From the Catherine Herrige's reporting on the O'Reilly Factor, we know the FBI and ICE actually "pushed" this story out into the media, because, due to this solid citizen's selfless work as a "youth coach," it's possible there are victims of physical molestation out there. That hasn't been proven yet; it hasn't even been alleged.

But it's a concern. And that's why law enforcement pushed the story. They want the victims to come forward.

They even avoided id'ing the guy as a former ACLU Chapter president. Again, that from Herrige, who had to find that out herself. She says that when she called for confirmation, law enforcement sources refused to confirm it.

Why? Because they wanted the story out there -- so that parents of possibly victimized children would be aware there could be a problem -- and apparently were sensitive enough of the political angle to avoid saying anything about his association with the ACLU.

Now, given that -- given that law enforcement wants this story out so that possible victims of child abuse, or even child rape, will come forward, if they exist -- has the media helped? Has it cast a bright light on the story, as it did in the Mark Foley affair, demonstrating similar concerns over the plight of the poor Congressional interns?

Are you kidding? Have you not been paying attention?

No mention of the story in the NYT, the Boston Globe, the LAT, the Seattle Times. A mention on page B05 of the Washington Post in its Virginia Briefing.

Well, it's not like the Washington Post has a strong circulation in the state of Virginia, where this guy worked as a "youth coach." So I'm sure their burying the story won't hinder parents from finding out about law enforcement's darkest suspicions.

Nice job, MSM! You've done a man's job!

A Message To Parents From Mainstream Media

If you didn't want your kids getting fucked by dirty old perverts, you shouldn't have made them so damn cute. You bought the tickets, enjoy the ride.

Thanks to Larwyn.

Posted by: Ace at 12:12 AM | Comments (196)
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Just a minor update: A fairly big blogger has been thinking about starting his own Digg competitor for a while, and now he thinks he's going to do it.

To be honest, I have no idea what the hell this thing is supposed to be or what you're supposed to do with it, but it will be great to have a service out there doing whatever the crap Digg does, only better.

Just kidding. I know what it is. I just never use it because -- well, hey. Digg sucks. Maybe a non-Digg Digg won't.

Once again, conservatives are forced to create a shadow media organization. Whatever. We've done it before. We're getting good at it.

So, Digg, fuck off. Within three months you'll lose one third of your client base, and more down the line as conservatives (who seem overrepresented on the Interent) flock away.

The question always posed is, "Why do the media deliberately or at least willfully drive away conservatives through biased policy? Isn't that bad for business?"

Well of course it is. But liberals are arrogant. And they're also so warped that they tend to put thumb-in-your-eye partisan politics (Take that, Michelle Malkin! Take that, LGF!) against common-sense business practice. And they'll keep on doing so, forever.

Posted by: Ace at 11:17 PM | Comments (24)
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Marriage is about compromise.

Weddings, not so much.

The couple had secretly spent six months perfecting the routine performed by Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey in the 1987 film [Dirty Dancing].

"I really am such a bad dancer," said Mr Derbyshire. "It was the last thing I wanted to do on my wedding day."

Emphasis mine.

She got him to do something he hated for six months?
She must have a tongue like an aardvark.

Posted by: LauraW. at 07:10 PM | Comments (62)
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One thing about Ninetendo is that it usually came with a decent game. I figured I had no interest in this stupid, childish, kinda-gay Mario Bros. game, and then found myself playing the thing a fair amount. More than most of the other games I had which looked kewler, at least in the box.

Thanks to Knemon.

Posted by: Ace at 06:05 PM | Comments (18)
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Check out LGF's lament about Digg. It all strikes me as very unfair and mobbish, and I'd be very upset about it, if I gave a rat's ass about Digg. I think I've gotten about 100 hits total off Digg.

But look -- isn't there an answer to this? Charles Johnson is an Internet guy. He's a cofounder of Pajamas Media, which is something of an original content/news aggregator hybrid.

Why doesn't PJ start its own alternative to Digg? Aren't we just talking about some fairly simple software here?

If you can't join them, beat them.

Update: Charles now links Digg Spy, where you can watch the armies of unemployed leftist robots frantically burying every single link that discomfits them.

"Free speech." Heh.

Allah suggests that you read this article about "Digital Maoism," or collectivists' belief in the power of draining human individuality out of information exchange. I'm not sure why he recommends it; maybe it's because it was written by Drexel from True Romance:

You want an eggroll, man? I got everything here from a diddle-eyed Joe to a damned if I know.

