Gizmodo takes perhaps an overly censorious view of one man’s passion.

Personally, I think the Bradster’s setup is highly impressive, in its own peculiar way Homeric. It would be interesting to watch him multi-task.

World of Warcraft player/dorkmaster supreme Bradster has caved to his smack addiction-like dependence on WoW and created 36 separate accounts that he plays simultaneously on an epically ridiculous rig. He claims to spend over $5700 per year just on the game, and plans to pick up 36 copies of the new expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King when it’s released. …

Bradster’s setup features a whopping seven separate laptops, four desktops hidden away under the desk, and an array of screens that’s disorienting even in a static image. He might be the only person on earth who’s capable of using the 15-button mouse.

older photo of MV Iran Deyanat in different paint

After Somali pirates hijacked the Iranian freighter MV Iran Deyanat (aka Deyant or Dianat) on August 21, 2008, as ransom negotiations proceeded, in late September, reports of strange illnesses striking down the pirates began appearing in the international press.

South Africa Times 9/28:

Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died.

Andrew Mwangura, the director of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, told the Sunday Times: “We don’t know exactly how many, but the information that I am getting is that some of them had died. There is something very wrong about that ship.”

ShiratDevorah offers the following explanation:

The MV Iran Deyanat is owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) – a state-owned company run by the Iranian military that was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury on September 10, shortly after the ship’s hijacking.

According to the U.S. Government, the company regularly falsifies shipping documents in order to hide the identity of end users, uses generic terms to describe shipments to avoid the attention of shipping authorities, and employs the use of cover entities to circumvent United Nations sanctions to facilitate weapons proliferation for the Iranian Ministry of Defense. The MV Iran Deyanat departed Nanjing, China, July 28, and, according to its manifest, planned to sail to Rotterdam, where it would offload 42,500 tons of iron ore and “industrial products” purchased by an unidentified “ German client”. The ship has a crew of 29 men, including a Pakistani captain, an Iranian engineer, 13 other Iranians, 3 Indians, 2 Filipinos, and 10 Eastern Europeans, stated to be Albanians.

The MV Iran Deyanat was brought to Eyl, a sleepy fishing village in northeastern Somalia, and was secured by a larger gang of pirates – 50 onboard and 50 onshore. The Somali pirates attempted to inspect the ship’s seven cargo containers but the containers were locked. The crew claimed that they did not have the “access codes” and could not open them. Pirates have stated they were unable to open the hold without causing extensive damage to the ship, and threatened to blow it up. The Iranian ship’s captain and the engineer were contacted by cell phone and demanded to disclose the actual nature of the mysterious “powdered cargo” but the captain and his officers were very evasive. Initially they said that the cargo contained “crude oil” but then claimed it contained “minerals.” Following this initial rebuff, the pirates broke open one of the containers and discovered it to be filled with packets of what they said was “a powdery fine sandy soil” ….

Within a period of three days, those pirates who had boarded the ship and opened the cargo container with its gritty sand-like contents, all developed strange health complications, to include serious skin burns and loss of hair. And within two weeks, sixteen of the pirates subsequently died, either on the ship or on shore. …

Although American intelligence and government sources are maintaining a strictly observed silence, the same does not apply to the Russians and so it is that we learn the real story of the MV Iran Deyanat. She was an enormous floating dirty bomb, intended to detonate after exiting the Suez Canal at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in proximity to the coastal cities of Israel. The entire cargo of radioactive sand, obtained by Iran from China (the latter buys desperately needed oil from the former) and sealed in containers which, when the charges on the ship are set off after the crew took to the boats, will be blasted high into the air where prevailing winds will push the highly dangerous and radioactive cloud ashore.

Given the large number of deaths from the questing Somali pirates, it should be obvious that when the contents of the ship’s locked cargo containers finally descended onto the land, the death toll would be enormous. This ship was nothing more nor less than the long-anticipated Iranian attack on Israel. Not the expected rocket attacks (which could be intercepted by the Israelis) but an even more deadly and unexpected attack by sea. It is very interesting to note that the Israeli government has in the past few weeks, been loudly demanding that the United States establish a naval blockade of Iran.

