An hospitable Leopard Seal (Hydrurga leptonyx) makes every effort to feed National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen, but is frustrated by the strange incompetence of the clueless biped at the simple feat of eating penguin.

1:48 video

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

1:17 video

One of the participants on a bamboo fly rod list forwarded the link to this 2007 YouTube video of a mountain lion looking into the window of a Colorado home in very much the manner of a house cat sitting patiently outside a mouse hole.

The lady doing most of the filming seems a bit overconfident in the ability of window glass to serve as an impenetrable barrier to wildlife. One can see the lion giving some serious consideration to having a try. Fortunately he decides in favor of prudence, or I expect we’d have never seen this video.

Apparently, the lion had been seen hanging around the vicinity of these people’s house before the video was made. The sensible thing to do would have been to shoot this particular lion.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) celebrates the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall with this 5:06 video.

I was watching this video which mentions that 200 people were killed trying to get over the wall after the East German government issued orders to fire upon defectors, and I could not help recognizing the identity of philosophic outlook with the recent House-passed Health Care Bill which proposes to fine people who fail to purchase health insurance. Punishing someone with a fine for failing to contribute to a collective insurance scheme differs only in scale from shooting someone for trying to withhold his work and taxes by escaping from the state entirely. The same view of the right of the collective to demand what it wishes of the individual is fundamental to both.

Readers emailed new video links to Big Hollywood in response to the original story back in late September about children at the B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, New Jersey being taught to sing songs praising Barack Obama reminiscent of the forms of indoctrination used in totalitarian states.

Liberals dismissed the original story as just one case of questionable taste involving only a single teacher in a single school. Six weeks after the original story, John Nolte has managed to collect 11 more from a range of places including Wisconsin, New York, Massachusetts, Georgia, and Illinois.

Nolte’s right. There is an epidemic of this sort thing, proving just how thoroughly entrenched a liberal mentality embracing a cult of statism and yearning to fall prostrate before a messianic leader is among the pseudo-educated class of persons employed in America’s school systems.

My personal favorite Obama song was the one that began

We believe in Barack Obama
He loves you and he loves your mama.

1:19 video

Hat tip to Ace via Bird Dog.

2:16 video

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Here is a short 0:53 video from Finland showing a Golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) attacking and killing a reindeer calf (Rangifer tarandus).

BBC:

A BBC natural history film crew gathered the extraordinary footage along a reindeer migration route in northern Finland.

It finally proves this eagle species does occasionally hunt reindeer, something suggested by forensic evidence and the local Sami people.

The crew filmed the behaviour while capturing footage of the reindeer migration for the BBC natural history series Life, though the images were shot at too far a distance to be included in the final cut of the high definition programme.

In the last 100 yards it went into a low powerful glide and hit the back of a calf

Television producer Dr Ted Oakes, cameraman Mr Barrie Britton and scientist Mr Harri Norberg set out to film the hunt along the northern edge of Finland.

For his PhD thesis Mr Norberg has spent the past few years studying how predators interact with the reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), which are known as caribou in North America.

Mr Norberg would tag calves, then search out those that had stopped moving to find out what had killed them.

By examining the bodies and the size and shape of claw, bite or talon marks, he ascertained that the majority of reindeer calves killed in the region had been attacked by eagles. ...

More often than not the golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) appeared to attack white calves, rather than tan or brown ones, though the crew did not know why.

According to Mr Norberg, it is usually immature golden eagles that kill the calves.

However, he also believes the birds occasionally hunt adult reindeer.

Another larger species of eagle lives in the region, the white-tailed eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla), but this bird is less aggressive than the golden eagle, and will often be chased off a reindeer carcass by its smaller relative.

The Sami people that live in the area say they have seen white-tailed eagles also killing reindeer, but this behaviour has yet to be scientifically documented.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

That cute little Pixar lamp stomps the letter I in those opening credits, but you’ve never seen the full story.

1:32 video

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

SNL answers the obvious question of what exactly Barack Obama has done in less than a year in office to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

4:12 video

Ann Althouse explains why he didn’t get the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Bruce Kesler has 10 reasons we should all be glad Obama won, starting with: Everyone should start their day with a good laugh. My wife laughed loudly when I shouted the news to her down the stairs.

Micky Kaus thinks he ought to turn it down. Lots of luck with that.

Morozov questions the significance of what he calls “iPod Liberalism,” and argues that the “Spinternet” and the use of the Net for “authoritarian deliberation” actually significantly aid authoritarian regimes.

