Buried treasure!

"Archaeologists yesterday unveiled the largest and most valuable hoard of Saxon gold in history."

The discovery took place on July 5. I haven't heard about it till now, but I'll link it anyway. Why is this back in the news? Some artifacts will be going on exhibit at the Birmingham Museum, starting tomorrow.

A couple of links that have pictures:

Pensioner strikes ancient gold.

Largest hoard of Saxon gold unearthed.

Oh, wait, look: there's a website! The Staffordshire Hoard.

Also, Flickr.

Real live troll

Those of us who are "aware of all Internet traditions" have seen trolling before, on plenty of websites. What does it look like in Real Life^TM? What did this fool expect, that the group gathered to express their opposition to the message on his banner would ask him to take the stage and speak?



Charles Johnson is channeling Maureen Dowd here, when he says, "He had a police escort, and obviously needed them. Imagine what would have happened if the police weren’t there." Imagine, indeed. Let the imagination run wild. As the video shows, there was considerable jeering, but no violence, nor anything close to an attempt at violence.

Nobody bit his finger off.

More about Obama's campaign fundraising

This could be huge.

U.S. charges Obama fund-raiser in $290 million fraud

By Grant McCool

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hassan Nemazee, a fund-raiser for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats, has been indicted for defrauding Bank of America, HSBC and Citigroup Inc out of more than $290 million in loan proceeds, U.S. prosecutors said on Monday.

If it gets coverage, if the DOJ does not suppress the investigation.

Thanks again to Glenn Reynolds.

And see Questions about Obama's fundraising, here earlier.

Zelaya has returned to Honduras

Neo-Neocon links to Fausta.

Reynolds links to La Gringa, on the spot in La Ceiba.

Obama's continuing support of Zelaya shows, among other things, his contempt for the law. ("You, a law professor!" Lecturer, actually.) He learned the rules in order to be able to game the system.

Update: More, from Jennifer Rubin, who quotes the WSJ.

Some background on ACORN

From the NY Post:

Sowing the seeds of destruction.

ACORN's shady tactics made headlines last week. But their shocking radicalism is nothing new.

"Every time you turn over an ACORN rock, something ugly crawls out," said Scott St. Clair, of the nonpartisan Evergreen Freedom Foundation based in Washington.

A story that should have been written years ago, but better late than never.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

A printed version of PBS and NPR ...

... is what the newspapers will look like if this happens.

Obama open to newspaper bailout bill

The president said he is "happy to look at" bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.

"I haven't seen detailed proposals yet, but I'll be happy to look at them," Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called "Newspaper Revitalization Act," that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin's Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D).…

"I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding," [Obama] said.

That reference to fact-checking sounds like a joke, considering the way the mainstream press has treated the Van Jones story, and, indeed, Obama himself. Where are his college transcripts? What did he study at Columbia? Have we heard anything from Tony Rezko lately? Many more questions, unanswered and never asked.

Both of those Senators are from Baltimore. Their sponsorship makes sense to anyone who has picked up a copy of the Baltimore Sun lately. The paper of Mencken has become a shadow of what it was a few years ago. It used to be as fat as the Washington Post. Now it's thinner than the Washington Times, and has less content. I remember when there were two Sunpapers, the Sun in the morning and the Evening Sun in, naturally, the evening. The Evening Sun set on September 15, 1995. The idea of saving the paper by restructuring it as a nonprofit is mentioned in Baltimore Magazine's current issue: Stop the Presses. The article places the blame for the paper's declining revenue on, guess what, the Internet. David Simon, the genius who created "The Wire," suggests charging subscription fees for access to online content. Nowhere in the Baltimore Magazine article is it mentioned that the Sun is a far-left paper. Maybe people just don't want to read the content that they are offering. If that's the case then trying to charge for it on line would simply be a repeat of the Times Select experience.(Baltimore Magazine, by the way, seems to be doing fine. It's fat and glossy and loaded with advertising. Maybe the newspaper could learn something from the magazine.)

But getting away from Baltimore: Tax breaks? Would all non-profit newspapers receive the same tax breaks? What government agency would determine which newspapers would receive which tax breaks? Would Cass Sunstein, who favors policing the Web for "falsehoods," be involved? As head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, it seems only natural that he would be.

