Richard Oppel, Jr. in the New York Times implies that the deadlock on a prime minister for Iraq may have finally been broken. What's not clear is whether Jawad al-Maliki, the new nominee, will actually be a good choice. The Times reports that he is a Shiite hardliner.
On one hand, if the deadlock is broken, that's good. If Maliki is a religious-based hardliner, that may not be good.
We'll see.
To all the nice folks who have linked to me. I thank you for linking me. (Folks who have blogrolled me have been blogrolled in return and are not included in this list.)
The Anchoress, I'm Glad you liked the title. That is high praise.
The Moderate Voice, Twice, and I thank you for that.
As always, if you linked and I missed it, please send me a note and I will add you.
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That was my first thought when I read this headline: "Emotional Wiring Different In Men And Women." I mean who hasn't experienced that first hand? But it turns out they have actually found that men and women have completely different neurological connections in a little almond shaped cluster of neurons. The area processes how men and women experience fear and aggression. Men are wired to respond by heightened awareness of areas that process information coming from the outside world, like visual and motor actions. Women instead are wired for heightened awareness of internal processes and regulation of heart rate, etc.
That of course fits in with the theory that men and women evolved with different roles. Men as the hunter/defender and women as the nurturer and child protector.
Or it could be that we really are from different planets. Which would explain a lot more.
Michael Totten's final chapter in his day trip to Iraq is up. It's about cigarettes, borders and taxi drivers. And quite a lot more. Take a look.
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We here at Blue Crab Boulevard go out of our way every day to find news that really, really matters. In that spirit, we brought you news on telephone calling and telecommuting.
And now we have the topper. Carpentry.
An Oakland, California carpenter was arrested when the homeowner he was building bookshelves for returned early. It seems the itinerant woodworker was letting it all hang out. He did not have a stitch of clothing on.
He told officers he stripped before crawling under the client's house to do electrical work because he didn't want to soil his clothes, police said.
Honniball said Thursday that working au naturel gave him a better range of motion and that a skilled craftsman can work clothing — and injury — free.
We here at Blue Crab Boulevard suspect Mr. Honniball (we swear we are not making up his name) is not quite telling the truth here. He's been arrested three other times for the exact same offense.
We have never, ever done carpentry in the nude. Honest.
We have grown attached to portions of our anatomy and prefer they stay attached.
Crime, Weird Stuff | Gaius | Comments Off
A CIA officer has been fired after being caught leaking classified information to the media. The officer admitted he had given information to and held unauthorized discussions with the media.
WTF is with the CIA?
UPDATE: WaPo coverage.
UPDATE: Another take on it.
Legal, Media | Gaius | Comments (7)
CBS breathlessly announces they have an exclusive interview with a retired CIA official who denounces the Bush administration. They release lots and lots of juicy tidbits to get a lot of buzz generated.
And, once again, they fail to disclose that the person being interviewed has a new book to sell.
WTF is with the CIA?
It's ice cream news day! Ben and Jerry's is apologizing for introducing a new flavor called "Black and Tan". Now for those of you who think a black and tan is a harmless name for a mixture of Guinness and beer, you are about to gain a factoid. The name Black and Tan originated as a nickname for a para-military police auxiliary recruited by the British during Ireland's war for independence. They were noted for their brutality and many people in Ireland still hate them and what they stood for.
Ben and Jerry's was likely thinking of the drink, not the militia. No word if the ice cream in question is stout/beer flavored. (Side note; a guy I once knew actually made a beer float – he dropped a scoop of ice cream into a beer. He said is was absolutely horrible. I didn't even try it – it looked bad enough!)
And ice cream flavoring happens to be our next subject. A Portuguese shop will begin selling up to 60 flavors of ice cream when it opens. In all sorts of interesting flavors. Like grilled sardine, cod, shrimp and tuna. The owner is the son of a man who holds a place in the Guinness book of World Records for inventing the most flavors of ice cream. (See, these stories are too tied together!) The original store in Venezuela serves over 700 flavors including trout and the ever popular garlic.
I wonder if they have Guinness flavor?
In today's Opinion Journal, Daniel Henninger takes a look at the blogosphere and asks, "Are you people all crazy?" Well, not exactly, but close. He points out that there are some very odd things happening out there in interweb space. The thing he worries about most is disinhibition. (We've mentioned before that the lack of non-verbal cues leads some people to go completely over the top when blogging or commenting).
Example: The Web site currently famous for enabling and aggregating millions of personal blogs is called MySpace.com. If you opened its "blogs" page this week, the first thing you saw was a blogger's video of a guy swilling beer and sticking his middle finger through a car window. Right below that were two blogs by women in their underwear.
In our time, it has generally been thought bad and unhealthy to "repress" inhibitions. Spend a few days inside the new world of personal blogs, however, and one might want to revisit the repression issue.
The human species has spent several hundred thousand years sorting through which emotions and marginal neuroses to keep under control and which to release. Now, with a keyboard, people overnight are "free" to unburden and unhinge themselves continuously and exponentially. One researcher quotes the entry-page of a teenage girl's blog: "You are now entering my world. My pain. My mind. My thoughts. My emotions. Enter with caution and an open mind."
