A thousand year Irish psalmbook has been dug out of the ground after a construction worker spotted it.

The approximately 20-page book has been dated to the years 800-1000. Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries.

"This is really a miracle find," said Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland, which has the book stored in refrigeration and facing years of painstaking analysis before being put on public display.

"There's two sets of odds that make this discovery really way out. First of all, it's unlikely that something this fragile could survive buried in a bog at all, and then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing."

That's just happenstance and archaelology. Here's the weirdness:

The book was found open to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations' attempts to wipe out the name of Israel.

Andy the Squirrel knows I'm a heathen, so he sends along a modern rendering of Psalm 83, with his annotations to it:

1 O God, do not keep silent;
be not quiet, O God, be not still.

2 See how your enemies are astir,
how your foes rear their heads.

3 With cunning they conspire against your people;
they plot against those you cherish.

4 "Come," they say, "let us destroy them as a nation,
that the name of Israel be remembered no more."

5 With one mind they plot together;
they form an alliance against you-

6 the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites,
of Moab and the Hagrites,

7 Gebal [TODAY JBEIL, LEBANON], [a] Ammon [Part of Jordan today I believe] and Amalek [SOUTHERN JORDAN/PARTS OF ISRAEL, ]
Philistia, with the people of Tyre.

8 Even Assyria has joined them
to lend strength to the descendants of Lot.
Selah

9 Do to them as you did to Midian,
as you did to Sisera and Jabin at the river Kishon,

10 who perished at Endor
and became like refuse on the ground.

11 Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb,
all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna,

12 who said, "Let us take possession
of the pasturelands of God."

13 Make them like tumbleweed, O my God,
like chaff before the wind.

14 As fire consumes the forest
or a flame sets the mountains ablaze,

15 so pursue them with your tempest
and terrify them with your storm.

16 Cover their faces with shame
so that men will seek your name, O LORD.

17 May they ever be ashamed and dismayed;
may they perish in disgrace.

18 Let them know that you, whose name is the LORD-
that you alone are the Most High over all the earth.

Tyre was in the news all day yesterday.

See? Weird.

A Non-Weird Way Of Looking At This: One can note that pretty much "Tyre" and "Assyria" have been trying to destroy Israel for 5000 year straight, with only a 1000 year or so pause after they managed, more or less, to accomplish that, so it's not surprising that today's news echoes the "news" of previous millenia.

Still. Weird.

Posted by: Ace at 08:29 AM | Comments (40)
Post contains 532 words, total size 3 kb.

"You're a dead man."

Idle talk? Just something someone might say on an anonymous phone call to you?

Just some hijinks?

I tried not to overplay it, because I don't think any criminal charges will come from this. When you look at the long history of cyberstalking, though, this looks a little worse.

Note: Seixon himself reports that he hears one of Leopold's unhinged sock-puppeting defenders sounds something like Leopold, so it could be that guy. Or it could be some completely other guy.

Whoever this was, though, Leopold shares in the blame at least partly. (If not fully.) Because Leopold has been posting Seixon's information all over the place, and has been forging emails from Seixon to make them sound that Seixon himself is making absurd threats about "making stuff up about your family" and driving Leopold to "commit suicide" and the like. And then posting those at ThinkProgress, and online community where, it seems, that partisan passion well exceeds the average level of emotional stability.

If you tell all of your on-line buddies, over and over again, that Seixon is admitting his desire to "blackmail" you and "lie" about you (and "your family") the goal of attempting to drive you to "commit suicide," well, then, someone who believes in you just might attempt to defend you in a criminal manner, no?

One thing that occurs to me is that a lot of this is a he-said he-said sort of deal, and that I'm assuming Seixon's credibility.

I do know that those "threatening emails" seem so incredibly crude as to be unintended comedy, and that no one writes "threats" like that, nor announces an intention to lie. They are simply implausible. I don't know Seixon, and only heard of his blog recently, but I simply don't buy he's crazy enough to commit to words his intention to lie, blackmail, and drive someone to suicide.

