By Jove, I think they've got it:

The US military is funding development of a weapon that delivers a bout of excruciating pain from up to 2 kilometres away. Intended for use against rioters, it is meant to leave victims unharmed. But pain researchers are furious that work aimed at controlling pain has been used to develop a weapon. And they fear that the technology will be used for torture.

[A whiny Brit doctor says:]"I am deeply concerned about the ethical aspects of this research..."

But of course you are, darling. If you weren't "concerned" about something the US is doing each and every morning, you fear you would suddenly cease to exist. Querito ergo sum.*

"Even if the use of temporary severe pain can be justified as a restraining measure, which I do not believe it can, the long-term physical and psychological effects are unknown."

Ever see the "long-term physical and psychological effects" of a .50 caliber machine-gun bullet?

Which sounds more humane to you, Andy?

Why even bother getting this perfectly-predictable quotes about new weapons-- any new weapons, even weapons designed to be non-lethal and spare human lives? We know what they're going to say.

"Ethical concerns... blah blah blah... unknown effects from long-term exposure... blah blah blah... arms are made for huggin'!"

Don't all of these complaints always boil down to, "I don't like this weapon; you could hurt somebody with it."

Well, no frickin' derrr. It's a weapon.

Look it up in the frigging dictionary, Niles. "Weapon [noun]: Something you could hurt somebody with."

This, you see, is sort of the point of a weapon. Unless, of course, it is a bludgeon of some type.

[Documents concern] so-called Pulsed Energy Projectiles (PEPs), which fire a laser pulse that generates a burst of expanding plasma when it hits something solid, like a person (New Scientist print edition, 12 October 2002). The weapon, destined for use in 2007, could literally knock rioters off their feet.

According to a 2003 review of non-lethal weapons by the US Naval Studies Board, which advises the navy and marine corps, PEPs produced "pain and temporary paralysis" in tests on animals. This appears to be the result of an electromagnetic pulse produced by the expanding plasma which triggers impulses in nerve cells.

Interestingly enough, one of the experts consulted, apparently on the topic of the efficient infliction of pain on a human subject, was, wait for it, a dentist:

Brian Cooper, an expert in dental pain at the University of Florida, distanced himself from the work, saying "I don't have anything interesting to convey. I was just providing some background for the group."

He wasn't paid in money. The Navy promised he could have a nice shiny souped-up Pain Gun for his office.

John Wood of University College London, UK, an expert in how the brain perceives pain, says the researchers involved in the project should face censure. "It could be used for torture," he says, "the [researchers] must be aware of this."

You know what else could be used for torture? Fists. Ropes. Razor blades. Baseball bats. Water. The special director's cut of Prince of Tides.

Jackasses. God, these nitwits just love hearing themselves pontificate.

And I oughta know about that.

* My feeble attempt at translating "I bitch and moan, therefore I am" into Latin. Let me know how badly I've goofed.

Posted by: Ace at 09:09 PM | Comments (14)
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Awww, shucks, I just did that for attention. He's not really arguing for segregation per se, and he isn't even making a point I disagree with.

What he is doing is questioning whether or not prisions should be segregated, to reduce the amount of racially-inspired violence.

I don't think it's a bad idea, necessarily. As Yglesias points out, people are in prison to serve hard time, not to "learn about different cultures" or "immerse themselves in an open, diverse environment."

I do sort of question how much it will change things, though. Might it reduce racial violence? Of course. Will it reduce violence? Well, maybe a little; but these vicious bastards will just start shivving and raping each other for different reasons.

Still, gangs are one of the worst problems in prisons, and people join them chiefly as protection against other gangs. And gangs, of course, divide down strictly racial lines; unlike on TV, gangs are not made up of one Hispanic, one Asian, one black, and white kid with a mohawk. Maybe taking race out of the mix will be beneficial.

Posted by: Ace at 07:49 PM | Comments (9)
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And by Jonathan Freedland, no less.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this, err, specimen's work, he's a viciously anti-American leftist hack.

Ilbis tips to this piece:

The war's silver lining

We need to face up to the fact that the Iraq invasion has intensified pressure for democracy in the Middle East

Jonathan Freedland

Tony Blair is not gloating. He could - but he prefers to appear magnanimous in what he hopes is victory. In our Guardian interview yesterday, he was handed a perfect opportunity to crow. He was talking about what he called "the ripple of change" now spreading through the Middle East, the slow, but noticeable movement towards democracy in a region where that commodity has long been in short supply. I asked him whether the stone in the water that had caused this ripple was the regime change in Iraq.

He could have said yes, insisting that events had therefore proved him right and the opponents of the 2003 war badly wrong. But he [graciously] did not.
...

