Fictitious threat, Part 7,658. Blair is just manipulating Brits' fears to increase Bush's popularity ratings. Or something:

THOUSANDS of police marksmen will be on LondonÂ’s streets and rooftops again today after warnings that another team of suicide bombers is plotting a third attack on the capital.
The new group is believed to be made up of British Muslims who were understood to be close to staging an attack on the Underground network last week. According to security sources the men are thought to be of Pakistani origin but born and brought up in this country. They have links with the Leeds-based terrorist cell that staged the July 7 attacks, in which 52 innocent people died.

Even with the transport system so heavily guarded, police and intelligence sources believe that the bombers are intent on once more attacking LondonÂ’s bus and Underground network. Another multiple suicide strike is also intended to demonstrate how the network can call on more recruits. The men are said to have access to explosives.

US security sources said yesterday that this third group of would-be bombers met at Finsbury Park mosque in North London, where some of the July 7 terrorists are also known to have stayed. There are reports that this team originally planned to strike last Thursday, which is why more than 6,000 police, half of them armed, were present at Underground stations. Scotland Yard said at the time that this exercise, the biggest since the Second World War, was to test their resources and reassure a nervous public.

As commuters return to work today police chiefs say that the arrest of five suspected bombers in house raids in Birmingham, London and Rome has not ended this threat. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of the anti-terrorist branch, said: “The threat remains and is very real.”

There is concern among ministers and police at how long officers can continue such an intensive operation to “lock down” London while a threat remains. Although reinforcements have been brought in and leave has been cancelled, resources are stretched to keep up the guard on the capital, which is costing £500,000 a day. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, admitted that his officers were “very, very tired”.

Gee, who'd have thought the Finsbury Park mosque would turn out to be a problem?:

The major link between the two sets of bombers is that the alleged leaders of both groups attended Finsbury Park mosque. Experts are studying similarities between the bombs used on July 7 and 21.

Shockingly enough, radical Islamist terrorists prefer attending mosques run by radical Islamist terrorist-encouraging imams.

And, with one of the bombers caught after being sheltered in Italy, Italy fears a coming strike as well:

Italian police say they are using Hussain’s phone records to unpick the international network that has been helping him. Alfredo Mantovano, an Interior Ministry official, said that the network “confirms the presence in our country of autonomous Islamic cells . . . which could represent a concrete threat.” Italy is worried that it is the next target for Islamic terrorists.

Britain needs to get real and grow up about this threat. Alas, I fear the British will be re-educated against their will rather than smartening up on their own.

But just in case there are those who are willing to understand:

Fundamentally, we're useful idiots

By Anthony Browne

As the rest of Europe acts, extreme Islamists take advantage of British naivety

ELEMENTS WITHIN the British establishment were notoriously sympathetic to Hitler. Today the Islamists enjoy similar support. In the 1930s it was Edward VIII, aristocrats and the Daily Mail; this time it is left-wing activists, The Guardian and sections of the BBC. They may not want a global theocracy, but they are like the West’s apologists for the Soviet Union — useful idiots.

Islamic radicals, like Hitler, cultivate support by nurturing grievances against others. Islamists, like Hitler, scapegoat Jews for their problems and want to destroy them. Islamists, like Hitler, decree that the punishment for homosexuality is death. Hitler divided the world into Aryans and subhuman non-Aryans, while Islamists divide the world into Muslims and sub-human infidels. Nazis aimed for their Thousand-Year Reich, while Islamists aim for their eternal Caliphate. The Nazi party used terror to achieve power, and from London to Amsterdam, Bali to New York, Egypt to Turkey, Islamists are trying to do the same.

The two fascisms, one racial and one religious, one beaten and the other resurgent, are evil in both their ideology and their methodology, in their supremacism, intolerance, belief in violence and threat to democracy.

Worth reading in full. Americans (mostly) understand this, but only a fraction of Brits do.

Obviously I don't want to see any further terrorism, especially against our greatest ally, but I just don't see the British mindset changing rapidly enough to forestall another slaughter.

