Weep for thousands of American soldiers killed in a futile battle, weep for hundreds of thousand of Iraqis killed for naught.

According to National Geographic, soon there will be no “road less traveled” to take.

As of 1995 only 17 percent of Earth’s land remained free of direct human influence, as seen in this map of the vast networks of shipping lanes and roads that crisscross the planet.

In the rush to stock food supplies, keep safe from predators and natural disasters, and improve trade and commerce, people have domesticated entire landscapes and ecosystems — often to their detriment, a new study says.

The study authors, led by Peter Kareiva of the Nature Conservancy, studied global maps and defined human impact using several criteria, including the presence of towns or cities and nighttime lights that are detectable by satellites.

“On average, the net benefits to humankind of domesticated nature have been positive,” the authors write in the current issue of the journal Science.

For instance, leaps and bounds in agriculture have increased food supplies and made for easy access to energy-rich, easily stored grains.

But the study also found that people have converted about 50 percent of the world’s surface area to grazed land or cultivated crops, felling about half of Earth’s forests in the process.

“We have, of course, made mistakes,” the authors write, “… leaving few, if any, truly wild places on Earth.”

This fan was obviously trying to entice me … Better not let Laura see it.

No quite sure why they asked me for a specimen, but they all wanted a sniff …

This looks like another one of their crazy festivals celebrating some dictator from the past. Funny looking moustache he has though.

Got a few shots like this. The cops look like they were trying to practice their golf strokes. They need to follow through a bit more because look where the ball ended up in the top right …

In light of the Walter Reed scandal and the other evidence that American soldiers serving in Iraq are getting less that adequate (let’s call it “indifferent” care), it’s revealing to return to September 10, 2001, and a speech given by Donald Rumsfeld to Pentagon outsourcers at the Pentagon.

Quoted in Jeremy Scahlll’s new book, Blackwater, it is more than interesting, it is damning:

“The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, to the security of the United States of America.

This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans.

From a single capital, it attempts to impose demands across time zones, continents, oceans, and beyond.

With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk. Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union … [but] this adversary is closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.”

The damning information does not end there. Listen to Jane Smiley again:

Given the fact that in 2001, we know Rumsfeld and Cheney were planning war with Iraq and just looking for an excuse (which they got and recognized the very next day), we have to suppose that what we have seen happen to the army in the last six years — its breakdown from a well-trained, well-equipped, well-educated superior volunteer force that the Pentagon was proud of to a struggling mess, where injured soldiers are redeployed … because of staffing shortages, where injured soldiers get poor care or no care … where female soldiers are at risk of rape from not only their fellow soldiers, but their commanding officers … and where recruits are increasingly actual convicted criminals — we have to accept that when Rumsfeld declared war on the army, he was not kidding, and he carried out his plan, and that, indeed, his success in destroying the army was the very reason Cheney called him a great Secretary of Defense.

He lives in the White House.

President Bush declared in 2003 that he did not read newspapers, but at his final  news conference of the year last week, he casually mentioned that he had seen something in the paper that very day.

Asked for his reaction to word that Vice President Cheney would be called to testify in the CIA leak case, the president allowed: “I read it in the newspaper today, and it’s an interesting piece of news.”

That was a marked contrast with his position in 2003, when he told  Brit Hume on Fox News that he glanced at the headlines, but “I rarely read the stories,” because, he said, they mix opinion with fact.

He said he preferred to get his news from “objective sources” — like “people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”

The Texas band, which has felt a backlash at home for criticizing Bush’s Iraq war policy, played a sold-out concert in Vancouver Wednesday night.

Lead singer Natalie Maines couldn’t resist taking a shot at the humbled Bush administration as she praised her Vancouver fans. “Either the beer is free or you’re happy that Donald Rumsfeld resigned today,” Maines said.

Here’s a little taste:

There is very little that sums up the record of the U.S. Congress in the Bush years better than a half-mad boy-addict put in charge of a federal commission on child exploitation. After all, if a hairy-necked, raincoat-clad freak like Rep. Mark Foley can get himself named co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, one can only wonder: What the hell else is going on in the corridors of Capitol Hill these days?

These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula — a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.

And some more …

If you want to get a sense of how Congress has changed under GOP control, just cruise the basement hallways of storied congressional office buildings like Rayburn, Longworth and Cannon. Here, in the minority offices for the various congressional committees, you will inevitably find exactly the same character — a Democratic staffer in rumpled khakis staring blankly off into space, nothing but a single lonely “Landscapes of Monticello” calendar on his wall, his eyes wide and full of astonished, impotent rage, like a rape victim. His skin is as white as the belly of a fish; he hasn’t seen the sun in seven years.

It’s funny, sad and frustrating, and worth the read.

They certainly put things in perspective: While this year’s Nobel prize for physics went to two scientists who helped to prove that the universe began with a big bang, Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris won the Ig Nobel physics prize for tackling the conundrum of why dry spaghetti breaks into more than one piece when it is bent.

People’s Choice will no doubt go to Francis Fesmire, of the University of Tennessee, who was awarded the medicine Ig for his report Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage.

The 2006 Ig Nobel award for peace went to Welshman Howard Stapleton for his electronic teenager repellant, called the Mosquito.

The device makes an annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults.

He later used the same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers.

Two Australian researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation (CSIRO) have won an Ig Nobel for their research on how many photos you need to take to ensure that nobody in a group photo has their eyes closed.

Australians Nic Svenson and Dr Piers Barnes have found that to take a photo of a group with fewer than 20 people, dividing the number of people by three gives the number of shots needed.

Ivan Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip May, of the University of California Los Angeles, have won the ornithology prize for their pioneering work on the ability of the humble woodpecker to avoid head injury.

Wasmia Al-Houty, of Kuwait University, and Faten Al-Mussalam, of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, have taken home the nutrition prize for showing that dung beetles are in fact finicky eaters.

Three US scientists — Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand — have been awarded the acoustics prize for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.

While the conclusions of a group of scientists from Valencia University and the University of Illes Balears in Spain are not immediately clear, the judges have deemed their study Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature worthy of the chemistry prize.

Also honoured for cheese research, Bart Knols from Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands has won the biology award for his part in research showing that female malaria mosquito are equally attracted to limburger cheese and human feet.

Despite the ceremony’s irreverent tone, the awards are taken increasingly seriously in the scientific community, with eight of the 10 winners this year paying their own way to attend the ceremony.
The Improbable Research web site, home of the Ig Nobel Awards, will no doubt have full details of the research, once they’ve recovered from the hangover of the awards ceremony at Harvard last night.

“They rediscover bin Laden every two years right before the election. If you had a business strategy that worked all the time that was premised on scaring the living daylights out of people, you just keep doing it.”

– Bill Clinton, in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s Political Capital with Al Hunt, about the Republican strategy for the midterm elections.