Archive for November, 2005
29 Nov 2005

Bin Laden still Directing Terror Operations

DebkaFile reports today that:

Interrogations of al Qaeda adherents captured in 9 countries in November have finally exploded the myth of Osama bin Laden as a semi-retired inspirational figurehead. (DebkaNet)’s intelligence and counter-terror sources reveal that bin Laden has emerged as a vitally active planner of all al Qaeda’s terrorist operations up to the present.

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In an interview on Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” CIA Director Porter Goss said the agency has made progress in finding the leaders of al-Qaida, and knows a “great deal more about (Osama) bin Laden, (Abu Musab) al-Zarqawi and (bin Laden aide Ayman) Zawahiri than we’re able to say publicly.”

Meanwhile, the ever-perspicacious democrat Majority Leader Nevada Senator Harry Reid of Nevada said this week he thinks Osama Bin Laden was killed in last month’s earthquake in Pakistan.

29 Nov 2005

Star Wars Auditions

Kevin Spacey plays Christopher Walken as Han Solo and the late Walter Mattau as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Darrell Hammond plays Richard Dreyfuss as C3PO. Classic sketch from SNL spoofing behind the scenes footage of “Star Wars, the 20th Anniversary Home Video”.

29 Nov 2005

Natural Gas not a Fossil Fuel?

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WorldNetDaily reports that developments in deep-drilling for natural gas present serious challenges to those who still maintain “Fossil-Fuel” theories as to the origin of complex hydrocarbon fuels. The Oklahoma GHK Company has found Natural Gas in two wells drilled to depths greater than 30,000 feet (approximately 5.7 miles), too deep for the remains of dinosaurs to be found. A Japanese Company, Teikoku Oil, produces equipment specifically for use in Japan’s Nagaoka and Niigata fields which are producing natural gas from bedrock that is volcanic in origin.

(Some) might stretch to argue that even if no dinosaurs ever died in sedimentary rock that today lies 30,000 feet below the surface… those levels (may) contain some type of biological debris that has transformed into natural gas. That argument, a stretch at 30,000 feet down, is almost impossible to make for basement structure bedrock. Japan’s Nagaoka and Niigata fields produce natural gas from bedrock that is volcanic in nature. What dinosaur debris could possibly be trapped in volcanic rock found at deep-earth levels? Deep-earth natural gas strongly supports the theory that the origin of oil (also) is abiotic, not organic in nature.

The growing evidence of the possibility of an abiotic, geological origin of so-called “fossil fuels” would be a very serious blow to leftist critics of modern industrial civilization. Predictions of the impending exhaustion of allegedly limited supplies of precious natural resources are a staple of leftist critiques of Capitalism and the American way of life.

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Mr. David Nix, a classmate of mine at college, has thoughtfully passed along this link to an article on the American Association of Petroleum Geologists web site.

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California blogger Gahrie supplies some links to materials on the abiogenic theory.

29 Nov 2005

Mayflower Painting Removed

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.

28 Nov 2005

That Bear

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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.

28 Nov 2005

Google Gossip

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.

28 Nov 2005

Giant Frozen Windows Error

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Right now in Times Square.

28 Nov 2005

Indifference (and the Right) threatens MSM

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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.

28 Nov 2005

Iraqi WMDs

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

28 Nov 2005

If Hackers Ruled The Earth

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8MW

Photoshop contest.

28 Nov 2005

Forgotten Favorites

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.

27 Nov 2005

Devolution Hits the Blogosphere

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Angry Bear

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.

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