The World's Most Dangerous Basketball Team
How the Georgetown Hoyas changed college basketball.

By Mike DeBonisPosted Thursday, March 29, 2007, at 5:28 PM ET

Three years ago, John Thompson III began to resurrect the Georgetown basketball program his father built. When the team started winning again, students on campus began wearing T-shirts with the epigram: "RESPECT IS BACK / FEAR IS NEXT." For Georgetown basketball, fear has always been the gold standard. This Georgetown squad, the Hoyas' first Final Four team in 22 years, is certainly the school's best since Allen Iverson left in 1996. But when it comes to scaring the bejesus out of the opposition, Jeff Green, Roy Hibbert, Patrick Ewing Jr., and Co. will never compare to the Georgetown teams of the 1980s.
No program since John Wooden retired has left as deep an impression on basketball's collective psyche. Not Phi Slama Jamma. Not the Fab Five. Not Rick Pitino's Kentucky teams. Certainly no team involving Christian Laettner. And the students have it right: Fear is what made Georgetown memorable.
Part of it came from the Hoyas' style of play. They pressed up and down the court, trying to force turnovers and low-percentage shots. Patrick Ewing, and later Dikembe Mutombo, stood in the lane swatting (and often goaltending) shots away, shooting intimidating glances across the floor. Meanwhile, John Thompson the elder, a giant man with a white towel tossed over his shoulder, patrolled the sideline with a scowl. The Hoyas won a lot, too, reaching three national finals between 1982 and 1985.
But the fear, back then, had as much to do with race as hoops. Georgetown basketball under John Thompson was always intertwined with racial politics. That was inevitable when an elite Eastern university, then as now overwhelmingly white, started fielding teams made up almost exclusively of black players. When Thompson came to Georgetown in 1972, he wasn't plucked from some other sideline legend's "coaching tree." Rather, he had been plying his trade at a tiny Catholic high school in northeast Washington, D.C., at a time when the only notable black coaches were Lenny Wilkens and Bill Russell—both player/coaches for NBA teams.
Mediocre Georgetown teams composed of white parochial-school graduates soon became a relic. Thompson recruited inner-city black players, often well after they'd graduated high school. (He had to wait for one of his first recruits, Mike Riley, to finish a hitch in the Navy.) The Hoyas' rise came shortly after the founding of the Big East Conference in 1979. Before the Big East, Georgetown was part of the sprawling Eastern College Athletic Conference, which represented more than 200 schools. As part of the Big East, Georgetown played regularly against the finest black players from New York and Philadelphia, helping to market the Hoyas to both recruits and East Coast hoops fans. By the late '70s, the Hoyas were starting an all-black five. Soon, African-American basketball players—Patrick Ewing, Sleepy Floyd, Fred Brown, Reggie Williams—became the university's most visible symbol. Perhaps most visible was Michael Graham, a substitute on the 1984 team, who was the spitting image of every Angry Black Man stereotype: He was the bald-headed, bruising spark plug on a championship squad before academic troubles forced him to transfer away.
Around the time Georgetown won the 1984 national championship, the university trademarked the Hoyas name and snarling-bulldog logo. This was the first college sports team to become a brand—and it was a tremendously lucrative one. By the early '90s, Georgetown apparel outsold even schools with powerhouse football programs. Georgetown Starter jackets sold well across the country, but the team's image was especially resonant in black America. Not only was this an all-black team with a black coach, the Hoyas also played in a majority-black city run by a black mayor. Thompson took a well-publicized stand against Proposition 42, an NCAA rule change that he believed would threaten black athletes by imposing higher academic standards. Eventually the racial cues became more overt, most famously in the kente-cloth-trimmed uniforms of the Iverson era.
Eventually, touchstones of black culture spread from Washington, D.C., to every corner of college hoops. As revolutionary as Thompson's teams might have been, he always remained a traditionalist. Michigan's Fab Five made baggy shorts iconic, and Iverson didn't grow his famous cornrows until he left the Hoyas. It wasn't just the culture that passed Thompson by. His defenses became less effective with the rise of the 3-point shot and swingmen who could handle the ball and take it to the hoop. When Iverson left, the dying embers of Georgetown's place in popular culture went with him—the school's licensing revenues have dropped out of the collegiate Top 50 in recent years, overtaken by the likes of Boise State.
With the Hoyas back in the Final Four, you might think blue-and-gray Starter jackets will come back in style. After all, there isn't a sportswriter with a pulse who's able to resist the Thompson-and-Ewing-all-over-again storyline. But neither son is much like his father. Thompson III has yet to utter so much as a controversial subordinate clause. (It's worth noting that since John Thompson retired in 1999, no college coach has filled his role as an outspoken advocate for black athletes.) Ewing Jr., meanwhile, has the quickness and clutch outside shot his dad never had, if not the size or physical dominance.
To their credit, neither seems to care much about cultivating the team's image. Save for a couple of bench warmers, the team is still all-black, but the kente cloth is gone. So is the full-court press—today's Hoyas stick to a slow-paced half-court offense that's engineered to slow down the game and open up high-percentage shots. It's a type of basketball you have to respect. But, as much as Georgetown fans might wish, the fear will never be back. Maybe the students should start printing up another T-shirt: Respect is back. Who needs fear?