Posted by: Ace at 05:38 PM | Comments (37)
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This is only of interst to bloggers, but...

Okay, so I've been waiting to here from Pajamas Media, the last best chance at some of that Crazy Blog-Money I crave.

And it turns out... well, apart from a signing bonus, they're pretty much offering me just a little more per month than I've been making on BlogAds. But with BlogAds, I can have great months, whereas with Pajamas Media I'm stuck at the same level every quarter.

Or, I could go with the "Basic" plan, in which case I can continue using BlogAds too, but Pajamas Media gets the top four slots, which will of course depress my BlogAds prices.

I'm not knocking Pajamas Media. I suppose they did their best to negotiate with the sort of big coporate advertisers they wanted to attract. But they're barely offering more than Internet-based t-shirt sellers are offering.

Long story short: You can't make money in blogging unless you're one of the top ten bloggers. So, probably, best not to try at all.

Oh, And... I never had much by way of illusions that blogging could provide a salary, but I had hoped that Pajamas Media could manage to make it a worthwhile side-gig.

But the amount I'm being offered (and I'm a semi-somewhat-large blogger) doesn't even make it that.

I think it's time to go back to my sequined throw-pillow business.

Posted by: Ace at 01:49 PM | Comments (27)
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On stem cells, natch.

Bill points out that seven or so (lost count) frozen embryos were destroyed in the process of creating "snoflake baby" Trey Jones. Which I think is a good point, though I'm not really sure why.

But better is his point about a Red State contributor calling Bill Frist a "traitor."

Please. Can't we be above that sort of crap?

I take solace when the Kosmonauts punch up Hillary! for having the temerity to suggest a truce with the moderate-posturing DLC. The woman calls for a truce -- the most anodyne and disposable bit of speechifying there is; who's against unity, for crying out loud? -- and the Kosmonauts go batshit crazy.

But it appears it's going on on the right, too.

I know a lot of readers disagree with me on the stem-cell issue but I trust most don't think I'm a "traitor" for having a different set of assumptions and priorities.

Posted by: Ace at 01:41 PM | Comments (33)
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Predictably.

Somehow a rather large sum of public money for a youth and seniors' charity ended up being "loaned" to Air America. Air America hasn't repaid this "loan" yet, though it promises to do so.

The left -- beginning with Daily Kos (who else?) and spreading to its various client-blogs -- is calling this a "phony" story ginned up by extreme right-wingers.

Of course.

How can it be a phony story, Radio Equalizer wants to know, if Air America admitted it must pay back the money?

Obviously, then, money went from a charity to Air America. Is that within the operating parameters of the charity? Just loaning (or, perhaps, "loaning," if you know what I mean and I think you do) money to a for-profit talk radio network? I sort of doubt it, though I guess it's possible that's an allowable use of pubic tax money and private charitable donations. Either way, though, this isn't a "phony" story; there's possible wrongdoing here, and it needs to be investigated.

The reality-based community. Okay.

Oliver Willis' pet phrase is "the right wing Wurlitzer machine," by which I suppose he means the lockstep repetition of claims from right-leaning blogs.

I don't know. I attack Instapundit all the time, was all over Andrew Sullivan back when most considered him a conservative, and here on the right we've had vigorous disagreements about drug legalization, the patriot act, random searches of bags at subway stops, Terry Schiavo, and stem cell research.

And yet the left seems to be in unison (as of yet) in defending Air America.

Who's playing songs only from the approved corporate playlist, Oliver?

Posted by: Ace at 01:21 PM | Comments (26)
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Not big on patriotism, apparently:

I can therefore recommend it to any and all audiences
lacking higher brain functions. Sea cucumbers, perhaps. Ones waving American
flags.

And:

For a movie to pretend, in the face of the deaths of tens of
thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children directly or indirectly caused by
our presence there, that we can wage war without anyone really getting hurt
isn't naive, or wishful thinking, or a jim-dandy way to spend a Saturday night
at the movies. It's an obscenity.

