Riis Took EPO

1996 Tour de France winner Bjarne Riis, who is now the owner and manager of Team CSC, admitted doping in a Friday press conference at CSC headquarters in Lyngby, just outside Copenhagen. The Dane, who was then riding for Team Telekom, said he took EPO in 1996, the year that he ended Miguel Indurain's five-year Tour de France winning streak.

At this point folks (if they haven't done so already) may start to wonder about anyone who does well at Le Tour.

I realize that some libertarians question the ban on performance enhancing drugs in sports, but I don't. Though I would not advocate the government enforcement of such bans.

Today's Video From Iraq

One of the great things about the personal video recoder age is their use by soldiers in the field. Anyway, check out the reaction of these Marines to I guess a JDAM taking out a building.

John Wayne Speaks!

While Wayne isn't overly specific, I would guess that these remarks by him concern 1960s student radicalism. Make of the video that has been tacked onto the speech what you will.

"The Theists [sic] Nightmare"

Why do men have nipples?

WTF?

In a speech in Brazil last week, the pope sparked controversy by saying that native populations had been “silently longing” for the Christian faith brought to South America by colonizers.

“The proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture,” he said in Brazil.

I'm not quite sure what to chalk these remarks up to. I can say that claiming that you know what people long dead were "silently longing" for, at least in this context (e.g., conversion by force), is at best an arrogant remark. As for the "alienation" and "imposition" remark, well, clearly the Pope is simply ignorant of the events that took place in the Americas following Columbus' voyage. By itself suppressing the worship of the Gods of the indigenous population was an "imposition of a foreign culture."

Perhaps the Pope should read de Las Casas; clearly he needs some sort of education on this particular issue.

The Muppets

YouTube has a nice collection of snippets from various movies, TV shows, etc. made by the the The Muppets.

Boomerang

CRAWFORD, Texas - The White House on Sunday fired back at former President Jimmy Carter, calling him ”increasingly irrelevant” a day after Carter described President Bush’s presidency as the worst in history in international relations.

Whatever the merits of this claim it seems to me that this statement could be easily used to describe the Bush Presidency. Indeed that observation is so obvious one wonders why the White House would have used such language to describe Carter.

Stanley Milgram's Experiment

One can watch some of the footage of the controversial experiment here.

Conformity to authority illustrates a powerful example of the lack of free will or at least the inability to exercise such (for the majority of individuals).