That's a real headline from The New Scientiests. Who says geeks have less fun?

As an aside, Uranus is a word that stubbornly refuses to not embarass you. Either you're saying "Your anus" or, putting the stress on the second syllable, you're saying "Urine us."

To avoid this, I call the planet by its original name, as it was first dubbed by its discoverer in 1745, "Sweaty Stinky Goat Balls."

Thanks to Craig again.

Posted by: Ace at 07:51 PM | Comments (14)
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Yeah... they weren't just making that stuff up about "making the deserts bloom," guys:

The Palestinians who took over the Jewish greenhouses in the Gaza Strip when Israel withdrew its communities from the area now are asking expelled farmers for advice after reportedly failing to reproduce the region's famous insect-free vegetables, WND has learned.

Prior to Israel's August withdrawal, the residents of Gaza's Gush Katif slate of Jewish communities ran greenhouses known for producing high-quality insect-free vegetables. The Gush Katif gardens featured some of the most technologically advanced agricultural equipment and accounted for more than $100 million per year in exports to Europe. The greenhouses also supplied Israel with 75 percent of its own produce.

...

Earlier this month, the Palestinians now running the greenhouses reportedly told the Israeli-Palestinian Economic Cooperation Fund they failed in their efforts to grow bug-free produce.

Now the Palestinian owners have asked the United States Agency for International Development, which has been involved in reconstruction efforts in Gaza, to hire former Jewish Gaza greenhouse owners as consultants for their declining vegetable businesses.

I guess this is understandable. There's an awful lot of experience and know-how that didn't come along with that deal.

Still... if they weren't so anti-Jew and arrogant about their "cultural superiority," they might have kept on some Israeli engineers to help them get things running, eh?

Thanks to Craig, h/t to Sondra K's aptly-named Knowlege is Power.

Posted by: Ace at 06:53 PM | Comments (22)
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I just don't know what to do sometimes.

If you're writing a comment, especially a long one, please copy and save it so it doesn't get zapped. At least until the Great Content Filter D-bacle is over.

Update: It's over. D's are allowed again.

Posted by: Ace at 06:12 PM | Comments (19)
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Charming:

In June 2003, after television cameras caught a cheering, thousand-strong mob in Fallujah dragging the charred, dismembered bodies of American contractors through the streets, Moulitsas linked to the reports and said of the contractors: “I feel nothing… Screw them.” The declaration, gleefully seized on by right-wing bloggers, provoked weeks of controversy. Democratic candidates came under pressure to pull their advertisements from the site, and even Moulitsas’s traditional allies in the liberal blogosphere—including The Washington Monthly’s Kevin Drum—criticized him. (When I asked Moulitsas recently how he felt about the episode, his mouth stretched into a smile: “Vindicated,” he said.

How does anything that happened, or could happen, "vindicate" his "I feel nothing... screw 'em" statement? That's not saying "Iraq is unwinnable," a statement which could be vindicated by the right facts.

It's just a statement of pure uncaring maliciousness.

But don't question his patriotism.

He also talks about his pride in being a total asshole.

Remember, this guy is a blogger. Not even so much a blogger as the host of a large chat-forum. Yes, he's got traffic. But still, in the end, a blogger.

I still think blogging is pretty embarassing. This guy thinks it makes him cool enough to get away with being a dickhead.

Ah, well. Maybe three million hits a day does that to you.

Related: The Politics of Personal Vindication, about people rooting for American tragedy just so they can tell their friends they were right in a political argument.

Chris Matthews expressed his own preference for personal vindication over American triumph in talking with Thomas Friedman:

Well, let me talk to you about, as a person who spends every night here arguing about it one way or the other, trying to understand it one way or the other.

If we do succeed in reconstructing Iraq along the lines of a moderate democracy, then the people who supported the intervention, the preemptive act, the preventive attack on that country, will say we were right. That‘s the problem.

That's the problem-- an American victory would force Chris Matthews to say "I was wrong." And he just can't have that.

Posted by: Ace at 05:25 PM | Comments (28)
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Okay, Big Bird seems in the clear. Seems.

A Plainfield man was charged Wednesday with capital felony, murder and felony murder in the death of a Woodstock jogger whose battered body was found on property owned by the performer who plays Big Bird on "Sesame Street."

Under the capital felony count, prosecutors can seek the death penalty or life in prison without parole for Scott Deojay, 36.

Deojay told police that he struck Judith Nilan, a 44-year-old middle school social worker, with his car by accident on Dec. 12 in Woodstock and panicked, according to an affidavit supporting the new charges against Deojay. State police said Deojay hid the body in an outbuilding on Caroll Spinney's property, where he worked as a caretaker.

Authorities arrested Deojay on a kidnapping charge on Dec. 13 in connection with Nilan's death and said Spinney was not involved.

I don't know. I'm still suspicious.

As Martin Riggs said, "Be on the lookout for a big yellow bird, speaks in a funny voice."

Posted by: Ace at 01:02 PM | Comments (22)
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We don't know who yet.

