As we know, Fidel Castro has hung up his black hood and retired, we are given to believe, from the day-to-day oppression of an entire nation. A man who was supported by the Russians until they could no longer afford him, or much of anything else; who invited the Russians to put in nuclear missiles 90 miles from America; whose regime is so vile that people flee over rough waters in water vessels that a rubber duck would laugh at; and a man who outsmarted Jimmy Carter, who took the criminals and psychopaths that Castro had in his jails that he was tired of feeding but couldn't quite face the bad press of putting down. Well, fooling Jimmy Carter isn't hard or noble. In fact there was hope that after winning his first Nobel James Earl Carter could be taught to operate an ATM but those hopes were dashed when he went chasing brigands in Africa. And believed what they said.

Ever mindful of their duty to inform us of their lucubration, both mental and moral, let's not forget that last bit, the luminaries of Tinsel Town have lined up to show their regard for this paragon of the People's Revolution, Fidelito, as Sally Quinn, another useful idiot, called him. Behold a peerless sample of moral depravity and foolishness:

"Very selfless and moral. One of the world's wisest men." -Oliver Stone.

"Cuba's Elvis." -Dan Rather.

"Castro is at the same time the island, the men, the cattle, and the earth. He is the whole island." -Jean Paul-Sartre.

"A dream come true!" -Naomi Campbell.

"If you believe in freedom, if you believe in justice, if you believe in democracy, you have no choice but to support Fidel Castro!"-Harry Belafonte.

"A genius." -Jack Nicholson.

"Fidel, I love you. We both have beards. We both have power and want to use it for good purposes." -Francis Ford Coppola.

"The first and greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second World War." -Norman Mailer.

"Socialism works. I think Cuba might prove that." -Chevy Chase.

"Castro is an extraordinary man. He is warm and understanding and seems extremely humane." -Gina Lollobrigida.

Not much to add to that, is there? Beyond satire or parody. Who needs screenwriters when you have that? L. Ron Hubbard seems sane now. And you wonder why there is so much shit out of Hollywood? And that is, by the way, the mot juste.

To avoid the expense of proving that a murder on my mind was justifiable, I spent the weekend in El Paso. On the 42" HD television in the cave-like room of the Hyatt Place there appeared Hildog and Barack Hussein Obama in a debate and our Empress was intoning her deeply felt beliefs and thoughts and wishes for the world, gifts that she wanted, in her beneficence, to bequeath on others who had not been as fortunate as she was. Yada yada yada, she cares, she cares, she cares, blah blah blah. Stick 'em up. I made up that last sentence.

Her tone was patronizing, stagey, stilted and so obviously fake that I thought that it was a gotcha moment, or perhaps the Obama campaign had gone grossly negative: "See what she's like. Do you want to listen to that for eight years?"

No. It was her commercial, one that she paid for, one that she authorized.

My heart sank. I have loathed this woman from the first moment I clapped eyes--dread thought--on her, shivering with a frisson of disgust from the first time she was vomited on the public stage, jammed my fingers reaching for the remote button to avoid her caw, and to think that now I want her to be pleasing, emollient, and fetching, anything to get her to win the Democratic nomination, and she's not helping. She's tone deaf, in addition to being a mean, arrogant, grasping collectivist.

But there is valid reason to vote for her, to bear the pain, and I know it will be intense, but you only have to do it just once. Like telling the surgeon, "Go ahead. Amputate."

Again, please cross the aisle and vote for Atilla the Hilla. Take Dramamine or Scotch--your pick, mix or match, I'll buy--but vote for her. So we can beat her like a drum in November.

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on. No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down. [ Emphasis mine]

And they say that films don't have any influence anymore.

(Article here).

As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Oh, my. This is serious. And not because this prediction came from a secret Pentagon report that Chimpy McHitlerburton obviously tried to quash in order to protect his buddies in the oil industry...because let's face it...everyone knows that.

And not even because this so-called secret report was written in *cough* 2004.

No, my friends, it is much worse than that.

If trying to suppress the Pentagon report that was trying to save us all wasn't bad enough, the neo-con, fascist, empirical evidence worshipping death dealers in the White House are now obviously keeping secret the actual wide-spread coastal flooding and the deaths of untold millions that it has caused.

Now, that is how you run a conspiracy, boys.

Hat Tip: Tim Blair

I appreciate the efforts of our noble Site Admin.....mainly because I like the author interface for MT4. I'd post something significantly political, but unlike some soreheads, I have a paying job and we are short staffed.

