Selectpersons of long-time Cape Cod artist colony Provincetown have decided they don’t want to continue to have to look at a painting depitcting the signing of the Mayflower Compact. The Pilgrim Fathers were sexists, you see, and did not include Indians in their ballotings.

Selectwoman Sarah Peake spun her chair around near the end of the Nov. 14 meeting, gazed up at an oversized oil painting depicting the Pilgrims voting on the Mayflower Compact when they first landed in Provincetown, and declared that she wanted it removed.

Mind you, it’s not that she didn’t like the look or the colors or the style. It’s not that she thought it was too big or too small for the Judge Welsh Hearing Room. It’s not that it clashed with anything around it.

No, what Peake didn’t like was that the painting didn’t include any women. That and the fact that the painting’s only Indian—Native American, I’d better call him—wasn’t holding a ballot like everyone else…

The selectmen took a vote, and three of the four supported removal of the painting.

Responding to recent humiliating demotions in Ecosytem Rankings, many much-lower-on-the evolutionary-ladder bloggers are probably feeling that TTLB is really lower than themselves, that TTLB ought to be saying of itself, as Julianne (played by Julia Roberts) said in My Best Friend’s Wedding:

JULIANNE I am pond scum. No… Actually. Lower. I am the fungus that feeds on pond scum. Lower. The layer of mucous that cruds up the fung…

MICHAEL

Lower.

JULIANNE

(agreeing) Lower.

MICHAEL

The pus that infects the mucous that cruds up the fungus that feeds on the pond scum. (Trace of a smile)

Kidding around aside, the big change, as far as is visible, seems to have amounted simply to a renumbering of how many links make a blog a this instead of a that. My Top Posts has always not worked, and still doesn’t. My link count has gone up, rather than than down, the opposite of my location on the food chain, but some links (including prominent ones like NRO (which produced 6K hits in one day) have never apparently been listed or counted, but TTLB’s count is still higher than Technorati’s. Go figure.

MeaninglessHotAir (must be John Cole’s cousin) at YARGB has compiled a terrific collection of Google links, including a link to a disgruntled Google employees’ blog. Those of us with lives connected to the Tech Industry love this kind of stuff.

Right now in Times Square.

Michael Massing in the last New York Review of Books contemplates with alarm, in the first of a projected two-part chin-stroking series, the continuing assault on the credibility of the MSM by a spectrum of alternative Conservative information sources, including AM talk radio, Fox News, and the Conservative Blogosphere, and laments the ever-diminishing readership of major newspapers:

while more than 70 percent of older Americans read a newspaper every day, fewer than 20 percent of young Americans do. As a result, he writes, “America is facing the greatest exodus of informed citizenship in its history.”

All this is very bad, you see, because:

If the leading newspapers lose their capacity to report and conduct inquiries, the American public will become even more susceptible to the manipulations and deceptions of those in power.

Frankly, old boy, complacent Establishment organs like the NY Times, the NYRB, CBS News, and the rest of the MSM look an awful lot like those in power to me. I’m strongly tempted to insert an MP3 at this point of Bob Dylan singing “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

Hat tip to Eugene Volokh who wryly responds to the NYRB’s lamentations by noting mistakes typical of MSM-reporting in the same article.

LeeBert at ApognosiS provides a useful reference collection on Iraqi WMD evidence.

Photoshop contest.

Catherine Seipp, who blogs on Cathy’s World, discusses the mysterious unfairness of the progress of the world by which some past authors remain famous and abundantly in-print, while other, like Ruth McKenney, Peg Bracken, Ernie Pyle, and others, are undeservedly discarded from the publishers’ lists and forgotten. Even today, it can be impossible to find, with all the book search utilities there are, titles which not necessarily rare, but which have merely escaped the antiquarian book dealers’ radar screens, usually simply as the result of not having been identified as desirable within a recognized category of book-collecting.

If any book dealer out there has a copy for sale, for example, of Heather Mixture by “Klaxon,” not listed anywhere as the result of not being understood to be a Game Shooting title, the owner of this blog is eager to purchase it.

The Truth Laid Bear bit the Blogosphere today, when its proprietor began implementing plans to eliminate counts of open trackbacks, and other forms of blogger cooperation in raising the status of individual blogs, toward ecosystem ratings and top posts. TTLB results are in complete shambles at present.

Glenn Reynolds, eat your heart out. Higher Beings are currently being reported to be:

1.Cold Fury (62) details
2.Caterina.net (62) details
3.http://www.ospolitics.org/ (62) details
4.Inter Alia (62) details
5.Times & Seasons (62) details
6.Writing for the Web (62) details
7.Go Dubya! (62) details
8.Freedom Nation (62) details
9. Cor ad cor loquitur (62) details
10.Hypocrisy and Hypotheses… an acute angle in an obtuse world (62) details

Three out of ten of which are dead links.

But what do we know? We’ve regressed to Multicellar Microorganism.

We were warned this was coming yesterday by James Joyner. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Irate bloggers can be found starting with Don Surber.

reviewed by David Lipsky:

[Kaplan] chastises the ‘elite’ for casting Vietnam in a bad light; the soldiers consider that war ‘every bit as sanctified as the nation’s others.’.. we’ve been too thrifty with our troops; to prevail in the war on terror, he advises, we ought to become more tolerant of American casualties. So what’s the holdup? It was the elites that had a more difficult time with the deaths of soldiers and marines. ‘Their concern is misplaced. The grunts have an ‘unpretentious willingness to die,’ which is in part ‘the product of their working-class origins. The working classes had always been accustomed to rough, unfair lives and turns.’..