A WASHINGTON lobbyist at the heart of a Capitol Hill bribery investigation is ready to give evidence against Republican politicians, setting the stage for an explosive corruption scandal involving President George W. Bush's party.

Jack Abramoff, a former lobbyist with financial ties to numerous politicians, is prepared to co-operate with prosecutors and provide information on at least six members of Congress. Most, if not all, are Republican.

The Abramoff investigation, which has been expanding for nearly two years, has been viewed as a ticking bomb for the Republican Party.

The Justice Department is also believed to be looking at the role played by government officials in Mr Abramoff's dealings.

The department is examining claims that Mr Abramoff and associates bribed politicians with money, gifts, expensive meals and holidays in exchange for legislative action favourable to Mr Abramoff's clients.

That comes from The Australian, so pardon the "We're finally gonna git 'em" tone, but this could be quite bad, obviously.

Or "bad" in terms of politics. You get caught dirty, you gotta go.

I don't get these guys. They're paid $150,000 per year (more than most would make in the private sector), they get sick benefits and freebies, and they can take an awful lot of hinky money and gifts without actually breaking the law.

How can they be this greedy and corrupt? Or stupid?

Posted by: Ace at 12:21 PM | Comments (19)
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I think my wait-and-see attitude was wrong:

SpielbergÂ’s Palestinian terrorists have deals with CIA officials in which they are paid not to harm American diplomats. Real-life Palestinians in 1973 beat to death U.S. diplomats, like Cleo Noel and George Curtis Moore in the Sudan, with Yasser Arafat personally giving the orders. (They were tortured to death and beaten so badly, authorities could not tell which of the two was black and which was white.)

Spielberg’s Palestinian terrorists have cute, young, innocent, piano-playing daughters who will be fatherless. But he never shows the cute, young daughters of the Israeli athletes who were made fatherless – and whose fathers, unlike the Palestinian terrorists, were innocent victims with no choice in the matter.

Spielberg’s Mossad agents say bigoted things like, “The only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood,” and go around killing innocent people at whim. The real-life Mossad agents who hunted the Munich terrorists went to great pains to avoid killing innocents (whether or not they were Jewish), a reason it took so many years and financial resources to get all but one of them. (Jamil Al-Gashey lives safely under the protection of the terror-state Syria.) In real-life, they killed only one innocent man whom they mistakenly believed to be a terrorist – a Moroccan waiter in Norway – for which those Mossad agents responsible were tried, convicted, and imprisoned, something that does not happen in the Spielberg version of events.

One of Hollywood's biggest problems with respect to the War on Terror isn't their leftist politics per se. It's that they feel, as an artistic, aesthetic matter, every film must be an anti-war film.

Even Saving Private Ryan, intended by Spielberg as a tribute to the men who fought for freedom during World War II, was, implicitly and unavoidably, at heart an anti-war film. Spielberg said as much.

Bruce Willis' underated Tears of the Sun was likewise intended by Willis to show the courage of Navy SEALs, but still, the film had a decidely anti-war bent. It was the rescue of innocents that made the mission worthwhile, not the practice of warfare against savage enemies itself.

The enemy in war, as Denzel Washington declared in Crimson Tide, is war itself. (Yes, he was speaking of "war in the nuclear age," but close enough.) This mentality is fine for popcorn pictures like the James Bond franchise. And it's actually a fair truism as far as most war and most violence goes.

But what happens when an enemy is so malicious and monstrous that that this ambivalence towards the use of force becomes, well, idiotic? That's where Hollywood loses its bearings, and that's why, as regards the War on Terror, it's perpetually stuck on stupid. The paradigm that serves it well in 90% of its products just is inapplicable here, and they can't seem to make themselves realize that.

One can understand moral ambivalence as regards Vietnam, Korea, World War One, and even the Revolutionary War. But World War II? And the current war, in which we're fighting moral monsters whose tactics would make Hitler himself cringe?

The term "good war" is not an oxymoron. It's simply a rarity, a historical exception to a general rule. It's too bad that genuinely creative and gifted folks in Hollywood don't have the capacity to recognize that nuance.

Posted by: Ace at 10:26 AM | Comments (149)
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The Blogometer runs it down.

It's sort of a "Greatest Week Ever" of dorks. Kinda embarassing when the Hundred Perecenter's delinking crusade is one of the big blog events of 2005.

Posted by: Ace at 10:15 AM | Comments (9)
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Ummm, didn't he already kind of take over Iraq with Halliburton executives? Did they have a falling out?

The Dick Cheney legend just grows and grows... like, uhhh, you know.

Posted by: Ace at 06:53 AM | Comments (8)
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Are they trying to kill the franchise?

I guess that would explain the para-tsunami-snowboarding videogame sequence in the last Bond movie.

Yeah, the girl is very hot. She's fine for Dukes of Hazzard. But Bond?

And as for the hit-single-theme-song synergy I'm sure they're thinking about-- did they hear her cover of These Boots Are Made For Walkin'?

Posted by: Ace at 06:46 AM | Comments (38)
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