I ask because I listened to this Nutroots idiot badgering James O'Keefe, with that voice and improperly deployed sarcastic whines and I despair of being part of this gruesome parade of attention whores.

Is this what I shall become?

Is this what I already am?!?

And the thing of it is, she uploaded this and presented it as something which, in her opinion, other people should watch.

I wouldn't have uploaded this. First, I would have observed my screeching-rat voice recalls Winston Churchill's retort, "And if I were your husband, madame, I should drink it."

I would then have undertaken a regimen of behavioral therapy to cure me of my neurotic flights into diamond-cracking agitation.

I would then talk to my friends to see how many times per day I manage the odd and off-putting combination of anger combined with superciliousness combined with whining. Dear Lord in Heaven, the whining.

Then I would conclude that I had also gotten no usable footage from this asinine exercise, and simply record something better over it, like, for example, Christina Aguilera's chubby-girl cleavage on The Voice. I would exercise a tiny amount of editorial judgment that an interview in which the interviewee confesses no fault, and also does not offer any indica of guilt like stammering, or evasiveness, or anger, but rather spends his time smugly mocking my desperation and erratic ability to control my emotions, is simply a failed interview attempt.

And I would decide that I should not magnify and amplify my own waste of fifteen minutes of my life by inviting unsuspecting innocent third parties to waste fifteen minutes of their lives watching video evidence of my failure.

This is what I would take away from this.

I would not be like that endless parade of Wannabe Internet Superstars on YouTube who think that everyone wants to see their own "kooky" rendition of Rebecca Black's Friday where they all wear funny hats and unfashionable ties and sing into overturned tennis rackets, because, ha-ha, see, it's a microphone, but it's really not.

Then, having done all that, I would go out to the garage, jam towels beneath the door to create a seal, turn the car on, and sink into the euphoric haze of cyanosis while drinking a coconut daquiri and listening to "Thunder Island" so I could at least pretend I was going out in a cool way, like blowing my head off in the Florida Keys, Hemingway-style. And Wikipedia seems to be telling me he did that in Idaho, but that's no fun.

I want to go out like in a Corona commercial. When I punch my own ticket, I want to be wearing some Jimmy Buffet-themed clothing or something, or at least I want to pretend I am.

Oh Lord: There's a reassuring thing about discovering someone is a multiple-offense asshole. Because then you realize that where before you thought you had two assholes, turns out, nope, just the one.

This always pleases me about life, when God grants me the gift of reducing my count of assholes.

So... just the one, then. Not two, but one.

Thanks to Joanie. But I'm still revving up the car.

Sing sha-la-la-la-la...

Your Poopies

Not all of them are fit for public adoration. In fact, probably only 10% of your poopies are so fit for public adoration. Maybe even less. Maybe like 8% of poopies.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 04:42 PM | Comments (277)
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Who wouldn't want to see at least one of these?

An open thread for your late afternoon.

Posted by: CAC at 03:42 PM | Comments (68)
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Politifact.org, who we really should start ignoring entirely as a partisan pusher of liberal memes, figures this is a good one to say is false, to prove they can call a liberal's statements false, and says Stewart is wrong in his assertion (link to Verum Serum).

Don't these studies include bits like "Was Saddam Hussein involved in 9/11?" They ask about what the media wants you to think.

If you answer in manner that is less deferential to Media Common Wisdom -- like, "I don't know if he was involved at all. I don't think anyone does, though I do know the media thinks it knows" -- then you get dinged as "misinformed."

When in fact you're highly informed. You just don't want to take the media's word for it on speculative conclusions derived from known facts.

I think a lot of conservatives would answer "correctly" if we were asked point-blank "What is the media wishes you to believe on this question" rather than "What do you believe the answer is?"

I know what the media wants me to believe. If I disagree with them, to the extent I'm wrong, it's that I'm committing an "error of reason." Not being ignorant of the knowledge, just drawing a supposedly erroneous conclusion.

Let's just headline this properly:

Shock Study: Conservatives Don't Believe The Liberal Media

Posted by: Ace at 01:41 PM | Comments (227)
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That mistake? He tried to prove his premise was plausible by implementing it in real life.

