Good evening all.

LEGO® STAR WARS™: BOMBAD BOUNTY

Even with Jar-Jar and hand-less Lego people I'd still much rather watch 120 minutes of this than any of Lucas' three prequels.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:54 PM | Comments (317)
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It's 2:40 am Wednesday morning here in Paris, and I'm wide awake -- not because of jet lag, but because I came down ill with a 24-hr bug on Monday night and slept most of Tuesday. The good news is that I'll get more euros when I withdraw cash from the friendly neighborhood ATM in the morning:

Investors dismissed European leaders' latest attempt to restore market calm, raising doubts about whether governments can rebuild confidence in the region's common currency amid signs that the debt crisis is creeping deeper into the Continent.


The euro fell to a 10-week low, and was below $1.30 in late New York trading. Bond markets across Europe's vulnerable fringe sank, as the "risk premium" investors demand for lending to Spain and Italy hit record highs. Standard & Poor's said after European markets closed it is considering a downgrade on Portugal's credit rating, citing economic pressures and increased risks to the government's creditworthiness.

The eurozone was, for the most part, a collectivist pipe dream fueled by grand intentions -- the classic liberal fallacy of "if we just mean well, it will all work out." Megan McArdle, a libertarian economist, suspects the euro, as a currency, may not survive. More disturbingly, McArdle -- no alarmist or ideologue -- has real concerns about what lies ahead for all of us:

Europe cannot let its banks fail, but it also can't divert public pensions to line the pockets of bankers. Yet it may well have to do one or the other. I am also expecting finance to win. Forget whether Germany has the political will to bail out the PIIGS: does either the EU, or the ECB, actually have the means to bail out all five? If Spain topples, that is what it will come to.


This is starting to throw off more echoes of the Great Depression, where you have a sequence of crises, each touched off by the ones that came before, like dominos falling into some diabolic design. Europe and America thought they'd seen the worst of things by the end of 1930, only to be knocked back down even harder by the contagion of the Creditanstalt crisis. In the US, the crisis ultimately triggered a string of bank failures worse than those sparked by the initial stock market crash, and the worst two years of the Great Depression were 1932-3.

Hey, if I can't sleep, there's no reason why you should get to. ..fritz..

Posted by: Open Blogger at 04:47 PM | Comments (147)
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You're making your football picks, and you wanna land your football picks in solid double digits. You not only look at the spread, you look at the f'n win/loss records.

What are you lookin at?

Do you need me to get Vinny Falcone to show you the Vegas line?

Well do you?

joltin' j's 99
Quarreyman 98
Iowa Amy 98
Reggie Bush's Birth Cert 97
Commando Pete 96
Bruin 22 96

The Guys Get Shirts

Ben 87
DrewM 85
CDR M 81
Russ from Winterset 77
DiT 76

Full value for your money. Also could somebody please give me some intelligent f'n answers?

Put me some knowledge.

Also, because you haz been good, and I'm not at work. more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 03:40 PM | Comments (89)
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After nine months of study, including the largest ever survey of troops on a personnel matter, the DOD working group instituted to review the law known as Don't Ask, Don't Tell has released its results and recommendations.

It's actually too long and complicated to summarize all of it, but I will highlight a few things that caught my eye because they repeatedly come up in comments here when DADT is discussed. (You can get a fair overview of the more general findings from Allah.)

First, in the recommendations portion of the report, the working group found that sexual orientation should not be placed alongside race, color, religion, sex, and national origin, as a class eligible for various diversity programs, tracking initiatives, and complaint resolution processes. It noted that such special treatment would itself cause problems. Instead, complaints of discrimination, if they occur, "should be dealt with through existing mechanisms—primarily the chain of command—available for complaints not involving race, color, sex, religion, or national origin."

Second, the study found that among those opposed to repeal, one of the most-repeated concerns was "open" service:

Repeatedly, we heard Service
members express the view that “open” homosexuality would lead to widespread and overt displays of effeminacy among men, homosexual promiscuity, harassment and unwelcome advances within units, invasions of personal privacy, and an overall erosion of standards of conduct, unit cohesion, and morality. Based on our review, however, we conclude that these concerns about gay and lesbian Service members who are permitted to be “open” about their sexual orientation are exaggerated, and not consistent with the reported experiences of many Service members.

That's from the executive summary. If you dig into the report you find a marked difference between the conduct anticipated by troops who say they have never served alongside a gay or lesbian person and the troops who say they already have. The report also found that when Service members who had already served with (or believed they served with) a gay or lesbian person 92% stated that their unit's "ability to work together, was "very good," "good" or "neither good nor poor." Hence the conclusion of the study that fears of "open" service are exaggerated.

