John Fund on the hypocrisy:

The mines had a generally good environmental record, but they wouldn't pass muster either with the standard Mr. Gore set in "Earth in the Balance" or with most of his environmentalist friends. In May 2000 the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation issued a "Notice of Violation" notifying the Pasminco mine its zinc levels in a nearby river exceeded standards established by the state and the federal Environmental Protection Agency. In 1996 the mine twice failed biomonitoring tests designed to protect water quality in the river for fish and wildlife. "The discharge of industrial wastewater from Outfall #001 [the Caney Fork effluent] contains toxic metals (copper and zinc)," the analysis stated. "The combined effect of these pollutants may be detrimental to fish and aquatic life."

The Gore mines were no small operations. In 2002, the year before they shut down, they ranked 22nd among all metal-mining operations in the U.S., with total toxic releases of 4.1 million pounds. A new mine operator, Strategic Resource Acquisition, is planning to reopen the mines later this year. The Tennessean reports that just last week, Mr. Gore wrote SRA asking it to work with a national environmental group as it makes its plans. He noted that under the previous operator, the mines had, according to the environmental website Scorecard, "pollution releases from the mine in 2002 [that] placed it among the 'dirtiest/worst facilities' in the U.S." Mr. Gore requested that SRA "engage with us in a process to ensure that the mine becomes a global example of environmental best practices." The Tennessean dryly notes that Mr. Gore wrote the letter the week after the paper posed a series of questions to him about his involvement with the zinc mines.

...

Mr. Gore has called the campaign to combat global warming a "moral imperative." But Mr. Gore faces another imperative: to square his sales pitches with the facts and his personal lifestyle to more align with what he advocates that others practice. "Are you ready to change the way you live?" asks Mr. Gore's film. It's time people ask Mr. Gore "Are you ready to change the way you live, as well as the way you lecture the rest of us?"

Hot Air and Instapundit don't think this is a big deal. I'm more with John Fund on this. Al Gore is fairly absolutist on the environment, at least in terms of his rhetoric. He's actually very latitudinarian on these issues in how he lives his own life.

Should a multimillionaire really be lecturing all of us to make do with less if he's not willing to make the colossal sacrifice of living merely like a member of the lower upper class, rather than the upper upper class?

I always giggle at Bill Maher railing about America using such a disproportionate amount of the world's resources. And who in America is using a disproportionate fraction of that disproportionate sum? Why, the rich, like Bill Maher. And yet he can't even forgo a membership at the Playboy Club.

Sweet: Gore to be grilled by Inhofe on "global warming" before a Senate committee.

The weather forecast says it'll be a balmy 43 degrees.

Anyone want to bet it'sll actually be below freezing?

Posted by: Ace at 10:16 AM | Comments (19)
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Well, someone had to say it.

It's simply not plausible that "some guy walked by [her] office" and told her to write up a memo suggesting her husband for the job.

And it's just not plausible she was "covert," in a legal or real sense. The woman began her duties working out of an embassy -- that's officially cover, not "non-official cover" or NOC.

Real covert spies do not work out of embassies. Everyone working in an embassy is suspected of being a spy until proven otherwise (and then they're still suspected, just less so). Everyone working in an embassy is photographed every few weeks by just about every intelligence service with a global reach in the world.

There are CIA officers working in the embassy, of course-- probably about a quarter to a third of its staff. And they are engaged in espionage. But "covert"? Please. They're not covert -- they've virtually got "SPY" written on their foreheads -- which is why they need diplomatic immunity to cover them.

Any "spy" who works out of an embassy is, in short, "burned" as a true covert agent for life. You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube.

Posted by: Ace at 09:40 AM | Comments (124)
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Not sure what to think about this:

A British Airways passenger was refused compensation and told by the airline to "get over it" after a corpse was placed in the row where he was sitting last week.

Paul Trinder, 54, a businessman from Brackley, Northamptonshire, spent more than £3,000 for a first-class ticket from Delhi. He awoke during the flight to find that cabin staff were propping up a dead woman almost next to him. "The stewards just plonked down this body without saying a thing," he said. "I remember looking at this thin, sparrow-like woman and thinking she was very ill."

The woman had been in economy class when she died soon after the plane left Delhi. "She kept slipping under the seat belt and moving about with the motion of the plane," Mr Trinder said. "When I asked what was going on, I was shocked to hear she was dead."

Mr Trinder, who was kept on board the plane when it landed and questioned by police and a coroner, contacted British Airways to complain, but was told to simply "get over" the experience.

British Airways says the dead woman was taken into first class because the rest of the plane was full.

He says his ticket cost more than three thousand pounds. I guess for that kind of money one usually expects not to fly with the rabble, or the dead, or worst of all, the dead rabble.