I upgraded the site to MovableType 4 a while back to help combat the comment spam that we were receiving on a constant basis and while all of the scripts were updated I did not learn enough about how I really should have upgraded and re-coded all of the various templates that displays these august pages. What this means is that even though I was running the new MT4 the site was still susceptible to the spammers because I did not upgrade all of the templates that I built that, while they still worked, also still made the site spam-bait.

For the uninitiated, "comment spam" is created by (probably) those same low-lifes that produce e-mail spam. The difference being that these people have written programs that crawl the internet looking for blogs and when they find them and also discover that they allow unregistered commenters to post it then begins posting commenets that conatin links to the same stuff that you see in your e-mail like "cheap v1agra", "no interest loans", "Vote for Ron Paul", and "South American Teenage Llama Porn."

Okay, I made up that last one.

Comment spam is an irritation to me because it loads up the site with a bunch of random comments from strangers full of sound and fury, signifying nothing...and quite frankly that is better left to us regular contributors here at the Well.

The really bad news is that while studying up on the new capabilities of MT4 I got a bunch of really cool ideas on how I should redesign the site. Which of course means that I will purposely blow all of this stuff up again trying to be clever and spend a week getting it all back together.

But for now we are back and the comments are online again....just in time for Walsingham to retire, apparently.

Further crushing of dissent through incompetence.

I have become unpopular with my ISP because all of my Movable Type templates date back to much older versions and still contain code that makes them very susceptible to comment spammers who then use these susceptibilities to bang on the server's various cgi scripts so that not only do I spend a lot of of time deleting spam comments I have become a bad neighbor on the shared server.

So I am going to start from scratch and install nothing but default templates and work my way back from there so you can see my progress (or lack thereof) in real time.

I know that this is not the way the pros do it.....so what's your point?

This way I can learn a lot more about the new templating and module features in Movable Type 4.1 at your expense.

Which makes this a win-win situation for me.

The time has come," Theocritus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of votes--and polls--and delegates--
Of a bitch would be queen."

And I hope she gets everything, except the brass ring.

In the primary I shall vote for Hildog.

Imagine the world if the Holy Gore had been elected in 2000. He is a man with the world's biggest brass balls but none of the useful sort. Instead of taking action, as George W. Bush did, he would no doubt have engaged in a dialog and spent time wanting to make sure that they understood us and that we meant them no harm, thinking, in his foolish, self-absorbed way, that our good intentions would result in theirs. This presidential election will be as important in its own way as the one in 2000, but this time we know it will be.

9/11 was not the day the world changed; rather it was the day that we knew that it had changed, and it ought to be apparent to the meanest intelligence, that the West is engaged in a fight for its own survival. Washington took a holiday from history during the 90s, thinking that after the fall of the Berlin wall that we had won, that Western, and in particular, American values, had triumphed. 9/11 proved that to be a fool's paradise.

The most important thing facing America today is acknowledging that and the acknowledgement of that will be not electing Barack Hussein Obama. Socialized medicine, health care, immigration, lesser issues like intellectual property, and even the most current rehab of Britney Spears are secondary issues in comparison with the war of cultures that we are facing now, and it is a war to the death which Europe does not have the will to fight and we may not either.

Barack Hussein Obama is an attractive candidate and individual, free from rancor and he would make the first post-racist president, which is no bad thing. Although he does support the usual Balkanization of America along victim groups; still this does not set him apart from Hildog.

Hillary Clinton is the queen of busy-body hell, a committed collectivist and a control freak. She's as mean as a stepped-on rattle-snake, which is no bad thing when you're dealing with other heads of state. Bear in mind that a lot of them got to be the head of their state by literally eating the opposition. When dealing with people like that, you don't want to appeal to their better feelings, show that you care and expect them to, when they've just seen off their competition in a stew-pot. Follow the politics in Sierra Leone and Liberia. And they're small potatoes compared to dealing with the ChiComs or that nutjob Dear Leader in North Korea.

Obama would transfer American power to unelected and unaccountable, and therefore unremovable, people in nasty places like Brussels, Davos and the UN--people who think themselves evolved above mere patriotism--so last-year, dear--and I don't like that one little bit.

Obama's record as a community organizer, university lecturer and civil-rights lawyer does not inspire me with the idea that he is in touch with the world at large. When's the last time that you placed any faith in the street sense of a college professor?

