The program was scrapped because the data-mining and connection-making software turned up too many prominent Washington names. Including Hillary!

As Captain's Quarters notes, given that this particular search concerned Chinese espionage, it's hardly surprising the name Hillary Rodham Clinton popped up. In fact, the program would be a failure if it didn't note the connections between Johnny Chung and the Clintons.

A very poor decision. Yes, prominent names are going to turn up; anyone's whose spent more than five minutes on the Internet knows you can find vague connections between just about anyone.

I just applied for Google ads. I was rejected for "objectionalbe content." Knowing this decision was made by a computer -- which almost certainly raised red flags over the sexual language in the Dick Cheney threads -- I figured the computer had mistakenly labled this a porn site. A gay porn site. A gay porn site with a pronounced bestiality/Dick Cheney fetish.

So I wrote back and asked them to take a common-sense second-look with human eyes. Within 12 hours they wrote back to say that the site was unobjectionable as regards content.

If people working at Google can use common sense to toss out the sort of silly conclusions mindless computers sometimes arrive at, why couldn't the military intelligence people at the Pentagon?

Posted by: Ace at 11:29 AM | Comments (12)
Post contains 231 words, total size 2 kb.

It's all about the sunglasses, baby.

Slublog is nice enough to remind me of my own rip on Caruso:

I'm not sure why the other two CSI shows so completely fail to capture the giddily-macabre magic of the original. I guess the main problem with CSI: Miami is that David Caruso seems hellbent to convince me every episode he's gay, what with the queeny line-deliveries, "vogue-ing" body language, and constantly putting on and taking off his $800 sunglasses.

The guy cannot interrogate a witness without foppishly snapping off those stupid sunglassess. "Ricky," he will say to a perp as he snaps off the sunglasses, "these pictures show you entering the scene of the crime three minutes before Maria Santos was murdered." Then he'll get kissably close to Ricky and say "I'm going to nail you hard," and then snap on the sunglasses again.

He's got a whole thing with the sunglasses. They come off to talk about evidence and come back on for his exit-line. A man could make a whole drinking game out of the sunglasses on, sunglasses off thing, if one was determined to become a degenerate alcoholic within the span of a 60 minute crime drama.

Oh-- and also, the show just sucks, generally. I blame Caruso. The show is all about him, his heroics, his conflicted soul, his... indeterminate sexual orientation. And of course his fucking sunglasses.

Posted by: Ace at 11:03 AM | Comments (22)
Post contains 249 words, total size 2 kb.

And the other 33% is about Madonna, which is no picnic either.

The Malcontent notes that 8 of Saint Andrew's last 12 entries have been about torture, which isn't really that uncharacteristic, statistically speaking.

Loose Math: I incorrectly wrote 8 out of 10. Thank for the correction.

Posted by: Ace at 08:49 AM | Comments (14)
Post contains 57 words, total size 1 kb.

American security consultant Ronald Schulz has been murdered, jihadis say.

Posted by: Ace at 08:28 AM | Comments (6)
Post contains 18 words, total size 1 kb.

Pundit Guy has a remembrance and links aplenty.

I'll never forget where I was when I heard John Lennon was dead. I had just finished Part I of the Bad Poetry Slam judging, and I heard someone say, "John Lennon was shot in 1980."

And I thought, "Man, that's harsh." And also: "I have to do a better job of keeping up with news about this 'rock and roll' music the kids are all into these days."

And then I thought: "I just totally ripped off a joke from the letters page of 15 year old National Lampoon."

Posted by: Ace at 08:04 AM | Comments (43)
Post contains 118 words, total size 1 kb.

The New York Times' headline:

Playwright Takes a Prize and a Jab at US

Is this a jab? I thought we take jabs at each other here. I think this is more serious than that:

The playwright Harold Pinter turned his Nobel Prize acceptance speech on Wednesday into a furious howl of outrage against American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq but had also "supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship" in the last 50 years.

"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them," Mr. Pinter said.

Yeahhh... few have actually talked about them. Just you, every fucking douchebag artiste or faux intellectual or dilettante cafe-goer in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America, and the various corrupt leftist regimes in San Franscisco and Boston.

Brave guy. Why don't you do something really brave and say something critical about Islam, like Salman Rushdie said?

These courageous truth-tellers only seem able to muster the bravery to malign the five or six countries on the face of the earth that won't rub them out if they get too nasty.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:13 AM | Comments (264)
Post contains 780 words, total size 5 kb.

Chris Matthews hears all sorts of strange things when Dick Cheney speaks:

MATTHEWS: I heard—I watched the vice president and I listened attentively to his speech at Fort Drum. I heard something different than just we are building a democracy over there.

I heard we are fighting for American influence. It was a much more traditional position about geopolitics. We are over there. And he went through all the cases that they, the terrorists, tried to knock us out of being over there.

Lebanon in ‘83, Somalia later on, he went through each case and said, what they are trying to do, the Arabs over there, are throw us out of Arabia. He says we have a right to be there in force; we‘re going to stay there.