But if he had wanted to brag and claim credit - boasting that the toppling of Saddam Hussein had set off a benign chain reaction - he would have had plenty of evidence to call on.

He then recites all the countries of the Middle East now moving towards either freedom, democracy, or peace. I won't bore you-- you know what the globe looks like. It's round and it contains a lot of orange and yellow and green countries.

Once in a while a pink one, although I'm sure there's always some hurt feelings about that.

And then he blah, blahs his disclaimer that none of this is necessarily due to, or speeded by, the historic elections of 30 January.

Let's skip through that wordcount-padding hedging.

Even so, it cannot be escaped: the US-led invasion of Iraq has changed the calculus in the region. The Lebanese protesters are surely emboldened by the knowledge that Syria is under heavy pressure, with US and France united in demanding its withdrawal. That pressure carries an extra sting if Damascus feels that the latest diplomatic signals - including Tony Blair's remark yesterday that Syria had had its "chance" but failed to take it and Condoleezza Rice's declaration that the country was "out of step with where the region is going" - translate crudely as "You're next".

Similar thinking is surely at work in the decisions of Iran and Libya on WMD and Saudi Arabia and Egypt on elections. Put simply, President Bush seems like a man on a mission to spread what he calls the "untamed fire of freedom" - and these Arab leaders don't want to get burned.

This leaves opponents of the Iraq war in a tricky position, even if the PM is not about to rub our faces in the fact. Not only did we set our face against a military adventure which seems, even if indirectly, to have triggered a series of potentially welcome side effects; we also stood against the wider world-view that George Bush represented. What should we say now?

First, we ought to admit that the dark cloud of the Iraq war may have carried a silver lining. We can still argue that the war was wrong-headed, illegal, deceitful and too costly of human lives - and that its most important gain, the removal of Saddam, could have been achieved by other means. But we should be big enough to concede that it could yet have at least one good outcome.

Second, we have to say that the call for freedom throughout the Arab and Muslim world is a sound and just one - even if it is a Bush slogan and arguably code for the installation of malleable regimes. Put starkly, we cannot let ourselves fall into the trap of opposing democracy in the Middle East simply because Bush and Blair are calling for it. Sometimes your enemy's enemy is not your friend.

Um, that last sentence would seem to mean that Mr. Freedland is just twigging on to the possibility that Al Qaeda and brutal and backwards ME regimes are not necessarily his "friends" just because they're Bush's (his enemy's) enemies.

But let us not be churlish. That was a pretty manful admission. That had to sting.

George Bush, Cowboy, is finally roping up these doggies and driving the herd home. Yee-how!

Correction: I initially said that Lileks had fisked one of this guy's sneering pieces about Georgia. Well, it wasn't Freedland -- it was a Deadwood named Matthew Engle (oh, what a giveaway!) -- and it was actually about Alabama.

See-Dubya tips me to the article; it's here, and it's worth reading. It's hysterical.

None of this is related to Jonathan Freedland, really, except both of these mutants work for the Guardian, and both hate you. Yes, you.

Here's the part that still sticks out in my mind:

Engle, being all pissy about the Olive Garden he's eating at in Birmingham, Alabama: And from the Olive Garden it does seem very distant. Indeed, the whole messy and diverse concept of Europe seems very distant.
Around Birmingham, there is nothing but miles and miles of Alabama.

Lileks: Apparently around Birmingham England, there is nothing but miles and miles of Belgium, Thailand and the Antarctic Ice Shelf.

Ohhhhh... snap!

Posted by: Ace at 04:34 PM | Comments (12)
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As Charleton Heston would say: Out of my cold, dead hands, bub.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens said on Tuesday he would push for applying broadcast decency standards to cable television and subscription satellite TV and radio.

"Cable is a much greater violator in the indecency area," the Alaska Republican told the National Association of Broadcasters, which represents most local television and radio affiliates. "I think we have the same power to deal with cable as over-the-air" broadcasters.

"There has to be some standard of decency," he said. But he also cautioned that "No one wants censorship."

This is going to sound like a joke, but it's not. This is real. It may sound funny, but this is a genuine political principle:

Any party that tries to take away the titty-channels from a red-blooded American man is a party that's looking to go the way of the Whigs.

Guys? Focus on public displays of indecency. Not private stuff.

And what comes streaming through someone's cables is private.

The minute you try taking away my access to the Spice Channel is the minute I start toying with the idea of comparing you to Hitler my own damn self.

Related Re-Post: Since new traffic is coming to this post, might as well throw a link to something else I've written.

You know, the next thing they'll want to regulate is video games.

And I won't put up with that either.

Not now that I've finally figured them out. And I share all my secrets with you here, in Ace's Generic Universal Walk-Thru For Every Fuckin' Video Game You've Ever Fuckin' Played.

