Video of Cheney noting the president had three plans presented to him to destroy it, and turned them all down, bizarrely.

Because apparently there's some question about whether Iran, which murders US troops in Iraq, and the US are engaged in low-level hostilities.

By the way, I have no idea why "sending someone in to recover it" is even mentioned. It's a frigging drone. We can make another one. We don't need it back; we just need others not to have it themselves. There is no way in hell that is worth sending a team of men in for.

I think this whole "send someone in" notion is in the mix just to demonstrate how very unadvisable such a mission would be.

But no one with a brain in their head would send in men to bring it back out.

But blowing it up on the ground? For crying out loud.

Posted by: Ace at 10:59 AM | Comments (254)
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Yeah, I know, "You're fired." I didn't do it because I'm better than that, man!!!

(crying whisper) I'm better than that. Aren't I? Aren't I?

Anyway I don't have details but FoxNews and Reuters report Trump is out as far as moderating. Trump says he reserves the right to still run for President as an Independent.

So there's that, at least.

I guess this means that everyone will be back in for the December 27th debate.

Posted by: Ace at 10:18 AM | Comments (154)
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You can watch it at EW's PopWatch, and I think it's worth it, at least for a bit.

She is not a natural broadcaster. I feel safe in saying that.

I've seen more moxie and sex appeal in Hanoi Hilton prisoner propaganda videos.

I've seen a more engaging, electric presence sitting next to Elliot Spitzer on CNN for two months.

Hot Air excerpts a Washington Post TV critic, and upon reading it I was tempted to take the contrarian view and call him a bitchy little bitch, but then I watched her debut.

[W]hat was surprising to see on Monday night’s show is how someone can be on TV in such a prominent way and, in her big moment, display so very little charisma — none at all. Either we’re spoiled by TV’s unlimited population of giant personalities or this woman is one of the most boring people of her era.

Her natural lack of presence is exacerbated by the sort of stories she's decided she'll do -- "uplifting" puff-pieces about just plain unassumin' folks, makin' a difference, payin' it forward and such.

Clinton will continue such segments as part of NBC’s “Making a Difference” featurettes, which are not unlike ABC News’s “Person of the Week” segments, and, frankly, not unlike the article and photos laid out in the center of most newspapers’ Metro pages — so many points of light that one eventually becomes inured to them, especially when one is on the hunt for news....

Stories from the Chelsea beat, meanwhile, are all meant to do a few things, very quickly: Highlight some bright spot of good news in otherwise bleak circumstances; indicate how viewers might help out the situation, if so inclined; and (this is never once said, but almost always palpable in the empathetic eyes of the reporter) ennoble the reporter herself, and thereby ennoble the network. This is why Clinton says she is doing television — to make a difference.

That's a neat point. These stories are not presented to publicize the goodness of the subjects, but rather the goodness of the newspersons who are so filled with good they share these tales of goodness with you, Good Viewer.

Cloying, sanctimonious, and false earnestness + a complete blank in terms of presence + boring subject matter + transparent effort to gild one's PR profile = bad tv.

But I don't think the point is to make good tv. I think it's to once again transmit the idea that NBC Is Good and Chelsea Clinton is Good.

Posted by: Ace at 09:59 AM | Comments (140)
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Are there no depths...

Forty-five students, among them young children, were discovered held in chains in a basement when police raided an Islamic seminary in Pakistan last night.

The male students, some said to be as young as 12 but appearing even younger, were found in what amounted to a dungeon at the Madrassa Zakarya in the Sohrab Goth district of Karachi.

Led barefoot from their prison, captives told officers they had suffered regular beatings and been hung upside down as a form of punishment.

Parents actually sent them to the unlicensed madrassa for "religious education." I guess they got it.

'A few drug addicts and mentally challenged persons were also among those who were recovered.'

'It seems that the administration was running a sort of religious school-cum-rehabilitation-centre and were receiving considerable sums of money from parents of those kept in for that purpose.'

Is there some kind of project to collate stories of sexual abuse of Muslim youths at the hands of their monstrous captors? If not, there should be. If there is, it should be publicized more.

There is no way so many of these diseased individuals have 24 hour a day access to imprisoned children and aren't sexually abusing them.

And not to be all "racist" but sex with male children is accepted in barbaric Afghanistan, and I'm sure much of Pakistan too, despite "the Prophet's" supposed hostility to homosexuality.

Posted by: Ace at 09:21 AM | Comments (116)
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Funny video. Editing must account for the 100% disparity in gender opinion on this; surely a few guys gave the Alan Alda answer and said yes.

But still, pretty funny, and irresistible traffic bait.

