Oh and apparently the AosHQ Two have been unbanned. Sometimes the system fails us.

Charts!

Man those scandis are a surly jittery bunch.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:18 PM | Comments (803)
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It sort of shocks me that we might still be discovering planets in our own neighborhood, but I guess that's because I don't really appreciate how very large our own neighborhood is (even if it's tiny).

Out in the Oort Cloud*, which is something I always have to look up but seems to be where comets live when they're not commuting in to destroy the earth, there may lurk a behemoth planet four times as massive as Jupiter.

Oh, here's the Oort Cloud, in comparison with a tiny inset of what we usually think of as the solar system:

They suspect some large planet is out there because comets aren't coming out of the cloud at the predicted angles, something they think could be explained by the presence of a hitherto-unknown mass kaffoodling with their trajectories.

* I have to note that the Oort Cloud is the best made-up Star Wars name that actually isn't made-up or in Star Wars.

Posted by: Ace at 01:51 PM | Comments (246)
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On the contrary: It's doing precisely what it's designed to do.

Welcome to one of BritainÂ’s most influential Islamic faith schools, one of at least 2,000 such schools in Britain, some full-time, others part-time. They represent a growing, parallel education system.

The school is the Darul Uloom Islamic High School in Birmingham, an oversubscribed independent secondary school. Darul Ulooms are world-renowned Islamic institutions and their aim is to produce the next generation of Muslim leaders. In fact, these schools have been described as the ‘Etons of Islam’.

This school is required by its inspectors to teach tolerance and respect for other faiths. But the Channel 4 current affairs programme Dispatches filmed secretly inside it – and instead discovered that Muslim children are being taught religious apartheid and social segregation.

We recorded a number of speakers giving deeply disturbing talks about Jews, Christians and atheists.

We found children as young as 11 learning that Hindus have ‘no intellect’ and that they ‘drink cow p***’.

And we came across pupils being told that the ‘disbelievers’ are ‘the worst creatures’ and that Muslims who adopt supposedly non-Muslim ways, such as shaving, dancing, listening to music and – in the case of women – removing their headscarves, would be tortured with a forked iron rod in the afterlife.

In 2009 this school was praised by Government-approved inspection teams for its interfaith teachings. The report said that ‘pupils learn about the beliefs and practices of other faiths and are taught to show respect to other world religion.'

And the British are paying for this. Unbelievable.

Posted by: Ace at 01:28 PM | Comments (130)
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Either it's real or it's fake but it should be real.

Two things give men boners: 1, boobies, and 2, the hope of Jedi Force powers. Combine the two and you're banging on all cylinders.

Oh: 3, a trailer for a superhero movie that looks like it just might be kinda good. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:32 PM | Comments (107)
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The media wants to give Obama credit for taking The Dangerous Tyrant Mubarak out.

First of all, let us note the obvious: Few in America were really clamoring for Mubarak to be deposed. If this were Iran, I'd say "Well done, Mr. President."

But Egypt is not an enemy -- quite the opposite -- and during Iran's own uprising Obama chose to actually support the regime.

Egypt? On my top five of regimes I want the US to undermine, Egypt places... not on the list. I suppose in an expanded list it would come somewhere between The Netherlands and one of those made-up countries in tv shows, like East Pretendistan.

But even assuming we wished for this to happen (and, um, we didn't), did Obama have a damn thing to do with it?

We know that Bush actually put money into liberalizing Egypt, and Obama not only slashed that funding, but he put a stricture on the funding that it could only flow to groups specifically approved of by the Eygptian government.

It seems when it comes to even soft power, Obama's against it -- he's not only willing to do business with dictators, he's positively giddy at the prospect.

And Verum Serum has dug up this clip of Obama, praising Mubarak as a "stalwart ally" and "force for good in the region" and refusing the interviewer's terming of Mubarak as an "autocrat."

As Verum Serum says: "Not exactly a 'tear down this wall' moment."

The MFM wants to credit Obama with this because they need to credit him with something; for such a transformative figure in politics, Obama has almost no actual objective successes. (Subjective successes in the form of liberal political deliverables, yes, but those are easy; what about unambiguously good deliverables?) So they're desperate to throw a few scraps of fabric on The Naked Emperor.

