Great article. Six of seven tests of anti-missile systems have been successful.

I never understood the claims of anti-ABM-system ravers. They come perilously close to suggesting that such a system is impossible, even in principle, as if we're talking about a perpetual motion machine or engineering around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

It's a difficult thing, to be sure. But the certainty held by some that we are incapable of achieving the difficult has always made me scratch my head.

Especially because many of the key technologies -- especially supercomputers that can calculate intercept courses very quickly and with nearly 100% accuracy, and microcomputers that can adjust an ABM in flight -- are advancing more quickly than anyone could have expected.

And yet people who seem level-headed, like the guys at the great warporn site DefenseTech, seem to be stuck in a time-loop in which it is always 1984 and Reagan is a crackpot for even suggesting such a sci-fantasy.

Posted by: Ace at 09:58 AM | Comments (69)
Post contains 189 words, total size 1 kb.

Roc Ingersol was wondering about this.

Speaking of Roc Ingersol, there's a related question-- Which movies most deserved a sequel and never got one? Galaxy Quest must be very near the top of that list. (Although, as with many good movies, it finishes so well and so thoroughly that it doesn't really admit of a sequel. Still-- that never stopped them before, did it?)

And of course Spinal Tap. But as one of the guys from that movie said (Michael McKean, I think), "When you do a movie exactly right, and it still doesn't make any money, there's not really a good reason to make a sequel."

Which is why we never got a sequel to The Thing, either.

Best sequel ever? Not the Godfather II, which is, I hate to say it, a big jumble with no strong through-line as the first one had, and is often, umm, boring. The first movie focused on the Corleones, who were interesting, and vengeance, which is compelling; Godfather II focused on Hyman Roth and the mafia turncoat and something or other going on in Havana.

No, the best sequel ever was Superman II.

Second best: Rocky III.

Third best: Star Trek II, which is very nearly not a sequel, because most people basically know this as the first Star Trek movie, completely ignoring the pajama-clad borefest called Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Fourth best: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Fifth: Either Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi. I still really don't get the whole anti-RotJ thing. Ewoks? Well, come on, the SW universe has always had a little too much cuteness -- look at R2-D2, for example.

Someone brought up the Evi Dead sequels, but the best one (Evil Dead II) isn't a sequel, it's a remake, and the last one is great up until Ash stops being Ash and becomes a more-standard action hero.

Sorry, that's just the way it f'n' is.

Major Correction! How did I forget Aliens?

Aliens is the best sequel ever, easily. Everything else gets moved down the list one step.

Man, I Keep Forgetting: Road Warrior-- also easily the best sequel ever. Tied with Aliens.

I tend to forget that's a sequel, becuse I didn't see Mad Max before it (who the hell did, outside of Australia?) and it's even set in an entirely different world.

Honorary Mentions: Magnum Force, which I personally like better than Dirty Harry. It's just more fun. And "Otter" plays a bad guy. (Of course, Dean Wormer played the mayor in the first one. And, if I'm not mistaken, Flounder played a charismatic revolutionary in The Enforcer.)

And Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Great movie. Almost better, in ways, than the first one. Love them mutants and their Atomic Bomb God. And I love Charleton Heston blowing the earth up at the end.

Posted by: Ace at 09:29 AM | Comments (165)
Post contains 482 words, total size 3 kb.

Man's got a point.

Not that that threat matters much to a man who believes he can bring back the occulted imam by plunging the world into apocalyptic chaos.

Can't wait for the response to this. Let me put on my Kreskin dork-glasses and peer into the future: I see Kofi Annan strongly condemning Israel for making such "provocative" statements, and contributing to the "cycle of violence."

You know, the cycle of violence, whereby crazed Islamofascists butcher us and then we dare to get snippy about it.

Posted by: Ace at 09:14 AM | Comments (25)
Post contains 121 words, total size 1 kb.

Not as exciting as it sounds, but still justice. Ace of Spades Justice.

If I had to dock the clerk points, I'd do so for, umm, first taking cover behind his female co-worker as he brings out his gun and starts firing (although that is more to hide the fact he's taking out his gun than to actually use her as a shield) and, umm, firing very close to through a mother holding her baby.

Still, the right guy got shot and everyone else had pie.

I assume they had pie, anyway. If I shoot a criminal, you can be goodamned sure there's going to pie afterwards.

Posted by: Ace at 09:10 AM | Comments (14)
Post contains 121 words, total size 1 kb.

The latest woe-is-Tom's-box-office piece.

If you read these articles carefully, you'll note that M:I III isn't really underperforming much more than could be expected. What's the old rule in Hollywood? Each sequel costs twice as much to make as its predecessor and makes half as much money. That's overstated by half on both ends, but sequels have a very serious diminishing-returns slope.

