Actually, there's no mention of any money changing hands in this press release, but presumably Duke U. didn't get out of this with a statement about how pleased they are the lacrosse players were exonerated.

Thanks to Fatwa Arbuckle.

Posted by: Ace at 07:15 PM | Comments (18)
Post contains 57 words, total size 1 kb.

The full version of the Robot Chicken Star Wars parody. Clips of this have been out for about a year now, but here's the whole thing.

Some good stuff, some slow stuff. I give it a solid "B". I can think of worse ways to spend the next twenty minutes.

And in a completely unrelated story, apparently scientists now say that the Amazon is now the longest river in the world, rather than the Nile. Although said scientists are Brazilians, so, you know, they would say that, right?

Brazilian scientists claim to have found a new source of the river Amazon that extends its length to beat the Nile as the longest river in the world.

Scientists discovered the new source at the top of the snow-capped Mismi mountain in neighbouring southern Peru, not in the north of the country as was previously believed.

The discovery adds about 284km (176 miles) to the Amazon. This takes the river to 6,800km (4,225 miles) - 105km (65 miles) longer than the Nile - according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), the body that sponsored the expedition.

The Amazon's wife is said to be "pleased" with the results.

Okay, I may have made that last part up. At any rate, here's the real question: How long until an Egyptian cleric levels a fatwa against the Amazon? Because I'm thinkin' there's a whole new level of crazy they could hit here.

Geographic features, guys. Take the step.

Posted by: AndrewR at 05:45 PM | Comments (16)
Post contains 250 words, total size 2 kb.

Best thing about the Internet? Instantaneous global humiliation.

A US teenager has been arrested after he was caught on video having sex with a horse in a barn.

The owners of the barn in Corvallis, Oregon, had installed the video surveillance camera after previous assaults on the horse, reports the Corvallis Gazette-Times.

They were shocked to see footage of the teen sexually assaulting the mare when they checked the video in February.

We don't know if the horse was "good," but we do know the teenager was:

Deputy Clay Stephens, who viewed the video, said the youth seemed very practiced, not hurried but not wasting any time. He seemed to be following a "very concise, deliberate, well-thought-out plan".

I should be so lucky as to have government officials vouching for my skillz.

Posted by: Ace at 04:32 PM | Comments (77)
Post contains 150 words, total size 1 kb.

I'll give him this -- this definitely wasn't one of those fake-sucides-to-elicit-sympathy things.

A Marion County Jail inmate tried to commit suicide by hammering an ink pen in to his left eye with a Bible. Corrections officers tasered Lester Williams to prevent him from further harming himself Saturday night.

Ouch. Very ouch, baby.

I guess the liberals are right -- Christianity really is as much a threat as radical Islam. Hey, no fourth grade students being indoctrinated into Eastern religion have used Tibetan Prayer Bowls in any sucide attempts yet.

Thanks to dri.

Posted by: Ace at 04:06 PM | Comments (12)
Post contains 117 words, total size 1 kb.

...against the economic terrorism of the US Federal Reserve, which he intends to abolish.

A true Jacksonian. After all, Jackson said he'd kill the National Bank or it would kill him.

This is the sort of crank conservativism I don't like. There is originalism as a legal doctrine -- good! -- and then there is originalism as a political doctrine -- crank!

The Constitution is mostly a document establishing procedure for governance. It makes relatively few substantive policy declarations that the US should be run this way or that way. Most of that substance is contained in the Bill of Rights, of course, and some amount is sprinkled throughout the main text.

But, overall, it's a charter for establishing a framework of government, by which the actual substantive policy decisions will be made by that government. The Constitution mostly tells you how we will make political decisions; not what those political decisions should actually be. Some policies are clearly forbidden -- infringing the right to bear arms. Establishing a state religion. Quartering troops in citizens' homes. (Ummm...) Most are neither forbidden nor encouraged.

Should the US have a national powerball lottery to goose revenues? I'm afraid there's as little in the Constitution to guide us on that point as there is on, say, abortion policy.

Crank Conservatives are deluded by the belief that the Constitution and the Framers were writing out not just how to promulgate laws, but what those laws should actually be. Way back in 1789, you see, they could see far into the future, and, given their reluctance to enter into "entangling alliances," they were warning us that we should not extend a security promise to Taiwan. Because the Framers did not establish a central income tax or actually any other strong compulsory form of funding, relying almost exclusively on tarriffs and barriers for revenue, that -- by gum! -- that ought to be good enough for us now. Ron Paul observes, sagely, that there was no central banking system when the Constitution was signed (although such banks kept springing up from time to time, including very shortly after the Constitution was inked), so, ergo, we ought not to have one now.

I'm always bothered by the line offered by some politicians that they keep a copy of the Constituion in their pockets to guide them in their decisions. Yes, there's a few decisions the Constitution sheds some small amount of light on. It doesn't say very much about, say, bankruptcy reform, and the suggestion that it somehow does is either 1) rank pandering by someone taking his constituents for stooges or 2) the deeply believed delusion of a cretin, as seems to be the case with Ron Paul.

There's actually a dirty name for this belief -- "substantive due process." This was the name given to the idea that the Constitution, amidst its numerous purely procedural guidelines, also suggested or actually demanded susbtantive outcomes on various policy questions. Note the oxymoronic nature of the phrase -- substantive due process. In other words, parts of the Constitution which by their plain text only established procedural frameworks somehow also managed to sneak in substantive guidance through "penumbras and emanations." And it gave rise to an even sillier coinage for constitutional doctrine about actual procedure -- "procedural due process."