Our Empress is, I think, more serious about international affairs than Obama; I do not think that she would be as willing to cut and run in Iraq as would Obama. If we leave before the surge succeeds, which it shows signs of doing, Iraq will turn into a training ground for terrorists and the world would have a laugh at the cowardly giant. Do you want France to laugh at us and have a right to? Me either.

Were we to have a Democrat as president, I'd prefer the Hildebeest. She's confrontational enough that the Republicans might grow some huevos and fight her. Republicans might be afraid to combat Obama for fear of charges of racism--which would be a typical leftist canard and I've learned that Republicans may be charged with many things but bravery is not one of them.

It has been mooted that one reason that people might vote for Obama is to prove to the world, and perhaps to themselves, that America is not racist. Note that Republicans who advance people like Condi Rice, Clarence Thomas et al are not absolved of charges of racism. It is completely ignored that the position of president it too important for sex, race, or sexuality to be involved. Come to think of it, the position of janitor is too.

And here is another reason to cross the aisle and vote for Atilla the Hilla. She has the highest negative ratings of any politician since the ratings were started, and has a voice like streetwalking grackle. Half of the men in America will wonder if they can stand eight years of Nurse Rached.

John McCain could beat Our Empress. Obama could beat John McCain.

Let me urge you vote for Hillary in the Democratic primary, no matter how painful. I'll vote for her. I promise; it's a necessary evil, but please do it. After all, we've all been to the emergency room, and just think how good you'll feel when you leave. The life you save may be your country's.

In order to restore the ability to comment I am resorting to more drastic measures. Resorting to drastic measures is not the same thing as increasing my level of competence so if this blog goes away for a while it is either because I am a complete boob or because the Midland Development Corporation paid us all to quit this blogging crap.

Which would be money well spent, I might add.

The question then arises: fair enough, guys, what would it take to alarm you? The other day, in a characteristically clotted speech followed by a rather more careless BBC interview, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that it was dangerous to have one law for everyone and that the introduction of sharia - Islamic law - to the United Kingdom was "inevitable." No alarm bells going off yet? Can't say I blame you. After all, de facto creeping sharia is well established in the Western world. Last week, the British and Ontario governments confirmed within days of each other that thousands of polygamous men in their jurisdictions receive welfare payments for each of their wives. Still no alarm bells? I see female Muslim medical students in British hospitals are refusing to comply with hygiene procedures on the grounds that scrubbing requires them to bare their arms, which is un-Islamic. Would it be alarmist to bring that up - say, the day before your operation?

Read the rest here.

Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba - namely free education and universal health care, and racial integration.

This is how CNN "maintains access" to oppressive regimes.

We have free education in this country and if Hillary or Obama have their way we will have "free" health care also which, if nothing else, will stop the influx of Canadians that are trying to escape their "free" health care at home.

I have totally broken the ability to comment by trying to rid myself of comment spammers. Why do you ask?

The good news is that the comment spammers can't make an entry either, so while your personal assent or dissent is being crushed by the hob-nailed jackboot of my incompetence my quality of life has gone up significantly. At least until I un-fix-fix it.

Since I started paying attention to politics in the 70s, it seems that there has always been a particularly loathsome senator. One whose meanness, ruthlessness, and partisanship roiled my gut. I recall my visceral loathing of Howard Metzenbaum, a liberal's liberal, and a congressional thug.

Another senatorial thug is Joe Biden, who ran for president in 1988 but was forced to resign when it was found that he was plagiarizing the speeches of Neil Kinnock who is now Lord Mayor of London, whom they call Red Ken. The Wikipedia article on Biden, by the way, is a whitewash on the man, and is obviously written by a derriere baiser, or osculopygist. I made both those up: they mean ass-kisser. Biden bowed out in 1988 out of the embarrassment of stealing someone else's words, but only when he was caught; it doesn't embarrass him at all to steal other people's worldly goods and has made a living doing so. But that shows that he's a good man. By the way, someone did some research and found that Biden's speech in which he said he would no longer seek the presidency was stolen from Tony Blair. This puts a new gloss on shameless. Biden has always opposed tort reform; that is all you need to know: he's a lackey of the personal-injury lawyers who fund the Democratic party and since that sentence, in virtually its own paragraph, but not in bold, was in his Wikipedia article, which, as I said, sounds like a press release by his office, it can only be interpreted as a wink and a flash of Senatorial cheesecake under a street corner light to the ambulance chasers who are the biggest money men of the Democratic party. "Bought and paid for but always needing new diamonds, dear--give until it hurts. Or else." I hope Biden's hair plugs pain him.

