Embarrass the Iranian Guardian Council like this and I'm pretty sure you're gonna be slated for an "early retirement".

...For its part, Agence France-Presse retracted its four-missile version this morning, saying that the image was “apparently digitally altered” by Iranian state media. The fourth missile “has apparently been added in digital retouch to cover a grounded missile that may have failed during the test,” the agency said. Later, it published an article quoting several experts backing that argument...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 11:20 AM | Comments (9)
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As you guys know, the new site wasn't, and isn't, really ready for unveiling. Among a host of other problems, there's still no "Headlines" entry there, and since it seems most people are going over there, I've given them up.

Which I hate. Because I like Headlines. A lot of the cobloggers do too.

Posts also tend to get lost between the two sites. I wrote a long post on Obama's call for requiring kids to learn Spanish an hour ago, and yet it still hasn't posted.

Given the fact that the new site is just not ready for prime time yet, maybe come back to the old site until it's actually ready to go? And only use the new site when the old site is breaking down?

Oh: The old site is at www.ace.mu.nu, in case any new readers have come here lately, which, if my SiteMeter is any guide, seems highly doubtful.

Posted by: Ace at 11:11 AM | Comments (82)
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The hilariously profane (and big Content Warning for Sarah Silverman's unbelievably foul potty-mouth) opening of The Way of the Gun, as performed by the SuperFriends.

It's not great, but it's decent.

Thanks to MattM.

Posted by: Ace at 11:03 AM | Comments (5)
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This is pretty interesting stuff that could have a major impact in places like the Middle east, Africa, southern California and Florida.

...One of the most promising applications for carbon nanotube membranes is sea water desalination. These membranes will some day be able to replace conventional membranes and greatly reduce energy use for desalination.

In the recent study, the researchers wanted to find out if the membranes with 1.6 nanometer (nm) pores reject ions that make up common salts. In fact, the pores did reject the ions and the team was able to understand the rejection mechanism.

“Our study showed that pores with a diameter of 1.6nm on the average, the salts get rejected due to the charge at the ends of the carbon nanotubes,” said Francesco Fornasiero, an LLNL postdoctoral researcher, team member and the study’s first author

Fast flow through carbon nanotube pores makes nanotube membranes more permeable than other membranes with the same pore sizes...

This story came out of Lawrence Livermore National Lab and warrants more exposure than the zero exposure the MSM is giving it so far.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 10:11 AM | Comments (30)
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Defending his claim that American parents must make sure their children also speak Spanish in addition to the actual language of this country, Barack Obama claimed this would help kids eventually secure jobs. And that learning a second language was a good thing in any event.

Taking the latter point first -- it's true. Learning a second language is undeniably a good thing. The trouble is, learning any hard-to-master skill or field of knowledge is undeniably a good thing. There are few adults or kids who could not benefit from additional learning. Adults might go to community college to finally puzzle out the calculus that had baffled them as youngsters (or that they had never been exposed to at all). Kids might elect to take statistics or economics courses, both for the natural brain-building power of dealing with any difficult field, as well as the usefulness of those fields in many careers. Most of us are scientifically illiterate, and could stand some more science in our lives, even if it's not directly related to our careers.

There are numerous things Americans should do to improve themselves, build their brains, and enhance (possibly) their career choices down the line.

But with all these competing possibilities for time and effort, why should learning Spanish be considered a priority for most, if not all? If learning a language, why not Chinese or Japanese? Why not German or French?

And why should anyone be required to learn a second language at all, just to navigate the mundane tasks of everyday living, such as shopping?

This is actually what Barack Obama means by Spanish helping your kids get a job.

He implies that learning Spanish will help one get a high-status job in international trade or negotiation. Certainly the Spanish-speaking world is a large one (though not nearly so large as the Chinese-speaking world). But even with expanding trade and expanding wealth in the Latin world, the number of jobs that require a Spanish-speaker in order to communicate with Spanish-only speaking transnational clients is tiny.

And given the huge number of native speakers of Spanish in this country, I'd say we have a surplus of talent in that area.

When Barack Obama says that speaking Spanish will help your kids get a job, he's telling the truth -- but the jobs he's talking about are fronting a McDonald's cash register, or working at Wal-Mart, or even just pumping gas.

Or doing pretty much anything at all. Because with the rise of a very large Spanish speaking minority, Spanish is rapidly becoming nearly essential for any job.

Most jobs previously required no facility in any foreign language at all. But now many jobs increasingly demand Spanish as a skill, due to the large and ever-growing of domestic Spanish-only speakers.

He's not talking about forcing your kids to learn Spanish to open up additional job opportunities. He's talking about forcing them to learn Spanish to simply be more competitive at jobs for which a second language was never previously a requirement, nor even much of a benefit. What you could do yesterday with just the native tongue at English, you now increasingly need some Spanish to do.

