• Sequester Could Impact The WH Easter Egg Hunt
  
• Apparently We're Sending A Delegation To Chavez's Funeral
  
• Rand Paul's Tea Too Strong For The GOP?
  
• Don't Bring A Knife To A Gun Fight
  
• Many College Hate Crimes Are Really Hoaxes
  
• Californians Getting First Taste Of Obamacare
  
• Milky Way's Black Hole To Gobble Space Cloud
  
• Blue Civil War In Illinois
  
• Obama On His Heals
  
• Lights! Camera! Weimar!
  
• Thomas Sowell On Economic Mobility
  
• Treasury To Pressure EU On Hezbollah
  

Sorry for so few links. Sequester is starting to hit hard at the HQ.

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:07 AM | Comments (280)
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Happy Friday.

Sens. Paul and McCain inadvertently shared an unplanned, post-rebuke elevator ride yesterday. Awkward.

Prisoner who was put in solitary confinement for two years after being arrested for a DWI wins $15.5 million lawsuit. A nightmare story.

In part to deal with unemployed law grads, law schools are opening firms of their own.

Phyllis Schlafly is not happy about recent Republican support for gay marriage: "'We expect all Republican officials to uphold the Platform,' she wrote in a letter to RNC Chairman Reince Preibus. 'The endorsement of same-sex marriage is not acceptable.' . . . She also confirmed that she received a 'very courteous' reply to her letter from Preibus, but that the chairman did not commit one way or the other."

At the moment, there are only three Illinois Republicans who were elected in state-wide races: Sen. Mark Kirk, Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, and State Treasurer Dan Rutherford. Kirk and Topinka are in favor of retaining Illinois GOP Chairman Pat Brady in the face of a social conservative push to oust him tomorrow for supporting gay marriage. Rutherford has been mum on the Brady question, but, notably, Rutherford was the only GOP vote for civil unions back when he was a state senator. Ousting Brady for holding the same position on marriage as the last GOP vice president is unlikely to make it easier for Republicans to get elected in Illinois.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (406)
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Friday!

Posted by: andy at 02:48 AM | Comments (1)
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After having beaten us senseless with "the stick" for years now...they finally get around to admitting what "the carrot" is.

The climate then stabilized at relatively warm temperatures about 10,000 years ago, hitting a plateau that lasted for roughly 5,000 years, the paper shows. After that, shifts of incoming sunshine prompted a long, slow cooling trend.

The cooling was interrupted, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, by a fairly brief spike during the Middle Ages, known as the Medieval Warm Period. (It was then that the Vikings settled Greenland, dying out there when the climate cooled again.)

Scientists say that if natural factors were still governing the climate, the Northern Hemisphere would probably be destined to freeze over again in several thousand years. “We were on this downward slope, presumably going back toward another ice age,” Dr. Marcott said.

Instead, scientists believe the enormous increase in greenhouse gases caused by industrialization will almost certainly prevent that.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:44 PM | Comments (118)
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The Top 102 Non-fiction Stories of 2012

As collected by Conor Friedersdorf (yeah yeah I know). Some of these have already appeared on previous ONTs. And even ones that I just picked out at random were all pretty good reads.

_{Warning: Some of the stories in Conor's list may contain <gasp> liberal views. If that freaks you out, best to move on and spare yourself the anger and tears.}

No. 15 Why Things Fail by Robert Capps
From tires to helicopter blades, everything breaks eventually.
Wired, October 2012

"In our Moore's law-driven age, we expect devices to continuously be getting smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more efficient. All this is great for innovation, but it's terrible for reliability."

No. 57 The Meme Generation by Matt Labash
Hide your kids, hide your wife, hide your husband. The end is nigh.
The Weekly Standard, Jun 2012

"Rarely in history have so many truly smart people applied their intelligence to something as dumb as aggregating and propagating LOLcats."

