Not the feather in the hair kind, the dot on the forehead kind. Sorry, that's a Strangers With Candy joke.

You can't order a Slurpee or a Munchkin without having a slight Indian accent?

Really? One needs to affect an Apu accent to order such sundries?

The funny thing is, after making this not-very-funny, not-very-logical "joke," he adds, "I'm not joking."

Okay. So he's serious.

Hillary Clinton made a similar "joke" about gas stations, I think, all being owned by Indians.

It's just not true that liberals don't have a sense of humor. They do. They make the sort of jokes about Indians dominating 7-11 franchise ownership that were considered cutting edge back in, ohhhh, 1985 or thereabouts.

Coming soon: John Kerry wants to know "what's the deal with the peanuts" they give you on airplanes.

Is This Offensive? Tushar, who's Indian, thinks it is. I'm not Indian, so I wouldn't really know. It just seems more stupid than offensive. A lot of Indians do own convenience stores. But it seems idiotic to point out the obvious. Where's he going with that, exactly?

There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, too. Gays as well. And...? What's the follow-up?

I really don't get the "I'm not joking" at the end of his stupidity.

Posted by: Ace at 02:51 PM | Comments (89)
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...who's an annoying lefty entertainment columnist for LA Weekly.

Seipp's column got pulled because she called Finke "crazy," which Finke deemed libelous.

Apparently she's kinda dumb:

Until fairly recently, Nikki was ignorant of even the basic blogospheric knowledge that the IP addresses of commenters are easily checked. What this means is that, for instance, if you post once on my blog under the name Nikki Finke, and then again as a lawyer threatening me with libel for disrespecting Nikki Finke (as she did last year, much to general amusement when I revealed that bit of Internet sock puppetry to my readers), it might be better to post the second comment from someone else's computer.

That's inconvenient, though, if you rarely leave the house. I haven't run into Nikki in years, probably because these days she looks like Jabba the Hut, if you can imagine Jabba after he's said to hell with the diets already. She doesn't allow herself to be photographed, so the only picture she's made available for publication is one from her debutante days more than three decades ago.

Correction: The pic posted at Seipp's is apparently a joke I didn't get. I'm told it was a pic of Divine, the transvestite from John Waters' films.

I KNEW There Was a Payoff To This Post: Nikki Finke-- not crazy in the least.

Thanks to Riehl World.

Posted by: Ace at 01:03 PM | Comments (13)
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Yeah you know me.

Do you know anyone like this?

Linehan theorizes that borderlines are born with an innate biological tendency to react more intensely to lower levels of stress than others and to take longer to recover. They peak "higher" emotionally on less provocation and take longer coming down. In addition, they were raised in environments in which their beliefs about themselves and their environment were continually devalued and invalidated. These factors combine to create adults who are uncertain of the truth of their own feelings and who are confronted by three basic dialectics they have failed to master (and thus rush frantically from pole to pole of):

* vulnerability vs invalidation

* active passivity (tendency to be passive when confronted with a problem and actively seek a rescuer) vs apparent competence (appearing to be capable when in reality internally things are falling apart)

* unremitting crises vs inhibited grief.

DBT tries to teach clients to balance these by giving them training in skills of mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, distress tolerance, and emotional regulation.

Kernberg's Borderline Personality Organization

Diagnoses of BPO are based on three categories of criteria. The first, and most important, category, comprises two signs:

* the absence of psychosis (i.e., the ability to perceive reality accurately)

* impaired ego integration - a diffuse and internally contradictory concept of self. Kernberg is quoted as saying, "Borderlines can describe themselves for five hours without your getting a realistic picture of what they're like."

The second category is termed "nonspecific signs" and includes such things as low anxiety tolerance, poor impulse control, and an undeveloped or poor ability to enjoy work or hobbies in a meaningful way.

Kernberg believes that borderlines are distinguished from neurotics by the presence of "primitive defenses." Chief among these is splitting, in which a person or thing is seen as all good or all bad. Note that something which is all good one day can be all bad the next, which is related to another symptom: borderlines have problems with object constancy in people -- they read each action of people in their lives as if there were no prior context; they don't have a sense of continuity and consistency about people and things in their lives. They have a hard time experiencing an absent loved one as a loving presence in their minds. They also have difficulty seeing all of the actions taken by a person over a period of time as part of an integrated whole, and tend instead to analyze individual actions in an attempt to divine their individual meanings. People are defined by how they last interacted with the borderline.

Other primitive defenses cited include magical thinking (beliefs that thoughts can cause events), omnipotence, projection of unpleasant characteristics in the self onto others and projective identification, a process where the borderline tries to elicit in others the feelings s/he is having. Kernberg also includes as signs of BPO chaotic, extreme relationships with others; an inability to retain the soothing memory of a loved one; transient psychotic episodes; denial; and emotional amnesia. About the last, Linehan says, "Borderline individuals are so completely in each mood, they have great difficulty conceptualizing, remembering what it's like to be in another mood."

I realize it's penny-ante sophomore Psych 101 crap to suggest such a diagnosis on the basis of one's writings, but seriously, we have a lot of writings here to look at.

And also, St. Andrew's such a dickweed that I don't feel bad about offering this diagnosis.

