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Soviet space dogs blast-off to animated immortality

In space, no one can hear you bark. Two mongrels named Belka and Strelka made history in 1960 when they went into orbit in a Soviet space ship and then returned to Earth -- the first animals ever to survive the trip.

The Mystery Of Cursed Bread & A CIA Agent's Death

(PhysOrg.com) -- For 60 years, the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit has been famous for the events of a few days in August, 1951, when dozens of villagers were struck with unexplainable and horrifying hallucinations of fire and snakes and beasts of all kinds.

Study shows further benefits of noscapine for prostate cancer

New research has revealed a major breakthrough in the use of cough medicine ingredient noscapine as a prophylactic treatment for prostate cancer.

Google to leave China April 10: state media

US Internet giant Google will close its business in China next month and may announce its plans in the coming days, Chinese media reported on Friday, after rows over censorship and hacking.

EMC CEO gets $9M pay package in 2009, down 23 pct

(AP) -- The pay package last year for EMC Corp. CEO Joe Tucci was 23 percent lower than in 2008, a reflection of lower equity awards and cuts to the data-storage company's executive salaries.

Hollywood and Bollywood join arms to fight piracy

(AP) -- Hollywood and Bollywood linked arms Thursday to fight piracy, with the announcement of a coalition among the Motion Picture Association of America and seven Indian companies to tackle counterfeiting in one of the world's largest film markets.

Lady Gaga, Rep. Jared Polis, and 5 Tips for Pols Who Twitter

Filed under: Woman Up

My congressman tweeted about Lady Gaga's new video last week, calling it "AMAZING."

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the queen of glam. But if I want advice on hot new videos, well, I'm kinda thinking it should be from someone other than my congressman, Rep. Jared Polis, (D-Colo.)

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Don't Give the Roberts Court the Chance to Kill Health Reform

Filed under: Senate, House, Democrats, Republicans, Nancy Pelosi, Health Care, Supreme Court, Congress

Searching for health care votes with the desperation of...well...a family without medical insurance trying to pay a hospital bill, Nancy Pelosi must find the temptation nearly irresistible.

With skittish House Democrats reluctant to ratify the heavy-handed compromises in the Senate health care bill such as the reviled Nebraska-only Cornhusker kickback, Pelosi is beguiled with a parliamentary gambit that would avoid such an awkward vote. Under a congressional sleight-of-hand called "deem and pass," House approval of fixes in the Senate bill (including rescinding the Cornhusker kickback) would be considered identical to actually passing the politically troublesome original Senate legislation.

If you are confused at this point -- and who can blame you -- here is a career tip: Do not expect to ever be a congressional parliamentarian.

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Democrats' Momentum Building for Sunday Health Vote

Filed under: Senate, House, Democrats, Republicans, Nancy Pelosi, Health Care, The Capitolist, Congress

After months of debate, delays and intraparty disarray, Democrats in Washington seemed to gain crucial momentum toward passing a health care reform bill by week's end. But legislative booby traps and fickle election-year politics mean that significant hurdles await the bill in the Senate, even if it passes the House in a likely Sunday vote.

The tide seemed to turn for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats on Thursday morning, when the Congressional Budget Office released a very preliminary, but highly favorable, cost estimate for the newly combined House and Senate bills that the chambers will take up under reconciliation.

CBO Director Doug Elmendorf told Congressional leaders their compromise bill, which would extend coverage to 32 million Americans without insurance, will total $940 billion in new federal spending over 10 years. More importantly, he said, it will cut the deficit by $130 billion in the first 10 years and by $1.2 trillion in the 10 years after that. It will also overhaul the nation's student loan program, saving billions of dollars by eliminating private banks from most transactions.

Pelosi opened a Thursday press conference, her third in three days, with the CBO numbers on a large poster board beside her, a smile on her face, and a victorious message to the assembled crowd.

"They say a picture is worth a thousand words," she said. "But a number is worth a lot, too."

The CBO numbers, it turned out, were worth crucial votes for the bill as the day went on. Moments after Pelosi presented the findings to her caucus, Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.), a fiscally conservative holdout on the final bill, emerged from the meeting and said the deficit reduction projected by CBO would make a major difference in his thinking. "I'm pretty happy about the numbers," he said. "That moves me a step forward, and I want to get to a place where I can support it, but I'm not there yet."

