This dust devil is 12 miles high and about a hundred yards across.

What a picture. From Universe Today:

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has now spotted a gigantic Martian dust devil roughly 20 kilometers (12 miles) high, churning through the Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars. The HiRISE camera (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) captured the event on March 14, 2012. Scientists say that despite its height, the plume is just 70 meters (70 yards) wide.

Also, kind of science-y, the Russians are trying to close the exotic weapons gap. But their microwave heat ray doesn't penetrate only the top 1/16th inch layer of skin, like our hi-tech, non-lethal weapon does. Our heat ray creates the sensation of heat without doing real damage. Theirs actually cooks people. Apparently they didn't get the memo on non-lethality.

High doses of microwaves can damage the functioning of internal organs, control behaviour or even drive victims to suicide.

‘When it was used for dispersing a crowd and it was focused on a man, his body temperature went up immediately as if he was thrown into a hot frying pan.

Note to Russia: It's not hi-tech if it's what I have in my kitchen.

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Posted by: rdbrewer at 03:37 PM | Comments (83)
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Time editor Belinda Luscombe made some sort of Indian joke. And Haley had just explained she's no longer a Sikh. Awkward.

In New York City, which you're visiting for a couple of days, a lot of our taxi drivers are Sikhs.

If you get one, are you going to give them a slightly bigger tip?

Let me fix that. See, it would have worked much better if Benjamin Netanyahu had been sitting there.

In New York City, which you're visiting for a couple of days, a lot of our taxi drivers are Jews.

If you get one, are you going to give them a slightly bigger tip?

Hi-larious! Um.

Video below from The Hill. more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 02:44 PM | Comments (201)
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Well, he was right about one of those statements.

Did I say he was the losing contestant? My bad. He won.

Enjoy this video of government bureaucrats laughing about taking you to the cleaners.

Oh: Also suspended was a $250,000 employee-incentive program, apparently rewarding employees for doing what they were already being paid to do.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:04 PM | Comments (152)
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Carney was revising Obama's Supreme Court remarks again, denying that Obama's use of "unprecedented" was a misstatement. Plante had enough of it. From The Blaze:

What he said on Monday was an obvious misspoken moment, because he talked about the court not being in the position to overturn acts of Congress. You‘re standing up there twisting yourself in knots because he made a mistake, and you can’t admit it.

The funny thing was, Carney responded by trying to exert social pressure: "YouÂ’re sharing in the righteous indignation here of your colleague." (Referring to Ed Henry from Fox News.)

Video below from Mediaite. more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 01:28 PM | Comments (156)
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Kos ran a satirical piece.

MSNBC, the "news" organization, announced it as actual news.

And:

This isn’t the first time Roberts and the show’s staff have fallen victim to less-than-factual information put out in the liberal blogosphere. Last December, Roberts relied on a blog post from the “progressive site” Americablog to tie a campaign ad for former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to the Ku Klux Klan. Roberts later apologized for the error.

You're not liberal though, right? Anything that goes up on Daily Kos immediately makes it on to your airwaves -- even when it's a clear parody, or hard-to-believe nonsense from an anonymous "Diarist" -- and you clearly simply believe an-ny-thing-guh that pops up on an absurdly partisan blog, but you're not liberal.

I have this right, right?

Thanks to kbdabear.

MSNBC

Your place for breaking, unverified news that was on The Daily Kos yesterday or the day before.

Posted by: Ace at 12:50 PM | Comments (103)
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Via Hot Air, the Shark Tank reported the statement.

“I actually think we’re going to have a very good nominee. I think Mitt Romney’s going to be the next president of the United States. And by their own admission, the folks running against Mitt Romney have admitted that they cannot win the primary, that the only way they can win is a floor fight at the convention, which I think would set us back in terms of our goal of replacing Barack Obama.

“So I do believe it’s time now to concede that Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination, that he’s going to be the Republican nominee, and that if we all get behind him he will be the next president of the United States.”

