I heard excerpts from McCain's speech on Rush today, and I'm done. I've been trying to polish this turd since McAmnesty won the nomination, but it's still a disgusting piece of shit, and I'm through. Don't get me wrong, I'll still go vote against Obama on Election Day, but even if we do keep Chocolate Jesus from the presidency, America is still going to get the presidential equivalent of a prison colonoscopy over the next four years.

McCain's big "achievement" in the next four years will be bipartisanship? Would that be bipartisanship where both sides work to get the best outcome possible, or would it be the usual Washington game where Republicans curl up into the fetal position while Charlie "Damien 'Football' Williams" Rangel uses a concrete block to cave in their skulls? His other goals are laughably lacking any details of how the hell we're going to get them accomplished. Senator, your plans make the "Underpants Gnomes" version of a business plan look like the senior project of a Harvard MBA candidate by comparison.

I'm now resigned to the fact that the next four years will be one long assault on free speech rights, second amendment rights, American sovereignty & border control, and our general business climate too. Jeebus Kee-rist, with this speech, McAmnesty is walking into Huckabee territory with me, and he's now officially "Huck sans Bible".

My plan? I'll coat my guns in cosmoline & bury them in the woods. My wife and I are slightly smarter than "the average bear", so we'll be able to spend some time to teach Moses all the things that our wonderful Government School System "forgets" to cover. I'm not a bad karaoke singer (my "Folsom Prison Blues" will bring tears to your eyes, man), so I'll be able to sing for change on street corners once McAmnesty or Obama destroy the construction industry by importing millions of Mexicans willing to put in a day's work for three Hershey bars and an apple. My wife works for the State, so we're OK there, since neither McAmnesty or his other (D) opponents will cut government.

If anyone needs me, I'll be over in the corner freaking out with Corporal Hudson.

Posted by: Russ from Winterset at 12:10 PM | Comments (185)
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I'm sure they'll find it was right-wingers behind the sabotage of helicopters our boys use to fight.

Federal prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into what has been described as "deliberate" damage done to two nearly completed Chinook combat helicopters at the Boeing Co. assembly line in Ridley Township.

U.S. Attorney Patrick Meehan and several prosecutors from his office toured the facility early today with criminal investigators from the defense department, who announced a $5,000 reward for information about the damaged helicopters, which cost $20 million to $30 million each to produce for the Army.

...

Meehan said his office would use its "full toolbox" of resources to prosecute this case.

Boeing spokesman Jack Satterfield said earlier today that all employees reported on their regular shifts this morning despite the ongoing federal investigation into who or what may have caused the damage to the two aircraft.

...

Earlier, a union official said idled assembly-line workers were "very concerned" about reports that someone might have intentionally "hacked out" wiring on one helicopter and that a washer critical to propeller operation on another had been found where it did not belong.

U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, a former Navy admiral whose district includes the plant, said that he had spoken with Army investigators and that odds were low that the damage to the two Chinook F-model choppers was accidental.

Please, people -- when they discover who it was who deliberately sabotaged two helicopters in what seems to have been an attempt to murder possibly dozens of US troops, do not dare question their patriotism.

Thanks to lots of people.

Posted by: Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (46)
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Okay, there's no actual armor on that exoskeleton, but when you're multiplying strength by a factor of 20, welding on heavy titanium plates becomes a pretty trivial exercise.

So this is where my Flyin' Car development dollars have been diverted to? All right, fine. But I want a civilian model, fuckers.

Rex Jameson bikes and swims regularly, and plays tennis and skis when time allows. But the 5-foot-11, 180-pound software engineer is lucky if he presses 200 pounds — that is, until he steps into an "exoskeleton" of aluminum and electronics that multiplies his strength and endurance as many as 20 times.

With the outfit's claw-like metal hand extensions, he gripped a weight set's bar at a recent demonstration and knocked off hundreds of repetitions. Once, he did 500.

"Everyone gets bored much more quickly than I get tired," Jameson said.

Jameson — who works for robotics firm Sarcos Inc. in Salt Lake City, which is under contract with the U.S. Army — is helping assess the 150-pound suit's viability for the soldiers of tomorrow. The suit works by sensing every movement the wearer makes and almost instantly amplifying it.

The Army believes soldiers may someday wear the suits in combat, but it's focusing for now on applications such as loading cargo or repairing heavy equipment. Sarcos is developing the technology under a two-year contract worth up to $10 million, and the Army plans initial field tests next year.

Before the technology can become practical, the developers must overcome cost barriers and extend the suit's battery life. Jameson was tethered to power cords during his demonstration because the current battery lasts just 30 minutes.

...

