Good evening M&Ms. Let the boredom commence.

Tech Support Tuesday

So you want to put fun smilies in your posts like the cool commenters?

Well then just use the codes listed here.

Introducing The Shiba Inu Puppeh Cam
Now you can watch the puppehs 24/7. Cause it wasn't like you were really going to leave your house anyway.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:53 PM | Comments (657)
Post contains 315 words, total size 4 kb.

The Senate Armed Services Committee heard from Defense Secretary Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen this morning on the issue of the policy known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The pair laid out their plan for determining whether an appeal is appropriate and how best to implement an appeal if Congress were to pass one. I livetweeted the hearing and if you want to see that contemporaneous recounting, without editing or editorial comment, go here, scroll to the bottom and hit "more" a few times.

Here's my summary:

more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:41 PM | Comments (132)
Post contains 1279 words, total size 8 kb.

It's a 'new program' and a 'science fiction thing'.

The republic really dodged a bullet in not electing that inarticulate fool Sarah Palin.

There's no truth that before the action moved to Pandora, Biden yelled at the screen, "Stand up Jake! Oh God love me, what am I talking about?"

Below the fold, a reminder that Joe Biden is smarter than you. Well, maybe not you but certainly than your kids or your cat. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 05:30 PM | Comments (95)
Post contains 119 words, total size 3 kb.

I don't know anything about modern television cameras. I remember the old ones had lights on them or something so you could tell when they were broadcasting.

You could tell that if you didn't have your back to them.

Video below the fold, slightly NSFW but you're a pretty good distance away, although there's a closer up video at the link. Watch the fellow in the middle left part of the screen at 1:04.

via Andy over at the Hostages where they pretty much spend all day surfing stuff like this so you don't have to.

more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 03:36 PM | Comments (183)
Post contains 122 words, total size 1 kb.

And so I officially retract my own regurgitation of it, and apologize for my statement that "I am guessing the story is not inaccurate."

It was.

Posted by: Ace at 02:01 PM | Comments (117)
Post contains 44 words, total size 1 kb.

The heat island effect: The fact that most weather stations have had cities (or towns, at least) grow up around them, so that what once used to be a patch of grass in the shade of trees is now most likely a paved-over heat-absorbing slab of asphalt with building and car exhaust blowing at it all day long.

Critics of claims of catastrophic warming have always pointed out this problem. The weather stations you are using, they say, are simply different than they were in the 1940s. Then, they were in fairly cool, natural places; now, they are largely in urbanized areas, with the heat of human and mechanical activity pumping them with artificial heat all the time.

Oh, don't sweat that, came the response. You see -- we have a study. Our study shows the heat-island effect is no big deal. Not at all! We can use those stations which were once wreathed in shady leaf and now sit upon baking black asphalt with only the most trivial of adjustments.

Yeah, well.

You know how these "studies" tend to be.

Surely the most worrying sign for the thuggish enforcers of "settled science" is that even the eco-lefties at the Guardian and the Independent, two of the most gung-ho warm-mongers on the planet, are beginning to entertain doubts. From the Independent:

Professor Jones and a colleague, Professor Wei-Chyung Wang of the State University of New York at Albany suggested in an influential 1990 paper in the journal Nature that the urban heat island effect was minimal – and cited as supporting evidence a long series of temperature measurements from Chinese weather stations, half in the countryside and half in cities, supplied by Professor Wei-Chyung. . . .

However, it has been reported that when climate sceptics asked for the precise locations of the 84 stations, Professor Jones at first declined to release the details. And when eventually he did release them, it was found that for the ones supposed to be in the countryside, there was no location given.

Oh, right. Very scientific. From the Guardian:

It also emerges that documents which Wang claimed would exonerate him and Jones did not exist. . . .

Wang said: "I have been exonerated by my university on all the charges. When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more."

Ah, yes. The old dog-ate-my-tree-rings excuse yet again.

And, as the link notes, this is almost more of a media scandal. Because they allowed these charlatans to claim whatever they liked, so long as it fit the narrative, and thereby encouraged and nurtured the greatest anti-scientific fraud in history.

Posted by: Ace at 01:22 PM | Comments (151)
Post contains 471 words, total size 3 kb.

INCOMING!!!

Incoming...

Incoming?

Hello? Hello?

Echo?

Isn't it funny how the media's big guns go silent in such a a predictable fashion.

Of course it never came. I am tired by being told by these partisan liars that they go "wherever the story takes them."

There are some stories they love reporting and masturbate themselves silly over. Larry Craig. Mark Foley.

There are other stories they don't want to be true and will spike if they get even a weak denial from a Democrat. Would "take too much digging" they decide, and quickly move back to... Mark Sanford.

