
Last time we posted, we the Scary Arab Clowns allowed our brother Hamham to type and we didn’t like the way he capitalized things (or didn’t) so we won’t be letting him type again. We write these things as a Scary Arab Clown Collective with each of us providing phrasing, stories, and commentary. Today, Ya-el will be typing.
You may think we have funny names, but at least none of us are named Blanket. Michael Jackson actually named one of his children after a bed covering? Wait until we tell our friend Duvet about this…

The deceased pop star left all his assets to the Michael Jackson Family Trust and has named his mother Katherine, 79, as guardian of his children – Prince, 12, Paris, 11, and Blanket, 7.
We think we know why Vago loves the King of Morocco, they are obviously brothers!

Here is the King!

Here is Vago!
We found a story yesterday in the New York Times that we thought was interesting. It seems that the conservative Bush Administration is still moving the United States to the right even under the Obama Presidency through Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito.
The court took mainly incremental steps in major cases concerning voting rights, employment discrimination, criminal procedure and campaign finance. But the chief justice’s fingerprints were on all of them, and he left clues that the court is only one decision away from fundamental change in many areas of the law.
The two newest justices, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., both appointed by President George W. Bush, agreed 92 percent of time, the highest rate for any pair of justices. But Justice Alito often wrote concurring opinions to underscore or try to extend conservative rulings, especially in criminal cases. He may well now be the court’s most conservative member.
“Alito is staking out some room to the right of the chief justice,” said Pamela Harris, the executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center, “and you would have thought there is no such room.”

We think the United States is still a more scary place to be than just about any other country in the world…
Today seven American teens were killed in Detroit, while four American soldiers died in Iraq. The moral? It’s safer to send your teens to Iraq than to Detroit.
Gunmen in a van opened fire on a group of teens waiting at a bus stop near Detroit’s Cody Ninth Grade Academy school on Tuesday, wounding at least seven, including two who were in critical condition. Two gunmen, possibly three, emerged from a green minivan and “asked for a person by name” before they “opened fire at the crowd,” Detroit Police spokesman Rod Liggons told WXYZ-TV.
Four soldiers were killed in Baghdad on the eve of the American withdrawal from Iraq’s cities as a “result of combat related injuries,” the military said.

And while the mainstream media has stopped talking about anything but Michael Jackson, we would like to remind you that Pakistan is still a nuclear country at risk of losing control:
A militant commander in northwest Pakistan tore up a peace deal with the Pakistani government Tuesday, dealing a major blow to the government’s campaign against Islamist insurgents in the extremist-controlled Waziristan region.
And we might add that North Korea is still psychotic an armed with nukes. Though we applaud the efforts of the U.S. at stopping them from trafficking weapons…
A North Korean ship tracked by the U.S. Navy on suspicion of carrying a banned arms cargo may be returning home, a U.S. official said, as Washington cracks down on companies helping Pyongyang export missile systems.
North Korea will find it increasingly difficult to trade arms due to U.S. moves and U.N. sanctions to punish it for a May nuclear test, but those measure will not end the weapons exports the destitute state relies on for foreign currency, experts said.
“Of course, it raises the costs of doing the arms and weapons of mass destruction business, but it won’t stop them from trying to circumvent the sanctions,” said Daniel Pinkston with the International Crisis Group in Seoul.
Now if someone would just stop the two biggest arms dealers in the world from selling weapons…those of course are the U.S. and Israel….

