I mean, stuff he's reviewed. Not reviews of him.

Reviewing George Galloway, friend of dictators, inciter of assassination attempts on Tony Blair: "a hero for out time."

Reviewing deadly hurricanes: "I root for hurricanes. When, courtesy of the Weather Channel, I see one forming in the ocean off the coast of Africa, I find myself longing for it to become big and strong--Mother Nature's fist of fury, Gaia's stern rebuke. Considering the havoc mankind has wreaked upon nature with deforesting, stripmining, and the destruction of animal habitat, it only seems fair that nature get some of its own back and teach us that there are forces greater than our own."

In fairness, some critics have noted that Wolcott's retard-novel The Catsitters was, in fact, an attempt to convey the full horror and human misery of a Category 5 hurricane in prose, and, viewed in those terms, was an unqualified success. "Ther are indeed forces greater than our own," one reviewer wrote, "and among the greatest and most fearsome is James Wolcott's awful writing. Every page of his novel is a heartbreaking glimpse of the wreckage left by 100 mph drivel and twenty-foot high cresting cliches."

Thanks to Allah and Jason for the reminders of this great "cultural critic's" gushingly-positive reviews of human death.

Posted by: Ace at 08:42 PM | Comments (69)
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Who's James Wolcott? That's the question that's precisely on no one's lips. That's the name that causes no one's breath to bate, and no one's senses to thrill.

But who is he, anyway, whether it matters or not?, you don't ask yourselves. As you refuse to play along, I'm forced to just go ahead and tell you anyway.

Well, he's pretty much a nobody. Oh, that's not quite true; his name is better known than, say, Dr. Emelius Starkmucus, but not much better known. He's often called "trenchant" and "mordant," and I don't really know what those words mean, but, using the "context clue" of the caricature on his website, I imagine they're just SAT words for "pudgy" and "pillow-bellied."

more...

Posted by: Ace at 06:06 PM | Comments (74)
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The raid that disclosed a chemical weapon factory did not, alas, result in the capture of a reported vest of chemical mayhem.

I blame Haditha. See, that "provoked" the terrorists. (Our boys, on the other hand, attacked "without provocation.")

Posted by: Ace at 04:00 PM | Comments (8)
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I'm still trying to track down what's happening, but most of the munu blogs are currently offline due to what appears to be a denial-of-service attack. We have two main servers, one (Kei) hosting the databases, forums, and a select few blogs (including this one), and the other (Yuri) hosting the majority of the blogs.

Yuri is currently seeing 40 to 50 times the normal amount of incoming traffic, and keeps locking up or crashing. Trying to fix this from the other side of the planet is not fun. So far I don't know where the traffic is coming from, or if it is in fact a deliberate attack as opposed to a network or hardware problem. The end result is the same, either way.

We haven't been hacked. All the files and databases are safe. Yuri is even up and running now - but we've had to disconnect it from the internet, which kind of defeats the purpose.

More news as it happens.

Update: The really fun part is that if I enable the network interface on Yuri to see if the attack is still going on, I have maybe thirty seconds to turn it off again before the server dies. Ugh.

I'm currently migrating blogs across to Kei, because that will at least work. Only problem is, this takes hours.

Update: Blogs are starting to come up on Kei now, but it will be a few hours before the job is complete and the DNS has updated. Bah.

Update: The fun never stops! While I was transferring accounts, we had a hardware failure and Kei crashed too.

Someone remind me why I do this.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:58 PM | Comments (41)
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The Jeff Goldstein Experience thread has provided us with a whole bunch of low-functioning trolls trotting out the "chickenhawk" insult.

To which I have four questions:

1) What is a "chickenhawk," precisely? It is someone who supports a war but does not enlist to fight it, yes-yes?

2) Do you support the War in Afghanistan? Most liberals say yes to this, as they want to prove they're reasonable and not simply dopey pacifists.

3) Did you enlist to fight in the War in Afghanistan? Of course you didn't. (Well, of course some small number did, but certainly not the trolls here.)

4) Doesn't that make you therefore a "chickenhawk" -- supporting a war you do not volunteer to fight in?

Most liberals haven't even thought about this, and so will initially gasp at the implications. Once they're done sputtering in cognitive dissonance, they will say, "Well, no, the original definition I agreed to, before I realized it would be used against me, is wrong. It is not supporting any war in which you do not fight which makes you a chickenhawk; it is supporting an illegal war on a sovereign country without UN permission in a unilateral war of choice without enlisting that makes you a chickenhawk."

And if that doesn't restrict it enough, perhaps they can add, "...fought against a country located east of Jordan and west of Iran, north of Kuwait and south of Turkey, which didn't pose a threat to anyone, ever, and spent all its pre-war time flying colorful kites, as seen in Fahrenheit 911."

Whatever.

If you didn't support the War in Afghanistan either, then you're not a chickenhawk, you're just a vapid ninny whose opinions should be entirely discarded as lunatic.

And, you know, you're a pure straight chickenshit appeaser, too.

Corrected the east-west screw-up. I always mess that up.

I'm a bear with north-south, though.

Posted by: Ace at 01:42 PM | Comments (61)
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Well, okay, that quote is, umm, paraphrased. But sometimes (and I know this from my media professional betters) a quote needs to be juiced up a little.

I want to congratulate you all upon your graduation from the University of Maryland College of Journalism, and wish you luck as you prepare to embark on exciting careers in telemarketing or large-appliance repair.
My point is, this is a challenging time for journalists.

...

What are your challenges, specifically? Let us begin with, quote unquote, getting a job. Good jobs in journalism have become scarce as newspapers shrink and die, broadcast media fragment to smaller niche audiences and the public appears more and more willing to receive its "news" online from nincompoops ranting in their underpants.

