Let right be done.

“The president’s decision to circumvent the American people by installing his appointees at a powerful federal agency, when the Senate was not in recess, and without obtaining the advice and consent of the Senate, is an unprecedented power grab,” McConnell said. “We will demonstrate to the court how the president’s unconstitutional actions fundamentally endanger the Congress’s role in providing a check on the excesses of the executive branch.”

Posted by: Ace at 02:38 PM | Comments (194)
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I think it's something.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:16 PM | Comments (278)
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What?

You -- wait, I had it, then I lost it. You had a scoop and you didn't want people to notice it?

Huh?

Washington Post columnist Patrick Pexton made a rather startling admission in the paperÂ’s Sunday edition: The Post never meant for their recent story about how President ObamaÂ’s health care law expands the budget deficit to become a viral Internet sensation. In fact, they deliberately tried to bury the story.

Putting the story (inside the paper) on A3 was the right judgment for a print publication. (Story author Lori) Montgomery urged her editors, correctly, not to put it on the front page: it wasnÂ’t worth that.

....

Pexton, the Post’s resident ombudsman (an in-house critic-scold for those not familiar with journo-speak), admits that they are ambivalent about this success, calling story’s popularity a reflection of our “our reactive, partisan, hyperventilating media culture.”

ObamaCare is one of the most important issues this cycle, in terms of both public interest and actual importance. Sometimes the two aren't in sync -- Kim Kardashian's sexual exploits get more coverage than they warrant, obviously.

But here they are in sync. This issue is both objectively important and is of great interest to the public.

Here, a study demonstrates that a central selling point of ObamaCare -- that it will reduce the deficit -- is a lie, or, to put it less harshly, completely wrong, and that the critics were right -- it will increase the deficit.

And the Washington Post thinks that's an A3 story, at best?

And they worry about the reaction from "partisan" critics? What is the fear? That partisan critics will shout out, "We were right!"?

Well, uh, why shouldn't partisan critics shout out "We were right"? We were.

Is this too much for the Washington Post to admit?

Of course it is.

While the Washington Post fears hyper-charged partisans outside the walls of its offices, hyper-charged partisans have already established a dominant position within those walls.

This story sums up everything that is wrong with the media, and why it is dying -- and why it should die.

The media is no longer in the information business.

They are in the instruction business.

This is an important distinction.

If you're in the information business, your stock in trade is information. You have no particular concern about how that information will be received, or interpreted, or used for making political arguments. That's not your business-- you are in the business of data, not Narrative and not the internal contents of your readers' minds.

You are not your readers' minders, nor their tutors: You stand equal to them. They are citizens are you are citizens; you have no special insight into The Truth, and they no special disadvantage in discovering The Truth.

Now, if you're in the Instruction business, things are quite different. You stand not as an equal with your readers, but as a Teacher. And, worse yet, they are Children in need of your guidance.

You cannot just offer information willy-nilly to children. You cannot tell them, for example, that the odds of a heterosexual, non-intervenous drug user contracting the AIDS virus are trivially low, or they will Draw The Wrong Conclusions from this.

You must be protective of Children, who are, in final analysis, incompetent (legally as well as actually) individual who need to be told what to think and how to think. You cannot give them license to think whatever they like, for they are not mature enough for that.

They haven't yet learned the skill of thinking.

Thus, everything you tell a child must be with rounded corner and soft padding. Children are dangerous, after all, to themselves and others, if not properly minded at every moment.

Why do people -- and not just strong partisans, but most anyone who isn't a diehard liberal partisan -- hate the media?

Because of this, this belief of the media that we wish or need their Instruction in ordering our lives and ordering our thoughts.

But they are determined to do just that.

Why is every terrorist story underplayed, at least after the media can no longer pin it on a Tea Partier? They are afraid of what their fellow childlike, incompetent readers will think, and what they will do. So they have to make sure you mentally-retarded ward-of-the-state adults don't do anything rash.

Ditto every story involving a black criminal. You can't possibly handle that information; you didn't go to the right colleges. Only if you are educated to the media's satisfaction can you be trusted with a story about black criminals.

This isn't even restricted to news -- the media's strong belief that it is the Thin Black and White Line between semi-retarded barbarians from Idiocracy and civilization is present in films and fictions, too.

Every goddamned movie is a children's movie, with a soporofic, corporate-approved Moral (don't hate strangers; be yourself!).

Even movies for adults. Especially movies for adults.

This is called "being responsible." It's also called "being condescending" and "making infantile, bad art," but they prefer "being responsible."

The media will die, and it deserves to die.

