She reports, you decide.

Prior to my relationship with Fox News' Suzanne Sena, I was allegedly involved for a brief time (20-25 minutes tops) with Fox News' sexpert.

Tonight, she adds fuel to the gossip fire by writing about transcendent sex in a way that makes it more likely than not that I was her never before revealed lover.. I feel so used and violated. But in a good way.

Now I'm not one to brag, so I'll just let the Sexpert's words speak for themselves:

Many would find it far-fetched to hear that their friend, brother or co-worker was transported to another realm during sex last night.

The closest IÂ’ve ever come to such a spontaneous, divine experience involved my life-force energy shooting up from the base of my spine during an orgasm. It happened when I was with my ex-lover and I found myself blissfully lost in a purplish-turned-white light that went beyond my body.

The feelings were beyond description. Saying it was amazing doesnÂ’t do it justice. But from what I understand, my story can be trumped by even more ecstatic experiences.

People who have been swept into transcendent ecstasy, according to developmental psychologist Dr. Jenny Wade, have reported:

— Seeing visions;

— Feeling heat, light and energy waves throughout the body;

— Reliving past lives;

— Seeing the face of God;

— Paranormal powers;

— Being visited by gods;

— Paranormal powers;

— Being visited by gods;

— Feeling possessed by spirits;

— Working with natural forces;

— Nothingness, whiteness, pure bliss;

— One with everything – there is no “me” or time;

— A lack of sensory channels;

— Time travel;

— Enlightenment.

And before you ask, yes I noticed that reference to "time travel". No, I never had sex with retired General Wesley "Time Ranger" Clark. Just want to put that rumor to bed here and now. Get it? Put it to bed? I crack myself up.

In any event, there really is only one more thing I can add to this story.

FoxNews Sexpert? You're welcome.

Posted by: Jack M. at 03:30 PM | Comments (47)
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It's like Alien vs. Predator: Whoever wins, we lose.

But seriously, it was a vicious attack by yobs, either Hippies or anti-Hippies driven to violence by dirty, smelly hippies. (They cling to to their bitterness, etc.)

Ricky Green wandered into this town some months ago, a stranger just a bit stranger than most.

He had shed his middle-class respectability -- a job as a graphic artist in the 'burbs -- strapped a guitar over his shoulder and landed on what he told people was "a spiritual journey."

Bolinas seemed like a good fit.

The unincorporated town of 1,600 on the Pacific coast is Marin County's most blatant throwback to the Summer of Love, a hippie haven that is bent on stopping tourists from spoiling its laid-back groove.

The 33-year-old, prone to age of Aquarius-speak about the moon and the stars, already looked sort of like a local.

...

Six young people, including two juveniles, are said to have attacked and stabbed Green with a viciousness that is forcing Bolinas to search its soul for meaning.

I don't know if the town is really "searching its soul for meaning," or if that's just the stupid reporter stupidly searching for meaning himself. But I find it amusing. Not the stabbing. The "search for meaning" in a stabbing.

If you want those sorts of answers and that sort of context in a cosmic plan, go to church. Personally, I don't think church has the answers either, but I do think people sound much, much less foolish searching for meaning with traditional metaphysics than the sort of touchy-feeley Dr. Phil new-age retardations these people are likely to come up with.

"Searching for meaning," I'm guessing, will involve a lot of people claiming some sort of vague societal responsibility for the attack. Sounds nice, but not a one of them believes they actually have any such responsibility (as they should not, unless they took part in the stabbing or encouraged it). But this is the typical empty, meaningless, nothing-but-pretense-and-preening display that passes for wisdom and "healing" in liberal circles.

Thanks to Maetenloch.

Hippy Fight! More violent, smelly hippies.

Posted by: Ace at 03:07 PM | Comments (45)
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It's like Mad Libs, only for a younger, less sophisticated audience!

Here's one:

"I think it's time we had a national conversation about "swamp ass". We need to get past all the oil speculators and recognize that we are our own best hope for overcoming Bush Justice Department officials. We need handjobs, not mercenaries. Handjobs are our marshmallow Fluff. And we need to have change in "swamp ass"."

Sounds pretty real to me.

Thanks to Danny, not Noonan.

Posted by: Ace at 02:07 PM | Comments (70)
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"Although Republican presidential candidate John McCain has called Social Security "a disgrace," he still cashes his own retirement check every month."

Ironic, huh? The Media Blog notes that although Barack Obama calls Washington broken, he still cashes his Senate check every month.

It should also be noted that John McCain isn't calling Social Security payments a disgrace, but rather the shaky actuarially doomed financing of the scheme. True enough, if every senior simply stopped cashing his checks and remitted them back to the government, the system would be immediately flush with cash and perfectly solvent. Is the AP seriously suggesting that that's what McCain has himself suggested, or that any senior should do so?

In further irony, to quote Colonel Jessup, the AP rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom our military provides and then questions the manner in which they provide it.

