The Daily Kos: Because sometimes a longstanding problem deserves a Final Solution (TM).

Jews everywhere should rejoice at what the New Left has become. One one hand, tacit approval for pogroms and new Kristalnachts and the destruction of the only Jewish sanctuary state in the world.

On the other hand, they won't be fed transfats as they're being driven into the sea. So it all kinda balances out.

Posted by: Ace at 02:33 PM | Comments (21)
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Crazy blog-money.

And here I mean "crazy" more literally than usual.

Thanks to JackM.

Posted by: Ace at 02:29 PM | Comments (13)
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Goblins! Buy three and get a timesaving Miracle Kobold (TM) at no extra charge!

Belief in goblins is still persistent in Zimbabwe, fuelled by a desire for quick riches, fame and power. And there are people ready, for a large fee, to "manufacture" them to feed the desires of the gullible.

And sometimes this "manufacture" will involve more than just a cash fee. Rape, mutilation and even murder have been committed, although few will ever admit to such crimes.

But even "making" goblins would probably be illegal under the Witchcraft Suppression Act, since it is an act of witchcraft. Some of the processes would also be crimes under other laws.

But how easy is it to acquire a "goblin" -- genuine or fake?

...

The "goblin" was a scary-looking object, a fierce doll made up of a black cloth, animal hide and beads.

We were instructed not to eat chicken for the rest of our lives, tell no one about this "goblin" and prepare a safe, comfortable place where we would keep it.

We would also need to perform rituals every year and pay homage to the "goblin" so that it would continue blessing us.

A special cloth popularly known in Shona as retso was to be used to wrap the goblin.

To protect ourselves, we asked about the correct method of disposing of the "goblin" if we no longer wanted it.

...

We paid $890 000 for our newly acquired "asset" and left Sekuru Nzaramuroyi's tiny room before we locked up the strange-looking "creature" in the back of our pick-up truck.

Um, I'm guessing the Zimbabe dollar doesn't go as far as the American one, and perhaps only half as far as the Canadian one.

Okay, but what about that murder thing? Well, a real goblin contains human body parts:

We then took the "goblin" to Zinatha.

The organisation's deputy secretary for administration and information, Mr Tapera Dzviti, said the purported "goblin" was nothing more than a fake pixie made from baboon hide, beads, a traditional clay plate and African potato.

"This goblin is not genuine. As Zinatha we are aware that there has been mushrooming of fake n'angas that sell fake goblins," Mr Dzviti said.

He said the real thing was made up of different animal hides, herbs, cooking oil and human parts.

Mr Dzviti said the most common human parts used were fingers, hair or bones.

A genuine goblin should talk the way a human being does.

"A real goblin has powers that allow it to talk because it is made from a dead person's spirit. During the making of the goblin the traditional healer goes to the grave of the dead person they want to raise and conduct the ritual," Mr Dzviti said.

Not to geek out here, but they seem to be talking about a homonculous, not a goblin. Though I confess I don't know real-world myths about goblins.

CSI: ET:

Researchers looking into the case of “Alionshenka the Alien” have arrived at a sensational conclusion: the mysterious creature did not catch his death of cold as previously thought. They believe the supposed alien was killed.

“He didn’t die from natural causes,” said Vadim Chernobrov, a coordinator with the public research center Kosmopoisk. “We found out that his skull had been fractured,” Chernobrov added.

The mysterious dwarf was found near the town of Kyshtym of the Chelyabinsk region. Stanislav Samoshkin is a morbid anatomist who performed autopsy on the body of the dwarf in a local hospital. He was the first to claim that the creature was a non-human being.

Well, that picture convinces me. You can tell how serious these scientists are, given the out-of-focus picture, and the use of a high-tech pink pillow from a Turkish whorehose as a laboratory table.

“The human skull consists of six bones. The skull of that creature was made up of four bones,” Samoshkin said.

Russian and foreign researchers have been trying to unravel the mystery of the “Uralian alien” for eleven years. The story looks like a detective novel in progress. The body of the dwarf was reportedly stolen. The key witness to the case, an old woman who actually named the dwarf “Alioshenka”, died a sudden death.

In related news, Samhita from Feministing is calling for "goblinoid liberation," and Jill from Feministe is pretty certain the Duke lacrosse team killed the ailen.