But one of the meanest, most ruthless Senate thugs is Senator Patrick Leahy. Called Leahy the Leaker, he was kept out of the intelligence loop because he blabbed what he knew trying to score personal points. Or to show that he is intelligent when he is, in fact, not. He surrounds himself, in the words of Hill staffers, with whack jobs. He was childishly taunting Vice President Cheney about Halliburton--that old leftie conspiracy wheeze--when Cheney lost it and said, "Go f*** yourself," and walked off, to the delight of staffers on both sides of the aisle.

There is more on this odious man here.

A friend sent me a picture the other day:

This is a mole rat, which lives underground. As I recall, when two male mole rats meet, they fight to the death.

One can only hope.

Mark Steyn wrote America Alone, which posits that in short order only America and possibly our Antipodean English-speaking cousins will have the fertility and cultural confidence to resist a return to the dark ages of fundamentalism, but this one an Islamic one. Steyn is a Canadian who lived in Britain for a long while and is now a resident of New Hampshire. Steyn and another Canadian, Ezra Levant, are being harassed by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, along with outlets that publish them, for the crime of "Islamophobia." Some of their writings are deemed, in Kanukistan, to be punishable if they intended to cause offense, but may not be if they were not intended to cause offense. This is of course a thought crime.

Dutch Catholics have re-branded the Lenten fast as the "Christian Ramadan," on the argument that more young Dutchmen would understand Ramadan than Lent. A retired Dutch Bishop, Martinus "Tiny" Muskens, has said that Christians should pray to Allah. Even I couldn't make that one up.

I read in The Spectator that government functionaries in Britain have banned the reading of the story "Three Little Pigs" because having to deal with pigs might cause Muslim students distress.

In London madrasahs there are competitions to find new dirty names to call Jews. Some of these schools get public money, and no one would think it politic to suggest that the madrasahs not preach hatred and murder because it might cause Christians death, much less distress.

You may remember a Star Trek episode when the crew of The Enterprise is taken hostage by machines which are infinitely logical and which have bad designs on messy, sloppy, sentimental, emotional humans, as represented by the studly Captain Kirk, a man who is to acting what Atilla the Hilla is to a mild suggestion. To confound the machine, he causes a system crash by presenting the paradox, "Everything I say is a lie." I've heard this called, in times past, Zeno's paradox, although it seems that Zeno said a great deal more than that. Yahoo answers even devotes a section to it to explain that it is indeed a lie. I'm sure it's a welcome explication. I was afraid to click on the link because it might have lots of pictures, some possibly of Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse, who just flew into my radar screen and I wish would fly out again. For some reason my current mood is such that all this seems perfectly reasonable.

Now there is a diet pill, with a fake Scandavian name adorned by umlauts and other diacritical monstrosities--is any language more linguistically teratogenic than Swedish?--being advertised on television and the first thing that they say is, "We couldn't say it on television if it wasn't true." I am not making this up.

We are told, with a straight face, that one candidate will wave her magic broom and bestow on her subjects a tax cut for middle-income Americans while she spends more money than exists in the known world.

Another's followers have taken up the mantra of, "Yes, we can." We can what? The little engine that could? Government by Sesame Street. "Today is brought to you by the letters B and S."

But we couldn't say it on television if it wasn't true.

Doesn't it seem more likely that everything they say on television is a lie? Television. The philosopher's stone of the digital age.

Is Midland experiencing a critical straw shortage? For the third time in two days, three different establishments were out of straws. I have this feeling of impending doom as the next crisis will be the lack of lids and then cups.

Thankfully, the wife bought a couple of sets of very nice washable and re-usable straws from crate and barrel a while ago, so I will not want for a straw.....as for the rest of you....

From this article in a Brit paper comes the news that fire brigade members are routinely attacked both while fighting fires and sometimes even when responding to hoax calls that are a setup for ambushes.

No mention of the demographics of the attackers are mentioned which bolsters my already strong confidence that those responsible for these attacks are likely Muslim youths. They call them disaffected youths in France where they sometimes burn three hundred cars in single evening. Anything but Muslims.

So now that you know the problem, hear now my solution.

If one can use deadly force to prevent arson why can't we use deadly force to prevent firefighting?

Assign every ladder company an SAS Sniper. When the sniper is in position the fire brigades can roll in.

Throw a brick at or try to stab a fireman doing his duty...catch a bullet in the head.

That crap will stop overnight.