A Fairleigh Dickinson University physics professor is in custody for allegedly running a prostitution website involving about 200 women and more than 1,200 johns, police said Monday.

He claims he's not a hero,
but they all say that.

So he's a physics professor. We can work with that. I envision some zany shenanigans in the particle accelerator lab. Like Night Shift, but with beakers and ions, whatever ions are.

There's so much here.

Schipper declined to comment on FloryÂ’s current job status at the university.

Job status? Golden.

Fairleigh Dickenson can use a man like Joel.

Now, bear in mind he's a physics professor, so he has an orderly sort of mind, and likes categorizing things and, frankly, overthinking them.

Users were split into three categories, and first-time visitors had to first gain the trust of Flory before gaining any access. Ordinarily this was done, Roseman said, by “sleeping with a prostitute.” The prostitute would then report to Flory what sexual acts the two had engaged in, as well as how much money was exchanged.

After that process, users were designated as “Verified,” gaining access to a wider circle of women to choose from, Roseman said. If users became more frequent customers, their status was increased to “Trusted,” which gave them access to more women and more portions of the website, including message boards explaining how to avoid the police, Roseman said.

..

The site also included message boards where users could rate the prostitutes with stars, including specific sexual acts, Roseman said.

One imagines, here, a series of "funny" codewords and slang for sex taken from physics, like "I want a Large Hadron Collider" or "She's what I call 'low force of friction,' if you know what I mean" or "Nice muons!!!

It's writing itself. The script has become self-aware.

Best part?

Roseman said Flory told police he did not make money off of the website and instead saw it as a hobby, “a safe place for guys to find female prostitutes.”

Great little direct-to-video movie. Needs a title, though.

Thanks to cthulhu, via Instapundit.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:38 PM | Comments (320)
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Via RDBrewer: Another award, but this one truly earned.

As the July 2011 deadline for Afghan troop withdrawal nears, President Barack Obama is gearing up for another significant milestone, the Nobel War Prize awards ceremony, which will be held in Oslo next month.

Obama has been selected as this year’s winner of the first inaugural prize to commemorate the world leader who has “best advanced the goals of war and militarization across the globe,” amongst a notable cast of runners-up that includes NATO’s head Anders Fogn Rasmussen, China’s premier Wen Jiabao, and former President George W. Bush.

...

Among Obama’s list of war accomplishments, the committee highlighted Obama’s decision to double the number of troops and expand the number of private contractors in Afghanistan, as well as his dramatic escalation of drone strikes and targeted assassinations in Yemen and Pakistan. According to one committee member, “Two years ago, we worried that President Obama would rollback Bush administration policies and pursue a peace agenda, but in fact he’s expanded the militaristic Bush approach to counterterrorism. He’s managed to get the U.S. involved in three wars in the Middle East, keep Guantanamo open, and dramatically expand the use of covert CIA capture/kill operations across the globe. We could not think of a more worthy candidate for this award.”

I never know whether to print stuff like this, because I don't know if I want to mock him on this particular point, given that I'm not necessarily averse to these decisions. But funny is funny and cutting irony is cutting irony.

And this just in: Obama's war powers argument -- it's not "hostilities" when you kill people -- is a disgrace.

On its own terms, the presidentÂ’s statement is a constitutional joke. At no time does it give any account of what the critical term "hostilities" means, except to say that whatever its meaning, it constitutes a high threshold that is not met in Libya. The trusty thesaurus offers the word "fighting" as a synonym for "hostilities," which is just what we are doing in Libya today. There is no evidence in the WPR text that the term "hostilities" does not have its ordinary English meaning.

Epstein goes on to challenge a generally-accepted (and I'm not sure why it is so generally accepted) constitutional meme the right often embraces, that the War Powers Act is inherently unconstitutional.

The WPR then sets out a program that requires the president, if he has ventured off on his own, to report to Congress within 60 days (unless, in the event of an armed attack on the United States, he gets Congressional authorization for a 30 day extension). Perhaps one can quibble with the details of the WPR, but the only way in which it is unconstitutional is if the president as commander-in-chief may wage a war that Congress has never declared. That bizarre position inflates the constitutional powers of the president to unrecognizable proportions. What can we make of any system of checks and balances if the power not to declare war somehow fails to operate as a limitation on the presidentÂ’s powers?