On October 10, Iran evidently having paid the required ransom, the Deyanat was released, and allowed to depart. It sailed apparently in the direction of Muscat.

Mark Steyn (now free from Canadian prosecution for un-PC speech) would prefer a less mystical adversary from the left.

The day after the debate I bumped into two Obama supporters in St Johnsbury, Vermont who said isn’t it great that he’s on course to win. Well, they were cute chicks, and I know an obvious pick-up line when I hear one, so I stopped to chat. God Almighty, it was like reverse Viagra: After ten minutes of Babes For Barack, I never want to meet a female woman of the opposite sex for the rest of my life. Their basic pitch was:

How do you solve a problem? Like, Obama!

How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?

That’s John McCain’s problem. Traditionally, when an unknown politician emerges on the national scene, it’s a race to define him. Governor Palin is a good example: within days, the coastal sophisticates were mocking her as a chillbilly ditz with a womb that spits out inbred kids faster than the First National Bank of Welfare Swamp issues subprime mortgages. That’s politics as usual: Define your opponent. But Obama is defined by his indefinability. When I pointed out to my Vermont gals that he lives in a swank pad that was part of some shady real estate deal with a convicted fraudster (Tony Rezko), that he entrusted his daughters’ entire religious education to a neo-segregationist anti-American nut who preaches that the government created the AIDS virus to kill black people (Jeremiah Wright), that he attended fundraisers with a political patron who’s an unrepentant terrorist proud of plotting to blow up young ladies just like them at a dance at the Fort Dix military base (William Ayers), when I pointed all this out, they looked at me as if I’d brought a baseball bat to a croquet match. Mere earthbound politicians are defined by their real estate deals and sleazy buddies, but Obama is defined only by his vibe. As his many admirers in France would say, he has a certain je ne sais quoi. And, if you try to pin down quoi precisely, then they don’t want to sais.

Besides, said one of the cuties, it’s racist to try to link him to unsavory white men (Ayers). And black men (Wright). And Arabs (Rezko). And, just to be on the safe side, any dodgy Uzbeks or Papuans who might have been lurking around the greater Chicago area for the last quarter century. The ladies weren’t exactly covering their eyes and going, “Neee-neeee-na-na, can’t hear you,” but the other cutie did begin waving at me her Obama sticker — the one with the giant blue-frosted O embedded in a manicured candy-striped upland — like the villain in the movie trying to hypnotize you with his pocketwatch. I began frantically looking around in hopes that a passing Hare Krishna or Scientologist type could get me out of there. But, no: Gaze into the giant zero of the Obama logo, the hole in the star-spangled donut, the vast fathomless nullity that is the gaping keyhole to the door of utopia. To a sad shriveled Republican cynic, there’s nothing there but the wide open spaces of Obama’s blank resume. But a believer will see therein the healing of the planet and the receding of the oceans. The black hole of Obama will suck you in through the awesome power of its totally cool suckiness.

Read the whole thing.

A prominent news agency is reporting that Antoin Rezko is singing like a bird to prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and that Illinois democrats are trembling in their boots.

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HillBuzz rumors that Fitzgerald is after the ultimate scalp for his personal collection: Barack Obama’s.

The Sun Times today gave a major clue that Barack Obama will indeed go down with Tony Rezko, sooner rather than later. It looks as though Rezko is about to turn on Alexi Giannoulias, the 30-year old State Treasurer of Illinois (who was elected only because Obama backed him).

Here’s where all the clues are…and then we’ll walk you through the local Chicago politics on how today’s hint by the Sun Times has us convinced, for the first time ever, that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald could indeed send Barack Obama to jail.

Sounds too good to be true, but we are certainly going to be keeping an eye out for further developments.

