Blog Heap o'Links for December 2011

Iran's navy does not have the size for a sustained physical blockade of the Strait, but does have mine-laying and missile capability to wreak some havoc, analysts said. ... the Bahrain-based U.S. Fifth Fleet is nearby and keeping a close eye on Iran's activities in the Strait....

Two northern Arizona parents have been arrested after photos of their children allegedly being abused were posted on Facebook. ... children, ages 2 years and 10 months... bound with duct tape around their wrists and ankles. Their mouths were taped shut, and one of the children was hung upside down by some exercise equipment.... "The photos depicted the children's faces in sheer terror," says Cmdr. Gilliland....

A Swedish woman's recent toiling in her garden turned up a rather unexpected harvest when she pulled a carrot out of the ground 'wearing' the wedding ring she had lost back in 1995. ... “Our daughter Anna was at home at the time and she heard an almighty scream from the garden...."

t was Google co-founder Sergey Brin who warned that the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act "would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world." Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman argue that the bills give the Feds unacceptable "power to censor the Web."

But these companies have yet to roll out the heavy artillery.

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you'll know they're finally serious.

a student in UK has actually converted 0.01% of the Wikipedia encyclopedia into a printed book [um... huh?]

A girl who was swept away in the Indian Ocean tsunami seven years ago said Friday she broke down in tears this week after tracking down her parents, who had long lost hope of finding her alive. The 15-year-old showed up in Aceh province’s hard-hit town of Meulaboh earlier this week, saying that not long after the wave hit she was “adopted” by a woman who called her Wati and forced her to beg, sometimes beating her and keeping her in the streets until 1 a.m. When the teen stopped bringing in money, she was told, “Go ahead, leave ... go find your parents then, they’re in Meulaboh.”

Sam Schmid, an Arizona college student believed to be brain dead and poised to be an organ donor, miraculously recovered just hours before doctors were considering taking him off life support.

...check out this speech [Newt Gingrich] gave to the NRA convention back in April. If you don’t have time for the full 26-minute speech, watch from around the 5:18 mark to about the 14:30 mark

‘He's talking to me just as calmly as I'm sitting here talking. ‘He told me: “I've been shot three times, my fingers are in the bullet holes, the police are going to take care of the kids...."'
[via Daily Caller, h/t to Vic at Ace of Spades

An effort by GoDaddy customers to boycott the domain registrar over its support for Hollywood-backed copyright legislation has sparked allegations of foul play.... technical barriers to prevent its customers from leaving. GoDaddy lost over 70,000 domains last week.... denies any wrongdoing... On December 23, GoDaddy partially caved, announcing that it was no longer backing SOPA, but stopping short of saying it will oppose the legislation.... [Note: This site is hosted on GoDaddy. For now.]

Just as Easter ranks below Kwanzaa in the estimation of the Manchurian Moonbat, Christmas can’t hold a candle to Ramadan, about which Obama is evidently better informed, and which he obviously takes more seriously.... [Video contrasts Obama's statements. Comment: The evil that SCOAMFs do live after them! We just hope, not very long.]

(ABC News) — What’s the trait you most deplore in yourself, and the trait you most deplore in others?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Laziness.

Narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by dramatic, emotional behavior, which is in the same category as antisocial and borderline personality disorders. Narcissistic personality disorder symptoms [listed] Although some features of narcissistic personality disorder may seem like having confidence or strong self-esteem, it's not the same. Narcissistic personality disorder crosses the border of healthy confidence and self-esteem into thinking so highly of yourself that you put yourself on a pedestal. In contrast, people who have healthy confidence and self-esteem don't value themselves more than they value others.

Obama's record doesn't match his rhetoric on his accomplishments. [Video]

My Magnificent Seven. Some bust myths. Others highlight a reality the media is ignoring. Enjoy! ... 7. America’s debt picture is worse than you think.....

Hughes, a local union president, is pitching the idea that school board membership be limited to people who “have worked in the education field,” because the issues at hand are “so complex” and too complicated for average citizens.

A new technology called ShotSpotter enables law enforcement officials to precisely and instantaneously locate shooters, and it has been quietly rolling out across America. From Long Island, N.Y., to San Francisco, Calif., more than 60 cities in the U.S. have been leveraging ShotSpotter to make their streets safer.

Smart meters should come in handy when the EPA inflicts its self-granted mandate to force every aspect of our lives to comply with obscure bureaucratic conceptions of “sustainability.” [Video]

The Bartlesville Municipal Authority heard a presentation by Water Utilities Director Mike Hall about a proposed automated meter reading project.