11:51 video

Charlie Booker, at the Guardian, knows that Windows sucks, but explains that he still hates Mac and Mac users more.

Recently I sat in a room trying to write something on a Sony Vaio PC laptop which seemed to be running a special slow-motion edition of Windows Vista specifically designed to infuriate human beings as much as possible. Trying to get it to do anything was like issuing instructions to a depressed employee over a sluggish satellite feed. When I clicked on an application it spent a small eternity contemplating the philosophical implications of opening it, begrudgingly complying with my request several months later. It drove me up the wall. I called it a bastard and worse. At one point I punched a table. ...

I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it’s there, and there’s nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I’m repelled. To them, I’m a sheep. And they’re right. I’m a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I’m also a masochist. And that’s why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

That’s why Windows works for me. But I’d never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, “Hey, have you considered Windows?” Not in the real world at any rate.

Until now. Microsoft, hellbent on tackling the conspicuous lack of word-of-mouth recommendation, is encouraging people – real people – to host “Windows 7 launch parties” to celebrate the 22 October release of, er, Windows 7. The idea is that you invite a group of friends – your real friends – to your home – your real home – and entertain them with a series of Windows 7 tutorials.

Win 7 Launch Party video: A very serious contender for lamest (interminable at 6:14) video ever made.

Read the whole thing.

You thought teaching small childen to sing Obama’s praises was ridiculous? Well…

Community organizers attending a Gamaliel Foundation International Leadership Assembly held December 4, 2008 in Washington, D.C. conducted a mock funeral of existing American health care, and a large portion of the crowd during a litany actually prayed to Barack Obama (who once worked for Gamaliel in Chicago).

2:00 video

I knew it all along. Barack Obama is not a US citizen. He is a space alien, probably a robot. Eric Spiegelman has the proof. He compared 130 photos of Barack Obama posing with UN dignitaries at reception recently in this 0:21 video. Can that smile possibly be human?

Hand gun enthusiast Nutnfancy has a new 43:22 video out.

Nutnfancy is a modernist, a semiauto guy really, the sort of person who wants a magazine with enough rounds to deal with an assaulting Zulu impi, who prefers double action shooting, and who wants a Picatinny rail to hang lights from on his guns, but this time he is reviewing the Smith & Wesson 686P, the S&W Performance Center L-frame .357 Magnum revolver with the 7-round cylinder.

He is an intelligent critic though and rather insightfully, I thought, recognizes the S&W 686P as Smith’s version of the much-admired, but unfortunately discontinued, Colt Python, and proceeds with a head to head comparison.

I am not especially interested in this model. I already own two other S&W .357s, but Nutnfancy does quality reviewing, and I found this one entertaining enough to watch anyway.

This video recorded around June 19, 2009 at the B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, New Jersey shows young students being taught to sing a pair of songs praising President Obama.

This interesting performance was arranged in connection with Father’s Day.

2:24 video

Song 1:

Barack Hussein Obama
He said that all must lend a hand
To make this country strong again
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Yes

Song 2:

Hello, Mr. President we honor you today!
For all your great accomplishments, we all doth say “hooray!”

Hip, hip hooray!
Hip, hip hooray!
Hip, hip hooray!

—————————————————————
Obama obviously did not write the songs or arrange for them to be composed, but it can hardly be denied that the teacher(s?) responsible in New Jersey were responding to a personality cult and a political style which has been recognizable since the appearance of Barach Hussein Obama (Mmm, mmm, mm!) on the national political stage. It is a style a lot more compatible with backward Third World Communist dictatorships than with the American Republic.

—————————————————————

Fox News story

I think Gateway Pundit was the original source of the story.

0:58 video

8:33 video

The
Telegraph explains the story of the animation.

Hat tip to John Cole. Thanks, John. It’s a good one.

Lewis asserts that some ACORN offices may not actually have been helpful, and charges the filmmaker with committing an unspecified crime of some kind by subjecting ACORN’s staffers to this kind of test.

9:50 Baltimore video 1

8:15 Baltimore video 2

The James O’Keefe videos appear at the Big Government blog.

We are their Willy Horton for 2009. We are the boogeyman for the right-wing and its echo chambers. If ACORN did not exist, the right-wing would have needed to create us in order to achieve their agenda, their missions, their ideal, retrograde America. This recent scam, which was attempted in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia to name a few places, had failed for months before the results we’ve all recently seen. I am appalled and angry; I cannot and I will not defend the actions of the workers depicted in the video, who have since been terminated. But it is clear that the videos are doctored, edited, and in no way the result of the fabricated story being portrayed by conservative activist “filmmaker” O’Keefe and his partner in crime. And, in fact, a crime it was – our lawyers believe a felony – and we will be taking legal action against Fox and their co-conspirators.

