“The Bradshaw Foundation, in association with Stephen Oppenheimer,” has produced an interactive presentation showing the spread of Homo sapiens around the world from our origins in tropical Africa. I ran across the link to the presentation at The Semi-Daily Journal, economics Professor Brad DeLong’s excellent blog.
Take the interesting tour.
While looking through the blog traffic statistics I noticed a referrer with the name scroggle.org. As I do when I don’t recognize a referring site I did a Yahoo search for scroogle. I found this at Wikipedia:
Scroogle is a web service that disguises the Internet address of users who want to run Google searches anonymously.[4] Scroogle also gives users the option of having all communication between their computer and the search page be SSL encrypted.[5] The source code was released into the public domain on January 2005 by Public Information Research, Inc.,[6] a nonprofit corporation that also operates Google Watch.
The tool was created by Google critic Daniel Brandt,[2][3] who was concerned about Google collecting information on users, and set up Scroogle to filter searches through his servers before going to Google. “I don’t save the search terms and I delete all my logs every week. So even if the F.B.I. come around and ask me questions I don’t know the answer because I don’t have the logs any more,” he said “I don’t associate the search terms with the user’s address at all, so I can’t even match those up.”[7]
Traffic has doubled every year and as of December 2007, Scroogle had passed 100,000 visitors a day.[8]
Besides anonymous searches, the tool allows users to perform Google searches without receiving Google advertisements. There is support for 28 languages[9], and the tool is available as a browser plug-in. A secure connection to the Scroogle website is also possible.
I’ve added a Scroogle search box in the sidebar if your interested. Those interested in using Scroggle to search may also bookmark this link to Scroogle Scraper. If you have a website or a blog you are able to modify you may find the Scroogle search box code here. If you wish to add Scroogle plugin to your borwser search options you may find the plugin here.
I previously wrote about Adblock which deletes ads from the pages you visit. Pages load much more rapidly since they don’t need to wait for the servers upon which the ads reside.
The Hill reports on AG Mukasey’s decision to not prosecute former DOJ employees who were found to violate the law relative to the hiring of DOJ staff. I have added the bold type.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Tuesday that the Department of Justice would not pursue criminal charges against former employees implicated in an internal investigation on politicized hiring practices.
“Where there is evidence of criminal wrongdoing, we vigorously investigate it,” Mukasey said in a speech at the American Bar Association. “And where there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we vigorously prosecute. But not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.
Last month, a report by the DoJ inspector general found substantial evidence that two key aides to Mukasey’s predecessor Alberto Gonzales — former Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson and former White House liaison Monica Goodling — improperly vetted applicants for career positions at DoJ for their political leanings. That report followed a June investigation that found evidence of similar misconduct in the hiring practices for DoJ’s Summer Law Intern Program and Honors Program.
Mukasey said the wrongdoing outlined in the two reports did not merit criminal charges because it constituted “only violations of the civil service laws.”
You may remember that Goodling and Sampson hired DOJ staff based upon the applicants’ views on such things as abortion, gay marriage, and religion.
So not “every violation of the law, is a crime” so long as the crimes were committed to benefit one’s political party by packing the DOJ staff with true believers of the gospel of Jerry Falwell.
I am old enough to have witnessed the consequences which accrued to many Nixon administration who violated the law, and the noble acts of of the Congressional investigating committee members of both parties, and of Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus in resigning rather than acceding to Nixon’s demand that they fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, a task ultimately affected by that useful whore Robert Bork. Some of the crooks actually spent time in prison, including AG John Mitchell.
So why are not Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson to be prosecuted? I suppose because Mukasey is as much of a whore as was is Robert Bork.
Spanish as spoken in Cuba is quite different than that which is spoken in Mexico. I had some time back boasted that I was able to travel without my dictionary. Not so in Cuba.
Cubans generally abreviate words, often, for example, they do not pronounce the ’s’ or ‘r’ in a word. The buenas dias in Mexico is buen dia in Cuba, though it was explained to me that one is greeting another on a particular day so the singular, buen dia, is more appropriate. The explanation, however, doesn’t explain why the ’s’ is generally omitted.
Despite the differences, I have generally been able to converse with Cubans. However, speaking to folks in Pons was something altogether different. Almost everyone in Pons speaks really, really rapidly, to the point I was unable to understand almost nothing. I required a translator, a friend who would repeat more slowly what was said.
I took to telling folks in Pons that they speak Ponspanol, which they generally thought was pretty funny.
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