Frankly, no one in the media is terribly intelligent. These people selected a career which involved a fair amount of social skills and a goodly amount of Wearing Make-Up on TV, and not so much deep thinking, for a reason.

There are relatively few people in media who would have succeeded in a field requiring deep thinking.

Although a lot of people enter the media industry from deep-thinking fields, I am aware of not a single reporter who has exited his industry to pursue a medical or engineering degree.

I don't know about you but I'm getting a little sick of people who couldn't break 550 on the Math SATs presuming to lecture me about what I should think about data.

By the Way: I'm not actually a complete "We're all equal" populist.

I have elitist tendencies.

It's not that I don't think there's a group of people who could be termed a Cognitive Elite.

It's just this:

I know for a fact the media is not well-represented among them.

I ain't sayin' there ain't smart people.

I'm saying, Media, very specifically: They ain't you.

Posted by: Ace at 12:32 PM | Comments (205)
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Because it's been hours since I posted.

Why does Leon Panetta take a $32,000 trip back home to California just about every weekend, and why is the taxpayer paying for it?

This is absurd. Part of the job description of "CIA Director" is that you have to live near Langley, Virginia.

It's only when a Government Entitlement Mentality overcomes you, with taxpayers footing the bill, that it begins to seem like a good idea that you can commute from California.

Hey, super-nice plane, WiFi connected, nice lay-back sleeping seats. No line for security.

Why not take a $32,000 flight every weekend, on the taxpayers' dime?

Posted by: Ace at 11:52 AM | Comments (375)
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In which I foolishly begin enumerating chickens whilst still in eggs.

I don't want to post polls all the time but there is a farcical Conventional Wisdom established among "insiders" and "political elites" that Obama wins in a walk.

No. Obama may win. Stranger things have happened and stranger things will happen.

But if he wins, it will be close.

If Romney wins, I can see it being close. I can also see it not being very close at all.

I don't see that latter possibility with respect to an Obama win.

Anyway, this "Obama is a lock" is very similar to the wishcasting of the liberals/DC insiders that "ObamaCare can never, ever be struck down by judges. Obviously."

I don't get how you can possibly think a guy with 10%+/15% real unemployment and trillion dollar deficits forever, and, importantly, no actual connection to the American public, is a "lock."

Based on what? Those pecs aren't as muscular as advertised, and those trousers are no more impeccably-creased than my dry-cleaner is able to accomplish for the low sum of $4 per pant. And no one calls her a "post-racial Messiah."

Once The Dummies Who Are So Smart get it into their heads that they're pretty f'n' stupid, I'll stop.

As CAC already noted, Rasmussen has the Republicans out front with an impressive 46-36 lead on the Generic Congressional ballot.

Posted by: Ace at 10:22 AM | Comments (421)
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If you check other people's reviews, most are scrupulous about saying very little about the plot of the film, as it's a Puzzle movie, and the solution to the puzzle is pretty fun.

If you're worried that ads for the film have already given it all away -- that scene of high-tech troopers stomping about -- no, don't sweat it; the technological aspect is telegraphed from, literally, the opening scene. Pre-title. (In a fun bit of grindhouse aesthetic, the film's title comes up in block red letters as if it's the scariest thing in the world, even though the scene it's appended to is a funny modern office sequence.)

The actual twists are not spoiled by the ads.

Speaking vaguely as possible...

Much of it actually a pretty silly and funny comedy. It's a very meta horror film, about the rules of horror (and why they must be so), even more so than Scream (which told us the rules of horror but not Why They Must Be So). Even if you're not a horror fan, though, you know the basic set up of a horror film well enough to get the jokes and plot-points here.

The laughs here are bigger and better-earned than in most actual comedies.

I would say it's more funny and clever than actually scary. The scares are really just pop-ups and graphic violence, not that feeling of dread and tension you feel in a genuine horror movie.

The characters -- the standard five young people off for a weekend debauch in an isolated Cabin In the Woods -- are actually reasonably likable. And, the film makes a point of noting, intelligent.

That point -- that they're smart -- is not just thrown in gratuitously; much of the film's plot and commentary on horror relies on establishing them not just as smart but actually very smart.

It's novel but not mind-blowingly so. The elements in play here are well-known to most geeks; horror fans, especially of the geekier sort, will recognize all the basics of everything seen here and discussed here. The novelty comes in how they are assembled, and to what effect -- that is at least new. No one's ever used these elements in this way before.

I'm speaking abstractly. I don't want to give anything away. It's a bit like a Doctor Who where the beginning is all about setting up a "What the Hell is going on here?" bizarre-situation cliffhanger, and then, with the characters, discovering more detail, until the solution for The Strangeness is revealed.

