Rogue’s Gallery

Who’s not in this picture?

Sudden Clue Outbreak at NASA

A mere four years after SpaceShipOne, NASA has seen the light.

“I’d like for us to get to the point where we have the kind of private/public synergy in space flight that we have had for a hundred years in aviation,” Griffin said. The spirit of private enterprise is crucial to the future of space exploration, he acknowledged. “I see a day in the not-very-distant future where instead of NASA buying a vehicle, we buy a ticket for our astronauts to ride to low Earth orbit, or a bill of lading for a cargo delivery to space station by a private operator. I want us to get to that point.”

That’s a pretty fast turnaround for an outfit that went from can do to can’t fail to why bother.

Election Year Numerology

No, I don’t believe it. But it’s a funny coincidence.

Still, suspicious of the number, I looked it up. If I’m counting right, that’s 19 columns of 3. Sure enough. But the cached description that showed up on my Ask.com search says 56. If the 57th had just been added recently that could argue either for it being fresh in Barry’s mind, or argue that it’s just a coincidence.

I’ll stick with coincidence.

What’s the Real Controversy?

It’s not what the IDiots say it is.

Evolution clearly has no shortage of controversies. But none of those controversies involve the basic principles of evolution, and all of them operate within a framework where random mutation and selection play a key role in creating diverse species that are related by common descent. It’s clear that the Discovery Institute is trying to introduce controversies that don’t exist, while ignoring those that do. That’s why the academic freedom bills it’s promoting are such dangerous things; while supposedly promoting intellectual analysis, they’re actually an attempt to pave the way for misinformation to enter the scientific classroom.

Doin’ the Mookie Stomp

Uncle Jimbo has some thoughts on the formerly big man.

Now I’m a fan

of Segways.

Whenever I’m presented the choice

between “organic” food and “no-organic”, I always choose the cheaper. I consider “organic” to be a marketing term used to sell inferior goods at inflated prices.

Perhaps I’ve been too kind.

Obama’s Problem Solved

If he’ll wear it, of course.

Mini Movie Reviews

First, my take on Iron Man: Don’t let the bleeding-heart politics bother you. It’s really a fun movie. Tony Stark, even when he’s outwardly despicable, is really likeable for a very important reason: He’s his own man.

Next, someone at PIxar gave this nerdly review of Speed Racer:

Probably just before the final save in every comp script the following is run

ColorSpace1 = ColorSpace(0, “rgb”, “hsv”, 0.3, 0.59, 0.11);
Reorder1 = Reorder(ColorSpace1, “r1ba”);
ColorSpace2 = ColorSpace(Reorder1, “hsv”, “rgb”, 0.3, 0.59, 0.11);

For a select few, that’s laught-out-loud funny.

Rhetorical Question OTD

Why are liberals actively helping terrorists?

Common goals couldn’t possibly be the answer.

Six Things Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You To Know

A civil, succinct list from Scientific American.

Chaiten

Some awesome photos of the recent eruption in Chile.

Red Flag?

Instapundit writes:

I GET AN EMAIL NEWSLETTER from an oil trader and today it includes this tidbit: “In an interesting twist of OPEC news – in the folder titled ‘Adequate Supply’ – Iran has chartered an armada of supertankers to act as floating storage for as many as 28 million barrels of crude oil that is backing up on them. Analysts are blaming worldwide refineries yet to recover from maintenance programs. It’s not the first time that Iran has had trouble finding buyers; they temporarily floated 20 million barrels in 2006. No, I can’t explain this in light of record oil prices and continual cries for more release of OPEC crude oil. ”

U.S. crude stocks are up, too. This is unlikely to be the case, but here’s a thought: If I were, say, the United States government, and I anticipated military action in the mideast that might interrupt oil supplies, I wouldn’t want to stockpile directly because that would be a tipoff. But if I manipulated markets into running up stocks, I wouldn’t have to. . . . Nah. They’re not that smart.