Thanks to dri and JackStraw.

Bonus! Help A Geek Who's Defending The Nation! Ziggurat Con will be a D&D convention in Iraq in June, and they need whatever geekly stuff you can send them.

The largest problem with running a Con in Iraq, of course, is that there are no local stores or game publishers, and few game books on the post. Even dice are in short supply, with many soldiers breaking the unwritten taboo held by many gamers and (gasp!) sharing dice. Thankfully, many game publishers have also lent their support, and have agreed to supply game products to help the Con along. aethereal FORGE, Sovereign Press, Final Redoubt Press, Goodman Games, Paizo Publishing and Steve Jackson Games are among those that have thrown in their support for the convention. But Amberson indicated that the soldiers could definitely use more.

Dorks... who can kill you.

Is your wife embarrassed by your refusal to throw out your six hundred Rifts rulebooks? Send 'em here:

Donations can also be sent to SPC Amberson directly at the following address:

SPC David Amberson
A Co 86th Sig Bn
APO, AE 09331

Curious: What the hell is a goblin, really? I mean, I know they don't exist. But what are they supposed to be? Every Halloween I hear about "ghosts and goblins." Well, I know what a ghost looks like, but what about a goblin?

All I can envision is the goblins from the Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit.

Posted by: Ace at 01:49 PM | Comments (37)
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Could the killer have used previously-outlawed extended-capacity clips to reduce the number of reloads he needed? Sure.

Do we have any evidence he was carrying anything but pre-ban 10-bullet clips? Nope.

Which makes it the perfect time for ABCNews to offer this news-free news, before actual facts might contradict them.

PS, I'm not terribly certain a guy armed with two pistols up against a college population armed, all told, with zero really needs all that much of a reduction in reload time to maintain his advantage.

Posted by: Ace at 01:17 PM | Comments (95)
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This 60 Minutes piece is so-so, not really breaking any new news, but still worth watching if you're interested.

One take-away: Even when Crystal Gail Mangum was being called in for additional questioning in order to clarify the confused and contradictory testimony she'd offered previously, she came in either liquored up or drugged out or both.

It takes a special kind of mindset to get fucked up on your way to an interview with the state's attorney general.

This print article is more interesting.

Some continue smearing the Duke lax players-- like Jill from Feministe, insisting, again vaguely because the facts just don't support her (like Mangum's various absurdities) that "someting must have happened." After all, mentally unstable substance-abusing car-stealing/police-assaulting admitted semi-pro prostitutes previously making wild accusations about rape and prescribed anti-psychotic medication just don't make these things up:

The overwhelming response, from liberals and conservatives alike (but mostly conservatives), has been to brand the accuser a liar. I’ve already had to delete a series of “gotcha!” comments from the moderation queue. Anti-feminists in particular are overjoyed with the players’ exoneration — not because they particularly care about justice, but because they think this is a good way to stick it to the feminists who support rape survivors, sometimes to the detriment of white men. These are the same people who regularly lectured us not to jump to conclusions, and to wait until the “boys” had their day in court.

...

-I am in no way saying that I think these three lacrosse players are guilty. My opinion on their guilt or not isnÂ’t really relevant since I wasnÂ’t there and I donÂ’t know all the facts of the case, but if youÂ’re interested, I donÂ’t think that they raped her. ThatÂ’s neither here nor there, but there it is.

-I do, however, think that something happened in that house — I’m not sure what else explains her fingernails on the bathroom floor, her leaving her cellphone and wallet at the house (especially if she’s a greedy whore, as many people seem to be arguing), and the medical examination which showed trauma consistent with sexual assault.

I would direct CSI Jill to this bit from the CBS article:

The case rested entirely on the word of the accuser, Crystal Mangum, despite the fact that she changed her account of the attack more than a dozen times.

Attorney General Cooper says he's appalled that Nifong didnÂ’t challenge her about that. "We can't see where she was ever asked the tough questions," he says.

"Ever?" Stahl asks.

"That specifically contradicted things that she was saying. And when our investigators and attorneys started interviewing her again, new stories came out that had never been told before that did not fit with the evidence. So we went in and tried to get all of it rectified, and the way it turned out it was much worse than we thought," Cooper explains.

