So, there are some "protests" in Beirut.

Makes for some compelling photos that don't need to be photoshopped to look all scary.

And yet -- not much media play, and the violence is played down as mere "protests."

Why?

Because you can't pin it on Jews this time, that's why.

That's what Israel should have called its campaign against Lebanon -- the 2006 Cross-Border Combined-Arms "Peace Warrior" Protest.

Marketing.

Posted by: Ace at 07:32 AM | Comments (10)
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Bush so happy, he want to cry.

The State of the Union is a disaster. I did my best, but I made mistakes, and my best wasnÂ’t good enough.

We went to war without building up our army, and now, I am trying to make up for that.

But that is not the disaster.

The disaster is that you, Congress and the American people, do not care to fight.

Faced with a fundamental challenge to our own security, to everything we believe in, to the world order to peace and security for which we and our parents fought so hard for so many years, you now want to pretend like none of these threats are real. You want to surrender to the evil I have been telling you about. An evil that, unchecked, can consume large parts of the world and threatens to usher in a dark age.

You didnÂ’t like it when I talked about evil. Sounded too simple, too uncompromising, too moralistic. Too Â… biblical.

I donÂ’t know what else you call people who fly passenger jets into office buildings; who rape women in front of their husbands and children, and execute their opponents in acid baths; who seek to spread tyrannical and archaic religious regimes that enslave women and stifle fundamental freedoms. Who want to dominate the worldÂ’s primary oil fields with nuclear weapons.

I call it evil. Works for me.

Posted by: Ace at 06:45 AM | Comments (58)
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Fokker mother?

When the Wright brothers first took to the sky in a biplane, they were using a design nature may have tried 125 million years earlier.

A new study of one of the earliest feathered dinosaurs suggests it may have had upper and lower sets of wings, much like the biplanes of early aviation.

It's not clear if the design was a step on the way to modern birds or a dead end, tested by nature and discarded.

...

Microraptor was described by Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2003 as having aerodynamic feathers on both its arms and legs. Xing suggested at the time that it glided, extending its legs backward so its wings were arranged one behind the other, like a dragonfly.

But that would be aerodynamically inefficient for a feathered creature, Chatterjee concluded, noting that the feathers on the legs would not face forward.

Instead, he suggested, the legs of the 2-pound creature could have been held below the body in flight, creating two staggered wing sections, the upper one slightly ahead of the lower one.

In the future, by the way, all sports teams will have black uniforms, and all dinosaurs, even the most innocuous herbivores, will have "raptor" somewhere in their name.

Marketing, baby. Mindshare.

Posted by: Ace at 06:41 AM | Comments (23)
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Diplomacy.

Of course, an agreement from North Korea to stop building nukes is much like an agreement from Ike Turner to stop slapping a bitch. Maybe they even mean it. For now. But the second Tina starts working too closely with Berry Gordy, it's back on, baby.

Allah also links some interesting stuff suggesting that Iranian "moderates" are less interested in Ahmadinejad's bomb.

Posted by: Ace at 05:20 AM | Comments (16)
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I don't even know how to summarize this. The article's writer seems to have the same problem, but stick with it, it's plenty werid.

Roy sums it up:

Woman pretends to be her daughter in chat room.
Guy chats her up, pretending to be young Marine.
Guy's wife reveals (to the woman pretending to be her daughter) that young Marine is old married ex-Marine.
Woman chats up other young guy (to find out if it's true that her internet paramour isn't really what he claims).
Old guy kills young guy in a fit of jealousy.

It's like Romeo & Juliet, except with ugly, stupid people.

In related news, Steven Seagal has ballooned up to 600 pounds.

I guess that's not really related. But it's the elephant in the room.

Also Related: The Parlor, a kinda-clever dramatization of an Internet chat room. Hot Air linked this a while ago.

Posted by: Ace at 06:34 PM | Comments (38)
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Jules Crittendon points out the absurdity of this situation. It's about the NYT hit on Dinesh D'Souza.

As it turns out, of course, I agree with most of that hit, at least in general outline.

But it is remarkable that the NYT, constantly whining about how they're targeted as disloyal and unpatriotic for "merely" exposing perfectly legal anti-terrorism programs to Al Qaeda, decides that one can safely use the "t-word" after all.

If one is a liberal, and using it against someone associated with the right.

The piece's title is None (but Me) Dare Call It Treason.

More evidence that the the Times' "patriotism" is not a patriotism to America itself but to a global Vanguard of the Enlightened. After all, the Times has never dared call anyone on the left, even those who obviously sympathize with terrorists, treasonous.

It's only when you betray the only institution to which you owe true loyalty -- "The Movement" -- that you can truly be accused of high treason.

Good Lord, I'm A Moron: The title is intended to be a mocking paraphrase of D'Souza's own claims. It's supposed to serve as an alternative title of the book. Mocking D'Souza for finding traitors all over the place.

I apologize for my idiocy.

It began to dawm on me when the writer began calling D'Souza a McCarthyite. "My goodness!" I thrilled. "Does he not realize how savagely ironic this all is?"

Um, yeah, I realized: Maybe he does. Maybe that's the point.

But seriously-- this gaffe aside, the NYT sucks.

Correcting My Correction: He may mean the title to be a mockery of D'Souza's thesis, but he does write:

I never thought a book by DÂ’Souza, the aging enfant terrible of American conservatism, would, like the Stalinist apologetics of the popular front period, contain such a soft spot for radical evil.