Thanks to Hwapper and dri.

Posted by: Ace at 08:52 AM | Comments (44)
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The last mistake:

IRAN is threatening to retaliate in Europe for what it claims is a daring undercover operation by western intelligence services to kidnap senior officers in its Revolutionary Guard.

According to Iranian sources, several officers have been abducted in the past three months and the United States has drawn up a list of other targets to be seized with the aim of destabilising TehranÂ’s military command.

In an article in Subhi Sadek, the Revolutionary GuardÂ’s weekly paper, Reza Faker, a writer believed to have close links to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, warned that Iran would strike back.

“We’ve got the ability to capture a nice bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks,” he said. “Iran has enough people who can reach the heart of Europe and kidnap Americans and Israelis.”

They think the disappearances of their officers aren't defections, but kidnappings.

>One theory circulating in Israel is that a US taskforce known as the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group (ISOG) is coordinating the campaign to take Revolutionary Guard commanders.

The Iranians have also accused the United States of being behind an attack on Revolutionary Guards in Iran last month in which at least 17 were killed.

Military analysts believe that Iranian threats of retaliation are credible. Tehran is notorious for settling scores.

It's not 1979 anymore. A kidnapping would be just the legal pretext we need for a massive bombing campaign.

Posted by: Ace at 08:02 AM | Comments (21)
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...And the media declined to cover it?

Gathering of Eagles turned out a huge success, with about 30,000 participating in the counter demonstration at the Pentagon and assembling around memorials to prevent those black bloc morons from defacing them again.

You didn't hear about it on the news, but they were there and they deserve our praise and thanks.

Photos and more links to those who photographed the day's events at Michelle Malkin.

I made this comment at Hot Air this morning, but I think it bears repeating:
If the antiwar protestors support the troops, why do so many of them show up dressed as mujahedeen? That's a show of solidarity with the enemy, and any Soldier or Marine serving in the Middle East would recognize it as such.

Too bad nobody showed up masquerading as Ho Chi Minh. There were a lot of Vietnam Vets there who would have appreciated the belated show of support.

Posted by: LauraW. at 07:55 AM | Comments (75)
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Video from the straight-to-video disaster starring Matt Sallinger (yeah, JD Sallinger's son). Music from Team America: World Police (language warning).

Thanks to fdgfd.

Bart was asking if this was the real trailer for Wonder Woman. No, I don't think that's even been cast yet. This is one of those many fanboy trailers of varying quality that litter YouTube. Like this "trailer" for a "JLA movie," or this Batman/Superman "movie" which actually has special effects, or this old clip by the same dorks of a Batman vs. Predator "movie."

When it comes to fan-made movies, I don't think anything will ever top this:

Posted by: Ace at 07:41 AM | Comments (8)
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These douchebags were looking for a whaling vessel to attack with acid and smoke bombs, and got lost in the fog. They were rescued by the very same vessel they were looking to ambush.

And then,

Once the activists were safe they thanked the Japanese crew, but one said, “I guess we’re back on schedule, and we’ll be pursuing you again.”

A short time later, the activists approached the whaler and tossed the acid onto the deck. Two crew members were injured in the attack.

Posted by: LauraW. at 12:35 PM | Comments (69)
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Note: This review seems to be an awful lot of words wasted on a minor horror remake from last year, especially one that fared so poorly at the box office as well as in critics' estimation. Still, for some reason, I wanted to write about it, so I did.

...

Some posters warned me away from this Nicholas Cage-starring remake of the 1973 British chiller (considered by most to be at least a minor classic), and the critics were savage, tearing into the film with a hostilty not seen again until, well, 300.

I rented it because I had nothing better to watch, and because I enjoy truly inept movies like Battlefield: Earth and The Avengers, delighting in their incompetence and providing me with the egotistical thrill of thinking "I could do better." Perhaps because of my low expectations, and because I like Nicholas Cage, I actually liked this movie quite a bit, and I'm confounded as to why my take on it differs so much from, well, almost everyone else.

My guesses: Most people didn't like it because they either don't much like Nicholas Cage, were turned off by the subtle (arguably somnolent) pacing, and were expecting this "horror" film to actually be horrific. It's actually not really a horror film so much as cross between a low-octane psychological thrller and a detective story set not in the Big City but in an odd, insular rural community of modern-world rejectivists (with the cliche -- though a fun cliche -- of the weirdly-customed agrarian-types and their requisite unapologetic hostility towards and suspicion of strangers intruding from the modern world ). Anyone coming to this movie expecting genuine horror, or even a high creepiness level, is going to be disappointed; it's really more of a (softly) hard-boiled detective story set in the forest with some light supernatural overtones.

