I'm linking this for two reasons:

1, as a demonstration of how anti-state propaganda is done.

2, Did you know that a video camera attached to a RC miniature helicopter could possibly produce such clear pictures? Or that a little RC chopper could be made, by electronic gyroscopes I assume, into such a stable photography platform? (Update: @comradearthur notes there are twitch-elimination programs people run on video after it's shot, such as VReveal, to produce stable-looking imagery.)

Because I did not. I've got a little bit of tech-shock here: Sure, I knew the government would have access to this level of quality electronics, but I didn't know it was something someone could just buy at the store.

Amusingly, a lot of protesters on the ground keep shooting lasers up at the RC chopper's camera to obliterate the picture. They assume it's a government probe -- they too assume, like me, that Only a Government could afford such a wonder.

Nope. Some citizen owns this eye in the sky. Possibly like this one, which you can have for under a grand. Bye-bye privacy, S. Weasel says.

Meanwhile, one man is staging a Lonely Protest, standing alone in the middle of Tasksim:

That would be interesting, because the military is supposed to defend the secularist vision Turkey.

Turkey's government warned Monday it may deploy the military against protesters who continue to defy officials by taking to the street in what the interior minister called "illegal" demonstrations.

The warning is the first time the Islamist-rooted government has mentioned use of the military to restore public order. The military establishment traditionally has been seen as a bastion of secularism in Turkey and a foe of past Islamist political figures.

"First, if necessary we will deploy the police," Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said on Monday. "If that's not enough we will call on the (national guard). But if events still require further action, and the governor so wishes, we will resort to calling on the military to contain these protests."

...

Five major unions representing public sector workers, doctors, engineers and architects have called their rank-and-file out on a one-day strike and march in city centers across Turkey. One analyst said it would be a "major move" if the Turkish government were to involve the military in its attempts to control the protests.

Below, video from the government crackdown on the demonstrators from June 15. The aftermath of it -- including children choking on tear gas -- is at around 4:20.
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Posted by: Ace at 02:06 PM | Comments (109)
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There are pictures, and she is butt-naked in them, but remember, this is Science, and she's learning about swimming naked with Beluga whales.

Well actually it's not about Science (TM) per se, it's about taming whales, about getting them to be okay with human beings and confinement so they can be carted off to aquariums -- "dolphinariums," this article calls them -- around the world.

She swims butt-naked in arctic ice, by the way.

The average human could die if left in sub-zero temperature sea water for just five minutes.

However, Natalia is a yoga expert and used meditation techniques to hold her breath and stay under water for an incredible ten minutes and 40 seconds.

Not so much "news" as "I can't believe that's a job."

(In which American workers just couldn't cut it, of course.)

via @MTotenkopf

Oh: I know the original expression is "buck naked," but since Eddie Murphy said "butt-naked" in his first HBO special, that's been the way to say it, at least for me.

Posted by: Ace at 01:22 PM | Comments (204)
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So it wasn't partisan targeting, you understand.

When front-line tax agents in Cincinnati used the term “tea party,” they didn’t just mean conservative groups. Instead, a “tea party” case could refer to an application for tax-exemption from any group – including liberal ones – believed to be engaging in political activity, one IRS official told congressional investigators.

“Since the first case that came up to Washington happened to have that name, it appeared to me that that’s what they were calling it that as a shorthand, because the first case had been that,” said Holly Paz, the Internal Revenue Service’s director of rulings and agreements. She said “tea party” could mean any political group, just like “Coke” is often used as a generic term for soda, or people refer to tissues as “Kleenex.”

Uh-huh. Nice try. Telling this blatant a lie after-the-fact is evidence of the guilty mind during the fact.

Holly Paz seems to be one of those workers who, for lack of a better term, just can't cut it.

via @LilMissRightie.

Posted by: Ace at 12:42 PM | Comments (251)
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Given that she's got forensics experts saying she was hacked, the "waking up" business seems to be more than a Windows update, more like unauthorized remote access.

“Whoever was in my work computer, the only thing I was working on were work-related things with CBS were big stories I guess during the time period in questions were I guess Benghazi and ‘Fast and Furious.’ The intruders did have access to personal information including passwords to my financial accounts and so on, but didn’t tamper with those, so they weren’t interested in stealing my identity or doing things to my finances. So people can decide on their own what they might have been trying to do in there.”

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Posted by: Ace at 11:56 AM | Comments (266)
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Is this for real? This is earth, right? The place where Harry Reid failed to pass a budget for four freakin' years? I'm not losing my mind here, am I? That all actually happened?

