They're a lot less persuaded by Lisa Myers' piece than I was.

The charge that the Dragon Skin plates come loose after being dropped, doused in diesel fuel (something that happens frequently, apparently) or exposed to Iraqi summer heat seems to be one of the biggest knocks on the armor system.

Is it true? I don't know. The DoD and OpFor's source says it is.

Also they complain that while Dragon Skin performs well in direct fire tests, it performs much less well against shots coming in from an angle or from the side. The scales are good at distributing the impact of straight-on shots, but not so good when a bullet comes in at an angle and basically slips between discs. (Well, maybe not literally slips between them, but perpendicular shots greatly reduce the armor's effectiveness -- the mutual reinforcement/impact distribution feature of the multple overlapping scales is largely defeated when a bullet fails to strike the plates in the right way.)

Definitely worth reading.

While I support the media investigating whether our troops have the best weapons and armor available, I do now have to seriously question: Why did Lisa Myers not subject the armor to the drop/heat/glue-eating tests the army requires, instead only focusing on pure ballistic tests?

And, I have to admit, the perpendicular shot thing did not occur to me at all. But then, I make no claims of expertise in this area. Lisa Myers, on the other hand, did make such a claim of expertise, in the form of the two experts tagging along with her, plus the staff at the "world renown" ballistics lab in Germany where she conducted her test.

Did not a single one of them know or mention that a piece of armor has to be tested by shots from multiple angles, and that dead-bang balls-on straight shots are not the only shots one ought to conduct in a test?

Now that it's pointed out to me, it seems glaringly obvious -- you just don't test a tank's survivability by pounding on its most well-armored part; you also test its lesser-armored areas. How could two experts in body armor and the "world renowned" German ballistic laboratory staff failed to suggest testing the armor against angled shots?

It's borderline inconceivable.

This seems all seems a lot shoddier to me now, and more of a deliberately rigged "test." Not entirely unlike that old Primetime Live rigged truck-explosion "test."

Whether or not Dragon Skin is superior to, or even the equal of, the Interceptor armor, I don't know. But I do know that Lisa Myers' tests seem deliberately rigged to play to Dragon Skin's strengths and avoid its weaknesses.

It's possible the DoD is doing the same thing, of course -- maybe for some reason it has a hard-on for Interceptor armor and so carefully crafts tests it knows the Interceptor will pass and the Dragon Skin armor will fail. Maybe. Who knows.

But there's no evidence of that, while there does seem to be evidence that Lisa Myers, whether out of sheer ignorance or willful collusion, "chery-picked" and "twisted" her own "intelligence" as to the comparative capabilities of both amor types.

I don't know a damn thing about armor, but I know something about the media's incompetence and wilfull deceptiveness. And I know that Myers' test wasn't only unfair and untrustworthy, but seems almost deliberately designed to be precisely that.

Exit question, as Allah says: If the DoD was about to actually buy billions of dollars worth of Dragon Skin armor, do you think Lisa Myers would have trumpeted its effectiveness by putting it through tests that played to its strengths and avoided its weaknesses? Or do you imagine she would have done exactly the opposite?

Punk'd by NBC: What pisses me off is I made a conscious effort to give Lisa Myers the benefit of the doubt. I tried not to go into knee-jerk "the media is lying because they hate Bush and want to undermine the military" mode.

I gave the report a fair viewing. I stated it was proper and even helpful for the troops for the media to look into how our troops are being armed and armored. I called Myers' piece "persuasive."

And guess what? They lied to me again. I gave them an inch of credulity and they paved over me with a highway mile of deceit.

Is Dragon Skin armor good? Again, I don't know.

But I can evaluate the media's performance here. As usual: malfeasant.

If Lisa Myers were a Pentagon procurement officer, they'd be bringing charges against her for cooking tests to favor one system over another simply to advance her own career.

Posted by: Ace at 08:26 AM | Comments (54)
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FutureWeapons clip on SWORDS, a robotic gun platform.