No. 58 The Expendables by William Langewiesche
It's the dark romance of the French Foreign Legion: haunted men from everywhere, fighting anywhere, dying for causes not their own. Legionnaires need war, certainly, and Afghanistan is winding down. But there's always the hopeless battle against rogue gold miners in French Guiana . . .
Vanity Fair, Dec 2012

"An old legionnaire told me about a lesson he learned as a young recruit, when a veteran sergeant explained dying to him. He said, 'It's like this. There is no point in trying to understand. Time is unimportant. We are dust from the stars. We are nothing at all. So fuck off with your worries about war.'"

No. 85 The Landlord's Tale by Bert Stratton
A member of a maligned class explains, among other things, how he keeps up the neighborhood.
City Journal, Dec 2012

"I used to feel guilty about charging rent. I hadn't done anything to deserve it, other than maintaining a building-a building I hadn't even built. Now that I'm middle-aged, though, I feel fine collecting rent."

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:06 PM | Comments (440)
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Her newest #hacked tweet:

"I refuse to apologize to the Zionist lobby in America regarding my previous anti-Zionist statements under pressure from American government therefore they withdrew the award.”

And it's still the case that your State Department immediately chose to lie to you when they were apprised of this.

Nothing but PR, nothing but PR, nothing but PR, nothing but CYA corporate crisis strategy, nothing but spin, nothing but politics, nothing but a steady torrent lies washing everything away.

BTW: Good on her for not going along with their proposed Hagel Strategy of just claiming "I've learned so much since then... I talked to Chuck Schumer for five minutes and now I love the Hebrews."

Posted by: Ace at 05:13 PM | Comments (261)
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Before that, here's a little something to keep your eyes open for:

Well we already heard this Fine Woman telling us how much she loved watching America burn on 9/11. Not sure how she'll top that, but I have every confidence she can.

And remember, your State Department -- your employees -- lied to you about it without batting an eye.

Meanwhile, the State Department won't take my own #hacking problem seriously.

Posted by: Ace at 03:50 PM | Comments (233)
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Both from Reason but via Instapundit.

The SPLC is now targeting "hate" as documented in a PUA-watch site called, wait for it, Man Boobz.

t is truly sublime that a group the DHS cited in its controversial report on right-wing terrorism now turns to a website called "Man Boobz" for its hate-group reporting.

More baby talk. What these guys are doing is taking a cultural dislike of some people -- which is certainly fair enough; PUAs generally are disliked by anyone but other PUAs -- but then attempting to turn a subjective distaste into an objective trespass by calling it "hate."

And they do this again and again and again. They don't like the FRC, so the FRC is a "hate group," and then they send genuine haters over there to murder them. And of course they don't apologize for it.

I was just talking about this phenomenon, the attempt by various parochial cohorts to transmogrify their own class preferences for some sort of object standard by claiming different standards lead to hate -- or murder and rape.

What people do when they can't prove their own sense of taste or sensitivity to some issues is immediately begin postulating a ridiculous string of X leads to Y and Y and leads to Z reasoning to claim that they're not just objecting on grounds of personal, idiosyncratic, biased, and politically-motivated taste, but are in fact attempting to reduce real-world tangible evils like rape and violence against women.

See? I'm not just objecting on grounds of taste that Limbaugh said Sandra Fluke was "like a slut;" what I'm really doing is fighting rape.

So I win: My sensitivities must carry the day.

...

The fact is, there is no I Win card in matters of taste. De gustibus non est desputandum -- In matters of taste, there is no argument, as it's out of the realm of the intellectual and things that can be proven. And it's In Latin (TM), so you know it's true.

But what people are doing is trying to craft an intellectual argument -- drawing in lots of risible claims of causality -- to "prove" that their taste is not merely taste but An Fact.

Well, it's not An Fact. Never will be An Fact. And all this crap about Limbaugh's Fluke joke leading, somehow, to violence against women is just an absolutely stupid argument offered up by someone who Rilly Rilly Rilly Rilly Wants to Win an Argument Because, Rape.