But it seems that more videos, made in Brooklyn, New York, show that that employees at that ACORN office, too, were willing to assist tax fraud in aid of underage prostitution.

Fox News

9:37 New York video 1

6:05 New York video 2

Hat tip to Michael Lawler.

It’s the sort of thing Leni Riefenstahl might have done… after a lobotomy and a very long immersion in moronic American pop culture.

The Guild is an amusing online comedy whose storyline revolves around a group of on-line gamers playing an unnamed Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing game bearing a considerable, not entirely coincidental, resemblance to World of Warcraft.

Not surprisingly, because The Guild represents a satirical commentary by actress Felicia Day, best-known for the role of Violet on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on her own on-line gaming addiction.

The Guild premiered on-line in 2007. Its first season consisted of ten 3-to-7-minute episodes. A second season of only six episodes ran the following year. But The Guild has attracted corporate sponsorship. Microsoft bought the exclusive right to release the first episode of Season 3 on Xbox starting this week, for one week prior to the general release September 1st.

The musical number Do You Wanna To Date My Avatar is a good introduction and has links to episodes.

WatchtheGuild

Hedrick’s point, that Congress has absolutely no right to interfere with our right to chose our own health insurance, is dead on.

2:19 video

Mr. Hedrick was clearly far from alone in his sentiments. The crowd cheered his remarks.

From Simon at Classical Values via Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm.

1:39 video

From College Humor via Atomic Nerds via Karen L. Myers.

3:28 video

The Washington Post already pulled this once, presumably because of an uncomplimentary reference to Hillary Clinton. I would not count on the link remaining good terribly long.

2:34 video

Hat tip to Scott Drum.

4:17 video

1:03 video

Hat tip to Gateway Pundit.
——————————————————————
UPDATE 7/16:

The contention was made in Comments that Obama wasn’t really booed. The commenter argued that a few people always boo, but more people cheered Obama, this commenter asserted.

In reply, commenter T&L44 supplied a link to this 1:01 video
which provides a fuller view of Obama’s sissy pitch and in which the boos (and an announcer commenting on them) are very distinctly audible.

The video of the young woman’s death was originally posted on Facebook, where it has been since deleted, by by an Iranian expatriate in Holland who said it was sent to him by a friend in Tehran, a doctor who tried to save the shooting victim’s life. It was captioned as follows:

0:53 video

At 19:05 June 20th

Place: Karekar Ave., at the corner crossing Khosravi St. and Salehi st.

A young woman who was standing aside with her father watching the protests was shot by a basij member hiding on the rooftop of a civilian house. He had clear shot at the girl and could not miss her. However, he aimed straight her heart. I am a doctor, so I rushed to try to save her. But the impact of the gunshot was so fierce that the bullet had blasted inside the victim’s chest, and she died in less than 2 minutes.

The protests were going on about 1 kilometers away in the main street and some of the protesting crowd were running from tear gass (sic) used among them, towards Salehi St. The film is shot by my friend who was standing beside me. Please let the world know.”

The video was republished repeatedly on YouTube, and quickly seen by countless viewers who learned of it on Tweeter.

————————————————-

Mainstream media outlets, like Time and CNN have recognized the electrifying impact of the tragic images of her death and their potency as a symbol of of the brutality of the current dictatorship.

“RIP NEDA, The World cries seeing your last breath, you didn’t die in vain. We remember you.”

That Twitter post was from a man who said he is a guitarist from Nashville, Tennessee.

Amid the hundreds of images of Saturday’s crackdown on protesters in Iran that were distributed to the world over the Internet, it was the graphic video showing the dying moments of a young woman shot in the heart that touched a nerve for many people around the world.

Like most of the information coming out of Tehran, it is impossible to verify her name, Neda, or the circumstances of her apparent death, which was captured close-up on a bystander’s camera. ...

It shows a woman in jeans and white sneakers collapsed on the street, as the person with the camera—most likely from a cell phone—runs toward her and focuses on her face.

One blogger posted that Neda was protesting with her father in Tehran when pro-government Basiji militia opened fire and shot her.

“The final moments of her tender young life leaked into the pavement of Karegeh Street today, captured by cell phone cameras,” the unnamed blogger posted on Newsvine.com. “And not long after, took on new life, flickering across computer screens around the world on YouTube, and even CNN.”

————————————————-

Even one blogger at the normally cynical Gawker found himself haunted by the video.