As a gift, or as a goad--and I leave it to you to decide--the Site Administrator sent me this. Thank you Nat; it is the only Valentine I've had since grade school and it is a great deal more fun than the ones that I got then. What a billet doux.

This website has, divided into a few videos, a BBC Documentary called, "Lefties: A Lot of Balls." Balls, if you're not up in British slang, has our meaning but also means nonsense. That's the more common meaning from what I can tell.

In 1987 Margaret Thatcher, one of my all-time heroes, had just been reelected. The Tories were riding high; the press was right-wing (I promise you that was true. I really do. There really is such a thing, just not in America.) And the lefties were going berserk.

Alan Hayling left Cambridge with a double first and with socialist convictions, and to prove that he was one of the people, worked on the Ford assembly line. He of course took part in and led "industrial action," i.e., strikes against Ford but that was not enough. He had to lead the people, inform the people, educate the people and spread the word of socialism. He had to have a national left-wing tabloid paper, News on Sunday.

So he got some friends from the leftie group Big Flame, and they pounded the pavement and raised $13 million, and most of it from the pension funds of local governments and labor unions. Hayling and others contacted the (in)famous left-wing journalist, John Pilger, an Aussie who is so objectionable that Auberon Waugh, in disgust, coined the verb "to pilger" to describe his particular brand of sensationalism presented toward a foregone left-wing conclusion. I gather he's a skinny Michael Moore. Pilger is much admired by Harold Pinter and Noam Chomsky--that tells you all you need to know.

They had the usual mad mission statement: the right of self-determination of all people, the right to basic services, the right to a basic standard of living--all the usual collectivist clap-trap, read with great seriousness.

Wi-fi at city owned airports should be free. Further, I think that businesses that still charge for on-site wi-fi (I am talking to you, Starbucks) are making a mistake.

The Dairy Queen in Ozona had free wifi two years ago, but Fivebucks Coffee still charges?

Bad move.

"We can no longer tolerate what's going on...What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there's a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail..."

Oh yes, there's more.

But it's not just moonbats like David Suzuki who wish dissenters to be physically punished for not joining the religion. The Kyoto Protocol itself says that "every person who contravenes a regulation made under the act is guilty of an offense punishable by indictment or on summary conviction, as prescribed by the regulations, and liable to a fine or to imprisonment as prescribed by the regulations."

Can you imagine? Well, you might not have to for long, as I wouldn't dare put any of or current presidential candidates above signing on to the Kyoto Manif...er...I mean Protocol if given effective persuasion.

Yes, McCain included.

It seems the FTA's National Transit Database now has raw monthly data available. It is about time. So as a treat, lets look at EZ Rider's un-official 2007 ridership numbers. (no 2007 cost data is available, yet)

So, it seems that EZ Rider enjoyed a 11.1% increase in ridership. This translates into about $25,000 a year more in fares, which might mean the fare payers and the local tax payers are contributing about the same amount to the system. Which, combined, is still less than 30% of the full cost of operating the system on an annual basis.

Over at KMID, ABC 2, BIG 2, permianbasin360.com they got a little confused on the ridership for EZ Rider:

Good news for West Texas travelers! Community National Bank has just christened a new EZ Rider bus. The system transports more than one million people a year has registered more than one million unlinked passenger trips since it started operation in October of 2003. The new eye-catching bus will seat up to 30 people, with room for two wheel chairs. Anyone in Midland and Odessa will be able to hop on! Bill Storall, the bank’s vice president says, "We're very proud to have always been supported by the transit system that's been provided by EZ rider. It allows us to show our support and show our brand through the market." The bus is ready and rolling for service next week.

Too bad we have to wait another nine months to see how EZ Rider did in 2007.

All the support for Ron Paul nationwide, including finishing second in the Montana Caucus, has given me hope that there are still a few people in the USA who aren't afraid of liberty.

Before this election cycle, I would've said Dr. Chuck Baldwin was right. He once said that in their zeal to have government become their ultimate benefactor and sustainer, Americans have allowed it to become their taskmaster and overlord. As a result, Americans have become little more than well-fed, well-entertained slaves to the state. He punctuated his point by saying that freedom, as envisioned by our forefathers, is gone. I don't agree with Baldwin on everything, but in my opinion, I've found that observation to be largely true. Even Sallust said that few men desire liberty, most wishing only for a non-fearful master. The current incarnations of both the Democrat and Republican parties are good evidence of that.

