Martian Art

NASA has a wonderful collection of photos and graphics from the various robotic spacecraft orbiting Mars, or exploring its surface. The photo at right was taken by the Opportunity Rover, two years ago. The collection has multiple pages, so don't forget to flip through them all!

Fetal Consent Bill

Now here's some abortion reform that I could get behind!

New Abortion Bill To Require Fetal Consent

Torture Manual

A few days ago, American forces discovered an Al Qaeda torture manual, complete with illustrations like the one at right (see The Smoking Gun for details). Horrifying, but hardly surprising; we know too well what barbarity the warriors of the "Religion of Peace" are capable of. The news mostly left me frustrated that the lamestream media essentially ignored this story whereas they trumpeted even false stories of American "torture" that was positively loving by comparison. Wretchard says it very well:

The problem with the word "torture" is that it has been so artfully corrupted by some commentators that we now find ourselves at a loss to describe the kinds of activities that the al-Qaeda interrogation manual graphically recommends. Now that the term "torture" has been put in one-to-one correspondence with such admittedly unpleasant activities as punching, sleep deprivation, a handkerchief pulled over one's face and loaded with water, searches by women upon sensitive Islamic men or the disrespectful handling of Korans -- what on earth do we call gouging people's eyes out?

Answer: we call it nothing. My fearless prediction is that not a single human rights organization will seriously take the matter up. There will be no demonstrations against these barbaric practices, often inflicted upon Muslims by other Muslims, in any of the capitals of the world. Not a single committee in the United Nations will be convened nor will any functionary in the European Union lose so much as a night's sleep over it. The word for these activities -- whatever we choose to call it -- will not be spoken.

Read the rest of his post, too. Michell Malkin noticed Wretchard's comments as well, and she also has a great roundup.

Meanwhile, in our upside-down world, Americans will continue to be condemned and even sent to prison for "torture" such as exposing Muslim prisoners to Playboy centerfolds, and Al Qaeda is not condemned for gouging out eyeballs, drilling holes in hands, amputating fingers and genitals, endless beatings, and beheadings.

Makes you want to run right out and vote for a liberal Democrat, doesn't it?

Word of the Day

Screwphemism.

Invented by Ann Althouse as a more specific alternative to "euphemism" when that word is used in circumstances like this one from Andy McCarthy:

Senator Obama says: " It is time to end this war so that we can redeploy our forces to focus on the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and all those who plan to do us harm."Senator Obama, are you proposing that we move U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, where you guys keep saying the "real" War on Terror is? There is also a very good chance that bin Laden and some al Qaeda hierarchy are in Pakistan. When you say "redeploy," are you suggesting that we invade Pakistan?

Folks, let's not let these guys get away with this. By "redeploy," they don't really mean move the troops to where they say al Qaeda is. They don't want to fight al Qaeda. If they wanted to fight al Qaeda, al Qaeda is in Iraq — that is indisputable. Bin Laden has said repeatedly that Iraq is the central battle. You can argue about whether al Qaeda has been in Iraq all along or whether they are there only because we've drawn them there. Reasonable minds differ on that. But however they got there, they're there.

If you really want to fight al Qaeda, you stay in Iraq.

Ms. Althouse says:

There should be a term for this. Maybe there is, but since I don't know what it is, I'm going to call it a screwphemism. This is a euphemism gone bad. Not only do we see through it and know that you're saying the thing you were hoping to downplay, but we know you were trying to manipulate and deceive. So we know what you're really saying, and we mistrust you for not saying it straight.

Oh, she's got that exactly right. What a lovely word she's invented!

Blogger Roller Coaster, Part II

So yesterday I ran into a problem with Google's Blogger service that resulted in me being unable to import posts from my old blog. I was limited to 50 posts per day, according to some information I found online. This morning I tried it again, and sure enough -- it stopped working at exactly 50 posts.

I'm hoping to hear back from the Google folks with a better solution, but meanwhile, I'll be importing a bit each day, starting with the oldest posts. You can see them in the blog archive section at right...

Cal Johnson in Court

Yesterday we got the horrific news about Cal Johnson, a Jamulian accused of some rather extreme abuse of his wife. Today he was arraigned; he plead "not guilty" to all charges:

Cal Johnson, 47, appeared shaken as the prosecutor went through the graphic details of the alleged assault. The 14 charges against him range from rape to assault with a deadly weapon to false imprisonment of his wife. Johnson entered his not-guilty plea through his attorney via a closed circuit television feed in the courtroom.