No, I'm not making that up. Liberal jurists went so whole-hog inventing "substantive" elements of due process that it became necessary to indicate when one was actually speaking of true process by coining the redundancy "procedural due process."

I consider Ron Paul and his fellow cranks to be scarcely different than William Brennan and the rest of the substantive due processers -- actually, they're a little worse, because Brennan at least believed his doctrine of a "living constitution" which became more and more liberal as it evolved was limited to the sphere of judicial doctrine. Whereas Ron Paul thinks that his own originalist version of substantive due process applies not merely to judges but to his own votes and proposals as a legislator.

It's completely crank. We have no idea what the Founders would have thought of the War in Iraq, or the current income tax system, or the federal reserve. And even were they quickly paced through 200+ years of history as America rose from backwater farming colony to global colossus so that they could understand how the country and the world has changed since their deaths, their input still wouldn't be controlling -- because the most important part of the Constituion is that We, The People get to make all these decisions ourselves, working under the framework and according to the explicit substantive demands of the Constitution. Men who lived in an entirely different century, and an entirely different world, don't get to make these decisions. The Dead Man's Hand isn't permitted in wills and it's not much more prudent in government.

Posted by: Ace at 03:36 PM | Comments (117)
Post contains 826 words, total size 5 kb.

A story about those annoying jagoffs who pester you with offers to sell fake video-game gold for real US money.

Twelve hours a night, seven nights a week, with only two or three nights off per month, this is what Li does — for a living [i.e., kill monsters and "farm" gold to sell to other players]. ... And there are only two ways players can get as much of this virtual money as the game requires: they can spend hours collecting it or they can pay someone real money to do it for them.

At the end of each shift, Li reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20. The small commercial space Li and his colleagues work in — two rooms, one for the workers and another for the supervisor — along with a rudimentary workers’ dorm, a half-hour’s bus ride away, are the entire physical plant of this modest $80,000-a-year business. It is estimated that there are thousands of businesses like it all over China, neither owned nor operated by the game companies from which they make their money. Collectively they employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items. The polite name for these operations is youxi gongzuoshi, or gaming workshops, but to gamers throughout the world, they are better known as gold farms. While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.

Well, I'm doing one.

Thanks to someone.

Posted by: Ace at 03:00 PM | Comments (21)
Post contains 354 words, total size 2 kb.

Hopefully we can get comprehensive immigration reform passed in time to draw them "out of the shadows."

Large teams of newly trained suicide bombers are being sent to the United States and Europe, according to evidence contained on a new videotape obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

Teams assigned to carry out attacks in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Germany were introduced at an al Qaeda/Taliban training camp graduation ceremony held June 9.

A Pakistani journalist was invited to attend and take pictures as some 300 recruits, including boys as young as 12, were supposedly sent off on their suicide missions.

Another fictional threat.

Posted by: Ace at 02:53 PM | Comments (271)
Post contains 136 words, total size 1 kb.

An indication of surging seriousness: having determined that the Tigris river is being used almost exclusively for transporting terrorist bombs and ammo, the US is now destroying all the river traffic.

An amusing anecdote:

U.S. soldiers on patrol here recently watched a man walk into the street with a bomb and begin to dig. They killed him before he finished. Out stepped another man to finish the job, so they shot him too — then another, and another and another.

In all, five people tried to place the makeshift bundle of munitions in the same hole within an hour.

"You see what we're up against," said Adam Jacobs, a 26-year-old Army captain, after recounting the astonishing story.

The article details the US' partnering with Sunni insurgents/militamen, like the 1920 Brigades, to oust Al Qaeda from Diyala.

More signs of seriousness: bombs drop on Iranian-armed Iraqi stooges in eastern Iraq.

Posted by: Ace at 02:14 PM | Comments (28)
Post contains 191 words, total size 1 kb.

True, Thompson's support has doubled, and double-true, he's not even officially announced yet. Still, I'm surprised to see my boy holding up so well, even though he's not my boy any more due to his numerous and possibly disasterous missteps.

Posted by: Ace at 01:20 PM | Comments (39)
Post contains 62 words, total size 1 kb.

At last, the first Muslim /Christian priest/imam Islamist/infidel!

Not only is she obviously not a Christian at all -- I'm sorry, but that bit about "have no other Gods before me" and that other one about "the light, the truth, and the way" are rather important -- but she's not a Muslim, either. Newsflash: Islam considers "polytheists" infidels and blasphemers. And what the hell is she but a polytheist?

Shortly after noon on Fridays, the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding ties on a black headscarf, preparing to pray with her Muslim group on First Hill.

On Sunday mornings, Redding puts on the white collar of an Episcopal priest.

She does both, she says, because she's Christian and Muslim.

Redding, who until recently was director of faith formation at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral, has been a priest for more than 20 years. Now she's ready to tell people that, for the last 15 months, she's also been a Muslim — drawn to the faith after an introduction to Islamic prayers left her profoundly moved.

Her announcement has provoked surprise and bewilderment in many, raising an obvious question: How can someone be both a Christian and a Muslim..?

She says she felt an inexplicable call to become Muslim, and to surrender to God — the meaning of the word "Islam."

...

"I could not not be a Muslim..."

Redding's bishop, the Rt. Rev. Vincent Warner, says he accepts Redding as an Episcopal priest and a Muslim, and that he finds the interfaith possibilities exciting.

Don't we all.

Steyn's post notes that Scrappleface offered this exact -- exact -- story up as a joke long ago.

Posted by: Ace at 01:03 PM | Comments (66)
Post contains 292 words, total size 2 kb.