Today is Mass Graves Day in Iraq. It was designated in 2007 to be an annual day of remembrance for the thousands of people killed and dumped by Saddam Hussein.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:57 AM | Comments (184)
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The Most Pr0n-Crazed Nations in the World?

Unshockingly they seem to be Middle Eastern Muslim ones:

Last year, Google ran an analysis of its search queries and concluded Pakistan is the leading nation in sex-related, porn content searches, leading Fox News to dub the nation “Pornistan.” Iran came in third on the overall list, and Egypt was fifth.

And yes - sometimes the stereotypes are true:

Pakistan is top dog in searches per-person for "horse sex" since 2004, "donkey sex" since 2007, "rape pictures" between 2004 and 2009, "rape sex" since 2004, "child sex" between 2004 and 2007 and since 2009, "animal sex" since 2004 and "dog sex" since 2005, according to Google Trends and Google Insights, features of Google that generate data based on popular search terms.

The country also is tops -- or has been No. 1 -- in searches for "sex," "camel sex," "rape video," "child sex video" and some other searches that can't be printed here.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:31 PM | Comments (600)
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Gingrich called him a food stamp president, which he is, and since Obama is that, it must be ruled out-of-bounds as quickly as possible.

And so it begins.

The media's two year long campaign to deem every effective charge against President Failure "racist."

Gingrich, to his credit, gives Gregory the dismissive scorn he deserves.

Next up: Isn't it racist to say a black man got us into a third war? Like, isn't that suggesting black people are violent?

It's amazing that the media lectures us on treating black people like white people.

Really? Really?

Posted by: Ace at 04:18 PM | Comments (220)
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Correction: This doesn't seem to be the Apprentice Finale. Sorry, I thought it was.

A possible bit of news in the Apprentice Finale, because Trump has claimed in his live finale, he'd be making an announcement. Presumably about running for office.

The trouble is, NBC says that finale was taped.

“The show this weekend [part one of the finale] was taped back in November, and next week’s episode is also taped,” Pannozzo said. “So there will be no opportunity for him to do something like that.”

What? Didn’t Trump himself suggest to The New York Times that he’d be delivering the news—or at least news of when and where he’d deliver the news—of his presidential plans on the show?

“I am thinking of saying on the live finale of The Apprentice on May 22 that in a few days I will be making an announcement about my decision,” Trump told the Times. ”I might ask the two finalists if I should run for president. Of course, if they’re intelligent they’ll have to say yes, since I’m about to fire one of them.”

Not exactly, according to the show’s publicist. “There will be no announcement,” Pannozzo said. “It’s just misinformation on his part.” Pannozzo insists there will be no live segments of the show. Asked about Pannozzo’s comments, Trump spokesman Michael Cohen confirmed to National Journal: “Mr. Trump will not be making any announcement during the finale of The Apprentice.”

Is Trump lying? I don't know. I know in the past the finale has been live but containing chiefly recorded material. Maybe they tape a show, and then people keep quiet about winners and losers, and then they re-stage the show live, even though the winner was already picked. And maybe NBC decided that they wouldn't permit Trump to do that this time.

I haven't watched The Apprentice much anymore but it always was live before.

On Survivor, no political news. Reading the editing tea leaves: Whoever is going to win, the editors know it, because they already saw it happen. So they can (and always do) shape their editing to give the winner a good cut, a warm and fuzzy cut, even if the winner is a coattail rider who didn't do much on the show.

On the show, only two (and maybe three) people have been given anything like a hero's edit: Rob, Matt, and maybe Andrea. Mike, the Afghanistan veteran with the winner's edge, can't possibly be winning, because they would be featuring him in confessionals every week.

Natalie and Ashley? I wasn't even sure of their names until last week.

And they haven't shown much of Matt or Andrea lately, either.

Even though you might say, "Of course they're giving Rob a lot of screen time, he's making the moves," well yes, but they can always show the winner talking about family, or just sticking with it, or something for the audience to relate to and identify with them on.