"Everybody likes the idea of being a superhero, and this is all about expanding the capabilities of a human," said Stephen Jacobsen, chief designer of the Sarcos suit.

Bunk.

As far as power... well, I wonder if they can't shift to laser power. It's heavy and difficult to carry around batteries and engines. But what if you could produce that energy elsewhere, and then beam it by laser to a receiver in the suit, which then converts it to electrical energy? Essentially you could make your "engine" any size you wanted, up to the size of a huge nuclear reactor, and you'd always be "plugged in" to that engine via a laser that tracked your position and always shifted to hit you. So long as there are satellites overhead, you've always got gigawatts of power at your disposal.

I really think Iron Man (the movie) should have used that explanation of his power source rather than the battery-sized miracle power source "arc reactor" they postulated.

Posted by: Ace at 11:55 AM | Comments (32)
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Excellent essay.

ID supporters will find some to like here. Those (such as myself) who think ID is anti-science will find a bit more. This crystalizes, better than I've managed, the basics of my antagonism towards ID:

Why Science and Faith Don't Mix Well

It is not that science disproves -- or tries to disprove -- the existence of God. The acts of a transcendent creator are simply outside the realm of anything that science can examine.

Science is the process of trying to discover mechanistic causes of publicly observable phenomena. The trouble is that causation cannot be positively proven. Ever. Under any circumstances.

So the best that scientists can do is make guesses (hypetheses) about causation and then conduct experiments designed to prove those guesses wrong. If the experiments don't prove them wrong, then the guess is considered to be a good one, an educated one, and scientists assume that it is true, or true enough, until new evidence emerges to contradict it.

But in science, no answer is ever final. No assumption of cause is beyond question. We never know enough to say, "This subject is now closed."

And that's just on the subject of mechanical cause. When it comes to final cause, which we call "purpose" or "motive," science is simply helpless. It is up to historians and biographers and fiction writers to provide motive and purpose and meaning -- and their work is specifically considered not to be science.

Scientists must therefore conduct their work as if the entire universe were one big machine, in which everything that happens is caused to happen by outside forces that push on each other.

Every serious student of science knows that this does not imply that the mechanical model of the universe is a complete explanation of anything -- it's not provable, it's simply the assumption that must be made before any useful scientific work can take place.

Here's why: The moment you allow transcendent or metaphysical forces into the equation, by definition they cannot be measured or replicated on demand. So the moment you say, "This event does not have a mechanical cause, but rather a spiritual/intelligent/purposive/magical one," science has stopped cold.

Think how much progress medicine made back when diseases were blamed on gods, and "treated" through sacrifices or prayers alone. Whether invoking gods does any good is a matter of faith; it will never lead you to effective medical treatments.

That is why science simply cannot admit God -- or Intelligent Design -- into the public discussion of science. The moment transcendent forces are invoked, science ends. And that's why I am among those who do not want to see Intelligent Design offered as a scientific alternative to Darwinism in science classes. It is, at best, a distraction; it is not that ID is wrong, it's that it's irrelevant to the project of science.

I've used the example of Thor and his lightning bolts. Even if it were actually, provably true that Thor created lightning with his hammer -- like, you could actually see him in the clouds making lightning -- science could not embrace this fact as part of science, because then all research into lightning would end. You can't summon Thor into the lab to do tests on him. You can't do any meaningful research into why Thor chooses to loose lightning on this day but not this one. It's a scientific dead-end. Once the supernatural -- literally, beyond the natural, and hence beyond science -- is conceded as actual fact, science can do no more work. The subject matter has left the jurisdiction of science and entered the realm of metaphysics and religion. In the Thor example, we've stopped researching lightning per se and must now turn to reading Norse stories about Thor to determine his temperament and motivations. Lightning isn't caused by any natural forces we can conceivably understand or reduce to theory; it's caused by Thor, end sentence end paragraph end science, and if we want to understand lightning we must turn to religion to understand the mind of Thor.

It should be noted that the theory of evolution itself is a a theory of intelligent design -- that is, due to natural selection and competitive advantage of favorable mutations, evolution will lead, usually, over aeons, to more complex structures and creatures which are more finely adapted to exploit and flourish within a particular ecological niche. The difference is, of course, evolution postulates that the forces impelling such a general trend towards "intelligent design" are themselves impersonal, unintelligent, and natural forces such as chance, the law of large numbers, and natural selection. Intelligent design, on the other hand, postulates an actual supernatural intelligence behind such a tendency, even though it frequently claims to not necessarily be speaking of God. No, not necessarily God, just some other omnipotent, omniscient sentient being capable of imposing his will and design on all of creation for all of time.