Private Sam Wilson’s Walker Colt and flask

The all-time auction record for a Colt Revolver was made his week at James D. Julia, Inc. in Fairfield, Maine, when a Colt Whitneyville Walker, marked “Company A #201,” issued at Vera Cruz in 1847 to Texas Ranger Private Sam Wilson sold for $920,000.

Samuel Colt produced, between 1847 and 1849, roughly 1100 massive .44 caliber revolvers along the lines suggested by Texas Ranger Captain Samuel Walker.

The Walker Colt could be argued to have been the most powerful handgun in the world up until the introduction of the .357 Magnum in 1935. Its use by Texas Rangers in the Mexican War and in frontier battles with the Comanche Indians combined with its rarity and extraordinary size all combine to make the Walker Colt the ne plus ultra of 19th century collectible revolvers.

Antique and Auction News explains why this particular example was so desirable.

With the Wilson/Kenly Walker there are some specific attributes that make this example stand far above all others known. First of all is its spectacular condition. The Walker was so revered during its period of use that one of the first actions that occurred as a Texas Ranger fell in battle was the retrieval of his Walker pistol. The thousand martial Walker pistols originally produced saw a tremendous use in future years. Those few examples that have survived are almost all in extremely worn and well-used condition. Very rarely is there even a hint of finish left on the revolver. It is not uncommon to find many or most of the markings worn off, parts replaced, etc. The Wilson/Kenly Revolver, however, is in extraordinary condition, retaining 40-60% of its original finish, and of equal importance, retaining all of the inspector marks, proof marks, and other fragile idiosyncrasies almost never seen on other surviving Walkers. This resulting masterpiece literally makes it a reference study in what a real martial Walker looked like at the time of issue.

A second very appealing aspect of this important revolver is its impeccable provenance. The gun was originally issued to Samuel Wilson, a private in the Texas Rangers. Not only is it recorded that the Walkers were issued to his Company, Wilson also scratched his name on the brass trigger guard of this most prized of his possessions. Wilson unfortunately died in late 1847 or early 1848 at Jalapa and Major Kenly, at that time Jalapa’s Garrison Commandant and in charge of the hospital, obviously obtained the gun at Wilson’s demise. He kept this and other items he collected throughout the battle for his entire life, and passed them on down to his descendants. The consignor, an octogenarian from Libby, Montana, first saw the gun in 1941 when he and his mother retrieved it along with the Walker Flask from the family homestead. It had been in the possession of his mother’s aunt (Kenly was a great-uncle to this aunt). The Colt Walker A Company No. 210 has never been outside the family, nor ever offered for private sale before. October 7, 2008 will be the first time. The Walker will be offered with a $500,000 to $1,000,000 pre-sale estimate.

James D. Julia press release

Maine Morning Sentinel story

Shooting a replica Walker Colt 9:01 video

Christopher Buckley has endorsed Obama.

This from the son of the man who wrote: “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

Kimberly Strassel, in the Wall Street Journal, admires the showmanship of Barack Obama’s promises.

And now, America, we introduce the Great Obama! The world’s most gifted political magician! A thing of wonder. A thing of awe. Just watch him defy politics, economics, even gravity! (And hold your applause until the end, please.)

To kick off our show tonight, Mr. Obama will give 95% of American working families a tax cut, even though 40% of Americans today don’t pay income taxes! How can our star enact such mathemagic? How can he “cut” zero? Abracadabra! It’s called a “refundable tax credit.” It involves the federal government taking money from those who do pay taxes, and writing checks to those who don’t. Yes, yes, in the real world this is known as “welfare,” but please try not to ruin the show.

For his next trick, the Great Obama will jumpstart the economy, and he’ll do it by raising taxes on the very businesses that are today adrift in a financial tsunami! That will include all those among the top 1% of taxpayers who are in fact small-business owners, and the nation’s biggest employers who currently pay some of the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world. Mr. Obama will, with a flick of his fingers, show them how to create more jobs with less money. It’s simple, really. He has a wand.

