After whooping for joy a few minutes ago while reading this story, I decided to Google the first sentence to find a more detailed report on the incident. So I copied the first several words into my search window, and here is what came back:

Man up, Google. The guy didn’t drop the head of a wax statue of Adolph Hitler. He reached in and tore it off.

Every other year or so, VodkaPundit publishes the text or video of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In that spirit, here’s King’s original inspiration — The Declaration of Independence.

You know, just on the off chance you needed a reminder.
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How do you hide an entire aircraft plant from enemy attack?

You put “suburban camo” netting over the entire damn thing.

Those are before and after pictures of Lockheed’s Burbank plant in 1942, when in the wake of Pearl Harbor, a Japanese air raid seemed like a real possibility. I don’t know who came up with the idea of suburban camouflage, but it has a kind of simple brilliance to it.

Happy Independence Day, and thanks to all those who made it possible — even the ones who thought up, built, and rigged giant nets.

Barack Obama: Change you can believe in. Except when he doesn’t want you to believe he’s changed.

What’s the Dell Windows Vista Bonus?

XP preinstalled.

Steve loaned me his copy of Tom Kratman’s novel Caliphate a few weeks ago. It’s basically a polemic-as-potboiler about what the world might look like in a hundred years should current demographic trends result in an Islamic-ruled Europe.

I thought the premise was pretty clever. I didn’t, however, think it was likely to be proved prophetic.

Until today:

The most senior judge in England tonight gave his blessing to the use of sharia law to resolve disputes among Muslims.

Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips said that Islamic legal principles could be employed to deal with family and marital arguments and to regulate finance.

He declared: ‘It is possible in this country for those who are entering into a contractual agreement to agree that the agreement shall be governed by a law other than English law.’

In his speech in an East London mosque Lord Phillips signalled approval of sharia principles as a means of settling disputes so long as no punishments that conflict with the established law are involved, and as long as divorces are made to comply with the civil law.

With such steps does civilization teeter into darkness.

So long, Europe. We could protect you from tyranny, but we cannot stop you from willingly giving your freedom away.

The holiday tempo in our house begins today, so before things get too busy I want to wish you all a happy 4th of July, 2008. I’ll be celebrating with family, with some of my oldest friends and some of my newest. We will have a fine day tomorrow, followed by a day of tubing down the Guadalupe River.

And, see - even an automaton can enjoy the company of others! From the Offenbach opera “The Tales of Hoffman” here is (you guessed it!) Natalie Dessay, performing as a wind-up doll to some of the most hauntingly happy music to be had anywhere.

The Doll Song (Les oiseaux dans la charmille)

Thank you, France! Happy Birthday, America!

If you need to buy flash memory from industry leader Samsung, and your name isn’t Steve Jobs, then you’re in trouble. Apple must be planning on selling lots of new 3G iPhones. Like, 10 million or more just in the second half of this year.

It seems that Apple is doing (or trying to do) to the smartphone market what Microsoft did to the PC market in the ’90s.

Back when Apple sucked — pretty much most of the ’90s — Microsoft exploded. It’s not that Macintosh was losing sales, it’s that while Apple was stuck with their existing customers, Microsoft was creating entire new markets of PC buyers.

Similarly, Apple isn’t trying to steal customers away from RIM’s Blackberry. Those people want their email every four seconds, and RIM delivers. Say what you like about Blackberries, but the do that one thing better than anybody. Instead, it seems that Apple is creating entirely new markets of smartphone buyers. People like me who don’t need a dedicated email phone like RIM makes, but something a little more all-purpose.

In other words, iPhone sales won’t grow by stealing customers away from RIM. Apple is making all-new customers RIM never dreamed of pursuing.

I’m not in the market for a 3G iPhone — my current model works just fine, thanks. But when it finally breaks, you can bet I’ll pop right on up to the Apple Store to buy the latest and greatest 4G (or whatever) model. And Crackberry addicts will most likely stick by RIM. But people who never dreamed of owning a smartphone before will prove much more likely to buy an iPhone than a Blackberry. Just like Microsoft once made PCs ubiquitous, Apple is poised to do the same for smartphones.

So my bride’s laptop computer is dying. It was a cheapo Dell, so no big loss — but you still don’t expect the screen of a $1,300 machine to die after barely 30 months.