Pardon me if I find the distinction between such a being and God Himself a rather dodgy bit of semantics.

It could be that God Himself is in fact the "Watchmaker God" that Intelligent Design assumes, and did in fact create all the circumstances that would lead to complex life (and humanity) and so set evolution in motion according to his plan, working exclusively through natural forces, allowing His hand to remain hidden. There's no way to disprove such a theory. But then again, science can't really investigate this theory, nor admit it as being true, because by its own terms it would be unprovable (the theory noted above specifically envisions a hidden hand of God, invisible to earthy scientific attempts to reveal it) and furthermore would lead to the Thor-Lightning problem: Once a supernatural intelligence and will is admitted to be the causal force of a phenomenon, scientific inquiry into the cause of that phenomenon must end, and religion and metaphysics move in to take up the subject.

If God did it, that's the end of the inquiry as far as science goes. Science really can't carry that ball any further.

Why and how did birds evolve wings? A lot of interesting science can be done here if one assumes natural forces spurred the evolution of the wing.

If one's answer is "Because God wanted them to have wings," um... what avenue of inquiry is left to be explored? That simple sentence seems to settle things as far as the science goes, doesn't it? Why? Because God wanted them to have wings. How? Because God willed them to have wings. Done and done. Next subject.

That said, Card goes on to attack scientists who erroneously believe that because a fundamental assumption of science is that there are no supernatural forces at work in the universe that assumption proves that the universe contains no supernatural forces and hence no God. And then he turns to the anti-scientific, quasi-religious cult of global warming and overhyped attacks on Ben Stein's Expelled.

Worth a read.

Thanks to Rocks_Off.

Posted by: Ace at 11:23 AM | Comments (192)
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The whole set is here. Amidst the superheroes and pop-culture references are some, um, edgier ones.

Thanks to the Marchand Chronicles.

Posted by: Ace at 10:51 AM | Comments (12)
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Not for emissions reduction, but for emissions timing.

Scientists from around the world convene to answer the important question "What's the definition of 'premature ejaculation'"? Answer? 60 seconds or less.

You need to last one minute to avoid the label, experts now say.

The International Society for Sexual Medicine (ISSM) gathered the world's leading sexual health experts to develop an evidence-based definition for the dreaded quick ending.

I think I rather preferred the vague and fuzzy definition myself. And I really don't get the use of the word "dreaded" in that last part of the quote.

The researchers considered these factors: time to ejaculation, inability to delay ejaculation and negative consequences from premature ejaculation, or what they like to call a crushing sense of masculine inadequacy combined with deep seated feelings of failure and oh shit why did I do this with someone at work who can't keep her big mouth shut?

I might have messed up that quote some.

60 seconds certainly doesn't achieve the absurd definition of "optimal" (or as I call it "yeah, right), chronicled here by that liar our co-blogger DrewM, but it does set the bar a little lower which I'm sure a lot of you morons will appreciate.

Frankly I still maintain if I've been thinking about it all day it can hardly be considered "premature".

ripped from Slub's headline which he ripped from HotAir

UPDATE: Bumperstickerist read the book, saw the movie.
more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 10:33 AM | Comments (19)
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Just coming over, here's the early report. Lots more to come no doubt.

PDF of decision is here.

Reading [ace]: Looking for quotes and key findings. But it's 172 pages long.

After noting the state's domestic partnership law is "virtually" the same as marriage, the court announces it's deciding the Big Magillah. Examining the constitutionality of the current compromise regime under which...

... the union of an opposite-sex couple is officially
designated a “marriage” whereas the union of a same-sex couple is officially
designated a “domestic partnership.” The question we must address is whether,
under these circumstances, the failure to designate the official relationship of
same-sex couples as marriage violates the California Constitution.

So this is for full marriage, including the designation "marriage."

Please:

It also is important to understand at the outset that our task in this proceeding is not to decide whether we believe, as a matter of policy, that the officially recognized relationship of a same-sex couple should be designated a marriage rather than a domestic partnership (or some other term), but instead only to determine whether the difference in the official names of the relationships violates the California Constitution.

After mouthing this platitude about judicial restraint the court will proceed to "discover" an always-existing constitutional right to gay marriage that had hitherto lurked in the shadows, tossing stones at windows on occasion in the hopes that someone would notice it.

Having discounted their own policy impulses and announced they would be deciding the issue based solely on the state constitution as written, they immediately announce their new understanding of homosexuality changes previous constitutional law:

Furthermore, in contrast to earlier times, our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.

Before this they make some pro forma claims, using italics to let you know this is constitutional law, yo, that they've determined that marriage is a basic substantive right, which is just jargon for "we're going to overrule the legislature and the people acting through the initiative process, just because."

