Lost and found

A lost Sherlock Holmes story is found in an attic.

Kepler 186f... an earth we can move to when we eff this one up.

Speaking of which... the Amazon trees are dying and not dealing with as much carbon as they used to.  Didn't we call the Amazon forest the lungs of the world?  Maybe France will save us from ourselves.

Paul Krugman and his threateningly dangerous statements of truth about Republicans.

Women are scary things and shouldn't be given too much power.

Do it yourself health insurance.

How to react to the killings in Paris

Juan Cole has excellent advice.  Apparently getting incensed and invading the wrong country is not the way to do it.  Overreacting and blaming innocent and law abiding Muslims is not the way either because it plays straight into Al-Qaeda's plans.

What happened in Paris.  The supposed reasons.  How the cartoonists are reacting.  French police have zeroed in on three men responsible for the attack.

The Republican War on Women continues...

Kansas Senate Prepares To Kill Reproductive Rights, Republicans Mock Rape Victims while France... France Makes Contraception and Abortion Free

Update 4/5: But amazingly there is a federal judge:

Judge Orders Morning-After Pill Available for All Ages 

A federal judge ruled Friday that the government must make the most common morning-after pill available over the counter for all ages, instead of requiring a prescription for girls 16 and younger. In his ruling, he also accused the federal government of “bad faith” in dealing with the requests to make the pill universally available, and said its actions had been politically motivated.

From sex to bombs...

Interesting take on the latest sex scandal.

Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy.

McCain is still sore he isn't president.

Run away, run away!!

The perils of being a woman online.

Did Anonymous save the election by blocking Rove's hacking minions?

Verdun, France has a Forbidden Forest filled with 12 million unexploded bombs from WWI.

If cats reported the news

Stripes says everything looks great from his perspective...

Scale of the universe.

Admission by Walker that it was all about union busting. And questions mount over the supreme court vote in Wisconsin.

Atlas Shrugged Part 1.

Bashing teachers is as much fun as hippie punching. Or tasering kids.

Obama's budget cuts

Refighting the Civil War

This is what a decade of war looks like.

Roger Ebert remembers Sydney Lumet

France bans the burqa

Tracking Japanese radiation around the world and the US. And apparently sea salt and baking soda will fight radiation exposure.... (I suggest buying stock)

Firing the entire city management of Benton Harbor, Michigan. You know these guys wanted to do this like forever....

Internetal tubing

Today is 10/10/10. What did Nostradamus and the Aztecs say about this?

Fathers.

Time capsule: For 70 years the Parisian apartment had been left uninhabited, under lock and key, the rent faithfully paid but no hint of what was inside.

My son was just given one of these. We're rich!!1! ... or he's rich and we're related so he better share!1!!1

And speaking of the rich:

Donald Duck and Glenn Beck:

Mickey's response to Donald Duck's smear of Glenn Beck:

We can't live without land.

Now we get to the point

It only took five years and thousands of dead:

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Oil giants Chevron Corp. and Total have confirmed that they are in discussions with the Iraqi Oil Ministry to increase production in an important oil field in southern Iraq.

The discussions are aimed at finalizing a two-year deal, or technical support agreement, to boost production at the West Qurna Stage 1 oil field near Iraq's second-largest city of Basra.

Chevron and Total confirmed their involvement in the discussions in e-mails received Saturday by The Associated Press.

"Chevron is interested in helping the Iraq government's objectives to develop its oil and gas industry," Chevron spokesman Kurt Glaubitz said in an e-mail. Total spokeswoman Lisa Wyler confirmed the French company's involvement.

[snip]

The Iraqi Oil Ministry has said it is also negotiating with Royal Dutch Shell PLC, BP PLC, ExxonMobil Corp. to increase crude production in four other fields and under the same agreement.

Iraq has the world's third-largest oil reserves, totaling more than 115 billion barrels. Iraq's average production for February was 2.4 million barrels per day and exports averaged 1.93 million barrels per day.

crossposted at SteveAudio

Shades of the Da Vinci Code!

Undercover antique restorers lurk underground, attacking and fixing an ancient clock....


Clock watching ... the Pantheon in Paris. Photograph: Alamy

It is one of Paris's most celebrated monuments, a neoclassical masterpiece that has cast its shadow across the city for more than two centuries.

