Wednesday - November 16, 2005

Second Thoughts?

_{Corky Trinidad, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin}

Posted by The Skipper     on 11/16/2005 at 07:00 AM   
Filed Under: • Humor •  
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   Tuesday - November 15, 2005

BMEWS IN TIME MAGAZINE!?!

Blogwatch

French prosecutors moved against the Internet last week in an effort to stop the street riots. They shut down blogs and arrested scribes for so-called moblogging, i.e., rallying rioters with incendiary language. Entries on SKYBLOG ranged from urging malcontents to “unite ... and burn the cops” to reasoning that “we have to be calm; if not, all of this will come to nothing.” Across the Atlantic, bloggers were enraged and agog. BARKING MOONBAT EARLY WARNING SYSTEM deemed the assault on free speech the “Most Ridiculous Item of the Day,” adding sarcastically, “I never realized we bloggers had this much power.”

  Well, we’re big rock singers
We’ve got golden fingers
And we’re loved everywhere we go (that sounds like us)
We sing about beauty and we sing about truth
For ten-thousand dollars a show (right)
We take all kinds of pills that give us all kind of thrills
But the thrill we’ve never known
Is the thrill that’ll get ya when you get your picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone

(Rolling Stone) Wanna see my picture on the cover
(Stone)Wanna buy five copies for my mother (yeah)
(Stone)Wanna see my smilin’ face
On the cover of the Rolling Stone (that’s a very, very, good idea)

I got a freaky ole lady name a cocaine Katy
Who embroideries on my jeans
I got my poor old grey haired daddy
Drivin’ my limosine
Now, it’s all designed to blow our minds
But our minds won’t really be blown
Like the blow that’ll get ya when you get your picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone

Posted by The Skipper     on 11/15/2005 at 05:52 PM   
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How’d We Miss This?

Life could not get much better.  The family is all healthy, deer season opens on Saturday, the project I’ve been under water with for the past two years looks like it is about to be completed and Steven Den Beste is writing again.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/15/2005 at 02:56 PM   
Filed Under: • Editorials •  
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We said what???

Three minutes and fourty-seven seconds of clue-batting

Posted by Drew458     on 11/15/2005 at 11:37 AM   
Filed Under: • Politics •  
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King Kong: The Legend

The legend of King Kong appears to be based on actual scientific fact. Once upon a time, over a hundred thousand years ago, there lived a species of gigantic ape that stood over ten feet tall and weighed 1,200 pounds. This race of giant apes (gigantopithecus blackii) co-existed with humans who were also around at that time. Is it possible that the legendary King Kong is actually a racial memory from long ago humanity’s past? What other legends might be hanging around in our DNA? Anyone want to take a shot at explaining Godzilla ... ?

Giant Ape Lived Along-side Humans
Hamilton, ON

A gigantic ape, measuring about 10 feet tall and weighing up to 1,200 pounds, co-existed alongside humans, a geochronologist at McMaster University has discovered. Using a high-precision absolute-dating method (techniques involving electron spin resonance and uranium series), Jack Rink, associate professor of geography and earth sciences at McMaster, has determined that Gigantopithecus blackii, the largest primate that ever lived, roamed southeast Asia for nearly a million years before the species died out 100,000 years ago. This was known as the Pleistocene period, by which time humans had already existed for a million years.

“A missing piece of the puzzle has always focused on pin-pointing when Gigantopithecus existed,” explains Rink. “This is a primate that co-existed with humans at a time when humans were undergoing a major evolutionary change. Guangxi province in southern China, where the Gigantopithecus fossils were found, is the same region where some believe the modern human race originated.”

Research into Gigantopithecus blackii began in 1935, when the Dutch paleontologist G.H. von Koenigswald discovered a yellowish molar among the “dragon bones” for sale in a Hong Kong pharmacy. Traditional Chinese medicine maintains that dragon bones, basically fossil bones and teeth, possess curative powers when the fossils are ground into a fine powder, and ingested. For nearly 80 years, Gigantopithecus blackii has intrigued scientists, who have pieced together a description using nothing more than a handful of teeth and a set of jawbones.

“The size of these specimens – the crown of the molar, for instance, measures about an inch across – helped us understand the extraordinary size of the primate,” says Rink. Sample studies further revealed that Gigantopithecus was an herbivore, feasting mainly on bamboo. Some believe that the primate’s voracious appetite for bamboo ultimately placed him at the losing end of the evolutionary scale against his more nimble human competition.