They did that with Sandra, for example, when she won twice, despite being a bit of a coattail-commuter. You always got her sassy chatter in confessionals. They made sure you knew her.

According to editing: Mike and Grant are ciphers, despite being likable and hunky. The two girls are cute but virtually unheard from. Matt and Andrea get a little face time.

And Rob's on the show all the time.

Well, honestly, so is Philip. But I gotta figure that's just because he's zany and in this snoozer of a season that's how they filled the time.

Oh man. Geeze Louise, Philip might win.

Oh, I guess there is a slight political angle: A lot of viewers are annoyed that Matt the Christian gets so much Jesus-talk out into his edits. Not sure why that bothers people, but there you go.

Posted by: Ace at 03:57 PM | Comments (57)
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Matthew Yglesias gets smacked by a couple of punks walking home, which leads to a "policy observation".

higher density helps reduce street crime in an urban environment in two ways. One is that in a higher density city, any given street is less likely to be empty of passersby at any given time. The other is that if a given patch of land has more citizens, that means it can also support a larger base of police officers.

I'm sure he's smarter than me, because I don't even understand his point. There's a reduced street crime rate in urban environments other than where he happened to be walking, because of witnesses or something, and also more citizens of said urban area mean more cops, also not helpful with his particular incident.

How do you make this leap?

Slublog pointed out higher population density leads to higher crime because of the anonimity factor. In rural areas, you are more likely to be shot identified. He emailed me this (but not the LINK, jerkwad), from a Harvard economist, so I'm just putting it out there, not saying the guy knows anything.

Informal community sanctions may be as important as formal, legal sanctions in eliminating crime. Urban anonymity makes it hard to enforce sanctions (Wilson and Herrnstein 1985). Likewise, the communities that would enforce any sanctions may be weaker in cities because people in the cities are more transient or more anonymous and therefore more likely to be free riders (see Wirth 1938; Putnam 1993).19 Glaeser (199 formalizes some of these arguments and presents evidence suggesting that social cohesion appears to decline in large cities.

The point being, Yglesias has it exactly backward. Social mores repress criminality because of the likelihood of being caught and held accountable for your actions. Not masses of humanity in the teeming streets, or extra cops.

We email shit like this to one another on Sunday afternoons because we're idiots, and also Andy started it so there.

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Posted by: Dave in Texas at 11:54 AM | Comments (421)
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Shorter Newt: Yeah, I'm as much of a loose cannon as you remember.

On Ryan and Medicare.

The former House speaker and candidate for the GOP presidential nomination called it "radical change" and "too big a jump." Instead, he pushed for creating a system that allows people to pick other options than government-run coverage, so that they "voluntarily migrate to better outcomes, better solutions, better options."

And what are his better options? He'll let you know after we have a "national conversation". I'm not sure if that involves a listening tour or not.

So if you're up for kicking the Medicare down the road (until it comes crashing to a halt no later than 2024, if it lasts that long), Newt's your guy.

Either way, I'm sure the Democrats appreciate the campaign ad, "The GOP Medicare Plan Is Too Extreme For Newt Gingrich".

As for insurance mandates, Newt seems to think Mitt gave up too soon.

“I believe all of us — and this is going to be a big debate — I believe all of us have a responsibility to help pay for health care,” he said, insisting there is “a way to do it that make most libertarians relatively happy.”

“It’s a system that allows people to have a range of choices that are designed buy the economy,” he said. “I don’t think having a free rider system in [health care] is any more appropriate than having a free rider system in any other part of the economy.”

Nice theory but as we've seen, it's not exactly the biggest problem we face in health care. You still have to subsidize the poor and it does nothing to control costs. But yeah, let's focus on that.

So too summarize, Newt is basically running to the left of Paul Ryan on entitlement reform and Mitt Romney on healthcare.

Posted by: DrewM at 09:04 AM | Comments (357)
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Hey, how's that new Google Chromebook sounding? You know, that thing where you give all your data over to Google for "cloud storage"?

