Grim Milestone Alert

American casualties in Iraq have reached 2500. This grim milestone is pretty grim, as it is the grimmest grim milestone since the last grim milestone, which was pretty grim in itself compared to the slightly less grim grim milestone that grimly preceded it.

Yes, I know there's nothing funny about casualties, but it's the MSM that turns them into a bad joke with its ghoulish accounting.

Chernobyl Sur le Mer

The Russians have announced that they are building the world's first floating nuclear power plant-- assuming that one ignores several hundred submarines, cruisers, aircraft carriers, freighters, and ice breakers that have been built in the last fifty years.

The idea is actually a very good one and were this being built by the Americans or British I'd be all for it, but given the Russian nuclear safety record and that serving on Soviet submarines used to be called radio-active duty, I'd stay upstream from this baby.

Blinkered BBC

Two people in the north of England have been arrested on terror charges and the BBC has leapt boldly into action to display its lack of curiosity.

A youth, 16, and a man, 21, have been charged with conspiracy to murder and conspiring to cause public nuisance by using poisons or explosives.

"Youth" and "man" are all we get, but given that explosives and poisons are involved it isn't hard to guess at least one detail these two have in common-- especially when this tidbit appears in the story:

Police say they are aware operations "of this nature" can cause public concern and have been meeting religious and civic leaders in Dewsbury and Bradford to keep them informed of events.

"Religious and civic leaders" and the BBC can't figure out what that common factor is. Funny that.

Iran and the Ostrich Syndrome

It's 1933 all over again.

Confirmation

Power Line has printed the profile of Jeff Goldstein, the author of Protein Wisdom, Power Line's Blog of the Week.

Jeff Goldstein is a writer living in Colorado. Before the birth of his son, he spent most of his time teaching at a private university and writing short fiction. These days, he finds himself doing a lot of very simple shape puzzles and (when his mind wanders) looking for instances of subversively placed anti-capitalist, pro-progressive agitprop in shows like "Higglytown Heroes."

I knew it! I'm not the only one who saw the truth about Higglytown Heroes! I'm not paranoid! I'm not!

Tres Bien

25 Jihadists gaoled in France for plotting to blow up the Eiffel Tower.

Reinventing the Door

From the department of pointless inventions comes this automatic door from Japan that is made from a series of parallel slats that open just enough to form the outline of the person coming through.

I predict that it will last five days before it's bashed out of all recognition by people crashing into the thing.

Future Kitchen

One of the planned sections for Tales of Future Past is on kitchens of the future, so we were excited when the renowned architect Zaha Hadid (no, we've never heard of him either) created the ultimate high-tech kitchen for Dupont and Ernestomeda.

The exquisite Z. Island is equipped with numerous futuristic features such as embedded heating membranes, touch control panels, sound activators and scent dispensers, LED lighting and a multimedia entertainment system, including a flat screen and an Apple Macintosh Mini for serving iTunes.

Call us nitpickers, but we still want to know whether or not it's any good for actually preparing meals.

And the Sun Rose in the East

From the Times:

Madonna has reinvented herself again.

A Grim Joke

From the Telegraph:

Abu Bakar Bashir, the Islamic cleric jailed in Jakarta for his part in the 2002 Bali bombings, has been released early for good behaviour, and immediately called on his followers to spread Sharia law.

So, you help murder 202 people in the name of Jihad, get caught, get convicted, get out in a couple of years and then take up right where you left off.

If you want to know what justice is, this is the exact opposite.

Buenos Aires: the Zaphod Beeblebrox of the Western Hemisphere

According to Slate, Buenos Aires is now officially the coolest city west of Iceland.

That's good to know; now what do I do with it?

Quality Control

NASA reports that the crash of the Genesis space probe in 2004 was due to sensors used to trigger the parachutes being installed backwards. Marvellous. $264 million worth of machinery bringing back samples of cosmic dust and it's screwed up at the last second by a widget the size of a pen cap.

I've always had a soft spot for Genesis ever since that NASA spokesman declared after the accident that the mission had "been a complete success until then."

Yep. A complete success right up to the moment it ploughed smack into Utah at 200 miles per hour.

Breaking Contact

James S. Robbins looks at the impact of the death of Zarqawi and concludes that it's all about networking.

