Quick hits

Glenn Reynolds links to Jules Crittenden: "What are we on, Day 103? I think that Change shark just officially got jumped." Seems that Obama will be reviving the military tribunals for Gitmo inmates, the ones he had previously condemned. That is, for the inmates he does not plan to release onto the streets of the US, with assistance (which would mean cash and what else?) to help them get settled.

Via the Crittenden link above, Gateway Pundit: "Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Omar al-Baghdadi has close ties to the Saddam regime. [… much else …] Remember this the next time you see a mainstream media report claiming there was no links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda."

Fox News: "The Obama administration has asked a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit against Iran filed by Americans held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran 30 years ago."

Peter W. Huber: Bound to Burn. TigerHawk calls it "[t]he best article you will read on why it is not merely futile, but counterproductive, for rich countries to struggle to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide," and has comments.

Stages of Denial: Take pity on the left as it grapples with the tea party revolt.

Putting MADD in Charge of America's Highways: President Obama's troubling nominee to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. To go with that, The Dangers Of The Drinking Age: The government pressured states to raise it to 21. So why didn't the move save lives?

Obama says, "I would love to get the U.S. government out of the auto -- auto business as quickly as possible.… I don't want to run auto companies." Meanwhile, the government is moving even deeper into the auto business: 'Cash for clunkers' kicks in gear. Subsidies at both ends, the sellers and the buyers. That ought to do it! Inline update: Katherine Mangu-Ward at Hit & Run points to a NY Times item on this with a lot of smart comments.

Barney Frank is messing with the money again, with The Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act of 2009. Nick Gillespie says, "Frank is nothing less than a trickster figure in American politics." There's a great graphic, oh, what the heck, here:



Some history: The Assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, by Peter Kross.

More disgusting lefties, indulging in ad feminam about Carrie Prejean: Reynolds links to Hot Air. TigerHawk links to GayPatriot. These videos are not safe for anyone. Partial transcription, and commentary, at the Daily Howler. Did Michael Musto actually compare Carrie Prejean to a "Klaus Barbie doll?" Good grief. Meanwhile — could Perez Hilton possibly be embarrassed? If not why this copyright fight with Patterico?

Feats of Strength at the Cocktail Competition: Tasting 150 liquors in two days (via)

Gleanings

The Periodic Table of Awesome. (via)

Ex-Star Wars boffins build mosquito-blasting raygun (via)

The Chia Obama. (via)

Barack Obama is tired of your motherfucking shit. (Audio, NSFW) (via, via)

The third party for all the third partiers. (via blake, somewhere)

Gleanings

The mystery of Ireland's worst driver. (via)

25 things you may not know about Robert Burns.

How in the world did Ted Rall get to be the president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists?

Kate at small dead animals beat me to both of these, and put them in one post: The Reagan vs. Obama debate, and Michael Ledeen's "We Are All Fascists Now."

Gleanings

The historical origin of "Yes we can."

Found: the lost cities of the Amazon.

Very well then, what was THE MOST TRAGICAL TRAGEDY That ever was Tragedized BY ANY Company of Tragedians? Why, it was Chrononhotonthologos. Naturally. By Henry Carey (c1687-1743) but variously published under the pseudonym Benjamin Bounce, esq., or Robert Carey. Full text at the link! Thanks to commenter Sam Kelly at Making Light.

Help for pale people is on the way: Suntan Drug Greenlighted for Trials. Not a lotion that turns you yellow, but an injection that promotes production of melanin. Now see if the stuffy old FDA will let anyone use it. (via)

This time I am going to link the whole darn Friday Odd Links list from The Corner. Oh—I just did! Dr. Mengele; the far side of the moon; brewer's droop found to be mythical; and more.

A few snacks

Cajun squirrel crisps. "What they're eating in Britain."

More food: Bacon pie, the story and all the pictures (via).

Which led indirectly to Chadzilla, a blog with pictures, oh, my, such pictures, of amazing food conjured by a group of chefs in Miami.

