Link: http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/butcher/story/8049305p-7942245c.html

Susan Butcher, a four-time winner of the Iditarod, who had been battling leukemia for over a year, lost her fight with the disease on Saturday in Seattle.
She had been battling graft-vs-host disease following a bone marrow transplant in May. More recently, doctors diagnosed that her leukemia had returned, and she had re-started chemotherapy to prepare for a second bone marrow transplant. The combined effects of the GVHD and the chemo were too much even for her legendary resilience.
Follow the tributes on ADN, her official web site and other media outlets.

Link: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/51140

....which would be hysterically funny if it didn't sail so close to current reality...

It has emerged that once again, President Bush has failed to understand that in politics, when in proximity to the media, there is no such thing as an off-the-record conversation.
Back in 2000, he and Dick Cheney were caught talking off-stage at a campaign event, not realizing that microphones were turned on. They agreed that a well-known journalist was "a major league asshole". While politicians probably complain about media figures all of the time, it is clearly not smart to allow your contempt to surface.
Well, now the President has committed the same error again, this time making an off-the-cuff remark about getting "Syria to stop doing this shit" during a conversation with British Prime Minister Tony Blair during a media conference.
A large part of successfully running one's life is to learn from your mistakes. This pattern of repeating indiscretions suggests to me that the current elected leader of the U.S. Executive branch is a poor learner. This does not bode well for the governance of the United States at this critical time, with several unstable geo-political situations currently active (Israel-Syria, Iraq, Iran, North Korea). It also contrasts rather glaringly with his 2000 campaign position that various alleged incidents from his past (including high alcohol consumption and ingestion of mind-altering chemicals) were "youthful indiscretions", the implication being that they were a part of his past that he had put behind him. Mistakes like the ones he is making in public media situations make me wonder whether George W. Bush is really at all capable of learning from mistakes and not repeating them.

Link: http://susanbutcher.com

...who underwent a bone marrow transplant in mid-May in Seattle for Leukemia, is that she has been battling an outbreak of GVHD (Graft vs. Host Disease) for the last 2 weeks. This is not uncommon in bone marrow transplants where the bone marrow came from an anonymous donor. Even a close match donation can cause GVHD. Susan has been fighting the side-effects of the GVHD and the steroids that they have had to give her to combat it. Still, she seems to be fighting as hard as she fought to win all of those Iditarods. You can get updates on her condition (a no-holds-barred weblog of what it is like to go through a bone marrow transplant) here. Patient ID is butcher, Password is butcher1.

Link: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/6/6/8212/40666

...appears to be frightening to many people, until you actually look at all of the other issues facing modern America. At that point, we need to be able to plausibly answer the question: why are political leaders wasting time on this?

Link: http://susanbutcher.com

Susan Butcher, a 4-time winner of the Iditarod, was diagnosed with leukemia last year. She underwent a bone marrow transplant last month in Seattle, and is currently in the early stages of recovery from that procedure. Her long-term plan is to join another 50-plus cancer survivor, Dee Dee Jonrowe, and compete in the Iditarod again.
You can follow her progress in her fight against leukemia via her web site.

Link: http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002399.html

...according to this article at DefenseTech.

Link: http://www.asce.org/reportcard/2005/index.cfm?pic=3

The American Society of Civil Engineers publishes a yearly assessment of the state of the infrastucture of the USA. This is the report from 2005. It makes sober reading.

...the next few months of my life look to be very busy (moving house, packing kids off to college etc.) so this blog will only be updated occasionally until the Fall of 2006.
Folks interested in Information Technology can find my I.T. tech and leadership blog here. My aviation blog will continue to be updated as time allows.

Link: http://www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=2173

...where the Texas Ethics Commission has apparently re-written its own rules in order to determine that recipients of gifts do not have to disclose the monetary value of those gifts, in spite of the Ethics Commission rules that say they have to disclose the value.
Puzzled? Read this article which explains how you too can distort and gerrymander the rules of an Ethics Commission...
And people ask me why I think that the Republicans are incompetent...sheesh, incompetent is the wrong word for this sort of behaviour. This is rule gerrymandering, pure and simple. Otherwise known as ethically cleansed, morally bankrupt behaviour.