Mike DeBonis is senior editor of the Washington City Paper.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2162970/

http://lioninoil.blogspot.com/

In the sports blogosphere it's a rare sight to see a story about someone who seems to be a all-around good guy. Well here's one for you: Georgetown's Jonathan Wallace. The Junior stamped his name in the history books last Sunday when he hit the game-tying three pointer against UNC that eventually put them into overtime. An Alabama native, Wallace grep up on an 80-acre cattle farm. Wallace's three years in DC have proven that you can take the kid out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the kid. Wallace's take on transportation in the nation's capitol?
"Taxis are dangerous," the Georgetown point guard said. "You don't know who's driving. I like driving my own car, or I like riding with my mom or my dad or aunt, somebody I know. If I don't know you, I'm not going to get in the car with you."

His dream scenario for the future?
"I want cows," Wallace said with a smile. "I want cows and land one day."

Finally, his idea of a wild night?
"It's a lot of things I don't do that the other guys tend to do a lot, as far as going to the mall and so forth on the subway," Wallace said. "I usually stay in the room and wait for them to come back because I'm not too comfortable with that stuff. It's not me."Perhaps Georgetown coach John Thompson III summed Wallace up the best:

"You win with people like Jon Wallace," coach John Thompson III said. "You look at him, he's not the fastest person in the world, he's not the strongest person, never will be. But he has character, he has guts, and he's a good man. He's willed his way through so many situations and is someone who has gotten the most of his God-given ability."

All in all, Wallace seems like a good, normal college student. He's not a primadonna, there's no pretension about him, and he really seems to know who he is deep down inside. In this time where college athletes show up on campus expecting to be waited on hand and foot, Wallace, the former walk-on is a breath of fresh air. He's clearly comfortable with himself, and doesn't pretend to be anything else. He set goals, and he accomplished them. He's been student body president, a national merit finalist, and a Red Cross volunteer.

Go Hoyas!

theonion.com

Burger King Going Cageless
Burger King announced that it would begin buying pork and eggs from farms that do not cage or crate their animals. What do you think?

Priya Shenoy,Produce Manager

"As a regular Burger King patron, I don't think I could make it any more clear that I don't give a flying fuck what I put into my body."

Derrick Braswell,Customer Support Operator

"But the cages were what pushed all the flavor tight into the animals."

Pete DuMont,Systems Analyst

"Now all that's left for them to do is to stop buying from farms that feed their livestock Burger King."

Nice

Rosie thinks we did it.

Rosie O’Donnell is now officially a Truther. She came out today on “The View:”

Video: Rosie melts down.

