Dave continues mocking me by bringing more "new" Internet funnies to my attention.

Yeah, yeah. Giggle at a retard.

You might want to check out his list, though, as it includes some classics that are still funny, and some stuff you might have (horrors!) not seen before.

Posted by: Ace at 02:54 PM | Comments (27)
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It's Allah's tip and Allah's title. And when Allah sends you a tip and a title, you publish it as is, or you risk being in a world of shit. And, for you Allah fans, most of the rest of this is right from the Maker of Wisdom Himself:

Tired of hearing Europeans sniff about American gluttony? You should be.

Supersize Moi!:

At least seven European countries now challenge the United States in size — at least around the waistline. In a group of nations from Greece to Germany, the proportion of overweight or obese men is higher than in the U.S., experts said Tuesday in a major analysis of expanding girth on the European continent.

"The time when obesity was thought to be a problem on the other side of the Atlantic has gone by," said Mars Di Bartolomeo, Luxembourg's Minister of Health.

Emigration must be looking more attractive than ever to Filet o' Fish.

Next time one of you asks, "Hey, Ace, where's Allah? What's he up to?," now you know-- he's mah bitch.

Posted by: Ace at 01:37 PM | Comments (10)
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Dorian Davis uncorks on the Ninth Circuit, an the judiciary generally:

In the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, it is perfectly legal to finance and train terrorists--and harbor them--but illegal to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

...

A few questions for liberals. 1) Are judges smarter than we are? 2) What makes them smart? 3) Law school? 4) Is Anton Scalia smart? 5) If not, why? 6) If so, then who do you actually trust to make decisions about abortion and gay marriage--voters, or a panel of nine Anton Scalias? 7) Finally, if you preferred the voters to Anton Scalia, then why on earth should the rest of us put our fates in the hands of the Ruth Bader Ginsbergs on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals?

Some may argue that, among judges, there is both a liberal and a conservative bias. There is not. The so-called "conservative bias" is constructionism, a reasonable assumption that the constitution was meant to be read and interpreted at face value. To the contrary, the judiciary's liberal bias assumes that the Founding Fathers encrypted the constitution with secret rights that weren't necessarily written out in black in white.

Warning: He uses the word "p*ppyc*ck," without bowlderizing it, as I have, for the safety of my readers.

Thanks to Alarming News, who also has an update to the Rachel Corrie lawsuit saga -- now they're going after the maker of the bulldozer, Caterpillar.

Because, you know, it was a design defect that a bulldozer weighed more than forty pounds.

Posted by: Ace at 01:25 PM | Comments (19)
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Simultaneously interesting, obvious, and utterly stupid:

The convictions of dozens of death-row inmates in California are coming under legal scrutiny because of accusations that Jews and black women were excluded from juries in capital trials in Alameda County as "standard practice."

A former Alameda prosecutor, John R. Quatman, made the contentions in a sworn declaration in the habeas corpus case of Fred H. Freeman. Mr. Freeman is a condemned inmate who is seeking to overturn his conviction in 1987 in a killing and robbery at a bar in Berkeley.

Mr. Quatman, who worked for 26 years as a deputy district attorney and prosecuted the case, said the trial judge, Stanley Golde, advised him during jury selection that "no Jew would vote to send a defendant to the gas chamber."

"Judge Golde was only telling me what I already should have known to do," Mr. Quatman's statement said. "It was standard practice to exclude Jewish jurors in death cases."

The problem arises from an earlier SC decision that it constituted a reversible denial of fair trial rights to exclude persons of certain races from a jury.

Trouble is, it was a stupid decision. Yes, in a perfect world, we would like to pretend race and sex mean nothing at all about anything; but it is simply a fact that blacks are less likely to convict blacks, women are less likely to convict anyone, old white guys know who's guilty "jess by lookin' at 'em," etc. The SC's rule was just at odds with common sense and good trial strategy.

And so it goes.

Thanks to Chickpea, or, perhaps, Daddy Chickpea.

Posted by: Ace at 01:16 PM | Comments (4)
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Interesing post-obituary article on Dan Rather.