Another news report had more details:

Deputy District Attorney Claudia Grasso said the chain of events that led to the arrest began a week ago."Throughout the weekend, the defendant was insistent she was having an affair with a family friend," the prosecutor told the judge.At one point, Johnson held the woman's head under water running from a bathtub faucet and threatened her, Grasso said.Later, the defendant confronted his perceived romantic rival, punched him and threatened him, the prosecutor said.Monday, Johnson allegedly threw a computer keyboard and mouse at his wife, and late that night, woke her up and told her they were going to meet the alleged "other man" at a church, Grasso said.Instead, Johnson and his wife ended up in a secluded area and he threatened to kill her, the prosecutor said."The defendant proceeded to stun her over 100 times, called her a bitch and said she was about to die," the prosecutor told the judge.Johnson then sexually assaulted his wife, but she was able to run off and hide until morning, Grasso said.The victim suffered bruises and lacerations all over her body, according to the prosecutor.

It's frightening to think that people capable of such behavior (assuming all the charges are true) walk around amongst the rest of us, and we can't tell. They need to have a big neon sign on their forehead!

If any of my readers know either Cal Johnson or his wife, I'd sure appreciate some insight and background -- I know nothing more than what I read in the sketchy news reports...

Cute Overload

If you like this photo, you'll love the site it came from: Cute Overload.

The Ups and the Downs of Blogger...

Losing the 1,500 or so posts from my old blog is darned annoying. I really don't want to lose them permanently. So I did some research this evening to find out if there was any way to automatically put data into my new blog, despite the fact that Blogger has no "import" feature.

And it turns out that there is way, albeit a highly geekly one. I backed up my old blog every day into a set of XML files. These files can be easily interpreted by software -- and I know how to write programs. And Blogger, bless their pointy little heads, has an "API" -- a way for programs written by geeks like me to interact with a blog. This API allows new posts to be created, and it allows comments to be tacked on -- probably the two most important things I care about. It doesn't handle images, unfortunately. But at least I could recover all that writing!

So I set to work late this afternoon, to write this little program. A couple of hours ago I finished it -- and it works! I uploaded one post, and voila! It appeared, like magic. Then I uploaded 10, and they appeared. Wow! So then I got bold, and uploaded 50 -- and only some of them appeared. Oh, oh. Something screwy going on. Worse, every attempt after that to send more posts failed, though my program got no errors.

This was really weird. I then did what software engineers always do when weird shit happens: I started researching in all the places where someone might complain about this. And sure enough, in a news group dedicated to the Blogger API, I found other users complaining about exactly this problem -- and some explanations from Google. The explanation is that in their never-ending quest to fight spam blogs (an honorable goal that I fully support), they've implemented some stuff to detect automatic posting -- especially high rates of posting to a single blog. They've set a limit of 50 posts per day -- if you go over this, they go into a blocking mode which manifests itself with exactly the symptoms I'm experiencing.

This is a real problem for me, and I've written an email to Google to explain why. In practical terms, this means I can only import 40 or so blog posts a day -- and maybe less if their software counts comments too. This could take me months to import my old blog! I can see why they're doing this, but...their very mechanical approach means that a legitimate use (which importing certainly is!) gets incorrectly tagged as something evil (spamming).

If they don't offer me some sort of solution, I'm afraid I may have to move my blog again, to another provider with a better import or API capability. WordPress is the obvious alternative choice, and I just may end up heading over there.

I sure hope I get a good answer from the folks at Google...

Quote of the Day

The always-excellent libertarian CoyoteBlog first makes this observation:

State unemployment rates for April were released last week by the BLS, and there are now 18 states that have set historical record-low jobless rates in the last year. Here are the 18 states with historical record-low jobless rates…

…California: 4.7% in November 2006
…Arizona: 3.9% in March 2007
…New Mexico: 3.5% in February 2007
…Texas: 4.2% in April 2007…

Then says:

I wonder where our economy would be without those 15 million Mexican immigrants. Negative unemployment?

Heh!

