And then he'll start getting serious.

Like furloughing Border Patrol officers.

In other words, his message to the GOP is that he'll cut cops and free prisoners-- all these cuts are coming out of "our" budget, not the liberals' favorite items.

Is there any legal remedy for a president who deliberately subverts the operations of government?

Maybe. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:46 PM | Comments (449)
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I'm not making that up.

"Duck Dynasty" is apparently a reality tv show about a family of duck hunters. Or, "Serial Animal Killers." (That was actually the original title of the program, but it didn't test well, except with animal serial killers.)

Morrissey would be honored to play the show, if Duck Dynasty were removed.

Morrissey stated, "As far as my reputation is concerned, I can't take the risk of being on a show alongside people who, in effect, amount to animal serial killers. If Jimmy cannot dump Duck Dynasty then we must step away."

I wish there was a word for "not retarded" because I totally need it right now!

The former celebrity Morrissey then went on to opine:

What political causes mattered most to you back then, and are they still important to you now?

War, I thought, was the most negative aspect of male heterosexuality. If more men were homosexual, there would be no wars, because homosexual men would never kill other men, whereas heterosexual men love killing other men. They even get medals for it. Women donÂ’t go to war to kill other women. Wars and armies and nuclear weapons are essentially heterosexual hobbies.

War is the most negative aspect of male heterosexuality.

Second most negative? Not buying Morrissey records.

Morrissey's One Song: Only popularly known because it became the theme song to a forgotten and very lame WB show about witches.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:21 PM | Comments (427)
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Hey, In Search Of told me there was at least one sunken continent, if not three of them. Lemuria, Mu, Atlantis... all sleeping under the sea.

So here's your In Search Of news of the day.

In a paper published online Monday in Nature Geoscience, an international research team reports that it has found evidence of a lost "microcontinent" in the Indian Ocean, northeast of Madagascar. The scientists analyzed sands they found on the beaches of the island nation of Mauritius and found traces of an ancient form of the mineral zircon. That's noteworthy because Mauritius is a relatively young, volcanic island, while zircon of that age is typically found in much older, continental crust.*

The researchers propose that the minerals came from a long-submerged landmass that was once wedged between India and Madagascar in a prehistoric supercontinent known as Rodinia. The theory is that, as India and Madagascar began to drift apart some 85 million years ago, the landmass broke apart and sank, Atlantis-style. The scientists have dubbed their lost microcontinent "Mauritia."

Yeah it's fun, but I have a couple of problems. First, they call it a "micro-continent," which is another way of saying "not a continent," because "continent" is grabbier than "island." So already they've got some credibility problems.

The other things... how do continents "sink"? Ships sink because they float. When they stop floating, they sink.

Continents don't float. Well, I guess they float on magma twenty five miles down or something, but they don't "sink" like a ship, though the idea of this is stuck in the popular imagination.

They could fall lower than sea level... but... like, not all that far down. Where does all the submarine landmass wind up going? Does it just break apart like a crumbling house?

The other thing is this: Because these sorts of "Catastrophic" events are frequently pitched about the Old Earth's history, science has created a prophylactic bias against "Catastrophism." Just so many crank theories were pitched under this banner -- such as Velikovsky's magic comet, Venus, ejected from Jupiter (precisely as Venus sprang from Jupiter's head in Greek myth) -- that science began to dismiss catastrophic-explanations on their face, and insist upon Gradual Process explanations ("gradualism").

Of course this bias has its costs; for years scientists resisted the Asteroid theory of dinosaur mass extinction, because that was indeed a Castastrophic explanation, and they preferred gradualist ones (like, I don't know, overpopulation leading to mass die-offs).

But that said, there is still a reason to have one's Skeptical Cap on when reading about theories of Old Earth Continent-Sinking Catastrophes. The human brain just loves these theories too darned much! It's like Rock-n-Roll Geology! So you have to discount for human bias.

And then of course... It's suspicious that we may find Mu, Lemuria, and Atlantis too:

But if the researchers are right, Mauritia may turn out not to be the only ancient continental fragment lurking deep beneath the sea. Oxford geologist Conall Mac Niocaill told the magazine there are several other places on earth whose gravitational field might suggest the presence of submerged continental crust.

Would one of them be somewhere off the coast of Europe, perhaps? Where an advanced civilization predating the Greeks might have arisen and then fallen?

Still, I loves me some sunken continent stuff. I know it's all (or almost all) bunk, but I can't help but love it anyway.

If Velikovsky's Venus-the-Comet Theory Sounds Familiar to You But You Don't Know Why... Maybe you heard of him from the guy I did.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:51 AM | Comments (297)
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Arrested.

What was his crime?

Rape? Murder? Home invasion? Defrauding 10,000 people in a pyramid scheme?

