No I haven't seen it. Just looking at this trailer and not liking anything here.

What really sunk it for me was Superman claiming the "S" on his chest isn't an "S," but rather stands for... well, you'll see.

Below that: I saw this General Zod commercial on a TV show over the weekend.

I don't get that one, either.

Yeah I'ma gonna wait for DVD. more...

Posted by: Ace at 04:53 PM | Comments (148)
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So.

A lawyer says ex-South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford trespassed at his ex-wife's home and he has been ordered to appear in court two days after his special congressional election.

Documents acquired by The Associated Press Tuesday say Jenny Sanford confronted her ex-husband leaving her South Carolina home on Feb. 3. Her attorney filed a complaint the next day and she confirms the documents are authentic.

Not entirely sure where this fits in the whole "he deserves a second chance" narrative but I'm sure Team GOP will explain it later

Via David Fredoso

Posted by: DrewM at 05:15 PM | Comments (140)
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Welcome the lurkers.

Do not frighten the lurkers. Do not move suddenly towards the lurkers. Treat the lurkers as if they are fawns in the morning haze.

No not with guns. I mean fawns you want to pet. No, not on their deer-genitals.

Come on, just fawns. Nice animals.

Just be nice. Is this so hard?! Geeze Louise.

Lurkers, you should probably just continue lurking.

Banned? First, see this thread by Andy.

Posted by: Ace at 03:56 PM | Comments (816)
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"Experts."

Funny thing, when a lawyer wants to bring expert testimony to trial he expert-shops for someone willing to make his case for him.

Everyone knows this is standard practice, but I'm sure the NYT would never stoop to such a commonplace means of using an "expert" as a ventriloquist's doll through which you sound your own voice.

Incidentally, there are now "experts" who can tell us when a media company is, or is not, biased. Time was, "experts" would actually have to have expertise in a rigorous field of knowledge in which there was an actual science or at least a craft or extensive body of knowledge qualifying one for that status.

What I mean is, we didn't used to cite "experts" for things which are plainly personal opinions.

But we're a stupider nation now, so apparently if someone calls himself an "expert," and the NYT asks him to say nice things about the NYT, then the "experts" have weighed in on the matter and now the case is closed.

I guess we'll just have "experts" in all "fields," such as Is MSNBC Awesome or What? and "Girls" is Totally Funny, Serious You Guys.
(Safe link to MRC, by the way.)

Posted by: Ace at 03:44 PM | Comments (79)
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Reported by CNN, relayed by a WUSA reporter on Twitter. I didn't see the report myself.

My actual guess here is that they are paying extra-special attention to the mail (recalling the anthrax letters post-9/11) and what they've found will turn out to be a false positive.

But obviously it's worth mentioning.

Update: Via twitter, someone says it tested positive for ricin three times.

Corrected: Wicker is a Republican from Mississippi, not a Democrat from Connecticut. I have no idea how I botched that.

Update: Via @benk84, picture showing a very suspicious package which seems to be placed in the epicenter of the blast.

We can't see who placed it there, not yet, but now that we know what the object looks like (white/natural dufflebag with orange-ish flap-top with brown leather bits?) we could use video to spot anyone carrying it pre-blast.

Letter-Sender ID'd: Apparently he writes to lawmakers a lot. The article does not say if he's kookoo or not. But, just playing the odds, he's probably not writing thank-you letters.

Ricin has been used by Al Qaeda -- but it had also been planned to be used by "geriatric militiamen" from George* in 2011.

Al Qaeda Suspected in the Bomb Plot... by federal investigators, but they have no good evidence supporting that hunch yet.

It is noteworthy that Al Qaeda has not claimed credit-- they've always before wanted publicity. But who knows, perhaps this is a new strategy of sowing doubt and discord, leaving their ownership of an atrocity up to public debate.

Update: Although it was claimed that the letter was tested three times, and showed positive for ricin three times, in fact a guy on CNN is now saying it showed 1 positive, 1 negative, and 1 inconclusive.

Thanks to @tsrblke.

* "George" is the polite, "vous" form of "Georgia."

Posted by: Ace at 02:23 PM | Comments (471)
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We can only hope.

There were many horrors made yesterday, but among the worst was that done to this family.

This was the eight year old boy murdered:

His entire family was decimated by the bomb. I'll refer you to the link above; I don't want to quote it.

Let me clean up a few incorrect claims I transmitted yesterday. As you all know by now, the NYPost's reporting of "at least 12 dead" seems wrong. Perhaps they were estimating that the large number of amputees either were dead or would soon be dead. 2 confirmed deaths + 10 amputations = 12.

