Snow Dome!!!

Give it a shake.

Props to Joe Rhodes for the link.

4:54:00 PM     leave/read comments []

Mac Eye For The Windows Guy

FABULOUS!!!!

3:19:17 PM     leave/read comments []

Last Concorde lands at birthplace. The last Concorde ever built lands at its new home at Filton Airfield near Bristol. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]

Aw gee. I wonder if the old boy will sit around the hangar, smoking a pipe, sipping brandy and telling tales of its time in the service?

"Well it was '85. There I was, stuffed to the gills with celebrities waiting to pop over to Wembly for some sort of pop music show, when this disagreeable dwarf, all covered in sweat, comes bounding down the jetway yelling, 'I'm bloody Phil Collins!!! Hold the bloody airplane!!!' like some kind of possessed savage. Harrrruuumph!"

The Duke (of York) said it was a "truly memorable occasion", that the plane was an "icon of the 20th century" and thanked the dedication of the staff who had worked on it.

"Today is one of the saddest in aviation history but at the same time, it's a day to reflect on the glory of what the UK can achieve," he said.

At the foot of the plane's steps, senior Concorde pilot Mike Bannister said: "This fabulous aircraft will be a legend because of one thing, the people.

"The people made Concorde a legend and we will never forget it."

Concorde ended three decades of supersonic travel in October when the final commercial flights from New York landed at Heathrow.

2:00:47 PM    

Reprinted by Permission: Generating Crises and Winning Votes by Pretending to Solve Them. Originally posted to independent.org by Ivan Eland [Morons Dot Org]

Incisive, insightful and full of righteous bile. Read it all the way through.

President Bush's first political ad for the 2004 campaign indicates that he will play on post-September 11 public fear to attempt to convince voters not to change presidents in the middle of a national security "crisis." Yet such opportunism is a classic case of a politician contributing to and exacerbating a crisis and then taking advantage of it politically.

1:47:10 PM    

The rest of the article is more Wacko Jacko stuff, but my goodness, I do love the blurb above.

Wouldn't An appetite for monkeys, Ferris wheels and surgery make a great album title?

1:41:07 PM     leave/read comments []

MPAA, RIAA seek permanent antitrust exemption. Get out of jail free [The Register]

Oh my, this smells worse than the reject bucket at a sushi bar.

  Just weeks after an antitrust suit was filed against the RIAA by webcasters, the music labels' lobby group, along with Hollywood, is seeking a permanent exemption from similar litigation. The proposal seeks to extend the exemption to anything covering mechanical copyright: a sweeping extension of the copyright cartel's immunity.

It's buried away in a piece of legislation co-sponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch called the EnFORCE Act, or the Enhancing Federal Obscenity Reporting and Copyright Enforcement Act of 2003. With 12-year old girls being threatened with $150,000 fines, and the computer industry embracing social engineering technologies such as locked music, you would think the last thing that the nation's cultural heritage needs is stricter enforcement by the copyright cartel.

Even the name of the bill is extra-creepy NewSpeak. No good can come of this.

1:11:59 AM     leave/read comments []

G'night, folks.

1:06:39 AM     leave/read comments []

More on Al-Qaeda's Christian targets. Paul Marshall offers a useful summation of the evidence that Al-Qaeda targeted Christians, not Muslims, in Riyadh [~] and of the dangers of glossing over that evidence. "The media," says Marshall, "seem to equate Arab with Muslim and, along with... [Jihad Watch]

It seems that the Saudi government has played most of the world press with their spin doctoring of the Al-Qaeda attacks in Riyadh, covering up the reasons Al-Qaeda gave for the attacks and then sweeping the identity of the victims under the rug. You can't fight a war or catch criminals with bad intel and disinformation.

This exerpt is expecially interesting and is a good reminder of just who the Saudis are:

"Similarly, media coverage of the October 4 suicide attack on Maxim, a restaurant in Haifa, noted that one co-owner was Jewish, but described the other simply as 'Arab.' Commentators wondered why Palestinian terrorists were killing 'Arabs.' But the second co-owner was actually a Lebanese Catholic, as were many of those killed. The term 'Arab,' while playing into America's obsession with ethnicity, hides the religious dimension that is central to the worldview of al Qaeda, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad."

Precisely.

"However, every day in every way, al Qaeda reiterates that its target is 'infidels,' wherever they live, including Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and the vast majority of the world's Muslims, who reject the extremists' vision of a restored caliphate under a reactionary version of Islamic law." . . .

"The fact that the Saudi authorities did not reveal that this was largely a Lebanese Christian area, that they rapidly demolished the remains and stayed silent while the media misreported the identity of the victims, suggests a deliberate attempt to mask what is going on in the kingdom. (Meanwhile, a debate is taking place in the Saudi press over whether a woman named Saban Abu Lisam, who was herself injured in the blast but nevertheless drove seven other injured victims to the hospital, should be praised for her courage or punished for violating the ban on women driving.)

How much you want to bet she gets punished?

12:32:27 AM     leave/read comments []