• The Obamas Are Going To Vacation A Bit More This Month
  
• Citi's Matt King: The Most Depressing Slide I've Ever Made
  
• Actor In Bloomberg Anti-Gun Ad Violates Basic Gun Safety Rules
  
• Mark Kelly's Assault Dog Kills Baby Sea Lion
  
• Mark Kely's Gun Purchase Cancelled By Gun Shop Owner
  
• Margaret Cho Still Exists Apparently
  
• The Maliki Slapdown
  
• French "Survivor" Cancelled After Contestant Dies
  
• Surprise: California Looking For Ways Not To Pay Out The Chris Dorner Reward
  
• Eurozone Chief Plans On Raiding Other Country's Depositors As Well
  
• The Firearms Industry Employs Twice As Many Americans As GM
  
• Reason To Homeschool Your Kids Part 2,123
  
• How Debt Ruins Systems
  
• Pictures From The Top Of The Egyptian Pyramids
  

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:25 AM | Comments (127)
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So... is this real, or not? Update: My sarcastic skepticism aside, it seems real. Update: I take that back. I don't believe it. If they look young-ish in the video, it's just good make-up. This cannot be real.

It could be fake in two ways: First, they were just having us on and meant to be silly, so the joke's partly on us.

Second, they were having us on, and also, it's not from the 80s, but from like three months ago.

Their website claims, again, it was shot in 1986 (but MTV refused to air it, the dastards) and even runs some suspiciously cleanly digital pictures from their 1986 photo shoot. Because, you know. Everyone has pictures from 1986 lying around.

They also have the first few minutes of their 1994 (?) film, Sister Sensei. Which is not listed on imdb, before you check.

The "movie" also appears to be not-quite-serious in tone.

Like all Newly Discovered Artifacts from the 80s, the Karate Rap is available for download on iTunes.

Questions. Swirling.

Mystery.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 04:47 AM | Comments (129)
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The student. The student who spoke up is suspended.

Not the professor.

Just making sure you understand that wasn't a typo.

Posted by: Ace at 04:20 AM | Comments (128)
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Happy Tuesday.

Sens. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee will filibuster gun-control legislation, though they don't use the word. Any gun-control legislation.

Gene Healy recaps the bad week drones and drone-proponents just had.

North Korea expands its provocations, putting artillery to combat readiness, threatening missile strikes on Pacific U.S. bases.

Breaking [ace]: I had to break into Gabe's news headlines to report that this is fucking awesome. more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:47 AM | Comments (284)
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Jan/Feb student load writeoffs hit $3B.

... Banks wrote off $3 billion of student loan debt in the first two months of 2013, up more than 36 percent from the year-ago period, as many graduates remain jobless, underemployed or cash-strapped...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 02:32 AM | Comments (29)
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Remembering Operation Linebacker II

CBS apologized this week for using the wreckage of a US B-52 shot down in Vietnam as a prop in its show "The Great Race" but most viewers probably didn't know how it got there, what it's significance was or why it mattered so much at the end of the Vietnam war.

And Spook86 at In From the Cold explains it for those who've forgotten or never knew.

When the North Vietnamese walked away from the Paris Peace Talks (yet again), President Nixon decided to force Hanoi's hand militarily.  He ordered his commanders to prepare a "maximum air effort" against the North.  Unlike earlier, incremental air power campaigns (such as Rolling Thunder), the new offensive, dubbed Linebacker II, would feature large numbers of sorties against a wide range of North Vietnamese targets from the onset.  And most importantly, the new campaign would send waves of B-52s over Hanoi, in the largest American bomber raids since World War II. 

The offensive began on December 18, 1972.  North Vietnam's Soviet-designed air defense network (built around the SA-2 surface-to-air missile system), offered massive resistance.  By some estimates, almost 2 SAMs were launched for every "Buff" sortie, meaning that North Vietnamese crews fired over 200 missiles during some of the nighttime raids.

But there were also concerns about potential losses; if too many Buffs went down over North Vietnam, SAC would have difficulty maintaining political support for its bomber force and B-52 losses were irreplaceable, since the Boeing assembly line had been shut down a decade earlier.

...The heaviest losses occurred in the early phases of the campaign; three B-52s were lost on the first night over Hanoi, and six more (4 "G" models and 2 "D" models) went down on the third night, forever known as "Black Thursday" in the B-52 community.  Overall, SAC lost 15 Buffs during Linebacker II, including the one now used as a memorial in North Vietnam.  A total of 33 B-52 crew members were killed, and an equal number were captured by the North Vietnamese.  Among the six men who flew on the B-52 whose wreckage now forms that memorial, only four survived.