Which leads directly to Obama Foodorama: A Daily Diary of The Obama Foodscape, One Byte At A Time. Chadzilla says, "Everybody in the food industry should bookmark this site and read it daily." People not in the food industry might find something there as well. Top post this morning:

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack: Millionaire, Subsidy Recipient

The Office of Government Ethics released Cabinet appointees' income reports this week, and the AP and AM Law Daily point out that Barack has surrounded himself with millionaire lawyers in his admin, including Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

A two-term former Iowa governor, last year Vilsack's income included $300,000 from the global law and lobbying firm Dorsey and Whitney in Des Moines, Iowa; $100,000 consulting for MidAmerican Energy; $63,000 from Iowa State University; and $55,000 from other sources, including honoraria, a fellowship, a director's fee and consulting. In addition, he and his wife have $500,000 to $1 million in farmland that yielded $15,000 to $50,000 in rent.

There's more. So it's not all recipes, over there, by a long shot.

Gleanings

More on the Antikythera Mechanism, including a working model. The 76-year cycle sounds like Halley's Comet. Or can you think of something else with that periodicity?

The Modern Drunkard interview with Gary Shteyngart. Lotsa vodka, a little caviar, some reflections on the condition of Russia, literature and the writing life (via).

Frozen bubbles. Via Althouse, who calls it a "cool photography stunt." Cool? Below freezing, I'd say!

Self-handicapping excuse artisans. "I coulda been a contenda." If all the if-only's were laid end to end … (via)

Wreck of the bark Trajan discovered in Newport harbor.

Faggots in the raw. (SFW!)

UFO sighting in Cumbria, UK. Turns out to be Chinese lantern balloons, released at a wedding at this hotel. Nice hotel!

Morris dancing in danger of extinction? Probably not just yet.

Speaking of dancing, in Finland they spell YMCA with a NMKY (via Althouse commenter jdeeripper).

Gleanings

A trojan that mimics Windows activation. (via) And another one: "It's not clear how the initial infection gets to your computer. But once there, it puts hooks into Firefox to allow the spyware to watch and report on access to banking-type web sites. When such a site is accessed, the spyware grabs your login credentials and sends them off to the evil hacker. And that can't be good."

What makes Idiocracy an unlikely outcome: Balls and brains, at the Economist. (via)

"You kids take it easy with that kissing, now!" "Did you say something, Dad?"
Chinese girl gets 'kiss of deaf': A young Chinese woman was left partially deaf following a passionate kiss from her boyfriend. The story says that she will recover, so a little humor is not completely out of place. All the jokes are at Althouse.

50 worst cars of all time. Up to the present, I think, is what they mean, but it's TIME magazine, so maybe it's the 50 worst cars that have appeared in the magazine, or something else, careful about facts TIME is not, and the writing is highly subjective and personal (are those the same thing?), so "worst in what way," it could be anything, and indeed it's many things, to go with many cars. Worth it for the Horsey Horseless alone. (via)

A real Christmas tree is better for the environment than an artificial one. Via Planet Gore.

One of those blogs that's mostly links, you never know what you'll find there: The Message Digest. A few such links that appealed to me: the bacon and cheese roll. Looks delicious, but you would want to have a defibrillator handy. The Phrontistery, where "you will find the International House of Logorrhea (an online dictionary of obscure and rare words), the Compendium of Lost Words (a compilation of ultra-rare forgotten words), and many other glossaries, word lists, essays, and other language and etymology resources." Oddstrument.com, all about, yes, odd musical instruments, or as the author says, "fantastic instruments and sounds from around the world." Christmas Carol Music dot org: free sheet music for Christmas carols, in SATB and lead sheet styles, and quite a bit more, including MIDIs.

An Obama olio

A whole lot of open windows, not much energy to make a coherent post.

Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis, by James Simpson. Thanks to blake for this one. It describes the Cloward-Piven strategy and its relationship to ACORN, Obama, and various foundations, and of course George Soros. Also at Simpson's blog. I mentioned this strategy, though not by that name, a year and a half ago: Got to break it before you can fix it.

Inside Obama's Acorn, by Stanley Kurtz. From last spring.

Why the press hides Obama’s lies, by Roger L. Simon at PJ Media. Lots of comments.

AT HOME WITH: Bernadine Dohrn; Same Passion, New Tactics, by Susan Chira, NY Times from 1993. At home with Mrs. William Ayers.

They named their children after some of their heroes. Their older son, Zayd Osceola Ayers Dohrn, was named in honor of Zayd Shakur, the Black Panther killed in New Jersey during a shootout with police in 1973, and Osceola, the Seminole chief who sheltered runaway slaves. Their 13-year-old, Malik Cochise, takes his names from Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) and the 19th-century Apache chief who fought settlers encroaching on his land.

