Malone on the Diggbats

Get me some smelling salts. This appeared on ABC’s web site.

Worse, users have learned to use the “bury” feature, originally designed to get rid of spam postings, to crush stories with political perspectives (usually conservative) that don’t match their own. The most notable victim of this kind of burying is one of the blogosphere’s most popular sites, Little Green Footballs.

But the biggest problem with Digg is not the business itself, which is an impressive creation, but its community. One of the things we’re learning about the Web 2.0 world is that all communities aren’t alike; when you let millions of anonymous users design your product, you also let them determine your fate. And Digg has put itself in the hands of an army of postadolescents with too much education and too much free time, the age cohort that gets its news from “The Colbert Report” and holds the anarchistic view that all information should be, in fact, “wants to be,” free.

Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, been there, done that. But now, in my gray-haired middle-age I’ve come to realize that if you are going to create a venue for children to play, someone has to be the grown-up. And that is where Digg blew it.

Read the whole thing.

No Connection

“Everybody knows” there was no connection between al Qaeda and Iraq before 9/11. The trouble with what “everybody knows” is that it’s usually wrong.

At Salman Pak, I was there in 2003. We [Marines] found high quality leather suicide vests, wrapped in plastic, ready for shipment. The SEALs were doing work there too. I wonder what the enemy was doing with those? We actually sent out press releases with pictures in and around April/May 2003, and it was ignored by the mainstream media.

“This is a very big deal, and the Army has blown it, big time.”

I have to agree. Michelle Malkin has a great roundup of the Pentagon’s crackdown on milblogs.

It’s one thing to worry about OPSEC. It’s another to shoot yourself in the foot in the battlefront that a) matters most and b) we’re losing: the media.

Desires of the Human Heart, Part 2

Don’t miss Michael Yon’s latest dispatch from Iraq.

There is a side to this war that cannot be captured in any kind of statistics. The importance of personal relationships among the soldiers and their Iraqi counterparts cannot be captured in quick stories or numbers. A huge part of this war comes down to personal relationships and respect. It’s not about killing. That’s only a small part of it. It’s about building: building bonds that build societies. Giving Iraqi civilians a real alternative to those who create and then flee from civil havoc. Terrorists don’t pick up the trash on the way back from blowing up the electrical stations.

Slippery Slope Watch

While Apalachia and parts of Europe rejoice, somewhere Rick Santorum is shaking his head and saying, “I told you so.”

Hitch 1, Tenet 0

Ready. Aim. Fire.

A highly irritating expression in Washington has it that “hindsight is always 20-20.” Would that it were so. History is not a matter of hindsight and is not, in fact, always written by the victors. In this case, a bogus history is being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no foresight at all.

VDH: Assessing Mexifornia

Hansen is at the top of his form with his analysis of the state of the illegal immigration debate and its rightward shift.

The growing national discomfort over illegal immigration more than four years after “Mexifornia” first appeared in City Journal is not only apparent in the rightward shift of the debate but also in the absence of any new arguments for open borders—while the old arguments, Americans are finally concluding, really do erode the law, reward the cynical here and abroad, and needlessly divide Americans along class, political, and ethnic lines.

That’s the conclusion. Read the whole thing.

How an Insurgency Loses

Rich Lowry has an important post on The Corner, notable not just for the potentially significant good news from Iraq, but for the fact that even the New York Times can’t keep the good news out of its own pages.

From the Frontiers of Non-Science

Apparently ScienceDaily is so hard up for content that this thinly-disguised press release counts as a “science” story.

Let’s list a few of the breathtakingly unscientific assumptions here:

• Two people are enough subjects for a “study”
• Five interviews provide enough data to analyze for a “study”
• “Language of the non-powerful” can be identified without bias
• Deciding ahead of time what are “female” and “male” language patterns won’t bias the “study”
• People can have a gender
• Hillary has a sex

Scientific study or sophomore High School homework assigment? You decide.

Get Rosie on the phone

I really need her metallurgical expertise to explain how this could happen.