Yeah, I was really angered that Batman Begins failed to show the genuine carnage of the War in Iraq, too. Come on! All this silly crime-fighting in a black armored suit. Should have given the project to Oliver Stone, who'd tell us the real story of Batman, and his support for cryptofascist control of our country by six families (the Waynes of Gotham being one of the worst, of course).

Couple of points:

All "prestige" Hollywood productions, to the extent they're political, are left-tilting.

The only conservative-tilting movies are these disposable, dumb entertainments like Stealth, which, this reviewer's idiocy aside, I'm pretty sure is a crappy and stupid film.

Yes, we on the right probably spend too much time knocking the liberal media.

But it's amazing how some on the left are so threatened by the occasional intrusion of right-leaning messages into "their" little domain.

Roger Ebert reviewed Team America: World Police for its "nihilism," for its even handed (and thus "nihilistic") goring of the left and right.

What if Team America had only gored the left? Would Ebert suddenly have fallen in love with the film for not being "nihilistic," but rather coherent in its political message? I rather doubt it.

Thanks to Old Coot.

Posted by: Ace at 12:48 PM | Comments (23)
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Okay, summer vacation is only halfway through, and Chuck Schumer is not a semi-retarded six-year-old (occasional indications to the contrary notwithstanding), but still, pretty funny.

Posted by: Ace at 12:36 PM | Comments (2)
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In case you didn't know, there's a debate whether the ninth planet, Pluto, was ever discovered. There are a lot of small to mid-sized planetoids in a belt beyond Neptune, and Pluto's small size, plus the fact that it's not really a great deal bigger than a bunch of other icy rocks out there, has prompted some astronomers to strip Pluto of its deisgnation as the ninth planet. Instead, they want to lump Pluto in with what they call non-planet "Trans-Neptunian Objects." Pluto would just be the biggest of that non-planet bunch.

Obviously, this angers a lot of people, chiefly because, and I'm quite seriosus about this, we've done a dozen science dioramas featuring Pluto as a planet and we're not ready yet to call our entire childhoods a lie. Everything else in our childhoods turned out to be a lie, but not Pluto. Pluto we thought we could count on.

Now comes the discovery of a Pluto-like planet, or psuedoplanet, whichever you prefer. Except this one is apparently bigger than Pluto.

So, the discoverer points out, if Pluto's a planet, this one must be a planet.

But some astronomers say: But maybe Pluto's not a planet, so why are you bothering us with this nonsense? And then it gets weirder.

Astronomers have discovered an object in our solar system that is larger than Pluto. They are calling it the 10th planet, but already that claim is contested.

The new world's size is not at issue. But the very definition of planethood is.

It is the first time an object so big has been found in our solar system since the discovery of Pluto 75 years ago.

Just in case you thought nothing interesting was being discovered lately. Another possible planet was discovered the same day:

The announcement, made Friday by Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, came just hours after another celestial object slightly smaller than Pluto was revealed, on a very confusing day for astronomers and the media.

The new object, temporarily named 2003 UB313, is about three times as far from the sun as is Pluto.

"It's definitely bigger than Pluto," said Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech. The object is round and could be up to twice as large as Pluto, Brown told reporters during a hastily called NASA-run teleconference Friday evening.

His best estimate is that it is 2,100 miles (3,360 kilometers) wide, about one and a half times the diameter of Pluto.

The object is inclined by a whopping 45 degrees to the main plane of the solar system, where most of the other planets orbit. That's why it eluded discovery: Nobody was looking there until now, Brown said.

Some astronomers view it as a Kuiper Belt object and not a planet. The Kuiper Belt is a region of frozen objects beyond Neptune.

Pluto itself is called a Kuiper Belt object by many astronomers. Brown himself has argued in the past for Pluto's demotion from planet status, because of its diminutive size and eccentric and inclined orbit.

But on Friday he struck a different note.

"Pluto has been a planet for so long that the world is comfortable with that," Brown said during the teleconference. "It seems to me a logical extension that anything bigger than Pluto and farther out is a planet."

Offering additional justification, Brown said 2003 UB313 appears to be surfaced with methane ice, as is Pluto. That's not the case with other large Kuiper Belt objects.