Not Quite Ready to Join the Crusade, by Victor Davis Hanson at PJ Media.

Hot Air has some videos: The Ayers connection. The third video includes a brief interview with John Murtagh, who wrote this, in City Journal last April: Fire in the Night: The Weathermen tried to kill my family. Inline update: at 7:34 in this last video, after the Murtagh interview, is a clip from a 1998 interview in which Connie Chung begs Ayers and Dohrn to repent of their violent actions. Their response is to fall all over each other with interruptions in their eagerness to say that they did not do enough. "I wish we'd done more." "We'd do it again." No ambiguity here.

The WSJ has Bill v. Barack on Banks: Clinton instructs Obama on finance and Phil Gramm.

A running cliché of the political left and the press corps these days is that our current financial problems all flow from Congress's 1999 decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that separated commercial and investment banking. Barack Obama has been selling this line every day. Bill Clinton signed that "deregulation" bill into law, and he knows better.

How allies of George Soros helped bring down Wachovia Bank, by Ed Lasky. If you didn't quite understand what was going on in that Saturday Night Live video that is so hard to find (try here!), the one with Herbert and Marion Sandler, this will lay it out for you.

Stanley Kurtz asks, "What exactly does a "community organizer" do?" in O's Dangerous Pals: Barack's 'organizer' buds pushed for bad mortgages, in the NY Post.

And here's one from last February on the Global Poverty Act, Obama's Global Tax, by Lee Cary in the American Thinker.

Just a couple more here. Powerline is keeping up with ACORN: "Is ACORN stealing the election?"

It is reasonable to ask whether ACORN is in fact a criminal conspiracy to subvert the voting rights of Americans. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Barack Obama paid ACORN $800,000 to register new voters, and then lied about it, falsely telling the Federal Elections Commission that the $800,000 went to a group called Citizen Services Inc. for "advance work."

ACORN's Criminal Enterprise, Continued. "At least nine states have now launched criminal investigations of ACORN…." Oh, look, they also have this video of Louis Farrakhan, last Feb 24, calling Obama the messiah.

A few links for Fannie and Freddie

Link dump on the Fannie & Freddie mess (updated and bumped):

Jerry Pournelle has an overview. And more:

As I surmised, the bailout -- good idea or poor -- can't be made to happen until Barney Frank and Senator Dodd are allowed to wet their beaks. The Democrats want part of that pie. Obama's leadership abilities were put to the test, and apparently found wanting: even in the White House, with what all of them concede to be the financial health of the Republic at stake, no agreement is possible.… When the game is to restore confidence, it's important to act quickly. When the ship of state is being blown onto the rocks, it may be best to drop anchor; it may be best to raise sails and beat to windward; either course of action may work. Both will not work. Doing nothing is certain disaster.

Did Dr. Pournelle exclude a middle? Trying to do both at once, yes, sounds like certain disaster. Or did his sailing metaphor take control of my imagination, leading me to think that another possibility might be to reef up and, since our sailing vessel has been modified since the last time it hit the rocks, use our new engine to keep us off the lee shore. The engine being the SEC and all of the changes and controls on the securities markets that have been put in place since 1929. On the gripping hand, sometimes nothing is the best thing to do. Maybe the horse will learn to sing. One does not want to fall victim to what I have heard referred to as "Yes, Minister" syndrome: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do it." What would Calvin Coolidge do? Cool Cal went by the book, the book that had not been written yet when he was alive, the book that says on its cover, "Don't Panic."

Who caused "the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression?" by Roger Kimball at PJ Media. Lots of comments; links to a video called "Burning Down the House," also linked below.

Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie: How the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history gave birth to the mortgage crisis, by Wayne Barrett in the Village Voice.

How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis: by Kevin Hassett at Bloomberg. Glenn Reynolds has a couple of reader comments.

A Mortgage Fable, editorial in the WSJ:

Once upon a time, in the land that FDR built, there was the rule of "regulation" and all was right on Wall and Main Streets. Wise 27-year-old bank examiners looked down upon the banks and saw that they were sound. America's Hobbits lived happily in homes financed by 30-year-mortgages that never left their local banker's balance sheet, and nary a crisis did we have.

