] COLUMBUS, Ohio -- At least five people died and two
] others were wounded after a shooting at a Columbus
] nightclub on Wednesday night, NBC 4 reported.
]
] FeedRoom
]
] Nightclub Shooting
] FeedRoom
]
] The shooting took place shortly after 10 p.m. at Alrosa
] Villa, located at 5055 Sinclair Road.
]
] Two members of the heavy metal band Damageplan were
] reportedly shot and killed, including Dimebag Darrell,
] formerly with the band Pantera, NBC 4's David Wayne
] reported. The other band member's name was not released.
] The alleged gunman also died at the scene, Wayne
] reported.
]
] Shortly after the band began playing its first song, a
] man reportedly ran onto the stage and began shooting,
] according to a witness who identified himself as Sean.
] Some members of the audience reportedly thought the man
] running onto the stage with a gun was part of the band's
] act, NBC 4's Erin Tate reported.

Crazy People + Guns = Bloody Christmas.

nbc4i.com - News - At Least 5 Dead, 2 Wounded In Nightclub Shooting

] NEW DELHI, Dec. 2 (Xinhuanet) -- India and Russia
] announced Thursday that they would hold their first-ever
] joint army exercisenext year and increase their
] investment in a joint venture that makes the BrahMos
] supersonic cruise missile.

Russia and India partners.

Xinhua - English

] MARK BENJAMIN: Well, with respect to the wounded, the
] Pentagon does report a number that it says is the number
] of soldiers that are wounded in the war. I think we're
] running around 7,000 or 8,000 in Iraq. But what that
] number does not include is the number of soldiers who are
] wounded or ill, or injured in operations that are not
] directly due to the bullets and bombs of the insurgents.
] So, for example, as of mid-September, if you take
] actually Afghanistan and Iraq together, there were 17,000
] soldiers who were injured or ill enough to be put on
] airplanes and flown out of theater, and none of those
] casualties, and I call them casualties because they fit
] the Pentagon's definition of casualties, none of those
] casualties appear on any public casualty lists.

Democracy Now! | The Forgotten Casualties of War: Over 17,000 U.S. Troops Wounded

] This article is the first in a series that will be
] covering the construction of project WMD, my very own PC
] doomsday device.

Okay, now this is a casemod...

bit-tech.net :: WMD - Part 1

] The goal is to create a reactor that could produce about
] 300 megawatts of electricity for the grid, enough to run
] about 300,000 window air-conditioners, or produce about
] 2.5 kilos of hydrogen per second. When burned, a kilo of
] hydrogen has about the same energy value as a gallon of
] unleaded regular gasoline. But fuel cells, which work
] without burning, get about twice as much work out of each
] unit of fuel. So if used in automotive fuel cells, the
] reactor might replace more than 400,000 gallons of
] gasoline per day.

The New York Times : Washington : Hydrogen Production Method Could Bolster Fuel Supplies

] However, both Yanukovitch and Yushchenko are not good for
] a job of Ukranian president. Millions have seen
] Yanukovitch falling under throwed egg during his election
] campaign. Big swine looking man just felt on the ground
] with his hand on his chest. From egg's impact huge man
] felt on the ground. He thought that the bullet hited.
] Poor thing that Yanukovitch man, about 150 kilograms,
] over-weighted. But the bullet is supposed to be a part of
] presidential job, a part of profession. Every monarch,
] every elected leader of a state should expect one day to
] be assassinated. If leader falls under egg it is
] laughable leader. More laughable if he weights 150
] kilograms or so. Even if a bullet hits a President of
] State, he, President, should fall with a dignity, as
] statue in full length, with heroical smile. I am no an
] admirer of President Reagan, but Reagan behaved well when
] Hinckley shooted at him. He looked brave, Reagan, I mean.

Edward Limonov, a famous Russian-exile-revolutionary-bisexual-poet's take on Ukraine.

What is that all hustle about? - By Edward Limonov

] On the evening that I'm writing this, the 24th, thousands
] of shaven-headed pro-Yanukovich marchers and local police
] and security from the Donetsk region were seen entering
] Kiev in huge columns. Reporters who interviewed their
] mothers said these the columns of young men were rounded
] up from their Donetsk-region factories and schools and
] shipped directly to Kiev. The army is reportedly massing
] outside of the capital with armored columns. They have
] already deployed some armored personal carriers and large
] Kamaz trucks packed with sand, creating barricades and
] dividing up the city.
]
] Their effect is already evident this evening. The orange
] flags and colors of the opposition are disappearing as
] opposition protesters have retreated to safety, staying
] inside and communicating by phone.
]
] When the CEC declared Yanukovich the official winner
] tonight, women in offices and stores broke out in tears
] all across the city. Kiev's one day of revolutionary
] freedom is over. It's unlikely that Kiev can stand up
] against such an army of soldiers, police and
] lumpenproles. The opposition is too dispersed and doesn't
] have a direct plan for taking over power. Ukraine is
] faced with either civil war or dictatorship. It looks,
] for now, like dictatorship.