Government is already in the auto business and in banking. The press, next? The profit motive has never looked better.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Update: Kim Priestap has something to say about this, at Wizbang.

Conservative rhetoric encourages left-wing violence

So conservatives should STFU. That's what Eric Boehlert appears to be saying in this post at Media Matters:: "A President was killed the last time right-wing hatred ran wild like this." Oswald was a Communist, as you know, Bob. Or Eric.

Althouse calls this "Cahrayzee! Crazy... and desperate."

Mark Hemingway says "The Reality-Based Community's Having a Breakdown." Jonah Goldberg quotes an apposite passage from his book. And Hemingway follows up.

In a somewhat related post, Neo-neocon says that

we are suffering from a generalized national false memory syndrome about our history and the history of the world, aided and abetted by the press and academia. After all, these two institutions are tremendously instrumental in giving us the bulk of our information as to what’s happening as it occurs (the so-called “first draft of history”), and then in further filtering, explaining, analyzing, and therefore shaping and ultimately defining our memories of historic events, even events that we ourselves have lived though. And these two institutions have in recent decades been ever more strongly taken over by liberals and the Left.

It's Gramsci all over again.

Ric Locke has some thoughts on alternate histories, and mentions Jack Vance.

Also, it's another step towards Media Matters losing all credibility. Keep the crazy coming, MM.

Update: Neo-neocon has another post addressing this directly, in which she quotes from the first Hemingway link above.

Andrea Harris says "This is what Orwell meant," and links indirectly to this post by Kathy Shaidle.

In 1971, Holdren was looking for an ice age

It would have been a short one, something of a hiatus in the ineluctable course of anthropogenic global warming.

Zombie has found another Holdren-Ehrlich collaboration, Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man. The post at Zomblog includes scans and quotes. Zombie says:

My personal opinion is that Holdren is a “doom peddler” who latches onto the nightmare-scenario-du-jour — overpopulation, nuclear holocaust, global cooling, global warming (all of which he’s trumpeted at various points in his career) — and then wildly exaggerates it in order to scare the public into adopting his politicized “solutions.”

That seems accurate.

The "science" in the chapter in question, titled "Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide," reminds me of the bafflegab used in space opera. Got to repolarize the dilithium crystals, or all heck's going to bust loose.

Here earlier: Let's take a closer look at that book …, referring to Zombie's take on a different Holdren-Ehrlich collaboration, Ecoscience. Thanks, Zombie, for doing the heavy lifting on this stuff. Also, more on fear of ice in the '70's: Newsweek: The Cooling World. How times change, yet remain the same: always something to fear, something that's such a screaming emergency that only much more government can deal with it. <sarcasm>Better put the scientists in charge, and give them lots of money</sarcasm>.

Click the  "Deep Greens" label for far too much more of this claptrap, including the pulsating maggots.

Update: John Tierney links to Zombie: Holdren's Ice Age Tidal Wave.

ACORN videos here

For reference, these hidden-camera videos are coming in on this Youtube channel, veritasvisuals.

Your money in the Age of Obama

Where is it? Is it in here?

If it's in that Obama savings bank, you are going to need one of these 16-digit calculators:


to figure out whether it's worth anything.

ACORN defunded ... or not

Instapundit reader Kevin O’Brien writes:

It’s a typical these-voters-are-such-rubes stunt; the House and Senate voted to defund ACORN on different bills. The Senate bill is a housing bill, the House bill the federal takeover of student loans. Each bill will wind up in conference committee where the ACORN ban can be quietly stripped out, behind closed doors and secure from prying eyes. Then the org can keep on doing its important work of voter fraud and pandering to presumed pedophiles.

The most useful principle to hold close when considering members of Congress: they’re all crooks.

You'd be right more often than wrong.

Sunday night Obama olio

Let's start with a song, "It Ain't Obama's Business If I Do."



Misterdregs has more of these on his Youtube channel. Nice work, Misterdregs. For the inquisitive, that's a parody of a song by Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins, recorded by Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and many more. It later gave rise to another song, by Eric von Schmidt, called "Champagne Don't Hurt Me, Baby," and a book, Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, by Peter McWilliams, who died a casualty of the War on Drugs. Some people with badges thought it was their business what he did.

