They do actually sell it that way-- the conclusion to the Epic Trilogy. I don't think they're being ironic.

Just as Return of the Jedi returned to the first episode's main location -- the Death Star -- so the Wolf Pack shall return to Las Vegas.

I don't know. I didn't like Hangover, gave Hangover II a very positive review which definitely looks dumb in retrospect. Hangover II's stock-in-trade was Ultimate Shock; it doesn't hold up on a second viewing, now that the shock factor is gone.

What can I say? I was maybe over-impressed that they did something I didn't expect: they actually shocked and horrified me.

I suppose I will wearily see this one, just as I will wearily see "The Hobbit II: Gondor-A-Go-Go."

Whatever. Gotta complete the trilogy. All nerds have that Completist tic that corporations so ruthlessly exploit.

And: Iron Man 3, too. Though no one's promising a "conclusion."

I rooted for four years for the Avengers movie. And it was good. And it was something that hadn't been done before. So it was neat.

But now... eh.... another Tony Stark movie? Okay I guess but... I dunno.

To mimic the team dynamic of The Avengers, apparently Tony Stark's given an Iron Man suit to every one he knows, and all of his employees. Rhodey's even wearing Captain America-style armor.

There are literally 20 or 30 of them on the screen at the end. It's like the Green Lantern Corps. They even have their own Kilowog.

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Posted by: Ace at 12:42 PM | Comments (283)
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This would be a strange sort of #hacking -- apparently the #hackers would occasional #hack her Twitter account to send out anti-semitic, pro-Hilter, and pro-9/11 tweets, then cede control back to her, and then re-#hack her account, all without her realizing it, until now.

Here are the Tweets. Enjoy.

On Twitter, Ibrahim is quite blunt regarding her views. On July 18 of last year, after five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver were killed a suicide bombing attack, Ibrahim jubilantly tweeted: “An explosion on a bus carrying Israelis in Burgas airport in Bulgaria on the Black Sea. Today is a very sweet day with a lot of very sweet news.”

Ibrahim frequently uses Twitter to air her anti-Semitic views. Last August 4, commenting on demonstrations in Saudi Arabia, she described the ruling Al Saud family as “dirtier than the Jews.” Seventeen days later she tweeted in reference to Adolf Hitler: “I have discovered with the passage of days, that no act contrary to morality, no crime against society, takes place, except with the Jews having a hand in it. Hitler.”

Ibrahim holds other repellent views as well. As a mob was attacking the United States embassy in Cairo on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, pulling down the American flag and raising the flag of Al Qaeda, Ibrahim wrote on twitter: “Today is the anniversary of 9/11. May every year come with America burning.” Possibly fearing the consequences of her tweet, she deleted it a couple of hours later, but not before a screen shot was saved by an Egyptian activist.

Only now, today, as she's asked about these tweets does she claim her account has been "stolen" and those tweets about hatred and terrorism only are #hacked messages; the rest is hers. She doesn't explain how this failed to rise to her notice previously, or why she didn't delete the #hacked tweets when she saw them (and saw them being retweeted by jubilant jihadis).

No link for the reliable party apparatchik Jeffrey Goldberg, but he claims that the State Department backs her ludicrous story:

UPDATE: Veteran State Department reporter Nicole Gaouette just tweeted, "State officials tell me they've looked at 1000s of her tweets & believe her account was hacked." Waiting for more information from State.

Sure, #hackers always take over an account for one Tweet, cede control over it back to the user, re-#hack it weeks later, cede control again, all without the actual user ever becoming aware of the #hacking.

Literally happens ever single day.

Your Government is lying to you and will continue lying to you with every word that comes from its lying diseased organs.

Truth is never even on the list of possible options.

Thanks to @johnekdahl

Update: You can tell the State Department is telling the truth by their actions in deleting this Ibrahim woman's bio from their website.

So you know they have full confidence in the public claim that she was #hacked.