On Dec. 20, 2002, Sens. Joe Biden of Delaware and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska shared a byline on a Washington Post op-ed titled "Iraq: The Decade After." Biden and Hagel, both of whom had voted two months earlier to go to war with Saddam Hussein's regime, warned that it would not be an easy undertaking and that America had to be prepared for a long-term commitment:

"Although no one doubts our forces will prevail over Saddam Hussein's, key regional leaders confirm what the Foreign Relations Committee emphasized in its Iraq hearings last summer: The most challenging phase will likely be the day after--or, more accurately, the decade after--Saddam Hussein.
Once he is gone, expectations are high that coalition forces will remain in large numbers to stabilize Iraq and support a civilian administration. That presence will be necessary for several years, given the vacuum there, which a divided Iraqi opposition will have trouble filling and which some new Iraqi military strongman must not fill. . . . Americans are largely unprepared for such an undertaking. President Bush must make clear to the American people the scale of the commitment."

Today President Bush remains committed, while Biden and Hagel are among the leaders of the effort to retreat. Their "decade" turned out to last barely four years.

Clive James on Sartre

The best explanation might have more to do with his personality. Perhaps he was overcompensating. It would be frivolous to suggest that Sartre's bad eye was a factor in determining his personality; and anyway, Sartre's physical ugliness in no way impeded his startling success with women. But it might be possible that he was compensating for a mental condition that he knew to be crippling. He might have known that he was debarred by nature from telling the truth for long about anything that mattered, because telling the truth was something that ordinary men did, and his urge to be extraordinary was, for him, more of a motive force than merely to see the world as it was. This perversity—and he was perverse, whether he realized it or not—made him the most conspicuous single example in the 20th century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization. Like Robespierre, he had an awful purity. He turned down the Nobel Prize. He was living proof that the devil's advocate can be idealistic and even self-sacrificing. Minus his virtues, he would be much easier to dismiss. With them, he presents us with our most worrying reminder that the problem of amoral intelligence is not confined to the sciences.

How Liberals Think

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaE98w1KZ-c

Incredible video. Former writer for Bill Maher...

Hoyas Gone Wyld!

http://nomas-nyc.com/2007/03/hoya-saxa-jesuits-gone-wild.html

Great video of some M street goodness-

Illegal immigrants allowed at least five strikes
Border-crossings guidelines revealed amid probe into U.S. attorney firings

By SUSAN CARROLL and MICHAEL HEDGES
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Documents released in the controversy about eight fired U.S. attorneys show that federal prosecutors in Texas generally have declined to bring criminal charges against illegal immigrants caught crossing the border — until at least their sixth arrest.
A heavily redacted Department of Justice memo from late 2005 disclosed the prosecution guidelines for immigration offenses, numbers the federal government tries to keep classified. DOJ officials would not say Thursday whether it has adjusted the number since the memo was written, citing "law enforcement reasons."
The prosecution guidelines have been a source of frustration for years among the ranks of U.S. Border Patrol agents, said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council. Smugglers can figure out the criteria by trial and error, he said, and can exploit it to avoid prosecution.
"It's devastating on morale," Bonner said. "Our agents are risking their lives out there, and then they're told, 'Sorry, that doesn't meet the criteria.' "
The memo was written in response to DOJ inquiries at five U.S. attorney offices, including Houston, about immigration prosecutions. The others — San Antonio, San Diego, Phoenix and Albuquerque — cover the 2,000-mile border.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in Houston declined to comment.

Clocky!

http://www.nandahome.com/products.clocky.html

No more hitting snooze 10 times...

http://www.conradblackblog.com/

http://www.conradblackblog.com/

Get all you Conrad Black trial news here!
Friend in Chicago is running it.

About Mr. Black-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Black

Anna Nicole Judge Citied for Pot in Park

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. - A judge who had a secondary role in the recent Anna Nicole Smith proceedings was charged with smoking marijuana in a city park, police said Monday.
Lawrence Korda was smoking marijuana while sitting under a tree Sunday, police said. Three officers who were training there saw Korda and field-tested the cigarette, said Capt. Tony Rode, a police spokesman.