Then he updates with this hmmm.

Could the working side of Bush’s brain, the one that hasn’t fallen for global warming and ethanol, be misunderestimated again? The elephant in the room has been speaking Farsi for quite some time now.

Why Israel Matters to Us

It’s the civilized world’s canary in a coal mine. If the Jihadists sweep it aside, we’ll be next.

Aaron Klein, an American journalist who now lives in Israel, last year released a fascinating book, Schmoozing with Terrorists: From Hollywood to the Holy Land, Jihadists Reveal Their Global Plans — To a Jew!. In it, he recounts how in hundreds of hours of interviews with dozens of terrorists their declared hatred of the West was nearly as great as their hatred of Israel. They were not motivated by poverty or political oppression as much as by faith and ideology, and nearly all spoke of establishing a worldwide caliphate once they had dispatched the Jewish state. They were especially enraged by our equal treatment of women and our tolerance of gays and lesbians.

The enemy isn’t resting. And there are more of them than their apologists want to admit.

Update:

Mark Steyn agrees.

The Western intellectuals who promote “Israeli Apartheid Week” at this time each year are laying the groundwork for the next stage of Zionist delegitimization. The talk of a “two-state solution” will fade. In the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, Jews are barely a majority. Gaza has one of the highest birth rates on the planet: The median age is 15.8 years. Its population is not just literally exploding, at Israeli checkpoints, but also doing so in the less incendiary but demographically decisive sense.

Peter Robinson has a fun job

He gets to meet and interview some really interesting people.

Treat yourself to part 1 and part 2 of his interview with Tom Wolfe. I especially like Wolfe’s explanation of the Charming Aristocracy in part 2.

One of his readers observes:

What he said about the charming aristocracy perfectly describes, it seems to me, the sophisticates who support Obama. [They think that] those of us who are lesser beings can’t possibly understand what Obama is and what his election portends for the country.

Update:

Another reader takes it a step further.

Tom Wolfe, in his description of the charming aristocracy, outlines many of the habits of liberals in general. He points out that the aristocracy comes to believe that the simple “journalism” is too low-brow for them. I have seen this exact attitude in many who embrace anti-Americanism, anti-patriotism, and most liberal points of view because they don’t want to seem pedestrian. When they come up against someone who is well educated, reasonably refined, AND conservative, they are at a loss to explain it. Hence, the difficulty understanding someone like William F. Buckley and his peers (did he actually have any peers?).

Graduation Day

All college commencement speeches should, from hence forth, be this one.

Don’t moan. I’m not going to “pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next.” I’m a member of the 1960s generation. We didn’t have any wisdom.

We were the moron generation. We were the generation that believed we could stop the Vietnam War by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. We believed drugs would change everything — which they did, for John Belushi. We believed in free love. Yes, the love was free, but we paid a high price for the sex.

My generation spoiled everything for you. It has always been the special prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grown-ups. But my generation exhausted the Earth’s resources of the weird. Weird clothes — we wore them. Weird beards — we grew them. Weird words and phrases — we said them. So, when it came your turn to be original and look and act weird, all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologize.

Read the whole thing.

Moving Windmills

Here’s a great story, told in only 6 minutes.

Obama’s Better Half?

Christopher Hitchens asks a very good question: How responsible is Michelle for Barack’s association with bad people? He hits some interesting points along the way.

In 1995, there appeared a documentary titled Brother Minister about the assassination of Malcolm X. It contained a secretly filmed segment showing Louis Farrakhan shouting at the top of his lungs in the Nation of Islam’s temple in Chicago on “Savior’s Day” in 1993. Farrakhan, verging on hysteria, demanded to know of the murdered Malcolm X: “If we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours?” His apparent admission of what had long been suspected—that it was the Black Muslim leadership that ordered Malcolm’s slaying—is not understood or remembered (or viewed) as often as it might be.

I didn’t know that. And I love this:

I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama’s 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be “read” at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language.

