Monday, July 31, 2006

my president would get his ass kicked by your president.



the real tragedy?

The injury means he might not be able to take part in a match next Sunday between government representatives and special guests invited to the inauguration of the Constituent Assembly, who are expected to include Brazilian President Lula and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Monday, July 17, 2006

Stealing content is wrong

But hey... it makes for fascinating reading. From Stratfor:
From an international standpoint, the Israelis expect to be condemned. These international condemnations, however, are now having the opposite effect of what is intended. The Israeli view is that they will be condemned regardless of what they do. The differential between the condemnation of reprisal attacks and condemnation of a full invasion is not enough to deter more extreme action. If Israel is going to be attacked anyway, it might as well achieve its goals.

Moreover, an invasion of Hezbollah-held territory aligns Israel with the United States. U.S. intelligence has been extremely concerned about the growing activity of Hezbollah, and U.S. relations with Iran are not good. Lebanon is the center of gravity of Hezbollah, and the destruction of Hezbollah capabilities in Lebanon, particularly the command structure, would cripple Hezbollah operations globally in the near future. The United States would very much like to see that happen, but cannot do it itself. Moreover, an Israeli action would enrage the Islamic world, but it would also drive home the limits of Iranian power. Once again, Iran would have dropped Lebanon in the grease, and not been hurt itself. The lesson of Hezbollah would not be lost on the Iraqi Shia -- or so the Bush administration would hope.

Therefore, this is one Israeli action that benefits the United States, and thus helps the immediate situation as well as long-term geopolitical alignments. It realigns the United States and Israel. This also argues that any invasion must be devastating to Hezbollah. It must go deep. It must occupy temporarily. It must shatter Hezbollah.
The whole thing can be read here -- scroll down.

Speaking of stealing, you've probably seen this already:
"What the irony is, they need to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it's over."

Thursday, July 13, 2006



Monday, July 10, 2006

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Remember when the media was considered dangerous?


Consider it the 90's answer to F911. I had heard about this movie a long time ago, but I never saw it -- now the whole shebang is online. It's really fascinating.

Friday, June 30, 2006

This one's for you, Zargon

[Researchers] studied 40 volunteers who used a driving simulator four times--while undistracted, using a handheld cell phone, using a hands-free cell phone and while intoxicated to a 0.08 percent blood-alcohol level--the average legal level of impairment in the United States--after drinking vodka and orange juice.

Three study participants rear-ended the simulated car in front of them. All were talking on cell phones and none was drunk, the researchers said.

Motorists who talked on either handheld or hands-free cell phones drove slightly more slowly, were 9 percent slower to hit the brakes, and varied their speed more than undistracted drivers.
Discussion question: who drinks screwdrivers anymore?

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Friday, June 23, 2006

Breath As Fresh as a Spring Ham


Futurama Returns. For real this time. With actual confirmation from actual people in the position to confirm. Seriously.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Subtle Dig, Slowly Cracking

Clearly, the liberal media is straining under the pressure of trying to appear anything but for the last six years.

From CNN's website in a story about the overwhelming scientific consensus on Global Warming. Note the phraseology in the link to the associated video clip:

"The Bush administration has maintained that the threat is not severe enough to warrant new pollution controls that the White House says would have cost 5 million Americans their jobs. (Watch as lawmakers argue saving the planet could ruin our economy-- 2:24)"

I don't know about you, but I hear sarcasm and spite splatter on the floor as they drip and ooze off that turn of phrase.

As one jerk to another

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s decision on whether to veto the General Assembly's BGE rate-deferral plan isn't due until midnight tonight, but he has given strong signals that he will reject the legislation and attempt to push a bill of his own.

The Democrats who run the legislature tried during last week's special session to bring an end to the issue that has dominated Maryland's political scene for months. But the governor indicated yesterday that he would like to keep the debate alive, and he said consumers are on his side.

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

It's like that one X-Files episode only real

WN: What sort of evidence?

McKinnon: A NASA photographic expert said that there was a Building 8 at Johnson Space Center where they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging. I logged on to NASA and was able to access this department. They had huge, high-resolution images stored in their picture files. They had filtered and unfiltered, or processed and unprocessed, files.

My dialup 56K connection was very slow trying to download one of these picture files. As this was happening, I had remote control of their desktop, and by adjusting it to 4-bit color and low screen resolution, I was able to briefly see one of these pictures. It was a silvery, cigar-shaped object with geodesic spheres on either side. There were no visible seams or riveting. There was no reference to the size of the object and the picture was taken presumably by a satellite looking down on it. The object didn't look manmade or anything like what we have created. Because I was using a Java application, I could only get a screenshot of the picture -- it did not go into my temporary internet files. At my crowning moment, someone at NASA discovered what I was doing and I was disconnected.

I also got access to Excel spreadsheets. One was titled "Non-Terrestrial Officers." It contained names and ranks of U.S. Air Force personnel who are not registered anywhere else. It also contained information about ship-to-ship transfers, but I've never seen the names of these ships noted anywhere else.

... well, the guy's actually up for extradition, anyway.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Al-Qaeda terrorists came within 45 days of attacking the New York subway system with a lethal gas similar to that used in Nazi death camps. They were stopped not by any intelligence breakthrough, but by an order from Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Zawahiri.
If we know why, we aren't telling.

Friday, June 16, 2006

Arrrrre you rrrrrready to rrrrrrrumble?

Are you an in-shape male weighing between 64 and 86 kilograms and hate the films of controversial German director Uwe Boll? If so, he wants to fight you in Vancouver as part of one of his films...

"On the message boards, you have, like, tons of people, they want to punish me kill me, grill me, shoot me, everything. The Internet threats are so full of hate in a lot of times that I think it goes way over the top of normal reviews and normal talk about a director."

The top five critics who sign up to fight him will be flown to Vancouver and will be extras in Postal... Five, 10-round fights will be staged over the last two days of filming and scenes from the matches will become part of the film, Boll said... To be eligible, critics must have written at least two negative articles about Boll in 2005.

Saturday, June 10, 2006

I really thought we were the only ones who did this.

From an article on the D+D website about dice habits:

'The most extreme dice superstition I’ve seen was something called "prepping the dice". This ritual was preformed before making an important d20 roll, like against a save-or-die spell. It involved the individual taking as many d20 as they owned, 8 to 12 dice, and rolling them over and over, eliminating all the high rolling dice. The theory being that if you had a die that had just consistently rolled low, it was now due to roll high and could be used for the official roll. '

I'm honestly surprised that other people in the world are as nuts about this shit as we are. And by 'nuts' I mean 'fucking crazy'.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Optical illusions for morons

This takes so little effort to work and is endlessly amusing.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006



Now that apparently all of us have fallen under the sway of the dread Apple Computer, Inc., I thought I'd share some Nice Things:
  • Uno. Holy cow, all of a sudden there's a consistent, non-garish interface!
  • TextWrangler. Free and way more text editor than you dabblers will ever need.
  • Like your junior prom date, Seashore's not great but it's good enough for basic fooling around. Also... free.
  • HexPicker for color-pickin' on that there interweb.
  • Camino. Unless you need a Firefox extension to make your life complete, it's better.
  • Adium. Equip with pretty icons and emoticons.
  • VLC plays every video ever.
  • Senuti, Transmission, and Acqlite.