So the basic schtick is that men and women form different-sex relationships. Both want something out of these relationships. A lot of times it's just friendship, or the validation of having a "safe" admirer of the opposite sex.

It's this last thing that seems to cause confusion. A lot of times people don't seem to understand that just because some enjoys an admirer (who doesn't?), doesn't mean there's much admiring going on in the other direction.

Posted by: Ace at 08:59 AM | Comments (123)
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The Children's Crusade.

In more Occupy news:

Seattle scumbags clash with police; 11 arrested.

300-400 Occupiers attempted to blockade one of the nation's most active and crucial ports, Long Beach. The action resulted, as JWF would say, in mostly peaceful "skirmishes" with police.

Neil Cavuto talks with one of these idiots, whose name, if I caught it right, is Chubby Chaser's Lisa Loeb, who was "targeting" the port of Portland, to shut down Goldman Sachs' extensive shipping operations (???).

This girl brings up an important issue, though: Shame-Eating.

Posted by: Ace at 08:33 AM | Comments (97)
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No not those God particles

I think how this works is that we've determined that quarks impart electromagnetic properties to subatomic particles, but we're still up in the air about what gives them actual mass. The Higgs Boson is postulated to be a particle which adds all (?) of the mass to subatomic particles, but we've never seen it.

CERN's been hunting for it, using bigger and bigger guns to blow up atoms in order to search for smaller and smaller particles, as they say.

It was thought they might announce they'd found evidence of this postulated-but-never-evidenced particle, but they only said they'd narrowed down the hiding spots it could be lurking in.

The Higgs boson is thought to be tied to a field (the Higgs field) that is responsible for giving all other particles their mass. Ironically, physicists don't have a specific prediction for the mass ofthe Higgs boson itself, so they must search a wide range of possible masses for signs of the particle.

Based on data collected at LHC's CMS and ATLAS experiments, researchers said they are now able to narrow down the Higgs' mass to a small range, and exclude a wide swath of possibilities.

"With the data from this year we've ruled out a lot of masses, and now we're just left with this tiny window, in this region that is probably the most interesting," said Jonas Strandberg, a researcher at CERN working on the ATLAS experiment.

The researchers have now cornered the Higgs mass in the range between 114.4 and 131 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).For comparison, a proton weighs 1 GeV. Outside that range, the scientists are more than 95 percent confident that the Higgs cannot exist.

I thought I understood this, in broad strokes at least, but now don't even understand that. How can the Higgs boson be a building block of the proton if it weighs over 100 times as much as the thing it's a building block of?

I'm not sure what the practical engineering impact of the discovery of the particle would be, but a lot of science fiction technology relies upon direct manipulation of mass -- artificial gravity, for example, or some kind of warp-type drive, or, even better, maybe even some kind of direct mass-to-energy conversion.

Not a nuclear reaction; that's "indirect" in the way den Beste means direct here.

The fourth and last future source I can envision is direct conversion of mass to energy, and some of my younger readers may live to see it. With the work in cosmology going on now, they're getting near to actually having an explanation of exactly what mass truly is and how the interconversion of mass and energy actually happens. It's more complicated than just particles appearing and disappearing. The energy released by fission and fusion doesn't come from a change in the number of particles; rather, the hadrons are changing weight, and the energy release comes from that. The reason that fusing hydrogen into helium releases energy is that the protons and neutrons in helium weigh slightly less than the ones in protium and deuterium, and the excess mass is released as energy (which is why the Sun shines). We know that's true, but no one knows why. No one can explain why it is that the hadrons in iron weigh less than for any other element, so that below that fusion releases energy and above that fission does. Why iron, instead of cobalt or carbon or gold? Why isn't it a single slope curve, so that fusion of everything would release energy and fission would always consume it? No one knows.

Once the theoreticians actually figure that out, it may turn out that there are ways totally unsuspected by us now to convert mass into energy that don't involve elaborate silliness like plasmas and toroidal magnetic fields and fissionable materials. What I'm talking about is a theory at the level of subatomic physics as comprehensive and important as quantum mechanics was at the level of atoms.

Our nuclear technology now is about like 19th century chemistry: we have a lot of recipes but we don't really know why they work. It took quantum theory to tell the chemists what they actually were doing, and once they had it they began to produce miracles that made 19th century chemistry look lame. Quantum mechanics also taught us how to make field effect transistors to replace vacuum tubes; a completely different approach to the same result which was vastly smaller, far more reliable, and far more efficient, dropping size and power and manufacturing costs by something like 10 orders of magnitude. Once the nuclear engineers have an equivalent theory and actually know what they're doing, they will almost certainly make all existing nuclear technology totally obsolete, and they may well figure out a straightforward way to produce energy directly from any mass. For example, it might become possible to create a system which took ordinary hydrogen, crashed the electrons into the protons to produce neutrons, and then annihilated the neutrons to produce quite large amounts of energy leaving behind only an ash of neutrinos (or antineutrinos; I can never remember which). Or it might turn out that there's an easy way to directly convert matter into antimatter, which is then a twofer in terms of energy production.

