...and scrap the ratings system in favor of one that simply deems a movie either "OKTM" (Okay to Muslims) or "JNGM" (Just Not Gettin' Made.)

No movies, ever, about Islamicist terrorist villains.

But $500,000+, and a brave, Oscar (TM) bait potrayal by Johnny Depp, for an Islamicist terrorist hero.

Well, an ex-terrorist. He trained as a terrorist, met his hero Osama bin Ladin, and currently, apparently, isn't a terrorist anymore. And he'll be paid a half-mil should Paramount make his story into a feature.

Variety notes that “[the envisioned screenplay] appears it will follow the storyline that makes him look best....”

What a shock. Can't spend a half-mil on the rights to a terrorist's life-story and then make a downer, judgmental movie about him. Have to really justify his mindset and add "context" to his deicision to train as a mass-murderer.

Both found at The Corner.

Posted by: Ace at 05:58 AM | Comments (22)
Post contains 160 words, total size 1 kb.

Starting bid $40,000; shipping's a steal at only $6,000.

Video of the mech in action.

Specifications:

Chassis Type: X (Anthromorphic\Humanoid)
Approx Dimensions: H 18' x W 8.5'
Weight: 3000 lbs ( 1.5 tons )
Power\Drive: 18hp Briggs and Stratton \ Hydraulic Cylinders

A few Features of the NMX04-1A:

12 volt electrical system
Key start ignition
Lighting system
3000psi hydraulic system.
40pts of possible movement.
Clamp styled hands with optional locks for full on crushing or just gentle clasping as full ram extension.
Weight stabilizers.
Removable foot plates for increased traction.
2 x Flame Throwers, one on each arm. [!!!]

No extendable/retractable buzz-saws?

Get these men funding, posthaste:

Future Neo-Mecha created by Neogentronyx will be used for everything from fighting forest fires far too hot and unsafe for a human, riot control, construction, maintenance, handling hazardous waste and navigating hostile environments, modern day warfare, to the entertainment industry where Neo-Mecha will do battle in an arena setting with different types of chassis being pitted against one another in combat sparring.

Well, just in time for middle age: I have no officially lost all interest in sex. From now on, it's mecha, and only mecha.

Take care, penis. We never really got on all that well, and I'm sure you'll make new friends at the Happy Gardens retirement home in Ocala, Florida.

Thanks to John.

NOT SAFE FOR WORK, unless you work in a really cool office: Okay, my sex drive is back. I don't know what I was thinking with all that "mecha" nonsense.

Thanks even more to Steve.

Posted by: Ace at 11:14 PM | Comments (17)
Post contains 281 words, total size 2 kb.

No idea. I'm told it's the video for Rubber Johnny by Aphex Twin, but those words mean absolutely nothing to me. It's like some crazy gibberish a homeless person says when you try to steal his cans.

Whatever this is, it's strange. It's like David Lynch having fever-nightmares about the woman from the weird videotape in The Ring doing acid with Dieder from Sprockets.

Thanks, of a sort, to Irwin.

Posted by: Ace at 10:39 PM | Comments (10)
Post contains 80 words, total size 1 kb.

It's about time.

And I'm tired of the "clear and present danger" gloss on the American Constitution, too. Advocating violence should not be a protected right. Perhaps in other times we could allow such latitude in absolute free speech. No more.

If you advocate violence, you should be punished. What does it matter if there are morons ready, willing, and able to follow your incitements presently? Should you escape punishment merely because you don't have suitable charisma to actually persuade people to put your instigations of violence into rapid practice?

Fascist? Fuck you, buddy. You can make all the political points you like except for encouraging, inciting, and advocating that which the law expressly forbids -- illegal violence in the service of some twisted political goal.

If you can't edit yourself, well, pardner, I'm a-guessin' your shit out of luck.

Were it not for the clear and present danger "rule," half of the vicious terrorist-preachers in this country would've been in the slammer a long time ago.

Posted by: Ace at 09:48 PM | Comments (7)
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Jennifer Granholm, the Canadian Governeur of Michigan, thinks those who accuse her of being an advocate for high taxation are traitors:

Last month the state legislature buried the Democratic Governor's top legislative priority, a grandiose proposal to raise taxes on insurance companies, banks and thousands of small businesses that private studies said would have cost up to 20,000 jobs. Ms. Granholm's plan was widely criticized, including in these columns in March and in an op-ed article on the opposite page last Thursday by state legislator Rick Baxter, a Republican, and Hillsdale College Professor Gary Wolfram.

Ms. Granholm was not pleased, going so far as to denounce the op-ed as "treasonous for the state of Michigan." The authors' high crime? Exposing Michigan as a high tax state and criticizing Ms. Granholm for wanting to raise taxes. Her choice of words was no inadvertent slip of the tongue, by the way--a Howard Dean-like temporary loss of sanity. The Governor has used the "t" word repeatedly and has even suggested that Mr. Baxter "should be removed from office."

Hmmm... removed from office? For daring to express his opinion? Is she suggestign that a lawfully-elected state legislator be "removed from office" to chill his right to dissent?

Let's recap:

* You're a mouth-breathing troglodyte if you suggest that Ward Churchill should be removed from his unearned tenured position, inter alia, advocating the fragging of American military officers, plagiarism, falsification of sources, falsification of qualifications, and for comparing the victims of 9-11 to Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann.

* But you're a rising star in the Democratic Party for suggesting that a legislator be "removed from office" for (correctly) pointing out that you are advocating an economically disastrous tax-and-spend policy.