It's rare that I can't figure out What The Hell Is Going On Here pretty early in a movie. I didn't figure out this one until pretty late. They did a good job of giving you enough hints that the solution was On The Tip of My Tongue for longer than I actually had it in hand -- it was just sort of outside my grasp, tantalizingly.

The solution is both logical and wildly implausible. There's an old observation that if if you concede to someone a single false premise they can prove anything, with perfect logical form; all silliness can be established, logically, if that one false premise is conceded.

This film's One False Premise is a big, fun one (again, a bit like Doctor Who), and, given a willingness to concede it to the filmmakers (as I was, as they were entertaining me), they can spin a lot of perfectly logical, but perfectly ridiculous, conclusions from it.

I call this type of a movie a Funhouse Movie, where at no point are they genuinely attempting to depict reality; it's all sensation and fun. Done poorly, such a film seems trivial and trite (and often boring as hell, as absent the sense of realism and dramatic investment, who the hell cares?)

But done right, they can be a fun ride. Ever-so-slightly intellectualized so that you might mistake the Funhouse for something Deep (if only for a moment)- just enough pretense of being smart, when really it's just clever.

Definitely worth a trip to the theater, if the ads enticed you at all.

Spoiler Caution! If you've seen the film, please please do not even hint at the solution (a hint would be noting, as I was tempted to do, the various sources the film draws on for inspiration).

That's 90% of the fun. Don't ruin it for anyone. Be very very vague.

Thor: I did not recognize Chris Hemsworth (is that his name?), aka Thor, until about halfway through. He comes off as a college student here (which is what he's supposed to be), and not a Mjolnir-Bearer at all.

But he's the closest thing the movie has to a star, so I should note he's one of the "teenagers."

Posted by: Ace at 09:36 AM | Comments (244)
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I actually have to put up a Content Warning for a news story -- it's just that bad. The description of the cake eaten here is bad enough; the video, featuring a black-faced African Savage out of a suppressed Bugs Bunny cartoon, could actually get you fired.

So maybe file this one away for later.

The shocking photos show how several established left-wing members of the Stockholm cultural elite celeberate together with Cultural Minister Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth when she slices and eats a cake depicting a black African woman with minstrel-esque face.

According to sources Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth was invited to declare festivities open by performing a clitoridectomy on the cake, which she did by removing the cake womanÂ’s labiums.

So, if you want a description: The "body" of the savage is cake (black as the Ace of Spades, as they say; a Hitlerian color palette), but the head is a minstrel-painted actor who's sticking his head up through a hole in the table to make the "savage" appear living.

Then they do cliterectomies on the cake, and eat parts of its "body," while the head-part screams in agony.

But the Minister of Culture is anti-racist. Just ask her.

Publicly she advocates a strict hard-line approach against racism and when the nationalist newspaper Nationell Idag recently had enough subscribers to be granted tax funded press subsidy she immediately took action to change the countryÂ’s press subsidy laws.

Posted by: Ace at 08:47 AM | Comments (321)
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One good thing about a chronic f***-up: Even when he sets his mind to f***ing things up, he'll often fail.

Yesterday Barack Obama addressed the Summit of the Americas in Colombia and spoke about the conflict between the United Kingdom and Argentina over the Falklands. Obama seemed to tilt toward Argentina by calling the islands the “Malvinas” rather than the Falklands, which Argentina insists is their proper name.

Only Obama didn’t say Malvinas, he said Maldives–an entirely different group of islands located thousands of miles from the Falklands in the Indian Ocean:

Pictured: Not even close to Malvinas

As George Will observed: " Obama is not nearly as well educated as many thought, and he thinks."

It's important at these moments to remember the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The more competent you are, the more you realize your shortcomings and areas of incompetence and inexpertise.

The more incompetent you are, the more simplistic your understanding of things, the more likely you are to think you're highly competent. After all, everything's simple, right? You've got this.

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

tend to overestimate their own level of skill;

fail to recognize genuine skill in others;

fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;

The only hope for such a person is that they may...

recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

If.

But Obama is untrainable. He thinks he knows all there is to know, or at least all there is worth knowing.

Posted by: Ace at 08:33 AM | Comments (194)
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CNN weighted the responses to get a nine point Obama lead, 52-43.

That's what they got when they weighted things. The actual count of people saying they'd vote for Obama versus Romney? 484-476. That's just barely a 1 or 2 point lead (among registered voters).

CAC had a post yesterday defending some media-poll weighting of poll results in favor of Democrats, but only from 0-4 points of Democratic advantage. Not seven points (the Democratic edge in the huge, non-replicable 2008 election) and not the 9, 10, or even 15 points you see sometimes.

