The Metaphysical Girl also says "most priests are gay."

No comment yet from Andrew Sullivan. I think we may need a level higher than "Filled With Heart-Ache Over Such Gob-Smacking Vileness" when he finally composes himself enough to respond.

Previously: Madonna Calls For US Withdrawal From Iraq, Then Pantomimes Masturbation With a Fungo Bat

I guess I'll have to agree with Mr. Blue on this one. I liked Borderline and Material Girl well enough, but then she started with that Papa Don't Preach crap and I just tuned out.

Posted by: Ace at 02:29 PM | Comments (36)
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Shockingly enough.

Another million-dollar study finds that cute chicks get less speeding tickets than smelly dudes wearing Queensryche t-shirts and Spock ears. (Believe me, I know whereof I speak.)

Read down to the end... he mentions a dopey economic analysis which purports to prove that death and taxes go together more than you'd ever before thought. Specifically, that people choose to die when it is economically optimal for them to do so, i.e., they make rational financial decisions about snuffing it according to when it is optimal to do so according to tax considerations.

To be... or not to be. Let me check with my estate planner and I'll get back to you on that issue, okay?

Was it Hotblack Desiato who chose to spend a year dead for tax purposes?

Answer: It was Hotblack Desiato, not Desiderio or whatever I wrote. Thanks to some morons for correcting me.

Fall-Fundraising Tie-In: Given that hot chicks are better at raising money than stone-cold geekboys, I think I should announce that my secret identity is actually Stacey Summers, and that I'm a very hot busty stripper (using the name Heather Autumn) who just blogs to make some extra money to go to Whore School.

Won't you make my dream come true? I'm only six credits away from a Masters in Light Spanking.

Posted by: Ace at 02:13 PM | Comments (17)
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The lowest safety-score of any vehicle sold in Europe. It got a zero.

The car's name -- "JiangLing" -- translates roughly as "Let's face it, your kids and wife are a fucking pain in the ass anyway."

Posted by: Ace at 01:35 PM | Comments (25)
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10. Favorite Date-Movie In Iceland? The Shining; they say Jack Torrance "had a dream and wasn't disuaded by 'outdated social conventions' about following that dream;" they also liked all the snow

9. Famously-high Swedish suicide rate plummets, not because they've overcome their depression, but because their depression has become even worse; hanging oneself in the snowmobile garage now seems "just such a bother"

8. Soccer, or as Americans call it, "something children play until they're old enough for more serious contact sports, like minitature golf"

7. Highest-selling book in France is nationalistic screed titled The Primacy of France: Seriously, I'm Pretty Sure That St. Kitts and Tonga-Tonga Still Give A Shit About What We Think

6. European Space Agency vows it will accomplish one of either two European firsts: 1, to either "put a man on the moon by 2030" or, alternately, 2, to paint the European-produced Airbus with "wicked-ass flames along the nose" and "cool Boris Vallejo paintings of barbarians and busty Valkyries" to let the world know that European aviation kicks ass

5. French Academy of Arts decides its Jerry Lewis worship just isn't grabbing the attention it used to; votes greatest artistic achievement ever produced in previous century was Bats!, starring Lou Diamond Phillips (co-starring a lot of Bats!)

4. All of Europe vows to move to Alec Baldwin's house if Hillary wins the next election

3. "Yabooism" catches on among English upper classes; "British Country Hooligans" begin riots and random assaults at fox-hunts and steeplechases

2. Five Words: That Whole David Hasselhoff Thing

...and the Number One Sign that Europeans Are Batshit Crazy...

1. New conspiracy-theory documentary sweeps European box-offices, blaming 9-11 attacks on secret cabal led by, you guessed it, Bob Dole's cock

Posted by: Ace at 11:43 AM | Comments (9)
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Garsh, I never would have figured:

Mental illness affects over 27% of European adults every year, and is responsible for the majority of the annual 58000 deaths by suicide, more than the number who die in traffic accidents.

The European Commission adopted Monday a Green Paper with the aim to launch an action plan on how better to tackle mental illness and promote mental well-being in the EU.

Mental health levels can have a significant influence on the economic and social welfare of society.

"More than one in four Europeans suffer from mental illness every year, and it can cost our economies up to four per cent of GDP in lost productivity and other social costs," said Markos Kyprianou, EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection.