But even so, it was wrong at the time, and many of the victims of maiming will live. The death toll will undoubtedly still rise but as of now it's two.

Also, it's not true that the feds shut down the cell phone system to stop the system from being used to detonate additional bombs.

In case you missed the earlier mention, that Saudi national who is (was?) a person of interest is looking less interesting.

[O]n Tuesday morning, one law enforcement official said investigators had determined that the man, who was injured in the blast and was questioned at the hospital, was not involved in the attack.

Posted by: Ace at 02:11 PM | Comments (83)
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Local crime story. Video below the fold.

Meanwhile, the media is protesting it so did not embargo the story, because, well, we covered it once!

Kristen Powers replies that they did in fact embargo it, despite their claims. And in fact they still haven't really covered it-- most of their "coverage" consisted of excuses for not covering it.

It’s remarkable how quickly a story of a trial about decapitated babies and maimed women was overshadowed by liberal rage at Fox News and the “conservative media” who allegedly were hypocrites because they hadn’t been covering it, either. (In fact, Fox News has run 11 stories over the course of the three-week trial, while The New York Times so far has run just one piece, on A-17, the day the trial began.)

I can only think of a handful of times in my eight years as a Fox News contributor that IÂ’ve discussed abortion. The people who obsessively cover it and anything vaguely related to it are those in the mainstream media and in the left-wing media, which is why their silence on this is so remarkable. Mollie Hemingway did yeomanÂ’s work chronicling how faithfully The Washington PostÂ’s health reporter, who covered Todd Aiken, the Susan G. Komen controversy, and the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, didnÂ’t write a single story on the Gosnell trial. No abortion regulation is too small for the mainstream media to cover; no stupid comment about abortion by any Republican goes unnoticed. So her disinterest in this trial is inexplicable.

But while the left has alternately attacked the right for its alleged lack of interest and for paying too much of the “wrong sort” of attention, I haven’t heard a lot about the near silence from the feminist organizations that lecture us endlessly about how they stand for women’s health. I find the claims now that feminists were deeply upset about poor minority women being abused and killed along with their babies a little tough to believe. A search for “Gosnell” on NOW's website yielded only two hits, both from 2011. Search for “Gosnell” on the League of Women Voters website and you will find nothing. The same search on the NARAL and Planned Parenthood sites returned the same number of hits: zero.

But thatÂ’s probably Fox NewsÂ’s fault.

Hard left professor of Being Black Marc Lamont Hill also weighs in. He's the guy who found Chris Dorner's shooting spree "exciting" (or at least understood why people found it such), so he's as left as you'd like.

He's also an academic who doesn't really have to worry about Democrat Party positioning, nor about the media's Corporate Lie about being "neutral." So while he's a lefty, what I'm trying to say is that he's a lefty who's free of any need to fudge the truth on this. He's free to be honest.

And here's how he sees it.

“For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left. I think it’s a bad idea, I think it’s dangerous, but I think that’s the way it is.”

Although it's less than clear what the antecedent for "it" is there, I believe "it" stands in for "the media's failure to cover this and our own political commitments to the left."

That is dangerous, he's saying: The union of politics, which is inherently self-serving, manipulative, and dishonest, with the news-gathering function of the media, which is supposed to serve only capital-t Truth and have no other mistress.

But the two have merged seamlessly and copulated shamelessly.

And that is in fact bad, and dangerous, for democracy.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:33 PM | Comments (214)
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I've got some solid candidates for Mars One.

Here's what I believe the procedural backstory to be: The bill that passed is a shell bill of some kind, which wouldn't pass itself, but was to serve as the vehicle for the finished bill. The finished bill would be supplemented by the Toomey-Manchin "compromise" -- without this supposedly "centrist" compromise, the shell bill would not pass.

And now Republicans are balking about adding that amendment to the shell bill. If that amendment is filibustered, it can't be added to the shell bill, and the whole bill will fail (as it won't have enough Republicans in its favor).

That's what I think is going on.

The Senate bill advanced last week on a 68-31 vote. But Democratic leaders will likely have to round up a minimum of 60 votes at least once more, and many of the 16 Republicans who joined Democrats last week are backing away.

The latest is Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., who said Tuesday he opposes a vital amendment on background checks.

"I supported having a debate on the issue of violent crime, but as I made clear from the outset, I will oppose any legislation that chips away at our Constitutional rights," Burr said.

thanks to a commenter but I can't find his or her comment now. I'll call him "Zeke the Geke."