Melissa likes my Macs (and loves her iPod), and thanks to Parallels, she can still use Office for Windows and Lockheed-Martin’s super-top-secret VPN software. So I told her what to look for in a MacBook, and that even their bottom-of-the-line model had enough muscle to edit high-definition baby videos from her new camcorder.

She told me, “We’d better wait to buy it. $2,300 is a little much for our budget right now.”

“How the hell did you price a MacBook up that high? It starts at eleven hundred and that’s for the newest version of the two-year-old one I have — and mine is plenty fast.”

“Oh, I was pricing a MacBook Air.” The Air is the pretty, shiny, skinny, expensive one. And she priced it with damn near all the options.

I’m telling you, when it comes to Apple, my wife’s a natural.

No, of course not. He’s just the political and philosophical enabler of slum lords.

The man would never get his hands dirty himself.

(Hat tip, Insty and Kaus.)

One hundred and fifty years ago today, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace put science in the driver’s seat of the story of the origin of species.

1858: The Linnaean Society of London listens to the reading of a composite paper on how natural selection accounts for the evolution and variety of species. The authors are Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Modern biology is born.

Alas, one hundred and fifty years later, superstition is still hanging around yelling “shotgun! shotgun!” like the annoying little brother you hope your friends don’t see you with.

So, you pat him on the head to humor him, hoping he’ll go away or at least keep to himself, but he just keeps yelling and yelling and yelling and finally he brings Ben Stein in to make a really lame, almost universally-panned, documentary about how you’re nothing but a Nazi.

But that’s ok, because you’re still the smart one and you get all the girls (mostly the ones with glasses, but there’s a naughty minx hiding in each one).

That out of the way…

Hi, you probably don’t know me, but I used to run a lil’ blog called The World Wide Rant, until I decided not to run it anymore.

In general, I would sum myself up as a “small-L” libertarian, although I’m a little more to the left than Steve these days (the doc says it could be because I sleep on my belly with the left knee raised). I’m also an atheist, which means - statistically - chances are you and I are going to disagree on at least one topic. It’s a real tragedy that you’re so mistaken about it too. But, hey, variety is the spice of life, and if everyone agreed with me, who would I poke fun at?

So, anyway, just thought I’d say hello and how do you do. As the mood strikes, I might drop a post here and there, generally ones that I anticipate will cause discord, strife, and human suffering, because that’s what we atheists do, you know, given our lack of morals.

Have a fabulous day!

Hitchens gets waterboarded. Some would probably applaud that.

The rumors were dead-on right this time: Nikon announced the D700 body today.

What is it?

It’s a prosumer D300 (which I usually shoot) with the full-35mm size digital sensor from the professional D3 shoved up inside it.

What’s it cost?

$3,000.

What’s it do?

It’s shoots a lot slower than the D3, which is built for speed. It even shoots slightly slower than the D300, unless you add on the battery grip; then they’re tied.

What’s it good for?

If you need to shoot really wide angles, or in really low light. Otherwise, save yourself $1,300 and buy a D300. The D3 and D300 are virtually identical on sharpness and color rendition, and I suspect the D700 is no different. Literally, no different. It has the sensor of the D3 and the electronic guts of the D300. All three cameras are 12 megapixels.

The verdict?

Honestly? The D700 slips into the very tiny crack between the D3 and the D300. I can see why Nikon felt they ought to build it, but I can’t see much reason to buy it. Also, with the DX-size sensor on the D300, my 70-200mm zoom effectively reaches out like a 300mm lens. Put it on a D700, and you’re back down to 200. To get the same reach (with the same fast f/2.8 aperture and vibration reduction) on the D700, I’d have to pony up an extra $4,500 for this baby.

I’ll keep saving my money for the 24 megapixel D3X next year.

UPDATE: Longer review from Ken Rockwell.

“I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French one behind me.”
—General George S. Patton

PARIS — A military shooting demonstration in southeast France on Sunday left 16 people wounded, including children, when real bullets were used instead of blank ones, officials said.

Four of the wounded were in serious condition, including a 3-year-old child, Bernard Lemaire, chief of the regional administration in Aude, said on France-3 television. Fifteen of the injured were civilians.

A Defence Ministry official said the incident occurred during a demonstration of hostage-freeing techniques at the Laperrine military barracks. The official said investigators will look into why real bullets were used.