Then, lo, came the evil Reagan marching from Mordor with his horde of Orcs, short for "market fundamentalists." Reagan's apprentice, Gramm of Texas and later of McCain, unleashed the scourge of "deregulation," and thus were "greed," short-selling, securitization, McMansions, liar loans and other horrors loosed upon the world of men.

Now, however, comes Obama of Illinois, Schumer of New York and others in the fellowship of the Beltway to slay the Orcs and restore the rule of the regulator. So once more will the Hobbits be able to sleep peacefully in the shire.…

The Real Culprits In This Meltdown, editorial in IBD. "Big Government: Barack Obama and Democrats blame the historic financial turmoil on the market. But if it's dysfunctional, Democrats during the Clinton years are a prime reason for it."

Why our financial system nearly collapsed, the Anchoress: timeline, links, comments.

Doug Ross has a number of posts with graphics:

Jamie Gorelick, Mistress of Disaster.
Root Cause.
Fannie Mae: the New York Times rides to the rescue of the GOP.
Any Questions?
'Ya think?' Department.
Legacy.
The tale of Jamie Gorelick just keeps getting better and better.

Fannie Mae and the Vast Bipartisan Conspiracy: a list of villains in boldface, by Jack Shafer in Slate. Jamie Gorelick's photo is at the top.

Friends of Barack, editorial in the WSJ.

Obama Dollars, by Mac Fuller in the American Thinker.

Arnold Kling links to (among others) Tyler Cowen, who quotes Mindles H. Dreck on the effects of regulation. With all the screaming for more regulation we are hearing now, it's good to be reminded that "the answer is not to add one more vaguely described activity to the long-as-your-arm list of 'no-nos', but to shine an ever brighter light on the books and let the buyer discriminate." Dr. Dreck is currently blogging at TigerHawk's place, of course. Recently: "We have been force fed a super-sized trucker meal of stupid paper-pushing requirements while the basic risks of asset leverage went unaddressed."

Greed, Or Incentives? Richard Epstein on regulation, in Forbes. "Short term heroics are no substitute for dispassionate deregulation, which won’t happen so long as our political leaders are fixated on greed. Taking steps to prevent financial meltdowns is more likely to hasten their unwelcome arrival, so says the libertarian."

A little (more) history: New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, NY Times from 2003. "The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt -- is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates."

My favorite mustelid has some things to say, as a small mammal selling in this market. One thing: "Blaming Wall Street operators for the current financial crisis is like discovering a fly-blown corpse and arresting the maggots for murder." Another thing: "Government has just stolen sixty thousand dollars from me. Let’s be clear about this: THE DEMOCRATS STOLE $60,000 FROM ME."

There is a video, "Burning Down the House," for those who would rather not do so much reading. And another video, with enough Barney Frank to make up for the lack of Barney Frank in the first video. Another video, from a 2004 hearing dealing with the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight; featuring Maxine Waters, Gregory Meeks, Artur Davis, Franklin Raines, and yes, Barney Frank.

Palin makes McCain a lot easier to vote for

I'm quite chuffed about John McCain choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate. It shows an amount of imagination and nerve that comes as a refreshing surprise. So it's the old man who has the ability to think outside the box, and the young one who is trying to play it safe with the unimaginative choice of another Senator, and a particularly dull and annoying one at that, who is prone to making unforced foot-in-mouth errors. (Inline update: more.)

There has been so much about Palin in all the news outlets and blogs lately that I don't feel any need to write a lot about her here. Althouse has been posting up a storm (a vortex?) about Palin, and that would be a place to start.

Some of the media coverage has been just god-awful. Howard Kurtz's last two Reliable Sources shows have been devoted to Democrats bashing Palin. I was going to say something last week about CNN's Lola Ogunnaike falling for the fake gun-and-bikini shot, but even Gawker has that. So a few quick links:

Transcript of the Charlie Gibson interviews. Mark Levin has some excerpts with emphasis on the editing.

Charlie Martin's list of Palin rumors and smears.

That's like "bad Charlie and good Charlie." It's not hard to tell them apart.

Sarah Palin Sexism Watch.

Bill Whittle at NRO: "Sarah Palin has done more than unify and electrify the base. She’s done something I would not have thought possible, were it not happening in front of my nose: Sarah Palin has stolen Barack Obama’s glamour. She’s stolen his excitement, robbed his electricity, burgled his charisma, purloined his star power, and taken his Hope and Change mantra, woven it into a cold-weather fashion accessory, and wrapped it around her neck."