It's been 86 days since the Senate passed a budget. Republicans, stop obstructing us from proceeding to conference. pic.twitter.com/DiQ4oEuNvH

— Senator Harry Reid (@SenatorReid) June 17, 2013

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Posted by: JohnE. at 10:18 AM | Comments (117)
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What do we do with them, then?

“‘There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it,’ a Rubio aide told me. ‘There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly.’”

We should discuss this publicly, as this is one of the most important issues in play in the immigration argument.

Restricting the right to work in America to Americans is a form of protectionism towards American workers. Of course it is. It creates, of course, a legal barrier to entry against foreign workers.

Of course. That's the point of it.

Now, the effect of this is the same as any other form of protectionism: The favored class, the American workers, can demand higher wages, and in fact work less hard than they otherwise would, because they know they have some level of protectionism favoring their work. Their work doesn't have to be quite as good as the Very Best in the World, because Very Best in the World aren't all competing for American jobs.

Any form of protectionism creates the ability of the protected to ask for higher prices and/or produce lower quality. That doesn't mean all workers will take advantage of this ability, but surely some will, and the net aggregate cost of production will rise, and/or the net aggregate quality of production will probably fall.

There are some who see this as a bad thing-- that protectionism like this is always bad.

I don't see this as a bad thing. First of all, Americans have got to work, right? Either they are going to get money from wages from a job or -- and this is important -- they are going to get money from the government for not working at a job, and we should not be indifferent between these two options.

For the sake of a hypothetical, let's blow this situation up and talk about if we followed the Amnestias' logic to its natural end-point. We could just go bananas with "Let's just import all-new workers from Third World countries where people are so hungry and desperate that they'll gladly undercut the prevailing American wage and work harder, too" plan and invite, say, 200 million new workers to make their abode in America, thereby displacing virtually all American workers.

At least those workers who aren't willing to work for truly low wages, and those workers who are effectively competition-proof either due to having some difficult-to-replace skill, etc. A certain class of worker will tend to be protected due to having an attribute foreigners don't usually have -- native fluency in English, for example. I don't mean this as a shot against the media, but the media would be naturally protected, at least for a while, under this Go Crazy With It scheme, simply because their own Native English skill is not easily acquired by a non-Native-English-speaking foreign competitor, no matter how hungry he is.

Okay, Big Business sort of might like this idea, because now, of course, they're making their product for less money and are more competitive.

So long as you're looking at just that one side of the ledger -- lowest costs for your products. But there are other parts of the ledger one should look at, too.

For example: In America, Americans are used to some sort of social safety net, and furthermore, can vote themselves a more generous social safety net if they like. If 200 million foreign workers displace 200 million American workers, it's not quite true that our products are now cheaper and more "competitive" in the market, because the money to pay for all these now-permanently-unemployed Americans has to come from somewhere.

Might as well tax Big Business, then. So the actual cost of labor is not just the wages you pay to your actual employees -- the cost of labor is really:

The cost of wages you pay to your employees

plus

The costs imposed by government in taxes, especially those required (in this scenario) to now put 200 million formerly-working Americans on the dole

So when we think about American labor costs, we always have to keep this second factor in mind.

Now some will object, "But that's silly, we're not talking about displacing 200 million American workers."

No, you're only talking about displacing 20 million. So yes, that would be only 10% as bad.

But I'm afraid "only 10% as bad as a catastrophe" still isn't good. I blew the scale of this up to demonstrate that if you'd object to such a plan in Super Size Form, you should also probably object to it in the Value Size. Ten grams of poison is fatal. One gram, while perhaps survivable, is still poison.

Another thing to consider is that as a moral, political, and psychological matter, it is far better to have a country in which most of its voting citizens have the self-worth and natural connection to the economy that a job provides, as opposed to having more and more citizens taking the government dole, knowing they are essentially worthless to the nation, so many useless mouths to feed.
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Posted by: Ace at 10:46 AM | Comments (405)
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Plus -- "Who is he?," The Hill wonders, which Instapundit can't help noticing was a damn fine question... five years ago.

“A CNN/ORC survey released Monday shows Obama with a 45 percent approval rating, down from his 53 percent mark in mid-May. Fifty-four percent say they disapprove of how Obama is handling his job. The poll also finds that 49 percent believe Obama is honest to 50 percent who do not, the first time a majority have not found the president to be trustworthy.”

Posted by: Ace at 09:45 AM | Comments (198)
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John E. made a very good point on last week's podcast...under the terms of the 2001 Authorization of Use of Military Force, the US has a stronger legal basis for going after the Syrian rebels than it does in helping them.

But help them we will.

