Amanda Marcotte just had a stroke-inducing orgasm. She's expected to recover in time to further demolish John Edwards' chances at the presidency.

Bonus for her: It's being planned by that peaceable nation that the thuggist western patriarchs are always picking on, perhaps for being too feminist.

Iran plans a female-only island to boost tourism in a northwest province, the Tehran-e Emrouz newspaper on Wednesday quoted a local official as saying.

It will be on the Urumiyeh lake in Western Azerbaijan province, a municipality official identified only as Aghai said.

Under Iran's strict Islamic law, mixing with men in public is forbidden. Strict sex segregation actually protects women rather than restricting their rights, officials argue.

"There will be no men on the Arezou (Wish) island. Public transport, restaurants and other facilities will be staffed only by women," Aghai said.

Sounds like Iran has been hired on to do some guerilla marketing for the much-delayed, Joss-Whedon-abandoned Wonder Woman movie.

Which is just a bad idea, by the way. Wonder Woman is an okay character, I guess, but it's like making a romantic comedy just for men.

A lot of women will claim they love Wonder Woman, but really, you guys going to line up to buy tickets on its opening weekend? Or are you going to see whatever horrific movie Hugh Grant has stumbled into?

Posted by: Ace at 12:57 PM | Comments (45)
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The camp X-Ray jihadist prison there, he means. But who knows? Maybe he wants to give the whole base to the Cubans while he's at it.

He's troubled by the "symbolism" of Gitmo. Some of us are more troubled by the reality of jihad.

As Bryan Preston points out, there's a reason they're held at Gitmo and not Leavenworth -- Gitmo is outside the jurisdiction of US judges determined to impose the rules of criminal law on warfighting and thus make warfighting impossible. Similar to how a dopey law professor argues assassinating enemy nuclear scientists and heads of state is illegal, and calls Instapundit "fascist" and "extremist" for suggesting such a course.

They tried to make warfare "illegal" once, after WWI. Didn't really work. So now they're trying to make it illegal not by making war itself illegal, but by declaring that virtually every single action taken in war is illegal or forbidden by the Constitution. Oh, they're not so extreme or pacifist to outright claim it's illegal for America to defend herself; that wouldn't play in Peoria. Instead, they'll just try to make every single specific incidence of warmaking illegal, killing war itself by a thousand cuts.

Well, of course, that won't actually stop war; it'll just make make America stop fighting wars. But isn't that what's really important? After all, doesn't America, with some assistance from its toady state Israel, start all wars anyway?

If not through actual belligerent action, then via globalism or its "culturally hegemonistic aggression" or, you know, whatever.

Posted by: Ace at 12:27 PM | Comments (52)
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Clown beat-down. Alas, it's the clown doing the beating -- on a 12 year old, no less.

As a child going to the circus, you might expect the clown to throw a bucket of confetti at you, or squirt you with water from the flower on his lapel.

You certainly wouldn't be prepared for him to grab you by the scruff of the neck, punch and kick you and leave you needing hospital treatment for cuts and bruises.

As these astonishing pictures show, that's what happened when 12-year-old Amos Lutz met Kaspar the Clown at a circus in Leipzig, Germany.

Amos's mistake seems to have been to hurl a carton of his own confetti at Kaspar - otherwise known as Bernd Kalster, 47 - as he strolled by. Clown Bernd Kalster, 47, punched and kicked helpless Amos Lutzer, 12, to the ground at Leipzig, Germany, then claimed it was self defence.

Kaspar clearly failed to see the funny side.

A German lacking a sense of humor? A clown which brings not mirth but misery and horror? It's almost too unbelievable to be true.

An oldie: Top Ten Signs You've Got A Bad Clown On Your Hands.

Thanks to... well, so many people that I can't name them all, as they say at the Oscars.

"Cycle of Violence" Update: Two clowns shot dead at circus.

The local police chief stated: "The killings had nothing to do with the show the victims were performing at the time of the incident."

I don't know about that. They were doing clown shit, right? That seems like a motive that shouldn't be so quickly dismissed.

Seems similar to how police always immediate rule out jihadism as a motive when a "trechcoat-clad youth" gets it in his head to shoot people, blow people up, or run people down in his car.

In related news, Jimmy Carter is set to write a book condemning the west's "anti-clown animus" and calling for an end to the "apartheid" clowns suffer under within the children's entertainment community.

Clowns have, in turn, conferred an honorary clownship on him.

It's about time.

Posted by: Ace at 12:16 PM | Comments (51)
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Patterico notes the LAT withholds the names of CIA agents charged with kidnapping in a counterterrorism covert operation -- real, genuine, bona-fide cloak-and-dagger stuff -- but offer enough details of their homes and their vehicles so that pretty much anyone with enough time can figure out who they are.

Patrick Fitzgerald was quoted as saying, "Let me know if you can somehow connect this to Dick Cheney and I'll get right on it."

Via Instapundit.

