I started to blog this memorial service in Tucson...but something about it is creeping me out. I'm not sure what, maybe, the logos...maybe the T-shirts.
Perhaps the cheering.

The president should be on in a moment. Thus far he has actually handled this with a good deal of class.

UPDATE: It seems to be perfectly decent speech by the President. But the cheers seem really inappropriate and off-putting.

UPDATE2: He went there.

UPDATE3: Maybe not, it actually sounds like he's trying to walk back some of the excesses of his erstwhile allies.

UPDATE4: Pretty decent speech...it just won't...end.

All in all a decent speech. It went quite long but covered all the bases and was respectful and actually presidential. It was the audience that seemed off.

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Wait WHAT!?

As today was the first day of the new semester, last night I logged on to the school website to get the locations for today's classes.

None of my classes were listed on the Blackboard site.
I had gotten the course numbers from there Thursday when I bought my books. Indeed, I had signed up back in November, and yet here they ...weren't.

A little digging turned up some contradictory facts....
I had no holds on my record.
I had been suspended from all 5 classes on Friday.
I was a student in good standing with the university.
I had been suspended.
I was able to add/drop classes.
I was forbidden to add/ drop classes.

GHAAAAA!!

In times such as this, it is important for a gentleman to maintain a stoic visage.....so I'll subcontract the expression of my innermost feelings at that time to this young lady.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:18 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Elvis Presley was born.
I'm not a particular fan of his music but his importance to music history is undeniable.

I also think that he helped the civil rights movement  quite a bit. He was the vector by which many Americans heard black music for the first time. Even those who were raised to not give them the time of day were, primarily through Presley, made  aware that African Americans had talent. Additionally, Elvis was undeniably at ease around black entertainers. While this was not advertised due to the social mores of the time, it was not exactly a deep secret either.

This was not the march to Selma or anything of the sort of course.  However, I firmly believe that Presley's cultural contribution in the area of thinking of people of color as people, was a non trivial one.

 THAT hurdle was the big one that allowed the hard uphill struggle to gain traction.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 09:13 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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With all the bad happening today one very uplifting story is getting left by the wayside.

In Egypt, hundreds, perhaps thousands of Moslems, resonse to the bloody New Years Day bombing of a Coptic church are standing as human shields to protect the Coptic churches from violence during their Christmas celebrations.

Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular preacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole.

“This is not about us and them,” said Dalia Mustafa, a student who attended mass at Virgin Mary Church on Maraashly. “We are one. This was an attack on Egypt as a whole, and I am standing with the Copts because the only way things will change in this country is if we come together.”

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Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D AZ) has been assassinated. At least 6 others are also dead. A bystander tackled the assassin who is in custody.

More here, here, here, here and here, As I type this, only Fox and NPR are running this story but that should change momentarily.

Wonderduck just IM'd me that her husband was one of the Space Twins.  Gabrielle Giffords was the mother of two.

UPDATE: Now it is being reported that Giffords is still alive, but in grave condition. Not so fortunate, a child of 10 or younger in the crowd.

The Anchoress has thoughts.

It’s kind of disgusting when you hear someone is shot and the first thing you do is try to figure out how to fit the terrible news to your political worldview. Blame the gunman.

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Wonderduck has...well he's embedded something that's...I....It's just wrong.

^{Yuno from Hidemari Sketch is suitably appalled}

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:16 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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While I was in the hospital, this post on anarchy appeared over at Instapundit.  It began as a quick link to this very thoughtful piece by Wretchard. Read it all.

Now the reason I bother to link to this when its been on the high traffic blogs already is that it brought to mind this piece from theBlogprof....which contains, amongst much text,  video of Ted Rall on MSNBC urging his people to arm themselves for class struggle and making the usual paranoid rants and idiotic associations involving the Tea Party...you know, those scary people who pick up trash, rather than trash the town.

Then there was the snowplow-gate and then this warning that I found going through my tabs before closing down tonight, it warns about the likelihood of  European style municipal worker strikes.

If city workers did undermine the snow-clearing effort to protest budget cuts, they may have contributed to the death of a baby girl in Brooklyn, who waited with her 22-year-old mother nine hours for emergency crews to fight their way through the snow-covered streets. A Queens woman watched her elderly mother die as she waited three hours for an ambulance to arrive.

Americans better get used to this treatment.

 

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Over at The Kawaii Menace, Don asks a very good question...

By the way, what the hell is “mild thematic material” ?

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:54 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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The follow up to yesterdays post on 'videogate' is about as bad as I expected.

There is little I have to add that I didn't say yesterday, but Cdr Salamander has a good post up at USNI Proceedings.

An excerpt:

It is the height of moral corruption to tell someone what they are doing is OK one day, and then the next – to protect yourself - act as if it were horrible. It is just as morally corrupt to reprimand a person, provide corrective action, accept remediation – and then at a later date punish him again for the same act only harder; submit that person to double jeopardy for your own self-preservation.