I thought he was staking a claim to the oil fields of Arabia, saying, we‘re staying there, we belong there like we belong in Texas and Wyoming. [emphasis added]

Yeah, that's what he said, Chris. He also said, while giggling, "I might have done a little unauthorized flight-mechanic work for Mel Carnahan, Paul Wellstone, and John F. Kennedy Jr.-- whoopsie!" and "They all did call me Daddy, because they were all hungry."

Real Clear Politics also doesn't think it's wise of Chris Matthews, of all people, to slam Dick Cheney on his current ratings.

Matthews has become an outright leftist, but only by convenience. When you're getting your ass kicked by Keith ("Who?") Olbermann -- who attracts a small but loyal audience of moonbat lunatics -- you adjust a little to chase that demographic.

Meanwhile, it's because of jackass statements like this -- to avoid these sorts of paranoid accusations -- that we consciously chose to give short-shrift to repairing Iraq's oil infrastructure, thus allowing its economy to stagnate:

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Thursday in a new report that Iraq's economy appears to be stabilizing.

However, major work remains to be done, particularly with Iraq's vast oil reserves, the country's primary source of income. The United States purposefully avoided investing in the oil export sector to the detriment of Iraq's reconstruction.

"In order not to look as if we had designs on Iraqi oil, the United States has foregone meaningful investment in the one area that would have made the biggest difference, namely Iraq's oil-exporting infrastructure," the study states.

Posted by: Ace at 09:43 PM | Comments (13)
Post contains 411 words, total size 3 kb.

You know, the one he's written fifty songs about murdering.

Dirty Centaurs (now there's a name for a blog*) explains it thusly:

Seriously, this is like if Optimus Prime and Megatron spent a weekend fishing together. And then had sex.

Now that's hot.

* Actually it's either Dirty Centaurs or "Fort Awesome," which is another good name for a blog.

He's got two good names for his blog, and "Two or Three" has, um, zero.

Posted by: Ace at 09:31 PM | Comments (19)
Post contains 85 words, total size 1 kb.

[Okay, I'm the Stupid One. Corrected at the end.

Ah, liberals.

See-Dubya snarked:

The New York Times review (and find your own damn link) was explicitly down on the Christian angle [in the Narnia film]. 'Too high a Jeesiosity quotient', I believe they said.

An anonymous liberal demands:

No link because no review maybe? It doesn't seem to exist on the NYTimes site (Times Select?). Where did you read this "jeesiosity quotient" review?

There's no such thing as a stupid question. There are, however, stupid people who ask them.

Yeah, Yeah: Obviously, not all liberals are dumb.

Just... a lot of them.

Actually, it's not that they're especially dumb so much as the chasm between their self-assessed level of intelligence and their actual level is so yawningly vast.

I'm dumb, but I'm smart enough to know what I'm dumb about. A lot of liberals... well, they kinda think that having listened to a two minute report on NPR about global warming (or cooling, or moderating, or whatever it is now) mints them into instant world-renown climatologists, able to speak fluently and confidently on long-range computer modeling of anthrogenic climate change.

And they seem to pretty humorless. Not just dour -- dour can be kind of cool, actually -- but humor-impaired.

And thus: Margaret Cho.

The LATimes Sacked Hack Robert Scheer, So That Proves Everyone's Dumber Than Me Update: The unjustifiably smug preening of a self-assessed Mensa Chapter President in full flamboyant peacockery.

It's been my theory for a while that if we just give them t-shirts that say "World's Smartest Smarty-Smart," they'll kinda go away as regards public debate.

Seriously, they just want that t-shirt. They just want us to tell them they're smarter. I don't think they really want to run the country into the ground; but, because they don't have those t-shirts, grabbing political power is currently they only manner they have of demonstrating superiority.

By withholding those t-shirts, we're kinda forcing them to run for office and then implement ruinous public policies.

If you want this country at its full potential, if you want an end to the eternal culture wars, remember the words of the Wise One:

The guys get shirts. The guys get shirts. That's just. The way. It fucking. Is.

All This Ranting For Nuthin' Update: It wasn't a liberal who asked that question. And the question wasn't stupid. The commenter meant to ask about See-Dubya's NYT review, not about a review containing the phrase "quotient of Jeesiosity." So, yeah, he knew that part was a joke.

Oh, well. Sorry, Mantis.

Posted by: Ace at 08:04 PM | Comments (55)
Post contains 413 words, total size 3 kb.

Basing it on part of the poll that said US allies would oppose US torturing terrorists on their soil. Ignoring that part about them actually feeling it was justified in rare occasions.

Other (later?) versions of the article ran with a more accurate headline.

I believe that papers that run AP stories are free to change the headlines, so this could actually be the fault of one (or several) newspaper editors working for AP-subscribed papers.

Still. For all their talk of honestly informing the public and reporting "hard truths," the "reality-based" media sure do seem to see what they want to see, and, worse yet, consciously decide to write only what they want you read.

Posted by: Ace at 07:41 PM | Comments (3)
Post contains 133 words, total size 1 kb.