Next up, Mr. Obama will re-regulate the economy, with no ill effects whatsoever! You may have heard that for the past 40 years most politicians believed deregulation was good for the U.S. economy. You might have even heard that much of today’s financial mess tracks to loose money policy, or Fannie and Freddie excesses. Our magician will show the fault was instead with our failure to clamp down on innovation and risk-taking, and will fix this with new, all-encompassing rules. Presto! …

Tada!

You can clap now. (Applause. Cheers.) We’d like to thank a few people in the audience. Namely, Republican presidential nominee John McCain, who has so admirably restrained himself from running up on stage to debunk any of these illusions and spoil everyone’s fun.

Read the whole thing.

Daily Mail

The Telegraph reports another inversion of the rule of law in contemporary Britain.

A gardener who fenced off his allotment patch with a single strand of barbed wire to protect it from thieves has been ordered to take it down in case intruders hurt themselves.

Bill Malcolm, 61, was told to “remove it on health and safety grounds” by the local council, which owns the allotments.

He erected the deterrent after thieves struck three times in four months, stealing more than £300 worth of spades, forks, hoes and wrecking his potato patch in the process.

But officials instructed Mr Malcolm to remove the waist-high wire from his plot at Round Hill Allotments in Marlbrook, Worcs.

He said: “It’s an absolutely ridiculous situation, all I wanted was to protect my property but the wire had to go in case a thief scratched himself.

“The council said they were unhappy about the precautions I had made but my response was to tell them that only someone climbing over on to my allotment could possibly hurt themselves.

“They shouldn’t be trespassing in the first place but the council apologised and said they didn’t want to be sued by a wounded thief.

In New Republic, David Samuels uses Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a touchstone to penetrate beyond the “blank canvas” onto which the American electorate has been invited to project its fantasies and desires to capture glimpses of the real personality of Barack Obama.

Samuels is as ravished by the idea of so good a writer, so fine a speaker, such an intriguing literary creation as Obama ascending to the presidency as many of us are alarmed and horrified by the same portrait of a calculating and angry half-breed in love with power and eager to wreak vengeance for his own birth.

What a subject for Joseph Conrad Obama would have made.

It is one of the outstanding ironies of Obama’s story that his political rise has been fueled by a tactical grasp of the same racial logic that condemned Ellison’s invisible man to living in a basement by himself. The blank screen approach that Obama has embraced works well in a moment dominated by the collapse of Wall Street and the Iraq war, issues for which all possible solutions seem unpalatable; what voters want is to feel that things will change, without too much uncomfortable detail about what will actually happen. The fact that the candidate does not make the usual appeal to the authenticity of his personal story makes the usual attacks on him seem nonsensical, regardless of whether or not they are true, a fact that the Clintons lamented during the primary season and John McCain will find equally frustrating during the general election. Crazy right-wing charges that Obama shares the loonier opinions of Dr. Wright or that he is a secret Muslim blend seamlessly into reports of his calls for immediately beginning the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq or his promise to sit down with the leaders of Iran and North Korea without preconditions, or the fact that he began his political career at Bill Ayers’s house in Chicago, or that his financial backer Tony Rezko was a scummy slumlord who paid for the Obamas to have a new backyard. None of it sticks, because Obama is not that kind of candidate. The campaign uses the Ellisonian condition of invisibility to its advantage while also exerting a powerful form of mental jujitsu on guilty white liberals, a species that Obama knows well: Attacks on the candidate are simply projections of the (racist) mentality of his accusers. As they erase the weirder and more specific points of his sensibility in a blizzard of superlatives, whites create an image of a black superman as a kind of photo-negative image of liberal guilt. …

In a scene (in Dreams of My Father) that owes an obvious debt to Ellison’s famous Battle Royal, in which two black boys are made to fight each other in a boxing ring, the narrator is taken out into the backyard of his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro’s small house in Jakarta and is made to put on gloves and fight. “The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable, and often cruel,” he saw. “My grandparents knew nothing about such a world, I decided; there was no point in disturbing them.” Emboldened, Obama asks his stepfather if he ever saw anyone killed, and Lolo says yes.