But for possibly the first time the North Vietnamese leadership were afraid and felt they needed to do something to get Americans to stop the bombing.

But the bombers achieved their goals.  North Vietnam suddenly decided to finalize the Paris Peace Accords, wondering what that "madman" Nixon might do next.  Inside the Hanoi Hilton, hundreds of American POWs also noticed a change of heart.  Senator McCain (and others) recall seeing genuine fear on the faces of their guards, who had mocked and taunted their prisoners for years.  With the B-52s roaming over Hanoi, they too, were worried about what might be in the offing. Treatment of the POWs finally began to improve. 

On February 12, 1973, barely six weeks after the last B-52 sortie over North Vietnam, a U.S. C-141 landed in Hanoi to repatriate the first group of American prisoners.  Among the men on that flight was Navy Commander Everett Alvarez, the first pilot taken prisoner by North Vietnam in 1964, and Air Force Technical Sergeant James Cook, a B-52 gunner who suffered two broken legs, a broken back and fractures in his shoulder and arm during the bailout from his stricken aircraft, which was hit by three SA-2s.  When the C-141 landed in the Philippines, Cook saluted the American flag from his stretcher. 

The Homecoming flights continued for almost two months, until the last of 591 POWs were repatriated.

This was the fate of the men flying that particular B-52:

RR=POW Repatriated.
NR=Negotiated Remains Returned

Callsign: Rose 1, B52D
Aircraft: No. 56-0608
Date of Loss 12-19-72 Hanoi
Based: U-Tapao

Pilot: Capt Hal Wilson, Status: RR
Co-Pilot: Capt Charles Brown, Status: RR
R/Nav: Maj Fernando Alexander, Status: RR
Nav: Capt Richard Cooper, Status: NR
EWO: Capt Henry Barrows, Status: RR
Gunner: E6 Charlie Poole, Status: NR

And these are the four men who survived the ejection and captivity as POWs:

It's believed that Cooper and Poole survived the crash but died later in captivity.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:11 PM | Comments (584)
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He ran away from Gutfeld on Twitter.

That might be because Dana Loesch already bloodied him up.

Posted by: Ace at 04:56 PM | Comments (288)
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I saw @drawandstrike and @adamsbaldwin discussing this. I think I might read the book.

To be honest, I'm not sure what it's about. I could just quote this article but that would be hiding my ignorance. My guess is that it's about this idea: That scientific materialism is a method of discovering the sorts of things that scientific materialism is good at discovering, but it is a process and a tool, and not, as many would have it, a complete philosophy of everything. It can discover many truths, but not Truth. Not Meaning.

But maybe I just think that because I read Carl Jung saying something similar, so I'm just summing up according to what my brain has already digested. *

Anyway, it sounds like an interesting controversy, at the very least. It's always nice to have the Pieties of the Smug tweaked and undermined. They really freak out when someone with credentials tweaks them.

* Though I'm not sure why there would be such a furious freak-out at such a (frankly) stodgy idea. It's not exactly novel.

Ah: At first I thought maybe he wasn't questioning evolution so much as questioning evolution as a philosophy of being. But he does seem to be rejecting evolution. I think. I'm actually not sure because he remains an atheist so... he would replace evolution-by-random-chance with some sort of evolution-by-fundamental-necessity-of-the-code-of-the-universe? (How could that not be God's work, if it existed?)

Anyway, The New Republic's longtime cultural critic Leon Weisthaler attacks the "Darwinian dittoheads" who are attacking Nagel.

Yup: My guess about "the code of the universe" inclining towards self-awareness was right:

His way out of this thicket is the most controversial part of Mind & Cosmos – and the ripest target for critics – as it seems to verge on the fanciful, suggesting consciousness is not an accidental by-product of evolution, but was somehow written into the universe from the beginning.

“Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself,” he writes.

The reason I was able to guess this is not that I am brilliant, but because it's an old, old idea. I don't understand all the pants-wetting about it.

This is the sort of things philosophers write about, for God's sake. Read a book, dummies.

I think Weisthalter has it right when he suggests the reaction is from scientists (or those who claim to Love Science) who actually have zero reading in philosophy so that this all comes as Quite the Shock to them.

Again, This Isn't New: Tipler is considered a crank by many but the Strong Anthropic Principle is quite old.