This is just creepy

Orwell saw this coming.

Yon: A Storm Before the Calm

Michael reports in the Daily News.

April saw 49 U.S. casualties in Iraq, the highest total in seven months. Does this mean, as some insist, that the enormous progress we have made since the start of the military surge is being lost?
As one who has spent nearly two years with American soldiers and Marines and British Army troops in Iraq – having returned from my last trip a month ago – here’s my short answer: no.

Department of Homeland Stupidity

Or is it the Department of Homeland Suicide?

If you won’t even name the enemy, how can you win a war?

This is madness.

Never forget that Jihad is the enemy.

Update:

Do read Limbaugh’s interview with Andy McCarthy.

We’re so intimidated by the idea that there’s a religious label on this and everybody is so afraid of their shadow to talk about it, that whenever you say what is obvious — which is that you can’t take the “Islam” out of Islamic terror and that the main cause of this is not democracy or lack of democracy; or, you know, ancient hatreds or the economy, poverty, or whatever our excuse is this week. This is driven by doctrine.  You know, we have poor people all over the world. They’re not all committing terrorism.

The Empire Strikes Barack

Squid’s Ink

Just what one would expect from the oxymoronically-named Discovery Institute.

This sickening attempt to link “Darwinism” (as if evolution were some kind of philosophy and not a scientific theory) to Hitler, which took “only” ten minutes in Expelled was pure squid’s ink, as is Klinghoffer’s column.

Darwin discovered a truth. It doesn’t matter what other crazy ideas he may have had. It doesn’t matter how much Darwin is quoted by genocidal maniacs. This is all a distraction from the truth: that evolution is the only scientific theory there is to explain speciation.

This smear attempt is really pathetic. I could fire back about how many people have been slaughtered in the name of every god ever invented and, if he were consistent, Klinghoffer would have to admit that religion is just as bad as so-called “Darwinism”. But he’s just squirming and squirting ink.

If he’s got an alternative theory to replace evolution, let’s hear it. Enough with the childish Hitler crap.

Well, the observant will notice that I left him a question in the comments. I don’t expect much of an answer.

The big disappointment for me is that he’s also invited to blog on The Corner.

Update:

Derb gives him an impassioned what-for.

Dear Barry

Relationship advice from Illinois Senator Barack Obama.

Dear Barry:

I’ve been married to the same wonderful man — Let’s call him “Jeremiah” — for 20 years. He’s a great provider and we live in a beautiful home. He dotes on me and treats me like a queen; even after twenty years he still brings me little gifts and opens doors for me. Best yet, our sex life is fantastic!  Jeremiah enjoys spicing things up with role-play, such as “Adolf and Eva,” and we host weekly swinger get-togethers for like-minded couples. I know it probably must sound kind of kinky, but trust me – it keeps things interesting in “the boudoir.”

Tempting Fate

I love reporters.

I hear it takes a few tries.

(If you’re worried, get one of these or one of these. They are both virtually unpickable. A good, monitored alarm is even harder to beat.)

Pass the Popcorn

The next installment in the Barry and Jerry story may be about to unfold.

I’ll bet Ben Stein didn’t expect

that he’d get the ADL mad at him.

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

But he should have known.

Gotta Love VDH

He’s my favorite egghead. Who else can turn a phrase like this and spank Obama with Greek classicism?

Note that when any candidate makes a Faustian bargain with extremists, nemesis eventually catches up with them.

Read the whole (short) thing.

Last Man Standing?

Sitting high atop my Buttle’s World perch, bemusedly surveying the political landscape, I can’t help but wonder if John McCain will win the presidency by default. He may greet November as the only candidate from either party whose campaign didn’t fade, fumble or implode.

Strange days. I’m glad I don’t live anywhere near Denver.

Come November I’ll look either prescient or foolish. Won’t be the first time.

Update:

This is what prescient looks like. Even if it was only a month ago.

Spunky

Watch this all the way to the end.