But Seriously... more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:27 PM | Comments (62)
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Random Birkel tells me that I was just mentioned (by Judy Woodruff, no less).

I don't know if he's joking or not. But if you recorded it, please save it.

And if you're one of those guys who somehow knows the Ward Churchill style Totem Magic necessary to put a TV clip on the internet... my gosh, but I'd be appreciative to see it.

I'd love to show my Pappy, jes' to let him know his boy is doin' all right.

Hmmmm... There does seem to be a small uptick in Google and Yahoo referrals for the search words "Ace of Spades."

Then again, I just got a hit for a search on "Frank Gorshin Riddler," too.

Update: Birkel says scout's honor, Ace of Spades HQ was just name-checked by CNN.

Paula Zahn-- here I come, baby!

No CNN-alanche: The site was down because we got hit, once again, by a blitz of spammers.

Lexis/Nexis Transcript: Someone who didn't identify himself/herself (though I have two likely suspects in mind) was nice enough to forward me the transcript of the very brief name-check:

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:14 PM | Comments (29)
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Chris points out in the comments that, in the Jon Stewart interview, Soderbergh seems to put partisan interests ahead of American security:

"There's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget. There's hope for the rest of us. . .there's always the hope that this might not work."

Now, here's the reason I didn't seize on this: I imagine she said it with a smile on her face. I imagine she was being ironic, engaging in a bit of gallows humor.

I can't imagine that anyone close to respectable would say such a thing seriously.

So I give her a little latitude on that. I don't want my every ironic jibe treated as if I was stone-faced serious, and I don't want to say that Soderbergh was actually expressing the hopes of American failure here.

It's possible she was; certainly other leftist journalists have confessed, proudly, to openly rooting for American deaths and American failures in order to advance a partisan agenda.

But somehow, given the forum, given the semi-comic banter between them, I figure Soderbergh was just indulging in a bit of dark irony. Something I don't think should be discouraged-- the left seems to have lost its sense of humor entirely since...

Well, I'm not sure they ever had much of a sense of humor. But they've gone all Sean Penn on us these past four years.

Instapundit seems to take it somewhat seriously; Junk Yard Blog hopes she was joking.

I'll have to see the tape to confirm she was being ironic. But that's my suspicion at the moment.

On the other hand... It's always somewhat sketchy to "joke" about something you actually, in your heart of hearts, truly believe or desire. Because then you're not really joking; you're using the form of a joke to express a thought that would be otherwise embarassing.

Al Franken, Cursed Be His Name Forever, actually has a cute term for this: "kidding on the square." You're kidding, kind of, in the sense that you're saying it in a funny way, but you're on the square-- you actually pretty much mean it.

I think Soderbergh was being ironic, just joking around, just using the sort of black humor I enjoy myself on the occasion. But I think, too, she probably meant it.

But I can't really prove that. So I giver her a pass. For now.

Posted by: Ace at 11:49 AM | Comments (16)
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I've been on this like Keith Olbermann on Jeff Gannon for a few days now. For those of you late to the party, here's a quick recap. I'm omitting all the terrific news about real-world events because, frankly, there's just too much of that right now to recap, and there's more every hour or so. I'm just concentrating on the media's own paradigm shift-- its grudging admission that Bush's much-maligned "forward strategy of freedom" might actually be working.

First, David Brooks introduced the idea of Kuhnian paradigm shifts. Well, he didn't introduce it; Kuhn did. But he introduced the idea that the Iraqi elections and the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon may have been a sea-change in Arabs' and Muslims' notions of what was possible and desirable in their societies.

Thomas Friedman and Michael Barone then wrote basically the same column, speaking of "tipping points" rather than paradigm shifts.

The Friedman piece was especially important, I think. For Friedman occupies a special place among reasonable liberals-- he, along with Paul Krugman, defines the outer boundaries of liberal conventional wisdom.

Krugman tells liberals how crazy and partisan they're allowed to be and still be considered, within liberal circles anyway, not completely nutters, not one of those black-bandana wearing anarchist types.

And Friedman defines the other pole-- how conservative a liberal is allowed to be before having to turn in his membership card.

When Friedman speaks, more reasonable liberals listen. Frankly, I think he's overrated and often just tells you the bleeding obvious, but liberals understand that when Friedman says "You must admit, or at least begin to consider the possibility, that all of this may in fact work," his admirers in the New York Times and Slate and Salon and all the rest know they need to follow his lead or else they'll begin looking... well, a bit like Paul Krugman.

After Thomas Friedman gave him his marching orders, Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl then did in fact dutifully execute them.

As did the New York Times editorial page itself.

And then the BBC and even the Arab press itself.