Discovered at Indymedia, this was the scene yesterday in here in Portland, as “anti-war” demonstrators burned not only a US flag, but a US soldier in effigy.

This makes me sick.

So, Mr. Hitchens, Weren't You Wrong About Iraq?
Hard questions, four years later.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, March 19, 2007, at 1:53 PM ET

4 years after the first coalition soldiers crossed the Iraqi border, one can attract pitying looks (at best) if one does not take the view that the whole engagement could have been and should have been avoided. Those who were opposed to the operation from the beginning now claim vindication, and many of those who supported it say that if they had known then what they know now, they would have spoken or voted differently.
What exactly does it mean to take the latter position? At what point, in other words, ought the putative supporter to have stepped off the train? The question isn't as easy to answer as some people would have you believe. Suppose we run through the actual timeline:

Was the president right or wrong to go to the United Nations in September 2002 and to say that body could no longer tolerate Saddam Hussein's open flouting of its every significant resolution, from weaponry to human rights to terrorism?
A majority of the member states thought he was right and had to admit that the credibility of the United Nations was at stake. It was scandalous that such a regime could for more than a decade have violated the spirit and the letter of the resolutions that had allowed a cease-fire after the liberation of Kuwait. The Security Council, including Syria, voted by nine votes to zero that Iraq must come into full compliance or face serious consequences.
Was it then correct to send military forces to the Gulf, in case Saddam continued his long policy of defiance, concealment, and expulsion or obstruction of U.N. inspectors?
If you understand the history of the inspection process at all, you must concede that Saddam would never have agreed to readmit the inspectors if coalition forces had not made their appearance on his borders and in the waters of the Gulf. It was never a choice between inspection and intervention: It was only the believable threat of an intervention that enabled even limited inspections to resume.
Should it not have been known by Western intelligence that Iraq had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction?
The entire record of UNSCOM until that date had shown a determination on the part of the Iraqi dictatorship to build dummy facilities to deceive inspectors, to refuse to allow scientists to be interviewed without coercion, to conceal chemical and biological deposits, and to search the black market for materiel that would breach the sanctions. The defection of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law, the Kamel brothers, had shown that this policy was even more systematic than had even been suspected. Moreover, Iraq did not account for—has in fact never accounted for—a number of the items that it admitted under pressure to possessing after the Kamel defection. We still do not know what happened to this weaponry. This is partly why all Western intelligence agencies, including French and German ones quite uninfluenced by Ahmad Chalabi, believed that Iraq had actual or latent programs for the production of WMD. Would it have been preferable to accept Saddam Hussein's word for it and to allow him the chance to re-equip once more once the sanctions had further decayed?
Could Iraq have been believably "inspected" while the Baath Party remained in power?
No. The word inspector is misleading here. The small number of U.N. personnel were not supposed to comb the countryside. They were supposed to monitor the handover of the items on Iraq's list, to check them, and then to supervise their destruction. (If Iraq disposed of the items in any other way—by burying or destroying or neutralizing them, as now seems possible—that would have been an additional grave breach of the resolutions.) To call for serious and unimpeachable inspections was to call, in effect, for a change of regime in Iraq. Thus, we can now say that Iraq is in compliance with the Nonproliferation Treaty. Moreover, the subsequent hasty compliance of Col. Muammar Qaddafi's Libya and the examination of his WMD stockpile (which proved to be much larger and more sophisticated than had been thought) allowed us to trace the origin of much materiel to Pakistan and thus belatedly to shut down the A.Q. Khan secret black market.
Wasn't Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations a bit of a disgrace?
Yes, it was, as was the supporting role played by George Tenet and the CIA (which has been reliably wrong on Iraq since 1963). Some good legal experts—Ruth Wedgwood most notably—have argued that the previous resolutions were self-enforcing and that there was no need for a second resolution or for Powell's dog-and-pony show. Some say that the whole thing was done in order to save Tony Blair's political skin. A few points of interest did emerge from Powell's presentation: The Iraqi authorities were caught on air trying to mislead U.N inspectors (nothing new there), and the presence in Iraq of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a very dangerous al-Qaida refugee from newly liberated Afghanistan, was established. The full significance of this was only to become evident later on.
Was the terror connection not exaggerated?
Not by much. The Bush administration never claimed that Iraq had any hand in the events of Sept. 11, 2001. But it did point out, at different times, that Saddam had acted as a host and patron to every other terrorist gang in the region, most recently including the most militant Islamist ones. And this has never been contested by anybody. The action was undertaken not to punish the last attack—that had been done in Afghanistan—but to forestall the next one.
Was a civil war not predictable?
Only to the extent that there was pre-existing unease and mistrust between the different population groups in Iraq. Since it was the policy of Saddam Hussein to govern by divide-and-rule and precisely to exacerbate these differences, it is unlikely that civil peace would have been the result of prolonging his regime. Indeed, so ghastly was his system in this respect that one-fifth of Iraq's inhabitants—the Kurds—had already left Iraq and were living under Western protection.
So, you seriously mean to say that we would not be living in a better or safer world if the coalition forces had turned around and sailed or flown home in the spring of 2003?
That's exactly what I mean to say.