The eXile's take on the crisis in Ukraine.

eXile - Issue #203 - Who's in charge?

] But winning is dangerous, if you don't have discipline.
] The Russians pulled out -- and the Chechens turned into
] monsters. The biggest industry in the country was
] kidnapping. They kidnapped more than 3,000 Russians in
] cross-border raids between 1997-99. To convince the
] relatives to part with the ransom, they released videos
] of some hardworking loony sawing off the hostage's head
] with a sheepgutting knife. Another video I saw shows the
] Chechen kidnappers shooting off a Russian hostage's
] finger, then laughing as he cries in pain.
]
] All these gory hostage videos coming out of Iraq -- it
] was the Chechens who were the pioneering filmmakers. Not
] sure there's an Oscar for most innovative Terrorist Film,
] but if there is the Chechens deserve it.
]
] Meanwhile Shamil Basaev, sort of a Chechen version of
] Nathan Bedford Forrest, launched incredible raids deep
] into Russia, which ended with hundreds of Russian
] civilians dead. The Chechens were so confident of Russian
] weakness that they actually tried to invade the Russian
] republic of Daghestan, take it over, and create an
] oil-rich independent Muslim country on the Caspian Sea.
] The original quagmire: elephant shown here stuck in mud,
] awaiting hyenas.
]
] The original quagmire: elephant shown here stuck in mud,
] awaiting hyenas.
]
] All this gore was good for one guy -- a little colonel
] named Putin. He sent the Army back into Chechnya with
] better plans and supplies in 1999. They did much better
] this time around -- wiped out the big rebel units in a
] few months, and took Grozny the smart way -- by razing it
] to the ground from afar before sending in Russian
] soldiers. It made him so popular that Yeltsin stepped
] aside, and Putin is still just about the most popular
] leader since, well, Stalin.

About military Quagmire

eXile - Issue #203 - War Nerd - The 2004 Quagmire Bowl! - By Gary Brecher

] But George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley,
] denies that academic institutions are biased against
] conservatives. The disparity in hiring, he explains,
] occurs because conservatives are not as interested as
] liberals in academic careers. Why does he think liberals
] are like that? "Unlike conservatives, they believe in
] working for the public good and social justice." That
] clears that up.

I think it does. You can't get any republican street cred without doing something tremendously lucrative and capitalist.

] Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations --
] except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor
] about their ideological monopolies. In contrast, American campuses
] have more insistently proclaimed their commitment to diversity as
] they have become more intellectually monochrome.

] They do indeed cultivate diversity -- in race, skin color,
] ethnicity, sexual preference. In everything but thought.

Thats because it is not possible for people of a variety of races, skin colors, ethnicities and sexual preference to converse in an open manner unless the spirit of liberalism dominates. Conservative thought is not tolerant of such a varied group of people. In fact, the reason that colleges have been moving farther to the left, is that they have become so diverse. Exposure to diversity kills conservatism by dispelling the prejudices, stereotypes and myths that contemporary conservatism is founded on.

Academia, Stuck To the Left

] Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder
] it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant
] nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of
] breeding children.
]
] Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and
] nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately
] designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things
] that could endanger children.
...
] Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are
] tormented. So why don't they do something about it?
] Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so
] unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new
] chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their
] bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing
] wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids
] will be miserable at that age.
]
] This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it,
] which probably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet
] naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the
] possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.
]
] I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids
] are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it
] should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at
] thirteen?
. . .
] The mediocrity of American public schools has worse
] consequences than just making kids unhappy for six
] years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids
] away from the things they're supposed to be learning.

To a great extent, the sleeping American populace has woken up to the fact that there is a problem with the way that they operate their society. Littleton style mass murders are both new and unique enough to indicate that something has changed, but also common enough to indicate that this change is not an aberration. People want to do something about it. Unfortunately, by all accounts, the dialog even years later is wanting.

People seem to grasp onto oversimplified solutions. They blame access to firearms, violent video games, industrial music, etc... These things are easy to attack, but the people attacking them can never seem to explain why their presence doesn't consistently produce the problems they are concerned with, nor why the problems they are concerned with sometimes exist without the presence of the specific cause they cite. This demonstrates a lack of understanding of the scope of the issue.

I have always felt that these problems were systemic and structural rather then limited and specific, and that we are unlikely to be able to see them, understand them, or address them as a society because we do not want to change the things that we would need to change.

Part of the problem is that we see teenage suicides and mass mur... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Why Nerds are Unpopular (Long, and worth it.)