Awesome. Europe's answer to depression and other mental illnesses will be more obtrusive and condescending government programs.

I'm not one for predictions, but I'll go out on a limb here: This one just can't fail.

European Bureaucrats

Because the road to hell just doesn't pave itself, you know.

Thanks to cutaway.

Posted by: Ace at 11:26 AM | Comments (30)
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California Conservative discussses Rush Limbaugh's recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

Key quote:

We conservatives are never stronger than when we are advancing our principles. And thatÂ’s the nature of our current debate over the nomination of Harriet Miers. Will she respect the Constitution? Will she be an originalist who will accept the limited role of the judiciary to interpret and uphold it, and leave the elected branches, we, the people, to set public policy? Given the extraordinary power the Supreme Court has seized from the representative parts of our government, this is no small matter. Roe v. Wade is a primary example of judicial activism. Regardless of oneÂ’s position on abortion, seven unelected and unaccountable justices simply did not have the constitutional authority to impose their pro-abortion views on the nation. The Constitution empowers the people, through their elected representatives in Congress or the state legislatures, to make this decision.

Hear, hear.

As I've said, I think that allowing abortions in most cases, especially in the first trimester, or to save the life of the mother (or avoid serious medical risks), is good public policy.

But it's the role of the Courts to determine what "good public policy" is. That role is left to the elected branches of government, voting as their constituents want them to (or being cast out of office if they don't do so frequently enough).

The Court thinks it's doing the country a favor by "resolving" difficult and contentious political issues through judicial fiat. The Court thinks it's, firstly, offering us the reasoned consideration of philosopher-kings better able to decide these issues than the common citizen.

And secondly, the Court imagines it's helping the country avoid these divisive issues by settling them "once and for all."

The first thought is so arrogant and anti-democratic it hardly merits rebuttal.

The second is equally absurd. Far from resolving the debate on abortion, the Court has in fact exacerbated it, by making millions of Americans essentially doubt the workings of democracy itself, and giving them good reason to think the government of, by, and for the people is in fact hopelessly stacked against them. The elites rule; the common citizens are marginalized. That is not good for democracy.

Further, the fact that the Court has arrogated to itself the power to decide all contentious, quite-debatable, and hotly-contested political questions for itself has produced a grotesque semi-democracy which is not even close to what the Framers envisioned. Rather than these questions being decided by political persuasion and political power, they're instead decided by an unelected superlegislature; more and more, the real power resides in the Court, and all normal politics are increasingly just a battle over who will get to pick those who will actually govern us.

Imagine if we didn't actually vote for a President. Imagine instead we voted for a group of Wise Ministers who themselves chose a President for us. (Please don't say "that's what the electoral college is.") We would not have any direct input to how this country's government is administered; we could only hope that those Wise Ministers we elect will chose the President we prefer. Similarly, for some of the most difficult questions of the age, the citizenry does not even have the indirect influence in shaping our polity that representative democracy afforts. The public's desires are triply-insulated from those actually making the decisions. We vote for representatives in the hopes they will vote they way we like them to; but on the difficult social questions that divide this country, they don't vote on those questions so much anymore. Instead, they only get to nominate and confirm the judges who will actually be deciding those issues. We only vote for people who then vote for the actual hidden government of the country.

This separation of actual political power from popular political support is more and more a characteristic of European democracy, such as it is. It was never intended to be the American scheme.

My continuing problem with Miers -- whether or not she's pro- or anti- Roe -- is that I have no evidence that she appreciates this or any evidence that she will seek to undue fifty-plus years of direct political power being exerted by judges. If she has the liberals' attitude that "the Constitution is what the Judges say it is," we will simply be trading a conservative judicial activist for a liberal one-- at best.

Posted by: Ace at 11:13 AM | Comments (21)
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I hate shaking the cybercup, especially when this blog has been -- oh, what's the word? -- so lame lately (except for my superb co-bloggers, of course), but it's that time of year again. The Val-U-Rite discount vodka and Val-U-Rite discount Bloody Mary mix just doesn't buy itself, you know.

I haven't had one of these in a while. Last time I did, everyone was so generous I was able to buy myself a really nice Vietnamese whore. The kind of girl who says "I'll do anything," so you say, "Okay, do my taxes then," and she doesn't laugh at the joke, she just gets out the adding machine and starts doing erotic double-entry accounting.

