This time it's to the Emperor of Japan.

I'm sure there are a lot of liberal bloggers burning up the Google servers trying to find an image of Bush doing this. Hopefully for their credibility they can find something better than Bush leaning over to have a medal placed around his neck.

Also, I guess given this we can now assume that idea that the idea Obama was just picking something up off the floor when he bowed to Saudi King Abdulah is um, no longer operative.

As for this case, is it proper protocol for the US President to bow to royalty? Nope. Here's how the NY Times described a much less subservient image of Bill Clinton kind of nodding to Akihito.

It wasn't a bow, exactly. But Mr. Clinton came close. He inclined his head and shoulders forward, he pressed his hands together. It lasted no longer than a snapshot, but the image on the South Lawn was indelible: an obsequent President, and the Emperor of Japan.

...But the "thou need not bow" commandment from the State Department's protocol office maintained a constancy of more than 200 years. Administration officials scurried to insist that the eager-to-please President had not really done the unthinkable.

"It was not a bow-bow, if you know what I mean," said Ambassador Molly Raiser, the chief of protocol.

What Clinton did may not have been a Whoppie Glodbergesq "bow-bow" but what Obama did certainly was.

I think most Americans find the idea of bowing to royalty kind of silly. The Emperor of Japan would be different simply because it's the cultural tradition to bow to anyone when you meet them in Japan. Obama however, isn't a tourist or a businessman hungry to close a deal. He is American head of state and he doesn't bow to other heads of state. Well, he didn't until recently.

"Slappy" found the video, it's below the fold. Oy. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 07:14 AM | Comments (588)
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Morning morons. Sittin outside here in Texas, drinking coffee and rubbing myself all over with orange marmalade. It's a nice cool day, sunny with a few clouds. Should be about 75 or so, perfect football weather.

Cincinnati managed to pull out a close one last night over West Virginia, good game. Others today that look like they'll be good, Iowa (15) at Ohio State (10) at 3:30 EST, and Utah (16) at TCU (4) tonight.

Enjoy your day goofballs.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 06:25 AM | Comments (85)
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Welcome all M&Ms. Friday at last, Friday at last! So now you don't need an excuse to stay up late and play in the ONT.

Star Wars: How the Death Star Computer Graphics Sequence Was Made
One of the amazing things about the original Star Wars was the computer-animated Death Star attack sequence. Of course it looks completely dated now, but it was state-of-the-art at the time it was made in the mid-70's. Here's a video by the animator, Larry Cuba, where he describes how he created the sequence.

Posted by: Open Blog at 06:00 PM | Comments (841)
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Our weekly SGU thread. Enjoy.

Also, I spotted this and thought of you guys: Sex not Stargates Brings Fans to SG-1/Atlantis Expo. more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 04:42 PM | Comments (78)
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Got tipped this in the comments -- that Thatcher was dead. But it's not on the BBC or anywhere else.

This is what I found.

It all started Thursday night when Canada's transport minister, John Baird, sent a text message to a friend: "Thatcher has died."

But it wasn't the Iron Lady who had passed away; it was the Iron Kitty.

Baird was announcing the death of his beloved pet, a 16-year-old tabby named Thatcher. Baird's friend got the message while at a black-tie party in Toronto for Conservative Party members, The Guardian reported.

As the text was transmitted from BlackBerry to BlackBerry at the dinner, attendees jumped to the not-unnatural conclusion that Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister who remains a hero to many Conservatives, had died.

For the record, Baroness Thatcher, 84, is still very much alive.

Making it more confusing were reports that "Before her death, Thatcher had stared down Yuri Andropov," Yuri Andropov, in this case, being a stray tabby that tried to eat her kippers, and also "won the Falklands," the Falklands being a local cat-agility contest.

Posted by: Ace at 04:26 PM | Comments (47)
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Not really "sex" tapes, per se, but you know.