Doug Ross asks if Obama is Smarter than a fifth grader?

Roger Kimball links to Thomas Sowell and quotes a lot of Shikha Dalmia, in the course of envisioning Obama as Tony Soprano, or, flipping America the bird.

Norman Borlaug, R.I.P.

A Nobel Peace Prize winner who deserved it. The real "Green Revolutionary." 1914—2009.

He left the world a better place than he found it.

Birds song

Five more-or-less parallel lines, with black dots on them. Looks a little like sheet music. That's what Jarbas Agnelli thought, and he did something about it. Click the pic. Thanks to Randy at Ambiance.

Apes laughing

They do, and they do it in different languages.

Can't embed the "tickling the gorilla" video here, so you'll have to go over to National Geographic to see it. Along with sound samples of other apes laughing: bonobos, chimps, orangs, you get the idea.

Here earlier: Rats laughing.

File this

Althouse commenter "montana urban legend" says "Hitler was much smarter than Bush."

The whole comment:

I don't condone comparisons of Mr Bush to Hitler. But the idea that you could force a Hitler comparison out of expanding access to health care is an even more desperate stretch than a comparison based on the violence of launching a war of choice.

And, oh yeah. Hitler was much smarter than Bush. Bush was kind of like a Forrest Gump figure, as far as presidents go. Likeable, lucky and oblivious. But not evil.

No fright here.

9/13/09 2:47 AM

I don't think Hitler was as smart as all that. Bush won his war, and retired from office alive, in a country that remains (aside from the WTC) intact, so far.

In the first sentence, MUL does not condone comparisons. In the fourth sentence he or she makes just that comparison. Short attention span? Or simply that "rules and laws are for the little people" attitude that we see so much of lately?

Big show in Washington

The September 12 Tea Party. Stephen Green rounds up some reports. Biggest D.C. demo ever? Maybe, but WaPo and NYT won't report it that way.

CNN, this afternoon, was focused on Obama's speech in Minneapolis. Since he was out of town, and did not see it with his own eyes, he will be able to pretend that the reports stating "tens of thousands" that are already appearing in the MSM are accurate. "Tens of thousands," that's, like, what, twenty thousand? Small potatoes. He will go on living in his own fantasy as long as he can sustain it. As long as it's "sustainable."

Update: Claudia Rosett has something to say about Obama's fantastic imagination.

Another update: A video report with not enough of Mary Katharine Ham, at Ace of Spades HQ. She's riffing in her introduction, referring to, among others, "political terrorists," a term coined by Rep. Baron Hill of Indiana.

Good news about ACORN

They might not be conducting the census, after all.

Will Obama try to change this?

9/11

A remembrance, at Looking At the Left.

Ralph Peters's take on the way things stand, now: "Betraying our dead."

There is some discussion of the Ralph Peters column at Power Line.

Bit his finger off

That's some rational debate. Or national conversation about health care.

The way to demonstrate the superiority of your argument is to bite off appendages of your opponent. This serves to elevate the level of discourse. If you're a lobster!

Dammit, we used to be mammals. Have 8 months of Obama reduced some of his supporters to the level of arthropods?

Free learning resources on line

Not an exhaustive list, but a good start. None of these offers actual college credits, so it's not a path to a degree, but to learning. Could be a supplement for enrolled students.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Sammy's Bar

I went down to Sammy's Bar
(Hey, the last boat's a-leavin')
By the shore at Pietà
(Call away the dghajsa.)

Maltese orthography is even worse than Gaelic. Paying attention to the letters will lead you far astray. How in the world do you pronounce "dghajsa?" I'd say "Die So," wouldn't you? You can reserve a dghajsa at Maltese Water Taxis dot com. And that beach. Eye 'n' Toughey, ya. Spelled Għajn Tuffieħa. And those haitches are not haitches, either, look close. Here's the best version (IMHO) currently on YouTube, sung by Jim Radford and friends:


There's a newish film in which some mimes sing this. They don't pronounce the Maltese right, and miss out on the English-language refrain. What would you expect, from mimes. A pleasant visual trip, though. But from xkcd, you would get some serious discussion. While I'm fussing about lyrics, I should mention that Jim Radford gets a word wrong in that video up above: The first line in the second verse should be, "And my real love, she was there." Not "true love." More poignant, less clichéd. As discussed at the next link.