I first saw the video of Neda’s death on Sunday afternoon at around 2PM. For the remainder of the day and up to this point, I’ve failed every effort, and there have been many, to get it out of my head. Even when I went to the gym late in the day, a place of solace where I’m usually able to blast music in my ears while exercising and just forget about everything going on in the outside world, I found myself unable to remove Neda from my mind.

Wikipedia entry

————————————————-

A candlelight vigil was held last night for Neda in front of the University in the Pasdaran district
————————————————-

Regime cancels Neda’s funeral at prestigious mosque.
————————————————-

mahmoudg blames a Hamas or Hezbollah sniper.

When you look at the video footage before Neda was shot, you can see that her death is the result of a sniper targeting the crowd from a secure location. Where the bullet entered her body (upper Torso) and the number of people around her is a sure signature of a professional soldier’s work. Now, there are only a few armies in the world that have trained soldiers for this type of work. America, Russia and China to name a few. None of these and others are likely suspects. The Iranian army does not need nor has been training for this type of surgical operations or clandestine needs. So who does that leave? The evidence points to the Hamas and/or Hezbollah Terrorist snipers who have been training for decades in the Bekaa Valley with the Iranian money. We have known for some time that Arabs have been imported into Iran from Palestine and Lebanon, trained to be markesmen to take out Israeli Soldiers. Today we saw that the time and money spend on these Arab murderors by their Arab bosses who are ruling Iran has paid off. They sniped the crowd and picked out this innocent girl to murder. The one thing they did not count on, was the world to take notice. The act would take a life of its own. Now the world knows that unless the Arabs are stopped, Iran and soon the world will start to burn.

Neda’s alleged shooter identified on Twitter. There is no confirmation, of course. Whoever it was had to be a coward and a villain to shoot to kill deliberately an unarmed and defenseless woman.
————————————————-

Original posted link to 0:37 version of the video on 6/21.

Hat tip to Right Wing News.

4:32 video

Hat tip to Henry Bernatonis.

A musical tribute to the Teleprompter of the United States.

3:36 video

A (typically unidentified) video of the 2005 disaster in which 63 people were injured is circulating currently as an Internet curiosity.

2:15 video

Hat tip to JonHenke.

2:45 The Baaa-Studs:”Extreme Shepherding”

From Terrierman via Karen L. Myers.

2:19 video

I’ve heard more fully developed analyses and better eloquence, but not often by people speaking from the heart from notes written at three o’clock in the morning after a lengthy session of work.

9:50 video

Leftie blogs are full of Rand villains sneering in response. Dagny would shoot the lot of ‘em.

5:35 video

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Hat tip to Right Wing Video.

6:31 video

One wonders if the videographer came back the same way.

16:23 video

Photo and video described as having been shot at Key West at Sunset, New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2008. It certainly looks like a missile. via Coast to Coast.

No official comments or MSM reports so far.

7:09 video

Confronted by a nearby Barn Owl (Tyto alba), it fluffs itself up into a very large owl. Seeing a more distant Barn Owl, it turns its less visible grey back toward the enemy and reduces its silhouette. All in all turning in a commendable Strigiperformance.

3:20 video

Hat tip to Labrat via Karen Myers.

That was quite a lion. I expect Major Parker would have said that particular lion was a gentleman.

1:29 video

3:26 video

2:26 video

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The video shows a referee, identified as Isao Nakamura Fushiki, putting a decisive stop to some post-karate-match aggression on the part of the contestant in blue.

It was clearly posted with intent, being labeled “Karate Master attacks 17-year-old,” and comments on YouTube and on martial arts sites have been overwhelmingly harshly critical of the behavior of Fushiki.

Apparently, despite the video’s recent appearance, the actual incident occurred a long time (eleven years!) ago at Autonomous University of Tamaulipas in Mexico. No explanation for the video’s sudden appearance has been found.

Isao Nakamura Fushiki is identified on the Net as a 7th (or 10th) dan Goju Ryu master (one source says Shito Ryu) who was World Kata Champion in 1970, 1971, and 1972 (one source says he was champion five times during the 1970s). One commenter in Spanish says that he served as an Imperial bodyguard for Hirohito and was known to Japanese karate fans as “the madman.”

The event was clearly not a conventional karate match, since the blue-clad contestant is wearing a kung fu outfit rather than a gi. Various commenters claim that the contestant in white was Fushiki’s pupil or even younger brother.

His takedown was certainly effective, but his third strike, the foot stomp to the head, seems generally to be thought to have been excessive.

Short version: 0:33 video

Long version: 3:15 video