A scientist (roguishly good-looking, and a maverick within his field) thinks that improved diet, not IVF, is responsible for burst of identical twins.

This indicates natural forces must be at work, according to Professor Robert Jansen, medical director of Sydney IVF: "It's hard to think of a steady trend that has occurred over such a long period of time other than one that is due to the improved health and nutrition of mothers, which is reflected in the increased capacity of an egg to form embryos," he said.

Prof Jansen speculated twinning may be nature's choice in favourable conditions. "Nature will have its way," he said. "There is some advantage to identical twinning if it increases the chances that your genes will be passed onto another generation."

The disadvantage is that you have two little bastards running around crapping all over the place and eating all your treasured pewter d8's.

Nature can go hang.

Posted by: Ace at 02:00 PM | Comments (9)
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Jews. Is there no end to their crafty schemes and machinations?

Posted by: Ace at 01:43 PM | Comments (9)
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It's Steyn, so of course it's good, though I disagree with the basics of it.

Yes, Coulter's basic argument was sound. Yes, she got a lot more attention for her argument than most others who tried. Yes, she's made this an issue, whereas it wasn't before.

For all that she deserves credit.

But Coulter and Steyn seem to think that Coulter could only accomplish this by going over-the-top. That only an over-the-line provocation could get people talking about the Democrats' Victims Political Rights project.

Maybe. I don't think so. 95% of what Coulter writes is spot-on-- and provocative. And often mean. And just terrific in its meanness.

It's the 5% of what she writes that's the problem, and I remain unconvinced that this over-the-line 5% is necessary for her to make her points. If that occasional "raghead" slur were necessary, somehow, for galvanizing the American public to stick out the fight against terrorism-- well, then, I guess I'd say that a slur would be worth making. But does anyone seriously contend this?

And, honestly, the media -- the gatekeeper of the national dialogue -- isn't really talking about whether or not they are willing participants in the Democrats' tactic of using victims as their spokesmen. What they're talking about is whether Ann Coulter is a nasty bitch. So I really don't know that Coulter has succeeded in making this a live issue whereas others have failed.

Posted by: Ace at 01:40 PM | Comments (96)
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"Degraded," meaning old, and including both filled and unfilled rounds; but still-- prohibited, undeclared chemical weapons.

I didn't see the story, but DJ Elliot says he saw it, and I believe him.

OT: Live on FOX

Senator Santorum and Congressman [Hoekstra] just announced that-

Declassified:

Since 2003 coalition forces have recovered 500 Chemical rounds in Iraq.

Degraded Sarin and Mustard filed.

More rounds expected to be found.

Filled and unfilled rounds.

Why is this only being declassified now? I question the timing.

Seriously-- why would this EVER be classified at all? The Iraqis knew what weapons they have; who, precisely, were the intelligence agencies hoping to protect by keeping this secret?

It's as if -- stay with me on this; this is a crazy theory -- there are a lot of liberals in the intelligence agencies who are over-eager to classify, and thus keep secret from the public, any information which might tend to support President Bush.

Is that the standard for classification, now? Not whether exposure of the information would harm the US government, but whether it would help it?

The Russian Devil Theory: The only way I can make sense of classifying such information is if it tended to implicate the Russians in this, and we made a national security determination that it was better to keep it hidden than embarrass our "strategic partners."

Other than that-- no idea. You don't keep secret stuff that your enemies already know. They know they had weapons; they know we've been looking for them; doubtless they know we've found some.

So why classify it? The only people in the dark here are the American public.

Posted by: Ace at 12:52 PM | Comments (73)
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I've been noticing a truly absurd amount of spam-comments, and I'm guessing that's what's causing the site to be so slow and the comments so glitchy.

Pixy may (or may not) install a comment registration system to stop the spam. If he doesn't, I think I'm going to have to go to Haloscan or a paid comment system, because this is getting ridiculous.

The trouble is, I think, that some mu.nu sites are kinda-sorta big, but the comment screening and other security measures are only robust enough to handle the spam harrassments visited on small blogs.

I feel your pain. I really do. It's getting very difficult to even access the site anymore.

Posted by: Ace at 12:40 PM | Comments (63)
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Why aren't liberal sites talking about Kosola, even if to defend Kos from suggestions that he seems to have something of a conflict of interest?

Well, partly because liberal sites just generally ignore anything at all that "hurts the team."

But in this case, Kos has been a little more proactive about it. He's sent out an email to major liberal bloggers ordering them politely requesting them to embargo the whole story.

My request to you guys is that you ignore this for now. It would make my life easier if we can confine the story. Then, once Jerome can speak and defend himself, then I'll go on the offensive (which is when I would file any lawsuits) and anyone can pile on. If any of us blog on this right now, we fuel the story. Let's starve it of oxygen. And without the "he said, she said" element to the story, you know political journalists are paralyzed into inaction.

Now, that's just a "request." But as I read that, it occurred to me that many of these sites rely upon Kos for traffic; he's the Instapundit of the left. That actually understates it; he's like the Instapundit, Malkin, Hewitt, and Powerlineblog of the Left, all wrapped up into one.