Worse: As a romantic gesture, he released a dozen helium-filled mylar Valentine's Day balloons with his girlfriend.

No really.

This man is now a criminal charged with releasing Valentine's Day balloons in an effort to please his girlfriend.

Also watching the romantic gesture: an FHP trooper, who instead noted probable cause for an environmental crime.

Brasfield was charged with polluting to harm humans, animals, plants, etc. under the Florida Air and Water Pollution Control Act.

Let me say something that was very obvious, and served as the backbone of criminal law, up until 25 years ago, when the Marxists, who understand nothing of human nature (and are quite proud of that) began destroying this country:

A criminal code must track with the basic human sense of right and wrong. The law has a make-'em-up rule to prevent people from saying "I didn't know there was a law against this" (ignorance of the law is no defense, it goes), but that's a stupid ass stopgap the law requires to function at all.

Before 25-30 years ago, most people had a sense of what the law was, without having to go to law school, because they understood, intuitively, that some things were bad. Mala in se, the law calls it -- "bad in itself."

But the criminal codes have proliferated mala prohibata offenses -- "bad just because the law has prohibited it" -- like evil freedom-eating Tribbles for 30 years.

Do you know what you are currently permitted to do? Do you know what you will face a criminal penalty for doing?

You don't. None of us are aware of the myriad laws we're breaking every day, simply by doing things that seem obviously legal but some vicious Marxist bureaucrat somewhere decided to put you in jail for.

And this state of affairs works out perfectly for the Marxists.

30 years ago, you'd just assume that anything that wasn't obviously contrary to morality was legal. That is, you'd have a built-in default setting of assuming liberty. And that assumption of liberty would then propel you to take actions.

But now, you have to assume that many things that aren't contrary to morality are illegal anyway. And so you now have -- quel coincidence! -- a built-in default setting of assuming prohibition. And that assumption that many of the things you'd like to do are illegal and criminal thereby reduces your desire to take any action at all.

You become docile, unmotivated, compliant, and risk-averse.

And this state of affairs works out perfectly for those who would control you. Only half the things you'd like to do are actually criminal, but you assume the rest might be too, thus putting it in your head you need State Permission to take virtually any action besides going to work and, of course, paying the state its dues.

Life Imitates Art: I barely remember, but wasn't Winston Smith's actual crime in 1984 loving Julia?

Let's just cut to the endgame and issue people their Sleep Pills, Work Pills, and Sex Pills, and at all other times dose them with libido-reducing sedatives. So that everyone is nicely compliant and in perpetually peaceful service to the State.

Posted by: Ace at 10:17 AM | Comments (570)
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Specifically, humor at someone else's expense. Mild-mannered humor or self-deprecating humor doesn't need this sort of a negotiation.

I've talked about this before but never this clearly.

Laughter can be modeled as a three-party game in which the parties bargain for inclusion in a two-party coalition (wit and listener) that excludes the third (the butt). No one party can dictate what is risible. Instead, the selection of butts is a matter of negotiation between wit and listener. The wit proposes a butt for laughter, and this offer may be accepted by the listener through a return of laughter or rejected through silence. In such a laughter exchange, individuals may be seen to trade off butts through implicit agreements about who is risible. These bargains determine what counts as a comic vice...

I've mentioned that while the joke-teller (the "wit") is free to make any joke he likes, only the listeners, in concert with him, can decide together that the joke works or is funny or that the target is a valid one (and targeted for the right reasons).

Sometimes people will propose just "joking about how dumb Obama is," and while I agree he is kind of dumb, I don't see that as a likely avenue for widespread transmission of the idea. Too many people would disagree that that's a valid target, and hence, wouldn't laugh. And hence, while the joke may work for a smaller audience (engaged conservative partisans) it would fail at the purpose for which it is deployed (shifting the conventional wisdom of the public).*

Even though it wasn't humorous, I'm pretty confident a similar social bargaining principle underlay Romney's frequent statements that "Obama is a nice guy, but he's in over his head." I think he believed (and polling would back him up) that Obama was adjudged a "nice guy" by 55% of the public, but only a minority had confidence in his ability to do the job to which he was elected. Ergo, he made the case upon which Obama was vulnerable and avoided the case which would be more difficult.

This post is very apropos given that leftists around the blogosphere are right now claiming "I just don't see why Michelle Malkin's funny dances are funny." Well, the media -- which swears it's not liberal -- doesn't understand how anything at all about Obama or liberalism could possibly be funny. They don't agree that these things have any "comedic vice" in them at all to be valid targets of joking.

Thus, the stone-faced act.