Today's hit piece in the NY Times: Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes.

I see nothing wrong with a newly elected executive firing holdovers from the old regime. Things might have gone better for G.W. Bush if he had done a bit more of that kind of thing. I'm thinking of George Tenet and Norman Mineta in particular. "A new broom sweeps clean."

Some of the attacks are so vicious that I would not have believed them if I had not seen them with my own eyes. Don't let the kids see these. You don't want them learning this kind of language.

Heather Mallick: A Mighty Wind blows through Republican convention.

Cintra Wilson: Pissed about Palin. "Sarah Palin may be a lady, but she ain't no woman."

Wendy Doniger: All Beliefs Welcome, Unless They are Forced on Others. "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

There's plenty more of this stuff. It's nasty to look at, but it's encouraging to see such consternation among the Democrats: it shows that they think they might lose.

Update: Confederate Yankee has the the real list of books banned from the Wasilla library. Total number of books removed from the library = 0. By the way: librarians "censor" their collections all the time. Books are acquired or not, and deaccessioned (disposed of, in regular English) as part of the normal course of business. Go check your local library and see if they still have a copy of the thoroughly discredited Arming America by Michael Bellesiles. Mine does, with more in the state system. I have donated books to the local library that have just gone missing, never been catalogued, never seen again. Were they censored? The bottom line is that if the librarian likes a book, it stays; if the librarian does not like it, it goes, or is never acquired to begin with. But nobody had better tell the librarian which books should stay or go! What librarians count on to preserve their hegemony over their little domains is obscurity. Most people just don't care. A librarian is a different kind of creature from an archivist, whose goal is to preserve everything. Librarians can't do that. In a small-town library, shelf space is precious, and decisions must be made as to which books stay and which books go. When a mayor appoints a librarian, the mayor has to hope that the person she has chosen will not decide to fill the shelves with Harlequin romances, and deaccession the Decline and Fall, even if no patrons check out the Decline and Fall from one decade to the next.

Another update: Eric S. Raymond: Heh — “Read My Lipstick”.

And another update: Plenty of Palin posts over at Sundries.

Catsup, ketsiap, ketchup

Catch up. The real stuff has anchovies. Fancy that!

Nothing here lately, there's been lots of Real Life to be attended to.

Al Gore makes a bid for the title of looniest (wanna-be) leader in a while. Demolish and rebuild the nation's entire electrical power generating system in 10 years? Yeah, right. Some people are just innumerate. Not Gore so much as his followers. If Gore had trouble with math, he wouldn't have been able to make all that money out of these here carbon credits. Grumble, grumble …

Obama goes abroad, loses Teleprompter, speaks to worshipful crowds everywhere, with foot still firmly planted in mouth. No need to link this, it' s all over. But, what the heck, might as well link a few.

David Evans hammers another nail in the coffin of the global warming scam.

If you are having trouble seeing the "We Are Building a Religion" Obama music video, try it here. It was working fine the last time I checked it, about a minute ago.

I'm a big fan of the HBO TV series The Wire. As a former Baltimore resident, I kind of like seeing the bits of scenery around the Inner Harbor. Here's a true crime story Too Weird for The Wire. (via)

Gleanings

A few more.

Compare and contrast.

Wherever the UN "peacekeepers" go, sex crimes follow: "Children as young as six are being sexually abused by peacekeepers and aid workers, says a leading UK charity. Children in post-conflict areas are being abused by the very people drafted into such zones to help look after them, says Save the Children." Thanks, I guess, Charles. I have mentioned this pattern of abuse here before.

Starship Troopers, here we come: the Berkeley Bionics robotic exoskeleton. (via)

J.F. Beck: "Arguing matters of fact with Tim Lambert is pretty silly; even though Lambert's often wrong, he steadfastly refuses to admit it." Beck goes on to provide a handy listing of some of Lambert's errors. Updated: Lambert has attacked, of course; and Beck has a followup post. (via)

Analyzing antique absinthe: it was all about the alcohol, all along.

Gleanings

Just another batch of things that caught my eye.

