Critters of the sea

Some serious ugliness going on underwater. Instapundit links to Real Life Sea Monsters - 24 Bizarre Creatures of the Deep. Remember the Dana octopus squid, from a while back? Here it is, not just etherised, but dead, upon a table:
From this picture, we can gain a better sense of scale. That's a good-sized serving of bioluminescent calamaro! There are bigger ones at the link. Poisonous octopodes as well.

Numa numa!

After watching the CNN YouTube Democratic candidates debate, I need something sweet to get the bitter taste of all that ambitious foolishness out of my mouth. So: Dragostea Din Tei!

Darn, I love this song! I love it even better in the original Romanian. Because I don't understand Romanian.

Here's the original Romanian language video. Way cool airplane! (Link may not last, Warner is on a campaign to keep you from appreciating their products. I have had to change two of these links in the last couple of days.)

A live performance at the Star Academy. This includes a dancing dinosaur, a "zero-g" spaceman, and plenty of bouncy audience members who join in the dance.

Another live performance by Buffy, with Spike on drums, and Willow dancing in the red-and-black striped top. [That link doesn't work any more, try this. Not as good video quality, but the same live performance.] Oh, no, sorry, that's not Buffy, it's Paula Mitrache. Another by Paula Mitrache and her group Haiducii [Outlaws], with lyrics in Romanian and English in the sidebar.

Here it is in English. Kind of loses a little of the mystery. Update: Now that I have found the transcriptions and translation of the original lyrics, I see that this is a completely different song, to the same tune. The original has much more depth and poignancy.

A couple of versions using World of Warcraft characters: In this one, a character does the Macarena; this one has a lot of babes in bikinis, with swords.

Wikipedia has a an article on the song that seems pretty thorough, with some interesting ideas for possible variant translations of the title. The repeated "nu ma, nu ma" seems to mean, "don't want, don't want." So is the song related to LOLcats in some way? Were LOLcats involved in this? No wonder it's so popular.

Sen. Byrd testifies in favor of repeal of the 17th amendment

That's the amendment whereby Senators are elected by popular vote, rather than by the state legislatures. Video, and comments. Again, speaking on a different topic: "Barbaric. Barbaric. Barbaric. BARBARIC !"

Update: Ted Kennedy, too. Again.

Dog story, non-shaggy

Yaacov Ben Moshe writes about four dogs. Real dogs, not shaggy dogs. There's a Liberal dog, a Progressive dog, a Conservative dog, a Libertarian dog. I'd love to see an illustrated version of this story, featuring Michael Moore as a toy poodle. That would be funny. This story is not funny, well, it has funny bits, but overall, it is moving, and worth reading in its entirety. (The rest of the posts over there are also worth reading. If I didn't think so, it would not be on the link list. But this one has dogs.)

This is a true story of hardships survived, pampered lives and the courage to face danger for the things and people you love. It is also an object lesson in how your philosophy affects your ability to survive.

It also has coyotes.

Captain Nemo, your ship is here

Instapundit links to this, which led me to Google around a bit and find this: Wow, it's the Nautilus! (That's a very large jpg.) Or close enough. More streamlined, with more viewports. Only $80 million or so. I suppose one could install a pipe organ.

Terrorist logos

An incomplete collection. There is much arguing in the comments about which groups should or should not have been included. Still, a resource. Thanks to The Corner.

Gnomes

The good kind. I have to be careful playing the CD in the car because it makes the miles melt away; wouldn't want to miss a turn, wind up in Philadelphia by mistake.

Rubber duckies sailing around the world

This is amazing:

Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey

They were toys destined only to bob up and down in nothing bigger than a child's bath - but so far they have floated halfway around the world.

The armada of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs broke free from a cargo ship 15 years ago.

Since then they have travelled 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, landing in Hawaii and even spending years frozen in an Arctic ice pack.

And now they are heading straight for Britain. At some point this summer they are expected to be spotted on beaches in South-West England.

Found in Jerry Pournelle's mail.

Happy Birthday, U.S.A.!

Fourth of July fireworks in Ocean City were postponed to the 5th on account of wind. Having the holiday on Wednesday seems to extend the mood to the whole week.