A better argument about the unconstitutionality of the War Powers Resolution, I think, would be made not on the risible proposition that the commander in chief somehow was granted, secretly, the power to order us into war at his own personal, one-man-one-vote whim, but that Congress can't pre-delegate power in this arena in the form of blank check, but must make the decision each time case-by-case.

But that suggests that the President has even less power to declare one-man-one-vote war, not more. That is, on that point, the pre-delegation of war making authority granted, improperly, must be subtracted from his power, as it was errantly granted in the first place. The unconstitutionality of the WPR shouldn't wind up granting him powers the Constitution seems to say he just doesn't have.

In other words, if the WPR is without effect, then we go back to the text of the Constitution (unaltered by an ineffectual, unconstitutional resolution), and that says.... Congress declares war.

I know there's a practical, historical reason conservatives have bought into the this dubious proposition-- that generally we had a good shot of winning the White House and a rather bad shot of winning Congress, so we have argued for more presidential power, generally.

But 1, that historical happenstance seems to no longer be the rule, and 2, you shouldn't pick your constitutional rules according to what's politically most expedient anyhow.

Correction: I kept calling it the War Powers Act. It's not an Act, as it was never signed into law by a president. It's a Resolution, promulgated by both chambers of Congress, which expresses Congress' will outside of the law-making process (and the claim would be made that since this deals with a Congressional prerogative under the Constitution, they don't need a president's signature to give it effect).

Epstein deals with that, too.

Whatever the WPR is, whether it's operative, whether it's moot, the Constitution does not seem to grant the President one-man-one-vote war-deciding authority.

Correction To My Correction: Damn me I'm an imbecile.

It's an act. It is called both the War Powers Act (which I thought it was called) and the War Powers Resolution.

As it was passed by 2/3rds majorities in both chambers, it was immune to veto, and so never needed a signature.

Although it was passed as a joint resolution, it is called an "Act," too, or actual law.

I'm kind of confused.

You figure it out.

This is the thing about this site: If I tell you true information, you get lazy.

I want you to exercise your brains and figure out which of the things I've said is true and which of those things is false.

My General Point

Still standing, proud and unbowed, like a penis tweeted to a coed.

Posted by: Ace at 11:48 AM | Comments (150)
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I don't know why Drudge is linking this, except it's fun to beat up on a dope.

A one-day swing like that is almost certainly noise.

But, it's fun to think about.

I have always thought that when opinion changes on Obama, it will change suddenly. That part of what's going on with his approval rating is Preference Falsification, a phenomenon of group psychology in which people don't express their true preference (or belief) because they think it is forbidden to think it or is strongly disfavored by the group. When the group starts talking more freely, however, people realize their true, suppressed (counterfeited) preference is in fact widely shared, and suddenly begin expressing their true preference.

As Glenn Reynolds' article on it noted, this is called a Preference Cascade.

That said, I don't think this occurs in a single poll in a single day. My idea of "sudden shift" in this context is a month or two.

Posted by: Ace at 11:08 AM | Comments (141)
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John Doyle is an Irish ex-pat who has lived and worked in Canada for 30 years. He also seems to be the only TV writer dumber than Tom Shales.

Doyle saw the Vancouver riots and decided they were the product of too many years of Conservative governments. No seriously, he did.

What happened in Vancouver was a failure of policing and an indulgence of male rage that is part and parcel of the hockey culture. It’s a short step from all that bellowing on TV about “establish the fore-check” and “get more shots and get traffic in front of the net” to rage on the street.

Hockey has political salience in Canada. A sometimes beautiful and sometimes brutal game, it has been co-opted by the Conservative government to become an allegedly defining Canadian quality, one of toughness, as the Conservatives try to remould Canada into a warrior nation, proud of being much more militarized. Putting so much emphasis on hockey as defining us in our new toughness – especially when done by figures in authority – only pushes up the temperature surrounding hockey. It’s asking for trouble, though nobody wants to admit that. Instead, most media coverage, especially television, spews forth material about “thugs” and “mayhem.” As if the culture of connecting hockey to military might could not be blamed.

