News.com.au:

Former NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell – a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission – has stunningly claimed aliens exist.

And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions – but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades.

Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as ‘little people who look strange to us.’

He said supposedly real-life ET’s were similar to the traditional image of a small frame, large eyes and head.

Chillingly, he claimed our technology is “not nearly as sophisticated” as theirs and “had they been hostile”, he warned “we would be been gone by now”.

Dr Mitchell, along with with Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard, holds the record for the longest ever moon walk, at nine hours and 17 minutes following their 1971 mission.

“I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we’ve been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real,” Dr Mitchell said.

“It’s been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it’s leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.

“I’ve been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes – we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it’s been happening quite a bit.”

Dr Mitchell, who has a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical engineering and a Doctor of Science degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics claimed Roswell was real and similar alien visits continue to be investigated.

He told the astonished Kerrang! radio host Nick Margerrison: “This is really starting to open up. I think we’re headed for real disclosure and some serious organisations are moving in that direction.”

Mr Margerrison said: “I thought I’d stumbled on some sort of astronaut humour but he was absolutely serious that aliens are definitely out there and there’s no debating it.”

9:15 video of Kerrang Radio Interview

Typical Daily Kos commenter delivers a
well-reasoned rejoinder.

Daniel Libit discusses one of the curious features of the blogosphere, what he refers to as “the Commentocracy,” the critical mass of enthusiastic participants who not only read some of the most influential blogs (on both the left and the right), but who impact the political debate with their own contributions, some thoughtful and of high quality and others vulgar, violent, and obscene.

It’s not unusual these days for prominent commenters to develop their own readership, and to go on to become regular contributors to the blogs where they have been habituees, or to proceed to found new blogs of their own.

A certain number of blogs, in my opinion, tend to rely on the vehemence of their commenters’ responses to shield them from criticism or rebuttal. A hooting posse of blogospheric sycophants is virtually de rigeur on the left, but there are some conservative blogs which are also known to contain a comment mob.

Barack Obama waves goodbye to the Illinois State Senate

Barack Obama didn’t even win a majority of the votes cast in the democrat party primaries. His party’s convention has yet to occur, and he has yet to be nominated.

Barack Obama has to be most ludicrously underqualified presidential candidate of all time. An insignificant state legislator, representing an inner city minority safe seat from a one party city, with no record of legislative accomplishment whatsoever, he lucked into the US Senate, courtesy of an angry divorce scandal. He then gets to give a token speech at the 2004 democrat convention, proves he can read effectively from a teleprompter, and entirely on that basis becomes a presidential candidate.

Since being elected to the Senate, he’s been running for the presidency, so he has even less of a record of accomplishment in the US Senate than he compiled in the Illinois State Senate where he was remarkable only for the number of occasions he voted “Present:” 129.

But, as Marc Ambinder reports, Barack Obama is so confident of winning that he is already planning for his presidency.

With less than six months to go before he would be sworn in as the nation’s 44th president, Sen. Barack Obama has directed his aides to begin planning for the transition.

“Barack is well aware of the complexity and the organizational challenge involved in the transition process and he has tasked s small group to begin thinking through the process,” a senior campaign adviser said. “Barack has made his expectations clear about what he wants from such a process, how he wants it to move forward, and the establishment and execution of his timeline is proceeding apace.”

Last month, the Post’s Chris Cillizza reported that campaign advisers were sounding out John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and currently the president of the Center for American Progress, for his advice.

An aide confirms that Podesta will probably be asked to head the transition team, which would take over from the campaign if Obama wins in November, and would be tasked with ensuring a smooth handover of power.

The Bardol Thodol also known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead describes the human consciousness’s experience after death leading to enlightenment and liberation or (uh oh!) rebirth.

Thomas Scoville explicates this challenging text for the Western reader by delivering it in comics form.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Ed Bott likes Microsoft’s initial ad attempting to defend Vista, but observes that it’s going to take more than trying to ridicule the messenger.

That’s a pretty good start. The real hard work begins with the messages that immediately follow this one. Microsoft has to identify the real benefits in Windows Vista and communicate them clearly and crisply. That’s not going to be any easy task.

Not easy at all, IMHO.
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Adrian Kingsley-Hughes points out that MSFT’s ad isn’t going to get it done, because although the earth was not flat, Vista really does suck.

Even the overall message that the ad is trying to convey is uninspiring. For example:

Meanwhile, a series of independent speed tests found that Windows Vista with SP1 performed comparably to Windows XP SP2.