Posted by: Ace at 07:47 AM | Comments (27)
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Lisa Myers of NBCNews sparked a controversy by comparing Dragonskin body armor versus the army's current Interceptor body armor.

First, the bias: the networks seem to have a needto prove that our troops are being inadequately protected, whether that's true or not. And Pinnacle Armor, Inc., Dragonskin's maker, has about a billion or so reasons to push its product hard.

But even given that bias, it's still important for the media to investigate our troops' arms and armor. Whether the military's procurement system is as nightmarishly FUBAR'ed as often rumored or not I don't know, but whether the MSM is trying to stick it to the Bush administration or not, I like seeing stories like this. Just so we're informed.

That said, one MSM story doesn't tell the whole tale, either.

The DoD rejects claims that Dragon Skin is overall a better system. In fact, they find the system to be overall inferior:

In response to a May 17 NBC News report challenging the Army’s use of Interceptor body armor vs. the newer “Dragon Skin” armor developed by Pinnacle Armor Inc., Brown today released information about the testing that ruled out Dragon Skin a year ago.

The tests were conducted May 16 to 19, 2006, at H.P. White labs near Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. The Pinnacle armor was subjected to the same tests Interceptor body armor goes through, first being X-rayed and analyzed and then undergoing a series of live-fire tests, Brown said. The live-fire tests included room-temperature tests, harsh environment tests, and durability and drop tests.

Of the eight Pinnacle vests tested, four of them failed the tests, with 13 rounds penetrating completely on the first or second shot, Brown said. After the first complete penetration, the vests technically failed the test, but the Army continued the testing to be fair, he said.

The Pinnacle vests also were subjected to extreme temperature variations, from minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, which would be a realistic cycle if the equipment was loaded onto a plane and flown to the Middle East, Brown said. These temperature tests caused the adhesive holding the Dragon SkinÂ’s protective discs together to fail, and the discs gathered at the bottom of the vest, leaving gaps in protection, he said.

Brown also noted that the Dragon Skin vests are significantly heavier and thicker than the Interceptor vests. Dragon Skin vests in size extra large are 47.5 pounds and 1.7 to 1.9 inches thick; the Interceptor vests in size large, which offer an equivalent coverage area, weigh 28 pounds and are 1.3 inches thick.

“Bottom line is, it does not meet Army standards,” Brown said of the Pinnacle body armor.

Brown showed reporters videos of the tests, which were supervised by the chief executive officer of Pinnacle. He also displayed the actual vests that were tested, with markers showing the penetration sites.

The Army did not initially release the information about the tests because of possible security concerns, Brown said. “We are facing a very media-savvy enemy,” he said. “They’re not only media-savvy, they are Internet savvy. … Everything that we put out into the public domain, we pretty much assume that they get. We don’t like to discuss our vulnerabilities and our counters to the vulnerabilities in the open public.”

The Army says it's actually interested in the Pinnacle armor system, but only after they've improved the product.

That weight thing is important -- we know that in Vietnam most troops ditched their heavy flak jackets. The best armor in the world is no better than no armor at all if troops are not wearing it -- and given the heat in Iraq and general exertion of moving, marching, patrolling, and fighting, hot, heavy armor may be inferior armor even if it is, on paper, better at stopping rounds.

Unworn armor stops no rounds. True enough, armor discipline has increased dramatically since 'Nam -- you rarely see soldiers without their armor and helmets -- but who knows what would happen if they were forced to begin wearing armor approaching the weight and bulk of a flak jacket again.

Whether or not the DoD's extreme-temperature test is a fair one, or a bureaucratic artifact, I don't know. I know that the DoD sometimes insists on standards that make little sense in the field. The AR-15, a good assault rifle, was endlessly re-designed to chamber a heavier round, for example, due to the Army's desire to have a bullet that was accurate out to a certain range, just because that was the traditional range for testing guns. They tended to ignore that most firefights occurred at fairly short ranges, and at those ranges -- the real ranges of fire combat -- the AR-15 was a damn good weapon. But the insistence that it hit accurately out to, say, 2000 yards like a conventional bolt-action rifle wound up engineering it into the jam-prone pieces of shit that were the first versions of the M-16.