It seems his testimony helped end the Fairness Doctrine, and thereby advanced his ability to be as liberal as he wanted to be... but also for conservatives to offer their opinions without being mealy-mouthed about them:

Dan Rather provided key expert testimony that figured prominently in the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in August 1987. Some might suggest that by doing so, he unleashed a tide of real diversity in the opinion and news business, and thus helped seal the fate of his infamous 60 Minutes report on President Bush's National Guard service. And some would be right--but this irony does nothing to detract from Rather's important contribution to the demise of an egregious obstacle to the freedom of the press.

The Fairness Doctrine, instituted in 1949, mandated that each radio or TV station (a) feature news and (b) offer balanced perspectives. The penalty for noncompliance was, potentially, the loss of a license, thus encouraging broadcasters to offer news and opinion only in their mildest, least controversial form. Yet, the reigning assumption was that speech was being protected by the Fairness Doctrine, not inhibited.

...

What led the FCC to this bold move was a 1985 report documenting the doctrine's "chilling effect" on speech.

One historical gem it contained was the campaign launched by the Democratic National Committee after the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty encountered populist opposition. The Kennedy-Johnson administration blamed conservative radio shows, initiating (through the DNC) a system to monitor the airwaves and file extensive "fairness" complaints. As one operative later testified: "Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters" into silence. The FCC concluded that the Fairness Doctrine provided "a pervasive and significant impediment to the broadcasting of controversial issues," and that news broadcasts and diverse viewpoints would flourish in its absence.

The prediction was dead on. Informational formats (news, talk, and public affairs), just 7 percent of all AM stations in 1987, jumped to 28 percent in 1995--dramatic statistical evidence of the doctrine's chilling effect.

Posted by: Ace at 01:10 PM | Comments (1)
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51-49, no filibuster permitted:

Amid the backdrop of soaring oil and gasoline prices, a sharply divided Senate on Wednesday voted to open the ecologically rich [read: they have many varieties of "environmentally-sensitive" lifeless tundra mud] Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling, delivering a major energy policy win for President Bush.

The Senate, by a 51-49 vote, rejected an attempt by Democrats and GOP moderates to remove a refuge drilling provision from next year's budget, preventing opponents from using a filibuster - a tactic that has blocked repeated past attempts to open the Alaska refuge to oil companies.

The action, assuming Congress agrees on a budget, clears the way for approving drilling in the refuge later this year, drilling supporters said. The House has not included a similar provision in its budget, so the issue is still subject to negotiations later this year to resolve the difference.

I really didn't think they'd ever manage this one.

Huzzah!

Support Oil Exploration in ANWR

Because if caribou can survive freezing their nards off in perpetually subzero temperatures, they're probably butch enough to hack an oil pipeline in their fields of vision.

Posted by: Ace at 12:44 PM | Comments (16)
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Newsflash: that "hocky-stick" purporting to demonstrate rapidly-rising temperatures is a hoax.

This record of Northern Hemisphere temperature variation in the last 1,000 years shows a recent warming trend apparently linked to human activities.

New work in the journal Geophysical Research Letters questions its validity, challenging the way it was originally put together.

Other scientists say the work simply highlights a technical issue.

...

The authors say that when they took [the original hockey-stick analysis' biased methodology] into account, the results in the 1998 paper did not achieve statistical significance.

"This means their model is not qualified for projecting temperatures back more than 500 years," Dr McKitrick added.

...
However, even those scientists who agree with evidence for recent, strong anthropogenic warming have reservations about models such as the hockey stick.

According to Professor John Waterhouse, of Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge, UK, the so-called Medieval Warm Period (AD 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (AD 1600-1850) do not show up.

"Most climate researchers expected them to be there," he told the BBC News website.

Um, yeah. That's what bugs me the most. We know for a fact that the Northern Hemisphere, at least, was so warm for a period that grains became incredibly cheap, they grew grapes for wine in dreary, cold England, and that even Greenland was warm enough for primative agriculture to sustain a large colony.

