Ace of Spades contributor Aaron Burr has began an Election Prediction thread.

He's now predicting a Bush loss, and arguing with fellow blogger Nick Kronos about that. Aaron is a pro-Bush Republican, but he's always tended to be pessimistic as to Republican chances.

Posting requires registration. You might want to weigh in.

Then again, you might not. Who's to say? It's a crazy world.

Posted by: Ace at 08:05 AM | Comments (9)
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RDBrewer explains: The XM307, our new grenade machine gun. Yes, grenade machine gun. It shoots high-explosive airbursting, armor piercing, and training ammunition. The rounds can explode while flying over a target. Accurate up to 2000 meters.

More here, including a Quicktime video of the weapon in use.

Posted by: Ace at 06:20 PM | Comments (29)
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A brief idea, but I think it's an important one.

One of the most common charges leveled by liberals against Bush is that he has "divided" the country after 9-11. According to this argument, the country was "united" immediately after 9-11 (in fact, they say the whole world was united as well, but let's put that aside for now), but that Bush's Krazy Kowboy Konservatism has undone that unity.

For this theory to make sense, it needs to be the case that an "original understanding" was forged in the aftermath of 9-11, from which Bush and the conservatives, rather than the liberals, walked away. For the argument to be valid, it needs to be true that after 9-11 we reached some Grand Compromise that liberals have remained true to, but which conservatives have betrayed.

Is that true?

After 9-11, did the nation forge an "original understanding" that was fairly liberal, fairly conservative, or a good compromise of both?

After 9-11, did the nation rally around cherished liberal notions such as strong-form, if not absolute, enforcement of civil rights restrictions on law-enforcement activities or passivity, deference, and negotitation as our primary foreign-policy tools?

Was that the deal this national collectively struck in that horrible week after the disaster, with bodies still cooking in the ground, which Bush has betrayed by his subsequent actions?

That doesn't jibe very well with my recollection. I remember one reporter or liberal after another announcing that "we all now understood" that the passivity and "carefully calibrated counter-attacks" of the Clinton years would have to be discarded. I remember Howard Finemann saying specifically on Hardball that the ACLU and Muslim advocacy groups "understood" that there would have to be more aggressive, and sometimes more intrusive, law-enforcement scrutiny of potential Muslim terrorists, and that racial profiling was definitely on the table as a possibility at the very least.

In short, I remember the liberals crossing the ideological aisle to agree with, and acquiesce to, conservatives. I don't remember conservatives becoming more liberal in order to achieve a compromise. My memory is that liberals became hawkish on both law-enforcement and foreign policy -- or at least posed as being such -- and thus joined with conservatives, who had as rule been hawkish on both for years.

We did reach an Original Understanding, all right -- one that was almost completely conservative in outlook.

We did not come to an understanding that was more liberal. Nor even somewhat liberal. We came to an understanding that was decidedly conservative -- even arguably authoritatrian and belligerent in some respects -- in those seminal weeks and months.

Since those early weeks and months, we have seen liberals become increasingly dovish in their anti-war impulses, and increasingly strident in their demands that we be more "sensitive" as regards civil rights in combating terrorism inside the US.

So: Who walked away from that Grand Original Understanding we all forged after 9-11?

It is the liberals who have reconsidered; it is the liberals who have decided that their immediate reaction was too driven by emotion, anger, and fear; it is the liberals who have walked back the cat from their post-9/11 acceptance of a conservative -- yes, conservative -- law-enforcement policy and foreign policy.

Now, they have the right to reconsider. If they now think that they overestimated the danger posed by terrorism, or if they now think that such dangers are not as great as the danger posed by overagressive law enforcement or military action, they have the right to retract their original acquiesence in the post-9/11 Original Understanding.

But they do not have the right to lie about who, precisely, is splitting away from whom. They are splitting away from that Original Understanding. Conservatives are merely honoring it.

They have decided to "divide the country" by walking away from the original understanding. They may have reconsidered, they may have reevaluated, they may have repriortized, but they cannot blame Bush for merely holding to the original understanding we nearly universally embraced after 9-11.

Is Bush to be blamed because he has committed the great sin of not following the liberals in their, ahem, evolutions of thinking on these issues? Is it the conservatives' fault that we have, surprisingly enough, failed to become more liberal after 9-11 than we were before, simply because the liberals began reverting to form scant months after the greatest attack on this country in our history?