One thing is that while we, as partisans, focus on the partisan split and partisan weighting, in fact pollsters are weighting on a lot of other things. Typically, pollsters get far, far too many older voters and far, far too few younger voters, so they have to greatly overweight the younger respondents they get through to.

Now, they're supposed to have quotas for different age groups (they keep calling people until they have the right number of younger voters) so that they don't have to weight. But that gets expensive, and many times they don't bother with the quotas because that drives up cost. Instead they resort to the cheap expedient of weighting.

(I remember a guy defending candidate polls --often dismissed as self-serving-- and noting that at least candidate polls have some money put into them, and tend to be more accurate, if you can get the actual polling data. Media polls are often cheaper and thus feature worse demographics, weighted this way and that to get the right balance.0

But everytime you deliberately weight on one thing (say, weighting up younger voters) you wind up incidentally, and avoidably, weighting up on a host of other things (like Democratic affiliation). As one pollster told me, it's like Wack-A-Mole -- you weight to correct one demographic imbalance, weighting it to make it go away, and due to your weighting another demographic imbalance pops up, which itself needs to be wacked, and that leads to another, and so on.

CNN's poll might not have been engineered to produce a partisan result but when a tie becomes a nine-point blow-out via demographic weighting, well, the numbers have been teased an awful lot, and the results are suspect. Virtually all of Obama's advantage in the CNN poll is not actual respondants giving him their support, but the result of mathematical manipulations. As they say, if you torture the data enough it'll confess to anything.

Posted by: Ace at 06:57 AM | Comments (221)
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I very much enjoyed reading this article in the NYTimes because of how thoroughly (and inadvertently, I believe) it portrays traditional publishers as suggesting that books should cost more than people are willing to pay for them. I'm not going to quote from it, just to make you go read the whole thing. I'll wait.

Did you catch the bit about the publisher who "dared" to show Amazon who's boss by removing all of its titles from Amazon's "virtual shelves" and, as a consequence, took a $1.5 million hit in annual sales? The whole article takes that tone. Amazon stands on one side, "unsustainably" selling books at ever-lower prices, and the traditional publishers nobly stand on the other, insisting that publishing is a "craft industry" and therefore requires that prices be higher. The oddest part is that nowhere do the publishers suggest that consumers are want to pay higher prices for this craft. There's an odd assumption that consumers would want to pay higher prices if only Amazon weren't around to force prices down.

There is a telling quote from an author caught in between the publisher, who wanted the books to cost more, and Amazon, who just wanted to cut prices: "I donÂ’t know whether Amazon is being greedy or [the publisher] is being cheap, but IÂ’m caught in the middle. . . . What matters to me is getting my books back on Kindle." Never fear, dear author, Amazon has made self-publishing easier than ever.

And that's the bottom line. Amazon has made the sale of books more convenient than the publishing industry ever imagined. And, for lack of imagination, they have failed to adapt. The publishing industry wants to keep its editors and staff assistants, marketers, and salespeople, just as if the world hasn't changed.

For a similar tale of a company that has failed to adapt owing to its attachment to traditional power structures, see this article on Sony's expected $6.4 billion loss this year. Yes, $6.4 billion with a "B."

Parting shot: I just loved this comment to the publishing article:

I work in the editorial department of a Big Five legacy publisher. Reading the hateful comments here about traditional publishing has been an extremely shocking frustrating experience.

In many contexts, this is erroneously portrayed as a black-and-white issue, a battle between Good and Evil. The truth is that traditional publishers have an ambivalent relationship with Amazon. We all share the goal of getting books to readers, and Amazon has done a lot to make books more accessible for everyone. The problem is that Amazon's business structure emphasizes price, but publishing by nature involves assigning value to something that inherently doesn't have a price in the traditional sense--ideas, and the expression of them.

When you are buying a book you are not just buying sheets of paper bound together; you are purchasing something intangible. The process by which publishers determine how much they'll pay for a book is complicated, fascinating, and subjective...and at the mercy of fluctuating cultural forces. The effort put into getting that book ready for publication also doesn't have a finite price--there's no such thing as "rate of unit production" in editorial.

This is a very basic explanation of the central conflict between Amazon's model and that of traditional publishing--how do you reconcile the identities of reader with consumer? Please, don't be so quick to strike us out of the equation by assuming what we do has no worth.

Oh, silly person, nobody's saying what you do has no worth. I think that at a fundamental level I speak a different language than these people.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 04:42 AM | Comments (323)
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