This is the work of someone who knows almost nothing about hockey or Canada.

According to this native Irishman, hockey and toughness are only recently connected in the minds of Canadians. Perhaps he's never heard of Eddie Shore...you know "Old Time Hockey". Shore is famous for many feats of courage and even brutality.

Or how about Bobby Clarke in the 72 Summit Series. Clarke basically made his name and spot in Canadian history by breaking the ankle of the Soviet's top player.

The "Flin Flon Bomber" also earned the despise of many as he is of course remembered for a vicious two handed slash on Soviet superstar Valeri Kharlamov's sore ankle, which caused him to miss the final game. Many have chastised Clarke for his dirty actions. It is a bit of a trademark image for Clarke, who was known as a gritty but sometimes dirty player who would do whatever it took for his team to win.

Clearly Stephen Harper, then 13, was to blame for Clarke's tough guy act and the acclaim he received for it.

As for riots, let's not pretend that this is the first hockey riot in Canada, hell it's not even the first hockey riot in Vancouver. Behold the 1994 Stanley Cup riots. Oh and the Prime Minister of Canada in 1994? Jean Chretin, who was most assuredly not a Conservative.

Of course the most famous hockey riots of all time were the so called "Richard Riot". This riot wasn't over a lost sereis but over the suspension of Montreal Canadien star Maurice "The Rocket" Richard for punching a linesman. This was 1955 and the Canadiens (the actual team) are actually kind of proud of it.

So please Mr. Doyle, spare us the lectures about the dangers of evil and militarist conservatives and spend a little more time learning about your adopted country.

Now, why does this show Andrew Sullivan is a gullible fool because he linked to the above crap by noting that the writer "undresses" the riot and the famous photo of the couple kissing during it.

It's like facts don't matter to Sullivan, just as long as "Conservatives" somewhere are being slandered, he's your man.

Added: I didn't want this to be a hockey post. My larger point was going to be sometimes immigrants like Doyle and Sullivan don't know their adoptive countries as well as they think they do. What's new to even long time immigrants is sometimes just part of a larger tradition they missed out on not having grown up in the culture.

This isn't to say that immigrants can't be good, productive citizens of their adopted homes (200+ years of American experience shows otherwise) but that their "outsider" critiques would often be improved by a bit of modesty about the deeper traditions of a society.

I think it's something to consider when you see guys like Sullivan, David Frum and Fareed Zakaria opine about 'real conservatives' in the American context. And it works both ways. There are a lot of people who talk about countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan and even less "exotic" places like the UK, who haven't the slightest clue what life is like there or the myriad of subtleties that influence issues great and small on a daily basis.

Added Part II- AmishDude makes a great point in the comments.

Steyn is also an American immigrant, but he loves all of the stuff that people like Sullivan hate. Sullivan is happy to make more money and pay less taxes, but Steyn actually loves American culture.

That's why I was hesitant to add that part....the danger of over-genalization. As I said, it's not that immigrants can't contribute or comment, it's just that the perspective of someone who grew up in a different culture is going to be, well different, from someone who did.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:58 AM | Comments (134)
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That Ah. Charles Schumer. Hero of the Workin' Man, as he preens, and as the media represents him.

Why, he's out there fighting for you.

Except, oddly enough, you aren't keeping his campaign coffers fat with large green. No, that would be the mega-banks he fronts for.

There are many things I despise, but high on the list is the hypocrisy of Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) claiming that guys who sit in committee doing favors all day long for super-luxe corporations are somehow blue-collar crusaders.

Charles Schumer is well-paid by the banks to be, effectively, their Vice President in Charge of Senatorial Outreach.

Fine. I'm sure he just loves bankers and banking and banks. That's a common enough aspiration.

But since he's the Senior Senator from CitiBank, can we drop the Blue Collar Crusader pose?

Or does he get to accuse Republicans of being in the pocket of Big Banking while Big Banking won't get its hands out of his pockets, to deposit money therein?

So, a guy has a patent. It's a good patent. It's a smart, useful technology. He created the process by which copies of digital checks are processed.

And the big banks are using this tech, often without securing a license, at which point this guy sues for infringement, and often wins.