Concern about the Syrian al Qaeda-affiliated group Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as the al-Nusra Front, is at an all-time high, according to the analyst, with as many as 10,000 fighters and supporters inside Syria. The United States has designated al-Nusra Front as a terrorist group with links to al Qaeda in Iraq.

That assessment is shared by some Middle Eastern intelligence agencies that have long believed the United States is underestimating the Sunni-backed al Qaeda movement in the country, according to a Middle East source. It is also believed that Iran is running training camps inside Syria for Hezbollah and that other Iranian militia fighters are coming into the country to fight for the regime.

The analyst has been part of recent discussions with the U.S. intelligence community, which is urgently working to understand what is going on inside the war-ravaged country and is consulting outside experts. The analyst, who declined to be named because of the sensitive nature of the information, stressed that all assessments about Syria are approximate at best because of the lack of U.S. personnel on the ground.

The report also says the rebels are trying to get their own chemical weapons. Fantastic.

Victor Davis Hanson is worried.

U.S. influence in the Middle East and North Africa is at a new postwar low. That Iran supposedly plans to send 4,000 fighters to Syria suggests that it is not too afraid of anyone preempting its nuclear facilities or of the supposedly crushing oil boycott.

There is no guarantee that American air support or close training might not end up in some sort of American ground presence — the only sure guarantee that so-called moderates might prevail should Assad fall. Of course, any costly intervention would eventually be orphaned by many in the present chorus of interventionists in a manner that we also know well from Iraq. We are told that dealing a blow to Iran and Hezbollah would be a good thing, and no doubt it would be. But in the callous calculus of Realpolitik, both seem already to be suffering without U.S. intervention.

The last part is key...we should do enough to keep the fight going but not enough to help the rebels win. Let them fight and bleed for another year, two or more. I don't care. Once they are wasted away from killing each other we can figure out what comes next.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:43 AM | Comments (320)
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This wasn't part of the illegal immigration enforcement bills from a few years back but rather a voter imitative law put in place in 2004.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states cannot require would-be voters to prove they are U.S. citizens before using a federal registration system designed to make signing up easier.

The justices voted 7-2 to throw out Arizona's voter-approved requirement that prospective voters document their U.S. citizenship in order to use a registration form produced under the federal "Motor Voter" voter registration law.

Federal law "precludes Arizona from requiring a federal form applicant to submit information beyond that required by the form itself," Justice Antonia Scalia wrote for the court's majority.

It's a fairly straight forward preemption issue. The federal government has mandated a use of a specific registration* form through the Motor Voter Act and the court is simply saying that states can't add qualifications to it.

What the Court didn't seem to say is that such a requirement would be unconstitutional. So, it's time to press House and Senate candidates to add this to the federal form. Ideally, they'd repeal Motor Voter all together but that's not going to happen so fixing this oversight is probably the best we can hope for. Of course, that's likely a bridge too far.

*Apparently some people are confusing proof of citizenship at the time of registration with being able to vote. Just to be clear, SCOTUS didn't find a right to vote for non-citizens or say states couldn't stop non-citizens from voting.

That's why I said this was more a simple preemption case than an earth shattering voting rights case. Still, I think it's something states should be allowed to do and with political will it's a simple fix.

(I added "Registration" to the title to help avoid confusion)

Posted by: DrewM at 07:26 AM | Comments (250)
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• Aldous Huxley And The NSA Leaker
  
• IRS Supervisor In DC Was Obama Donor, Scrutinized Tea Party Cases
  
• Senate To Pass Immigration Bill With Over 70 Votes
  
• Not That It Matters, But Obama's Approval Rating Appears To Be Dropping
  
• Turkish Protests And Counter Protests Continue
  
• Boehner Says He Won't Back Immigration Bill Without Majority GOP Support
  
• Our Masters, The Bureaucrats
  
• If We Don't Pass An Immigration Bill We'll Never Win The White House Back Says Lindsey Graham And Every Democrat
  
• Is Hassan Rouhani Really A Reformer?
  
• Cute Video, Sea Lion Pup Jumps Onto Boat To Cuddle With Driver
  
• Ammo Made With Jihadis In Mind
  
• Nobel Peace Prize Winner's Next War
  
• I Don't Blame Miss Utah, It Was A Stupid Question To Begin With
  
• Erdogan's Majority Rule
  
• Yeah, These People Totally Aren't Fascists
  
• The New American Enemies List
  
• The Hill Baffled About Obama
  
• The Search For The Magic Fig Leaf
  
• Woman Hit In Head With Golf Ball At US Open
  
• Egypt Appoints 17 Governors, Including 8 Islamists
  

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:10 AM | Comments (94)
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