Dave Price thinks it's a good thing that cars will robotically self-drive themselves in the next couple of decades. He thinks that will cut down on traffic collisions.

Um, okay. But didn't he see 2001: A Space Odessey? I don't really feel like arguing with my friggin' car to open the door for me when it decides it can't "allow Ace to compromise the mission" by going to a tittie-bar.

Posted by: Ace at 01:53 PM | Comments (15)
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Eric Boehlert is an annoying, far-left talentless hack working for the amateur on-line webzine Salon.

Or so I thought. It turns out he's a commedian of inspired sarcasm, both subtle yet deadly.

His "book of political commentary" is called Lapdogs: How The Press Rolled Over For Bush. I'm giggling already.

In blistering prose, Eric Boehlert reveals how, time after time, the press chose a soft approach to covering the [Bush] government, and as a result reported and analyzed crucial events incompletely and even inaccurately. From WMDs to Valerie Plame to the NSA's domestic spying, mainstream fixtures such as The New York Times, CBS, CNN, and Time magazine too often ignored the administration's missteps and misleading words, and did not call out the public officials who betrayed the country's trust.

Titter. It gets better.

Throughout both presidential campaigns and the entire Iraq war to date, the media acted as a virtual mouthpiece for the White House....

Oh, man, he really has to stop. I'm about to chuckle up a kidney.

Finally, in Lapdogs, the press is being held accountable by one of its own.

Nice one. Eric Boehlert is about as much of "one of [the media's] own" as I am. I like the self-deprecating irony.

Boehlert homes in on the reasons the press did not do its job: a personal affinity for Bush that journalists rarely displayed toward his predecessor, Bill Clinton...

A personal affinity for Bush that they rarely displayed for Clinton.

Now, yeah, sometimes a joke goes a little too far, I grant you, but then, sometimes a joke is so damn good you can't go too far.

And what do you call the mainstream media's coverage of Bush?

"The Aristocrats!"

Great stuff.

I've got to get this book. I need a good laugh, as Iran's going to blow us all to f**k within the next three or five years.

Update/Correction (?): Instapundit seems to think this book is serious.

Surely that can't be right. This is a spoof, right?

I don't like calling shenanigans on Instapundit, but surely he's been had, right?

I mean-- it's just not possible someone really believes this, is it?

Posted by: Ace at 01:31 PM | Comments (59)
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He's like an intellectual Achilles. Just one foe after another falls under his onslaught.

Hitch is no fan of Israel, to be sure, but here he absolutely eviserates supposed Middle East expert and unpaid Iranian lobbyist Juan Cole.

The whole column is worth reading, but here's the best part:

Cole continues to present himself as an expert on Shiism and on the Persian, Arabic, and Urdu tongues. Let us see how his claim vindicates itself in practice. Here is what he wrote on the "Gulf 2000" e-mail chat-list on April 22:

It bears repeating as long as the accusation is made. Ahmadinejad did not "threaten" to "wipe Israel off the map." I'm not sure there is even such an idiom in Persian. He quoted Khomeini to the effect that "the Occupation regime must end" (ehtelal bayad az bayn berad). And, no, it is not the same thing. It is about what sort of regime people live under, not whether they exist at all. Ariel Sharon, after all, made the Occupation regime in Gaza end.

...

In fact, Khomeini's injunctions are referred to twice [in a speech by Ahmadnejad, quoting Khomeini with regard to Israel]. Quite possibly, "wiped off the map" is slightly too free a translation of what he originally said, and what it is mandatory for his followers to repeat. So, I give it below, in Persian and in English, and let you be the judge:

Esrail ghiyam-e mossalahaane bar zed-e mamaalek-e eslami nemoodeh ast va bar doval va mamaalek-eeslami ghal-o-gham aan lazem ast.

My source here is none other than a volume published by the Institute for Imam Khomeini. Here is the translation:

Israel has declared armed struggle against Islamic countries and its destruction is a must for all governments and nations of Islam.

This is especially important, and is also the reason for the wide currency given to the statement: It is making something into a matter of religious duty. The term "ghal-o-gham" is an extremely strong and unambivalent one, of which a close equivalent rendering would be "annihilate."

Emphasis added. How cute is it that Juan Cole offers his doubt that Persian contains the EXACT IDIOM for "wiped off the map"? Well of course one language probably doesn't offer such an exactly-similar idiom. But "annihilate" means not just to destroy, but to destroy without even leaving so much of a trace behind, so I think "wiped off the map" is a fair approximation of the term.

Hmmmm... Hitchens quotes from a translation by the INSTITUTE FOR IMAM KHOMEINI -- who, you know, I think would know -- while Juan Cole apparently gets his translations from Stuff Ahmadnejad Said, And Didn't Say, Deluxe Anti-Semite Edition (with a special afterword by Klaus Barbi).

This guy is a professor and an EXPERT, though. You should listen to him, because he knows a lot more than you, and would never think of lying to you to advance his jihadist-apologist agenda.

Thanks to Allah.