Is Tom Cruise's flaky behavior depressing ticket sales? Almost certainly. But most of this can be explained by less sexy, less celebocentric factors. The original Mission: Impossible made money because it was new -- or, new for Hollywood at least, which means it was actually very old but at least was being remade as a movie for the first time. It wasn't very good, but there was a bit of fun in hearing the M:I theme music again. more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:21 AM | Comments (43)
Post contains 791 words, total size 5 kb.

It's almost self-parodying, but Jihadwatch.org has parodied it anyway.

Posted by: Ace at 07:31 AM | Comments (8)
Post contains 23 words, total size 1 kb.

That's the suggestion in this American Thinker piece.

Anti-administration sources for various articles repeatedly refer to a "former State Department official with strong CIA connections." [Emphasis added.] Now, who could that be? And, as Wilson's strong CIA connections run through his wife, doesn't that mean that he himself told reporters about Valerie Plame?

I think I get now why there is such emphasis on "outing Plame for political payback." See, if Wilson was telling every reporter he could corner about his super-hot Double-Oh Soccer Mom wife, using her credibility to buttress his claims, then he would have been guilty of exactly what he accuses Rove and Company of.

Except.

Except he is making the distinction between outing his wife for "good reasons" -- to hint to reporters he's getting national secrets through pillow talk, so their stories should reflect his take -- and outing his wife for "bad reasons," i.e., "political payback."

I'd be interested in seeing all of Joe Wilson's comments about his wife being outed. I bet in almost every case he notes that it's wrong to "out" a supposedly covert agent "for political payback," thus making sure to draw a distinction between Libby's actions and his own actions.

Posted by: Ace at 07:26 AM | Comments (13)
Post contains 205 words, total size 1 kb.

Some Republicans, like Pete Hoekstra, are against him.

Some fret that he is an Air Force general and so, I don't know, this is somehow inappopriate as head of the CIA. On FoxNews Sunday, either Britt or William Kristol expressed the fear that Hayden is too go-along-to-get-along to make the aggressive changes the CIA needs (or at least one of them said that's what the Hayden skeptics feared).

But others think this is the final step in making the CIA subservient to the Pentagon-- a step I don't mind at all.

The pending appointment of General Michael Hayden as director of the Central Intelligence Agency will pave the way for the agency's emasculation and for the Pentagon to assume full authority over paramilitary operations.

A senior intelligence community official yesterday said the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, has indicated "he is willing to give up covert operations to the Pentagon."

...

"Putting a military person into this role is just a bad idea," Mr. Hoekstra said. "I think you will have the CIA folks in D.C. and the CIA folks around the world see this as the last straw. I am not sure you will see resignations. But people who have chosen the CIA as a career, I don't think ever envisioned it being run by a general."

Mr. Hoekstra also said he thought the fact that Mr. Goss was stepping down at this moment - after firing an analyst accused of leaking to the press, Mary McCarthy - sent the wrong signal to those in the CIA who oppose the president's policies.

"Two weeks after Porter takes one of the biggest steps to send a clear signal around the agency on leaks, he loses his job. I don't know how people will read this.

"Some people might say insubordination at the CIA is going to be tolerated. This is the last major decision which I thought was crucial to the agency. There had been a lot of people knifing Porter in the back. He was sent in as an agent of change. Some people over there might believe they won."

Well, yeah.

Who knows. Perhaps it was Goss' resistance to making the CIA the intelligence arm of the Pentagon that caused him to be forced out. He was, after all, a former agent himself, so might have greater respect for the traditions of the CIA than they, quite frankly, deserve.

Obviously, I don't know either way. Apart from one glorious weekend we shared together in the Poconos, a weekend of horseback riding, archery, and nonstop sodomy, I barely know the man.

Posted by: Ace at 07:10 AM | Comments (25)
Post contains 437 words, total size 3 kb.

Will no one rid me of this troublesome pest?

Oh, okay, I can. Done and done. And I mean done.

If you find you've been accidentally banned, let me know by email. Sometimes this winds up blocking the wrong people.

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 PM | Comments (91)
Post contains 48 words, total size 1 kb.

Ray Midge:

This, it seems to me, is the issue of our age. Does there come an implosion point when a sufficient percentage of a given society instinctively "know" their society is the most evil society ever was or could possibly be - that every freedom afforded its citizenry is, at best, a perverted, ironic hollow in its structural evil.

I wonder if this is just the way it has to be. Just some sort of grand human cycle where, when material want has been relieved, and man has been given pretty much everything they want, the society that granted such must be speared and gored because it has still somehow fallen short of perfection. That a great society necessarily births children who, wallowing in its luxuries, turn against it out of .... boredom, a means of signaling their elite status, the pleasure of self-hate and "special knowledge."

I just can't see things getting better on this front. If we don't destroy ourselves from within, we'll have rotted out the support timbers for when something outside throws its weight on us - then busy ourselves with convincing others and ourselves we had it coming. The highest decadence. What a luxury.

Actually, of course, this isn't a case of self-loathing so much as loathing of the civilization to which one belongs; liberals and lefties are quite fond of themselves. It's the America government, our national history, Western values, and their fellow countrymen they despise.