It is the right of liberals to "divide the country" by taking a contrary position. These are, in fact, divisive issues, and the interests of unity does not demand they remain silent when they dissent with the government.

But honesty does demand that they forthrightly admit that it is they who are "dividing the country," because it is they who abandoned the understanding reached after 9-11.

Posted by: Ace at 11:31 AM | Comments (18)
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Now this is what I'd call "too gloomy."

It should be noted that the controversial Net Birth/Death Adjustment to the jobs figures -- which took away over 100,000 jobs in July -- won't take away from the August jobs figures.*

Which will be announced the day after Bush accepts the Republican nomination.

Hopefully, the August jobs figures will be strong enough that Josuah Micah Aragorn-Son-of-Arathorn "Strider" Marshal will "question the timing" of the long-scheduled report.

*The adjustment may even add to the actual survey figures, but I don't know about that.

Posted by: Ace at 11:23 AM | Comments (6)
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Some say the Jacobsen account of the suspicious Syrians on her Northwestern flight has been discredited.

But what to make of this?:

"What we have seen all across the country -- at military bases, at critical infrastructure facilities, at soft civilian targets such as schools, shopping malls [and] sports arenas, and domestic and international airline flights -- are probing attacks" said Peter Leitner, co-founder of the Higgins Counter Terrorism Research Center in Arlington, Va.

"Probing attacks are designed to elicit a response in an effort to map out patterns of reactions by law enforcement, the ease of approaching and withdrawing from a target and to test the reaction of the civilian population to a potential attack situation," Leitner told CNSNews.com.

Leitner said the June 29 Northwest Airlines flight from Detroit to Los Angeles, involving the suspicious activities of 14 Syrian male passengers, "was undoubtedly a probing attack."

...

In another example, the Washington Times quoted an airline pilot describing an incident in which a "man of Middle Eastern descent" locked himself in a lavatory for a long period of time before an air marshal forced his way in. The pilot told the Times that the air marshal found "the mirror had been removed and the man was attempting to break through the wall. The cockpit was on the other side."

Many incidents of suspicious videotaping have also been reported. Last month, two security guards at Iran's mission to the United Nations were expelled by the U.S. State Department after they were caught taping landmarks and infrastructure in New York City. The Iranians, according to State Department officials, were expelled on a technicality related to their official capacity, but most individuals caught videotaping are simply questioned and released.

Another videotaping incident involved a Jewish girls' school near Baltimore, Md., last October. The Baltimore Jewish Times reported that outside the Bais Yaakov School for Girls, "a man described as Middle Eastern in physical appearance was observed videotaping the school.

I'm really curious to know why we're only hearing about the break-through-the-cockpit-wall story so late in the game, and only from the conservative-leaning Washington Times.

Has the liberal media decided that a Middle Eastern man attempting to break through a lavatory wall into the cockpit is no longer newsworthy?

I question the suspicious timing of the media's terrorism-friendly insouciance.

Meanwhile... Liberals, Muslim advocacy groups, and the ACLU have apparently decided that it is now a constitutional offense for law-enforcement officers to ask a Muslim a question.

Anyone remember that right after 9-11, liberals, Muslim advocacy groups, and the ACLU specifically stated that "everyone knew" that we'd have to make certain changes in how we conduct law-enforcement, including racial profiling and increased FBI scrutiny and questioning of potential suspects?

We seem to have come a long way from that post-9/11 understanding. The liberals etc. have really walked back that particular cat.

I will have a great deal more to say about this later.

Posted by: Ace at 11:19 AM | Comments (2)
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This Mozart-of-the-blogging world is now running a haiku contest, of all things.

Where does she come up with this stuff? It's like there's a Secret Room of Great Inventive Ideas somewhere and only she has the key.

And, oh: Yes, I know there's a contest-winners announcement due. It's coming. Promise.

Whoops, Forgot to Credit: Thanks to Scout for pointing this out.

Posted by: Ace at 09:54 AM | Comments (21)
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Jim Treacher just lit me up with three good tidbits I gotta figure a lot of you will be interested in.

First up, a long Salon article (you have to watch an ad to read) explains the movie Donnie Darko.