Nevertheless, to alleviate these concerns, the working group recommends training to remind troops and leaders that standards of conduct already exist which regulate inappropriate dress and appearance; acts of violence, harassment, and disrespect; and (in the Marines) public displays of affection. The working group also recommends that the Services review their standards of conduct to make sure they are sexual-orientation neutral and applied that way. Finally, the working group reminds commanders that they already have myriad tools to punish and remedy inappropriate conduct.

Third, I was struck by this particular statistic:

The survey results also reveal, within warfighting units, negative predictions about serving alongside gays decrease when in “intense combat situations.” In response to question 71a, for example, 67% of those in Marine combat arms units predict working alongside a gay man or lesbian will have a negative effect on their unit’s effectiveness in completing its mission “in a field environment or out at sea.” By contrast, in response to the same question, but during “an intense combat situation,” the percentage drops to 48%.21 See section VII. While 48% indicates a significant level of concern, the near 20-point difference in these two environments reflects that, in a combat situation, the warfighter appreciates that differences with those within his unit become less important than defeating the common enemy.

Fourth, the working group study is adamant that creating separate housing, bathroom, and shower facilities for gays and lesbians will stigmatize gays in the service (and also oddly require gays and lesbians to disclose their sexuality, something the report finds most do not want to do). The report goes so far as to refer to this idea, mentioned by many Service members during the review and publicly speculated on by Marine Commandant Gen. Amos, as "separate but equal" and flatly rejects it.

Finally, though it does not appear within the report, the whole study is premised on the idea that the DOD will have some time to implement training to minimize the risk of disruption. Sec. Gates has repeated over and over during the past month that it would be better for DOD to have some control over the process than to cede that control to the courts. He repeated that argument during the announcement today:

He said a sudden, court-issued mandate would significantly increase the risk of disruption.

"Given the present circumstances, those that choose not to act legislatively are rolling the dice that this policy will not be abruptly overturned by the courts," Gates told reporters.

He noted that the version of DADT repeal that has already passed the House and that is currently pending in the Senate contains a delay provision under which repeal actually occurs only after certification of the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. It therefore gives the military the time to prepare that the working group found necessary.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:10 PM | Comments (272)
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Hmmmm...

We wanted to know: If you could flip the telomerase switch on and restore telomeres in animals with entrenched age-related disease, what would happen? Would it slow down aging, stabilize it, or even reverse it?
It was akin to a Ponce de León [the Spanish explorer looking for the Fountain of Youth] effect. When we flipped the telomerase switch on and looked a month later, the brains had largely returned to normal.

One of the most amazing changes was in the animals' testes, which were essentially barren as aging caused the death and elimination of sperm cells. When we restored telomerase, the testes produced new sperm cells, and the animals' fecundity was improved - their mates gave birth to larger litters.

Why the "uh-oh" in the headline? I don't know. Just seems so big, possibly, it deserves an uh-oh.

Posted by: Ace at 01:51 PM | Comments (77)
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I have dreaded posting this because I know it will be bait for me to get into arguments with people, which I just don't want to do. So I won't.

I'll just note my belief that the odds of defeating ObamaCare politically will go up significantly if there's some kind of more-attractive but less-intrusive replacement on the horizon. Conservatives have seized, kind of oddly, on ObamaCare's keep-kids-on-your-insurance-'till-they're-26 provision, but I think it's too popular to get rid of, and trying to get rid of it will threaten the more important goal of getting rid of socialized medicine.

The other part is also popular -- no barring coverage for those with pre-existing conditions -- but it's also extremely costly and without any good way to implement it. The problem is, of course, that you can't have free riders skipping insurance all their lives until the day they're diagnosed with a costly illness, then signing up and paying what healthy people pay.

I don't know how you get around this -- you either have to force people to buy insurance, which is of course a no-go (and might in fact get ObamaCare struck down by the courts), or you... no idea. You just subsidize their game-the-system behavior.

You could make people pay very high premiums indeed if they do this, penalizing the game-the-system types, but in the end, you can't penalize them enough to make this an unattractive proposition.

Politico Spins: Politico wrote its article suggesting that parts of ObamaCare would be "retained," according Eric Cantor. I always knew that was false-- a false way to put it. Cantor wants to replace ObamaCare, repeal it, then propose a new reform; Politico tries to suggest that ObamaCare would be "retained." No, no.

Anyway, I knew Politico was lying about that part of it from the get-go and declined to follow their spin. However, Eric Cantor is proposing that two popular parts of ObamaCare be part of the replacement bill; that part's true.

Politico updated to note its initial lie:

Editor's note: This article was changed at 1:57 p.m.. The Hill incorrectly reported in the initial version that Cantor wants to keep certain provisions of the healthcare law intact. The article was revised to emphasize that Cantor and House Republicans are pursuing a full repeal of healthcare reform while addressing issues in the law, such as pre-existing conditions and allowing young people to stay on their parents' insurance plan, in their replacement bill. Both provisions are in current law, but Republicans would deal with them differently than Democrats did in the bill that passed earlier this year.