http://www.790theticket.com/audioplayer.php?mp3=2070214352Luke%20Interview-%202-27-07.mp3&show=The+Dan+Le+Batard+Show+with+Stugotz&id=2122

Luther Campbell explains how to "Make It Rain"

Classic

gawker.com

An old Texas political adage concerning lobbyists goes thusly: "If you can't take their money, drink their whiskey, screw their women and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in the Legislature."

But what of reporters, specifically the reporters who are screwing political consultants? Today's LAT takes a look at some of the reporters covering the race for the White House who happen to be married to various campaign aides.

News media and politics: an uneasy union [LAT]

POLL: IRAQIS SAY LIFE IS GETTING BETTER...

POLL: IRAQIS SEE HOPE DRAIN AWAY...

Fjordman looks at Europe’s multicultural capitulation to expansionist Islam, giving rise to the recent riots in the Netherlands: Native Revolt: A European Declaration of Independence.
In the city of Antwerp, Belgium, Marij Uijt den Bogaard from 2003 to 2006 worked as a civil servant in the immigrant borough of Berchem. She noted how radical Islamist groups began to take over the immigrant neighbourhoods, but was fired when she warned against this danger in her reports to the authorities:

“Many victims of burglaries in houses and cars, of steaming and other forms of violence, can testify that aggression by Muslims is not directed against brothers and sisters, but against whoever is a kafir, a non-believer. Young Muslims justify their behaviour towards women who do not wear the headscarf, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, by referring to the Salafist teaching which says that these women are whores and should be treated as such. They told me this. I wrote it down in my reports, but the authorities refuse to hear it.”
Filmmaker Pierre Rehov tells how a friend of his is a retired chief of police who used to be in charge of the security of a major city in the south of France. According to him, 80% of the rapes in the area were made by Muslim young men. In most cases, the parents would not understand why they would be arrested. The only evil those parents would see, genuinely, was the temptation that the male children had to face from infidel women.
The wave of robberies the increasingly Muslim-dominated city of Malmö is witnessing is part of a “war against Swedes,” this according to statements from the immigrant youths themselves. “When we are in the city and robbing, we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.” This argument was repeated several times. “Power for me means that Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet.”

From the ethics exam I took for work today:

Instructions: Click on the best answer below:
Keith and Todd were wrong to try to block a job candidate because of his race. Which of the following would also be inappropriate? -Sending anonymous notes to their supervisor that say:
"Retire! Old people belong in nursing homes!"
-Leaving threatening notes for an employee they believe to be gay.
-Singing the theme song from Shaft whenever a black coworker enters the room.
-These are all inappropriate and don't belong at work.

The rest were almost as good. Makes me wish I knew "Shaft"!