Reps. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) and Betsy Markey (D-Colo.) said the numbers had done even more for them -- they will change their previous "no" votes to "yes."

With the CBO estimates softening resistance among the Blue Dog Democrats, some persuasion from the president seemed to be changing other Democrats' minds. When Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) announced Wednesday he would change his "no" to a "yes," the usually high-minded progressive spoke in starkly practical terms, saying President Obama had urged him to decide on the bill as it is, "not as I would want it to be."

Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.), a pro-life supporter of Rep. Bart Stupak's language on abortion funding restrictions, announced Wednesday that he, too, would vote for the bill he had resisted for months. "We must not lose sight of what is at stake here -- the lives of 31 million American children, adults and seniors who don't have health insurance," he said in a written statement. "There is nothing more pro-life than protecting the lives of 31 million Americans."

A final group of holdouts from the Hispanic caucus relented on Thursday as well and endorsed the bill as pressure built against their resistance to the final package, which will prohibit illegal immigrants from purchasing health insurance through newly created exchanges with their own money.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), who made his frustration with the president over immigration reform well known over the last weeks, said, "I cannot see that voting against this health care bill is going to bring us any closer to comprehensive immigration reform. I do see that a success and a victory on health care will allow this president to be strengthened and to be able to carry out with more political capital our ultimate goal."

With votes lining up behind the Democrats, Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter said she plans to convene her committee Saturday to vote on the rules for the House debate on the health care bill, and that she will most likely use the "deem and pass" procedure. That would allow Democrats to vote on changes they want to make to the deeply unpopular Senate health bill, and in the same vote "deem" that the underlying bill has passed as well.

"It is our protection to make sure the Senate bill is changed," she said. "It's not that complicated. It's been used here forever. This notion that this is some brand new byzantine thing we brought up out of the cave is nonsense." She said the House will most likely vote Sunday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Republicans vowed Thursday, as they have every day, to do everything possible to delay, dismantle, or destroy the health care bill.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the bill "a government take-over of health care" and said Democrats' relentless efforts to pass their legislation will backfire. "That kind of arrogance usually proceeds a big fall," he said.

House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio accused Democrats of trying to "ram, ram, ram this through the Congress" and promised, "We're going to do everything we can to make sure this bill never, ever passes."

He and his fellow Republicans lived up to their word Thursday, offering two separate measures to force the House to vote directly on the Senate bill. Both measures failed, but won the votes of all Republicans and several Democrats.

It remained unclear whether Pelosi and her deputies had indeed secured the 216 votes necessary to pass their bill through the House on Sunday. Stupak (D-Mich.) remained firmly against the abortion funding language in the bill and maintained that several of his pro-life colleagues would join him in switching their yes votes to nos. And even with a victory in the House, it is clear that the health care reform saga will only continue in the Senate.

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), the chairman of the Budget Committee, described an arduous process of vetting each portion of the House bill though the Senate parliamentarian to ensure it complies with the rules. He also noted that Senate Republicans can offer an unlimited number of amendments to the Senate bill, which they have been planned to do for months. If even one amendment is added or one provision is stripped out of the House-passed bill, the entire package will go back to the House to begin the process again.

But McConnell insisted he hasn't thought that far ahead. "Our plan is for it not to come to the Senate. Our plan is for it to be defeated in the House in the next few days."

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Glenn Beck, Jim Wallis, and Falwell-esque Dangers of Mixing Politics and Faith

Fox's Glenn Beck and Sojourner's Jim Wallis are dueling about the meaning of social justice and the Bible. Neither man will be mistaken for Reinhold Niebuhr.

The dispute started when Beck, on his radio show, said, "I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. ... Am I advising people to leave their church? Yes! If I am going to Jeremiah Wright's church. If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish. Go alert your bishop."

Wallis fired back in a post, saying:

Beck says Christians should leave their social justice churches, so I say Christians should leave Glenn Beck. I don't know if Beck is just strange, just trying to be controversial, or just trying to make money. But in any case, what he has said attacks the very heart of our Christian faith, and Christians should no longer watch his show. His show should now be in the same category as Howard Stern.

"When your political philosophy is to consistently favor the rich over the poor," Wallis added, "you don't want to hear about economic justice."