That post a while back about John Kessel's musical, Faustfeathers, led me to an anthology called Feeling Very Strange. I'm about half-way through it now. I don't feel any different …

.ubɐʇɥ,ɟ ɐı ǝǝɟɟoɔ ǝ1ʇʇı1 ɐ ǝqʎɐɯ 'ɥbnoɥʇ ʇsɐɟʞɐǝɹq ɹoɟ ʞɐǝɹq oʇ ǝʌɐɥ ı

*

More Gore, they cry

For a value of "they" < 2. But that's enough of my readership that the call for more Gore-bashing must be answered. Briefly this time, though, with links.

Ponder the Maunder is the website of 15-year old Kristen Byrnes. As an extra credit project for Honors Earth Science at Portland (Maine) High School, she wrote up a point-by-point critique, a demolition really, of An Inconvenient Truth. While looking around for that page, I found her posting on Physics Forums [which appears to be a homework-help site], a little about how the appearance of "consensus" is being maintained, to the extent that it is.

Government scientists such as those with NASA JPL or GISS gave me the okay to acknowledge them in my paper that would be turned in to my teacher, but would not approve of the same in the on-line version.
Within the scientific community there is a fear of being harrassed by political activists, creationists, peers and etc. They also fear having their funding cut. As for the influence of the fossil fuel industry, it seems that there is no money directed to scientists who are not directly employed by the fossil fuel industry. Sceptical scientists do not want to accept fossil fuel money because they would be plastered all over the press as "shills" for the fossil fuel industry and their careers ruined.

So that's how that is going.

I compared Al Gore to a revival preacher in Another Gore campaign event. Roger L. Simon compares him to a couple of Sinclair Lewis characters, and also finds that Maggie's Farm had this idea way back in February, and with a terrific graphic, too. I'm sure it was just coincidence that Dodsworth was on TCM last night!

And I see that AGW has made it to the comic strips! The link is today's Dilbert, too big to be legible here. More jokes! Let us have more jokes. Maybe this thing can be laughed to death.

"Thus I refute Chomsky."

I just wanted to write that headline. Props to Dr. Johnson. It's not actually me refuting Chomsky, and no-one, at this point, is entirely certain that there is a refutation going on. But this article from the New Yorker, referenced in Jerry Pournelle's mail, seems to point that way.

“When I went back and read the stuff Sapir wrote in the twenties, I just realized, hey, this really is a tradition that we lost,” Everett said. “People believe they’ve actually studied a language when they have given it a Chomskyan formalism. And you may have given us absolutely no insight whatsoever into that language as a separate language.”

Everett began to question the first principle of Chomskyan linguistics: that infants could not learn language if the principles of grammar had not been pre-installed in the brain. Babies are bathed in language from the moment they acquire the capacity to hear in the womb, Everett reasoned, and parents and caregivers expend great energy teaching children how to say words and assemble them into sentences—a process that lasts years. Was it really true that language, as Chomsky asserted, simply “grows like any other body organ”? Everett did not deny the existence of a biological endowment for language—humans couldn’t talk if they did not possess the requisite neurological architecture to do so. But, convinced that culture plays a far greater role than Chomsky’s theory accounted for, he decided that he needed to “take a radical reëxamination of my whole approach to the problem.”

It would be such fun to learn that Chomsky, revered as a scientist of linguistics in Academe, and as a sage of politics by the Left, had been wrong in both places! That his linguistics was really, from the article, "something that looks like science." As opposed to being actually, you know, science. The Ptolomaic epicycles looked like science, once. But if indeed there is a natural language, spoken by actual human beings, that does not conform to Chomsky's theories of "deep structure," then might not that invalidate all his other pronouncements? Ah, the weeping in Bezerkeley. Though it's certainly possible to be right about one thing, and wrong about another.

Still, this tribe may be evidence that Sapir and Whorf (and Jack Vance) had something going on. I guess where I'm going with this is that I'm looking to be able to say, "Noam Chomsky, you nut! You had people fooled for a while, thinking you were a smart guy! You fooled people into thinking you were a genius of linguistics, and bootstrapped that reputation into people thinking you were a deep thinker in other fields! But we're on to you now."

There's another whole post in the Pirahã attitude toward time. If I have time, I'll get to it. If thinking about that post comes back into experience.

Generic radio

Adrian the clever, contrarian Canadian leads the way to Musicovery. What? It's like a radio, only on the Internet, and it takes requests, only in very general terms, only. Pretty cool! If you don't care which piece you are listening to, but can specify what kind of music you would like to hear, well then, Musicovery.com is just the place for you. [Edited to repair lapse of memory.]