I have noticed this growing tendency of people to reject the proper language when discussing things. Instead of using the language of taste in discussing matters of taste, we instead begin discussing things like "hostile environment" and "real world effects."

It's a scam. The left created this, of course (as they have created most abuses of language and conceptualization). But we should resist it. Because ultimately this sort of thinking -- that even the most trivial action (or inaction) by a person somehow results in a real world horror which we are duty-bound to avoid, by whatever means necessary -- is ultimately an argument that People Can't Be Trusted With Freedom and We Need Some Sort of Enforcement Mechanism To Make Sure They Think and Say the Right Things.

I seized upon this Onion thing [the Tweet that called the young actress a bad word] because I've been thinking about this lately -- that I can't seem to see anyone ever saying "That's tasteless" anymore. The left abandoned that 20 years ago, as every Word became a Weapon and they began their disarmament campaign against Assault Language.

...

It's all so false. There is virtually no action or utterance one can undertake now without someone who disapproves of that action or utterance, whether on the left or right, claiming it will result in some Parade of Horribles which we simply cannot abide.

It's also Baby Talk -- yes, dear, every single entry on your What's Hot and What's Not list is objectively provable to belong there. Every squeaking fart of a thought you have is An Fact, and it's furthermore An Fact of such consequence it requires Government Action.

Karl Marx on Indignation and Critique as Weapons Against the Existing State of Man: Few "respectable" people acknowledge it, but this is all just textbook Marxism.

War on the German state of affairs! By all means! They are below the level of history, they are beneath any criticism, but they are still an object of criticism like the criminal who is below the level of humanity but still an object for the executioner. In the struggle against that state of affairs, criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute but to exterminate. For the spirit of that state of affairs is refuted. In itself, it is no object worthy of thought, it is an existence which is as despicable as it is despised. Criticism does not need to make things clear to itself as regards this object, for it has already settled accounts with it. It no longer assumes the quality of an end-in-itself, but only of a means. Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential work is denunciation.

Indignation and denunciation? Well I've never seen any of that from the left...

Criticism dealing with this content is criticism in a hand-to-hand fight, and in such a fight the point is not whether the opponent is a noble, equal, interesting opponent, the point is to strike him.

Alinsky might have read that once or twice. Obama too.

Later in the essay Marx writes of the basic mindset the revolutionary must possess:

I am nothing but I must be everything!

Lot of that goin' round, eh?

Posted by: Ace at 02:56 PM | Comments (182)
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A helpful chart for you Northerners, some brief observational updates from viewers in Louisana and Florida, and some helpful tips below. If you live on the East Coast it should be coming into view about now, given you have a clear shot of the horizon. more...

Posted by: CAC at 01:57 PM | Comments (121)
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If you haven't been watching -- which I hadn't myself, until last week -- it's actually a well-conceived and well-done show. Let me caveat that: It's well-conceived and well-done in the specific range of possible reality TV elimination shows featuring nerds engaging in nerd-ish games.

It's hosted by Original Nerds Lewis (Robert Carradine) and Booger (Curtis Armstrong), who actually created the show, and are good, likable hosts. Curtis Armstrong does every line reading so Big and with such Thunderous Portent that it's funny; Carradine does a sort of shy nerd commentary. Rather like the Pat Summeral of Nerd Games.

The cast of contestants chosen from the show was pretty good, including, actually, two chicks who were pretty cute and other two who were nerd-doable. Unexpectedly, the last five people on the show consisted of one nerd and four nerdesses. There was a lot of crying, baby-whining, arrested development and nerdly arrogance. The cast was just likable enough to be watchable and just annoying enough to be watchable in that reality-tv show way (where you kind of just want to feel superior to these goons).

It's on TBS tonight. TBS also features the last four shows (shows 4-7) on demand so you could catch up real fast if you wanted to.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:31 PM | Comments (190)
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