* It's wrong to accuse those who actively root for our country's defeat in war, and who celebrate the deaths of American "mercenaries," and who serve as apologists for terrorist murderers of (constructive, if not legal) treason.

* On the other hand, if an economics professor analyzes your tax-and-spend plans and deems them imprudent, he can and should be called "treasonous."

Everyone clear on the rules?

PS: You will never hear of this story again. It just doesn't serve the liberal Democratic Media's Spirit Squad's interests.

Your Liberal Media Spirit Squad

Start listening again to what we tell you morons or else we'll say very very hurtful things to Scott McLellan. You do... *like* Scott McLellan, don't you?

Update: More from Hubs and Spokes, including his up-close-and-personal observations of her, and his conclusion that she's as dumb as a sack of dumb things.

Posted by: Ace at 09:26 PM | Comments (8)
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You soft-pedal the Gitmo behavior, but for me it brings back memories of Nazi Death Camps with the dancing, the name-calling, and (because it was a different time and place) the prisoners being forced to wear giant woolen bloomers on their heads. Sometimes I wake up screaming.

-- Nickie Goomba

* Not really an email.

Also, not really Andrew Sullivanesque. Contains not one gushing testimonial to my intellectual bravery and independence, goddamnitall.

Posted by: Ace at 05:38 PM | Comments (7)
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Cool:

newly discovered planet has bountiful sunshine, with not one, not two, but three suns glowing in its sky.

It is the first extrasolar planet found in a system with three stars. How a planet was born amidst these competing gravitational forces will be a challenge for planet formation theories.

"The environment in which this planet exists is quite spectacular," said Maciej Konacki from the California Institute of Technology. "With three suns, the sky view must be out of this world -- literally and figuratively."

The triple-star system, HD 188753, is located 149 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. The primary star is like our Sun, weighing 1.06 solar masses. The other two stars form a tightly bound pair, which is separated from the primary by approximately the Sun-Saturn distance.

"The pair more or less acts as one star," Konacki told SPACE.com.

The combined mass of the close pair is 1.63 solar masses.

Using the 10-meter Keck I telescope in Hawaii, Konacki noticed evidence for a planet orbiting the primary star. This newfound gas giant is slightly larger than Jupiter and whirls around its central star in a 3.5-day orbit. A planet so close to its star would be very hot.

The rest of the article explains, pretty interestingly, why it's hard to explain how this planet formed. Apparently gas giants can't form except far from a sun, past a point called the "snow line."

Also, the article contains assertions by scientists that "there are almost certainly no vampires whatsoever" on the new three-sun planet.

An artist's bullshit conception of
the new planet. Note the uncanny
absence of vampires.

Posted by: Ace at 04:32 PM | Comments (18)
Post contains 279 words, total size 2 kb.

The AP:

Schmidt said that to get ["20th hijacker" Mohamed al-Qahtani] to talk, interrogators told him his mother and sisters were whores, forced him to wear a bra, forced him to wear a thong on his head, told him he was homosexual and said that other prisoners knew it. They also forced him to dance with a male interrogator, Schmidt added, and subjected him to strip searches with no security value, threatened him with dogs, forced him to stand naked in front of women and forced him onto a leash, to act like a dog.

The AP quotes Schmidt...

Still, he said, "No torture occurred."

"Still?" "He said?" The writing in cast in terms of doubting his statement. Is this torture?

If this is torture, what to make of Saddam's acid-shower rooms? What are they?Double-secret super-torture?

Cliffs of Insanity notes that after breathlessly reporting horrid allegations of men forced to wear thongs on their heads (PS, I'm not weird, but I gotta say, doing that just makes me feel sexy), the AP finally buries the real lead-- that only three violations of protocols were discovered at Guantanamo.

The New Editor also weighs in, quoting the same piece:

"It is clear from the report that detainee mistreatment was not simply the product of a few rogue miltiary (sic) police in a night shift," said Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the committee. Bush administration officials have sought to portray the excesses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as just that.

Bear in mind these people -- anti-war Democratic politicians and the anti-war Democratic media Spirit Squad -- downplayed Saddam's vicious torture and state-supported rape, so as not to help the Administration in making its case for war.

Having done so, it appears particularly egregious now that they trump bras on the head as "torture" or even "mistreatment."

There's a reason the allegation of being anti-American is so often directed, overtly or subtly, at the liberal opposition (both the official political one and the semi-official public-relations office known as the MSM). It's due to this longtime practice of minimizing the savagery of America's enemies while trumpeting the barely-worth-mentioning "mistreatment" inflicted by America.

Again, their response to this is always: "But we want to America to be better." Who doesn't? But it's hard to square their claimed love of America with their constant adversarial position against her. Generally the objection of your affection is seen and a described in a positive light, not a viciously distorted negative one.

Posted by: Ace at 02:46 PM | Comments (79)
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The apology is forthright and fulsome, but one wonders what planet she's living on to have thought such a thing in the first place.

The Reality-Based Community

We ain't got much use for "facts" and "statistics" and such. Everything the Good Lord wanted us a-knowin' he set down in the Bible, also known as Mother Jones.

Posted by: Ace at 10:24 AM | Comments (27)
Post contains 82 words, total size 1 kb.

Yeah, when someone sends you a note through a pneumatic tube saying "This is a stick-up," despite the fact that he's outside in a car and you're protected by bullet-proof glass and, you know, brick walls, you should definitely give him the cash.

LauraW thinks this is evidence that the unemployment rate is too low.

Gotta be an inside job, a connivance between the robber and teller. The teller couldn't be that dumb, could s/he?

Posted by: Ace at 10:04 AM | Comments (14)
Post contains 85 words, total size 1 kb.