Honors is being hung out to dry for something that was either fine with his then superiors or which he was duly critiqued for and allowed to move on in his career. Either way, this is ex post facto outrage and the senior leadership of the Navy has simply thrown a dedicated and decorated officer to the wolves.

Speaking of Honors' career...did you know he was essentially promoted twice after these videos were made? He remained at the same rank (Captain) but went from being Executive Officer of the Enterprise (the 2nd in command) to command his own ship, the USS Mount Whitney. In 2008 he led her into the middle of the Russia-Georgia war to provide relief supplies to the Georgians.

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The bird death in Arkansas has been well reported. The initial hypothesis that it was due indirectly to fireworks or directly to severe weather was reasonable.

Then there was the report, also from Arkansas, of 100,000  dead fish turning up about 125 miles from the bird kill, with the whole area having had earthquake swarms since September.

Of course this is not in any way creepy, its just a coincidence.

...as is the bird fall in Louisiana yesterday,  The fish kills in the Chesapeake Bay, and off Brazil, or the epidemic plaguing the bats.

There is nothing odd, unusual or worrisome about any of this. There is certainly a rational explanation.

...or at least an explanation.

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"Parsons was Winston's fellow employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the thought police, the stability of the Party depended." George Orwell 1984

Twain himself defined a "classic" as "a book which people praise and don't read." Rather than see Twain's most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the "n" word (as well as the "in" word, "Injun") by replacing it with the word "slave."

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 04:56 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Don't know much else, but it appears that the damage wasn't severe.

More here.

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Someone named Shin1701 has pics of some of the props from last months Yamato movie on display here.

There are clips alleged to be from a new Gatachaman movie here.

Also Sentai Filmworks seems to be something other than dead. Their catalog has 10 new releases solidly scheduled, and in the true spirit of 'Zombie ADV' they have announced a DVD release of High School of the Dead.

^{Art, despite being by Ueyama Michirou, is reportedly a bit off model.}

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 02:39 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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James Rummel links to a new blog, Forgotten Weapons that focuses on little known firearms, some of which were design failures and some of which merely did not find favor.

James himself has an interest in such things as one can see here and here.

My favorite of the 'almost were great' weapons is the old Evans rifle. With a helical magazine in the stock holding 36 rounds of .44 caliber ammo...in 1873. It was rejected by the army in the parsimonious days after the Civil War.

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Brian Wang has a lengthy post on the potential of Drexler style solar sails. He also makes some important points about light pollution.... really impressive light pollution.

^{Official NASA art}

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It appears that the CO of the USS Enterprise is in hot water over some videos he made for the crew on the ships last deployment.

Now the PC pantywaists are clamoring for his head.

Cdr Salamander has thoughts here.

Galrahn has a lengthy post on this that provides quite a bit of context.

The deployment in which the videos were created was between May 2, 2006 and on November 18, 2006 USS Enterprise returned to homeport after steaming nearly 60,000 miles. During their deployment, CVW-1 aircraft delivered 65,000 pounds of ordnance, including 137 precision weapons, to provide unprecedented support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom. They completed more than 8,300 sorties, of which 2,186 were combat missions, while flying more than 22,500 hours and making 6,916 day and night arrested landings.

...but do read his whole post too.

A warship is a pressure cooker and a warped sense of humor is a reliable and necessary safety valve. This officer seems to have an impeccable record on the things that matter, like driving ships and managing flight operations . It will be tragic if he loses his career and America loses his services because some paper pushing professional whiners at the dull end of the spear who can't tie a bowline, let alone run a ship are allowed to claim another scalp.

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Via Scott Lowther comes a speech given in Australia by Niall Ferguson on the collapse of Empires.

Really informative and not a little scary.

The speech is here and it actually begins at the 9 minute mark, and the facts and figures start around minute 23. It's about an hour and fifteen minutes long but well worth it.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 11:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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May  2011 bring you prosperity and happiness. ...and tasty fish.

^{Art By BiNyo}

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 11:21 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I've been down with a rather spectacular stomach bug that resulted in running, then walking, the hobbling to the bathroom every 20 minutes for 9 hours. By the end I had emptied the contents of my stomach and seemed to be regurgitating the contents of regions rather below that. I ended up in the hospital and received 2 and a half bags of IV fluid. I gathered that there is something of an outbreak going on in S.E. Virginia. This contradicts my earlier theory that it had to do with the fact I was watching Sekerei. A big heaping thanks to my friend Allan Rowe, in whose bathroom I spent New Years 2010/11 and who ran me to the hospital.

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This is astonishing.
An American grad student has landed an interview with Dr. Bernhard Frank, a German WW2 veteran.
But there is more, because it turns out that Frank wasn't in the Kriegsmarine, or the Luftwaffe, or the Panzer Corps.
Oh no. He was in the SS.
He was the number 4 man...in the SS.
He was THE Nazi.
The Nazi who signed the order that started the whole unspeakable hell in motion. He has proof.

...and Dr. Frank doesn't exactly seem contrite.
Watch the whole thing.

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