You're not gaining any new opportunities or benefits; you're just having to expend time and effort to do what you used to take for granted.

This is a dramatic shift, and most Americans, quite rightly, resist it. Obama, pandering to the Spanish-speaking lobby, instead embraces it, and demands that America change to better accommodate itself to its growing, and largely non-assimilating, cohort of Spanish-only speakers.

There are good and rational reasons to resist Obama's call for a bilingual American state. A single language is economically beneficial -- there are lesser transaction costs within the country, less frustration, less delay. Less money paid out, for example, to an employee on the payroll largely simply because he is fluent in Spanish.

And, of course, it is far easier, and hence far more desirable, for those of us who speak English only (or at least do not speak Spanish).

The Hispanic lobby and the left will of course denigrate such concerns -- "You're refusing to learn Spanish just because it's difficult for you and it's easier to live your English-only lifestyle?" -- but those are real and legitimate concerns. I may be willing to spend time and effort to learn a skill I want to learn, or to learn a skill which will earn me more money at my job, but I strongly object to having to learn a skill simply to be able to do all the things I could quite easily before without that skill. Time is money, and if I'm required to dedicate more of my time to learning a skill that yields me no benefit whatsoever, that's basically a tax on me, and either an expenditure of my working time (for which I am not getting paid) or an expenditure of my free time.

So yes -- what's easiest for me, what's easiest for the greatest number of Americans, is a valid political goal. Most people are not in favor of policies that will make their lives more difficult, more complex, and more frustrating.

It should also be noted that those who agitate for Spanish as effectively a second official language are also pushing that program because that's what's easiest for them. It's hard to learn English, of course, and millions of Spanish speakers would like not to be required to do so simply to live their lives and work at their jobs. They may choose to learn English -- most do -- but they'd like to not be absolutely required to do so. And they'd like to not be penalized in terms of time and frustration for not being fluent in English. And they'd like to not have many jobs closed off to them simply because they don't speak English.

Which is pretty much the way most those of us who speak English as our first language. We also don't want to be forced to learn Spanish simply to adapt to a growing population which speaks Spanish and little English.

And we'd like our kids to not be disadvantaged in the work-force simply because they haven't learned Spanish. If they prefer to invest their time in learning other skills -- or no skills at all; people are allowed to be lazy and underachieving, after all -- we'd like it if this were a penalty-free decision.

Obama feels otherwise. As he said, you're going to have to make certain your kids learn Spanish.

Struggles over language are among the most passionate political disputes. Wars have been fought over such concerns, as they're struggles over both culture -- whose will prevail? -- one one's children's futures -- whose children will be favored or disfavored due to the dominant language?

One group has to adapt to the other. That's what the struggle is all about -- who will have to invest the time and energy to learn a language not one's own, who will have to at least partly abandon his own native culture in favor of an alien one.

The left always casts this dispute as one that's easy to compromise -- we all just learn Spanish, too. But that's not a compromise. That's simply conceding the political dispute entirely. When one counter-argues that it's just as easy for Spanish-speakers to learn English as for English-speakers to learn Spanish (easier, actually, in terms of total manpower hours expended -- there still are a hell of a lot more English speakers than Spanish speakers in America), the left and the Hispanic lobby resorts to name-calling. Lazy. Racist. Unwilling to welcome our new citizens (or non-citizen illegal migrants). Etc.

Nope. What animates the Spanish-speaking lobby is precisely what animates the English-speaking lobby: We want to live our lives with a minimum of additional effort and frustration, and do not wish to make our lives more difficult in order to make the lives of another group easier.

Selfish, perhaps. But it's selfish on both sides. There is no additional moral virtue on the Spanish-as-a-second-official-language side. They want precisely what we English-first speakers want, and for precisely the same reasons -- given a cultural collision between two large groups of people living together, one group is going to have to exert a great deal more effort and also give up some of their own culture and traditions to adapt, and they'd prefer it be the rest of us.

The rest of us, for the same reason, prefer it to be them.

There is no very good reason to prefer the wishes of the minority over the wishes of the majority, despite the left's reflexive demands that the majority always adapt to the minority. And there are good reasons to resist it: having a single official language makes the nation work better, period.

It must also be noted that no other language in the history of America has actually threatened English's primacy. Immigrant groups have tended to be smallish, making the learning of English more or less a requirement for immigrant groups, at least within a generation. Spanish is the first foreign language to be spoken here in such great numbers that a Spanish-speaker doesn't necessarily have to learn English at all.