China’s top leaders said they were thankful for U.S. help after Sichuan’s devastating earthquake, with Premier Wen Jiabao saying Monday he was impressed that the first foreigners he saw providing help when he toured the province were Americans.

Almost 70,000 people died in the May 12 quake that devastated a wide swathe of Sichuan. The dead included thousands of schoolchildren who died when their classrooms crumbled.

“I would like to express our thanks to madam secretary and through you to the American people,” Wen told visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Wen said he was being driven to Beichuan in northern Sichuan, where at least 16,000 people died, when he saw three young people with backpacks.

He asked his driver to stop, got out of the car and learned the three were Americans.

“I was touched by their enthusiasm to help and I thanked them,” he said.

Early this month, I gave Martini Boy a fifth of my then-favorite clear grain spirit, the outstanding Square One, which is an “organic” rye vodka made in Idaho. Right up until this weekend, I was convinced (and I think Steve agreed) that it’s one of the smoothest, if not the smoothest vodka I’ve ever tried. It’s also one of the pricier brands (short of the really esoteric stuff), weighing in at around $40 a fifth in your average package store.

That was then. This is now.

Tito’s Handmade is distilled from corn, and produced in a little shack outside of Austin by a guy whose real name is Tito Beverage–all of which led me to believe that it would resemble lighter fluid more than a top-shelf brand. The only reason I picked it up on Friday is, I used to live in Austin and got a kick out of the idea of having a bottle of vodka made there.

How wrong I was.

Not only can it go toe-to-toe with Square One in flavor and smoothness, Tito’s gets a big tough-economy thumbs-up for costing less than half as much. Check it out, and if you’re in a state with no sales on Sundays and can’t get to the store today, click here in the meantime for a really great article about the origins of Tito’s from a few years back in the Austin Chronicle.

Reporting from Laviano, Italy, Russell Shorto writes:

When Falivena took office in 2002 for his second stint as mayor, two numbers caught his attention. Four: that was how many babies were born in the town the year before. And five: the number of children enrolled in first grade at the school, never mind that the school served two additional communities as well. “I knew what was my first job, to try to save the school,” Falivena told me. “Because a village that does not have a school is a dead village.”

Laviano now pays women 10,000 euros to have babies and live in the town. Although school enrollment is up, the city is still losing population.

It’s a long article, but well worth your time to read the whole thing.

It’s imperative that you crank the volume on this one.

Why I am so pissed off at Bobby Jindal? I’ll tell you.

When you fail to teach children how to think critically… wait, scratch that. When you teach children that critical thinking doesn’t work, doesn’t apply, doesn’t mean anything… then you’ve opened the door for every and any charlatan and faker who comes a’ knocking.

And I’d rather have a bald-faced charlatan — like Barack Obama — than one like Jindal, any day of the week. And if Jindal really believes in the law he just let pass? Then that makes him the most dangerous charlatan of all: The one who really does believe his own BS.

Obama can hurt the economy and our security for four or maybe eight years. Jindal (and his ilk) can destroy generations of Americans minds.

A kid who is taught bullshit by liberal teachers in all his “soft science” classes still has a chance of saving his brain — so long as somewhere, anywhere, he learns the goddamn difficult process of critical thought. That’s what the hard science classes are good for nowadays: the last line of defense. There’s a reason almost every engineer I’ve ever known — damn near every single one — was a true-blue libertarian or conservative.

But if you poison the well, then what is that kid left with? If you mix faith and science in the same classroom, then all he’s got is some right wing god-fearing religious pablum, to go with the left wing state-worshiping pablum he gets in the rest of his classes.

Social sciences are, almost by definition, soft-skulled bullshit. So let the liberals teach it. Real science is supposed to mean something… and when it no longer does, then we’re all screwed.

So am I emotional on this issue? You bet your ass I am. And I’ll get emotional whether it’s a Kansas school board, or the legislature and governor of a state I’ve barely even visited.

In the churches, faith can and does sustain good people of every stripe — and in ways biology, physics, and math never could. But forcing our preachers to teach in the scientific method would ruin the religious experience. Just as surely, mixing faith and science would destroy those things science offers us.

And with that, I’ll step away from the pulpit for a while. I’d like to think that Governor Jindal would do likewise and get the hell out of our classrooms.

We’ll start with: “Bitter Bill Face.”