Posted by: Ace at 12:02 PM | Comments (9)
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Kinda sorta balanced, which is surprising, coming from CJR. But only superficially so.

Because to get that balance, the writer has to draft Tony Snow into the media, which he currently isn't, in order to find an example of a right-leaning voice in the media speaking out against bloggers. Which just sort of shows you how difficult it is to find a conservative in the media.

What binds the critique of Gregory and Snow, it seems, is an annoyance with the blogosphere's insistence on seeing everything in political terms. Don't they understand? We are objective. The White House tells us all it knows, in as clear and direct a way as it can. And the press corps -- the people's proxy -- asks the questions it needs to get at that information.

They can't be so naïve to believe this - to both imagine there is no spin or obfuscation, and that there is no political motivation beating in the hearts of reporters. The only other reason then for swatting away at what are actually - to be honest here - fairly powerless bloggers, is that they are genuinely scared. It's not that blogs have brought a new politicization of the coverage. White House briefings, for example, have always been charged with politics. After all, it is the president's version of events trying to beat out the others. What blogs bring is scrutiny. There is more of it. And this is what unites a David Gregory and a Tony Snow. They are being watched and picked apart by that many more millions of eyes. And this means journalists have to be more careful, choose their words more wisely, make their questions smarter and more aggressive. Press secretaries, for their part, have been forced to more quickly address criticism, answer questions more clearly than they have in the past, and be more accountable for flip-flops and lies.

Now, remind us again, what's wrong with that?

Couple of points. Snow's actual complaint was:

"You've got this democratic age of the media. I'll occasionally punch it up," he admits. "You've got this wonderful, imaginative, hateful stuff that comes flying out."

So Snow was noting, correctly, that there's some good stuff coming out of the democratic Young Media, but an awful lot of "hateful stuff," which is undeniably true. And while it's impossible to tally up all that hate and compare, it does seem that most of the hate is coming from one side of the aisle, the side where spitting rage counts as a coherent argument.

And very annoying is this:

...Richard Wolffe, Newsweek's White House correspondent, offered the coup de grace: "They want us to play a role that isn't really our role. Our role is to ask questions and get information. ... It's not a chance for the opposition to take on the government and grill them to a point where they throw their hands up and surrender... It's not a political exercise, it's a journalistic exercise. And I think often the blogs are looking for us to be political advocates more than journalistic ones."

At first, this seems unobjectionable -- until you realize whom he's talking about. He's talking about leftwing bloggers, as they're obviously the ones demanding the press corps admit its deep liberal biases and unapologetically act upon them. Which means, in turn, he's only reading leftwing blogs -- apparently they're the only ones whose opinions count.

I see this a lot from the MSM -- they only lower themselves to respond to complaints from the sinistrosphere, because 1, it's only the opinons of fellow liberals they respect and only their criticisms that sting, and 2, because they're only reading such blogs in the first place.

You are what you eat, they say, and your mind is similarly what you read. The media is defensive against and ultimately responsive to the leftwing bloggers' charge that they were too supine in acting as "Bush's stenographers" in the run-up to the war; and yet there are thousands upon thousands of posts written in the dextrosphere pointing out their much better documented anti-Bush, anti-war biases, and yet these complaints don't seem to cause any "heart-ache" whatsoever. They don't read them, and even if they do -- who cares what a bunch of rightwing nutjobs think, anyhow?

It's the critiques from the left that rankle, and, by jimminy, while they'll object to the left's call for them to be out-and-proud political actors, they are quite willing to meet them half way, and be tough, strong in their relentless criticism of the war, the president, etc.

As Pamela Hess pointed out, her media colleagues now take any question about the real national-security implications of a failure in Iraq as "carrying Bush's water." And yet they do not pause to consider that their stubborn refusal to consider such a national security debacle is, effectively, carrying John Murtha's and Nancy Pelosi's water for them. Only the first is forbidden; if Murtha and Pelosi happen to benefit from the media's, err, intellectual incuriousity about the true costs of defeat, why that's just a price they'll have to pay, isn't it?

This is exactly why I was so infuriated by the media's reaction to Stephen Colbert's criticism of them at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. For thirty years, those on the right have been exposing the media's blatant left-wing bias, and yet it only took a TV clown's comedy act to convince them that they were too biased in favor of Republicans and Bush. They acted hurt by his criticism, but it was the pain of a masochist saying "hurt me, hurt me" -- they took pleasure in the kiss of the whip, because it reinforced their pre-existing belief that they just weren't liberal enough in their reportage, and they'd have to start doing better. And boy did they.

Thanks to JackStraw.

Posted by: Ace at 11:55 AM | Comments (3)
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Malkin has more on troll who graduated from internet trolling to real-life kick-in-the-door trolling.

He hates "Kykes," too. What a shock.

Posted by: Ace at 10:49 AM | Comments (37)
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And I learned three things:

1) She's a woman who has needs;

2) She's a student at NC State;

and

3) She's, apparently, available.

Anyone got her number?

Just askin'.

