This week’s beautiful pudu-like beastie comes from the below-cited Scientific American list of creatures which will probably soon become extinct in the wild:

This is what pudus call the Dammit Gazelle, which only fifty years ago could be seen in large numbers from Morocco to Sudan. Now there are only a few hundred left, in scattered groupings around Mali, Niger, and Chad.

More properly known as the Dama Gazelle, this fellow is suffering from climate change-induced loss of habitat, loss of food from overgrazing by human-controlled livestock, and motorized machine-gun hunting.

Dammit.

For those who came in late: Doug Feith was one of the head loons who cooked up a bunch of now-discredited crap linking Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

One of the links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda that Feith pointed to involved a company called Vlemmo NV, said to be Dutch. (The "NV" is analogous to our "Inc." or "LLP.")

The Dutch government announced this week that they’d searched high and low and found no evidence whatsoever that any such company had ever existed in the Netherlands. And a bunch of lefty blogs have picked up on the report as further evidence that Feith was full of crap.

I almost did, too. But something about this didn’t smell right to me. Even if Feith was obviously embroidering certain connections, it seemed doubtful to me that he’d make up an entire company. That would be too easy to discredit, even by wingnut standards.

So I did a simple Google search just now. And I plowed through the results — many of which simply recite the Vlemmo-doesn’t-exist news story — carefully down to the very end. And there, in the bitter dregs of the Google search bin, you’ll find links to two Belgian government documents. (Both are .pdfs; download here and here.)

My Dutch zuigt bigtime, but it sure as heck looks to me like a company called Vlemmo NV operated out of Antwerp, Belgium at least as early as 1997 (first document) until it went bankrupt in 2004 (second document). (Somebody who actually speaks Dutch can probably tell me if I’m reading it right. The first document seems to be a bureaucratic register in which a Vlemmo shareholders meeting is discussed on page 78. In the second document, page 125 seems to include the ruling of an Antwerp bankruptcy court, declaring Vlemmo officially over and out. Ja?)

What’s more likely? That two different companies had the weird name "Vlemmo" (which, as far as I can tell is a nonsense word even in Dutch)? Or that Feith — whom Gen. Tommy Franks notably called "the f***ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth" — got confused by the fact that Dutch is also spoken by people who are not Dutch?

If anybody reading this is truly curious about digging further, there may be even more yummy Vlemmo goodness buried in the Belgian government documents stashed here. Nerdfest! Go for it! The online archive only goes back as far as 1997, so I have no idea yet who founded Vlemmo, much less whether they had both Saddam and Osama on speed-dial.

(Which, incidentally, wouldn’t necessarily mean anything. Remember, both guys were super-rich. Saddam had investments in so many companies that he was actually a minority owner of Elle magazine, Women’s Day, and Car & Driver, among a gazillion other things. And Feith’s whole gig was to splice together connections with the slightest threads. That he and OSP could never really come up with much shows just how unrelated the two guys were. And never mind that Osama completely despised secular Arab governments. Etc.)

If you haven’t seen it, a bird crapped directly on Dear Leader today:

The bird was immediately shot in the face by Dick Cheney and is now wearing an orange jumpsuit in Guantanamo.

Meanwhile, Jon alerts us to the single most bizarrely hateful version of "We Are The World" you will ever hear, courtesy Fred Phelps’s psychotic Westboro Baptist Church:

God also apparently hates people with the slightest musical skill. If you can carry a tune, you will burn in the fires of eternal hell.

And finally, this sneak preview of Sylvester Stallone’s next Rambo movie, which is waaaay gorier than you might expect. The message of the film seems to be that (a) genocide is bad, but (b) 60-year-old übermenschen can still slaughter lots of nameless dark-skinned people, if fighting (a). Good to know.

I’m particularly fond of the guy who gets hit by an arrow and suddenly explodes. (It’s at about 2:52.) He kinda falls over into some water and goes kaboom. Maybe the water is explosive. Cinema!

I thought the war was supposed to be against theologically driven ideologues who want to organize society around their irrational allegiance to certain versions of certain parts of one religious text.

It’s not like the translators were all having the sex at their desks, while translating.  That could make for some interesting transcripts. 

If there is another attack, it’s entirely possible that thousands of innocent people could die from somebody else’s homophobia.

A bolt of lightning broke his arm clean off.

Damn.