The world is far stranger than one can imagine

Hannidate - the dating service for fans of Sean Hannity. I think a rain of frogs is next.

This is scary

And will be making the rounds on the internet soon I would imagine.

HT: Marginal Revolution

Of minor interest

I'm in danger of receiving my first payment check from Google Adsense for the ads on Jargon Database. I've almost cracked the 110,000 page view barrier as well.

The new venture reaches beta

The Blog Squad. Thoughts anyone?

Rage

Take
1 stressful week
Add
5 ongoing projects
Mix in
3 last minute projects
Pour Over
2 deadlines
Blend in
1 newly configured (by someone else) server
Sprinkle in
2 foreseeable changes
Garnish with
1 instance of Microsoft Content Mangement Server

And you get a newly reached level of anger and frustration. About two hours ago I heard a strange noise and realized that it was me. Growling.

I turned into the Incredible Hulk for about 10 minutes, I really did.

I'm better now.

Quick round up

• Blogs to Riches - a good article on the major blog players. I'm not mentioned for some reason.
• Signs That the United States is About to Bomb Iran - it's more of what the signs would be more than an indicator of occurrence.
• Bikers roll to military funerals to oppose anti-gay protests
  

  They call themselves the Patriot Guard Riders, and they are more than 5,000 strong, forming to counter anti-gay protests held by the Rev. Fred Phelps at military funerals.

  Phelps believes American deaths in Iraq are divine punishment for a country that he says harbors homosexuals. His protesters carry signs thanking God for so-called IEDs -- explosives that are a major killer of soldiers in Iraq.

  A good article on some fairly spontaneous action against Phelps and his loathsome cadre. Supposedly their intention is to provoke either the police or the military into assault to they can sue.
• In the footnotes of this post, Jane Galt puts it very well with

  My favorite moment in the debates came at the "town hall" style one, where Kerry told a pro-life questioner that while he personally agreed with her that abortion was murder, he couldn't legislate his morality. Pro-choice readers should substitute the words "lynching" for "abortion" and see if this position would overcome their reluctance to vote for a Dixiecrat

  That was what turned me off of Kerry too. At that time I was somewhat open to voting for him. Since the course in Iraq is set, I think the president and congress fighting all the time and getting nothing done would be a wonderful thing. Then he said that.
  
  I would imagine his actual position on abortion is more in the middle, most likely mirroring my own strong disapproval, but that statement lost me forever. My original thought on that debate was a bit different. He prefaced that comment with a statement of his Catholicism. My thought was "that's like saying you're a vegetarian that eats veal". But Jane's remark was much better.
  

Interesting

One way to separate the tech savvy from the non tech savvy I suppose.

Thought and line of the moment

An interesting thought from Jesse Walker at Reason's Hit and Run

But is there anyone in the country who wouldn't be delighted to learn that the forces behind 9/11 are based in Washington, D.C.? That the enemy is not some exotic conspiracy of mysteriously motivated foreigners who speak impenetrable languages and fade easily into an alien landscape, but a familiar group of Republicans with Middle American accents who would be ousted the moment their cabal came to light? The Bush-did-it theory lends itself to a tidy movie ending, a conclusion far preferable to the endless bloody soap opera we've landed in instead.

There are many reasons I don't believe the president plotted 9/11. The biggest is that I'm just not optimistic enough to think the problem could be eliminated that easily.

But the real winner is in the comments (they're quite snarky over there these days) with

... and I think we've 'turned the corner' again, too. Considering how many times we've turned the corner in Iraq, I suspect that the country is shaped like a gigantic four-dimensional dodecahedron.

I think 50 years from now all of this will be seen as a negative function of technology and communications more than anything else.

It's that special day again

It's Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day.

As I'm sure you can imagine from the low blog volume, I've been quite busy lately.

Nifty Firefox fix

The "Unresponsive Script Fix". Quite handy.

If at first you don't succeed, you're not Chuck Norris.

Via Mark, this would seem to be the definitive list of Norrisisms....

A new blog in our midst

My favorite CD store, Decatur CD has joined the blogosphere. They've always had the best email newsletter of any I've signed up for and now they reveal that they have the new Neko Case album in, though not for sale. It comes out March 7th evidently. Oh well.

Now this is interesting

Apple adopting Windows?

I will laugh and laugh and laugh if true.

Referrals

Oddly enough, this InstaChuckNorris from Parrotline is the largest referrer to Jargondatabase.com this month but a wide margin.

Thursday rapid fire

• Telegraph fun
• Bluegrass everywhere but here
• It washes, dries and irons! All in one device.
• The Yahoo Ajax blog.
• More Ajax I need to get around to understanding.
• An interesting article about Saddam and WMD. It's odd how no one seems to be interested in what happened to the WMD. While it's been proven they're not there, the details of the removal are absent.
  