I changed a word in my own headline to further distance myself from Politico's spin.

Honestly, on this one, I wasn't fooled. I just sort of assumed Politico was deliberately distorting Cantor's words and read past that.

Posted by: Ace at 01:01 PM | Comments (222)
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In a way, yes. Refusing to even recognize opposing voices in debate? Yep, that was definitely part of it.

In case you're curious as I was, Laura Richardson was alas not personally thrown out of power. How sweet that would have been-- to be able to say, "And that's why you personally were fired."

She ran for reelection in California's 37th (Long Beach, Compton) and easily beat challenger Star Parker.

And if you like that, you'll like UK Independence Party (euro-skeptic) Nigel Farage take the euro-fanatics to task, asking them, "Just who in the hell do you think you are?"

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:48 PM | Comments (41)
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WikiLeaks just released this long-suppressed intelligence supporting my unending war on shiftless drifters.

At the time of his arrest, Strickland was "found with two dogs, including the victim, and pornographic material in his possession," according to the city prosecutors.

That pornographic material? Snausage Lovers.

Posted by: Ace at 11:39 AM | Comments (179)
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Actually, I believe Assange is a coward who only wishes to preen as a dangerous rebel with states that will not kill him (such as America), and thus capitalize on unearned status -- he likes to play the hunted revolutionary without having to actually be hunted.

When it comes to a state that will in fact kill him, he will fold like a cheap suit. (I realize that makes no sense.)

So I doubt that Captain Ed's belief that Assange is about to provoke the wrong enemy is correct.

I doubt it will happen, I can't help but wanting this dump to occur:

National security officials say that the National Security Agency, the U.S. governmentÂ’s eavesdropping agency, has already picked up tell-tale electronic evidence that WikiLeaks is under close surveillance by the Russian FSB, that countryÂ’s domestic spy network, out of fear in Moscow that WikiLeaks is prepared to release damaging personal information about Kremlin leaders.

“We may not have been able to stop WikiLeaks so far, and it’s been frustrating,” a U.S. law-enforcement official tells The Daily Beast. “The Russians play by different rules.” He said that if WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, follow through on threats to post highly embarrassing information about the Russian government and what is assumed to be massive corruption among its leaders, “the Russians will be ruthless in stopping WikiLeaks.”

Although these leaks have been damaging to foreign policy -- especially in Yemen, where a cooperate government was just outed as dishonestly claiming it wasn't cooperative -- there are some upsides.

Revelations about Iran and North Korea should not have been suppressed from the American public. We are entitled to know, roughly, what enemy nations are doing, and how great a danger they pose. In the case of Iran and North Korea, America's official word tends to strongly understate how much danger these states pose.

This is one of the greatest powers of the presidency -- the president may decide what is and what is not a foreign policy threat or crisis. If he wishes to take action against such a state, he outs the information about it (as we did in the case of Iraq).

On the other hand, if he doesn't wish to act, he also doesn't want the public clamoring for action he has no intention of carrying through on, so he simply suppresses information about how much of a threat a nation poses. This doesn't make the threat go away -- it only takes it off the front pages. It removes the threat only from the public debate.

George W. Bush suppressed information about how truly bad-behaving North Korea was, because he was not ready to kick that particular hornet's nest, and Obama has continued doing so.

In this case, WikiLeaks has outed information we should have known all along -- that North Korea is providing advanced missiles to Iran, for example. The reason to withhold this information had little to do with protecting America's foreign policy interest; it had instead to do protecting the current and past administrations' political interest.

No president wants it talked about in the press that there's a pressing foreign threat that he intends to studiously ignore, and that the nation's real policy regarding that threat is to cross fingers and hope for the best.

Assange is a rotten bastard who deserves a bad end. I'm not claiming he's the hero he preens as or anything close to it. He's a villain. But administrations do typically attempt to "manage foreign policy" not by actually managing it, but primarily by managing public opinion about their policy (or lack thereof), and they do so by hiding information from the public.

That's an improper use of the classification system. It's not letting Assange off the hook to say that Obama shouldn't be hiding evidence of Iran's and North Korea's bad behavior from the public just to keep us in the dark about it and keep his poll ratings from dropping another 3 or 4 points.

The ironic thing is that Assange has outed more information about the bad behavior of hostile foreign states than about his true enemy, America. But perhaps that's predictable, since America is a well-behaved state. Perhaps a little too well-behaved for its own good.

By the Way: A spy-type did write to me yesterday, to say that yes, intelligence agents already do prepare multiple versions of their reports in different levels of sensitivity.

