Tiger Vs. The Purple Dinosaur

Doing Battle with The Purple Dinosaur of Doom!!!!!
Where Did Purple Dinosaur Go?????
Oh No, He's Getting Away!!!!!
Tiger Achieves Victory Over The Purple Dinosaur!!!!!

Brzezinski Offers Support for Obama

New York Times:

Right on the heels of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s assertion that she could handle the political ramifications of a terrorist attack better than her Democratic rivals, a major foreign policy figure associated with Democrats endorsed her archrival, Senator Barack Obama.

In an interview with Al Hunt that will air on Bloomberg’s “Political Capital” at 11 p.m. tonight, Zbigniew Brzezinski said that Mr. Obama is “clearly more effective and has the upper hand.” The national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter continued, “There is a need for a fundamental rethinking of how we conduct world affairs, and Obama seems to me to have both the guts and the intelligence to address that issue and to change the nature of America’s relationship with the world.'’

He called Mrs. Clinton’s foreign policy “very conventional.”

“I don’t think the country needs to go back to what we had eight years ago,” Mr. Brzezinski said.

HOW MUCH YOU WANT FOR STEALTH BOMBER?

As you may know, there is a big airshow going on in Russia right now. People have come from all over the world to gawk at the latest in airplane technology, as well as the old favorites. It's like any collection of geeks and their hobby, except this involves multimillion dollar hardware, some of which are advanced weapons.

On hand for view was a stealth bomber, which is, sadly, not actually invisible.

Apparently an "unidentified Russian, wearing sunglasses and surrounded by bodyguards," went up to the group of Americans guarding the bomber and asked if he could buy the stealth bomber, that according to Komsomolskaya Pravda.

One of the Americans told the guy it would cost at least $500 million.

"That is no problem. It is such a cool machine," the Russian was quoted as saying by Pravda, which said its reporter overheard the conversation.

It is a cool machine, it's true. Remember when we were at war with the Russians? I guess this is what is meant by the world is flat. Planes, too.

Senator Warner Urges Withdrawal

Senator John Warner
of Virginia






Senator John Warner, of Virginia, and former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has called on President Bush to start bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq by Christmas, beginning in September.

Warner said Thursday that a pullout was needed to spur Iraqi leaders to action.

"In my humble judgment, that would get everyone's attention that is not being paid at this time," said Warner.
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GREAT MOMENTS IN CORPORATE BEHAVIOR

REUTERS:
"The head of one of the leading insurers in non-standard, high-risk personal auto insurance apologized on Thursday for some substandard behavior - spying in church on people who had the sued the company.

Progressive Corp Chief Executive Glenn Renwick apologized for the use of private detectives, who went undercover to join an Atlanta church group in order to discredit a couple suing the insurer.

"What the investigators and Progressive people did was wrong - period," Renwick, head of the third-largest U.S. auto insurer, said in a statement. "I personally want to apologize to anyone who was affected by this."

The statement was issued a day after the story appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The newspaper reported that a pair of detectives hired by Progressive became members of the Southside Christian Fellowship Church in August 2005 in order to get damaging information on two church members involved in a 2004 traffic accident.

The detectives talked their way into a private support group where members discussed abortions, sexual orientation and drug addiction, and taped the sessions, the newspaper said."

DEPARTMENT OF INEFFECTIVE PROTESTS

"A member of a Japanese right-wing group was arrested Thursday after he sent his severed little finger to the ruling party's headquarters in protest at Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's failure to visit a Tokyo war shrine.

The 54-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of making threats after he sent his finger to the Liberal Democratic Party headquarters in Tokyo, said a police official in Okayama Prefecture, western Japan.

The envelope also contained a letter of protest and a disk showing images of the man cutting off his finger, the official said.

"I thought they would ignore me if I just sent the letter, so I put my little finger in as well," Kyodo news agency quoted the man as telling police."

CAESAR INTERRUPTUS

"Caesar pacified Gaul by mass slaughter; he then used his successful army to crush all political opposition at home and establish himself as permanent ruler of ancient Rome. This brilliant action not only ended the personal threat to Caesar, but ended the civil chaos that was threatening anarchy in ancient Rome – thus marking the start of the ancient Roman Empire that gave peace and prosperity to the known world."
-Philip Atkinson
The Family Security Foundation, Inc.