Perhaps, to have a perfectly "clean" and consistent position without any hypocrisy whatsoever, every reporter or editor who works for the AP ought to leave the country they despise so much.

Posted by: Ace at 02:00 PM | Comments (33)
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What a stupid fucking douche.

"Our dangerous reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all these problems – economic, environmental, national security," Gore said. "The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels."

...

Despite winning the popular vote against George Bush in the 2000 presidential election [I'm sorry-- how is that relevant?], Gore has displayed no interest in returning to politics.

...

He shied away from specifics during the speech, not mentioning the trillion-dollar price tag of ending carbon-based electricity. Instead, Gore urged the US to institute a carbon tax that could be offset by reducing the payroll tax on employers.

"We should tax what we burn, not what we earn," he said.

Underpinning Gore's remarks, however, was a finely tuned sense of the economic anxiety that dominates American life 13 weeks before the next presidential election. He observed that the environmental, fiscal, and national-security dangers facing the country would be eliminated by a conversion to clean energy.

Finely-tuned sense. Right. He's proposing to make energy cost even more when its price is currently skyrocketing and edging the world towards a global recession.

Well, that's al-Guardian for you.

Photoshop by Slublog.

Posted by: Ace at 12:36 PM | Comments (70)
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Seems slightly dangerous. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:16 PM | Comments (32)
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I'm 5'8", supposedly, according to conventional direct measurements which I no longer believe can be trusted. I've always felt like I was six feet tall (or at least thought I should be), and was always both disappointed in, and somewhat skeptical of, direct empirical testing that put my height well below that.

Well, I just found out that I am no longer shackled by petty empiricism. I am liberated from such old-fashioned and dodgy shibboleths, and can use other indirect measurements, supplemented by some sketchy assumptions and guestimates, to arrive at a value for my height that better suits my intuitive belief about it.

I will use a height proxy to determine my height. I will toss away the direct measurements as biased, incomplete, or hopelessly inaccurate, and instead interpolate/estimate my height based upon my weight.

My weight is 170 or so. Assuming my frame is "large," and assuming I'm not terribly overweight, then this chart of height and weight correlations puts me right smack in the middle of the range for men 6'0" tall.

Awesome. I always wanted to be tall (or at least tall-ish). With this terrific new technique, I now am. Woot! Out of my way, you small-minded, short-statured fools.

Does this sound ridiculous? Eff you, buddy. It's Science. The New Science, which means it's the best science.

I learned this technique from the very scientific global warming alarmists. In Gabriel's must-read link below, I found out the following.

The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. If we had found the greenhouse signature then I would be an alarmist again.

When the signature was found to be missing in 2007 (after the latest IPCC report), alarmists objected that maybe the readings of the radiosonde thermometers might not be accurate and maybe the hot spot was there but had gone undetected. Yet hundreds of radiosondes have given the same answer, so statistically it is not possible that they missed the hot spot.

Recently the alarmists have suggested we ignore the radiosonde thermometers, but instead take the radiosonde wind measurements, apply a theory about wind shear, and run the results through their computers to estimate the temperatures. They then say that the results show that we cannot rule out the presence of a hot spot. If you believe that you'd believe anything.

They are tossing out direct empirical measurements (which undermine their theory) and replacing facts with estimates of those temperatures based on indirect proxies supplemented with sketchy theories about the interrelation between proxy and actual measurement.

Is there anything more anti-scientific than that? Simply ignoring good, thorough data because it does not accord with your theory, and then attempting to estimate the "true" measurement based on measuring something else entirely and multiplying it by the Finageler's Constant (as my old chemistry teacher used to term his student's habit of, um, subtly adjusting their lab results to better accord with the answers in the book).

This is not science. Science is and must be a prisoner of empirical measurement. Wild-eyed global warming alarmists cannot simply liberate themselves from the shackles of empiricism simply because they find it too constraining.

Theories must be adjusted to fit observed facts; observed facts must not be adjusted to suit theories.

This is at the very heart of science. This is what separates science from non-science. It's what separates science from, say, alchemy, or perhaps more relevantly, theology.

Global warming "scientists" have long relied on alleged proxies and dubious assumptions about their correlations to temperatures to indirectly estimate measures that simply do not exist. Their assumptions and guesses about such unobtainable data might be open to critique, but no one could fault them for trying to determine data they otherwise simply could not have.

They seem to have become far too comfortable with such guestimation, though. They've now crossed the line.

For they're now "estimating" data which they actually have in hand, and which is incontrovertible.

Trouble is, it's data that undermines their theory/religion. It is data which could be called An Inconvenient Truth.

Inconvenient, perhaps, but not insurmountable. One just needs to pretend it isn't so and seek out estimated numbers one finds more pleasing.

