ninme

Posted by ninme at 7:41 am 3 Comments

Finally had a moment to watch this election night video Brett McS left in my comments the other day:

Wayne Swan (“The Hapless”) is Federal Treasurer, which is the equivalent of the US Treasury Secretary (but with somewhat more policy setting power, relatively speaking). Michael Kroger is (or was last time I looked) president of the Victorian Liberal Party and frequent media commentator. Also, nice non-verbal cameo from Peter Costello.

“No wonder they whacked you in the face, son.” Oh, SNAP!

God that’s wonderful. What a country!

Posted by ninme at 8:59 pm No Comments

So, it’s quick links time!

Telegraph Blogs – Daniel Hannan: The Internet is dragging Britain away from Europe and towards the Anglosphere

Brett McS sent me this one within moments of me reading an excerpt from it in The Corner. It’s an interesting and perhaps obvious point, though I think perhaps a little optimistic. And I’m not inclined towards optimism these years.

The EU is being made redundant by technological change. In the 1950s, a regional trade association arguably made sense. But in a world where capital surges around the globe at the touch of a button, physical proximity becomes irrelevant. When deciding whether to invest in a country, corporations will consider many factors – tax rates, regulation, language, corruptibility of public officials – before they worry about geography.

The Internet makes it as easy for my constituents to do business with a company in New Zealand as with a company in Belgium. Easier, indeed, because the Kiwi company shares our common law, accountancy practices, commercial traditions and language.

Next:

NYT – Venezuela, More Deadly Than Iraq, Wonders Why

This one is curtsies to RC2 (“Behold The Bolivarian Revolution!“). I thought this line was funny:

Police salaries remain low, sapping motivation. And in a country with the highest inflation rate in the hemisphere, more than 30 percent a year, some officers have turned to supplementing their incomes with crimes like kidnappings.

I think perhaps the propensity towards kidnappings might be doing more for the murder rate than police salaries. Just going out on a limb, there. I don’t think, just doing some back-of-the-napkin rounding, that were police salaries to fall 30% in, say, Seattle, or Redmond, or Davenport, Iowa, that the police would immediately turn to kidnapping to pay their family’s cable bills.

Next:

American Digest – War Costs and Deficits: Going Viral

I do love me some infographics!

And lastly:

The Times – An audience with V.S. Naipaul, by Sathnam Sanghera

There’s quite a bit of talk about cats in there.

Posted by ninme at 8:41 pm No Comments

This is so cute. £.

Posted by ninme at 10:46 am No Comments

I thought, when he disappeared last summer after his Kangaroo Kourt proceedings were at an end that he’d be back in the fall with a new book on the subject, but it’s this year that he’s come back with a new book on the subject:

Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight Of The West

Peculiarly, its publishing date says April, but I feel like I would’ve noticed if he’d had a book out the past 5 months…

Posted by ninme at 3:48 pm No Comments

From @wheatweeds:

Dang. Now we have to let him put it in Manhattan. http://americandigest.org/Bomb%20Mot.jpg

If I RT that, heads would explode. Which would be great, but I’m chickening out anyway.

Posted by ninme at 8:59 pm 2 Comments

Oh man, curtsies to RC2’s Google Reader for this one (I’m a couple days behind):

The myth, cherished by Generation Narcissus, that Jesus made precious, precious Us—the Baby Boomers, source and summit of all goodness, and final peak toward which all human history has been straining—-into the rightful teachers of the Church and that the job of the Pope and the bishops is to sit at our feet and learn until the Catholic Church is finally remade in the image and likeness of trendy liberal Episcopalianism or bellicose Messianic Americanism is a fantasy that will not die till the last member of Generation Narcissus is rubbed out by their pro-euthanasia children.

“Source and summit of all goodness, and final peak toward which all human history has been straining.” *air punch*

Posted by ninme at 8:20 pm No Comments

Telegraph – Ivan the Terrible descendants launch court case to get Kremlin back

The Russian state has been given a month by a court to prove it owns the Kremlin after descendants of Ivan the Terrible filed a lawsuit to stake their claim to the Moscow landmark.

So good.

The problem for the state is that no official ownership of the Kremlin has ever been registered. The prince wants his foundation to be awarded management rights over the sprawling complex, for the head of the Russian Orthodox Church to be housed there, and for his foundation to be allowed to hold cultural, political and religious events inside its famous walls.

“The property was not purchased from us, was not lawfully taken away from us, and the federal authorities do not have any right to our property. The Ruriks demand the return of our property, rent from the government for the illegal possession of our property, and financial compensation,” he said.

I say he has a strong case!

Posted by ninme at 1:50 pm No Comments

Telegraph – North Korea joins Facebook

North Korea appears to have joined the social networking site Facebook after its Twitter account was blocked by South Korea under the country’s security laws.

:\

Posted by ninme at 1:45 pm 2 Comments

Um, I knew I’ve been busy and sick and readying a new house and planning a kitchen remodel and a few other things besides, but did I really miss a whole election?