Another Update: Apparently, according to the Digguerillas, every article Michelle Malkin writes is "spam," the same as a penile growth adverts.

And, as it's labeled spam, it's blocked from ever getting prominently displayed.

Funny, huh?

Thanks to zryan.

Posted by: Ace at 05:27 PM | Comments (27)
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Via HotAir:

I was about to post on this Thursday, but didn't.

In case you don't know, Sony's entire gaming brand is now threatened. They've gone from being the leader in the field to being in fourth. The unassuming little overachiever from Nintendo, the Wii system, has first place, X Box has third. Sony's PS3 lags in fourth place.

Who's in second place? Well, Sony. But with the PS2, which is outselling its heavily hyped new system.

And neither is it selling very well in Europe, where it's only now debuting, at least if pre-orders are any guide.

Indeed, the British division of online retailer Amazon.com apparently still has allocations remaining in its queue for pre-ordering the PS3, despite starting the process more than a week ago. By comparison, the Wii sold out of all of its pre-order allocations last year in less than 7 minutes. The year before, allocations of the Xbox 360 went nearly as fast.

Even PS3 pre-orders at Play.com are doing no better. According to the retailer's website, the button to "buy" is scheduled to disappear upon the sale of their entire pre-order allocation - yet the same Gameworld Network report states that "the button is still there and very clickable."

Sony attempted to leverage the popularity of the PS system into making its Blu-Ray technology the preferred format over challenger HD-DVD. And apparently they've managed that... sort of. They currently now have a lot more Blu-Ray players out there than there are HD-DVD players, but one suspects that's only because so few people have bought either sort of player yet, and Sony used its big customer base to push Blu-Ray out there on the back of the PS3. What happens, though, as the PS3 starts to enter a death spiral, as seems likely? And does it matter if a relatively small number of early-adopters have "chosen" Blu-Ray (and they haven't really "chosen" it -- for many, it just came bundled with their very-expensive PS3 system)? After all, the general public has not made its decision yet -- perhaps only 5% of the ultimate market has bought these things yet.

Plus, again, the porn industry seems to be embracing HD-DVD. Cool innovation mentioned there: DVDs being sold with normal DVD coding on one side, HD-DVD coding on the other. Seems like a smart thing to do for all DVDs now, as no one wants to build up a DVD collection anymore just to replace it with HD versions in two or three years.

This article describes how the death-spiral will go for Sony. It's fairly interesting if you like this kind of thing.

THE CONSOLE MARKET is a virtuous circle with three main points, a virtual virtuous triangle. If you don't do well on all three points, you end up out of the market, and Sony is on the verge of just that.

The three points of the triangle are cost, installed base and games. If you don't have two of them, the third will never happen, and if you do have two, the third will come for free. Basically it is a feedback loop, you will excel at all three and ramp up the numbers or you will be in a death spiral quicker than you can say comprehensive Blu-Ray crack. There is no middle ground.

The writer says that most game consoles are at first usually sold at a loss -- basically the company is eating a loss to get as many units out there as possible, and make up for those losses with game sales. These companies usually get a $10-15 kickback -- well, license -- from each game sold by third party licensees.

The XBox 360 is now apparently turning a $75 profit per console, and can choose to drop their costs further if they really want to stick it to Sony. Sony is eating a $200 loss with each $600 PS3. So Sony can't really afford to cut prices much further.

This is where it gets really bad for Sony:

I have been told by a bunch of people that dev costs are painful on the new consoles, the 360 and PS3 specifically. If a game for the older XBox1 or PS2 cost $5 million to make, the 360 is about double that or theoretically $10 million. The killer here is that the PS3 dev costs are between 2-3 times that of the 360 and about 5x that of the Xbox1 or PS2. Ouch.

...

Basically what it comes down to is the more units a console maker has out on the market, the more willing game companies are going to be to write for it. Even if you make a stinker, if there are 100 million consoles out there, you will probably make a profit, there are a percentage of people who will buy anything. Conversely, if you make the best game in the world that everyone buys, if there are 100K consoles out there, you will still not make any net profit.

There is a big mushy middle ground here, and that has to do with how much effort you expend on each version of a game written for multiple platforms. If the 360 has 10 million units and the PS3 1 million, you can do the math. Write it for the 360 and spend $10 million, but only port it to the PS3 if you can do the port for under $1 million.

This is where a lot of the death spiral side of things comes in. If you don't have enough consoles out there, people will not write games for your super 31337 system, or at best do a crappy port to it. This means the console with the most units will get the better games. It will sell more units allowing them to lower costs, make up the money they initially ate faster, and in general be happy camper.

