Medary.com

After all the Sturm und Drang, Marquette University decides to keep their current "Golden Eagles" nickname.

I'm sure there's a joke or three in there somewhere.

Anyone who thinks that an analogy between President Bush and Wichita's BTK Killer is in any way appropriate needs some serious therapy.

Link

There was something about Bush that reminded me of another president, a man I’d seen on the news the previous evening. It was the former president of his church, the BTK terrorist, justifying *his* project. Of course, to my knowledge, Bush hasn’t *personally* bound, tortured and killed anybody. Rather, his destiny was determined by that which he was trained for in college. He is our Cheerleader-in-Chief.

Thought #1: This would be as good a reason as any to avoid "The Huffington Post" like the plague it appears to be.

Thought #2: If you read the above excerpt and found any, ANY area of agreement, seek professional help immediately. You have serious issues which you appear to be projecting onto others. Again, seek professional help IMMEDIATELY.

Previously on Medary.com I joined voices from left and right in decrying the Supreme Court's decision that government can take your house and give it to Pfizer Corp. on the sole basis that Pfizer claims that the government will earn more tax revenue that way.

Well, here we go:

A startup media company in New Hampshire has submitted an application to build a hotel on the site of Justice David Souter's home. They say that that this is a serious proposal, not just a prank.

We'll see if Souter and the Five Who Killed Property Rights can sleep in the bed that they have made.

This has been floating around for a while. I debated whether or not to post it, but decided to go for it.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time or effort commenting on this one way or another, except to observe in passing that the author does not seem to know that Harvard and Yale are actually in the Ivy League now. Judgments of the accuracy of the rest of the assertions are left to the research, rumormongering, tribal mythology, or prejudicial bias of you, the gentle readers.

(click on the message title or "Read More" to continue . . . )

Shocking expose' or lunatic speculation?

I can't tell.

From OpinionJournal: A Cartel and Its Snakeoil.

Matthew R. Simmons, a Texas investment banker with a Harvard Business School degree and 20 years' experience in oil, has his doubts. In "Twilight in the Desert," Mr. Simmons argues that the Saudis may be deceiving the world and themselves. If only half of his claims prove to be true, we could be in for some nasty surprises.

We've all heard about the "Downing Street Memo" but in my opinion, not enough has been made of the al-Qaida Training Manual (i.e. members are instructed to lie about torture and abuse should they be captured.)

Whether you oppose or support the effort to install democracy in Iraq, you owe it to yourself to read this--it is the manifesto of "our enemy." (Unless you've fallen so deep into paranoia that you really think this is a fake, too.) Here it is. Read for yourself.

The al-Qaida Training Manual.

Excerpts:

The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates . . . , Platonic ideals . . . nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun.

Islamic governments have never and will never be established through peaceful solutions and cooperative councils. They are established as they [always] have been:

By pen and gun, by word and bullet, by tongue and teeth.

Warning: some images in the below Fark.com link may be offensive. That's part of the fun. Also, it's very image-intensive...low-speed users will find that it takes a long time to load.

OK, here's the deal. A group of folks over at Fark.com sieze on a photograph and apply their prodigious Adobe Photoshop skills to alter, disfigure, distort, and otherwise change the photograph to achieve humorous results. Sometimes they fail horribly. But sometimes the results are brilliantly funny.

Your mileage may vary. It's not news, it's Fark.com. Tastes like chicken.

Photoshop the H&R Block World Headquarters

My favorites so far are the Alien with the H&R Block Mouth and the Death Block.

An international consortium has chosen a site in France to build the world's first experimental fusion reactor.

Fusion is what powers the Sun, and is more powerful and more difficult to achieve than is fission, which is the current method of nuclear power used in power plants, submarines, etc.

Article in Nuclear Engineering.

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Vitamin C won't stop a cold -- unless you run miles

A new review of 65 years of research on colds and vitamin C concludes there's little evidence that 200 milligrams or more a day wards off or shortens the duration of the common cold -- with the possible exception of people exposed to extreme cold or physical stress.

via My Way News with an assist from the omnipresent Instapundit:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Internal Revenue Service is investigating whether unauthorized people gained access to sensitive taxpayer and bank account information but has not yet exposed any privacy breaches, an official said on Friday.

The U.S. tax agency -- whose databases include suspicious activity reports from banks about possible terrorist or criminal transactions -- launched the probe after the Government Accountability Office said in April that the IRS "routinely permitted excessive access" to the computer files.

The GAO team was able to tap into the data without authorization, and gleaned information such as bank account holders' names, social security numbers, transaction values, and any suspected terrorist activity. It said the data was at serious risk of disclosure, modification or destruction.

I think it's safe to say (having actually worked in the computer security field for a while) that while we do know how to make sure sensitive information stored in computers stays reasonably secure (i.e. AES encryption, two-factor authentication, etc., etc.), it's expensive and complex, and most organizations seem to think it's simply not worth the effort.

Hey, guys and gals, it's worth the effort.