Free Republic

US SOLDIER Robert Bales, who killed 16 Afghan civilians during a rampage in Kandahar last year, will escape the death penalty by pleading guilty to murder. ... Sixteen people, mainly women and children, were killed in two villages near the base during the rampage. Some of the bodies were piled up and set on fire. ... Last month, AP spoke to locals in the villages that Bales terrorised. "Relatives of the victims became outraged at the notion Bales might escape the death penalty," it said. One man, Mohammed Wazir, who lost 11 family members including his mother and two-year-old daughter...

Two British tourists were barred from entering America after joking on Twitter that they were going to 'destroy America' and 'dig up Marilyn Monroe'. Leigh Van Bryan, 26, was handcuffed and kept under armed guard in a cell with Mexican drug dealers for 12 hours after landing in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting. The Department of Homeland Security flagged him as a potential threat when he posted an excited tweet to his pals about his forthcoming trip to Hollywood which read: 'Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?' After making their way through passport...

Look at the front page of YouTube today you'll see the entire page is smeared with communist propaganda bull**** regarding the "World Economic Forum". Of course, the topics of discussion are: stealing from the productive and giving to the lazy (redistribution), Al Gore's money-making scheme based on political lies (global warming), and other neo-communist nincompooperies. The whole thing was set off by this video. So why all this propaganda that somehow made the entire front page of YouTube? Could it be that Google owns YouTube and is the highest percentage donor to the liberal Democrats?

WASHINGTON — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is dropping its bid to establish a bank after months of heated debate over whether the world's largest retailer should be allowed to gain the added financial power of a federally insured bank. Wal-Mart announced Friday that it was withdrawing its application for a bank charter, which aroused widespread opposition from banks, lawmakers and consumer groups, and spurred debate within Congress and before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The FDIC was considering Wal-Mart's application to establish an industrial loan corporation, which is a limited-purpose bank for processing credit card and other payments.

Remember the Contract With America and all the other good stuff about reducing the size of government? Here's a nice graphic illustrating the question: What Happened? I have no idea.

[No Excerpt]

'Nuff said.

I don't get it. Why are Xinhua and AlJazeera listed as the first news sources that comment on NASA's Deep Impact mission? Followed closely by The Standard (Hong Kong), Globe and Mail (Canada), Australian (Australia), AME Info (United Arab Emirates). Google News confounds me.

I flipped to C-SPAN today and saw Howard Dean speaking to and taking questions from a Democratic audience. The subject was the future of the Democratic party and how it can win back the government. A couple of observations: 1. Republicans who cast Dean as a fringe ideologue are incorrect. If anything, he seems to be attempting to use his credibility with the leftist fringe to coax it into more mainstream thinking. 2. "We can do X better" was a recurring phrase throughout his speech and answers. His attitude was not "we have different ideas to bring to the table,"...

There's quite a big hubbub surrounding the South Loop post office; lots of riot police on the ground, news choppers in the air. The protest itself is somewhat unimpressive. Same old (and I do mean old) bedraggled crowd listening to unintelligible megaphone blather. Since I couldn't get an accurate headcount just by looking at the crowd, I measured the length and width of the area by counting the cops surrounding it. The area is approximately 65 x 30 people standing next to each other, so the upper bound on the crowd is about 2000, assuming it is that compact. The...

The Iraqi Interim Government has a wealth of information about the upcoming election here.

One thing I liked about Ayn Rand is that she didn't do bullshit. If she had a position, no matter how unpopular, she defended it without compromise. The same can't be said of her successors at the Ayn Rand Institute in the wake of their tsunami PR disaster. Can anyone make heads or tails of this hairsplitting quote? Obviously, the tsunami, with the thousands of innocent victims left in its wake, is a horrible disaster. The first concern of survivors and of those trying to help them is to provide basic necessities and then to begin rebuilding. The American public's...

The Ayn Rand Institute published an op-ed by David Holcberg during the tsunami disaster arguing that the US government should not give aid to the tsunami victims. After the PR disaster that followed, ARI "clarified" its position in another article (which I will discuss later). I noticed, however, that ARI removed the original op-ed from its web site. The link that originally pointed to it has been redirected to an article about Iraq. Fortunately, Google has a cached copy of it. Clarifying your position is one thing; obliterating history so that you control the discussion is completely unethical and unwise...

60 Minutes ran a story on January 2nd about Google, its business and culture. At one point, Lesley Stahl does a Google search for "60 Minutes", which yields results she complains are "controversial" (the Drudge Report featured prominently in the results). This is a "problem" apparently. Here's the quote: That includes the term "60 Minutes," for which Google's computers return 19 million search results in one-fifth of a second. But at first glance, the top results are all related to "60 Minutes" stories that have created some kind of controversy. And that’s a big problem with Google: Its ranking system...

Looks like my initial hunch was correct. The assassination of Baghdad governor Ali al-Haidari on January 4th shocked the Iraq elections futures on Tradesports. I did a little bottom fishing at 81. The price has since rebounded to about 89. There are still about 20 days to go until the election, so maybe some more opportunities will come up.

The publisher of CIO Magazine, Gary Beach, writes an ominously titled article, "The Education Crisis", in the December 15, 2004 issue. I suppose it's the fad nowadays to bemoan America's fall from its position as world technology leader. This collective sense of doom oftentimes produces incoherent arguments from otherwise smart people. This is one of those times. Beach is particularly concerned about the decline in US engineering graduates. To support his concern, he engages in some fuzzy math. He claims that: So in the 16 years from 1985 to 2001, there was a 40 percent drop in the number of...

I did a Google search for the word "blog", limited within the past 3, 6, and 12 months. The number of hits for each time period are as follows: In the past... Hits 3 months 20,400,000 6 months 19,400,000 12 months 21,900,000 What's wrong with this picture? Well, the hit number for 6 months doesn't make any sense. How could more pages have been updated in the past 3 months than have been in the past 6 months? Is there something going on that I'm not getting?

Shawn Macomber talks about the State Department's designation of the al-Manar TV network as a terrorist organization. He describes some of the typical fare on al-Manar, worthy of Borat no doubt: The popular game show, "The Mission," allows the home viewing audience to cheer on contestants as they "recapture" land stolen by the Jews. For every correct answer a contestant answers about the American-Zionist conspiracy, he or she (Oh, who are we kidding here? He!) moves that much closer on a giant map to Jerusalem. In between singing the praises of suicide bombers and denunciations of Jews, the show's host...

The TradeSports "Osama captured" contracts jumped up wildly today. The price changes are as follows: Contract Change OSAMA.CAPTURE.DEC04 +7.9 OSAMA.CAPTURE.JAN05 +15.7 OSAMA.CAPTURE.MAR05 +11.6 OSAMA.CAPTURE.JUN05 +2.0 I don't know what news might have prompted this buying, except the new tape that was released yesterday.