Award Postponed:

US reverses decision to honor Egyptian woman
Published: 03.07.13, 21:46 / Israel News

The State Department had said Samira Ibrahim, an Egyptian activist who was subjected to a "virginity test" after protesting in Cairo's Tahrir Square, would be among recipients of an International Women of Courage award presented by Secretary of State John Kerry and first lady Michelle Obama on Friday.

Now the State Department says she won't be honored Friday because of anti-American and anti-Semitic comments on her Twitter account. (AP)

Another story says the award is being "postponed" while they review the #hacking.

Oddly Enough... This #hacker #hacks her account using the same platform, an Android phone, that she uses for her non-#hacked tweets.

And this #hacker apparently responds politely to readers:

The tweets were sent over a period of a few weeks, and in the meantime she was active on Twitter as usual. And, when she referenced ‘Jews’ in the Saudi tweet, another tweeter helpfully contacts to her to suggest she uses ‘Zionists’ or ‘Israelis’ in the future. Samira (or the supposed hacker) replies to this suggestion politely saying she would learn from it!

Posted by: Ace at 11:52 AM | Comments (270)
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It rankled the Lordly Dignity of Obama and Holder to be asked.

And that is what we're talking about, the privileges of a Lord. I don't believe Obama had much of an intention to whack American citizens on the streets. But what I very much believe is that he is a narcissist and a monarchist at heart and recoiled from the notion that he wasn't allowed to do certain things.

The Strong Man would have quickly conceded such an obvious point. Not Obama, though. The Great and Wise O cannot bear people even thinking about touching the curtain that makes him seem Mighty.

More at Hot Air, and this statement from Rand Paul:

"Under duress, and under public humiliation, the White House will relent and do the right thing."

The grandest office in the world is in the possession of a very small man who has to constantly puff himself up to seem as if he's in place.

Posted by: Ace at 11:14 AM | Comments (243)
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Japan tried what Obama is trying. It failed.

Other nations slashed spending and prospered.

As Boskin points out, the Netherlands in the mid-1990s and Sweden in the mid-2000s "stabilized their budgets without recession [with] $5-$6 of actual spending cuts per dollar of tax hikes."

And he notes that Canada reduced government spending in the mid-1990s and early 2000s by an amount equal to 8 percent of gross domestic product.

Those cuts weren't painless, but they put Canada on a trajectory different from ours. Canadian voters value budget surpluses, and Canada managed to avoid almost all the bad effects of the 2007-09 recession.

Why isn't the political class interested in this? Because while a defanged political class may serve the interest of the public it doesn't serve the interest of the political class.

Posted by: Ace at 10:20 AM | Comments (234)
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The network that once gave serious coverage to Code Pink (when Bush was president) now thinks Rand Paul is just a silly boringhead who's boring.

This is important to MSNBC White for several reasons. The most important reason is helping CNN's liberal audience -- which likes to consider itself enlightened and Deeply Concerned about civil liberties -- cope with the cognitive dissonance of supporting Barack Obama, who asserts the right to kill Americans on American soil even if there is no ticking-timebomb urgency and Dick Durbin, who objects to a Sense of the Senate Resolution stating that the president is not allowed to murder people.

The second reason is simply to support Obama. Obama always gets the Tone of Seriousness and Heroism in CNN's reporting; anyone who challenges him gets the Tone of Comedy, of Ridicule, of Triviality.

It doesn't matter what people do or say. We're accustomed to watching movies and TV, in which the what a character says or does is only incidental to his Heroism. The main determinant of whether someone's a hero or villain is simply how the movie treats him tonally.

Only the Designated Hero Wins Applause. AP edits out the standing ovation Paul received at the conclusion of his filibuster.

Even though Paul is making the same objections AP (and Erin Burnett) used to make -- and considered themselves quite Heroic for so objecting -- he can't be the Hero because we already know King Barack is the Hero.

So Paul must be the Clown or the Villain. A movie can only have one Hero.