The critics, on the other hand, rejected the film chiefly because of its perceived politics, as liberal critics are wont to do. Many say they found the film "unnecessary" or "redundant," which I expected them to, given the high esteem the original is held in, but I don't get that complaint, generally -- a remake of a classic is almost never as good as the original, but isn't there some value in getting the old material back into the theaters again? The Wallflowers' cover of Heroes was a note for note re-do of the Bowie original, and could hardly be expected to out-do that amazing song, but was there any harm in getting Heroes back in wide play on the radio? I didn't think so; sure, I prefer the Bowie version, but even a lesser remake of a great song is still pretty good, isn't it?

How many people, precisely, were renting the original 1973 Wicker Man? Almost no one, save for some few dedicated cinefiles and horror fans. So why not remake the film and give the basic story a much-wider audience? Is there some great virtue in leaving an old film unsullied by a remake, and also almost entirely unwatched?

I didn't really see the original -- well, I saw a few minutes of Edward Woodward confronting some odd Welsh-ish primitive screwheads in thatch huts, and the somewhat famous climax -- so I can't really judge how good this movie is compared to the supposedly great original. It does seem to me, though, that the hostility for what seems to be to be a fairly smart, subtle, and effective horror flick is motivated chiefly by liberal disconent with the film's fairly light political undertones. Is the film a little too low-key and under-played for modern megaplex tastes? Well, then, wasn't the original as well? Isn't a film-maker willing to risk a bit of quiet and subtlety in a genre usually marked by obvious manipulation to be praised?

Well, usually. But not when that film-maker is Neil LaBute, and his target is, very lightly, modern, or at least recent 80's-style, feminism.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:05 PM | Comments (45)
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Oscar bags contained 10,000 pounds worth of supposed carbon offsets.

From where is this carbon being offset?

Well, for a real offset, you'd have to pay someone to do something he otherwise would not do (such as fill a lot of his land with trees he otherwise would not have planted), or pay someone not to do something they otherwise would have done (such as not fly on chartered private jets).

But it seems these supposed "offsets" are coming from people doing things they were already doing -- for example, TerraPass is selling "reduced methane" emissions in its garbage dumps, despite the fact they were already reducing methane before the sale of "carbon offsets."

Thus, you're not paying somoeone to generate less "greenhouse gases." You're paying someone to continue generating the same levels of greenhouse gases they were before you paid them.

It's absurd, but what Al Gore and his Hollywood nitwits are doing, basically, is paying me not to fly on private Gulfstream jets. Well, see, I already wasn't flying on them. Paying me not to fly on them does pad my pocket a bit, but it doesn't reduce carbon dioxide emissions, because I already wasn't flying on them.

Carbon offsets are not carbon offsets at all. They're hypocrisy offsets at best.

And, of course, they're really just indulgences for the Church of Gaia.

Thanks to Larwyn.

Posted by: Ace at 05:11 PM | Comments (106)
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A comedy of terrors. Now remember, US casualties in Iraq are actually down despite more aggressive tactics as well as putting troops out into more vulnerable positions (such as putting a platoon or two in a not-very-well-defended forward position out in a trouble area -- the Americans have a real presence out there, discouraging violence, but at an increased risk to their own lives).

So this is a win-win situation. American soldiers are reducing sectarian violence, reassuring locals who want peace, and waging more aggressive war on terrorists -- and yet, despite so many more of our troops now being deployed out in what were formerly No Man's Lands in barely-fortified positions, fewer are dying.

Here's how the NYT spins this as bad news-- by stating first not that fewer Americans are dying, but that a greater proportion are now dying in the surge areas:

The heightened American street presence may already have contributed to an increase in the percentage of American deaths that occur in Baghdad.

Over all, the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq from hostilities since Feb. 14, the start of the new Baghdad security plan, fell to 66, from 87 in the previous four weeks.

But with more soldiers in the capital on patrol and in the neighborhood garrisons, a higher proportion of the American deaths have occurred in Baghdad — 36 percent after Feb. 14 compared with 24 percent in the previous four weeks. Also over the past four weeks, a higher proportion of military deaths from roadside bombs have occurred in Baghdad — 45 percent compared with 39 percent.

Taranto asked yesterday that if the situation were reversed -- that more American soldiers were being killed, but that a lower proportion of soldiers were being killed in surge areas -- would the Times have tried spinning that as positive news?

Of course not. So why is this supposedly bad news?

Mickey Kaus doubts that it's even news of any sort of all -- obviously, troops are going to tend to suffer more casualties where there are more of them, and where they are more aggressively confronting the enemy. So the New York Times has whipped out it's calculator to confirm the expected, dog bites man, and they have elevated this bit of shabby mathatical spin to be the main take-away in its report.

It is breathtaking in its blatantness, and comical as well.

Posted by: Ace at 04:56 PM | Comments (32)
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