And then fake-journalist Jon Stewart, considered by many daffy liberals to be the most trusted anchor on TV.

And then, in the Mother of All Shocks, even the NPR domino fell.

And a special, very grudging "Huzzah" to Bill Maher, who admitted this could happen before any other liberal, way back on February 4.

Unbelievable. When I first brought up the possibility that Friedman's column might cause a stampede of media groupthink towards the right, I was only half-serious.

Well, less than half-serious. I didn't think it would happen; I just speculated that with Thomas F'n' Friedman now admitting that freedom might actually work, the press corps might feel obliged to reconsider three years of relentless negativity and doom-saying.

But the stampede does in fact seem to have happened.

Anyone who can get cows to move that fast must have a little cowboy in him. Which makes Thomas Friedman something of a kindred spirit to President Bush.

Posted by: Ace at 11:27 AM | Comments (6)
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Hmm... only six months ago liberals were calling Afghanistan "The Forgotten War," claiming all manners of horrors and grotesqueries were going on there while we conservatives tried to "distract" everyone with Iraq.

Now who do you think is trying to forget about Afghanistan?

Posted by: Ace at 11:10 AM | Comments (1)
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Just after the State of the Union and the Iraqi elections, I caught a Hardball interview with Bill Maher that I had always meant to transcribe. I never got around to it, until last night.

Bill Maher isn't funny, and he's a shamelessly partisan hack, but he does occasionally call bullshit on the excesses of the left. He serves usefully, once in a while, as a canary in the coal mine of leftist lunacy.

And he seemed to be reconsidering the Iraq War as far back as February fourth.

Regarding Bush's SOTU, he said:

What I was more interested in was the shout-out to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, I thought that, I was way surprised by that, and I applaud that. I mean that's good to give both guys a little nudge.

Chris Matthews then ponders how difficult it is to tell the sons of Arab despots that their oldest sons can't simply succeed them as rulers, given that Bush succeeded his father. Except, of course, he didn't; there was a President named Clinton between them, and except for the fact that Bush was elected twice and did not "succeed" his President-King dad, a fact apparently forgotten by Matthews, or possibly challenged by him as being a fact at all.

At any rate, that idiocy out of the way, Matthews then asks, "But are you willing to give the President a modest asalute for the success of the [Iraqi elections on January 30]?" To which Maher answers:

Absolutely. And I think he did the right thing by sticking to the election ddate, because postponing it wasn't going to help.

And I think some of his sentimental rhetoric [about freedom] was borne out. I mean people really do want a different way of life there.

I think a lot of us forgot when we went into Iraq that Iraq was not a backwater like Afghanistan, not a country that was recently in the Middle Ages like Saudi Arabia. They picked Iraq, of course they lied to get us there...

See the below post on Jon Stewart's whine for an answer to that bit of kneejerk hackery.

...because [Iraq does] have a middle class society. And Baghdad could be Beirut. Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East before the civil war. Cairo, I think the people in Cairo, Egypt, are looking at that election and go, "Wow! How bad are we doing now?! Iraq has pased us. Now they're having a real elections; we don't have one yet."

I think places like Teheran, even, in Iran, if you got rid of the mullahs, Baghdad, Cairo, these are cities that really could be European cities. [Cities that] hat really coud be someplace that would change the world.

Two points:

Why does Bill Maher feel he has to tell us which countries Teheran and Cairo are located in?

And he pronounces "mullahs" as "Moolahs," which Bush just took some ribbing for by the left. I doubt they'll nail Maher on his similar mispronunciation.

He concludes with the standard disclaimer:

However, having said that, I don't think it's necessarily true that this election over in Iraq has achieved the goal that we're all looking for, which is to make us safer.

Little bonus: After the break, Chris Matthews noted that the Iraqis had to dip a finger in indelible ink to prove they had only voted once, and they had to show ID. He wondered why we didn't have the same system in the US, to keep people from voting multiple times in the cities.

Maher and Matthews remain jackasses, but give Maher credit for at least admitting the possibility that the elections in Iraq could change the political dynamic throughout the Middle East-- and for doing so well before Thomas Friedman told him it was now officially Safe and Socially Acceptable to admit this.

Posted by: Ace at 10:43 AM | Comments (9)
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I did not see this coming:

All Things Considered, March 1, 2005 · NPR's senior news analyst says that recent events in Lebanon and Egypt suggest that the Middle East is moving towards democracy. Bush may have had it right when he said that a liberated Iraq could show the power of freedom to transform the region.

-- News Analysis by Daniel Schorr

Follow the links from Hubs and Spokes to Winds of Change to listen to Daniel Schorr's reconsideration of the Bush Doctrine.

Posted by: Ace at 09:51 AM | Comments (5)
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