The intense heat crumbled the elevated roadway that carried eastbound traffic from the Bay Bridge onto Interstates 580 and 980 and state Highway 24. The broken concrete fell like a blanket over the connector roadway from southbound I-80 to I-880, where the single-vehicle crash occurred.

How long before we find out Karl Rove and/or Halliburton was behind it?

Batman vs. al Qaeda

Frank Miller is ready for his fatwa.

“These terrorists are worse than any villain I can come up with, and I think it’s ridiculous that people in entertainment are not showing what we are up against here…. This is pure propaganda, a throwback, there’s no bones about it.”

They Couldn’t See This Coming

It’s not like they’re psychics or anything.

More Strange Beauty from Science

OK, this video needs a better narrator and more production values. It’s still cool what you can do with corn starch and water.

I’m old enough to remember when it was marketed (with a little coloring added) as “Phunque”. It didn’t take long to figure out how to make it at home with corn starch and water for a fraction of the price, so it was short-lived.

It never occurred to me to take it to this extreme, though. (Dont’ worry that it’s in Spanish. You’ll understand everything when you watch it.)

A Giant Exits

Rostropovich, R.I.P.

Duncan Hunter

I’ve heard him briefly on KSFO, and was favorably impressed. Apparently the folks at the Patriot Post are even more impressed.
I heard him use this line on the radio. It’s a good one:

In the March South Carolina contest, he drew to a statistical tie, at 22 percent each, with John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. “We were outspent 10 to 1,” he remarked, going against an “army of consultants.” Running the effort was his son, a Marine captain and OIF veteran. Of this, candidate Hunter quipped, “You know, that’s a pretty good match-up: one Marine versus 550 consultants. We did have the advantage.”

Meanwhile, in the British Army

Michael Yon provides gripping proof that not all British Military forces have devolved into simpering whimps. It includes one of his best battle portrait photos yet.

Update:

A few visitors to this blog seem to have missed the point of this article. It may in some way be understandable now that the shameful news about the “simpering whimps” in the Navy has faded from memory. My point with this post was to contrast the eminently professional and steadfast British Army, written of by Yon, with the aforementioned naval capitulation.

Lest anybody think I was picking on the British in general here, I would have used the same language to describe the same behavior on the part of any country, including my own.

To put that in words that even a semi-literate like “para sam” (whose comment was edited for taste, but not for syntax and spelling) might understand, it means “British Army good! Navy not so much!”

Predicting the Future, Redux

On the other hand, people who stop to think carefully about the problem can be remarkably good at it, as witnessed by this 1945 Atlantic Monthly Article.

LA Times or The Onion?

I can’t decide.

What a Woman

She has class. Ayaan Hirsi Ali praises the Imam who called for her death, calling him “very honest”. After all, he was only quoting the Koran.

Another Exciting Discovery

Wow! Modern imaging techniques have uncovered a palimpsest with not two, but three books on it! Wait until you see who the authors are.

Dr Noel said: “There is no more important philosopher in the world than Aristotle. To have early views in the 2nd and 3rd Century AD of Aristotle’s Categories is just fantastic.”

“We have one book that contains three texts from the ancient world that are absolutely central to our understanding of mathematics, politics and now philosophy,” he said.

“I am at a loss for words at what this book has turned out to be. To make these discoveries in the 21st Century is frankly nutty – it is just so exciting.”

It prompted this lovely observation from Iain Murray on The Corner:

I think it was Richard Porson who uncovered one palimpsest by spotting “a darling little iota in the corner.”

How We Will Fight

The Army has come a long way from its nadir with the “Army of One”. Check out the video on their How We Will Fight page. Now they look serious.

Backbone

Every time I read Fred Thompson I like him a little more. He makes so much sense he just couldn’t be elected president.

Could he?

Maybe we just need a little backbone.

This rewriting of history through omission wasn’t some government policy. It was the result of individual decisions in local schools by teachers with large populations of Muslim students. Unfortunately, many of these students have been taught by parents and mosques that the holocaust never happened and that the Crusades were an unprovoked attack on Islam by European Christians. History books that present these events in any other light, they believe, are part some giant conspiracy designed to attack their very religion.

