From the AP Newswire:

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Robert Downey Jr. is strapping on his metal suit to join the superhero team effort “The Avengers” in addition to “Iron Man 2.”

Downey is reprising his role as billionaire genius Tony Stark from last summer’s blockbuster “Iron Man.” The sequel is due May 7, 2010, and “The Avengers” is scheduled for July 15, 2011, Marvel Studios announced Tuesday.

The movies are part of a four-picture deal between Downey and Marvel.

“Iron Man” director Jon Favreau is returning to direct “Iron Man 2″ and serve as executive producer on “The Avengers,” which will team the guy in the metal suit with Marvel Comics heroes the Hulk, Captain America, Thor and others.

Just saw the trailer for the latest Clint Eastwood film. Had not heard anything about it till now, but it looks interesting.

Clint plays a retired war veteran who confronts his prejudices in a changing neighborhood. The cool thing is that he confronts them with an M1 Garand rifle.

The video below is of dolphins playing with the unique silver colored rings they have the ability to create underwater.

The explanation for how dolphins make these silver rings is that the phenomena are “air-core vortex rings”. Invisible, spinning vortices in the water are generated from the tip of a dolphins dorsal fin when it is moving rapidly and turning. When dolphins break the line, the ends are drawn together into a closed ring. The higher velocity fluid around the core of the vortex is at a lower pressure than the fluid circulating farther away.

Air is injected into the rings via bubbles released from the dolphin’s blowhole. The energy of the water vortex is enough to keep the bubbles from rising for a few brief moments of play time.

Besides being nice to look at (and a cool demonstration of fluid mechanics), this phenomenon also might throw some light on dolphin cognition, since the skill to create the rings is a bit subtle and tends to be taught from one dolphin to the next via careful observation and practice. 

Also intriguing is the report that they seem to be using sonar to locate the vortex in the water, since that would be a fairly amazing bit of audio analysis.

Things had been going pretty well with my eBay business. At least until a rival seller (who under eBay rules outrageously is allowed to remain anonymous) trumped up false charges of pilfered text and/or images. Now I’m in a fight to clear my name (I never appropriated anything) and the way eBay treats Sellers it’s doubtful I will prevail.

Borne of this frustration and the sincere, deep-seated desire to utterly rearrange someones face, I give you the classic cover by The Clash of the 50s Bobby Fuller Four hit, I Fought the Law.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

American Thinker details Barack Obama’s links to the radical left, introduces the names of Columbia University professors Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, and details a decades long strategy of deliberate failure.

This may be the most important post I will read this year (via Ace); it should ring an alarm bell with Canadians. We too have seen our country changed beyond recognition in the service of the same ideology and by variations on the same policy of deliberate failure and the will to decline.

Citing David Horowitz, American Thinker defines the Cloward-Piven strategy:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
…
By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.

Continuing:

No matter where the strategy is implemented, it shares the following features:

1. The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can.
2. The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.
3. The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.

Deliberate, crippling immigration policy, systemic fraudulent voter registration (such that eight of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote), multi-generational welfare dependency and the culture of entitlement it both stems from and creates and, of course, using the taxpayer to guarantee home purchasing for people who could not afford to purchase houses and here we are today.

I ask you, is it possible ACORN would train Obama to take leadership positions within ACORN without telling him what he was training for? Is it possible ACORN would put Obama in leadership positions without clueing him into what his purpose was?? Is it possible that this most radical of organizations would put someone in charge of training its trainers, without him knowing what it was he was training them for?

As a community activist for ACORN; as a leadership trainer for ACORN; as a lead organizer for ACORN’s Project Vote; as an attorney representing ACORN’s successful efforts to impose Motor Voter regulations in Illinois; as ACORN’s representative in lobbying for the expansion of high risk housing loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that led to the current crisis; as a recipient of their assistance in his political campaigns — both with money and campaign workers; it is doubtful that he was unaware of ACORN’s true goals. It is doubtful he was unaware of the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

We are on the verge of the election to the presidency of the man Americans should hold most accountable for instigating the next Great Depression but who unaccountably Americans may have decided is the man to save them from it. Forward this American Thinker piece to everybody.

Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis