US Representative Thaddeus McCotter (R) Michigan gives a short lesson on how to speak Democrat. Nice!

via babalublog

Posted by: Open Blog at 03:38 AM | Comments (50)
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(Thanks to C.C. Wiggum in the comments.)

From an unknown news source via another unknown news source, Carlin died of heart failure, at a Santa Monica hospital Sunday evening.

If you’d like to leave your condolences, please do so using all of “The Seven Dirty Words” in the comments below.

George wouldÂ’ve wanted it that way. Rest in peace, G.

Update: Cheshirecat nails it directly on the head, right out of the starting gates. For reference, here's the Seven Dirty Words and the routine that originally got him busted.

(Bonus points and three months free subscription to Ace of Spades HQ if you can use all seven in a coherent haiku format.)

Posted by: Open Blog at 10:24 PM | Comments (67)
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Attention whore James Hansen, of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is using tomorrow's 20th anniversary of his first BS session with Congress to call for the arrest of oil company CEOs. He wants to try them for "high crimes against humanity and nature."

In an interview with the Guardian he said: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."

He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections. He will campaign to have several of them unseated. Hansen's speech to Congress on June 23 1988 is seen as a seminal moment in bringing the threat of global warming to the public's attention. At a time when most scientists were still hesitant to speak out, he said the evidence of the greenhouse gas effect was 99% certain, adding "it is time to stop waffling".

Meanwhile, data from every source except GISS shows no warming trend for the past 11 years. Funny that.

ALSO: In what could be an unfortunate coincidence, tomorrow is an opinion day for the Supreme Court. A ruling on the Exxon Valdez punitive damages case is a distinct possibility. As I wrote in February, Justice Alito had to recuse himself because he owns ExxonMobil stock, making a 4-4 split possible. If that happens, Exxon will be required to pay the largest punitive damage award upheld in Supreme Court history. The $2.5 billion award (reduced from $5 billion in the appellate court) is greater than the combination of all punitives ever awarded in federal court.

Rulings on the Exxon case, and the D.C. gun ban case are expected sometime in the next week. Possibly as soon as tomorrow morning.

[I'm not back, but I've got a thing for the Valdez, oil companies, and the ideological battle over the correct way to measure punitive damages (fun!) so I thought I'd put all this on your radar.]

Morning Update: No Supreme Court opinion in either D.C. v. Heller or the Exxon case this morning. The Court will release more opinions on Wednesday. Seven opinions are left to be announced this term.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 10:10 PM | Comments (22)
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Subtitled: “Kill the Car”

This really didnÂ’t seem to be the best year for killing the car. A lot of misses and we didnÂ’t really get to see the money shot, at least on this video.

Maybe thereÂ’s a better video out there of this yearÂ’s shoot, but I havenÂ’t found it quite yet.

But it gives me a good excuse to repost the classic 2005 Full Auto Shoot video, complete with the 6-year old girl going blitzkrieg style on full auto. I guess sheÂ’s probably about 9 by now and has advanced to TOW missiles, but no definitive word on that.

HereÂ’s the link to that.

Five minutes and eighteen seconds of pure bliss. Turn up the volume on your speakers and try not to wet yourselves too much.

(I hear Dave in Texas wields a pretty nasty pellet gun. Just sayin.Â’)

Posted by: Open Blog at 09:43 PM | Comments (12)
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You can take away the natural economic penalty for bearing children out-of-wedlock at a young age, but so long as you maintain the social inhibitions against it, the problem will be limited to the most dysfunctional.

You can take away the social inhibitions against such puerile stupidity, but as long as the natural economic consequences of such actions remain mostly in place, again the problem will be limited. Awful for those who affirmatively choose stupidity, but at least limited a select number of hardcore sexual recidivists.

Take away both -- effectively pay very young girls to get pregnant, and give them nice little heavily-subsidized apartments, and also remove all social inhibitions against out-of-wedlock young-teen childbirth, and you get this.

