From @ComradeArthur, a very short (128 seconds) horror film made for a short horror film contest.

Is it scary? Well, I got scared 20 seconds in. Then it got worse.

Then I turned it off, because: I don't need this crap.

Also below: The new trailer for X-Men: Days of Future Past, which is just like Star Trek Generations, except instead of Jean Luc meting Kirk, he meets himself.

Oh, and it's got Sentinel robots.

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Posted by: Ace at 03:13 PM | Comments (194)
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For any Identity category that more than two people associate themselves with, the left has a Grievance Workshop explaining why people should be angry at other people for all their failings.

You say, "Why 'Fat Justice'? Hasn't this gotten a little absurd?"

But like the Son of Sam, I say: "What took you so long, Fat Justice Identity Grievance Movement?"

A “Fat Justice and Feminism” seminar sponsored by Swarthmore College blamed Ronald Reagan for the suffering of fat people and accused the Body mass index (BMI) of having “direct links to a white supremacist.”

The workshop, taught by feminist activist Cora Segal and self-identified “angry, man-hating lesbian,” Nicole Sullivan, took place Thursday and sought to “address the ongoing exploitation and oppression of fat people.”

“There is no scientific consensus whatsoever that fat people need to exercise more, or that fat is unhealthy. There is no evidence that [being] fat causes diabetes. Medical professionals are informed of this so-called knowledge by lobbying groups.”

The Swarthmore Independent reports that Segal and Sullivan took aim at a variety of subjects including President Ronald Reagan, who they claimed “f*cked everything up” for fat people—though the Independent drily reports that “[n]o specific evidence about Reagan’s perverse policies or animosity toward obese people was offered.”

...

Paige Willey, an attendee to the conference, told Campus Reform "the whole event had a negative tone to it."

"Their whole argument was based in hatred. Very unproductive."

You don't say.

The guy they claim is a "white supremacist" is Adolphe Quetelet, who was an astronomer and sociologist who lived from 1796 to 1874, and created the BMI after recording the heights and weights of a lot of people. I don't see any mention of his "racist white supremacism" but he was French, and he was named Adolphe, so...

By the way, if you think this is a punking: It's not a punking. It's all too real.

Posted by: Ace at 02:16 PM | Comments (316)
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It's a useful bit of propaganda for Obamacare supporters to say "Even those opposed to Obamacare still want their Congressmen to work to improve the system, to make it work."

Pew's supplied the Democrats with that very bandwagon-effect-promoting propaganda.

But did they get the answer they wanted fairly?

Well, imagine how you, personally, would inquire into the preferred course of action of Obamacare supporters. You might give them the options of "Work to improve it anyway," or "Stay out of the way of it/Let it collapse under its own weight," and so forth.

Here are the options -- two of them -- that Pew gave respondents to choose from:

What do you think elected officials who oppose the health care law should do now that the law has started to take effect? Should they [X] or should they [Y]?

Do what they can to make the law work as well as possible

Do what they can to make the law fail

Emphases added.

Pew gave them a binary choice between "doing what they can to make the law work" and actively working to subvert and sabotage the law, and they present it as a meaningful bit of data that 30% supported the former choice, and only 19% the latter.

Good God.

Now, there are those who do actually favor just that -- working to make the law fail. But very few people are at that level of decisiveness (decisive enough on this issue to decide the long-term harms of Obamacare justifies short-term "let it burn" pain).

Most people would still choose a less aggressive, underhanded-sounding response, like "Let it collapse under its own weight."

But Pew refuses respondents that choice, insisting that people either declare their desire to "make Obamacare work the best we can, by Golly!" or declare themselves hostage-taking terrorists of the sort often decried by one Harry Reid.

Why, you'd almost think that major institutions of the media are entirely captured by the political left or something.

Posted by: Ace at 12:28 PM | Comments (359)
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Be afraid.

UN scientists are set to deliver their darkest report yet on the impacts of climate change, pointing to a future stalked by floods, drought, conflict and economic damage if carbon emissions go untamed.

The report goes on to claim:

A great and rich power will be subject to serious natural disasters,
particularly earthquakes and flooding, and rend the nation from end to end, causing enormous conflict, despair, and misery. The wealthy power will be bankrupted attempting to deal with its disasters. Three other great nations will send aid to help the citizens survive.

Oh I'm sorry, that's not from the IPCC report, that's from the Prophecies of Nostradamus, Volume I, Century VIII quatrain 29.