“Why was the man killed? The one you saw?” the young Obama asks.

“Because he was weak,” Lolo answers, instructing his half-American, half-Kenyan stepson in the age-old logic of the world outside sunny Hawaii. Obama’s version of the scene ends with a searing recognition that the white part of his family lives in a fantasy world in which the need to learn such ugly lessons simply does not exist. While Obama’s Third World-ism carries with it a certain assumption of American historical guilt, it should not be confused with the cult of victimization that is still popular on college campuses. Obama identifies with his father, Lolo, and other post-colonial men because they are strong. Dark-skinned men can understand power in a way that white men like his grandfather can’t. If you are not strong, Lolo continues, “be clever and make peace with someone who is strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always.”

The most outstanding characteristic of the portrait that Obama draws of his white mother, who also serves as a stand-in for white liberal readers of his book, is her hatred for power–a characteristic that her son finds naive and contemptible. “Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse,” Obama wrote, of his mother’s response to the inequities of Indonesian society. “Guilt is a luxury that only foreigners can afford,” her husband Lolo responds. “Like saying whatever pops into your head.” What is notable about this and other passages in Dreams from My Father is the extent to which Obama’s identifies with the verbal slap and with its speaker, rather than with his mother, a girlish and naive white American liberal. White Americans like his mother and his grandfather are unsuitable sources for the author’s evolving subjectivity because they are blinded by the privileges of their race to the realities of power.

Obama understands the white liberal American distaste for power as a symptom of white privilege, and he is certainly right. Yet it is hard not to be haunted by the feeling that Obama’s admiration for dark-skinned strength is the mirror image of his personal feelings of weakness and inauthenticity, and that the personality that he has cobbled together out of the historical experience of other men in other time. …

Obama has impaled himself on the horns of a painful dilemma. While the identity that he constructed for himself in his autobiography has allowed him to blossom as a man and as a politician, it bears little resemblance to the conventional narratives of white men who run for president–and contains elements that are likely to frighten off large portions of the electorate, before or after November 4. The story of a man who identifies with a foreign father, and with people who are not Americans, and who does so on the basis of the color of their skin, flies in the face of the simplistic racial pieties that white Americans have embraced since the end of Jim Crow. The identity that Obama so painstakingly created for himself is not one that he can share with the electorate, and so the price of his political success is that he is forced to sublimate the material he had so painfully excavated and again become invisible. His image-makers create new stories about the candidate, which ring false and drain his marvelous abilities as a writer, a speaker, and a leader.

Read the whole thing.

New McCain ad discussing Obama’s ties to domestic terrorist William Ayers.

1:40 video

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Ha tip to Captain Ed.

The Howard Stern Show tests the role of the issues in the decisions of some Harlem voters.

2:48 audio

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Hat tip to Scott Drum.

Jack Cashill thinks he recognizes similarities of style in the memoirs of both men.

A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama’s election as Harvard’s first black (law review) president caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama’s proposed memoir.

With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where he dithered. At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.

According to a surprisingly harsh 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, which detailed the “ruthlessness” of Obama’s literary ascent, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.

Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled amateur, with no paper trail beyond an unremarkable legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes, into a literary superstar. …

I bought Bill Ayers’ 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for reasons unrelated to this project. As I discovered, he writes surprisingly well and very much like “Obama.” In fact, my first thought was that the two may have shared the same ghostwriter. Unlike Dreams, however, where the high style is intermittent, Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. What is more, when Ayers speaks, even off the cuff, he uses a cadence and vocabulary consistent with his memoir. One does not hear any of Dreams in Obama’s casual speech.

Obama’s memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama’s path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.

In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama’s career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama’s belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.

Unprovable, but intriguing.