The company with the lower number of units gets the shaft. They become less and less desirable to write for, and less and less desirable to buy, and less able to lower costs. Higher costs means fewer sales means worse games. Negative feedback, and it hurts.

He continues his analysis in part II, here. Basically, Sony may have marginally better graphics capabilities, but users will never see those potentially sharp and fluid graphics, because few games will be written for the Sony:

The problem there is that the 360 will be utilized fully and optimized for. If there are special features of the 360, they will get used, and every tweak and hack explored as well. This will then be shoveled off to some poor third party who has to make it work on the PS3, a very different architecture with a very different set of strengths and weaknesses.

What you end up with is a fully utilized 360 and the 'same' game on the PS3 with all the weaknesses of the 360 and all the weaknesses of the PS3. Add in very little budget to optimize the resultant PS3 code, and you get a B-list version of an A-list title. This will be readily apparent to even the most blatantly paid for game reviewer.

Ouch.

I was wondering if Sony's benefits could possibly eventually cause it to take off. One thing they brag about is that you can use the gaming system as an internet browser, to manage digital photographs, hold your whole MP3/iPod music library. Sony will start offering downloadable movies -- from their site right to your PS3's hard drive -- and one article notes that you can even run Linux on the PS3.

But -- what, who cares? Why on earth would I want to run Linux on my game console? Doesn't everyone buying a very high end gaming console already have a computer to take care of such things?

It's a feathered fish, a fish that neither swims nor flies. About half of a computer, for about price of a half of a computer, which is, alas, far more than people are used to for paying for a game console.

And I don't get the whole thing about "turning your television into an internet browser" to make the system "your family's core entertainment system." The internet is just about the most solitary, anti-social past-time available. People say watching TV discourages families from talking, but at least there you're watching the same thing in real-time and thus have a common topic for conversation.

But the whole point of the internet is to let people jump from this hyperlink to that one, following whatever interests them at that very second -- how can that sort of experience, optimized for a single user, ever become a "family experience" or otherwise shared experience? How can Dad and Daughter ever agree on what site to go to next? Does Dad want to go to the Barney the Dinosaur sing-a-long site? Well, maybe, but not for long. And likewise Daughter doesn't want to read about off-season football player trades.

So... I don't know. The PS3 community is still hoping it will take off for some reason, but why on earth would it suddenly take off? It's only marginally better, on paper, than the XBox in terms of graphics, and in reality, is now doomed to be its inferior; and it's hellaciously more expensive than the Wii.

The product is inferior and the pricetag is huge. Not a winning combination. And anyone who hasn't yet committed to buying the Sony is now warned that the system may be all but dead within a year, with Sony basically disappearing from the business until it tries to buid again from scratch at the start of the next product development cycle in five years or so.

What a mess.

All to push the Blu-Ray.

Not sure if that will be seen as a wise move five or ten years from now. If they successfully win the format fight, I guess they'll make more money off that than they would have made with the PS3. Maybe the sacrifice of one product was necessary to guarantee the success of a more lucrative one.

But if they don't even win that, it's just a disaster all the way around.

Posted by: Ace at 04:22 PM | Comments (117)
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Dave from Garfield Ridge is going to be in Boston tomorrow, and since I don't know how long I can possibly discuss Tony Fransiscus versus Charleton Heston yet again, I was wondering if local AoS readers had any interest in a few Sunday evening beers. Early night type stuff. No wild debauchery. Probably like 6-10 at the latest.

I know Sunday evening is a weird time for this, but Dave's just in town tonight for a wedding and tomorrow.

Anyway, let me know.

PS: Times are flexible, so if any homos just have to see the Oscars or something, it's easy enough to change the time. I didn't know the Oscars were on tomorrow until I came across this rundown from David Spade and the Showbiz Show staff.

All I know is I'm rooting against Babel. Not sure why. I just think I hate that movie.

And another PS: This is late notice and all. If there are enough Boston area people who want to do this, but perhaps with more notice, let me know that too.

I always felt a little weird about this, because I'm not a planner or organizer sort (as you could well guess) and I'm kind of embarrassed to be announcing, superficially, a gathering in tribute to me. Even though I know that's not really what it is, I feel goofy about saying, "Hey, I'm doing a public appearance soon..."

But if you guys want to get together at some point, I can arrange something. Kind of. Someone else has to tell me what would be a good bar to go to, because I almost never leave my apartment.