And, of course, there's the obvious fact that Spanish-speakers are largely new immigrants, those who have been permitted to become Americans. There is hardly anything oppressive about attaching the condition that new citizens must be fluent in English before we extend citizenship to them. It hardly seems unreasonable to say, "Yes, you can come to America, but please do not start making demands that we accommodate ourselves to you. After all, you have chosen to come to an English-speaking country; the rest of us already here did not choose to to come to a Spanish-speaking country."

This cannot be finessed, Captain Bullshit's insistence to the contrary. Either Hispanic immigrants will learn English and adopt that as their primary language (at least as the primary language outside the home), or the long-standing population of America will have to learn Spanish to better accommodate them. There is no objective reason to favor Spanish-speakers' convenience over English speakers.

Incidentally, Captain Bullshit's argument is self-defeating. Don't you worry about immigrants learning English, he lectures us, they will.

They will? Why should they, when the rest of the country is to become bilingual in Spanish? Certainly many will, but if Spanish and English are now effectively co-official-languages, the natural incentive to learn English would be greatly reduced. There are strong incentives to become fluent in English currently, and yet many schools have adopted bilingual education rather than accelerating kids' comprehension of English and making that the first priority.

I cannot comprehend how making Spanish a semi-official language of America will induce more Hispanic immigrants to undertake the inherently difficult task of learning a new language. If Americans currently choose, largely, to not learn Spanish because we don't need to and because, hell, we don't like doing more work than we have to, why on earth would we imagine that Spanish-first speakers will behave differently than we do when they have no particular incentive to learn a new language?

I think conservatives are understandably gun-shy about arguing self-interest. And so this argument is largely had on a very abstract, noble-minded plane. English is what binds us. English is the common currency of our shared American heritage. All of that.

That is true, but that avoids a more tangible and primary reason for resisting the move to a Spanish-English dual-language America. I resist it, primarily, because English-only (or at least English-first) is easier for me, and makes my life simpler -- and better.

Self-interest is hardly a noble reason to champion a policy. But it is nevertheless a good reason. And those arguing the contrary position are just as animated by simple self-interest, just as interested in making their own lives as convenient as possible. As we're all arguing, ultimately, from the point of self-interest, I cannot fathom why I should elevate someone else's convenience over my own. Especially as I, unlike an immigrant, have not chosen to relocate to a country with an alien language.

And, of course, English-speakers greatly outnumber Spanish-speakers, and thus can (and actually should) vote in favor of our preferences.

Instapundit quoted James Lileks as stating that muticulturalism was merely the process by which a formerly dominant culture transfers power to a newly dominant culture. I am not willing to accelerate that process, even if Barack Obama -- speaker of exactly one language, last I checked -- demands that I Change.

Posted by: Ace at 11:00 AM | Comments (44)
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More specifically, he's suing two Bible publishers for printing the Leviticus edict that homosexuality is a sin/an abomination.

Change you can litigate for?

Thanks to AliceH.

Posted by: Ace at 09:07 AM | Comments (67)
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No nudity alas, but lots of obscene gestures, including the one for oral sex.

Even worse, she appears to be trying to qualify for Hot Chicks with Douchebags:

Posted by: Ace at 09:01 AM | Comments (50)
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Take all that smoke and pollution out of the air and more sunlight reaches the earth.

Since 1980, average air temperatures in Europe have risen 1 °C: much more than expected from greenhouse-gas warming alone. Christian Ruckstuhl of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Switzerland and colleagues took aerosol concentrations from six locations in northern Europe, measured between 1986 and 2005, and compared them with solar-radiation measurements over the same period. Aerosol concentrations dropped by up to 60 per cent over the 29-year period, while solar radiation rose by around 1 watt per square metre (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2008GL03422 . "The decrease in aerosols probably accounts for at least half of the warming over Europe in the last 30 years," says Rolf Philipona, a co-author of the study at MeteoSwiss, Switzerland's national weather service.

At least half, note.

So... we need to start running sooty factories again?

When you have the time, this long article demolishes claims of man-made global warming pretty thoroughly. This is pretty interesting:

[C]arbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation (IR) in only three narrow bands of frequencies, which correspond to wavelengths of 2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers (µm), respectively. The percentage absorption of all three lines combined can be very generously estimated at about 8% of the whole IR spectrum, which means that 92% of the "heat" passes right through without being absorbed by CO2. In reality, the two smaller peaks don't account for much, since they lie in an energy range that is much smaller than the where the 15 micron peak sits - so 4% or 5% might be closer to reality. If the entire atmosphere were composed of nothing but CO2, i.e., was pure CO2 and nothing else, it would still only be able to absorb no more than 8% of the heat radiating from the earth.

...

We've decided to be exceptionally generous to all concerned in the debate and look at the worst-case scenario, where we'll say that all of the available heat in the CO2 absorption spectrum is actually captured. We know that man is responsible for about 3 % of it, so with the simplest of math, we have .03 x .08 = .0024. And remember that 8% figure was actually larger than reality, since the two side peaks don't have much energy to capture.