Conspiracy thoughts

If I were partial to the intentional fallacy, I would think this:

1. Dick Cheney does his interview with the MSM/Fox the same day that more Abu Ghraib photos come out. The photos don't actually add anything to the case mind you, but they are more fuel on the fire. The Cheney story seems to have trumped the photo story.
2. The whole cartoon controversy is ginned up by the establishment regimes in the middle east as a way to shut out Western influence. By making a mountain out of a molehill via artful use of rent-a-mobs they can freak out the West by seeming totally crazy by Western standards and only a little crazy by Middle Eastern standards. This puts pressure on economic and cultural ties between the two regions, and will do a lot to pressure European governments to limit immigration from the Muslim countries. This keeps Western thought out and lets the weird combination of monarchies and theocracies in power.
   

Not in the Valentines spirit

Dukhtaran-e-Millat activists burn Valentine's Day cards in Kashmir
Nearly two dozen black-veiled Muslim women stormed gift and stationery shops Friday in Kashmir, burning Valentine's Day cards and posters to protest a holiday they say imposes Western values on Muslim youth.

Nomenclature

Over the past week the term "Prophet Mohammed" has come into existence. Weird. It used to just be Mohammed, with no title.

In related news, here is a fine editorial by Andrew Sullivan on the topic, and here is a post about the media as "a proper Victorian gentleman" which is well worth reading Also marginally related, Fareed Zakaria on the decline of Europe.

I've been meaning to write about this for a while

But I haven't had the time. Here is a very good article on alternative liquid fuels. Not wholly convincing, but interesting nonetheless.

Thoughts on Flickr?

Does anyone have an opinion? I'm running a bit low on space here on moodyloner.net, and I'd like to outsource the photo hosting. Has anyone had any experience with them?

Quick round up

• An excellent article on Muslim immigrants in Sweden. Maybe we didn't win the cold war. Combine cultural separation with the welfare state and you get some ghastly results. It would be interesting for someone to do an article comparing American Muslims with Europe's. Everything I've seen states rather convincingly that American Muslims are slightly better on all of the social metrics (income, higher education, etc) than native born Americans, whereas Europe's trend very poorly.
• Senator Reid (D-Nevada) linked to Abramoff. We all knew that was coming I suppose. What is it going to take for term limits to make their come back? Maybe after more gains by the Republicans in November (my current prediction). If not, nothing will.
• I am reflexively against anyone who declares that politician x is "playing the ----- card".
• Quote of the moment - Mickey Kaus with "McCain is to pundit shows what lesbians are to Howard Stern."

I forgot about that one

Andrew Sullivan remembers that South Park portrayed Mohammed in an episode a few years ago. And no on cared. What a scam this all is.

And Kudos to the Weekly Standard for publishing the photos. The gutlessness of the American press on this one has been quite sad. The article is well worth reading as well. Quick quote:

None of these anguished reactions actually occurred, of course--no pogroms, no renunciation of U.S. and E.U. aid, no hiccup in the Iranian nuclear program. Because there was no real "anguish." In truth, by December nothing much had happened because of the cartoons.

So a group of Danish imams took off for the Middle East to try to cause trouble. To do this, they added three cartoons to their roadshow that they seem to have ginned up--crude propaganda pieces that would be guaranteed to stir a mob, just in case the original illustrations didn't produce the effect they were after.

The militants' trip was a success. Various extremist groups and terror-connected Islamists decided to use the cartoons as yet another weapon in the radical Islamist attempt to intimidate the West, and various Arab dictatorships saw a political opportunity in starting some anti-European riots.

And you can understand their calculation. Since 9/11, the West has gone on offense against radical Islamists and Middle Eastern dictatorships. That assault has apparently been more threatening to them than many of us realized. From Iraq to Palestine to Iran, from Islamist enemies of liberty to dictatorial opponents of democracy, those who are threatened by our effort to help liberalize and civilize the Middle East are fighting back with whatever weapons are at hand, and with whatever invented excuses and propaganda ploys they can discover.

I continue my way through the classics

And I must highly reccomend Paul Muni in "I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" (1932). A somehwat true story evidently. More info here.

I return from my work-related hiatus

• Gaza shopkeeper stocks up on Danish flags to burn
  
• Your tax dollars at work
  
• Some courage in the media
• What is the deal Iranians and the Holocoast? Are they positioning themselves to take over bin Laden's place as anti-west figurehead in spite of whole Shiite thing?
  

There's not much more to say.....

Everything that needs to written about the current green line conflict (to use hip internationalist jargon) in Denmark has been written. I suppose the underlying theme is the need for people to participate in a society to a strong degree.

It is a good display of spine by the Danes; I imagine we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future as multiculturalism wears thin for the Europeans, and diminishing marginal returns (as it becomes easier to move about that part of the world) on immigration.

May a thousand property values bloom

Atlanta 'McMansion' ban fails committee vote

A proposed 120-day ban on building permits for big houses in four Atlanta neighborhoods was rejected Wednesday afternoon by a committee of the Atlanta City Council, but it remains on track for consideration Feb. 6 by all members of the council.

At least the neighborhoods can change organically.

Tuesday rapid fire

• The story and original lyrics to Bonaparte's Retreat.
• A very good bio-article on Micky Spillaine.
• A new conspiracy site!
• You've got your pain ray in my sonic blaster!