We think it is time to point out too, that space is more than just a fun place to do somersaults in the air…it is filled with dangerous things….like Uranium. The Japanese have found Uranium on the Moon.
Uranium exists on the moon, according to new data from a Japanese spacecraft.
The findings are the first conclusive evidence for the presence of the radioactive element in lunar dirt, the researchers said. They announced the discovery recently at the 40th Lunar and Planetary Conference and at the Proceedings of the International Workshop Advances in Cosmic Ray Science.
The revelation suggests that nuclear power plants could be built on the moon, or even that Earth’s satellite could serve as a mining source for uranium needed back home.
The Japanese Kaguya spacecraft, which was launched in 2007, detected uranium with a gamma-ray spectrometer. Scientists are using the instrument to create maps of the moon’s surface composition, showing the presence of thorium, potassium, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, calcium, titanium and iron.
“We’ve already gotten uranium results, which have never been reported before,” said Robert Reedy, a senior scientist at the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, and a member of the Kaguya science team. “We’re getting more new elements and refining and confirming results found on the old maps.”
The findings could help decide where to build future lunar colonies, since manned outposts will need energy, and could potentially derive it from nuclear power plants.
Furthermore, since uranium supplies on Earth are scarce, mining uranium on the moon to satisfy our energy needs at home could prove lucrative.
Kaguya, officially named SELENE (”Selenological and Engineering Explorer”), crashed into the lunar surface at the end of its mission on June 10.
We always used to laugh at the idea of curry being England’s national dish, but it turns out, that curry really is English…
Curry powder is a spice mix created by the British in an effort to replicate the flavor of the freshly ground spice blends they encountered in India. “Curry” comes from the Tamil word “kari,” which means spiced sauce, according to “The Oxford Companion to Food.” Commercially prepared mixtures were available to the British cook late in the 18th century. With time, the book notes, “what had been an Indian sauce to go with rice has become an English stew with little rice in it.”
Curry powder was one of the “exotic treasures” brought back by American sailors to their wives or mothers, wrote Avanelle Day and Lillie Stuckey in “The Spice Cookbook.” They note a “currey of chicken” was included in a 1792 cookbook published in Philadelphia.
Curry powder contains up to 20 spices, herbs and seeds, according to “The New Food Lover’s Companion.” Most commonly used are cardamom, chilies, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, fennel seed, fenugreek, mace, nutmeg, red and black pepper, poppy and sesame seeds, saffron, tamarind and turmeric.
We’ve always believed that curry makes your sex-drive higher. It turns out daily sex also makes our sperm stronger…
Having sex every day improves the quality of men’s sperm and is recommended for couples trying to conceive, according to new research.
Until now doctors have debated whether or not men should refrain from sex for a few days before attempting to conceive with their partner to improve the chance of pregnancy.
But a new study by Dr David Greening of Sydney IVF, an Australian center for infertility and in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, suggests abstinence is not the right approach.
He studied 118 men with above-average sperm DNA damage and found the quality of their sperm increased significantly after they were told to ejaculate daily for seven days.
We particularly like that this can be sex by one’s self as well. That will be good news for HamHam.
We are certain things are getting worse in the United States now…
Because the high-end booze has been taking a sales hit as consumers have increasingly turned to bargain-priced liquor. Distillers of the good stuff are chopping their prices to hang on to recession-weary customers.
What do American’s do when things get bad? They start drinking….

California, is about to fall apart…by the way, we erred when we said it was the 14th largest economy in the world…it’s actually the 8th largest.
And then we have the state with the largest people…

Mississippi’s still king of cellulite, but an ominous tide is rolling toward the Medicare doctors in neighboring Alabama: obese baby boomers.
It’s time for the nation’s annual obesity rankings and, outside of fairly lean Colorado, there’s little good news. Obesity rates among adults rose in 23 states over the past year and didn’t decline anywhere, says a new report from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
And while the nation has long been bracing for a surge in Medicare as the boomers start turning 65, the new report makes clear that fat, not just age, will fuel much of those bills. In every state, the rate of obesity is higher among 55- to 64-year-olds — the oldest boomers — than among today’s 65-and-beyond.
That translates into a coming jump of obese Medicare patients that ranges from 5.2 percent in New York to a high of 16.3 percent in Alabama, the report concluded. In Alabama, nearly 39 percent of the oldest boomers are obese.
Health economists once made the harsh financial calculation that the obese would save money by dying sooner, notes Jeff Levi, executive director of the Trust, a nonprofit public health group. But more recent research instead suggests they live nearly as long but are much sicker for longer, requiring such costly interventions as knee replacements and diabetes care and dialysis. Studies show Medicare spends anywhere from $1,400 to $6,000 more annually on health care for an obese senior than for the non-obese.
“There isn’t a magic bullet. We don’t have a pill for it,” said Levi, whose group is pushing for health reform legislation to include community-level programs that help people make healthier choices — like building sidewalks so people can walk their neighborhoods instead of drive, and providing healthier school lunches.
“It’s not going to be solved in the doctor’s office but in the community, where we change norms,” Levi said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long said that nearly a third of Americans are obese. The Trust report uses somewhat more conservative CDC surveys for a closer state-by-state look. Among the findings:
_Mississippi had the highest rate of adult obesity, 32.5 percent, for the fifth year in a row.
_Three additional states now have adult obesity rates above 30 percent, including Alabama, 31.2 percent; West Virginia, 31.1 percent; and Tennessee, 30.2 percent.
_Colorado had the lowest rate of obese adults, at 18.9 percent, followed by Massachusetts, 21.2 percent; and Connecticut, 21.3 percent.
_Mississippi also had the highest rate of overweight and obese children, at 44.4 percent. It’s followed by Arkansas, 37.5 percent; and Georgia, 37.3 percent.
_Following Alabama, Michigan ranks No. 2 with the most obese 55- to 64-year-olds, 36 percent. Colorado has the lowest rate, 21.8 percent.

