The MSM: A Growing Peril.

It's so sad when effete narcisstic children grab the megaphone without integrity or accountability.

Posted by: Ace at 07:27 PM | Comments (8)
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A shrill attack on bloggers. Indeed, Ms. Parker, we are a "growing peril."

Tom Cruise isn't worried about Hollywood moving productions to Canada or Eastern Europe. It's the lighting guys and boom-mike-guys who are worried.

Bloggers are not a threat to, say, Brian Williams, but we most definitely are a threat to those on the lowest rungs of the media ladder. Like yourself. No offense.

She's a low-ranking member of the guild, so darnit, she's going to defend that guild to the hilt. She worked to hard to (barely) get in it.

And if you think I'm being unfair, read this screed.

Not since the birth of the printing press have our lives been so dramatically affected by the way we create and consume information - both to our enormous benefit and, perhaps, to our growing peril.

...

It is... our new enemies - that interests me most. I don't mean al-Qaida or Osama bin Laden, but the less visible, insidious enemies of decency, humanity and civility - the angry offspring of narcissism's quickie marriage to instant gratification.

"Our new enemies." Bloggers and blog readers, she means. But wait for it-- she's about to babble about bloggers writing screechy, screedy, nasty rants.

There's something frankly creepy about the explosion we now call the Blogosphere....

Although I've been a blog fan since the beginning, and have written favorably about the value added to journalism and public knowledge thanks to the new "citizen journalist," I'm also wary of power untempered by restraint and accountability.

Say what you will about the so-called mainstream media, but no industry agonizes more about how to improve its product, police its own members and better serve its communities. Newspapers are filled with carpal-tunneled wretches, overworked and underpaid, who suffer near-pathological allegiance to getting it right.

I've got nothing to add to that, except a pause. A pause filled with venomous silent sarcasm.

...

[BLoggers] hold the same megaphone as the adults and enjoy perceived credibility owing to membership in the larger world of blog grown-ups. These effete and often clever baby "bloggies" are rich in time and toys, but bereft of adult supervision. Spoiled and undisciplined, they have grabbed the mike and seized the stage, a privilege granted not by years in the trenches, but by virtue of a three-pronged plug and the miracle of WiFi.

They play tag team with hyperlinks ("I'll say you're important if you'll say I'm important) and shriek "Gotcha!" when they catch some weary wage earner in a mistake or oversight. Plenty smart but lacking in wisdom, they possess the power of a forum, but neither the maturity nor humility that years of experience impose.

Umm, we play tag-team with hyperlinks?

But I love how someone who thinks she's part of the media is all upset because we cry "Gotcha!" when we catch the press in a mistake or, our favorite, deliberate dishonesty or the covering up of a mistake.

Ms. Parker-- this is precisely what the media does to every other occupation on earth. Why should reporters be immune from the same treatment?

It is famously difficult to convict a lawyer of malpractice; much easier to convict a doctor, accountant, or financial advisor of malpractice. Why? Well, duh: Lawyers look out for their own. Lawyers can sue everyone on earth for malpractice, but just trying to get one of them for that. Much more difficult, by design.

They're above the malpractice rules, pretty much.

And Ms. Parker similarly believes our nasty, preening, mistake-prone and frequently dishonest "Gotcha!" press should be shielded from their own "Gotcha!" paybacks.

...

What Golding demonstrated [in Lord of the Flies]- and what we're witnessing as the Blogosphere's offspring multiply - is that people tend to abuse power when it is unearned and will bring down others to enhance themselves.

Sort of like the media.

Likewise, many bloggers seek the destruction of others for their own self-aggrandizement.

Sort of like the media.

When a mainstream journalist stumbles, they pile on like so many savages, hoisting his or her head on a bloody stick as Golding's children did the fly-covered head of a butchered sow.

Sort of like the media did when Michael Brown stumbled. Or Harriet Miers. Or any one of a thousand other victims of the MSM pigpile.

Schadenfreude - pleasure in others' misfortunes - has become the new barbarity on an island called Blog. When someone trips, whether Dan Rather or Eason Jordan or Judith Miller, bloggers are the bloodthirsty masses slavering for a public flogging. Incivility is their weapon and humanity their victim.

I think it was Michelle Cotelle who said on a talk show a few weeks back that what really gets the media salivating for blood is hypocrisy and dishonesty. Well, we're the same, Ms. Parker. Except we get excited when we catch your buddies in hypocrisy and dishonesty -- and you just don't like that the same treatment you give to everyone else is being inflicted now on you.

"Humanity their victim." I always knew I was incivil, but I really didn't ever imagine I was victimizing humanity.

...

We can't silence them, but for civilization's sake - and the integrity of information by which we all live or die - we can and should ignore them.