* There's also a misguided anti-racism that thwarts such a joke. Too many people would automatically think "Gee I can never say a black person is dumb, that would be racist" without pausing to consider the more sophisticated idea that that itself is racially condescending -- that such a "rule" that black folks can never be, for reasons best left unsaid, treated Just Like Everyone Else, is itself a bit racist.

Obviously you wouldn't want to have to explain that in the middle of your joke!

Posted by: Ace at 09:18 AM | Comments (256)
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Via Hot Air, a recapitulation of Ashley Judd's bizarre extreme feminist statements.

Seriously, they're SCUM-level.

— On her decision not to have kids with her husband: “It’s unconscionable to breed, with the number of children who are starving to death in impoverished countries.”

...

- On fathers giving daughters away at weddings: “To this day, a common vestige of male dominion over a woman’s reproductive status is her father ‘giving’ away her away to her husband at their wedding, and the ongoing practice of women giving up their last names in order to assume the name of their husband’s families, into which they have effectively been traded.”

...

- On how Christianity “legitimizes” male power over women: “Patriarchal religions, of which Christianity is one, gives us a God that is like a man, a God presented and discussed exclusively in male imagery, which legitimizes and seals male power. It is the intention to dominate, even if the intention to dominate is nowhere visible.”

- On men: “Throughout history, men have tried to control the means of reproduction, which means trying to control woman. This president is a modern day Attila the Hun.”

Hit the link to see the ones not about feminism (like about the coal industry and the "environmental holocaust" in the US rivaling that of the human holocaust in Rwanda).

This configuration of "feminism" just seems to be Marxism for people who don't like math or economics.

Buzzion:

We're all thinking it. What a lovely woman.

Posted by: Ace at 08:35 AM | Comments (312)
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Farrakhan praised Hagel as a man who finally had the guts to hate the Jews. Hey, we were all thinking it.

And, as we speak, Republicans are changing their "nay" votes on cloture to "yea." Lamar Alexander's fainthearted fade makes Hagel -- a dumb man -- in charge of our military.

So, Farrakhan carried the day.

Posted by: Ace at 08:06 AM | Comments (139)
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Michelle Malkin parodies Michelle Obama. more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:33 AM | Comments (194)
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How else can you interpret this action?

The federal government released groups of illegal immigrants from custody across the country Monday at the same time the White House was making its case that impending budget cuts would harm efforts to protect the border and enforce federal immigration laws.

What a way to apply political pressure directly to American citizens. Nice country you got here. Be a shame if something were to happen to it.

Think this is a misinterpretation?

Remember, this is the same guy who sent buses full of supporters directly to harass the homes and families of Wall Street bankers, and who told the bankers "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

The last time someone released scads of foreign criminals into the United States, it was Fidel Castro, and it was called the Mariel Boat Lift.

Except instead of Castro releasing foreign criminals in our country as a ‘screw you,’ gesture, our own president is doing it to us.

In pretty much the same spirit.

“Lots of us are getting out who were brought in for driving without a license or other small things,” Manuel Perez, a detainee at the Polk Detention Center in Livingston, Texas, said in a statement released by the National Immigrant Youth Alliance. “I hope more of us are able to get out soon.”

'Small things.' Why, it's not like unlicensed, uninsured motorists cause any big problems.

And I'm fully confident that our Chicago-tough political class will only release those who did such 'small things,' and that they will take full responsibility for any resulting chaos, instead of blaming it on budget 'cuts' that actually only represent a (slightly) smaller increase in spending.

Call or write your Senators and Congressmen. Especially the Democrats. Let them know that it is absolutely unacceptable to use the threat of releasing foreign criminals as a political bludgeon against American citizens.

Posted by: LauraW at 06:42 AM | Comments (186)
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• Obama Releases Waves Of Illegal Aliens From Holding Centers
  
• Sequester Cuts In Perspective
  
• Beretta Probably Leaving Maryland
  
• Emily's List Puts Christie On Notice
  
• With Friends Like These
  
• WaPo Publishes Reporters Anonymous Screed
  
• Chris Matthews Offers To Help Hillary's 2016 Campaign On Air
  
• Boehner Said Obama Has Balls Made Out of Marshmellows, Media Confirm Based On Taste And Consistency
  
• Dreams Of Gas Riches Fading For NY Landowners
  
• Obama's Medicare Cuts Arrive
  
• Chicago Special Election Primary Today
  
• Cracks In Obama's Sequester Wall?
  
• Texas Has An 8.8 Billion Surplus
  
• Germans Not To Happy About Italian Election Results
  
• A Historic African American District In Los Angeles Transforms
  
• Animals Photobombing
  
• Chris Christie Not Invited To CPAC
  
• Hot Air Balloon Crash In Egypt Kills 18
  
• Federal Spending With And Without Sequester Cuts
  
• Hillary Is Running In 2016
  

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:10 AM | Comments (334)
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