Jamulian Shocker

Cal C. Johnson was arrested yesterday on suspicion of kidnapping, torture, assault with a deadly weapon, spousal abuse, sex assault and making death threats. He's being held on $5M bail, pending arraignment. Cal Johnson is a Jamulian:

An East County man was in prison Thursday and facing a number of criminal charges for allegedly kidnapping his wife and torturing her with a stun gun because he believed she was having an affair.Detectives arrested Cal C. Johnson, 47, in Lemon Grove Wednesday, according to sheriff's officials.Authorities had been looking for the Jamul resident since the previous day, when a passer-by found his nude and terrified wife in a remote area off Proctor Valley Road, near Chula Vista.The woman reported that Johnson had abducted her from her home over the weekend and taken her to Mexico, officials said. He then purportedly waited for nightfall and brought her back into the United States, taking her to the back-country location where she later was found.There, Johnson allegedly began shocking her with the electric self-defense device in an attempt to force her to confess to his false accusations. The woman reported that her husband assaulted her with the stun gun more than 150 times, according to investigators.

Arraignment is scheduled for this afternoon. I don't know anything except what's in the news stories.

If you know anything about the people involved, or the incident, please add your information in the comments.

Estonia Complex

The Moscow Times has an interesting article about President Putin's "Estonia Complex". It does seem like Putin has a very short fuse on all matters Estonian, and perhaps this is why:

Putin seems to have taken personally Estonia's decision to move the memorial to fallen Red Army soldiers. This may be because he sees it not only as an affront to his country but as an affront to the memory of his father. As Putin once told it, his father was betrayed by Estonians during the war.

Before he was first elected in 2000, Putin gave a series of interviews to three Russian journalists for a book called "First Person." In the first chapter, he talks about his father. During the war, he was in an NKVD sabotage battalion operating behind German lines and was sent as part of a group of 28 people to carry out an operation in Estonian territory. They succeeded in blowing up a supply train and were able to hide in the woods, but eventually they ran out of food and turned to the local population. Estonians brought them food but then gave them up to the Germans. Only four people in the group survived, including Putin's father, who hid in a bog, breathing through a reed, to escape detection by Nazi soldiers who were searching for them with dogs.

The article goes on to tell of some instances of Putin's Estonian Complex, and also talks about his warped perceptions of twentyth century Baltic history -- no doubt instilled by his education as a Soviet youth, and high consumption of beer (read the story!).

Jamulian Swimming Champ!

As many of my readers know, I'm not exactly a big sports fan -- I know next to nothing about most sports, and I don't follow them at all. But if I were a sports fan, I wouldn't be expecting to see open water swimming champions from Jamul -- maybe baseball, or soccer, or some other such sport that can be practiced here -- but open water swimming? Nevertheless, I read this morning that Courtney Weigand, a 17 year old girl from Jamul, took fifth place in a national competition:

Courtney Weigand Takes Fifth Place In National Championship USA 25K Swim

In a long grueling swim, seventeen-year-old Courtney Weigand takes on the 2007 USA 25K National Championships at Fort Myers, Florida with a splash and promises to return to an even better repeat performance next year.

Jamul, CA (PRWEB) May 25, 2007 -- Local teenager Courtney Weigand (17), of Jamul, CA, took fifth place at the USA Swimming National Open Water 25K competition May 21, 207, with a finish time of 6:57.33. Courtney swims for North Coast Aquatics (NCA), a local swim club located in La Jolla and Carlsbad and is on the North Coast Aquatics National Team. She is coached by NCA head coach, Jeff Pease.

"I was in third place at the 10.5 mile mark," says Courtney; "but my body and mind didn't cooperate to keep me there."

"It's very mental swim," adds her open water coach and kayaker for the race, John Lapp. "Courtney had never swum a competition farther than 10 miles, and this swim was over 15 miles; but she picked up her pace when she saw the finish line, and was able to take home the fifth place medal."

Courtney, who has been doing open water swims since she was six, was the youngest finisher to place in the 25K race, swimming around Estero Island at Fort Myers, Florida. On June 10, 2007 she heads for the Alcatraz swim, and in December she qualified in the Double Waikiki swim to compete in the 10K Grand Prix Open Water Swim, in Indianapolis, Indiana, a qualifier for the USA Olympic Trials 10K swim in October, which will also be held in Fort Myers, Florida.

"The top two women finishers were 24 and 25 years old, " explains Lapp. "Courtney is a strong swimmer and has a lot of years ahead of her as an elite open water swimmer. She did really well. This was her first 25K swim, and now she knows what to expect. We'll be back next year. She'll do even better!"

Congratulations, Courtney!

Next thing you know, we'll have a Jamulian astronaut...

Quote of the Day

From Jeff Goldstein, at the excellent (if sometimes challenging to understand) Protein Wisdom:

I’ll be here all week. Whereas a pro-democracy Russia? Maybe nyet.