If anybody needs to hear these facts, it is the children who are being abused by those who are teaching the same hateful lies that have helped turn the Middle East into the self-destructive and often suicidal mess it is today.

Joke OTD

Another groaner from mom.

Get your rim shot ready.

The Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, while visiting a primary school class, find themselves in the middle of a discussion related to words and their meanings.

The teacher asks both men if they would like to lead the discussion of the word “tragedy”. So Rev Jackson asks the class for an example of a “tragedy”.

One little boy stands up and offers, “If my best friend, who lives on a farm, is playing in the field and a runaway tractor comes along and knocks him dead, that would be a tragedy.”

No,” says Jackson, “that would be an accident.”

A little girl raises her hand. “If a school bus carrying 50 children drove over a cliff, killing everyone inside, that would be a tragedy.”

I’m afraid not,” explains Sharpton. “That’s what we would call a great loss.”

The room goes silent. No other children volunteer.

Reverend Al searches the room. “Isn’t there someone here who can give me an example of a tragedy?”

Finally at the back of the room little Johnny raises his hand. “If a plane carrying the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton were struck by a missile and blown to smithereens that would be a tragedy.”

Fantastic!” exclaim Jackson and Sharpton, “That’s right. And can you tell me why that would be a tragedy?”

“Well,” says little Johnny, “because it sure as heck wouldn’t be a great loss, and it probably wouldn’t be an accident either.”

I live in a Red State now!

Just look!

Any attempts to correlate that map with politics will result in a lot of correlation.

Exciting Astronomy Find

This is really thrilling. A new planet-detecting system called HARPS has just found a planet close to Earth’s mass and temperature, and it’s only 20.1 light years away. That’s right next door in astronomical terms. It’s now the prime candidate for a mission to search for extraterrestrial life. What a setting it must be. It orbits so close to its red dwarf sun that its year is 13 of our days.

“As soon as you find a planet at the right distance [from its star] such that liquid water might exist, then you’re saying this is the kind of environment in which one might start looking for life.”

Point of View

Day by Day with a nice observation.

Update:

Good advice for Mr. Bush, as well.

Free Advice for Inferior Cultures

Yes, some cultures are inferior. Very much so. Multiculturalism is a noxious lie. On Breath of the Beast is a long post about our Indian Guilt. It contains some good advice for Islam:

We have bought into multiculturalism because we no longer have the fortitude, the honesty or the intelligence to look someone in the eye and tell them, “Look, you are humiliated because you do not have the culture or political leaders or the education to be otherwise. You really need to stop making such a big deal about feeling humiliated. Why not try some of these simple steps toward civilization instead:

• 1. Specifically outlaw honor killing
• 2. Stop beating your wife and/or kids.
• 3. Send your kids to a decent school where they won’t waste their time memorizing an entire “holy book” to the exclusion of learning critical thinking skills and studying arithmetic, science and geography.
• 4. Forget using Israel, Jews and America as the excuse for being a loser.
• 5. Understand that your leader (fill in one: Ahmadinejad, Assad, Kadafy, Mubarak, Abdullah etc…) is a tyrant of the worst sort and is actually working hard to keep you ignorant and filled with rage, that’s how your feudal system works.
• 6. For God’s sake stop thinking of anyone who believes (or doesn’t believe in him) in him (God that is) in a different way than you do as less than human. That only makes you feel worse when you see that those “unbelievers” live better than you do.

If you take care of all that, there would be no need for you to feel humiliated anymore.”

The whole thing, long as it may be, is worth reading.

Signs of Hope

Novato, where I grew up, is at the “other end” of Marin from the one you probably know about, the end that produced Taliban Johnny. I was in the first class of 7th graders ever at then Sinaloa Jr. High, which is now Sinaloa Middle School. Seems there’s a Boy Scount troop there which arranged a nice homecoming for a couple of our soldiers, showing just how far Novato can get from Mill Valley on a good day.

Dear Senator Reid

Here’s a nice letter.

I hope he does it.

Michelle Malkin has a few more letters for the Dishonorable Senator from Nevada.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan

Need more to worry about? Watch this video on LGF.