Kevin Kenny

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• Commented on Family's personalized Where the Wild Things Are <s>fresco</s> relief
  Fresco is the technique of producing murals by painting on wet plaster. What we have here is basso-rilievo. Sorry, I'm a pedant....
• Commented on Goldwag: Some thoughts about 9/11 Truth
  What's really important here? 27 February 1933. The Reichstag building in Berlin burns. A naked Marinius van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist, is found still alive in the wreckage. He is later found guilty of murder, arson and insurrection, and...
• Commented on Makers, my new novel: free downloads, donate to libraries and colleges, signings and tours
  Cory, you so-and-so, you just cost me a couple of nights' sleep. Thanks. :)...
• Commented on Brit business secretary promises to punish accused file-sharers' families with Internet disconnection by 2011
  Oh. This rule will be quite effective in cutting down on Internet-based filesharing, by banning everyone, guilty or innocent, from the Internet, based on some unfounded accusation or another. Or so the record companies and movie distributors fondly hope. After...
• Commented on Man finds "missile launcher" in his back-40
  Now that he's gone to the press about it, watch someone try to punish him for having it. Because he's broken one of the real laws: Never Embarrass the Powerful....
• Commented on HOWTO make mushroom shelves
  And some tree fungi make excellent tinder, which lends them their name....
• Commented on REAL ID reincarnated with a new name: "PASS ID"
  @Gato #13: For me, at least, the reluctance to allow this step comes from the fear that the national ID will remain revocable (as drivers' licenses are). We fear giving the bureaucrats the power to strip us of personhood for...
• Commented on Associated Press will sell you a license to quote the public domain
  For the politicians, I don't think it's about the contributions. The politicians have always desired the power of imprimatur for themselves. If they can make an end run around constitutional restrictions on that power by collaborating with a copyright cartel,...
• Commented on PowerPoint considered militarily harmful
  One common mistake - so common that I'm astonished not to see it discussed more widely - is confusing the PowerPoint slide deck with the presentation, or even with the report. I don't know how many slide decks I've had...
• Commented on Britain's loony rules for artist visas embarrass festival organizers
  Cory [#18]: What makes you think we treat our own citizens any differently? I'm now at least a little bit afraid to travel abroad, not for fear of what will happen to me there, but for fear that my country...
• Commented on CIA's former bin Laden expert: "The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States."
  Wow. Any bets that the next terrorist attack in the United States will be a false flag operation, precisely so that Gen. Scheuer's scenario can be played out?...
• Commented on Associated Press will syndicate non-profit investigative journalism
  This story vaguely worries me. Does it imply that the reporters will have a voice only if what they have to say appeals to the AP members' advertisers? As badstorydan (#1) says, the story at face value sounds too good...
• Commented on Repo man who specializes in recovering planes from deadbeat con-artists, gangsters and drug-lords
  This story makes me wonder whether the guy repossesses aircraft from the CIA to sell them back to the Government. I know it's been covered here before, but a number of the drug-running planes seized in recent years appear to...
• Commented on New Jersey police officer enjoys clubbing man for complying with another officer's request to zip his sweatshirt
  In jurisdictions where the judges are elected, 'resisting arrest' no longer means 'presenting the arresting officer with a credible threat of bodily injury;' it means 'not acting sufficiently servile.' Simply saying 'huh? what's going on, officer?' when a cop approaches...
• Commented on Bob Graham's much-scoffed-at little notebooks are more reliable than the CIA's records
  @Hosidax (#22) - If I'm to live under an autocracy, let it be the autocracy of Frederick the Great: despotism tempered by inefficiency. An efficient autocracy scares me. (I won't be the first up against the wall come the Revolution,...
• Commented on Llamas: Nature's Cute & Fluffy Crusaders Against Bioterrorism
  It's not just llamas. All the creatures in the camel family have unusual antibodies that lack the "light chain" or "VL region". There are many projects around that are investigating camelid antibodies because of their odd structure. http://www.chemie.uni-hamburg.de/bc/lehre/Review_II_Holliger_2005.pdf is a...
• Commented on United Airlines wants to charge large people for two seats
  There is a potential for quite a lucrative profit center here. Since the judgment of who is 'obese' is left to the subjective decision of an airline employee, have a policy where borderline-'obese' passengers are allowed to board their outbound...
• Commented on Bank pushing 120% APR loans
  Back when I was young - several decades ago - I had checking and savings accounts with a certain institution in New York City. I kept the savings account at minimum balance for fee-free checking for several months, until I...
• Commented on Bus tours of AIG executives' homes
  The "torches and pitchforks" mentality that I see here is alarming. I suspect that it isn't going to stop until the mob starts hanging the poor working stiff who cleaned an AIG executive's toilet - after all, he was a...
• Commented on Obama administration: releasing details of secret copyright treaty endangers "national security"
  Does the Senate get to see it before voting on ratification, or do the Senators simply get ordered how to vote?...
• Commented on PooH &#38; Ice
  DJ PooH and Ice-Cube?...
• Commented on Quack back massager from 1930
  Because of the Comstock Act, these things couldn't be labeled as what they were. You see a lot of ads from the period touting vibrators as neck massagers or complexion aids - check out the picture of the Ash Flash...
• Commented on Tomorrow is Britain's nationwide "Convention on Modern Liberty"
  I think that censorship in a private forum is entirely reasonable. This is the editors' space, and what they expose to the world is what they see fit to expose. Censorship becomes evil when it constrains a publisher from publishing...
• Commented on Stanford Fair Use Center needs your Mannie Garcia Obama photo-alikes for Shepard Fairey defense
  @Brindle Read the linked articles. The photographer has said in public that he doesn't mind. The Associated Press is raising the stink - and claiming that the photograph was "work for hire" so that it can negate the photographer's permission....
• Commented on Massachusetts Gov. wants to track cars on state roads with GPS units in each car
  The quarter-cent per mile isn't the revenue they're after. It's the fact that they can ticket you *every* time you exceed the posted speed limit, run a STOP sign or a red light, or make an unlawful left turn. Even...
• Commented on European Commission demands a single, standard phone charger
  I wonder if the solution to this problem will turn out to be what Motorola does. Use a standard USB port for the charger, but use the data port as well, and exchange a secret handshake with the charger, refusing...
• Commented on Wm. Shakespeare's Five and Twenty Random Things Abovt Me
  Oh yes, and the random, patternless Capitalizations were neither random nor patternless. It was simply the done Thing to capitalise all Nouns, and not just the first Words of Sentences. German still follows that Convention. A later convention was to...
• Commented on Wm. Shakespeare's Five and Twenty Random Things Abovt Me
  The Y-shaped thing in "Ye Olde" was a variant on the letter 'edh' - Ð or ð. I don't think that a small ð looks particularly Y-shaped, but Norman printers did. Moreover, it was a misspelling; 'the' was usually spelt...
• Commented on Making sauerkraut is easy
  Avoid the mold (mostly) by keeping the crock covered with a clean bath towel. Fermentation and canning instructions from the Agricultural Extension Service: http://msuextension.org/publications/HomeHealthandFamily/MT199607HR.pdf Properly canned, it'll keep all winter....
• Commented on House prices plummet in Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland
  At those prices, get together a consortium, buy a few blocks, and incorporate a village. Hire some cops to keep the surrounding riffraff out. Get the city to write off the back taxes as an "urban development grant." A roof...