The most effective form of media bias isn't slant. It's simply not reporting a story at all. A story doesn't need to be slanted or spun if it is simply disappeared altogether.

But when the Enquirer story was published, nothing much happened. "To our relief, no serious newspaper or TV network picked up the story because they couldn't find a source to confirm it," Young writes. "Our phones and those of our friends and relatives rang constantly with calls from reporters and producers, but we ignored them all. Rielle and the campaign followed the same strategy, and since they still play by the multi-source rule, the big print and broadcast news organizations were stymied." The damage was confined to a few websites. "We began to think that perhaps our strategy had worked," Young writes.

What followed was an insane series of events in which Baron shelled out enormous amounts of money to fly Hunter and the Youngs around the country to keep them out of sight until the Iowa caucuses, and then the New Hampshire primary, and then, after the campaign fizzled but Edwards still had hopes of making it onto the Democratic presidential ticket, until Hunter had the baby.

They never dug on the Fred Baron situation, either. Conservative blogs joked about it every day -- someone, maybe Allah, maybe me, dubbed him The Greatest Friend A Guy Could Ever Have. It was obvious to anyone what was going on.

The media made a few check-the-box calls, got the denials they sought, and dropped it.

Posted by: Ace at 12:51 PM | Comments (80)
Post contains 388 words, total size 2 kb.

Not wishing death on him. Not sure why I have to say that, but I guess I do.

That said, obviously this puts into question whether he will be healthy enough to stand for reelection in 2010.

Posted by: Ace at 12:41 PM | Comments (146)
Post contains 61 words, total size 1 kb.

Linking to Hot Air, since that's where I saw it.

The Washington Post reports:

Sex education classes that focus on encouraging children to remain abstinent can persuade a significant proportion to delay sexual activity, researchers reported Monday in a landmark study that could have major implications for U.S. efforts to protect young people against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

Only about a third of sixth- and seventh-graders who completed an abstinence-focused program started having sex within the next two years, researchers found. Nearly half of the students who attended other classes, including ones that combined information about abstinence and contraception, became sexually active.

The findings are the first clear evidence that an abstinence program could work.

Could work? Seems like did work. Of course, it is probably true that the students who completed the program were more motivated by their parents to not have sex. But that, in turn, undermines the cop-out attitude that underlies most of this pro-sex-for-kids agenda: That there's nothing we can do, might as well let them start humping in seventh grade.

I know liberals and, as people, they're just as alarmed about this as anyone -- well, the ones with kids are, anyway.

I just don't understand how their personal beliefs -- kids should not be having sex and we ought to discourage this to the extent possible -- wind up getting subverted by their group political belief.

I just think that they don't see themselves as pro-sex-for-kids (and most aren't, of course). It's just they have it stuck in their heads that conservatives are anti-sex, and who wants to be anti-sex? So they run away from that position, just automatically reject anything a conservative might say on such issues, and go 180 degrees in the opposite direction without even thinking much about what they're doing... and find themselves, on a group political level, at least, supporting a position that they find horrifying on a personal level.

Bill Maher has said exactly two things I agree with: "All rumors are true" is one. (Well, not all rumors, but that's the way to bet.) And that liberals are taken with this idiotic idea that kids are just "Little Adults."

They're not. They're kids. They should not have full freedom. Where a parent draws the line is up to that parent (and up to the kid, quite frankly -- you can't break a kid if he sets his mind to rebel and resist). But this idea that we should just go into schools and have a "rap session," treating them as if they're adults and able to make "the right choices for themselves," is preposterous.

Almost no liberal -- certainly not one with kids -- would embrace that idea on a personal level.

But because they're all agitated and angry about "anti-sex conservatives" they keep supporting this dangerous nonsense anyway.

Furthermore, I don't even understand the point. Kids are curious about sex. I knew all about rubbers and The Pill and crabs and the clap of the rest of it well before I even had a chance to kiss a girl.

The problem with these classes is that they normalize this, and it shouldn't be normalized. Taboos are important in a functioning society. Many taboos are jackass, and are rightly abandoned. But not all.

And if kids are thinking sex is a taboo and something frightening they shouldn't mess with -- Good. They should be thinking that.

Most kids will, unfortunately, begin having sex long before his or her parents want him or her to. And long before it's prudent for him or her to.

But we have gotten to the point where "sexually precocious" no longer means a girl who has sex at the still-almost-a-baby age of 14. Now that's kind of normal, unfortunately. The new "Bad Girls" are doing it by age 11 or 12.