View from the fort

There now, that's something more pleasant to have at the top.

Ted Kennedy sings, in Spanish

Oh, the panderage! I wish I had not listened to this. But I want to be able to find it again. "I thank you for your soul, and your heart." They look so tasty!

More at the link.

Update, Feb 22 2008: This post has been receiving an inordinate amount of hits in the last couple of days. I finally figured out why; he's done it again. The same song, at an Obama rally. Well, all right, here it is, with live video this time:

Far be it from me to discourage anyone seeking a new career in music. I can let others do that. Simon, what did you think?

Where to get your elven cloak

That would be right here, at Stansborough Fibres Ltd. NZ$ 860 ≈ US$ 660. Blessing of Galadriel, invisibility, leaf-wrapped lembas not included.

Comment from a contrarian Canadian in Cambridge on the preceding

I do love to alliterate. A low taste, I know, but mine own.

So there's more on this with the vegetables and the Sopranos at a blog that is new to me, found through a backlink at Althouse on one of those mentioned in the previous post: David Chase (spoilers ahead), on the actual Sopranos episode; Blogging as Performance Art, on the Althouse miniseries described below. Adrian is the blogger's name, as the alliteration advances, and he also has the good taste to link to a Megan McArdle post that I also hold in high esteem, in The Essence of Conservative Thought. Go there for the link, it's a good 'un. As is the rest of The Misfit, which goes on the link list now.

His post on health care, Talk is Cheap, with its link to 45 million myths: Better Canada's frayed health care system than unbridled U.S. capitalism that leaves millions with no safety net, right? Well, take a closer look, by Norma Kozhaya, is something else that I should mention here. With the new Michael Moore movie coming out, and all.

What we were saying the other day about percentiles

I've been having a lovely time the last few days, thank you. Between the thunderstorms and the birdwatching. Watching Mike across the street running with the lawnmower to beat the thunderstorm. (There was a special on sentence fragments at the deli, I stocked up, I might use up a few of these run-ons too, they seem to be getting stale, I'd better use them now, they might go off.) But Internet-wise, the most fun has been over at Professor Althouse's site. She kicked it off with a post about the new Hillary Clinton campaign video, which is "a take on the last scene of 'The Sopranos.'" Onion rings! Carrot sticks! Freudian interpretation! Whoopee! (Not for Bill.) In keeping with the link dump spirit of this place, I'll list the posts so far:

The new Hillary Clinton video is a take on the last scene of "The Sopranos."
Let's take a closer look at Bill's carrot and Hillary's onion ring.
Ah, a nice, refreshing, troll-diluting...
For some, onion rings. Others do better with the calamari.
"Get away, Onions."
Let's think more deeply about the meaning of carrots.
Think of a vegetable, lonely at home....
"Democrats always know how to implode, how to be ambiguous, how to waver, how not to be authentic."
"I fear the best I can do is to say that I'm rather sorry to have engaged her at all."
Friday pop quiz: Explain this.

My word, I had not realized there were so many. And all this interspersed with other posts, some on serious topics. If, O best beloved, you should choose to read all of these, with the comments, you had better set aside some time for it. Probably over a thousand comments on this extended thread, and that number is unlikely to grow smaller. And most of them just the worst kind of trash. What, you say, is the worst kind of trash? That would be the kind of trash that takes up your time and distracts from the discussion that could be underway if there wasn't ALL THIS SENSELESS SHOUTING GOING ON! Which economists refer to as an opportunity cost. Which rhymes with "opportunity lost." Which is what an opportunity cost costs you.

