That Dubya is so Duu-uumb

Here the stupid cowboy whipped up a hurricane just to kill black folks, and ended up missing the target!

Statistics released by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals suggest that fewer than half of the victims of Hurricane Katrina were black, and that whites died at the highest rate of all races in New Orleans.

We'll be standing by to see this trumpeted in the press, followed by Louis Farrakhan's apology.

No. Really. I'm a human.

A little peek behind the curtain at Buttle's World:

I just noticed that the reason I was having to do word verification for each posting is that Blogger's anti-spam robots thought this blog had some of the characteristics of a spam blog.

As with many powerful tools, blogging services can be both used and abused. The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.

To be fair, they say that the algorithm is inherently fuzzy, and they apologize for the false positive. A human will soon review this blog and it is to that human that this particular post is most directed.

Hi there. I'm a person.

I have to admit that there's a part of me that is flattered that some software opines that the blog is irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical. I hope it was mostly the latter.

And since everybody has been so considerate in their comments, I'm turning off word verification and moderation. Keep it civilized, or I'll turn it back on.

Mightier than the Pen

How a reporter decided to become a Marine.

A year ago, I was at my sister's house using her husband's laptop when I came across a video of an American in Iraq being beheaded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The details are beyond description here; let's just say it was obscene. At first I admit I felt a touch of the terror they wanted me to feel, but then I felt the anger they didn't. We often talk about how our policies are radicalizing young men in the Middle East to become our enemies, but rarely do we talk about how their actions are radicalizing us. In a brief moment of revulsion, sitting there in that living room, I became their blowback.

That's not the whole story, of course.

A classified ad you won't see at the New York Times

"Wanted: Fact checker."

Roberta Smith's review of the Pixar MOMA show (free registration required) includes this howler:

Farther along, you can see the many looks and personalities that were bruited about for Eve, the ultimately severe German-accented action-suit designer in "The Incredibles." Said to be inspired by the designer Edith Head, she also looks a lot like Linda Hunt, who provided her voice.

Two easily verifiable errors in one paragrah! I propose that we start calling Brad Bird "Linda" around work. Re-dubbing every copy of The Incredibles to change Edna's name to Eve may prove cost-prohibitive, however.

Then there's this:

Informed comments abounded. "See that carpet?" a man said knowingly to the woman standing next to him. "That's Andy's room." He was referring to the image of a blue and gray hooked rug covering the revolving stage, which is also found in the "Toy Story" films, on the floor of the bedroom of Woody's and Buzz's owner. Little did he know that the weave of this version had been mathematically calibrated so that it would remain legible when the zoetrope was moving at its 25 m.p.h. pace.

Now, I got to see the zoetrope before it was packed up, and I will testify in any court that it was going exactly 0 mph. It's very heavy, and has no wheels under it. Oh, yes, the turntable spins but, as anybody who made it through Grade School knows, you don't measure rotation in mph. (It turns at 60 rpm, with 18 facets providing an 18 fps, frames per second, animation.)

She also claims that there's a second zoetrope at the Ghibli Museum in Japan. This will come as news both to the folks at Ghibli, and to my friends who built this one-off for the MOMA exhibit.

I knew the review was going south when she peppered it twice with the word "corporate" used as an epithet. Am I grousing about her opinion? Well, a little, since I can't take seriously an art review written by someone who thinks that real art is art nobody is willing to pay for. Hey, she's entitled to her opinion. Not everybody loves Pixar films, and I have no problem with that.

What I'm really grousing about is the high-school-newspaper level of editing. If she ever wants to get a job with a real newspaper, she may want to learn to fact check.

Or take out an ad for someone to do it for her.

Bad News for the Moonbats

Check out this Iraq Election Roundup.

Sergeant Major James Keesee describes the atmosphere in Mosul as that of a "large playground."

I mean, if you're a Jihadi or a Democrat, those words have got to sting.

Scamcell Research Update

The South Korean scientist, Woo Suk Hwang, has admitted that his stem cells were fake, and has withdraw his paper. Read about it at AP News and ABC News. (Hat tip: The Fact Is)