It is not clear that terrorist leaders are as fungible as some people would like to think. Someone like Zarqawi, with decades of experience in the craft of terrorism, will not be easily replaced. Terror networks are built on personal connections, and it will be difficult for the bad guys to rebuild from the loss of such a critical node in their associational scheme. Whether Abu Hamza has what it takes remains to be seen. But there is a clear deterrent effect in targeting terrorist leaders. The Israelis have been successful at it. Saudi Arabia too — each time they took down a leader of the local al Qaeda outfit, the terrorists would announce a new one — until so many went down they stopped identifying their leaders.

Looks like the next step is to start targeting the terrorist meet-and-greets.

Real UFOs

One of the unexpected points of interest in the recent declassification of the British government's report closing the book on flying saucers for good is not in what it says, but what it leaves out. In a section of the report that suggests that one of the sources of false UFO reports has been classified experimental aircraft, a number of references to certain American projects have been redacted for security reasons, which has lead some to speculate that these refer to the much-speculated about, but never confirmed, Aurora spyplane.

If Aurora really does exist, then in my book this is cooler than little green men any day.

Cartoon Fallout

The Cartoon War has faded from our front pages and blogs, but the fact of our defeat is still starkly apparent, as this quote from Bertel Haarder, Denmark's Minister of Education and Church:

We have all learned from the Mohammed Crisis so that we now exercise self-censorship, or at least think carefully before making any statements. There are things that I would have said previously, which I'm not going to say today. I believe that this is true for all of us!

Mr. Haarder openly admits that his reason is not born of multiculti sensitivity, but out of fear for his life. Denmark was the one country in Europe that refused to kowtow to the Jihadists, and yet dhimmitude as a daily policy has taken root even there.

News You Can Use

A study at the University of Oregon indicates that eating pizza and drinking beer can help prevent prostate cancer, but the scientists also put forward this strange caveat:

However, the 17 beers and four large pizzas needed to get enough xanthohumol and lycopene to help prevent prostate cancer is unfortunately not advised.

I presume that this means we're going to have to cut down a bit so we stop at 17 and four.

Pressing Question

As you may have heard, President Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq that, as usual, irked the White House press corp because Bush somehow imagines that he doesn't have to tell them beforehand about every move he makes. You'd think he was the President or something.

I haven't commented on this until now, as I've been hunting down the answer to the question that is on everyone's lips: When Bush arrived in Baghdad, did he or did he not bring cake or perhaps an assortment of pastries.

The public have a right to know!

Excelsior!

Pure, mind-bending propaganda.

Professor Paul Reiter, Institut Pasteur (Paris) on An Inconvenient Truth.

The reviews are coming in and it looks as though Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth may turn out to be this year's The Day After Tomorrow for climate scientists.

But will there be drinking games?

Update: Headline: Al Gore: Next Movie May Have Nude Scene

Ew!

Not So Distracted

Christopher Hitchens on Zarqawi and Iraq:

For some reason, I have not recently been hearing that the war in Iraq is "a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida." Perhaps this mantra became harder to chant after Zarqawi went to all the trouble to certify his gang as "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia" and to receive Bin Laden's official franchise. Then again, if one wanted to argue that al-Qaida would not be in Iraq if we were not, one had to confront the fact that Zarqawi was actually there first. And that while he was there, he could in theory have had a chat with Abdul Rahman Yasin, the man who mixed the chemicals for the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and then (released by the FBI) went straight to Baghdad. Or perhaps kicked back with Abu Abbas, organizer of the ocean liner hijacking that resulted in the murder of American Jew Leon Klinghoffer, who when arrested by the Italians had to be released because when on hijack duty he carried an Iraqi diplomatic passport. Failing that, what about chewing the fat with Abu Nidal, assassin of several PLO diplomats and mastermind of the mass slaughter at the Rome and Vienna airports? Yes, it's true that there are more foreign gangsters in Iraq today, but they are no longer living in government hospitality homes, and they are being killed at the rate of dozens every week. And, yes, it hasn't yet been shown that any of them—except of course Zarqawi and his friends—were ideologically linked to the events of Sept. 11. But the intervention in Afghanistan was to make up for that atrocity. The intervention in Iraq was partly designed to forestall the next attack. Now I'm told that it has only made the jihadists more angry. Should I try to think of a policy that would have made them less so?

When is a House Not a House?

When it's an electrical transformer.

Tip o' the hat to boingboing.