There are several things to untangle in this dispute. The first is that Glenn Beck is hardly an authority who can (or should) speak to such matters. There is a critique to be made here, but this is not the manner in which it should be made. I have made it clear any number of times that Beck is not someone I find particularly appealing - and have I spelled out some of the things he has said that I find outright offensive:

The second thing to say has to do with the terms "social justice" and "economic justice." They are simply not offensive terms per se. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are filled with admonitions to pursue justice. And showing concern for the poor and the dispossessed, the alien and the sojourner, the widow and the orphan, is clearly scriptural. There are vastly more verses dealing with our treatment of the poor than there are, for example, dealing with homosexuality. So, to be in favor of social justice is not itself problematic and, rightly understood, is commendable.

At the same time, however, the term "social justice" and "economic justice" have, in the hands of politically religious activists like Jim Wallis, been cheapened. They have gone from being a set of important biblical principles to becoming a justification for a liberal/Left political agenda. That's not entirely surprising in the case of Wallis, who himself is a fairly radical political figure, as anyone who has read Sojourners and Wallis over the years can attest.

Let's see where this self-described "public theologian" has come down on various issues over the years. We could start, I suppose, with Wallis' extraordinary claim years ago about the Vietnamese boat people. "Many of today's refugees," he said, "were inoculated with a taste for a Western lifestyle during the war and are fleeing to support their consumer habit in other lands."

In the 1980s, Jim Wallis said of the United States and the Soviet Union, "We must refuse to take sides in this horrible and deadly hypocrisy." According to Wallis, "a totalitarian spirit fuels the engines of both Wall Street and the Kremlin." About the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Wallis said their policies "are designed to benefit the poor majority of the country more than the middle and upper classes." He declared as well that "the gift of democracy to the Nicaraguan people came from the Sandinistas." (See Katherine Mangu-Ward's excellent story, "God's Democrat," for chapter and verse.)

During the welfare debate in the mid-1990s Wallis was a fierce critic of reform, saying, "The results we can now expect [from welfare reform] will be nothing short of disastrous for many people... A million more children will likely be thrown into poverty, and 3 million to 4 million already in poverty will be plunged into deeper jeopardy." Nor has Wallis been at all shy about criticizing Republican budgets as being an attack on the poor.

Some of Wallis' comments have been morally indefensible. Beyond that, though, he doesn't bring any particular knowledge or competence to matters of public policy or governing. And so he often makes claims that in time are exposed as ridiculous. Overhauling welfare, for example, ranks among the most successful social reforms of the last half-century. (For more, see the discussion of welfare reform here:

At other times Wallis comes across less like a self-styled prophet and more like Paul Begala. Take as just one example this posting by Wallis in the aftermath of a 60 Minutes episode:

I believe that Dick Cheney is a liar; that Donald Rumsfeld is also a liar; and that George W. Bush was, and is, clueless about how to be the president of the United States. And this isn't about being partisan - I was raised in a Republican family with two Republican parents that I loved more than any two people in the world. I've heard plenty of my Republican friends and public figures call this administration an embarrassment to the best traditions of the Republican Party and an embarrassment to the democratic (small d) tradition of the United States. They have shamed our beloved nation in the world by this war and the shameful way they have fought it. Almost 4,000 young Americans are dead because of the lies of this administration, tens of thousands more wounded and maimed for life, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis also dead, and 400 billion dollars wasted -- because of their lies, incompetence, and corruption.

But I don't favor impeachment, as some have suggested. I would wait until after the election, when they are out of office, and then I would favor investigations of the top officials of the Bush administration on official deception, war crimes, and corruption charges. And if they are found guilty of these high crimes, I believe they should spend the rest of their lives in prison -- after offering their repentance to every American family who has lost a son, daughter, father, mother, brother, or sister. Deliberately lying about going to war should not be forgiven.

This comes from a man who calls for a "politics of compassion, community, and civility." Wallis' rants would qualify him as just another partisan (and uncivil) voice on the Internet, except for the fact that he so often justifies his views by placing on them the imprimatur of God, the obvious and indisputable position held by those who care about "social justice." Indeed, Wallis authored a book modestly titled "God's Politics" and is described on the website of Sojourners as a "bestselling author, public theologian, preacher, speaker, activist, and international commentator on ethics and public life."

With that write up one would think he would bring a seriousness of purpose and a reasonable tone to the debate of the issues of our time. But one would be wrong.