Posted by: Jack M. at 07:08 AM | Comments (33)
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Michael sends this, telling me I don't have to hat-tip, he just wants my take.

I got nothing. I'll toss out the obligatory cover-my-ass speculation that this is performance art of a particuarly cringe-inducing kind. But I really don't think so.

20 years from now we may look back on this as the day the Internet became the primary vehicle for vengeance through public mortification.

Will that result in better world or a worse one? Depends, I guess, on whom you sympathize with here -- the cheating girl, or the cheated-on guy who put on his own Jerry Springer show.

I don't know. Why should a wronged party be expected to suffer in silent dignity, which may reflect well on them, but also abets the bad actor?

Will this cause a whole new genre of videos to flood YouTube, resulting in the technological resurrection of the stocks and public flogging?

It's all horrible. Life sucks.

Interview with the spurned lover here:

Sketchy: Actually, I'm wondering about the punk'd angle more now. He contacted the 1000 people through an open declaration in Facebook he was going to do this, and his girlfriend didn't find out? His explanation from this -- "Some people just pride themselves on not using Facebook" -- seems pretty lame, and he has no good answer when his interviewer asks didn't any of her friends see this on Facebook, either?

more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:58 PM | Comments (52)
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His frequent lament in this interview is that he takes no pleasure in the stellar job he did, because there were people being paid by critical, once-respected institutions to do this job but refused to do so. Forcing an obscure professor from New York to do the media's and academy's work for them.

And doing their work for them better than all 30,000 of them, acting together, could, to boot.

We all know race and class issues exist all over this country, but with the Duke case, do you sense that people just wanted a compelling case, or a symbol of a reality they wanted to believe in?

They wanted the latter, both in the media and the academic contexts. I wasn't following the media as closely initially, but it was clear that there was a sensationalistic element to it. I used to think the New York Times was the Bible, but they were way off on this one. On the academic side, one of the most amazing things was a quote by Duke professor Thaviola Glympth. As the case (began to fall apart), she said "Things are moving backwards." Here you have a teacher at a school that wants some of her students convicted of rape because it advances her pedagogical interest. As for the journalists, it wasn't so much that they got the facts wrong, but it was the absolute moral certainty involved. We think of journalists as people-yeah they have their biases-but that they're at least interested in the facts, and if you're a reasonably responsible journalist, you'd want to appear non-biased.

...

And are the machinations of a mass-media organization now more revealing?

There was no internal corrective process at the Times from what I can see. And then they have a column by the public editor saying they have no problem with how it's been covered, and even if it blows up, as it has, they'll continue the process of coverage on the culture of a Duke lacrosse team! It's mind boggling.

...

Kurt Andersen told me you are "heroic." Does that make you feel good, or just more convinced that others missed the boat?

I think it's disappointing to me the sort of role I've played in this case to the extent that it wasn't played by professors at Duke. We have 47 guys on this team that are encountering, say, 150-200 professors a year. I don't know all the players on the team. I've met a few; some I like. Nice kids. And you have 200 or so Duke Professors that came into contact with these people, knew they were pretty good people, and chose to remain silent or sign the Group of 88 statement. These guys were targeted in part because they were college students. I wish there had been more involvement by Duke. It's depressing. In terms of the media coverage, local was great, like the Observer. They were even better than I thought, but that didn't percolate into the national media. It just shouldn't have gotten to the point where a blog like mine could be influential.

The media and academy aren't merely biased. They are determined political actors, full stop, and should be treated as such. Just as everyone ought to suspect that anything a politician says is highly suspect and carefully scrubbed from any contrary evidence that might undermine the overarching message -- or metanarrative -- so too must everyone understand the media and academy have abandoned all pretext of being impartial advocates for only an "Agenda of Truth" and are now every bit as dishonest and self-serving as small-city prosecutor looking to win an election on the backs of three innocent college students and thereby pad his pension benefits.

The New York Times "the Bible"? It's, well, odd to run across someone who until recently held such antiquated opinions, but it's comforting to know the New York Times finally went too far for yet another former believer.

Posted by: Ace at 05:31 PM | Comments (32)
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Watching this kid makes me affirmatively want to destroy the world.

He'll be a second assistant fluffer* in the lowest levels of the gay porn industry before he's 18, and he's worried about the fucking fish? I'd say he's got bigger problems on the horizon.

But he is very angry, and angry means authentic, and authentic means "absolute moral authority," so there you go.

* A second assistant fluffer fluffs the guy who's fluffing the fluffer, to make sure the assistant fluffer is actually "into it" enough to fluff the actual on-screen "talent."

The position is also called "Rather Less Than Best Boy" or "Not-Key Grip."

Global Warming Scientists... say that by the year 2030 we may live in a world without eyebrows.

Alas, for some, the damage has already been done.

Kee-ristmas. No wonder he's so concerned about global warming. The little albino freak looks like he might catch fire if he takes that hood off during daylight.

Posted by: Ace at 04:32 PM | Comments (213)
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