I don't really find this "hypocritical." I have a problem here, but it's not hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy does not mean "Establishing a standard for yourself and then failing to live up to it." There is a different word for that: It's called being a human being. Or at least a human being who does, in fact, attempt to better herself and set goals and maintain a standard of conduct.

Anyone who sets goals for himself will fail. And what is the alternative?

Hypocrisy is, instead, proclaiming a series of values and vindictively using those values to chastise others for failing to live up to them, all the while gleefully violating them yourself.

Has Prejean done this? I don't remember a single statement she made about sexual modesty. The only thing I remember her saying about sex at all wasn't even about sex, per se, but about marriage, and that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

A position shared, the left is never willing to concede, by our president, Captain Wonderful. (At least publicly he proclaims this -- in private, he's probably in favor of gay marriage, which the left takes to be "better," somehow, than actually believing in traditional marriage and saying so like Prejean.)

So I don't mind this stuff, really. I do not believe Christians are somehow magically neutered and lack a sex drive. I do not believe that Christians do not have kinks and enjoy sex and even enjoy somewhat forbidden sex. I also do not believe that most Christians attempt to claim otherwise, or scream when others demonstrate similar desires.

Mostly what I see Christians saying is that the culture and our major institutions ought not to overly-glamorize sex out of the covenant of marriage, and especially should not sexualize children, both of which seem to be pretty innocuous statements and do not in fact include any possibility of "hypocrisy" at all.

For example, I'm not Christian, and I'm a damnable pervert, but I don't want sex to be too public or too encouraged by our culture. Not because I don't want to have perverted sex -- believe me, I do -- but because I kinda don't want 13 year olds thinking they're "weird" if they're not having sex at such a young age. They should, I think, wait until they are at least mature enough to handle such a thing, as I did, when I chose to remain chaste until my 29th birthday.

No but seriously? This shit with sexualizing children is pretty evil and needs to stop.

But I don't see how any charge of "hypocrisy" can possibly be contrived out of that set of positions. 1, yes, I want pervy stuff, 2, yes, I support other adults' right to pervy stuff, and 3, we should all keep our pervy stuff off of Times Square billboards to avoid putting ideas into kids' heads and exacerbating the already-intense peer pressure to lose one's virginity as quickly as possible.

Where's the hypocrisy? I support both my freedom to be a perv and the understandable desire of parents to have a public space free of overtly-sexual messaging. We can both have what we want, really: We just need people to not look at what I'm doing behind closed doors, and we need people like me to not put what we're doing behind closed doors on a jumbotron ad for Calvin Klein.

At any rate, that's not my problem with Prejean. My problem, instead, is that she has enlisted supporters, such as myself, to support her in her legal/PR campaign, on the theory that the California pageant had nothing legitimate to boot her out on, and that only anti-Christian animus could explain their behavior, when in fact... well, first the photos, which were racy, but I excused and defended. And then, well, the masturbation tape, which I kept quiet about.

And now... the other seven masturbation tapes.

From her point of view, I can see how she's conned herself into believing she's a victim. There is some truth in the idea that this stuff would not have come out, and she could have retained her sexual privacy as most beauty queens do (come on-- you don't think these girls are all virgins, do you?), had Perez Hilton not ambushed her with a question and turned her into a pageant-loser and a cause celebre. And that if vindictive members of the gay gossip mafia weren't looking to "get" her after that.

Yeah, I get that.

On the other hand: She knew all this stuff was out there, she knew it was coming out, etc., and yet I and many of her supporters have been impressed into duty as her defenders through deception.

Because it wasn't ever true that there was no reason, save anti-Christian animus, to kick her out of the pageant organization. A masturbation tape is, well. I'm not really offended by it but other pageant-hopefuls have gotten the boot for the same thing, and even a lot less.

So what do I feel about her? I feel she chumped me in order to advance her own legal interests. And there's nothing hypocritical about that, and nothing about Christianity about that, and nothing about sex about that.