I've had to cut out a lot to comply with fair-use laws, but she gets in a lot of screedy insults that I didn't quote.

Sort of like a blogger, actually.

Ms. Parker, incivility is your weapon, and humanity your victim.

Posted by: Ace at 07:15 PM | Comments (37)
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Democratic Politicians, Paul Krugman To Be Hardest Hit

A fifth straight year of economic expansion in 2006 promises to mean new jobs, higher pay, and maybe even fatter investment portfolios for millions of Americans.

...

There's no guarantee that the economy will actually match current expectations of 3.4 percent growth next year. But of more than 50 business economists surveyed by Blue Chip Economic Indicators, all but five see growth of 3 percent or higher. The lowest forecast is 2.6 percent. The upshot for those who work, shop, and invest would be a solid but not exciting environment.

"I think we'll see decent income growth and decent job growth," says Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight in Lexington, Mass. "The average household will be better off, but moderately."

The consensus forecast calls for:

• Rising pay. Disposable incomes will rise by 3.2 percent, after inflation, more than double this year's gain.

• Costlier borrowing. ... [though] small upticks from current levels.

• Moderate inflation. The consumer price index will rise 3.0 percent during 2006, down slightly from 2005.

• Healthy profits. Corporate earnings will grow 7.9 percent, but that's less than half the pace of 2005....

• A strong job market. Unemployment to remain level at 5.0 percent. While job creation is not forecast in the Blue Chip survey, some experts call for job growth to reach 2 million for the year, higher than 2005 and much stronger than the early years of the current economic expansion.

Let me add in my own forecast that Iraq will be largely stabilized by the summer of 2006, prompting the withdrawal of 20,000 more troops, and I'd say that the Democrats are in a spot of trouble.

Then again, they can always rely on the nation's ravenous hunger for gay-marriage and Brokeback Mountain, as Frank Rich believes, to help them win the culture debate. So they've got that working for them.

Posted by: Ace at 06:18 PM | Comments (15)
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The party of compassion strikes again:

Recently, I was invited to address a local Republican Women's Club; my landlord read an article in the local paper reporting on the event. Soon after, I received a notice raising the Dome Village rent from $2,500 a month to $18,330. Shocked, I inquired as to the seriousness of the change and the property owner blurted out that the cause of our "eviction" was "because you are Republican." He said that as a Democrat, he was tired of helping me and the Dome Village. In other words, let the homeless be damned.

And people think the Democrats are the party of compassion and tolerance. Private property should be protected, of course, and I have no intention of causing any trouble for this property owner as we part ways. Whatever he does with his valuable land -- it is only a few blocks from the Staples Center -- is no concern of mine, and I will not go to court.

Still, I cannot help but be saddened by the whole business. When I founded the Dome Village 12 years ago, we had an understanding that he could ask for his property back at any time for any reason, and I would say "absolutely" without hesitation. Still, his reason was prejudice against Republicans.

I love that the guy isn't even entertaining the idea of going to court. (I don't think he'd have much of a case, but there's always that threat.)

Memo to liberals: No matter how right and righteous you believe yourselves to be, and no matter how wrongheaded you think Republicans are, it does not give you the right to act like total f'n' pricks.

These are the same people who endlessly weep about the Hollywood Blacklist, forever. But it seems as soon as they get a little bit of power, and the ability to likewise blacklist those whose politics they don't like, they jump at the chance.

Eh. "Do as I say, not as I do." The really cool thing about being a hyperpartisan leftist is that you have such wonderful thoughts it pretty much cancels out any bad acts you commit.

I suppose that's one of the main selling points at recruitment centers.

Posted by: Ace at 05:51 PM | Comments (5)
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Although Kong, more recently released, edged Narnia over the weekend, Narnia is now back to beating Kong:

"Kong" finished a solid second on Tuesday with $7,919,225. But "Narnia" ruled, with $9,224,127.

The two movies have been locked in a dead heat for the last two weeks, but it now seems that "Narnia" has completely wedged "Kong" out of first place.

This can only be frustrating news for the folks at Universal. "Kong" cost $300 million, including marketing and promotion. At this rate, it will take a long time to recoup its expenses and see a profit.

In related news, Hugh Hewitt just called Allah to ask him when he could put him in a pretty sundress and take him out dancin'. And maybe make him "do some stuff" to his friends.

In fairness, it probably didn't help any that when Jack Black was on SNL to promote the failing Kong picture, this was the only thing on the show worth watching.

Jack Black did a Kong song, too. But, uhhh... you're not seeing that one on the Internet, now are you?

Posted by: Ace at 05:14 PM | Comments (5)
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Lucy Liu?

[Two archeologists] believe that early-human fossil discoveries over the past ten years suggest very different conclusions about where humans, or humanlike beings, first walked the Earth.