Um, dude - they killed Caeser.

BLOGGER PZ MYERS SUED FOR BOOK CRITICISM

According to Wired Magazine, PZMyers, the brilliant science blogger Pharyngula, is being sued for libel by a guy named Stuart Pivar because of critical remarks he made about a book Pivar wrote called "Lifecode: From egg to embryo by self-organization."

Wired quotes a press release on Lifecode as describing it as

"... an alternative theory of evolution which contends that the embryo is formed by self-organization, as are crystals, rather than by a genetic code subject to natural selection. Accompanying illustrations depict hypothetical construction blueprints for the various body forms. Biological Self-organization has long been a contending alternate theory for the code of life; recent proponents include evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Brian Goodwin."

I'm not qualified to judge if that's nonsense or has some validity, though anything that presents alternatives to evolution raises all kinds of red flags.

Here's what Myers wrote Pharyngula on that got Pivar peeved.

"The doodles in this book bear absolutely no relationship to anything that goes on in real organisms, but after staring at them for a while, I realized what this book is actually about.

This book is a description of the development and evolution of balloon animals."

I am qualified to judge the merits of his legal case. I haven't read the whole brief, but it sounds like Pivar doesn't have a leg to stand on. (Maybe he could grow one, like a crystal.) I would go so far as to call him an idiot and a moron, but he might sue me.

Or he might not be so dumb. Wired suggests, plausibly, that the whole thing is a publicity stunt. (Pivar is apparently rich or something). If true, this would be a great abuse of the legal system - not to mention a threat to bloggers of whatever political belief or ideology.

WE B LOOKN 4 2 DOODS

The FBI is asking the public for help in identifying two men who were seen behaving unusually aboard several Washington state ferries. The Seattle Post Intelligencer is not publishing the photos because neither man is considered a suspect nor has either been charged with a crime.

QUESTION OF THE DAY

Who are Liz and FLo?

(A) Jenna's bridesmaids

(B) Two of the four identical quads

(C) The designated names of the next two hurricanes

(D) Malaysian dogs who catch pirates

NAZI FILES DIGITIZED, TRANSFERRED

BBC NEWS:

"The keepers of a vast archive of Nazi documents on the Holocaust have transferred copies of millions of files to museums in Israel and the US.

The electronic transfer is part of an agreement to open up the Bad Arolsen archive, overseen by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The files, kept in Germany, were found in concentration camps and other Nazi prisons at the end of World War II.

The ICRC says the archive has now transferred many documents from the archive to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the US and to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Centre in Israel.

The 47 million files stored in the spa town of Bad Arolsen hold meticulously recorded information on forced labourers, concentration camp victims and political prisoners. They take up 26km (16 miles) of shelving.

Historians believe many more details about the Nazis' murder and brutal exploitation of millions of Jews, Roma (Gypsies) and other victims will be revealed.

So far, 12 million documents have been digitised for electronic transfer, the ICRC says.

In grey, bureaucratic language the Nazis kept records on the smallest details - from the number of lice on a prisoner's head to the exact moment of their execution."

Rove on Meet the Press

For the David Gregory - Karl Rove interview, click here, and scroll down: The Bobblespeak Translations

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ASHCROFT WAS "BARELY ARTICULATE"

"Notes taken by Director Robert S. Mueller III of the F.B.I. say that Attorney General John Ashcroft was “barely articulate,” “feeble” and “clearly stressed” shortly after a hospital-room meeting in March 2004 in which two top White House aides tried to persuade him to sign an extension for eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.

Mr. Mueller’s notes, based on a visit to Mr. Ashcroft’s room and released Thursday by the House Judiciary Committee, provide a fuller picture of the events surrounding a March 10, 2004, confrontation over the surveillance program. They go beyond the account that Mr. Mueller gave the committee in July and reinforce an account by James B. Comey, the former deputy attorney general who testified in May.