Holder had authorized the FBI to provide the explosives to McVeigh and Nichols in conjunction with a Clinton administration undercover operation

Using e-mails and handwritten notes acquired in that lawsuit, Trentadue demonstrated in his correspondence to Patrick Leahy that then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder had engineered a scheme to sidetrack any investigation into his brother’s death in order to “deflect congressional oversight and media attention.”

What kind of disastrous economic policy results in the death by starvation of up to 3 million people in a nation with the population of Texas?

Fairey “used a collage of scenes from the Arab Spring to Moscow to Occupy Wall Street as a backdrop, images he said shows the dramatic accumulation of these global protests,” TIME wrote… TIME selected a [single] dead-beat American credit-junkie to symbolize the brave souls who risked everything in their struggle for freedom…

A cat that went missing in New Mexico while on a trip with a man bicycling across the country to raise money for animal shelters has been found. Twenty-one-year-old Ted Brady and his kitten, Pikachu, had been on a two-month bike trip that began Oct. 19 in Bartlesville, Okla.

Researchers have discovered an elaborate 44,000-year-old Neanderthal house in Molodova, eastern Ukraine, made from mammoth bones, delicately decorated with carvings and pigments.... suggests the early human ancestors settled in areas where they built structures to live for extended periods of time....

Less than two weeks after finding out about the tumor, the McCartneys decided to go ahead with open fetal surgery, a procedure that had been successfully completed fewer than 20 times worldwide. It would be the first time the operation would be conducted at Texas Children's Hospital. But with Macie's heart getting weaker by the day and excess fluid building up around it, there wasn't much time to deliberate.

One devout libertarian told me recently that candidate Paul "believes in all the things I do about the menace of government control, and he's a defender of the Constitution—I just intend to take what I like about him." The speaker, educated and highly accomplished in his field (music), is a committed internationalist whose views on American power are polar opposites of those his candidate espouses. No matter. Having tuned out all else that candidate has said—with, yes, perfect consistency—it was enough for him that Dr. Paul upheld libertarian values. This admirer is representative of a fair number of people now flocking to the Paul campaign or thinking of doing so.

$45.1 Trillion:
Total Federal Spending Proposed By Obama’s FY2012 Budget Through 2021. (OMB, 9/1/11)

$24.0 Trillion:
Projected Federal Debt In 2021 Due To Obama’s Binge Spending. (OMB, 9/1/11)

$15.1 Trillion:
Current National Debt ($15,073,380,701,589.57). (U.S. Treasury Department, Accessed 12/6/11)

$9.1 Trillion:
Amount Obama’s FY2012 Budget Would Add To The Debt Through FY2021. (OMB, 9/1/11)

[h/t The Conservatory]

After he signed the omnibus into law Friday, the White House released a concurrent signing statement saying Obama will object to portions of the legislation on constitutional grounds. Signing statements are highly controversial, and their legality is disputed.

18 Last night, my daughter just walked into the living room and said, "Dad, cancel my allowance immediately. Throw out all my clothes, take away my TV, my stereo, my iPhone, and my iPod. Please take all of my jewelry to the Salvation Army or give it to Goodwill. Then sell my car, my horse, and laptop. Take my front door key away from me, throw me out of the house and rent my room out. You must disown me and never talk to me again. And don't forget to write me out of your will and leave my share to my sisters."

Well, she didn't put it quite like that. She actually said...

“Dad, I have decided to work for Obama's re-election campaign”.

Posted by: real joe at December 23, 2011 07:33 AM

Paranoid Personality Types — We're not crazy. Those are just Zionist lies spread by the CIA and utility companies. -Ace

posted a photo of his 1-year-old daughter bound in duct tape on Facebook... hands bound by blue tape. Another strip of tape covered her mouth. A caption with the photo read, "This is wut happens wen my baby hits me back."

The Hare Krishna temple in Vanløse (Copenhagen) was attacked by young Muslims on December 6. It started when young Muslim terrorists threw stones, and later, armed with clubs, tried to break into the temple.... The temple is now urging its supporters not to wear the distinctive orange robes near the temple to avoid physical attacks.... The reason for the attack in Copenhagen may have been that a Muslim motorist was annoyed that a Hare Krishna follower criticized his awkward parking.... When unknown assailants tried to set fire to a mosque in Brønshøj, it was in almost all media. The Muslim attack on Hare Krishna has still not been mentioned anywhere in the mainstream media.

