Logic & Sanity

Terrorist bastards!

Gazeta.ru reports
that a car bomb went off in Moscow. 8 dead, 18+ wounded.
On a related note, the 2 chechen women who are suspected of blowing up the russian planes last week, were travelling with 2 others - Rosa Nagayeva and Mariam Taburova. There is no record of them being on the flight. Authorities are looking for them.

More photos here.

UPDATE

A witness is claiming to have seen a female suicide bomber set off the explosion. FSB is investigating.

1TV is reporting that the bomb was filled with bolts and other small metalic objects.

Freedom of speech?

Photos from the protest (@ Medienkritik's) - Photos 1 Photos 2

Check out this video of protestors attacking those whose signs they don't approve of. So much for freedom of speech.

Also, most of us already knew that ACLU were never neutral, but this is pretty blatant.

Left's paranoia

Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web Today" is a daily read for me. Always fresh, informative and witty. Yesterday, they walked around the city talking to protestors.

The Canadian guy was actually pleasant and earnest, and we ended up chatting with him at some length. At one point he theorized that there was a connection between the savings-and-loan scandal of the late 1980s and the Gulf War of 1990-91--i.e., that the first Bush administration had engineered the latter as a distraction from the former.

We thought we had a pretty good counterargument. "There were two events that preceded the Gulf War," we noted: "the S&L scandal and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. I can see the connection between the invasion and the war, but I can't see the connection between the S&L scandal and the war."

He responded with a long disquisition about Iraq's legitimate grievances against Kuwait--something about "angular drilling" to steal Iraqi oil--his point being that, although he didn't approve of the invasion, it was not wholly unprovoked.

We listened patiently, then asked, "What does that have to do with the S&L scandal?"

"OK, I was reaching," he admitted. "Maybe there wasn't a connection." This certainly restored our faith in the power of civil debate and sweet reason.

This guy managed to kill off his own conspiracy theory. Maybe there's hope?

And another example of the extreme left's paranoia.

"You NEVER protested against Osama!"

A brave woman recounts her experience dissenting at the protest:

Towards the end of the march a procession of American flag draped coffins started passing by. The organizers say there were a thousand to represent the not quite number of GIs killed in Iraq. Some of the 'coffins' were draped in black.

AS they passed by, I called out the 'pallbearers' thanking them for reprising their procession of 3000 flag draped coffins that they had done after September 11. I then told them, "Wait, you didn't do that after September 11. In fact, you NEVER protested against Osama bin Laden!" I kept repeating, "You never protested against Osama" as they shrieked in fury at me for daring to challenge them so bluntly

Make sure to read the whole thing (via AllahPundit.com).

Protest photos

Just found a whole directory of photos from the protests in the city. Check them out. Protest Warriors are out in full effect and doing a good job of countering hippies.
Also, lots of links here.

UPDATE

Rich Lowry of the National Review recounts his experience with the protest on Sunday.

A guy in a VFW hat was off on a sidewalk at one point, attacking Kerry and defending the U.S. military. A protest girl walked up close to him and just stuck out her middle finger at him for a long time with a self-satisfied look on her face, as though she had come up with the cleverest gesture ever.

I think that pretty much sums up the protestors. A bunch of pissed off folks with no solutions or rational arguments. Read the whole thing. As always, their stupidity is quite entertaining.

UPDATE

More photos.

Plain ghetto!

It just doesn't get any more ghetto then this:

JA Rule wasn't exactly keepin' it real when he went on the MTV show "Cribs" and showed off his Miami mansion — the posh pad on Star Island wasn't even his. Owner Jeanette Varela, who rented her 8,000-square-foot digs to Rule, has filed a lawsuit saying MTV is illegally airing clips of her home and wrongly portraying it as Rule's.

More details here.

DSC-V3

The rumor came out to be true. SONY has announced three new cameras and DSC-V3 is one of them. DSV-V3 uses the same Carl Zeiss lense as DSC-V1, but now has a 7.2 megapixel sensor and a black body. Surprisingly, the new model is actually bigger then its predecessor - longer by .7 of an inch. Most likely its due to the huge 2.5" LCD on the back (vs. the 1.5" LCD on the DSC-V1). It's also great to see SONY come to their senses and include support for compact flash (TYPE 1 only, though) in addition to their proprietary (and expensive) memory stick.
This is definately a great camera, but one I won't be buying due to its size. Casio P700 is on top of my list, but the quest for a pocketable camera with manual controls continues still.

Adding to the list

Casio announced five new cameras on wednesday. Two of them are going on my list:

EX-P700 and EX-Z50/EX-Z55

EX-P700 (Canon lense) is basically the same camera as EX-P600, but with a 7 megapixel sensor. It looks very good and is on top of my list, however the EX-P600 had issues such as dead pixels and the a flaky USB port. I am not sure how significant those problems are, after all a card reader is only $10 and several dead pixels in a 7 megapixel image might not matter, but still...

EX-Z55 looks very decent as well. It's a 5 megapixel/3x zoom camera with a Pentax lense. This camera has manual controls, a huge 2.5" LCD (EX-Z50 has a 2"), and its only .9" thick (my old Canon s230, which is very pockatable, is 1.1" thick).

There's also a rumour of SONY announcing a new line up on monday. Maybe they'll announce a DSC-V2?

'Shear' luck

The pun in the title was shamelessly stolen from the original headline in the NY Post. It's just way too early to be original.

The Nissan was barreling along at high speed on Ocean Parkway between Avenue N and Avenue O around 10 p.m. Sunday when it hit two moving vehicles and crashed, cops said. No one in the other cars was seriously injured.

The Nissan's front end wound up about 50 feet away from the rest of the car.

"The flow of water don't work in the our bath."

Mike's building's super has a clipboard by his door where people leave their complaints and demands. Naturally, I had to take a photo.

(click on the photo for a bigger version)