For reference: Palin's Hong Kong speech

The speech is transcribed at Citizen Palin for President.

Most sites that mention this speech have only excerpts. This looks big enough that it might be the whole thing. A pity they didn't get the Q & A as well.

Looking more likely that Bill Ayers was Obama's ghostwriter

Start here, with a random airport encounter.

Go on to this, about a new book.

See if you have the stamina for this video, it's a little on the long side, about an hour. An interview with Jack Cashill, who has been looking into this for some time.

Do it while you can, while we still have some freedom of speech and reading, while this here Internet thing still works.

On tour of New England

Remember when Randy, the Internet Ronin, went on a tour of England, and posted all those great photos? He's doing it again, in New England this time. Some noteworthy leaf-peeping can be found at Rambling Around.

Jack Vance has written a memoir

Steven Hart writes about Vance, and about this book, This Is Me, Jack Vance (Or, More Properly, This Is "I").

Too many favorite Jack Vance stories to name them all.

There is some more discussion here. The Vance Integral Edition has already become a rare item.

Musical prescience

IF Iran and North Korea are aligned on the Axis of Evil, AND they are working on nuclear weapons, THEN this old song takes on new relevance.

From 1947, the Golden Gate Quartet, "Atom and Evil:"



An encore at the Sunday free concert.

Obama on SNL

Not really him, but Fred Armisen playing him. Not worshipful, for a change (change!), but a properly disrespectful SNL bit.

More jokes, please!

Thanks to a correspondent of Rich Lowry at The Corner.

Free concert on a Sunday afternoon

Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin in "Every Sunday," from 1936. This short is Deanna Durbin's first movie. Judy Garland had previously appeared in a few shorts, "Bubbles" (1929), "A Holiday In Storyland" (1930), "The Wedding of Jack and Jill" (1930), and "La Fiesta de Santa Barbara" (1935), as one of The Three Gumm Sisters.



Let's not get into where the funding for the "free" concerts came from. It's just as likely, more likely, they were sponsored by a civic group or an individual wealthy music lover, with the money routed through the city council, as that the orchestra was paid for out of the city's general fund.

Thanks to Helen at Your Freedom and Ours.

Free concert, second set

"Hey There, Cthulhu" by Eben Brooks. An antidote to the wholesomeness above.



A little bit this, a little bit that. Fair and balanced.

Thanks to Lynn at Violins and Starships.

Free concert, third set

Do you remember September? It was just a few days ago.



That's Pomplamoose. They have much more.

Via ChordStrike, by way of Glenn Reynolds.

New search widget

"Search Blog" in the navbar, up top, is not working. So I have added a search widget in the sidebar. Results from this are unreliable, but I suppose it's better than no search at all. The best for now is to use Google directly, with site:hectorowen.blogspot.com followed by the search term, e.g., site:hectorowen.blogspot.com antikythera. FWIW. Other Blogspot sites are afflicted by this, as well. It's not just me.

Update: But see above.

Bats drinking

On the fly.

More here. From Jerry Pournelle's mail.

Garrison Keillor: old, grumpy, no longer charming

Or, Why I have not listened to "Prairie Home Companion" for years. I'm old and grumpy, and far from charming, but Keillor's got me beat all hollow. (Would they say "all hollow" in Lake Wobegon? I dunno.)

When an entire major party has excused itself from meaningful debate and a thoughtful U.S. senator like Orrin Hatch no longer finds it important to make sense and an up-and-comer like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty attacks the president for giving a speech telling schoolchildren to work hard in school and get good grades, one starts to wonder if the country wouldn't be better off without them and if Republicans should be cut out of the health-care system entirely and simply provided with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Thirty-two percent of the population identifies with the GOP, and if we cut off health care to them, we could probably pay off the deficit in short order.

It's time to dump the dead-end issues that have wasted too much time already. Old men shouldn't be allowed to doze off at the switch and muck up the works for the young who will have to repair the damage. Get over yourselves. Your replacements have arrived, and you should think about them now and then. Enough with the shrieking. Pass health-care reform.

"If we cut off health care to them." We? Them? Cut off? Health care isn't run by the government yet. He's a little ahead of schedule with this wish-fulfillment fantasy.

He is five years older than I am. Check back with me five years from now, and see if I am advocating that 32% of the population be cut off from health care. So that there will be more left for me. Yet this old grump is trying to identify himself with "the young." "Your replacements have arrived …" What's this, but Bob Dylan from 1964.

I have to wonder how well he would have recovered from his recent stroke if it had occurred in some other country. One with government health care. How nice for him that he was able to be transferred from United Hospital in St. Paul to the Mayo Clinic's St. Mary's Hospital, "simply because they know so much more about me down there." <sarcasm>The fact that he is a wealthy celebrity could not have had anything to do with that</sarcasm>.

This gets a "humor" tag only because Keillor is widely regarded as a humorist. For a while, I thought he might be capable of taking up the mantle of Jean Shepherd as a humorous Midwest memoirist. But to be bittersweet, you need to use care in mixing the bitter with the sweet. Keillor's all bitter, now.

Via Surber, via Reynolds. Reynolds says, "with this gang in charge who would be surprised to find that under ObamaCare your chances of a liver transplant really will depend on your politics? Not me." It's the Chicago Way.

Climate money

By Joanne Nova. "The Climate Industry: $79 billion so far – trillions to come." (PDF)

As Jerry Pournelle says, "with that much money at stake, does science as science have a chance?"

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.