Wot, no aussie election coverage? Well, OK, we’re not that important. But, very good result! Tony Abbott (my fav) looks like being the new PM, although it’s still very close and will require some negotiation with a (conservative) independent (Nothing so radical as required in the recent UK result). Why this is an excellent result for Abbott is that Australians always give a federal government at least two terms. Three if they are reasonable. Four if they’re good (John Howard). This is the first time I know of that a federal government has been kicked out after only one term. But then it was the first time that a party had kicked out their own PM before giving him a chance at re-election, so there would be a certain amount of justice in that. Anyway, from looking like a certain loss to Rudd with the Liberal Party under the sook Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott (former boxer, senior minister under Howard, and devout Catholic) has first seen off a popular PM and then brought his party to the brink of government. Brill!

…Senior Australian Surprise Election Correspondent Brett McS, reporting in my comments.

Posted by ninme at 1:36 pm 2 Comments

io9 – Ultraviolet light reveals how ancient Greek statues really looked

(That’s a Roman statue there, says the girl who took two years of art history classes.)

Curtsy: RC2.

Posted by ninme at 1:25 pm No Comments

The Times (£) – From Beijing to London in 48hrs? Now that’s a great rail journey

High-speed technology and investment is about to make railways competitive again. Bargain airlines may have made previously forgotten cities accessible but security and congested skies have added hours to the journey. Trains can offer greater comfort, more space and better sleeping quarters.

“Some 30,000 km (19,000 miles) of railway track is currently under construction or is being planned,” a spokesman for the International Union of Railways said.

Yes!

The revolution is mainly about freight and acknowledging the trade interdependence between Asia and Europe. “We want to shift the increasing transfer of goods between China and Europe on to the railway tracks,” Hartmut Mehdorn, the former head of Deutsche Bahn, said. “Rail can transport goods better and around 12 days faster than by boat In a few years we can expect through-trains from Beijing to Berlin.”

Yesss!

The Times (£) – Palaces on wheels bring back bygone luxury to India’s railways

At the peak of their pomp India’s maharajahs lavished huge sums on their “palaces on wheels” — the private trains that they commissioned with every imaginable luxury. Now, a handful of entrepreneurs are joining the Indian Government to recreate the most extravagant age of railways.

The Deccan Odyssey is one of two new luxurious trains to have begun carrying tourists across India this year. Another three are planned. Pulling out of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s main railway station, recently, the Odyssey passed platforms crowded with clapping eunuchs and orange-robbed sadhus. …

The route, which meanders from Mumbai to Delhi over seven days, takes in archaeological wonders such as the rock temples of Ajanta and Ellora. The experience caters to trav

Yessss!!

Okay that was mostly across Europe and Asia but Africa’s had some poor luck, Australia’s too far away, South America has too many jungles and North America is LAME.

Posted by ninme at 9:26 pm 2 Comments

“I love the internet sometimes”:

Auto-Tune the News Hits the Billboard Top 100

Watch the videos. The first half of the first one if you haven’t seen it already, then the second one, then go find a dsl line and hug it.

Posted by ninme at 8:26 pm No Comments

I think I’d intended this for yesterday, but it’s a good thing I forgot because lord, there is nothing going on. But this was quite hilarious:

If you’ve ever traveled by budget airline, and I’m an American so I never have, you’ll really appreciate it.

Posted by ninme at 8:21 pm No Comments

We’ve been watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona. It’s a good movie, generally. I’ll make no comment on the bohemian morality here. But the pacing and music and light is lovely (and apparently Woody Allen is good for a baby’s frayed nerves, too).

It’s funny though. Everyone in the film is idle. The Americans because they’re rich, staying with someone who’s rich, or married to someone who’s rich, and rich because they work for a multinational or embassy. The Spaniards because they’re, um, artists.

You look at all those lovely young creative types talking and drinking and discussing and smoking and pursuing truth and beauty in the bars and cafes and living in amazing houses and you think, wow, the Spanish government is screwed.

Posted by ninme at 7:10 pm No Comments

The Times – Is giving away £5m a reason for such hatred? By David Aaronovitch

Tony Blair announced he’d give the proceeds from sales of his new autobiography to a veterans charity (a quarter of his net worth, apparently), and this sparked a most incredible reaction. Yesterday a letter was published in the Guardian (natch) calling on the bookstore where he’ll be doing a signing later to not sell his book (natch):

Ah yes, the scandal of the bookseller selling books. Deplorable.

This ludicrous epistle was also signed by Andrew Murray, a pro-Soviet supporter of people-starving, dissident-murdering, boat-sinking “People’s Korea” (this may explain his aversion to book signings), the journalist John Pilger who, in 2004, backed the Iraqis then killing British servicemen, saying that anti-war activists “could not afford to be choosy” about their friends, and Moazzam Begg, the Islamist who thought Taleban-ruled Afghanistan such a paradise that he took his daughters to live there.

But these people — ridiculous almost beyond parody — nevertheless were close to the tone of other reactions to Mr Blair’s gift. Nearly everyone making a comment felt entitled to sit inside the former PM’s head and second-guess his real motives for a donation that — and let’s face it — none of them had predicted. It was his conscience, maybe his priest had suggested it, it was spin, it was an attempt to retrieve his reputation (doomed, naturally), it was anything but what he said it was.

Ah, opined many — given insight into the ways of these things — if he were genuine he would have kept the donation private. Think about it, will you? Would he be asked where the £4.6 million went? Yes. If he said he’d given it away but refused to say where, the result would have been a firestorm of speculation that he’d kept it or donated it to his own foundation. In fact, when in office, Mr Blair did make unpublicised visits to military hospital units in the Midlands and was — predictably — criticised for not going.

Insane.