Further, someone I know fairly well through online communications knows him somewhat and says he's a level-headed sort. I will ask further about this, just to make sure we aren't making unwarranted assumptions about credibility.

Seixon, a commenter noted, wrote sentence "My critics will stop at nothing to silence me" (or something like that; I'll check a moment), which seems pretty melodramatic.

However, given the fact that someone -- Leopold, or Dean, or a yet unknown Leopold partisan -- is spamming the Internet with Seixon's personal information, including his mother's maiden name (which can be used to get someone's financial information-- that's an almost de rigeur security question for changing a password and the like), the sentence doesn't read quite so melodramatic.

Again, I'll check as to my source's take on Seixon.

And AnonymousArmy says my site is down for him, which is possible, and that's why he can't post, but that is beginning to bother me a little bit.

But given those emails, we seem to have a case where one party to the dispute is a little unbalanced, so that party's credibility is in question. It's possible that two unbalanced people have just found each other and are now going at it with both sides engaging in sockpuppetry and lies, but it seems more likely it's just one.

I suppose that it could be the case that Seixon is gaslighting Leopold, writing deliberately crude and implausible emails so that, when Leopold disloses them, they will look like forgeries.

That is possible.

Then again, it is also possible Glenn Greenwald lives in an over-crowded flop-house of blog-buddies obsessively scouring the internet to find references to Greenwald and refute challenges to his cyberhonor.

Posted by: Ace at 08:13 AM | Comments (9)
Post contains 622 words, total size 4 kb.

Forgive the disorganized nature of this post. I have tried to both figure out what was going on in a story I knew little about while digesting it here. That's a dificult trick, and I haven't pulled it off elegantly. It's late, and I've done the best I could.

...

It did not take precognition on the level of Nostradamus to predict, as in my Bad Moon Rising post below, that something ugly was in the air. There seems to be a bus-accident of a human being afoot, or maybe several, and things are getting ugly.

This is not some petty vanity with sock-puppets anymore. It's escalated into an area that most would consider fairly serious. Patterico describes it, basically, as Deb Frisch. Plus a little something extra. It's moved from the merely objectionable to the possibly actionable.

It involves Jason Leopold, you won't be shocked to hear. How directly I don't know; but it all swirls around him, and his various ardent defenders, including one unhinged man named "John Thomas Dean," and of course former CIA agent and MSM go-to "expert" Larry Johnson, now a disgraceful political hatchet-man and a budding conspiracy theorist with some real promise and who, in his spare time, serves as Joe Wilson's pimp.

Read this. You'll want this background when it all comes out. This is the best digest of the recent situation. But even this stuff, as bad as it is, is sort of trivial to some of the other stuff going on.

This is Seixon's short-form digest of the story, also required reading.

Long story short: AnonymousArmy is a poster on DailyKos. He objected to Leopold's claim of proof of the "Rove indictment," and pointed out stuff like, oh, the docket number he kept citing as being on the indictment wasn't even assigned until several days after Leopold claims to have seen it.

Or have been told it existed by someone who'd seen it. Whatever the hell his claim was.

AnonymousArmy, as I understand it, believed the left was putting too much faith in the claims of Joe Wilson and his pimp Larry Johnson.

Leopold began harrassing AnonymousArmy, and escalating that harrassment, and, of course, escalating that harrassment via sock-puppets.

Some of these sock-puppets were exposed, and the story was picked up by Seixon, who also began getting abused by sock-puppets.

But sock-puppet abuse is one thing; this is something else entirely. A Leopold defender (apparently not Leopold himself) named "John Tomas Dean" now gets involved:

Mr. Dean called my parents home in the United States (I live in Norway). He passed himself off as someone doing research for an article, got my father to confirm some things, and also divulged that he had researched my mother and father’s activities to do with a “liberal” cause.

On June 26th and June 27th, personal details about me were disclosed at Think Progress where I had been commenting frequently for the past few weeks. Think Progress management declined to remove the comments, citing the fact that the details could be found on the Internet, although this still violated their Terms of Use.