In astrophysics and cosmology, the anthropic principle (from the Greek, anthropos, human) is the philosophical consideration that observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it. Some proponents of the anthropic principle reason that it explains why the Universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate conscious life. As a result, they believe it is unremarkable that the universe's fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life.[1]

The strong anthropic principle (SAP) as explained by Barrow and Tipler (see variants) states that this is all the case because the Universe is compelled, in some sense, for conscious life to eventually emerge. Critics of the SAP argue in favor of a weak anthropic principle (WAP) similar to the one defined by Brandon Carter, which states that the universe's ostensible fine tuning is the result of selection bias: i.e., only in a universe capable of eventually supporting life will there be living beings capable of observing any such fine tuning, while a universe less compatible with life will go unbeheld. English writer Douglas Adams, who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, used the metaphor of a living puddle examining its own shape, since, to those living creatures, the universe may appear to fit them perfectly (while in fact, they simply fit the universe perfectly).

I think some of these guys have to diversify their reading. This is like having a freak-out that Bob Dylan used an electric guitar on his last album... in 2010.

Not new, guys. In fact it's such a common idea it was bruited in... The Big Bang Theory, a sitcom. And no, that's not where I heard it. I'd already heard it. (I think Carl Sagan mentioned it in the book-of-the-show of Cosmos!)

What the hell is this freak-out about? Why the wig-out over an idea being discussed casually as lunch-chatter on a sitcom?

Is Dr. Sheldon Cooper the next for the stake?

Weisthaler is right -- this isn't about a theory being right or wrong. Something can be rubbished as wrong without the ginning up of a moral panic about it.

This is about Heresy.

Posted by: Ace at 02:41 PM | Comments (539)
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Obviously we should win this seat.

So why do I have this sinking feeling we won't?

This is a big thing-- we consistently lose Senate races in the supposedly red states of the Mountain West. I don't know why. I've heard it's because of farming subsidies, but all Republicans from this area support those took so I don't get it.

Posted by: Ace at 01:57 PM | Comments (249)
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Ehhh...

Now that her show is off the air, and not doing NBC any good, I can admit in a post what I've given away in the comments: I thought 30 Rock was seriously good in Season 2 and 3. After that, it coasted on old jokes and the Same Old Thing, though it did manage the great "Reaganing" episode in Season 4 and "TGS Hates Women" in Season 5. Still, a terrific show overall. Most shows don't have two great seasons, after all.

I do think it was hurt partly by ill-will towards Fey for her Palin impression. The ironic thing is, it was, despite its likely intention, actually a show that frequently set up the Conservative Jack Donaghy as the Smart, Wise Hero exposing the Liberal/Feminist Liz Lemon's follies.

That was template for the Jack/Liz interaction that dominated the show-- I can't think offhand of a single "lesson" Liz taught Jack, but I could readily name five or six that Jack taught Liz. By Season 3 liberals were asking about it: How did a show by liberals, for liberals, and of liberals turn into a weekly exercise of the Conservative Jack making the liberal/feminist Liz look ridiculous?

I don't think the liberals behind the show intended it to go this way; I think in Season 1 you can see the original intent of making Jack the clueless rich-guy corporate doofus that you'd imagine liberal writers would make him. But by Season 2 they discovered it was funnier when Jack was right.* And they kept to that formula, despite the weirdness of it, just because it was funnier that way.

Anyway, that said, we have yet to see if Tina Fey can do much in a role that isn't based on the schtick of Tina Fey style silly/smart slapstick comedy. And it seems doubtful she'll actually break out on the big screen -- she seems to be a creature of TV, smaller (but solid) laughs for a smaller audience.

* For some definitions of "right." Jack was mostly right because he was a ruthless cynic and the universe of the show turned out to be ruthlessly cynical. Nevertheless, cynicism aside, he was portrayed as the smartest, wisest, and most in-control guy on the show (despite being slightly insane himself), and more moral than almost anyone else on the show. (Though the crazy inbred hillbilly Kenneth was generally the show's moral paragon, though in a frequently demented sort of way.)

Addition: Another interest facet of the show was that Jack and Liz's relationship was never romantic. It was interesting, because rather than set it up as a Will They or Won't They thing, the show seemed to take the attitude that even if they did drunkenly hook up, it just wouldn't matter, because they're simply not romantically attracted to each other at all. What they were were... friends. Best friends, actually. While they weren't sexually interested in each other, their relationship was deeper than any brief sexual one could be. They were essentially beyond sex. With each other, I mean.

Kind of an interesting thing, a male-female friendship in which sex isn't an issue at all.

I sort of didn't like it when Liz asked in one of the last shows why they'd never gotten into bed together. It seemed wrong. Their relationship seemed deeper than a one-time fling. They nearly made it the entire run without ever addressing the question, but then they broke down and asked about it.

Posted by: Ace at 12:24 PM | Comments (604)
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