Portland Tiki

The Legacy of the TikiThe history of the Tiki Bar is an essential part of American popular culture and spread out from California to include tiki bars over the globe. Once numbering in the thousands, and building in popularity from the 1930s, tiki bars had their heyday after WWII through the late 1960s. This was due in part to the nostalgia and new found tastes of returning servicemen from the South Pacific, a national craze for “Hawaiiana” culture after it became the 50th State in 1959, and the American love of all things boozey during that era of the martini lunch and standard pre-dinner cocktail hour. While some, like Trader Vic’s, served high end food in a tasteful and hushed atmosphere, many tiki bars were outrageous, wild, and vaguely sexy and naughty with their half naked hula girls and topless Polynesian lady paintings. They were also sometimes completely over the top with flaming torches in the parking lots, Vegas style theatrical floor shows, live parrots and other animals, and even giant smoking volcanoes. Some, like the still going strong Tonga Room in San Francisco, had elaborate fountains and fake lagoons with floating band stages, and regularly scheduled tropical “monsoon” rain storms. It is also widely thought that Tiki bars had such an appeal because they allowed an exotic, albeit safe and relatively affordable, few hours of escape from the button tight new suburban world for the dames and fellas of that otherwise outwardly conservative generation.
Thatch looks back and captures that earlier golden era of the Tiki bar before they became victims of changing tastes and lifestyles; before the alcoholics and down on their luck bar flies began to take them over in the 1970s; before the atmosphere was watered down by adding obnoxious Keno machines; or before a whole bunch of them turned into, gasp, sports bars. Sadly, by the 1990s, many of the original tiki bars had closed with a few strongholds such as the Alibi on N. Interstate or several Trader Vic’s locations still holding the torch. Thankfully, tiki bars are once again experiencing a renaissance, and as the diverse crowd at Thatch shows, this is with both young and old alike.
Tiki fanatics are roaming the internet, building elaborate private basement and backyard tiki habitats, forming local clubs, publishing books, and there are even several new Trader Vic’s opening up, including one that recently opened just outside of Seattle. Also, watch out for the 5th annual Portland Tiki Kon 2007 convention this summer, where Thatch will most certainly be at the center.
Thatch has the nostalgia, feel, and wonderful aesthetic appeal of the tiki bar down pat. Furthermore, Thatch is keeping the Tiki dream fresh by taking the time and care to honor this unique historical and cultural phenomenon through authentic décor, attention to detail, and some damn whopping good drinks. As the little birds in the Enchanted Tiki Room sing,

“In the Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki RoomAll the birds sing words and the flowers croonIn the Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki RoomWelcome to our tropical hideaway, you lucky people you!”

Link to MenuAddress: 2733 NE Broadway, Portland, OR. 97232. Google MapPhone: (503) 281-8454Hours: 5pm to 2am daily. Happy Hour 5pm-6:30pm - $5 Mai Tai’s, dollar off well drinks($4)

opinionjournal.com

Q: There's a lot of debate right now over the best way to communicate about global warming and get people motivated. Do you scare people or give them hope? What's the right mix?

Gore: I think the answer to that depends on where your audience's head is. In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

"An over-representation of factual presentations of how dangerous it is." Isn't that what people accused President Bush of offering vis-a-vis the erstwhile Iraqi regime? Didn't this lead a certain former vice president to thunder, "He betrayed this country! He played on our fears!"?
And it's not as if Gore's "over-representations" don't have harmful effects. They've caused a lot of people to get really sad and stressed out. Consider this report from BusinessWeek http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/mar2007/id20070312_656488.htm?chan=search

*** QUOTE ***
In recent years, the TED conference has gained a reputation for blissfully big ideas buoyed by unrelenting optimism. So few conference goers were prepared for venture capitalist John Doerr to choke up with emotion as he kicked off the second day of talks on Mar. 9.
"I'm scared," he told the audience, looking down at his 15-year-old daughter in the front row. "I don't think we're going to make it."
Doerr issued a passionate call to action for everyone to make environmental concerns their "next big thing."
*** END QUOTE ***

And this one from the Post-Chronicle http://www.postchronicle.com/news/entertainment/tittletattle/article_21268842.shtml , about someone called Jennifer Garner:

*** QUOTE ***
Jennifer has also confessed she cries more now she is a mother. The actress believes the experience has made her more caring.
She said: "Since I became a mother, I cry more because I care about things more.
"I can't watch a movie where something happens to a child. And I've always cared about global warming and breast cancer, but now there seems to be an urgency about them."
*** END QUOTE ***

GORE LIED, PEOPLE CRIED!!!!