But maybe, just maybe, all this grass-roots support for Paul is a beacon of hope for natural liberty in the US.

The fact that Paul is so quirky seems to further bolster my point. He's not a great speaker, he's a bit geeky, and he hasn't had the best PR advisement throughout his bid. Still, his supporters seem to easily see past all that distraction to the bare bones of his principles -- and have given him the money, means, and encouragement to stay in the fight long after the likes of Fred Thompson and many others called it quits.

Paul may be unelectable as president at this point in American history, but he's never voted for a tax increase, never voted for an unbalanced budget, and supports federal bills only when they fall strictly within the confines of the enumerated powers. That's something to commend the guy for, even if you don't support him for president over all.

We live amongst a majority of fear-stricken softies who look to the government for their every need and want. And so long as there's pizza at the door in 30 minutes and American Idol on the idiot box, they'll sacrifice just about any other right for those comforts. That's sad. But hopefully the lesson of Ron Paul 2008 will have been that, indeed, a few bold, brave, pioneering people in this country still 'get it', and will pass-on the seeds of knowledge and liberty to others.

That idea, friends -- be it mildly delusional or not -- makes me happy.

The iPhone OS is now a top 5 operating system!

I've nothing against football, but nothing for it. I'm utterly agnostic as I am about soap operas, chat shows, although Jerry Springer can be tremendously funny when the bouncers drag drunk, hollow-chested, battling white trash apart and the man with no legs, or hips, walks across the stage on his hands while the audience hoots like the monkey house. I'm not making this up. I'm not that imaginative. Springer was, by the way, the former Democratic mayor of Cincinnati, and that's today's Democrat bashing.

Channel surfing today I saw some of the Superbowl post-game show, and was struck by the sheer volume and garishness of it. It was no doubt made even brighter by the HD, on my newest extravagance, a huge Pioneer plasma, and made even louder by the incredibly powerful speakers and amps, which I pay for by hiring out them as arc welders at night. Or it could be my advanced age.

And it took me back. For years it seemed that the favored bump music for this most macho of sports was "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions," which were both by the rock band Queen, not the most macho of rock bands. Queen was not eponymous, at least not in the case of Brian May, but it certainly was in the case of Freddie Mercury.

While doing a little research a few interesting things presented themselves to me. First is that in 1992, after Mercury's death, Queen's popularity surged--it's that old dead star effect. (I'd call it the halo effect if I believed in an afterlife.) Right after that the remaining members of Queen formed the Mercury Phoenix Trust and organized a concert for AIDS, which was broadcast to 76 countries and had an estimated viewing audience of one billion.

As you will remember, on July 7, 2007, The Goracle had his Live Earth concert, and it was a resounding flop. It came in last in the American networks, and only in Canada and Brazil and Germany did it do fairly well. Well, I nearly fell asleep even typing Canada; I know little of Brazil, except that they must be masochists--ever hear of the Brazil wax?--and as for the Germans: have you ever seen the Eurovision Song Contest? They love that. They also love getting drunk in beer gardens and singing sentimental songs and scatological humor before a hard day at the camps, so that's a good fit then.

This is cool. The Navy has been developing a rail gun which can fire a projectile at over five thousand miles per hour and hit a five meter target at 200 miles.

The comments are interesting though. They are full of the usual, "Can't work. Won't work. Not practical. Too large" comments from dedicated lefties who would see us disarm.

But it is especially delicious to see all these comments about how we are wasting money on a big, impractical, expensive Department of Defense project.....all posted on the internet.

The reviews are better than those of that book, It Takes a Village, that Hildog did not in fact write.

But look at the alternatives. Hildog, whom Bill Safire called "a congenital liar," who stood by her man while he lied and lied, or Obama, who is not, I think, especially economical with the truth, but who is callow and jingoistic and is simply not tough enough, not tested enough, a possible result from being a member of an accredited victim class (see Clarence Thomas' autobiography), to be fit for the job of president. And the idea of electing a president on the basis that other heads of state would like him still frightens the hell out of me. Playing pat-a-cake with autocrats and bureaucrats on the make has nothing to recommend itself to me although they'd love it, sensing an advantage in the weakness of a needy American president elected by a needy people. A siren call to bullies.

If you've an interest in spelunking those events of July 18, 1969, here's a site which gives a detailed analysis of what really happened at Chappaquiddick. Well, I suppose it does; the Starr report gives a detailed account but my willingness to believe the bad on these people is such that I tend to skim to get to the saucy bits.

My bad but at least I know it.