Whoever is sock-puppeting for Leopold just happens to share Leopold's obsessiveness in searching for references to his name on Technorati. (Have you heard this story before?)

As readers of this site know, someone calling himself "Seixon" posted all of the real Seixon's personal information in a post. And then, tonight, someone attempting to discredit AnonymousArmy posted as "AnonymousArmy" and posted this hateful screed about "Jason Jew Leopold," outing his personal information (supposedly) with a big helping of extremely crude, KKK-level Jew-hatred.

A nasty post. But one cannot help but suspect the post was designed to aid Jason Leopold, not hurt him, by discrediting an enemy, and drawing sympathy for Leopold's supposedly thuggish treatment by his critics.

Which, I should say, does not mean at all that Leopold did it. But someone acting in his interests seems to.

Now, AnonymousArmy has contacted me, through an intermediary who doesn't want to be mentioned for fear of these freaks. (And not an unfounded fear at that.)

AnonymousArmy of course denies he was responsible for the "Jason Jew Leopold" post.

Hello blog guy. I was just sent this link by a seixon fan who saw that dear Jason was up to no good again.

Anyway If you want to email me and ask me any questions it's at [redacted].com. The same address Leopold uses when he pretends to be me but can never respond from.

The whole Jew hate is particularly vile but since his goal is to get me banned at kos I expect nothing less.

Okay, not necessarily big shakes there. But here's where Larry Johnson comes in. By the way-- what the hell is a go-to MSM "intelligence expert" doing trolling at the Daily Kos, anyway?

He fell flat with his dod/dia attempt, he is getting Johnson to call
me a diebold plant now..

[Larry Johnson's response to Anonymous Army:]

AnonymousArmy Shill for Diebold (4+ / 1-)

When will KOS blow the whistle on this scumbag? He hides behind a false email address. Yet, when you check out the servers he has used they trace back to Diebold. Hmmmmm, you think the boy has an agenda?

by L C Johnson on Mon Jul 24, 2006 at 08:51:51 PM EDT

That's here.

Now, is there anything to Larry Johnson's charge of a Diebold IP? Here's the unfortunate thing: I can't tell. AnnonymousArmy says he tried to post on my stie, but was blocked by the spam-filters. So he didn't post. So I don't have his IP. I can see addresses in his email, but they all come through the email servers, and tell me nothing at all.

I'll ask him to post tomorrow, so I can verify he's posting from Toronto, where he says he lives. Obviously, it would be a long commute from Toronto to Diebold.

Moving on:

...and still no result. So [someone's] desperate and now posts "f@#$ Kos" comments in my name and other things on right leaning sites hoping to convince someone to ban me.

He went to bed before he could clarify who this someone was.

The amazing part is this is ALL revenge. Even Leopold isn't deluded enough to think having me banned from kos is somehow going to save his thrice-ruined career.

And, while I may be the biggest pain in these liars' asses I'm hardly the only lefty trying to weed the garden of frauds and phonies.

I never got to the Larry Johnson angle in my interview with Seixon today; time was too short. Let me correct that by quoting Seixon, and, along the way, the thug-pimp Larry Johnson:

Perhaps most haunting was the email I received from Larry Johnson last night. He claimed I defamed him and called him a liar. I did not defame him and he did lie to me when he said that he had answered my questions when he had in fact not done so. This was not part of the story I wrote yesterday, calling him a liar for that, I simply stated the fact that he declined to answer a set of yes/no questions I posed to him, as he responded that he had already answered them, which was false.

Johnson laced the email, to a personal account of mine which I do not usually give out and which is not available through Google, with personal details about my family and me. Just like Leopold had done, Johnson repeated my motherÂ’s name, my parentsÂ’ address, and even my birth month and year. Obviously Johnson thought this would freak me out and scare me into retracting everything. He concluded the email with:

I am willing to accept a written apology and move on. If you refuse to retract your statements about me I am prepared to ratchet this up several levels. I have not spent the last twenty years working with the U.S. military and the intelligence community to accept this kind of nonsense from a wet-nosed 24 year old coward, who is an armchair warrior but does not have the courage to enlist in the military when his country is at war.