Would Kos decrease your traffic by half by simply no longer linking you if you didn't embargo the story? Well, he doesn't say that; but then, the Don doesn't have to make threats. It's always a risky business to offend a big blogger.

But Slate's blogger thinks there might even be more to it than that.

Along with Armstrong and MyDD's Chris Bowers, Kos runs a BlogAds advertising network called Advertising Liberally, to which a number of "Townhouse" members belong. (If you want a fuller understanding of how BlogAds advertising networks operate, and how they allow lower-traffic blogs to gain more clout with advertisers by combining their traffic, read this piece.) Therefore, Kos (along with Armstrong and Bowers) gets to decide which blogs belong--and don't belong--to Advertising Liberally, which means a lot of these blogs' financial health hinges upon staying in Kos's good graces. Is it any wonder they're so obedient?

He also has a link to a blogger's lament about the financial/traffic ruin of falling out of Kos' good graces.

Oh, and, one more thing: He says he's considering lawsuits.

Whatever, dipshit.

Big big thanks to Allah for that.

Posted by: Ace at 12:17 PM | Comments (26)
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Bitch-slapping the silly bitch:

Andrew Sullivan - a man I once admired, and who is more than anyone else responsible for me entering blogging - is now writing that the difference between our side and theirs is not one of kind, but only of degree. Shame on him. This war cannot be tracked or explained on the basis of political points. The moojies kidnapped and murdered laundresses and schoolteachers and riddled civilians with bullets and slaughtered new police graduates long, long before the Abu Ghraib story broke. Abu Ghraib does not in ANY way explain or mitigate what Al Qaeda did to our two abducted soldiers. That Sullivan even tries to do so evinces a moral dysfunction bordering on degeneracy. What Al Qaeda did is an evil in and of itself, and entirely self-contained.

Maybe if the captured soldiers were a married gay couple, Sullivan would just be capable of cutting our troops an even break. But I doubt it even then. I don't think Sullivan could muster a full-throated condemnation of the sadistic vermin who did this unless they first converted to Christianity and enrolled in Bob Jones university.

For all his talk of the "moral high ground," it's astonishing how low he has sunk.

Thanks to American Barbarian.

And again: more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:07 AM | Comments (22)
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It's a new feature here at mu.nu. You post a comment, it appears in the "Most Recent Comments" sidebar, but then doesn't actually show up for ten minutes, making you wonder if it really posted at all, and frustrating all attempts to have a dialogue with other posters in real-time.

Basically it's designed to piss you off. We're always working on new ways to screw up the comments here. That's what your donation money goes to.

Posted by: Ace at 11:01 AM | Comments (10)
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They say small little earthquakes are good because they bleed away, at a manageable level, the pent-up tensions of the moving plates of the earth.

The San Andreas Fault hasn't moved much for 250 years, and that's definitely a bad thing. One scientist thinks it's ready to finally shift catastrophically, moving perhaps 10 full meters.

Al Gore postulates that the faultline is being triggered by "being heated up by global warming, much like an egg will explode if you put it in the microwave." He has slides and graphs and charts to explain this.

But seriously-- it's just one scientist making this dire prediction, but this would be godawful.

And in disaster movies, it's always that one scientist who knows what's coming while all of his colleagues scoff.

If this one scientist is roguishly good-looking and considered a "maverick" in his field, and perhaps has some sympathy-engendering backstory, like he's a widower with an adorable, sassy 10 year old daughter, we should definitely start worrying.

If the scientist also has an adorable mutt he rescued as a stray after its owners died in a minor quake, who he's given the cute name of "Richter," then we must evacuate southern California immediately.

If the scientist is actually Dennis Quaid, who's secretly a world-class seismologist when he's not being a movie star -- forget it, the world is coming to an end.

Harry Callahan's Update: As if we needed more proof that global warming is caused by humans, remember that the Stanley Cup was won by the Carolina Hurricanes and the NBA Finals were just won by the Miami Heat.

Coincidence?

I think not.

(via Jonah Goldberg)

Posted by: Ace at 10:36 AM | Comments (38)
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Fictitious terrorists fictitiously distrupted again.

Al Qaeda terrorists were planning to use cameras to disguise bombs and flash attachments as stun guns in a disrupted hijack plot that targeted the U.S. east coast, Britain, Italy and Australia, U.S. officials say.

The plot was one of three previously unknown al Qaeda hijack plots disrupted before they could be carried out, according to a Department of Homeland Security report obtained by ABC News.

The report, a strategic assessment on U.S. aviation, says despite security improvements, "DHS continues to receive information on terrorist threats to the U.S. aviation industry and to the Western aviation industry worldwide."

The previously secret plots include one in which "Al-Qa'ida planned to hijack flights departing London's Heathrow Airport and crash them into the airport and a skyscraper in the Canary Wharf financial district of London."

The plot using cameras and flash attachments was foiled in the summer of 2003, according to the report.

In related news, Andrew Sullivan is having conniptions about whether or not any of these terrorists were "cuffed on the head" at any point, which he considers "akin to Aztec ritual disembowelment."

Posted by: Ace at 10:31 AM | Comments (10)
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