Donnie Darko has always fascinated me because it seemed smart and well-made but didn't make a lick of sense. I'm usually amazingly good at figuring out plots within the first ten minutes of a movie, but I didn't figure out Donnie Darko's. In fact, I didn't figure it out ten minutes after the movie was over, or three years later. It gnawed on me that there was something going on that I just didn't get.

Well, this article explains everything that was going on in the movie. It's not just guesswork; it's based on the writer/director's commentary and interviews and such.

As it often happens, the question is more interesting than the answer. Why did that jet engine fall off the plane at the end of the movie? Because Donnie Darko used his telekinetic superpowers to rip it off the plane. Huh? No, that's not a joke. That's really what supposedly happened.

Bit of a let down. Still, I can now check "Finally figure out Donnie Darko" off the lifetime to-do list. Why is Donnie Darko such an unsettlingly authentic portrayal of schizophrenia? Because the writer/director is a freakin' lunatic, that's why.

Then he links this, which is... well, Spider-Man cartoons with all the characters saying inappropriate things. Mostly involving homosexuality and unlikely sexual acts.

Keep refreshing on the link; there's 20 strips.

And then, the "Batman Begins" website, including a teaser trailer. Okay, first they seem to be going overboard on the moody-whispering/"dark" crap, but the punchline, if you will, to Batman's solliliquy gives me some hope. And moody-whispering/"dark" crap is infinitely preferable to absurdly-campy Burton/Schulmacher abortions. Howard Stern called the last entry -- the one with Mr. Freeze -- "the gay Ice Capades." Spot on on that one.

Posted by: Ace at 02:29 PM | Comments (10)
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And I thought it was enough that Margaret Cho was just unfunny and fat. No, it turns out she's also self-important, ungracious, bitchy and borderline delusional as well.

This is "dated intelligence," as they say, but it turns out that the delightful she-cow lowered herself to perform for a corporate crowd and was, as you're probably guessing, "unconstitutionally censored" after ten minutes of her awful act.

I am not exaggerating much when I say that this narcissist describes this rather pedestrian affair in terms of emotional violation more suited for a woman describing a rape to a therapist.

Perspective-- that's what our comics give us. We have to understand that Ms. Cho's problems -- being paid a big pile of cash and being ferried around by limo in order to perform for people she loathes -- are the real problems facing this country, while unemployment, terrorism, and cancer are mere distractions.

Put aside the niggling problems you have in your own life in order to say a little prayer for Ms. Cho. How this courageous woman soldiers on in the face of so much adversity is beyond me.

Posted by: Ace at 02:05 PM | Comments (13)
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The payroll jobs survey isn't just a raw survey. It's actually adjusted to a degree by seasonal/monthly modifications in an effort to "tune out" predictable cyclical noise. Those adjustments are, of course, based on assumptions. If the assumptions fail, the numbers won't be accurate.

This guy has been complaining about these adjustments for a while, and not just when they hurt Bush. I remember reading him some time ago arguing that Bush's big-growth numbers in the Spring were also partly phatasmal, based on sketchy adjustments which might or might not bear any relationship to reality. Hack that I am, I discounted him at the time; I didn't need him raining on my cowbell parade.

But he predicted yesterday that these adjustments would "make" July a bad job-growth month, at least on paper, just as they had last July. (January, too, is always adjusted into a poor-job-growth month.)

I'm not sure what to make of all this. Do we really have any good idea at all how many jobs are being created or lost at any given time? How much of this is all just back-of-the-envelope guesswork?

We do know, with nearly perfect accuracy, how many people are signing up for jobless benefits at any time. That's not a poll; that's just counting.

If the number of people signing up for unemployment benefits keeps dropping, doesn't that suggest that more people are finding work?

Hat tip to Kausfiles.

Bill Quick has a more rigorous analysis of this phenomenon.

Posted by: Ace at 12:21 PM | Comments (5)
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My Pet Jawa's gotten a hold of NKVD Station Chief Olive Willis' latest top-secret memorandum to the Blog Vanguard.

A mole who has infiltrated into conservative circles, codenamed "AS," is prominently mentioned. We must figure out who on earth this could possibly be.

I think it must be Allah Pundit. I've never really been convinced that Allah was as anti-Muslim-terrorist as he's pretended to be.

Posted by: Ace at 11:09 AM | Comments (14)
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