That sounds snider and snarkier than it is. That's really all it means. Categorizing something as a "fundamental" or "basic" "substantive" "right" is just a bit of judicial code for "We get to decide and no one else does."

It is, in legal terms, an ipse dixit, an "it's this way because I say it is," and you can always tell when a court is resorting to ipse dixit because it stops citing the actual constitution and previous decisions and begins speaking of hitherto-unknown "fundamental rights." How did they become "fundamental rights"? Oh, they always were. Just no one ever noticed.

The ipse dixits roll on. The right to establish a family becomes part of the living, breathing, sexy constitution, and with it comes the also newly discovered secondary right of that family to be treated with "equal dignity and respect."

Whoops: In fairness, this is the "conclusions" part of the ruling, so a lack of citations is to be expected. However, of course, this being a new right and all, they won't have actual citations for any of these propositions later, either; that's part of what makes this new law, after all. There are no actual precedents. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 09:22 AM | Comments (185)
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Believe it or not, Sean Penn is President of the the Cannes Film Festival Jury and sight unseen, heÂ’s announced that movies that donÂ’t conform to his political vision are out of the running for Best Film Honors.

Penn said it was impossible to separate film from politics, and promised that the winning film would be a reflection of the current climate.

“One way or another, when we select the Palme d’Or winner, I think we are going to feel very confident that the film-maker who made the film is very aware of the times in which he or she lives.”

But itÂ’s okay because Penn is a card carrying liberal, so you know, no worries.

On the upside he is sticking it to the French and their silly smoking ban.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:45 AM | Comments (35)
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Oh yeah baby... that's good, that's good... a little to the left.. yeah... now right into the ventricle...

I was doing this as a sidebar thing but it's too weird for that.

Note the couple just started having sex four weeks prior to the stab-play. That's a pretty short time to become jaded and looking for exciting new variations, eh?

And yes, shockingly enough, alcohol was involved.

I'm changing a word here or there to make it 20% hotter.

A Winnipeg woman who accidentally plunged a knife into her boyfriend's chest during a drunken bout of rough sex received a three-year conditional discharge yesterday.

"It was an accident that had sexy results," said the woman's lawyer, John McAmmond.

A court order has prohibited the young lovers from communicating with each other since the February 2007 incident. That order was lifted yesterday and the couple left court together, smiling, toting a cutlery catalogue.

Court heard the 25-year-old woman and 24-year-old man had known each other since grade school but had only become romantically involved four weeks prior to the accident.

The man was rushed to hospital in ecstatic condition after suffering a stab wound to the left ventricle of his heart.

"Hospital staff thought he was going to die, he was very close to climax," said Crown attorney Larry Allan, adding the man has fully recovered.

Allan said the man and woman had been drinking heavily and were engaged in "rough sex activities" when the man requested she "carve artwork" into his chest.

"He said they engaged in dangerous play, and due to her intoxication, was not precise with the organ-dildo and devirginized his heart," Allan said.

The man told police the ventricle-fucking was an accident and that the two routinely cut and scratched each other with knives. The man showed police several wounds, including a heart-shaped scar on his back featuring the woman's initials and an intricate etching of the Predator and Tony "Scarface" Montana sodomizing each other with broadswords.

McCammond said it was the victim who introduced the woman to "body modification" and asked her to carve another heart on his chest. The woman was complying when the man asked her to pop his heart-cherry, McAmmond said.

Posted by: Ace at 08:44 AM | Comments (23)
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Niiiiiice.

President Bush speaking to the Israeli Knesset today celebrating that country's 60th anniversary:

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," the President said to the country's legislative body, "We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is –- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

No names were used but Obama knows when he's being slapped. (Maybe not, see update at end)

In a statement, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., shot across the bow: "It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 6Oth anniversary of Israel's independence to launch a false political attack. It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel. Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all elements of American power -- including tough, principled, and direct diplomacy - to pressure countries like Iran and Syria. George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the President's extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel."

Who's your daddy?

Slushop courtesy of the one, the only Slublog

Tom Daschle was just on Fox complaining that it was inappropriate for the President to do this and insert himself into the campaign like this.

After 8 years of Democrats inserting themselves into foreign policy with trips to dictators I'd say they don't have much to complain about.

MMM...I smell a World's Worst Person award or possibly even a dreaded Special Commentary tonight!

And no matter what Obama says, Hamas is pulling for him

Hamas has endorsed Barack Obama for President. Yousef said, "We like Mr. Obama and we hope he will win the election." Why? "He has a vision to change America."

Below the fold commenter hit and run points to the White House response...not so fast Barack. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 06:41 AM | Comments (73)
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