By the way, Larry Johnson enjoys saying people he disagrees with have never served, even when it's quite obviously untrue. But I digress.

Is that a threat, Mr. Johnson? After I responded, he fired back with this:

I know where you are living. You forget that I do work for the European Union and friends in Interpol. I've offered you a mature way to deal with this situation. You're obviously too immature and inexperienced to recognize the offer for what it is. Too bad.

Is Larry Johnson using his law enforcement contacts to dig up information on me to intimidate me into retracting uncomfortable facts about his involvement with peddling false allegations against a commenter at my blog? Sheesh. So who was the one who dug up everything? Was it John Dean? Was it Leopold? Was it Johnson? Obviously Johnson has the most resources to do such things, as he so aptly says himself.

Trying to scare someone by lacing an email filled with personal details about them and their family is a “mature” way of handling business?

[Emphasis added to all Larry Johnson quotes above.]

And why is Larry Johnson, scary-important ex-CIA agent, spending so much of his time defending Jason Leopold, anyhow? Leopold doesn't seem to be able to hold a straight media job. And maybe for good reason. He's had a long series of "scoops" about the Plame case that apparently no one else could apparently verify.

I am slapping myself in the head now that I dwelled upon some ridiculous forged email when Seixon's had Larry Fucking Johnson threatening him via email.

As I said, Seixon is the one to watch today. He didn't get to bed until 8 am or so Norway time due to the events of the night; but he will post at some point. I'll keep my eye on the site, and you probably should too.

Why is the MSM not interested in Larry Fucking Johnson threatening amateur journalists?

They scream bloody murder when Bush says a bad word about them, crying a threat to the press. But this pig seems to be suggesting he could either inflict physical harm on Seixon or somehow pull strings to get the cops to harrass him; is this not a story the media cares about?

Are they simply going to keep inviting him on as an expert and never ask about his burgeoning career threatening "24 year old cowards"?

But the story today will be about... well, who knows who. There are, actually, a couple of possibilities; it isn't necessarily Leopold, or even Dean. It could just be someone else in Jason Leopold's TruthOut freakshow.

While I've been talking about bullshit, all this has been going on. I haven't seen this stuff linked; I only heard about it a couple of days ago from a columnist in an email exchange. I just don't understand how this has been missed by so many.

How did this get such little attention, and how has Seixon been left to fend with so little moral support against these thugs?

I'm sorry, Seixon. I just really didn't know.

Semi-Related: Hitchens destroys Joe Wilson's claims -- what's left of them, anyhow.

PS, Glenn E. Greenwald: Have you, by any chance, gotten around to condemning any of this?

Or is condemning just something for little people -- you know, those who don't have New York Times bestellers, or a meteoric nine-month rise in the blogosphere, or a whole legion of adoring housemates with names tending to begin with your middle initial singing your praises to the world?

Posted by: Ace at 10:47 PM | Comments (151)
Post contains 1950 words, total size 12 kb.

Truth Laid Bear has an extremely cool map where you can click on bloggers reporting locally on the fighting.

Posted by: Ace at 09:48 PM | Comments (6)
Post contains 27 words, total size 1 kb.

Everyone, really, should chill.

With the sock-puppetry, the outing, all the other crap.

Knock it off.

And I don't know if you people on the left can get your own crazies under control, but you really should, because this is going to get ugly and it's going to get ugly fast, and it's probably not going to be pleasant for anyone.

That's not a threat or anything. That's just common sense. Once certain boundaries are breached, there's really no stopping what's going to come. Mutual assured destruction for everyone.

You can believe me or not, but there's a really ugly taste in the air. And I'm telling you, there is going to be a real bloodletting if the craziest out here aren't restrained a little bit. You reel yours in, we'll reel in ours. Okay?

Posted by: Ace at 08:38 PM | Comments (26)
Post contains 145 words, total size 1 kb.