I don't know if the DoD is right. I started writing this post with the assumption they were, but I have to admit that Lisa Myers' report, posted after the jump, is somewhat persuasive. Certainly it doesn't appear to be the case that the Dragon Skin armor is less effective at stopping rounds, as the DoD claims.

Then again, Myers admittedly did not conduct the DoD's temperature-extremes tests. Why not? She announces she knows what that test is, but they're not bothering with it. If she truly wanted to evaluate the DoD's claims, why deliberately avoid conducting the tests the DoD was relying upon?

Further, she makes an awfully big deal out of the fact that the Interceptor armor failed after repelling four or six bullets, while the Dragon Skin repelled the sixth bullet. Whether or not it's worth an extra 17.5 pounds on an already encumbered soldier to repel a sixth direct hit or not I don't know. It seems to me that if you've been racked that many times by automatic firepower in the chest, you've probably also been hit a couple of times in the femoral artery, or the neck, or the head, making an armor's capacity to repel six or more body shots of somewhat marginal usefulness.

Anyway, here's Myers' piece.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 06:56 AM | Comments (38)
Post contains 1475 words, total size 10 kb.

I'm told the site is hanging up for a lot of people. Especially in the Firefox browser.

Although I've supposed to not have BlogAds running, one ad slipped through, and I guess I have to run it until it expires. But as soon as that's done, I'll eliminate all the BlogAd code from the site -- which seems to be causing some hang-ups.

Pixy says he thinks the PJM ad might be causing hang-ups too. I'll write them to ask them about this.

I've asked phin to do a site redesign, but I was hoping to hold off on it until we switch to the new blogging software Pixy's got. Seems goofy to redesign the current software just for a month or so. But if simple fixes don't do the job, I'll see about a cleaner, simpler template to avoid these problems.

Here's another suggestion: Add an Internet Explorer add-on to your Firefox browser. This allows you, with the click of a button, to change a tab from running in Firefox to running in IE. You're still in Firefox -- it's just that tab that's now running as IE.

I realize that that may seem like a big step just to view a single blog (though people say that My Pet Jawa, for example, is demonstrating the same Firefox misbehavior), but I added it myself for other reasons -- for example, Javascript video would never play in Firefox for me, always telling me it was missing the plug-ins, never able to locate those missing plug-ins and install them -- and so now when I have that problem with Firefox, I just hit the display-as-IE button and am able to watch the video without having to actually open up IE.

If you're having that kind of problem, it's a cool little widget to have anyway.

Jiggity recommended that to me. It's sweet.

The new design, I think, is going to be pretty stripped down, without all this sidebar crap I've got going on. So load times should be quicker.

Posted by: Ace at 06:03 AM | Comments (33)
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Every once in a while there's some good news out there.

Video past the jump, not because it's objectionable, just because I'm told the YouTube videos are starting to really hang the site up. (BlogAds too -- they'll soon be entirely removed.) more...

Posted by: Ace at 05:49 AM | Comments (24)
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A lot of good stuff.

[Stuart] Taylor, columnist and co-author of Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, realized very early on that prosecutor Mike Nifong didnÂ’t have much of a case. He rushed a column to print in April 2006, worried that his column might be old news and others would beat him to the punch with this revelation. Taylor assumed many other journalists had reached similar conclusions, and he wanted to get his piece in. He was wrong. His was the only opinion piece from a member of the mainstream media (MSM) who was skeptical about the case.

Also:

[N&O investigative reporter Joseph] Neff said that his editor had a “gut feeling” in the beginning that something wasn’t right about Crystal Mangum’s story and that his paper has a strict policy against using anonymous sources.