An interesting thought. Are we, in fact, losing our inhibitions and, by extension, some of our civility and and ability to control ourselves? Well, I think the answer is: some people are. Henninger cites some of the rank behavior on some comment threads. There are people who obviously act as if they are out of control. Now whether they would continue that behavior away from the computer is another thing altogether.
At the risk of enabling, does the Internet mean that all the rest of us are being made unwitting participants in the personal and political life of, um, crazy people? As populist psychiatry, maybe this is a good thing; the Web allows large numbers of people to contribute to others' therapy. It takes a village.
But researchers note that the isolation of Web life results in many missed social cues. It is similar to the experience of riding an indoor roller coaster, what is known in that industry as a "dark ride." This dark ride could be a very long one.
Well, I think it may be a bit to soon to predict the end of the world as we know it. (Sorry, I'll bet you could hear R.E.M. just then couldn't you?) But I think Henninger has a valid point here. He may also be struggling to grasp the whole concept of the blogosphere.
Read the whole thing.
(Hollyweird) APRIL 21 – Legendary director George Lucas today announced the Michael Moore will headline an all-star cast in the next Star Wars installment. Using a working title of "Episode 7: Revenge of the Clueless", the project has already begun filming near area 57. Working in deep cover, our photographer from the Magic 8-Ball Photography and Septic Pumping, Inc. has obtained an exclusive picture of Moore in his new role.
In today's Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer channels Blue Crab Boulevard. The only difference in our opinions is that he, of course, gets paid for writing his!
We've always had discontented officers in every war and in every period of our history. But they rarely coalesce into factions. That happens in places such as Hussein's Iraq, Pinochet's Chile or your run-of-the-mill banana republic. And when it does, outsiders (including the United States) do their best to exploit it, seeking out the dissident factions to either stage a coup or force the government to change policy.
That kind of dissident party within the military is alien to America. Some other retired generals have found it necessary to rise to the defense of the administration. Will the rest of the generals, retired or serving, now have to declare which camp they belong to?
It is precisely this kind of division that our tradition of military deference to democratically elected civilian superiors was meant to prevent. Today it suits the antiwar left to applaud the rupture of that tradition. But it is a disturbing and very dangerous precedent that even the left will one day regret.
Which is what we have been arguing all along. This is deadly ground for the left to tread. But in their blind quest to pull down the administration they will not see the danger.
And we do all this for free!
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The Washington Post picked up the story about the LA Times' suspension of Michael Hiltzik's blog. That's probably an all-time record for a mainstream publication to notice an event in the blogosphere. We know Patterico did an amazing job of laying out the evidence and Hiltzik helped things along with his non-denial denial. However, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard still shamelessly, and with no merit whatsoever, claim credit. Because of our damning photographic evidence.
And because we're quacking lunatics, too.
The New York Times is reporting today that the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, is announcing a tough, new crackdown on companies that hire illegal immigrants. He then solemnly announced the government had designed and built a working flying pig and has plans to aggressively begin installing immense amounts of ice in Hell.
Well, that's the gist of it. Lot's of really tough talk, about 1,100 illegals arrested, most of whom are probably already free and seven "mid-level" managers (read: designated sacrificial lambs) nabbed. And it took more than a year of work to catch them. By our calculations here at Blue Crab Boulevard, tha job will be completed in a year. That year would be 4754.
Stop with the window dressing and build a fence. Now. Then start your crackdown.
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Noel Sheppard has a devastating takedown of the media in the American Thinker today. He points out that Anthony Zinni, former general and current book pimp, has been widely quoted as saying he saw no evidence that Iraq had WMD.
One small problem; in this day and age, with all the research tools available to non-media types, it took about two minutes to come up with a briefing Zinni made to congress in 2000 in which he very emphatically stated that, "Iraq either possessed or was aggressively pursuing WMD."
Which of course makes Zinni's current statement a flat lie. Not a misstatement, not an error. A lie.
The media persists in conveniently forgetting the past when it does not fit the current agenda they are pushing. They continue to lose readership because people remember things better than the media does.
Yesterday it was widely reported that Harry Reid was taking the president to task for not going it alone on Iran. This would be the same Harry Reid who criticized Bush for his unilateral actions.
I suspect what we're seeing here is a case of Malevolent Mendacity.
Go read the whole thing
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans police confiscated guns found in homes. While it would be defensible to take them so as not to leave them lying around for looters to find, they also took them from people. The NRA sued and the police agreed to return the weapons. But only if the owner has a receipt or a sworn affidavit with the serial number.
Now, logically, since everyone pretty well knows that records would be unlikely to survive or be legible, how the heck are people supposed to be able to meet these standards? Since at this point, only about seven of the 700 or so guns have been returned, it's fair to say almost nobody. On top of which, if you ask for your gun back, the police do a background check on you. Effectively, the police have gotten away with a) seizing legally owned guns, b) seizing property without a warrant and c) performing additional checks on citizens who try to reclaim property.
The police say "some' of those guns were found to have been used in crimes. How many? This is more terrible response from a department that already showed it was badly run.
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