The liberal mind is often animated by truly compassionate impulses, at least at first. It doesn't seem fair that a young mother should suffer the grinding poverty her choices have inevitably led her too; let's alleviate that suffering, and even make it nearly an economic wash for poorer girls to choose between sound choices (not getting pregnant, getting the skills to work in a decent, but hardly high paying, job) and bad choices.

It doesn't seem fair for sexually precocious young girls to be branded sluts or callow morons seeking status, of all things, by getting knocked up by popular boys or older men, so let's take away that stigma to the extent we can, to ensure their self-esteem isn't terribly damaged.

Both impulses are understandable. But what is harder to understand is the refusal of many liberals to think one or two steps beyond their initial impulses and ponder the likely -- or inevitable, as is frequently the case -- consequences of too much compassion, support, and self-esteem-boosting for decisions which are, ultimately, disastrous.

Diving off of piers into shallow water is a bad choice which cannot be made into a good one, no matter how much economic or social support one provides to the teenagers inevitably rendered cripples by such insanely self-destructive stunts. No liberal would argue we should support such choices or pay taxpayer funds to teenagers to subsidize the activity.

And yet, when it comes to matters sexual, liberals just suddenly lose all common sense in the headlong rush to encourage -- or at least remove all natural discouragements -- for pathologically poor sexual decisionmaking.

Liberals are so determined to be broad-minded and progressive about sex they often wind up extraordinarily narrow-minded and reactionary about the subject.

Take away virtually all consequences for a bad choice and you know what you've got? A choice which was formerly a bad one but is now a rather good one, or at least seems so (somewhat rationally) to a certain cohort of the population.

To liberals, conservatives often seem heartless or even sadistic towards such people in refusing to give money or social approval for their bad choices, thus making their lives more difficult.

But to conservatives, liberals seem heartless and even sadistic by making very bad choices relatively easy, even advantageous, to make -- and refusing to admit that those bad choices may be made easier to make, but they can never again be unmade. And the consequences for such choices lead to even more misery.

Anyone thinking these seventeen girls' seventeen children (with many more to come in the next ten years, I'm sure) will have a happy lot in life? That they'll grow up well-adjusted and well-parented and successful?

One or two or even three might overcome the atrocious circumstances of their formative years.

For the rest -- all the misery and poverty and dysfunction liberals had hoped to alleviate by being compassionate towards their borderline-retarded mothers, plus a 50% bonus level of misery, and also affecting a greater number of people than we'd hoped to mitigate originally.

No misery or poverty or social stigma has actually been avoided. The reduced levels of such evils will be more than made up for by the hard, sad, likely violence-filled lives of the 30+ children they'll eventually mis-raise. And an even greater number of grandchildren so afflicted.

And of course all those assaulted, raped, and/or murdered by this increasingly-dysfunctional line of whore-spawn. (If whore-spawn seems harsh, well, I'm having trouble imagining what other sorts of jobs these girls will end up moonlighting in when they need a bit of extra spending cash. Whoredom is a popular career-path among the young, female, self-destructive, and otherwise-unemployable.)

Is that compassion? Only if one willfully blinds oneself to hard reality, and refuses to even consider the esoteric concept called "the future."

Oh... Seems like as good a time as any to re-link Patrick Moynihan's prescient essay Defining Deviancy Down.

The process of defining deviancy down never ends. It cannot ever end.

For even as society uncritically accepts a new depth of human self-destructiveness, stupidity, and cruelty, the mandates of "compassion" require us to lower the bar of "deviancy" once again, so as not to penalize or even stigmatize those who have failed to even meet the current debased standards of proper behavior.

p

Posted by: Ace at 12:57 PM | Comments (114)
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North Korea's got Obamania.

Our European allies, on the other hand, are aren't so keen on Obama unilaterally conceding a key precondition to Iran's mad mullahs.