Or of course we could build a planet-busting bomb, as den Beste notes.

Michael Crichton always made this point, as does, I think, Freeman Dyson: Why are you proposing we spend trillions to combat Global Warming, which is not proven to exist and furthermore, even assuming it does exist, might be entirely irrelevant in 40 years?

Crichton always pointed out that no one in 1900 would have foreseen on-the-hour air transportation in just 40 years. (Well science fiction writers did but who took them seriously? No one, that's who.)

Explanation: So what I'm hearing from my Informant on the Street, Dr. Steven Huggy-Bear Hawking, is that it's not actually the Higgs boson which creates/imparts mass, but the Higgs field, and that the Higgs boson would just be confirmation of the Higgs field.

Plus, once we find the particle itself, we could blow it up.

The name Higgs refers to at least four things. First of all, there is a Higgs mechanism, which is ultimately responsible for elementary particles’ masses. This is certainly one of the trickier aspects of particle physics to explain, but essentially something like a charge — not an electric charge — permeates the vacuum, the state with no particles.

These “charges” are associated with a Higgs field. As particles pass through this field they interact with the “charges,” and this interaction makes them act as if they had mass. Heavier particles do so more, and lighter particles do so less. The Higgs mechanism is essential to the masses of elementary particles.

The Higgs particle, or Higgs boson, is the vestige of the simplest proposed model of what created the Higgs field in the first place. Contrary to popular understanding, the Higgs field gives mass — not the Higgs boson. But a discovery of the Higgs boson would tell us that the Higgs mechanism is right and help us pin down the theory that underlies both the Higgs mechanism and the Standard Model.

Thanks to RD for that. Tall Dave also tried to explain, but he got obsessed with soup and then left, presumably to have some soup.

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Posted by: Ace at 07:25 AM | Comments (261)
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Hey I said that.

Romney and Gingrich had a sharp exchange. Romney suggested that Gingrich ought to give back the money he made lobbying for Freddie Mac; Gingrich responded by suggesting Romney give back the money he'd made at Bain Capital, "bankrupting" companies and "laying people off."

It's a strange comeback for a conservative -- to essentially attack the foundations of capitalism itself. While people say stuff like "Newt doesn't make mistakes," in fact he does, and they're just as worrisome as a "heartless" comment on immigration. There is a conception that Newt thinks very carefully before speaking, and delivers consistent conservative messaging with each pronouncement; in fact he tends to grab for any rhetorical club at hand, and doesn't seem to give a lot of thought as to how the club might fit into conservative philosophy.

Brit Hume had reacted sharply to Newt's counter-attack earlier in the day.

Posted by: Ace at 06:33 AM | Comments (240)
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Via Andrew Kzcysnki and Allah.

I know...it was 2002 and he was lying to those rubes in Massachusetts but he's telling us the truth now. He's totally, totally a conservative and always has been, swearsies!

I was on Team Newt mostly as a protest but now it looks like he could win this thing and that's a scary thought. Of course, so is the idea of nominating Mittens.

Hey Iowa:

Perry '12: Vote for the SCOAMF (As A Candidate) Because It's Important!

Posted by: DrewM at 05:53 AM | Comments (208)
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His Majesty the King Barack Hussein Obama is an economic illiterate. This in itself is bad enough in any public servant who has such an impact on public policy, but Obama takes it a step further by being ignorant of his own ignorance. His disdain for the opinions of his own advisers (as in the Bowles-Simpson plan) points to a man deep in the throes of intellectual arrogance. The 2012 election will either bring Nemesis to bear (if he loses), or will simply justify his belief in himself (if he wins).

I've often said it: the moment that Japan has to go to foreign markets to roll their debt, they are screwed. I think that the big story of the 2020's is going to be the collapse of Japan as an industrial power -- their demographics are lousy (they have one of the oldest populations in the world, and one of the lowest birthrates), their debt is sky-high, and they've been mired in political stasis for most of two decades now.

San FranciscoÂ’s minimum wage tops $10/hr. And IÂ’ll bet you that most of the good liberal denizens of that burg still insist that this has no effect on employment at the low end.

Blinded by the 'animal spirits' myth.
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Posted by: Monty at 05:02 AM | Comments (121)
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