- Read more of this monkey business here

Posted by The Skipper     on 11/15/2005 at 11:30 AM   
Filed Under: • Science-Technology •  
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2005 Weblog Awards Nomination

The 2005 Weblog Award nominations process is now open.  Go and nominate your favorite blogs.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/15/2005 at 11:11 AM   
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Senator Gives Away Pre-War Secrets

You’ve undoubtedly heard of the exchange between Chris Wallace and Senator Jay Rockefeller on Fox News Sunday.  If not, here is a portion:

WALLACE: Now, the President never said that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat. As you saw, you did say that. If anyone hyped the intelligence, isn’t it Jay Rockefeller?

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: No. The — I mean, this question is asked a thousand times and I’ll be happy to answer it a thousand times. I took a trip by myself in January of 2002 to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, and I told each of the heads of state that it was my view that George Bush had already made up his mind to go to war against Iraq — that that was a predetermined set course which had taken shape shortly after 9/11.

Did you catch that?  The ever-brilliant Bill Bennett did.

While Democrats in Washington are berating the White House for having prewar intelligence wrong, a high-profile U.S. senator, member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, who has a name more internationally recognizable than Richard Cheney’s, tells two putative allies (Saudi Arabia and Jordan) and an enemy who is allied with Saddam Hussein (Syria) that the United States was going to war with Iraq. This is not a prewar intelligence mistake, it is a prewar intelligence giveaway.

Indeed.  Who is going to start the investigation into what exactly the good Senator told the Syrians, Jordanians and Saudis?

Posted by Drew458     on 11/15/2005 at 11:04 AM   
Filed Under: • International • War-Stories •  
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Ignoramus Quote Of The Day

Here it is in a nutshell: TIME magazine is proposing to name Hurricane Katrina its Person Of The Year in an upcoming issue ...

“You don’t want to put someone on the cover and have people say, ‘Huh?"’
-- Time’s managing editor, Jim Kelly

Posted by The Skipper     on 11/15/2005 at 09:55 AM   
Filed Under: • Media-Bias • Stoopid-People •  
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They Want To Steal My Internet!

The United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU) and several asshat third-world countries want to take the internet governance away from the US and ICANN. They think they can do a better job of managing the damned thing. So they are going to hold a conference in Tunisia to discuss it and gang up on the US, which is appropriate since Tunisia is one of the worst internet censors in the entire world. I smell a cheese-eating surrender monkey in the woodpile somewhere.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear to all the little chattering monkeys at this conference: the US invented the internet (actually the US Department Of Defense in the form of Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration - DARPA), we built it up to an international communications system that is free and open, and finally, we allowed the rest of the splodydopes in Europistan and Africastan to play with it. Don’t push your luck, morons! Your puny networks can be nuked in a heartbeat if you piss us off. Got that?

EU Says Internet Plan Gains Support
BRUSSELS, Belgium (MYWAY NEWS)

The European Union’s compromise proposal on how to govern the Internet is gaining international support ahead of this week’s U.N. technology summit, the EU’s executive Commission said Tuesday. The EU has been promoting its proposal ahead of the formal start on Wednesday of the three-day United Nations technology summit in Tunisia, the preparations for which have spurred accusations that the Tunisian government has barred entry to activists trying to attend the event.

At issue is the question of who gets to make the big decisions on how the Internet is run - a task that now solely belongs to the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, overseen by the U.S. Commerce Department. Several countries have called for taking Internet oversight powers away from the U.S. government and establishing a separate U.N. agency to handle the job. The Bush administration said in July that it does not want to change the way ICANN is run.

The EU sees itself as tracing a middle path between those positions, proposing a system where governments collaborate to make decisions on governance issues like spam, cybercrime and ensuring people all over the world have access to the Net. That last issue has brought the spotlight on the summit’s host country of Tunisia, which activists call one of the worst Internet censors.

Already, rights watchdogs say, both Tunisian and foreign reporters on hand for the summit have been harassed and beaten. Reporters Without Borders says its secretary-general, Robert Menard, has been banned from attending.

- Read more of this silliness here

Posted by The Skipper     on 11/15/2005 at 09:35 AM   
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Al-Qaeda’s War Against Colonel Sanders

Enough is enough. Now the terrorist bastards are attacking fried chicken ...