So our enemies love him, our allies are afraid of him.

Sounds about right.

Posted by: Ace at 11:51 AM | Comments (32)
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The Northrup Grumman Military Industrial Complex has been awarded a DARPA contract to develop genius binoculars that use a soldier's brainwaves to detect threats from a distance.

You can find many links to reports from a news organization. Search "intelligent binoculars".

Supposed to be able to use existing technologies to access what a human brain is capable of detecting with patterns, movement and objects.

They call it HORNET.

I call it "miniblinds can't stop me now".

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 09:16 AM | Comments (24)
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A university of Florida professor has filed a patent on a plasma/MHD driven flying saucer technology.

...University of Florida (UF) mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) department associate professor Subrata Roy submitted the application for the design that is reminiscent of the spaceships seen in countless movies. He calls his a "wingless electromagnetic air vehicle," or Weav...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 06:00 AM | Comments (41)
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I fell upon this mindless site that allows you to create Star Wars type word crawls using whatever text you choose. The amount of characters allowed is limited to 650 including spaces so you don't have much to work with. Still it's a fun way to waste 15 minutes of your life. My creation is below the break.

Update:
The site has been closed. The following message is all that remains:

This site has been closed.

"LucasFilm has asked us to remove this site, as they felt it infringed on their properties. We have enjoyed seeing the tens of thousands of users over the past several days, and thank you for your interest. "

I would like to thank the 35,000 people who viewed the Star Wars Obama Crawl while it lasted. more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 04:35 PM | Comments (43)
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How about that? Throughout the actual surge, the NYT studiously avoided taking notice of the great progress our troops made, for fear, of course, of giving any political help to those who were, correctly, noting the fact that the surge not only had a chance to work, but was working beyond all expectations.

The NYT finally notices the year-plus of nearly catastrophic success.

Just in time to not give any of the surge troops a dollop of usable contemporaneous recognition and morale-building.

Journalism is the first draft of history? Not when it comes to the NYT reporting on American military success. Then journalism becomes the tenth or twelfth draft of history, safely documenting victories long after such reportage could actually inform the public in a timely enough manner to make informed judgments about American policy.

The self-designated "Paper of Record" finally reports what has been reported by everyone else -- including Al Qaeda itself:

WhatÂ’s going right? And can it last?

Violence in all of Iraq is the lowest since March 2004. The two largest cities, Baghdad and Basra, are calmer than they have been for years. The third largest, Mosul, is in the midst of a major security operation. On Thursday, Iraqi forces swept unopposed through the southern city of Amara, which has been controlled by Shiite militias. There is a sense that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-MalikiÂ’s government has more political traction than any of its predecessors.

...

For Hatem al-Bachary, a Basra businessman, the turnabout has been “a miracle,” the first tentative signs of a normal life.

Really? I had no idea.

Incidentally, what's the least-read day of any newspaper?

Saturday, of course.

Guess this piece -- which could have been written any time over the past month (or the past year, actually) -- was just coincidentally published on the day with the least readers.

Just kinda worked out that way. Today was the first day they could finish the vigorous fact-checking of information. They could only confirm that violence was seriously reduced as of today, and not a day earlier.

And certainly not a day later. Can't crowd out all those wonderful Sunday edition features with a report of something as trivial as an American military victory.

Oh, and of course they do note that by being so very, very wrong about the surge, they're actually vindicated:

The changes are already affecting IraqÂ’s complicated relationship with America. In the presidential campaign, a debate is rising about whether the quiet means American soldiers can leave.

There really never was a debate about whether, once we win a war, we can withdraw our troops. The "debate" the NYT must mean is whether or not we can withdraw our troops precipitously enough to lose a war that's already been won.
And whether or not it's politically safe for the left to fight for that.

Wonder which NYT editor sports this tattoo?

Thanks for that last one to Jim.

Posted by: Ace at 03:45 PM | Comments (29)
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