But it is unlikely that the Panthéon, or any other building in France's capital, will have played host to a more bizarre sequence of events than those revealed in a court last week.

Four members of an underground "cultural guerrilla" movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France's cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.

For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon's unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid "illegal restorers" set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building's famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.

"When we had finished the repairs, we had a big debate on whether we should let the Panthéon's officials know or not," said Lazar Klausmann, a spokesperson for the Untergunther. "We decided to tell them in the end so that they would know to wind the clock up so it would still work.

"The Panthéon's administrator thought it was a hoax at first, but when we showed him the clock, and then took him up to our workshop, he had to take a deep breath and sit down."

The Centre of National Monuments, embarrassed by the way the group entered the building so easily, did not take to the news kindly, taking legal action and replacing the administrator.

[snip]

But the UX, the name of Untergunther's parent organisation, is a finely tuned organisation. It has around 150 members and is divided into separate groups, which specialise in different activities ranging from getting into buildings after dark to setting up cultural events. Untergunther is the restoration cell of the network.

Just so long as there isn't an albino monk into self-flagellation....

Ahhhh, merde.

PARIS (Reuters) - The Paris prosecutors' office has dismissed a suit against Donald Rumsfeld accusing the former U.S. defense secretary of torture, human rights groups who brought the case said on Friday.

The plaintiffs, who included the French-based International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) and the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), said Rumsfeld had authorized interrogation techniques that led to rights abuses.

The FIDH said it had received a letter from the prosecutors' office ruling that Rumsfeld benefited from a "customary" immunity from prosecution granted to heads of state and government and foreign ministers, even after they left office.

It said in a statement it was "astonished at such a mistaken argument" and said customary immunity from prosecution did not exist under international law.

The suit was filed in October during a visit to France by Rumsfeld.

The Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq hit the headlines in April 2004 when details of physical abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers were made public, badly damaging the reputation of the U.S. military.

Former prisoners at the U.S. detention camp in Guantanamo Bay are suing Rumsfeld and 10 military commanders, alleging torture and violations of their religious rights during their detention there.

The CCR and FIDH filed suits in Germany in 2004 and 2006 in an attempt to have Rumsfeld tried for rights abuses.

Isn't it strange how some people rabidly support the war

When there is no chance they'll ever have to fight in it?

Glenn Greenwald of Salon has an article up about Romney's manly adventure cheering on the Vietnam War while doing all he could to stay far away from signing up:

More repugnantly still, both the NYT article and accompanying video contain all sorts of quotes from Romney and his co-missionaries complaining about how very hard life was for them in France because it was so difficult to convert people, without any sense of how that "hardship" compared to their fellow citizens' fighting and dying in the Vietnam jungle. It's hard to put into words what twisted self-absorption and lack of empathy is required to wallow in such self-pity -- exactly the same strain that led Romney earlier this year to equate his sheltered sons' work on his presidential campaign with other Americans' sons and daughters who are in the Iraq war that Romney so loves and exploits for political gain.

Romney's draft-avoidance isn't quite as shameful as Super Tough Guy Rudy Giuliani's, whose deferment request was denied in 1969, thus placing him at imminent risk of being drafted, when he somehow convinced the federal judge for whom he was clerking "to write to the draft board, asking them to grant him a fresh deferment and reclassification as an 'essential' civilian employee." The very idea that a first-year judicial clerk, just out law school, is "essential" for anything is absurd on its face. Yet the swaggering tough guy Rudy Giuliani used that blatant lie to ensure that someone other than himself was sent to fight in Vietnam.

But Romney's record is hardly better. Although he claims he was ultimately convinced by his dad that the war was wrong, he spent most of the war cheering it on -- from the same safe and sheltered distance where one finds most of our right-wing tough guy warriors today, the ones who understandably recognize themselves in both Romney and Giuliani. Needless to say, a centerpiece of both of their campaigns is how "tough" and courageously pro-war they are.

Brave Sir Rumsfeld ran away

Bravely bold Sir Rumsfeld fled forth from Paris
He was not afraid to have others die, O brave Sir Rumsfeld
He was not at all afraid for them to be killed in nasty ways
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Rumsfeld

He was not in the least bit scared to have others mashed into a pulp
Or to have their eyes gouged out and their elbows broken
To have their kneecaps split and their bodies burned away
And their limbs all hacked and mangled, brave Sir Rumsfeld....
(mangled hijack of Monty Python's Brave Sir Robin)

Whig of Cannablog first caught it, Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat expounded more: Rumsfeld had to leave France suddenly to avoid legal complications over a lawsuit.