Asked if Mangum just lied, Cooper says, "The people who talked with her, and these are trained investigators who have been around for a long time, a number of them said to me, 'I've never seen anything like this.'"

One of the things that stunned them was that the accuser came up with a new wild and vivid version of her central allegation in the case, the alleged attack in the bathroom. HereÂ’s what she said happened:

"She was suspended in mid-air and was being assaulted by all three of them in the bathroom. And I've been in that bathroom. And it was very difficult for me to see how that could have occurred. And then we got another new story," Cooper tells Stahl.

"Well, wait. Because it was so small orÂ…" Stahl asks.

"It was a small bathroom. Yes. And you would've had to have four people in there in different positions that she was describing to us being attacked," Cooper says.

"Including up in the air?" Stahl asks.

"Including being suspended in mid-air. It was just difficult for any of us to see how that could have occurred," the attorney general says.

So let me get this straight. Absent the discovery of a complex canteliever-and-pulley-sexual-flying-harness in the bathroom -- a discovery I'm quite sure Mike Nifong would have revealed -- we're to believe that Crystal Gail Mangum was raped while floating around like Baron Harkonnen hopped up on Bene Gesserit meth?

Maybe she just got confused. Maybe it wasn't the Duke lacrosse team at all, but the notoriously badly-behaved Duke Acrobatic Sexual Assault & Levitating Synchronized Sodomy squad.

I've had run-ins with those guys. And let me tell you, once they've psychokinetically raised you in the air, they go at you with their meat-bats as if you were a friggin' pinata.

Honestly, I don't know how the hell those guys still manage to collect $5000 a year in student fees. I don't care how many Meals On Wheels fundraisers they hold, I'm just tired of being gang-raped by sodomaniacal Sith masters of white skin privilege.

Feminism 2.0: Women don't lie about rape.

Feminism 3.0: Women especially don't lie about psionically-assisted Fremenrape.

I think Jill from Feministe and Samhita from Feminsting should just start their own "Rapebusters" service, using the Ghostbusters' famous pitchline: We are ready to believe you.

Posted by: Ace at 12:36 PM | Comments (45)
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It's easy if you can...

Guns don't belong in the classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same.

-- A vice president of college relations at Va. Tech responding to an editorial stating the campus population was "unarmed and unprotected" in 2006.

Unarmed, Unprotected, and Unalarmed: One of Allah's last updates says that the university took over two hours to warn students there was a spree killer on the loose.

I imagine they'll say they didn't want to "alarm" students. Erm, I'm sorry, but when someone's going around murdereing everyone in sight, that's more or less the time for "alarm."

Pretty much the reason the concept of the "alarm" was invented in the first place, in fact.

Notified By Email At 9:30: According to a student interviewed on Cavuto. Two hours after the inital spree.

Posted by: Ace at 11:56 AM | Comments (35)
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I like Collingsworth, Bettis, and Barber, but I'm afraid I'll be tuning out this show, which is lame anyway.

Not enough clips, and it's bad enough they already have one semi-talent convinced he's far funnier than he actually is.

Though it might be amusing to watch Costas and Olberman attempt to wry and droll each other to death. Awkward silences and flop-sweat can be so entertaining.

Thanks to Blacksheep.

Posted by: Ace at 11:45 AM | Comments (21)
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The unannounced, unofficial front-runner?

In recent Republican presidential preference polls, Thompson tends to run third, behind Giuliani and McCain but ahead of Romney and the rest of the field. In a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll released last week, Thompson came in second, just ahead of McCain, with support from 15 percent of those surveyed.

...

If he joins the race for the Republican nomination, and if he campaigns the same way he spoke to me last week, Fred Thompson, a mild-mannered, slow-talking southern gentleman, will run as the politically aggressive conservative that George W. Bush hasn't been for four years. And the actor in the race could well be the most authentic personality in the field.

...

In eight years in the Senate, Thompson developed a reputation for an independent streak, yet he compiled a voting record more conservative than one might expect of one who had described himself as a moderate in his first campaign. Over the course of his time in Congress he earned a lifetime rating by the American Conservative Union of 86 percent. He was not quite as conservative (using 2002 numbers) as Rick Santorum (87), Strom Thurmond (91), Trent Lott (93), or Jesse Helms (99), but more conservative than Arlen Specter (42), Olympia Snowe (52), John Warner (82), and John McCain (84).