Except, the thing is, the stuff is published under the name "AnonymousArmy." I'm told that "AnonymousArmy" is one of the people who exposed Leopold as a likely confabulator on the Rove indictment "scoop."

I'm pretty damn sure "AnonymousArmy" wouldn't publish this filth under his own name -- even if he were given over to such hatred -- and Seixon, being in Norway, is sound asleep, so I know it's not them.

Further, the message is rather, um, overly crude, as if someone were trying to impersonate what they thought a "reich-wing rethuglican" ought to sound like. The KKK Guy, Daniel Carver, who used to come on the Howard Stern show had more nuance and subtelty than this.

Yeah, I know that Leopold has enemies, but I don't know if he has the reach to get to enemies who write like this. You have to have a computer, and a power source, to even get on the Internet, right?

Pardon the very harsh anti-semitic language here. I'm just telling you what the message said.

Jason Leopold is a filthy Jew. He should be sent to the overs with the rest of the filthy Jews. Fucking Jew bastard.

If anyone wants to kill the Kike let me know. Here is his address

Jason Jew leopold

[redacted]

This isn't really the right site to troll anti-semitic agent provocateurism crap. We like the fact the Jews control the world. Frees us up to watch porn and Planet of the Apes marathons.

Now, I banned the IP that posted Seixon's personal information, but it's easy enough for a twit to just hop on to another computer.

Again, I don't know who this is; I'll have to compare notes with Seixon. I've got the screen-caps and IP again. But Seixon's on Norway time, and very much asleep right now.

I have to really read over Seixon's piece before I start making wholly unsusbstantiated allegations. I'd really, really like to make a really wild and vicious unsubstantiated allegation right now, but I'm too tired.

Maybe tomorrow, when I've had some coffee.

And look here, jerkoffs: Stop posting any personal information on this site, including your own.

I take this sort of stuff down fast, my readers on the look-out for this stuff, and we're all too law-abiding and even-keeled here to do anything violent. So you can just stop with these jackass attempts to score sympathy points, or for that matter actually put someone's life in jeopardy, or whatever the hell you think you're accomplishing, by polluting my site with this nonsense.

Thanks to Harrison for alerting me to that.

Thanks to readers for pointing out who AnonymousArmy was. Sheesh, I interviewed Seixon today about AnonymousArmy and I can't remember. Eh, I was drunk. Plus, I spent the whole radio show writing AoS + JG TLF on my notebook cover.

I Question The Timing Update: I'm working on the sock-puppets of Glenn E. Greenwald (the E. stands for... what? Elllis, perhaps?) and now I've got another sock-puppet trying to draw my fire.

Listen, Other Sock-Puppet, stop trying to get some Daddy Time Attention from me.

I do find it curious that the day I publicize a story by Seixon about Leopold's sock-puppeting that someone sock-puppeting himself as "Seixon" shows up here to post Seixon's personal information, including name, address, telephone number, and even his mother's maiden name.

The next day, when I post again on it and interview Seixon, someone calling himself "AnonymousArmy" -- one of Jason Leopold's enemies/exposers -- comes in here and posts (probably bogus) personal information about Jason Leopold.

And also does so with a raft of crude anti-semitic slurs of a kind not entirely unlike the crude "threats" in alleged emails from Seixon, obviously forged by Leopold himself, then published by Leopold on ThinkProgress in a transparent and pathetic attempt to garner sympathy from his ideological soul-mates and fellow lunatics.

So who is this? I don't know it's Leopold, of course. But it does seem to be someone trying to do Leopold a good turn, at least in his own warped mind. And whoever it is-- you're not doing Jason Leopold a lick of good, I can assure you.

Whoever this is, knock it off. I'm dealing with one Sock-Puppeteer right now. I advise you to stop, immediately, before I cultivate an interest in your pathetic ass.

I'm obsessive, I'm vindictive, and I have plenty of free time on my hands to bring the hurt to nasty lunatics like you.

Ask Glenn Greenwald. I just fucked him so hard I hear he's dating women again.