How should reporters cover cases like Duke? As long as reporters cover crime stories as routine court cases instead of as “metanarratives” of race, class, and such, they should be OK. The problem arises when reporters go beyond news gathering and rely on stereotypes rather than on facts. The narrative is quickly set, and other coverage reinforces it. In the Duke case, the narrative was that a group of racist, drunken, rich, white frat boys had raped a poor, oppressed black woman who went to school and worked to feed her children.

Even after more facts about Mangum came out, the narrative was set. What did we find out about her? That she was a “prostitute,” a word Taylor used, wasn’t much of a student and had a history of mental problems.

Even after “second stripper” Kim Roberts admitted on “60 Minutes” — national TV — that she threw the first punch, so to speak, by calling one of the players “small dick white boy,” the narrative was that she and Mangum were called niggers by the players. One player — one player — said something about thanking her grandfather for picking the cotton that made his shirt after her conjecture about his private parts.

Even after the “60 Minutes” airing, said Taylor, the NYT still was reporting that neighbors (fact: only one neighbor) heard players (fact: only one player) call Roberts a nigger (unverified).

The MSM is still getting a lot of mileage out of that unverified* "nigger" slur.

The MSM is not not so big on mentioning the slur that prompted the "nigger" slur -- "small dick white boys!" (or "short dick," I've heard before), admitted by Kim Roberts.

The former's a slur for which one should be punished for rape, even if one actually committed no rape, or any other trespass, at all.

The latter is, I guess, just a little bit of "ribald banter."

It's what we call "pillow talk" in the future, baby.

LaShawn also reports on the panel's charge (or admission) that the MSM strongly prefers to bury its mistakes and confess no error, as they've by and large done through this case. Taylor notes that even at this late date the NYT is still misreporting the case, always to the detriment of the Duke lacrosse team.

Oh... I hardly think Kim Roberts should be raked over the coals for her own provocation, either. The lax players were pissed off at the strippers, and the strippers were pissed off back. (Well, Crystal Gail Mangum was just pissed, period, stumbling drunk and probably loaded up on goofballs.) Harsh things are sometimes said.

So Kim Roberts taunted the lax players "small dick white boys" as she left. Big deal. But I hardly think it's the crime of the century if someone then calls her "nigger" in return fire.

It's not a pleasant exchange. But it's no reason to continue insisting "something must have happened" to Crystal Gail Mangum.

If "something must have happened" due to use of the word "nigger," then at least three strippers were raped in the writing of this post, and one or two more in LaShawn's.

* Though, actually, I do believe it was said -- Kim Roberts has seemed pretty straight-shooting through all of this, and even admits she slurred/taunted the players first -- if someone's copping to bad behavior, I'm inclined to believe most of what they say. Pretty much everything she says accords with the record. Indeed, she was pretty much the first to really scorch Nifong's frame-job. Which was rather brave, given that a cabbie who came forward to cast doubt on the case had an old arrest warrant suddenly revived.

Childishness: It occurs to me that in order to claim the "nigger" slur was truly a godawful crime against humanity, the MSM would have to engage in a somewhat childish cross-comparison with Kim Roberts' initial taunt.

What she said is a little less forbidden than what the unidentified lax player said. Still, I think I speak on behalf of "short dick white boys" in saying while we don't have an n-word of our own, that's hate speech that scars us sometimes for life.

Then the MSM would have to also note that, while the return fire of the n-word was an escalation, Kim Roberts had started the name-calling. And then they'd have to argue that even though Roberts started the racial taunting, the unidentified Duke player (not one of the three accused of rape, by the way) failed to properly calibrate his retaliatory slur so as to achieve a "proportionate response," and therefore is blameworthy for taking it up to 10 whereas Roberts merely took it to seven.

But then we'd have to get into a discussion as to whether someone retaliating to a Category 7 racial taunt is required to only respond at Category 7, or is permitted to escalate up to Category 8 or 9, given that the party "started it."