But beyond that, they want to tout soft power (persuasion, money, diplomacy) over hard power (war and threats of such). They want to hold up Egypt as a place where soft power triumphed, so take that, neocon war mongers!

Let me circle back to the earlier part about no one particularly wanting Egypt's regime to fall. It's not a success to have something happen that no one attempted to make happen. This is like taking a randomly fired shot with a gun, accidentally hitting your neighbor's car window, and then telling your neighbor You're welcome. Well, he didn't ask you to do that and you didn't even aim at that; on what basis are you taking credit?

But more fundamentally, conservatives have never argued that soft power isn't useful. 95% of all international kefuffles are handled with soft power: we jawbone the Chinese about devaluating their currency; we do not go to war with them. We agitate for Norway and Japan to stop killing so many whales; we do not bomb them. We press Mexico to clamp down on border crossings -- oh wait, we don't do that, but we theoretically could.

In short, we do not go to war over every dispute. In fact we go to war over very few of them.

Conservatives have never taken the position that soft power should be abandoned or is useless, and that warfare is the only tool in our foreign policy box.

No, we never claimed that, so Egypt can't serve as a refutation to a thesis never offered.

On the other hand, the liberals have offered an extremely radical idea -- the idea that only soft power should be used in any foreign dispute, no matter how serious, and that soft power works to fix everything.

That is the radical idea, the idea that hard power has no usefulness nor any justification in the modern world.

So yes, soft power is fine for Egypt, a country which wasn't threatening us (and indeed was doing us a rather good turn as far as clamping down on terrorism). And soft power is fine for Japan, and for China, and for Canada and most other countries.

And no conservatives ever said otherwise.

On the other hand, liberal foreign policy experts have claimed, essentially, that war is illegal and always the worst possible policy choice.

The case of Egypt does not speak to their premise at all. But they're hoping the uniformed out there come away thinking it's been proven -- all because Obama attempted to prop up yet another Muslim dictator and failed at it yet again.

Posted by: Ace at 12:07 PM | Comments (99)
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Mika Brzezinski (and by extension, Barack Obama) vs. Niall Ferguson on Egypt joins other great rivalries like nail v. hammer, scissors v. rock and the George Lucas v. that crazy guy from Red Letter Media.

Via Iowahawk

I agree with Ferguson that the military taking over is not the end of the story and Obama Mika declaring "Mission Accomplished" on Obama's behalf is silly. Still, it was probably the best outcome at this stage in the process. There were no other institutions that could have stepped in and kept the country running and avoided a slide into anarchy.

I do have to wonder why in the world Ferguson lists Mika's dad as a first class foreign policy mind. It's a nice jab to deflate her Obama love but anyone connected with Carter's foreign policy team is suspect at best.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:54 AM | Comments (188)
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Apparently, Federal agencies are being swamped with so much ObamaCash™ they have no idea where to spend it, don't have any commitments for it, and its just piling up like so much dirty laundry in a hamper.

...Meanwhile, more than $700 billion gathers dust in accounts all around Washington.

That’s right. An arcane budgetary category called “unobligated funds” includes money that Congress has appropriated for agencies and programs in every corner of the federal government. When that money goes unspent, it just sits there — like an ancient wooden chest on a Caribbean island, just waiting to be pried open...

...these unobligated funds “have not yet been committed by contract or other legally binding action by the government,” OMB explains...

...Senator Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) holds the treasure map...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 10:54 AM | Comments (44)
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Madness, simply madness.

$3.73 trillion — total spending this year (25 percent of GDP).

$46 trillion — total spending over the next decade.

$8.7 trillion — total new spending over the same period.

$77.4 billion — Funding allocated for the Department of Education, a 22 percent increase from 2010 levels, and a 35 percent increase from 2008 levels.

More from the horror story at the link.

How are we going to pay for this? Well, we're not really but he will raise taxes a lot.

However, Obama also would rely heavily on new taxes, to a degree unacknowledged by administration officials in recent days. His budget request calls for well over $1.6 trillion in fresh revenue over the next decade, much of it through higher taxes on the wealthy and businesses.