Posted by: Ace at 11:03 AM | Comments (90)
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County commissions seem to attract the most colorful characters. I've criticized commissioners before (for example, in Perry County, Alabama and Blount County, Tennessee) but this guy takes the prize. Oklahoma County Commissioner Brent Rinehart has created a comic book which he says is "more or less a story of my experiences of the last four years of being the county commissioner of District 2."

Toga-wearing gays, political figures, trench coat-clad henchmen, concerned residents and Rinehart round out the comic's cast.

"This is one of the strangest things I've ever seen," said Keith Gaddie, a political science professor at the University of Oklahoma. "I've never seen a comic book with the phrase 'anal sodomy' in it before. That was a new one for me."

Gaddie said comics were common political campaign tools decades ago, but not for today.

"He's pretty much grinding every ax he's got from his days in the county commission," Gaddie said. "In a way, it's a sophisticated piece."

In one sequence, Satan says: "If I can get the kids to believe homosexuality is normal!"

The angel replies: "Hey Satan, not with Brent around you won't!"

"The history of my office is that I do expose the homosexual agenda, and that it does exist in the state of Oklahoma, and my history also would show that I am very much opposed to the homosexual agenda," Rinehart said.

In the comic, Satan endorses Rinehart's opponents in the July 29 Republican primary for the District 2 county commissioner seat. The angel endorses Rinehart.

Repeat: Satan endorses Rinehart's primary election opponents---other Republicans---because they are part of the "homosexual agenda." Eeesh. Sometimes I'm not too sure about this local democracy thing.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 10:44 AM | Comments (33)
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Is the war over, effectively if not formally? The Geopolitical 8-Ball says "Possibly; Try Again."

Note the very encouraging fact that Al Qaeda has been reduced to using its technically-skilled recruits -- its bomb-building geeks -- for actual field missions. That's a damn good sign, cannibalizing high-value bomb-makers for use in field operations for which they're blessedly ill-prepared.

I'm partially rewriting this, not for comic value, but to avoid AP's lawyer intimidation.

COMBAT OUTPOST COPPER, Iraq - [Where US troops once faced frequent sniping and IEDs, all is now peaceful.]

"The difference is night and day," says Capt. George Morris, 26....

[Throughout the country, Al Qaeda has become so degraded and decimated that it is all but "irrelevant" in the war.]

[In the AP's own words, in the Latifiyah area, at least, "it's hard not see that the goal [of the surge] appears to have been achieved." A fairly roundabout and soft-pedaled way of saying "The success of the surge is undeniable and obvious."]

...

"The people themselves will turn over the terrorists" if they show themselves, says al-Shamari.

...

[Al Qaeda in Iraq once numbered 6,000 or so; their numbers have dwindled. But if their ranks have thinned, their leadership has been all but wiped out. So many leaders have been so killed, captured, and scattered into hiding that the remaining force is largely ineffectual. Indeed, with so many field leaders dead or otherwise incapacitated, technically-oriented lab-geek types have been shanghaied into service as combatants, and even leaders.]

[This cannibalization of Al Qaeda's technical cadre has a doubly deleterious effect -- not only the bombmakers simply poor tactical leaders, but more and more of them have been exposed to risk, and often killed or captured -- thus leading to a degredation of Al Qaeda's bomb-making capabilities, as well as their battlefield execution.]

[Triggering mechanism have become cruder and less reliable. IEDs used to contain hundreds of pounds of explosives; now IEDs are being seen with relatively small charges of 25 pounds or less.]

"They just can't get the material any more to do what they want to do," Batschelet said.

Good stuff, good stuff. I'd say "read the whole thing," but it's AP. Fuck them.

Posted by: Ace at 10:12 AM | Comments (14)
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How could that happen? Bush won't veto any bill renewing the ban? There'd be enough Congressmen and Senators to override the veto?

What madness is this?

President BushÂ’s decision this week to allow preparation of leases for energy exploration on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) lets Republicans press their energy advantage even harder. BushÂ’s executive order of Monday removes all White House restrictions on the establishment of new oil leases. Democrats had been using these restrictions as an excuse for Congress to do nothing about oil exploration. The ball is clearly in the DemocratsÂ’ court. The OCS drilling ban expires on September 30, with the Department of the InteriorÂ’s fiscal 2008 appropriations. Although House sources believe it will almost certainly be renewed, that renewal will create another political pressure point on a good Republican issue close to this yearÂ’s election.

Um, I'm not interested in "political pressure points." I'm interested in positive action. If the GOP can't do this -- what the hell use are they?

They don't have to affirmatively pass a law here, something that's very hard to do from a minority position, nevermind all the squishes and RINOs. They merely need to deny the Democrats a two thirds majority to override a veto in either house.

Again: Bush isn't planning on a firm veto? The GOP seriously can't even muster this minor level of solidarity on such an important (and politically winning) issue?

I'm going to write to some of my few congressional contacts to find out what the hell is going on with this.

Posted by: Ace at 09:30 AM | Comments (48)
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