Since this all a very childish and absurd discussion, and yet required if the MSM is going to continue calling the Duke Lacrosse team racists based on the n-word slur if it were the case that they were to accurately report Kim Roberts' opening remarks, as it were, they decide that that's just too much trouble to go through, and simply refuse to report Kim Roberts' remark at all.

That way, they don't have to be bothered with this "she started it but a player over-escalated it" analysis. To mention Kim Roberts' taunt at all compromises the metarnarrative. The metanarrative cannot be explained cleanly and with the full desired teachable-moment impact if the Roberts taunt is mentioned. The metanarrative is most powerful when it's the simplest. This additional complexity -- nuance, if you will -- hurts the metanarrative, and the metanarrative must be protected.

So they just spike that bit of "context" which "surrounds... the story."

Of course that means they're mispreporting and misrepresenting the actual circumstances surrounding this, and they know it.

But they don't mind doing that. They do it all the time. It's what their jobs have become. And they've gotten rather good at it.

How Childish, Exactly? This childish. I was thinking about comparing this whole absurd discussion -- which the media wisely avoids, but at the sacrfice of accurately reporting relevant information -- to the accepted norms of the Playground Taunt Progression. CUS suggested this example: more...

Posted by: Ace at 04:32 AM | Comments (52)
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So, Bryan over at Hot Air makes an interesting catch I thought I'd share with you.

Essentially, Amnesty International is asking its readers to vote on who had/has the worst human rights record.

The candidates for this dubious acheivement? Darth Vader, Hobgoblin or Dick Cheney.

Interestingly, Spider-Man's foe Hobgoblin is currently leading the pack with 73% of the vote. Vice President Cheney comes in third with only 4%.

Like any red-blooded American, I was at first appalled that Cheney wasn't scoring better! What good is having a Republican Vice President who won't go scurrying around the world to abuse impoverished brown people as a leisure activity, after all? Did I waste yet another vote?

And then I noticed something interesting in the poll question.

Here is how Amnesty International summarizes the Hobgoblin's atrocities:

Attacks on Spiderman, gassing civilian populations, using innocents as human shields.

Here is how Amnesty characterizes VP Cheney:

Torture, black sites, "disappearances," kangaroo courts, indefinite detention, and more!

Let's see...Attacks on Spiderman. Gassing civilian populations. Using innocents as human shields. Does that remind you of anyone?

Because, with the exception of placing a fatwa on Peter Parker, it would appear to me that gassing civilian populations (like the Kurds) and using innocents as human shields were the hallmarks of a different villian.

Saddam Hussein, anyone?

So, I want to take this opportunity to thank Amnesty International for finally recognizing the evil that was Hussein's Iraq, and I congratulate the voters in their poll for belatedly recognizing the importance of the American Military's legal intervention and overthrown of the Hussein regime.

I also want to thank them for their poll for one more reason. By comparing Cheney's alleged "atrocities" to those of two fictional characters, does that not underscore just how unserious the charges against the VP actually are?

I think so. So kudos to you, Amnesty International! Before you know it you'll be with us on the need for Jack Bauer-esque torture techniques.

Which might mean you were actually useful. For once.

Posted by: Jack M. at 05:40 PM | Comments (90)
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Well, kinda.

MKH's gag riffs on Boehner's branding the "Comprehensive Immigration Bill" a "Piece of Shit."

So she substituted "Comprehensive Immigration Bill" in movies where the word "piece of shit" or just "shit" is used.

Like so:

Triggers? We Don't Need No Stinking Triggers! Supposedly the amnesty bill requires the "enforcement triggers" to be pulled before the bullet of amnesty is shot. (Um, yeah, that got away from me.)

Check out this Hugh Hewitt post, though. Hugh's done something 90% of the amnesty bill's supporters have not done: RTFB (read the fuckin' bill).

Turns out that while the "enforcement trigger" provision is right up front in the bill, all reassuring-like, a rather enormous exception is carved out deep in the text.

To wit: any alien can, even before any enforcement trigger is met, or even begun, apply for a Z Visa and receive it within in a day.