Over the last day or so, I have written several posts criticizing GoogleÂ’s treatment of Ann Althouse. So did my guest blogger Aaron Worthing.

I collected several examples of people getting locked out of their Google accounts in the last 24 hours after criticizing nitecruzr on the Althouse support thread. The people include Althouse commenters EnigmatiCore and Dead Dog Bounce, as well as Hoystory — and Aaron.

All of whom, as it happens, left criticism on the Google support page for AlthouseÂ’s blog.

The cretin who insulted her and then deleted his taunts from the support thread, nitecruzr, is still acting on GoogleÂ’s behalf even today.

Patterico provides the supporting screencaps. In an earlier post, he shows where Google representative "nitecruzr" was flagging people's accounts for statements in support of Althouse. Do you really want to leave your personal information and data in the hands of the petty, bureaucratic asshole-punks who work at Google?

Added: Below the fold, a review of the latest services Google offers. more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 06:50 AM | Comments (275)
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I've long enjoyed reading space technology and cosmology books. I've been an inveterate space-geek since I was a kid, and I love reading about our efforts to crack that frontier.

Eric Chaisson's The Hubble Wars is one of my absolute favorite books because it combines a fascinating story of the telescope itself with a story of the antics of the human beings attempting to control the finicky beast.

It's also an interesting story about how government-backed "big science" gets done. The story of how a multi-billion dollar piece of hardware was nearly rendered useless by a malformed main mirror is a centerpiece of the book -- and the story is both funny and infuriating. The company that was supposed to run the test, Perkin-Elmer Corporation, was far over budget at the time and over schedule, so they failed to run a very basic and cheap test to test that the main mirror had the proper "prescription". The mirror was ground too flat, and no one caught the error until the telescope was already in space. If you were paying attention to the news when Hubble first went up, then you probably remember the embarrassment and chagrin experienced by NASA. But this book will tell you how dysfunctional NASA really is: Perkin-Elmer, the manufacturer of the faulty mirror, was not only not punished for the error; they were paid a bonus for outstanding performance on the contract. (PE later nearly went bankrupt and was sold to another firm.)

The Hubble Wars is as much about the people and systems on the ground as it is about the machine in space, and it's an absolutely fascinating story in both respects if you're into that sort of thing. Highly recommended.

Posted by: Monty at 04:27 AM | Comments (89)
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Discuss, opine, rant, rave, inveigh, laud, jest, or extemporize.

[UPDATE]: This seems like a big deal (though not flaming-skull big), so I'll put up a place-holder here: IMF Head Arrested For Sexual Assault.

Posted by: Monty at 04:18 AM | Comments (236)
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AREA 51 Book
Remember author Annie Jacobsen? She wrote the book Terror In The Skies about her experience on NorthWest Airlines Flight 327 where 13 Syrian musicians were acting strangely. Well, she has a new book coming out titled Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. I think we know her genre now. Her new book asserts that Roswell was a Soviet plot to create panic in the United States and the infamous Nazi Dr. Mengele is involved with it.

It dismisses the alien story and puts forward the theory that Stalin was inspired by Orson Wells’s famous radio adaptation of the HG Wells novel War of the Worlds, which provoked hysteria across America when broadcast in 1938. According to the book, the plot started after the Soviet Union seized from Germany at the end of the war the jet-propelled, single wing Horton Ho 229 – a fighter said to be the forerunner of the modern B2 stealth bomber.

This is where Mengele enters the story. The Nazi doctor, who experimented on prisoners in Auschwitz and fled to South America after the war, was supposedly enlisted to create a crew of “grotesque, child-size aviators” in return for a eugenics laboratory.

The book says that the plane was filled with “alien-like” children, aged 12 or 13, who Stalin wanted to land in America and cause hysteria similar to the 1938 broadcast. But, the plane, remotely piloted by another aircraft, crashed and the Americans hushed up the incident.

Do I think this is true? Hell no. Would it make a great X-Files episode? Hell yeah! I think Mulder and Scully are looking for new material no?

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:02 PM | Comments (722)
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