"This object is in a class very much like Pluto," he said.

NASA effectively endorsed the idea in an official statement that referred to 2003 UB313 as the 10th planet.

Yet in recent years, a bevy of objects roughly half to three-fourths the size of Pluto have been found.

Brian Marsden, who runs the Minor Planet Center where data on objects like this are collected, said that if Pluto is a planet, then other round objects nearly as large as Pluto ought to be called planets. By that logic, 2003 UB313 would perhaps be a planet, but it would have to get in line behind a handful of others that were discovered previously.

"I would not call it the 10th planet," Marsden told Space.com.

Alan Boss, a planet-formation theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, called the discovery "a major step." But Boss would not call it a planet at all. Instead, he said Pluto and other small objects beyond Neptune should be called, at best, "Kuiper Belt planets."

"To just call them planets does an injustice to the big guys in the solar system," Boss said in a telephone interview.

We can't have that. Plus, imagine the size of the shoebox you'd need for a diorama containing dozens of mini-planets beyond Neptune.

This is interesting. 10,000 Plutos?

Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, the top scientist for NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto, predicted in the early 1990s that there would be 1,000 Plutos out there. He has also contended, based on computer modeling, that there should be Mars-sized objects hidden in the far corners of our solar system and even possibly other worlds as large as Earth.

Thanks to BrewFan, or as My Favorite Nazi so wittily has dubbed him, "SpewFan."

I Question The Timing Update: Kaos muses...

IMHo, I think the new planet is the Death Star planted there by KKKarl Rove. Any day now we'll be seeing legions of clone warriors and tie fighters decending on earth with the intent to destroy the remains of the democrat party or maybe it's just a speck of dust on the hubble mirror.

Everything is a "distraction" from Rovamania.

Or, as Traffic Non-Santa might say, "There's an investigation on."

Plutonian Politics: Is there any way we can use the Planet (?) Pluto controversy as a wedge issue against the Democrats?

Can we bait Howard Dean into saying something derogatory about Pluto?

Because, if we could, it would really annoy a lot of nerdy liberal-leaning voters.

There must be some way to use this. We conservatives can argue on behalf of "tradition," and bait liberals into taking an anti-Pluto position by using over-the-top anti-intellectual arguments in favor of Pluto, perhaps attacking the "pusillanimous puling pencil-necked pointy-heads" with all their silly "facts" and "theories" and "arrayed radio telescopes."

The "reality-based community" will then, predictably and invetiably, be forced to mock the Plutophiles, perhaps denigrating Pluto as a "sub-planetoid Jeebus spacerock."

And then we just sit back and reap the political benefits.

All we need to do, really, is get President Bush to mention Pluto in connection with some passage of a book of the Bible. Isaiah, maybe. Isaiah always seems to set these people off.

Or -- just spit-balling here -- "plucky little Pluto, the period at the end of the solar sentence, a methane-ice covered David fighting the Goliath of post-modern relativism and scientific hubris..."

I know they'd fall for the bait. They just can't help themselves.

They're crazy.

Posted by: Ace at 10:16 AM | Comments (38)
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A news editor at The Guardian has been fired over Le Affair Du Sass, apparently because the roiling schism in the paper between those who wanted the Jihadi Journalist fired and those who... well, who seemed to think it's good for "diversity" to have an anti-semetic religious-fanatic terrorist-sympathizer on the staff.

Of course, the Guardian is quite down on right-wing extremist American bloggers for making such a fuss about this.

I guess "diversity" has its limits. There's good diversity and bad diversity; good diversity is the diversity of those who agree completely with you, bad diversity is the evil diversity of people who disagree.

As Miss America opined in Bananas, differences in opinion are good, unless they become too different, in which case the holder of that opinion becomes a "subversive mother."

Funny, isn't it, that when Woody Allen made that film all those years ago, that was intended as a shot against the right wing.

Now it's the left wing most concerned about "subversive mothers." "Question Authority" has become "Listen To Us Or We Will Call You Names."