Why a day? Because that's precisely how long the bill allows the government to conduct a background check to determine if the alien is a criminal or a terrorist or otherwise not someone we'd much want in our country.

What happens if the background check cannot be completed in a day?

Tough shit. The Z Visa still issues.

You got a day. Period.

And, of course, given that our current immigration folks are overstretched, and certainly cannot possibly be expected to conduct throrough 24-hour-only background checks on perhaps a half-million or a million aliens a day petitioning for their right to a Z Visa, that means that pretty much less than 1% of these folks will be checked at all before the automatic-issuance-after-24-hours-unless-you-can-find-something-disqualifying bug (or is it a feature?) kicks in.

But you know... they're so, so interested in security. Really, this bill is the only way we're going to get that security, and you're a bigot if you oppose it.

Thomas Sowell trashes the whole bill, but this especially angers me:

Incidentally, remember that 700-mile fence that Congress authorized last year? Only two miles have been built. That should tell us something about how seriously they are going to enforce other border-security provisions in the current bill.

Bush never wanted that fence. The Republican Senate didn't want that fence. They passed the authorization for a woefully inadequate fence just to appease voters in time for the 2006 election. (It didn't work, of course.)

The moment the election passed, whoops, the forgot to fund the fence and they forgot to build it.

Not only did they forget to build it, they also seem to have forgotten to even plan where or how to build it, and still, to this day, do not even have a plan of where it will supposedly go.

(I'd sort of think it would go pretty much along the border, with minor deviations, thus reducing the need for a great deal of planning in this regard, but I guess I'm not smart like these Washington types.)

But seriously-- trust Bush. He's willing to build that fence. You just have to grant him what he wants, and then, when he already has what he wants and needs nothing more from you, he'll definitely get around to building that fence that he clearly is opposed to building and has not built in the past six months nor even decided where to put, because, of course, he's decided not to put it anywhere at all.

He says what he means and he means what he says.

And what he says is, "You're bigots." Well, Lindsey Graham said that, and Michael Chertoff merely insinuated it.

By the way, why that didn't faze me -- I'm used to that, even from a douchebag administration I've supported for a long time; after all, the moment they couldn't get their precious Harriet Miers nomination they called us sexist and elitist -- I know a 9/11 ex-liberal-turned-conservative who is not used to being so branded and she is hopping angry about that.

Really pissed.

Heckuva job, boys.

Oh... Over at Kaus, rumors of a stiffening liberal resistance to this sham (but I wouldn't count on that saving us -- Kaus thinks, giggle, the Democrats care about their own constituents' interests), and growing suspicions that Fox News is soft-pedalling any opposition to the bill due to a request from the White House.

The Upside: Previously Republican candidates have had to walk a difficult line. They've had to express general support for and confidence in the President, until lately popular with the base, and yet criticize him enough to appeal to disaffected conservatives and independents who are, by and large, sick of him and waiting for that magical lame-duck status to set in so at least he can do less harm.

After this unmitigated political disaster, I don't see that being a problem for the Republican candidates much anymore. They're going to run from Bush like Rosie O'Donnell running from a balanced, sensible diet.

No longer will they have to pretend to want to carry on the Bush legacy, whatever that is; they can simply support the small handful of issues that Bush hasn't managed to botch completely.

Bruce Bartlett Jogs a Victory Lap: ...for abandoning Bush three years ago.

For me, the tipping point was the Medicare drug bill, which was rammed through Congress in the dead of night just hours after a conference agreement had been reached. Neither Bush nor his congressional lackeys dared allow any member to actually read the bill or know what they were voting for because then it would be obvious that the bill was unaffordable and almost certainly would go down to defeat. The only hope of passage was stealth, speed, and massive political pressure on principled conservative holdouts — a few of whom eventually buckled and allowed the bill to pass.
...