Drug war casualty: "Marie Walsh was the very picture of American suburban respectability. She and her husband, a company executive, lived in a £400,000 house in an affluent area near San Diego, California. But the 53-year-old had a secret that even her husband and three children did not know: she was really Susan Lefevre, a convicted drug dealer who had been on the run for 32 years after escaping from the Detroit House of Corrections."

Fierce comment threads at Althouse and Volokh on Ayers and Dohrn, and Barack Obama's relationship with them. The Althouse thread inspires a post by Blake: Terrorism and Indoctrination vs. Education, which gets some silly comments by yours truly.

Adopted Man Finds Biological Father on Death Row.

Bagpipe bands violate EU noise regulations and must be muted. (via)

PSA from Hungary intended to promote bicycling. Looks pretty persuasive to me.

How'd you like to walk (or cycle) across this footbridge? (via)

Strange But True photos at the L.A. Times.

Great tits cope well with warming. Well, that's good news! (via)

ROFLcon. Sounds like fun. Over, though; it was held the last weekend in April. The blog includes a list of Sleeper Hits of the Internet, a bunch of (mostly) fun videos that you may have missed. And that seems to require a mention of ROFLMAO. "Do-doo-do-do-do."

Gleanings

About time to release these into the wild.

John Derbyshire reviews American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau.

Annie Dillard goes furthest into the dark territory: "Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me … we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die—does not care if it itself grinds to a halt … space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death.”

[…] to the degree that ordinary folk disengage from nature, we shall be less able to evaluate what we are told by the Al Gores of the world, nature’s self-appointed custodians, and their legions of tax-eating experts.

I just love Annie Dillard's writing. I don't know if I agree with her, or even understand her, a fair amount of the time, but my word, that woman can write.

Radley Balko: Standing Near Children Now a Crime.

Rand Simberg coins a word: ambit, v., from ambition. Like "aspire," only not so nice. "Her ambition is to…" = "She ambits to…"

Generations on welfare. "Six million Britons are living in homes where no one has a job and 'benefits are a way of life', according to a report by MPs." (via)

Youth crime in Britain. Johnathan Pearce, at Samizdata, links to Clive Barker and Time magazine. It's just getting worse. Parts of Britain are losing the status of civilization, and it's not the booze, either, it's the attitudes of invulnerability and entitlement among those with a ton of self-esteem and no self-respect. (via)

Ace says Want To Be Happy All of Your Life? Make an Ugly Woman Your Wife Dude Your Husband.

Striped icebergs.

LauraW, at Ace's place, calls this a Nifty Mashup. I don't disagree. Jim Morrison meets Debbie Harry for "Riders on the Rapture."

Gleanings

Another batch of these? Why, yes.

How the Markets Really Work.

David Mamet explains why he is "no longer a brain-dead liberal." Good comments at Roger L. Simon's place; more discussion at Althouse; observations and links at Powerline.

How could you pull the trigger of the world's smallest pistol? (via)

Ten Simple Rules for Graduate Students in the Evil Sciences. In the spirit of the classic "The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord." (via)

Nice surrealistic music video from Panic at the Disco: Nine in the Afternoon. By way of Politiscope, who asks "How many times did Panic at the Disco have to listen to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band before they finally decided, 'Eff it. Let's just try to be them.'"

Obama not so much the Messiah (see below) as the Kwisatz Haderach. (via)

How many Obama supporters does it take to change a light bulb? (via)

Theo is serious sometimes, funny sometimes. He's got the funny goin' on with some videos. The cellphone with all the features, the Sumsing 3000 Turbo Xi Multitask. The wackiest, sexiest juice commercial you'll ever want to see. Oh, those Canadians! NSFW.

Tech note: the post below with the MSNBC video is not editable. I suspect that this is because the embedding is done with an iframe tag, rather than the object tag that Youtube videos use for embedding. It's annoying, as it keeps me from adding updates, or doing anything to it at all.

Gleanings

Beginning with the gruesome, moving on to the funny.

This seems to be a custody dispute. From Saudi Arabia: Toddler beheaded in supermarket. Arab News: Man Butchers 15-Month-Old Nephew in Jeddah Supermarket. Follow-up from Saudi Gazette: Dad Denies He was there at Son’s Beheading. (via)

Terri Irwin and Australia Zoo are in trouble with the tax authorities in Australia.