Posted by: Ace at 11:45 AM | Comments (12)
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Okay, it's Liberal Day here at Ace of Spades, but Paul Krugman makes a few good points in comparing the American and French views about economics and competition.

First things first: given all the bad-mouthing the French receive, you may be surprised that I describe their society as "productive." Yet according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, productivity in France - G.D.P. per hour worked - is actually a bit higher than in the United States.

It's true that France's G.D.P. per person is well below that of the United States. But that's because French workers spend more time with their families.

O.K., I'm oversimplifying a bit.

[But the] point is that to the extent that the French have less income than we do, it's mainly a matter of choice. And to see the consequences of that choice, let's ask how the situation of a typical middle-class family in France compares with that of its American counterpart.

The French family, without question, has lower disposable income. This translates into lower personal consumption: a smaller car, a smaller house, less eating out.

But there are compensations for this lower level of consumption. Because French schools are good across the country, the French family doesn't have to worry as much about getting its children into a good school district. Nor does the French family, with guaranteed access to excellent health care, have to worry about losing health insurance or being driven into bankruptcy by medical bills.

Perhaps even more important, however, the members of that French family are compensated for their lower income with much more time together. Fully employed French workers average about seven weeks of paid vacation a year. In America, that figure is less than four.

So which society has made the better choice?

I've been looking at a new study of international differences in working hours by Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, at Harvard, and Bruce Sacerdote, at Dartmouth. The study's main point is that differences in government regulations, rather than culture (or taxes), explain why Europeans work less than Americans.

But the study also suggests that in this case, government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff - to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family - the kind of deal an individual would find hard to negotiate. The authors write: "It is hard to obtain more vacation for yourself from your employer and even harder, if you do, to coordinate with all your friends to get the same deal and go on vacation together."

Just sayin'. There's nothing inherently wonderful about the short vacation times Americans get. It would be nice if we could all collectively bargain for more; I doubt any except the most driven individuals would balk at taking a couple of more weeks off per year. Or even shortening the work week to thirty seven and a half hours.

Yes, this is, to some degree, a form of socialism. It's artificially creating rules which disfavor the more-driven in order to keep the less-driven from experiencing the full competitive disadvantage they'd suffer were the workweek as long as one decided to work, or vacation time as brief or nonexistent as one chose.

To some extent it's not so much state-mandated socialism as tradition. Anyone who's tried to eat or buy stuff in Europe in the late afternoon knows shopkeepers and such tend to take a few hours off mid-day. It's an inconvenience for the buyer, of course, but it can't help but be a boon to the shopkeeper.

I don't know. Not sure what my point is here, except, perhaps, to get ripped further by Fat Kid.

Forget The Facts: Quite frankly, I expected that Krugman's "facts" would be exposed as sham.

I don't put a lot of stock in them.

I'm more citing this for the general proposition -- there's not necessarily anything economically or competitively magical about two weeks of vacation per year. I suppose productivity might suffer some if people had three or four weeks vacation average; then again, many of the top wage-earners in the country take off more than that, so perhaps, they being very smart and very productive, know that a bit of me-time can actually make for better workers.

Posted by: Ace at 11:32 AM | Comments (78)
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I'm sure dogmatic libertarian-types will now tell us that security-cameras do nothing to combat terrorism, because...

Traffic Non-Santa made a fuss over the fact that cameras didn't do anything to dissaude the bombers from attacking. I wonder if he'll acknowledge they seem to have done an awful lot to keep them from committing their would-have-been next attack.

There are several justifications for punishing criminals, among them deterrence and incapacitation (you can't commit crimes against society when you're exiled from society). Cameras are justified for the same reasons; they can either deter or lead to incapacitation.

Granted, there's no deterrence (or at least not enough to have prevented this), but cameras do seem to have lead directly towards incapacitation.

I don't expect the dogmatic libertarian Anti-Lighthouse Brigades to reverse their positions, but it would be nice to read their explanation as to why they're sticking by their guns.

Posted by: Ace at 10:06 AM | Comments (25)
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