The way he phrased it, it's not necessarily an instruction to Gingrich or Santorum. It seems like more, "We should all concede this."

For what it's worth, I don't think politicians should say this. It's counterproductive. Every statement like this makes people want to dig in their heels more.

People should just be permitted to come to terms with this on their own schedule.

It's one thing to think you lost a big game. If you think you were outplayed, you accept it.

If you decide that the refs took the game from you, now you have a grievance, and a sense of unfairness, and an anger towards The Whole Corrupt System.

Romney supporters should be very wary of giving anti-Romney Republicans that sense of grievance.

"We lost" is one thing; "We wuz robbed!" is another. And the whole Narrative among some conservatives (yes, conservatives have Narratives too) is that a hostile and corrupt power structure has denied them a great true-blue conservative candidate who'd have an advantage in a general election, which turns out to be, improbably, either Santorum or Gingrich.

Anyone believing "We wuz robbed! It's a rigged game!" by November will probably just stay home and not vote (and usher Obama into an End of America presidential term), so it is imperative to not do anything to provoke feelings of disenfranchisement.

Those feelings are already there. No point throwing gas on that particular fire.

I believe Romney is indeed inevitable. So let him be inevitable. Let the inevitability take care of itself.

Rather than make the case for Romney in this way, why not make the affirmative case for him?

He actually does have some good things going for him.

My own experience with coming over to Romney's side is this: Once you get past hating his guts, you kind of... like him.

Is he a great candidate? No, but he's quite good. Look at him again, just on a superficial basis: What's here that you wouldn't want in a candidate?

Is he ultra-conservative? No, but I do believe he is conservative. And while people largely ignore this, he has endorsed the Ryan Budget. Democrats are currently trying to make that a central issue in this campaign, Romney's "extremism" in embracing this budget.

And yet embrace it he did.

I'm not going to nominate him for a Medal of Honor, but it's a positive sign, surely.

But people need the space and time to discover that for themselves. Pushing them towards that conclusion only encourages further resistance.

No one, especially those who wave a Gadsden Flag, wants to be pushed towards something.

I always say this: It's a standard principle of persuading someone, or, frankly, of conning them, to let the target (or, um, "mark") come to the conclusion himself.

That way, he has ownership of it. It wasn't forced upon him. He put together the bits of data and made a conclusion himself.

Now I'm talking about conning people, and that's not really a good thing to be discussing here, but the fact is, con artists employ this principle because they know it's how people actually think.

People are rankled that Romney is likely to win. They're comparing him, I believe, not to Santorum and Gingrich, but to hypothetical candidates they would really prefer, for whom Santorum and Gingrich are substitute place-holders only for basis of comparison.

And when you compare Romney to Your Absolute Favorite Choice, hey, he kind of sucks.

But that'll be ending soon, because the calender compels it. The real choice will soon (probably) be between Mitt Romney and Barack Hussein Obama.

I think that's a pretty easy and painless call. I am not worried that my judgement on that will be rejected by a significant number of conservative voters.

Let people get there on their own. Most will get there.

Posted by: Ace at 11:54 AM | Comments (464)
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Shockingly enough, despite being an actor in left-leaning Hollywood and black -- two reasons for him to take the very easy path of condemning George Zimmerman without facts -- he actually... castigates NBC and the media's narrative generally.

He makes a sharp point to those in the media who feel they need to "help" a story along:

"Truth does not need 'help.'"

My friend steve_in_hb has been telling me for some time that The Guard is a very funny movie. I think Cheadle's more an important co-star in it than star (Brandon Gleason, originally from Braveheart, is the main character), but either way, I'm told it's good. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:56 AM | Comments (234)
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Was Zimmerman a paranoid constantly harassing the police with dozens of unfounded 911 calls in a year?

No.