Enter the Hero of the Workin' Man.

After years of fighting Mr. Ballard at the federal Patent Office, in court and across a negotiating table, the banks went to see one of their best friends in Congress, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who inserted into a patent overhaul bill a provision that appears largely aimed at helping banks rid themselves of the Ballard problem. The Senate passed the bill easily in March.

The proposal would allow banks to get a federal re-examination of certain patents that they have been accused of infringing, specifically limited to “a financial product or service.” The language is now included in a bill that may come to a vote in the House of Representatives as early as Wednesday. While at least two House members have moved to strip the provision from the bill, bank lobbyists have worked hard to defeat previous attempts to remove it.

Mr. Schumer and the Financial Services Roundtable, a business group that pushed the measure, say the provision is not focused on any one company but more broadly at “meritless litigation over patents of dubious quality,” as Steve Bartlett, the president of the Roundtable, said at a House hearing.

Now here's the thing: Flynn of the Big Blogs tipped me to this last night. Without having the background, I could guess what this was about: A process or method patent.

I will confess one thing: It has bothered me, and continues to bother me, that process or methods are given patents. I don't think the patent law is intended to cover algorithms and syllogisms. I think it is intended to cover things. Not processes.

And the patent office is inconsistent about this. Because the patent office seems of two minds on the issue, sometimes it grants patents for processes, and usually it doesn't. It has been a long time since I read patent law but at the time this stuff was staring they didn't have a good logical framework for deciding which processes should be treated like things and which processes shouldn't.

Now, that's the backstory, and that's how Charles Schumer justifies his emergency intervention on behalf of the banks.

The whole point of Schumer's amendment is to put the patent protection of this particular process in doubt, which then means that all settlements over infringement will be reduced in favor of the banks. That is, the stronger your claim, the higher the cash settlement will be, as a cash settlement is made to avoid trial, and if you think you've got a great chance of winning, you only settle to spare yourself time and energy.

On the other hand, if new facts emerge which make your claim less likely to prevail in court, you settle for less. The banks pay up less.

That's all this is about: Improving the banks' negotiating position at the conference table as the various lawyers negotiate a price.

Now, if the Hero of the Common Man really has a problem with process or method patents -- and I think this is an area of the law which could use a Big Rethink -- then he should just propose a law, or at least propose a commission, to examine the question, and extend those findings generally.

Either Patent Law covers processes, or it does under very limited and well-defined circumstances, or it doesn't at all. Let's pick a stance and go with it.

Perhaps we need a new area of the law, separate from but similar to patent law, to cover process or method innovations in special cases and for a short give-them-a-few-years-of-market-edge duration of protection.

But that is a general question, which should be resolved generally.

It should not be "taken care of" by Mr. Totally Wants To Be A Banker in one particular case, as a favor to his patrons' lawyers.

And, by the way: Some Republicans are pushing this, too. The reason? Um... let's just say I don't think they're particularly deep thinkers on the limits of patentability and maybe have a more tangible interest here.

Clean up your acts, assholes. We pay you a salary too, in case you hadn't noticed.

An Interesting Conceptual Question: This is actually a live and somewhat interesting question, at least for geeks.

Historically you could not get patents for "techniques." This is why a cook can't get protection for a recipe, nor a dress-maker for his patterns.

On the other hand, patents were designed to protect physical-object type inventions.

In the digital age, a new in-between category arose: Stuff you could arguably say was more like a recipe or pattern, but you could also argue that in the digital age, digital "inventions" were even more important than physical-object innovations, and therefore just as (if not more) deserving of patent protection.

Why should my invention not get patent protection simply because it's virtual rather than physical?, the rhetorical question goes.

The Patent Office, I think (it's been years), really isn't sure how to deal with this dispute. It's muddling through, haphazardly, developing a case law and series of precedents, but erratically and disjointedly. Because they're still not entirely sure what they're supposed to be doing with these claims.

As opposed to its methodology for dealing with physical-object patents, which is fairly well-settled, at least in broad conceptual strokes, because that area of the law is as old as the hills. Well, not as old as the hills, but as old as the oldest trees on the hills.

What they need is firm guidance here. Congress needs to clarify this area of the law.