It's just dishonest, and mercenary, and I don't appreciate it.

So, that's that. Yes, she got a raw deal. Yes, a lot of other pageant hopefuls have sexual skeletons in the closet that never come out because the gay left in the media isn't determined to bring them down, by hook or by kink.

But still, for me, I'm very much done defending her. It's not like it cost me a great deal to defend her -- quite the opposite; taking a popular position among your political confreres is never really a costly position -- but still, I feel a bit taken for a ride, and don't really want to defend her any further.

Whether she has anything more interesting to say is up to her. But the Perez Hilton/pageant stuff? I really don't care to hear how unfair it all was anymore. It was unfair, and a book deal was gotten out of that; that's enough. A book deal can bandage up a lot of wounds.

Posted by: Ace at 03:31 PM | Comments (418)
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The more important story here is Duke Cunningham and Mark Foley, and oh, by the way: Did Sarah Palin go on a shopping spree during the campaign?

Thanks to Movie Quote 101 graduate loppyd. And Ken, too, who has a book coming out.

Posted by: Ace at 02:13 PM | Comments (106)
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And if there's water, there's the chance of life.

No, not Moon-life. But if there is water on the moon, we don't need to space-truck all that heavy liquid up there, but instead can just put up the (much lighter) machines necessary for extracting it.

Which makes a Space: 1999 moon-base ball-park possible, if at least 40 years late.

Based on the measurements, the team estimated about 100 kilograms of water in the view of their instruments — the equivalent of about a dozen 2-gallon buckets — in the area of the impact crater (about 80 feet, or 20 meters across) and the ejecta blanket (about 60 to 80 meters across), Colaprete said.

"I'm pretty impressed by the amount of water we saw in our little 20-meter crater," Colaprete said.

"What's really exciting is we've only hit one spot. It's kind of like when you're drilling for oil. Once you find it one place, there's a greater chance you'll find more nearby," said Peter Schultz, professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator on the LCROSS mission.

This water finding doesn't mean that the moon is wet by Earth's standards, but is likely wetter than some of the driest deserts on Earth, Colaprete said. And even this small amount is valuable to possible future missions, said Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist for Exploration Systems at NASA Headquarters.

And so why would we go to the Moon and live there, anyway? I don't know. Seems cool. And in an Aasimov book (IIRC), all the sexual mores on Luna Colony totally lightened up, like gravity, so all the chicks walked around with their knockers hanging out.

So that's something, at least. Chicks walking around with their knockers floating around in .16 earth gravity, like bouyant sex-puddings.

We could probably also run some tests to see how spiders build webs in low-gravity, and other such make-work PR "experiments" suggested by children. That, and naked moon-jugs floating around rambunctiously like one of Kevin Bacon's space-socks, and I think we can secure funding.

On the plus side: Obama could spend $50 billion and actually be able to claim he really has created 50-100 jobs with our money. Gotta work better than the cash he's pissing away on earth.

Correction: Commenters say this sounds more like Heinlein in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and that sounds more right to me. I remember putting it down (blasphemy, I know!) because his loopy sexual-utopian stuff sounded frankly juvenile to me, and I was, like, 10 years old.

I just didn't get why, after spending a couple of years on the Moon, suddenly it would all be Haight-Ashbury meets Swedish Nudist Soft-Porn. I mean -- these people did remember earth, right? They didn't immediately forget their past 30 years of earthly upbringing upon landing on Luna Base, right?

The narrator was surprised to see that men and women donned bras and jockstraps to play one of those dumb games that always turns up in sci-fi -- some sort of very vague mix of jai-alai and basketball and, um, quidditch in low gravity -- and his female guide offered the explanation that "We have little modesty, but still, we do not want dangly things swinging about," which I guess I was supposed to take as titillating but honestly, even at ten, I felt pandered to.