Whether you call him "excitable" or "hysterical" or what have you, the guy does seem to swing from one extreme mood to another, "splitting" people constantly. One day they're getting love-notes that make a reader blush at the unrestrained gushing; the next day, they're Hitler.

There's just something wrong with this cat. He's just hooked up wrong.

Posted by: Ace at 12:25 PM | Comments (39)
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His post, slightly edited and ammended to make his juvenile hysteria more coherent:

Ramesh "Party of Death" Ponnuru says he opposes torture. He did and said virtually nothing for the four years it has been American policy, except cover his ass with a couple of statements, designed not to offend those whose patronage he seeks. His record of near-silence speaks for itself, torture torture Abu Ghraib. No amount of flim-flammery can now rogue nation. As for whether it is "hysterical" to relate the Bush administration's policy to allow torture and abuse of military prisoners to Abu Ghraib and the dozens of other sites in Iraq and Afghanistan where torture has occurred, torture torture waterboarding Haditha "Hadji Girl" torture were also "hysterical". He must also believe that the torture torture Abu Ghraim torture torture torture Madonna tickets, first row, P-town, beagles are cute.

So on my side: the government reports and the Supreme Court. On Ponnuru's side, the usual torture torture FMA betrayal of true conservative principles, and by the way the Pope is a Nazi. Also notice Ponnuru's "argument" about what conservatism is. For him, it suffices to say that torture torture water-boarding poor Khalid Sheik Mohammad I cry myself to bed everynight thinking about the perserverence of this new Gandhi. Is conservatism now a social clique? Or is it a philosophy worth debating and arguing over, as I try to do in my next book? For Ponnuru, conservatism is a club. For me, it's a set of torture "conservativism, c'est moi." If Ponnuru wants to say I am not a serious conservative, then let him make the case. The rest is schoolgirl cliquishness.

"Schoolgril cliquishness." "Hysteria." Incivility.

Again, projection (yawn) ain't just a river in Egypt.

A little repost. I like this old take-down of St. Andrew of the Sacred Heart-Ache. Andrew Sullivan: "I'm not easy to offend."

Oh really?

St. Andrew Flashback: He actually speculated that the War on Terror was all just a concoction to stave off gay marriage.

I shit you not:

But in my darker moments, I wonder whether the war wasn't a cover to persuade good, open-minded folk like Glenn to enable the theocratic impulses of the Republican base. Of course, Glenn can wait and see. Gay couples who have had basic rights taken away from them since November, might feel more aggrieved.

He never shuts up about "Glenn." It's like he has a crush on him, as he once seemed to have on Bush.

People tend to bad-mouth those they once had crushes on. "After the love is gone," a philosopher once said, "what used to be right is wrong."

Posted by: Ace at 11:23 AM | Comments (49)
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On a weekend night before a holiday.

When, presumably, O'Reilly was running reruns or canned material.

In one demographic.

For fifteen minutes.

Yes, that's right. Not even for a full hour. Just a quarter of one.

They're so beaten down they think losing is winning.

Thanks to the BumperStickerist.

Posted by: Ace at 10:49 AM | Comments (40)
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He said this on Fox News a little while ago. I'm looking for a print article.

But, basically, the immigration debate is, for now, moving in the right direction, albeit slowly.

Posted by: Ace at 10:43 AM | Comments (160)
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Instapundit notes Dave Wigel's strange inconsistency about the privacy rights of public officials. He defends the Al Qaeda Intelligence Service's decision to publish the locations of Cheney's and Rumsfeld's vacation homes, but insinuates that Michelle Malkin is to blame for the suicide of UC-Santa Cruz' president, Denise Denton.

Why? Because Michelle published the woman's office, official, university-provided phone number. So that readers could express their disapproval about the president's lax attitude to campus lawbreakers.

Well, as Instapundit notes, if it's no big deal to put out someone's home address, how the hell can it be a violation to note someone's official phone number?

Malkin states the obvious: she didn't kill Denice Denton. Her own troubled psychology did.

So, why would Wiegel engage in such absurd double-standards?

Simple. He dreams of being hired by the AQIS, or anyone else in the MSM. Michelle Malkin isn't hiring.

Live the fantasy, Dave.

Posted by: Ace at 10:30 AM | Comments (17)
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At Something Awful.

I like the tag for Battleship: "Go ahead and move your submarine, your grandpa can't see shit." Funny because it's true. Even in Electronic Battleship, you could win every time by simply not entering the positions of a single ship. Or, just not entering one ship. Your opponent could enter "B9, D12, F3" all the livelong day. Can't hit a ship that doesn't exist in the game's memory.

Thanks to steve_in_hb.

Posted by: Ace at 10:02 AM | Comments (5)
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Goes for the inappropriate kiss, too.

I don't know why these guys think that voters want strangers touching their children.

Posted by: Ace at 09:44 AM | Comments (6)
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It's funny because it's true.

Via Villainous Company, who seems to have been the first to note that Eric Lichtblau, the lead reporter on the SWIFT story, didn't know about it, despite the fact that everyone knew about it.

Posted by: Ace at 09:41 AM | Comments (8)
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