I've already got two IP's you sent this stuff from, so, you know, it's really not going to take a lot of Holmesian deduction to figure out who you are when I run this through ARIN. Why not retain some amount of plausible deniability and refrain from giving me three IP addresses that will somehow magically appear to originate from your neighborhood?

You're obviously nuttier than a Snickers bar so you probably won't take this advice, but maybe there's some flicker of lucidity still sputtering inside that badly-addled brain of yours.

You really think this is going to work?

I don't think it's going to work.

I'm just a knuckle-draggin', NASCAR-lovin', pro-wrasslin'-watchin', wife-beatin', gay-hatin', turkey-smokin' banjo-strokin' cousin-pokin' Red State hillbilly (via Manhattan and Boston, I should say), and even I, inbred to the point of drooling imbecility, think I've got a pretty good handle on what's going on here.

I don't think it's a mystery up there with the particle-wave duality of light to anyone else, either.

Seriously. Do yourself a favor, calm yourself down, and stop getting yourself into more trouble and embarrassment than you already are.

Don't frisch out on yourself, dude.

Posted by: Ace at 07:19 PM | Comments (28)
Post contains 971 words, total size 6 kb.

The Europeans seem to be the right of Bush on this issue.

Meanwhile, in the US, Senate Republicans are working on a compromise bill to create a "virtual Mediterranean Sea" between the United States and Mexico.

Posted by: Ace at 06:55 PM | Comments (6)
Post contains 62 words, total size 1 kb.

Not only not a scoop, but the Influence Peddler's been on this like nervous sweat on Pee Wee Herman at a Pee Wee Football game.

Howard Dean allows brother to campaign against Lieberman, while running the DNC into the ground.

James Dean and liberal Dems threaten Schumer, to stop DSCC from supporting Lieberman.

Schumer pledges support for Lieberman, offers only $62 to Lieberman's campaign.

Dems oppose Lieberman because he's not a real Democrat, but favor Socialist over Democrat in Vermont Senate race.

Yeah, well, a Socialist is a real Democrat, dude. A-derrr.

Posted by: Ace at 06:32 PM | Comments (10)
Post contains 110 words, total size 1 kb.

What's geekier? Dorkwads squealing "Ni!" from Monty Python & The Holy Grail in bad British accents with their reedy little geek-voices?

Or gaywads quoting from the Star Trek episode A Piece of the Action, talking about how a "Royal Fizzbin" beats every other hand and then giggling about that in shrill girly cackles?

What if you could, somehow, combine the two? If you could somehow combine Gaywad and Dorkwad tactical battle modules into one Voltron-like superbeing, would you not have the ultimate geek MegaWad?

You just might. You just might.

Thanks to steve_in_hb.

PS to Andrew Sullivan: This had better not show up on your site tomorrow without a hat-tip. Know what I'm talkin' about there, Juice-Box?

Posted by: Ace at 05:47 PM | Comments (38)
Post contains 125 words, total size 1 kb.

I guess the book dropped a little on the bestseller list. However, it should be noted from the fuller interview that she appears to have been baited into saying something she said off the air:

I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of
latent homosexuality.

Dan will have the video soon, too.

Now, here's me expressing my outrage:

...

...

...

It's "outrageous" only in the sense that it's almost certainly not true and just very, very silly. A gay guy would not have gone for a Monica Lewinsky; that's a straight horndog at work. A gay guy would have gone for more of an Audrey Hepburn kind of look.

Goin' for the kinda dumb, kinda trashy, kinda dumpy girl with the big cans? Straight guy.

It's a goofy little remark that comes right out of MASH, with its Cassanova dentist who fear he might be gay (because he read somewhere that the Cassanova complex is a sign of latent homosexuality).

I just don't buy it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Ann.

So to speak.

It's not "outrageous" or worth the shrill response it's going to get. It's just wrong and silly and based on a goofy Freudianism that I'm almost sure Coulter rejects in almost every other case.

Posted by: Ace at 03:42 PM | Comments (106)
Post contains 225 words, total size 1 kb.