Hype

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: March 13, 2007

Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.
But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.
“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”

Beer-tossing fridge

RALEIGH, N.C. — When John Cornwell graduated from Duke University last year, he landed a job as software engineer in Atlanta but soon found himself longing for his college lifestyle.
So the engineering graduate built himself a reminder of life on campus: a refrigerator that can toss a can of beer to his couch with the click of a remote control.
"I conceived it right after I got out," said Cornwell, a May 2006 graduate from Huntington, N.Y. "I missed the college scene. It embodies the college spirit that I didn't want to let go of."
It took the 22-year-old Cornwell about 150 hours and $400 in parts to modify a mini-fridge common to many college dorm rooms into the beer-tossing contraption, which can launch 10 cans of beer from its magazine before needing a reload.
With a click of the remote, fashioned from a car's keyless entry device, a small elevator inside the refrigerator lifts a beer can through a hole and loads it into the fridge's catapult arm.
A second click fires the device, tossing the beer up to 20 feet — "far enough to get to the couch," he said.

From Deadspin:

A friend of mine just told me he's getting married. When he gave me the news I immediately thought of the time we were in Scottsdale at spring training, because it's the best pickup story I've ever been a party to. It was about nine years ago, and I actually forget the bar. But my friend was seriously putting the moves on this somewhat attractive young woman, who was wearing leather pants and had a leather jacket draped over her lap. They had been chatting at the bar for about an hour, and my friend thought he was in the house. I had never seen someone work so hard for a score. But just as he was putting on the finishing touches, Chris Berman walks by. And without even breaking stride, Berman looks at the girl, points and says "You're with me, leather." And the girl looks up, instantly recognizes Berman, snatches up her jacket and walks out with him, leaving my friend in mid-sentence.

Because we made another call to independently confirm this tale, "You're with me, leather," now officially enters the pantheon of Chris Bermanisms, of which there were probably several more uttered later during the evening in question. Yeah, we should have noted earlier that this thing gets really horrifying if you think about it too much.

The CIA is ramping up its activities in the lawless northern Waziristan area of Pakistan, on the trail of two very high value targets: Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Armed with fresh intelligence, the CIA is moving additional man power and equipment into Pakistan in the effort to find Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al Zawahri, U.S. officials tell ABC News. “Reports that the trail has gone stone cold are not correct,” said one U.S. official. “We are very much increasing our efforts there,” the official said.
People familiar with the CIA operation say undercover officers with paramilitary training have been ordered into Pakistan and the area across the border with Afghanistan as part of the ramp-up. Although never publicly acknowledged, Pakistan has permitted CIA teams to secretly operate inside Pakistan.
Pakistan officials say they are aware that CIA teams have increased their presence in northern Waziristan since last September when Pakistan withdrew its troops from the area under a much-criticized “peace deal” with tribal leaders.
Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell testified last week that current intelligence “to the best of our knowledge” puts both bin Laden and al Zawahri in Pakistan. It was the first time a high-ranking U.S. official publicly identified Pakistan as bin Laden’s hiding place.