Here's The Australian previewing the new prophecies:

It predicted global temperatures would rise 0.3C-4.8C this century, adding to roughly 0.7C since the Industrial Revolution. Seas will creep up by 26cm-82cm by 2100. The draft warns costs will spiral with each additional degree, although it is hard to forecast by how much.

Let me note there is such a vast difference between a low-end prediction of zero point three degrees Centigrade -- over a century! -- and 4.8 degrees C that this hardly counts as a prediction at all.

And let me note that actual observed warming is lower than 95% of all "modeling" predictions.

Andrew Bolt notes the odd inverse relationship between evidence and shrillness: as the former declines, the latter rises up in a hockey-stick like spike.

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Posted by: Ace at 11:02 AM | Comments (419)
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No really, that is the column's title.

Meanwhile, a group of conservative and libertarian writers and editors have founded a start-up they call "Liberty Island," a forum featuring fiction (mostly of the pulp variety) with a right-leaning sensibility.

Sarah Hoyt interviews one of the founders, Adam Bellow, at PJ Media.

SH: Who is the audience for Liberty Island? What is “conservative fiction”? Shouldn’t good stories just stand on their own?

AB: Great literature stands on its own, but the productions of popular culture often carry a hidden freight of ideology that reflects its authors’ biases. Sometimes not so hidden — the evil conservative businessman is essentially the default villain in Hollywood these days. But think about what happens when great stories are told from a conservative perspective: you get Tom Clancy, or Brad Thor, or James Patterson, or Vince Flynn. Mega-bestselling authors with a huge following. Our audience is anyone who loves great pulp writers like those guys. At Liberty Island you will find dozens of stories like these, in genres ranging from humor to thriller to SciFi. These writers aren’t heavy handed in the least – their conservative outlook is sometimes explicit but just as often merely implied or completely submerged. Besides, a case can be made that traditional pulp genres are inherently conservative.

...

SH: What made you think of the project – and commit to it and work so hard for it?

AB: Two things: first, an impulse to carry the culture war into the field of popular culture. And second, the writers themselves. In 25 years as an editor of nonfiction books I’ve watched the conservative intellectual project thrive and flourish. But like others on the right I’ve been dismayed by the slowness of conservatives to challenge the liberal dominance of popular culture. It’s not enough to carp and criticize the frequently substandard and offensive crap that liberals produce. As Andrew Breitbart used to say, we have to make our own—and it has to be good. But recently we began to notice an exciting development: hundreds, indeed thousands of conservative and libertarian writers were seizing the opportunity afforded by new digital technologies to produce and publish original works of fiction. Others were making music, video, graphics, and other forms of entertainment right on their laptops at home. These were ordinary men and women all over the country, working in isolation, doing their best to hone their art and find an audience. Yet no one seemed to know that they existed. So we started talking about what we could do to help them. Liberty Island grew out of those discussions.

They take submissions. They don't actually pay for those submissions, though they do encourage satisfied readers to hit the tip-jar of any author whose work they like.

Posted by: Ace at 10:19 AM | Comments (221)
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A gruesome detail about hospital practices in the UK, reported by the Telegraph.

Allahpundit (first link) considers the various possible positions of the pro-choice on this report. In the comments, there's also something of an argument between those on the pro-life right: Some assert that focusing on the remains of a baby post-abortion is focusing on the wrong thing entirely, as, at that point, there isn't a strong pro-life interest in the dead (apart from affording the dead dignity in death).

In other news of the abortion debate: An atheist posts at Patheos why she is pro-life, basing her objection to abortion on humanist grounds.

Posted by: Ace at 08:58 AM | Comments (565)
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Silver didn't actually predict a GOP Senate takeover; he only said the GOP was a "slight favorite" to take majority control. But even this was enough to spur Democrats into Heretic Denouncement mode.

But of course it doesn't take much to do that. That's their preferred mode of expression these last thirty years.

Democrats aren't taking Nate Silver's latest Senate prediction lying down.

In an unusual step, the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee on Monday issued a rebuttal the famed statistician's prediction—made a day earlier—that Republicans were a "slight favorite" to retake the Senate. Silver was wrong in 2012, the political committee's Guy Cecil wrote in a memo, and he'll be wrong again in 2014.

Note that the Democrats have cited his predictions just this very cycle, to gin up the base:

[I]n fundraising pitches this cycle, Democrats regularly invoke his earlier prediction that the battle for Senate control was a "toss-up" [.]

But in the memo, Cecil argues that Silver's track record is less than stellar....

In truth, Silver's suggestions that Republicans are favorites to win the Senate matched the assessment of most analysts in Washington.

Silver's tentative forecast is here.