More

and here

and here

Call or fax French Prosecutor Jean Claude Marin to urge him to charge Rumsfeld with torture.

and Attaturk has an excellent pic

Tigers and foxes and dogs

Oh my! Must have been really shitty service....
Fox attacks restaurant worker in Maryland:

The attack happened near closing time Thursday, when customers encountered a wild fox in the parking lot. Feeling threatened, they ran inside the slow-release door at Chef Fred's Chesapeake Steakhouse, Bar & Grill. The fox followed them inside.

"It was a bizarre thing," said Sara Hall, a manager at Chef Fred's Chesapeake Steakhouse, Bar & Grill. "I've never been so scared in my life."

Once inside the building, the fox scampered into the dining room area, into the bar area and back to the dining area, causing employees and patrons to take cover. Several jumped onto tables or chairs.

Hall told The (Salisbury) Daily Times that she went to discover what was causing the ruckus, when the fox lunged at her and bit her hand.

"One of the bouncers at the bar starts to choke the fox, and it still wouldn't let go," Hall said.

Employees eventually got the fox outside, where it ran off.

How many times has this happened recently?

And this is new, a tiger loose in France:

BORDEAUX, France (Reuters) - Police in southwestern France are searching for a big cat, possibly a young tiger, that has been spotted prowling in a village near the city of Bordeaux, the village's mayor said Thursday.

Officials from the National Hunting Office have also laid traps for the animal after a woman and her daughter saw it repeatedly in their garden.

"At first they didn't believe it, but the third time the animal was 10 meters (yards) away from them," Pierre Soubabere, mayor of Saint-Louis-de-Montferrand, told Reuters.

Another resident has seen the cat roaming the countryside, and its tracks suggest it is a young tiger, though it could be a jaguar or a leopard.

Maybe it's because of the horrific things we do to animals, like dog fighting....

Doing the math

For a better health care system. It wouldn't cost that much, says R. Neal of Looking South. Check the link for his comparisons of American, Canadian, French and British taxes and expenses. Neal concludes:

So, yes, providing universal insurance coverage or universal health care for everyone would cost a little more in taxes, but not that much more. And think of the savings, not to mention peace of mind and security. It seems pretty clear that it would be better than the $2 trillion we spend now that leaves nearly 50 million people behind and gives false hope to the other 250 million who think they are insured until they file a claim.

Thank you. Another blockade destroyed, another hurdle removed. Watch Big Pharma and the Insurance companies build another one...

Some French are not happy with the votes

Because of the e-voting machines. Well... I guess they haven't been paying attention then:

It's not as if there haven't been enough warnings that e-voting machines have some kinks to work out, but apparently every new country that makes use of the machines figures that all the problems have been worked out. Unfortunately, one by one, they're discovering that's not the case. The latest is France. lavi d writes in to let us know that the election held over the weekend in France was the first that made use of e-voting machines, and it's being described as a "catastrophe" -- though mostly by those who didn't win. So far, there haven't been reports of the machines having errors, but apparently many of the machines malfunctioned while the ones that worked weren't at all easy to use. Of course, the nature of the problems isn't clearly explained -- suggesting that it may just an easy scapegoat for politicians or voters unhappy with the results of the election. Still, you would think that with so much attention placed on problems with e-voting machines over the last few years, election officials and e-voting companies would go out of their way to make the process as smooth as possible.

Oh, and by the way,

The French warned us 9 months before 9/11 about hijacking plots.

PARIS - Nine months before al-Qaida slammed airliners into the World Trade Center, French intelligence suspected the terror network was plotting a hijacking — possibly involving a U.S. airline — and warned the CIA, former French intelligence officials said Monday.

But the French warning hinted at a plot in Europe, not the United States, and there was no suggestion of suicide attacks or multiple planes. One former official said al-Qaida may have leaked misinformation to divert intelligence agencies from the bigger, deadlier plot to come on Sept. 11, 2001.

And since I have your attention, no, not everyone believed Iraq had WMDs. In fact only a few people did. Mostly our idiot press and about 33% of the country....