When does it stop, and when do good-intentioned liberals realize that a bit of that judgmental, holier-than-thou, old-fashioned, cranky, unhip anti-sex attitude is useful and necessary especially as regards children?

This is something I cannot get, myself. I think I have told this story, but I'll tell it one more time: A while back, I contacted a left-wing feminist type abut something she'd written. She'd been angry at some "anti-sex, anti-girl" conservative who was writing about the alarming tendency of girls to have sex earlier and earlier.

"You are a sensible person," I gambited. "How on earth can you possibly say that girls having sex at such young ages is a good thing, and it's wrong to try to reverse that or at least arrest the long fall downwards?"

Well -- her answer was perplexing. She assured me that she herself was in a committed relationship with her boyfriend, was strictly monogamous, did not support sex at such young ages, would strongly warn any girl against this, had not had sex at such an early age herself.

She was trying to reassure me, someone she barely knew, that she largely shared my anti-sex conservative values!

What the hell?!!

Then why was she getting on this "pro-sex" hobbyhorse and attacking this right-leaning feminist author for in turn attacking this alarming trend?

"Because she gives off an anti-sex and anti-girl vibe," I was informed (approximately). "She's always trashing girls for their sexual choices."

B-b-b-but-- you just said you also strongly disapproved of girls's sexual choices, if they were having sex at such young ages!

She really couldn't square the circle. I didn't press her, because I barely knew her and she was polite enough with me, but I was sputtering over the massive disconnect between what she really believed and what she was claiming she believed in print.

Guys, guys, guys? This "hip" thing you have? This "pro-sex" thing you have? This distaste for "anti-sex conservatives" you have?

Most of you have some "anti-sex" in you too -- because it's normal and good. And just because your self-conception is sexually liberated and loose does not mean you have to just brainlessly endorse the opposite of whatever a conservative does and wind up on the bizarre side of the issue where you're basically giving kids the Green Light for sex at age 12.

Or earlier. For God's sake! I don't even have kids and I find this hair-raising!

I mean, almost none of them -- some, but few -- really believe that crap.

So what the hell is going on in their heads when they keep basically endorsing it?

Is it so important you always appear hip? Carefree? Sexually libertine?

Is it so important you always put the maximum possible distance between yourselves and those dreaded, crochtty, Footloose-dance-banning anti-sex conservatives?

Even to the point that doing so requires you to endorse a position you actually recoil from?

Guys -- you are always going to be able to play the "I'm hipper than conservatives/I am more sexually light-footed than conservatives" card in almost every debate. You will have it to play about movies, tv, plays, music, gay sex, gay marriage, open marriage, etc.

It is unnecessary to play it here.

And no "intellectual consistency" requires you to extend anything like the same rules you apply to yourselves and other adults to children.

Rethink this, guys. Maybe we "anti-sex conservative prudes" are the enemy, but there is a bigger enemy.

You don't always just have to take a position contrary to us just to prove you're superior.

Posted by: Ace at 11:22 AM | Comments (275)
Post contains 1247 words, total size 8 kb.

Reuters had pulled this story, by the way. I doubt it is inaccurate at all. I think they just got one of those famous calls from the press-is-against-me White House, and of course caved.

The next story, that they promise next week, will of course have all of Obama's spin and talking points in it.

And yet the story lives on, on Yahoo.

-The Obama administration's plan to cut more than $1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade relies heavily on so-called backdoor tax increases that will result in a bigger tax bill for middle-class families.

In the 2010 budget tabled by President Barack Obama on Monday, the White House wants to let billions of dollars in tax breaks expire by the end of the year -- effectively a tax hike by stealth.

While the administration is focusing its proposal on eliminating tax breaks for individuals who earn $250,000 a year or more, middle-class families will face a slew of these backdoor increases.

The targeted tax provisions were enacted under the Bush administration's Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001. Among other things, the law lowered individual tax rates, slashed taxes on capital gains and dividends, and steadily scaled back the estate tax to zero in 2010.

If the provisions are allowed to expire on December 31, the top-tier personal income tax rate will rise to 39.6 percent from 35 percent. But lower-income families will pay more as well: the 25 percent tax bracket will revert back to 28 percent; the 28 percent bracket will increase to 31 percent; and the 33 percent bracket will increase to 36 percent. The special 10 percent bracket is eliminated.

Investors will pay more on their earnings next year as well, with the tax on dividends jumping to 39.6 percent from 15 percent and the capital-gains tax increasing to 20 percent from 15 percent. The estate tax is eliminated this year, but it will return in 2011 -- though there has been talk about reinstating the death tax sooner.

Posted by: Ace at 10:50 AM | Comments (365)
Post contains 359 words, total size 2 kb.