The problem, this guy noted, is simply that this idiot private Manning was an intelligence analyst, which he never should have been (indeed, he shouldn't have been in the military at all), and thus had access to secret documents in raw form as part of his job.

Another problem that was noted is that we make too many things secret, which then has a bad effect: Because so many things are secret (or top secret, or above that), many people wind up not being able to do their jobs without secret (or better) clearance, so we grant them that clearance, and inadvertently wind up giving them access to stuff that's unnecessary to do their jobs as well as a lot more sensitive. His suggestion was to make fewer things secret (just make them classified) so that we can give the less-dangerous classified clearance to more people and the more-dangerous secret clearance to fewer people.

Posted by: Ace at 10:17 AM | Comments (203)
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Normally the best thing to do with anyone who writes for the company that employs Linda “Report all lies against the regime” Douglas and Andrew “Show me the afterbirth” Sullivan is to ignore them. Sometimes though one of them writes something so ridiculous it’s necessary to call them out on their BS. This James Fallows post is one such time.

Fallows was responding to Ross Douthat’s contention that conservative anger about the TSA now and not under Bush is part of the ebb and flow of politics…you let things slide when your guy does it but get outraged when ‘they’ do it. Fallows thinks this is unfair to Democrats and liberals and that only Republicans and conservatives are guilty of this particular sin.

Stop laughing, he really seems to think this.

The TSA case, on which Douthat builds his column, is in fact quite a poor illustration -- rather, a good illustration for a different point. There are many instances of the partisan dynamic working in one direction here. That is, conservatives and Republicans who had no problem with strong-arm security measures back in the Bush 43 days but are upset now. Charles Krauthammer is the classic example: forthrightly defending torture as, in limited circumstances, a necessary tool against terrorism, yet now outraged about "touching my junk" as a symbol of the intrusive state.

This is such a delicious example of liberal ‘thinking’. Fallows’ example doesn’t demonstrate Krauthammer’s lack of principles. What that paragraph does is demonstrate that Fallows and many other liberals simply can’t differentiate between how the US government should and is required to treat its own citizens on American soil and how it may deal with non-citizen, enemies outside the jurisdiction of the United States.

Fallows is free to make the case that people in line to get on an airplane and enemy combatants captured in a war with Islamic fundamentalists but he doesnÂ’t get to steal that base and simply say people who donÂ’t agree with him are intellectually inconsistent and opportunistic.

It would be bad enough if Fallows stopped there but he didnÂ’t.

So: it's nice and fair-sounding to say that the party-first principle applies to all sides in today's political debate. Like it would be nice and fair-sounding to say that Democrats and Republicans alike in Congress are contributing to obstructionism and party-bloc voting. Or that Fox News and NPR have equal-and-offsetting political agendas in covering the news. But it looks to me as if we're mostly talking about the way one side operates. Recognizing that is part of facing the reality of today's politics.

Democrats aren’t ‘guilty’ of “party-bloc voting”? Has he checked the Senate roll-calls on the vote for the so-called “stimulus” bill? Or health care reform? Or the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act? Can he find one Democrat who voted against either of Obama’s Supreme Court nominees?

Fallows is right about one thing...for the last two years Democrats haven’t been ‘guilty’ of “obstructionism”. How could they obstruct anything when they control the White House, the Senate and the House?

On the other hand, I do seem to recall a fair bit of Democratic “obstructionism” when George W. Bush was trying to get some judges on various courts of appeal or when Bush wanted to pass the free trade agreement with one of our most important allies in South American, Colombia.

IÂ’m sure if I spent more than 5 minutes thinking about it I could come up with dozens of other examples where Democrats obstructed BushÂ’s agenda (Social Security reform pops to mind) but in Fallows world, nothing like that ever happened.

I canÂ’t get worked up about the opportunism of politicians, like the proverbial scorpion, itÂ’s their nature. While I enjoy tweaking liberals like Fallows and their rose colored glasses, I donÂ’t get worked up over their idiocyÂ…it is after all just their nature.

Added: I forgot to include this bit of news from today's meeting between Obama and Republican congressional leaders.

Senior admin official tells CNN the President did tell Repubs behind closed doors he failed to reach out enough in 1st 2 yrs

Ah, you see Obama didn't reach out to Republicans for two years for a very simple reason...he didn't need them. They simply didn't matter given the overwhelming numbers Democrats had in both houses. Now however the situation is different and Obama will act differently or at least will give lip service to it when it's politically helpful.

It's almost as if Obama lied about his interest in bi-partisanship and is now acting differently simply out of political expediency. I'm shocked!

I eagerly await Fallows taking Obama to task for this. Or you know, not.

Posted by: DrewM at 09:54 AM | Comments (92)
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