The elites, having become global citizens, represent a threat to ‘the age-old ability of individual democracies to persevere in a sustained and difficult war.’ For Kaplan, it comes down to interests and allegiances: ‘Journalists were global cosmopolitans. If they themselves did not own European and other foreign passports, their spouses or friends . . . did. Contrarily, the American troops I met saw themselves belonging to one country and one society only: that of the United States.’

Wretchard proposes a provocative way of looking at current events:

The fundamental issue… is whether nation-states are in some sense being replaced by distributed networks of people…

That Islam traditionally had no fixed hierarchy helped it adapt more readily to networked war. For the Jihadi the requirements of public policy and international law not only proved no hindrance, in a fundamental sense they did not apply: things like the Geneva Convention were the impedimenta of nation-states. Holy warriors were accountable only to Allah, which in practice meant they answered to no one but themselves. This circumstance exculpated the Jihadists from a multitude of sins in the eyes of a Western media capable of recognizing only state actors. Attacks against hospitals, schools, churches; and the use of children as combatants excited no opprobrium because these were understood to be acts of individuals; unfortunate to be sure, but ultimately insubstantial. Only states could commit war crimes, so that Jihadi atrocities, even on the scale of September 11, were only the subject of police action…

The key challenge is whether America, in the sense of a shared idea, can be expansive enough to permit subordinate threads which can truly “take on a life of their own”, and so become agile enough to engage the Jihadis at the lowest level.

The unaussprechlichen FrankJ is waging war on Glenn Reynolds, you see. The origins and history of this terrible conflict are described here:

Blogging is a hobby of pure ego, whose purpose is to 1) see your words in print, and 2) have other people read them. Currently, one blogger, Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) gets far more page views and links than any other, and deservedly so. Glen updates MANY times per day, and his links are usually well worth clicking. However, he normally offers very little of his own commentary. Sometimes just a cursory “indeed” or “hmmm”.

Because he has so many readers, if he links to your site you get a LOT of hits, which is very gratifying. His links are highly prized by bloggers.

Frank J., of IMAO, is an up-and-coming blogger who occasionally mocks Glenn as a way to gain attention. His first method was making up outrageous lies: Glenn puts puppies in blenders and drinks them; Glenn murders hobos for fun; Glenn worships Satan; Glenn is a communist spy who does the robot dance; Glenn punched Frank J.

Later, Frank attempted to get Google to bring up Glenn’s site if the terms “liberal assclown” were entered. Results were mixed.

His latest attempt was to “declare war” on Glenn and asking bloggers to choose sides. Frank’s side is the Blogging Alliance, Glenn’s supporters are the Axis of Naughty. It’s all in good fun, and much entertaining mockery and gratuitous linkage will ensue as a result.

One of FrankJ’s allies, Harvey, has composed an indictment not to be missed by connoisseurs of Blogospheric humor.

The irrepressible FrankJ posts an amusing collection of “Amazing Beliefs” about Guns, compiled by Michael Z. Williamson :

(excerpt)

That incidents where people shoot criminals in self defense are very rare, and shouldn’t be used as excuses to own guns, just as incidents where presidential press secretaries are shot are very rare, and shouldn’t be used as excuses to ban guns.

That guns are the real cause of crime, but we will blame and jail the owner of said gun for the crime, even if the owner wasn’t the person involved.

That a mugger will kill you in the half-second it takes to draw from the holster, but won’t harm you while you dial 911 on your cell phone, talk to the dispatcher and wait half an hour for the cops to arrive.

That gun control works, which is why there are no illegal weapons in Northern Ireland or Beirut.

That the Second Amendment only applies to flintlocks, just as the First Amendment only applies to quills and lead type.

The Telegraph reports:

Poland’s newly elected government threw open its top secret Warsaw Pact military archives – including a 1979 map revealing the Soviet bloc’s vision of a seven-day atomic holocaust between Nato and Warsaw Pact forces.

The defence minister, Radek Sikorski, showed off the map at an emotional press conference.

He described it as a “personally shattering experience”, pointing to a long line of nuclear mushroom clouds neatly stamped along the Vistula, where Soviet bloc commanders assumed that Nato tactical nuclear weapons would rain down to block reinforcements arriving from Russia.

About two million Polish civilians would die in such a war, and the country would be all but wiped off the face of the Earth, he said.

On the map, western Europe lay beneath a chilling overlay of large red mushroom clouds: Warsaw Pact nuclear strikes, using giant warheads to compensate for their relative lack of precision.

Soviet bombs rain down on cities from northern Denmark down to Brussels, the political headquarters of Nato. Large red clouds blot out cities such as Hamburg, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich and Baden Baden, Haarlem, Antwerp and Charleroi, above the Franco-Belgian border.

In 1979, the town I was living in, Redding, Connecticut, was debating, and ultimately passed—despite some speeches of mine—a Nuclear Freeze resolution, promoted by the American Left throughout much of the United States, opposing the deployment of medium range missles in Europe by NATO. The Soviet Union was no threat, we were told. One does not like to think about what might have happened had Ronald Reagan not been elected president in 1980.

(click on picture for more images)

Simply astonishing.

Other works