The songwriter had this to say, about it all.

Cyril Tawney never wrote a bad song, not that I've heard, anyway. The Grey Funnel Line, for the tired, who wish they could escape; Chicken on a Raft, for the frustrated, who still manage to retain a sense of humor; On a Monday Morning, for the hung-over; The Oggie Man, for the wistful; Sally Free and Easy for the bitterly bereft.

In "The Grey Funnel Line," there is an image that I have found to be unforgettable.

Each time I gaze behind the screws
Makes me long for St Peter's shoes
I'd walk on down that silver lane
And take my love in my arms again

Saint Peter's Lane, which you need Saint Peter's shoes to walk on, is the silver path the full moon makes on the sea. I tried taking pictures last summer. They looked good in the camera, but not so good when uploaded to the computer. I need to figure out how to do longer exposures. "Grey funnel line" refers to the Royal Navy. Steamer lines such as Cunard, White Star, and the rest, painted the funnels of their ships distinctively. The Royal Navy paints everything grey, hence, "grey funnel line."

While I'm dumping links, there's a clever parody by Bob Williamson:

I went down to Sammy's Bar
(Hey, the lamp-posts are leaning)
Just went out to have a jar
(On me way up Hyde Road.)

Althouse, pushing the envelope of pithiness

Possibly the shortest blog post ever?

My comment was much too long.

Feds are interested in your yard sale

CPSIA begins to get its feet under it, going forth to wreak havoc.

Seller, beware: Feds cracking down on garage sales

WASHINGTON — If you're planning a garage sale or organizing a church bazaar, you'd best beware: You could be breaking a new federal law. As part of a campaign called Resale Roundup, the federal government is cracking down on the secondhand sales of dangerous and defective products.

The initiative, which targets toys and other products for children, enforces a new provision that makes it a crime to resell anything that's been recalled by its manufacturer.

"Those who resell recalled children's products are not only breaking the law, they are putting children's lives at risk," said Inez Tenenbaum, the recently confirmed chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The crackdown affects sellers ranging from major thrift-store operators such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army to everyday Americans cleaning out their attics for yard sales, church bazaars or — increasingly — digital hawking on eBay, Craigslist and other Web sites.

Told you. And furthermore,

President Barack Obama and Democratic congressional leaders are crafting an appropriations bill that would boost the agency's funding next year by more than 11.4 percent — to $117 million — and it's already hiring new inspectors and other employees in anticipation of the funding infusion.

they'll have plenty of your money to do their surveillance of you. Of me? us? We all need watching. Just in case something fishy might be going on. Or, you might say, "De minimis nunc curat lex."

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Sweet bird of youth, you must be laughing

The song. (First version is the one from the album, second from a live performance, sort of eerie.)

The play, which the song is referring to.

The bird.

The bird.

Up at the mountains, we watched the old Studio One production of "The Trial of John Peter Zenger," from this set of movies. We had a pretty good conversation about the importance of the Zenger verdict to American jurisprudence. I think I said, "This was the case that established freedom of the press in America, even before America existed." I thought there should have been a few more minutes to it, to give some attention to the jury's deliberations. The way it was presented made it look like Andrew Hamilton simply won Zenger's case, but the way the jury reached their verdict was just about as important as the verdict itself. The film skipped over that entirely.

But much more conversation resulted from the fact that this old TV show included three Westinghouse commercials, with Betty Furness selling a refrigerator, of course, and a TV, and something else, an air conditioner, it might have been.

So the daughter said, of Betty Furness, "When was it that people stopped wanting to look like that?" Like adults, she went on to explain. Which I thought was a good question, and we went down a winding conversational path having to do with neotenic behavior among baby-boomers.

Now I'm back in the world which includes an Internet, and I see that Morgan Freeberg has done some redecorating at The House of Eratosthenes, and that he has a post there with a clip from the late night Scot, dealing with this very issue. So check it out.