http://www.deadspin.com/

So, less than a month after you've won the Super Bowl, you've got a bevy of entertainment options and endorsement opportunities. Or, you can just ignore both and sleep on a beach somewhere, maybe make out with balding country music stars your wife, just take it easy.
Or: You can accept $200,000 to show up at a Sweet Sixteen party.
According to one of the (anonymous) party attendees, Manning spent the past weekend as the main attraction at a girl's Sweet Sixteen party; he was rumored to have been paid $200 grand for a two-hour appearance. (Cedric the Entertainer was also there, which must have been confusing, since "The Entertainer" is also Peyton's nickname.)
According to an attendee:
"The first hour was the actual birthday ceremony which included Manning hiding behind a cake with a baker's hat on, then Manning took off the hat and surprised the birthday girl and the rest of the crowd. The second hour was Peyton standing next to a background and a professional photographer, where the entire party lined up to take pictures with him one by one. The pictures were printed and framed and given to the guests as they left."
We're sorry, but if you want Daddy to hire someone famous to attend your Sweet 16 party, and you pick Peyton Manning ... you're the lamest teenager we've ever seen. We love that of all the people in the above photo, Peyton's the one who looks like he's going through his awkward phase.

Mindcrime

Following the announcement of Channel 4’s documentary debunking The Great Global Warming Swindle, Britain’s extreme left newspaper The Guardian goes on the attack against this double-plus ungood mindcrime: Why Channel 4 has got it wrong over climate change.

And they throw in a little “America is eeeevil” red meat for the devotees: Official report says US CO2 to rise by 20%.

So this is enough to make one happy: The cover boy for the new EA Sports NCAA Football 2008 game is ... Boise State quarterback Jared Zabransky!

Scientists at a Chinese robotic engineering institute remotely controlled a flying pigeon. First they implanted tiny electrodes in its brain. By activating the electrodes from a computer, they "forced the bird to comply with their commands," flying right, left, up, or down. According to Chinese government-controlled media, they're refining the technology in the hope that it "can be put into practical use." Scientists' fantasy: remote-controlled animals. Government fantasy: remote-controlled scientists.

(For Human Nature's take on remote-controlled aerial drones in espionage and warfare, click here. For remote control of rats, click here and here.)

Nooooooooooooooooooooo!

Man Blames Burrito For Paralysis

POSTED: 8:31 am EST March 1, 2007

TAMPA, Fla. -- A man who can no longer feed himself said an uncooked chicken burrito put him in a wheelchair.
Roger Anderson said he ate the burrito at a Moe's Southwest Grill in Land O' Lakes in September and became sick with stomach cramps, diarrhea and joint pains.
Anderson's attorney said the burrito caused a bacterial infection, which led to a disease that affects the body's nerves.
Anderson and his wife filed a lawsuit against Tampa-based GCF Ventures LLC, which operates the restaurant.
The company said all of its employees are trained in safe food handling and preparation practices, and the restaurant is regularly checked by health inspectors.

Sugiero has lots of interesting detail on the German organization for ex-Muslims, whose leader recently asked for police protection after receiving death threats from representatives of the Religion of Women’s Rights™: Ex-Muslim Says ‘Islam Inherently Radical’.

Arzu Toker, deputy chairwoman, used a news conference to announce her separation from Islam: ‘I herewith resign from Islam. That’s it.’
Toker, a journalist who was born in 1952 in Turkey’s eastern Anatolia region, is radical in her criticism of Islam. She does not accept its Sharia system of rules at all, saying they contradict both human rights and the values of the German constitution.
She added that Islam was anti-woman.
‘It humiliates women and turns them into servants of the men,’ she said, adding the Islam was anti-man as well.
‘It reduces men to breeding animals controlled by their urges,’ said Toker. She quoted the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘He said, God is dead. One can live fine by taking one’s own responsibility.’
She said she did not distinguish between Islam and fundamentalism. ‘Islam is inherently radical,’ she said.
Ahadi described her life to reporters and said, ‘Political Islam has afflicted my life.’ Born in Iran in 1956, her support for human rights had rapidly put her in opposition to the Islamic Revolution. She refused to wear a headscarf and was expelled from university.
Later her husband was executed. She had lived in Germany since 1996.
‘I know all about political Islam,’ she said. ‘It ends up with us being stoned to death, even here in Germany.’