I knew I had seen FDR with a halo, or at least a nimbus, in old movie shorts. Lileks has found one of these, in which Jimmy Durante sings "Give a Man a Job." The post includes some commentary on the NRA (not the National Rifle Association, the other one.) (via)

If you have a copy of Love and Consequences by Margaret B. Jones, hang on to it. It's going to be a rare book. (via)

New supersonic business jet on the way. Shiny! (via)

Unusual instruments: I suppose this is a form of glass harmonica, but what a form! Michel Lauzière plays Mozart on wine bottles, on rollerblades. (via)

A new typographical term: keming. I have been having trouble with modem and modern for years. Though one can usually tell by context, with that pair. (via)

Photoshopped comics, not a new idea but very well done indeed: Rampant plagiarism. (via)

Continuing the discussion from comments at BitMaelstrom on smart TV shows, Jennifer Ouellette, of Cocktail Party Physics, mentions a bit of genuine erudition on, not "Buffy," but "Angel." Close enough. Also: the music of the spheres. And from the same post at Flares into Darkness, some photographs whose intensity makes them dreamlike: 20 beautiful HDR pictures. (HDR = high dynamic range.) There's a lot of griping in the comments about how unreal they look; I would have thought that was the point. It would be easy to slip into Thomas Kinkade or Velvet Elvis land with this effect, but it's just another tool in the toolbox. Here's a Flickr group for this technique. Also on photos with dreamlike intensity, take a look at this. The reds on left and right seem to *pop*!

Speaking of photos, the Library of Congress has uploaded a large collection of images to Flickr. Two sets so far, 1930s-40s in Color, and News in the 1910s. From the LoC blog: My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven.

Gruesome, or funny? More on the funny side, I think: LOLTHULU: Cthulhu Fhtagn Cheezburger.

How did the Amazon reviews for Tuscan Whole Milk, one-gallon size, become a repository of gloriously absurd short fiction, and some poetry even? I have no idea. But I laughed and laughed. Look at the customer images too. (via)

Gleanings

About time to set this batch free, and start another.

Skateboard ballet. (via)

Dick Lamm's Plan to Destroy America. It seems to be well underway. And goes well with The White House wants a $1.4 billion stimulus/national security package…for Mexico.

Derbyshire won't stickle over rankling.

Iowahawk hath An Archbishop of Canterbury Tale.

The Path to the Final Solution. From The Jawa Report.

T.J. Rogers adding SunPower to Cypress. (via)

Aesop's fables: more editions than any book except the Bible? (via)

Entrances to Hell in the United Kingdom. (via)

A large and funny collection of Computer Stupidities. (via)

The Return of Sister Flute. Women keep fainting at these Obama rallies.

Gleanings

Quickly, now, quickly.

Andrea Harris: England continues to sink. Not post-glacial rebound, here; cultural deterioration.

From the Yemen Times: There must be violence against women. Otherwise, they would be going to the police and the courts all the time. What?!

Paul Graham: How To Do What You Love.
Compare and contrast:
Marty Nemko: Do What You Love and You'll Starve.

Fred Thompson: "I don’t think that it’s the primary responsibility of the federal government to tell you what to eat.… With that, or whether you're talking about education, there's some things the federal government can't do." This reasoning could be extended to the drug war.

New solar cycle coming, looks like cooler days ahead. NASA: Long Range Solar Forecast: Solar Cycle 25 peaking around 2022 could be one of the weakest in centuries.

Aerosols an important factor being left out of climate models. How many more factors are left out? Could Earth's interior heat be one of them? H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe knew that there were volcanoes in Antarctica.

To end with something blessedly funny, Megan McArdle links to Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine. Thanks Jane!

Aand one more of the funny, and possibly practical: edible googly eyes.

Gleanings

Instapundit: Progress on resveratrol.

Andrea Harris: Global warming is responsible for everything.

Recommended by two of Jerry Pournelle's correspondents: The Secret to Raising Smart Kids.

Amy Alkon links to Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic on Caring for Your Introvert: The habits and needs of a little-understood group. Alkon's comments may be better than the original Rauch piece.

Clear vision and chain reactions, and a sip of wine

From P.J. Doland, a NY Times Magazine article on highway signage and how a typeface evolves; and a pleasant timewaster, Boomshine. Also: how having more advice makes it worse, not better: How to Ruin a Web Design. Aaand furthermore, something significant about wine, and the making thereof: Two Buck Chuck takes a bite out of Napa.