In providing corroboration for Mr. Comey’s version of events, Mr. Mueller’s typewritten entries served to rebut the suggestion of some Bush administration officials who have privately dismissed Mr. Comey’s account of the hospital standoff as an overwrought and one-sided description.

Mr. Mueller said in the notes that he had gone to the hospital after receiving a call from Mr. Comey, arriving at 7:40 p.m. and departing at 8:20. His notes said Mr. Comey had told him that Mr. Ashcroft, who had undergone gall bladder surgery the previous day, was in “no condition” to receive visitors.

Mr. Mueller said Mr. Comey had asked him to intervene with Mr. Ashcroft’s F.B.I. security detail to limit visitors.

'Comey asked me to meet briefly with the AG to see his condition,” he wrote. “He also asked that I inform the detail that no visitors, other than family, were to be allowed to see the AG without my consent (I so informed the detail).' "

Link to full story in the New York Times, Notes Detail Pressure on Ashcroft Over Spying

Cliff with Snow

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FOX NEWS WITH NEIL CAVUTO NAILS SUPERMODEL ANGLE TO CHINESE TOY STORY

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Next Up: The Housing Meltdown: What Does Naomi Campbell Think?

TOPIC OF CALCULUS

"A little known school of scholars in southwest India discovered one of the founding principles of modern mathematics hundreds of years before Newton according to new research. Dr George Gheverghese Joseph from The University of Manchester says the 'Kerala School' identified the 'infinite series'- one of the basic components of calculus - in about 1350.

The discovery is currently - and wrongly - attributed in books to Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz at the end of the seventeenth centuries.

The team from the Universities of Manchester and Exeter reveal the Kerala School also discovered what amounted to the Pi series and used it to calculate Pi correct to 9, 10 and later 17 decimal places.

And there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Indians passed on their discoveries to mathematically knowledgeable Jesuit missionaries who visited India during the fifteenth century.

That knowledge, they argue, may have eventually been passed on to Newton himself."
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Say it ain't so, Isaac!

"JOHN FROM CINCINNATI" WASHES UP

The wave has crashed for "John From Cincinnati." A day after its first-season finale, HBO on Monday canceled the dark surfing drama.

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Best lead-in ever and they blew it.

Worst part is I never to got blog about how it might have been the worst tv show I have ever seen.

BEHOLD THE POWER OF THE BUNNY FENCE

BUNNY FENCE, BITCHES!

A fence built to prevent rabbits from entering the Australian outback has unintentionally allowed scientists to study the effects of land use on regional climates.

The rabbit-proof fence — or bunny fence — in Western Australia was completed in 1907 and stretches about 2,000 miles. It acts as a boundary separating native vegetation from farmland. Within the fence area, scientists have observed a strange phenomenon: above the native vegetation, the sky is rich in rain-producing clouds. But the sky on the farmland side is clear.

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NAME THAT SPEAKER!!!

“I have an employment record that I think would be attractive to any employer. I’ve worked in an industrial kitchen in a hospital; I’ve waited tables; I’ve worked in convenience stores and have been robbed at the point of a gun twice; I’ve pumped gas; I’ve babysat; I’ve cut lawns; I’ve delivered newspapers.”

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TROPICAL DEPRESSION?

Reuters:

"In Cape Coral, a town near Fort Myers on Florida's sun-drenched Gulf Coast, almost every other house on some of its streets has a for-sale sign outside.

With a bloated inventory of unsold homes and a growing number of homeowners forced by mortgage delinquencies to sell -- thanks to the subprime crisis and ensuing credit crunch -- southwest Florida's once warm clime for property has turned stone-cold.

Linda Setterlund, 61, owns a pristine three-bedroom, two-bath, Cape Coral house that has been on the market for about a year.

At a reduced asking price of $183,900, she said the house had been priced to match what she and her husband owed on it, after moving in three years ago with a 30-year fixed mortgage.

Setterlund said she and her husband had decided to leave the area to join family in Tennessee, but their decision was also prompted by growing real estate taxes and skyrocketing homeowner insurance rates after an active 2005 hurricane season.

"They're saying that we're heading for a recession but I think we're past that," said Setterlund, referring to the housing glut and its effect across much of south Florida.

"I think we're headed more into a depression."

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