But to get back to the percentiles: The trolls on this [extended] thread seem to fall into a couple of main groups. 1) the ones who just don't get it, and are resentful about that. Explaining a joke is tedious; explaining it over and over again, to people whose self-esteem is now invested in the idea that it was a lousy joke and that not getting it shows superiority, must require the patience of a teacher, or the subtlety of an artist or a lawyer. [Gosh—who does that profile resemble?] 2) the ones who are just making noise to keep other people from saying anything sensible. You know what I mean: you're trying to talk about business or love or politics, and every time you get a sentence out, your pesky brother interrupts, just to get attention. A classic trolling tactic, uncoupling the cars of the collective train of thought. (Luckyoldson makes a short, senseless, often obscene response to every post by anyone else. A variation is used on political websites by posters who put up long screeds about nothing in particular just to shut down the conversation. I am thinking of "Muslim Unity" at Wizbang!, but it's not an uncommon tactic. "Flood the zone" kind of thing. "Cyrus Pinkerton," not present on these threads, does a lot of this chez Althouse. I suspect that "Cyrus" is a sock puppet of Amanda Marcotte; maybe he/she/they are on vacation this week? Both Lucky and Cyrus have empty blogs that could have hundreds of posts if they had redirected the writing impulse that way, instead of scrawling on someone else's pages.) So what we have is a few people trying to conduct a conversation about a witty observation on current events, while some others, resentful of their incomprehension and too proud to admit it, are banging on pots and pans. Outside the window of a person with degrees in both art and law. Their mothers told them, "Do not meddle in the affairs of artists, for they are subtle, and lawyers are subtle also, and a lawyer who is also an artist, hoo-boy, watch out." But did they listen?

This is a preserv'd specimen of the loneliness of the high percentile. What universities are good for. Why people join Mensa, if they can find a local chapter that has not been taken over by bureaucrats and lingo-slingers. Why Steven den Beste shut down the forum at USS Clueless. Why I said the other day that spending time in conversation with people who are smarter than oneself is a good thing. Did I say that? I meant to. But one has to listen.

I would like to think that Prof. Althouse is cultivating a troll garden, for fun. I hope she is having fun, anyway. My own patience would be sorely tried.

It might be worth noting that (as far as I can recall) not even the worst of the trolls has tried to defend Céline Dion. Some things … maybe she's better en français.

Update: A troll has left a dropping in the comments, which we may examine. Observe the characteristics: anonymity; hostility; willful ignorance; arrogance; irrelevance; confusion of humorous sarcasm with plain viciousness. Trolls often, erroneously and characteristically, imagine that they are funny. I wonder if they also think that they are good-looking. That would be more irrelevance.

Another update, much later: Blogger backlinks are busted, it seems; so here's the backlink for this post: "I would like to think that Prof. Althouse is cultivating a troll garden, for fun."

Harry Reid speaks, Marlo Lewis fisks

Apparently there is an energy bill in the Senate. Better they spend their time with anything besides the zombie of an immigration bill, which is reported to be rising from the dead. But the stuff that Harry Reid will say! Marlo Lewis chews it up it a bite at a time at Planet Gore. Here's just a little bit, to wet your whistle, or whet your appetite:

Reid: No reasonable person continues to doubt that global warming is real and that humans are in large part responsible. But it took President Bush six-and-a-half years to even utter the words global warming.

Bush used the words “global warming” in June 2001, during the very speech in which he explained his reasons for keeping America out of the Kyoto Protocol.

Reid: The best scientists in the world are telling us we only have 10 to 15 years to begin to dramatically reduce carbon emissions. That means starting now, not 2012 or later as the President suggests, but right now.

Doomsday predictions enjoy a long history of failure.

Reid: Countries across the globe have shown that they’re up to the challenge.

Kyoto-constrained Europe’s CO₂ emissions are rising faster than ours; so are Japan’s.

Reid: Major corporations here in America are signing on, as are many state governments. They are facing reality and finding creative ways to turn it into opportunity. Science has been ignored on the federal level for too long. But that time is over.

As CEI President Fred Smith explained in congressional testimony, the companies “signing on” to Kyoto-style controls are either rent-seekers—businesses scheming to profit from market-rigging regulations—or firms that fear they will be “on the menu” if they are not “at the table.”

Reid could have run the speech past a staffer or two for a little bit of fact-checking. Of course, had he done that, there would not have been much left of it. Good work, Marlo Lewis!

A two-fer at PJ Media today

or maybe a four-fer, depending on how you count it. Roger Simon interviews Mark Steyn, for one. Steyn comments on the crappiness of American newspapers, journalism school, the general uselessness thereof, and how modern J-School grads are utterly out of touch with the reality on which they are supposed to be reporting, as a consequence of having been to J-School. Which seems kind of upside-down.

Then a three-parter from Oleg Atbashian, previously identified here as the creator of "The People's Cube," on the question of (I paraphrase) "What the HELL is the matter with the media, including the papers run by all the J-School grads, and particularly with Hollywood!?" Otherwise known as "Our Degenerating Media." Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. My personal favorite newspaperman, H.L. Mencken, never went to J-School, so he wrote it the way he saw it.