Many of us believe that it is fully appropriate, and in some cases honorable, to be involved in politics and governing. Politics is a means to advance the moral good. "The end of the state," Aristotle wrote in "The Politics," "is not mere life; it is, rather, a good quality of life." He went on to argue that "it is the cardinal issue of goodness or badness in the life of the polis which always engages the attention of any state that concerns itself to secure a system of good laws well obeyed."

At the same time, those in politics who speak in the name of Christianity can, if they are not careful, do great harm to their faith and their witness. Their faith becomes a means to a political end, a cudgel with which to beat up those with whom one disagrees. It vulgarizes and can even corrupt Christianity; people, both within and outside that faith are understandably turned off when partisans use it to advance ideological ends.

Which returns us to Jim Wallis. In many respects he is, ironically enough, the mirror image of the late Jerry Falwell. Like Falwell, Wallis is drawn to power and attention like a moth to a flame on a dark summer night. Like the former founder of the Moral Majority, Wallis takes biblical principles and simplistically connects the dots to public policies he supports. He has, as the Reverend Falwell had, enormous confidence that he knows the mind of God on matters of politics. And Wallis says harsh and irresponsible things about those who hold views different than his. It is reasonable to say, I think, that there is little evidence of a spirit of grace and reconciliation in the words of Wallis.

"Identification of Christian social ethics with specific partisan proposals that clearly are not the only ones that may be characterized as Christian and as morally acceptable," the Christian ethicist Paul Ramsey once wrote, "comes close to the original New Testament meaning of heresy." That assessment is a wise and serious one - and it is one Jim Wallis, a person who undoubtedly longs to be faithful to his Lord, should carefully reflect on.

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Mark Levin Inverviews Paul Ryan -- By: Andy McCarthy

Of all the people in govenment, Paul Ryan may be the ablest guy on our team against Obamacare, and I'm grateful we have him. Sometimes, though, he slips too easily into wonk-speak, to the detriment of clarity and impact. Not last night, though. Listen to this interview of Rep. Ryan by Mark Levin. Mark was great -- slowed the congressman down in all the right spots so that the inside-baseball of double-counting and other Obama budget and procedural chicanery came clear. Really well done ... and fury-making.

We Don't Need to 'Get Over the Sanctions Delusion' -- By: NRO Staff

Over at Foreign Policy, Lara Friedman recommends "getting over the sanctions delusion" and predicts that the Iran Refined Petroleum Act now making its way through Congress -- a set of unilateral sanctions targeted at Iran's refined gasoline imports from across the Persian Gulf -- will probably fail. Her argument is worth examining; in addition to being both novel and deeply misguided, it raises an important point.

Noting that supporters of stiffer Iran sanctions "triumphantly" raise the success of sanctions against South Africa as an example in their favor, Lara sees a crucial difference, because

South Africa is the one case where sanctions were about supporting the self-identified interests of a large portion of that country's population. In every other case, sanctions have been about promoting US interests, not the interests of the people bearing their brunt. We sanctioned the Castro regime because we refused to tolerate Communism so close to home. We sanctioned Gaza because we rejected any dealings with Hamas. We sanctioned Iraq because we decided that Saddam Hussein had become an irredeemable enemy of the US. We started sanctioning Iran because we decided that the Iranian regime was beyond the pale. And -- no surprise -- in every case except South Africa, the populations that were expected to rise up and act as tools of US foreign policy obstinately refused to cooperate.

Lara is right to distinguish South Africa from these other cases, but she draws entirely the wrong distinction. Her point is a variation on "blame America first" and may be paraphrased as follows: In South Africa sanctions had a humanitarian purpose, in solidarity with the wishes of the South African people, whereas in the other cases sanctions were motivated by U.S. interests in an exercise of imperialist realpolitik.

But those who have supported sanctions against Cuba, Gaza, Iraq, and Iran were also motivated by humanitarian concerns, in many cases quite centrally and passionately. Conservatives tend to see humanitarianism and the pursuit of U.S. interests abroad -- properly understood -- as generally consonant aims. In Cuba, Saddam's Iraq, and Iran (and perhaps even Gaza) people have been unable "to rise up and act as tools of US foreign policy" (i.e., liberate themselves) not because they didn't want to, but because they were and are terrified. Actually, in Iraq, they did rise up, and they were crushed. In Cuba, hundreds of thousands decided that their chances were better if they risked probable death on inner tubes and rickety boats trying to cross the Florida Straits -- arriving with stories of terror and a loathing of Castro that easily match what the victims of apartheid felt towards that regime. The people of Cuba and Iraq might well have had "self-expressed" widespread opposition to their regimes -- and solidarity with U.S. policy -- if their countries' respective terror police had not been so effective in silencing them.