But Congress should do so generally, not on a special favor for special people basis.

As Richard Epstein (I think) noted in that interview in Reason: Our country is becoming more feudal, more dependent on special relationships and personal favor-banks and so on, when the whole thrust of the Enlightenment, and our Enlightenment-based democratic Republic, should be in precisely the opposite direction, with more firm, impersonal rules, and less reliance on personal favors and special access to legislators.

This gambit strikes me as pure feudalism.

If you've got a problem with the exploding number of method patents being granted, if you think the Patent Office has strayed off the reservation, then lay down rules as clear as transparent as possible, and I know perfect clarity and transparency of operation is not possible here (as it's not possible anywhere), but enough with the feudalism of special favors.

It's this repeal of the Enlightment, and slow walk-back to the darkness of feudalism, that bothers me.

The law should be the law for all parties. If the law is bad for one party, it is bad for all parties, and should be reformed.

There are no dukes, or there are supposed to be no dukes, and we should not have a special series of laws to protect ducal privileges.

Clean Up: People correct me to note that method patents are not a new invention.

I take that as true, because I don't know what I'm talking about.

However, where the method patent used to be a rather odd bird, it's becoming more and more protected.

Instead of recapitulating the corrections/arguments, I'll recommend you read the commenters, as Andrew Breitbart does.

The claim made (which may be perfectly true, I don't know!) is that process patents have been granted for physical production of a good (such as extraction of amonnia from some other chemical), but generally not "business methods."

And now, as I always say when I don't know what I'm talking about, and please, you know the words, so say it along with me: My General Point still stands.

Posted by: Ace at 09:57 AM | Comments (203)
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You may know the actor Brian Dennehy from his starring roles in In the Heat of the Night, Blood Simple, In the Line of Fire, and Paul Blartt: Mall Cop.

Thanks to Gabe.

Posted by: Ace at 09:07 AM | Comments (243)
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An interesting example of the New Age we're in.

Here's the thing: The ideas of self-publishing, one-man media organs, and Open Source Journalism are now not even "ideas" so much as they're just overlooked as background facts. Almost like few people notice their own breathing (unless it stops or is strained).

Add into that the consequent idea that our institutions have no idea what they're doing and the average citizen can probably their jobs half-decently, and you have this.

Someone sitting in a jury box wondering, "Why doesn't the defendant just get up on the stand and say if he's guilty or not? Why doesn't someone ask these relevant questions?"

In the days before instant searches of every name that's ever been typed into a computer, you wouldn't even think to do this, as it was strictly impossible.

Now you can run a one-second search and 75% of the time you'll get a hit. So strict impossibility is no longer a moat surrounding the castle. Now you have to actually explain to people why the defendant is not taking the stand (it's his right not to do so, and, sidenote, there's probably a good reason he doesn't want to be interrogated by the DA) and why the rules of evidence were created.

Given that this stuff probably wasn't explained to this woman very well -- institutions have not adapted to the new reality of instant worldwide searches and instant communication yet -- they should probably not treat her very harshly as an "example." Make the point that the charge of contempt of court exists, and someone flouting the judge's rules can wind up in jail, and put people on notice.

But also understand that the internet has made people impatient with process and rules without explanation. It's an understandable failing. This woman did not want to wait for the answers to be given to her (probably incompletely, as that's how these things tend to go) by the prosecutor and witnesses and got impatient and decided to ask the man himself.

Contempt of court? Absolutely. Something that needs to be discouraged and penalized? Absolutely.

But I also think an understandable thing when you consider two eras are crashing against each other like icebergs.

This is a tough situation because a court really can't spend the time explaining Why for every evidentiary ruling or objection to a question. The why gets explained in two years of law school. (Not three; the third year is a waste of time pushed by law schools not for any strong pedagogical reason but simply because 3 x $20,000 is better than 2 x $20,000.)

But in broad terms, courts will probably have to explain better, at the beginning of a trial, the basic underlying theories above evidence and proper questions and a defendant's right to refuse to testify.

And also the penalties for one-woman FaceBook investigations.

Thanks to LauraW.

Posted by: Ace at 08:55 AM | Comments (52)
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