The Speculist has a podcast interview with Jim Bennett, serial space and IT entrepreneur, and popularizer of the Anglosphere.
Among other things, he explains why this may not be the Chinese century.
The Speculist has a podcast interview with Jim Bennett, serial space and IT entrepreneur, and popularizer of the Anglosphere.
Among other things, he explains why this may not be the Chinese century.
What happened to Hillary’s books?
…here is a FASCINATING observation I have made. I have thus far seen NOT ONE of the Hillary books at either flea markets or thrift stores. Have you? Think about it. This book supposedly has MILLIONS of copies floating around out there and yet somehow they just don’t make their way thru the normal book recycling system like other books. So what happened to all the Hillary books?
…Could the vast majority of the Hillary books (except for the autographed copies sold for profit on eBay) end up in warehouses? That is my suspicion and most likely they are still SITTING there. And who bought those books only to warehouse them? Labor unions? Other organizations? Using Freakonomics observations makes me suspicious that Hillary has received campaign contributions via PHONY book sales.
Someone might want to look into this. But most won’t.
Amidst all of the media hyperventilating over the Bush “leaks,” the WaPo actually has a sensible editorial today. The post title is its first three words:
Mr. Wilson subsequently claimed that the White House set out to punish him for his supposed whistle-blowing by deliberately blowing the cover of his wife, Valerie Plame, who he said was an undercover CIA operative. This prompted the investigation by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald. After more than 2 1/2 years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald has reported no evidence to support Mr. Wilson’s charge. In last week’s court filings, he stated that Mr. Bush did not authorize the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity. Mr. Libby’s motive in allegedly disclosing her name to reporters, Mr. Fitzgerald said, was to disprove yet another false assertion, that Mr. Wilson had been dispatched to Niger by Mr. Cheney. In fact Mr. Wilson was recommended for the trip by his wife. Mr. Libby is charged with perjury, for having lied about his discussions with two reporters. Yet neither the columnist who published Ms. Plame’s name, Robert D. Novak, nor Mr. Novak’s two sources have been charged with any wrongdoing.
As Mr. Fitzgerald pointed out at the time of Mr. Libby’s indictment last fall, none of this is particularly relevant to the question of whether the grounds for war in Iraq were sound or bogus. It’s unfortunate that those who seek to prove the latter would now claim that Mr. Bush did something wrong by releasing for public review some of the intelligence he used in making his most momentous decision.
…as a campaign theme for the Donkeys. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Alan Mollohan, Democrat:
The National Journal, distinguishing between the Abramoff-DeLay nexus and the Cunningham bribery case, opined that
…as a campaign theme for the Donkeys. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Alan Mollohan, Democrat:
The National Journal, distinguishing between the Abramoff-DeLay nexus and the Cunningham bribery case, opined that
…as a campaign theme for the Donkeys. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Alan Mollohan, Democrat:
The National Journal, distinguishing between the Abramoff-DeLay nexus and the Cunningham bribery case, opined that
So I was looking at this map of how people pronounce things in the US, and I noticed that very few of them showed any distinct regional differences. The most striking of the few that do are what people call sweetened carbonated beverages, that thing you drink water from, and what you call Halloween eve. Bubbler people seem to reside mostly in Wisconsin, and Devil’s Night seems to be a mostly Wolverine thing. I also notice that while they ask what people call drive-through liquor stores, they don’t ask about liquor stores in general. An appellation that’s apparently unique to Michigan (I didn’t realize this until others pointed it out to me, having grown up with it) was “party store.”
Most of them just showed that the distribution of people who called them different things was pretty evenly distributed (that is if 80% called it one and 20% another, that would be as true in the deep south as in New England).
I wonder to what degree mass media and migration has been wiping out regional dialects? How different would these maps have looked a hundred years ago?
Via John Rennie (who seems to be blogging at Scientific American now) comes this sad story about “Dr. Dino” (aka Kent Hovind) and his dinosaur Bible park:
Escambia County authorities this week locked up a museum building at the theme park on North Palafox Street in Pensacola after Circuit Judge Michael Allen ruled the owners were in contempt of court.
Owners of the park, which shows how dinosaurs may have roamed the Earth just a few thousand years ago, did not obtain a building permit before constructing the building in 2002. They have argued in and out of court that it violates their “deeply held” religious beliefs, and that the church-run facility does not have to obtain permits.
Did I say sad? I meant hilarious. What a bunch of scam artists.
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been three years. Joe Katzman has a roundup of all the good things that resulted, something that the press would rather ignore. And Judith Weiss has more on the subject.
Probably little to no posts this weekend. A guy is coming in tomorrow to do the drywall, and we’re frantically trying to finish up the electrical and plumbing so that the ceiling is ready to be buttoned up and closed.