bubbly housewives from fondling toilet paper. The punch line of most spots was that Whipple himself was a closeted Charmin squeezer.

The first commercial aired in 1964 and by the time the campaign ended in 1985 the tag line and Wilson, a former Canadian airman and vaudeville veteran, were pop culture touchstones.

He also played a drunk on several episodes of “Bewitched,” and appeared as various characters on “Hogan’s Heroes,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” and Walt Disney productions.
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Thank you AP News
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I bet there isn’t a Baby Boomer out there that doesn’t remember “Mr.Whipple.”

Rest in peace, Dick Wilson
~The Baby Boomer Queen~

Michael Vick SURRENDERS Early to do Federal Time…Apologizes to Nation…

Michael Vick Surrenders, Will Enter Prison Early

Suspended Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick surrendered to authorities yesterday after deciding to begin his federal prison sentence three weeks earlier than his scheduled sentencing, according to a court document.

Vick surrendered to U.S. marshals and was being held at a regional jail. He is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 10 by U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson after pleading guilty to a conspiracy charge related to his participation in a dog fighting operation based at a property he owned in southeastern Virginia.

According to an order signed yesterday by Hudson, Vick “has indicated his desire to voluntarily enter custody prior to his sentencing hearing.”

The order said it appeared “appropriate to do so” and Vick “is remanded to custody based solely on his desire to begin his period of incarceration prior to his sentencing hearing and not because of a violation of any condition of his bond.”

Vick is facing a recommended jail sentence of 12 to 18 months, although Hudson can sentence Vick to up to five years in prison if he chooses.

“From the beginning, Mr. Vick has accepted responsibility for his actions, and his self surrender further demonstrates that acceptance,” Vick’s Washington based attorney, William R. (Billy) Martin, said in a written statement. “Michael wants to again apologize to everyone who has been hurt in this matter and he thanks all of the people who have offered him and his family prayers and support during this time.”

Vick also is facing state dog fighting charges and was suspended indefinitely by the NFL after entering his guilty plea in his federal case.
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Thank you The Washington Post, Mark Maske and Jerry Markon, Washington Post Staff Writers
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@@@@@HERE’S A FOLLOW UP ON MY POST OF 11/17@@@@@

SILENT INJUSTICE A Twist to the Left
A Murder Conviction Torn Apart by a Bullet
In a 1995 Maryland Case, Key Testimony and the Science Behind It Have Been Discredited

Former Baltimore police sergeant James A. Kulbicki stared silently from the defense table as the prosecutor held up his off duty .38 caliber revolver and assured jurors that science proved the gun had been used to kill Kulbicki’s mistress.

“I wonder what it felt like, Mr. Kulbicki, to have taken this gun, pressed it to the skull of that young woman and pulled the trigger, that cold steel,” the prosecutor said during closing arguments.

Information from Joseph Kopera, who worked as a firearms expert for the Maryland State Police, was used to convict James A. Kulbicki of murder. This is a 2000 Photo By Gail Burton, Associated Press.

Prosecutors had linked the weapon to Kulbicki through forensic science. Maryland’s top firearms expert said that the gun had been cleaned and that its bullets were consistent in size with the one that killed the victim. The state expert could not match the markings on the bullets to Kulbicki’s gun. But an FBI expert took the stand to say that a science that matches bullets by their lead content had linked the fatal bullet to Kulbicki.

The jurors were convinced, and in 1995 Kulbicki was convicted of first degree murder in the death of his 22 year old girlfriend. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

For a dozen years, Kulbicki sat in state prison, saddled with the image of the calculating killer portrayed in the 1996 made for TV movie “Double Jeopardy.”

Then the scientific evidence unraveled.

Earlier this year, the state expert committed suicide, leaving a trail of false credentials, inaccurate testimony and lab notes that conflicted with what he had told jurors. Two years before, the FBI crime lab had discarded the bullet matching science that it had used to link Kulbicki to the crime.

Now a judge in Baltimore County is weighing whether to overturn Kulbicki’s conviction in a legal challenge that could have ripple effects across Maryland. The case symbolizes growing national concerns about just how far forensic experts are willing to go to help prosecutors secure a conviction.

“If this could happen to my client, who was a cop who worked within this justice system, what does it say about defendants who know far less about the process and may have far fewer resources to uncover evidence of their innocence that may have been withheld by the prosecution or their scientific experts?” said Suzanne K. Drouet, a former Justice Department lawyer who took on Kulbicki’s case as a public defender.

Prosecutors are fighting to uphold Kulbicki’s conviction, arguing that there is still plenty of evidence that proves his guilt.

“While much of the evidence against the petitioner falls into the category of circumstantial evidence, the state presented a mountain of evidence, both direct and circumstantial,” prosecutors argued in a motion earlier this year opposing Kulbicki’s request for a new trial.

Police had lots of circumstantial evidence. A jacket with the victim’s blood on the sleeve was found hanging in Kulbicki’s closet. And four bone chips and a bullet fragment were found in his truck. Tiny drops of blood also were found in the truck, and one spot of blood on the holster of his off duty weapon. But the blood spots were so small and their quality so poor that they could not be matched to the victim.

If you would like to see more about this incident, here is a link for you:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/18/AR2007111801539.html?wpisrc=newsletter
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Thank you AP News, The Washington Post and John Solomon
Washington Post Staff Writer
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Well, there you go….this just further substantiates my comments in my earlier post.

This is an example of some of the people in our justice system.
And the extent that they will go to to get a conviction…another notch on their gun!

They aren’t all as bad as this…but look at the damage this ONE man has caused and all of the lives he has affected.

Oh what lies we web, when first we master to deceive…

~The Baby Boomer Queen~

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