Here's why he didn't seek a second full term, which I didn't know:

Then in late January 2002, his daughter Elizabeth Panici died suddenly following a heart attack. She was only 38. Thompson's friends say he was devastated. A month later he announced that he had changed his mind--he would not seek reelection. "I simply do not have the heart for another six-year term."

The whole thing is worth a read, but especially the middle bits on Page 2 regarding his record and positions:

* Thompson says he came to respect George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign because of his plan to reform Social Security. Congressional Republicans considered the plan a political liability, and it went nowhere. Thompson says that although it was only tinkering on the margins of real reform, it was a good start. He won't share his own plan--"I'll roll that out at the appropriate time"--but the general principle he articulates sounds like a political risk.

"It's based upon the proposition that granddad and grandmom will be willing to sacrifice a little bit if they feel like it helps their grandkids avoid financial disaster, and that their sacrifice is not going to be wasted down some government rathole," he explains.

...

* He believes that elements of the CIA were out to get Scooter Libby and his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby, though not the original leaker of the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame, was convicted of lying and obstructing justice. "It makes me mad as the devil just to think about it," Thompson says. He had never met Libby when he volunteered to serve on the advisory board of the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Trust. Is Libby innocent? Thompson answers with one word. "Yes."

Do you think there will be negative political fallout from defending the convicted former chief of staff to an unpopular vice president?

"I have no idea. I have a hard time seeing it. If I'm wrong about the temperature of the American people on this, then I'm wrong about a lot of things about the American people. And we might as well find out."

* I asked him about his vote for the Iraq war and the Bush administration's failure to explain to the American public the real story of the prewar intelligence on Iraq. ...

Thompson slips into sarcasm. "It is amazing to me how a man that they say is so dumb fooled so many real smart people. But that's what they're saying about Bush. Bush
 canoodled the entire Democratic establishment. Absurd on its face, and yet some people want to believe that sort of thing."

Then he goes on to give a better defense of the White House than anything that has come out of the White House communications shop in four years.

You'll have to hit the link for the full the quote. It should be noted that Thompson served on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Suffice to say he thinks Bush has done a piss-poor job in defending the Iraq War and Thompson means to do, and in fact already is doing, better.

* He is equally blunt about Iran. Thompson says that the actions of the Iranian regime--harboring senior al Qaeda leaders, funding and training Iraqi insurgents, supplying terrorists in Iraq with devices that are killing American soldiers--are acts of war. He stops short of calling for a military response, but seems to suggest that he would be saying something different if circumstances were different.

....

* In the days since Thompson allowed that he was thinking about running for president, his views on abortion have come under scrutiny. Thompson finds the news reports from his first run for Senate perplexing.

"I have read these accounts and tried to think back 13 years ago as to what may have given rise to them. Although I don't remember it, I must have said something to someone as I was getting my campaign started that led to a story. Apparently, another story was based upon that story, and then another was based upon that, concluding I was pro-choice."

But, he adds: "I was interviewed and rated pro-life by the National Right to Life folks in 1994, and I had a 100 percent voting record on abortion issues while in the Senate."

...

Thompson says he thinks Roe v. Wade is bad law and should be overturned, but he says he does not support a Human Life Amendment.

Ah, the "federalism" dodge. Except in Thompson's case, it doesn't appear to be a dodge. He seems to be a strong believer in federalism as a principle, and not merely as a clever rhetorical dodge for evading giving answers on hot-button issues:

His voting record suggests a strong belief in federalism. Thompson was frequently a lonely voice opposing the federalization of what in his view were state issues. His unwillingness to compromise on that principle even put him on the losing end of a 99-to-1 vote on the so-called Good Samaritan law, legislation that protected individuals from being sued if their good faith efforts to help someone in distress were unsuccessful. He thought it should have been left to the states.

One big knock on Thompson is that he wasn't able, as chair of the Government Reform Committee, to get Clinton on Gore on their massive campaign-finance abuses in the 1996 campaign. Then again, with all the stonewalling and missing emails and outright lies there -- and Janet Reno refusing to do as the law demands and appoint a (then-legal) independent prosecutor to investigate possible crimes by ranking administration officials -- it's an open question if even Detective Columbo could have made any headway there.