First, Times reporter Lizette Alvarez reported on March 16 and again on March 20 that Mr. Zimmerman "placed 46 calls to 911 in 14 months"; even NPR eventually noted that those 46 phone calls ran from January 2004 to the present, so "46 calls to 911 in eight years" is the phrase they seek. Yet no correction is appended to either story, nor was the error addressed in their big walkback/walk away piece. Is it relevant to the story? The Times thought so when they reported it, and some might find that it reveals a bit about Mr. Zimmerman's paranoia, or lack thereof.

Maguire notes a series of errors, including the Urban Legend of Zimmerman as a 250 pound bruiser. (He's 170.)

The Times does not acknowledge its new reporting serves as a correction to its old reporting.

Posted by: Ace at 10:44 AM | Comments (83)
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When I saw "dirty" and "Asian," I thought maybe he was talking about brothels masked as massage parlors.

Nope. He means those "dirty" Asian shops where you buy "dirty" Coca-Cola and Slim-Jims.

"We've got to do something about these Asians coming in, opening up businesses -- those dirty shops," Barry said Tuesday night, after winning the Democratic primary for the city's Ward 8 seat and effectively securing a third council term.

Barry went on to say: "They ought to go. I'll just say that right now, you know. But we need African-American businesspeople to be able to take their places, too."

Does dehumanizing a disfavored racial group make violence and unfairness towards them more likely?

That's the central animating principle behind black Civil Rights leaders' pronouncements. To stop the behavior, we have to end the hate; and to stop the hate, we have to roundly condemn those who speak hateful words, lest people think such beliefs are true, or at least true enough to be socially acceptable.

And here Marion Barry, who was just of course reelected, is preaching racial pogroms.

Anyone?

But I guess there's no reason to make a fuss -- after all, angry blacks would never, ever commit violence out of racial grievance and hatred.

Posted by: Ace at 10:21 AM | Comments (199)
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Let's first of all bitch that we do not have a la carte cable service. The cable companies negotiate a fee to pay media channels; then, without asking us, they extract that cost from us in our cable bill.

ESPN is very popular, but you know what? I don't watch it. And no one has ever asked me if I want to pay $6 a month for it.

The pay channels -- HBO, Starz -- ask me if I'd like their service.

Why doesn't ESPN? Why am I currently spending $0.25 per month, every month, for Current? (I'm making all these figures up, but you get the point.)

I know the answer they'd offer-- Because when we negotiate these payments and extract them from you involuntarily, it creates an economy of scale and you get the channel cheaper than you otherwise would.

Uhhh... yeah, here's the thing: I don't want ESPN. (Sure, Monday Night Football, occasionally, but you know what? I'll endure without it.)

I don't watch it. Ergo, the best price, for me, is $0.00. No economy of scale is going to get the cost down to my preferred price point.

The other answer would be, I assume: Without forced contributions, very few of these channels would exist at all.

Yeah I'm file that one under Things Which Ain't My Problem. Shock -- a product few people are interested in won't command much money, and may fail.

And all the rest of them. BET? Univision? Let the people watching them pay for them. I'll pay for FX and USA, and Spike, I guess, and maybe TNT, and that's pretty much it.

I should be able to choose which networks I want, too.

In the case of Current, it probably wants a great deal more from Time Warner than ratings would suggest it's conceivably worth. So Time Warner may not continue carrying it.

According to three sources with knowledge of the situation, Time Warner Cable IncÂ’s carriage agreement with Current TV stipulates that, if the left-leaning political news network fails to meet a minimum threshold for overall viewers in a given quarter, financial penalties such as Current TV being required to increase marketing and promotion spending on the cable operatorÂ’s systems are triggered.

If Current TV misses the audience benchmark in two consecutive quarters, another clause is triggered that would allow Time Warner Cable to drop the channel. The condition was built into the most recent distribution pact between the two parties, which was signed in 2010.

This is probably a negotiating position to get Current to renegotiate its fee to something lower.

Which is bullshit too.

How about $0.00? That's a low fee. That's what I'd like to pay.

And if that means I don't get Current -- oh, well!

Posted by: Ace at 09:45 AM | Comments (251)
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