Touché, Jeff...

PowerLink in Jamul?

Reader Michael passed along this article in the San Diego Union Tribune, which reports on a new alternate route proposed for the PowerLink (the huge new power transmission line designed to accommodate San Diego's anticipated growth in energy requirements). As usual, it is frustratingly short of any real information. The graphic in the article is hard to read, but if I've got it right, it shows the route following I-8 west until about Buckman Springs Road, where it heads due south and then makes a sweeping loop to the west, traveling south of Lake Morena, south of Barrett Lake, and then heading north back to I-8, passing between Gaskill Peak and Barrett Lake. That last leg is only a couple miles east of our home.

From one perspective, I can see the attraction in this route -- it passes through some of the least populated areas of San Diego County. However, they are not unpopulated -- and I'm sure the Jamul residents in the area it would pass through are not happy about it.

I've read several debates about whether there's even a need for the PowerLink -- some people question the growth projections, and others claim alternative energy (especially solar) generated within the County would satisfy any growth. Others say the PowerLink is a "must have"; that San Diego's growth will be stunted without it. I have no personal knowledge or expertise on that question, so I have no inclination to take either side of that debate. If, however, you assume (even if just for the sake of argument) that the need for PowerLink is real -- then the darned thing has to be built somewhere. And you know there's nowhere at all it could be built without impacting some group of people.

This is exactly the sort of issue that the power of eminent domain was intended to address. And the sort of messy debate we're currently going through, with lots of shouting and raised blood pressures, is the best way I know of to get it all resolved. It's like making sausages...you really would rather not watch the process unfold, but the end result will most likely be a tasty one...

Joke of the Day

Nutritional Issues...

Two alligators were relaxing in the swamp talking.

The smaller one turned to the bigger one and said, "I can't understand how you kin be so much bigger 'n? me. We're the same age, and we was the same size as kids. I just don't get it."

"Well," said the big 'gator, "What you been eatin', boy?"

"Politicians, same as you," replied the small 'gator.

"Hmm. Well, where do y'all catch 'em?"

"Down 'tother side of the swamp near the parkin' lot by the capitol."

"Same here. Hmm. How do you catch 'em?"

"Well, I crawls up into one of them Lexus and wait fer one to open the car door. Then I jump out, grab 'em on the leg, shake the shit out of 'em, and eat 'em!"

"Ah!" says the big alligator, "I think I see your problem. You ain't gettin' any real nourishment. See, by the time you get done shakin' the shit out of a Politician, there ain't nothin' left but an asshole and a briefcase!"

Thanks, mom...

Ponder the Maunder

Here's a remarkable paper, published on the web, that examines anthropogenic global warming. The most amazing part of the paper is revealed in the introduction:

Welcome to Ponder the Maunder, an extra credit assignment for Honors Earth Science, Portland High School, by Kristen Byrnes of Portland Maine.

This report is a comprehensive look at the global warming issue without financial or political bias. It uses the most updated information provided by scientists and researchers and interjects common sense, an important component missing from the global warming debate.

And then Kristen opens with this:

I will demonstrate that the Earth’s warming climate is a result of natural variance and that man made changes in the warming climate in the last 40 years are negligible at best. I will insert pieces of the puzzle from new scientific studies that were not available or were ignored in previous global warming studies. I add a possible piece of the puzzle, nuclear weapons testing in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, that may have made a small contribution to cooling at that time. After reviewing numerous scientific studies and observing data, it is clear that the theory that “man made increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide are causing global warming” is not likely.

It's longish, but well worth reading in its entirety...

Thanks to Simi L. for passing this along...

Baker's Dozen of Doozies...

Check out these amazing photos! Click any of the small images to get a larger version...

Tip of the hat to Jim M. for sending them along...

Slide Rule Collection

If you're wondering where my slide rule collection went to, here it is.

Big Change!

You may have noticed that the blog looks much different!

Due to major technical difficulties, I have switched from using Pebble (open source blog software) on my own server to using Blogger (free software and hosting) from Google.

So far I have not figured out any way to move all my old posts (or photos) from the old blog to the new one -- so for now, at least, I'm simply starting over...

Web Site of the Day

Part of my daily reading routine is a stop at Cute Overload to see what new delights have been posted. Every day, several new photos, audio clips, or video clips of animals are posted. “Cute Overload” is a very apt name for this site, and if you love animals, you’ll find it irresistible…