bfwebster on May 22nd, 2007

I ran across a blog entry this morning, Mark Steyn citing John Podhoretz regarding the uproar over the immigration bill being rushed through the Senate despite being incomplete, inconsistent and, by and large, incomprehensible. Here are the nested posts in full: Given his general antipathy to the National Review line on illegal immigration, I thought [...]

Continue reading about Bad legislation, bad government and IT project failure

bfwebster on May 20th, 2007

[UPDATED 05/20/07 - 2056 MDT] First, thanks to Glenn for the Instalanche[tm]! And welcome all, however briefly it may be. Second, this comment from friedaK deserves to be called out: I was 6 years old when the war ended in Germany. Our little town was pretty close to where the Russians stopped and we were [...]

Continue reading about Why history matters [redux]

bfwebster on May 18th, 2007

This video has 100 scenes from 100 movies — containing the numbers 100 down to 1. A remarkable bit of compilation and editing. Hat tip to Metafilter.  ..bruce..

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bfwebster on May 16th, 2007

Victor Davis Hanson talks about why study of military history matters: 1. All history is not equal. There is something about battle — the ghastly effort to kill young people with state sanction — that accelerates time and reduces other considerations to trivialities…. 2. Oddly, wars are not uniformly bloody and deadly, as we saw [...]

Continue reading about Why I read military history [UPDATED]

bfwebster on May 13th, 2007

And here it is: (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.) This planet is some 63 light-years away from us. It is one of the so-called “hot Jupiter” planets, that is, a gas giant that is in a very close, tight orbit around its star. You can find more details here. Yeah, I know there’s not a lot of [...]

Continue reading about First map of an exosolar planet

bfwebster on May 12th, 2007

Of course, I blame Bush: As seen in Figure 1, Neptune has been getting brighter since around 1980; furthermore, infrared measurements of the planet since 1980 show that the planet has been warming steadily from 1980 to 2004. As they say on Neptune, global warming has become an inconvenient truth. But with no one to [...]

Continue reading about Global warming on…Neptune!

bfwebster on May 12th, 2007

Slate provides some simple animation for a recorded exchange (regarding ferret rights) between Giuliani and a caller back while Giuliani was mayor of NYC: In 1999, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani hosted a weekly call-in program. During one show, he responded to caller David Guthartz, a ferret-rights activist who was upset over city regulations making [...]

Continue reading about Yet another reason why I support Giuliani for President

bfwebster on May 9th, 2007

After taking about a week off, I walked again today, which puts me at 227 miles down, 1078 miles to go. I’m going to need to push a bit harder to get back on track for my October 6 goal of 1305 miles. In the meantime, I’ve started a new blog — Adventures in Mormonism [...]

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Gerard Van der Leun, one of the finest American writers posting regularly on the net these days, talks some important upgrades to his “go bag” (as in “grab and go” in case of a natural or man-made disaster): ABOUT QUARTER TO NINE this serene Sunday morning, as I was sitting down and wondering what to [...]

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bfwebster on May 8th, 2007

Michael Barone (much as with Robert Samuelson) is one of my favorite social/political commentators because he bases his observations on actual facts rather than wishful thinking. He also probably knows more about state-by-state, county-by-county, precinct-by-precinct politics and demographics in the United States than anyone else alive. So when he talks about that subject, it’s worth [...]

Continue reading about Changing American demographics