NYCers: An NYC reader just said he might take the train to make it. Which is a bad idea, because Karol from Alarming News is going to re-schedule the NYC blogger bash that was supposed to happen last weekend at some point in the next month or so. I'll let everyone know when that's happening, and if I'm going. I usually do.

Posted by: Ace at 02:49 PM | Comments (47)
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Allah's got the video from O'Reilly, and notes the inevitable I-was-just-doing-research-on-child-porn defense, which of course is now one of the go-to excuses for deviant behavior.

Stop the ACLU notes that the ACLU pressed for the legal sale and ownership of child porn (of course!) a couple of decades ago. Their position was that child porn might be illegal to produce -- involving, as it does, the sexual exploitation of children -- but not to own or sell, acts, they say, which do not involve the direct exploitation of children, but merely the transfer of materials depicting children who had already been exploited/molested/raped.

The Supreme Court didn't buy this argument. Maybe they should try again. Justice Kennedy is doing a lot of "evolving," especially as regards the newly discovered right "at the heart of liberty... to define oneÂ’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."*

Little tidbit I didn't know: That jagoff Barry Lynn, supposedly a "reverend" or something in the "United Church of Christ," the guy who's pretty obviously an atheist but likes to pretend to be religious in order to further his secular agenda, was a proponent of this viewpoint.

As legislative counsel for the ACLU in 1985, Barry Lynn told the U.S. Attorney GeneralÂ’s Commission on Pornography (of which Focus on the Family President Dr. James C. Dobson was a member) that child pornography was protected by the First Amendment. While production of child porn could be prevented by law, he argued, its distribution could not be. A few years later (198 , Lynn told the Senate Judiciary Committee that even requiring porn producers to maintain records of their performersÂ’ ages was impermissible.

* Incidentally, as a bit of rhetoric, that's a nice enough sentence and I have no strong disagreements with it. I'm annoyed to see it cited in a Supreme Court opinion, though, where words are supposed to have definite, limited, operative meanings. Kennedy's little slogan is both too vague and too sweeping -- pretty much the statement means "everything is legal." But of course he can't mean that literally -- so what does it mean? How can someone use that bit of dicta to determine what sorts of actions are protected by the "heart of liberaty" and freedom to "define the mystery of the universe" and which are not?

It's useless in that capacity. Either it means so much as to claim that virtually every act is protected from prosecution by the Constitution, or it means so little as to not be worth quoting in an opinion, or, of course, it's just "a little literary flair" which, again, really does not belong in an opinion. Words in opinions are supposed to mean something, and serve as a guideline as to what may be found legal or illegal or consitutional or unconstitutional in the future; does Kennedy's goofball Walt Whitman-esque rhetoric serve that function?

Posted by: Ace at 01:39 PM | Comments (18)
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I mentioned this video a few days ago -- it's the video where a British newshost questions a Saudi-funded school headmistress in Britain is challenged on using textbooks calling Christians "monkeys" and Jews "pigs" -- but couldn't link it at the time as it had been, predictably, removed from YouTube.

It's back up. Click fast, because you know YouTube's policy on "Islamophobia."

What this guy does is something American journalists by and large don't bother with -- he follows up on questions and will not allow shabby evasions to stand. One thing that makes O'Reilly still compelling, for all his flaws, is that he too sinks his teeth in and won't let go. Apparently virtually every other journalist considers this impolite and will allow their interviewees to offer up the silliest dodges and non sequitors and then dutifully move on.

I guess the tough, strong media manages to rouse itself to do this when it's grilling Tony Snow or George Bush (remember the six thousand questions from different reporters demanding to know if Bush had made any mistakes in the Iraq War?), but for all others -- especially Democrats and Islamic spokesman -- they're quite willing to take an evasion as an "answer."

This clip is shorter than the original, and so you don't get a sense of the doggedness of him asking the same question over and over (and the Islamic headmistress offering the same non-answers), but it's still good.

"Look, these are platitudes, with respect."

Via PetiteDov.

Posted by: Ace at 01:16 PM | Comments (22)
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A picture is worth a thousand words.

Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oi Oi Oi! We love you too, Australia.

Unfortunately, the first picture I wanted to post- a bigger closeup of the banner- is no longer viewable on Yahoo News Photos.

The URL just seems to have up and disappeared. That's odd.

Best Of Cool Facts About Dick Cheney Thread, since it has been a while and they're funny all over again.

Posted by: LauraW. at 11:26 AM | Comments (26)
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