This is also interesting, explaining why it is that while increasing CO2 and increasing warmth are linked in the historical record, it's actually the increased warmth that comes first, then the increase in CO2:

CO2 is by far the heaviest of the major constituents, and the law of gravity applies to it as well. It sinks to the ground.. in fact, into the ground, and into the oceans, as well, because CO2 is very water-soluble and that's what puts the fizz in Ginger Ale.

This doesn't happen overnight. In fact, the winds and convection currents and such keep the air stirred up constantly, so it may take 100-150 years for the CO2 you are exhaling right now to make it back into mother earth, where most of it is currently locked up.

Now our puzzle is complete, and we can visualize the whole thing.

1. The sun heats the earth, repository of most of the CO2 on the planet.

2. Some stored CO2 comes out by a process known as outgassing ( from the soil ) and the champagne effect ( from the oceans ). The oceans are by far the largest source.

3. Sloppy "scientists" see the warming, and the CO2, but overlook the changes in the sun, don't see the fine differences in timing... and proceed to blame the increasing temperature on CO2 and mankind as the culprit in a classic knee-jerk reaction.

Thanks to CADaddy and cismar.

Posted by: Ace at 08:47 AM | Comments (26)
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I don't think this is the ass-kissing Bill Clinton had in mind.

Time’s Page: "Oooops!!!! [Obama] back on stage after his final curtain call at a Manhattan fundraiser last night— he had forgotten to ask for donors’ help with Hillary’s debt."

Associated Press: "After a minute or so, the music was cut short and Obama returned to the stage. ''This is not the speech part, but it is important,'' he said sheepishly, urging the group to reassemble. "

LA Times: But what happened Wednesday night was a little embarrassing. After the two Democrats voted differently on the Senate's FISA retroactive surveillance O.K. bill, Obama flew Clinton from Washington to New York CityÂ… Oops! It seems Obama had forgotten to mention the part about giving money to Hillary Clinton in the spirit of unity, the whole reason they were gathered there in the first place.

New York Times: "At this point, he was supposed to appeal for donations for her debt-relief fund, aides said. He evidently forgot and circled back to do so at the end of his remarks. "

Note the Times once again deliberately misreports the incident. This may not be the biggest story, but it is a story, and the Times chooses to mislead its readers to understate it -- because healing the Obama-Clinton rift and thus helping the Democratic Party is of a higher priority than properly informing its readers. (Let alone entertaining them.)

Posted by: Ace at 08:22 AM | Comments (20)
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Democrats usually claim that voter fraud doesn't exist, or at least that it is not a big problem. After all, everyone knows that Republicans just want to suppress the black vote, right? Well, Alabama is getting national attention today for claims of voter fraud in its June 3 non-presidential primary elections. I'll give you two guesses as to which side likely broke election laws, but you'll only need one:

In May, a local citizens group gathered affidavits detailing several cases in which at least one Democratic county official paid citizens for their votes, or encouraged them to vote multiple times. The affidavits were presented to state officials in Montgomery, the capital, and after the June 3 primary, the Alabama attorney general, Troy King, a Republican, seized voting records from the primary election in Bullock, Lowndes and Perry Counties. [...]

Ms. Chapman also raised questions about the possible abuse of absentee ballots. In the election on June 3, a quarter of the voters here [Perry County?], 1,114, cast absentee ballots, a percentage that is six times the state average and a figure that Ms. Chapman called "astronomical." In Jefferson County, which includes Birmingham and has 60 times Perry CountyÂ’s population of 10,600, there were 365 absentee ballots. [...]

Some Democrats here say the inquiries are motivated by racism and partisanship.

"The Republican Party has an unscripted mandate to target Democratic counties, and African-Americans particularly," said Albert Turner Jr., a county commissioner here.

Mr. TurnerÂ’s father, a local civil rights hero, was tried and acquitted on vote fraud charges 23 years ago. The younger Mr. Turner was photographed talking to voters in a polling place in the National Guard Armory throughout the day on June 3, when he was a candidate for re-election.

How sadly typical. A black man likely breaks the law and his first defense is to yell "Raaaaacists!" I believe this is the same Albert Turner Jr. who punched a woman at a Perry County Commissioners meeting and who has been obsessed with vilifying whites for his entire career. I don't know why anyone would want this man to represent them even on a simple county commission, but that too is sadly typical.

Alabama seems to have hit the voter fraud trifecta: absentee ballot irregularities, candidate misbehavior, and good old fashioned voter intimidation. Wouldn't it be a nice change if someone were actually prosecuted for it?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:00 AM | Comments (22)
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