...which is precisely the charge lefties go apopleptic over and cry smacks of the very McCarthyism that this article, inevitably, decries.

So, according to the NYT and this liberal, you can accuse someone of apologism for bin Ladinism and a disgusting toadying up to evil.

So long as it's someone associated with the right being so accused.

Posted by: Ace at 05:49 PM | Comments (15)
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I'll give you three guesses, though of course you only need one.

George W. Bush is the worst President in history, it seems, even worse than Lyndon Johnson, whom Stone claimed whacked President Kennedy in JFK.

Question: If Bush's alienation of the world accounts for WTC's poor international performance, what, praytell, can account for it laying an egg here in the States?

Posted by: Ace at 05:17 PM | Comments (27)
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Oh well. We still have most of the offensive linemen.

The only good news I can get out of this horrific devolopment is that one of them has to lose.

No, but seriously, I'm glad the Bears are back in it, and while I was disappointed by New England's loss, I didn't want to see Peyton Manning become the Susan Lucci of quarterbacks. Even Dan Marino at least got to go to one.

How long before this game is turned into some sort of karmic endorsement for Barack Obama? About five seconds, I imagine. If Chris Matthews hasn't done it already, he will for Sunday's snoozer.

Husband Gets Wife To Induce Early Delivery So He Can Watch The Bears: The article says it was the wife's idea. Right.

Posted by: Ace at 03:24 PM | Comments (141)
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Gateway Pundit has a video of Jimmy Carter calling the Holocaust the "so-called Holocaust."

Now, in fairness, Carter states that this was one of the greatest crimes in human history, and that it was Hitler's plan to exterminate the Jews by mass-murder, etc.

So he's not saying "so-called Holocaust" in the usual way it's used, i.e., to deny the Holocaust, or, worse yet, to admit this all actually happened but question whether it was a bad thing or not. (As I learned from, I think, Mara Liason on Brit Hume: Abu Abbas is rightly called a "Palestinian moderate," despite the fact he's a Holocaust denier. In many Arab countries, the "moderates" are the Holocaust deniers. The non-moderates are the Holocaust enthusiasts.)

Still, the fact that this locution springs to his mind while speaking extemporaneosly kind of suggests who he's been reading and talking to of late, no?

A So-Called "Photoshop:"

Thanks to Rosetta.

Posted by: Ace at 03:11 PM | Comments (42)
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Blogging's not just idiots typing in their dirty underwear. It's a Star Making machine, baby. Ana Marie Cox gets a deal to do a supposedly fun, hip, irreverent version of Meet the Press for HBO, which they'll be looking at as a potential pilot.

Wonderful. HBO is really doing some ground-breaking work. Where else can you find a supposedly "funny" interview/panel show on the week's events?

Oh, right -- on HBO. And on Comedy Central. And on Saturday Night Live. And... everywhere else.

Phin sent that to me, depressing me to no end, especially because my one Hollywood connection (no names) had written back to me recently that he "liked" my script, and thought it was "orginal" with "great characters," which, of course, is what you say when you hate something.

The only worse possible review would contain the words "interesting" and "has a lot of potential" and "some parts I liked" and "I appreciated many of your punctuation choices."

But I just got off the phone with him, and he seems to have liked it a bit more than that his email suggested, and will try to get it into the hands of someone who might want to make the movie. (Of course, this contains the implicit message I and my production company would definitely not be among those select few willing to make your movie, but it's something.)

Still, it was very fun to be talking to this guy, and hearing the last names of writers and directors and big-name actors dropped, especially since I liked most of the names being dropped. (Especially when it's just the last name -- makes it sound cooler, and makes you feel like you're in with the guys somehow.)

And hearing that so-and-so, who I think is pretty funny, also reads this stupid blog, is pretty cool.

Incidentally, this guy -- comedy writer/actor/etc. -- really loved the Steven Seagal thread, and was laughing out loud at a lot at the various jokes you morons were telling each other. If you can make a professional comedy guy laugh, you must be pretty funny. So give yourselves a pat on a back, but don't let it go to your heads.

By the way, a couple of his contributions would have been:

Steven Seagal is... Sweating From Exertion

and

Steven Seagal is... Undressing You With His Eyes

...but he doesn't really post here, so they didn't grace the thread. He particularly liked Rosetta's (I think) Steven Seagal in.. The Usual Sous-Chefs, and a couple more. I would have listened more carefully, were I not crushed by the direction of the conversation, "Yeah, the script's okay. You know what was really funny? That thread you had absolutely nothing to do with, that's what."

So, there you go. Not there yet, but this stupid moronblog might actually succeed in its intended mission -- getting me a big fat check overflowing with crazy screenwriting money.

Then again, he thinks you're funny, so, really, he's not exactly a tough sell.

Oh... Since he was generous enough to give me some suggestions on my script -- or "notes," as we people in Tinseltown call them -- I'll offer him a punch-up of one of his Steven Seagal entries.

Steven Seagal is... Sweating From The Thighs

I just think that paints a stronger visual. Plus, I love the word "thighs." It's technically not a dirty word, but it always reads like a dirty word. I like the thematic tension of that.

Posted by: Ace at 02:06 PM | Comments (56)
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