Trouble is, I didn't so much buy her as rent her, and the bitch left two weeks ago and stole my television too. So, like, I need a new TV. And a new whore.

Once again, the math:

Assuming there are 3,000 frequent readers to this site:

If every frequent reader just donated one dollar through PayPal (no PayPal account needed; just a credit card or a checking account), that would be a sweeeeet-ass $3000 dollars for the bandwidth/TV/Vietnamese whore fund.

If every frequent reader donated five dollars through PayPal (did I mention-- you don't need a PayPal account to do so?), that would be an even sweeter $15 large.

If every frequent reader donated -- stay with me on this -- $100, that would be 300,000 damn-bastard dollars. That's big money-- that's Joshua Micah Ezekiah Oakenshield Finster Smythe Boutros-Boutros Marshall money.

And if every frequent reader donated -- not saying you should do this, but if -- fifty-frigging-thousand dollars each, that would be a fall-fundraiser haul of one-hundred-fifty million dollars, which, you know, would tide me over quite nicely until January. Or thereabouts. It depends on how much the whores steal from me.

Come on. I know a lot of you have fifty thousand dollars just sitting around uselessly in college funds for your kids or in "equity" in your homes (equity is The White Man's Lie, by the way).

Posted by: Ace at 10:54 AM | Comments (38)
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TMP Cafe wants to talk this up as a conflict-of-interest deal-- reporters shouldn't get security clearances, as it brings them into the hated military-industrial complex.

But TMP Cafe does bring up a more interesting angle: If Miller had a security clearance, or if Scooter Libby thought she did, wouldn't that be a defense against mishandling classified information?

From Miller's testimony:

In my grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to the subject of how Mr. Libby handled classified information with me. He asked, for example, whether I had discussed my security status with Mr. Libby. During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment "embedded" with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I had discussed classified information with Mr. Libby. I said I believed so, but could not be sure. He asked how Mr. Libby treated classified information. I said, Very carefully.

...

I told Mr. Fitzgerald that Mr. Libby might have thought I still had security clearance, given my special embedded status in Iraq. At the same time, I told the grand jury I thought that at our July 8 meeting I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me if I knew whether I was cleared to discuss classified information at the time of my meetings with Mr. Libby. I said I did not know.

Her security clearance seems to have lapsed by the time of the discussion in question. Still, if Libby thought that clearance was still operative, that would seem to be a defense as regards deliberately giving classified information to someone not authorized to receive it.

Posted by: Ace at 10:43 AM | Comments (14)
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Only Reaganites Unite's headline makes me interested in this at all:

Senator Kennedy 0-for-2 in Water Rescues!

It's funny because it's true.

Posted by: Ace at 10:32 AM | Comments (8)
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Not sure if this really avoids the heart of the traditionalists' complaint about the techology:

Two studies released today take further steps toward creating human stem cells without harming embryos, but are not expected to change dramatically the policy disagreements over embryonic stem-cell research.

Both studies, conducted in mice models and published in the journal Nature, attempt to resolve the core objection to such research -- that embryos are destroyed to obtain their stem cells.

...

The first study -- conducted by a team led by Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology -- uses a procedure known as single cell embryo biopsy, used to look for genetic defects, in which a cell is removed from an eight-celled embryo and tested.

The team took a cell from a mouse embryo and used the cell to develop stem cells without destroying the embryo.

The second study used the cloning technique to produce an embryo that is incapable of implanting in a uterus and developing to term, but still produces stem cells. In the cloning process, the nucleus of a body cell is combined with an egg to produce a cloned embryo. In the study, the body cell was stripped of the gene needed to produce a placenta and implant the embryo in the uterus.

I think the objection remains that embryos will still be created and then destroyed just for the stem cells. I suppose there will be some number of embryos tested in the normal course of in vitro fertilization that may be available for this sort of thing, but the core objection will remain: more embryos will be created just to grab some of their cells for stem cell production, and then destroyed or left in a freezer.

The cloning option seems not to avoid any of these issues at all. Deliberately creating a non-viable embryo -- an embryo, but just incapable of actually ever growing much further -- via cloning seems just as bad as creating an embryo to destroy it.

Thanks to OgreGunner.

Posted by: Ace at 10:15 AM | Comments (4)
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