Last week was exhibit X in why I'm glad I'm not a Republican

Posted by: Gang of Gaming Morons! at 11:39 AM | Comments (43)
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Or the latest scuttlebutt on the "Sound of Music" fiasco.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 12:09 PM | Comments (103)
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Just some stories of Obamacare I saw in the morning papers.

Insurers say CMS is overstating the Healthcare.gov backend fixes. "Insurers said that they had previously reported many of the errors to the “help desk” at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and that the problems remained unresolved."

California is sending "insurance educators" to colleges to tempt young invincibles onto the California exchange. "In California, a bellwether state, about 22% of those who enrolled in coverage over the first two months came from the under-35 target audience." Estimates are they need 40% of enrollees to be from the young demographic.

The lagging Hispanic enrollment rate in California is raising red flags for exchanges nationwide. "Hispanics are a linchpin of the health-care law because they constitute more than a third of the estimated 29 million people who are eligible to buy coverage on the online insurance exchanges."

The D.C. exchange is trying to woo young invincibles at Denny's and Footlocker. Because everybody loves being bothered by annoying people with clipboards while trying to eat or shop or just walk down the sidewalk.

Consider this the Open Thread for purposes of the Football Thread above.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:46 AM | Comments (155)
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Middle of December football is the best.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 08:47 AM | Comments (252)
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We Politely Request That All Off-Topic or Political Comments Be Directed to the Thread Directly Below This One, Which Will Serve Officially as the Current "Active Conversation" Thread for All Discussions Not Related To This Topic.

-- Sincerely, the Fascist MGMT

Any classic cocktail book will have a martini recipe that is bizarre for the typical modern drinker. A 2:1 or 3:1 ratio of gin to dry vermouth yields an unpleasant drink. The vermouth overwhelms the gin's botanicals, and you are left with the flavor of cheap, fortified wine with some herbs tossed in for flavor.

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 12:10 PM | Comments (161)
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If you like your open thread for non-book related topics, you can keep your open thread for non-book related topics.

Also, if you need something to pass the time, you can watch these guys excavate a giant ant-hill. I always enjoy these "nature is amazing" videos.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:59 AM | Comments (38)
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Well Done, Morons

That Denver Post stealth edit of the Arapahoe shooter's socialism blew up on Twitter yesterday, and it was caught by Moronette 'Wordy girl' in yesterday's morning thread. I tweeted it to Bob Owens, who also had the "Socialism" version of the story, Instapundit retweeted that tweet, Owens updated his story and started hammering the Denver Post on it and, well, it just kind of took off, leading to this idiotic statement that Ace covered yesterday:

As it turns out, this guy seems to have not had much of a problem talking with his classmates about his affinity for statist ideologies.

Senior Chris Davis, 18, was among many students Saturday trying to make sense of Pierson's shooting rampage.

"He was a weird kid," Davis said. "He's a self-proclaimed communist, just wears Soviet shirts all the time."

You can safely bet everything you own that if he'd ever worn a Gadsden flag shirt, there'd be wall-to-wall coverage at the Denver Post, and we'd know the size, manufacturer, location of purchase and all the rest by now.

Related: The Tweetable Guide To Media Myths And Left-wing Violence

Gun-Control Dishonesty

A must-read by the always excellent Charles C. W. Cooke:

Earlier in the year, as the gun-control movement tried clumsily to transform an abomination into a cudgel, the Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker distilled its problem into a single sentence. “Nothing proposed in the gun-control debates would have prevented the mass killing of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School,” Parker contended plainly, “and everybody knows it.”

This was abundantly clear at the time, and it is even more so in retrospect. And yet I must nitpick ever so slightly with Parker’s excellent contention, for it is missing the crucial word “almost.” Almost everybody knows it. The public seems to know it. Legislators seem to know it. But, judging by the abundance of vexed anniversary columns, a significant cabal of journalists and activists have never got the message. A year later, their cry is as it was at the outset: Why won’t we act?

Gun Of The Week

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Posted by: andy at 05:50 AM | Comments (225)
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Did you fix the website yet, daddy?

Posted by: andy at 03:51 AM | Comments (246)
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Good morning morons and moronettes and welcome to the award-winning AoSHQ's prestigious Sunday Morning Book Thread.

Get Ready For SkyNet

Well, here we go. From the sidebar earlier this week, we're supposedly on the verge of creating devices with human-level intelligence, and the implications, a new book by James Barrat claims, are not good. The progression from 'normal' human-level intelligence to artificial super intelligence will be lightning fast and impossible to stop.

Me, I'm skeptical. Keep in mind that Barrat is not an AI specialist, but rather a filmmaker whose work, according to his website, mainly focuses on Mideast archeology. I don't believe in exclusive professional "guilds" where outsiders are shut out completely, and that gifted amateurs can certainly contribute, but on the other hand, there is a tendency for the amateur, who may know just enough to be dangerous, to latch on to a theory and then cherry-pick evidence from the experts who are sympathetic and discount or explain away contrary evidence from those that aren't. I've seen this happen, among other places, in the flap over Y2K preparedness. So what you get is not science, but rather some form of ideology or belief masquerading as science, impervious to refutation, even theoretically.

I went to one of the links in the review article and learned that this issue is referred to as the "AI foom" debate, that is, if generally intelligent AIs could undergo a “foom” in which they very rapidly improve their own capabilities with little or no warning. For those interested in looking more into this, they even have an eBook of a foom debate by two AI experts, Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, free for downloading. You can get it in pdf, ePub or Mobi formats.

Sgt. Mom on Sale, This Week Only, Save 15%

She e-mails:

I usually do three or four Christmas sales events at this time of year, but this year one was cancelled and another absolutely wrecked by insanely cold weather. I am going to have a one-week long sale of print books through my own website, through the 19th in order to recoup some of what I might have earned.

It's 15% off, and a special deal for five of my print books at $50 - autographed, personal message if requested.

Here is the order page at her website.

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:00 AM | Comments (107)
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Funny.

You've probably seen a lot of these before. Some of them are so funny/witty I kinda think they're fake.

Ah well. Let's just go with it.

via @DoreenHDickson

Posted by: Ace at 03:39 PM | Comments (294)
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