Or maybe I felt it was "titillating" circa 1963, before technological advances brought us Benny Hill 6 hours a day on various non-network local channels. I mean, once you've seen Hill's Angels, reading about exposed lunatits just sort of leaves you cold.

So I think I put it down and read Conan in Beyond the Black River for the sixth time.

Posted by: Ace at 01:52 PM | Comments (119)
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Why did Rudy have to be such a schmuck over abortion and run such an awful, awful campaign?

He runs through all of the problems with Obama's decision to try KSM in civilian court...they are war criminals, evidentiary challenges, venue problems, an unwillingness to call Hasan a Islamic Terrorist and more.

It's a long clip but worth it.

Rudy also points out that the KSM's volunteer, lefty attorneys will put the US government and by proxy Bush, on trial.

Andy McCarthy is thinking along the same lines and says it's a feature, not a bug of Obama's decision.

This summer, I theorized that Attorney General Eric Holder — and his boss — had a hidden agenda in ordering a re-investigation of the CIA for six-year-old alleged interrogation excesses that had already been scrutinized by non-partisan DOJ prosecutors who had found no basis for prosecution. The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies (i.e., the policies that kept us safe from more domestic terror attacks), coupled with the Holder Justice Department's obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the "reckoning" that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. It would be too politically explosive for Obama/Holder to do the dirty work of charging Bush administration officials; but as new revelations from investigations and declassifications are churned out, Leftist lawyers use them to urge European and international tribunals to bring "torture" and "war crimes" indictments. Thus, administration cooperation gives Obama's base the reckoning it demands but Obama gets to deny responsibility for any actual prosecutions.

Today's announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses — intelligence sources — must expose themselves and their secrets.

So now the scum that set in motion the plot that killed 3,000 people on American soil have the same rights as anyone else. Obama couches this as an expression of strength that will awe people around the world. The truth is it's a power play by a far left President who is looking for political payback. This decision will weaken the United States and endanger the lives of Americans.

Posted by: DrewM at 01:23 PM | Comments (137)
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At least about Sarah Palin.

Althouse argues that Sarah Palin's "passivity" and reluctance to stand up for herself vis a vis the McCain campaign's determination that she should start her interviews with Katie Couric and the like proves she's kinda dumb.

She seems to be making some feminist point about women being just as capable of men and therefore, her thinking goes, needing to act in that fashion, and not whine later that their opinions were overlooked.

Why didn't you have a say [about what media you were interviewed by]? There's that "really" hedging: You didn't really have a say. You're pleading passivity and impotence but you want us to think you have what it takes to be President of the United States?

As a general proposition about women's need to assert themselves, maybe she has a point, but here, I think her Sisters Gotta Do It For Themselves analysis overlooks a major point: Sarah Palin did not act as a subordinate to John McCain due to her sex, or her gender's desire to avoid conflict, or anything at all like that.

She acted as a subordinate to John McCain because she really was as subordinate to John McCain. Althouse's analysis seems to easily gloss over the fact that John McCain really was the boss here, and Sarah Palin really was the underling.

I don't know if Althouse, being a tenured (I assume) professor, really has a "boss" anymore, or if her status means that she's essentially the Boss of Herself. So perhaps she has forgotten: Whether you are male or female, and whether your boss is male or female, the boss gets his way.

The underling may offer suggestions. The underling may protest. But at the end of the day, the boss gets his way.

So I don't view this as some kind of "Sarah Palin is too weak to stand up for herself" thing. I view it instead as "Sarah Palin joined a team, with the express (and historically well-founded) understanding that all choices about the campaign are ultimately made by the actual captain of the team -- the presidential candidate -- and conducted herself accordingly, despite the fact that she thought the boss was erring badly."

I just don't understand how that is so easily blown-off as immaterial.

So, Sarah Palin acted as if she were not John McCain's equal? Pssst: Keep it low, but she wasn't John McCain's equal.