Blast Outside KFC in Pakistan Kills Three
November 15, 2005, 3:53 AM EST
KARACHI, Pakistan (AP)

A powerful car bomb exploded outside the front entrance to a KFC restaurant in the southern Pakistan city of Karachi early Tuesday, killing at least three people and injuring 12 others, police said.

The blast, which went off about 8:45 a.m., badly damaged the restaurant, part of the global American fast food chain, burning several cars along the street in front.

Mushtaq Shah, Karachi’s police chief, told reporters the bomb was concealed in a car parked outside the restaurant. Another police official, Sanaullah Abbasi, said three people were killed in the blast and 12 injured.

The bomb struck as commuters were heading to offices and shops in the crowded business hub. Hundreds of people gathered at the site near the Pearl Intercontinental Hotel that is popular with foreign tourists and business people.

“I can see that the KFC building is burning, six cars have caught fire and injured people are lying on the road,” said Saeed Mohammad, a traffic police official who rushed to the scene after hearing the blast.

- Read More On This Story Of Fowl Play Here

Posted by The Skipper     on 11/15/2005 at 05:52 AM   
Filed Under: • Terrorists •  
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Hysterical Rewrite

- Read More About The Donk’s Latest Trick At Cox & Forkum

- And From Norman Podhoretz: “Who Is Lying About Iraq?”

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

- More From James Taranto at WSJ’s Opinion Journal.

Dems: We’re Not Responsible!

There’s been a lot of talk of late about how the Republican Party is in trouble. And it might be, except for the absence of a serious opposition party. Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia appeared on “Fox News Sunday” yesterday, and he had trouble answering questions from host Chris Wallace:

Rockefeller: Chris, it is always the same conversation. You know, it was not the Congress that sent 135,000 or 150,000 troops to--

Wallace: But you voted, sir, and aren’t you responsible for your vote?

Rockefeller: No. I’m--

Wallace: You’re not?

Rockefeller voted for the liberation of Iraq on the ground that it “poses an imminent threat,” a claim far beyond anything the Bush administration ever said, but now in retrospect he takes a pro-Saddam position. And this guy is the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, which we guess means he’s the most intelligent Democrat.

Posted by The Skipper     on 11/15/2005 at 05:33 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists •  
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   Monday - November 14, 2005

Criminals With Real Chutzpah

Who says criminals are dumb? These two cats, described below, had a great scam going. Admittedly, they pulled it off against a bunch of stoopid University of Tennessee fraternities so it couldn’t have been too difficult, right? Vols suck.

La. Convicts Claim to Be Katrina Evacuees
November 14, 2005, 2:07 PM EST
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP)

Two escaped prison inmates from Louisiana took advantage of sympathy for Hurricane Katrina victims to pass themselves off to University of Tennessee students as fraternity brothers who had been displaced by the storm, police said. Steven Ridge, 31, and Zachary Arabie, 22, were arrested in Knoxville last week after Ridge tried to buy gas with fake money, authorities said.

Ridge and Arabie integrated themselves on the Tennessee campus, attending fraternity parties, dating coeds and renting an off-campus apartment, police said. “We believe they were in the process of creating new identities to disappear again and possibly do an abduction,” police Sgt. Sean Hejna said. “We got these two just in time.”

Ridge, serving a 10-year sentence for forgery and theft, and Arabie, serving 20 years for armed robbery, escaped Sept. 13 from prison in Ferriday, La., after using a Popsicle stick as a key, Hejna said. They stole two cars to get to Knoxville and showed up at the Lambda Chi fraternity house a few days later, police said. Ridge claimed to be a fraternity member displaced by Katrina from a graduate program at Tulane University in New Orleans. He even had a Tulane ID card.

“It’s genius, their plan, it was really genius,” fraternity president Sam Seyler said. “Who is going to deny the fact that someone is a refugee? We took them at their word.” Seyler said Ridge and Arabie were so gracious for the aid they received and generous with their own time and money that he became suspicious. Seyler arranged a meeting with a university official on Nov. 7, the day Ridge was arrested allegedly with a stack of counterfeit $10 bills.

Authorities had trouble identifying Ridge because he deliberately injured his fingers, even gnawing the skin off to obscure his fingerprints, Henja said. A jailer finally recognized him among a roster of escaped inmates. The identification led authorities to the men’s apartment, where they found a cash counterfeiting operation as well as fake ID capabilities, police said.