The difference in the case of South Africa was not in the motivations of the U.S. government, but rather in the motivations of the South African government. What South Africa had by way of a repressive apparatus came apart in the course of the 1980s, increasingly assailed and isolated by anti-apartheid forces within the government as well outside it. By the time U.S. and Europeans imposed sanctions in 1986-87, Nelson Mandela was still in prison and the African National Congress was still banned; on the other hand, official apartheid had largely disappeared from most workplaces, black trade unions had been legalized, the Mixed Marriages Act had been repealed, the Separate Amenities Act soon would be, and the pass laws and forced removals of blacks had ended. As Margaret Thatcher related in Downing Street Years, "In all these ways 'apartheid,' as the Left continued to describe it, was if not dead at least rapidly dying." Soon after sanctions were imposed, Mandela was released and the ANC legalized; within a few years the last white governments of South Africa had dismantled apartheid entirely and ushered in the 1994 mixed-race elections which ended white rule in South Africa forever. In the end, the sanctions proved useful mostly as a political lever within a South African regime that was in the midst of transforming itself.

By contrast, the regimes of Cuba and Saddam's Iraq were (and in the case of Cuba, still is) unified and largely unconcerned with the isolation and poverty that their peoples have had to endure. The Cuban government for example has no interest in ending U.S. sanctions (otherwise they would be offering something in return, such as limited freedom of speech, or the release of a few political prisoners). The government's protests against the U.S. embargo are designed only to justify the dictatorship at home and increase its standing abroad. Its political monopoly would be more endangered by an end to the country's isolation than it ever has been by the absence of U.S. economic ties -- it is the same reason that Kim Jong Il decided in the 1990s that starving several million fellow North Koreans was better than embracing the West. But if significant elements of the Cuban government were to start seeking political authority on the basis of popular legitimacy, the desire to improve the lives of their people would give Cuban officials a real interest in ending both the U.S. embargo and the repressive policies of the current regime. Communism in Eastern Europe came to an end as a result of many factors -- but most primordially because the Communists themselves initiated and steered the process that ended it, as recounted in Tony Judt's Postwar.

So, into which basket should we place Iran now? Is the regime unified and unconcerned with popular support and international isolation, thinking itself able to maintain power indefinitely on the basis of a terror police? Does the regime still believe that the Islamic Revolution can survive in the long run, with the will of Allah plus a few nukes? That is entirely possible. In that case, sanctions by themselves have little chance of working, and stronger inducements may have to be considered. But if the regime in Tehran is increasingly riven by faction, coming apart along political lines, cracking under the pressure of international ostracism, then a policy of piling up all feasible sanctions will have a chance of working. Perhaps there are elements of the Iranian elite who don't think they can survive without popular support, who secretly want the U.S. to impose stiffer sanctions, to start cutting off gasoline imports, hoping to push the Ahmadinejad-Iranian Revolutionary Guard regime to its final end (his primary purview is the budget, with its massive gasoline subsidies). Maybe they are willing to pay a price in terms of the Iranian people suffering economic deprivation in the short run. Hillary Clinton has from time to time made comments aimed at Ahmadinejad and the IRG as distinct from the Iranian state generally, which suggests that a South Africa model may well be what the Obama administration is thinking. That would be not so much a question of isolating the Iranian government as of isolating particular factions within the government -- much the direction in which Margaret Thatcher tried to steer the push for sanctions against South Africa.

Such a policy would have at least one hopeful precedent: In the heat of apartheid's crisis, South Africa gave up an indigenously-developed nuclear-weapon program and willingly joined the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons state. It did so in the midst of self-effectuated regime change in which, helped along by a U.S.-European policy of "constructive engagement" and sanctions, the government began to reflect the will of its people. If the government of South Africa had not first begun to change its attitude towards its own people, embracing a desire for international legitimacy based on domestic justice and popular support, sanctions would likely not have worked there either -- whatever the will of the people or the motivations of the U.S. government.

-- Mario Loyola is a former foreign policy counsel at the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee.

