Hoping on the latest craze to sweep the internets, check out these pictures of Garfield without the cat. Seriously funny.
Hoping on the latest craze to sweep the internets, check out these pictures of Garfield without the cat. Seriously funny.
I aged radically yesterday, suddenly becoming a whole year older than I was the day before. Fortunately this shocking event was cushioned by a trip to the pub with the three people I love most, and a small but perfectly chosen set of gifts (including a teleconverter for my camera, and a photography book from my brother-in-law who has suddenly developed expert taste in gifts for me).
I’ve been amazed at the acclaim that the recent shooting down of a failing US satellite has met (here’s just one example, from the ironically titled American Thinker).
I’ve no doubt it was an impressive technical achievement, especially when we don’t have a system setup in advance to do this sort of thing. But it’s not even a shadow of a plausible missile defense system – the satellite was following a known trajectory, we had days of notice, it was traveling thousands of miles an hour slower than an actual missile would, it was considerably larger, and it wasn’t trying to avoid being hit. There’s 5 reasons off the top of my head why saying this proves that the missile defense system works is nonsense.
Captain’s Quarters has a post about Cuba, specifically the treatment of political prisoners there. Just to remove any doubt before I start, let me quote a little of the final paragraph with approval:
We can differ on how best to improve the lot of the Cuban people and prepare for the post-Castro era, but let no one be fooled into thinking that the ruling junta is anything other than a brutal, oppressive, and inhumane regime.
What he’s talking about is this quoted material:
Four dissidents freed this week after five years in inhumane conditions in a Cuban prison have revealed the dark side of Fidel Castro’s regime.
The four – José Gabriel Ramón Castillo, Omar Pernet Hernández, Alejandro González and Pedro Pablo Ãlvarez – described regular beatings, humiliation and arbitrary punishment with long periods of solitary confinement in cramped cells with cement beds.
Mr Castillo, 50, a journalist who wrote articles critical of the regime, told The Sunday Telegraph: “It was terrible. It was like being in a desert in which sometimes there is no water, there is no food, you are tortured and you are abused.
“This was not torture in the textbook way with electric prods, but it was cruel and degrading. They would beat you for no reason even when you were in hospital.
“At other times they would search you for no reason, stripping you bare and humiliating you. There was one particular commander at a jail in Santa Clara who seemed to take delight in handing out beatings to the prisoners.”
If I look back on the last 8 years and find one thing that saddens me more than anything else, it might just be this: When I moved to America such barbarism would have been disgusting; now it’s only the target of the barbarism that we can legitimately rail against.
No, not what some of you are thinking, it’s actually a technique in commercial fishing where you drag your net across the bottom of the sea to catch bottom-dwelling fish, crustaceans etc. Treehugger have a picture of what this looks like in the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s quite amazing.