If Ann Althouse did have a boss capable of firing her, I can assure her that the boss would get his or her way, male or female, and she, as an underling, would not get her way, and Althouse's sex has little to do with that. And in the end, every one of Althouse's suggestions might be ignored, and that would have nothing to do with Althouse's sex, or intelligence, or willingness to stand up for herself. It would have everything to do with the basic concept of the boss gets first and last say.

What am I missing? Is this some minor technicality easily elided?

She may quibble that in this case, Palin was not a clear subordinate in the sense she could be fired. She could be fired, of course, but admittedly, firing Sarah Palin would have doomed John McCain more than he was already doomed. So that would have been an unappealing option. Palin did have some leverage here, then, more than most subordinates. (But every subordinate has that leverage, too: Your boss obviously wants to keep you on, which is why you're still employed in the first place, so firing a valuable employee is never a cost-free decision.)

But even if she had some leverage, that doesn't mean she should exercise it willy-nilly. She came into the situation as a subordinate and even if she could, theoretically, start throwing her weight around and making demands -- even if she could, hypothetically, demand that the ticket be a true partnership -- what kind of a monster would do that?

This was John McCain's candidacy, to win, or to piss away, as he saw fit. He chose the latter, as we all know. I don't think it's necessary, in order to prove one is a strong woman capable of standing up for herself, to be a total dick.

Which is what Althouse seems to be arguing. That if Palin failed to act like a total dick and disrespect the clear, 230+ year understanding that the presidential candidate is the decision-maker as regards the campaign, and the vice presidential candidate is an adviser only (and often not even that-- I don't think Joe Biden had much say in the Obama campaign, but fortunately he truly was too stupid to realize he was being condescended to like a retarded child), then she's somehow unqualified for the job of President.

Different jobs have different job descriptions. It is the job of the vice presidential candidate to support the presidential candidate and defer to him. That is the job description; that is the job's responsibilities. I don't think the fact that she correctly served in one job proves that she's incapable of performing in a completely different job.

This also seems lose-lose for Palin, because she did, in fact, eventually go a bit rogue and assert herself. And in those situations, she's called out as not being a team player and sabotaging McCain's chances and acting as if she's the boss when she's not. (Note: Althouse isn't making this case, so there is no contradiction on her part.)

But in fact that's what McCain's people are claiming: That even Palin's minor deviations from the script given to her constituted disloyalty and a failure to act according to the captain's orders.

So what is the correct strategy here? Just pretend she's actually the boss and the presidential candidate and therefore entitled to make any campaign decisions she likes?

I don't get that. Althouse's argument seems to be rooted in some form of overcompensation where she's claiming that women should never act as subordinates even when they are, in fact, subordinates. And if women did behave in such a manner (thankfully, they do not), they would be bad employees and their bosses would be justified in purging their companies of these chronically insubordinate, incompetent female employees.

But that's the thing about Sarah Palin: The mere mention of her name is enough to make normally-sensible people begin babbling silliness.

Actually: This ties into one of the more destructive memes in feminist thought: That to assert oneself as a woman requires that that woman behave unreasonably.

I read this a lot on feminist sites. Crap like "In order to prove you are the equal of your husband, you can and should make him go without sex for up to an entire year, or more, if that's what your free-thinking independent-minded heart desires."

There is a lot of very unpleasant overcompensation among feminist thinkers, where it often suggested that "equality" means, somehow, utter dominance and total lack of any interest in compromise and give-and-take. That every compromise or gesture towards comity is somehow a betrayal of one's womanhood. That strict mercenary self-interest in all things is somehow elevated to a virtue, and any deviation from that, a sign of weakness.

Again: I don't understand why the feminist ideal should be acting like a total douchebag about everything.

Men don't see it as an ideal to be aspired to that we get our way on everything and show no interest whatsoever in compromise and balancing respective interests. Why does the feminist ideal often seem to suggest that is the goal?

Posted by: Ace at 11:38 AM | Comments (477)
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