Bush assured wavering congressmen that they were guaranteeing their reelections by getting the large and growing elderly population to vote Republican. He told them that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson had gotten earlier generations of elderly voters to go Democratic by giving them Social Security and Medicare.

Rather than buy the elderly’s votes for good, however, they were only rented for the 2004 election — the only one Bush cared about.... I predict that a majority of seniors will go back to voting Democratic next year.

Now it seems that conservatives will once again be asked to throw away their principles for illusory political gains....

Perhaps if there were some reason to believe that Hispanics would be so grateful for this immigration bill that they will vote heavily Republican for years to come, then it might be worth supporting purely out of political expediency. But there is no reason whatsoever to believe that this will be the case, since the Democratic Congress will at least get equal credit for passage.

ItÂ’s worth remembering that despite BushÂ’s support for an immigration bill last year, congressional Republicans only got 30 percent of the Hispanic vote, versus 69 percent for Democrats. This was a sharp decline from the 44 percent of the Hispanic vote Bush got in 2004. Thus whatever gratitude Hispanics might have for him because of his support for immigration reform, it is not going to transfer to other Republicans.

This looks like the Medicare debacle all over again to me. Bush is going to put the screws to principled conservatives to ram a piece of repugnant legislation through Congress in order to gain votes that are never going to emerge. Hispanics are going to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats whether this bill passes or doesnÂ’t. And to the extent that it enlarges the Hispanic voting population, Republicans will be cutting their own throats.

Even before the deal on immigration was reached, I was forecasting a Republican loss of the White House in 2008. Passage of the immigration bill means that it will be many years indeed before Republicans retake Congress.

I'm afraid that's right. I think we've returned to the pre-Gingrich Revolution equilibrium, in which Congress is almost always held by Democrats, and Republicans will need to capture the White House to have a share of governmental power.

Which is a hard trick to manage every four years.

Of course, we have a natural ally doing their level best to return Congressional power to us: Democrats. But given the GOP's moves lately, I don't even think the Democrats heroic efforts to reveal themselves as the unprincipled, hypocritical, corrupt anti-American tax lice they are will be quite enough to do the job.

Posted by: Ace at 03:44 PM | Comments (55)
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Iowahawk conducts his own poll:

"If there is one headline here, it's how remarkably moderate the Lutheran community is," said Pew director Andrew Kohut of the survey, which was co-sponsored by the Council on American-Yooper Relations. "It really paints a picture of a dynamic culture in or somewhere near the American mainstream."

Kohut pointed to one of the study's key findings that only 29% of all respondents agreed that "bloody, random violence against infidels" was "always" or "frequently" justified, versus 56% who said such violence was "seldom" or "never" justified. The approval of violence rose slightly among younger Lutherans and when the hypothetical violence was targeted against Presbyterians, but still fell well short of a majority.

...

Further bolstering the findings, Kohut noted that fewer than 6% of respondents physically attacked field interviewers during the survey.

...

Equally disturbing, many respondents reported experiencing discrimination at the hands of non-Lutherans. Frequently cases of non-Lutheran bigotry included "Got all nose-in-the-air like" (48%), "Made personal remarks about my hot dish" (37%), "Wouldn't let me borrow their combine head" (36%), and "Wouldn't stand still so I could kill them" (22%).

The poll results show a greater rejection of random violence by American Lutherans than European Lutherans, although, to be fair, the latter tend to be almost entirely dirty luge-humping Scandi snow-queefs.

Thanks to Roland.

Posted by: Ace at 02:21 PM | Comments (43)
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A typically rambling childish post says she'll be spending time with her, um, euphemism Kelli to celebrate her birthday.

The rest of it is trainwreck schoolgirlism. She allows (in her moderated comments) her fans to slam Elizabeth and all that, and responds like a depressive drunk in short statements like "i dont know" and "im glad 2 be out 2."

In related news, ABC is pursuing Deb Frish to fill the Ro-Ro's big, smelly shoes.

Posted by: Ace at 02:10 PM | Comments (28)
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