Two Votes Short: Via Twitter, Biden has said that they're two votes short of cloture on the amendment at the moment. If I recall correctly, there are two Democrats currently voting against cloture.

Posted by: Ace at 12:15 PM | Comments (379)
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Well, a group calling itself "Mars One" wants to send people to Venus -- no, just kidding, Mars, but I didn't feel like writing "the Red Planet" just because of this dumb semi-rule that you can't use the same word twice -- and anyway, they want to generate money for this via a reality tv show.

Now, as people are apparently consulting the blog for TV show ideas, here's two more I've not seen any action on yet:

"Knight Train," about a robot train that solves mysteries; and

"Bear Fucker," a reality tv show in which contestants earn cash prizes by sneaking into the den of a hibernating bear and sexing it. Bonus cash if it's a male bear.

Now back to this Mars business. There are two catches: 1, you have to pay $25 to even enter their phony-baloney sweepstakes.

In an attempt to separate serious candidates from dreamers, the company plans to institute an entry fee that will vary depending on your native country. It's reportedly going to top off at $25 though, so hopefuls won't need to take out a second mortgage to plot out their departure from Earth. The mandatory fee is also a means for Mars One to secure funding for the actual trip and Mars colony buildout.

Nigerian-style fund-raising is what I call "a real confidence builder."

Catch 2 -- first prize is a one way ticket to Mars. That's right.

...

Mars One has already been met with 10,000 emails from interested parties, but it remains to be seen how many of those will translate into serious contenders. And considering the voyage is a one-way trip — you read that right, Mars One won't be providing anyone with a ride back home — it's certainly a dramatic decision.

So, the catch is, if you win the contest, you'll go to Mars for free.

Cost for coming home? Expected to be in the range of 43 bazillion dollars.

But if you average that out it's only 21.5 bazillion dollars for each leg.

Posted by: Ace at 11:43 AM | Comments (267)
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"Struggling."

Bit of a preamble here: The IPCC offered its nonsense "consensus" prediction that the earth would warm 3 degrees to 6 degrees Celsius over the next century, or even warmer. All their scariest predictions were based on the "six degrees or warmer" range of predictions.

For the past 15 years, there has been next to zero increase in temperature, despite ever-rising CO2 production.

Now, CO2 is not a strong global-warming gas. It's one of the weakest ones, actually. Their claims that CO2 would jack the earth's temperature up by 6 degrees C or more were based on the notion that rising CO2 would create positive feedback loops -- CO2 pushes more water vapor into the atmosphere, for example, which in turn really warms the earth -- that amplified the direct contributions of CO2.

Things they didn't consider, or at least gave short-shrift to: That any positive feedback may come along with a negative feedback (that is, a temperature-lowering feedback). For example, while water vapor is powerful greenhouse gas, and thus may increase temperature, water vapor may also result in increased cloud cover -- and clouds, having a high albedo ("albedo" is a scientific term meaning "white and fluffy"), reflect away a lot of solar energy.

They had no science on this (no one understands how clouds work yet) so they just assumed an impact of zero. Because assuming things is fun and easy.

At any rate, due to the complete non-warming of the earth for a decade and a half, scientists are now questioning this 3 to 6 degrees or even more prediction, and asking if 3 degrees isn't much more likely than 6, and in fact... if three degrees would represent the actual upper bounds of likely warming, with the average of all likely scenarios being something more like 1.4 degrees.

Which you wouldn''t even notice. And neither would the Arctic ice cap, and neither would the polar bears.

So the diehards, the bitter-enders, the one who've gotten easy undergraduate pootie-tang* for 20 years based on their bullshit models, are now scrambling for a paradigm in which bullshit is actually sort of scientifically heroic.

Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.

Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon.

...

Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat with the result that the surface is cooler than expected, that industrial pollution in Asia or clouds are blocking the sun, or that greenhouse gases trap less heat than previously believed.

The change may be a result of an observed decline in heat-trapping water vapor in the high atmosphere, for unknown reasons. It could be a combination of factors or some as yet unknown natural variations, scientists say.

Note how arrogant they were before when they were making predictions -- overwhelming consensus, the science is settled, "global warming deniers," etc. -- and how modest they appear now. Now everything's all about "unknown factors we don't yet understand" or "perhaps we overestimated the actual warming factor of CO2."

The Economist -- a famous, fatuous magazine for people who want to think they're smart -- has already noted Global Walkback, and this writer from the Financial Post welcomes all the newfound skeptics into the reality-acknowledging community.

* Corrected: I originally wrote the archaic "poontang." more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:40 AM | Comments (410)
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