"If you want to learn how badly your public lands are managed, just look at the wild horse program," says Leigh, who has closely followed and challenged the roundups for two years. "It's not working at all." This is one thing on which wild horse advocates and ranchers can agree. [Photo series from Hughes Ranch, Bartlesville]

Vaclav Havel, a dissident playwright jailed by Communists who became Czech president and a symbol of peace and freedom after leading the bloodless "Velvet Revolution," died at 75 on Sunday. ... Just six months after completing his last jail sentence, Havel led hundreds of thousands of protesters in Prague's cobblestone streets in a peaceful uprising in November 1989 that ended Soviet-backed rule. Just over a month later, he was installed as president in Prague Castle. Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said on Twitter: "Vaclav Havel was one of the greatest Europeans of our age. His voice for freedom paved the way for a Europe whole and free."

In an historic hearing in the federal courthouse in Manhattan on Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge George Daniels said he planned to issue a ruling in the coming days declaring that Iran shares in the responsibility for the 9/11 terror attacks.

“The extensive record submitted to this court, including fact witnesses and expert testimony, is satisfactory to this court,” Judge Daniels said. The court “accepts as true” the various allegations of the plaintiffs and their experts, he declared, and “will issue an order” in the coming days that Iran bears legal responsibility for providing “material support” to the 9/11 plotters and hijackers.

The $2 million barrier has been broken, with Nicolas Cage’s CGC 9.0 copy of Action Comics #1 now holding the all time auction record.

[Portrait of the first black American Senator and Congressmen]

People with a certain gene trait are known to be more kind and caring than people without it, and strangers can quickly tell the difference

Estimated bare minimum cost of Mooch’s impatience: $100,000. Good thing for her it’s someone else’s money.

Eric Holder is an attorney general who is specifically horrid. Unfortunately, his sheer inadequacy allows him to fit in perfectly with this particular president’s cabinet.

Holder fails at what should be the first qualification for his job, namely in how he promotes depraved behavior instead of freaking stopping it. It may offer precisely zero comfort, but imagine how much more damage he would inflict if he was any good.

The only present relief is knowing that someone with bad ideas is bad at making things happen, although Holder has managed to inflict quite enough bloodshed even with his astoundingly limited skill set.

Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone's GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan. [h/t War News Updates]

Iraq War's 'Last Casualty' (The 4,483rd American) Is Mourned

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is rebranding itself to try to lose the negative "baggage" associated with the larger terror organization's identity, according to a senior Arab diplomat who says the Yemeni-based group is trying to attract more foreign fighters to its cause.

One of the last of the founding fathers of comic books, writer/editor/artist/publisher Joe Simon, died yesterday at the age of 98… first editor at Marvel Comics… [co-created] Captain America with artist Jack Kirby… [and] Guardian and the Newsboy Legion, the Boy Commandos, and Manhunter… created the romance comic… one of a handful of creators without whom the American comic book field would not be as we know it today….

Merely having a state medical marijuana card, BATFE insists, means that you fall afoul of Sect. 922(g) of the federal criminal code (from the 1968 federal Gun Control Act), which says that anyone “who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” is basically barred from possessing or receiving guns or ammo (with the bogus assertion that such possession implicates interstate commerce, which courts will pretty much always claim it does).

Time lapse animation of the demolition of 660 W. Division, one of the last remaining buildings within the Cabrini-Green housing projects in Chicago.

For the first time on record, the Chinese Communist party has lost all control, with the population of 20,000 in this southern fishing village now in open revolt.

The last of Wukan’s dozen party officials fled on Monday after thousands of people blocked armed police from retaking the village, standing firm against tear gas and water cannons.

What the SOPA legislation allows government to do is to consign all those foolish “pulldown” requests to the dustbin, and simply to freeze the entire offending site on the basis, not even necessarily of that site having reproduced some copyright-infringing (in their judgments, of course) material, but simply to have linked to it. Once a complaint is made, there is a presumption of guilt, and the matter drops out of their hands, to be litigated in the usual ways.

Such a process clearly works against the small, independent blogger, and provides a lot of potentially remunerative busywork for lawyers. It also provides a lot of potential for professional and semi-professional “offense chasers” to get kickbacks (or referrals, if you prefer) for discovering transgressions, and for ideologically driven offense chasers to tie up sites whose views offend them personally with nuisance lawsuits.

It’s time for a different type of redneck joke. Rednecks know who they are, and have been very tolerant of mockery, and they don’t require the jokes to come from another redneck, lest you be killed.

Take a look at these and ask yourself, am I a redneck?

You might be a redneck if: It never occurred to you to be offended by the phrase, ‘One nation under God.’ ....