Yet the hockey-stick says: No such warming ever occurred.

Except, of course, that it did.

Posted by: Ace at 12:23 PM | Comments (7)
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Evan sends:

I think Trudeau's main strength is that he appeals to newspaper staffs and in particular to the editorial page. His sensibility evokes NPR at its most earnest, a very mannered "isn't that obvious?" conformity that embodies the editorial we. There is real wit at work here – sometimes even a joke with a punchline – but it's so plainly self-blind that after a few strips it starts to wear thin.

...

In between comparing himself to Walt Kelly and whining that no one gives him credit for his sloppy pencils (after 26 years the man hasn't learned to ink his own meager output), Trudeau muddles on with Baby Boomer cluelessness. Part of the Doonesbury tradition from the past decade has been its stilted portrayal of anyone younger than 25, as many recent strips demonstrate. The attempts at hip jargon are so pathetic – "dopest", "dawg" – that I wonder if it's an elaborate put-on. Why include characters you can't write dialogue for? Maybe it's Trudeau harkening to the strip's collegiate origins, maybe it's a generational narcissism straining to identify with contemporary youth, maybe it's just middle-age desperation. It's all part of the Boomer attitude, I guess. They either detest the more recent generations or they worship them as reflections of themselves. Sometimes both in the same day.

He also thinks that Trudeau can't draw.

Posted by: Ace at 11:24 AM | Comments (11)
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Both at the very tops of their respective games, togther reaching a combined audience of several million people (plus Willis' 3000 or so), both highly respected and accomplished media doyennes.

Who will prevail this digital-age Götterdämmerung?
John From Wuzzadem has a report about this momentous struggle.

No Mas Update? It looks like Willis won-- Brit Hume just announced he is resigning as anchor of FoxNews, citing his long history of deliberate lies on behalf of "Evil."

Wait. That doesn't sound right.

Slublog, with a new address, reports that Willis has finally taken down his idiotic "Resign, Brit" banner.

What if they threw a grassroots effort and no one came, except to giggle at a retard?

Bill From InDC Update: A glimpse into Oliver Willis' future. Good stuff.

Sorry I swiped that link from you, Slublog.

Posted by: Ace at 10:36 AM | Comments (17)
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You know, when Ari Fleisher, immediately after the 9-11 attacks and Bill Maher's praise of the courage of the hijackers (as opposed to the lack thereof of our nation and military in responding to previous attacks), said, "We all need to watch what we say," the media dwelled on this off-the-cuff remark for years, citing it as evidence of the Bush Administration's antipathy towards free speech.

Well, MSM, what the hell are we to make of this?

"We learned," Kerry continued [at a speech after being presented with yet another fakey award], "that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"

...

"A lot of the mainstream media were very responsible during the campaign. They tried to put out a balanced view, and they did show what they thought to be the truth in certain situations of attack. . . . But it never penetrated. And when you look at the statistics and understand that about 80 percent of America gets 100 percent of its news from television, and a great deal of that news comes from either MTV, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Jay Leno, David Letterman, you begin to see the size of the challenge." (Those were all Kerry supporters or, at any rate, Bush opponents, but this thought--if any thinking occurred--didn't slow Kerry.) "And so I don't have the total answer. I just know it's something that we've really got to grapple with."

Emphasis added. Lord, I'm sick of writing that. It's pointless. People don't talk in bodface, after all.

Here we have Senator Kerry wondering what we should do about this pesky free-speech thing; something, it seems, we all need to "grapple with."

No one in the MSM seems to have noticed, have they? We don't hear any comment from Jonathan Alter about Kerry's somewhat contemptuous estimations of the public's ability to sift through differing accounts and draw conclusions, nor about his suggestion that something -- something! -- needs to be done to make sure the American people get the "right information" and only, as he sees it and he decrees it, the "right information."

P.J. O'Rourke noticed, though, and while he's more serious here than usual -- as he should be, I think -- he's worth reading on the point.

Imagine George Bush making these remarks. Would we ever hear the end of it?

Posted by: Ace at 10:21 AM | Comments (9)
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