Posted by: Ace at 09:26 AM | Comments (277)
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These guys seem to think that conservatism consists solely of supporting the accumulation of power into the executive and proposing war as a solution to every problem.

“I don’t think what happened yesterday was helpful to the American people,” said Mr. McCain, Republicans’ presidential nominee in 2008 — who topped Mr. Paul’s father, former Rep. Ron Paul, in that year’s primary.

And where even Democrats praised Mr. Paul for using Senate rules properly to launch a filibuster, Mr. McCain said it was an abuse of rules that could hurt the GOP in the long run.

“What we saw yesterday is going to give ammunition to those who say the rules of the Senate are being abused,” the Arizona Republican said.

Mr. Paul said he was filibustering to get the administration to affirm it won’t kill non-combatant Americans in the U.S. — but Mr. Graham and Mr. McCain said that was a ludicrous question.

“I do not believe that question deserves an answer,” Mr. Graham said.

Now it's possible they're suspicious of Rand Paul and think he's carrying water for his father's Doctrinaire Pacifism but under the false flag of a much more narrow issue on which he has the right; that is, they think he's trying to move opinion to the Doctrine Pacifist camp in the typical way the Pacifists and anti-American agitators do it, to wit, seizing one one particular grabby issue at a time.

I have to confess I have the same suspicion. I do believe Rand Paul is his father's son.

But even so, to just dogmatically bark that we should trust the president and the military on every question and assume they're "acting for our own good" is idiotic.

For one thing, the greatest crimes occur when large groups of people convince themselves they're "acting for the greater good."

For another thing, it is fundamentally undemocratic to tell American citizens their duty is to simply trust those higher-up in the chain of command and to not bother with all this questioning business.

American citizens are actually at the top of the chain of command: They're citizens. Or at least we used to think so.

McCain and Graham seem to have a military mindset in which orders come from command and duty comes from the troops. That is a fine and noble mindset... for people acting within the command structure of the Armed Forces of the United States of America for missions undertaken for the Armed Forces of the United States of America. It will not due for a Senator, though, and neither would it due for a Senator's superior officer, a citizen of the United States.

And while a soldier must obey his superior officer as to military business, in the ballot box he's his own man.

McCain and Graham should stop trying to be Good Soldiers and start trying to be Good Citizens for a change.

Baby Talk: There's an awful lot of political baby-talk these days. I consider McCain's and Graham's appeal to very vague and childlike things ("this makes you safer," "we should trust the president") to be Baby Talk.

I'm very tired of Baby Talk. I'm tired of Baby Talk from CNN when all it can do is whine "we should just get together and compromise on the sequester!" without bothering to share the details or the Republicans' plan with the audience, so that the audience may make the informed decision of an adult, and their Baby Talk tactic of avoiding all substantive and adult discussion of choices in favor of the Baby Talk of Serious You Guys Can't We All Get Along.

No more Baby Talk. We're goddamned adults and citizens and we demand we be treated as such.

Posted by: Ace at 08:39 AM | Comments (419)
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Video below. After thirteen hours, Paul yield the floor, and went to the bathroom.

Meanwhile, Dick Durbin, the man who called our troops Nazis, Soviets, or Khmer Rouge, is now big on the president's claimed murder-authority.
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Posted by: Ace at 08:21 AM | Comments (129)
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• Dumbest Gun Control Proposal Yet
  
• North Korea Threatens Nuclear Strike On The US
  
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Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:27 AM | Comments (434)
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Well, that was exciting.

Now for the follow-through.

Posted by: andy at 03:05 AM | Comments (239)
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Today a close friend emailed me a link to this NBC News story.

It's a piece about how wireless technology is now being used in medicine. There's some really cool applications in here, including a demonstration on how you can essentially use your iPhone as an EKG machine, record a video of the readout, and email it to your doctor for diagnosis.

The piece itself is about 9 minutes. Go check it out first (the experiment requires it), then I want to take to take this discussion somewhere unexpected (maybe, depending on your perception). more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 08:21 PM | Comments (61)
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