Posted by: Ace at 12:47 PM | Comments (17)
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Bob Herbert is justifiably famous as the Times columnist you never read even when you used to read the Times at all. He's a personal hero of mine, as he has absolutely nothing to say but says it twice a week anyway, and gets paid big bucks for his lack of efforts.

Nancy Kruh of the Dallas Morning News began noticing that his columns didn't just say nothing at all -- they said nothing at all in very similar ways to previous columns which said nothing at all.

Inspired by the fact that Bob Herbert's empty columns are filled with vacuuous repetitions, Brain Terminal spent 15 minutes writing software to automatically generate "Bob Herbert" columns. I can't really tell the difference.

The "Turing Test" is a famous test of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence will have been created, the test states, when a machine is able to pass its communications off as human. That is-- if you can't tell the difference between organic intelligence and simulated intelligence, the simulated intelligence has become true artificial intelligence.

I propose the converse "Herbert Test" -- if you can't tell the difference between a machine's columns and a column supposedly written by a human, doesn't that prove that the alleged human doesn't possess true human intelligence at all?

I owe someone a hat-tip here but I can't find where I got this from.

Posted by: Ace at 12:26 PM | Comments (15)
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Yup.

Gee, it's funny that what we must all do to avoid this approaching global cataclysm is jot-by-tittle precisely wants the left us to do anyway: stop driving cars, reduce industrial productivity, build more public transportation, and stop eating meat.

I guess it's all just a coincidence, though.

Posted by: Ace at 10:18 AM | Comments (76)
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Guest Trais Rowley will discuss his book, Out of Ivy, and how the jackass leftists at Brown University drove him from being apolitical to a strong conservative.

We'll also discuss what's left of America after the catastrophic strike by dishwashers and hedge-trimmers, and maybe Peter Beinart's call for Democrats to return to a muscular "Cold War liberalism," and liberals, predictably, savaging him for such a suggestion. They seem to make two contradictory cases: musclarity in foreign policy is evil, and also, that they're already muscular enough. And maybe Steven Colbert and the economy, too.

Call in at 866-884-TALK if you're so moved. Usually we spend the first twenty minutes interviewing the guest ourselves, so calls should probably wait until :25 after or so. Otherwise you'll just be sitting on hold, which I know is annoying.

At Rightalk at 4:05 Eastern.

Posted by: Ace at 10:13 AM | Comments (9)
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How does a country without nerve gas successfully test nerve-gas detection equipment?

Ummm...

A caveat: I don't know how discriminating this equipment is. Many nerve gases are chemically similar to pesticides; a lot of the early false-positive detections of "nerve gases" by US troops turned out to be detections of cyclocyanides (I think) found in pesticides.

So, it's possible the "successful test" really only detected the similar chemicals in pesticides, and was treated as successful for doing so.

But would that be a "successful test," really?

And why exactly was Iraq attempting to detect nerve agents at all?

Seems to me a country with nerve agents and the desire to deploy them would certainly want such a capability.

Posted by: Ace at 09:20 AM | Comments (16)
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Nobody grows up wanting to be a politician.

"I wanted desperately to be an Olympic athlete," Clinton said Monday at a Purchase College symposium on Title IX, the 1972 law outlawing sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding. "I tried everything. I ran every race, and if I was really lucky I finished second to last...I couldn't jump, I couldn't run, I couldn't swim."

After determining she'd never be an athlete, she set her sights on becoming an astronaut.

"So I wrote to NASA and said, 'How do I sign up to be an astronaut?"' she said. "And they wrote back very politely and said, 'We don't take girls."'

So she became an attorney instead.

Why do people feel the need to generate personal stories for specific events?

Its all a steaming pile, of course. Just like Al Gore's mother singing him the Union Label song as a lullabye, many years before it had even been written.

I'm sure there were many other careers a starry-eyed young Hillary pursued before she settled on law and politics.

Anybody else feel a Top 10 coming on?

Posted by: LauraW. at 09:02 AM | Comments (63)
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A gallery of DARPA's warbot prototypes.

There's the "Crusher," which is a robotic mule that can carry 8000 damn-bastard pounds of supplies, ammo, and weaponry at 26 mph.

And cooler still is the remotely-control Stryker.

Some warbots have accompanying video so you can beat off evaluate their current performance.

Thanks to Oger Gunner.

Update: SPIDER-BOTS! Walking, talking mechanical creepy-crawlies.

As a great scientist once said, "If I have seen further than those who came before me, it is only because I stood upon the shoulders of giants, such as Gene Simmons in Runaway.

Thanks to Pupster.

Posted by: Ace at 08:50 AM | Comments (9)
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And if you're a deaf-mute, don't be shy about speaking up.

I mean, really. Genius.

The NYT's price chart looks like a graph of Billy Joel's reaction times after having some "fruit juice" before a Sunday drive.

Sulzberger really intends to spend more time trying to fix his dying company, but he already has so many commitments to the CERNE laboratory in Geneva, where's he's on call 24/7 for emergencies when the particle accelerator malfunctions, and scientists need him to split atoms... with his mind.

Thanks to JohnS.

Posted by: Ace at 07:53 AM | Comments (18)
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