I think I've said this a couple of times before, but I'll say it again:

One of the most foolish forms of moral vanity is the determination to rival God Himself in viewing events from a truly "objective" perspective, that is, a vantage point from which the subject -- oneself -- is not given any special consideration.

We all like to imagine ourselves objective-- to a degree. We like to think we can view a situation without privileging or prioritizing our own wants and needs over the wants and needs of others -- to a degree. But only an imbecile imagines he can actually manage a perfect stance of objectivity.

And only someone suffused with moral vanity imagines he should aspire to such a vaunted perspective.

I've had this argument with a dozen leftists and hard liberals. They insist, among other things, that Americans should not be afforded by other Americans any special regard as concerns matters of life and death; they will insist, for example, that the collateral deaths of foreigners on a battlefield are just as important, if not more important, than deaths of American soldiers, and that the rules of engagement should be much more strict to avoid causing any foreign civilians harm, even if it results, as it must, in an increased death toll among American soldiers.

They do not see this as a question of American lives versus foreign lives. They only view it "objectively" as a question of soldiers versus civilians, with no weighting of soldiers' lives due to the fact they are their fellow American citizens.

Imagining they can and should remove natural human irrational and subjective sympathies from the equation -- i.e., first duty to self and family, second duty to friends, third duty to community, fourth duty to nation, fifth and final duty to all others -- they fetishize their own "enlightment" by refusing to prioritize the safety of their countrymen over non-countrymen.

The amateur webzine Slate had a good piece about an extreme form of this psychotic condition. Remember back during the "Summer of Shark" attacks, before 9/11, when all we thought we had to worry about was a spike in shark attacks (which really wasn't a spike at all; it was just a spike in news coverage) and Gary Conditt?

Some people actually chose to become, as Slate dubbed them, "shark apolgists." In a territorial dispute between sharks, which wanted to eat people, and human swimmers, who wanted to not be eaten, some biologists and environmentalists actually argued in favor of the sharks' "right" to chow down on 11-year-old boys. After all-- it's their territory. They have to eat too, right?

It was a sickening example of the Moral Vanity of Objectivity being taken to the next level -- not only are Americans not to be favored over non-Americans, but now human beings (and children, too!) are not even to be favored over non-human, non-sentinent aquatic predators.

Hey-- let's just take the fact that we're human, and have, of course, an "irrational bias" in favor of humanity, out of the equation. Viewed in "objective" terms, in which we don't favor humans just because we're humans -- viewing things as if we were space aliens, in other words, and space aliens who further don't favor the sentient over non-sentient -- there is no special objective reason to favor human children over sharks, right?

Liberals and leftists are forever patting themselves on the back for removing their natural affinities from the moral equation -- or at least pretending to -- and they praise themselves so highly for this habit that they scarcely realize what they are urging is not a "higher morality," but a moral obscenity.

If you are so far gone that you cannot privilege human beings over a goddamned shark, for crying out loud-- congratulations. You have, in moral terms, more or less removed yourself from the human race. Almost every other human being would favor you over an unthinking shark; but you do not return the favor, even out of respect for an implied compact (you favor me over the sharks, so, in return, I will favor you, even if I don't really agree with the principle behind that "humanocentric" favoritism).

And yes: If you cannot privilege your fellow Americans over non-Americans in your moral calculus -- even knowing you receive the benefit of that favoritism from the vast majority of your fellow Americans, who would of course save an American's life over a foreigner's, if they had to choose, and all other considerations being equal -- then you've effectively removed yourself from true citizenship and community with your fellow Americans.

You may be a "Citizen of the World" or a "Global Citizen," but not all dual citizenships are permitted, and sometimes you have to turn in one passport to gain another. You can be a Citizen of the World if you want, but stop calling yourself an American, and stop objecting when others question your patriotism. You reject patriotism by proud self-declaration.

Except, of course, when others note you've declared that. Then you get all self-righteous.

At some point, we just don't have the luxury of decadent philosophical inquiries as to who the real monsters are, us or them. When someone's trying to kill you, you don't have the luxury of exploring whether or not your would-be killer feels justified in his efforts at murder, or has legitimate grievances against the US or Israel, or whether there are "root causes" which mitigate his evil. You either defend yourself or die.

A lot of people in this country just don't seem to understand that. They are unwilling to simply say, "We are at war; it is time to defend ourselves." And by rejecting that simple, unnuanced, "jingoistic" notion, they instead choose death.

And not just their own deaths, of course; they choose death for their fellow Americans, to the extent they can put their desires into practice.

And while these peacocks strut about to show off the pretty feathers of their "enlightened morality," men of real morals and genuine courage are, of course, dying in order to protect them. Better men die so that they can wallow and luxuriate in their presumed righteousness and then scorn those who make their decadance, and very continued existence, possible.

Posted by: Ace at 12:42 PM | Comments (143)
Post contains 1303 words, total size 8 kb.