New Asian finds are significant, they say, especially the 1.75 million-year-old small-brained early-human fossils found in Dmanisi, Georgia, and the 18,000-year-old "hobbit" fossils (Homo floresiensis) discovered on the island of Flores in Indonesia.

Such finds suggest that Asia's earliest human ancestors may be older by hundreds of thousands of years than previously believed, the scientists say.

"What seems reasonably clear now," Dennell said, "is that the earliest hominins in Asia did not need large brains or bodies." These attributes are usually thought to be prerequisites for migration.

Not when you gots the mad kung-fu skillz, foolz!

Posted by: Ace at 04:50 PM | Comments (28)
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Lucy Liu?

[Two archeologists] believe that early-human fossil discoveries over the past ten years suggest very different conclusions about where humans, or humanlike beings, first walked the Earth.

New Asian finds are significant, they say, especially the 1.75 million-year-old small-brained early-human fossils found in Dmanisi, Georgia, and the 18,000-year-old "hobbit" fossils (Homo floresiensis) discovered on the island of Flores in Indonesia.

Such finds suggest that Asia's earliest human ancestors may be older by hundreds of thousands of years than previously believed, the scientists say.

"What seems reasonably clear now," Dennell said, "is that the earliest hominins in Asia did not need large brains or bodies." These attributes are usually thought to be prerequisites for migration.

Not when you gots the mad kung-fu skillz, foolz!

Posted by: Ace at 04:50 PM | Comments (28)
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The Ultimate Cool Fact About Chuck Norris. But...

Staus: Undetermined. I haven't been able to verify any of this. So it could all be made up. The extract below is credited to Eonline, without a link.

Chuck Norris, Real Life "Texas Ranger"

Maybe they can get the attorneys on Law & Order to defend them.

For 67 people collared on crack-cocaine distribution charges in 1997 in Terrell, Texas, getting arrested must have been as surreal as it was disturbing. That's because karate champ-actor Chuck Norris - star of such beat-the-beejesus out of felons and foreigners movie classics as Invasion USA, Silent Rage, Forced Vengeance and the Missing in Action saga - was there to put on the cuffs.

Norris, who films his six-season-old CBS series, Walker: Texas Ranger in nearby Dallas, had been moonlighting as a reserve cop for the Terrell PD for a couple of years. Accordingly, he did his part for the department's narcotics sting that culminated with a raid on three so-called, 'drug rings.'

One understandably confused suspect who was overcome by the bizarre nature of having a minor celebrity arrest him asked, "Is this a movie?"

Yeah, it's oooooold. But still.

Thanks to Allah Pompous!

Posted by: Ace at 03:05 PM | Comments (4)
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The goofy world of quantum physics.

Background:

Imagine that a pair of electrons are shot out from the disintegration of some other particle, like fragments from an explosion. By law certain properties of these two fragments should be correlated. If one goes left, the other goes right; if one spins clockwise, the other spins counterclockwise.

That means, Einstein said, that by measuring the velocity of, say, the left hand electron, we would know the velocity of the right hand electron without ever touching it.

Conversely, by measuring the position of the left electron, we would know the position of the right hand one.

Since neither of these operations would have involved touching or disturbing the right hand electron in any way, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen argued that the right hand electron must have had those properties of both velocity and position all along. That left only two possibilities, they concluded. Either quantum mechanics was "incomplete," or measuring the left hand particle somehow disturbed the right hand one.

But the latter alternative violated common sense. Such an influence, or disturbance, would have to travel faster than the speed of light. "My physical instincts bristle at that suggestion," Einstein later wrote.

Bohr responded with a six-page essay in Physical Review that contained but one simple equation, Heisenberg's uncertainty relation. In essence, he said, it all depends on what you mean by "reality."

Does this mean that one can have two entangled particles, separated by light years of space (one on earth, one on, say, Andromeda-5) and change the spin of one (therefore instanteously changing the spin of its partner) and therefore have the makings of an instanteous communications system?

Do sci-fi fans know if "quantum radio" is usually the explanation for FTL communications?

Posted by: Ace at 02:20 PM | Comments (24)
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I mean, a round-up of posts, mostly about genitals. And the Vikings sex-cruise.

Circumcision losing popularity in the US.

Health professionals caution women against, um, the "feminine pause that refreshes."

If you're upset you lost your, uhhh, maidenhead to a jackass on Prom Night, plastic surgery can give you a second chance to experience your first time.

All the grim details about the Vikings Sex Cruise. (Warning: this one's particularly frank in its descriptions).

Question: Does Fred Smoot's behavior count as "placating"? I'm not sure. But it's very exciting, to say the least.

Posted by: Ace at 01:45 PM | Comments (35)
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