How to liven up a bored Bulldog: scrotum tickling in the showring

If you thought that the spoof documentary about dog shows, “Best in Show”, was a little exaggerated, think again. The reality of life in the upper echelons of showing pedigree dogs can be more bizarre than a film director could ever imagine. A video taken at Crufts last weekend proves the point, but it needs a [...]

Google May Leave China on April 10

Google’s decision to cease its operation in China is edging closer to reality after months of negotiations. China Business News reports that Google plans to leave China on April 10.

The report cites an unidentified Google China employee, but this information has not been confirmed by Google. Allegedly, Google gave its China employees the option of moving to the company’s U.S. headquarters or working for its Asia-Pacific operations.

If this is true, it once again raises the question of what, exactly, is Google pulling out from China: its entire operations, or just the search engine, which they’ve declined to censor? The latter now seems more likely.

In any case, if Google does pull out, it may be a long, long time before they return. According to Peter Lui, who was formerly Google’ss financial controller for the Asia Pacific region, said that Google’s public announcement to leave had “burnt bridges and they’ve burnt the Google brand in China. There is no way Google can ever come back.”

Tags: censorship, china, Google

“Camera-man”: This is what Pentax wants your camera to look like

In October last year, Pentax launched a "robotic" version of their K-x entry level digital camera, a colorful variation of the conventional black model. And today, the same company, presented another "creative" approach, the "Camera-man" [JP]. It's not a new camera (or a special version of an existing device) but a set of accessories, namely a special 52mm lens cap (which shows a smiley) and a puppet body that needs to be fixed beneath the cap.

If Everyone Watches This Google Japan Street View Video... [Street View]

...World peace would likely reign—or at the very least, privacy watchdog hissers would slink back to their fluoro strip-lit offices. More »

Invisibility Cloak Project Becomes More Realistic [Science]

Invisibility cloak project is back on! It's from a different team of scientists that were using silver-plated nanoparticles in water though, with these latest Harry Potter enthusiasts using photonic metamaterials to change light rays. More »

Meth Head Bikers Terrorize California Sherriff’s Department [Meth]

The Vagos motorcycle gang is being labeled "terrorists" after setting booby traps in and around a gang task force building in Riverside County. Sherriff's Captain Walter Meyer said "Obviously we have angered somebody." [AP] More »

Those Facebook QR Codes Are Part Of Their Location Plans

A few days ago, we noted that Facebook was testing putting links to QR codes on their main profile pages. Now we know why. Apparently, Facebook is doing some testing ahead of their location feature roll-out, which will use these codes. A source with knowledge of Facebook's plans tells us that the QR codes will be used with an upcoming version of Facebook's mobile app. More specifically, businesses could potentially print out a QR code and put it on a wall or a counter in their venue to allow users to scan it to check-in at that store, we're told. Facebook is expected to unveil its location plans at its f8 conference in late April.

Friday Free For All: Howard Stern Edition

Yesterday, Howard Stern informed listeners that he would never again vote for a Democrat, saying they “are communists.” If you’ve lost Howard Stern…

Invisible Man Who Can Sing in a Visible Voice -- By: John J. Miller

I first heard about Alex Chilton because the Replacements sang about him. Then I discovered Big Star, his band. I came to enjoy Big Star, though, in truth, I've enjoyed bands said to be "influenced by Big Star" even more. "Jesus Christ" is a good song; the cover version by Teenage Fanclub goes into heavy rotation at my house each Christmas. Chilton died on Wednesday, age 59. The tributes have started, even on the floor of Congress.

SXSW: When Sponsors Attack

As Here We Go Magic played, the Harley-Davidson booth invited people to sit on its motorcycles and go VROOM VROOM.

SXSW: Do the Monkey on a Stick

DJ Jubilee listed, performed and urged dozens of dance moves on the crowd.

Homosexual Army Responsible for Massacre, Says Retiree [Don't Ask Don't Tell]

A fondness of handcuffs and openly gay "socialization" in lazy European armies led directly to the killing of thousands in Bosnia, a retired US general told a Senate committee. The Dutch aren't happy about it. More »

Our schools turn out unemployable blockheads

“An End to Factory Schools”, published today by the Centre for Policy Studies, is an impassioned plea by Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Wellington College, to turn our education system around. It needs it: British school children ranked 22nd out of 27 developed countries on schooling last year. In maths, they were ranked 24th, and in literacy, [...]