Saturday, May 16, 2009

Around the Moronosphere in 60 Minutes 5/16/09

Flopping Aces - Greta Van Susteren Mocks Obama - When scientologists find your beliefs wacky you may have a problem.

Little Green Footballs - No More War - War on Drugs that is. Look for legalization talk to start seriously in the next year or two

Patterico's Pontifications - The Left's Latest Conspiracy Theory - "On Wednesday, Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, claimed that the Bush administration authorized Egypt to waterboard top al Qaeda camp commander Ibn al Shaykh al Libi in order to generate phony intelligence connecting Iraq and al Qaeda, as a pretext for the invasion.

The story took a day to go from a lefty blog to CNN. Wilkerson told the cable net, “I couldn’t walk into a courtroom and prove this to anybody, but I’m pretty sure it’s fairly accurate.”

PRETTY sure it's FAIRLY accurate. What kind of standard is that for a news organization to run with?

Powerline - Kolder on waterboarding - The problem with trying to legally define torture

Slashdot - When does it become OK to make a game about a war? - "The cancellation of Six Days in Fallujah seems to have stirred up almost as much debate as its original announcement. Given the popularity of World War II games, it seems clear that the main concern about a game focusing on modern war events relates to how recently they happened."

You know if this game were done in a historically accurate fashion it could become the new "The World at War". Remember that series?

The Belmont Club - Bits and Pieces - McClatchy reports the Taliban are abandoning guerilla tactics and going head to head with Pakistani security forces.

Generally it is a losing proposition for irregular forces to engage in a traditional battle with a regular army. Overconfidence or desperation?

Caption This - Morbidly Heavy Metal

D=S - Olivia Munn Interviews Sasha Grey - MMMMMMMM Olivia

Innocent Bystanders - Process Engines - Very cool video. watch it.

Invincible Armor - Leon Panetta Calls Pelosi Liar - "Swamp cleaner Pelosi is mired in lies and has totally screwed the pooch after telling the nation that the CIA lied to her. Leon is not happy that America's Nanny lied about the agency he heads just to cover her Ms California butt."

Sweasel - Pretty picture of the Swine Flu

The Other McCain - Why the Keynseians are wrong - "More importantly, the demand-side obsession gets causality backward. Economic growth boosts consumer confidence, not the other way around. Discussion of the consumer "mood" is therefore irrelevant to the project at hand: Developing government policy to promote recovery in the wake of a massive market collapse."

Word Around the Net - Someone shares my complaints about Star Trek - although overall they liked the movie while I felt it was irredeemably ruined by these flaws.

Other Stuff:

Al-Jazeera - Pakistani forces raid Taliban bases - Pakistan's military has launched fresh attacks on suspected Taliban positions in the northwest of the country as thousands more civilians flee the conflict zone.

At least 47 suspected Taliban fighters have been killed in raids by Pakistani forces across the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) in the last 24 hours, the military said on Saturday.

somehow I have the feeling that when we add up all these casualties it's going to be a lot like a vote in Seattle, only instead of more votes than voters we will find that there were more casualties than there were people in SWAT

BBC - Sri Lanka army "defeats rebels" - "The Sri Lankan president has declared a military victory over the Tamil Tigers after 26 years of bloody civil war."

CNN - New search engines aspire to supplement Google - New search engines that are popping up across the Web strive to make searches faster, smarter, more personal and more visually interesting.

Some sites, like Twine and hakia, will try to personalize searches, separating out results you would find interesting, based on your Web use. Others, like Searchme, offer iTunes-like interfaces that let users shuffle through photos and images instead of the standard list of hyperlinks. Kosmix bundles information by type -- from Twitter, from Facebook, from blogs, from the government -- to make it easier to consume.

Dawn - Pakistan presses military offensive as thousands flee - "PESHAWAR: The military Saturday pressed its offensive against Taliban militants in the northwest of the country after tens of thousands more people fled the conflict zone."

Fox News - Pennsylvania Democrats Unsure Whether to Embrace Arlen Specter or Toss Him Back - We don't want him you keep him

France 24 - Sarkozy pledges 12 million euros for Swat valley refugees

LA Times - Panetta fires back at Pelosi on interrogations - The CIA director says agency records show that officials truthfully briefed the House speaker in 2002. He also urges CIA employees to tune out the uproar.

NY Times Books - Two that seem interesting - Weight of a Mustard Seed - "...it’s a relief to read Wendell Steavenson’s “Weight of a Mustard Seed,” a masterly and elegantly told story that weaves together the Iraqi past and present. Her subject is Kamel Sachet, an Iraqi general and war hero who came to despise Hussein, and was finally executed in 1999. Steavenson, a journalist who has written for many English and American publications, set herself a difficult task: Sachet died long before she ever set foot in Iraq. The country began to implode soon after she arrived in 2003, making it even harder to piece together his life. But she succeeds, and makes his story a powerful inquiry into the moral question at the heart of Hussein’s Iraq and so many other dictatorships: Why did people go along with it? Did any resist? And if so, what made them different?

and

Horse Soldiers - In late 2001, small units of elite Special Forces soldiers, working with C.I.A. operatives and Air Force bombers, joined forces with Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance to defeat the country’s ruling Taliban. They didn’t need tanks and 100,000 troops. They rode into battle on horses.

Doug Stanton tells the story of that brief shining moment in “Horse Soldiers,” a rousing, uplifting, Toby Keith-singing piece of work.

NY Times - In Detainee Furor, a Rare Dent in Pelosi Armor

Ex-Governor of Alabama Loses Again in Court
- when Karl Rove sets you up you stay set up

Washington Post - No Waterboarding Used in Questioning On Al-Qaeda Ties to Iraq, Officials Say - "Senior intelligence officials yesterday acknowledged that two al-Qaeda operatives, Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, had been questioned about alleged links between al-Qaeda and Iraq when the two men underwent CIA interrogation in 2002 and 2003. But the officials denied that the questioning on Iraq had included waterboarding."

Algebra For All: The Push For Higher Math - Educators Are Challenging the Idea That Numerical Ability Must Come Naturally

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