Further wonders of modern science

Start with a thoughtless headline on a NY Times story about mutant whippets, add Making Light's commenters, get the laugh out loud Internet winner of the day.

Hitchens on Paris

He takes the unusual step of writing about her current difficulties with humanity and compassion. However, the piece is more about the coverage, and those of us whose attention is drawn, and those doing the attention-drawing:

The supposedly "broad-minded" culture turns out to be as prurient and salacious as the elders in The Scarlet Letter. Hilton is legally an adult but the treatment she is receiving stinks—indeed it reeks—of whatever horrible, buried, vicarious impulse underlies kiddie porn and child abuse.

[…] Lynching parties used to be fiestas, as we have no right to forget, and the ugly coincidence of sexual nastiness—obscenity is the right name for it—and vengefulness is what seems to lend the savor to the Saturnalia. There must be more than one "gossip" writer who has already rehearsed for the day that Paris Hilton takes a despairing overdose. And what a glorious day of wall-to-wall coverage that will be!

A relief from, and contrast to, the pervasive Dr. Phil/Oprah/Springer vampirism.

KGB Psyops from the horse's mouth

Glenn Reynolds links to this at PJ Media.

"Former KGB agent and Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov explains how the KGB worked from within American universities to demoralize our society in a generation."

The manufacturing of "useful idiots:" a first-hand explanation of how and why they did it, which helps to explain why so many otherwise fine, nice, pleasant, even smart people seem so resistant to logic and even to facts, should those things contradict their negative views of "the power structure" or "bourgeois Amerika." Willi Münzenberg's old weapons of the Cold War are still working.

Here's a blogpost about Bezmenov and the documentary this clip is excerpted from, with links to other clips:

In 1984 G. Edward Griffin released a documentary titled Soviet subversion of the free press, a conversation with Yuri Bezmenov and through the magic of YouTube, snippets of that documentary are available on the web today. Now, as far as I can tell, G. Edward Griffin is a little bit odd. He's championed some questionable cancer cures and written books about monetary conspiracies and all sorts of odd stuff (there's a page about him here: G. Edward Griffin Totally Explained, but really, it doesn't do all that much explaining). Still, you can't deny the video and he lets Bezmenov rant in his own words.

Do read the rest, it's worth the click. The blogger, Rob Hafernik, talks about the documentary and also about an issue of Look magazine from 1967 that was a glowing account of the USSR and its glorious potential. That sounds a lot like those articles by Walter Duranty that the NY Times ran in the early 1930's, described in the Weekly Standard and Wikipedia, which brought the Times a Pulitzer, but which historians have concluded were pure propaganda. There is also a book about Duranty, Stalin's Apologist. (Those three are just from the first page of Google results.)

The YouTube user who uploaded these Bezmenov clips seems to be a Nazi sympathizer. I didn't like looking at his other clips, so didn't look at many, but that was the impression I got, from their content and from his descriptions. But the Devil can quote Scripture, as they say, and after the abrogation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, even a real Nazi would have little love for Russians. Which make it a bit less likely that these are some sort of double-fake.

Click the label "psyops" for more on Münzenberg and meme-war.

Update: Youtube has, as far as I can tell, removed everything from the user mentioned above. I have changed the link to one that still works; the better audio, and Portuguese subtitles! are just gravy.

Another update: Yaakov Ben Moshe has posted a couple more Bezmenov clips. Ted Kennedy appears at 6:26 in the second one.

When LOLCats don't quite satisfy

Then u can has something a little deeper. Philolsophers!


One more, to carry on with the critters theme:


Lest this get completely out of hand, I'll just link to a couple more that I think are highlights, and, y'know, relatively comprehensible: the gestalt-shifting lolduckrabbit, and the Athenian philosophers with their invisible basketballs.

Thanks to Ann Althouse, who has interesting comments, Jeremy Bentham in the cupboard (or Auto-Icon, if you must), and links to "No soap, radio." Definitely worthwhile if you enjoy jokes like

"How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"
"Fish."

LOL!

Buffalo, lions, a crocodile

Another for the critter fans. Megan, or Jane, has good comments, so go there to watch it. Ah, Nature, red in tooth and claw.