Why doesn’t it win? Simple. Behind the scenes, Windows Vista is doing a lot more on your behalf than Windows XP does. It’s indexing your files so you can find them fast, keeping your hard drive organized, saving your work so nothing gets lost, and defending your computer against hackers and phishers.

So, when your favorite first person shooter starts to stutter, or that photo is taking a little too long to open in Photoshop, you can take comfort in the fact that Vista is doing a lot more on your behalf than Windows XP ever did.

I tried Vista recently, and I thought it was doing a lot too much for me. Every mouse click produced a close relative of MS Office’s infamous dancing paperclip freezing the action and popping up to warn me that opening a browser or clicking on an application could expose my system to viruses or possibly initiate a fatal sequence of events leading to the heat death of the universe.

I gathered a distinct impression that Vista’s designers really believed one should take that PC and admire the nice Microsoft wallpaper through the lucite block you had cast around it.

Everyone assured me that one could reduce the level of pestering by tweaking security settings, so I reduced them alright. I just installed XP right over it.
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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The last time German media was quite so worshipful of a politician.

9:31 video

Decisions by committee, you know what those are like.

4:32 video

Hat tip to Ketchup and Caviar.

Telegraph:

The idea that people have an innate mathematical ability has been questioned by a study of an Amazonian tribe that has no sense of number.

The ability of tribal adults of the Pirahã to conceptualise numbers is no better than that of infants or even some animals and their language, with only 300 speakers, has no word even to express the concept of “one” or any other specific number.

Prof Gibson found that there were no words for ‘one’ or ‘two’ for members of the Pirahã tribe
The team, led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson, found that members of the Pirahã tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express relative quantities such as “some” and “more,” but not precise numbers.

It is often assumed that counting is an innate part of human cognition, said Prof Gibson, “but here is a group that does not count. They could learn, but it’s not useful in their culture, so they’ve never picked it up.

Hat tip to MeaninglessHotAir.

Melanie Scarborough thinks US presidential candidates should be running against socialism and stupidity, not using them as tools to manipulate voters.

1. It is not the responsibility of your fellow citizens to buy health insurance for you and your family. They have enough of a burden paying their own bills. ...

2. “Diversity is our strength” has become a dangerous mantra. Diversity will destroy us unless we start insisting that those who come here to take advantage of our prosperity also assimilate to our culture. ...

The only way the United States can protect itself from such inevitable chaos is to severely limit immigration from Muslim countries — and withstand the caterwauling about bigotry. Western democratic values are fundamentally incompatible with some of the tenets of Islamic law. Muslims who do not believe in the equality of men and women, secular government, or freedom of speech are never going to embrace American values, and their presence can only weaken our culture.

3. There is no relationship between the amount of money spent on schools and the quality of education. For example, Washington, D.C., ranks third in per-pupil expenditure yet has one of the worst school systems in the country. The crucial determinant of student achievement is the competence of teachers, and paying higher salaries to bad teachers doesn’t solve the problem. ...

4. As economist Robert Samuelson recently pointed out, the United States faces a crisis that will become a catastrophe if we don’t take immediate steps. By 2050, one fifth of the population will be older than 65, and while the entire U.S. population may exceed 430 million, about four-fifths of that increase will reflect immigrants, their children and their grandchildren. “The potential for conflict is obvious,” Samuelson said. “Older retirees and younger and poorer immigrants — heavily Hispanic — will compete for government social services and benefits. Squeezed in between will be middle-class and middle-age workers, facing higher taxes.” ...

5. It is not the government’s responsibility to take care of you from cradle to grave.

She’ll have to vote for Bob Barr. John McCain isn’t likely to become a domestic conservative.

Via the News Junkie and McQ.

Telegraph:

The leaders at Portsmouth City council were asked to donate £500 to a fun day event to raise money for the charity Help The Heroes, which looks after wounded soldiers back in this country.

But they initially turned down the grant because it argued their support may upset ethnic minorities who could have been traumatised by armed conflicts.

A rejection letter said the event “could cause offence to ethnic minority groups living in the community who may also have experience of injury/violence due to the war”.

The decision left Richard Chamberlain, 57, who had arranged the event with other residents in his block of flats “jumping up and down” with anger.

Poster of entire Portsmouth City Council

Think you can cast?