Arabie was captured Thursday while walking on campus. Besides facing counterfeiting charges, Ridge and Arabie are under investigation for fraudulently obtaining $4,000 from the Red Cross by posing as Katrina refugees, authorities said.

Police said they think the men were planning an abduction, but investigators refused to elaborate. “Were we duped? I guess,” Seyler said. “We were trying to be good Southern gentlemen and show some hospitality in a tough time. We thought it was the right thing to do.”

Posted by The Skipper     on 11/14/2005 at 04:44 PM   
Filed Under: • Crime • Stoopid-People •  
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Headline of the day

(shamelessly stolen from Paul at Wizbang!)

Thai Tourists Warned Of Sedative-Spitting Transvestites

He’s right, that’s not one you see every day.  Here’s the scoop:

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thai police are warning tourists of a new scam.

Members of a Thai transvestite gang have confessed to hiding strong sedatives in their mouths and spitting them down the throats of victims during deep kissing. Then they rob the drugged tourists.

The confession came from three attractive transvestites arrested in Bangkok last week. Police say they’d robbed a Bangladeshi businessman of more than $7,300 in cash and valuables.

Police say the victim told investigators he met the transvestites in a bar and invited them all back to his apartment.

After kissing one, he said he felt dizzy and passed out. When he woke up, his cash, watch, mobile phone and notebook computer were gone.

A police lieutenant colonel has this warning for tourists: “Don’t rush to kiss a stranger on the mouth or you will end up in a deep sleep.”

Better advice could not be given. 

Posted by Drew458     on 11/14/2005 at 02:15 PM   
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State Of Fear: Your Daily Dose

Here’s another group who thinks you don’t have enough to worry about. They think you need to be concerned about getting a bad case of THE BLACK PLAGUE if global warming is not stopped ASAP. Fear factor: -1, Comedy factor: +6, Overall score: priceless ...

Climate Change Could Spread Plague: Scientists
OSLO (Reuters)

Warmer, wetter weather brought on by global warming could increase outbreaks of the plague, which has killed millions down the ages and wiped out one third of Europe’s population in the 14th century, academics said. Migratory birds spreading avian flu from Asia today could also carry the plague bacteria westward from their source in Central Asia, Nils Stenseth, head of a three-day conference on the plague and how it spreads, told Reuters on Monday.

“Wetter, warmer weather conditions mean there are likely to be more of the bacteria around than normal and the chance of it spreading to humans is higher,” he said. The European Union-funded group has just finished analyzing Soviet-era data from Kazakhstan which show a link between warmer weather and outbreaks of the plague.

This analysis was important as it had not previously been clear whether warmer conditions encouraged the bacteria, fleas and rats to grow or killed them off, Stenseth said. Plague bacteria are often carried by fleas on rats. “But if it becomes too hot it would kill off the fleas and rodents,” he said. Many scientists say a build-up of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels is pushing up temperatures around the world and changing Earth’s climate.

The plague—caused by the virulent, aggressive and mutating Yersinia Pestis bacteria—periodically breaks out in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries and has been carried around the globe by fleas on the back of rats, birds and in clothing for centuries, Stenseth said. “If you treat it with antibiotics in a few days it should be all right, but if you leave it any longer there is a 60 percent chance of death.”

In the 14th century the plague killed around 34 million people and some academics believe it reappeared every generation, including the Great Plague of London in 1665-66. “The link is very important and it is also important to link it back to the Black Death in the 1300s because there were the kind of weather conditions then—warmer and wetter—that we predict for the future,” Stenseth said.

“After 1855, when it (plague) reappeared again, there were once again similar weather conditions.” Scientists are still unsure why the plague originates in Central Asia. It has spread throughout the world, including recently to east Africa, and this is due at least partly to birds. “Many, many bird species are spreading bacteria from one place to another, from one rodent to another, by carrying fleas,” Stenseth said.

“That birds spread the bacteria is not in question but how important that is in the big picture is not yet clear.” Unlike the bird flu virus, which infects and kills domestic birds, plague-carrying fleas do not harm the birds that carry them.

Posted by The Skipper     on 11/14/2005 at 01:29 PM   
Filed Under: • Environment • Stoopid-People •  
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

1. Keep a firm grasp of Right and Wrong
2. Stay involved with government on every level and don't let those bastards get away with a thing
3. Use every legal means to defend yourself in the event of real internal trouble, and, most importantly:
4. Keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere

It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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