His attempts to be funny are, well, let us be charitable and say he "showed a lot of energy" and "has some real promise."

They feel threatened. They ought to.

It's about time they owned up to something. They're not particularly good at their jobs, and their jobs aren't particularly demanding in any event. Being a reporter, it seems, requires the following scary-advanced skills:

1) Dialing a phone number

2) Talking to people

3) Asking those people questions

4) Writing their answers down in a notepad or on a cocktail napkin

5) Putting a series of coherent sentences together to describe what you've learned

and of course

6) Larding the article up with as much political bias as possible without being blatantly obvious about it

It's true that these guys are better at these things than bloggers. But then, bloggers aren't on a straight salary, given two weeks or so to track down a story. And bloggers don't do these things every day.

I don't imagine bloggers -- or most people, as a matter of fact -- would find it difficult to learn the difficult skills of phone-dialing, schmoozing, and typing were we to simply displace these dopes in a mass employment-exchange.

A columnist, of course, has an even easier skill-set to manage. He has to read the day's news, come up with a quick opinion, and -- get this -- write that opinion down on a piece of paper and deliver that paper to his editor.

Tough gig. Not quite as hard as being a publicist for an Enuff Z'Nuff reunion tour, but still, wow, really tough.

To return to my favorite well of describing anger according to a threatened ego: they're upset because they've long considered themselves the Priesthood of Information, gifted and elite, doing a job that no more than perhaps .001% of the population could possibly do, and are now a bit miffed to find out that they're not really as gifted, elite, or special as they once thought.

It's quite true that I'm a nincompoop. And I often rant. And I often do so in my underpants. Or even not in my underpants. Sometimes I just blog wearing nothing but a baseball cap with Bullwinkle horns and strategically-placed fruit roll-ups.

And, of course, an American Cornhole Association membership badge.

It must be galling for a fashion-plate like Gene Weingarten to know that a nincompoop so dressed can manage a not-trivial fraction of his readership with no more experience or credentialing than your average ficus.

It's not that bloggers are so good. It's just that-- well, you guys don't really do anything all that difficult. And that's what really hurts, isn't it?

Let's put it to the test. Let's swap jobs for two weeks. Let's see if a blogger can -- given the slight head-start of being assigned a tip or story -- can manage a publishable news article in fourteen days. And let's see if an MSM genius can manage a blog that draws decent traffic, interest, and reviews over that same period. For a headstart, they get to take over an established blog with decent readership.

To be honest, I think both will be more or less successful, but I think the blogger will come out ahead on points.

Because what you're doing just ain't that tough.

Anyone in media-land up for the Ace of Spades Cornhole Classic Job-Swap Challenge?

I doubt it. They know, deep inside, that they're doing a fairly easy job.

Posted by: Ace at 12:49 PM | Comments (43)
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...and responsible for the Permian-Triassic mass-extiction that wiped out nearly all animal life on earth.

And also, as a bonus, the incredible impact may have split Australia from Antartica and sent it moving northward.

Planetary scientists have found evidence of a meteor impact much larger and earlier than the one that killed the dinosaurs -- an impact that they believe caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history.

The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And the gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out.

Its size and location -- in the Wilkes Land region of East Antarctica, south of Australia -- also suggest that it could have begun the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent by creating the tectonic rift that pushed Australia northward.

Scientists believe that the Permian-Triassic extinction paved the way for the dinosaurs to rise to prominence. The Wilkes Land crater is more than twice the size of the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula, which marks the impact that may have ultimately killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The Chicxulub meteor is thought to have been 6 miles wide, while the Wilkes Land meteor could have been up to 30 miles wide -- four or five times wider.

"This Wilkes Land impact is much bigger than the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and probably would have caused catastrophic damage at the time," said Ralph von Frese, a professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University.

Al Gore immediately seized upon the news to demand that we reduce carbon production, because "atmospheric carbon is a sort of 'supermagnet' for meteors, asteroids, comets, and 'temporal anomalies, as seen on Star Trek: TNG.' "

In all seriousness, it really is kind of a wonder that human beings ever made it at all.

Posted by: Ace at 11:41 AM | Comments (13)
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Is this funny? No idea. I did a system restore and now I can see Flash stuff, but can't hear it.

Steve sends it, and he usually sends good stuff, so it's probably funny.

Posted by: Ace at 11:21 AM | Comments (16)
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Try here and comment at "hit me." I realize it's not really an optimal solution, but it's the best I can do right now.

Posted by: Ace at 10:30 AM | Comments (18)
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Josef Goebbels would be so proud of the Beeb!

Apparently, there aren't enough Anti-Semitic, Anti-American degenerates already working for the station. Now they are subcontracting to Al Qaeda! That's right folks, they are cutting out the middleman (Al Jazeera) and going straight to the source!

The big story is that US forces went on another rampage in a town called Ishaqi back in March. The BBC says that women and children were shot deliberately. How does the BBC know this? They have a report with pictures. Where did the pictures come from?

The pictures came from a hardline Sunni group opposed to coalition forces.

Or as people who still speak English like to say - Al Qaeda!

Alas, I can no longer be too surprised by these degenerate subhumans. Just look at their lexicon:

Muslims who blow up women and children in Tel Aviv? Militants.

Muslims who blow up women and children in Baghdad? Insurgents.

Muslims who blow up women and children in Beslan? Armed Gang.

Muslims who blow up women and children in London (where the BBC and it's employees are located)? Terrorists!

I guess in a way it makes sense that they get their reports on massacres from Al Qaeda. After all its their raison d’être.

Posted by: Tanker at 10:27 AM | Comments (2)
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