Saturday, December 30, 2006

Indiana Jones 4 will be filmed in 2007, and hit the screen in May 2008. Harrison Ford, 64, says that he is still fit enough to play the character.

I certainly hope that this movie is not the flop that the three Star Wars "prequels" were. The Indiana Jones sagas are terrific movies. I will definitely watch any of them should I happen to catch them on TV at virtually any time.

Friday, December 29, 2006

One of the great mass murderers of the twentieth century has paid the ultimate price for his crimes against humanity. Saddam Hussein was executed by the Iraqi government after a trial that by all credible accounts was much fairer than any that took place under his regime.

Reactions of all sorts are coming in. Many Iraqis, including Iraqi-Americans, are rejoicing. Extra security and higher alert status are in place to guard against Sunni/Baathist violence from any "Saddam dead-enders", or those who would use his death as a pretext for violence.

There has been an apparent car bombing at an airport parking garage in Madrid, Spain. As I type this at 1:02 AM Pacific time, CNN International reported the bombing, but did not report any claim of responsibility. It could have been done by Basque separatists, or another terrorist group.

The hope, slim though it may be, is that Saddam's death will remove some of the initiative for Sunnis to oppose peaceful progress in Iraq. The coming days will tell whether those hopes were pipe dreams or whether they may come to fruition someday.
Traditionally, the MSM and some in the blogosphere write about the biggest stories of the year and make predictions for the next. Wretchard writes a must-read treatise on "The Blogosphere at War" that is much more useful than the former.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Lileks points to two interesting posts. I'm not sure I believe that the dots connect in the first, but the second makes a great deal of sense.
Michael Hirschorn's article for the The Atlantic Online, entitled "Get Me Rewrite! A modest proposal for reinventing newspapers for the digital age," does an excellent job of framing the problems that printed newspapers face and proposing an interesting direction that could save and even expand their presence in the digital age.

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

On the one hand, it's encouraging to read that the US intelligence community is considering using Wiki and blog technology and techniques to improve the quality and speed of its analysis. On the other hand, it's discouraging that it hasn't already been a well established practice.

The full research paper is available here.

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Betsy Newmark takes a pitch in her wheelhouse and belts it out of the park. The fact that she nails the Seattle school system by calling it "despicable" adds extra distance to the homer.
American Thinker asks, "What Islamic Science and Philosophy?"
The Tao of Defiance explains "Why the Muslims world was left behind."

This excerpt should encourage you to read the whole thing:

[..] Secular order in India thus is possible only when Muslims are not in power. Thondi, Rasathipuram and other places prove that the Muslim mind suffers from a dangerous duality—of seeking secularism when out of power and imposing a brutal demeaning theocracy for non-Muslims when in power."


India is in effect another canary in the coal mine, illuminating the true character of Islamofascism for all who will see to understand the threat to civilization that unchecked Islamofascism poses to the world.

Update: don't miss this post, entitled "The Hajj story you won’t hear; Islam as a religion that lost sight of its inner meaning."

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Despite being born in Mobile, AL and growing up in Macon, GA--and purposefully mimicking Gary Owens of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In fame--my quiz results indicate that I am from Philadelphia.

What American accent do you have?
Your Result: Philadelphia

Your accent is as Philadelphian as a cheesesteak! If you're not from Philadelphia, then you're from someplace near there like south Jersey, Baltimore, or Wilmington. if you've ever journeyed to some far off place where people don't know that Philly has an accent, someone may have thought you talked a little weird even though they didn't have a clue what accent it was they heard.

The Midland

The Northeast

The South

The Inland North

Boston

The West

North Central

What American accent do you have?
Take More Quizzes


I wonder if Space Ghost is from Philly? Gary Owens is from South Dakota.
That source of unimpeachable truth, the Weekly World News, reveals a truth that puts paid to the ambitions of all too many of us.