Thanks to someone.

JackM. emails:

He also voted against Tort Reform (along w/ Richard Shelby) on strict federalism grounds, to the consternation of most trial layer hating GOP'ers.

So he seems to be solid on this issue, for good or for ill.

Posted by: Ace at 11:42 AM | Comments (32)
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Two simple rules:

1. Approach them as you would with regular girls, noting common interests, such as yoga.

2. Try not to let it bother you when they're having sex with a lot (in some cases, 600+ in a single day) of sketchy guys on camera.

I'm guessing Rule 2 is the tough one.

"Jealousy can rear its ugly head," one porn star notes. That, and of course the ick factor.

Thanks to dri.

Posted by: Ace at 10:05 AM | Comments (52)
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Global warming is what we used to refer to as "the weather."

The greatest storm to hit the city in more than 20 years, providing the plants with a needed drink, causing some challenging commutes, and threatening the Long Island coastline, is escalating the debate about a climate shift.

The gusty winds and record rainfall came a day after a series of protests across the country to draw attention to the global warming debate, and a week before Vice President Gore opens the Tribeca Film Festival with seven short films about the environment. Mayor Bloomberg plans to unveil the city's environmental sustainability plan on April 22, Earth Day.

"There's something ironic about the fact that we were down on the Battery yesterday, forming a line to show where the new tide line will be in New York with rising sea levels," Bill McKibben, the founder of the group that organized the protests, Step It Up 2007, said. "Today, Bloomberg is issuing emergency flood warnings for Lower Manhattan."

The members of the group that descended on Lower Manhattan called themselves the "Sea of People." Participants, wearing water-themed clothing and costumes, re-created what some scientists predicted would be the new permanent tide lines with a 10-foot sea-level rise.

As a bit of irrelevant anecdote, I met someone on Saturday that was at that "Sea of People" stunt. The nitwits wore blue clothing to simulate the ocean, and blew soap-bubbles to simulate, um, how the ocean blows soap-bubbles for fun.

The watchword for this global warming stunt was: Dress warm -- it's chilly!

Needless to say, this particular person got several phone numbers of potential dates.

...

An associate director of Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment, Paul Epstein, said it was the storm's intensity that made it stand out.

It's not unusual to have a storm happen that is a cold reversal of the warming from the winter," he said. "This is exaggerated. The storms are staying longer, and they're more profound because of climate instability. Â… It's becoming in your face. It's hitting everybody."

Still, several climate experts, scientists, and policy advocates said that it was impossible to tie a single storm to a global climate phenomenon. The general population now has a greater sensitivity to the weather because of the debate about the climate, several experts said.

"It's very difficult to connect any given instance with a global long-range phenomenon," the director of the Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service, Rae Zimmerman, said. "However, that said, certainly this is in keeping with some of the effects of climate change."

...

[But the director of the anti-Gore film "An Inconvenient Fiction"] Mr. Hayward said yesterday that calling the nor'easter of 2007 a product of global warming was a good example of the anti-intellectual nature of one side of the debate.

"If we have hot weather, it's climate change. If it's cold weather, it's climate change, too," he said. "Climate change has become what philosophers call a nonfalsifiable hypothesis. It's something where everything is for it and nothing can be accounted against it."

Exactly. Much of what is termed "extreme weather" is in fact the opposite -- mild weather. If it's warmer than normal in the winter, or cooler than normal in the summer, we used to call that "mild" or "moderate" weather. And we used to enjoy it.

Now it's "extreme weather" and a threat to us all.

Pretty much any deviation from the average -- a few degrees of additional warmth in January, a couple of degrees towards the cold in March, a few more inches of rain in April, or a few less inches of rain in December -- is "proof" of global warming.

Only were the weather to remain permanently inside these narrow bands of averageness would it not be counted as "global warming."

Actually, were that to happen, they'd probably start calling that "extreme weather effects cause by global warming as well" -- a historic and possibly catastrophic "flat-lining" of the weather towards the median without the crucial fluctuations that sustain life.

Posted by: Ace at 09:57 AM | Comments (24)
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