When FiveThirtyEight last issued a U.S. Senate forecast — way back in July — we concluded the race for Senate control was a toss-up. That was a little ahead of the conventional wisdom at the time, which characterized the Democrats as vulnerable but more likely than not to retain the chamber.

Our new forecast goes a half-step further: We think the Republicans are now slight favorites to win at least six seats and capture the chamber. The DemocratsÂ’ position has deteriorated somewhat since last summer, with President ObamaÂ’s approval ratings down to 42 or 43 percent from an average of about 45 percent before. Furthermore, as compared with 2010 or 2012, the GOP has done a better job of recruiting credible candidates, with some exceptions.

His chart of the likely winners of all Senate seats up for election (not just the swing seats being vigorously contested) has Mary Landrieu's reelection as a 50/50 proposition.

Polls don't mean everything and are often wrong. Still, as between the guy saying "Skewed polls, yo!" and the guy saying "Polls are usually right," I'd rather be the latter. I was the former in 2012, and it was pretty awful.

Posted by: Ace at 07:55 AM | Comments (304)
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You might recall that the day before Russia made it's move in Crimea the US intelligence community (or at least a part of it) said the Russians were bluffing. That was...unfortunate.

Now there's a possible explanation for that atrocious error.

U.S. military satellites spied Russian troops amassing within striking distance of Crimea last month. But intelligence analysts were surprised because they hadn't intercepted any telltale communications where Russian leaders, military commanders or soldiers discussed plans to invade.

America's vaunted global surveillance is a vital tool for U.S. intelligence services, especially as an early-warning system and as a way to corroborate other evidence. In Crimea, though, U.S. intelligence officials are concluding that Russian planners might have gotten a jump on the West by evading U.S. eavesdropping.

"Even though there was a warning, we didn't have the information to be able to say exactly what was going to happen," a senior U.S. official says.

Hmmm, I wonder how the Russians might have been able to avoid having their communications intercepted? Oh right.

So, has Snowden enabled the Russians to evade US signal gathering? It's seems possible, maybe even likely. It's also possible the US after over a decade of focusing on terrorist treats and supporting efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan simply wasn't paying enough attention to the Russians or they just missed the signs.

I'm happy to have Snowden come back to the US and face a firing squad but I don't think we should jump to the conclusion that every intelligence failure from here on out is because of his crimes. It makes me nervous to see intelligence professionals jump to the easy conclusion. Aren't they supposed to be about not taking information at face value or the easy route to a solution?

Yes, they should be operating under the assumption that almost everything they do is compromised but the US intelligence community missed things before Snowden and shouldn't be exempt from having their work analyzed for problems going forward because of what he's done.

In related news....

The Russians could steamroll through Ukraine anytime they want.

The Ukrainian Army is preparing for battle by...raising money for equipment online.

And I put together a list of some of the things we still have today that date back to the "original" Crimean war back in the 1850s.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:48 AM | Comments (129)
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The British agency charged with investigating crashes in the UK along with the company that owns the satellites that handles the engine data transfers have refined the location data from the satellite "pings" that gave two options for where the plane went, the "northern corridor" towards central Asia and the "southern corridor" towards the Indian Ocean. The new findings show that the plane headed into the "southern corridor".

The Malaysian Prime Minister just announced based on the refined data they have concluded there were no possible landing sites and that the flight "ended" in Indian Ocean west of the Australian coast.

This location would seem consistent with the debris that's been spotted by satellites. There's still no confirmation linking that debris to the flight but....

Finding debris and eventually the location of the crash will only be the start of the process of figuring out how and why the hell the plane wound up there.

The full statement from the Malaysian PM:
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Posted by: DrewM at 06:07 AM | Comments (399)
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• In Denial On Dependency
  
• The New Marxism
  
• Nate Silver's Senate Forecast Given At Gunpoint From The AoSHQDD Dungeon
  
• The Media's Democratic Donor Delusions
  
• Dem Strategist: Obamacare Being Terrorized By Hostile Ads
  
• The Sinkhole Of Bureaucracy
  
• Did You Know Socialized Medicine Can Incinerate Dead Babies To Heat Hospitals? The NHS Does
  
• The Prime Minister Of Japan Is Trying To Roll Back Parts Of Japan's Pacifist Constitution
  
• Burn The Heretic
  
• Egypt Sentences 529 Morsi Supporters To Death
  
• Charlie Rangel's Last Stand?
  
• Turkey Shoots Down Syrian Plane
  
• Bitcoin Vulnerability
  
• Are You Ready For Another Six Years Of John McCain
  
• MSNBC: Hate Forward
  

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 04:55 AM | Comments (272)
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