0:57 video

Shelby Steele puts his finger on the essence of the 2008 election: Barack Obama is offering a fascinating and incredibly seductive bargain involving Black America and White America with himself as broker and beneficiary.

(Jesse Jackson) and the entire civil rights establishment pursued equality through the manipulation of white guilt.

Their faith was in the easy moral leverage over white America that the civil rights victories of the 1960s had suddenly bestowed on them. So Mr. Jackson and his generation of black leaders made keeping whites “on the hook” the most sacred article of the post-’60s black identity.

They ushered in an extortionist era of civil rights, in which they said to American institutions: Your shame must now become our advantage. To argue differently—that black development, for example, might be a more enduring road to black equality—took whites “off the hook” and was therefore an unpardonable heresy. For this generation, an Uncle Tom was not a black who betrayed his race; it was a black who betrayed the group’s bounty of moral leverage over whites. And now comes Mr. Obama, who became the first viable black presidential candidate precisely by giving up his moral leverage over whites.

Mr. Obama’s great political ingenuity was very simple: to trade moral leverage for gratitude. Give up moral leverage over whites, refuse to shame them with America’s racist past, and the gratitude they show you will constitute a new form of black power. They will love you for the faith you show in them.

So it is not hard to see why Mr. Jackson might have experienced Mr. Obama’s emergence as something of a stiletto in the heart. Mr. Obama is a white “race card”—moral leverage that whites can use against the moral leverage black leaders have wielded against them for decades. He is the nullification of Jesse Jackson—the anti-Jackson.

And Mr. Obama is so successful at winning gratitude from whites precisely because Mr. Jackson was so successful at inflaming and exploiting white guilt. Mr. Jackson must now see his own oblivion in the very features of Mr. Obama’s face.

Read the whole thing.

It might be worth it.

Glenn Reynolds has a little prediction for you lefties.

Andy Borowitz reports:

McCain Makes Historic First Visit to Internet—Will Spend Five Days at Key Sites.

In a daring bid to wrench attention from his Democratic rival in the 2008 presidential race, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) today embarked on an historic first-ever visit to the Internet.

Given that the Arizona Republican had never logged onto the Internet before, advisors acknowledged that his first visit to the World Wide Web was fraught with risk.

But with his Democratic rival Barack Obama making headlines with his tour of the Middle East and Europe, the McCain campaign felt that they needed to “come up with something equally bold for John to do,” according to one advisor.

McCain aides said that the senator’s journey to the Internet will span five days and will take him to such far-flung sites as Amazon.com, eBay and Facebook.

With a press retinue watching, Sen. McCain logged onto the Internet at 9:00 AM Sunday, paying his first-ever visit ever to Mapquest.com.

“I can’t get this [expletive] thing to work,” Sen. McCain said as he struggled with his computer’s mouse, causing his wife Cindy to prompt him to add that he was “just kidding.”

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Hat tip to David L. Larkin.

Lorne Gunter, at the National Post, observes that it’s a case of “Do as Al says, not as Al does.”

On Thursday, former U. S. vice-president Al Gore delivered a major address calling on his country to abandon all fossil fuels within 10 years. By 2018, U. S. electricity and fuel should come entirely from “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources,” he said. Tickets to the event encouraged attendees to “please use public transit, bicycling or other climate-friendly means” to reach the lecture hall.

So how did Mr. Gore and his retinue arrive? In two Lincoln Town Cars and a full-sized SUV that sat idling with the air conditioners blasting while the Gore party was inside.

It was 34 C (93.2 º F) in Washington. Al Gore can’t be expected to get into an overheated vehicle after he’s worked up a sweat telling others how to save the planet.

Remember, too, the Nobel prizewinning environmentalist lives in a Tennessee mansion that produces a carbon footprint 20 times that of the average American home. A sizeable chunk of his personal fortune comes from royalties on a zinc mine which had to be temporarily closed five years ago in part because the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency ruled it one of the worst-polluting mine sites in America. Illegal toxins were frequently discharged into nearby rivers.

Mr. Gore’s Live Earth benefit concert last summer flew scores of rock bands to stages around the world in carbon-spewing private jets. To cover the emissions from his own frequent use of private jets, Mr. Gore set up a company that buys carbon offsets, so that in effect he is paying himself for his carbon indulgences, writing off the expense on one hand, while pocketing the proceeds on the other.

Apparently if the world is ever to reach the carbon-free future Mr. Gore dreams of, it will have to get there without Al’s help.