Households with income of more than $250,000 a year would immediately see new limits on the value of their itemized deductions. And starting in 2013, they would lose the lower tax rates and other breaks that were enacted during the George W. Bush administration and recently extended.

The president proposes to hit businesses with an array of proposals he has offered in the past, including an end to subsidies for oil and gas companies, new taxes on hedge fund managers and a $30 billion fee on financial institutions aimed at repaying taxpayers for the federal TARP bailout.

The cuts target defense, heating assistance and community development grants and include a scale-down of the Pell grant program for college and vocational students.

Republicans are not amused.

“Failing to heed the warnings of economists and the demands of the American people, the President’s budget accelerates our country down the path to bankruptcy. Far from ‘living within its means,’ the President’s budget puts the government on track to nearly double in size since the day he took office — a direct result of his party’s reckless spending spree,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said.

“His budget destroys jobs by imposing a $1.6 trillion tax hike, adding $13 trillion to the national debt and fueling uncertainty in the private sector,” he added.

Senate Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said, “President Obama has failed to lead in the face of this growing crisis. Today he submitted a budget to Congress that accelerates our dangerous trajectory. His budget increases spending every single year, eventually doubling the size of the entire government from what it was the day he took office.”

“The president’s budget also doubles the national debt by the end of his term, and then triples it by the end of the decade,” he noted.

Obama is basically taking a pass on seriously dealing with the nation's financial mess. Shocking, I know. He's going to make Republicans go first and propose real cuts and a way to deal with entitlements. He's hoping that the public will turn against the GOP and he can pretend to be the reasonable one heading into 2012. I'm not sure if that's Change You Can Believe In or not.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:05 AM | Comments (127)
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That's what he said, and seemed to want to say more before being gagged:

‘You never found one in San Diego though?’ Mr Blacher asked.

‘I would say at the port of San Diego we have not,’ Mr Hallor said.

‘Have you found one in San Diego?’ Mr Blacher asked.

The interview was then interrupted and cut short by a public relations official before Mr Hallor was able to answer the question.

San Diego's Customs and Border Protection agency was unavailable for comment today.

No comment? What?

There are two main possibilities here. First, that he is the victim of a game of Telephone, where a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend said something like this but it was garbled. In this case, it's basically not true. He thought it was, but he got it wrong.

The other main possibility is that WMDs have been discovered being smuggled into America and this information has been suppressed by government officials. But this guy let it slip.

I don't want to jump on to possibility two too hard -- it's hard to keep a secret, and also, federal agencies usually have a strong incentive to publicize their busts.

There is a third possibility that I'm sort of embarrassed to note because it involves my own ignorance. That is, I am not sure, but I think I've heard about stuff like this before -- that is, he may be talking about a story that made the news in the past but we forgot about it. I'm not sure if I'm Inventing Memories here, but I thought I could remember back in 2004 and 2005 stories about port security noting that sometimes undeclared radioactive material gets discovered. I'm trying to google to see if that's a real memory or an invented one but I'm not finding the answer.

Anyone remember?

This "no comment" stuff is atrocious. Either knock it down or offer up the details; it's insane that our government agencies, whom we, you know, pay for are keeping information from us and telling us "no comment" as if we're busybodies asking about things we have no right to ask about.

Thanks to Ben, who had this in the sidebar earlier.

Posted by: Ace at 09:45 AM | Comments (94)
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A video called "Cat Shit One." A bloody, realistic CGI animation featuring bunnies who blow cats away.

They're releasing the first episode for free on the internet, but they also want you to know if you really like it you can buy the DVD or Blu-Ray.

Pretty good. I like the shot of a bunny casually putting one into the head of an already-downed cat.

On the subject of odd videos: a local newswoman seemed to be struck by some kind of speech-gibberishing brain malfunction while on camera. I specifically want to say I'm not making fun of this woman, but it's so odd I can't not link it.

Confirmed? Stroke? The online written reports speculate it was a stroke (or a mini-stroke), but commenters seem to have more than that, and say it was a stroke and she's in the hospital now.

Thanks to DrewM.

Posted by: Ace at 09:33 AM | Comments (93)
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